Guardsmen of Tomorrow (28 page)

“There aren’t that many starships,” she said. “Patrol Headquarters has to know that someone has been running the
Millennium
.”

“Someone has,” Galland said. “Just not you.”

She licked her lips. They were dry, too. “What have I been doing then?”

“Penance, just like you were supposed to. Working dock-side with me.”

“You son of a bitch!” She started across the desk at him, but he caught her by her shoulders.

“Don’t fly off, Roz,” he said. “You don’t dare. Or I’ll report your usage of the
Millennium
. All of it illegal.”

“That’s not true. We’ve done surveys for the Patrol. We’ve gone on assignment-”

“True,” he said. “All of it logged in under the new captain’s name. The only runs that bear your signature are the eleven I asked for.”

“All illegal,” she said.

He shrugged. “All insurance.”

She eased herself out of his grasp. “What about my crew?”

“Loyalty is a two-edged sword, Roz,” Galland said. “They’ll say anything for you.”

“You’d ruin their careers, too?” she asked.

He smiled. “It seems that you already have.”

She clenched her fists and had to walk around the office once to keep herself from flattening him. Asshole. She had been right. She should have trusted her instincts, should have believed in that feeling she had every time he gave her an assignment.

But she had wanted her ship back so badly, she had been willing to believe him.

Willing to become his patsy.

Dammit, this was her fault. She willingly blinded herself so that she could have the command she felt she deserved.

Now she wished she could go back in time. She wouldn’t refight the battle in the Cactus Corridor. She’d done that right. No. She’d report the entire thing to Headquarters when she got back to the base, just like she had planned.

But Admiral Galland had talked her out of it. He had said that he had taken care of the report, and he had told her to keep her information to herself because he thought he could save her command and maybe even give her the
Millennium
.

She remembered seeing the
Millennium
, brand new and sparkling, docked on the base’s secure ring. She had wanted that ship. After the battles she fought, the risks she had taken, the way she had saved her crew and the mission, she felt she had deserved that ship.

And Galland had used those emotions. Used them all.

She made herself focus on the statue of a man on a horse on one of the bookshelves. It was a Remington, from Earth, twentieth century. She knew because Galland had told her. And she had looked it up one afternoon while lounging in her quarters. If the bronze statue was the original, it was priceless. It had once stood in the Oval Office of the White House, back when Ronald Reagan was president, centuries ago.

Had Galland stolen that, too? Or had he bought it?

She didn’t know. Anyone could get rich out here, and still serve in the Patrol.

Getting rich wasn’t illegal. It seemed like very little was any more.

Damn him.

“So,” she said, “you’re even taking the
Millennium
away from me.”

“Roz, you’re the one who proved that full-sized vessels can’t survive intact in the Cactus Corridor. That nebula would be dangerous without the Ba-am-as and their mines. But the fact that the Ba-am-as claim it and defend it, and the Corridor is filled with more debris than the average nebula, make it the most treacherous area of space out here.”

“I’ve flown it,” Roz said.

“And lost a ship doing so.”

“If regulations hadn’t insisted on one: successful completion of a mission and two: crew’s lives above all else, I’d‘ve gotten the damn ship out.” She took a deep breath. “I want the
Millennium
on this mission.”

“No.”

“And since this mission’s off the books, I’m not following regulations.”

“Roz-”

“What are you going to do, Allen?” she said, being as disrespectful to him as he was to her. “Throw the book at me? You can do that already. If you want me to go, and it’s clear you do, you do it my way.”

“See the prototype first,” he said.

“Has the prototype flown any farther than this base?”

“No.”

“Have its weapon systems been tested in real battles, not simulations?”

“No.”

“Has it ever flown in anything other than optimum conditions?”

“No.”

“Then you give me the
Millennium
, or you find someone else to take this little joy ride of yours.”

“I’ll have your ass, Roz.”

She smiled at him. “It seems that you already do, Allen. There’s not a lot more that you can threaten me with. You do it my way, or it’s not going to get done. Or did some other captain wrap a noose around her neck like I did?”

He stared at her for a long time. Then he sighed. “All right,” he said. “You have the
Millennium
.”

“Somehow,” she said, “I’m not overjoyed.”

Roz was even less overjoyed when the
Millennium
hit the Cactus Corridor. The Corridor was the name the Patrol had given one of the larger nebulas in this part of the galaxy and it was, as Galland had said, dangerous even without the mines placed in it by the Ba-am-as.

The Ba-am-as were a possessive race who claimed not only the space around their planet, but the space around their solar system as their territory. That they shared that space with at least seventy-five other sentient species didn’t seem to bother them at all; that among the seventy-five were four-teen that were space-faring only bothered the Ba-am-a“s in that they had to defend themselves.

And they did, against everyone.

To make matters worse, the Ba-am-as were more technologically advanced than the Patrol. It meant that any space-faring ships that went into self-proclaimed Ba-am-as territory had to be warships, and had to have a lot of maneuverability.

The
Millennium
had both, and normally, Roz would have felt all right going into Ba-am-as turf with her ship, but things weren’t normal, The
Millennium
was designed to run with a crew composite of three hundred. It could run well with anything down to two hundred and, theoretically, could function with a skeleton crew of one hundred.

Galland had allowed her the fifty crew members of her choice, promising to reassign all the others and rebuild their careers. She was happy for them-but the problem that she had was that to run the
Millennium
with half her minimal crew composite required her to use her best people-and those were the people she most wanted out of Galland’s clutches.

Her only other choice was to take the prototype which she trusted as much as she trusted Galland. Better to run the Corridor with a tired overworked talented crew in the best ship in the fleet than run it with a new ship and an unfamiliar crew.

Or so she told herself.

If there had been a way to avoid the Corridor, she would have done it. But there wasn’t, at least, not a quick way, according to the maps she had gotten from Galland. She would have interviewed his alien informants herself, but they had conveniently left the base just before she arrived.

She did watch the vids of the interviews and noted that all the pertinent information hadn’t been filmed at all. Some-one had shut off the vids at all the appropriate moments. That meant she couldn’t even reconstruct the blacked-out vids. All she had was Galland’s word, the crazy map, and supposition.

The interviews told her less than Galland had.

The fifth day into the nebula, the computer reported the first minefield.

The Ba-am-as were clever. The mines were impossible to detect, at least with Patrol technology, but the Ba-am-as always issued warnings in the parameter around the field. The warnings always ended with some Ba-am-adian dignitary expressing its wish that no race get hurt in Ba-am-adian territory.

So considerate.

Roz had the computer do a sweep anyway. She had learned, the last time she went through this nebula, that the Ba-am-adian mines appeared on scans as bits of rock.

Her plan was to avoid all rock as she went through.

If the Bd-am-as had changed the configuration of the mines, however, the
Millennium
would get through the nebula by luck alone.

As soon as the announcement came through, Roz went to the bridge. She wasn’t the best pilot on board, not anymore, but she was the most canny. She took the copilot’s chair and served as backup as the ship crawled its way through the minefield.

Fifteen agonizing hours passed. Roz suspected they were nearly out of the field when the first Ba-am-as ship appeared.

Ba-am-as ships were slender and white, looking so light that they seemed to float in space. The Ba-am-as never revealed themselves. Even their announcements came through as audio only, and all attempts to look at their planet were blocked.

Roz always imagined that they looked like their ships, white featherlike creatures without any substance to them at all.

“Message,” said Ethan, her first on this mission.

“What language we got?”

“Bad English,” said Ethan.

It annoyed her that the Ba-am-as had learned the language of the Galactic Alliance, but the Alliance had never even heard the Ba-am-adian language.

Maybe language was just annoying her all around these days.

“All right,” she said. “Tell them to go ahead.”

Although she could probably recite the announcement chapter and verse already.

She still heard it in her dreams.

“Galactic Patrol Vessel,” said the flat androgynous voice that was so obviously computer generated. “You are in Ba-am-adian space. We request that you leave it immediately.”

She had two ways of responding. She had tried the first the last time she had gone through and that had gone very badly. The Ba-am-a’s seemed to have no patience with people who claimed that this part of space could not be owned.

She operated the communications array herself. “Ba-am-adian vessel,” she said.

“We had no idea we were in your space. We’ve been called to an outpost on the other side of the nebula. We request safe passage to tend to our people.”

There was a long silence before she got the response, “There are no Patrol outposts on the other side of the nebula.”

“There is one,” she said. She wondered how far she would have to take this bluff. “I can give you the coordinates if you like.”

She hoped that the Ba-am-as could not read her star charts. If she had to send the information, she’d use the least informative way possible.

“You are already halfway through the nebula,” the Ba-am-as said. “You have guarantee of safe passage to the other side. But you must agree not to return through our space.”

Great. All she was doing was putting off the inevitable. “That would require us to go several light-years out of our way.”

“It is a small requirement to save your lives,” said the metallic Ba-am-adian voice.

Actually that was true. And it put a germ of an idea in her head, an idea she did not have to examine until she got back from Galland’s mystery planet.

“We agree,” she said.

Ethan swore behind her, and she waved him silent. The rest of the bridge crew was staring at her as if she had grown three heads.

“We accept your safe passage through the nebula and for it, we agree not to return this way.”

There was a long silence on the other end. Then the computerized voice said, “We shall hold you and your people to this agreement. Now, follow us and we shall lead you out of the nebula.‘’

“Thank you,” Roz said and ended the communication.

Her bridge crew was still staring at her.

“That Ba-am-as said ‘your’ people,” Ethan said. “You don’t have the right to negotiate something this big for the Alliance.”

“I know,” she said.

“Don’t you know what kind of problems this will create?” Ivy, her pilot, asked.

“I know,” Roz said.

“And you did it anyway?” Ivy asked. “Don’t you know what’s going to happen to you?”

“Nothing that hasn’t happened already,” Roz said. “I need a quick meeting of the senior staff. It’s time you all know what’s going on.”

They frowned and returned to their posts.

She sat back and let Ivy do the hard piloting. But Roz made sure the computer was charting their course, and taking readings of the rocks and debris near the strange twists and turns. Maybe, just maybe, she’d be lucky enough to find a common material in all of that junk.

Maybe she’d discover how to locate a Ba-am-adian mine.

“He’s been tampering with all of our records?” Ethan asked, pacing around the conference desk.

The conference room in the
Millennium
was probably the prettiest room on the ship. On one wall, it had floor-to-ceiling windows open to space, on the others it had hand-painted maps of the known universe-maps which could be covered by screens if someone needed to make a large presentation.

Ethan was a burly man who’d made his way through the ranks on sheer brute force.

It had taken her-and her crew- to show him that he had the intelligence to match that strength.

Now, however, she wished he was small and puny. He was using that strength to knock empty chairs and eventually, he’d knock them clear of their anchors in the floor.

Ivy was huddled beside Roz, looking as if she didn’t want to be there. Three other staff members, petite Gina Fishel who headed security, no-nonsense Belle Curry who ran the medical team, and sturdy Tom O’Neal who led the engineering team, watched Ethan warily. He was expressing the anger all of them felt-Roz was smart enough to know that-but they still weren’t comfortable with the edge of violence that was in all of his movements.

She was. She remembered having the same feeling in Galland’s office.

“Yes,” Roz said patiently. “He tampered with everything.”

“And you trusted him?”

“He was my superior officer,” she said. “We were following regulations.”

Ethan growled and smacked another empty chair. “You should have double-checked on him.”

“Why didn’t you?” she asked, unable to control the impulse.

“Because that was your job.”