My Life: An Ex-Quarterback's Adventures in the Galactic Empire (18 page)

The city, when we reached it, was a massive disappointment to me. I was expecting towers and spires, iridescent in the sun, with aerial ramps between them. What I saw was brick. Brick! For that, I could have gone to the Bronx. In fact, although the brick had a purple tint, many of the low structures had a tired, ill-kept appearance that would have suited the Bronx. A few vehicles like the one we were in plied the streets and there was a smattering of citizens wearing tunics that reminded me of dashikis, but it was pretty quiet for an urban center. The impression was building that all was not well on Thjonarodni.

The guild hall was a block square, a two-story structure of the purplish brick. The first floor was almost entirely open space, a cavernous exhibition area. I would have loved to know how they supported the floor above it. The driver conducted us to one of many M-shaped tables along the periphery—the same table, I noticed, as the one Gerangi had had back in South Dakota.

“The authorities have announced that you are here and willing to sign on crew,” he said. “You should keep your position open continuously until you are ready to leave. You can purchase food at the shop across the street to your right and sleeping quarters are on the floor above. I would suggest that if you do need to go out, you do so in pairs and go armed. It’s not too bad during daylight, but after dark is another matter. You can stay as long as you like. There will be no pressure to leave.”

The last, I thought, was said with a touch of sarcasm. Ours was the only occupied position in that whole huge place. The Srihani who had driven us there turned to go and would have left, had I not grabbed his arm.

“Wait just a moment,” I said. “We were told that we would be able to recruit in one of your major cities. This looks more like a relic from some civilization without airplanes, not a city of an interstellar empire.”

I wasn’t certain of what sort of reply to expect, but I didn’t expect him to laugh in my face. Which is what he did.

“You want to go to an Imperial city?” he asked me. “I can take you. There’s one just west of the spaceport. But nobody goes there except for a few outlaws, and nobody has for a couple of hundred years. Between wear and tear over time and no way to make repairs, plus damage from the occasional freebooter, it’s impossible to keep a city like that functioning. This is modern Thjonarodni.” He stamped his foot on the floor and the sound echoed hollowly around the room. “That’s the relic.” He pointed in the direction of the old Imperial city.

He caught himself, as though embarrassed at the heat he had put into his words. Likely, the proper, the truly Imperial thing for him to have done would have been to pretend that the brick city was just as good, if not better, and not to admit the truth, even to himself. When nothing else was said, he left. I stared at his departing figure, struggling with my disbelief. I might have stood there a long time, had not Ruoni interrupted my thoughts.

“Believe him, Danny. What he says is almost certainly true. This planet lacks the resources to maintain itself on its own and it doesn’t generate enough trade to maintain itself the way Tetragrammaton does. So it deteriorates slowly. There must have been some trade of value, or Carrillacki would not have bothered with it, but now Carrillacki will control that trade and whatever profit flows from it. That is, they will until Thjonarodni deteriorates to the point at which there is no profit. Then they will cut it adrift. It’s not an unusual scenario in the Outer Empire.”

“And the empire permits this?” I asked, knowing inside what the answer had to be. “It just lets worlds fall to pieces?”

Ruoni gave me the shrug I had come to associate with any discussion of why things happened the way they did in the empire. “The empire cannot be intervening in what happens between kvenningari, or internally on individual planets. If it tried, we would have civil war.”

“So, instead, you have civil chaos,” I snorted. Ruoni only shrugged again.

Stuoronin ignored the whole exchange and took a seat at one end of the forward legs. Since there was little point in continuing to discuss the decline of Thjonarodni, we followed suit. Ruoni stationed himself at the end of the other leg, while I sat at the dimple in the middle. Angel lounged against the wall behind us. Judging from the other tables, and remembering Gerangi’s identical one, I figured that this was the standard format for an Imperial job interview. At the time, it seemed like a large assumption that anyone in the half-empty husk of a city would show up.

They did, though. It took a while, but they began to arrive in ones and twos, then in groups. The initial trickle turned into a flood that formed a ranked crowd in front of our table. It was an eloquent statement about life on Thjonarodni, that one little freebooter drew such a crowd. Some of them were from the decommissioned Thjonarodni ships, still wearing the insignia of their defunct kvenningar. Some were drifters who had landed at Thjonarodni by some means or other, and were now looking for a way off. Others were Thjonarodni civilians, mostly youths from the city or the surrounding farms, eager to leave a world that had no future. The farm boys surprised me. They were, almost all of them, illiterate, unable to handle even computerized equipment unless it was equipped with voice recognition and response. Apparently, agriculture was an industry that could be easily de-automated, saving the authorities from expending credits on it and absorbing some of the otherwise useless part of the population. Of course, the youths most likely to be able to find off-world jobs were the best and brightest of the lot, precisely the ones that worlds like Thjonarodni needed to retain. Meanwhile, the city streets were unsafe and illiterate peasants with dung on their boots herded flocks within sight of a starship port.

There were relatively few Srihani from Thjonarodni ships, but many drifters and civilians. It was clear that the cream was already gone. What was left was the dregs. But I couldn’t complain too much. This was, after all, an expansion draft.

The process was simple. The applicant moved up to either Ruoni or Stuoronin. They would question him about what he could do and what his past performance had been. If they liked what they heard, they sent him to me. Otherwise, the applicant was dismissed. Since we needed almost an entire crew, we couldn’t afford to be too choosy. Still, I noticed a difference between Ruoni’s choices and the ones Stuoronin sent through. Ruoni was more inclined to send the journeymen away and take the local civilians, some barely literate if he liked them otherwise, while Stuoronin was the opposite. In theory, the final say about signing someone was mine. In practice, however, I had no basis for making an independent assessment. Consequently, I took whoever Ruoni and Stuoronin sent, registered their palms and retinas, and sent them to stand with Angel.

It was nearing sundown when the Srihani stopped coming. By then, we had three rows of them lined up against the wall. They would pass for a full crew in numbers, if not in skills. The chances, however, of finding more skilled Srihani by waiting another day were almost nil, so we decided to leave with the ones we had. That was easier said than done. Even if we had been able to find enough vehicles to transport all of them to the spaceport at once, the landing boat could lift only a fraction of them at a time. Of necessity, we had to go up in shifts. Four of the Srihani we had signed claimed to be able to pilot the boat, so Stuoronin would not have to fly it each time. Ruoni and I went up with the first boat, while Stuoronin and Angel stayed on the surface until the last boat loaded.

It was amazing, the change that adding a crew made in the old Flower. Where the corridors had been so deserted as to be spooky, they were now filled with Srihani trying to sort themselves out. Our skeleton crew was too small to quickly assume direction of the newcomers, and too many of the latter had no spacefaring experience at all. It took two days just to assign everyone space and put them into it. The problem was exacerbated by the change the Flower was making from merchanter to freebooter. We had signed on crew to constitute a strike force, but the layout of the merchanter wasn’t fitted to accommodate them all. We had to convert some of the cargo space to bunkrooms. It wasn’t satisfactory, and complaints were loud.

Once we had the ship organized, I called a meeting of my officers. The Flower still needed repairs as soon as possible and, if she were to take up a career as a freebooter, she needed more weaponry. Paying for that was going to be a problem. It was the old catch-22. We couldn’t fight without repairs, but the only way to get the money for the repairs was to fight.

The Conference Room was crowded. With the exception of a minimal watch, all of the officers from each of the ship’s departments were there. The only familiar faces were the officers who’d come out with us from Tetragrammaton. Of the new hires from Thjonarodni, most were subordinate to the original crew members, but not all. Andrave, for example, had kept Communications, but ceded Damage Control to Kryan a Damour, who had worked in that section for a freebooter before being wounded in action and left on Thjonarodni. Stuoronin, likewise, had kept Helm but not Navigation.

Another newcomer who headed a department was Vymander a Hausen, our strike force commander. Stuoronin had interviewed him and reported that he had fought for three small kvenningari prior to coming to Thjonarodni in search of a command, only to find Carrillacki in the process of taking over. He was a tall, slim Srihani whose charcoal skin clashed with pale-blue eyes and blond hair. He had come up with Stuoronin on the last ferry run. Since then, he had spent most of his time trying to organize and settle his force. He had acted decisively, though, and apparently had the Strike Force in order. Completing the roster in the room were Angel and four other guards pulled from the Strike Force.

I’m not good at speeches, after dinner or otherwise. Anyway, I didn’t know the protocol for welcoming a new pirate crew. I went straight to business.

“This conference is to discuss our options for obtaining the equipment we need, and I’m open to any information any of you have that will help us to do it.”

Vymander stood up.

“Captain. I believe I have the information you want. Before I reached Thjonarodni, I stopped at a station where I met a Srihani who’d come in on a merchanter so wrecked that it blew as it headed insystem. He had escaped in a lifeboat with two others, but they had died of their injuries shortly after docking. I tell you this so that you will know the information isn’t widely known. Previously, their ship had been hit by a freebooter, but they had managed to fight off the attackers and fled through the only wormhole they could transit. They wound up at Gar, a useless world, almost never visited anymore. Srihani live there, but they have no ships and no station although there is an old spaceport. They thought, I believe, that they could use the old port at Gar and their cargo—which was spare parts and tools for a spaceport—to fix their ship. They failed. The port had never been a major depot and what equipment was there broke down years ago. None of the locals had any idea of how to fix the equipment at the port and they weren’t very friendly either. In the end, they decided to try to make it to a base with their ship as it was, having stored the cargo at the port to reduce their mass. They failed in that, too. Since my informant was killed in a fight a few days later, and the locals on Gar have no use for the cargo, I’m sure it is still there.”

I had a feeling that I knew how the informant had come to die in a fight, but pushed it aside. Everyone else at that table had probably drawn the same conclusion. If anything, Vymander’s stock was rising.

“Vymander,” I asked, “do you think we can barter for the cargo?”

He looked unhappy. “They would probably take energy weapons,” he said, “but from what I have seen, we have barely enough for our own forces. I would say, no.”

“Then,” I asked, “are you recommending that we attack Gar and just take the cargo?”

“Yes, Captain. They have no defense worth mentioning against an orbiting ship. There are defenses at the port, but those are designed to defend against attacks by locals. Even with our limited capabilities, we should be able to win. There is also the added benefit of putting the new Strike Force under real fire in a battle we can’t lose.”

The way Vymander outlined his plan it sounded great. Of course, I had always enjoyed plays on a whiteboard showing the ballcarrier going all the way to the end zone, but I was realistic enough to know that it rarely happened the way it was diagrammed. I asked for other ideas. There were none. I decided Vymander’s plan was good enough to try. Perhaps Stuoronin had found us a gem.

“Ivengar, can
this
ship make a transit to Gar and then another to a world with a facility that can make the repairs?” I asked.

Ivengar had a terminal in front of him and I could see him working at the necessary computations before he said anything. When he was done, he said, “I won’t guarantee that she won’t blow, nor die in the black, but if you are willing to accept a small risk, I think it can be done.”

By now I knew Ivengar well enough to realize that the risk had to be more than “small” or he wouldn’t have mentioned it. Still, there was a stockpile of spare parts on Gar, virtually ours for the taking. There wasn’t much choice.

“Unless there are additional problems or suggestions, I’m going to accept Vymander’s recommendation.” I looked around the room. Nobody moved. “Then we are finished.”

“Excuse me, there’s one additional point.” It was Stuoronin, suddenly on his feet. The conversations that had started up stopped once again.

“I’m not arguing with Vymander’s plan,” he said. “It is the best chance we have. But, we need a different captain to carry it out.”

Suddenly, I was looking down the barrel of Stuoronin’s blaster.

“I am sorry, Danny a Troy,” he said, “but this command should not be yours. Not to carry out this plan and not to try a stupid run to the Inner Empire later.”

“I agree,” Vymander joined in. “We will sign on all officers and crew who are willing, so there is no reason for trouble.”