Commodore (24 page)

He nodded back. "I do. If I turn you over and the Empire loses, I'll either die or have to go back to living like a fugitive. I'll grant you this."

"Good," I replied, because it was the entire basis of my bargaining position. "What do you want in exchange for smuggling us out? Above and beyond the handsome fee you've already agreed to and accepted in good faith, I mean."

He smiled. "What're you offering?"

I gulped inwardly—Lord Robert had taught me while I was still very young that the first person to name a figure in a negotiation is always in the weaker position. But in this case, said weakness was merely a reflection of reality that it was best not to try and deny. "A full pardon, to begin with. For all previous crimes. Committed anywhere."

"That was a given," Jeffries agreed, gesturing with his blaster. "Go on."

I gulped again—this was
so
hard! What would a sociopath value most of all? Then I remembered his comments about how he'd had nothing while I'd had all of Marcus behind me. "A title," I offered. "And an estate-world to go with it. It'll have to be a new settlement—the rest are all taken. But… Ownership of a world." I smiled. "How does 'Lord Jeffries' sound, spoken from every throat on an entire planet?"

"You'd be welcome everywhere, socially speaking," Nestor added. "No one spurns a Lord. Or the hero who rescued David Birkenhead from sure death, for that matter."

Jeffries smiled faintly. "A clean record," he repeated. "A Lordship, fame, and my own planet. That's the offer?"

"A Lordship and a planet on the winning side of the war," I reminded him. "What more could you ask, that I might plausibly be able to deliver?"

"Nothing," he finally admitted. "Give me your word of honor as an officer and a gentleman?"

"My word," I replied, reminding myself that no promise made to the muzzle of a blaster is binding. Once our positions were reversed again he'd get his pardon and whatever I felt like he deserved—no more. Perhaps in the end I was the more ruthless after all?

Then he sighed, looked down at the deck for a moment, and nodded. "All right. You have a deal. But the Imperials will be here any second with the primary cargo. So, let's get you settled into my hidey-hole."

48

"I can't
believe
you agreed to make that... that
creature
a Peer of the Realm," Heinrich repeated for about the third time into the darkness. It was hot, smelly and above all claustrophobic in the tight confines of the smuggler's hole. Nor had we any way of knowing what was going on even mere feet away—for all I knew Jeffries was even now demanding
two
planets of the Emperor. But there was nothing for it but to sit and endure and wait for it to be over one way or another.

"The nobility has survived association with worse," Nestor countered, and I found myself grinning into the darkness at the expression that Heinrich's face now surely wore. Like most political refugees who change sides in the middle of a long-term and violent clash of cultures, he was a bit on the uber-patriotic side. Nestor, however, was notoriously liberal.

"We'll worry about all that later," I replied to defuse what might yet degenerate into nasty name-calling or worse in such tight quarters. Because the hold was almost certainly bugged, I couldn't even hint that I had no intention of carrying through on my word. "For now... Heinrich, I'm sorry. But we don't have a lot of bargaining power."

"True enough," he admitted, his voice a dark rumble. "But I still—"

Just then the hatch popped open, and my heart almost stopped when the muzzle of an Imperial blaster rifle came poking in. But it was just Jeffries again; he'd merely exchanged his hand weapon for something more potent. "They're gone," he explained. "Ate it up hook, line and sinker! Come on out!"

We did as ordered, too stiff and sore from the crowding to consider any course of action other than stretching and massaging the cramps out of our extremities. I'd been told that seven Rabbits and one human was the capacity of the hold, and that was precisely the correct figure. There hadn't been a cubic centimeter to spare. "We need to work out some sort of understanding," the lieutenant continued as we worked the kinks out. "I can keep you all under lock and key, but it'd be terribly inconvenient for me even more than you. And the truth is, while I can run this ship alone we'll make better time with a copilot and relief man." He looked Heinrich over. "I know the snotty can con a ship. How about you?"

"I can," he answered simply, speaking as few words as possible to a man he clearly despised.

Jeffries nodded back, ignoring the insulting tone. Or perhaps it simply didn't matter to him. "I offer you parole, then. All of you, in exchange for helping to work the ship." He waved his blaster at my fellow Rabbits. "I even have work for your kind to do. Of the sort you're accustomed to, I mean. Deck-scrubbing and the like." Then he turned back to me. "We must trust each other in order to succeed, David. At least to some degree. So I'm reaching out first. This is the only sensible way to do things."

Slowly, I nodded. He was entirely correct, at least about the mutual trust part. It was going to be a long trip home; far better it be made on peaceful terms than at something just under active war. "I'll serve under your orders, within reason. You have my word, sir."

"And mine," Heinrich agreed. Then the Rabbits joined in as well, and Jeffries lowered the blaster-rifle.

"Excellent," he declared. "Then I won't be needing this anymore." He locked the weapon in a heavy steel locker and pocketed the key, then to show his trust quite deliberately turned his back on us. "Up ship is in seven minutes, people. Come on up to the bridge and I'll show you the controls."

Jeffries was nothing if not a good pilot, I soon learned. He clearly knew his ship down to the last rivet, in much the same way as old Josiah had known
Richard
. Such familiarity came only with long association and many, many flights together; clearly he'd been aboard for quite some time.

"What's her name?" I asked Jeffries as he upped-ship from the mushy third-rate hardpoint just as easily as he shaved his own face. By then I was sitting strapped in at the co-pilot's station, even though there was practically nothing for me to do.

"What's whose name, snotty?" the lieutenant demanded, half-immersed in his controls.

"The ship's name," I explained. "The one we're in right now. All I ever heard her referred to by on the ground was her current registration number—88-483."

"Ah," Jeffries replied. We were just exiting the upper atmosphere, and recalibrating the Field for hard vacuum occupied his full attention for a moment. Normally that was a co-pilot's job in a rig like this one, doubly so given my personal qualification as a fully-rated engineer. But I chose to credit the snub to force of habit rather than malicious intent, just this once at least. "Well, that's her name then."

I blinked. "You mean you've never even named your own ship?"

"Whyever would I?" he replied, shaking his head. "Names are all a bunch of tommyrot nonsense." Then he scowled and flipped a switch on his console. "Wilkes control, this is 483. I'm requesting direct clearance to Point Three, skipping a hold in parking orbit. Check your records— my cargo is priority red, and I was inspected on the ground."

There was a long pause. "You're cleared as requested, 483," the Imperial controller eventually replied. "Safe voyages and long Jumps!"

Jeffries didn't bother to reply to the standard traffic controller's farewell; instead he snapped the switch and stared down at his controls for a moment. "People are fools," he explained as he worked out a rough course—refinements would come later. "They waste their lives on trivia."

"Right," I agreed, looking out the starboard porthole—ships as small as 88-483 had actual windows instead of viewscreens, though of course other views could be called up on the computers as needed. "Complete and total trivia."
Like friends and duty and obligations to one's fellows and maybe even love
, I didn't add aloud. Then, as our ship's engines spooled up to their truly impressive full-power rating and started us on the long journey home, I took a moment to feel a bit sorry for the lieutenant.

How would it feel, I wondered, to live one's entire life without a heart?

49

Jeffries's plan for getting us back home was solid, if unimaginative. The smuggling trade was only practical because space was so large, communications were so slow, and there were far more Jump points than could ever be monitored. His flight plan with the Imperials called for him to begin his journey by taking Point Three towards Imperious. So, that much of our trip was pretty much locked in—every Imperial vessel in the system knew we were expected to take that routing, and if we deviated from it they'd immediately grow suspicious. However, beyond Point Three it was unlikely that anyone either knew or cared that our flight plan called for us to take Point One from there. We'd do it anyway, however, on the off-chance someone might be paying unusually close attention—it was wartime, and Wilkes Prime was after all currently a major Fleet base. But there were
seven
such Jumps to be made before we arrived at Imperious, and given how fast our ship was there was no way that anyone two or three hops away would have any idea what our authorized course was supposed to be, nor was it likely that anyone present would particularly care. That was when, with no one looking over our shoulder, we'd sort of ease our way out of the main shipping lanes, ignoring and if necessary outrunning anyone who took too much of an interest in our personal business. Before we knew it we'd be back in Royal space with a holdful of stolen Imperial engine parts to sweeten the deal.

We fell into the obvious shipboard routine quite easily, all things considering. Jeffries, Heinrich and I divided the day up into three watches so that someone was manning the bridge at all times but none of us were being worked to death. It appeared on the surface that Jeffries trusted us entirely, though I wouldn't have been surprised to learn that he had remote readouts in his cabin. A Field was an inherently unstable entity and no computer program ever written could fine-tune one as well as a living, thinking brain; of all the many mysteries of Field science, this was perhaps the greatest. Therefore we made better time with three pilots than one, and our already swift vessel effectively became faster still.

I worked the afternoon watch, taking over from Jeffries at eight bells. Nestor was just arriving with a cup of tea on the second day out when I noticed something unusual on the main plot. "Well," I observed to my aide as we sat and sipped our hot drinks together—Nestor had recently begun drinking coffee, an unusual trait in a Rabbit. Then I tapped the computer screen with my forefinger. "A destroyer's coming through, hell for leather."

Nestor nodded and leaned forward, watching as a vessel labeled as V-237 came tearing into local space at Point Three as if her tail were on fire. Almost instantly she began transmitting in code, which of course we couldn't translate. All we could tell was that the message was very long.

"We're headed that way ourselves, aren't we?" Nestor asked.

I nodded and frowned. While there were never anything like enough resources to cover more than a few key locations, it was common practice for fleets and fleet bases to keep a destroyer or lesser ship standing by on the far side of local Points, ready to Jump back and relay news at a moment's notice.

"Wonder what she's saying?" Nestor asked, echoing my own thoughts.

"There's no way to know," I replied. "It could be anything from the Emperor announcing a new holiday to an attack warning."

"True," Nestor agreed.

Still, just to amuse the two of us I pulled up the local Jump chart so we could look the situation over. The nexus at Point Three was a very tight one, so much so that only a few hours separated the most widely-spaced Points. If one wanted to surprise an enemy as thoroughly as possible, such a Point was exactly the right sort to attack through. It gave the other side the minimum possible amount of warning. "Hrmm," I said to myself. Then I took another sip of tea.

"It
could
be the Fleet," Nestor pointed out. "Couldn't it?"

"It could," I agreed. "Or it could also be that the Emperor suffered a hangnail and he wants to reassure all his subjects everywhere that the corrective surgery was a success." I sighed. "We can't be sure of anything. And even if we were…" I frowned to myself. "I don't see where we're in much of a position to do much with the information anyway. We're an Imperial cargo vessel, you see. And unlike
Richard
, we really
are
a cargo vessel. Unarmed for real."

Nestor nodded, his face grim. "Yes, sir."

I shifted in the pilot's seat, which was suddenly extra-uncomfortable. Being designed for a human, it was never really what might be called pleasant for a Rabbit to sit in. But now… There was nothing in the rule book that said an on-duty watch-officer in a merchantman couldn't pace the bridge. So I did so, even though my walking-space was only three steps wide. "Hrmmm…." If the destroyer
was
warning of the presence of the Royal Fleet, how and when would I know for sure? And, what should I do about it?"

Then, startling me silly, the communications center came to life. "483, this is Wilkes traffic central. Are you reading me?"

I practically leapt back to the console, then remembering Josiah's studied incompetence when imitating a merchie I let the controller ask four more times before replying. "483," I typed into the keyboard. "What gives? I was taking a nap."

"You've been diverted," the slightly-annoyed controller replied verbally. "Alter course for Point Four immediately. That's an order, Captain."

"But…" I typed. "That's another four weeks to Imperious! With a red-rated cargo!"

"Just be glad you weren't further along," he answered. "Then it'd take you even longer. Alter course immediately, Captain. Control out."

"Out," I typed back. Then I looked at Nestor, and he looked at me. It was obvious now that there was something large and Royal coming our way. Under the circumstances, a force any smaller than the main line of battle didn't make any sense. So they'd listened to me and adopted my plan after all!