The warrior's apprentice (21 page)

Tung leaned back at last with a contented sigh, full of food and wine and emptied of stories. Miles, knowing his own capacity, had been nursing his own wine to the limits of politeness. He swirled the last of it around in the bottom of his cup, and essayed a cautious probe.

“It seems a great waste for an officer of your experience to sit out a good war like this, locked in a box.”

Tung smiled. “I have no intention of staying in this box.”

“Ah—yes. But there may be more than one way to get out of it, don’t you see. Now, the Dendarii Mercenaries are an expanding organization. There’s a lot of room for talent at the top.”

Tung’s smiled soured. “You took my ship.”

“I took Captain Auson’s ship, too. Ask him if he’s unhappy about it.”

“Nice try—ah—Mr. Naismith. But I have a contract. A fact that, unlike some, I remember. A mercenary who can’t honor his contract when it’s rough as well as when it’s smooth is a thug, not a soldier.”

Miles fairly swooned with unrequited love. “I cannot fault you for that, sir.”

Tung eyed him with amused tolerance. “Now, regardless of what that ass Auson seems to think, I have you pegged as a hot-shot junior officer in over his head— and sinking fast. Seems to me it’s you, not I, who’s going to be looking for a new job soon. You seem to have at least an average grasp of tactics—and you have read Vorkosigan on Komarr—but any officer who can get Auson and Thorne hitched together to plow a straight line shows a genius for personnel. If you get out of this alive, come see me— I may be able to find something on the exec side for you.”

Miles sat looking at his prisoner in open-mouthed appreciation of a chutzpah worthy of his own. Actually, it sounded pretty good. He sighed regret. “You honor me, Captain Tung. But I’m afraid I too have a contract.”

“Pigwash.”

“Beg pardon?”

“If you have a contract with Felice, it beats me where you got it. I doubt Daum was authorized to make any such agreement. The Felicians are as cheap as their counterparts the Pelians. We could have ended this war six months ago if the Pelians had been willing to pay the piper. But no—they chose to “economize” and only buy a blockade, and a few installations like this one— and for that, they act like they’re doing us a favor. Peh!” Frustration edged his voice with disgust.

“I didn’t say my contract was with Felice,” said Miles mildly. Tung’s eyes narrowed in puzzlement; good. The man’s evaluations were entirely too close to the truth for comfort.

“Well, keep your tail down, son,” Tung advised “In the long run more mercenaries have had their asses shot off by their contractors than by their enemies.”

Miles took his leave courteously; Tung ushered him out with the panache of a genial host.

“Is there anything else you need?” asked Miles.

“A screwdriver,” said Tung promptly.

Miles shook his head and smiled regretfully as the door was closed on the Eurasian. “Damned if I’m not tempted to send him one,” said Miles to Bothari. “I’m dying to see what he thinks he can do with that light.”

“Just what did all that accomplish?” asked Bothari. “He burned up your time with ancient history and didn’t give away anything.”

Miles smiled. “Nothing unimportant.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

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The Pelians attacked from the ecliptic, opposite the sun, taking advantage of the scattered masses of the asteroid belt for what cover they provided. They came decelerating, telegraphing their intention to capture, not destroy; and they came alone, without their Oseran employees.

Miles laughed delight under his breath as he limped through the scramble of men and equipment in the refinery docking station corridors. The Pelians could scarcely be following his pet scenario more closely if he’d given them their orders himself. There had been some argument when he’d insisted on placing his farthest outlying pickets and his major weapons on the belt and not the planet side of the refinery. But it was inevitable. Barring subterfuge, a tactic currently exhausted, it was the Pelian’s only hope of gaining a measure of surprise. A week ago, it would have done them some good.

Miles dodged some of his galloping troops hurrying to their posts. Pray God he would never find himself on foot in a retreat. He might as well volunteer for the rear guard in the first place, and save being trampled by his own side as well as by the enemy.

He dashed through the flex tube into the Triumph. The waiting soldier clanged the lock shut behind him, and hastily blew off the tube seals. As he’d guessed, he was the last aboard. He made his way to the tactics room as the ship maneuvered free of the refinery.

The Triumph’s tactics room was noticeably larger than the Ariel’s, and quite as sleek. Miles quailed at the number of empty padded swivel chairs. A scant half of Auson’s old crew, even augmented by a few volunteer refinery techs, made scarcely a skeleton crew for the new ship.

Holograph displays were up and working in all their bright confusion. Auson looked up from trying to man two stations at once with relief in his eyes.

“Glad you made it, my lord.”

Miles slid into a station chair. “Me too. But please— just ‘Mr. Naismith’. No ‘my lord’.”

Auson looked puzzled. “The others all call you that.”

“Yes, but, um—it’s not just a courtesy. It denotes a specific legal relationship. You wouldn’t call me ‘my husband’ even if you heard my wife do so, eh? So what have we got out here?”

“Looks like maybe ten little ships—all Pelian local stuff.” Auson studied his readouts, worry creasing his broad face. “I don’t know where our guys are. This sort of thing should be just their style.”

Miles correctly interpreted “our guys” to mean Auson’s former comrades, the Oserans. The slip of tongue did not disturb him; Auson was committed, now. Miles glanced sideways at him, and thought he knew exactly why the Pelians hadn’t brought their hired guns. For all the Pelians knew to the contrary, an Oseran ship had turned on them. Miles’s eyes glittered at the thought of the dismay and distrust that must now be reverberating through the Pelian high command.

Their ship dove in a high arc toward their attackers. Miles keyed Nav and Com.

“You all right, Arde?”

“For flying blind, deaf, dumb, and paralyzed, not bad,” Mayhew said. “Manual piloting is a pain. It’s like the machine is operating me. It feels awful.”

“Keep up the good work,” Miles said cheerfully. “Remember, we’re more interested in herding them into range of our stationary weapons than in knocking them off ourselves.”

Miles sat back and regarded the ever-changing displays. “I don’t think they quite realize how much ordinance Daum brought. They’re just repeating the same tactics the Felician officers reported they used the last time. Of course, it worked once . . .”

The lead Pelian ships were just coming into range of the refinery. Miles held his breath as though it could force his people to hold their fire. They were spread lonely, thin, and nervous out there. There were more weapons in place than Miles had personnel to man them, even with computer-controlled fire—especially since control systems had been plagued with bugs during installation that were still not all worked out. Baz had labored to the last instant—was still laboring, for all Miles knew, and Elena alongside him. Miles wished he could have justified keeping her beside himself, instead.

The lead Pelian spewed a glittering string of dandelion bombs, arcing toward the solar collectors. Not again, Miles groaned inwardly, seeing two weeks’ repairs about to be wasted. The bombs puffed into their thousands of separate needles. Space was suddenly laced with threads of fire as the defense weaponry labored to knock them out. Should have fired an instant sooner. The Pelian ship itself exploded into pelting debris as someone on Miles’s side scored a direct, perhaps lucky, hit. A portion of the debris continued on its former track and speed, almost as dangerous in its mindless momentum as the clever guided weapons.

The ships coming up behind it began to peel and swerve, shocked out of their bee-line complacency. Auson and Thorne in their respective ships now swung in from either side, like a pair of sheepdogs gone mad and attacking their flock. Miles beat his fist on the panel before him in a paroxysm of joy at the beauty of the formation. If only he’d had a third warship to completely box their flanks, none of the Pelians would make it home to complain. As it was, they were squeezed into a flat layer, carefully pre-calculated to present its maximum target area to the refinery’s defenses.

Auson, beside him, shared his enthusiasm. “Lookatem!

Lookatem! Right down the gullet, just like you claimed they would—and Gamad swore you were crazy to strip the solar side—Shorty, you’re a frigging genius!”

Miles’s thrill was mitigated by the sober reflection of what names he’d have earned by guessing wrong. Relief made him dizzy. He leaned back in the station chair and let out a long, long breath.

A second Pelian ship burst into oblivion, and a third. A numeral buried in a crowded corner of Miles’s readouts flipped quietly from a minus to a plus figure. “Ah ha!” Miles pointed. “We’ve got ‘em now! They’re starting to accelerate again. They re breaking off the attack.”

Their momentum gave the Pelians no choice but to sweep through the refinery area. But all their attention now was on making it as fast a trip as possible. Thorne and Auson swung in behind to speed them on their way.

A Pelian ship corkscrewed past the installation, and fired—what? Miles’s computers could present no interpretation of the—beam? Not plasma, not laser, not driven mass, for which the central factory was able to generate some shielding, the huge solar collectors necessarily being left to fend for themselves. It was not immediately apparent what damage it had done, or even if it were a hit. Strange...

Miles closed his hand gently around the Pelian ship’s representation in his hologram, as if he could work sympathetic magic. “Captain Auson. Let’s try and catch this one.”

“Why bother? He’s scooting for home with his buddies—”

Miles lowered his voice to a whisper. “That’s an order.”

Auson braced. “Yes, sir!”

Well, it works sometimes, Miles reflected.

The communications officer achieved a fully scrambled channel to the Ariel, and the new objective was transmitted. Auson, growing enthused, chortled at the chance to try his new ship’s limits. The ghost imager, confusing the enemy’s aim with multiple targets, proved particularly useful; through it they discovered the mystery beam’s range limit and odd large time lag between shots. Recharging, perhaps? They bore down rapidly upon the fleeing Pelian.

“What’s the script, Mr. Naismith?” Auson inquired. “Stop-or-we-blast-you?”

Miles chewed his lip thoughtfully. “I don’t think that would work. I’d guess our problem is more likely to be keeping them from self-destructing when we get close. Threats would fall flat, I’m afraid. They’re not mercenaries.”

“Hm.” Auson cleared his throat, and busied himself with his displays.

Miles suppressed a sardonic smile, for the sake of tact, and turned to his own readouts. The computers presented him with a clairvoyant vision of overtaking the Pelian, then paused, waiting politely on his merely human inspiration. Miles tried to think himself into the Pelian captain’s skin. He balanced time lag, range, and the speed with which they could close on the Pelian at maximum red-line boost.

“It’s close,” he said, watching his holograph. The machine rendered a vivid and chilling display of what might happen if he missed bracketing his timing.

Auson glanced over his shoulder at the miniature fireworks, and muttered something about “—frigging suicidal...”, which Miles chose to ignore.

“I want all our engineering people suited up and ready to board,” Miles said at last. “They know they can’t outrun us; my guess is they’ll rig some go-to-hell with a time delay, all pile into their lifeboat shuttle, and try to blow the ship up in our faces. But if we don’t waste time on the shuttle, and are quick enough getting in the back door as they go out the side, we might disarm it and take—whatever that was—intact.”

Auson’s lips puckered in worried disapproval at this plan. “Take all my engineers? We could blast the shuttle out of its clamps, when we get close enough to get the accuracy—trap them all aboard—”

“And then try to board a manned warship with four engineers and myself?” Miles interrupted. “No, thanks. Besides, cornering them just might trigger the sort of spectacular suicide move I want to prevent.”

“What’ll I do if you’re not quick enough getting their booby-trap disarmed?” A black grin stole over Miles’s face. “Improvise.”

The Pelians, it appeared, were not enough of a suicide squadron to spurn the thin chance of life their shuttle gave them. Into this narrow crack of time Miles and his technicians slipped, blasting their way, crude but quick, through the code-controlled airlock.

Miles cursed the discomfort of his over-large pressure suit. Loose places rubbed and skidded on his skin. Cold sweat, he discovered, was a term with a literal meaning. He glanced up and down the curving corridors of the unfamiliar dark ship. The engineering techs parted at a run, each to their assigned quadrant.

Miles took a fifth and less likely direction, to make a quick check of tactics room, crew’s quarters and bridge for destructive devices and any useful intelligence left lying around. Blasted control panels and melted data stores met him everywhere. He checked the time; barely five minutes, and the Pelian shuttle would be safely beyond the range of, say, radiation from imploded engines.

A triumphant crow pierced his ears over his suit comm link. “I’ve done it! I’ve done it!” cried an engineering tech. “They had rigged an implosion! Chain reaction broken—I’m shutting down now.”

Cheers echoed over the comm link. Miles sagged into a station chair on the bridge, heart lumping; then it seemed to stop. He keyed his comm link for a general broadcast, overriding and at volume. “I don’t think we should assume there was only one booby-trap laid, eh? Keep looking for at least the next ten minutes.”

Worried groans acknowledged the order. For the next three minutes the comm links transmitted only ragged breathing. Miles, dashing through the galley in search of the captain’s cabin, inhaled sharply. A microwave oven, its control panel ripped out and hastily crosswired, timer ticking away, had a high-pressure metal oxygen canister jammed into it. The nutrition technician’s personal contribution to the war effort, apparently. In two minutes it would have taken out the galley and most of the adjoining chambers. Miles tore it apart and ran on.

A tear-streaked voice hissed over the comm link. “Oh, shit. Oh, shit!”

“Where are you, Kat?”

“Armory. There’s too many. I can’t get them all! Oh, shit!”

“Keep working! We’re on our way.” Miles, taking the chance, ordered the rest of his crew to the armory on the double, and ran. A true light guided him as he arrived, overriding the infra-red display on the inside of his helmet faceplate. He swung into a storage chamber to find the tech crawling along a row of gleaming ordinance.

“Every dandelion bomb in here is set to go off!” she cried, sparing one glance at him. Her voice shook, but her hands never stopped patting out the reset codes. Miles, lips parted in concentration, watched over her shoulder and then began to repeat her movements on the next row. The great disadvantage to crying in fear in a space suit, Miles discovered, was that you could not wipe either your face or your nose, although the sonic cleaners on the inside of the faceplate saved that valuable informative surface from a sneeze. He sniffed surreptitiously. His stomach sent up a throat-burning, acid belch. His fingers felt like sausages. I could be on Beta Colony right now—I could be home in bed—I could be home under my bed...

Another tech joined them. Miles saw out of the corner of his eye. No one spared attention for social chit-chat. They worked together in silence broken only by the uneven rhythm of hyperventilation. His suit reduced his oxygen flow in stingy disapproval of his state of mind. Bothari would never have let him join the boarding party—maybe he shouldn’t have ordered him to duty at the refinery. On to the next bomb—and the next—and the—there was no next. Finished.

Kat rose, and pointed to one bomb in the array. “Three seconds! Three seconds, and—” She burst into unabashed tears, and fell on Miles. He patted her shoulder clumsily.

“There, there—cry all you want. You’ve earned it—” He killed his comm link broadcast momentarily, and inhaled a powerful sniff.