Starfist FR - 03 - Recoil (17 page)

“This is General Pokoj Vojak,” Mullilee introduced Daly to the stranger, “Haulover’s minister of war.”

“Ensign Daly, I’m pleased to meet you,” Vojak said and extended his hand. Even if his civilian masters weren’t, Vojak was respectful of the Marines. He’d been a major in the Confederation Army, and had experience with Force Recon, so he had an idea of their capabilities.

“General,” Daly said, saluting, then shook the offered hand.

“My army isn’t much, but I’ll offer you every bit of help we can give,” Vojak said.

“Thank you, sir. Once we locate the base of these raiders, we’ll provide you with assistance in dealing with them.”

Before they could say anything more about cooperating, Miner stepped forward, shouldering Vojak aside. “That’s all good and well,” he snarled. “But in the meantime, what are you going to do about this?” He waved a hand at the devastation. Vojak didn’t protest Miner’s treatment and moved away. Daly looked around but didn’t see anything that looked like the entrance to a mine, so he asked, “What were they mining here?”

“Platinum and ru-ruthenium,” Mullilee said. Miner shot him a harsh look.

Daly’s eyebrows went up. “Ruthenium?” He looked around again and saw gouges in the riverbed where the alluvial deposits had been dug out to be shoveled into sluice boxes.

“What did they do, pay for their initial operation with the platinum and use the profits to go after the ruthenium?” Ruthenium was commonly found with platinum. As a necessary metal in the manufacture of Beam interstellar drives, it was an extremely valuable export commodity. Platinum, while a precious metal, wasn’t as valuable on the interstellar export market. It was probably worth more on the domestic market; no matter how far they were removed from the bright lights of high society, women always liked to adorn themselves with sparkly and shiny things.

“Ah, I . . . I th-think so.”

Miner spat onto the alluvial deposit that contained the rare metals. “Johnson had some romantic idea about striking it rich like an old-time gold prospector,” he growled. “He spent all the time he could over four years prowling around, looking for the big strike. Every now and then he found a few nuggets of gold, but never enough to justify a commercial mining operation. Then he found this.” He shook his head. “The son of a bitch knew the value of the ruthenium. He wouldn’t sell out to me when he had the chance. Now look at where it got him.” He looked away. “People know I wanted this mine. Now some of them are going to blame me for what happened here.”

Daly looked at him levelly. “Are you?”

“Allah’s pointed teeth, no!” Miner yelled. “If I was, why would I have taken out two dozen farms and ranches? They don’t do me a damn bit of good. So don’t you think I’m in any way responsible for this, mister!”

They would if you were trying to deflect attention from yourself, Daly thought. He abruptly turned from Miner and Mullilee to direct the two squads in examining the ground surrounding the destroyed mining operation, leaving the locals to stand staring after him. Miner’s chest heaved with deep breaths as he tried to calm himself and bring his fury at this junior officer under control.

The Marines didn’t need to be directed by their officer; the squad leaders knew exactly what they needed to do and already had their Marines doing it. Daly remembered the “dumb question” he’d asked at the preplanning briefing: “This is a twosquad mission. Why does it require an officer?” He now felt every bit like the excess baggage he had feared he’d be. A few minutes later, a raised voice caused Daly to look toward the parked vehicles. He saw Miner angrily talking to the two men who’d been the assigned drivers of the Land Runners loaned to the Marines. He lowered his sleeves and put on his helmet and gloves before briskly walking toward the trio.

“. . . to scrounge whatever odd jobs you can find, because nobody on the board will give you any assistance,” Miner was saying to the two terrified-looking drivers when Daly stepped unseen between the director and the two men. The drivers didn’t say anything, didn’t look like they could say anything. Daly whipped his helmet off in a move that created the impression that he had simply appeared out of nowhere. The helmet removal was a move practiced by Force Recon squad leaders to startle people who needed to be put off balance; the sudden appearance of a disembodied head usually distracted whoever for long enough that the Marine could peel his gloves off, leaving the impression that he’d suddenly appeared exactly as seen.

“Mr. Miner,” Daly said in the voice noncommissioned officers have used to put fear into the hearts of recalcitrant soldiers for as long as there have been armies, “I believe you are threatening these men because they obeyed my orders!”

“I tol—”

“I don’t give a hair off Muhammad’s ass what you told them!

They are civilians. I told you I don’t want or need drivers. Maybe I didn’t make myself clear. Let me do that now. I am not going to put the lives of my Marines in the hands of civilians. I am not going to take civilians into situations where their mere presence might endanger the lives of my Marines. And I am not going to take them into situations where they might get killed!” As he spoke, Daly edged closer to Miner, until his nose was mere centimeters from the other’s face. Now he moved those final centimeters, forcing Miner to lean back off balance.

“Or do you want these men to get killed? Do you want my Marines to get killed? Do you?”

Those last shouted words sent Miner staggering back a step or two.

“You can’t talk to—”

“I can talk to anyone anyway I please when the success of my mission is at issue!” Daly lowered his voice to a tone that implied he had the weight of the entire Confederation of Human Worlds behind it and said, “I will not tolerate anyone placing their own lives or those of my Marines in jeopardy. If you punish these men because I won’t allow you to use them to interfere with my mission, you will have occasion to regret it. Do you understand me, Mr. Miner?”

A step away from Daly, barely within arm’s reach, Miner felt more confident. He drew himself up to his greatest height and shouted, “You’re insubordinate, mister! I’m going to lodge a complaint and have you removed from command here. I have connections, and by the time I’m through with you, you’ll not only lose your commission, you’ll be lucky if you don’t wind up in Darkside!” He began to turn to stalk away, staggered again when Daly stretched to grab his shoulder and yank him back.

“By the time your complaint reaches my superiors and their reply comes back here, my mission will have been completed and my Marines and I will no longer be here. And you will look like a fool, because my superiors will back me.” It looked like Daly merely flicked his fingers, but he did it with enough force to stagger Miner. He turned his back on the furious chairman and said to the drivers, “Let me know if he does anything to you.”

Miner wrapped himself in as much dignity as he could and stalked away, snarling over his shoulder, “You’re done here, mister. You’ll be sorry that you ever crossed me, Ensign!”

The two drivers waited until their boss was no longer looking back, then grinned.

“The son of a bitch deserved a chewing out,” one said.

“But you bought yourself some trouble,” the other added. Daly shook his head. “He doesn’t know what trouble is until he goes up against a few good Marines.”

Before either driver could respond, Daly heard a voice on his helmet comm and raised the helmet to his head to hear.

“Boss, we found something,” Sergeant Williams said. “Look to your eight o’clock. Use your magnifier.”

Daly put on his helmet and looked slightly to the rear of his left through the magnifier screen. He saw Williams waving an arm at him from a couple of hundred meters beyond the razed area. “On my way,” he said. He circled the destroyed area so as not to disturb anything for the constabulary’s forensics people. Two Hundred Meters West of the Johnson Homestead

“What do you have, Sergeant?”

“They traveled by aircraft,” Sergeant Williams said. He pointed at marks on the ground. Daly squatted to get an up close look at one of the faint marks on the hard ground, sighted along them to see how far they went. They were about sixty meters long, traces left by skids rather than by wheels. Toward one end there was blown debris in the kind of pattern thrown out by breaking engines; scorch marks in the other direction were those of thrusters launching an aircraft. The twin skid marks were roughly six meters apart.

“How long is the aircraft?” Daly asked.

“Hard to say,” Williams answered, “but look here.” He led the way to the central area of the skid marks. “The marks are very slightly deeper from here to there, like something sat there for a while.” He used a laser pointer to pick out “here” and “there”; they were almost distinct, about fifteen meters apart. Daly considered the marks for a moment, then asked, “What kind of aircraft is six meters by fifteen?”

Williams shook his head; he’d been wondering the same thing.

“Or it could be wider or narrower, depending on where the skids are under it. And the skids probably aren’t the full length of the aircraft, so it could be twenty meters long or even longer.”

He checked his comp. It didn’t have data on an aircraft with skids six meters apart and fifteen long. “What about footprints?”

he asked.

Williams showed him what his squad had found, which wasn’t much. The alluvial plain was hard enough that it didn’t take footprints very easily. What traces there were seemed to be of smallish feet. “Women, or adolescents?” the squad leader wondered aloud. His squad hadn’t found any prints farther from the homestead than the midpoint of the deeper skid traces, or any beyond a path that indicated whoever made them went directly to the homestead and back again. Nor had they found any that had a high probability of having been made by the missing homesteaders. There weren’t enough prints, or any distinct enough, to make an educated guess as to how many individuals there might have been in the raiding party. For that matter, it was only an assumption that the marks had been made by whoever had destroyed the Johnson homestead, and made seventeen people disappear—but that was a reasonable assumption. Daly got on his comm and called Sergeant Kindy. His squad hadn’t yet found anything to the east of the razed area.

“Keep looking,” Daly ordered. The Marines kept searching, but didn’t find anything else by the time the forensics team finished its work and was ready to return to Sky City.

“We’ll head back now too,” Daly decided. “I want to examine satellite, radar, and any other surveillance data available for this location over the past several days. Then we’ll come back with better equipment to see what more we can learn about these tracks.”

FIFTEEN

Government Center, Confederation of Human Worlds, Fargo, Earth

Every visitor to any government office in Fargo was required first to pass through an ultra-sophisticated biomedical scanning system. The individual was identified by fingerprints and retinal and voice scans which were compared to readings already on file in the vast database maintained on all citizens over the age of twelve. If for some reason that information was not already in the system, as sometimes happened with people born and raised on distant worlds, it joined the billions of others already on file there and the Ministry of Health and Human Services was duly notified and in time the planetary administrator on the unrecorded person’s home world was goosed to do a better job imprinting citizens’ personal data. But the main purpose of the system was for security. Each individual was subjected to several kinds of scans and minute quantities of moisture were collected from the person’s hands when palm prints were taken. This was subjected to instant blood chemistry analysis. Bone and tissue scans determined if a person might be carrying an implant of any kind. Spies with miniaturized transmitting and recording devices had been detected in that way, as well as would-be assassins. In one notorious case, a well-endowed woman carried a powerful bomb embedded in her breasts. It detonated in the screening station, killing her and everyone else within a radius of ten meters.

The woman had been on her way to testify before a congressional committee investigating a well-known criminal organization. After that incident guards did the screening from behind bombproof barriers.

Blood chemistry analysis was done to determine if visitors had any mind-altering drugs in their system that could make them a danger to other persons, or otherwise affect their conduct or embarrass politicians. Wags often joked that none of the members of Congress would ever notice any difference. One of the recent visitors to pass through the system was Jimmy Jasper. He had been admitted with a clean bill of health to visit President Cynthia Chang-Sturdevant. The results of his scans were provided routinely to several government ministries, among them the Ministry of Justice. Office of the Attorney General, Confederation of Human Worlds, Fargo Attorney General Huygens Long sat at his desk, scanning the lab analysis on Jimmy Jasper. “Gobbledegook. What’s it all mean, J.B.?” he asked, waving the report at his chief of forensics, Dr. Hans Jeroboam. J.B. leaned forward and gestured at the report with a long index finger. “He’s on something, AG.”

“Well, what? There’s a question mark in the column where all the other stuff, natural, harmless stuff, is identified. What’s he on?”

“That question mark is there because we don’t know what it is or what it does.” J.B. shrugged and pulled at his short beard.

“It does not match any known substance, natural or manufactured. There is nothing in our formulary like it.”

“Hmmm. Anything else?”

“Look at the MRI. It’s the right-hand column on the sheet.”

Long frowned. “Okay. So what?”

“Enlarged thyroid lobes, AG, that’s what.”

“So? Plenty of people have them. Nothing unusual there. Is there? J.B., stop playing these games with me. Come right out and tell me what you are driving at.”

“We’re getting there, AG,” J.B. said, grinning, “and no, enlarged thyroids are not that unusual. But upon closer examination we determined Jasper’s lobes had been surgically altered. Something was grafted to the gland, AG. Surgically implanted.” J.B. grinned again, as if that explained everything.