Star Risk - 03 The Doublecross Program (5 page)

"Miss Riss," M'chel said. "However, we're not running parades. Please dismiss your men, and have them fall out within the next half hour in patrolling uniform."

"Uh� yes. Miss."

It took an hour before the mercenary force was back on the parade ground. They didn't look nearly as perfect�their field gear, for the most part, looked as if it had just been issued and never worn.

Riss walked down the ranks.

"You� Sergeant. Front and center."

The noncom paled a little but doubled up to her.

"What are the five blocks in a patrol order?"

The man looked blank.

"Pull your team out and move them into the woods in open formation."

"Yes� ma'am."

Ten men and women obeyed, moving as if they'd barely learned their lessons from a book.

Riss watched them trot away.

"General, what's the size of your marksmanship training team?"

"We don't have one."

"Communications training team?"

"We have technicians who could teach, I suppose."

"What about ground-to-air light missile training."

"I'm sure we could assemble some of my experts into a team."

Riss nodded.

"How many hours do your men have in zero-G hand-to-hand?"

"That's an area we haven't been training on."

"How many of your men have an instructor rating from the Alliance, or an equivalent?"

"I don't have that figure handy, I'm afraid."

"Guess, General."

"Maybe a dozen� maybe two dozen."

"How many men are experienced at in-space transfer under hostile conditions?"

"Well, my warriors have been more trained at hands-on, on-planet conventional warfare."

"I see," Riss said. "If you'd step over here, away from your aides?"

The man obeyed.

"Your contract has another month to run," Riss told him. "When it expires, it will not be renewed."

"But� why?"

"This planet needs teachers, not more cannon fodder. General, I'll give you a bit of advice. Mercenarying is primarily either instruction, techies, spaceship crews, or special ops these days. The local lads provide the blood and the charges. People who're good at chucking spears around rate very low on the employment roster. That's all."

"Your troops," von Baldur said smoothly to Prince Barab, "are somewhat lacking in basic intelligence toward the enemy."

Barab looked as if he was about to lose his temper, changed his mind.

"Yes," he said. "That is a criticism that's been leveled before. That was one of the things the recently departed Alliance advisors were intending to help us with. The problem is that the Khelat are instinctive warriors, not particularly respecting the professions of espionage and such.

"I shall continue to have my staff search for any accumulated information about the Shaoki."

Von Baldur made politeness, cut off, as Jasmine came in with a handful of microfiches.

"Anything?"

"Not much," King admitted. "M'chel managed to find some reports about smuggling orbits into various of the Khelat worlds, if you want them."

"Now, what would the Khelat want to worry about�" Friedrich changed his mind. "No. Ship them over. At this point a thin something is better than a fat nothing."

"Colorful," Chas Goodnight said, voice dripping with scorn.

He and Grok stood outside a ramshackle barracks. Behind them were one hundred of the king's body-guards that Goodnight had borrowed, calling the group a "potential teaching aid."

"Aren't they," Grok agreed, without sarcasm, looking at the fifty men in a ragged formation. "The First Commandos, is that correct?"

"That's what they call themselves." Goodnight shook his head. "Are any two of them carrying the same weapon? That'll make resupply interesting.

"Come to think," he said, "are any of them carrying any less than three weapons? Not counting hideouts, sleeve guns, armpit daggers, and shit like that. I guess they need those just to show how baaaaaaad they are. And let's not even talk about their uniforms or strong need for baths."

Grok didn't answer.

"A goddamned disgrace to mercenarying," Chas grumbled. "Every damned unit we've looked at so far is either spit and stupidity or steel-teethed commandos. Disgusting."

"You make a jest," Grok said. "You think soldiering for hire is a calling for a high moral standing?"

Goodnight grunted, having temporarily lost his sense of humor.

The leader of the rabble ambled forward, and threw a most casual greeting that he might have intended as a salute at Charles.

"I am Captain Gorgio Pantakos, and we are at your service."

Quite suddenly, Chas recognized him.

"I remember your name being Dedan a few years back, correct?"

Pantakos jolted.

"No. You are thinking of someone else."

"Right," Goodnight said. "Somebody who got involved in some little war and decided to settle things out by turning a bunch of the local yokels with flamethrowers loose on a medium-sized village. And there wasn't an unfriendly troop within parsecs."

"That wasn't me," Pantakos insisted.

"Yeh, it was," Goodnight said flatly. "As if war wasn't a shitty enough deal. I wanted to have a look at your team� which doesn't seem to have accomplished anything, other than tearing up some bars and terrorizing whores.

"Now I have.

"Even without recognizing you, Dedan, I was pretty sure I was going to terminate your contracts, if I didn't get reasons to change my mind. Of which there don't seem to be any. This poor goddamned cluster's got enough problems without sociopaths who can't hold it under control.

"You and your crew are restricted to barracks, are to be disarmed immediately and transshipped back to whatever sewer the poor goddamned Khelat found you in."

Pantakos/Dedan flushed, and, perhaps thinking he could still intimidate, moved his hand to a heavy service blaster, worn crossdraw.

It was an incorrect response.

Goodnight touched his cheek, went bester. Before Pantakos's hand touched the butt of his blaster, Goodnight had it in his own grip. He twisted, and the bone snapped.

Goodnight came out of bester in time to hear Pantakos yelp in agony.

Goodnight spun him about and kicked him hard in the butt. Pantakos stumbled forward, fell on his face in front of his formation.

One man reached for his gun, froze seeing Grok leveling down on him and the bodyguards unslinging their blast rifles.

"As I have read from ancient Earth, you are a daisy if you do not," the alien growled.

No one moved for a long moment, then the group turned, started back inside.

No one bothered, until Goodnight shouted, to pick up the moaning Pantakos from the dirt.

"What the hell was that about being a daisy?" Goodnight asked.

"I read about some Earth gunman named Doc Earp saying it at a battle called the KO Corral."

"Find a leetle more macho line next time, all right?" Goodnight said.

"I cannot believe," Grok said, without replying to Chas's insult, eyes never leaving the retreating motlies, "that you have just turned moral on me, Chas."

"Sorry," Goodnight said. "I didn't sleep very well last night. I won't disappoint you again."

"I mean no insult, lady," the man in the oil-stained boilersuit said. "But you're evaluating my team's performance?"

Jasmine King could have, possibly should have, lost her temper. Instead, she found it funny.

They were in the cramped, rather littered office in a monstrous hangar, almost full of small patrol ships with various crimps or parts of their skin missing, and women and men with tools bustling about.

"You mean someone who looks like I do can't know anything about technicals?"

Jasmine wore a dark-colored, skintight coverall, slash-cut high boots, and a stylishly small pistol, carried in a shiny rig that matched her outfit.

"Oh, no. Oh, dear no," the stubby man said, coloring. "That'd be dumb thinking, just to start with. What I meant was, well, us techies are generally at the shitty�sorry for the language�end of the stick when it comes to everything. And, uh, you, uh�" his voice trailed off.

"I'm not sure I believe you, Mr. Ells," Jasmine said, grinning. "But I'll accept what you say. For the moment.

"My team, as you might have heard, will be overseeing the freelance military people in the Khelat System. Which includes your Maintenance and Operations Section."

"I hope, to be frank, that you're better than the Khelat," Ells said. "Because they've got the damndest assortment of for-hire idiots soldiering for them that I've ever seen� And then there'll be nobody in other slots where there should be someone."

"Such as?"

"Those half-wits that call themselves commandos just for openers, who shouldn't be allowed a kid's knife, for fear they'll cut themselves."

"They're gone."

Ells eyes rounded.

"That's a good start. Now, what about hiring some pilots? The Khelat, may they be forever blessed, think that all it takes to push a starship around is to be a member of royalty."

"I've seen the scrap heap," King said.

"They can wreck �em faster than we can fix �em, and that's the pure truth."

"That's something we'll have to look at."

"I don't know if we're gonna run out of princes or TAC ships first," Ells said. "By the way, did you notice that the easy way to tell a prince�other than he's got more jewels than anybody�is he generally speaks Alliance instead of Khelat?"

"I've noticed that," Jasmine said. "And wondered why."

"I'm not real sure," Ells said. "But I think it makes them superior to the other swine they're ordering around. And nobody's wising them up to the fact that makes the silly bastards strangers in their own land."

He shook his head.

"I've gone through your people's fiches, and also the maintenance records," King said, changing the subject. "I figure you're putting in, each, about sixty hours per local week. You need more time off."

"Sixty hours is what's on the clock, about right," Ells said. "They get pissy when we bill what we really do."

"That'll change," King said. "From now on, straight time bills� or we can flip you all to salary."

"Salary," the man said in wonderment. "Just like the sojer boys and girls what wear the pretty suits with all the rank. My, my. I'll have to talk to my people."

"Get back to me," King said. "Now, a question, or maybe the start of questions. What's your biggest complaint about the Khelat?"

"Well, they're likable enough. But they're rock stubborn. And, well, I can't say they're lazy. But they seem to have the opinion that some god decided they didn't have to work. Especially not when it comes to manual labor.

"Which is why my team's so damned big. We're supposed to be training them to do their own wrenching, their own electronics design and such� But we're the boys and girls who do the work, most times. And if there's any kind of error, and one of us is anywhere close, it's our fault.

"They're brave enough, I suppose. As long as things are going their way, and then it's fanny bar the door and get out from under the bugout.

"Or so I've been told. I keep myself away from what should be called the front lines. Not that there's been a whole lot of real fighting in the year I've been on this contract."

Jasmine nodded slowly.

"I just wanted to show up, introduce myself, and give you a new indent number for anything you need� And I'm a hell of a system analyst, I should warn you."

"Lady� sorry� I've never padded a contract. At least not yet. Although these Khelat have made me think about it."

"Very well," Friedrich von Baldur said. "We have rid ourselves of the deadwood and figured out, tentatively, who we'll be keeping."

The team had taken up quarters, at least temporarily, in a wing of the Rafar Arms.

"I might add that Jasmine has discovered our contract cuts almost equal what we're charging these Khelat, so that should make them happy.

"It appears that it is now time to show our employers that we have another set of teeth. We should be committing to something a bit spectacular, somewhat lethal, and, needless to say, not purposelessly hazardous.

"And then it shall be time to hire some competent underlings of our own."

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EIGHT � ^ � Target, target, gimme a stinking target," Riss chanted as she scanned the seven lit screens set up in the hotel suite.

"I'm having trouble believing this," King said. "The Khelat have been at war with the Shaoki for at least five generations, so you think they'd keep close tabs on their enemies, right? Wrong. I can't find anything that looks interesting to take out that'll irk the Shaoki and knock the socks off the Khelat that's not based on data at least five E-years old. Even here in the outback, people move their assets around� especially once they've been scoped."

"Lemme see the old stuff," Riss asked.

"Well� up there, screen C� I'll throw this up."

The holo snowed a rather ornate building, block-wide, in the center of a city.

"This is a still of a high-speed run a recon ship made just about five years ago in the Shaoki III system on the fourth world, which is Irdis, the Shaoki capital, over the planet's second city, and military capital, Berfan."

King touched buttons.

"If you look carefully, you can see two antiaircraft sites on the roof� Plus down here, on all four corners, armored lifters on standby, which suggests a possible target of importance."

She keyed another sensor, and the recon's record ran, blurring passage over a very large city with towering buildings.

"The Shaoki build close together," King added as an aside. "Not nearly as much money as the Khelat. Or maybe they're just friendlier.

"That recon ship had a Khelat pilot, but I suspect he was the front man and some for-hire sort was the real driver.

"Two years later, for some unknown reason, they decided to make another pass over Berfan. They used, according to the records, the same approach the previous recon had plotted, and got blown out of the sky for their laziness. If laziness it was."