Pledge Allegiance (4 page)

“I guess I should meet Shibari,” I told Vess, trying to hide my reluctance. I turned to Prime and Hart. “You two should head back to your stations and make ready for take-off.”

They left the room, Hart with a hearty “Yes, sir!” and Tegan Prime with a smile and a nod. She may have been half machine but she was damned attractive.

I assumed the
Finch
had the standard computer that was found in most ships, so I lifted my head slightly and said, “Computer, what is the current location of crew member Sumiko Shibari?”

A female voice, that of the computer but sounding totally natural with no artificiality at all, responded. “Crew member Sumiko Shibari is currently in the gymnasium, Captain.”

I looked at Vess. “Should we disturb her if she’s meditating?”

“Of course,” he said. “Sumiko can hardly wait to see you. She’s probably just lost track of the time. Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

Baltimore said, “Morrow and I should prepare for take-off.” She didn’t seem to be directing her comment at anyone in particular. Protocol said she should have asked me, but I didn’t think she could quite bring herself to do that, so she left the words hanging in the air between all of us.

“Yes, you should,” I said. “Dismissed.”

They left the conference room and made for the transporter.

“Well?” Vess asked me expectantly. “What do you think?”

“Of what?”

“The ship. The crew. Everything.”

I didn’t know why he seemed so concerned about my opinion. “It’s fine,” I said.

“Will it do?”

“Do?” I wasn’t following him. The ship seemed perfectly adequate for the mission ahead. I didn’t know how she would behave in flight yet but I had no reason to believe there would be any problems. The crew was obviously competent.

His expression changed from one of boyish enthusiasm to a visage of pain and emotion, as if he had taken off a mask. “Will it be enough to get my daughter back safely?” He leaned against the conference table as if all the strength had drained from his old body.

“Yes,” I said, putting a comforting hand on his shoulder. “I believe it will.” Solomon Vess’s glee regarding the ship, the uniforms, the crew, was obviously an attempt to hide his real emotions. These things were necessary to rescue his daughter but he had no real love for them.

He knew more about trading figures and stocks than he knew about an Avis class fighter ship and a crew of warriors. This was new territory for him and he probably felt like a fish out of water, something he wasn’t used to. He obviously hid his concerns beneath a veneer of excitement.

He wasn’t blindly optimistic after all. He was worried.

“We’re going to do our best to get Georgia back safe and well,” I told him. “You’ve assembled a good crew here and the ship will do her job without any fuss as far as I can see.”

“All right,” he said, nodding. “I just want everything to be perfect. There mustn’t be any mistakes made. I thought I’d lost Georgia once. Now that I have a chance to rescue her, I can’t lose her again.”

“Everything is as perfect as it can be,” I assured him. “And I want to thank you for giving me this chance. After what happened on the
Oregon
, I exiled myself to Iton-3 and my life became a mess. That was probably by my own design, whether consciously or subconsciously. After all, if I had caused the deaths of all those people, then my own life deserved to be a pile of crap, right? I’m not so sure I would have gotten out of that hole if you hadn’t come along with this mission. So, thank you.”

“Don’t mention it,” he said. “I told you, Georgia spoke highly of you. I knew what became of you after the
Oregon
went down. I think there’s a kind of poetic justice in the fact that you will lead the mission to save my daughter. What other captain would be as motivated to save the survivors of the
Oregon
as the man who feels responsible for them being stranded in the first place?”

“True,” I said. “I do feel a great responsibility toward them.”

“I know you do.” He straightened himself and seemed to brighten. “Now, let’s go and meet Sumiko Shibari. Have you ever met an onna-bugeisha before?”

I shook my head.

He grinned, his eyes twinkling again. “Well, you may be in for a surprise.”

T
he ship’s
gymnasium was located near the crew quarters, Vess explained to me as we rode the transporter. As well as weights and workout machines, it was equipped with a pool, sauna, and open area where the crew could practice their hand-to-hand fighting techniques using protective suits. This open area was where we’d find Shibari, apparently.

We entered the gym to the sound of metal clanging on metal and men shouting at each other. A group of soldiers was gathered around a bench where one of their number was lying on his back and pressing a loaded barbell. The bystanders were either shouting encouragement or insults, it was difficult to determine which from the noise they were making.

A couple of other soldiers were running on treadmills in their fatigues. The air had a slightly stale, sweaty smell.

Past the machines and weights, an open square area was marked by light blue padded flooring. Racks of practice weapons stood along one wall. There were fencing swords, energy lances, fighting sticks, and plain old boxing gloves.

Sitting at the far corner of the fighting area, her back to us, was a woman in a blue and white kimono. Her head was bowed, her long black hair reaching down between her shoulders and waist.

I gathered my resolve to meet the person who would probably be the dourest crew member yet and walked across the padded floor toward the woman. Vess hung back, watching with interest.

When I was about six feet behind Shibari, I halted and waited, thinking perhaps she would sense my presence and end her meditation.

She stirred slightly and then her head lifted. She looked over her shoulder at me with two deep brown eyes. When she saw me, her face lit up. “Captain!” Scrambling to her feet, she threw herself at me and drew me into a tight hug.

Surprised, I hugged her back. Her long hair smelled of apple and cinnamon.

She pulled her head back to look at me, an expression of genuine joy on her face. “It’s so good to see you.”

“You too,” I said. And I meant it. Although she and I had never met, I was pleased to see her. Nobody could be more different personality-wise from Morrow and Baltimore than this young woman. She was like a breath of fresh air.

She broke the hug and stepped back. “I’m sorry if I overstepped my bounds. It’s just that I’m so pleased you’re here. Now we can begin our mission under your leadership. Welcome, Captain. I am Sumiko Shibari of the onna-bugeisha and I am at your service.” She bowed slightly. Despite the formality of the words, her face still radiated happiness.

“Thank you,” I said. “I look forward to working with you.”

Vess stepped closer. “Sumiko is an expert in hand-to-hand combat, Captain, as well as a crack shot with the bow. She’ll be a great asset on Savarea.”

“I’m sure she will,” I said. “We’re getting ready for take-off,” I told her. “Do you have a station while the ship is flying?’

She shook her head. “I have no duties to perform while we are traveling. I will meditate and practice my weapon skills.”

“Very well,” I said. “Maybe we can practice together some time. I’m sure I’m a little rusty when it comes to close-quarters combat.”

“Yes,” she said, nodding. “We can fight whenever you wish. It would be an honor.”

“Excellent. I should be getting to the bridge now. It was nice to meet you.”

“And you also.”

Vess was grinning.

“What is it?” I asked him.

“I told you you’d be surprised.”

Shibari looked slightly alarmed. “You are surprised, Captain?”

“Well,” I said, searching my mind for the right words, “I have to admit that I am. When I found out that you were an onna-bugeisha, I expected someone entirely different.”

“Oh?” It was her turn to look surprised. “What did you expect?”

“Someone more…serious. I know part of your philosophy is that life is all an illusion. I expected you to be more solemn.”

She smiled. Unlike Baltimore’s cold smile, Shibari’s was warm and genuine. “Captain, if all life is an illusion, then what is the point of being solemn?”

I nodded. She had a point. “I’ll see you later,” I said. Vess and I left the gym. I looked back at Sumiko Shibari before the door closed behind us. She was moving across the fighting area, jabbing at the air in front of her with a sword, her movement fluid and graceful.

We took the transporter to the bridge where Morrow was seated at the control console. Baltimore stood near the windows, the stars behind her, outlining the curves of her figure.

I took my seat. The chair supported me like a feather on the breeze. Vess took the second seat at the command console.

“We’re going to be taking off soon,” I told him. Didn’t he have a shuttle to catch?

“Yes,” he said, nodding. “I’m looking forward to it.”

I held back the sigh of resignation I felt build up inside me. “Are you…are you coming with us on the mission?”

“Of course I am. We’re going to get my daughter back. I wouldn’t miss that for the world.”

I nodded but felt my heart sink. Vess was likely to be a liability. This mission could be dangerous and I was in no mood to babysit an old man.

I noticed a grin spread across Baltimore’s face. She liked the fact that I was flustered.

“Don’t worry,” Vess said. “I’ll stay on the ship when we get to Savarea. I don’t want to be a burden to you. But I want to see Georgia as soon as I can, and that means coming with you. Did you think I was going to wait on my own ship until you brought her back?”

Actually, that was exactly what I’d thought but I couldn’t argue with him on that point. Solomon Vess was running the show. It was his money that was paying for all of this and it was his daughter who was stranded on Savarea. I couldn’t blame him for wanting to come along. I’d be the same if I had a family member stuck on a planet in alien space.

I pressed the button that patched me into the ship’s intercom. “All hands, we are about to embark on a mission to Savarea to search for survivors from the Imperium Star Ship
Oregon
. I don’t expect this to be a walk in the park. We will be entering Horde space. Hopefully, they won’t pay much attention to a lone Avis class fighter. If we do run into trouble, I have faith that every man and woman on this ship will do their utmost to protect the
Finch
and their fellow crew members on board. Now, let’s get this job done.” I clicked off the intercom.

“Morrow,” I said, “set a course for the first gate.”

“Course locked in, Captain.”

I wondered how much it pained him to address me by my title.

“Full ahead,” I said. “Let’s see what the old girl can do. If she can handle full power for a while, then we’ll jump to FTL.”

“Full ahead, aye, sir.” He pressed the buttons that signaled the engine room we wanted full power. I imagined Tegan Prime down there giving orders to her team.

I felt a slight tremor in the floor beneath my feet as the engines flared to life and then the
Finch
began to move forward through space.

“
E
stimated time
before we reach the first gate, Mr. Morrow?” I asked after we had been traveling for an hour.

He checked his screen. “If we jump to FTL, our ETA is approximately five hours and thirty-four minutes, Captain.”

“Make the jump,” I said. I was beginning to feel nauseous and I wasn’t sure if it was from the space travel or the realization that I was in charge of a ship again.

Morrow nodded. “Initiating FTL drive now.”

A slight tremor shook the ship as the drive engaged, pushing the
Finch
into faster-than-light speed.

I got out of my chair and said, “I’ll be in my quarters.” I left the bridge and walked quickly to the transporter, feeling another wave of nausea come over me. I pressed the button for the crew quarters’ deck and leaned my forehead against the cool metal wall of the transporter, willing myself not to be sick until I was in my quarters.

When the doors opened, I ran to my quarters, punched a string of zeroes into the digital lock and rushed to the bathroom. As soon as I was in there and the overhead lights came on automatically, I leaned over the toilet and puked. When I was done, I rinsed my mouth with cold water from the sink and staggered into the bedroom.

I sat heavily on the bed, looking out at the stars. My head felt as if it had been stuffed with cotton wool. I was disoriented and dizzy.

Everything had happened so fast that I’d barely had time to think. A few hours ago, I’d been sitting in a doorway with all my possessions in a plastic box. Now, I was in space, commanding a crew of expert fighters, pilots, and engineers. I could hardly believe the strange turn of events.

Yet here I was. Back in space.

I couldn’t deny that being in charge of a ship again felt good, despite my only order so far being to take-off and set a course for the nearest gate. And Morrow had already done that task. In truth, once the course was set, the
Finch
would fly herself to her destination without any human intervention at all.

It was only if we flew into trouble that the bridge crew would be needed. If that happened, if we were attacked by pirates for example, the captain’s role became one of tactical decision making. The pilot was needed for evasive maneuvers.

But as long as we avoided trouble, I could rest here and try to come to terms with my new position.

A low beeping sound in the living area caught my attention. I got up and went in there to search for the source. It sounded again, near the door, and I realized that it was a doorbell. I went to the door and pressed the button to open it.

Tegan Prime stood outside. She smiled when she saw me. “Captain, may I come in?”

“Of course,” I said, stepping aside to let her enter. “Is there a problem?””

A worried look flashed across her face but only for a second before it was replaced by a more relaxed expression. “I don’t think so. I…don’t know.”

“Take a seat,” I offered. She sat on the sofa. The worried look reappeared on her face.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I’m sure it’s nothing but I was carrying out a diagnostic on the main engine after we were underway and I discovered some…irregularities.”

I sat in the easy chair and leaned forward to face her. “What kind of irregularities?”

She paused and I guessed she was trying to figure out a way to explain her problem in layman’s terms.

“Because we set off at full power,” she said, “I decided to check on the main engine’s efficiency while it was running. I noticed something strange while I was making a visual scan of the pipes underneath one of the turbines. There’s a device there. It wasn’t there a few days ago when I did the same visual check just after the pipes were installed for the engine upgrade.”

“A device?”

She nodded. “I think it’s a tracking device.”

A tracking device? Who would put a tracking device in the
Finch,
and why? It wasn’t as if we were flying to an unknown destination; we were headed for Savarea. The only reason to put a tracking device on the ship would be to know our exact location in space at all times.

“Have you told anyone else about this?” I asked Tegan.

She shook her head. “No. Not even Vess.”

“And it isn’t something that he had installed for some reason?”

“Definitely not. Vess knows nothing about engines. The entire upgrade was left in my hands. I was in charge of everything. Someone put that device there in the last couple of days and tried to hide it under the turbine.”

“Show me,” I said.

She nodded and we left my room. While Tegan called the transporter, I took a moment to change the passcode on the lock to my quarters. If someone had planted an unknown device in the engine room, that person could still be on board the ship. I wasn’t going to risk leaving my room open to intruders. I chose random digits and memorized them, repeating them over and over in my head until I was sure I would remember them.

When I joined Tegan at the transporter, the door was already open and waiting. We stepped in and it took us to Engineering.

“How many people are on your crew?” I asked her while we waited for the transporter to descend to the correct level.

“Three.”

“And none of them could have put the device on the engine?”

She shrugged. “If you mean did they have an opportunity to place it there, then yes, of course they did. But I’ve worked with all three of them for years. I trust them. They wouldn’t do anything like this without telling me.”

The transporter door opened and we walked out onto a suspended steel walkway that ran across a large room. Below, the engine pulsed with a deep hum. Its turbine gave off a ghostly blue glow that lit the entire room.

“Down here,” Tegan said, descending a set of metal steps toward the monstrous piece of machinery. I followed her down to a floor that was a metal grille. Half of the engine was below us in the blue-tainted shadows.

Tegan opened a hatch in the floor and dropped down onto a ladder. As she began to climb down, I felt dizzy watching her. I wasn’t afraid of heights but my nausea from earlier was coming back to haunt me and staring down at the ladder that descended into the humming darkness made my stomach lurch.

I gritted my teeth and lowered myself through the hatch. When my boots contacted the first metal rung, I stepped down gingerly until I was below the grille floor and climbing down into darkness.

The low thrum of the engine seemed to resonate through my entire body, making my stomach and limbs feel heavy. I wondered if it affected the machinery that made up the left half of Tegan’s body. I wasn’t going to ask her. If she wanted to talk about her mechanical modifications, that was up to her but until then, I wasn’t going to force her into a conversation she might be uncomfortable with.

I finally reached the steel floor at the bottom of the ladder and stepped onto it, grateful that I hadn’t puked on the way down.

Tegan took a flashlight from her belt and turned it on, playing the beam across the curved underside of the engine. She crouched down and shone the light between an array of steel pipes that snaked under the turbine.

I got down on my hands and knees and peered at the place where the light hit steel. I didn’t know anything about engineering beyond the basics I’d been taught at the academy, but I knew that the device I was looking at now did not belong on the
Finch
’s engine.

It was shaped like a dome, maybe a foot in diameter and half that in height, and made of dark gray metal. A tiny red light was illuminated on the metallic surface, probably to show that the device was functioning.

One thing was certain: it didn’t look like a bomb or the detonator for a bomb. There were no wires running from the dome to any explosive material. The device was self-contained and sitting among the pipes, perhaps attached by magnets on its base.

At first I told myself that I was paranoid if I thought someone was trying to blow up the
Finch
, but then I reminded myself that somebody had put this device here in secret. It had some purpose. If it wasn’t here to blow us up, it was here to track us through space. But why? It made no sense.

“It looks like a tracking device,” I said to Tegan, “but not like any tracking device I’ve seen before.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it either,” she said. “So what do we do? Who put it there? Why are they tracking our ship?”

I got to my feet. “If the device was placed there recently, do you think the person who put it there is still on board?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible. But a lot of technicians, engineers and mechanics have been on the ship lately. Even after the engines were upgraded and I performed my last diagnostic check, the onboard weapons systems were still being worked on, as were the crew quarters and the bridge. The
Finch
has had a total refit and that takes a lot of work. There must have been hundreds of people on board.”

I pointed to the shadows beneath the turbine. “But only one of them planted this device.”

She nodded, her long red hair tumbling over her face. She brushed it away and said, “Should we disarm it?”

I thought about that for a moment. If we disarmed the device, we might not be trackable anymore but we would tip off whoever had put this here that we’d found it. Even if we took this device out of action, there could be others hidden elsewhere on the ship.

“We should leave it for now,” I said. “There could be others, so disarming this one won’t achieve anything.”

Tegan looked around us at the massive engine with its pipes and cables, and the dark corners of the huge room. There must be a thousand places to hide tracking devices down here. “So what do we do, Captain?”

“What do you know about the people on board the
Finch
?” I asked her. “Who do you trust?”

“My crew,” she said. “I trust them totally.”

“Anyone else?”

Her green eyes gazed into the darkness as she thought about that. Finally, she shook her head. “I don’t know anyone else on board the ship.” Then she added, “I trust you.”

She didn’t need to add that last part; after all, she had shown the device to me and she wouldn’t have done that if she thought I was involved in planting it there somehow. But I liked that she had told me plainly about her trust in me.

“Don’t tell anyone else about this,” I said. “Not even your crew.” I needed time to think about the implications of the tracker’s presence on the
Finch
. I didn’t need anyone to start panicking. I was sure I could trust Tegan to remain calm; she seemed level-headed enough.

“What about you?” she asked. “Are you going to tell anyone? Are you going to tell Vess?”

“Not right now, no.”

“But he owns the ship.”

“And I’m the ship’s captain. If I tell Vess about this, he might tell others. He might unknowingly tell the person who planted the device. Then they’d know we were on to them.”

“But we’re not on to them,” she said. “We don’t know anything about who they are or why they put this here. We don’t even know if they’re still on the
Finch
. They could be long gone by now.”

“I realize that but until we know for sure, we need to keep this to ourselves. At least for now, okay?”

She nodded but looked uncertain.

“You said you trusted me,” I said.

“I do.”

“So trust me to handle this.”

She nodded again, this time looking more confident. “I will, Captain.”

“I’m going back to my quarters,” I said. “If you discover anything else out of the ordinary, report it to me, no matter how trivial it might seem.”

“Of course.”

I went back to the ladder but then stopped. “Just one more question, Ms. Prime.”

“Yes, Captain?” Her green eyes shone in the blue aura emitted by the turbine.

“If I ask you to disarm that device, do you think you’ll be able to do it?”

“Yes, I think so. It’s an unfamiliar design but most of these things work the same way once you pull them apart.”

“Good.” At least I knew that if we had to disarm it we could. I climbed up the ladder, feeling a little less sick than I had on the way down. Tegan followed me up to the next level but said she was going to continue her diagnostic checks when I began to ascend the stairs to the transporter.

I knew what she really meant; she was going to hunt for more devices.

I gave her an understanding nod and rode the transporter back to my room.

After punching in the new passcode, I went to the bed and lay there, staring at the ceiling for a while, supported by the mattress that made me feel like I was floating. Beyond the window, the stars shone in their unchanging patterns.

I pondered the problem of the tracking device until I eventually drifted into a deep sleep.