Wholesale Slaughter Page 4

  “Hi,” he said, waving in lieu of offering a hand, remembering the way she’d reacted the last time he’d come anywhere near her. “How is… everything?”

  “I’m feeling much better, Lieutenant,” she told him, setting down the tablet, unfolding her legs and letting them dangle over the side of the bed. She was short, he realized, maybe four centimeters shorter than his meter-nine. “Or should I say, my lord?”

  He winced at that. Sparta didn’t have primogenitor, but being the son of the Guardian of the most powerful of the Dominions brought with it a position of its own, and far too many expectations, which was why he tried not to spread his parentage around his unit.

  “You can just call me Logan,” he assured her. “Lyta… Captain Randell, that is, said you wanted to talk to me.”

  “Sit down,” she told him, patting the edge of the bed.

  “Okay.” Logan slowly and hesitantly sat so near the edge of the bed he was mostly leaning, as far away from her as he could get. His fingers drummed on his thigh and his eyes flickered toward and then away from her.

  “I wanted to apologize for what I said back at the hangar.”

  “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for,” he insisted, shaking his head. “After… what happened, you had every right to react the way you did. I was an idiot and I’m the one who should be sorry.”

  “I should have been thanking you, not lashing out at you. You saved all our lives.”

  “Captain Randell and her Rangers saved your life.” He tried not to snap the words.

  “She did,” Kathren agreed. “But if you hadn’t taken out that Scorpion, it would have circled back and caught us at the hangar with nothing but a few ground troops.”

  He was about to argue that Colonel Anders had stayed back with the command group, but he realized she was right; he’d read in the After-Action Review that the Colonel had fallen back to the landing zone to cover the cargo shuttles once he’d heard the Rangers had taken the compound. There would have been no armor at all guarding the ground troops and survivors.

  He opened his mouth, shut it.

  “I don’t know what to say, Sub-lieutenant Margolis.”

  “You could call me Katy,” she suggested, covering his hand with one of hers. “And you could say ‘you’re welcome.’”

  He felt heat rising to his face.

  “You’re welcome.”

  She moved the hand away and he breathed again.

  “Captain Randell was telling me,” Katy went on as if she hadn’t noticed his reaction, “you don’t think Sparta is doing enough to interdict the bandits.”

  He scowled, suddenly feeling his earlier depression returning.

  “You’ve seen it first-hand.” He waved a hand around as if they were back in the pirate base. “You saw the arms, the ships, the equipment they were able to build up right under our noses. And this is just one, small sliver of a larger network of bandits and pirates and black marketeers who slip into any system the military is too busy to patrol.”

  “But you came.” She shook her head. “You rescued us.”

  "It was just luck," Logan nearly spat the words out. "We were rotating back from a stretch on the frontier and we jumped into the transition system just about twenty hours after the bandits hit your ship. We could see them heading for the mid-system jump-point, but we were thirty-six hours behind. If not for that coincidence..."

  "Thank Mithra for coincidences," she said softly, looking down as if she could see the future that might have been somewhere on the deck below.

  "Those scum should've been hunted down months or even years ago, but we're so busy fighting each other and worrying about invasions from the Jeuta Confederation that we haven't the time or the troops to do it."

  “So, what’s the answer, Lord Guardian?” Her words weren’t quite mocking, but they were a challenge, and he couldn’t help but grin at the spirit behind them.

  “The Dominions have to be united again,” he declared without hesitation. “It's the only way we'll have the forces to guard against the Jeuta and hunt down the bandits at the same time.”

  She smiled, cocked an eyebrow. “I assume that sounds simpler than it is.”

  “If it wasn't, someone would have done it already. Hell, it's hard enough to keep our own Guardianship together. Political approaches are hopeless." He shook his head. "None of us trusts the others—we've all used pirates against each other in the past, although my father ended that practice for Sparta once he took power. And getting any two of the Dominions to agree to the speed of light is next to impossible.

  "That leaves military conquest; but a lot of our troops are tied up on the frontier. Any major redeployment would be noticed and we'd be attacked. If we tried to build new machines... well, war materials and production facilities are severely limited and heavily spied upon. If we start punching out new mecha and ships too fast, we're sabotaged or attacked." Logan sighed heavily, shoulders sagging.

  "Add to that," he went on, "the fact that all the established and mapped jump-points in the settled Dominion systems are pretty heavily patrolled, and it makes conquest nearly impossible."

  "Secret facilities?" Katy suggested.

  “I've thought of that," Logan admitted. "But if it would work, wouldn't someone have done it already?" He ran a hand through his hair. He normally kept it a close buzz, but it had grown out over the course of this patrol and he needed to get it cut. "Maybe I should talk this over with my father.”

  "I've always thought the Guardian was a very wise man," Katy replied with what seemed like carefully chosen words. "He seems to be genuinely concerned about the well-being of his people. But he's a man who's fought his battles."

  "What do you mean?" Logan frowned at the unspoken implication.

  "He's fought his war, won his throne." Katy shrugged. "He may be content with the accomplishments he's already achieved. Maybe what's needed is a new approach."

  "I don't know what I could come up with that he hasn't already.”

  "Give it time. You're still young. I'm sure your father didn't dream up a way to take back the throne till he was a few days older than you.”

  Logan laughed, loud and hard. He knew people were looking at him from around the medical bay, but he didn’t care.

  "You know, Sub-lieutenant Margolis," he said, surprising himself with his own frankness, "I don't think I've met anyone quite like you."

  “Call me Katy, Logan," she reminded him. "And considering the company you keep, I'll take that as quite the compliment."

  "Is there anything you need? Anything I can do for you?"

  She let out a breath, and with it the brash confidence he’d found so amazing.

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen now,” she admitted, staring into space as she gave voice to fears he was sure she hadn’t wanted to admit. “I know they won’t just let me report for my assignment on Sparta without psychological and emotional evaluation, and Mithra alone knows how long that will take.” She met his gaze again. “I don’t know anyone in Argos.”

  “I’d be happy to show you around the city,” he volunteered. “Assuming I don’t get sent out on another patrol right away.”

  “That’d be nice, but…” She glanced around her, eyeing the duty nurse carefully. The older man seemed suspicious, as if he’d already had to deal with trouble from Katy before. “I’d really love just to get out of this damned room.”

  “Give me an hour,” he said, sliding off the edge of the bunk and holding up a hand, half a plea to wait, half an oath he was taking. “I’ve got just the place.”

  "But why won't you tell me where we're going?" Katy insisted, following Logan through corridors nearly jammed with ship's crewmen rushing to their jump stations.

  He was preoccupied with the intricacies of weaving through the crowd, but he risked a glance back. She looked out of place in the utility fatigues he’d had fabricated to replace her hospital gown, though he couldn’t say why. The clothes had been easy; talking the Mananna
n Mac Lyr’s chief medical officer into letting him take her out of the sickbay, even for just an hour, had been several degrees more difficult. In the end, Logan had convinced the man it would do her good psychologically to get out of the sterile surroundings of the medical bay for a while. Dr. Severeid knew who his father was, and Logan glumly acknowledged that fact probably had held more sway than his arguments.

  "It's a surprise," he repeated for about the fifth time since he'd led her out of the medical ward. "If I told you, it wouldn't be a surprise."

  He led her through a corridor marked "Authorized Personnel Only," seeing the worried look in her eyes as passing crewman stared at them. At the end of the passageway was a set of double-doors, a red warning light blinking forebodingly on their security lock. Logan tapped a code in on the numeric keypad and the light flashed green, the doors hissing apart automatically. Beyond them was his favorite compartment on the ship… on any ship.

  “Wow,” Katy gasped quietly. “I’ve never been on the Observation Deck of a cruiser before.”

  “Most people haven’t.” He hit the control to shut the hatch behind them and it seemed as if they shut the rest of the universe off as well.

  Nearly every centimeter of any military ship was thickly armored behind centimeters of BiPhase Carbide, nickel iron, honeycomb boron or whatever the builders and buyers could afford, against man-made threats like lasers and railguns as well as more natural dangers such as cosmic rays and solar flares. But there was always the possibility of instrument failure, and in that event, there needed to be somewhere you could physically go out and look at the stars. At least that was the excuse they used; Logan suspected it was a perk Captains and Admirals enjoyed, a place where they could be alone with the stars and shut out everyone else.

  Or, in this case, the perk of the son of the Guardian.

  “Rank hath its privileges,” he expanded, his own voice sounding distracted in his ears.

  The Observation Deck of the Manannan Mac Lyr was a bubble of transparent aluminum positioned just above the forward hangar deck, nothing above it, nothing ahead, nothing at all to block the view. He’d seen the stars from uninhabited planets, with no light pollution to block them out, high in the mountains where the air was thin, and this was still better. You couldn’t find a blank patch of space to stare at; just when you thought you had, your eyes would adjust and there’d be more stars. You’d see what you thought was stark blackness in your peripheral vision and you’d turn and hunt for it, but that would be full of stars, too.

  He almost let himself be hypnotized by the view, let it take his mind out of the present and set it adrift in the universe… and then he felt warmth and pressure against his right side and realized Katy was leaning into him, maybe to keep her balance while she stared at the stars, and maybe not. He looked away from the universe and into her face and couldn’t decide which was more beautiful.

  The whooping of an alarm klaxon snapped him back to reality and started him breathing again. He could see her blue eyes refocusing, looking into his.

  “That’s the jump warning,” she said. “Shouldn’t we get out of here?”

  “That’s why we have the boots,” he told her, clicking the heels of his ship-boots together to activate the magnets in the heels.

  There was just the subtlest hint of connection to the metal deck-plates to let him know they were working; he noted hers were active too, and just in time. His stomach flipped and twisted at the sudden absence of acceleration-as-gravity and only the magnets in his heels were holding him down to the deck. The free fall didn’t seem to bother Katy, but then it wouldn’t; she was a pilot.

  “We’re going to watch the jump from here?” It was half a question, half a hopeful statement. She smiled broadly. “I’ve always had to be strapped into my berth in my cabin.”

  “My father,” Logan said, for once not feeling the little tinge of resentment he usually did when he thought of the side-effects of being the Guardian’s son, “brought me up to the Observation Deck the very first time I went with him and Mom on a starship. I try to get up here once every trip since then.”

  “Prepare for jump in ten,” an automated voice announced over unseen speakers. “Nine, eight…”

  Katy grabbed his hand, squeezing it tight. Her grip was firm, warm, certain. He wanted to meet her eyes, but he felt as if he’d be somehow breaking a spell. He lost track of the countdown, stopped paying attention, so when the jump came, it took him by surprise. Somewhere deep inside the ship, wrapped around the fusion reactor core like some parasitic worm, a giant spiral of superconductive wire was woven into a capacitor larger than most shuttles, larger than some in-system freighters. It took hours to charge, but it discharged in less than a second, venting its energy through the Kadish-Dean field generator, visible as a faint blue halo of Cherenkov radiation at the nose of the ship.

  Space ripped, torn apart at a weak spot, a jump-point mapped out and recorded a thousand years ago, and through that hole, he caught the briefest glimpse of another universe.

  “Oh!” Katy exclaimed, the same way he had the very first time he’d seen it. And then, “Damn!” which he’d also said, and gotten his ear boxed by his mother for swearing.

  And then they were through and the stars reappeared, different stars in the midst of a different system, six light years away from the one they’d just left.

  “It’s…” Katy stumbled over the words. “It was…” He glanced away from the new starfield and saw the consternation on her face. “It’s like I knew it was there, I could see what it was, but I can’t remember it now. It makes no sense.”

  “It’s always that way,” he agreed, trying to sound sympathetic. “But you never get enough of trying.” He laughed softly. “It’s like a drug. You always think the next time is the time you’ll understand, the time you’ll be able to wrap your brain around it. I never get tired of it.”

  The klaxon sounded again, this time warning of the return of thrust, and Logan sighed softly, knowing it was time. One gravity of acceleration returned beneath the faint rumble of the fusion drive igniting, and with it the perception of gravity.

  “I have a meeting with Colonel Anders in a half an hour,” he told Katy. “And Doc Severeid’ll tear me a new one if I don’t get you back soon, anyway.”

  “I understand,” she said, though he could hear just a touch of disappointment in her voice. She let her hand slip out of his, turning back to the hatchway out of the compartment. She paused and looked over her shoulder at him. “Thanks for showing me this.” Her jaw worked, her eyes retreating inward for a moment as if they’d caught a glimpse of an unwelcome memory. “It’s nice to see something beautiful after…”

  “Katy,” he told her, his guts churning as if they’d slipped back into free-fall, “I don’t have to look out the window to see the beauty in here.”

  It was a huge risk and he was probably an idiot to take it. She was still recovering from a horrific experience, she’d had her whole life ripped apart. This wasn’t the time to be…

  She kissed him on the cheek, the corner of her mouth turning up at his obvious insecurity.

  “Come see me on Sparta,” she said, heading for the hatchway. A glance backward at him, those blue eyes he’d seen so cold before suddenly glowing warm. “Promise.”

  She was gone, but he was still nodding.

  “I promise.”

  3

  Argos was a gleaming jewel in the mid-morning light, its bleached white spires painfully dazzling beneath the cloudless sky. Logan Conner slipped on a pair of sunglasses as he clambered out of the car, grabbing his bags out of the back seat and resisting an instinct to pay the driver; the man was an employee of the Guardianship government, sent by his father or, more likely, one of his father’s many aides to pick him up at the spaceport. Tipping him would be seen as an insult.

  He nodded to the short, thick-necked man who’d taken him to the palace, offering a hand through the open driver’s-side window of the limo.


  “Thanks for the ride, Victor,” he said, noting the surprise on the man’s face at Logan remembering his name. It was something his father had taught him, though he was sure the old man did it to engender personal loyalty; he just did it because it made people happy when someone important remembered their name.

  His duffle bag was light, another trick he’d learned long ago, though not from his father. He’d known Colonel Anders since he was a teenager and Anders had been a Captain and a favorite of the Guardian even then. Soldiers traveled light, Anders had told him. Things dragged you down, tied you to one place. He shouldered the bag and began walking up the steps to the palace.

  He heard the chime of his ‘link before he’d taken two steps, and stopped to check the message rather than trying to walk and read because he might wind up blowing past a General and getting an earful. The message “from” label was a stream of random numbers, indicating the ‘link messaging him was unassigned, a free unit picked up at a public terminal.

  It’s Katy. Got orders. On psychological leave for two weeks, pending evaluation. Assigned quarters at Outpatient Center at Naval Medical Center. I hate hospitals.

  He frowned, tucking the ‘link away. He’d answer her later; he didn’t want to stand too long in the middle of the square. It wasn’t busy today; he tried to remember if it was a holiday but nothing came to mind. There were a couple dozen people flowing back and forth, some in civilian clothes but a few in uniform. He eyed them carefully, trying to determine whether he’d have to salute them, but they were NCOs, probably clerks to the brass running their daily errands. A couple of them stopped to salute him and he dutifully returned the motion, fist going to his chest.

  At least none of them recognize me.

  Saluting was part of his job; the bows were not.

  The guards at the front gate knew him, though. They always did. Their ceremonial armor dazzled in the sun and he was glad he hadn’t yet taken off his sunglasses. There was a double line of them, angled in toward the doorway, and if their armor was for show, their weapons were for go. They came to attention as he approached, their rifles going to port arms as their leader brought a fist to his chest, then bowed at the waist.