The warrior's apprentice (16 page)

“All right. Imitate him.”

“They’ll never believe me. I can’t—I’ve never been—I don’t even have a cigar!”

Miles thought a second, dashed off, and galloped back moments later with a package of cheroots abstracted from one of the mercenary’s quarters.

“But I don’t smoke,” worried Baz.

“Just chew on it, then. Probably better if you don’t light it, God knows what it might be spiked with.”

“Now, there’s an idea for poisoning old Tarski that might have worked—”

Miles pushed him along. “All right, you’re an air polluting son-of-a-bitch and you don’t take ‘I don’t know’ for an answer. If I can do it,” he uncorked his argument of desperation, “you can do it.”

Baz paused, straightened, bit off the end of the cheroot and spat it bravely on the deck. He eyed it a moment. “I slipped on one of those damned disgusting things once. Nearly broke my neck. Tarski. Right.” He clenched the cheroot between his teeth at an aggressive angle, and marched into the main engineering bay.

Miles assembled the entire ship’s company in their own briefing room, and took center stage. Bothari, Elena, Jesek and Daum waited in the wings, posted in pairs at each exit, lethally armed.

“My name is Miles Naismith. I represent the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet.”

“Never heard of it,” called a bold heckler from the blur of faces around Miles.

Miles smiled acidly. “If you had, heads would roll in my security department. We do not advertise. Recruitment is by invitation only. Frankly,” his gaze swept the crowd, making eye contact, linking each face one by one to its name and personal possessions, “if what I’ve seen so far represents your general standards, but for our assignment here you’d have gone right on not hearing of us.”

Auson, Thorne, and the chief engineer, subdued and weary from fourteen hours of being dragged—raked— over every weld, weapon, tool, data bank, and supply room from one end of the ship to the other, had scarcely a twitch left in them. But Auson looked wistful at the thought.

Miles paced back and forth before his audience, radiating energy like a caged ferret. “We do not normally draft recruits, particularly from such dismal raw material. After yesterday’s performance, I personally would have no compunction at disposing of you all by the swiftest means, just to improve the military tone of this ship.” He scowled upon them fiercely. They looked nervous, uncertain; was there just the slightest hangdog shuffle there? Onward. “But your lives have been begged for you, upon a point of honor, by a better soldier than most of you can hope to be—” he glanced pointedly at Elena who, prepared, raised her chin and stood in a sort of parade rest, indicating to all the source of this unusual mercy.

Actually, Miles wondered if she wouldn’t have personally shoved Auson, at least, out the nearest airlock. But having cast her in the role of “Commander Elena Bothari, my executive officer and unarmed combat instructor,” it had occurred to him that he had the perfect set-up for a fast round of good guy-bad guy.

“—and so I have agreed to the experiment. To put it in terms you are familiar with—former Captain Auson has yielded your contracts to me.”

That stirred them into outraged murmuring. A couple of them rose from their seats, a dangerous precedent. Fortunately, they hesitated, as if uncertain whether to start for Miles’s throat first, or Captain Auson’s. Before the ripple of motion could become an unstoppable tidal wave, Bothari brought his disruptor to aim with a good loud slap against his other hand. Bothari’s lips were drawn back in a canine grimace, and his pale eyes blazed.

The mercenaries lost the moment. The ripple died. Those who had risen sat back down carefully, their hands resting plainly and demurely upon their knees.

Damn, thought Miles enviously, I wish I could muster that much menace... The trick of it, alas, was that it was not a trick at all. Bothari’s ferocity was palpably sincere.

Elena aimed her nerve disruptor in a white nervous grip, her eyes wide; but then, an obviously nervous person with a lethal weapon has a brand of menace all their own, and more than one mercenary spared a glance from the Sergeant to the other possible source of crossfire. A male mercenary attempted a prudent placating smile, palms out. Elena snarled under her breath, and the smile winked out hastily. Miles raised his voice and overrode the lingering whispers of confusion.

“By Dendarii regulation, you will all start at the same rank—the lowest, recruit-trainee. This is not an insult; every Dendarii, including myself, has started there. Your promotions will be by demonstrated ability—demonstrated to me. Due to your previous experience and the needs of the moment, your promotions will probably be much more rapid than usual. What this means, in effect, is that any one of you could find yourself the brevet captain of this ship within weeks.”

The murmur became suddenly thoughtful. What this meant, in effect, thought Miles, was that he had just succeeded in dividing all the lower-ranking echelons from their former seniors. He nearly grinned as ambition visibly lit a scattering of faces. And had he ever lit a fire under those seniors—Thorne and Auson stared at each other in edgy speculation.

“Your new training will begin immediately. Those not assigned to training groups this shift will temporarily re-commence their old duties. Any questions?” He held his breath; his scheme pivoted on the point of a pin. He would know in a minute...

“What’s your rank?” asked a mercenary.

Miles decided to stay flexible. “You may address me as Mr. Naismith.” There, let them build theories on that.

“Then how do we know who to obey?” asked the original hard-eyed heckler.

Miles bared his teeth in a scimitar smile. “Well, if you disobey one of my orders, I’ll shoot you on the spot. You figure it out.” He drummed his fingers lightly on his holstered nerve disruptor. Some of Bothari’s aura seemed to have rubbed off on him, for the heckler wilted.

A mercenary held up her hand, serious as a child at school.

“Yes, Trainee Quinn?”

“When do we get copies of the Dendarii regulations?”

Miles’s heart seemed to stop. He hadn’t thought of that one. It was such a reasonable request—the sort of commander Miles was trying to pass himself off as should know his regs by heart, or sleep with them under his pillow, or something. He produced a dry-mouthed smile, and croaked boldly, “Tomorrow. I’ll have copies distributed to everyone.” Copies of what? I’ll figure something out....

There was a silence. Then another voice from the back popped up. “What kind of insurance package does the, the Dendariis have? Do we get a paid vacation?”

And another: “Do we get any perqs? What’s the pay scale?”

And yet another: “Will our pensions carry over from our old contracts? Is there a retirement plan?”

Miles nearly bolted from the room, confounded by this spate of practical questions. He had been prepared for defiance, disbelief, a concerted unarmed rush... He had a sudden maniac vision of Vorthalia the Bold demanding a whole-life policy from his Emperor at sword’s point.

He gulped down total confusion, and forged ahead. “I’ll distribute a brochure,” he promised—he had a vague idea that sort of information came in brochures—”later. As for fringe benefits—” he barely managed to turn a glassy stare into an icy one. “I am permitting you to live. Further privileges will have to be earned.”

He surveyed their faces. Confusion, yes, that was what

he wanted. Dismay, division, and most of all, distraction. Perfect. Let them, swirled upside-down in this gush of flim-flam, forget that their primary duty was to re-take their own ship. Forget it for just a week, keep them too busy to think for just a week, a week was all he needed. After that, they’d be Daum’s problem. There was something else in their faces, though; he could not quite put his finger on it. No matter—his next task was to get off stage gracefully, and get them all moving. And get a minute alone with Bothari...

“Commander Elena Bothari has a list of your assignments. See her on your way out. Attention!” He put a snap in his voice. They shuffled raggedly to their feet, as if the posture were but dimly remembered. “Dismissed!” Yes, before they came up with any more bizarre questions and his invention failed him.

He caught a snatch of sotto voce conversation as he marched out.

“—homicidal runt lunatic...”

“Yes, but with a commander like that, there’s a chance I might survive my next battle...”

He recognized the something-else in their faces suddenly—it was that same unnerving hunger he had seen in Mayhew’s and Jesek’s. It generated an unaccountable coldness in the pit of his belly.

He motioned Sergeant Bothari aside. “Do you still have that old copy of the Barrayaran Imperial Service regs that you used to carry around?” Bothari’s bible, it was; Miles had sometimes wondered if the Sergeant had ever read another book.

“Yes, my lord.” Bothari gave him a fishy stare, as if to say, Now what?

Miles sighed relief. “Good. I want it.”

“What for?”

“Dendarii fleet regulations.”

Bothari looked pole-axed. “You’ll never—”

“I’ll run it through the computer, make a copy—go through and chop out all the cultural references, change the names—it shouldn’t take too long.”

“My lord—those are the old regulations!” The flat bass voice was almost agitated. “When those gutless slugs get a look at the old discipline parades—”

Miles grinned. “Yeah, if they saw the specs for those lead-lined rubber hoses, they’d probably faint dead away. Don’t worry. I’ll update them as I go along.”

“Your father and the General Staff did that fifteen years ago. It took them two years.”

“Well, that’s what happens with committees.”

Bothari shook his head, but told Miles where to find the old date disc among his things.

Elena joined the conference, looking nervous. But impressive, Miles thought; like a thoroughbred horse. “I’ve got them divided up into groups, by your list,” she reported. “Now what?”

“Go ahead and take your group to the gym now and start the phys-ed class. General conditioning, then start teaching them what your father’s taught you.”

“I’ve never taught anybody before...”

He smiled up at her, willing confidence into her face, her eyes, her spine. “Look, you can probably kill the first two days just having them demonstrate what they know on each other, while you stand around and say “Um,” and “Hm,” and “God help us,” and things like that. The important thing isn’t to teach them anything, but to keep them busy, wear them out, don’t give them time to think or plan or combine their forces. It’s only for a week. If I can do it,” he said manfully, “you can do it.”

“I’ve heard that before somewhere,” she muttered.

“And you, Sergeant—take your group and start them on weapons drills. If you run out of Barrayaran drills, the Oseran standard procedures are in the computers, you can filch some of them. Ride them. Baz will be running his people into the ground down in engineering—spring cleaning like they’ve never had before. And after I’ve gotten these regs straightened around, we can start quizzing them on those, too. Tire ‘em out.”

“My lord,” said the Sergeant sternly, “there are twenty of them and four of us. At the end of the week, who do you think is going to be tireder?” He slipped into vehemence. “My first responsibility is your hide, damn it!”

“I’m thinking of my hide, believe me! And you can best cover my hide by going out there and making them believe I’m a mercenary commander.”

“You’re not a commander, you’re a bloody holovid director,” muttered Bothari.

The editing job on the Imperial Regulations proved larger and more grueling than Miles had anticipated. Even the wholesale slaughter of such chapters as those detailing instructions for purely Barrayaran ceremonies such as the Emperor’s Birthday Review left an enormous mass of material. Miles slashed into it, gutting almost as fast as he could read.

It was the closest look he had ever given to military regulations, and he meditated on them, deep in the night cycle. Organization seemed to be the key. To get huge masses of properly matched men and material to the right place at the right time in the right order with the swiftness required to even grasp survival—to wrestle an infinitely complex and confusing reality into the abstract shape of victory—organization, it seemed, might even outrank courage as a soldierly virtue.

He recalled a remark of his grandfather’s—”More battles have been won or lost by the quartermasters than by any general staff.” It had been apropos a classic anecdote about a quartermaster who had issued the young guerilla general’s troops the wrong ammunition. ‘I had him hung by his thumbs for a day,” Grandfather had reminisced, “but Prince Xav made me take him down.” Miles fingered the dagger at his waist, and removed five screens of regulations about ship-mounted plasma weapons, obsolete for a generation.

His sclera were red and his cheeks hollow and grey with beard stubble at the end of the night cycle, but he had boiled his plagarization down into a neat, fierce little handbook for getting everybody’s weapons pointed in the same direction. He pressed it into Elena’s hands to be copied and distributed before staggering off to wash and change clothes, the better to present a front of eagle-eyed, as opposed to pie-eyed, command before his “new troops”.