Cauldron of Ghosts (42 page)

That job done, Arpino went to his own cabin, lay down on the bunk, and gazed up at the overhead with his hands folded behind his head.

There was nothing to do now but wait.

* * *

“All right, that’s it,” Captain Brandt announced.
Luigi Pirandello
’s velocity was exactly that of
Denmark Vesey
, and he nodded to his astrogator. “Kill the accel, and let’s get the hell down to the boat bay and find out if these . . . people intend to keep their word or not.”

“Yes, Sir!”

The astrogator shut down the slave ship’s impeller wedge and half-dashed off the command deck and down the passageway towards the boat bay. Brandt took a moment to exchange one last glance with Hinkle, and then the two of them followed somewhat more sedately. Even aboard a slave ship, there were traditions and appearances to maintain.

The first of
Luigi Pirandello
’s personnel shuttles had already departed, and the flight engineer sealed the hatch behind the captain and his exec as soon as they were aboard. The copilot was peering back from the flight deck, and Brandt waved both hands in the traditional hand signal of the order to undock. That was all the flight crew needed, and the shuttle had already detached her umbilicals and begun drifting out of the bay on maneuvering thrusters before the captain had settled into his own seat.

He watched through the viewport as the boat bay moved away from him. Then they were out, the viewport filled with a field of stars, and he closed his eyes and waited to find out just how honest Tunni Bayano had really been.

* * *

Lieutenant Marcos Xiorro watched as his pinnace slid steadily closer to the waiting freighter. According to the manifest the slave ship’s captain had transmitted in obedience to Lieutenant Commander Bayano, there were almost five hundred slaves in its holds, and Xiorro wondered if the captain had informed those slaves that they were about to be rescued.

Well
, he thought.
It won’t matter one way or the other in a few more minutes
.

In a way, he rather hoped the slaver captain
hadn’t
informed his cargo. This would be the very first slave ship the Royal Torch Navy had ever intercepted, and Xiorro was rather looking forward to going down in the history books as the officer who’d led the boarding party. Of course, the Marines were along to do any grunt work that might be necessary, but that wouldn’t detract one bit from the Navy’s glory, and Xiorro felt his lips twitch in a faint smile of amusement at his own vanity as he silently rehearsed the words he’d chosen.

“
The Navy’s here!
” That was what he was going to say, because for the first time in galactic history, the navy doing the rescuing belonged to an entire star nation of ex-slaves. Those ex-slaves would never forget their gratitude to all the other navies which had rescued them and others like them over the decades and centuries, but the date was special. This was the day slaves rescued their own.

* * *

The Gaul named Arpino had never appeared on
Luigi Pirandello
’s crew list, and in the haste to evacuate the ship, neither of the two shuttles’ flight crews realized that he wasn’t aboard the other one. Even if they’d known, they probably wouldn’t have worried
too
much, on the theory that anything that happened to somebody stupid enough to miss his assigned ride when the Torches found him was no more than he deserved.

But Arpino hadn’t “missed” his assigned ride. He was exactly where he was supposed to be under the orders intended to ensure that
no
evidence of Lisa Charteris’s or Joseph van Vleet’s deaths ever came to light. After all, the mere existence of their dead bodies might cause someone to wonder how two prominent Mesan scientists who had officially perished in an air car disaster had been discovered aboard a slave ship with heads shattered by pulser darts. For that matter, he couldn’t be certain that none of
Luigi Pirandello
’s crew people hadn’t heard Charteris or van Vleet’s names. So it would be as well to leave no loose ends, and he’d spent the half-dozen minutes since the personnel shuttles’ departure on the slave ship’s command deck, inputting a code no one except its captain and his executive officer was supposed to know.

Now he sat calmly, watching the screen which showed the interior of the brightly lit boat bay. He watched the Torch pinnace slide into it on skillfully metered bursts from its thrusters. It was a tricky maneuver, with no boat bay personnel ready to assist with the bay’s docking tractors, but the pilot of that pinnace clearly knew what he was doing.

The pinnace came to a halt, hovering within no more than four or five centimeters of exactly the right position, and Seleven Arpino entered the last digit of the code he wasn’t supposed to know.

* * *

Zachariah McBryde lunged to his feet in disbelief. He felt Zhilov behind him, knew the Gaul had stabbed an instinctive hand towards his pulser, but he couldn’t look away from the smart wall where
Luigi Pirandello
had just exploded.

For instants which felt like eons he simply couldn’t process the data. His thoughts skittered like a man on slick ice, unable to grasp what had just happened. It was insane! Brandt had
surrendered
his ship—he’d taken all of his people off aboard its shuttles. Why in God’s name had he done that if he’d intended to set a scuttling charge behind him?! He’d put all of his people into what amounted to a shooting gallery for the Torch frigate, and the destruction of
Denmark Vesey
’s pinnace and all its personnel was guaranteed to—

Then he knew. It was the only possible answer, and he started to whirl accusingly toward Zhilov in a triumph of reflex over rationality. The last thing he needed to do was to confront Zhilov. If the Gaul decided that Zachariah’s rage represented a threat to his own ability to control the situation, he wouldn’t hesitate an instant before killing the scientist where he stood. But before Zachariah could turn, he froze again, eyes sick as the inevitable happened.

Roldão Brandt never had the opportunity to protest his people’s innocence. It probably wouldn’t have mattered if he had—not with five hundred slaves and the twenty-seven Royal Torch Navy and Marine personnel dead in a blossom of nuclear fire.

Two million kilometers was too great a range for energy weapons, but the crimson icons of missiles streaked towards the helpless personnel shuttles. It took thirty-three seconds for them to reach their targets—thirty-three seconds in which Zachariah could not look away from the smart wall. Thirty-three seconds that ended in the obliteration of every remaining man and woman who’d been aboard
Luigi Pirandello
.

“Oh my God! Oh my God! Omigod! Omigod-omigod-
omigod!
”

It was Stefka Juarez, a corner of Zachariah’s mind realized, starting to shake off its paralysis. The woman stood to his right, one fist pressed against her mouth, eyes wide with horror.

“They fired!” she blurted. “They
fired!
And now—” she turned slowly, like a woman in a nightmare, to face Zhilov “—
now they’re going to fire on us!
”

Zachariah shook himself. That was ridiculous!
Prince Sundjata
was less than two and a half minutes from the hyper limit. They were that close to escaping—in fact, they’d all begun to relax with the knowledge that they were going to live after all. That was what had made the destruction of
Luigi Pirandello
so shocking, so paralyzing.

But Zachariah was a physicist. He wasn’t a weapons expert like Gail Weiss, but he could solve simple intercept problems, and he’d solve this one long since. Even if
Denmark Vesey
really had mounted the multidrive missiles Weiss had assured them couldn’t possibly be fitted into a frigate’s hull, and even if those missiles were capable of sustaining a thousand gravities of acceleration indefinitely, it would still take them over an hour to reach
Prince Sundjata
at this range.

Whatever her field might have been, it was obvious that Juarez was no physicist. Or, if she was, that her brain had been totally jellied by panic, because she lowered her hand from her mouth to point a shaking index finger at Zhilov.

“You
bastard!
” she hissed. “You
fucking
bastard! You killed all of us! You’ve—you’ve—!”

Words failed her, and she flung herself at the Gaul.

Whether
Luigi Pirandello
’s destruction had surprised him as much as anyone else, or whether it was the sheer insanity of Juarez’s reaction, Zhilov’s response was slow. His pulser cleared the holster, but before he could aim or fire, she was upon him. Most members of the onion had received at least some rudimentary martial arts training in their youth, but any training Juarez might have received was decidedly not in evidence as she went for the Gaul’s eyes with daggered fingernails. He got his left forearm up barely in time to block her first, frenzied strike, and her body slammed into his, pinning his right arm—and the pulser—between them, as her other hand came up and eluded his block.

Zhilov bellowed in pain as his right eye erupted in blood. Then he got a knee up, slamming it into her belly. She bounced away from him, whooping for breath as she folded up, but she never got a chance to recover the wind which had been knocked so brutally out of her. Before she could even begin to straighten, the pulser rose. It whined and a three-dart burst hit her on the crown of her head, pulverizing her skull instantly.

It was all one mad whirl of motion and insanity, of violence and blood, and yet even as it exploded about Zachariah, it all seemed to be happening in slow motion. He watched Juarez stagger backward, watched that pulser rise, watched the woman’s head explode . . . and realized the pulser was still rising, still swinging.

Swinging towards
him
.

He didn’t know what Zhilov was thinking. For that matter, he didn’t know
if
Zhilov was thinking, and there wasn’t time to ponder the Gaul’s motives. Maybe he was simply reacting to the suddenness of the attack, the pain in his ruptured eye. Or perhaps he was reacting to . . . neutralize his two remaining charges before they took advantage of his weakened position to escape the certainty of death he represented if anything like this day’s events should occur again. Or maybe he was reacting to something else entirely.

It didn’t matter. Zacharias saw that pulser coming, knew he was going to die, then saw the weapon go bouncing upward as Gail Weiss’ right foot left the deck in a powerful snap kick which landed perfectly on the Gaul’s gun hand.

The pulser went flying. Zhilov’s left arm lashed out, his forearm hammering Weiss across the side of the head. She went down—unconscious or dead; Zachariah didn’t know—and then
he
was moving, as well.

Zhilov was badly off-center, unbalanced, half blind as he fought to regain the center he’d lost, and Zachariah knew that if he did, he and Weiss would be as dead as Juarez. It didn’t matter what had started the explosion of violence. What mattered was that whether by instinct or intent, Zhilov meant to kill all of them.

Zachariah McBryde was a scientist, not a trained security man like his brother had been. For Zachariah, “martial arts” had been no more than an exercise form, never something he’d intended or expected to actually need. But as Zhilov twisted back towards him, he felt himself moving forward, driving into the Gaul. Zhilov was favoring his right hand—obviously Weiss’ kick had done significant damage to it—but his
left
arm was scything inward, and his left hand flexed strangely. The organic laminate blade which emerged suddenly from the back of his left hand projected almost eight centimeters beyond the knuckles and swept toward Zachariah’s throat.

The scientist’s right arm thrust vertically upwards like a sword, hammering into the inside of Zhilov’s left forearm, blocking the blade’s strike. And then Zachariah’s left hand went for the Gaul’s good eye and his right knee slammed forward in a vicious strike to Zhilov’s groin.

The Gaul blocked part of its force, but not all of it, and he jackknifed forward. Both of Zachariah’s hands cupped Zhilov’s head and he jerked downward with all the strength of his back as his knee came up again.

He was trying to drive his kneecap into the Gaul’s face, but he missed his mark as Zhilov threw himself forward, trying to knock Zachariah from his feet.

Unfortunately for Zhilov, that meant Zachariah’s knee caught him squarely in the throat, instead.

The Gaul went down, both hands clutching at his throat. The impact knocked Zachariah off his feet, as well, and he rolled frantically as he heard Zhilov’s hacking, coughing fight to breathe. He doubted very much that he could have done enough damage to crush the other man’s larynx, and if he hadn’t, if the far better trained Gaul regained his breath, got back to his feet . . .

Zachariah’s hand came down on something angular. It closed instinctively, and as he slammed into a bulkhead and rolled back up onto one knee, three meters from his opponent, he discovered the angular something was Zhilov’s pulser.

His hand rose as the Gaul shook himself and started to shove back upright—still hacking, still coughing—only to freeze. His gory face was expressionless, but his good eye widened in sudden awareness.

And then Zachariah McBryde’s trigger finger tightened and a four-dart burst of fire blew Anthony Zhilov’s chest into a steaming red mist.

Chapter 46

Csilla Ferenc had never been so terrified in her life. She thought she’d reached the limit of fear in those horrible moments when armored soldiers had come into the station’s traffic control center and taken her prisoner along with the others. But their captors then had been no worse than vigilant. One of them had even been rather good-humored, in a rough sort of way.

Now, their captors were in a rage. Stalking up and down the line of prisoners standing still—no; rigid as ceramacrete—with their pulse rifles no longer held carefully pointed away but leveled.

Except for a few bigshots like Somogyi, they’d all been herded into the station’s largest hold. Hundreds of them. At first, she’d taken some comfort in being just one person half-buried in those numbers. But then something happened. She didn’t know what it was but apparently, from what their captors were saying to each other, someone had destroyed one of their ships.

She was sure they were all about to be slaughtered. Then a short woman she didn’t know—some sort of officer, from her uniform—came into the hold, almost running.

“Stand down!
” she shouted. “
God damn you—stand down!”
She slowed her pace and lowered her voice—a bit. “You’re supposed to be soldiers, not a fucking mob. Stand down, I said!”

She pointed to one of the soldiers. “Sergeant Supakrit, are you in command of your unit?”

The big soldier looked meaner than just about any of them, but his expression was . . . well, not calm, exactly. But he seemed to have himself under control.

“Yes, Colonel Kabweza, I have them . . . They’ll obey me.”

“Good. You just got a field promotion to lieutenant. Junk the stupid ‘X’ and get a last name. Now bring your unit forward and stand guard over the prisoners. I want you prepared to shoot
dead
”—she turned and glared at the rest of the soldiers—“any worthless goddam so-called Marine who does not do
fucking exactly
what I tell them to do. Am I clear, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, Ma’am. Up front, people.” A small group of soldiers came toward him. They had their rifles pointed upward, but it was obvious even to a civilian like Ferenc that they were ready to use them—and not against her.

A little shudder seemed to go through the mob of soldiers. One of them, a short stocky woman who looked to be about Csilla’s own age, was standing a couple of meters away. She now looked at Csilla. Glared at her, rather.

“I didn’t do it,” Csilla said, in a small, tremulous voice. “Whatever happened, I didn’t do it.”

Her knees buckled. A moment later, she was sprawled on the floor, half-erect, supported on one hand. She started to cry. “I just work here. It’s the only job on the planet for people like me that doesn’t pay shit. My husband can’t work because he was crippled in an accident and we have three kids. My dad’s sick, too.”

She took a slow, shaky breath. “I just
work
here.”

The female soldier took a slow breath herself, which also seemed a little shaky. Then, looked at the rifle in her hands and brought it up so that it was pointed at the ceiling of the hold.

“Ah, hell,” she said.

* * *

Breathing heavily and trying to regain his composure, Zachariah turned and saw Gail Weiss on her knees a few meters away. The blow she’d taken from Zhilov’s forearm didn’t seem to have done any major damage, so far as he could tell.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She raised her head and looked up at him. He was relieved to see that her eyes seem to be able to focus. She might have a concussion, but he didn’t think it would be a major one.

Her eyes moved to look at Zhilov’s corpse. It was as if she was watching a cobra, to see if there might still be any life in the serpent. But she didn’t seem to be in a panic, or confused.

“Jesus, that was close,” she said, her voice husky. “I can live with being killed for a good reason—”

Abruptly, she broke off and choked down a laugh. “Talk about a phrase that makes no sense!” She took a breath, then another, calming herself. “But I’m damned if I want to get killed because two maniacs went at each other.”

She rose to her feet, went over to the table and sat down. Then she drank what was left from her coffee cup and carefully placed it back on the table.

“I knew—we both knew—he was here to execute us in case of capture. But I should have realized there was more to it. You know how the Alignment’s security people think. You heard Marinescu. Anybody who knows anything about Houdini either vanishes or dies. They were steel-hard on the subject.”

He nodded wearily. “So they had a second string to their bow. That’s what happened to the
Luigi Pirandello.
Arpino killed Charteris and van Vleet. Then he waited for the best available opportunity target and blew the ship. Thereby covering his own tracks. Now, nobody who’s not in the Alignment will have any idea what happened to Charteris and van Vleet. They’re not missing persons who get discovered as corpses—murdered for mysterious reasons. They’re just vapor now, indistinguishable from any other interstellar gasses.”

Zachariah looked around the chamber, which bore a lot more resemblance now to a slaughterhouse than an officers’ lounge. There was blood everywhere.

He was surprised no one had come to see what was happening. But the hatch was closed—and it was as solid as any ship’s hatch. And now that he thought back on it, the only really loud noises had been people shouting. The exact words wouldn’t have been distinguishable on the command deck, if they’d been heard at all. It was certainly not something they’d come to investigate, given their wariness around Zhilov.

“So now what do we do?”

“For starters, we need a cover story that’ll satisfy Captain Bogunov. I don’t think she’ll press too hard if we give her anything that’s reasonably coherent.”

She looked back and forth between the two corpses. “What do you think? Should we put the gun in Stefka’s hand and claim she—no, that won’t work. How did she shoot him four times in the chest and he was
still
able to take the gun back and kill her?”

“I think we should just stick to the truth,” said Zachariah. “She panicked, attacked him, he killed her—but then ran wild. You knocked the gun out of his hand and I picked it up and killed him. I think that’ll be enough to satisfy Bogunov, at least until she can get us off her hands.”

“And then what?”

He shrugged. “We tell the same story all the way through to the end. What the hell, it’s true—that
is
what happened. I don’t think the Alignment will punish us for it. There’s no reason to, once we’ve completed Houdini.”

Weiss thought about it, for a moment. “Well . . . That’s true enough.” Her mouth twisted into a little smile. “You’ve got to say this much for our security people—they’re as cold-blooded and ruthless as a spider, but they’re just as practical, too. They don’t kill people out of spite.”

* * *

“What the hell happened?” Colonel Donald Toussaint demanded. He knew no one aboard
Hali Sowle
had any more information than he did, but he half-glared around the freighter’s bridge anyway.

Denmark Vesey
was almost six light-minutes from Balcescu Station, and both she and
Luigi Pirandello
had disappeared from the FTL gravitic sensors the moment their velocities equalized and they shut down their impeller wedges. The sensor drone
Hali Sowle
had deployed had tracked the passenger shuttles’ wedges after they separated from the ship, then tracked the pinnace’s wedge until
it
was shut down. Then nothing. Nothing at all . . . until, three hundred and eighty-three seconds later, light-speed scanners had detected the nuclear explosion which had destroyed the freighter in a blinding bubble of light.

Followed, thirty seconds after
that
by the missile detonations which had killed
Luigi Pirandello
’s shuttles.

Lieutenant Commander Bayano’s report had come in one minute after that. The frigate CO’s summation of the events themselves had been clear and professional, but at the end, it had become almost plaintive.

“None of it makes any
sense,
Sir,” his recorded message said from Toussaint’s com screen as he played it back the second time. He’d viewed it the first time by himself. Now he wanted all the different perspectives on it he could get.

“They’d already surrendered and left the ship in their personnel shuttles,” Bayano continued. “They had to have known—dammit, I warned them
twice
, and I was blunt about it—that we’d take out all of them if so much as one slave was killed. So why blow their ship at that point? What the
fuck
did they think they were
doing
?” He’d been visibly shaken himself, then grimaced. “Sorry, Sir. I know you don’t know either, but losing Lieutenant Xiorro and all his people when we had the situation under
control
. . . that hurts. That hurts a lot.”

“Maybe they just wanted to get revenge by killing some of our people at the same time,” Lieutenant Commander Lansiquot said now. The Havenite adviser was standing next to Major Sydorenko, close enough to the screen to view the report along with her and the colonel. Toussaint had invited him to do just that, and now he paused the recorded message’s playback and raised both eyebrows at Lansiquot.

Sydorenko’s expression was tight, hard, coldly furious. “Like Commander Bayano says, damn it. Bastards killed Lieutenant Xiorro and all his Marines. That’s got to be why they did it.”

Donald waved his hand, trying not to be impatient with people either. “Meaning no offense, but neither one of you was ever a slave. I was—so was Tunni—and what they did makes no sense. It just doesn’t. These people were
slavers
, for Christ’s sake, not religious or political fanatics. Any slaver crew is likely to have one or two loose screws rattling around who might be crazy enough to do something like this, but
all
of them?”

He glared back down at Bayano’s frozen image in his display. Lansiquot started to say something but stopped abruptly, and Sydorenko inhaled sharply.

“Can we hear the rest of Commander Bayano’s report, Sir?” she asked.
Before I shoot my mouth off again
was left unspoken.

“Of course.” Toussaint gave her a humorless smile which strongly suggested that he’d heard what she’d left unspoken, and touched the screen again.

Bayano’s frozen image sprang back to life, and he shook his head like a traveler pondering the Sphinx’s riddles.

“I had fairly extensive contact with the ship’s captain, Colonel, and he sure didn’t seem like he was in a suicidal mood to me. That’s the main reason I’m so frigging lost for any explanation of what he did! He actually sounded
reasonable
, like someone who wanted to at least get his own people out of it alive, and he said all the right things. He even
did
all the right things . . . right up to the last moment.”

They could see him pause for a moment, and his expression become . . . not chagrinned, exactly. Rueful, perhaps.

“The truth is, Colonel, I think now I may have jumped the gun when I opened fire. Looking back on it, I don’t think the people in the shuttles had any idea what was going to happen.”

“Fuck ’em,” Toussaint told Bayano’s image bluntly, then glanced back up at Sydorenko and Lansiquot. “That’s pretty much what I told Tunni when I receipted his report, and I stand by it. I think he was probably right about how much Brandt and the other people in those shuttles had to do with it, but the fact remains that they were a bunch of stinking slavers. And assuming he
was
right, they wouldn’t have known anything so there’d have been no point in keeping them alive to be interrogated.”

He leaned back in his chair. “I look on the bright side. We just proved to any slaver who needs it that we mean what we say. We warned them, they didn’t heed us—regardless of who ‘they’ are, exactly—and we exacted the penalty we said we would. Let the rest of them learn from that.” He swiveled to look up at Sydorenko. “Make sure we collect every scrap of recording that exists on the incident, Anichka. Our records, the
Denmark Vesey
’s—the station’s, if they have any. When we get back to Torch, I’ll tell our intelligence people they need to squeeze that data for all it’s worth so we can hopefully figure out what really happened and why. There’s a mystery here somewhere, I can smell it.”

* * *

It was perfectly obvious to Zachariah that Captain Bogunov didn’t believe much of their story. But it was just as obvious that she had no intention of trying to ferret out the truth herself.

Let the authorities—whoever the hell they might be—sort this out for themselves. The same authorities who had stressed to her that she should ask no questions of the passengers and let Zhilov do pretty much whatever he had a mind to do.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to put you in confinement for the rest of the trip, though,” she said apologetically. “Pick whichever of your cabins you want. It’ll be a little crowded but . . . that’s the way it is. I haven’t got the personnel to keep a guard on more than one cabin.”

* * *

They settled in Gail’s cabin, which she’d shared with Juarez, since it had two bunks.

After Zachariah stowed away his few possessions, he sat across from Gail at the little extruding shelf that served the cabin as a pitiful excuse for a dining table.

“Did you leave everyone behind?” she asked him.

“Yes. Lisa was the only friend I had left, and . . .”

She nodded. “I guess I was lucky. My husband and I divorced a year ago and we had no kids. And my parents are both dead. I have a brother but we’ve never been close. You?”

After a moment’s hesitation, Zach began talking about his family. He was still doing so two hours later, as the ship vanished into the universe. By then, they were holding hands.