Eric Flint's Blog, page 319

The Forever Engine – Snippet 44

The Forever Engine – Snippet 44

 

TWENTY-SEVEN

October 9, 1888, The Lim River valley, Serbia

We kept the fire going, built it up, and had no more trouble from the animals.

Others straggled in over the course of the next hour, more than I thought would have survived. We’d been the Tail-End Charlies, so most of the animals had concentrated on us at first. When we kicked their asses, the flock, or pack, or whatever, lost a lot of its enthusiasm for the hunt. Many of our survivors had thrown away their rifles and packs. Gordon was among those who came in, but he didn’t have anything to say at first. At least he still had his pack.

Gabrielle and I had matching bites on our left arms, and she had a slash in her left thigh. She had been wearing her long overcoat over her riding habit, so the teeth hardly broke the skin, but the long knifelike spur on the bird’s foot had sliced through her overcoat, skirt, riding breeches, and into her thigh. If not for all those layers, the wound might have killed or crippled her.

I made her take off the coat and black jacket, rolled up the blood-stained sleeve of her blouse, cleaned the wound with rubbing alcohol, and then wrapped it with a clean linen bandage, both from her own haversack. I did the same with her thigh, first cutting away that leg of her breeches up to the hip. The slash looked deep, but it wasn’t bleeding all that badly so I just bandaged it good and tight. I pulled off my coat, and she bandaged my arm. I made sure we cleaned all the wounds thoroughly; the last thing we needed out here was an infection.

“You got any antibiotic cream or powder in that first-aid kit?”

“I do not know what that is,” she answered.

“No, I was afraid of that.”

We had two animal carcasses close by the fire, and we looked them over. They were like the biggest wild turkeys, or maybe fighting cocks, you could imagine, probably seventy or eighty pounds each, but with much thicker, more muscular legs and broader feet. They didn’t have beaks so much as long, bony snouts lined with small, sharp teeth. Their heads were too big for birds, though, and featured a flaring transverse crest across the back of their skulls which reminded me of the hood of a triceratops, but in feathers.

Their forearms bore a pretty complete set of long feathers, but nowhere near enough for flight. The substantial and muscular forearms ended in grasping talons. Their main weapons were the long, knifelike spurs on their hind legs, the ones which almost got Gabrielle and sliced up one of the Marines badly. The giveaway, though, was the tail, long and thin and about a meter long, as long as the rest of the bird’s body.

Neither the Brits nor the Bavarians had ever seen anything remotely like them. I had. Sarah had gone through a dinosaur phase, and that meant I’d gone through a dinosaur phase. I’d taken her to the Field Museum for the opening of a new exhibit on the late Cretaceous period a few years back. It included the first reconstructions of Velociraptor mongoliensis after the fossil finds that established it was feathered. The ones in adventure films were featherless and always larger, about man-sized, I guess for dramatic effect, which was over twice as big as the real animals. These carcasses weren’t that big, but they were bigger than the V. mongoliensis Sarah and I had seen, and the heads looked different, shorter and wider. Maybe they were a related species, like dromaeosaurus, or maybe something I’d never seen — something nobody from my time had ever seen. Who cared? They were night predators, hunted in packs, and were plenty big enough for me.

The fire burned smoky from the damp wood, and the wind kept changing, blowing the smoke in our faces no matter where we sat. Gabrielle and I got our coats back on and sat together, shoulder to shoulder, near enough to the fire to catch its warmth but far enough the smoke wasn’t too bad. At least when the wind gusted around we had time to close our eyes and hold our breath.

We hadn’t had a real meal since morning, and once the raptors — I couldn’t help thinking of them that way — seemed done for the night, some of the men started eating. None of us considered roasting one of the dead animals, interestingly enough.

I took a tin of bully beef from my haversack and Gabrielle and I shared it, pulling strings of the greasy corned beef from the can with our fingers and spreading them on hardtack. It gave me an entirely new appreciation for MREs.

Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you got till it’s gone?

Somebody got a kettle going, and O’Mara came around with two tin cups of tea for us and knelt in the grass beside me. The tea was sweet with sugar and evaporated milk, almost overpowering the flavor of the tea itself, but it hit the spot all the same.

“One of my lot’s still missin’,” O’Mara said. “Don’t know about the Fritzes. Don’t think their sergeant has done a count.”

“Okay. Thanks for keeping me up to date, but you need to make a report to Captain Gordon.”

O’Mara looked over toward Gordon, standing by himself at the edge of the light circle, and spat.

“Corporal, things are going to get worse here. I’m betting they’re going to get lots worse. Undercutting Gordon might give you some personal satisfaction, but it won’t keep your men alive.”

“The men’ll follow you, sir.”

“Well, thank you for saying that, but the Bavarians won’t, and we need them. All that keeps them here are their orders to work with Gordon.”

O’Mara thought that over, chewed on it like a piece of gristle he was reluctant to swallow, but eventually he nodded.

“As you say, sir. You want me to talk to the Fritz sergeant?”

“No, I will. He outranks you. He probably won’t take an ass-chewing from you all that well.”

That got a smile from him. He rose and walked across the fire lit circle to Gordon, came to attention, saluted, and gave a report I could see but not hear. I looked around the circle until I located Melzer.

 

Cauldron of Ghosts – Snippet 02

Cauldron of Ghosts – Snippet 02

Almost simultaneously, the lieutenant colonel slammed the butt of her weapon into the forehead of the third and final crew member. She tried to keep the impact light enough to simply stun the man, but…

That was hard to do, wearing an armored skinsuit in combat. She was pretty sure she’d broken his skull. He might survive, he might not — but Colonel Anderson seemed like a sensible commander, even if she was occasionally given to foolish whimsy. She had enough experience to understand the realities of close quarters assault.

The whole thing hadn’t taken more than a few seconds. Best of all, it had been done fairly quietly. The flechette gun’s knife-edged projectiles moved at high subsonic velocities, without the betraying cracking sound of a pulse rifle’s supersonic darts. The man she’d shot in the legs had screamed in agony, but not for more than two seconds. Private Kyllonen had come in right behind Kabweza and silenced him with the stun gun. Neither of the other crew members had been able to call out a warning and the rest of the noises were muffled enough that there was a good chance they hadn’t alerted anyone else in the ship. Even that one short scream probably hadn’t done more than cause someone in the bridge to be puzzled. A brief sound, no matter how loud, tends to be dismissed if it isn’t followed by anything else.

Kabweza didn’t care much anyway. She was already passing through a hatch at the far end of the mess, with her section closely following. This really wasn’t going to take long.

****

Nancy Anderson’s com unit buzzed softly. She held up a finger, indicating to the Ramathibodi‘s captain that she needed a moment to take the call.

“Yes, what is it?” Her tone was mildly annoyed.

“Sorry to bother you, Chief, but I thought you should know that the Hali Sowle seems to be returning to the Station.”

Nancy had the unit on loudspeaker, so Captain Tsang could hear both sides of the exchange.

“Oh, good grief. What does that maniac want now?”

“I have no idea, Chief. They haven’t sent any messages yet. And I may have misread their change of course, although I can’t think of anything else they’d be doing except coming back here.”

“All right. She probably just wants to yell at us some more, but just to be on the safe side get the point defense units ready. The laser clusters’ll be more than enough to deal with that piece of crap.”

She thumbed off the com. “That’s probably overkill,” she said to Tsang. “I doubt if that tub has any military hardware worth talking about. Still, we may as well play it safe. The Hali Sowle‘s skipper really isn’t playing with a full deck.”

Tsang grinned. “Better she’s your headache than mine.” She glanced down at the device in her hand. “Unless you’ve come up with a different reading than I have, all the labor techs we’re selling have been accounted for. You’re paid up, except for one more chip.”

“I concur.” Anderson nodded toward the open box, which was again showing the green light.. “Go ahead and take it out.”

Tsang did so. “All right, that business is done. What do you want to do next? Dicker over the pleasure units or deal with the heavy labor ones?”

The message about the Hali Sowle‘s return had been a code. Parmley Station’s control center had gotten a very brief encrypted signal from Loren Damewood, notifying them that Kabweza’s team was inside the slave ship and had started their assault. Things would start moving very quickly now.

“Let’s handle the pleasure units first,” said Anderson. The moment they brought out the BSC people posing as Manpower pleasure slaves, Tsang and her people would get distracted and let their guard down a little further.

“Okay with me.”

****

One of the members of the section stayed behind in the mess hall to tend to the prisoners. Kabweza didn’t really need the whole unit for the assault itself. There wasn’t room for them anyway, in the cramped quarters they were passing through. She’d rather keep the XO and his special gear and skills with her than leave him behind to carry out simple medical tasks.

And they were simple. All that was needed was to keep the three prisoners alive. In good health was a moot point, and consciousness would have been a nuisance.

Corporal Bohuslav Hernandez started by applying automatic tourniquets to the mangled legs of the man Kabweza had shot, since he was the one whose injuries most needed immediate attention. He then examined the woman with the half-crushed chest and the man who’d been struck on the head.

He decided the woman would be able to breathe well enough if she were sedated. He injected her with a drug that wouldn’t paralyze her or render her completely unconscious but would leave her unable to act or think coherently, much less call out any warnings to anyone else.

He was tempted to do the same with the unconscious man, but he wasn’t sure of the extent of the damage done to his brain. From the feel of it, he thought the man’s skull was broken.

Hernandez decided it was best to leave well enough alone. There was no chance the man would regain consciousness before the action was all over and any warning he might make would be a moot point.

****

Takahashi Ayako had stayed with the section, since they were still in a part of the ship she was familiar with. When they got to the next closed hatch, the freed slave made agitated motions with her hands.

That’s the crew quarters, she mouthed silently.

Kabweza nodded. Like Loren’s earlier sneer, the gesture was not really visible because of the shielded faceplate. But it didn’t matter. Damewood had read Ayako’s lips also, and was already working at his special equipment.

Over-riding the security on internal hatches was child’s play for someone like Loren. After a few seconds, he held up a hand, all his fingers open. Then, quickly, closed his fist and opened them again. The signal indicated that he was about to open the hatch.

Kabweza took half a step back. Behind her, so did the other remaining members of her section. Takahashi scuttled aside.

The hatch started sliding open. Kabweza went in and –

Nothing. The corridor was empty. To the left, three hatches — all of them open — led into sleeping compartments. None of them were occupied. All of them were unkempt and messy.

When Ayako came into the corridor, she looked at one of the compartments and the pinched look came back to her face. Quickly, she looked away.

“Where to now?” Ayibongwinkosi asked softly, the volume on her helmet speaker turned down very low.

Takahashi looked uncertain and made a little shrug. “I’m not really sure,” she whispered. “This…” She paused and took a little breath. “This is as far as I ever… that they took me.”

She pointed to a closed hatch at the very end of the corridor. “But from things they said, I think that leads into their headquarters. The ‘bridge,’ is that right?”

“Okay. You stay here. The rest of you, follow me.”

Takahashi shuddered slightly. “I don’t want to stay here. I really don’t.”

Ayibongwinkosi hesitated a moment. Then: “Come with us, then. But stay behind and don’t get in the way.”

Five seconds later, she and her section were ready at the hatch. The XO started working his magic again.

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 43

The Forever Engine – Snippet 43

 

I tripped, almost fell sprawling, but kept my feet and regained my stride. From its sound and weight I knew I’d tripped on a dropped rifle, and the sudden surge of anger almost overwhelmed me. Idiot! Some jackass dropped his rifle and had almost killed me, not to mention himself and his friends when the animals caught up and he was unarmed.

We’d overtaken at least some of the fugitives, but the sound of something coming through the grass was close now. No one was going to stop on their own, and this couldn’t end well. The ground cover was higher, thicker here. Branches and tree limbs crunched under my feet, and I saw the darker shape of a tree trunk.

“Come on you lot!” I heard O’Mara shout close by. “Keep together.” At least someone was still thinking about their men.

Time to make a move.

“Marines, rally on me! O’Mara, pick a spot for a stand.”

“Right. ‘Ere’s as good a place as any to face ‘em. Form up, you bastards!”

I knew the emotions struggling in the men. Their legs wanted to keep running, but their heads wanted someone to tell them what to do. It might be too late, though. The animals, whatever they were, were close, streaking through the brush and tall grass.

I grabbed Gabrielle by the arm to slow her, and we found a small knot of men, hard to tell how many in the darkness.

“Form a firing line facing the animals,” I shouted, my voice hoarse. “Do it now! Close up and keep it tight.”

And then the first one of them hit us, rocketing though the air in a leap. I only saw it for an instant, but it was the size of a wolf or bigger. It hit a Marine in the chest and bowled him over into the brush, the two of them rolling in a pinwheel of arms, legs, and feathers — big feathers.

“FIRE!” I screamed and got a ragged volley of four or fire rounds. I added two quick rounds from the Webley, firing low and spreading the shots, although the noise and muzzle flash were more important than the potential damage.

“Again! Keep it up.”

I heard the bird screeching behind me, the down Marine crying out, fighting for his life. The ragged volley had wiped out whatever night vision I had. Everything was sound and smell now. Sweat and fear, crushed grass and black powder. The crack of more rifle rounds from our firing line, screeches of animals, cries of men going down under them, but not here, farther from the river toward the hills. A wet-sounding thud and the animal on the ground squawked once in pain and fell silent.

“That’s done for him,” O’Mara said, his voice ragged. “On yer feet, Williams.”

“Gabrielle, where are you?”

“I am here,” she answered.

An animal streaked past me from a different direction. Gabrielle screamed as she and the bird went down together. I jumped on top, got my left hand into the feathers on its neck, and tried to pull it off, but the son of a bitch was strong! Screeching, ripping cloth, cries of pain. I raised the pistol and cracked the bird on its back — aimed for the head, but it was moving too much. The blow didn’t make much impression through the feathers, but I got its attention. It spun and sank its teeth into my forearm, or at least the sleeve of my coat, shook its head, and I felt its strength all the way up in my shoulder.

Its jaws, its head — too big for a bird. A bird with teeth? a remote part of my mind asked.

I didn’t know who might be in my line of fire but had to take the chance. I pushed the Webley’s barrel against its chest and pulled the trigger. Its body muffled the sound. It jerked, let go of my arm, took a step away, and fell over with a whimper.

“Gabi, are you okay?”

“I . . . I don’t know. I . . .”

I felt for her, found her, did a quick check on her face, throat, and hands, and didn’t find anything slippery with blood. She trembled uncontrollably.

“Hold it together, sweetheart. Okay?”

“Oui.”

“You carry matches, for your cheroots, right? Dig some out. I need them,” I said.

“O’Mara!” I shouted.

“One moment, sir. Cooperson, is that you on the end? You and Williams, half left, two paces forward, and fire to the south. Space your shots. You others keep up your fire but slow and steady, in sequence right to left.”

Then he knelt next to me.

“Is the lady all right, sir?”

“I think so, for now, but whatever these animals are, they’ll circle around eventually. We need a fire.”

“What the blazes are those things, sir?”

“Fire,” I repeated.

“Right. A fire,” he said, and it was clear it hadn’t occurred to him. “Aye, a fire would be a fine thing, sir, and there’s wood lying about here, but it’s damp from all the rain. It will take some time to get it going.”

“I bet we can speed things up if one of the men has a signal rocket.”

“I’ve got one here, sir.” He slipped his pack off and set it beside me. “I’ll see to some wood.”

I holstered the Webley and felt O’Mara’s pack with my hands. I found the signal rocket lashed to the top, got it free, and took my first close look at it, although by feel. A sheet-metal cylinder with a crimped cone at one end and a bracket for a launching stick at the other. The stick itself was tied to the rocket. I pulled out my sheath knife, cut the lashings that held the rod to the rocket, and started working at the soldered seam by the bottom.

“Here’s some wood, and I’ll get more.” O’Mara dumped an armload of damp brush and branches beside us and hurried away.

I had the bottom open by now and shook out some of the powder of the propelling charge into the brush.

“Got those matches?”

“Here,” Gabrielle answered and handed me a half-dozen and a box with a striker strip on the side. Her hand was steadier now. My own shook enough that I broke the first match, but I took two long, slow breaths to steady myself. The second match lit, and the charge powder sizzled and flared to life, igniting the brush. That got a ragged cheer from the Marines around us.

I worked the top of the rocket tube open, shook out a handful of the powder from the bursting charge, and threw it into the fire, got a nice flash from it and a wave of heat.

I turned to get more fuel, and right there, not more than ten feet away, I saw the eyes of a large hunting bird glowing with the reflected light of the fire behind me, disembodied and seemingly floating in the air. I pulled my Webley out, careful not to make any sudden move, took aim, and fired twice. I sensed more than saw the animal fly back from the impact.

A Marine was down in the grass near me. I could tell at first from the direction of his voice; then I could make him out in the growing firelight. He was praying in a thick Irish brogue.

“Hail Mary, full o’ grace, the Lard is with thee. Blessed art d’ou among wimin, and blessed is the fruit o’ thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mudder o’ Gawd, pray fer us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”

But it wasn’t the hour of our death. Close, but no cigar.

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 42

The Forever Engine – Snippet 42

 

TWENTY-SIX

October 9, 1888, The Lim River valley, Serbia

It was late in the day to begin a march, but we needed to keep the men moving and too busy or too tired to think. We ate on our feet — hardtack, although the Marines called it ship biscuit. It filled my belly but made me thirsty.

We marched southeast until sunset and then kept going, slowly and carefully. Sunset came early this time of year, about five in the afternoon, and with the weather it was full dark less than an hour later.

The Serbian border town of Priboj and its gun batteries lay across the river on the southwest bank, and Gordon and I decided our best move was to use the darkness as cover and make our way past it that night. There was a new moon, and enough overcast we didn’t even have starlight to see by, so our progress slowed to a crawl. We had to move carefully; the last thing we needed was someone with a broken leg.

I expected to be able to pick Priboj out on the far bank by lights on the waterfront, but there was nothing. The town might have been scoured from the planet, its inhabitants struck down or carried off, for all we could tell. The only evidence of life we heard was the crackle of rifle fire drifting across the water, distant and impotent-sounding, about an hour after dark. We paused to watch the distant fireflies of light, and make sure they weren’t firing at us, but it had the sound of a close-in fight to me, people firing as fast as they could rather than taking careful aim.

“Is that the Turkish patrol?” Gordon asked softly as we listened.

“Might be. They’re on the wrong side of the river, but who knows?”

We decided to take a five-minute rest break, and I sat down next to Gabrielle.

“How you holding up?”

“I am fine. My load is small compared to the others. Some of the Marines, they fly too much. They are not so used to the walking.”

She was right. I’d heard some panting from one of the Marines myself. If they were out of shape, somebody wasn’t doing their job back on Intrepid. There was plenty of deck space for exercise. With all those companionways up and down, the climbing alone should have kept their legs and lungs strong. It was too late to do anything about it now, aside from keeping an eye on it.

“I was frightened for you back at Uvats.”

“Really?” she asked.

“Yes. When I saw the blood . . .”

“Oh. You thought it was mine? Non. It was terrifying and so surprising. We had no warning, simply gunfire and men falling. I did not know what to do at first. Then the lieutenant stepped in front of me, as if to shield me. Otherwise I would be dead instead of him. When I heard the shot, felt his blood on me, I must have jumped behind the seawall, but I do not remember.”

“You got a round or two off from your Winchester, as I recall.”

“Yes. That I remember.”

I patted her hand but could not see her expression in the darkness.

The distant firing died away, and the silence was somehow more ominous after that.

“I wonder who won,” she said.

A bird screeched, and we both started. Hearing a hawk in the distance was one thing, but this one was close, maybe a hundred yards, and it sounded — bigger. The way a tiger sounds bigger than a house cat when it purrs and the purr comes out as a rumbling noise in the back of its throat that could rattle the china in a cupboard across the room.

“Fricken Teufel,” a Bavarian soldier near us muttered.

Another screech answered him, farther away and from behind us in the direction of Uvats. I stood up and listened. More screeches behind us, and then a murmur of frightened conversation ran the length of the small column. Much of it was in German, and I caught, “To hell with the British,” and “Let’s get out of here!”

“Gabi, better break out that shotgun, but stay down. Don’t run.”

What was the name of the Bavarian sergeant? Müller? No, Melzer.

“Feldwebel Melzer,” I called out. “Where are you?”

He called to me from near the back of the column, and I made my way past nervous soldiers rising to their feet and checking their weapons. I hadn’t said much to Melzer since the fight in Uvats, and neither had Gordon. With von Schtecker dead, he was in charge of the Bavarians, and I don’t think either one of us had a good sense of who he was. As I walked in the darkness I tried to reconstruct a mental image of him: average height, stocky, broad jowly face with deep-set eyes, crooked nose, and a pronounced under bite that gave him a defiant, pugnacious look. But he’d never made much noise, and he wasn’t barking his men to silence now. I never know what to make of quiet sergeants.

“Your men are nervous.”

“Ja. Who is not?” He looked around even though there was nothing to see in the darkness.

“Fargo! Damn it, where are you?”

That was Gordon, panic creeping into his voice.

“Back here with Feldwebel Melzer.”

The babble of conversation up and down the line grew louder, and Melzer just stood there with his thumb up his ass.

“Ruhig in dem Rängen!” I barked in my best drill-instructor voice — quiet in the ranks. Whether from instinctive obedience or just surprise, they immediately shut up.

“Fargo, is that you? Speak up, dammit. I can’t see a bloody thing.”

“Right here,” I answered, and Gordon joined us, breathing heavily. Walking the length of our short column hadn’t winded him. My money was on fear.

“I don’t know what’s out there, but we need to get away from them,” he blurted out.

“Ja,” Melzer agreed, his head bobbing in agreement.

“No!” I said. “Form a firing line with a squad –”

But nobody was listening.

“Make for the foothills to the left!” Gordon shouted. “We’ll take cover there, find some trees!”

Take cover? From animals? Now men began running off to the left, the sounds of jingling and clanking equipment almost drowning out their footfalls, but not the renewed screeching of birds, more birds, a large gaggle on the hunt, except they were on the ground, not in the air. I ran back to where I left Gabrielle, and she was still there, sitting in the grass, waiting for me.

“Come on, Gabi, time to haul ass!” I helped her to her feet.

“You said not to run if the others did.” Fear made her voice shake, and I could feel it tighten my own chest as well.

“Yeah, I just didn’t count on the whole outfit going.”

We ran. I ran to her left and a little behind her, between her and the sound of the animals. When she looked back to see if I was there, I yelled at her to run as hard as she could. I kept up with her.

We passed someone down in the grass, trying to get up, but didn’t break stride to help. Part of me was relieved we weren’t the last stragglers anymore and grateful I wasn’t in charge, because then I’d have to stop and help. Another part of me was ashamed of those feelings, but it was a small part and not a very survival-helpful one at the moment.

 

Cauldron of Ghosts – Snippet 01

Cauldron of Ghosts – Snippet 01

Chapter 4

The labor tech units started arriving in ten minutes. The slaves shuffled into the compartment, their heads down and their eyes on the floor. Two of the slave ship’s crew members herded them along with deactivated — for the moment — neural whips. The slavers were rather lackadaisical about it, though; clearly they weren’t expecting any sort of trouble. The people being channeled through the compartment were genetic slaves who’d been born, bred and shaped by bondage. They had learned long ago that resistance simply led to suffering.

The expressions on their faces weren’t so much despairing as simply blank. Despair was an emotion, after all — and Manpower’s slaves discovered as children that emotions were dangerous to such as they. Those looks made Nancy furious, but she let no sign of her anger show on her own face.

After the first batch of slaves passed through the compartment, a green light on the box started flashing. While they’d been waiting for the slaves to arrive, Anderson and Tsang had programmed the box to record the right number of slaves for one chip.

“Go ahead,” said Nancy. Gingerly, the Ramathibodi‘s captain reached into the box and removed one of the chips.

One chip only — and she was careful to lift that one out with just her thumb and forefinger. If the box sensed that more chips were being removed than had been properly accounted for, the lid would slam down and make sure the chips stayed inside — along with the hand that held them.

****

When the slaves arrived at the open hatch that led into the rest of the Station, the two guards from the Ramathibodi relinquished control to three people from Parmley Station’s contingent. Two of them were equipped with the same neural whips; the third was outfitted as a medical technician. She was there to give each arriving slave an examination to make sure no defectives were being pawned off on them.

She went about the business in a quick, almost perfunctory manner, giving each slave a scan with the medical detection device in her hand before they passed into the personnel tube beyond. The device would catch anything obvious, like a contagious disease or late-stage cancer.

It wouldn’t spot more subtle problems, but those weren’t of much concern. The sort of medical chicanery involved in passing off immediately defective units as healthy slaves was avoided in the slave trade as bad business. Contrary to the popular saw there is no honor among thieves, illegal or extra-legal transactions actually required a more punctilious attention to dealing in good faith — for the good and simple reason that no recourse to the courts was possible in the event of a dispute. That meant that such disputes were usually settled violently, which made everyone involved stay away from petty chiseling.

The other reason the medical technician didn’t pay much attention was even simpler. Given the nature of Manpower’s production methods, it was a given that a high percentage of their slaves would have some long-term medical problems. The sort of radical genetic engineering that created such slaves often produced unwanted side-effects. A slave bred for great strength might have a severe blood pressure problem, for instance, or be prone to renal failure.

As a rule the lifespan of genetic slaves was shorter than that of most humans, even leaving aside the fact that such slaves were almost never given prolong to extend their lifespan. According to the Bible, The days of our years are threescore years and ten. Manpower, Inc., perhaps not wishing to seem presumptuously equal to the Lord, figured fifty or sixty years was plenty good enough for their products.

Once the medtech nodded her approval, each slave passed through the hatch into the personnel tube leading to their new quarters aboard Parmley Station. The two guards waiting inside shepherded them along. More precisely, lounged against the walls and occasionally waved them along in as perfunctory a manner as the medtech did her duties. They weren’t worried about rebellion. The slaves knew perfectly well that a station like this one would have the same forced evacuation mechanisms that all slave ships did. If they rebelled successfully here in the compartments and corridors, someone in the inaccessible control room would just push a button and they’d all be expelled into vacuum.

****

Lt. Colonel Ayibongwinkosi Kabweza and her team passed a total of eight hatches along the way before they finally arrived at a hatch that Ayako told them led into the crew’s quarters. According to Ayako, at least six of the compartments they’d passed held slaves.

If she was disturbed by the fact that Kabweza made no effort to open those hatches and free the slaves therein, she gave no sign of it. She seemed quite intelligent; enough, probably, to realize that freeing slaves for the sake of it before the ship was secured would be counter-productive.

“This is it,” she whispered, touching the hatch with a forefinger. “It’ll be locked.”

Damewood sneered — an expression which was wasted, because of the faceplate.

His fingers worked at his device. Less than five seconds later, he stepped back from the hatch.

“At least this one got some maintenance.” He motioned Kabweza and her team forward with a hand gesture at the same time as the hatch started opening.

It was gorilla time now. A hatch sliding aside couldn’t be broken off its hinges, of course, but the lieutenant colonel did as good an imitation of smashing down a door as was possible under the circumstances.

The compartment she found herself in was small; empty; not more than five meters long — just an entry tube. There were open hatches to the right and left at the end opposite the one she’d entered. Through the auditory-enhancement that was built into her armored skinsuit, she could hear the sound of voices coming from the hatch on the left.

Two seconds later she was passing through that hatch, her flechette gun at the ready.

Three members of the slave ship’s crew were sitting at a table in a small mess hall, playing cards. Shocked by her sudden appearance, the two who were facing her — one male; one female — stared at her open-mouthed. The man sitting with his back toward her was starting to turn in his seat.

Colonel Anderson had made it clear she wanted live slavers for questioning. One of the Torch soldiers in the section, Private Mary Kyllonen, was armed with an old-fashioned stun gun for precisely that reason. But since Kabweza hadn’t known what they would be facing when they broke into the crew’s quarters, she’d left Kyllonen in the rear — and there was no time now to bring her forward before the slavers sounded the alarm.

A bit disgruntled by the silly business of taking prisoners but obedient to orders, Kabweza fired at the lower legs of the man sitting in front of her. The shot shredded the limbs below the knees so badly that they’d have to be amputated. But with quick care he’d survive and he didn’t need legs to talk.

She strode forward two paces and drove the table into the wall behind it with a powerful thrust of her foot, crushing the female crew member between them. That broke a number of the woman’s ribs, one or more of which were almost certainly driven into her lungs. She gasped but made no other sound. Quick care, again; she’d survive; and she could talk in a whisper for a while.

 

Cauldron of Ghosts – Chapter 03

Cauldron of Ghosts – Chapter 03

Chapter 3

Loren Damewood finished keying in the sequence he was using from his specialized software. Through his fingertips, he could feel the vibration of the locks opening. The sensations were very slight, of course, since he was wearing a skinsuit and gauntlets. If he’d been inside the ship instead of in the vacuum outside, that would have made an audible noise. Not a loud one, so it wouldn’t be noticed by anyone aboard the Ramathibodi unless they were standing nearby. That was unlikely, though. Damewood had deliberately picked a cargo bay personnel hatch, and cargo bays tended to be big, empty, boring spaces unfrequented by crew people unless there was actual cargo to be transferred. And the only sort of “cargo” which would be transshipped at someplace like Parmley Station was highly unlikely to come from a standard bay like this one.

Still, he was miffed. There shouldn’t have been any noise, if proper maintenance had been done.

But he wasn’t surprised. “Proper maintenance” and “slave ship” were not terms that went together very often. There wasn’t much difference between the sort of people who served on the crews of pirate ships and those who worked on slavers. A few pirate captains managed to maintain tight discipline on their ship, but most didn’t even try. Neither did slaver captains.

And there was a bright side. Cruddy maintenance usually went along with cruddy security, at least for anything except critical systems.

The hatch that he and his companions were gathered around began to slide open. Damewood’s program wasn’t doing that directly. If it had, telltales would be showing on the bridge that someone was almost certain to spot. Instead, his specialized software had insinuated itself into the ship’s own operating programs. The Ramathibodi was opening that hatch itself, with the added modification that it was doing so without triggering any telltales or alarms.

“In we go,” he murmured. To himself only, of course — all coms were silenced.

He didn’t lead the way into the ship. That would have been silly, with Ayibongwinkosi Kabweza and her people present. He was the tech expert in charge of disabling security, not one of the assault troop gorillas.

The lieutenant colonel slipped through the hatch as soon as it had opened far enough to make that possible. The three members of her section had finished passing through before the hatch had time to fully open.

Loren waited until the hatch finished moving before he entered the airlock behind them. “Trigger-happy gorillas,” he murmured. To himself only, of course.

Once they were in the airlock, they had to wait while Damewood’s program cycled it through the process. It had been a vacuum when they entered; by the time they exited, the atmosphere would match that of the ship.

****

In Parmley Station’s number one cargo bay, Nancy Anderson and two members of her team faced the captain of the Ramathibodi. She’d brought five members of her own crew to the parley.

The cargo bay was a big one for a station which had not originally been intended as a freight transfer point. Designed to accommodate the sometimes large equipment items required by a space-going amusement park, it was slightly over thirty meters in its longest dimension. The slavers had advanced a third of the way in before coming to a stop. They were now separated from the BSC trio by a distance of about seven meters.

“What’s your pleasure?” Anderson asked. “Full trans-shipment, partial — or are you just looking for supplies and R&R?”

“What R&R?” That came from one of the slaver crewmen standing a little behind Captain Tsang. It was a sarcastic remark, not a question.

“This is the biggest amusement park within fifty light-years.” Nancy’s lips twisted into a little smile. “Even if most of the rides don’t work.”

“Shut up, Grosvenor,” said the Ramathibodi‘s captain. To Anderson she said: “Partial trans-shipment. We’ve got more labor techs than we can sell, where we’re going. May as well drop them off here.”

The fact that the Ramathibodi only wanted a partial transshipment set the tactical parameters of the situation. If they’d been looking for a full trans-shipment, the BSC team could have simply waited until all the slaves were off the ship before launching their attack. Instead, it would be more complicated.

Anderson nodded. “Anything you want to pick up?”

“Pleasure units, if you have any. Those are always easy to sell. Heavy labor units, too.”

“Heavy labor units, we’ve got. Pleasure units…” She paused, before smiling nastily. “That depends on what you’re willing to pay.”

“I’d want to see ‘em first.”

“Well, sure.” Anderson gestured toward the heavy battle steel box attached to one of the compartment’s bulkheads by a maglock. “But why don’t we start with the labor tech transaction?”

Tsang shrugged. “Whatever suits you.”

Anderson wanted to give Loren Damewood and Ayibongwinkosi Kabweza as much time as possible to get into position and prepare their attack. The dickering and exchanges needed to complete the first transaction should provide them with plenty.

She and the Ramathibodi‘s captain moved forward to stand beside the steel box. For obvious reasons, the sort of electronic transfers that were the normal method of paying for goods and services were unsuitable for the slave trade, except in very secure locations like Mesa itself. Instead, recourse was made to more ancient forms of payment, involving the modern equivalent of cash transfers.

Such transfers were sometimes needed in perfectly legitimate businesses, so a well-developed and secure method for conducting them had been worked out centuries earlier. The method relied on the use of credit chips issued by one or another recognized major bank, usually though not always a bank headquartered on Old Earth itself.

Anderson keyed in the combination to unlock the battle steel box, and its lid slid smoothly upward. Inside were a large number of credit chips, issued by the Banco de Madrid of Old Earth. Each of those chips was a wafer of molecular circuitry embedded inside a matrix of virtually indestructible plastic. That wafer contained a bank validation code, a numerical value, and a security key whose security was probably better protected than the Solarian League Navy’s central computer command codes. Any attempt to change the value programmed into it when it was originally issued would trigger the security code and turn it into a useless, fused lump. Those chips were recognized as legal tender anywhere in the explored galaxy, but there was no way for anyone to track where they’d gone, or — best of all from the slavers’ perspective — whose hands they’d passed through, since the day they’d been issued by the Banco de Madrid.

Captain Tsang leaned over far enough to examine the chips, but she didn’t touch them. In fact, she was careful to keep her hands well away from the box. Any attempt to take the chips before the transaction was complete would result in a missing hand or two.

She took out a small portable device and aimed it in the direction of the chips, still being careful not to let either her hand or the unit come any nearer to the box than was necessary for the immediate purpose. She spent a few moments studying the readout; not long, just enough to verify that the chips were legitimate and that there were enough of them to cover any transactions they’d be carrying out that day.

That done, she turned to one of her subordinates and said, “Start bringing ‘em out.”

She then glanced around, looking for the needed exit from the compartment.

Anderson pointed to a hatch just to her left. “We’ll file them through there.”

As each slave passed through the hatch, Tsang’s hand unit would record the amount owed until enough was reached to remove one of the chips from the box. There shouldn’t be any dickering needed, not for labor techs.

Just to be on the safe side, though, she said: “We’ll want standard Verge price.”

“Not a problem,” said Anderson, nodding.

Tsang took a couple of steps back from the box. The damn things made her nervous, even though she’d never heard of one malfunctioning.

That done, she relaxed. This looked to be a simple, straightforward matter, now that the preliminaries were done.

****

Trigger-happy gorillas or not, once they were inside the ship the small unit of assault troops waited for Loren to bring out more of his specialized equipment and scan the area.

“That way,” he said softly. His pointing finger steered the section down the corridor branching off to the right.

The progress that followed was odd. The four assault troops moved forward quickly, leapfrogging down the corridor, one person providing cover while the others took more advanced positions. Meanwhile, in the rear — sometimes quite far to the rear — Damewood came up much more slowly. He wasn’t precisely “moseying along,” but an uncharitable observer might have used the term anyway.

Neither Kabweza nor any of her subordinates would have done so, however. Indeed, the thought never crossed their minds. The XO had a reputation for being something of a wizard with his sensor gear. That ability could make a world of difference to the outcome of their mission. Torch assault troops might be the modern analog of Viking berserks, but analogy was not identity. More than three thousand years of civilization had elapsed, after all, since the legendary Ragnarr Loðbrók led his longships across the North Sea to plunder France and the British Isles.

“Two hatches up, on the left,” Loren said. “That’ll let us into the slave quarters through a storage compartment. It’s unoccupied.”

****

It also turned out to be very full, almost to the point of being impassable without hauling supplies into the corridor, which would have been too time-consuming.

Not quite. It helped that the battle armor worn by the assault troops made it quite easy to crush whatever cartons, containers and cans needed to be crushed to clear a path.

One of those containers, as it happened, contained some sort of bright purple fruit juice. So it was on a garish note that they emerged into the slave quarters, as if they had camouflaged themselves to blend into a psychedelic landscape.

The compartment they entered was packed almost as full of people as the one they were exiting had been packed with supplies and equipment. The people were plastered against the walls, staring at them with wide-eyed alarm.

Kabweza had been expecting that, so she’d had Sergeant Supakrit X lead the way. As soon as he entered the slave quarters the sergeant opened the faceplate of his armor and stuck his tongue out.

Supakrit X was an escaped slave. His tongue displayed the genetic marker used by Manpower to identify their products. The marker was unique and difficult to duplicate — impossible, really, if it was examined at close quarters.

Which his marker was, almost immediately. A small young female slave came up to him, quite fearlessly, and pried his mouth further open with her fingers. Supakrit, who was much bigger than she was, leaned over to help her in the project. She gave the marker on his tongue a short but intense examination and then stepped back.

“It’s real,” she announced. “But they’re not Ballroom, I’m pretty sure.”

Supakrit straightened up and grinned. “Bunch of maniacs. No, girl, we’re from the Royal Torch Army.” He hooked a thumb at Commander Damewood. “We’re working with the Biological Survey Corps.”

Hearing that, one of the older male slaves grinned even more widely than the sergeant. Very few slaves had yet heard of the new former slaves’ planet of Torch. But some slaves knew the truth — some of it, anyway — about the BSC. Apparently he was one.

The young woman was scowling, however. “Don’t call me ‘girl.’”

Kabweza moved forward. “Give us a name, then.”

“Takahashi Ayako. You can call me Ayako.”

The fact that she had a full name and was willing to use it publicly was significant. Manpower did not give names to its slaves. They were raised with the last three or four digits of their slave number serving the purpose. Over time, though, slaves managed to create a society of their own, with adoptive parents who took most youngsters into their shelter. Manpower’s managers tolerated the practice, because it served their own purposes. It was simpler and cheaper to have slaves raise the youngsters who came out of the breeding vats instead of Manpower having to do it directly.

But while they tolerated the custom of slave families — and even made an effort not to break them up if possible — they did not tolerate the slaves doing so openly. A first name could be used publicly, including one chosen by the slave herself. After all, even animal pets had names. But a slave who used the surname of their parents in public was considered to be a borderline rebel and was likely to be punished.

Apparently, Ayako was such a borderline rebel — or someone acute enough to have realized almost instantly that Manpower’s authority was about to be abrogated.

Despite the Japanese name and the placement of the surname first, Takahashi didn’t look the least bit Oriental. Her eyes were hazel, her hair was a sort of redbrick color, and her skin was several shades darker than that of most people from East Asia.

But that wasn’t atypical of human beings two thousand years after the diaspora from Earth began — even leaving aside the way Manpower’s gengineers scrambled genetic lineages for their own purposes. One of Kabweza’s trainers when she’d been in a Solarian Marines boot camp had been named Bjørn Haraldsson, despite to all outward appearances being of purely African descent.

“Are you here to free us?” asked the man who’d grinned in response to Supakrit X’s announcement.

“Yes. But for the moment, we need you to just stay put,” said Kabweza. After a very brief pause, she added: “Except for one of you who should come with us. That’ll speed up the introduction.”

“Me,” Takahashi said immediately. “I know everybody. It’s because I’m so friendly” — she gave Supakrit a sharp glance — “except when people call me ‘girl.’ Well, and other stuff.”

She was an attractive young woman. She’d probably drawn the unwelcome attention of some of the slaver crew if there hadn’t been enough pleasure slaves aboard.

Judging from the skeptical expressions on the faces of several of the slaves in the compartment, Takahashi’s claim to superb friendliness was not universally shared. But if nothing else, the woman wasn’t shy. That ought to be enough. Heavily-armed and very dangerous-looking people who arrive to free people from bondage don’t really need much in the way of a friendly introduction, after all.

“Come with us, then.” Ayibongwinkosi moved toward the hatch at the opposite end of the compartment. “The rest of you, like I said, just relax. This will all be over pretty soon.”

****

Kabweza’s progress was slow. Not only was the compartment packed with people, but the same armor that had made it so easy to plow through containers required her to move carefully here. It would be easy to crush flesh and even break bones without hardly noticing.

Once at the hatch, she waited for Damewood to come up. Loren fiddled with his equipment for a few seconds. What exactly was he doing? Ayibongwinkosi didn’t know and wasn’t about to ask.

Click. The sound of the locks drawing back was quite audible.

“Slobs,” muttered Damewood.

The likelihood that the slight sound had alerted anyone on the other side of the hatch was low. Still, Kabweza passed through the hatch by rolling and coming to a crouch, her flechette gun covering the area.

Clear. Still in a crouch, she swiveled the other way.

The corridor was clear there also.

She gestured, waving the rest forward.

Takahashi was the last one to emerge. “Which way to the crew quarters?” the lieutenant colonel asked her softly. “Do you know?”

Ayako nodded and pointed in the direction Kabweza had first covered. “That way.”

“Are you sure?”

The young woman got a pinched look on her face. “Yes,” she said curtly. “I’m sure.”

Ayibongwinkosi didn’t inquire further. She nodded to Supakrit X and he took point.

 

 

Cauldron of Ghosts – Chapter 02

Cauldron of Ghosts – Chapter 02

Chapter 2

“Well, it would have been nice if they’d given us another week or so to complete our preparations, but I guess you can’t expect too much from slavers.” Colonel Nancy Anderson tapped her bottom teeth a few times with a thumbnail, in an unconscious mannerism that her subordinates had labeled grief-unto-others.

The “others” not being them, however, they were not perturbed by the gesture. Anderson was something of a martinet compared to most officers in Beowulf’s Biological Survey Corps, but that wasn’t saying much. The BSC was an intensely disciplined organization, but that was scarcely evident to those more familiar with other military services. Despite the innocuous sounding name, the BSC was a military outfit — one of the galaxy’s elite special forces, in fact — but it had precious little time for the spit-and-polish formality so near and dear to conventional military minds. The BSC was quite capable of performing military theatre with the best of them; when it came to doing its actual job, however, its personnel were much more of the roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-on-with-it suasion.

“How do you want to handle it, Nancy?” asked her XO, Commander Loren Damewood. He was lounging back in a seat at one of the com stations, studying the data on the screen more intently than his relaxed posture and lazy tone of voice would indicate. “Their transponder’s showing one of the flagged Jessyk Line codes. They’ve used it before — though maybe not this particular ship — when they did business here.”

Colonel Anderson understood his point. Slavers didn’t randomly show up at stations whose control was unknown to them. And just to make sure nothing had changed since they or another ship in their company last showed up, they’d use seemingly-innocuous transponder codes. Knocking at the door, as it were, with a special rhythm.

“They’ve got a cargo on board, then.”

Damewood nodded. “And that’s a two million ton ship, according to the sensors, so it’s probably a pretty big one.”

That precluded the simple and straightforward measure of disintegrating the oncoming slaver ship with Parmley Station’s disguised but very powerful grasers once it got close enough. “Cargo” was a euphemism, dealing with slavers. The term meant human beings, alive and… certainly not well, given the realities of their situation, but still very far from dead.

“Plan C?” suggested a third officer in the command station. That was Ayibongwinkosi Kabweza, the commander of the Torch army’s assault troops aboard Parmley Station.

Colonel Anderson took a moment to consider the question. She had no previous experience working with Torch military units and wanted to be sure she didn’t handle the issue improperly.

The Biological Survey Corps had asked the government of Torch to provide them with a battalion for service on Parmley Station once it became clear that their plans for the station simply needed more forces that the BSC itself could provide. For all its wealth and power, Beowulf was still a one-star system and a member of the Solarian League. While the Beowulf System Defense Force was unusually large and powerful for a League member system, thanks to the existence of the Beowulf Terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, it had never needed — or maintained — a large army. Instead, it had concentrated on maintaining one whose quality was excellent, and its modest size had allowed it to be picky about the personnel it recruited and then equip them with the very best. Given the heightened political tensions of recent years, Beowulf had increased its military spending considerably, but the priority was to fully modernize its naval forces first. At least for the time being, Beowulf’s available ground and marine forces remained sparse.

They’d made the request for assistance from Torch a little reluctantly. The training, methods and tactics of Torch’s army units had been shaped by Thandi Palane and were based on those of the Solarian Marines, which were in many respects quite different from those of Beowulf’s military, especially the BSC. Not only that, but the Royal Torch Army was still very much a work in progress, feeling its way towards its own sense of identity and organic traditions.

With no real experience to go on, it was hard to assess how well the two forces would work together. To make things still trickier, like many newly-formed units, Torch’s assault troops were likely to have a chip on their shoulder when dealing with forces that had been long-established. They would detect patronizing attitudes in every careless or misspoken phrase.

If Colonel Anderson chose to employ Plan C, it would be Lt. Colonel Kabweza and her soldiers who would carry it out. Plan C had the nickname among her BSC agents of Plan Biggest Hammer Around. If the Torch battalion she commanded shared any of the traditions and attitudes of Solarian Marines — which they were bound to, since both Palane and Kabweza came out of that military force — they would apply ferocious shock tactics in a boarding operation. The Beowulfan military, like that of Manticore, was highly skeptical of the Solarian Navy’s reputation, especially that of Battle Fleet. Not so, however, of the Solarian Marines. Unlike Battle Fleet officers and crews, who could easily go through an entire career without seeing any combat at all, the Marines were a real fighting force.

It was tempting. Slaver crews, no matter how vigilant and well-armed, had no more chance of resisting a full-bore close assault by Torch units trained to Solarian Marine standards than vigilant and toothy mice had of resisting bobcats. There wasn’t even much chance that the cargo would get harmed, so swiftly and savagely would the attack be driven through.

Still, there was some chance. All it would take would be for one of the slaver ship’s officers on the bridge to trigger the slave evacuation procedures. The cargo would be forced out of their compartments by poison gas and expelled into vacuum. There would be no logic to doing so, since under the circumstances there was no way the slaver crew could pretend they hadn’t been carrying slaves. Some of the corpses would even be drifting in sight of the Station. But the slavers might figure that they were doomed anyway — not without some reason, being honest — and choose to commit an act of mass murder as a twisted form of reprisal. God knew the slave trade attracted enough sadists and sociopaths! Indeed, one might say that those were two of the trade’s more essential qualities.

But even if no harm came to the cargo, there was no chance that Torch assault troops would leave any of the crew alive. Their tactics, like those of Solarian Marines, would lean entirely toward eliminate the threat, not taking prisoners. Not to mention that the majority of Torch’s assault troops had once been slaves themselves, and somewhere around one-third were former members of the Audubon Ballroom. Their hatred for slavers would be personal and deep. No matter how well disciplined they were, their tendency would always be to give no quarter.

Anderson shook her head. “No, Ayi, I don’t think so. This will be our first operation since we transformed Parmley Station into a fortress. If possible, I want to get some intelligence out of it.”

The skepticism on the lieutenant colonel’s face was obvious, but Kabweza didn’t say anything. However prickly they might be in some respects, Torch assault troops had been trained by Thandi Palane. Unlike some Beowulfan units, they would not be inclined to debate orders they disagreed with.

“We’ll try Plan F,” said Anderson. “We may as well find out now just how effective our new counter-sensor techniques are.” Seeing the expression on Kabweza’s face, Anderson smiled and said: “Oh, fine, Ayi. If it’ll make you happy, we’ll use your people as backup instead of Loren’s usual crew.”

She cocked an eye at Damewood. “If that’s all right with you, XO.”

“Huh.” Damewood gave Kabweza a look from lowered brows. “A small number, Ayi. And nobody trigger-happy.”

“None of my people are ‘trigger-happy,’” said the lieutenant colonel. “We just don’t suffer from the BSC’s habitual slackness when it comes to smiting evil-doers.”

That got a laugh from everyone on the bridge. Kabweza waved her hand in what might have been called a conciliatory gesture. “I’ll head up the section myself, just to keep you from getting nervous.”

The ship’s captain and executive officer bestowed upon her the sort of look naval officers might give to a lieutenant commander who’d just announced she was going to assign some perfunctory duty to herself instead of an ensign.

“I need the exercise,” Kabweza issued by way of explanation.

That elicited another laugh. The lieutenant colonel looked to be as much out of shape as a lioness hunting on the savannah. She wasn’t nearly as big as Thandi Palane, but she’d passed through the same rigorous regimen in the Solarian Marines.

“It’s true,” she insisted.

Damewood rose from his chair. Unfolded from his seat, it might be better to say. The XO seemed to have a skeleton with considerably more bones than any member of the human species had a right to. There were rumors that he was the product of dark experiments done in complete violation of Beowulf’s code of biological ethics.

No one really believed the rumors. Still, they never quite died away.

“I’ll get my gear.” He glanced at a different com screen which showed another ship already docked to the station. “How about the Hali Sowle? They could make a useful diversion if Ganny’s willing to stick her neck out a little itsy-bitsy teeny tiny bit.”

“I heard that, smart-ass.” Elfride Margarete Butre — the “Ganny” in question — was slouched in a seat next to the bridge’s entrance in a manner that seemed even more boneless than the one Damewood had assumed. In her defense, despite looking like a woman in her late thirties or early forties, she was at least a century older than the XO.

The matriarch of the clan that had once owned Parmley Station rose to her feet and planted hands on her hips. “Just what did you have in mind, Loren?” she demanded. She was rather formidable-looking, despite being less than one hundred and fifty centimeters tall. “Exactly in mind, I’m talking about. None of your damn BSC hand-waving bullshit.”

Damewood smiled. “Nothing fancy, Ganny. It’d just be nice to have you pulling away from the station right as this new ship is arriving and cursing a blue streak on an open frequency. You could even directly warn the incoming people that they’re about to be fleeced by the greediest and most unscrupulous bastards this side of Betelgeuse.”

He paused, his eyebrows rising as if he’d been struck by a sudden thought. “You do know how to curse, don’t you?”

Her reply put to rest any doubts he might have had — or anyone this side of Betelgeuse, for that matter.

****

“Will you listen to this?” Ondøej Montoya, the Ramathibodi‘s com officer was grinning widely. “This kind of talent shouldn’t be hidden under a bushel.”

He pushed a button and the transmission he’d been receiving was broadcast into the bridge.

The ship’s captain frowned slightly. She found Montoya’s habit of using archaic references rather annoying. What the hell was a bushel? But the frown faded quickly enough, as she listened to the broadcast. Before long, she was grinning herself.

” — une vraie salope! And as for you, dickless, I wouldn’t wish you on a Melbourne humpmonkey! Although you’d probably do okay with my second cousin Odom — that’s short for Sodom; his family dropped the ‘s’ after his third conviction for fumbled rape, on account of he’d become an embarrassment to them — when he gets out of prison in maybe fifty or sixty years. I’ll make sure to tell him to look you up although I doubt you’ll still be alive by then, the way you swindle people.”

Captain Tsang chuckled. “What’s she so riled up about?”

Montoya shrugged. “Hard to tell, exactly. Near as I can make out, she thinks they overcharged her for everything and didn’t give her anywhere near a fair price for her own goods.”

Marième Tsang studied the image of the ship slowly receding from the huge bulk of Parmley Station. “She doesn’t look to be carrying our sort of cargo, although you never know. What’s the name of that ship?”

“The Hali Sowle.” The com officer shook his head. “I couldn’t find her registered in our data banks. But…” He shrugged again.

That didn’t mean anything. Vessels plying the slave trade — even those which weren’t carrying slaves themselves — did their best to stay off registries. From the look of the ship, she was just a tramp freighter who’d probably arrived at the Station more by accident than design. But as Captain Tsang had said, it was impossible to be sure without examining the vessel’s interior.

Captain Tsang wasn’t too worried about being swindled herself. Parmley Station was a known if unofficial transit hub for the slave trade, and the Ramathibodi was not a tramp. She was owned — not formally, of course — by the Jessyk Combine, one of Manpower’s many subsidiaries. The people running Parmley would no doubt drive a hard bargain, but they’d keep it within limits or run the risk of losing most of their business over time.

Which brought to mind…

“Who is running Parmley these days, Ondøej? We haven’t come through here in… what’s it been now? Two T-years?”

“More like two and a half.” Montoya worked at the console for a moment, pulling up another screen and scanning it for a few seconds. “According to this, the station is currently held by Orion Transit Enterprises. It says here that that’s a subsidiary of an outfit based in Sheba’s Junction named Andalaman Exports. For whatever any of that’s worth.”

“Not much,” grunted Tsang. Sheba’s Junction was hundreds of light years away, almost on the other side of human-occupied space. She didn’t know anything about the system beyond the name, and the only reason she knew that was because it was unusual.

By now, the Hali Sowle had moved far enough away from Parmley Station to no longer pose a traffic hazard.

“Get us a docking approach, Lt. Montoya,” Tsang ordered, shifting for the moment into formalities.

“Yes, Ma’am,” replied Montoya. One of the things the captain liked about the ship’s com officer, despite some of his annoying habits, was the fact that he didn’t abuse the slackness that characterized relations between officers and crew members on a slave ship.

The inevitable slackness, given the self-indulgence of slaver ship companies that was one of the perks of the business. “Running a tight ship” was simply impossible, under those circumstances. All a captain could aim for was to maintain the necessary competence at the work itself.

Montoya was competent. So was the Ramathibodi‘s pilot. Docking would take at least half an hour and Tsang wasn’t needed for any of it. So, she slouched back in the seat at her command station and pulled up her financial records. Studying them — basking in them, rather; gloating over them — was her favorite form of relaxation.

 

 

Cauldron of Ghosts – Chapter 01

Since Toni posted these earlier in her table on Baen’s Bar, I’ll be posting the first three chapters now with the first snippet beginning with Chapter Four (this evening).

Cauldron of Ghosts – Chapter 01

Cauldron of Ghosts

By David Weber & Eric Flint

MAY 1922 Post Diaspora

“Lot of help that is too. Victor can turn almost anything into splinters.”

Yana Tretiakovna, Torch secret agent

Chapter 1

“So now what?” asked Yana Tretiakovna. She leaned back in her comfortable armchair, her arms crossed over her chest, and bestowed an impressive glower upon Anton Zilwicki and Victor Cachat. The first of whom was perched on a seat as he scrutinized a comp screen; the other of whom was slouched in an armchair and looking almost as disgruntled as Yana.

“I don’t know,” said Cachat, almost muttering the words. “I’ve been trying to get an answer to that very question from” — his finger pointed to the ceiling — “unnamable but no doubt exalted figures on high.”

Taken literally, the gesture might have led to the conclusion that the hard-bitten atheist Victor Cachat had suddenly become a believer, since there was nothing beyond the ceiling other than the heavens. The large suite the three people were sharing was on the top floor of a former luxury hotel in Haven’s capital that had been sequestered for its own purposes decades earlier by the Legislaturalist secret police. After the revolution — the most recent one, that is — the new regime had tried but failed to find the rightful owners, since they’d all died or vanished. So, not knowing what else to do, they’d turned it into a combination safe house and luxury resort for guests of the government.

Clearly, though, Cachat was oblivious to the irony involved. Still half-muttering with disgust, he went on. “So far, I might as well have been putting the question to a streetlight. Except a lamp post would at least shed some light.”

Anton’s mouth quirked wryly. “I’m pretty sure the question you should be asking is ‘where,’ not ‘what.’” He pointed to something on the screen. “See that?”

Ennui was shoved aside by interest, as Victor and Yana both rose from their chairs and came over to look at the screen.

“And what the hell is that?” demanded Tretiakovna. “It looks like scrambled eggs on steroids.”

“It’s an astrogational display showing traffic to and from the planet,” said Cachat. “And that exhausts my knowledge of the matter. I can’t really interpret it.”

Yana stared at the screen again. The ex-Scrag looked rather alarmed.

“Do you mean to tell me that this is how orbital controllers guide spacecraft to a supposedly — ha, ha, I’m dying of laughter here — safe orbit or landing? If so, I’m never flying again. Not even a kite.”

“Relax, Yana,” said Anton. “They don’t use this sort of condensed display at all — leaving aside the fact that all orbital routes are selected and monitored by computers. No, I slapped this together just to see if my guess was right, which is that traffic is being shifted around to allow for some sudden and unscheduled departures.”

He pointed to… this and that and the other, all of which looked like nothing much of anything to his two companions. “Think of these as boltholes, if you will.”

Victor and Yana looked at each other, then down at Anton.

“So who’s bolting?” asked Yana.

Zilwicki heaved his massive shoulders. For someone built along normal human rather than dwarf lord lines, that would have been a shrug.

“How should I know?” he said. “Victor will have to find out from his unnamable but no doubt exalted figures on high.”

Yana said something in a Slavic-sounding language that was almost certainly unprintable. Victor, a bit of a prude when it came to coarse language, kept his response to: “Well, hell.” And a second or two later: “Hell’s bells.”

****

Luckily for the dispositions of Cachat and Tretiakovna, relief from uncertainty came a few minutes later, in the persons of Kevin Usher and Wilhelm Trajan. Usher was the head of the Federal Investigation Agency, Haven’s top domestic police force; Trajan, the head of the Republic’s foreign intelligence agency, the Federal Intelligence Service.

Yana let them into the room, in response to the buzzer. As soon as they entered, Cachat rose to his feet.

“Kevin,” he said, in a neutral tone. Then, nodding to Trajan: “Boss.”

“Not anymore,” said Wilhelm. He glanced around, spotted an empty chair, and slid into it. Once seated, he molded himself into the chair’s contours, as someone does who is finally able to relax after a long period of tension.

“You’re being reassigned to the foreign office,” he elaborated. “No longer part of the FIS.”

He did not seem dismayed at losing the services of the man whom knowledgeable people, including himself, thought to be Haven’s most brilliantly capable intelligence agent. When President Pritchard had notified him of her decision to transfer Cachat, Wilhelm’s reaction had been: You mean I can go back to running a spy outfit, instead of being a lion tamer?

Usher took a seat some distance away from Trajan. “It’s one hell of a promotion, Victor. If you, ah, look at it in the right light.”

Victor gave him a dark look. “Under very dim lighting, you mean.”

Kevin’s expression, in response, was exasperated. “Oh, for God’s sake, Victor! No, I don’t mean using night goggles. I mean bright — really, really, really bright — floodlights. Your days of creeping around in the shadows are over. Over — with a bang and a boom. O-V-E-R.”

Trajan’s tone was milder. “Be realistic, Victor. Your exploits in launching Torch almost blew your cover completely as it was. They left it pretty tattered. Now, after Mesa? You — and Anton, and Yana” — he nodded in their direction — “just brought back the biggest intelligence coup in galactic history for… oh, hell, who knows how many centuries? Do you really think there’s any chance you can stay in your old line of work? Even using nanotech facial and body transformations won’t help you, since they don’t disguise DNA. Sure, that’d probably be enough for a modest, barely-known sort of spy. But you? Anybody who thinks you might be coming their way will have DNA swabs taken of anybody who might remotely be you.”

“StateSec destroyed all my DNA records except theirs the day I graduated from the Academy,” said Victor. “Those are still closely guarded and I’ve been very careful not to scatter my DNA traces about.” His tone of voice was perhaps a bit peevish.

“True enough,” said Anton. “You won’t find Special Officer Cachat carelessly discarding a cup after he’s taken a drink from it, I will grant you that. But come on, Victor — you know the realities perfectly well. As long as you were obscure and nobody was looking for your DNA, those precautions were probably good enough. But today?”

“Exactly,” said Trajan. He nodded toward the window overlooking Nouveau Paris. “Word’s already leaked out to the press. Within a couple of days — a week, at the outside — your name and likeness will be known to every person on Haven above the age of five and with any interest at all in the news. As well as — more to the point — every intelligence service in the galaxy, each and every one of which will be trying to get their hands on your DNA traces. Sooner or later, at least some of them are bound to succeed. So give it up. And don’t bother arguing with me or Kevin about it, either. President Pritchart made the decision. If you want it overturned, you’ll have to figure out a way to get her out of office.”

Usher wiped his face with a large hand. “Wilhelm, he gets enough ideas on his own without you making suggestions.

Trajan looked startled. “What? I wasn’t — ” Then, looked alarmed. “Officer Cachat…”

“I wasn’t planning to organize a coup d’état,” Victor said sarcastically. “I am a patriot, you know. Besides, I don’t blame the president for the decision.”

The dark look came back. “Clearly, she was misled by evil advisers.”

Anton started laughing softly. “Ganny warned you, Victor. It’ll be your turn now for the video treatment! I’d have some sympathy except I don’t recall you ever showing any for me because my cover got blown.”

Zilwicki looked over at Tretiakovna. “What’s your guess, Yana? Ganny thought the news services would go for either ‘Cachat, Slaver’s Bane’ or ‘Black Victor’.”

“‘Black Victor,’” she replied instantly. “Give Cachat his due, he isn’t prone to histrionics. ‘Slaver’s Bane’ is just too… too… not Victor. Besides, look at him.”

Cachat’s expression was now very dark indeed.

“‘Black Victor,’ it is,” announced Zilwicki. “Victor, you need to buy some new clothes. All leather, neck to ankles. Black leather, it goes without saying.”

For a moment, it looked as if Cachat might explode. At the very least, spout some heavy duty profanity. But…

He didn’t. Anton wasn’t surprised. Victor’s deeds were so flamboyant that it was easy to forget that the man behind them was not flamboyant at all. In fact, he was rather modest — and extraordinarily self-disciplined.

So, all that finally came out, in a very even and flat tone of voice, was: “Where am I being assigned, then? I’ll warn you, if it’s someplace that has an active cocktail circuit, I won’t be any good at it. I don’t drink much. Ever.”

“S’true,” said Yana. “He’s boring, boring, boring. Well, except when he’s overturning regimes and stuff like that.” She actually giggled, something Anton had never heard her do before. “Cocktail circuit! Diplomatic small talk! I can see it already!”

Victor now looked long-suffering. For his part, Usher looked exasperated again.

“We are not morons,” he said. “Victor, you — and you and you” — his forefinger swiveled like a turret gun, coming to bear on Anton and Yana — “are all going to Manticore. Tomorrow, so get packed.”

Anton had been planning to get to Manticore anyway, and as soon as possible. He hadn’t seen his lover Cathy Montaigne in more than a year. He hadn’t yet come up with a way to do so that the many and manifold powers-that-be were likely to approve, though, and now it had been unexpectedly dropped in his lap.

He saw Victor glance at him and smile. There was real warmth in that smile, too, something you didn’t often get from the man. Not for the first time, Anton was struck by the unlikely friendship that had grown up between he and the Havenite agent. Unlikely — yet all the stronger, perhaps, because of that very fact.

There were people in the world whom Anton liked more than he did Victor. But there were very, very few whom he trusted as much.

“And in what capacity am I going?” he asked Usher. “Somehow, even with all this new-found cordiality, I doubt that I’ve been assigned to Haven’s foreign service.”

Usher gave him a grin. “By all accounts — I was on Old Earth, remember, when the Manpower Incident went down — no star system in its right mind would assign you to its diplomatic corps.”

“Yes, I remember.”

It was hardly something Anton would forget. Nothing official had ever been said, and to this day Victor refused to cross any t’s and dot any i’s. Nonetheless, Anton was quite certain that Kevin Usher had engineered the entire episode. He’d stayed in the background, letting Cachat and the Audubon Ballroom do the rough work, but his had been the guiding hand.

Zilwicki’s daughter Helen — no, all three of his children, since he’d adopted Berry and Lars afterward — were still alive because of Victor and Kevin. It was a reminder, if he needed one, that just because he didn’t share someone’s ideology didn’t mean they didn’t take it seriously themselves. Haven’s political ideals were not Anton’s — well, some of them were — but it had been those ideals that had shielded his family.

Suddenly, he was in a very good mood. The information he and Victor had brought back from Mesa had not only ended the galaxy’s longest and most savagely fought war, and turned two bitter enemies into allies. Uneasy and hesitant allies, perhaps, but allies nonetheless. That information had also turned a friendship right side up. All the wariness and reservations he’d had to maintain about Victor Cachat were now draining away. Rapidly, too.

Something in Victor’s expression made it clear that he understood that also. But all he said was: “True enough. I may be a problem child for the diplomatically-inclined, but Anton gives them nightmares.”

“You still haven’t answered my question, Kevin,” said Anton.

Usher shrugged. “How the hell should I know? All I was told by Eloise was to round up all three of you — and Herlander Simões, of course — and take you to Manticore. Victor, you’re not exactly reassigned to the foreign service.” He gave Trajan a reproving glance. “Wilhelm was overstating things a bit. For one thing, Leslie Montreau was in the room along with Tom Theisman when Eloise made the decision to yank you out of the FIS. She nodded quite vigorously when Tom said that maybe she didn’t want — his words, not mine — ‘that lunatic bull in a china shop’ in her department.”

“What’s a china shop?” asked Yana.

“It’s an antique phrase,” Anton explained. “‘China’ was a name for a fancy kind of what they called… porcelain, if I remember right.”

“Lot of help that is. So what’s porcelain?”

“Stuff that Victor could turn into splinters easily.”

“Lot of help that is too. Victor can turn almost anything into splinters.”

Victor waved them down impatiently. “So to whom am I assigned, then?”

Usher scratched his scalp. “Well… no one, really. Eloise just thinks having you on Manticore will be essential to firming up the new alliance.”

“Why? Anton knows as much as I do — and he’s Manticoran to begin with.”

Usher was starting to look exasperated again. Zilwicki interjected himself into the discussion.

“That’s sort of the whole point, Victor. I’m a known quantity, in the Star Kingdom. I’ve even had a personal audience with the empress. You, on the other hand, are a complete unknown. Well, almost. I think Duchess Harrington has a good sense of you. But no one else does, in Manticore.”

Cachat was staring at him, obviously in complete incomprehension. It was odd, the way such a supremely capable man could be so oblivious to his own stature. That was a feature of Victor that Anton found simultaneously attractive and rather scary. In the right (or wrong) circumstances, people with little in the way of egos — more precisely, little concern for their egos — could do…

Pretty much anything.

“Just take my word for it, will you? They’ll want to see you, and talk to you, before they’ll settle down with any information you bring to them.”

“What he said.” Usher rose from his chair. “Oh seven hundred, tomorrow morning. Be down in the lobby, packed and ready to go.”

Trajan rose also, and went to the door. “Have a nice trip,” was what he said. What he meant, of course, was “have a nice long trip.” And there seemed to be a little spring in his step, as if a great weight had finally been lifted from his shoulders.

 

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 41

The Forever Engine – Snippet 41

 

TWENTY-FIVE

October 9, 1888, Uvats, Bosnia

 

I ran.

The downhill slope lengthened my strides, and the buildings flashed by, scarcely noticed blurs of gray and black. I fell on the ash-slippery cobblestones once but scrambled up again, never lost my forward motion, hardly missed a stride.

The gunfire grew louder, and suddenly the waterfront loomed ahead of me. I stopped at the corner of a building, used it for cover, and took a look.

Bodies by the dock, four of them, none in a gray-green riding habit. A jumble of movement at the nearby seawall to the right, occasional heads bobbing up, a couple rifles resting on the edge of the wall and firing across the open ground at targets to my left. I watched and listened for a few seconds—no sign of Gabrielle, and no sound of shotgun fire.

I risked a look farther around the corner to my left — a low boathouse and two sheds. A rifle fired from the door of the boathouse, then another from behind a jumble of crates and nets beside one of the sheds.

I pulled back and heard the pounding of boots on cobblestones behind me, turned and saw O’Mara leading, with Gordon and the rest of the Marines straggling behind. O’Mara stopped at the wall beside me, panting, and I realized I was panting, too.

“What’s the plan, sir?” he asked.

O’Mara looked to me, not Gordon, for leadership. I filed that away to think about later, but I knew it was a problem.

The others drew up beside us, and Gordon pushed his way to the front. I knelt down facing them and drew a sketch in the damp ash.

“We’re here. Hostiles are firing from cover in a cluster of small buildings here. Our people have taken casualties and are pinned down by fire behind the sea wall here. Our people are returning fire and have the enemy’s attention. The enemy is unaware of our presence. We . . .”

I stopped and looked up at Gordon.

“I recommend we use the Bavarians as our base of fire to keep the enemy pinned down, use these buildings to maneuver under cover to the enemy’s flank and rear, and attack using surprise to overwhelm them.”

Gordon knelt down as well, studied my diagram in the ash for a moment as if it contained some hidden wisdom which might have eluded him, and then nodded.

“Corporal O’Mara, we will use these alleyways to get behind the villains. Mr. Fargo and I will go ahead and find suitable attack positions. Wait for two minutes and then follow us.”

I followed Gordon down the alleyway. He stopped at the end, looked around the corner, and then trotted across five yards of open ground to the back of a burned-out house. We made our way past two more buildings before we caught sight of the back of the boathouse. I checked back and saw O’Mara and the Marines hurrying toward us.

“You have done this sort of thing before, haven’t you?” Gordon asked. “Any last advice before the others get here?”

Gordon asking me for advice? That was a switch.

“If you just open fire and bang away at them from back here, it’ll give them time to adjust psychologically to being flanked. Make a quick charge and take them out before they know what hit them. Assign specific men to specific buildings. And a prisoner or two would be nice. I’d like to know what the hell’s going on here.”

Gordon nodded and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. O’Mara and the Marines clustered around us, looking from Gordon to me. Gordon looked at the back of the boathouse, licked his lips, then nodded.

“They’re in those buildings. O’Mara, take three men and secure the shed on the right. I will take you four here,” and he pointed to the Marines closest to him, “and clear the boathouse. Mr. Fargo, you take the last three and capture the shed on the far side. Take prisoners if possible. We’ll make it in one dash, no firing or shouting until we enter the buildings. Is that clear?”

“Don’t forget there may be men between the buildings,” I said. “I saw one behind a barricade.” Gordon nodded, but I wasn’t sure he understood. He looked from face to face and then nodded again.

“Let’s go.”

He turned and started running, leaving the rest of us to scramble to catch up.

I ran across the open ground, passed Gordon as he pushed open the door to the boathouse with his shoulder, heard a shot, then another. I saw a man turn from the barricade beside the boathouse and fired two shots from the Webley at him, saw him go down. I came to the back of the shed, and there was no door or window. I wasn’t sure what to do.

I ran around the far side — a window. I broke out the glass, fired two shots into the dark, stepped to the side. A Marine following me put his rifle through the broken window. A shot exploded from inside and he pitched back, blood spraying.

I stepped back in front of the window, saw movement through it, fired twice, heard a cry of pain, stepped aside, broke open the revolver and dug for cartridges in my pocket. The other two Marines knelt by the wounded man.

“You, secure the front!” I shouted.

The closest Marine looked up, eyes wide, face white.

“‘Ee’s ‘urt!” he shouted back.

“Secure the front!”

“‘Ee’s ‘urt!”

Fuck!

Okay. Tactical breathing. Get centered again.

I finished loading with trembling hands and snapped the Webley closed. I edged to the corner of the shed and looked around the front, listened.

Shouting, men in rage, O’Mara cursing, someone crying out in pain, a pistol shot close by, then another, but nothing from the interior of my shed.

I took two quick steps to the door, looked at the handle but couldn’t make anything of it. Was it a latch? A door knob? The shape wasn’t familiar, so it didn’t register. I took a step back, kicked the door in, and went through with the Webley up and at eye level.

Movement in the dark corner. I turned, almost fired, but he sat in the corner waving a hand in the air, saying something, no weapon visible. His rifle lay at his feet. I crossed the three steps to him and kicked the rifle toward the door, backed away, scanned the shed for signs of anyone else.

Cordage, nets, wooden buoys, the smell of rotting fish and old kelp, but no one else.

“Clear!” I shouted, and turned back to the fellow on the floor.

He wore a shabby uniform jacket and trousers, hard to tell the color in the gloom of the shed but dark, maybe blue. He held his right arm with his left hand. Blood stained his uniform sleeve black but was bright red on the fingers of his hand. He blubbered something I couldn’t understand.

“Speak Turkish?” I asked him in Turkmen.

“No. Yes. Little,” he answered.

“Stay. Don’t move.”

He nodded vigorously, then shook his head just as vigorously. Pain creased his face and he started rocking back and forth, moaning.

My ears rang with the echoes of gunfire, but outside I heard only harsh orders in English and men talking rapidly to each other — the post-combat chatters. I stuck my head out the door and looked around. Gordon emerged from the boathouse at the same time, looking dazed. He saw me, but for a moment the image didn’t seem to register. He closed his eyes, shook himself, and then walked over to me.

“I . . . is it over?” he asked.

“Looks like it. I have a prisoner here, but he’s wounded and he doesn’t speak much Turkish. Did you take any prisoners?”

“What? Prisoners?”

He thought about it for a moment, face creased in a frown.

“I don’t think so. One of them may still be alive, but he’s in a bad way. Maybe he’ll survive. No, he’s very bad. I don’t know.” His eyes flicked back and forth, up and down.

He looked at the revolver in his hand as if he’d never seen it before.

O’Mara and another Marine emerged into the open area, dragging another of the men in dirty blue. He saw us and started toward us.

“Here’s O’Mara,” I said in a low voice, just for Gordon. “Take a deep breath and get your head together.”

Gordon looked at me, still dazed, but his eyes cleared and he nodded.

I left Gordon and O’Mara to round up whatever prisoners there were and see to our wounded. I started to walk toward the breakwater, saw our people there stand up and begin climbing up onto the dock, and I broke into a run, heart pounding.

Gabrielle was there, a Bavarian helping her up onto the dock, and I saw blood on her face and coat. She looked at me, face pale and eyes wide, still in shock herself. I stopped in front of her, looked for a wound but didn’t see one, touched her shoulder.

“Are you hurt?”

She thought about the question and shook her head, looked around, stared at the bodies on the dock.

“The lieutenant . . . he stood before me when the shots came.”

I followed her gaze and saw von Schtecker’s unmoving body on the ground. Gabrielle swayed, and I helped her sit before she fainted. I put my arm around her shoulder, and she wept quietly.

***

We had one Bavarian dead beside von Schtecker and four wounded. One of those probably wouldn’t make it. The only Marine injured was the private shot through the throat. He might not make it either, but you never knew. We had killed five “hostiles,” captured two of them wounded, and one got away in the confusion — the one between the buildings I had winged as I ran by. I was glad he’d gotten away. Pointless, stupid fight.

We had massacred what was left of the local Turkish Jandarma.

The realization that this was nothing but a blue-on-blue fight hit the men like hard. A lot of them reacted with anger — anger at the Jandarma for attacking without a challenge or attempt to communicate, anger at Gordon and me for leading them into this mess, anger at themselves for what they had done and what they had felt while doing it. Some reacted with grief for fallen friends, some with depression. Any exhilaration they might have felt at a fight won vanished.

The surviving Jandarma corporal spoke and read Turkish. When I showed him the letter from Cevik Bey, he cried.

Once he pulled himself together, he told us what happened in the town. The disease was cholera, but a very virulent form, one that struck people down and killed them within hours of the symptoms first appearing. That spooked the townspeople, and so had the wolves coming down from the hills, more aggressive than anyone had ever seen them, attacking in packs in broad daylight in the town’s streets and only retreating in the face of gunfire. Farmers from the hills fled to town, telling wild stories of livestock slaughtered by azhdaja. I didn’t know the word’s meaning but it sounded mythic and I translated it as troll for Gordon.

Panic grew as the death toll mounted and finally everyone fled downriver except for a dozen Jandarma who had stayed at their post with their captain. That had taken some guts. The captain died that morning of cholera, four others deserted, and we had done for the rest.

What of the platoon of riflemen sent by Cevik Bey?

They were somewhere across the border, patrolling the north bank of the river, trying to find if the Serbs were somehow behind this plague. I had a feeling one Serb in particular was, but I didn’t know how.

“I am uncertain whether to wait here for the return of the Turkish patrol or head out after them,” Gordon said after drawing me aside.

“Yeah, tough call, but I’d say head on. There’s no guarantee they’ll even come back here, assuming they survive. Every day we spend waiting is that much less chance we’ll take Tesla by surprise.”

“Yes, there is that.”

“Also, you’ve got some morale problems. If we sit around for a couple days, with nothing for the men to do but stew about what happened, things aren’t going to get any better. If we keep the men marching hard, they’ll have other things to worry about.”

He looked away, down the river, and squinted as if trying to see something clearly, but what he was searching for wasn’t out there.

“I’ve rather made a hash of things, haven’t I?”

“Nope. You had some bad luck, that’s all. Shit happens. What you do next could screw things up, but so far I don’t know what you could have done differently. How do you feel? How did the fight go for you?”

“Well . . . I don’t know exactly. I mean, it was exhilarating in a terrifying sort of way. I fired a lot of bullets but I don’t believe I hit anyone, even as close as we were. I’m rather glad, actually, now that we know . . . well. The thought that it was all unnecessary . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t suppose you ever ran into anything like this before.”

I laughed without humor.

“Oh, I see. Then what is the best way to avoid this sort of thing happening again?”

“Career change was working pretty well for me until today.”

***

The Greek word anabasis means the march up-country. Twice the Greeks used it to mean a heroic march through enemy-controlled territory: the march of the Ten Thousand under Xenophon and the March of the Macedonian army of conquest under Alexander.

We buried our dead. We loaded our wounded and the two surviving Bosnians in the steam launch, along with one healthy Bavarian armed with his own rifle and my report to Cevik Bey on the incident. Once it came time to explain what happened, I didn’t want the two Jandarma to have the only voice.

We had no pack animals, so we left our tents in the steam launch. As it chugged downriver to safety, we distributed our provisions, ammunition, and Cevik Bey’s eight signal rockets among our backpacks and haversacks, determined our march order, and began our own anabasis.

 

The Forever Engine – Snippet 40

The Forever Engine – Snippet 40

 

TWENTY-FOUR

October 9, 1888, On the Lim River, Bosnia

The rhythmic chuh-chuh-chuh-chuh of the steam launch’s motor, the slap of waves against the bow, and the low German and English conversations of the men packed into the boat seemed small things in the emptiness of the river.

Bosnia had a somber, brooding beauty — granite cliff faces and massive outcroppings from a distance looking like moss-covered boulders, scattered among scrub forest and meadows. The rain had passed on to the east, but a solid roof of dark clouds kept the sun from lighting the glens and woods, made them all home to imagined lurking menace.

Earlier we had seen groups of people on the banks, then a solid flood — families, some with carts, bundles on their backs, livestock, others with nothing but their lives. We passed boats as well, mostly fishing craft. The boats, the people on shore — all headed downriver, northwest. They said nothing to us, nor did they have to. I had seen refugees before.

I wanted to stop, question them, but Gordon insisted we had lost enough time already, were making slow enough progress.

“The river is running so fast this relic of a boat is hardly making headway against it. We need to make Uvats by dusk. We’ll find out what’s happened once we get there.”

I wasn’t so sure. The flood of refuges dwindled then dried up, and for the last hour we had seen no one.

I scanned all around us. Gray sky overhead, gray river broken by white chop ahead, and behind, seemingly forever, empty banks to either side—no wonder the men grew jumpy, talked only in lowered voices, checked and rechecked their rifles and ammunition. Gabrielle seemed restless, unsettled.

“What do you think, Gabi?” I asked.

“About what? Oh, the lack of people on the banks? Either the danger has passed or it has consumed Uvats, oui?”

Leave it to her to see to the heart of the matter.

“You don’t feel like uncasing that Winchester?”

“Non. If thirty armed soldiers cannot deal with the situation, I think one more gun will make little difference.”

She was right, but I checked my Webley all the same. Danger in the abstract was one thing, but as we grew closer to whatever was happening up ahead, the butterflies in my stomach woke up and started flying around. Gabrielle staring at me didn’t help.

“What?” I asked.

“Your wife, how did she die?”

My stomach clenched again, and for a moment I was afraid I was going to throw up. I felt a cold sweat on my face and knew I must have gone pale. I looked away, out over the river, but not for the view, just to avoid her eyes.

No one else here had asked me that. Not polite, you know, to inquire after a chap’s personal life. The answers might be embarrassing to everyone, and we wouldn’t want that, would we? But Gabrielle’s rather limited grasp of social convention was always trumped by her curiosity. Normally I liked that about her. I liked it a lot.

“She . . . um . . . killed herself.”

“This is so? My mother killed herself as well. Sometimes I wonder if she did so because of me.”

I looked at her. I’m not sure what I expected to see in her eyes. Maybe a hidden pain forced to the surface, a key to unlocking her trapped emotions. Instead I saw a thoughtful frown. Her mother’s suicide was another emotional puzzle for which she had no solution.

“Your mother made her own decision,” I said. “You can’t blame yourself for that.”

“Then why do you?”

The launch’s Bosnian skipper spoke enough pigeon Turkish to let me know what he was thinking when he felt like it. Now he raised his head to catch my eye, and I was happy for the distraction.

“Uvats. After hill,” he said.

I looked upriver, saw a bend to the right about two miles ahead with a large hill on the bank.

“That hill?” I asked pointing.

He nodded. I took a closer look. Faint smoke rose from behind the crest.

“How long?”

His face wrinkled up in thought. Then he let go the wheel and held up both hands, fingers spread, closed his fists, opened them a second time, closed them, opened them again.

“Thirty minutes?”

Nod.

I passed the word to Gordon, who called von Schtecker back to join us. Both officers seemed jumpy to me, both working hard at not showing it. Like me.

“Pilot says half an hour to Uvats,” Gordon started. “No telling what sort of a reception we’ll have there, so we need to be ready for all eventualities. Now, here’s my plan. Once we land I’ll take the Marines and find the local gendarmerie. Fargo, you will accompany me. Leftenant von Schtecker, you guard the boats and supplies with your chaps. Be prepared to support our withdrawal if things get hot.”

“Ja, sehr gut,” von Schtecker answered.

“Mademoiselle Courbiere should stay with the boats, I believe. You know how touchy these Mohammedans are about women,” Gordon added.

I knew how touchy some Englishmen were.

“You mind missing all the fun?” I asked Gabrielle.

She wrinkled her nose in disdain.

“I have no desire to walk through a burning town.”

Gordon and von Schtecker both gave a small start.

“Burning town?” Gordon demanded. “What’s all this, then?”

“Didn’t notice the smoke?” I asked and pointed at the smudge above the hill. Gordon and von Schtecker both turned and studied it, frowns creasing their faces. Gabrielle looked at them and shook her head.

***

Uvats was a sprawling, motionless, nearly colorless town of gray stone and stucco buildings with brown tile and gray slate roofs, spilling down a low ridge to the harbor. The waterfront was abandoned aside from a couple small boats swamped in the shallows and scores of large blue-black crows, fat and unalarmed by our arrival. They studied us not so much with hunger as speculation.

The fire didn’t look as bad up close; the heavy rains last night must have drowned most of the blaze. Several buildings in the town still smoldered, and the fires might grow and spread, but for now all they produced were dirty coils of smoke that formed a veil of mourning over the dead town. At least it looked dead.

As soon as the launch bumped against the dock, the Marines scrambled over the gunwale and spread out into a skirmish line followed by the Bavarians.

The air was tinged with the smell of wood smoke, but something else as well, a sour, oily smell that tickled my gag reflex. It made my heart rate climb and sweat break out on my forehead. As soon as I was on the dock, I unfastened the leather cover on my holster, pulled out the Webley, and kept it pointed at the sky, finger out of the trigger guard but ready to go.

“Bloody hell this place stinks of garbage,” Gordon cursed, and von Schtecker nodded his agreement.

I looked at the Marines, the Bavarians, and saw some noses wrinkled in disgust, but nothing more. That told me something about them: they’d never been to war, at least not a long, nasty one.

“That’s not garbage,” I said. “It’s decomp.”

Gordon turned to look at me.

“Decomp?”

“Decomposing human bodies, lots of them.”

Gordon’s look of mild curiosity changed to disbelief and then horror, quickly concealed behind a mask of nervous indifference. A murmur ran through the Marines and Bavarians, a ripple of movement as men became alert and scanned the buildings near the waterfront. I heard a zipping sound behind me, turned, and saw Gabrielle kneeling on the dock, uncasing her Winchester shotgun.

“If something happened here long enough ago for the bodies to start to rot,” Gordon asked, “why hadn’t the Turks heard of it?”

“Weather’s been warm and damp, so I’d say this could have happened within the last three days. Why no news of it back in Visegard? Telegraph was out. You heard Cevik Bey. Happens all the time, so no one thought anything of it.”

“Good Lord, what happened here?” Gordon asked.

Something bad, that was sure. As if to emphasize the point, a wolf appeared from an alley and stood sizing us up. A rifle cracked from the crowd of men on the dock, a slug knocked a chip from the corner of a building a few feet from the animal, and the wolf streaked back down the alleyway.

Gordon looked around uncertainly. One of the Marines opened the bolt on his rifle, and a spent brass cartridge case clinked musically on the dock.

“You call that shooting, Private Kane?” Corporal O’Mara demanded.

You call that fire discipline?

But it wasn’t my army so I kept my mouth shut.

Gordon looked at the steam launch, clearly wanting to reboard and head downriver. But then what? He looked into the silent town and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Well, let’s see if anyone is still here other than the wolves. Leftenant von Schtecker, same plan as before. You stay here with your men and guard the launch and our provisions. Make certain this cowardly bugger of a boatman doesn’t run off and leave us hanging. If you hear heavy gunfire, and you are not yourself engaged, send one section to support us, but you are to stay here with your other section and guard this boat.”

“Jawohl, Herr . . . Yes, Captain.”

I glanced back at Gabrielle and gave her a reassuring smile as we set off into the town. She nodded, face serious, and went back to pushing shells into the magazine of her Winchester.

“Any idea where we’re going?” I asked Gordon. We’d originally planned on asking directions once we got to town.

“It isn’t that large a town. The public buildings will be on the square.”

That made sense. We started up the cobblestone street. It wound up the hillside at a slope I felt in the calves of my legs after a dozen paces.

Up close the town looked pretty bad. The street was littered with clothing, broken crockery, soggy paper, the detritus of looting and panicked flight. The rains which put out the fires had left a muddy gray sludge everywhere, ash washed from the sky. Most of the doors stood open, some off the hinges. A lot of roofs had collapsed, the support timbers burned out from under them. What the hell happened here?

Once we were out of the waterfront and onto what looked like the main street of the town, the Marines went from skirmish order into a ragged group, walking up the middle of the street. Shipboard combat was their main duty, and I figured they were trained for use as a landing party as well, but they clearly didn’t know much about street fighting.

I moved over to the right side of the street and looked in an open door. A rug shop, with some woven baskets as well. Living quarters were probably upstairs. No sign of recent habitation.

“Anything?” Gordon asked as I turned away.

I shook my head.

“Corporal O’Mara, have the men check out the buildings to either side of the street,” he ordered.

“You heard the army captain,” O’Mara barked. “Jones, Riley, left side of the street. Williams, Kane, right side. Hop to it.”

We hadn’t gone more than a block before Kane, the private who’d fired at the wolf, drew back from an open door and vomited.

“Something here, Corp,” the Marine with him called out.

I walked over and looked in. Three bodies, and the wolves had gotten to two of them. All were bloated, the skin stretched and shiny. The decomp smell was strong, but there was something else, almost as strong.

“Diarrhea,” I said to Gordon as he came up beside me and looked in, white-faced and covering his mouth and nose with his hand. “Looks like these people shit themselves to death. I’d guess cholera or something pretty close.”

He took a step back and nodded.

“Small wonder they tried to burn the infected bodies,” he said, voice shaking. “Corporal O’Mara, send a runner back to the dock. Tell the Bavarians there is cholera in the town and they are under no circumstances to drink any water until it has been boiled.”

“You heard the army captain, Kane. Get going.”

Gordon was using his head, which was a good sign. And he knew cholera was water-borne and boiling was an effective prophylaxis. I wasn’t sure when folks figured that out, but obviously before 1888, at least in this world.

Gordon walked faster to draw ahead of the Marines and gestured for me to follow. When we were a dozen paces ahead he spoke to me in a low voice without turning to look at me.

“Cholera is endemic to the region. I cannot think people would abandon a town in panic because of it.”

“No, me neither. Something else must be going on.”

We walked in silence for a few more seconds. Then Gordon cleared his throat.

“I . . . ah . . . cannot say this to anyone else here. I am quite frightened by all of this, to the point that I fear my judgment may be impaired. But I am responsible for the success of the expedition. I cannot appear uncertain in front of the others. You understand?”

“Yep. Been there myself.”

“Really? As a translator?” he asked, doubt in his voice.

I glanced at him. It must have taken a lot to open up like this, especially to me.

“The truth is, I wasn’t always just a translator.”

“I see.”

I wondered if he did. We walked on in silence for half a block.

“My point is, I’m a bit at sea, trying to sort out what to do next. Everything seems . . . quite different than we anticipated.”

“No plan survives contact with the enemy.”

He grunted, almost a laugh.

“You’ve read Moltke, I see. I met him, you know. Not at all what I expected. Of course, he was quite old at the time. I’m rambling a bit, aren’t I?”

“Yeah. You want my advice? First things first — find the Turkish soldiers. We can use the extra firepower and someone who speaks the local languages. But if we can’t find them, we still have Gabrielle, a map, and the element of surprise.”

The street opened into a plaza ahead of us, with a church on the left side and what looked like a municipal building opposite it. Gordon motioned to O’Mara, and a barked command sent two of the Marines trotting toward each building. Gordon took out a cheroot and tried to light it, but his hands trembled too much to get the match lit. I lit a match myself and held it for him while he puffed the cigar to life.

“Thank you,” he said quietly.

“Nothing here, Corp,” a Marine called from the door of the municipal building.

“No one alive in the church,” another called from the other side of the plaza. “Ten or twelve bodies in there.”

I heard the pop of a rifle in the distance, from the direction of the waterfront, then another, then a crackling exchange of rifle fire punctuated by the distinct boom of a twelve-gauge shotgun.