Chains of Destruction (30 page)

"Great," Briggs said breathing a sigh of relief. "Get back to me as soon as you know for sure. Leave half your people at the ship and call immediately if you think you may need reinforcements. We'll hit that village with everything we've got."

"We're right on it, Captain. Over," Stratton said.

"Keep up the good work, Stratton. There's a promotion in this for you. Over and out."

Briggs leaned his head back so that his neck was resting on the back of his chair and laughed. "All right.
Now
hail that glorified toilet cleaner in the Kryptonite for me."

They were dawning night camouflage. "Is there really no trace of a second ship? No lingering ozone trail?" Bradley asked, zipping up the front of the coveralls.

"Who knows? On this planet none of our locating or communications equipment operates at 100 percent," Stratton said. "Frankly I doubt it. I imagine what I told Briggs is more or less the truth."

"It's hard to believe that someone from the station would attack it," Bradley said thoughtfully.

"I agree," Jackson said from where he sat watching Decker. "An attack like that could have taken out the whole station if any of the safety systems had failed. Such a person would have to have no one they cared about on the station. They'd have to be a fanatic."

"I think there must be a second ship here. That spies told the New Alliance what was going on, and that they are here in their own ship," Bradley speculated.

"Well, on this planet, even with all this fancy equipment, there is only one way that we're going to know whether there is another ship here or not," Stratton said.

"How's that," Jackson asked.

"See it," Stratton answered.

All geared up, Stratton, Bradley and Jessit left for the village. Jackson would stay behind to guard the ship and watch Decker.

The brush was thick here, and the mud was deep. Recent rains had left a small stream running through the middle of what might have at one time been a trail.

Their plan was a simple one. Jessit had told them that most of the people would be asleep. He would go to the Temple claiming to be a traveling priest and find out all that he could about the attack. Bradley and Stratton would search the village, paying particular attention to the area where the transmat station had been located and look for evidence of another ship. If they found evidence of a ship they would know what kind of ship by the landing pattern it would have left in the dirt.

At the edge of the city Jessit turned towards the Temple while Bradley and Stratton headed for the coordinates where the transmat station had been. They used buildings and small clumps of bushes and trees as cover as they moved silently through the village. It wasn't quite dark enough for them to feel like they were actually able to use "cover of darkness." In a few minutes they had found the location of the transmat station and the burnt almost unrecognizable wreckage of the skiff that had transported it there. Not too long after that they found the landing place of another ship.

"It's one of ours, a skiff, just like the one we're using," Stratton said. The scanner in her hand displayed an infrared picture of the area and clearly identified the marks of a second ship. "There was another ship."

"How can you be so sure?" Bradley asked. "It could have just been from where that ship landed," he said pointing at the wreckage.

"That ship was taken out by a plasma cannon. One like the one that is mounted on our skiffs. It sure as hell didn't shoot itself," she said. "Someone must have hijacked the Avonlea and used a skiff to come to the surface, but what did they do with the ship? Where did they hide it? Even with the pulses, we would have found a ship in orbit around the planet by now." She was talking more to herself than Bradley. As she spoke, she started scanning the surface around the landing site.

"Maybe they let the skiff off and then moved the ship out of range of our detectors," Bradley said.

"Maybe." Stratton suddenly took a deep breath.

"What?" Bradley asked.

"Well, look at the boot prints. The natives wear a soft padded leather shoe. So everything with a heel has to be either Reliance personnel or whoever was in that other ship. Now this
 . . .
" she made a boot print next to one the scanner clearly showed in the sand, "is an Elite boot print, and so is that one. Yet there were no Elites sent on this assignment. It's not my
own
print because it's considerably larger than mine. Which means that one of the people who came out of that ship was wearing Elite boots."

"So?" Bradley shrugged not understanding the significance of her statement.

"So
 . . .
I've only ever heard of one rebel elite," Stratton said.

"Don't be ridiculous! Anyone can get boots, and if you're a rebel you hardly care whether or not you're breaking the dress code." Bradley laughed. "Come on, let's go back to the rendezvous and wait for Jessit. With any luck he'll be able to tell us exactly what happened."

They waited in the wet brush at the edge of town for so long that they were beginning to think Jessit had abandoned them. They sat mostly in silence, both of them having things on their mind.

"I wonder
 . . .
did
one of our messages get through?" Stratton mumbled, temporarily forgetting that she wasn't alone.

"Who
 . . .
what are you talking about, Stratton?" Bradley asked. He'd been thinking about Harker and was glad to have a diversion, any diversion.

"Nothing," Stratton said nervously. "Talking to myself is all."

Bradley quickly tried to remember exactly what she had said. "No! What the hell were you talking about? Who were you trying to contact?" He jumped to his feet and turned to face her. She was silent looking at the ground, and he knew. "You!" he said through clenched teeth. "You!" He reached down, grabbed her by her collar and started shaking her. "It was you? You were the freaking spy, and you let Harker die for it. You let them space Harker knowing that it was you all along that leaked the information to the Rebels."

Stratton let her tears fall as she pushed away from him. "I didn't know they were going to space him! Besides, I didn't think any of our transmissions went through." She laughed then, though obviously not because she was amused. She wiped her face on the back of her sleeve. "We were trying to get you over to our side. You idiot! You were so sure Harker wasn't involved. Harker
started
the rebellion on the station, Bradley! He recruited me, not the other way around. He was baiting you, baiting everyone, trying to see where their loyalties lie. Between he and I we have half the maintenance staff and one third of the combat units on the station ready to revolt. But it wasn't enough to ensure success. To do that we would have had to infiltrate the entire station, and that was going to take time we didn't have, so we started trying to reach the New Alliance. But we didn't think we were having any luck – and then the transport bay was sabotaged. Everything happened so quick after that. Harker was arrested, Briggs sent us planet side." She cried harder then. "I didn't even know they'd arrested Harker until you told me. I didn't even get to say good bye." She sat back down on the ground and buried her face in her hands. Bradley sat down beside her and put his arm across her shoulders.

"I'm sorry
 . . .
I should have known. Just this morning
 . . .
Oh, God! Was that only this morning? Harker was saying very insubordinate, damn near treasonous things. So was I for that matter. I just can't believe
 . . .
Harker -- a rebel leader! I mean it just doesn't compute! He just never seemed to have that much ambition. Why wouldn't he just tell me what he was doing? I would have helped. At least now I'd like to think I would have. Maybe not, though. I've always been happy to just do my job and stay out of harm's way. Maybe Harker knew me better than I knew myself. But I do know this – I wouldn't have ratted him out."

"Maybe not on purpose, but once you know something
 . . .
The Reliance has ways of making people talk. You can swear you'd never talk no matter how badly you were tortured, but the truth is you never know what you'll do when you've got a blade to your privates." Stratton sniffed and wiped her face on her hands and then on her pants.

Bradley nodded and took a deep breath. In less than a day his whole life – his whole way of looking at things had changed. Absently he picked up some dirt in his hand and marveled at the fact that as much as it had apparently rained the ground was not mud. There was mud in the low spots, but any place with even moderate drainage was already starting to dry out. It was a testament to how poor the soil was and how long it had been since the last time it had rained.

"I've hardly ever been planet side," Bradley said conversationally. "I was born and raised on Frank Station, you know."

"No I didn't," she said knowing how unusual it was for a maintenance unit to have been raised on a space station.

"Yes, my parents were both air corps. I was supposed to grow up to be air corps, but the test showed I lacked the intelligence and fortitude to be anything but maintenance class. So at nine they sent me away from my parents to maintenance school. Since I had lived so long in a space station it was decided that I would be trained to maintain stations and star ships so my early education wouldn't be wasted. I remember my mother cried as I boarded, but my father couldn't even look at me. He was that ashamed of me because I was going to be in maintenance. I never told anyone this before, but for years I cried myself to sleep every night because I wanted to fly so much.

"One day, years later, we were being trained in the hanger and I overheard one of the pilots bitching about his fighter – how it was losing speed whenever he punched it. For the first time since my father had looked away from me with shame in his eyes I felt good about myself, because you see I was a green-assed seventeen year old kid, and I knew what was wrong with his fighter – and he didn't. He could fly it, but I could fix it. I realized that – no offense – a trained rat could fly a fighter, but it took some real smarts to know how to fix them.

"I realized that day that those tests they had given us didn't show that I was too stupid to be a pilot, they showed I was too smart to be wasted on jockeying a ship, even too smart to be in combat. See, everyone looks down on us because we're 'just' maintenance, but the truth is that without us ships don't fly, toilets don't flush, and people are swimming in their own filth. The thing they don't want you to know – the real secret that the Reliance is hiding from everyone – is that the higher up you go, the stupider people get. Briggs is Captain because he's too stupid to be trusted to do anything that really matters."

Stratton nodded silently.

Bradley changed the subject. "So, do you think Jessit cut and ran on us?"

"I don't know, but maybe we should go look for him," Stratton said.

"Beats sitting here getting our butts wetter." Bradley stood up and then reached down and helped Stratton to her feet. He just stood there for a second. "So, were you and Harker.."

"Yes," she said with a choking sound in her voice.

"Then I'm really sorry," he said.

"I'll do better if I just don't think about it. Let's go look for that native."

"Who me?" Jessit said.

They jumped about a foot in the air then turned to glare at him. He just shrugged.

"Where the hell have you been?" Bradley demanded.

"You didn't think I was likely to get a straight answer from a bunch of priests, did you? One had to tell the story of the explosion while pontificating on the deep religious meanings of the events, and then all the others had to disagree with him about it. I'm lucky I got out of there when I did." He started walking in the direction of the skiff, and Bradley and Stratton followed.

"So what happened?" Bradley demanded.

"Would you like the plain, the metaphysical, or the deeply religious version?" Jessit asked turning to look at them and smiling. He seemed to walk backwards in the dark with as much ease as he walked forward in the light.

"Just the simple truth, please," Stratton said smiling back.

Jessit imparted all that he had learned. They were almost to the skiff before he finished.

"
 . . .
She apparently knew the gold metal was making them sick, and she sent it and the dead bodies and some devise away with the box. Then she and her friends left."

"What did she look like?" Stratton asked suspiciously.

"The air must be too thin here. You aren't thinking clearly. It's not her. It
couldn't
be her," Bradley said with a laugh.

"They said she was like no person they had ever seen before. Her hair was as white as star light
 . . .
"

"It's her. It's got to be her," Stratton said a trembling in her voice

"Is she a god then?" Jessit asked no doubt confused by the sudden fear that had entered her voice.

"It's not her," Bradley assured Stratton. "Why would she be here? Here in the middle of space on a third class planet."