Star Risk - 03 The Doublecross Program (16 page)

"The new foods�such as your main�are in the New Products Division. That means Omni is taking a flier on them, on your company. If your product catches fire, as main appears to be doing, then, after a suitable time, they'll move you over to the Staples Market."

Friedrich's eyes glittered a little.

"But if it's no more than a fad, a momentary interest, or if for some reason you cannot provide your product consistently, on a fairly massive basis, you're doomed.

"Omni's dropped hundreds of thousands of new products over the years. Do any of you remember ralcat?"

Blank looks from around the table.

"I didn't think so," Davenport said. "That is an example of just what I'm talking about. Gone and forgotten, and no one, including me, knows why.

"Now, from what Friedrich had sent me, you want me to convince Omni Foods that you are, ultimately, in control of the main situation, as well as this cluster," Davenport said. "Which means no one need suggest the necessity of an Alliance peacekeeping force here."

"Just so," von Baldur said.

"The law gets in the way of our sort," Goodnight said bluntly.

"I hardly think that's the way to put things," Davenport said. "I wonder one thing, however, which you can correct me on. You are, let us say, advising the Shaoki here. Yet from what I've read, the other force in this cluster, the, uh, Khelat, have the majority of main plantations. Am I in error?"

"No," Riss said. "But given the nature of things, that is not necessarily a permanent state of affairs."

Von Baldur looked mildly alarmed, as if Riss shouldn't have spoken.

"I gather by that," Davenport said, "you intend a swift victory."

Riss started to offer another option, kept her mouth shut.

"We anticipate an end to this frankly absurd war at any moment," von Baldur said, and M'chel knew why, way back when, somebody said she stood little chance of making general in peacetime, since that meant being most political.

"I'll be happy to provide a full briefing in my quarters," Friedrich went on, and Davenport dazzled him with a smile, her siren role coming back.

M'chel Riss decided she was going to bed early.

She was up early and heading out the door, buckling her combat harness on, when Anya Davenport, looking tousled, came down the hall from Friedrich von Baldur's suite. That figured.

"How very interesting," Riss said as she eyed the manifest, authorizing the purchase of certain medium armaments, construction materials, and such, to be provided on a rush basis.

"Did I do something wrong by accepting this?" the worried clerk said. "Colonel Hore said he'd hand carried it to me, after you'd signed the requisition."

"No," Riss said slowly. "Nothing is wrong."

Everything was very wrong.

She'd never seen the requisition in her life, let alone signed it.

And she suddenly had a very good idea of what Hore was up to.

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TWENTY-FOUR � ^ � It was Vian's death that saved Jasmine King's life.

When the patrol ship crashed, he went, very messily, into the control panel. Jasmine's seat broke at the mount, catapulting her into Vian's cushioning corpse.

The world went away as the ship pinwheeled, then settled, stern first, only thirty meters from shore.

She came back to a world of pain, hurting everywhere. There were various alarms, and King smelled something burning. She wanted to just lie still and go back to that place where it didn't hurt.

But she also wanted to live.

She managed to hit the quick release on her safety harness, rolled away from the mess onto the floor.

A port painted sunlight across her, then away, as the patrol ship turned in the surf.

She closed her eyes.

The burning smell got stronger.

Jasmine wanted somebody to help her.

But no one came.

Without opening her eyes, she ran her hands over her body. There weren't any bones sticking out. King forced herself to sit up, tried not to look at Vian's body. There were two more bodies in the cramped cockpit. She didn't need to get up to see they were as dead as their CO.

Hissing came.

King wondered, dully, what that could be, guessed it might be water hitting molten metal.

No.

She did not want to die.

She forced herself to her knees, then her feet. The overhead was very close to her, smashed down in the crash.

Still on the back of her seat was her combat harness. King stared at it for a time, then pulled it on.

She almost fell, caught herself on a bulkhead, staggered to the air lock. Jasmine hit the cycle sensor. There was a humming, then a grating noise, but nothing happened.

King hurt everywhere. There were tears running down her cheeks. That does nothing, she told herself, pulled the safety cover, and hit the emergency lock controls.

The explosive charges in the inner and outer doors blew the lock open, and she smelled ocean instead of the canned ship air.

The burning smell got stronger, and King heard, from somewhere near the ship's stern, the whoosh of flames. She felt heat, pushed herself down the small, twisted tube of the lock.

The ship rolled again, and slurped water into the lock. Jasmine let herself slide forward, out of the ship, into the water.

The salt burned her cuts, but it was cold enough to soothe her for an instant. King went underwater, curled, and brought herself back to the surface.

There was the ocean, a reef in front of her. She turned, wiped her blurred eyes, saw a rocky beach.

Jasmine discovered she could swim, and made for the shore. She feebly stroked, again and again.

It would be easier to just stop and let herself be swallowed by the cool greenness. It would be easier to let the combat harness fall away.

But she did neither, and then there were pebbles under her feet, and she was on her knees, crawling out of the tiny waves.

She wanted to collapse on the shore, but didn't, crawling toward brush. At least her near-indestructible ship suit wasn't torn.

She allowed herself to rest for a few minutes in the shelter of the brush.

Then she caught herself.

King stared out at the wreckage in the sea, realized anyone overflying it would assume everyone aboard was dead.

She fumbled in her harness for her SAR�search and rescue�com. Maybe the other two patrol ships were still in-atmosphere, and she could shout for help. Or maybe the SAR would reach beyond the atmosphere. She had no idea of its range.

The SAR com wasn't in its pouch.

Jasmine remembered where it was.

It was plugged into its recharger, where King had conscientiously put it the day before, back on the bureau in her suite on Irdis.

And she was the woman who was supposed to remember everything�

There was a scream, and King got up. It had to be one of the patrol ships coming back to see if Vian or anyone was alive.

It wasn't, Jasmine realized, in time to flatten herself.

An in-atmosphere interceptor dove down.

Khelat.

Flanking it were three wingmen. Rockets spat from the lead ship, into the wreckage of the patrol ship, and it exploded, the shock wave rolling toward shore.

Jasmine found herself crying again, thought Goodnight would be snarling "What a baby" at her, forced herself to stop, crawled farther away from the ocean as the Khelat flight made another firing run.

An hour later, things looked a little better to her. She definitely had nothing but bruises, even though a few of them would make wonderful shades of purple.

All she was missing was the SAR com. Everything else was proper and well maintained.

Jasmine had some serious extras.

For openers, a lot more money than the standard survival kit suggested. She had both gold coins and Alliance credits.

Her emergency food packs had been tweaked by M'chel to be almost palatable, and she had tiny packets of spices to go with them.

Jasmine remembered the on-screen map of Khelat II quite clearly. Rafar City would be about thirty kilometers� that way. King didn't need a compass to find north. It was reflexive.

Her intent was to hike to the city, keeping away from the locals, since she would be hard-pressed to resemble them. She wished there really were bandits in the hills she could join up with until she was able to rejoin Star Risk, but knew better.

King guessed she'd work her way into the capital and try to join up with Ells and his maintenance crews. She doubted they'd turn her over to the Khelat. She was very unsure about the other mercenaries who'd remained with the Khelat.

It was a plan. Maybe not a very good plan, but a plan.

King put everything away in their little pouches in her harness, clipped it on, and set out, remembering the old clich�"A journey of a thousand blisters starts with a single stumble."

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TWENTY-FIVE � ^ � Hore and his ranking officers roused their battalion an hour before dawn, always a propitious time for a palace revolution.

In the hours before, the men and women had been armed, the supplies coming from the new arsenal to prevent suspicion, and told their duties.

The few mercenaries who still had any ideals were told that Star Risk had made a secret pact with the Khelat to doublecross everyone, including their fellow mercs, in the Shaoki worlds.

This was a deceit.

At the moment.

The more rational soldiers were told that Hore thought it was time to get rid of Star Risk because they weren't "winning the war by direct action," and, more important, were hogging the majority of the client's credits.

None of the various watching posts on Star Risk positions or soldiery reported anything untoward, although two LPs on the "mansion" said there'd been a flurry of ships that arrived after dusk on the roof landing platforms, but they'd trailed away within hours.

Electronic posts reported normal traffic from the high-rise.

The two critical units were Inchcape's destroyers and the three remaining patrol boats of Vian's unit.

All but one of the starships were comfortably grounded. Vian was dead, and Inchcape had just left on a five-day leave, according to reports from Star Risk Central.

Hore's XO and adjutant were beginning to gloat, but Hore reminded them of Shakespeare's lion hunter, and said the celebrations could wait until they had Star Risk's hide properly skinned and staked out for drying.

He reported to the Shaoki Council members who'd convinced him to betray his employers that his troops were on the move.

Hore intended to cause as few casualties as possible in his coup and make one quick strike against the mansion, wait until Star Risk realized fighting back was useless, and it would all be over.

Two cargo lifters had been fitted with 200 mm medium autocannon. Keeping to the streets, they closed on the high-rise. Behind them was the rest of the battalion, all in lifters.

Shaoki civilians heard the turbine whine, peered down, saw soldiers in the streets, and made for cover.

On signal, the two lifters came up from their concealment and took the mansion area into their sights. They each fired four rounds in less than a minute.

Masonry crashed, and glass sharded down. The outer wall of the high-rise cracked and tumbled, exposing Star Risk's innards.

The infantry lifters came in, surrounding the high-rise. There was only one slight problem:

There was no one, no one at all, in Star Risk's quarters.

Hore was still gaping at this impossibility when Inchcape's destroyer dropped down out of the clouds.

Two missiles spat out, were guided into Hore's artillery.

They blew, fireballs that left little debris to cascade down.

As the missiles struck, the other destroyers and the patrol boats lifted off from their fields. Her four destroyers linked with Inchcape, and each sent one missile arcing down on Hore.

The four Star Risk operatives watched, grim-faced, from Inchcape's bridge.

Riss had put sensors out around Hore's barracks, two days before, when she'd figured out what the man intended.

When the alarms went off the day before, as Hore concentrated his troops, Star Risk evacuated all their personnel from the hotel and let Hore walk into their trap.

The patrol boats flew up the streets, just over Hore's infantry lifters. There was no escape for the infantry�but the patrol boats held their fire.

Hore looked around, saw he was surrounded from above, took the obvious way out.

"Does anyone," he asked in an emotionless tone, "happen to have a white flag?"

Hore's battalion was disarmed, including the officers' individual weapons.

Hore started to say something about this being dishonorable, got a look from Riss that shut him up.

He was enough of a leader to be the last aboard the transports commandeered from the Shaoki, turned back at the entrance to the lock, and tried a smile.

"No hard feelings?" he asked.

"None," Friedrich von Baldur said in a friendly tone.

Hore nodded, went into the lock, and it cycled shut.

"Maybe not for you," Goodnight said. "But I'm looking forward to meeting him in a bar someday."

"Our blood requirements weren't satisfied," agreed Grok.

"Oh, well," von Baldur sighed. "At least they didn't ask for their back pay."

"Screw them," Riss said. "They're gone. Now we've got to figure out how to doublecross the Shaoki that tried to doublecross us."

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TWENTY-SIX � ^ � Jasmine King glowered at the approach to Technician Ells's maintenance and supply compound. It was down a straight road with no hiding places on either side. The road was z'd with solid barricades to slow traffic. The razor wire fence around the dozen buildings was taut, well maintained.

The pair of Khelat sentries were sharply turned out, and there was a manned and alert AA site just inside the gate to deal with any attacking lifters.

Jasmine had walked around the compound looking for a weak point, and couldn't find any.