Mercenary (32 page)

Meanwhile, we were rendezvousing with the planetoid, decelerating for our landing. A ship the mass of the Sawfish could not land on a true planet; the stress of gee would break it up. But a planetoid like this had so little gee that we would have to anchor our ships to it. The pirates would not dare approach until they got into a solid formation, and by that time we'd have our landing. The pincushion was what it sounded like: a ball of rock with ships sticking out all around like pins, able to fire in every direction.

Enemy approach was almost impossible because of the massed firepower of the anchored ships.

But that cutoff of our supply ship was worrisome indeed. The waging of war in space requires enormous amounts of CT fuel; the drones are especially demanding in that respect, because of their high acceleration. We could finish the battle we were in, but the Fiji fleet would find us virtually dead in space.

Our lifeline had been cut. I couldn't really blame Emerald for this; no one could have predicted the intervention of a third fleet at this time, though it certainly made piratical sense in retrospect. There were sharks out here in the Belt, feeding on each other's wounded carcasses. We were suddenly in trouble, and I didn't like it at all. This was, after all, no practice exercise with rubber knives; our lives were on the line, not to mention our pride. We could be about to suffer the very fate projected for us by the politicians of Jupiter.

I returned to the staff meeting when my uneasy half-hour exile expired. “Have you worked everything out?” I inquired somewhat wryly.

They were serious and somewhat nervous; I picked up the emanations. It was as though they were the members of a jury about to deliver a verdict of guilty, and not easy about it. Strange indeed!

“Sir, we have thrashed this out,” Spirit said, speaking with atypical formality. “We have concluded that our best course is to proffer our surrender to the Solomons' fleet.”

I felt faint. I found my gee-couch and sank into it.

“Please say again?”

“Straight is a halfway decent man,” Spirit continued. “He generally keeps his word, and he's not bloodthirsty. Go to him under flag of truce and present our situation. We could hold out here with the pincushion, leaving the Solomons to meet the Fiji fleet alone. If he will give us safe passage to our supply ship, we will vacate this base, which is the only usable one in this region, and allow him to take it. He will then be able to use the pincushion himself to hold off the Fijis, while we can return to Jupiter, having failed our mission. We'll have to provide him hostages, of course; he can choose among us for them, and ransom us back to Jupiter in due course.”

I found my voice. “How can you recommend such a thing! We aren't even in serious trouble, as long as we hold this rock!”

Mondy spoke. “Sir, we have analyzed this to our satisfaction. We are not set up to withstand an extended siege, which is what we'll face after the Fijis drive the Solomons away. In the end we'll have to capitulate from hunger and power depletion, unless we can get our supplies, and it is much, much better to deal with Straight. We are being realistic. We can save all our lives and equipment this way.”

At the expense of the mission! I looked at each in turn. All of them were serious, yet there was something they were concealing from me. “Now look,” I said. “I'm not going to proffer surrender while you lay a trap! I don't like this notion at all, but I won't deal in dishonor.”

“No trap, sir,” Emerald said. "Commander Repro has made an excellent if unusual case, and we agree.

You must go to Straight with our offer."

Again I looked at them. There was no banter, no nicknaming. I had never seen them, as a group, so nervous yet united. They definitely were not giving up, yet they really did want me to surrender to the pirate.

I had assembled this excellent staff, under Repro's guidance, and Repro himself was the agent here. I trusted his judgment of these officers. They knew better than I did what was required. I could overrule them, for I was the Commander; the final responsibility was mine. But I was reluctant to do that. “You won't explain?” I asked.

“After this crisis passes, sir, we will explain,” Spirit said.

I sighed. “I hope you have not lost your collective wits! All of us will be court-martialed for pusillanimity when we are ransomed back to Jupiter. All of our careers will be finished.”

“But we will suffer no further losses,” Emerald said. “We are thinking not of pride but of the greatest good.”

I turned away, unwilling to believe it. My staff—united in defeat when we had won the first part of the engagement? I had sworn to extirpate piracy from the face of the System; how could they expect me to capitulate? My whole will was toward the destruction of the pirate power—or death in the attempt.

Simple surrender the moment the going got tough? Surrender?! There would not only be a court-martial, there would be a scandal; and I would be the leading witness for the prosecution.

Yet I had to do it. I could not go against their collective judgment without violating my belief in my own talent, and I knew my sister would not betray me. She, like the others, sincerely believed this was the best course. But I was angry and perplexed. This made no sense I could see.

I signaled the Solomons' command cruiser. “Captain Hubris requests clearance for one ship for personal parley.”

There was some dickering with intermediaries, then Straight himself came onscreen. He was dressed informally, as if on vacation; I would not have figured him for either pirate or military commander if I had not encountered him before. “Parley, Captain?”

I was not going to do this thing on the air! “I will come to you under white flag. Just don't shoot my transport vessel out of space.”

He considered briefly. “I'll send a ship to pick you up.”

Smart counter! His own ship would not be booby-trapped. A pirate had to consider pirate devices.

“Agreed.”

I gave the order, so that our gunners would let his ship pass. It turned out to be a mere gunboat, hardly enough to threaten our battleship but surely a terror against farmers on the rock fragments of the Belt. I boarded alone; a bodyguard would have been pointless here.

In due course I arrived at the pirate cruiser. It was elaborate inside but not in the manner of a fighting ship. It was a gambling den with lush carpets and fancy lounges and games of chance of many kinds. It wouldn't be much use in battle, especially not against a competent Navy cruiser. The Solomons were not in as strong a position as it had seemed.

And my staff wanted me to surrender.

I was conducted to the gambler's office. “Parley?” Straight repeated.

I came immediately to the point. “My staff advises me that I must bargain with you on terms of surrender.”

He smiled. “Captain, you pulled a very nice maneuver there with the drones. But we are hardly ready to surrender.”

“Not you. Us.”

An eyebrow elevated. “You—to me?”

“We're low on fuel and ammunition. You have blocked off our resupply ship. The Fiji fleet is approaching. We prefer to surrender to you, rather than be starved out by them. All we ask is safe passage for our ships through your line so they can return to Jupiter without losses.”

He shook his head. “Surely you don't expect me to accept that at face value.”

I grimaced. “I hardly accept it myself. But I trust my staff, and my staff informs me that this is the best way out of an untenable situation. If we do further battle, the Fijis will wipe out our remnants, and that would not be good for either of our fleets.”

“True. But we could separate without fighting. I never sought this battle.”

“If we could trust each other,” I said. “My staff evidently feels we can't.”

Straight shook his head. “There is little honor among pirates. If I lost power, the Solomons would quickly fragment, until some other leader arose, probably after a good deal of violence. And I would lose power if I made a suspicious deal with the Jupiter Navy. I can't retreat; the wolves I face in the Belt are worse than those of the Navy.”

“My staff probably understands that.” I made a gesture of impotence. “So it seems I must surrender. It is not of my choosing or liking. It means the end of my career, and the abrogation of my oath.” I spoke bitterly; how could my staff do this to me?

Straight nodded. “I understand that. I think I would have preferred to finish our battle. You realize we would have to take hostages: you and your leading officers.”

“Yes. And ransom us back to Jupiter.”

“We could use the leverage of the hostages to force complete surrender of your ships.”

“Would such honor as you have permit that?”

It was his turn to grimace. “No. I am regarded as a fool in some quarters. I am a businessman, and my business depends on the validity of my word. Otherwise my wealthy clients would desert me.”

“So it is feasible for us to surrender to you, rather than to another band. I would have preferred some other course.”

He looked at the ceiling. “I remember courting Flush. She was the most beautiful wench in the Belt in those days. I raided her dome and carried her away and raped her that night. Oh, how she fought! I bear the scars of her nails and teeth yet.” He showed his forearm where indeed there were scars.

I looked at him, startled. What had this to do with the subject of surrender?

“My aunt, who never liked me, gave her a blade,” he continued. “But when Flush had it at my throat, she did not use it. And so she was mine, in the pirate fashion, and I have trusted her with my life ever since.”

“She had the knife, but surrendered to you,” I said, not certain I had made the correct connection. He was definitely telling me something important, but I could not yet fathom what.

“And her clan joined mine when they saw she was mine, and they have been loyal throughout. I never raped her again, never had to. Of course, we put out word that she fought me for two years, in the bedroom, until she was gravid with Rue, but that was a matter of protocol, so there was no dishonor on her clan.”

“You seem like a happy family,” I said, somewhat taken aback. This was not the sort of news one gave an enemy.

“As such things go. We honor the tradition.”

I shook my head. “No offense intended, but that tradition is foreign to me.”

“It is best to understand your enemy.” He shrugged. “Give me a little time to ponder your offer. Roulette will entertain you in the interim.”

“I don't gamble,” I said.

“You are gambling now.”

Touché! He smiled as he touched a button on his desk. In a moment his daughter appeared. She wore a bright red blouse and dark red skirt. The combination reminded me of fresh blood and old blood. Yet she was as strikingly beautiful as ever, and though I condemned my masculine foolishness, I knew I wanted her. “Entertain our guest for a while,” Straight told her.

Roulette fired a glance of anger at me but indicated the door. I followed her out, my emotions mixed.

Again, Straight was putting me with his daughter, again against her will. But to what point? He no longer needed to dangle such bait or to evoke my interest in her to protect his situation. There could be no future in our relationship. The situation had already given Straight victory.

She led me to a game room. It was filled with gambling machines of every type. Some were old-fashioned pinballs, a staple for centuries, in which a ball rolled and bounced around in a chamber, causing ascending numeric scores. Others were the historical one-armed bandits, whose windows showed simple designs of fruits and objects; the correct combination resulted in a payoff of coins. Still others were electronic video games, with all manner of trick devices of animation and challenge. We took one that showed two space fleets about to engage in battle. Roulette took one fleet, I the other. The fleets charged each other, under our control, and the dexterity and strategy of the players determined their success.

Sad to say, Roulette tromped me. “You must have been practicing this!” I protested.

“Haven't you?” she asked acerbically.

That stopped me. I was a Naval fleet commander; couldn't I manage my mock fleet adequately? Yet I was here to surrender; perhaps that was answer enough. “The truth is, I am not expert in tactics,” I said.

“It is my position to command the officers who are expert, so that we form an efficient team. I'm really a figurehead,”

She gazed at me with mixed surprise and contempt. “My father's no figurehead! He is our team. He directs the battle. He supervises everything. And he has trained me to do it, too.”

Now I was surprised. “You can direct a fleet in battle—a real fleet, not just a game fleet?”

“I was directing our fleet when our drones met yours.” She grimaced. “You decimated us. Who directed that ploy?”

“Her name is Lieutenant Commander Emerald Sheller. She—”

“She?”

“Yes. She is our strategist, my former wife.”

“You use women in positions of power?”

“Of course. We go by qualification and competence, not sex.”

“Not sex? But you cast her aside when you tired of her.”

“No. The situation separated us. We remain friends.”

Something changed in her. “I'd like to meet her.”

“You will. Your father will surely select her as a hostage.”

“A hostage.” She considered a moment, then turned on me a look of absolute fury as sudden and inexplicable as the one she had made the last time we met. I could read emotions but not always the causes of them. “God, I should kill you now!”

Anyone would have been surprised by this. She was sincere. She did not strike me as emotionally unbalanced, though she was certainly volatile. She believed she had reason to hate me.

So I inquired, as I usually do. “Why?”

She strode off without answer. I followed, covertly admiring her figure and her movements. Intellectually I knew it was ridiculous to desire this fiery creature, eleven years my junior, but intellect was not the motivating force. Straight met us at his office door. “I have decided,” he said. “We shall not accept your surrender.”

“You insist on fighting? It is pointless while the Fijis—”