Vicky Peterwald: Target (6 page)

Vicky eyed the admiral. He studied her right back. She could detect no decision behind his eyes, so she went on. “The only clear evidence of a conspiracy is the bribe that was given to you and the other admirals to deliver my delicate body to someone or ones unnamed. Did you try to trace the money?” she asked.

“The Navy did its best to do that,” Admiral Gort replied. “It got nowhere.” He glanced at Mr. Smith. “I wonder if you would have better luck.”

“I don’t deal with luck, sir, and I am always available for hire. Assuming the price is right, and the check clears.”

“Mr. Smith,” Vicky said, “has made it clear to me that he is first and last a mercenary.”

“An amazingly well-equipped one,” the admiral said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.

“His equipment has saved my life at least once,” Vicky added.

“A fortunate blow-by of my contract to keep Kris Longknife alive,” Mr. Smith said, dismissively.

“So you were employed by Wardhaven Security,” the admiral said, turning on him.

“Me, and a whole lot of other people you’d never expect,” Mr. Smith said with a grin. “In case you are concerned, the sudden decamping of the Wardhaven princess left me, and likely several others of my type, suddenly unemployed. I offered my services to your Grand Duchess, and she has accepted. With my contract, she buys my loyalty.”

“While the contract lasts,” the admiral growled.

“But of course, sir. How long would your loyalty last without a paycheck? And before you begin to toss stones, may I point out the glass in your own house, sir? You have admitted to taking bribes to determine the fate of my employer. Exactly how are we different?”

“And if I decide to kill her?”

Mr. Smith looked around at the gray walls surrounding him. “I would, of course, do what I could for her although I must admit, the circumstances do seem to agitate for discretion being the better part of valor for me.”

“Thank you so much for telling me that,” Vicky said.

“Please excuse me for stating the obvious, Your Grace,” Mr. Smith said, “but the correlation of space to force is decidedly against you. Where would be the benefit to you of my joining you in death?”

The look of disgust Vicky gave the mercenary was only equaled by the one he got from the admiral.

Vicky chose to go on with her own question. “Admiral, could you explain one thing to me?”

“I might,” he said guardedly, still eyeing Mr. Smith like something left behind by a diarrhea-ridden cat.

“You do not know where the money came from, but surely you must know where my still-breathing body is to be delivered. Else why bribe you in the first place?”

“I have an e-mail address. No doubt intel has already discovered that however it was acquired cannot be traced back to the person who did it. I will say that I have you and intend to deliver you. They will tell me where the delivery is to be made.”

“No doubt, with a lot of cutouts in between,” Mr. Smith said, professionally.

“So the conspiracy is lying low until it has something, or rather someone, to conspire around,” Vicky concluded. And then spotted the question she had missed before.

“And what does the Navy’s General Staff think of all this? I can’t believe that they aren’t in on this up to their ears.”

That question clearly bothered the admiral. “Lieutenant, you are asking too many questions.”

“Yes, that’s likely, but I strongly suspect that the decision to have me garroted or not was made well above your pay grade. I also suspect that the General Staff does not want me dead. Certainly not if my dearest stepmom does. Have I guessed it right?”

“You may be too smart for your own good,” Mr. Smith put in.

Since the admiral stayed quiet, Vicky turned to Mr. Smith. “How so, dear mercenary? I was always told knowledge was power.”

“Knowledge is power, but a little bit of power in the game you are playing can get you killed,” Mr. Smith said slowly. “Your stepmother wants you dead because she does not want to deal with the power you have and the potential power that may come to you. The Navy is playing a dangerous game and cannot afford to have a loose cannon careening around the gun deck. Am I wrong, Admiral? The Grand Duchess here has only one choice that leads to her staying alive for this voyage. She either throws in fully with the Navy, or she takes what little knowledge she has to her grave.”

“I would not have put it that bluntly,” Admiral Gort said. “But you have the gist of it.”

Which left Vicky sitting back in her chair, thinking. She chose her next words very carefully. They might well be her last.

“I grew up around the palace,” she said slowly, “consigned to the shadows. Feeling much like a fifth wheel. Or a sixth. Certainly not important. Hardly wanted. Do you get my drift, Admiral?”

“I believe so.”

“Then my brother got himself killed, and, suddenly, the wind changed. Everything was blowing at me. It was like a tempest, and I went where it blew me. And it knocked me down quite a few times.”

“Your file says that. Those were also Admiral Krätz’s observations.”

“Yes they were. Last night I read his reports on me. They were not easy to read, but by the time I finished, there was nothing I would disagree with.”

Admiral Gort raised an eyebrow at that admission.

“My time with Admiral Krätz began as a pain and finished as the best experience of my life,” Vicky admitted with painful honesty. Her differences with the man who trembled in fear of what the alien raiders could do to his wife and children did not have to enter into this discussion.

“Admiral, the Navy has been the best experience of my life. I don’t know what this Grand Duchess stuff will make of me, but I do know that I will always be Navy. I will always look back on my time with the fleet as the best and most formative of my life. Yes, I can be a loose cannon. I have been a loose cannon.” She allowed herself a chuckle at too many recollections of just how loose she’d been. “But, properly aimed and loaded, I can be a very powerful gun in someone’s arsenal.”

Admiral Gort listened to her intently. His eyes seemed to pierce through to her soul. That was not something she really wanted perused, but she held his eyes with her own.

Finally, he nodded. “I think you mean that. Or at least want to mean that.” He glanced around at the untouched meal. “I think we are done here. I would appreciate a report of the conclusions you draw about conditions in our beloved Greenfeld based on your assessment of all the data you now have. Shall we meet for supper? Just the three of us. Or four. I may include my chief of staff. He is a most observant man.”

“As you wish, Admiral,” Vicky said.

Once out in the passageway, Mr. Smith leaned close to Vicky’s ear. “You have a lot of work to do. If it is your wish, I will help. But first, I must get a decent breakfast in me.”

Vicky allowed herself a chuckle at his joke, and happily left him heading for the wardroom. She herself needed to stop in her quarters.

Her knees were so wobbly that she could hardly walk.

T
HE
day went fast. Too fast for Vicky. She had hardly gotten her knees under control . . . and her stomach . . . than Mr. Smith was back, and she was dumped into a school of hard knocks and computer wizardry.

Victoria Peterwald had been educated to be a lightweight. Admiral Gort had not been far wrong that her palace education had been limited to little of any significance. Yes, she’d picked up on those wonderful things girls would do with boys, but that had hardly been part of her official education. Of intrigue, however, she’d taken the graduate course.

All that had ended when she shipped out to the fleet.

Admiral Krätz had high expectations for her. And Kris Longknife’s critique of Vicky’s own efforts to kill the Wardhaven princess had been nothing short of brutal. Vicky had been left enraged at both the admiral and the princess.

And had to admit that both of them were right.

She was competent at nothing that didn’t involve lying flat on her back. Or standing. Or kneeling, or one of several dozen variations on the same theme.

If she wanted to be anything but a bed partner for someone her father foisted her off on, she needed to learn, and learn quickly.

Under Admiral Krätz, Vicky began to learn. More accurately, she began to learn how to learn. It had been a tough apprenticeship under the old admiral, but she had served it.

More importantly, she had survived it and gotten to watch one Kris Longknife and see how she not only survived but thrived in this poisoned environment that was part Navy, part political theater . . . and all kinds of dangerous.

Self-examination done in full, Vicky applied herself to learning more about her native land than she had ever thought it was possible to know.

Mr. Smith helped. He showed her how to get the most out of her new tool. He also showed her how to turn off the vacuum option on her computer to avoid accidentally sucking up more data than was offered.

More importantly, he showed her how to make sure when she was raiding a database that she left no footprints behind . . . of any kind. But that was only the beginning.

Vicky needed to know the lay of the land she was returning to. She needed to know who was doing what to whom and if not why, then at least how. She had lived at the center of power all her life.

And walked through it childishly ignorant of all that went on around her.

Today, she lost her innocence and learned the truth, as much as it could be known on a world like Greenfeld, where lies masqueraded as truth and reality was done with smoke and mirrors.

By lunch, she felt the need to take a shower. Even as she toweled off, she did not feel clean.

So much of what she’d been told had been a lie. So much of what she knew was not only wrong, but dead wrong. Her own mother, whom Vicky had been told died giving birth to her, had survived to nurse her.

And died a year later in an “accident” that most likely wasn’t.

Exactly what it was, not even the Navy knew. Maybe her father had grown tired of the woman and arranged her death. Maybe she had gotten crosswise with a powerful clique in the palace, and they had arranged for her demise. If that was the case, her father had not cared enough about the mother of his children to push for a more thorough investigation.

Vicky wanted to vomit.

Kris Longknife had warned her that growing up was hard and frequently full of disillusionment. Kris claimed that she was learning a lot about the seedy underbelly of the Longknifes.

Had she found anything in her past to match what Vicky was finding?

Among all the other trash, it came as hardly a surprise to discover that the present Peterwald fortune had indeed sprung from investments in illegal drugs, pirates, and slavers.

No wonder Admiral Krätz had taken such a delight in bringing down the nest of drug lords, slavers, and pirates at Port Royal. Vicky remembered that Kris had mentioned that something like the drug plantations on Port Royal was central to the Peterwald past. Vicky had insisted it wasn’t, and Kris had backed away.

Now Vicky smiled. So Kris was the one-eyed king, but she’d been smart enough to refuse to fight the willingly blind.

How could I have been so dumb!

How could I have been anything else?

But all this was only the start. Only the first of what she had to wade through to get to the present day’s crimes. The Navy knew a lot that wasn’t in the news. The Navy knew that six of its best battleships had been dispatched without flags or recognition signals to blast Wardhaven back to the Stone Age.

Vicky remembered how casually she had let drop to Kris and her team that she had heard an admiral raging at her dad for losing six battleships. Now she knew that Kris and her friends had fought those ships to destruction. And some of them had paid with their lives.

Oh my God! How could they stand to look at me after that?

Vicky found herself wondering if she should order Admiral Gort to take her straight to Wardhaven. They’d grant her political asylum if she asked for it, wouldn’t they? She’d read about political asylum being used back in the old days during the buildup to the Unity War.

But what would she be if she got asylum? Nothing! Just another penniless person, looking for a handout.

I’d be alive.

Yes, but at what price?

Vicky had been a nonentity for most of her life. She had no desire to go back to that again. She’d been a pawn since her brother’s death . . . and a weak one at that. Now, facing death, she found herself filling with a determination to stay in this game, and to stay in it as much more than a pawn.

Mr. Smith had retreated to the desk chair and silence as she had sunk deeper and deeper into the knowledge of where she came from. Now Vicky sat up from where she lay on the bed. “Okay, enough of this history,” she said. “Let’s see what we can learn about the present. That’s the game we’re in, right?”

“It certainly is, ma’am.”

By suppertime, Vicky was ready for whatever questions the admiral might throw her way.

C
AP
TAIN
Hoffman, the chief of staff, was a handsome man, a few years younger than his admiral, with alert eyes and a mouth that seemed never to smile. He was usually quiet, letting his admiral take the lead, but was quick to fill in when the admiral found himself at a loss for words. He was also quite ready to offer his opinion on most any topic . . . if the admiral asked for it.

He reminded Vicky a bit of Jack Montoya on Kris Longknife’s staff. The relationship between Admiral Gort and Captain Hoffman was very much like that between Kris and Jack . . . only without any of the sexual tension.

The admiral started with just the facts. Did Vicky know which planets were suffering riots, had famines haunting the cities, or were totally suppressed by the Bowlingame Security Services under her stepmother’s protective cover?

Vicky rattled of the answers with ease. After all, there were only eighty-six planets now in the Empire . . . and Vicky could always ask her computer if she forgot.

No wonder Kris Longknife seemed so smart.

Then they got into the harder questions.

“How would you stop the Empress and Bowlingames from adding another planet to their orbit?” the admiral asked.

“Your friend Admiral Balk had a pretty good idea,” Vicky said.

The admiral raised an eyebrow to his chief of staff. Captain Hoffman took over the questioning.

“But he was asked to assist by the at least semilawful government of St. Petersburg. Your Mayor Artamus had a system in place. When the incoming assault claimed it was merely there in reply to a request for help, he had a mechanism to quickly prove the lie. Could Captain Balk have threatened to open fire without a request from the civilian authority below?”

“I see your point,” Vicky admitted. “Those circumstances do seem a bit unique to St. Petersburg.” She paused for a moment, then asked a question of her own. “However, isn’t there any way to duplicate something like the council of mayors on other planets?”

Once again, the chief of staff took the lead in a response. “That would involve the Navy in civil affairs. How do you think your father would take to that?”

Vicky saw the problem. “Probably not well. Yet he turns a blind eye to his wife and her father, brothers, and uncles’ deep involvement in the same area, even when they are robbing him and the state blind.”

“The Empress somehow manages to distract him from a great deal,” the admiral remarked, dryly, then added, “No doubt, if something were to attract her ire, he would immediately pay attention to it.”

Vicky allowed herself to make a face. “I see the problem the Navy faces. The civil lifeblood of the state is poisoned. The Navy’s honor and professionalism will not allow it to either bleed the poison out or impose health from the outside.”

“Throughout history, Navies have never served as a good tool for civil intervention,” the admiral said. “Armies are well known for making kings or unmaking them. That probably explains why Greenfeld has not had a standing army since it stood down following the Iteeche War.”

“Grandfather was afraid of his returning generals,” Vicky muttered, as much to herself so she could hear her criticism of her family as to state the fact to those listening.

“That wasn’t what he said when he did it,” Admiral Gort said, “but it’s the conclusion we all drew.”

“Dad would have a hard time disbanding the Navy,” Vicky said. “It’s the one power base my stepmother can’t touch.”

“Don’t be so sure,” the admiral said. “Most of what has come out from the space docks held by your stepmother’s faction has been junk that cost too much and needed a refit before we dared risk it in space. There are two expanded Terror-class battleships building at High Anhalt that from all reports are going to be perfect on their trials.”

“That sounds nice,” Vicky said, knowing there was a huge “but” coming.

The admiral provided it. “The Navy has sent six captains to command the ships. Two were relieved for cause, and the other four have suddenly been found to be indispensable elsewhere in the Empire. Indispensable by the palace, to be precise. Now, the palace has decided that we should have an infusion of new blood. These ships should be commanded by captains from outside the Imperial Navy establishment.”

Vicky did not like the looks of where this was heading. “Who did the Empress decide should command these new ships?”

“The
Emperor
has selected two former captains in the Wardhaven Navy. If you have been following the Longknife saga, you should recognize the name of one of them. Captain William Tacoma Thorpe.”

“Wasn’t he Kris’s first commander, on the fast attack corvette
Typhoon
?” Vicky asked.

“Yes, when his squadron commander ordered the corvettes to conduct a sneak attack on the Earth battle fleet at the Paris system.”

“Oh,” Vicky said, eyes lighting up. “Is that why Earth gave her the Order of the Wounded Lion?”

“You didn’t know that?” the admiral asked.

“No. Kris is always very secretive about that bright blue ribbon and fancy starburst. He must be the commander she relieved. Now I better understand the whisper of mutiny around her. Oh, I can’t wait for the next time we get together! How I will dish the dirt on her!”

“So you didn’t raid the entire database last night?” said the admiral.

“No, sir. I didn’t download everything. As Mr. Smith said, I didn’t download anything extra intentionally. I’m not sure what parameters my computer used to decide what to swipe,” Vicky said, glancing at Mr. Smith.

“It was on autopilot, sir,” he said to the admiral. “It looked for things like ‘admiral,’ ‘financial,’ and ‘economic,’ or other key words and grabbed for them. It didn’t peer very deeply into the data, just the headers. A more organized snatch would have taken more time.”

“It’s nice to know that your computer, no matter how it may embarrass me, has limits,” Admiral Gort said, and glanced at his chief of staff. “Do we have any self-organizing matrix on board?”

“None, sir. We’re not authorized any. I don’t know if we managed to buy some while we were in the Helvetican Confederation. I’ll do a check tomorrow. I doubt we could acquire any in the U.S. while we are crossing their territory. They have restrictions on what technology we can buy.” He finished with a palms-up shrug.

“Your Grace, how did you get your self-organizing matrix?” the admiral asked.

“I bought it myself while I was on Wardhaven, before we launched the Voyage of Discovery. I was hoping Kris might help me out there. She didn’t. That girl is a slave to rules and regulations. When it suits her.”

No one chose to dispute Kris Longknife’s vices or virtues at the moment. The admiral was deep in thought. “If we stopped by Savannah, do you think you might be able to buy some?”

“If my credit is still good, why not?”

“Your Grace, it would please me to break our voyage at Savannah. I hope you will take the opportunity to acquire some matrix for the use of the fleet.” He turned to the mercenary. “And I trust that you will see the benefit of upgrading any computer Her Grace may choose to donate to the fleet.”

Mr. Smith merely smiled, and said, “At your service, I assure you. There will only be the matter of a small fee.”

“Mercenaries,” the admiral was heard to mutter under his breath.