A Choice of Treasons (35 page)

There was a whole group of them packed into the small cabin. Frank and Maggie, Jondee, Temerek, McGeahn, Gant, even Thring, and they all looked guilty, like a bunch of pubescent boys and girls caught showing one another their genitals.

“How about a drink?” Maggie offered.

York glanced around the room at each of them, and not one would look him in the eyes. “Ya,” he said, leaning against a bulkhead. “Make it something strong. I think I’m going to need it.”

No one moved or said anything as Maggie splashed something into a glass, then handed it to York. He took a sip, found it was real whiskey, not
trate
, was grateful for that luxury. “So,” he said, looking at Maggie, and in no mood to beat around the bush. “You wanted to see me, said it was important.” He looked around the cabin again. “And it’s obvious this is not a social call. So what’s so hot?”

Again the silence, no one willing to meet his eyes. “Someone answer me. Now. Or I’m leaving.”

He turned toward the hatch, and oddly, it was McGeahn who spoke. “Wait! Stay.”

He turned back and leaned against the bulkhead again. “I’m listening. Someone start talking.”

Again, McGeahn spoke. “How would you evaluate our present situation?”

York shook his head. “I wouldn’t. How would you?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and she looked to the others for help.

Frank came to her rescue. “The situation is deteriorating steadily. The civilians and crew are all carrying contraband arms. Sierka has armed the officers in the hope of keeping control. No one trusts or respects him. There’s no order, no discipline. He hasn’t even bothered to issue duty assignments for most of the crew, and—”

Temerek interrupted him. “Everyone’s seen the way you’ve got your marines operating, a nice well-oiled organization. We need responsible leadership. We need authority and discipline from the top down.”

York cut him off. “Sierka’s the top. Go talk to him.”

Temerek shook his head. “He’d never listen.”

“Maybe not. But that’s the only course you’ve got.”

“Please, York,” McGeahn pleaded. “We’re in a lot of trouble.”

“Yes,” York agreed. “If you’ve been in here hatching something, you’re damn right you’re in a lot of trouble.”

Maggie blurted out, “Sierka’s going to get us all killed.”

“As captain, that’s his prerogative.”

“Damn it, Ballin,” Frank demanded. “Help us here.”

“Help you do what? You don’t want me to help you. You want me to lead you in mutiny. Let’s spell it out.
Mutiny
is the word. You’re all talking about it, but not one of you has the guts to say it. And what the hell would that accomplish?”

Maggie shouted. “At least we won’t get killed by some stupid mistake.”

York shook his head. They didn’t understand, and he knew he couldn’t make them. “You bunch of idiots. You bloody, god damned idiots.” He sucked down his drink, swallowed the whole thing in a single gulp, looked at Maggie and Frank. “I thought you two were smarter than this.” He looked around the room one last time. “You’re all idiots.”

He tossed his empty glass at Frank—didn’t hear it shatter so he assumed Frank had caught it—and turned to the cabin door. Thring stood in the way, though he obviously had no intention of stopping York. But York grabbed him by the front of his church robes anyway, tossed him to one side. He palmed the lock on the hatch, stepped out into the corridor and slammed it behind him.

He got about five paces up the corridor when Soladin stepped out of Lady what’s-her-name’s cabin and they almost ran into one another.

“Ballin?” Soladin asked. “What are you doing here? This deck is off limits to you and your kind. Answer me. And stand at attention when you’re addressed by a superior.”

York clamped down on his anger and pulled his shoulders back.

“Answer my question.”

“What question was that, sir?”

“I asked you what you were doing here.”

“I was walking down the corridor, sir.”

Soladin’s eyes widened. “Don’t get smart with me.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

“I’m putting you on report. Now get below decks immediately.”

“Yes, sir. Right away, sir.”

York went back to his cabin and got drunk.

Early the next morning he was badly hung over when Sierka ordered him up to his office, had him stand in front of his desk for more than an hour while he shouted at him. Then, when Sierka let him go, York went down to the ready room and shouted at Palevi and Yagell and Tathit and the marines for a while. It didn’t make him feel any better.

They floated York in on a grav stretcher, one arm, shoulder, and half his face blown away—the good half. The prosthetic eye with the scars radiating out from the socket was still intact, but the skin around it showed the pallor of death.

Alsa Yan leaned over him, shook her head sadly, mumbled something to one of her technicians about getting a body bag. The man left the examination room.

She peered into the side of York’s head, noted that a good portion of the skull had been torn away by shrapnel. A fair amount of his brain was missing, and she could see shredded neural wiring where the interface to the prosthetic eye had been. Her job now was to retrieve all the prosthetic parts that had been installed in York over the years so someone else might make use of them, then wrap what remained in a body bag so Telyekev could give it a decent burial in space.

She set to work with grim determination. The arm that had been blown away had been his real arm. The one that remained was a prosthetic. She was mildly surprised that both legs were prosthetics, and when she popped his chest cavity she found that all of his internal organs had been replaced, one by one, with biomachinery and organo-synths. She worked steadily for a good hour, and when she finished pulling all the borrowed parts from York, she turned back to the table and was surprised to see there were only a few scraps left. The arm and the shoulder and the side of his head that had been blown away were basically all that had been left of the real York Ballin. And now, without them, all that remained was a bit of tissue, a piece of bone, a smear of blood.

The technician held out the open body bag. “I’ll scrape him into it.”

Alsa looked at what was left of York, shook her head. “That’s not him. There’s nothing left of him.” She reached out, scraped the bits of tissue into a pan, turned toward the disposal can . . .”

York slammed awake, sat up in his grav bunk and screamed, gasped for air and gripped the upper side of his bunk as the deck gravity field almost pulled him out of it.

He caught his breath slowly. “A dream,” he said into the dark, trying to suck air into his lungs. “That god damned dream.”

He sat there trembling, beads of sweat dripping down his face, his chest, his arms. He lay back in the bunk and it took him quite a while to calm down. While he lay there he felt the ship make transition. Sierka had probably ordered it for some reason, and hadn’t bothered to take any of the normal and reasonable precautions. That
feddie
hunter-killer would probably put a warhead in their side now.

York rolled over, drifted back to sleep, hoping it would happen fast and clean.

Jewel Thaaline rolled out of her bunk, staggered across the deck toward her terminal. The alert klaxon wasn’t sounding; rather it was just the terminal chiming softly at her, so she had to force down her combat reflexes and the rush of adrenaline that threatened to flood through her. But still, none of her crew would be stupid enough to wake her if it weren’t important.

She hit the receive switch and Ducan Soe’s face appeared on the screen. He didn’t bother with any formalities. “We picked up a transition flare at extreme range, about ten light-years. Barely able to detect it—shouldn’t have been able to detect it at all, if the fool had been smart enough to dump a little velocity before down-transiting. What kind of idiot’s running that ship?”

Jewel tried to rub the sleep from her eyes and ignored Soe’s question. “Any other activity?”

Soe shook his head. “Nothing that we can detect. He’s just out in the middle of nowhere.”

Jewel thought for a moment. “He probably needs a nav fix. And we’d better be sublight when he up-transits or we won’t be able to track his new course.”

Soe grinned. “I’m ahead of you, Jewel. Tac’tac’ah’s powering us down now, bringing us down slow and careful. We’re just about ready to down-transit with almost no flare. I don’t think he’ll be able to fix on us at this range.”

“Excellent!” Jewel said. “As soon as you’re ready, go ahead and down-transit. I’m on my way up.”

She cut the link, then pulled on coveralls, shot out of her cabin and scrambled up the ladder to the bridge. They down-transited just as she was sitting down at her screens. An instant later the
imper
cruiser up-transited and started picking up speed.

“Did you get that?” Jewel asked.

Soe was crouched over his console, working feverishly at his screens. “Shit!” he growled. “We missed him.”

“Nothing?” Jewel pleaded.

Soe shook his head sadly. “I’ve got some data on his wake after he made transition, but that’s not accurate enough.”

The
Pride’s
bridge filled with silence, then Tac’tac’ah spoke. “Ma’am, I did happen to catch a fragment of a transmission. Maybe two transmissions, actually.”

“Yes,” Jewel growled. “What do you mean maybe?”

“One was that
imper
warship, clearly a transmission, heavily coded—nothing recognizable for us. The other was so faint I’m not sure it was a transmission. But if it was, it came from a system on a shallow diagonal from them, about six light-years from them, about eighteen from us, much too far out for us to receive it clearly.”

“Do we have any information on that system?”

Chief Innay answered her. “It’s the Anachron system, ma’am. One inhabited planet settled by agro-croppers. They’re way out on the fringes, but still officially part of the Directorate, so there’s a small garrison there.”

There were any number of possibilities, but they were all irrelevant. The Anachron System was their only chance. “Mr. Tac’tac’ah, set course for that system. Maybe this game isn’t over yet.”

When
Cinesstar
down-transited for a nav fix, they picked up a distress signal from
H.M.S. Dumayia
, an imperial hunter-killer assigned the mission of raiding Syndonese commercial shipping lanes.

Dumayia
had torpedoed a convoy twelve days ago, but taken considerable damage from the convoy’s escorts. She limped into the nearest solar system with a habitable planet, and her crew just barely managed to abandon ship before she disintegrated around them.

Fifty-two survivors had crammed themselves into a small boat meant to carry no more than twenty passengers, then crashed on the planet’s surface: seven more crewmembers dead.

Shortly after down-transiting into Anachron
farspace
York got orders to put together a rescue mission.
Dumayia’s
crew had dug in about four hundred kilometers from Pare de’San, a coastal city with an estimated population of fifty thousand.
Dumayia’s
captain, a woman named Straegga, reported that the garrison on Anachron IV had nothing of any danger beyond artillery and a few atmospheric fighters. And a long rang scan survey taken during their nav fix showed no
feddie
warships in the vicinity to hinder them. With fire support from
Cinesstar’s
batteries, there was nothing to stop them from dropping a gunboat to the surface of the planet to rescue the
Dumayia
crew. Simple, easy.

York and Palevi had been called up to Sierka’s office to brief him, Soladin, Armbruster and Rame on the rescue plan. “I’ll take twenty marines in one boat,” York told them, “and I recommend you hold
Cinesstar
at ten thousand kilometers. The only danger to us will be the atmospheric fighters, and
Cinesstar
can easily track an airborne target at that range. With that kind of fire support as a threat, I doubt the Syndonese’ll try anything. And that way there’ll be no need to unduly endanger the ship.”

Sierka nodded and gave him an oily smile. “Excellent advice, Lieutenant. But take all three boats, and all of your marines. We won’t need you up here, and you’ll have all of your people as backup in case anything does happen.”

York frowned. “But sir—”

“No, Lieutenant.” Sierka waved a hand in polite dismissal. “I won’t hear of anything else. You marines deserve some consideration here. In fact, it’s an order. I won’t hear any argument on the matter.”

A few minutes later York and Palevi found themselves alone in the lift. Before giving the lift their destination, Palevi growled, “I don’t like it, Cap’em.”