Trial by Fire - eARC (38 page)

Trevor hefted his locker by the end handle, swung it around to rest against his back, and made his way off the pier onto the street.

“Taxi, sir?” The inevitable inquiry—but made by a strangely accented and familiar voice. Trevor turned—

—and saw Chief Petty Officer Stanislaus Witkowski emerge, arising from a supine position between two crates, pushing a panama hat back from his eyes.

“Stosh? What the hell are you—?”

“Doing? Waiting. For you. I hate officers. Always late. Ready to go up to the house?”

Trevor wanted to be able to play the surly boss, but couldn’t. “Stosh, you are a sight for sore eyes.”

“Or a sight to make eyes sore. Or so the ladies tell me. It’s tolerable seeing you again, too, sir. You’ve had a pretty busy itinerary since Mars, if shack chat is half true.”

“Yeah, they’ve kept me hopping.” They had arrived at a worn but ready-looking Land Rover which was idling irregularly. “How bad did the EMPs hit you down here?”

“Bad enough. Scuttlebutt says they pretty much blanketed the globe.”

“Yeah, that’s what they told me in Norfolk. Wasn’t intense enough to knock out milspec hardening, but any civilian gear that was switched on was pretty much fried. West coast got hammered. It was the start of rush hour there.”

Stosh opened the door with a flourish. “Not as bad as Tokyo or Beijing if you can believe the ham radio operators. Hit them right after everyone had settled in to work: computers on, streets packed, deliveries underway, elevators crowded. More than a little messy.”

Trevor rolled his eyes when Stosh opened the car-door and held it for him. “And was it some ham operator who told you I was coming?”

Stosh slid in the right-hand driver’s side. “Nope, that was the little birdie that visits a noncom when his CO is about to come and make his life miserable. And shorter.”

“And does that little birdie have a name?”

“Yes. It’s called ‘Common Sense.’”

“Cute.”

“Sure. I figured when the EMP hit, you’d be heading down here to keep us in the loop. Given the timetables for the coastal feeder system, I guesstimated you’d get out of Annapolis either the night we got hit by the cosmic bug-zappers or the day after. I figured you’d hitch a ride through to Norfolk and then have a zero-wait time to get a boat to Jacksonville or Miami.”

“Zero-wait time?”

Stosh had cleared the outskirts of Charlestown, gunned the Land Rover. “Captain, I’ve seen the card that Mr. Downing gave you. You weren’t going to be waiting on line anywhere. So I just ran the numbers, figuring it would take you maybe as many as two days to get a boat either out of the Keys or the Bahamas, wherever you had heard of the best connection.”

“Your little birdie is pretty clever.”

“Sometimes clever. Sometimes simply equipped with good ears.”

Trevor smiled as they bounced over a
ghut
, a gullylike washway that had been given formal and permanent shape by concrete. “Hard to believe there’s much worth hearing this far away from DC.”

“See? You officers lack imagination, lack vision. Don’t hear as well as our little birdies do, either. F’r instance, do you know how popular the local Four Seasons resort is with megacorporate executives and defense engineers?”

“Very?”

“Very very. And you’d be surprised at some of the things an NCO’s little drink-buying birdy can hear there.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, such as—Delta Pavonis remained off-limits even after the Virus scare was lifted, and even though a lot of military traffic continued heading there and to points beyond.”

“What kind of military traffic?”

“All kinds, but a lot of interesting cargo, particularly low-mass support weapons and high-tech assault gear. If you listen to the lower-echelon types, they are convinced that the knuckleheads in logistics really screwed the pooch on this one. According to them, the reason we're short of so many key systems here on Earth is because we sent them out to defend the colonies.”

“What shortages are you talking about?”

“Hadn’t you heard? EVA is almost unattainable. Specialty ammo is in short supply, particularly for heavy weapons. And the unofficial word on tacnukes is that the arsenals’ racks are as bare as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. So, apparently, are the barracks that house special and elite units.”

“Which you learned how?”

“Just because we’re incognito interlopers in this tropical paradise doesn’t mean we couldn’t do some online lurking, looking in on the websites of some pals in Pensacola, Quantico, Coronado, Benning and Bragg.”

“And?”

“And most of their sites haven’t been touched in about four months. The others have become electronic ghost towns.”

“And where have your missing pals disappeared to?”

“Oh, you hear lots of rumors. A popular one is that they were on the carriers or capital ships that were lost at Barnard’s Star, or out at Jupiter.”

Trevor held on to the roof with his left hand as they swept around a long, palm-lined curve. Mounting up on his left was the extinct volcanic cone of Mount Nevis. Sweeping off to the right was a sward of elephant grass that lead his eye onward to a broad white-sand arc, then white breakers, and finally glass-smooth turquoise water. “I was at Barnard’s Star for better than a month. I didn’t see a single SEAL or green beanie. No spec ops personnel at all. You might say their absence was conspicuous.”

Stosh nodded. “So is some of the online silence on the sites where the Teams’ spouses congregate. The ones who are talking haven’t heard anything, but you almost get the feeling that’s what they expected. Like when we’re sent on an extended classified deployment: the total lack of information is a kind of information in itself.”

“So you don’t think the missing units are part of the war casualties?”

“I think they’re connected to the equipment shortages. Wherever all the nifty gear went, that’s where you’ll find all the missing boots and butts. And although there are plenty of whispers that they were all on the ships that got pranged by the Arat Kur—well, there are some funny rumors about those, too.”

“Rumors about what? Our ships?”

“Yeah, at least some of the newer ones. About six months back, a few of us got messages from pals in the technical services—machinist’s mates, weapon techs, chief engineers—who were being redeployed to help the industrial corporations as their Lagrangian point shipyards went into overdrive. They were so overwhelmed just laying down the hulls that they relocated the post-assembly finishing processes to one of the secure yards out in the asteroid belt. So once they were done constructing the spinal frame and mounting primary hull modules, they popped in automated controls, a single small engine, and off it went on a three-week glide to the Belt.”

Stosh swerved left onto a steep and irregularly macadamed road. A familiar, gutted sugar mill flashed at Trevor through the trees on the right and was gone. “Now,” Witkowski continued, “I have a friend out in the Belt—”

“You have friends everywhere, don't you Stosh?”

“A consequence of my winning smile and barroom conviviality. So, my buddy in the Belt relayed this miraculous tale: those ships arriving from the cislunar ways were being finished in five days. Each one went through the same process: into the yard, secure perimeter thrown up around it, and in go construction robots and a few techs. Five days later, out come the techs and most of the ’bots, the secure cordon comes down, and—without a ‘well-done’ or a christening—off she sails.”

“No crew?”

“Skeleton or none. Apparently all these five-day wonders were being ferried out-system.”

Trevor saw the long, low, intersecting roofs of a refurbished plantation house rising up through the trees. “Stosh, I think your friend has been visiting a few too many of those convivial barrooms. A five-day finishing job? How are they doing it?”

“No one knows, because no one was allowed in. The techs were held in isolation during and afterward. Intelligence quarantine, they called it.”

Trevor nodded, wished he had more time to lay out all the pieces of this strange puzzle and play with them. But more immediate concerns called for his attention. “Stosh, are we ready to move?”

Witkowski simply smiled, went speeding past the plantation house’s porch, careened around the embanked driveway to the back—and hit the brakes hard in front of the already-open garage. He flashed the headlights. Bannor Rulaine and Carlos Cruz emerged from the black recesses of the building, wearing fatigues, suppressed liquimix bullpup rifles slung around their necks.

“How did you get them ready so quic—?”

“Our hardened pager/transponders. Cued everyone the moment I saw you step off the boat.”

“And the others?”

“Lieutenant Winfield’s still at the dock. He’s watching for anyone who might have tailed you. Barr is on overwatch in case someone arrived before you and is doubling back to pay us all a visit, or if someone decides to paraglide in for tea, crumpets, and a firefight.”

“You think I might have been foll—?”

“Sir, you’re an officer. Thinking is one of the luxuries of your rank. I just follow procedures and save our lives. And right now, that means taking nothing for granted. In twelve hours, if we haven’t had any visitors, protocol says that—provisionally—you have not been followed, observed, or bugged.”

Trevor shrugged, nodded a greeting to Cruz, who nodded back and moved to help him with his locker. But Stosh shook his head at Cruz—“As you were.”—and led him and Trevor into the garage. “You’re not going to have the opportunity—or reason—to unpack, sir.”

“Why?”

Stosh snapped the light switch. In place of cars, the garage held two six-by-twelve sand tables. One boasted a surprisingly lifelike model of the ferry dock at the Four Season’s Resort. The other depicted Bradshaw airport, twenty-two kilometers away on St. Kitts. On each, target vehicles had been painted day-glo orange. “We’ve been playing with our toys—for three hours every night. From leaving this garage to attainment of all objectives—vehicles seized, aircraft secured to the ferry deck, and underway to next area of ops—we conservatively estimate four hours, twenty minutes. If we wait for cover of night—and therefore, the absence of staff—the time-to-completion expands to almost six hours but with almost zero chance of us needing to fire our weapons. Unless, of course, I can convince you that we have a better option than the ferry
and
the VTOLs.”

Trevor leaned against the wall, crossed his arms. “Convince me.”

Witkowski strolled to the opposite end of the garage, returned with a black ring-binder, dropped it into Trevor’s hand.

“What’s this?”

“Technical specs for the DS X-198.”

“The what?”

Witkowski couldn’t restrain his smile. “A research sub.”

Trevor opened the binder, couldn’t get past the picture on the first page. “Where did you get it?”

“I decided it was time once again to disobey orders. So I went AWOL to San Juan and caught a Navy transport bound for Charleston. While on board, I liberated a few sheets of Navy letterhead, affixed your name and new rank—provided by Captain Rulaine—and convinced the folks at the NOAA facility to loan us this little fish they had decommissioned a year ago.”

Trevor scanned the sub’s schematics. Not an extreme depth vehicle, but it had external manipulators, a decent amount of space, and two airlocks for deploying multiple divers. But no accommodations.

“Stosh, this is great, but it’s a working sub.”

“Indeed it is. Look here: external racks for storing samples or carrying construction materials. Perfect for the battlefield playthings we’ve still got locked in our cargo container.”

“Yeah, but no place to live.”

“Not a problem. We still take the ferry—or better, a high-weather ship—and keep the sub tethered under us, to be used for final insertion.”

Trevor glanced at Stosh. “Insertion?”

“Yes, sir. In Indonesia, sir. And since you didn’t arrive on an official government tub, I’m betting that the op you have in mind is not in complete regs with any of the ones Mr. Downing has relayed and Captain Rulaine has read. So I figure we need to leave quickly for parts unknown to him.”

Trevor stared into Witkowski’s smiling eyes. So here was Stosh, cheerfully planning how to get them all to the other side of the globe for a rogue mission that was probably collective suicide. He was either one hell of a friend, or one hell of a bonehead. Or both. Aloud: “You might be right about the advantages of having a high-water ship, but then we probably won’t be able to carry and launch the aircraft.”

“Begging the august and accomplished officer’s pardon, but isn’t it likely that, if we try to launch the aircraft at all, that the Arat Kur might just take that amiss?”

“Yes. And that, Stanislaus, is the very lynchpin of my plan.”

“Ah. See? There’s an officer for you. I never understand a thing they say. But you’ve always been that way. That’s how I knew you’d make command grade. So. What’s your plan, sir?”

Chapter Twenty-Six

Commercial dockside, San Diego, Earth

The young fellow in civvies straightened and began to raise his hand into a salute. Richard Downing glanced sideways toward the tall man at whom the gesture was being directed—and who uttered a sharp, stentorian rebuke that turned heads at the far end of the wharf. “Belay that salute, rating!”

The young rating nervously snapped his bladed hand back down to his coveralled side.

“Son, do you want to lose the war for us?”

“Sir? Sir, no sir.”

“Good. Then remember this. We don’t own the skies anymore. They do. And their visual sensors are probably good enough to conduct a rectal exam on a gnat from low orbit. So if they’re watching us right now, and they see dockhands saluting civilians here on a commercial wharf, they’re going to get suspicious, don’t you think?”

“Y-yes, sir.”

“And what if they began to suspect that you aren’t loading
grain
on this ship?”

The rating looked nervously at the collapsible freight containers arrayed in single-height rows on the deck behind him. “This hull would be headed for a world of hurt, sir.”