The Princess of Caldris (9 page)

He smiled, and I realized the old iron
Detective had been forcing that smile for a very long, painful
time.

"Yes. No one uses wormholes in combat except
pirates, madmen, and Paramon. Too dangerous. I was at the Baal One
Station disaster. In a lifetime of military and police service,
I've never seen anyone use them since, until now. I'd stake what's
left of my career on it-we follow the bread crumbs and there will
be a Paramon agent at the end of the trail."

I glowered, sick with the
sudden knowledge of how a nineteen year old cadet feels after
watching his comrades perish, and Fifty years of loneliness after
that, always stepping back from that personal bond that would leave
the soul wretched come the loss.
Fifty
years of heavy metal shielding for the soul, and underneath it all,
a brutalized nineteen year old boy on flight deck.

"Don't let your desire to settle accounts
with Paramon prejudice your judgement, Detective," I offered from
the strange place of his memory.

A tech came in with a report; efficient,
cool, and detached-he handed the data to Hammerstein. The
detective's eyes widened and a name came loud to me as if the old
block had spoken it aloud.

"Colonel Herb Lahman, Black Devils." I
said.

Hammerstein looked about the room, "Cut that
out. Come on. We need a bigger boat."

Coco-butter looked at up
the mention of "bigger boat.” Hammerstein saw the eager
eyes.

"Pick out the best ship at the Fort, pilot,
and tell them we're requisitioning it, King's orders. You can fly a
bigger boat right?"

"I can fly any ship in this
Navy, Detective. I was born in flight, my mother at the helm,
single handed, strato-caster."

Hammerstein chuckled back
and winked. "Good! Then pick out a good one."

We stepped out of the
Officer's mess and I was struck with the realization that
Coco-butter's description wasn't hyperbole. He really had been born
in a flight dive with his mother at the helm. She'd lost his twin
in the struggle, but had managed to save Justin "Coco-butter.” She
was an amazing woman. But that is another story. I looked back at
Coco-butter as we left with a new found respect.

The wheels of his mind at
that moment were running through a mental inventory of ships he had
seen at the Base. Somehow I already knew he was going to pick
the--"Kanaafutura?!" Kemp was steaming. "That's my flagship
Hammerstein! I want to see a letter of requisition signed by the
King himself before you fly out of here with the pride of this
base!"

Fifty years of heavy metal shielding over
one's soul can be a particularly painful defense mechanism to
build. However, when he chose to use it, Hammerstein could crush
groups of trained men with it.

That smile.
In your face.
"Really,
Admiral Kemp-because I have a hypercaster right in the Hammerhead
and I can get the Royal family on the line right now, and you can
explain how you need the ship more than they need their
daughter?"

Kemp folded like a kitten, "No, no, no!" He
showed both palms, "Take it. Take it-and take a platoon of
Airborne. I don't want to see you, or that ship back at this base
again without a very attractive Royal personage by the name of
Clarissa on board. Alive, viewing historical tapes, and driving the
ship's cook crazy with peculiar dinner requests."

Hammerstein shrugged. "It's
a big Galaxy. Have those bots pick that Sunrider apart for clues
and I'll cast you on a coded line."

The old granite detective looked weary.

Now Kemp smiled, "Go find
her Hammer. Bring her back. The Royals-they picked the right
man.
I know you.
You'll be having lobster and feeding them oatmeal before it's
done."

For a moment the memory of the long ago
smugglers lifted Hammerstein's gloom.

But my mind was on the ship
Coco-butter had picked. The Kanaafutura.

What a ride.

Gabriel
Montagudo

VI

The KanaaFutura

It was a beast; built for
speed, blood, and fury. Two massive warp cores and two smaller
crossed the back end of the ship could ride the hyperstreams like a
surfer on the Tangerine sea, or bend space in normal space like
taffy at a high-winter fair. She was a charger, like a knight’s
stallion of old, well armored, well muscled, and meant to break the
enemy lines in one savage, dashing, berserker bolt.

"Come on kid, let's go find
out what our techs have dug up from the wormhole wreckage."
Hammerstein was working on an idea, I sensed it.

Past the serpentine
tunnels deeper and deeper into the older core of the base we
careened as Hammerstein’s idea turned and turned in his
mind
.

I sought to grasp it but it
wasn’t fully formed. At length we came to one of the labs and a
small group of techs were immersed in scanning equipment over
various bits of wreckage. One of them, and older woman, sported a
cigar and produced one from a pocket and gave it to the stodgy
detective with a flourish, “Hammer, old boy, so good to pick
through the blasted bits of your targets again.”

Hammerstein lit the cigar, “Glad to oblige,
Candy, my dear. What’s the word?”

She puffed and blew smoke in his direction
playfully. I sensed her fondness of the “old boy” ran deep. “The
word? The…words are ‘Langley Stay’.”

Hammerstein’s face turned into a grinning
death mask. “Herbivore…?”

Now she smiled and I sensed
they had been thinking alike. “Yes, Herbivore.
Colonel Herb LaMann.
The Lord God
King of the wormhole counter maneuvers back at… the Pleiades
incident.”

“
The only one who saw it
coming in time to pull his ships out. The only one capable enough
to counter measure.”

“
There is no smoking gun
here, Hammer. But last word is Colonel LaMann was operating a large
hardware operation on Langley Stay. Ships, military equipment, all
sorts of goodies-black market. The trace navigationals in the
computer systems in this wreckage all indicate a flight plan out of
Langley Stay.”

“
Put that together with
the wormhole attacks and one gets--“

“
Herbivore. He’s the only
one who would keep that kind of equipment flight worthy-just
because he could. I just had to confirm the ship was out of Langley
to confirm my suspicions.”

Finally Candy acknowledged my presence, “You
going to introduce me or am I already read like a book?”

“
Both. Lieutenant Candy
Parker, forensic Science. Please meet Master Winteroud, of the Sole
estate at the edge of the Tangerine Sea. A bonafide, genuine,
empath. Historian archaeologist adventurer in training.”

I beamed. It was the first
time anyone had called me a “Historian-archaeologist-adventurer”
but it was not to be the last. I felt an immediate affinity with
Lieutenant Parker, forensic science being not so different from
archaeology in so many of its methodologies. There was an
intelligence and good humor about her. Sensing deeper, of course,
one often finds various sadnesses. I found the sadness shadowed in
the back of her mind. I left it alone, tried to keep my focus on
what she had discovered in the wreckage of the ship.

I sensed it had taken her
some time to dig through layers of encryption, but like
Hammerstein, she had instinctively sensed the involvement of the
“Lord god king of wormhole counter maneuvers” from the onset, and
had set about reverse engineering lines of code meant to cover up
the attack ships origins until indeed she uncovered it.

“
Pleased to meet you, son!
Welcome to Fort Oort!”

I took her hand, and gave
her an aristocratic bow. She smiled, and long ago memories of other
aristocratic bows she had once been given came to mind.
At the estates near the Military academy
Specialist Candy Parker had won the hearts of many cadets; at first
sight. Athletic, statuesque, and ever a gleam of laughter in her
eye-
then the memory passed and her thoughts
moved her though back to the encryption codes she had unraveled,
and the older, more storied woman looked back at me
again.

Several bots moved through
the wreckage, scanning. My mind shifted between decades and the
deep emotions and perceptions of Candy’s life back to the present
crisis. Such was my lot in life as an empath, even at twelve
standard Caldris years.

“
So, you two both sense
the hand of “Herbivore” behind this-and yet, Herbivore I gather is
also an asset for our side?”

Candy’s eyes darkened with a slightly wicked
intent.

Hammerstein glowered,
“Wormhole strikes were a wickedly unpredictable affair. Herb’s
uncanny skill with them was about to get him dissected and analyzed
by Intelligence Science Division, I figure, but the war ended and
Herb went off the grid. Not just off the Planetary grid but
Galactic.”

Candy interjected and more shadows moved
behind her deep recollections, implications of intrigue, “Herb and
his covert ops teams could get behind enemy lines, wreak havoc, and
then be back before Command knew they had left. Herb had lost faith
in the government’s rationale for the war, this one and others. He
was, in all reality, on his own.”

On his own…with wormholes.

“
He liked Hammer, though.
Like a son.”

Somehow this embarrassed
Hammerstein, his ancient granite façade pulled down and his bushy
haired cadet revealed underneath.

“
Yeah, I was assigned to
escort him from the flight deck after he struck back after the Baal
incident. They had drawn blood; Herb hit back-and hit back hard.
Laid waste to a portion of Baal’s Northern hemisphere with a nasty
comet dump. Ba-Booma: the sky opened above an enemy division and
suddenly a rain of cometary material wormholed down, going from
below zero to high temperature in a sudden furious explosion with
such relentless and persistent mass most of the personnel shields
were fractured and collapsed.”

There was a grim
satisfaction behind the story for him-Herb had delivered payback to
the enemy. At the same time, that “enemy” who paid was in all
reality just a bunch of grunts and guys and gals like
himself-people who really didn’t want to be there, no matter how
much machismo they mustered, and who had absolutely no say in
either the orders to attack in the first place.

Candy took Hammerstein’s
pause as an invitation to finish, “The shields that did hold, well,
that did them no good either. Suddenly buried under tons of molten
cometary rock, shielded or not they weren’t going
anywhere.

Surely it was a more
merciful fate to go quickly.

Herb and his covert team
rode down in the debris hidden in faux boulders that passed any air
and space born defense scans. They assumed control of the region,
planting themselves atop the cooling cometary debris and making
sure no rescue arrived for any buried enemy units.

He pushed the rules of war right to the line
between battle and atrocity, to that ugly grey area nobody likes to
think of.”

The two of them dropped silent and I
realized then the bond they shared-the Baal incident had been their
first combat experience. The mass and sudden death, the dislocation
from the romantic notions of youth directly to the reality and
banality of war with its ugly evils; they had lost their innocence
together. Not in some romantic fairy tale love story set in opulent
gardens and universities, but in the sights and sounds of the
war.

“
And you think Herb
masterminded these attacks and the kidnapping of the Princess?” I
asked, sorting through their emotions. Candy, curiously dark,
Hammerstein suddenly revolted.

“
Herb is an arms dealer. A
used starship salesman. Expensive curious-contraband. He is no
longer a mercenary or master assassin. He would, however, know a
great deal of such men. I believe Herb can point us in the right
direction,” Hammer said crisply.

Candy filled with a dark
humor, “The trick will be finding Herb. Langley Stay is an Outspace
world, its cities carved out of solid stone in endless canyons, and
interlaced with labyrinths of canals. A lynchpin between the
refugee worlds of the Sagittarius Arm of the galaxy and the Orion
Arm, any Imperial order is purely pastiche-it is a smugglers’ and
mercenaries’ world. They will not hand over their own to some Royal
request from Caldris.”