Cauldron of Ghosts (33 page)

Chapter 35

“I still find it hard to believe this is the way people crossed oceans,” said Malissa Vaughn. “For
centuries.
”

Standing next to her at the rail of the
Magellan
’s
observation deck, her husband smiled. The expression managed to combine condescension and uneasiness.

The condescension came in his reply: “Your history’s creaky. Try millennia, dear.
Lots
of millennia.”

The uneasiness came from the fact that Jeffrey Vaughn was now regretting he’d ever come up with this idea for a vacation in the first place. At the time, spending two weeks aboard a recreation of a vessel from ancient history had seemed charming—and the term
seasick
just a historical curiosity.

Unfortunately, he was now discovering that even aboard a huge luxury liner equipped with stabilizers there was no way to evade the fundamental facts of his current existence:

The ship he was on floated directly upon the water, supported by ancient principles of buoyancy rather than modern principles of counter-grav.

The water immediately in question was a tiny, tiny, tiny portion of a very, very, very big ocean.

The latent energy in a planetwide ocean impacted by a planetary atmosphere dwarfed even the energy production and capabilities of modern civilization.

Which meant the ship . . .
jiggled
. Went up and down and side to side and back and forth as it damn well pleased and his stomach was welcome to take the hindmost if it didn’t like it.

“All you all right, dear?”

“I’m fine,” he said. Thereby unconsciously exhibiting another historical phenomenon, the ingrained reluctance of the human male to admit to frailty—a trait which was almost as deep-seated as the reluctance to ask directions from strangers.

“You don’t look fine. You look almost green, in f—”

That was as far as she got before the explosion that ripped a huge tear in the
Magellan
’s hull threw both of them off the deck and into the water. They fell almost thirty meters. Neither one of them was directly killed by the impact, but Jeffrey was knocked unconscious and drowned quickly. Malissa was so dazed that when she came back up to the surface she just swam in a circle. She didn’t even notice that the ship was getting farther and farther away.

But it didn’t get very far. Another explosion staggered the ship, this one at the bow. Within two minutes, the
Magellan
was visibly settling in the water and starting to list to starboard. By then, however, the emergency evacuation procedures were already underway.

In the ancient days when ships like this were the standard form of seagoing vessel, the training for emergency evacuation measures was usually done in a casual and slipshod manner. Typically, a cruise ship setting out on a voyage would have a single drill early on, which consisted of nothing more than lining up the passengers in their designated evacuation areas and then dismissing them almost immediately. No one actually got
into
the lifeboats; indeed, the lifeboats never so much as budged on their davits.

But the
Magellan
was a novelty on Mesa. It was one of the very few floating ships of any size on the whole planet. In fact, it was the first passenger vessel in almost four centuries—and its two predecessors had been much smaller river boats. So, the evacuation drills had been taken quite seriously. They’d had two drills on the cruise already, even though the voyage was still less than half over. And each drill concluded with the passengers and crew getting aboard the escape shuttles. The only thing that wasn’t done that would be in a real emergency was lifting the shuttles out of their cradles and flying to safety. That would have been costly—and the one thing no one in that day and age was worried about was the possibility that simple counter-grav atmospheric craft would malfunction.

So, within a short time a full third of the ship’s complement had been ferried off the
Magellan
and were on their way to the mainland. Another five hundred were loading into more shuttles.

The first shuttle to explode had actually not left the ship yet. It was still resting in its cradle when it disappeared in a fireball that killed everyone already aboard and still loading, as well as every exposed person on the deck for sixty meters on either side. The exact death toll would never be known.

Less than ten seconds later, two of the shuttles already in the air exploded. Five seconds after that, two more shuttles on the ship blew up. The accumulated fatalities already numbered at least a thousand.

Panic-stricken passengers and crew now sought safety inside the ship. Sinking or not, the
Magellan
had sturdy bulkheads. Almost no damage caused by the exploding shuttles had penetrated the interior. The open decks where the shuttles had been berthed, on the other hand, were places of sheer carnage.

Shortly thereafter, just as the surviving members of the crew were starting to bring some order out of the chaos, a third explosion struck the
Magellan.
As well built as she was, the liner had never been designed to handle this sort of damage. It capsized within a minute. The almost stately pace at which the ship had been settling until then turned into something much more rapid and terrifying. The bow plunged beneath the surface and the stern rose up out of the water. Four and a half minutes later, the last few meters of the stern sank below the waves.

Of the 2,744 passengers and 963 crew members aboard, only 855 survived. Three of the shuttles that had managed to lift off the
Magellan
made it to the coast unharmed. That accounted for almost six hundred of the survivors. The rest were rescued after the ship sank, pulled out of the water by rescue craft flying out from the mainland. The first of them arrived forty minutes after the alarm was sent on the heels of the initial explosion. Fortunately, the explosions had spread a lot of floatable debris into the water surrounding the ship, so people who lived long enough to get off the ship had something to hang onto. And since the ship had been sailing in Mesa’s northern subtropical zone, hypothermia had not been a problem.

One of the first people pulled out of the ocean was Malissa Vaughn. Despite being addled by her impact on the water, she was a good swimmer and her natural instincts had kept her afloat. Because the ship had travelled another two hundred meters from where she’d been thrown before the second explosion finally brought it to a halt, she hadn’t been struck by any of the debris produced by the exploding shuttles, either.

She didn’t remember a thing. Her last memory had been of walking onto the deck with her husband. He’d wanted some fresh air.

Between the force and fire of the explosions and the number of people who drowned, very few bodies were recovered. The identities of those killed had to be reconstructed from the ship’s own records—or rather, the records held by its parent company, Voyages Unlimited. The
Magellan
had sunk in ten kilometers of water, so salvaging the ship’s own computers would have been very costly. Why bother, when the parent company held duplicate records in its computers on dry land?

* * *

As soon as the first shuttle blew up, it became obvious to the authorities that the catastrophe which had struck—was still striking—the
Magellan
could not possibly be the result of an accident. Even the explosions on board the ship itself, especially
two
of them, were highly suspect. But given that the vessel’s design and construction were hardly what anyone would have called standard, and given that very few people on Mesa—outside of the officers and crew of the
Magellan
itself—had any experience with floating ships, it was conceivable that some peculiar mishap or set of mishaps had occurred.

Counter-grav shuttles, on the other hand, were about as exotic as boots—and just as reliable. The moment the first shuttle exploded in its cradle, any thought that they might be dealing with an accident went out the window.

The Green Pines incident had occurred only one year before, after all. The possibility—no, the probability—of another terrorist outrage was well established.

Voyages Unlimited (not to mention its insurers) was entirely in favor of adopting a terrorist explanation. You might even say, ecstatically in favor. But their public spokesmen, being practiced professionals, managed to maintain their mournfully solemn expressions throughout.

* * *

“Are you
listening
to this shit, boss?” Skylar Beckert, Director of Domestic Intelligence Analysis for the Mesan Internal Security Directorate, demanded as she burst into Bentley Howell ‘s office. Howell was the MISD’s commanding officer, and as a rule, he didn’t usually react well to uninvited eruptions into his office. Skylar, however, was something of an exception to that rule, even under ordinary conditions—which these assuredly were not—because of how often she and her people had ferreted out the exact information Howell required. Including information which rivals like Fran Selig or Gillian Drescher had had no intention of sharing with MISD.

“Of course I’m listening, Sky!” Howell snapped. He was glaring at the com unit on the corner of his desk. “I missed the first twenty seconds or so, though. Who the fuck is this?”

“They claim they’re the Audubon Ballroom,” Beckert replied. “They’re delivering some kind of ‘manifesto’ . . . and taking credit—if you can call it that—for the
Magellan.
”

“
Bastards!
” Howell hissed. “I
told
Selig and McGillicuddy—”

“Boss, I know that’s who they
claim
to be,” Beckert cautioned, “but I don’t think we can necessarily take that at face value. Some other terrorist organization might be responsible and just trying to deflect the reprisals on someone else.”

“Oh,
right
. . .” Howell’s tone oozed sarcasm. “Just what terrorists are famous for, their shrewdness and sagacity.”

Beckert hid an internal sigh behind an attentive expression. Commissioner Howell’s contempt for all seccies and slaves—and especially for
ex
-slaves—was the one truly dangerous chink in his armor, in her opinion. There were times when it was wiser not to press a point too strongly, however, so she simply walked around the end of his desk until she could see the com image at which he had been glaring when she entered.

That image was of a person sitting at a small table and looking directly at the viewer. The gender of the person couldn’t be determined, thanks to carefully baggy clothing and the fact that his or her face and voice were being electronically shielded, and a corner of her mind wondered why they’d bothered with a visual image at all. Proving the point that there was a real person behind it? The wreckage still settling on the ocean floor had already made
that
clear enough! And despite her own caution to Howell, Beckert could think of very few other organizations which might have had enough sheer gall—or enough raw hatred—to carry out an attack like this on
Mesa
, of all planets.

Whoever the hell they really are, they picked the
wrong
world to try
this
shit on
, she thought grimly.

“—while millions of disenfranchised citizens live in abject poverty,” the speaker was saying. “We can only hope the scavengers on the ocean floor get some sustenance from our blow for freedom. They perform a useful function, unlike the parasites who have the wealth to idle away their time on monstrously expensive and ostentatious luxuries. All such—”

* * *

“—warned. Continue on your present course and—”

The same transmission was being ignored in a hotel room two kilometers away. The Solarian League newscaster was chivvying his crew to assemble their equipment—
now! now! now!
—so they could get to the scene of the disaster and start recording before any of their competitors.

Xavier Conde was not one of the League’s top newscasters, but he was solidly in the second tier. He had many of the prerequisites for the job down cold. He was good-looking, telegenic, as ambitious as Satan and not burdened by an excessive number of scruples.

He was also not especially bright, which might have had something to do with his continued failure to crack into the top tier in his profession. Or perhaps the problem lay more in the fact that he was convinced he
was
extraordinarily intelligent—so he kept coming up with half-baked schemes to prove it. He might have gotten farther if he’d just accepted his limits with equanimity. After all, there were any number of well-known newscasters whom no one had ever suspected of being the sharpest edges around.

Conde and his team had arrived on Mesa a month earlier, to do a special report on the casualties suffered by the planet’s so-called “seccies” in the Green Pines outrage. His thesis—which he genuinely thought to be original—was that terrorists often kill and main “their own” in the course of their fanatical crusades.

Mesa’s Directorate of Culture and Information, needless to say, had been very supportive of the project.

“Come on, people! Let’s
go-go-go!
”

Chapter 36

“So how’s married life treating you?” one of his bunkmates asked Supakrit X. But the newly (re)promoted sergeant gave no answer.

Lying on his own bunk across the narrow aisle, Corporal Bohuslav Hernandez raised his head from his pillow and looked over at the still form of the sergeant. “Treating him pretty good, I’d say. He’s already asleep.”

“I still think he’s nuts,” said the fourth member of the cabin, Corporal Ted Vlachos. He was sitting on the edge of the bunk just above Hernandez. “You wouldn’t catch me sharing a bed with that woman. Tick her off a little too much—
zip
—you’re for the long jump.”

His fellow corporal made no reply, since he couldn’t think of one that wouldn’t be excessively rude. Vlachos should be so lucky. As far as Hernandez was aware, the slob hadn’t had a bedmate in at least six months—even though, being bisexual, he had a wider field than most.

Vlachos was . . . unpleasant. It didn’t help that he snored, bathed no more often than regulations required, chewed his food with his mouth open, made invariably stupid jokes, the list went on and on. How the man had ever made it beyond private was one of the mysteries of the universe.

“Leaving in fifteen seconds,”
came the voice of the
Hali Sowle
’s captain over the com. “
If you haven’t secured yourself by then and something goes wrong, don’t come whining to me.”

Bohuslav grinned. Ganny El, on the other hand . . . There was an old lady with ungracious manners, an abrasive personality, a well-nigh total disrespect for protocol—and a way with fools that was one of the wonders of the universe.

He checked to make sure he was strapped into the bunk, then looked over at Supakrit again. The sergeant, alas, had not secured himself before falling asleep. On the other hand, he looked so placid and boneless that Bohuslav figured he’d probably survive any mishaps that were survivable at all. The odds of that happening were microscopic, anyway.

And here we go.

* * *

The personnel tubes and umbilicals detached. The battered and bedamned looking freighter (whose hyper generator had been
thoroughly
overhauled after its recent maintenance issues, thank you very much) drifted clear of Parmley Station on carefully metered bursts from her maneuvering thrusters.
Hali Sowle
was in no enormous hurry, and it took several minutes for her to gain enough clearance to go to her main fusion-powered reaction thrusters and accelerate away from the station at a sedate twenty gravities’ acceleration. (Ganny El was frugal—some might even have gone so far as to use the term chintzy—with her reactor mass.) At that rate, it took her a leisurely fifty-five seconds to clear the mandatory three hundred-kilometer deep impeller-free safety zone around the station. The two
Turner
-class frigates, the
Gabriel Prosser
and the
Denmark Vesey
, kept pace with her until all three vessels crossed the perimeter and shut down thrusters. Then they rolled slightly as her heavy-lift tractors reached out, locked them up, and settled them into their jury-rigged nests on her flank.

Three more minutes passed as the frigates each locked a personnel tube to the far larger freighter and tested them for pressure and security. The frigates were fully self-contained and self-sufficient starships, of course, but why should their crews stay penned up inside their tiny hulls when much larger open spaces were available (within reason, of course) aboard
Hali Sowle
? Pressure checks satisfactorily completed, each frigate’s CO gave the freighter’s command deck the go ahead. Then—

“That’s that, Parmley. We’re out of here,” Ganny El announced over the com. The
Hali Sowle
’s wedge came up and the freighter leapt instantly to one hundred and seventy gravities. Five minutes later, she was nearly eighty thousand kilometers out, headed for the hyper limit at over five hundred kilometers per second.

* * *

Captain Anton Petersen keyed his control unit and a new set of figures came up on the wallscreen in the conference room. “These are my projections for assembling and training the special units. We need a name for them, by the way. Best way to tank morale I know is to assign someone to a ‘special unit.’ ”

Hugh Arai chuckled. “No kidding. In the BSC, that’s a euphemism for cleaning the toilets.”

Petersen smiled. “It’s got a wider application in the RMN—but none of them bring good cheer to those assigned.”

“Call them the Royal Commandos,” suggested Ruth.

“They’re not anything of the sort!” said Jeremy X scornfully. “These lads and lasses aren’t going to be storming fortresses. Their work will be more along the lines of turning over rocks to see what might be crawling around underneath.”

“That’s sort of what
most
people’s ‘commandos’ do, Jeremy,” Hugh pointed out mildly. “My own stalwart companions of the BSC come to mind. ‘Storm fortresses’?” He shuddered. “That’s what
Marines
are for! Not, mind you,” he continued judiciously, “that these lads are likely to be up to BSC standards any time soon. Take some training, some good doctrine, and a
lot
of experience to get there. So I’ll grant you the ancient and respected title might be just a
tad
premature at this point.”

“Call them the ‘Royal Mousers,’ then,” said Berry.

“That’s preposter—” But the Secretary of War broke off, frowning.

“Kind of like it, myself,” said Hugh.

Ruth sniffed. “Well, of course you do. Currying royal favor, seeing as how if you lose it the consequences are personal and immediate. But I think it’s a little . . . I don’t know. Disrespectful. Well, maybe not
dis
-respectful. Unrespectful?”

“Pfah.” That came from Jeremy, whose frown was clearing away. “Do them good not to be fawned over. Besides, they’re ex-slaves. Easily pleased by the occasional tidbit. All we need is to come up with a snazzy unit logo and they’ll be purring like—”

Hugh winced. “Please don’t say it.”

“—cats. With fresh-caught rodents squirming in their maws.”

Ruth still looked skeptical, but her always-active mind was intrigued. “How about . . . A snarling cat’s head over . . . What? Crossed swords, maybe?”

“Oh, pfui!” protested Berry. “I don’t want them
snarling.
Cat’s head, fine—but it should be the Cheshire cat. Better yet, just its grin before it fades away entirely. Over . . .”

Her eyes got a little criss-crossed, as she pondered the problem. “Rodents petrified, staring up—two on each side. And over the grin . . . Crossed lariats, maybe?”

Classic heraldry was something of a hobby for Petersen, but he managed not to wince at the Queen’s suggestion. The Cheshire cat was fine, and so were the terrified rodents. The crossed lariats, on the other hand, wouldn’t do at all.

Fortunately, tradition was at hand. “For the crest, I recommend going with either a pair of lions—sejant or rampant, either’ll work—or crossed keys. To avoid grumbling from the churches, though, if we opt for the latter we should use a different design than the keys of Saint Peter.”

Everyone stared at him.

“What’s ‘sejant’ and ‘rampant’?” asked Berry.

“The terms aren’t used in
modern
heraldry,” explained Petersen. His tone of voice had a touch of acerbic disdain in it. “Haven’t been used in well over a thousand T-years, in fact . . . except by those of us who really
understand
the importance of tradition. They’re from the classic forms and are based on ancient Norman—that’s an Old Earth language, one of Standard English’s less reputable ancestors. Not that Standard English
has
any reputable ancestors now that I think about it.” He shrugged. “Anyway, ‘sejant’ means sitting on guard, and ‘rampant’ shows the beast upright with paws raised as if it were entering battle.”

Berry made a face. “Seems . . . excessive, for a Cheshire cat. Let’s go with the crossed keys.”

“Done,” said Hugh. “Royal Mousers it is.”

Petersen cleared his throat. “I recommend using Royal Mouser Corps instead. The troops in the unit will start calling themselves ‘mousers’ immediately, but they’ll be disgruntled if they don’t have the dignity of ‘corps’ formally attached to the name.”

Hugh looked at Berry. “Okay with me.”

“Me, too,” she replied. “Jeremy?”

“I rather like it. And now that the folderol is taken care of, exactly how large a corps do you envision, Captain Petersen? And organized how?”

“We’ll start with a force of around four hundred officers and enlisted troops—the size of a small battalion—commanded by a lieutenant colonel. They’ll be divided into four companies of one hundred people, each commanded by a captain. Each company, in turn, will be divided into four platoons of twenty soldiers, commanded by a lieutenant, along with a special platoon of twenty commanded by another captain. That special platoon will consist mostly of intelligence specialists.”

“Seems a little top-heavy,” said Jeremy. “In terms of the officers-to-enlisted ratio, I mean.”

“It is, measured by the standards of combat units.” Petersen shrugged. “But the mission assigned to the Mousers is extremely complicated and will require a lot in the way of individual and small unit initiative. I think it’d be wise to have a heavy cadre of officers and noncoms.”

Jeremy looked at Hugh. “Do you have a problem with that?”

Hugh scratched his jaw. “Well . . . I understand Anton’s reasoning. We don’t use the same grades, but the BSC has a similar organizational structure—and for pretty much the same reason. What bothers me is that Torch’s armed forces are already strapped for officers, especially commissioned ones. This will aggravate the problem some.”

The Secretary of War looked mildly exasperated. “A straight answer please. Yes or no?”

“Yes, yes. I’m just fretting out loud.”

* * *

Walter Imbesi looked out over Erewhon’s capital city of Maytag. From his vantage point on one of the observation decks just a few floors from the very top of the Suds Emporium, he had an excellent view of Whirlpool Gulf and the harbor area. Both of which were causing him to muse on history, at the moment.

Or, more likely, he was musing on history because of the political situation. The landscape below was just a prop, you might say. Imbesi had a strong sense of irony. Once again, the present found reflection in the past.

Most visitors to Erewhon—most of the planet’s own citizens, for that matter—thought Whirlpool Gulf got its name from the maelstroms that formed in its narrow expanse due to the heavy tide. In fact, the name came from the same whimsy that led those ancient gangsters to bestow the name of Maytag on their new capital and call its tallest and most prestigious edifice the Suds. They planned to launder their reputations as well as their money, but couldn’t resist thumbing their nose at the galaxy while they were about it.

He turned his head slightly. “Is either of you a student of ancient history?”

“Not me,” said Sharon Justice.

“Define ‘ancient,’ ” said Yuri Radamacher.

“Anything pre-Diaspora.” Walter took his eyes away from the view and swiveled to face the other occupants of the observation deck. Which was more in the way of a small and luxurious lounge, really, than what most people thought of as a “deck.” The Suds had been designed with an eye in mind for informal and highly discreet conversations. The material lining the walls shielded the room from most methods of spying, and powerful electronic scramblers did for the rest. Visitors were always welcome to bring their own antidetection gear, of course.

“Specifically,” he continued, “the two centuries between the discovery of atmospheric flight and the first interstellar expedition.”

“Christopher Columbus discovered the moon, right?” said Sharon.

Imbesi winced. “I hope that’s a joke. The moon was ‘discovered’ by australopithecines. Columbus’ discoveries happened almost half a millennium before the development of air flight.”

“Hey,
I
thought it was funny.”

Yuri ignored the banter. “I know a fair amount about it. Why?”

“Our situation reminds me of one that existed in that period—and I think we can find a solution to our problem there as well. An inspiration, at least.”

“Explain, please.”

“After the first of the great world wars, two of Europe’s major powers—Russia and Germany—found themselves ostracized by the rest for political reasons. The reasons varied between the two, and certainly aren’t close to anything we face today. But the gist of their problem was quite similar. Russia was a vast country with a lot of space difficult for any foreign power to investigate. It was also a desperately poor country with a great need for technical assistance. Germany was almost the polar opposite: highly advanced, for the time, but a relatively small country with little in the way of privacy. It had also been forced to disarm itself as a result of losing the war.

“So, they cut a deal. The Russians allowed the Germans to set up secret development projects far inside its borders, which they used to build and test weapons. They also engaged in military training. In exchange, the Germans gave the Russians technical assistance and advice in creating a modern officer corps for its own army.”

Yuri was frowning slightly. “I knew the bare bones of that. But as I recall, there are a lot of differences . . .”

Walter made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “Oh, certainly. For starters, the Germans and Russians were deeply suspicious of each other, which”—here came a gleaming smile—“I daresay is not true of any of us.”

He bestowed the gleaming smile on the fourth occupant of the room, Lieutenant Commander Watanapongse. The Mayan intelligence officer who was doubling here as an informal negotiator for Governor Barregos and Admiral Rozsak had been silent so far.

He now broke his silence. In a manner of speaking. He issued a noncommittal grunt. But there was a definite trace of humor there, as well.

“Like all analogies,” Imbesi continued, “you can only push it so far. For one thing, we’re not proposing a formal military alliance and we’re working with three parties instead of two. For another, the issue of maneuvering room for training purposes isn’t really that important. The galaxy’s a lot bigger than a planet. We can find an uninhabitable red giant system somewhere in which to conduct maneuvers.”