Of Treasons Born (15 page)

He found
Relentless
easily, stepped through its main personnel hatch, saluted the flag, touched the identity card clipped to his chest, then saluted the young male officer on duty there. Holding the salute he said, “Spacer”—he hesitated as he recalled his new rank—“First Class York Ballin requesting permission to board ship, sir.”

The officer scanned his ID with a small instrument. “Welcome aboard, Mr. Ballin. I'm Lieutenant Crispin. A good gunner is always welcome on
Relentless
. You'll want to report immediately to Lieutenant Mercer.”

York said, “I'll also need to register a personal weapon with the master-at-arms.”

Crispin gave York directions, and a few minutes later he knocked on the hatch to a small office. Mercer turned out to be a tall woman with plain features. “Good to have you aboard, Mr. Ballin. Your record says you're a top-notch gunner. We can use you. Recently promoted to first class, I see. I'll arrange to have your implants installed.”

Seated behind her desk, she gave him an appraising look. “I see you were in a lower-deck crew on
Dauntless
. You're welcome to an upper-deck posting here.”

“No,” York said. “I'd prefer to stay on the lower decks.”

She frowned at that and cocked her head. “As you wish. It doesn't matter to me, as long as you burn feddie incoming.”

She sent him to Chief Stolkov, an older man with a lined face and a crew of eight gunners reporting to him. He introduced York to three of them who happened to be present at the moment, though York felt detached from his surroundings and didn't really catch their names. He stowed his gear and spent a couple of hours checking out his new pod—identified a few maintenance issues and flagged them for review. Then he climbed into his new coffin, said, “Computer, lights out.”

He lay in the dark and thought he could still smell a hint of Sissy. He wiped the side of his cheek with his finger, then touched it to his tongue, tasted the dried remnants of her salty tears, and there was still a trace of that scent she'd worn. As he lay there trying to find sleep, a piece of him knew he would never see her again.

Chapter 15:

Tank Dreams

Shortly after
Relentless
departed Muirendan Prime, York was ordered to report to the senior medical officer. He climbed up several decks to sick bay, and when he checked in, was greeted by a medical corpsman. “Ballin,” the fellow said, looking at a screen at his desk. “Implants, is it?”

No one had told York what to expect, so he said, “I guess so.”

York waited for about an hour, then a female corpsman appeared in the waiting room holding a small terminal. She had brown hair cut chin length, didn't wear any makeup, was a little overweight in an attractive way, and couldn't be more than a year or two older than York. The stencil on her chest read
PLEMIN
. “Ballin,” she announced. York was the only one waiting there, but she said it as if the room was filled with people waiting to be seen and she had to call out his name so he could identify himself.

He stood and towered over her. He'd grown a bit more, which had him standing just a little taller than most men, but he'd also started to fill out in the shoulders.

Plemin led him into a small room where she sat him in a powered medical chair. As she lowered a strange helmet with spiky protrusions over his head, she said, “We cultured an organic polymer to match your DNA. I'm going to punch six holes in your skull and inject the polymer. It's genetically triggered to grow circuits among your synapses. It's all minor outpatient stuff. You won't feel a thing.”

Beyond her statement that he wouldn't feel anything, he didn't understand much of what she said. She adjusted some sort of controls on the helmet, did something at a terminal nearby, then said, “Here we go.”

York braced for some sort of pain as the contraption punched or drilled or bored holes in his head, but she immediately lifted the helmet off his head. “How do you feel, York?”

“What?” he said. “You didn't do anything.”

She grinned and said, “Typical reaction. You've been out for more than an hour. Only takes a couple of minutes for the drilling and injections, but a good hour for the speed healing to take.”

She hustled him out of the chair. He didn't feel weak or sore—or anything.

As she walked him out to the waiting room, she said, “We haven't activated anything yet, need to let the circuitry grow for a bit. Report back here in a tenday and we'll run some initial tests.”

During the next few days, Stolkov put him through some simulated firefights. York scored well and everyone was quite impressed. He tried not to think how much he missed Chunks and Zamekis and all the rest, but he missed Sissy horribly.

After a tenday, they partially activated his implants. Apparently, the circuits still had a little growing to do, and he had to learn how to use them. With a lot of practice, he mastered certain thought sequences that were trigger keys for specific functions, but he quickly learned that the most important was the trigger that shut everything down. Otherwise, he had this constant background din running through his thoughts.

“You'll get used to that,” Plemin said. She smiled at him, and he thought he saw a bit of invitation in the look she gave him. He liked her, and she was pretty, but he could only think of Sissy. So he smiled back at her and kept any flirtatiousness out of the look. Then he turned and left.

York was hoping he'd left the lessons behind, but someone had told Mercer he'd shown an interest in navigation. She was all too happy to help further his education. He now regretted that he'd asked that one simple question of Marko.

During the next year, York fought in several smaller engagements, earned a gunner's chevron here and there. But at the massive battle at Trefallin, which lasted for more than a tenday, he earned six half-chevrons, and by his fifteenth birthday he had eight full chevrons on each arm. Only two crew members outranked him as a gunner: the chief gunner, and an older woman of very slight stature who'd been a gunner for years. Her eyes had a haunted look to them, and York didn't want to outrank her that way.

He and Plemin became lovers, but it didn't mean as much to him as it had with Sissy.
Relentless
hadn't been back for a full refit for more than four years when he joined her crew, and he sometimes wondered if it was he who held back with Plemin, he who kept their relationship more a matter of convenience for both of them. Sometimes she seemed to want to break through that, but when he was with her, he always thought of Sissy.

About a year and a half after York had joined
Relentless
, he got some mail from Cath, the female marine on
Dauntless
.

York:

I'm sorry to have to tell you this. We had a nasty little firefight on a bush-league planet in Aldebaran sector.
Three
took a big shell, went out with all hands. Chunks, Rodma, Sissy, they're all dead. I knew you'd want to know.

Cath

York cried himself to sleep that night, alone in his coffin. A month later, they docked at Cathan Prime.
Relentless
got orders to report to an inner-empire planet
for an indefinite period of time, for repairs and major refitting
. York got orders to report for duty aboard the heavy cruiser
Africa
, outbound for the front lines.

Africa
saw a lot of action and York picked up more gunner's chevrons. About six months after York had joined her crew, they were ordered to rendezvous with the Ninth Imperial Fleet at Sirius Night Star, a cluster of uninhabitable planets and planetoids orbiting a large red dwarf with a mass about half that of a standard solar. The three planets in the system were just large enough to avoid the designation
planetoid
, and the low gravity on each was ideal for heavy maintenance on warships. Over the years, they'd evolved into an important naval base that supplied and repaired ships close to the front lines. But the Federals were amassing a large fleet nearby, so it appeared they wanted to take, or destroy, Sirius Night Star. The Admiralty had tasked the Ninth Fleet with ensuring that that did not happen.

By the time they assembled, the Ninth had a complement of more than a hundred warships, and based on the intelligence at hand her commanders were confident they could repel anything the feddies threw at them. In the first engagement, the Federal forces came in using a classic swift-strike approach, down-transiting­ a few ships to upfeed targeting data to their main force of about eighty ships. York had developed his navigational skills to the point where he could handle any targets allocated to his pod but still follow developments in the overall battle with an occasional glance to a scan summary in the corner of one of his screens. The attacking force was always at a disadvantage, so he thought it foolhardy that the feddies would come at them without overwhelming odds.

He was surprised when
Africa
and twenty other ships were ordered to redeploy to their flank about two hours after the battle began. When York's scan summary updated, he saw the reason: Their intelligence data had been incomplete. The feddies had two additional forces of seventy ships each coming in from opposite sides of the system. York didn't need an officer to tell him that they were badly outnumbered and outflanked, and cut off from any help or reinforcements.

For days, they fought a running battle that the Federals were winning by a tactic of slow attrition, and by the end of the sixth day, York had four more confirmed kills. With an extended lull in the fighting, they held gunner's blood.

York stood silently as the chief cut a new chevron into each of his arms, let the blood run down his arms and drip from his fingertips onto the deck. He now had twelve full chevrons on one arm, twelve and a half on the other, and if the battle continued for another day or two, he'd outrank the chief, would be elevated to chief gunner. But he didn't think they'd last long. From a complement of more than a hundred ships, the Ninth had been whittled down to a count of about twenty operational warships. The festivities at gunner's blood that night were muted.

When York slammed awake in his coffin to the sound of the alert klaxon, his implants told him he'd had only about an hour's sleep. His coffin determined that he needed a little ant-alc, and he felt the pinch in his neck as it gave him the injection. When the coffin cycled open, he hit the deck running with the practiced ease of an experienced gunner.

He heard the thrum of
Africa
's main batteries echoing through her hull even before he had the power up in his pod, a bad sign. As soon as the pod signaled to the central combat computer that it was online, it immediately allocated two targets to him, another bad sign. He deflected one, but by that time he had another allocated, managed to kill one while someone else deflected the other.

The next two hours turned into a frantic scramble, with shell fragments pinging off
Africa
's
hull, the occasional screech of tearing plast and metal as something bigger penetrated her defenses. His implants allowed him to erect virtual screens, so he monitored damage control closely while taking care of his targets. Fear crawled up his gut as one of the power plants went off-line when a big shell hit it. His own power feed redlined, then dropped to 80 percent, finally leveling off at 70 percent.

With limited power, he barely managed to deflect the next target, and the next. Then he had three targets allocated, then four, then—

“Easy there, Spacer.”

York drifted back and forth between oblivion and pain. He tried to focus on the words of the medical corpsman.

“… have to tank you … hospital ship … bad shape …”

He eventually found a strange state of lethargy where nothing mattered. More by reflex than anything else, one of the thought-trigger keys for his implants rolled through his mind, but nothing happened.

He went away for a while to a place with no concept of self, didn't really sleep, but surfaced now and then to a slightly elevated state of consciousness. When that happened, he wondered where he was, and again that thought trigger tried to key his implants. He thought he might have been successful, but then he went away again.

Mathias! Why did that name come to mind?

An older man appeared in front of York in a hazy shimmer of a dream. He was missing a leg and an arm, but somehow he stood on one barely visible ghost of a leg. The man screamed and tore at his own face, then charged, his hands extended to tear at York, one nothing more than a phantom visible by a vague, shimmering outline. York screamed, turned, and ran.

The man returned again and again, and there were others like him, men and women. One of them finally cornered him, a woman he wanted to call Sharfa. In desperation, he fought back as she tore at his eyes, found himself kneeling on her lifeless body pounding on her face, her eyes open and unseeing. The next time Mathias came after him, he did the same to him.

Chapter 16:

Recovery

“Stand by all hands,”
allship blared. “
Down-transition in twenty minutes and counting.”

Commander Valerie Chechkova scanned her fire control console one last time to reassure herself that all was in order. She glanced sideways at Ensign Tomura, who was hunched over his own screens, tense and fearful. He looked her way, and attempting to sound casual and at ease, she said, “Relax.” She gave him a reassuring smile and tried not to let her own fear show. The imperial heavy cruiser
Defiant
, with all hands at battle stations, was about to down-transit blindly into what might be a very hot situation, and she didn't like having an unblooded trainee assisting her at Fire Control.

She glanced down at the outboard scan summary she'd loaded into the corner of one of her screens. Still in transition,
Defiant
's
own scan systems were useless as the ship screamed toward Orion 1341, an unnamed system that had been in enemy hands for two years.

Captain Turcott had five ships under his command. One hour ago, three-tenths light-year out,
Talent's Pride
had down-transited, launched its combat drones, and began broadcasting detailed scan data to the rest of the strike force, all still in transition and driving into 1341's nearspace. In that way, they weren't completely blind while attempting a close approach. But the
Pride
was still too far out to give them any detailed information.

On her screen, she saw the destroyer
Harbinger
down-transit behind them. It started feeding them scan data immediately, and she was relieved to see no sign of enemy activity, so they weren't in imminent danger of taking a torpedo. Now that
Harbinger
was providing better scan data from closer in,
Talent's Pride
up-transited­ to rejoin the strike force.

“Down-transition in ten minutes and counting.”

Captain Turcott's voice spoke softly through Val's implants. “Helm, let's start dumping some of that speed.”

After a series of heavy losses in this quadrant, the feddies had retreated several light-years, withdrawing from quite a few systems in the area. Most of them were much like 1341: no real strategic resources like habitable planets, but as imperial forces moved in to consolidate the new front line, it was a great place for a nasty little ambush.

As a cautionary move, they were coming in on a classic swift-strike approach. At full drive, in excess of two thousand lights, they knew their transition wakes were easily visible and could be targeted by pickets properly positioned along their course. The classic approach should allow the strike force to drive deep into 1341's nearspace with minimum probability of blindly taking warheads. If an enemy vessel threw anything at the strike force, the ship that had down-transited would lock onto the transition launch and provide accurate targeting data to the main force.

Orion 1341? That number sounded oddly familiar, so Val ran a quick search, was surprised at how rapidly results showed on her screen. “Shit!” she said as she read the first entry.

She keyed her implants into the command circuit. “Captain, I just checked, and the last engagement of Sirius Night Star took place in this system.”

“Holy shit!” She recognized the com officer's voice.

“That's a gloomy thought,” Turcott said. “Got to be a lot of ghosts in this system.”

Ensign Tomura leaned toward her and asked, “What's Sirius Night Star?”

“Two years ago,” Val said, “the imperial Ninth Fleet was wiped out at the battle of Sirius Night Star. Not a single imperial spacer came back.”

Tomura's eyes widened and he looked fearfully at his console.

“Down-transition in one minute and counting.”

Val ran her systems through one last pre-combat check, then leaned over and said softly to Tomura, “Remember, while there may be trouble waiting for us, we don't know that for certain, so be very careful to wait for orders from me or the captain before firing on anything.”

He nodded. “Aye, ma'am.”

“Down-transition minus ten seconds and counting, Nine … Eight … Seven … Six … Five … Four … Three … Two … One …”

Val's screens fluttered as the helm-officer said, “Sublight.”

The bridge went silent. Fresh out of transition,
Defiant
was a blind target with only long-range information from
Harbinger
's scans, and no idea of what they'd down-transited into until Scan got them data.

“We're clear to a hundred thousand kilometers and expanding, sir.”

Val let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding, heard others doing the same.

“Thank you,” Turcott said easily. “No surprises then. Now let's see what's on long range. Drones out, Commander. Hold them at the limit of your short-range scan.”

A distant, ghostly clang sounded through the hull of the ship as six drones shot out of their launch bays. “Drones out, sir,” Scan said.

Val's scan summary compressed as the drones shot outward from
Defiant
's
hull and their effective scan baseline broadened. At fifty thousand kilometers, the drones shifted into a complex circular orbit about
Defiant
, and the scan summary compressed even faster.

With one ear tuned to the bridge circuit, Val focused on the main batteries. If they got into a firefight now, it would at least be at a reasonable distance.

“Parasitic demand from the drones is smooth. Response is strong. Clear to one million klicks and expanding.”

“Excellent,” Turcott said happily. “Good job. Hold the drones at fifty thousand klicks. Go to extreme long range and start scanning. I want a full system map soonest.”

Over the next half hour, the tension on the bridge slowly dissipated. And while they remained at battle stations, everyone relaxed a bit. After two hours, they had a full system map, though if there were any feddie hunter-killers running silent, their scans wouldn't spot them, so they still had to move cautiously.

“Captain,” Val's implants said in the com officer's voice. “I'm getting a computer-generated imperial distress signal. It's on an old, out-of-date encryption key, but it appears to be authentic.”

“Computer-generated?” Turcott asked.

“Yes, sir. I've asked the ship's computer to connect me with a live operator, but it says there are none. It's identified itself as
Andor Vincent
, a hospital ship, and it's apparently unescorted.”

“What the hell is an unescorted hospital ship doing out here?”

“Don't know, sir, but I'm accessing its registry details now. Based out of Dumark, it was … Oh my God!”

All the tension that had dissipated from the bridge suddenly returned, and when the com officer again spoke, there was no mistaking the awe in his voice. “It was last assigned to the Ninth Fleet, is listed as having gone out with all hands at Sirius Night Star.”

Defiant
's bridge was silent for several seconds, then Turcott said, “No live crew left?”

“No, sir.”

“Tell the
Vincent
to stand by. We're busy right now. We'll get to it in a couple of days.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Like her fellow crew members, Val's thoughts immediately shifted back to the more important task of ferreting out any possible dangers in the system. But a few seconds later, the com officer spoke again in that awestruck tone. “Captain, the
Vincent
's computer wants to know if we want to take possession of its … patients.”

“Patients?”

“Yes, sir. Apparently, it has more than a hundred critically wounded survivors of Sirius Night Star. The
Vincent
's been running silent and keeping them alive in her medical life-support tanks for the last two years.”

When York awoke, he immediately recognized the trappings of a sick bay ward on a large man-of-war. He assumed he was still on
Africa
, but he felt strangely different. He tried to move, but his muscles didn't respond. Moments later, a medical corpsman walked into the room, looking into a hand terminal and vocalizing into his implants. “Yes, he's awake.”

He stopped beside York's bed and said, “Well, young man, welcome back to the living. How do you feel?”

“I can't move,” York said.

The corpsman shook his head. “Don't worry about that. We've got you on a central nerve block. Don't want you overreacting or seizing after two years in the tanks.”

“Two years?” he asked.

An older man marched into the room wearing an officer's uniform, rank of full commander. “How is he?”

The corpsman looked again at his hand terminal. “Looks pretty good. The regrowth took nicely. Let's turn off the block.”

The older man nodded. “Sounds good. Do it.”

The corpsman did something on his hand terminal, saying, “We're going to bring your nervous system back online slowly. Don't worry about feeling partially numb. That will pass quickly.”

York had been through this once before, but not after being out for two years. He expected to feel the kind of prickly sensation like that when circulation returned to an arm on which he'd slept. His fingertips tingled a little, but over a period of several seconds, he regained the use of his hands and legs without any real discomfort. They helped him sit up, then stand up, and he felt surprisingly strong. He learned they were on the heavy cruiser
Defiant
and that the older man was her senior medical officer, Commander Platkin, and the corpsman was Petty Officer Checkman. The corpsman told him that soon he'd be sent back to a hospital at a large naval base, though no one was quite certain where.

Platkin said, “We're not sure what to do with you, young man.”

They showed York a vid of his naked body and it surprised him. He was more muscular than he remembered.

“You must've filled out,” Platkin said. “Sixteen to eighteen, that's an important growth age. And the
Vincent
kept up your muscular stimulus treatments, so we expect you'll recover rather quickly.”

They asked York hundreds of questions, most of which he couldn't answer. At one point, they read a list of names to him, wanted to know if he recognized any of them. Among them were Mathias and Sharfa, but he cautiously denied ever hearing of them.

“We think some of the tanks failed,” Checkman told him one day while York was exercising in a physical therapy rig. “Some of the older spacers died of trauma that wasn't on their admitting report, so it must have happened after they were tanked, a lot of bruising about the face and shoulders.”

York recalled the visions of beating Mathias and Sharfa to death, and was glad he hadn't admitted to ever hearing of them.

They were quite interested in the dreams he'd had while tanked. He admitted to the nightmares, but didn't tell them about fighting Mathias and Sharfa.

“When we tank someone,” Checkman told him, “we always shut down their implants. But all of you shared similar dreams, so we think there was some sort of leakage going on, something we don't understand yet. We're guessing that's why you had those nightmares.”

York learned that the older spacers in the
Vincent
's tanks had died during that two-year stretch, and that among the younger ones, they were seeing signs of mental instability for which they could find no record of prior symptoms. “It's interesting,” Checkman told him. “The older the spacer, the more instability we see. You were the youngest, and you're the only one who appears to have come out of it mentally unscathed.”

York decided to never speak of his experiences on the
Vincent
. And he swore that he would never allow them to tank him again.

Carson stood in front of the news kiosk on Luna Prime looking through the display window, pretending interest in a vid showing a local sporting event, while really watching the reflection in the window of the people moving back and forth behind him. He spotted his contact across the busy concourse walking his way, couldn't recall the fellow's name, wanted to call him Tolliver, but he wasn't the same young fellow he'd met before, though he appeared cut from the same mold. Again, Carson suspected an attaché of some sort working for someone very high in the Admiralty. And again, there was no question that the fellow was regular navy, not AI.

He stopped next to Carson, pretended to be interested in the same sporting event on the same vid. “Any difficulties?” he asked softly without looking Carson's way.

“The commandant was a little reluctant,” Carson said. “But I pointed out that it would be detrimental to his career to … resist. And the identity codes you gave me ensured his cooperation, though he was actually insulted when I offered him the compensation you provided. I was unable to assuage his bruised sense of duty.”

“Will that be a problem?”

“No, he'll cooperate.”

“Then keep the extra compensation for yourself,” the young man said. “Consider it a bonus. I'm glad to be done with the Ballinov brat.” He turned to leave, and as he did so he dropped a small comp card on the floor beside Carson's shoe. Carson lifted his shoe and stepped on it, hiding it from anyone nearby. He let the fellow disappear in the crowd before reaching down and picking up his payment.

He wandered down the concourse, had a couple of hours to wait before he could board his ship. He found a bar, sat down at a small table with his back to a wall. An attractive young waitress came his way and he ordered a drink. Then he pulled up a small hand terminal and let his curiosity get the best of him. The young fellow had said, “… the Ballinov brat.”

That name sounded familiar, but he couldn't place it, so he ran a quick search. When he got the answer, his heart went cold.