My Life: An Ex-Quarterback's Adventures in the Galactic Empire (40 page)

“Strike Force Command? A female?”

“Yes,” Jaenna said. She brought the tip of the blaster up in front of his open faceplate. “Is there a problem with that?”

“Ah, no.” He paused to choose his words. “I apologize if I gave any offense. None was intended. You will grant me, however, that to find a female commanding a strike force is highly unusual. Even more unusual than for a freebooter to fight with the Fleet.”

“True.” He was correct there. Jaenna lowered her blaster and the tension eased. “You never know, though,” I said. “New emperor, new rules.”

I
suppose it was a victory. We did, after all, drive off a superior force, destroying or crippling more than half of the attackers, nine ships in all. The moonbase, still in Fleet hands, remained operational. Those are the usual elements of a victory. The price, however, had been painfully high. From the Fleet squadron, only half of the ships survived. It was worse with the Lusserani. Only one of the five ships that had started the battle was still operational. And what of the four freebooters I had led into the battle?

Tomao, who had survived so many space battles in the past, did not survive this one. Our search found no trace of the Avenging Sword, not even a clue to how its crew died. Skulls, too, was completely gone. The Cursed Wonder we found. Demril, however, was no longer “the lucky.” What was left of his ship was drifting toward Gadjeen when we overtook it. It had been shredded by beams and shot, one side blackened and partially blown away by a missile that must have detonated just outside the hull. Five of his crew were still alive in the wreckage, but Ramorir could do little more than shrug when we brought them on board.

Ginyera’s ship we picked up in orbit around Lussern. We learned that he had attacked two Tomarillio ships that had just finished off a Lusserani ship that had been trying to interdict them from bombarding the planet. He had blasted both of them but his ship, even though it had survived the engagement, was no longer spaceworthy. The engines were rubble and a lucky shot had smashed the bridge. The survivors of his crew, though, were in good spirits. They were proud of the account they had given of themselves. We signed most of them on, which replenished our own losses.

Ginyera himself was another matter. He had barely survived his triumph. The strike on the bridge had destroyed both his legs and opened his lower abdomen, spilling out his guts. Only luck, if you could call it that, had blown him through the entrance to the bridge before the pressure doors sealed, preventing the vacuum from finishing him. Not long after we brought him in, Ramorir came to tell me that it was hopeless. There were facilities in the Inner Empire that could have repaired even that damage, essentially by growing new parts from cell samples of his organs, but Ginyera could not live long enough in a ship’s medical unit to reach them. Even if that were possible, it was unlikely that they would treat a freebooter. There would be no such help on Lussern; the Carrillacki had seen to that.

Ramorir and I went together to give Ginyera the bad news. He was awake, alert and comfortable thanks to the synthetic endorphin Ramorir had dosed him with. Our supply of that was also limited, and greatly in demand. Ramorir said his piece. When he was finished speaking, Ginyera looked at him, then nodded, without saying a word. Quickly, Ramorir drew his blaster and shot him in the head. The move caught me totally by surprise and it was as much fatigue as control that kept me from jumping backward. I was glad, at least, that I had not yielded to curiosity before and asked Ramorir why the Medical Officer was walking around with a sidearm after the battle was over.

The toll in space, of course, was only a fraction of what had happened on the planet. Seen from Gadjeen, without magnification, it was hard to tell that anything had transpired. The face of Lussern looked the same as any other Srihani world. In close orbit around Lussern, however, a bad case of nuclear acne was obvious. Craters and slag marked most of the major cities. One area at the juncture of two rivers caught my eye. There must have been something important there once, because there now was only a cluster of overlapping craters surrounded by charred ground.

I had the opportunity for an even closer look three days after the battle, when Jaenna and I settled to a soft landing on Lussern at the request of the acting Imperial Governor, who was also the acting Squadron Commander. His primary job, which he held in addition to those, was captain of the Tireless, one of the surviving Imperial warships. He was the senior of the remaining Imperial captains and also the senior surviving Imperial official in the system.

The command post from which Lussern was being run was located in a physical education facility in a town of twenty thousand on the coast of Medmar, the larger of Lussern’s continents. A small spaceport, sited near the town and still operational, accounted for the location. Equally important, the town had also survived the battle unscathed.

Ringing both the spaceport and the town were miles of hastily constructed shelters. These housed the survivors from a major metropolitan region to the north of the town, a cluster of cities that had been turned into radioactive rubble by Carrillacki missiles. With only one viable evacuation route, the populace, what was left of it, streamed south toward the town. They were still pouring in when we arrived.

Tents on Lussern look much the same as tents anywhere, and a tent city was what we saw when we arrived. Its inhabitants were mostly sick with blast burns and radiation, and a daylong cold rain didn’t help matters. Imperial technology had medicines to treat the burns and the radiation, but there were neither enough physicians to treat the mass of people nor enough medicine to treat them with. The Srihani of Lussern, citizens of a ten-thousand-year-old galactic empire, sickened and died in the mud just like the citizens of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

The rain had stopped by the time we landed, and I was glad of that. I was skittish enough about the fallout that had to be in Lussern’s air without feeling it wash down on me. The fact that Franny’s pharmacopeia would treat me for any significant exposure I might get didn’t help. It was near sundown when we stepped out of the landing boat, and the spectacular reds and purples as the sun sank to the horizon only emphasized the amount of dust in the atmosphere.

We were met on the field by a young Srihani in Fleet gray and black. He introduced himself as Saavan a Grenshir. “I have an aircar to transport you to headquarters,” he said. “Ground transportation, I’m afraid, is a bit problematic.”

No kidding. The short hop, at low altitude, showed the extent, if not the intensity, of the suffering in the tent city. Saavan landed the aircar on a wide road in front of a school that was now their temporary headquarters. A guard from the front door took us to the second floor where he showed us to what must have been the headmaster’s office. The desk was now occupied by a captain of the Fleet.

He wore the usual gray tunic, embellished only by his emblem of rank over the left breast. The dark-skinned, almost black, face above the collar was haggard. Despite that, he snapped to his feet when we entered the room.

“Greetings,” he said. “I am Captain Donnar a Mynashair of the Tireless and, by fate, commander of the Fleet squadron at Lussern and governor of the system.”

“Our greetings to you, Captain,” I responded, “I’m Captain Danny a Troy of the Francis Drake. This is my Strike Force Commander, Jaenna a Tyaromon.”

“Ah yes.” He sighed and sat down. “The notorious Danny a Troy. Your reputation precedes you. Please sit. I’m surprised to find myself greeting you with anything less than a missile salvo.”

“Our feeling precisely,” I countered.

Donnar grunted. “Well, new emperor, new rules.” He leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head. “Captain, Strike Force Commander, the Emperor and the Fleet owe you a large debt for your actions here. Let me assure you that the Fleet, at least, tries to pay its debts.” The way he said the last sentence made both of us stiffen in our seats. “Don’t be concerned,” he said when he saw the reaction. “There is no one to here who might disagree.”

Either that, or Donnar was too tired to care.

“Take this, Captain Danny a Troy, and tell me what you think.”

He tossed me a small gray box that looked like a jewelry box and opened like one, too. Inside lay a short ribbon of black-and-red braid with fasteners at each end to hold it below the collar of a tunic.

“It is the Fleet Command ribbon,” Donnar said before I could ask. “The empire gives no medals to officers of the Fleet—we leave that to the kvenningari. We give only this ribbon, and only to those who have demonstrated their ability to command a Fleet squadron in battle. Be aware of the duty that goes with wearing it. A Fleet officer is expected to go armed except where custom dictates otherwise, but when you wear the Fleet Command ribbon you must always be armed, even at the court.”

“I am honored,” was all that I could say.

“I should hope so,” Donnar said. “There are very few in the empire today who can wear that ribbon. Certainly, no freebooter ever has. But, I fear Fate has decreed there will be more.” Donnar came to his feet, leaning over the desk with his weight on his fists. “New emperor, new rules. But this time, they are an emperor’s rules. The Game of Empire is over. We will fight.” Sad eyes looked across the desk. “That brings me to an offer—no, a request—that I have for you on behalf of the Fleet.”

He paused, then continued.

“Let me tell you about the magnitude of the problem we have here. This planet is a mess, Captain. Our estimates are between 500 and 600 million dead now, and with the devastation on the other continent the real numbers could be twice as high. I would guess there are as many as two billion homeless. Probably a third of those are going to die. Distribution networks for everything are smashed, communications nonexistent. It was planned this way, you know. No fleet would go into a space battle with the kind of munitions load the Carrillacki carried. The leadership here during the battle was fantastic; they stuck to their posts and did what had to be done, which is why there is anything left at all. But the result is that they are all dead, from the Imperial administration to the defense command to the planetary authorities.

“The Fleet can repair the defenses. That’s the easy part. We can also patch together a command and control system for the civilian population. Not easy, and very imperfect with our limited resources, but we can do it. But, we can’t sit here and run it! The emperor sent Anson here with four ships to reinforce the base; yes, we suspected the attack was coming. But, this is the start, not the end of the fighting, and the emperor will need those ships back and I have only two left. I can’t afford to tie up units as local police and governors, but this planet will be in no condition to take care of itself even after we make repairs and the base is too important to abandon.”

“That sounds like an accurate summation,” I told him. In truth, it made me queasy. Intellectually, a billion people is too abstract to grasp, but the scene outside the town brought it into focus. “What does this have to do with us?”

“I’m asking you to take over this planet when we leave and hold it for the empire,” Donnar said with a perfectly straight face.

I was stunned. Even that word does not do justice to the feeling. “You would turn over a whole system, plus a major base, to a freebooter?”

“Yes, why not? You fought for the empire when there was no reason why you should, so I think you’ll do it again. With your ship, and the other freebooter vessel which we can salvage for you, plus the defenses we will leave, the system should hold. I doubt there’ll be another action on the scale of the one we just fought. Not out here, anyway. I think it’s an even deal. You’re going to have massive problems here for a few years, even if there is no more fighting, but for all the damage, this world has a lot of accessible resources and surviving industrial sites. Do it right and you could grow old in comfort. Even if the rest of the empire drowns in its own blood.”

When it came to making a sales pitch, Donnar was pretty good. I would have bought a used car from him without hesitation. A used planet, however, was a different matter. Rebuilding Lussern was going to take years of painful decisions, even if the system never had to be defended. In fact, fighting would be easier. On the other hand, life as a freebooter held no guarantees, especially if the Fleet and the kvenningari were going to settle their thousand-year-old grudges. The crew would buy having a planetary base, most of them. I couldn’t make my own decision though, until I saw in that problem the solution to another problem.