Mercenary (29 page)

“You got your own woman,” the second protested.

“So? I got a share of any I want—and I never had a Navy officer gal either, 'specially not a young, sleek creature like this. How old are you, doll?”

“Twenty-eight,” Emerald replied. That reminded me that we had both been twenty-two when we met; how fast six years had passed!

The second pirate had to compromise. “Not as young as I thought. So we'll share her. Let's strip her first.”

They went at it, yanking Emerald's sturdy uniform off piece by piece, cutting it where it snagged. The others gathered around to watch. Soon there were thirty of them crowding the chamber, apparently all that were going to board. We waited, making sure, while Emerald was stripped. All the pirates were running their hands over her exposed body, delighting in her healthy flesh. Mondy did not react overtly; we both knew that Emerald was not sensitive about exposure, and that she was buying time.

But there was no need to acquiesce to rape. I reached slowly into a pocket and brought out a small device with a bulb. It was a light grenade.

I snapped my fingers. Emerald and Mondy—and the hidden personnel we had placed—closed their eyes tightly. I closed mine and activated the grenade.

The flash was so bright it seemed to burn right through my flesh. It was gone in an instant, but it took a moment for my protected eyes to recover. Slowly I opened them.

There was chaos in the chamber. All the pirates had been temporarily blinded. It did not matter which way they had been facing when the grenade went off; the reflections sufficed.

“Get out of there, Emerald!” I called. But she was already moving, floating for the center passage, getting out of the line of fire. Mondy and I retreated similarly, putting metal between us and the floating pirates.

Sure enough, one of them drew his laser and fired. The beam scorched into the side of another, causing him to scream with pain. Believing they were under attack, several more pirates drew and fired, randomly.

The carnage was terrible. The pirates were destroying each other, because of their blindness, suspicion, and panic. In moments only four were functional, and as they caught on to what had happened, we took them out with stunners.

“Now we move on their ship,” I said.

“I'll do it, sir,” Heller said. I had kept him clear of the prior action, but now he was back bodyguarding.

He carried a gas bomb. He launched for the lock, hurled the bomb through, and slammed the panel closed.

We waited fifteen minutes, meanwhile sending out our repair crew to work on our own hull. Emerald borrowed a uniform and dressed herself, unselfconsciously. Then we opened the lock. The gas had dissipated and neutralized itself as it was designed to do, and the pirate ship was silent.

“Let's see whether we can crew this thing and use it ourselves,” Emerald said. She was evidently somewhat shaken by the slaughter among the pirates but was in control. Certainly her understanding of what Mondy and I had been through in the past had broadened.

Captain Undermeyer of the Discovered Check joined us, as he was more savvy about destroyers than we were. He glanced about dispassionately as we entered the pirate ship. “She's been sloppily treated, but she's space-worthy,” he said. “Let's see what the bridge is like.”

There were pirates scattered about their stations; all were unconscious. Our gas bombs were effective, the gas being odorless and invisible as it diffused; our strategy and drill were paying off. We had successfully reversed the pirates' boarding attempt and had a number of captives and a serviceable ship for our effort. Emerald had done much to make it possible, by allowing her attractive body to serve as a distraction while the trap fell into place.

We came to the bulkhead sealing off the bridge. Captain Undermeyer opened it and stepped through, and into the arms of a husky pirate. “Hold it there, men,” the pirate said. “This brass is hostage.”

“Fool!” Emerald cursed. “Why didn't I think of that?”

“You? It was my business to anticipate this,” Mondy said.

“Not to mention mine,” I agreed ruefully. I had encountered such a trap before, when rescuing Spirit. We had all become as overconfident as the pirates.

“Get in here,” the pirate snapped. “Drop your weapons.”

We started to move, and Captain Undermeyer elbowed the pirate. The pirate's laser fired, Undermeyer cried out, and Sergeant Heller launched himself through the air as the pirate brought his weapon around for a shot at me. The laser beam burned past his head as I flung myself aside; then Heller was on the pirate, pulping his face with several blows of his right fist as he grasped the man's jacket with his left hand.

All of us dived for our discarded weapons—they had, of course, not dropped but floated free—but there were no other active pirates. This one, perhaps the captain, had been lucky enough to avoid the gas until it nullified itself, so had been alert. We should have been on guard.

“You're a good bodyguard,” I told Heller.

“I haven't saved your life yet, Cap'n,” he said. “You got out of the way of that beam on your own.”

Still, he had tried. My decision in giving him the position seemed justified.

Captain Undermeyer was not as fortunate. The beam had seared across his neck and the side of his face, nicking a vein; now he held his hand on the raw gouge to slow the bleeding. Already a medic was arriving, but I knew the good man would be in sick bay awhile. No chance now to activate the pirate ship; I was no pilot, and neither were Mondy or Emerald. But we would hold the ship for future use. We returned to the Discovered Check .

The situation had changed in the larger battle. The pirates' delay to plunder ships had given the Sawfish time to come on the scene at one side, and the Hempstone Crater on the other; already a number of drones from the carrier were aloft, chasing down pirate ships. Our pincers-trap had closed and all that remained was mopping up.

We had won our first battle, but had almost flubbed it by losing our top personnel, and two of our destroyers and a corvette were gone. We had gained back one destroyer, but that was only a ship and could not make up for the trained personnel who had died in the others.

“Sir, you can have my resignation,” Emerald said to me.

“Take this woman away and talk to her,” I told Mondy. He smiled; in the aftermath of battle, he retained his positive outlook. Emerald's inexperience had allowed us to be drawn into peril, but this first blood would toughen her and help her to become the strategist she could be. I knew Mondy would make her understand. He was a good officer and a good man, and now his qualities were showing. He had not lost competence under stress, he had gained it.

We advanced on the Caroline base, and it surrendered without resistance. One of the six major pirate bands had been dealt with.

But it wasn't quite over. There was one chore the Commander had to perform, and I did not feel free to delegate it to any subordinate, though I did not relish it myself. This was notifying the kin of our dead.

We organized our lists, I reviewed the backgrounds, and Juana started placing my calls. It is too painful for me to go into detail here, so I will provide a nightmare interview.

“Mrs. X? I am Captain Hubris, of the Jupiter Navy Task Force on a mission to the Asteroid Belt. I regret to inform—”

“Oh, no! Something's happened to Jonathan!”

“He died in honorable performance of his duty, and—”

“No! It can't be! He was such a good boy!”

“We regret that we are unable to return his remains to you, because—”

But the rest is drowned out by her screaming.

In actuality it was my own screaming; Spirit was holding my hand when I woke. As I said, this was a nightmare; no such interview occurred in reality. We were in the Belt, about thirty light minutes from Jupiter; a true exchange would take an hour between sentences. So I simply sent messages of condolence; my imagination provided the rest. Still it hurt.

“I was on similar duty when I started,” Commander Repro said.

When he started on the drug. Now I could understand that, too! I longed to deaden my mind to the horror of these notices but could not, for my system would soon throw off the drug. In any event, I would not. I understood too well the suffering of family loss; I had to suffer with these families, for the fleet and all its personnel were my responsibility.

We glory in war, in the shedding of human blood. What fools we are!

We wasted no time organizing for our encounter with the next pirate band, for those pirates were considerably stronger than the Carolines, and we did not want to give them much time to prepare. They were the Solomons, whose specialty was gambling. Their leader had adopted the name Straight, evidently relating to one of the winning configurations of the card game of poker, but he had the reputation of being straight in his dealings, too. This was essential for his business, for the gamblers had to have the trust of their clients, and the violation of understandings was not conducive to that. Straight was a pirate, and he had killed ruthlessly in the defense of his turf, but he kept his word. Mondy's research indicated that though the Solomons were one of the weaker bands in terms of hardware, they were perhaps the most competently led.

“Damn, I feel him.” Emerald muttered. "I feel Straight taking my measure, and I don't mean my bust line!

He's getting set to make a real fool of me in battle. I've got to come up with something good!"

“He shouldn't know it's you he's dealing with,” I said. “I'm the Task Force Commander, and there's no hint of strategic or tactical genius in my evaluation. He should hold my ability in righteous contempt, especially since that last battle seemed like sheer chance.”

Emerald bit her lip, “More truth to that last than I like! One thing's sure: I'm not going to put us in a ship in the battle! In fact, I'm not going to risk any ships if I can help it.”

How nice it would be to win a battle and not have to notify the families of our losses! “How can you fight a battle without ships?” I asked.

“With drones,” she said firmly. “They are the space-age analogue of the ancient airplanes, and in many respects their operation is similar. They are short range, so must have either a planetary base—better, a planetoid base, to avoid a punishing gravity well—or a carrier ship. But given that base, their effect can be devastating. In fact, a sufficient force of drones can dominate a given sector of space.”

“There's our answer,” I suggested. “Send in the HC and wipe the Solomons out.” I knew it couldn't be that simple, but I was curious what she planned. That prior battle had made me nervous. We could have taken much worse losses than we had, thanks to mischance—and mischance is part of war.

“Unh-uh! They've got drones, too—more than we do. We've got to nullify them so we can bring our ships into play, and they've got almost as many ships as we do.”

“But you have a notion,” I prompted her. I was familiar with her mannerisms, as with her body.

“I have a notion,” she agreed. “If it works, we'll wipe them out. But if they catch on, it'll be an even battle.”

“We can't afford an even battle,” I reminded her. “We have four more bands to snap after this one.”

“Don't I know it! That resupply fleet better not be late!”

She referred to the converted tanker coming from Jupiter on a secret schedule. It would bring food, ammunition, and CT fuel to restock what we had used. Supplies, as Commander Phist assured us, were the lifeline of a fleet in space. If anything happened to that ship, we would soon be hurting. In the bad old days of planetbound Earth, marching armies lived off the land, meaning they plundered the countryside.

Sometimes they were more trouble to their friends than to their enemies. The Jupiter Navy paid its own way, as a matter of policy. But that meant we were dependent on our supply ships. The moment that tanker arrived, we would proceed to the battle with the Solomons. Meanwhile, we checked the situation in the Caroline notch of the Belt. The pirates had ruled it, but they were not the only residents. There were regular settlers who farmed and mined and worked, staking out individual planetoids, some no larger than boulders. A colonist would set up a bubble-tent for air and a solar-focusing lens for energy—and presto: That boulder was halfway terraformed. Of course, it was a rough and ready and lonely frontier life with a relatively high rate of attrition; Belt colonists might not be physically impressive, but emotionally they were metal-hard. For a time, several planets had exiled their criminals to the Belt; it had been a handy way to get rid of them without having to go through the social awkwardness of killing them. Unfortunately those criminals had prospered and become the pirates that I was now attempting to eradicate.

If I speak of the Belt as if it is crowded with rocks, that is only relative; it would generally require a good telescope even to see the nearest neighboring rock from any one fragment. But though the Belt was actually a monstrous torus including more actual space than existed in all the Solar System inside the orbit of Mars, so that its thousands of planetoids and hundreds of thousands of motes were thinly spaced, they seemed much thicker to ships traveling at interplanetary velocities. A pirate ship could spring out from any one of them. Any rock at all is a nuisance to a spaceship, even if it's twenty light-seconds away, for it just might be on collision course.

The main base of the Carolines was a small city-bubble named Bright Hope. Perhaps that had been literal, at its founding; it had long since become cruel irony. The people there met us with fear, not joy of deliverance from the pirate yoke, and this perplexed me. Why should the sight of a Naval uniform cause them to retreat into tight-lipped silence?

At first we assumed they were afraid of reprisals, despite our reassurance. But ones we knew were victims of the pirates were the same. They did whatever we asked but would not speak. Impatient with this, I dressed in civilian clothes and took Isobel Brinker to the local free tavern.

The “free” did not refer to the beverages served; they were expensive. It referred to the human interactions. Anyone could speak freely here without consequence. It did not matter what he said, or whether it was true or false, serious or humorous, consequential or irrelevant; he had a right to utter it.

No one had to listen, but no one had the right to bar him from talking or deliberately drown him out.

People were armed but only with stunners. It was all right to take offense and to challenge a person to a duel, and victory with the stunner was considered vindication. But information presented in the free zone was privileged; a person could not carry a grudge or insult beyond this region. I realize this may sound ludicrous to a planetary person who has not seen it in action, and certainly there were violations, but it was a surprisingly effective system for the widely divergent personalities and cultures of the Belt. We had a variant of it in the Navy where enlisted personnel could let off steam by talking, bragging, or cussing out officers, and on occasion the officers were there and cussed them back, but it was all “off the record.”

Here among pirates it tended to be more violent, but we of the Navy were familiar with the principle. I knew this was the one place I could learn what I wanted. Here, people would talk without fear.

I took Brinker, the former pirate captain, because I needed a bodyguard. I was, after all, a potential target, and some pirates were less honorable than others. I also needed a woman. Not for sex; my interest in this older woman was hardly of that nature, and I had indeed seen to it that no man touched her. It was for appearance, so that I would not be solicited by local women for sex or by men for companionship. I wanted simply to talk and listen, without being unduly vulnerable. Brinker had agreed to serve me, and she was doing so; she had proved herself to be an extremely efficient computer technician and an intelligent woman. I still did not like her personally and had not forgiven her for the deaths of my refugee companions fourteen years before, but I respected her nature. She had blinding speed and unerring aim with laser or stunner—that was the bodyguard aspect—without seeming to be a bodyguard.

She also was conversant with pirate ways, and that was important; I had such an inherent antipathy to pirates that I risked a blunder and needed spot advice. And as it happened, I did want to talk to her about a certain matter.

We took a shuttle to the dome of Bright Hope. It was anchored to a stone fragment hardly larger than itself, but, of course, far more massive. The planetoid spun, and the dome bestrode its axis. Thus this was a circular settlement, like those of Leda; the city floor was a band around its hull where centrifugal force was one gee. The dome was oriented on the sun, leaving the planetoid in shadow. Thus, inside, the focused sunlight came always from the seeming horizon, and there was no night. The residents simply shut off the light from their houses when it was time for night, and slept while the light continued to charge their home-energy reservoirs. It was a primitive system, but effective.

Sergeant Heller accompanied us but remained with the shuttle. I would signal if I needed him. Brinker and I walked to the tavern. She was in a dress that enhanced her spare figure appropriately, while I wore Jupiter civvies—hardly more anonymous here than my captain's uniform. Anonymity was not the point; no stranger could be anonymous here. I was merely signaling that this was not an official trip.

The tavern was surprisingly large, and there were perhaps a hundred men and women in it. Evidently this was the main social nexus of Bright Hope. We showed our stunners to the clerk at the entry, whose eyes widened as he recognized me. “You know what you're getting into, Cap'n?” he asked.

I nodded, accepted back my stunner, and waited while he checked Blinker's. The point of the check was not to disarm customers but to make sure that their weapons could not harm the premises or precipitate blood feuds on the premises. Then we entered and found seats at a central table.

I looked around. This place could have been taken from a page of thousand-year-past history. There was no automation in view; the crude wooden tables were served by human waitresses, or more correctly, bar girls. The customers were informally, even raggedly, garbed in simple trousers, shirts, and boots, the women in low- and high-cut dresses. The beverage of choice was ale, foaming in big pewter mugs.

I concealed my reaction. In the Juclip, wood was a precious commodity, because of the space and time it required to grow it, and home-brewed intoxicants hardly existed, since the commercial processors were so much more efficient. Here in the Belt the sunlight was more concentrated and anchorages for domes common, so farming of all types, including tree farming, was relatively simple. Thus wood was cheaper than artificial material, and it showed.

A waitress arrived with steins of ale for us. We hadn't ordered; it seemed this was standard. We paid, and Brinker reminded me to pay a little extra; this was a “tip,” a gratuity to the waitress for her service. I had heard of such a thing but never before experienced it; Brinker was already helping me.

The floor show commenced: dusky-skinned young women with full breasts and skirts formed of grass.

Grass! Nowhere in the Juclip did grass like that grow! The girls were of Melanesian stock, as were many folk in the Belt, and they did their best to preserve fragments of the historical culture they identified with.

Watching them move their bodies, I mentally applauded their cultural effort. I suppose the commander of a Jupiter Task Force is supposed to be above noticing such an elementary thing as sex appeal in natives, but I was between marriages and quite tired of the Tail. These local women were of course off limits to Navy personnel, by my own order, because venereal disease did indeed exist in this undisciplined region of space. But psychologically this made them forbidden fruit, and in any event there is something about a well-moved grass skirt....

I forced my attention, if not my eyes, to business. “As you know,” I murmured to Brinker, “we have gained a ship.”

“And lost two,” she said. “You're lucky you didn't wipe yourself out.”

“Yes. Inexperience was very nearly disastrous. I need an experienced captain for the new ship—one I can trust.”

She gazed at me. “You are asking for a recommendation?”

“No. Can I trust you with such a ship?”

“I am a pirate. You know that.”

“My staff advised me to be open-minded about pirates,” I said. “It is not easy. I did not want to hire you, but you have served well. You could serve better. I am prepared to provide you with the means to escape my command and revert to your old ways—if you undertake not to do so. Will you serve me as the captain of a fighting ship?”

Brinker was a hard, controlled woman, but now her eyes shone with tears. “Yes,” she said. “For such a command—body, mind, and soul.”

That, from this particular person, was the ultimate commitment. “I will settle for loyalty,” I said. “The Navy way. Discipline by the book.”

“Yes.”

“And it ends when the mission does, without record. You are, after all, a civilian, without security clearance.”

“Yes.” Her secret past remained secret, officially.

“I will see to the assignment,” I said.

She shook her head ruefully. “I think this is the first time in my life I have said yes to any man three times in succession.”

“It is the first time I have given a fighting ship to a pirate.” But my talent told me this was the proper gesture. It was command that lured Brinker, not piracy. And I knew she could do the job. This assignment could save many lives.

A tall, elegant man of about forty approached our table, trailing a woman and a girl. He paused, glancing at me. “May we join you, stranger?” he inquired politely in English.

“Happy to have you, stranger,” I responded, aware that in this region stranger was equivalent to mister or sir . “If you don't find it crowded.”

“Cozy, not crowded,” he said with a smile, fetching chairs from the nearby tables and fitting them around ours. He and his companions sat down. It was tight but feasible. “I thought you might like information, and I possess the best.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “Let me introduce myself. I am—”

“Let's keep it anonymous for the present,” he interrupted with a smile. “Or at least on a first-name basis.”

Already I was reading him. This was no casual encounter! He was a highly disciplined man who recognized me and had sought me out. “As you prefer, stranger. I am Hope, and my companion is Isobel.”