The Price of Peace (26 page)

"You in there?" came Kick's growl from outside. "I am," Tom said.

"She wants to talk to you. She's excited about some damn fool idea to get more work out of you guys."

Tom dropped the bracelet into the back of his breechcloth. "I'm always happy to talk with the boss," he said as he swung out the door and closed it behind him.

Ruth and Trouble both kept silent until Tom and Kick's attempt at easy banter disappeared. "Can we really get out of here?" Ruth asked again.

"I think so. A lot depends on that message getting to Wardhaven. And then some gutsy folks being willing to launch a major invasion on a shoestring and a hunch." "Would you do it?"

"If I knew you were down here, yes." "But you're here. Who's out there who cares?" "Captain Izzy
Umboto
, Ruth. And she doesn't leave until the whole crew is aboard. You can bet your life on that."

The tiny 3K message on Surveyor 14 was the first to be tapped. It rode a routine report on reaction mass remaining up to Repeater 2 and then into the buffer of Satellite Maintenance. There, it hitchhiked a ride to Main Communications when a routine status check was made of the system that kept links open to the rest of human space. There, the message waited. Its next command was to attach itself to any mail going to Wardhaven. A last command would pull it off there and rush it to its final destination. There was no traffic heading for Wardhaven, so the message waited. It had no way of noticing that other copies of itself were collecting in the buffer, duplicates waiting patiently . .. and tying up Puffer space for no reason apparent to the technicians running the system. That wasn't unusual; packets were always being lost in transit. When it got too bad, the techs would flush the buffer. Of course messages would be lost, but what the heck, that was what backups were for.

If Steve hadn't been so tired last night, he might have realized Wardhaven was not a popular destination for mail from this corner of hell. He might have given the message alternate initial destinations, from which it could reroute itself to Wardhaven. He didn't, so the messages sat, collecting as more of the Surveyors were queried, taking up more of the large, but not unlimited, buffer.

Sleep refused to come to Izzy. Usually, she slept like the dead, but that was before she killed several hundred people she'd sworn her oath to protect. During the day, she stayed busy. God knows, the overhaul had enough going on ... and going wrong ... to keep her centered. But at night the ghosts came.

Izzy saw them. Dragged into a strange ship. Told nothing about what was happening. Heavy gees without the proper gear. Then wild maneuvering, and wilder fears. Then they were nothing, with no hint of warning. Not to know. Not to know until there was nothing to know. Their helplessness brought back memories of a helpless kid. The little Izzy bewildered by the slums, the bosses, the drug merchants. Someone was supposed to protect kids, but not there. There, a kid never knew where today's Shootout would be, never knew when a street game would turn deadly because somebody was shooting three blocks away and bullets don't stop just because they'd gone past their intended targets. Joie, Angie, little Toby... how long was the list that Izzy could still remember? Once in a long while, when Momma was sober, she'd tell Izzy she had to get out. School was a way out, not the run-down building called PS-921, but a real education. Somehow Momma found a way to send her to the school with the nuns. They'd opened up a whole new world for a wide-eyed kid. She'd taken in as much as she could, not nearly enough, but as much as a kid could, holding down a part-time job and cooking for Momma when she came home.

Izzy hiked straight from graduation to the Navy recruiter. The Navy was wonderful. They fed her. They clothed her. They had a job for her that left her wonderful hours of free time to study. And Lieutenant
Manon
had given her a chance for a real education and a commission. Izzy knew she wasn't as good as the other officers. They came from families, and had real educations. She knew what the Navy had taught her, and what she'd taught herself. They got ship duty; Izzy got the defense brigades, the last choice on the wish list. And when she finally got her ship—she killed a couple hundred innocent civilians. She was no better than a drug lord.

"Come on, Trouble. Get back here. I need some new faces, grateful faces of people we've set free. I can't take these faces much longer."

Every day was like the last on the farms. Get up, work the fields, go to bed exhausted and hungry. Every day it rained. Trouble's wounds healed; only one got infected. His visits to Ruth no longer lit up the day. Tom was the boss's regular. He managed to get the bracelet back without its absence being noticed. Unfortunately, Zylon Plovdic was learning from him. With Ruth's promise of doubling the crop, Zylon looked at improving the end product. Her orders were to strip the leaves off the plants and drop the stalks in the field to rot and support the next crop. That left the field hands with more work. Since only a dozen new hands had arrived, and six others had given up and died, it meant everyone had to speed up. Zylon didn't think to increase the rations, just the work pace.

Trouble went to bed each night wondering where the damn invasion was. Walt, the main message buffer is acting flaky. Take it down and reload it."

"Boss, there's only a half hour left on the shift. You want my status report today or tomorrow? Can't the swing or midnight shift do it?"

"Swing's got backups to do, and midnight's too thin to do more than keep the shop up and running. Tomorrow morning, first thing, you reload the buffer." "Will do, boss."

Ruth was discovering that the reward for a job well done was getting screwed. She'd tested the soil in every field, treated them, and worked herself out of a job. These crops got no pesticide or herbicide, for reasons no one would explain to her, so there was nothing she could do with her tractor there.

Helping your neighbor here was some kind of a joke. Her foreman laughed when she suggested loaning her out to the other farms to do similar tests and treatments. No, he figured, she was about due to be rotated to the vats.

That meant a collar and more attention from management than she cared for. Ruth

countered with a suggestion to retest the fields, this time doing four tests to a hectare. "After all, we're
terraforming
this place pretty unevenly."

"That ought to keep you busy until we get the first crop in that you treated. If it really is double, maybe we can find a permanent place for you." His grin had a twist to it, suggesting that if it was anything less than double, he had a place for her.

Trouble, where's that invasion fleet?

"Art, I told you this place was great," he said, waving his drink at the golf course outside the club's windows.

"That you did, that you did. But damn, the overtime is killing me. When am I
gonna
have time for a game or a swim?"

"They've posted vacancy notices galore, Art. We just got to recruit some folks to lighten our load. Know any good analysts back on Wardhaven? I could use a construction boss as well as a dozen composite stringers."

"I know a few good-looking ones."

"Be nice to have more women around here, Art."

Art turned the menu into a message pad, called up his address book, and composed a cover note to the vacancy notices.

"Throw in a picture of the condo I built, Art." "With all that rain?"

"It's not raining today. I told you the rain wouldn't last forever. Six months of rain, six months of blue sky."

"Yeah." Art finished his first message, copied it to another file, put a new name on it, and sent the first.

The message was large, with all its attachments. It almost overflowed the main
comm
buffer. However, it was addressed to Wardhaven. Several tiny packages that had been waiting for that address to appear attached themselves to Art's message. They went out with it, leaving the buffer with more room for the next job offer he sent. None of this mattered to Art. He was a manager. So long as his mail went where he wanted it to go buffers and lost packets meant nothing to him. They meant a lot to other people.

Eleven

"IZZY, CAN YOU get down here quick?" It was
Elie
on the view. She looked pale. "Is there a problem? Is Trouble back?"

"We've heard from him." "Heard?"

"The recon blew up in his face. He's in some kind of slave labor camp."

"On my way." Izzy punched off and headed for the bridge. "Stan, you, me, and Gunny are going
dirtside
, right now."

"Yes ma'am.
Bos'n
, have the captain's gig made ready. Quartermaster, have Gunny meet us at the gig." Stan exited the bridge only a step behind Izzy. "What's the problem?" he asked as he caught up with her.

"Recon blew up. They got a message
dirtside
that may tell us more." Stan looked worried but said nothing. Gunny fell in step as they turned the last corner to the gig. They belted in as the pilot backed the craft away from the station.

"We have a problem?" Gunny asked.

"The recon failed. Lieutenant
Tordon
is in some sort of slave labor camp. Our rescue mission may be a bit larger in scope and harder to plan."

"That boy got himself enslaved again," Gunny said ruefully. "Maybe this time we ought to let him stew a while."

"I suspect by the time we get there, he will have stewed plenty," Izzy observed dryly.

Trouble was having a bad day. The foreman had lost heavily in last night's poker game. He had a roaring hangover and, rather than sleep it off, was taking it out of their hides, literally. The long black leather bullwhip cracked again.

"You bags of shit are slow as shit," he roared, flicking another six inches of Trouble's hide off. Boss's vocabulary was very limited, as was his intelligence. Apparently, he'd also lost his productivity bonus this month. Trouble wondered what month it was and how long he'd been doing this.

The next crack of the whip hit someone on the opposite side of the work group. Trouble was grateful it wasn't him and ashamed of the thought.

"Ease up. Trouble." Tom whispered. "Your knuckles are white. Ease up, there's nothing we can do about it. Relax, the sun's past noon. This won't go on forever."

Tom got the next whiplash for talking.

Trouble wanted to bury his hoe in the foreman's empty skull. To pry his eyeballs out and see if there was anything but vacuum behind them. "Remember, you got to stay alive," Steve mumbled, as if he could read the marine's mind.

The whip cut into him next.

Out of the corner of his eye, Trouble watched the two corporate men. sweating in the heat, bleeding from the lash, keep their heads down and their hoes going mechanically. If that was what you had to do to make it in a corporation, Trouble wanted none of that. Give me a rifle and plenty of ammunition. I'll show you how to get ahead.

The image caught at him. A head. On a hoe handle. Trouble kept the smile to himself. Come on, Izzy, where's that damn invasion?

"I think we best forget an invasion at this time." Major Tran, commander, 2nd Guard, stood before the data displayed on boards behind him and worried his lower lip. "1 hate to give the bottom line first, but it's ugly enough you should have my recommendation in mind as we go over the report."

Beside Izzy. Gunny shuffled in his chair, a raging scream from a man who was usually ramrod straight and as responsive as rock. On her other side, Stan rubbed his chin doubtfully. Izzy would have expected him to nod agreement. Had he been around her too long? The commander of the Guard brigade continued.

"You have a copy of the brief message from the recon. For unknown reasons, he was apprehended before he could complete the reconnaissance of the target. That alone is a critical piece of information. Any hope we had of surprise is gone."

"Paranoid bastards," Izzy observed.

"They might feel they have reason to be," the unnamed spy responded.

"The extent to which the recon was unsuccessful before its capture is also of concern. Note that although they used the best systems we have available for hacking networks and cracking crypto systems, the firewall and encryption defeated them."

"Um."
Tru
Seyd
scowled at her equipment's failure.

"They have identified the station as a basic C-3-a structure, though defensive blisters have been added. The satellite suite is minimal, just a GPS, weather, and repeater system. Most communications are limited to fiber optics, leaving us little access for either hacking, cracking, or misinforming. Ladies and gentlemen, this is enough information to tell us an assault by my brigade is suicide and its prospects for success nil. I suggest we look for other options." The major sat.

Nobody spoke for a long time. In the silence, Izzy got up and ambled over to the wall screen showing what they did and didn't know about the Riddle system. Four jumps were scattered around it, all four or five days' travel from the occupied planet. A station in high orbit, say four hundred miles up, and orbiting every two hours. The extent of human occupation and its location were unknown.

"A lot we don't know," Izzy agreed.

"We can't plan a planetary assault without knowing what we are going up against." The major was definite.

"It would be tough planning it as we went along," Gunny agreed. Or was he opening an option?

Acting Minister Rita
Nuu-Longknife
shook her head firmly. "My husband, wherever he is, still walks with a cane because he tried to force open a pass he knew too damn little about. I won't send the Second Guard into that again."

Izzy smiled. "We chewed you up plenty good that day, but you should have seen the lash-up on our side. Our gear had been transshipped four times on the way out. We couldn't find shit. Our fingernails just were a bit stronger that day."

"Your rockets damn near wiped out my transport." Rita left the challenge hanging.

"I had to bust my butt getting those birds off the ground. No, it was a damn close thing. We were just a bit luckier."

"Luck doesn't fit into any plan I draw up," Major Tran spat.

Izzy wouldn't argue that point. Only a fool assumed anything in a battle plan. She stared long at the displays. "If we could seize the station ..."

"Unless the hackers and crackers support our move into that station," the major cut her off, "we'd have to fight for every level, every space. What you'd have when we were done wouldn't be worth having. And I wouldn't have much of a brigade, either."

"And we'd be hanging there with our rear out, skipper," Stan added. "Anything come in behind us, we'd have to fight it off while they were taking the station. Cannons to the front of us, cannons to the back of us," he misquoted.

"Lousy tactical situation," Izzy agreed. So, how could she make it better? She turned to
Tru
. "How could you improve your chances of hacking their system?"

"Trouble went in with a basic one-size-fits-all suite of tricks. If I had been there, with my gear, I'd have hit their system with human-directed input. Nothing beats reaching out and touching a problem yourself."

"You're not a combat trooper," Major Tran cut her off.

"I should hope not. But if you could keep those big hairy guys overdosed on testosterone off my case for a couple of hours, you might be surprised what doors I open."

"So, if we keep things from going terminal for a while after we dock the
Patton
, you might make it an easier nut to crack."

"Maybe" was all the answer Izzy got.

"Says here," Stan broke the silence. "That the fellow who designed the system and several of the people who laid out the urban plan are with Trouble raising drugs."

Izzy nodded, and the major shook his head. "We probably could identify the agricultural areas from the urban areas. However, we would not know which farms were growing drugs and which were growing lettuce. If we drop on the farms, I scatter my troops to hell and gone. Then I'd have to
reconcentrate
a strike for whatever center of gravity these people suggest. And their data will be at least six months old or older. I could be assaulting a brothel instead of a network center or power station."

Izzy nodded. "Yes, you could. We can't afford to scatter our only troops all to hell and gone." Izzy turned to Rita. "Is he Second Guard all you got?"

The minister patted her swelling belly thoughtfully before answering. "Wardhaven has three Guard brigades. The cabinet would have to decide to commit all three." "You don't have transport." The major shot that down.

"Stan, how's the
Patton
Jr. coming along?" The
Patton
was his job. The conversion of the captured pirate into a warship of some capabilities was his passion.

"Surprisingly well, ma'am. Local yard's familiar with the design and layout. It's coming together just fine."

"
Patton
Jr. ? " came from several people around the table, including Rita and the major. Not the spy.

"We brought a captured pirate ship in with us. Used to be a Daring class cruiser. Your yard's been working on it in their spare time. What's it got, Stan?"

"Six six-inchers, full sensors, engines in better shape than ours." He didn't have to say that. "I

think it could take a load of containers as big as the
Patton
. Maybe more."

"Rita, if you got us all three brigades, one could take the station with two in reserve for drops. Trouble got a message out somehow; maybe we can get a message down to them. Know where they are before we drop. Could use my marines for that."

For once, the major was not shaking his head. Now it was
Elie
. "Am I the only one who sees a problem with this entire idea? I mean, that planet is a member of the Society of Humanity. So is Wardhaven. Can you explain to me again how it is that we can just go off and start blowing it up?"

"Good point," Rita said. "We got too many uniforms at this table, trying to figure out how to do it. Should we do it? Do we have a right to do it?" She leaned back in her chair, eyes locked on the spy. Izzy used the silence to sit down. She had definite opinions about people who made hostages of her crew. Still, she didn't have the right to declare war. The admiral back at District Headquarters might not be very understanding if she did.

"Thank you for the reality check," the nameless one said. "If the leaders of Riddle are indeed trafficking in slavery and piracy, they are in violation of several articles of Society's Declaration of Human Rights. Both of which can be punished by any of the signatories to the constitution. This may surprise you, but I had my legal staff examine our situation." The spy actually smiled. "Captain
Umboto
, you are covered by the right of hot pursuit, assuming we can identify something hot for you to pursue. One of your crewmen is a hostage. I believe you have a prima facie case for investigating. Wardhaven ships have vanished. I believe that you have the right to request our assistance. That should cover the Guard brigades." That sounded encouraging to Izzy, but the spy was no longer smiling. What bad news was he about to add to the good?

"However, if we do not quickly show some cause for our arriving in force in the Riddle system, you can expect the powers that be to log a strong protest and tie us up in legal knots for so long as we all shall live. We need proof, solid proof, before we start shooting up

space stations and populated areas. We do not have it at the moment. I agree with the major. We need more information. We will need legal proof to cover our actions."

"Do you think we should stop then?" Rita asked.

Slowly the spy shook his head. "No, all evidence is that this disease is growing rapidly. It requires radical surgery, and soon. We are prepared to move at this time. If we can. I suggest we do. Captain?"

With that, the spy tossed the ball to Izzy. There was no question in her mind. Go! But an invasion of a planet required better preparation than getting a missile strike off at grounded transports. Her crew might well find hostiles to their front and back. She turned to Stan. "Your thoughts on the matter?"

He raised an eyebrow at that, then leaned back in his chair for a long, silent minute. "Pirates may or may not be in the system when we are," he said softly. "The station may or may not fall to a hack-and-crack assault. We may or may not have to shoot our way into the station and onto the planet. If we can't establish contact with hostages, we really shouldn't do any shooting. That's a lot of bad news." Then he smiled. "The good news is we can hightail it out of Dodge anytime up to the point we start shooting, and nobody is the wiser. What do you say we take it one step at a time, skipper? If it's working, we keep going. If we end up facedown in the mud, we start crawling in reverse as fast as we can."

The major looked none too happy. Rita seemed undecided. The spy was unreadable. "What the hell, they were offering me early retirement when I took this job. I say we go."

The data chief rubbed her hands together. "It's
gonna
be a fun little puppy if we do." Rita spent a long time staring at the ceiling. "Has the agency already completed its arrangements?"

"The large container ship Star of Gdansk loaded out a hundred thousand tons of prefab buildings and light industrial machinery. Its next port of call is Riddle. I have bribed its captain. My agent will bribe the rest of the crew when the time comes. If we do not go now, I will have paid for nothing. I think we should go forward with the option of reversing if necessary."