Cauldron of Ghosts (10 page)

“Spoken like a true statesman, Willie,” said Honor. Nimitz issued a noise that seemed approving. So did Ariel.

Samantha just nodded once, in the gesture the ’cats had learned from humans centuries ago.

* * *

“The meeting with the Empress went pretty well, I think,” said Victor later that night over dinner, in response to a question from Cathy. “Hard to be sure, of course. Nobody in that room got where they are by being easy to read.”

Cathy cocked her head. “Then . . . why do you seem a bit apprehensive?”

Startled, Cachat looked up from his plate. “I do?”

“Tense as a drum,” said Anton. “It’s pretty hard to miss, especially coming from you.”

“Oh. That.” Victor had barely touched his food. Now, he laid down his utensils. Much as a medieval knight on a battlefield might lay down his sword and shield as he conceded defeat.

“I wasn’t actually thinking about that at all,” he said. He glanced at his watch. “We sent the courier to Torch five days ago, right after we arrived here. It should have arrived at Beacon by now.”

Anton sucked his teeth. “Carrying your message to Thandi letting her know that, hey guess what, you’re now on Manticore. Having not stopped at Torch on your way to Haven.”

Cathy looked back and forth between the two men. “Do you think she’ll be upset with you, Victor?”

“Is Uranium 235 fissile material?” mused Anton.

“She’s going to kill me,” foresaw Victor.

Chapter 10

Thandi Palane glowered at the figures on the computer screen. She was trying to fit a round peg into a square hole: make a too-skeletal logistics network support the number of combat units she wanted for Torch’s military. Palane believed in a teeth-to-tail ratio that belonged to a tiger rather than a tadpole, but the tadpole was fighting back pretty fiercely.

Her mood wasn’t helped by the fact that the person sitting next to her, Captain Anton Petersen, had told her so. Several times, in fact, albeit politely. He had far more experience than Thandi did with these sorts of problems. Her own experience as a company grade Solarian Marine officer had been heavily concentrated in combat operations. Logistics on the level with which she was now trying to grapple had been something she left to others.

Her experience was short in other areas, as well. So, very soon after Torch was founded, Thandi had put in a request to both Manticore and Haven for training missions to be sent to provide her with advice and assistance.

Both star nations had agreed, although it had taken Haven a while to put their own mission together. Petersen and his aides, on the other hand, had arrived within two months. He was an officer in the Royal Manticoran Navy who’d compiled an impressive record in command of two destroyers and the light cruiser HMS
Impulse
before he’d been badly wounded. During his regeneration and physical rehab he’d moved over to the staff side and discovered he was even better at that than at commanding a Queen’s ship. His superiors had thought so, as well, and he’d been working directly for its First Space Lord, Sir Thomas Caparelli, before his sudden transfer to Torch.

Anton had now been with her for more than a year, and he’d been invaluable. Although he was still technically nothing more than an “adviser,” he was one of Palane’s handful of chief subordinates and for all practical purposes he was in charge of Torch’s navy. Even the Havenites got along well with him, after they arrived.

None of which improved her disposition at the moment, however.
I-told-you-so
may be a fine fellow but he’s still not likely to be welcomed with open arms when he tells you so.

There was a buzz at the door to Thandi Palane’s office. “Open,” she said.

Colonel Shai-gwun Metterling came in. “A courier just arrived from Manticore. It seems—ah . . .”

Hearing the hesitation and trace of trepidation in her aide’s voice—Shai-gwun was normally a sanguine fellow—Thandi looked up immediately. “What is it?”

“Well. It turns out Special Officer Cachat and Anton Zilwicki went to Manticore from Haven instead of, ah, as we thought they would—Cachat would, anyway—returning here.”

Thandi stared at him for a couple of seconds. Then said: “He’s a dead man walking.”

Metterling opened his mouth; closed it. Advising his commanding officer on matters of the heart went farther outside his military occupation specialty than—than—

He couldn’t think of an appropriate comparison. Composing an opera, maybe?

“Dead,” Thandi repeated. Abruptly she rose from her seat. “Don’t let that courier ship so much as shift a kilometer out of its orbit. I’ll be taking it to Manticore. Anton, hold down the fort for me.”

“Yes, General Palane. When do you expect to return?”

But she was already brushing past him and out the door. Moving like one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Death, to be specific. Famine, Pestilence and War would be straggling far behind.

* * *

Although he wasn’t willing to insert himself into a domestic quarrel between Palane and Cachat—talk about Scylla and Charybdis!—Captain Petersen didn’t feel he could in good conscience say nothing to anyone about his superior officer’s plans. She was so riled up she seemed oblivious to the fact that she was about to go AWOL. That was bad enough if you were a rating. If you were the commanding officer of the entire military . . .

He put in a call to Hugh Arai. In doing so, he was going completely out of channels, since Arai had no official position in either Torch’s military or government. Torch had never gotten around to adopting a formal definition of a monarch’s consort.

In the real world, however, he was the right person to contact. Arai was privy to all the plans and discussions of the “inner circle,” people listened to him, and Petersen had a great deal of confidence in his judgment.

In the event, the captain’s concerns proved overblown. As furious as she was, by the time Thandi got to her apartment—that took fifteen minutes—and packed her bag—that took three minutes—she’d calmed down enough to realize she couldn’t simply commandeer a courier vessel and head off to Manticore.

So, she put in a call to Petersen. “Sorry, Anton. I . . . sort of lost my temper, there. Cancel the hold on the courier. I’ll be back within the hour.”

But by then, Petersen had already alerted Arai and the consort-in-fact-if-not-in-name had informed his monarch and bed partner. He’d also given her his advice and, as she usually did, Berry accepted it.

She called Thandi at her apartment—not more than thirty seconds after Palane had broken off her call to Captain Petersen. The conversation that ensued was the last thing Thandi had expected.

“What can I do for you, Your Majesty?”

“Since when do you call me ‘Your Majesty’? I’ve got great news, Thandi! It turns out that Daddy and Victor wound up on Manticore. Imagine that! So I’ve decided to kill two birds with one stone. Well, I guess that’s a silly way to put it, but the point is that I want to combine seeing Daddy again with an official state visit to the Star Empire. I started to give the orders myself but then I realized that was probably inappropriate and you should do it instead. So tell the captain of the
Pottawatomie Creek
to get ready to leave for Manticore as soon as possible. Oh, and you need to pack a bag. I want you to come with me. Captain Petersen can manage things and you’ll want to see Victor anyway. I’m bringing Web and Jeremy too. Hugh will stay here and hold the fort while we’re gone.”

Thandi stared at the image of the young woman on the screen. Her brain seemed to have taken flight like a startled bird and was flapping around aimlessly.

She heard someone’s voice behind Berry but couldn’t make out the words. Then, another voice, but she couldn’t understand what it was saying either.

“What do you mean you can’t do that?” said Berry, looking over her shoulder.

Voices-talking-but-the-words-were-not-comprehensible.

“Oh, that’s ridiculous, Hugh!” said Berry. “God, I detest stupid formalities.”

Voices-talking-but-the-words-were-not-comprehensible.

“The so-called ‘integrity of government’ can kiss my sweet royal ass. Call Web. Tell him to make you a member of the Cabinet.”

Voices-talking-but-the-words-were-not-comprehensible.

“How should I know which cabinet post, Jeremy? Who cares, anyway?” She looked back at Thandi, her expression that of someone sharing the absurdity of the world’s workings with a close friend. “Can you believe this crap?”

Berry looked back over her shoulder and said: “Make him the cabinet member in charge when the queen and prime minister are out of the system. Call it the . . . Hell, I don’t know. The Department of the Posterior.”

Voices-talking-but-the-words-were-not-comprehensible.

Berry’s lips tightened. “Is that so?” She looked back at Thandi. “Time to take off the royal gloves.” Then, looked back over her shoulder again.

“The law says I can order one person exiled every year, right? Totally at my discretion? No appeals, no arguments, no ifs, ands or buts. I am correct, am I not?”

Voices-talking-but-the-words-were-not-comprehensible.
But given the brevity of the speech it had to have been a three word response:
Yes, Your Majesty
.

Berry looked triumphant. “Fine. Spread the word far and wide—have it announced on all the news stations; hire people to shout it from the rooftops—that the first jackass who questions Hugh’s right to run the show while we’re gone is immediately exiled. How’s that? Are we satisfied now, Mister Galaxy’s-Worst-Terrorist-Turned-OCD-Protocol-Fussbudget? How about you, Doctor Anal-Retentive-Former-Coldblooded-Commando?”

She turned back to Thandi. “How soon can you get here?”

Thandi’s brain came to roost where it belonged.

“About half an hour.”

* * *

By the time Thandi got there, Ruth Winton had decided to come along also.

More precisely, the princess had announced her decision to join the party headed for Manticore but various objections were raised, centered on the fact that with Anton Zilwicki gone the princess was needed to oversee Torch’s intelligence community. Said objections were overruled by Berry in a peremptory manner on the grounds that a traveling monarch needed a companion and if anybody didn’t like it see aforementioned provisions for summary exile and since when was intelligence a community anyway?

“
L’état, c’est toi,”
Hugh muttered.

“What was that wisecrack?” demanded Berry.

“ ’Twasn’t a wisecrack but the now-revealed godawful truth,” said Jeremy X. He started singing the verses of
La Marseillaise.

Under his breath.

Chapter 11

“Does she
ever
stop griping and grousing?” asked Colonel Donald Toussaint. His tone of voice was relaxed, though, and he was smiling rather than frowning. Apparently, he’d already been briefed on the . . . distinctive personality and behavior of the
Hali Sowle
’s captain.

“Ganny?” Commander Loren Damewood shook his head but didn’t look up from the console he was monitoring. “Not that I’ve ever noticed. But I might have missed a stretch where she was quiet, here or there, if I was preoccupied with something. After a while you just tune it out. It’s like living by the ocean—before too long, you don’t hear the surf unless you think about it.”

Another burst came over the com.
“—the fuck designed this stupid software, anyway? For Christ’s sake, I could chew some raw silicon—don’t think I couldn’t!—and spit out a better program than this miserable misbegotten—”

Donald tuned it out and swiveled his seat in order to bring his three immediate subordinates into sight.

He had to fight down a grin.
This must be what the historical novels mean by “a motley crew.”

On the left, looking like a misplaced piece of heavy equipment that someone as a prank had made to resemble a human being was Major Arkaitz Ali bin Muhammad. He was even bigger and squatter than Donald himself.

The major had formerly gone by the monicker of Arkaitz X. When he joined the Torch military he dropped the “X” and, as was the usual custom, adopted as a new surname the identity of some historical leader of anti-slavery revolts or protests. In his case, the name of the man who’d led the great Zanj Rebellion against the Abbasid Caliphate more than two millennia earlier.

On the right stood a woman whose membership in the human race was evident at a glance. That was Lieutenant Colonel Ayibongwinkosi Kabweza, Donald’s second-in-command. Insofar as this motley crew had a normal human member, it was Kabweza. She was the descendant in the matrilineal line of a slave freed a century earlier by a Beowulfan cruiser, but the ensuing four generations had brought the usual genetic blending. There were still traces of her maternal ancestor’s largely Mfecane heritage, but she looked more like a native of Terra’s great archipelago in southeast Asia than anything else.

Then, there was the person in the middle. Major Anichka Sydorenko. As was the case with Kabweza, Major Sydorenko’s membership in the human race was self-evident, as was her gender. As was true of almost all former Scrag females, she was tall, blonde, blue-eyed, erect of posture and generally majestic in appearance.

Although it was encouraged, it was not a legal requirement that former Ballroom members or former Scrags who joined the military had to abandon the “X” appellation or the Scrag habit of having no surname at all. But Torch’s Secretary of War insisted that anyone who desired to rise above the rank of noncommissioned officer did have to do so. When it was pointed out (by zealous news commentators as well as disgruntled comrades) that the Secretary of War himself had not followed suit, Jeremy X argued that maintaining his established identity was essential to demonstrating civilian control of the military.

And if that argument didn’t make any sense, so be it. Jeremy X he remained. Most people were pretty sure that the real reason was to quietly reassure the Ballroom that while he had formally resigned his membership he hadn’t abandoned them. Not in the least.

Donald gave the two majors no more than a passing glance, however. He was mostly concerned with Lieutenant Colonel Kabweza. Until he’d arrived there a week earlier, Kabweza had been the commander of the Torch forces at Parmley Station. Furthermore, she had a real military background.

The fact that Donald had enlisted in the military was mostly a legal formality. What he really was, official rank be damned, was the Torch analog of the ancient position of
commissar
and its modern equivalent, the post of People’s Commissioner favored by the former Havenite regime of Rob Pierre and Oscar Saint-Just.

The analogy was only a rough one. The original post of commissar had been created during the Russian Revolution because the Bolshevik regime didn’t trust many of the former Tsarist officers who formed the backbone of its military cadre during the civil war that followed. The task of the commissars was to oversee the political reliability of the officers who directly led the armed forces in combat.

Reliability wasn’t the issue here. Nobody thought that Torch’s military was in any way politically suspect. A high percentage of the soldiers and officers were former members of the Audubon Ballroom, for one thing. For another, whatever political disagreements and policy disputes might exist among the military cadre, none of the officers—commissioned or noncommissioned—had their origins in the overthrown Manpower regime. And finally, there was not the proverbial cold chance in hell that any member of Torch’s armed forces—officer, noncom, green private just joined yesterday,
anybody
—would defect and switch sides, which the Bolsheviks and Havenites had had to worry about.

There were some real advantages to having an enemy as blatantly committed to chattel slavery as Mesa and Manpower.
Why don’t you come over to our side so we can put you in shackles and keep you there for the rest of your life—oh, and that of all your descendants too
—is about the worst recruiting pitch ever devised.

In a sense, the problem Torch faced was the exact opposite. The reason that Jeremy X had decided he needed a layer of officers like Donald (X-now-Toussaint) was not to ride herd on the officers. They were not so much overseers in the traditional manner of commissars as they were negotiators and facilitators whose main job was to ensure that the
enlisted
ranks didn’t rupture military discipline and protocol.

Depending on the armed service in question, former members of the Ballroom constituted anywhere between twenty percent and forty percent of the enlisted personnel. And at least that high a percentage was made up of people who were heavily influenced by the Ballroom and its attitudes.

But the Ballroom had provided less than half that percentage of the officers.

The reason was obvious and nobody thought it was due to political discrimination. Not with Jeremy X himself as the Secretary of War! The problem was simply that the training and experience of Ballroom activists, while it had certainly exposed them to combat, had little in common with the skills and experience needed by officers of a regular military force.

The potential for clashes between officers and the ranks was clear, therefore. Jeremy had decided the best way to deal with it—forestall it where possible; diffuse it where necessary; squash it outright as a last resort—was to place some of the Ballroom’s most prominent and respected leaders in the top ranks of the field grade officers.

So, in the here and now that Donald was dealing with, he was officially in charge of all Torch forces assigned to Parmley Station and whatever missions might be dispatched from there. But he knew and she knew and anyone except outright dimwits knew perfectly well that Lieutenant Colonel Kabweza would be leading any of the ground forces that actually went into combat. Just as everyone knew that Lieutenant Commander Jerome Llewellyn was the person who’d really be in charge of the two frigates which had been assigned to the Parmley Station task force whenever they went into action.

Frigates were simply too small and fragile to have any significant role in modern naval combat. The roles the frigate had once filled were now filled by destroyers in any navy which aspired to be anything more than a system-defense force, and even destroyers were experiencing a steady upward creep in size and tonnage. There was still a role for small warships—indeed, a larger one than they had played in the better part of a century—but that role was played by LACs, not frigates, thanks to the revolution in warship technology which had come out of the Havenite Wars, especially where LACs were concerned. Unlike true starships, which were required to sacrifice considerable amounts of their internal mass to the hyper generator and alpha nodes which made hyper-flight practical, LACs were pure sub-light vessels. They could use all of that mass for the additional weapons, better armor, more point defense, and
much
stronger sidewalls which were now possible, and that made them far more effective in combat. They were also more survivable and, assuming equivalent levels of technology in their construction, cost less than a frigate.

But the LAC did have one great weakness, because it
was
a sub-light warship, unable to deploy across interstellar distances on its own. It was well suited to system defense, but to project power, it required a LAC carrier, and
CLAC
s were very, very expensive.

Up until very recently, Torch’s tiny navy consisted entirely of the fifteen frigates built for it by the Hauptman Cartel: seven of the
John Brown
class and eight of the newer
Nat Turner
class. The
John Brown
class were modernized conventional frigates while the
Nat Turner
class were the more fancy hyper-capable
Shrike
equivalents.

That situation had changed radically when Luiz Rozsak handed Torch the heavy cruiser
Spartacus
and all the other captured warships which had surrendered to him after the Battle of Torch, but that gift—magnificent though it had been—was something of a problem in its own right. The primary reasons the Royal Torch Navy had consisted solely of frigates prior to the battle were fairly straightforward. First, they were the cheapest hyper-capable ships Torch could afford, and even that had been possible only because of the Hauptman Cartel’s generosity. Second, (and even more importantly), they made ideal training platforms.

Because of the nature of Manpower’s genetic slavery, there were very few ex-slaves who had any experience with the complex requirements of operating starships—of any kind, much less warships. There were no more than a handful who had any experience with operating the sort of huge warships—battlecruisers, dreadnoughts and superdreadnoughts—which completely dominated modern warfare. And none of those had any experience in command positions. The few ex-slaves who did have naval experience had mostly been marines. And those who hadn’t been marines had almost all been simple ratings. Volunteers from Beowulf and Manticore, where liberated slaves and the children of liberated slaves had enlisted in the military with ferocious patriotism, had supplied a small core of highly experienced and highly proficient officers, but that supply could be stretched only so far. It could have been exhausted very quickly, indeed, in manning heavy hyper-capable combatants, so what would be the point of equipping Torch’s navy with capital ships? Even if they could have afforded such craft, they didn’t have the personnel to staff and operate them.

Most poor one-planet star nations, faced with the same reality, abandoned any idea of having a navy at all. At least, beyond whatever token force the existing regime decided was necessary for its own self-esteem. That varied quite a bit. The general pattern was that nations with a reasonably democratic political structure only maintained what pre-space travel people would have called a “coast guard.” Nations which labored under autocratic regimes, on the other hand, sometimes devoted a preposterous share of the public wealth to supporting naval forces that were still much too puny to do any good in an actual war, but made the local despots feel good about themselves. These were the sort of despots who invariably paraded around in fancy military uniforms festooned with a chestful of medals and decorations.

As it happened, though, Torch’s immense pharmaceutical potential gave its new government good reason to believe that it wouldn’t take more than a few years before it
could
afford a real navy. Still a rather small one, granted, but a navy that would be powerful enough to deal with the sort of recent raiding expedition that would have destroyed Torch had not Luiz Rozsak and his Mayan forces stood in the way. And, thanks to Rozsak, they had a very substantial core around which that sort of navy could be built. But before they could make proper use of those ships, they had to train not simply the officers to command them but the crews to
man
them, and for that the
Nat Turner
-class frigates were ideal. Too small and feeble to survive a modern space battle, frigates were still big enough and had the FTL capability to provide Torch’s fledgling navy with the experience it needed to train its officers and ratings.

And, truth be told, there were frigates . . . and then there were
frigates,
and the
Nat Turners
were significantly more dangerous than most people might have expected. Effectively, they were hyper-capable versions of the Royal Manticoran Navy’s
Shrike
-class LAC but with about twice the missile capacity and a
pair
of spinal-mounted grasers, with the second energy weapon bearing aft. Their electronics were a downgraded “export version” of the RMN’s (which was hardly surprising, given the fact that they’d been going to be operating in an area where the Republic of Haven’s intelligence services had ready access and no one in the galaxy had dreamed Haven and Manticore might end up
allies
), but the
Turners
were probably at least as dangerous as the vast majority of the galaxy’s destroyers. They were, in fact, considerably more modern and up-to-date fighting ships than the ex-State Security ships which had been handed over to Torch, and they would have eaten most navies’ destroyers for lunch in a stand-up fight. The new ships were earmarked for substantial upgrading courtesy of Haven, but until that process had been completed, the
Turners
were much better training platforms
and
combat units in almost every respect.

On the other hand, training could only go so far against simulated enemies. At some point, the frigates and their crews had to be tempered in real combat.

The trick, obviously, was to pick the right enemy—and for
that
purpose, Manpower’s far-flung slave-trading empire was ideal. There were any number of outposts and depots scattered throughout the human-occupied galaxy that would provide Torch’s adolescent navy with opponents tough enough to test it but weak enough to be defeated if the navy handled itself properly.