Flagship (6 page)

"No," said Cole.

"But you just said—"

"You get the engine and the insignia, but then you wait right here for my orders."

"What are you talking about?" demanded Lafferty. "I could kill fifty ships a day with this. We could keep killing them for months before anyone figured out what was happening."

"And once they did," said Cole, "they'd destroy you, and they'd still have three million ships."

"And what do you think
you're
going to do with this ship?" said Lafferty heatedly.

Cole looked at the ship again.

"Win the war," he answered.

The
Teddy R
had left the Cicero system far behind, passing one deserted planetary system after another.

"What the hell has gone on here?" asked Briggs as his sensors came up with another lifeless world, its buildings destroyed, its thoroughfares cratered.

"War has gone on here, Mr. Briggs," said Cole, who had found himself driven to the bridge through boredom. "The Teroni didn't leave any bases, because there was nothing here worth fighting for once the Navy pulled out—and the Navy didn't come back and rebuild because there was nothing valuable or interesting enough to keep the Teroni here. The only losers are the people who used to live here."

"Maybe they'll resettle someday," said Rachel Marcos.

Cole shook his head. "There's no infrastructure anymore, and if they build it, there's always a chance the Teronis will come back and destroy it again. We're out in the boonies; clearly the Navy doesn't consider this sector important enough to leave a residual force behind."

"It just doesn't make any sense," she said.

He looked at her youthful, unlined face and thought:
How can you be so innocent and uncynical after four years aboard this ship?
He suddenly realized that he envied her.

He shook his head as if to clear it of uncomfortable thoughts, then wandered over to where Wxakgini sat high above the floor, his brain connected to the navigational computer, his body connected to the nutrients that kept him alive. The Bdxeni were unique in the galaxy, the only race that never slept, and hence the ideal starship pilots. Cole had never met one with a name he could pronounce.

"How are we doing, Pilot?" he said.

"I don't understand the question," replied Wxakgini, once again omitting "sir" as a protest against Cole never calling him by his name.

"Just making conversation."

"I am pursuing an erratic course with no destination in mind, as per your orders."

Cole stared at the Bdxeni for a moment, wondered how anyone ever held a conversation with him, and then decided that he had a limited perspective on "conversation," that Wxakgini was conversing silently with the computer every minute of the day.

Suddenly the Platinum Duke's image appeared in front of Cole.

"I did it!" he cried happily.

"Did what?" asked Cole.

"Beat the little bastard at whist!"

"You actually played whist?"

"I had to," said the Duke. "He damned near cleaned me out at blackjack."

"That's what you get for gambling with a member of the British middle class," said Cole.

"Sir?" said Rachel, and the Duke's image vanished.

"Yeah?"

"We have a message coming in from Mr. Moyer."

"Coded and scrambled, I trust?"

"Yes, sir. He has just made another kill. That is his fifth."

"Good for him."

"You don't seem very elated," she noted.

"He's killed five ships, and that's impressive," admitted Cole. His expression darkened. "We still have three and a half million ships to neutralize. That's less impressive."

She studied her computer for a moment. "He wants to speak to you, sir."

"This will translate him into Terran, and my reply will go out scrambled to his ship, right?"

"Yes, sir."

"Okay, put him through."

"It will just be audio. It would take too long to transmit a live holo at this distance."

"Fine."

"Sir," said Moyer's voice, "I need some guidance. I have a prisoner here, a survivor from the last ship I destroyed. I couldn't just let him starve or run out of air in a safety pod. What should I do with him?"

"Put him down on an oxygen world," replied Cole. "It can't be a Republic world; they'd never let you take off again. If you can find some colony world, maybe a farming planet, drop him off there."

There was a pause while the message reached Moyer and his reply came back.

"Our charts may be out of date, sir. What we have as a colony world may have been assimilated into the Republic since we left. I think it might be safe to drop him on an uninhabited oxygen world, and contact a Republic world a week later with his coordinates. He's in good physical shape, no wounds at all; he can make it for a week, and I can be pretty far away by then."

"Makes sense," said Cole. "All right, handle it that way."

He signaled Rachel to break the connection.

"You still look unhappy, sir," she noted.

"We can't have all our ships cruise aimlessly, picking off small Navy ships whenever we can sneak up on them," said Cole. "We're not fighting some little warlord who commands twenty ships back on the Inner Frontier. This is the Republic. They don't even notice that we're here."

"Commander Jacovic says you have some master plan that has something to do with the ship Mr. Lafferty is equipping."

"Mr. Lafferty could be months or even years stealing or assembling an engine that can run that thing," said Cole. "Or he could get captured trying. If he accomplishes it, fine; but we can't just sit around waiting for him to do so." He suddenly looked around. "By the way, where's the Officer on Deck?"

"I'm coming," said Val, stepping off the airlift with a beer in her hand. "Briggs, did you finish that sweep?"

"Yes," he replied. "It's just a meteor storm."

"Good." She turned to Cole. "You can't be too careful. I used meteor storms for cover more than once in my pirate days."

"Damned dangerous," commented Briggs.

"Damned effective," replied Val with a smile.

"You could have lost your ship," said Briggs. "If something had hit you, there was nothing you could do."

"Sometimes you have to take bold action," said Val with an unconcerned shrug.

"You're right," said Cole suddenly. "Sometimes you do."

Val, Briggs, and Rachel turned to him.

"What the hell are you talking about, Cole?" asked Val.

"As far as the Republic's concerned, we're less than a gnat," said Cole. "They don't respond, because they don't even know we're here. We could pick off ten ships a day, and at the end of the week they'd have built more ships than we eliminated. We have to start being bolder; we have to make them aware of our presence."

"Won't that just mean they'll come after us with overwhelming force?" asked Rachel, frowning.

"They won't know where to come," said Cole. "Besides, they're fighting a war of attrition against the Teroni Federation. They're not coming anywhere in force."

"A fleet of eight hundred ships may not seem like a force to
them,"
noted Briggs, "but
we
couldn't survive against it."

"Our job isn't to survive it," said Cole. "Our job is to mobilize and misdirect it."

"I don't understand," said Rachel.

"Neither do I," said Val with a smile. "But I think I like it."

Cole turned to Val. "Who would you say are our two best pilots?"

"Me and someone else," she replied.

"I'm being serious."

"So am I."

"Damn it, Val!"

"All right. After me, the two best you have are Sokolov and Moyer."

"I agree."

There was a momentary silence.

"Have we won the war yet?" asked Val sardonically.

"Mr. Briggs, is there a way for me to send a holo, coded, scrambled, unreadable by anyone but one of the ships whose computers you and Christine rigged before we left?"

"Of course."

"I'm not done yet. Can we then transfer that signal to a captured ship?"

"Yes."

"I'm still not done. Now, the captured ship won't have a computer that you worked on, so I assume the signal should probably be put in a cube and hand-delivered to the captured ship's system?"

"That'll work," said Briggs, "but I don't see—"

"One final question," said Cole. "Can that signal then be transmitted, unscrambled and uncoded, to a destination of our choice?"

"Well, yes, if whoever transfers it to the captured ship's computer programs the ship's computer to do that."

"Is it difficult?"

Briggs shook his head. "All the difficult work has been done, encoding the initial signal so that it's undecipherable."

"Now, once those captured ships have been rigged to send the signal, we can also program them
when
to send it, right?"

"No problem at all."

"Thank you, Mr. Briggs." He turned to Rachel. "I want to send a coded, scrambled message to Vladimir Sokolov and Dan Moyer. I don't care if they can see me or not."

"Ready," she said, concentrating on the computer's controls.

"Gentlemen, this is Wilson Cole. I commend you on your recent kills. Now I have what will almost certainly be a more difficult task for you. I want each of you to capture or disable a small Republic ship— Class H would be perfect, certainly nothing bigger than Class J. Set the prisoners down on an uninhabited oxygen world, and I stress uninhabited. I don't want them on any world where they can make contact with anyone who might be sympathetic to the Republic. Leave them with all their food and all their medical supplies. You can also leave their weapons; just toss 'em out the hatch as you're closing it."

He paused, cleared his throat, and continued. "In a few minutes we will be transmitting a second message, a prerecorded holographic one. Mr. Briggs will tell you exactly how to handle it and what I want you to do with it. Once you have done as ordered, I want you to clear the hell out of the sector, whatever sector you're in. If there is anything you don't understand about your instructions or about the message you will soon be receiving, contact either Mr. Briggs or Lieutenant Mboya."

He looked over at Rachel and nodded his head, and she sent the messages off.

"Okay, this next will be the message I discussed with Mr. Briggs. And it has to be holographic, not just audio."

"All right," said Rachel. "Ready whenever you are."

"Now," said Cole.

"Go."

"This is Wilson Cole, speaking to you from the bridge of the
Theodore Roosevelt.
If you have any doubt of my identity, run a voice-print." He paused to give them the opportunity to do just that. "Four years ago you imprisoned me for an action that saved five million human lives. That is a disagreement between you and me, and I was content to live out my life on the Inner Frontier, well beyond your jurisdiction. But your pursuit of me has enlarged our disagreement to include literally billions of men, women, and aliens. You have committed genocide, you have practiced torture, and you have proven yourself totally unworthy of the trust the citizens of the Republic have placed in you. You have one Standard day in which to resign your position. If you do not, then be assured that you will be forcibly removed from it. This is not an idle threat, and I am not grandstanding: if you have not resigned within one Standard day, we shall be at hazard. And this time I won't be running
from
you, but
toward
you."

He nodded to Rachel, who coded and scrambled the message, then turned back to Briggs.

"This will be transmitted to Sokolov and Moyer," he said. "Once they've each captured or disabled a ship, I want these messages sent uncoded to the recipients I name, but I don't want them sent separately. I want them sent within a minute of each other, from totally different sectors."

"That shouldn't be a problem."

"Good. And even though Sokolov and Moyer aren't in military ships, I want them to get the hell out of the area, at least fifty light-years, before those messages are sent. If they can't find the proper wormholes, have them contact Pilot; he's been around forever and he knows every damned wormhole in the galaxy—or at least it feels like he does."

"I'll tell them, sir," said Briggs. "You haven't told me where you want the message sent."

"I want Moyer's sent to the
Xerxes
—Admiral Susan Garcia's flagship."

"It'll probably be picked up by thirty other ships first. It could take a long time to go through channels and reach her."

"Once they check my voiceprint, it'll take about twenty seconds," replied Cole confidently.

"And the other message, the one we're giving to Vladimir Sokolov?"

Cole smiled. "You haven't guessed? Have it sent to Deluros VIII, to the personal attention of Egan Wilkie, the Secretary of the Republic."

"So you're sending them a threatening holo," said Val. "So what? They'll laugh their heads off."

"No, they won't," said Cole. "They'll home in on the two ships, which I hope will be a couple of thousand light-years apart, and blow them to hell and gone—but at the same time they'll realize that we're a force of more than one. And then they'll start checking on how many of their ships have turned up missing. Probably some were brought down by the Teronis, and a few malfunctioned, but we'll take credit for—and be blamed for—every last one. Any power plant blows, any shipbuilding world is sabotaged—some will be our doing but most won't—they'll credit it all to us. They'll spread themselves thin, thinner than they should be while they're fighting the Teronis, and while we keep feinting and ducking, they'll keep responding—and sooner or later we'll find the weakness in their armor."