Starship Alexander (17 page)

Hammett looked him over. "I had you pegged as ex-military, Mr. Crabtree."

Crabtree nodded. "Twenty years in uniform," he said proudly.

"Were you by any chance a marine?"

Crabtree grinned. "Not every Navy man is as quick on the uptake as you, Sir. I started out as a jar, and then ten years as a sergeant. My last two years I was a master sergeant."

"I've known some marines in my time," Hammett said. "They were tough men, every one of them. They lived in fear of their master sergeants, though."

Crabtree nodded, accepting the compliment as his due. "Begging your pardon, Captain, but I was hoping to talk to Lieutenant DiMarco about the laser batteries. I've had some experience with manual aiming on personnel carriers."

"You'll find him in the missile bay," Hammett said. "In the meantime, how would you like to be my Chief of Marines?"

Crabtree's eyebrows rose.

"You will also be my only marine, until you do some recruiting. We won't be taking a Gate home. That means about another four weeks in deep space. It may be necessary to put a guard on the food supplies."

"I'll put together a plan straightaway, sir." Crabtree saluted and hurried out.

"I like him," said Carruthers.

Hammett grunted. "I'm certainly glad he's on our side."

Carruthers chuckled. Then his expression grew serious. "I didn't like that Hornbeck fellow so much." He shrugged. "Still, do you think he might be right? Maybe we should rush the Gate. Fight our way through, and get home. If there's only a handful of ships …"

"And maybe there's a whole fleet tucked in behind the Gate, or sitting on the surface of the planet." Hammett shook his head. "No, a nuke gives us our highest probability of stopping them. It makes for a long flight home, but we can't take a chance on leaving them a Gate."

Carruthers nodded.

"We can get into firing range," Hammett said. "I'm pretty sure we can take out the Gate. After that, the only trick will be getting away."

Pain.

For a time it was all Dalton Hornbeck knew. It was centered in his stomach, but it seemed to fill his whole body. Every breath was an agonized labor. He knelt in the corridor, the top of his head touching a bulkhead, wondering with each breath if he would be able to inhale again. It grew easier, but it still hurt.

As the worst of the pain passed a hot fury rose to take its place. It wasn't just the pain that stung him. It was the humiliation, and his utter impotence. He was nothing aboard the
Alexander
. Him, Dalton Hornbeck, the most powerful man in Deirdre. He had less authority than a cadet on this miserable tub.

He heaved himself to his feet and leaned against the bulkhead, holding his stomach. The casual, uncaring brutality of Crabtree's attack had rattled him deeply.
This
, he thought, fighting the agony in his midsection as he forced himself to stand upright.
This is why military forces need civilian oversight.

He set off down the corridor, moving at a slow shuffle.
I'm a civilized man surrounded by barbarians. I'm the voice of reason – which they desperately need – and they won't listen.

He would go back to his quarters, he decided. There he would be surrounded by his people, the survivors from Freedom Station. He grimaced. He was responsible for them, and he'd just failed them.

There were almost a hundred of them, and he was their leader. He felt his responsibility keenly. They were what mattered. The people, the innocent civilians who hadn't asked for an interstellar war. Why couldn't Hammett see that?

The man was a barbarian. He was like a little boy with a pellet gun, determined to shoot something just because he could. He was so keen on fighting the aliens, playing soldier, that he blinded himself to the whole reason that a military even existed.

"It's the people who matter," Hornbeck muttered. He thought of his staff back on Freedom Station. Most of them were dead. He remembered a man named Jerry, a retired spice farmer from a colony called Apricot. Jerry and Hornbeck had played squash twice a week for years. He'd become Hornbeck's best friend. Hornbeck had scoured the
Alexander
, hoping to find him, but Jerry wasn't there. He was gone.

So many people were gone. He saw their faces every night when he closed his eyes. It was costing him sleep. His friends, his colleagues, and casual acquaintances who had lived on his station. So many dead, and the rest in desperate danger. They were all his people, and he needed to get them home.

Which meant he needed to stop Hammett.

Hornbeck slowed his pace. He no longer wanted to rush to the comforting privacy of his little cabin. He hadn't risen to the top position on Freedom Station by being timid. By being afraid to make the tough choices. No, he'd always been willing to step up, take responsibility, and face the consequences of his actions.

He stopped. The idea that had taken root in the back of his mind frightened him. If he followed through, the consequences would be dire indeed.

But what were the consequences of doing nothing?

He whispered, "I can't let him destroy the Gate."

I can't do it on my own. But I'm a leader. And I know I'm not the only one who wants to get home. We could storm the bridge, take control. Put Hammett in the brig, along with anyone who insists on following him.

And then what?

Another officer would take command, and nothing would change. Hornbeck scowled. The civilians couldn't fly the ship; they didn't have the skills. He needed the cadets and the regular sailors, and yes, even the officers on his side. But there was no way he could convince them all. They were brainwashed. The military did that to a person. They were rigorously trained to follow a chain of command. To follow it blindly, even when the man at the top of the chain was an obvious lunatic.

If Hammett's in the brig, who takes charge? Probably that dolt Carruthers. He'll just to whatever he thinks Hammett wants.
Hornbeck scowled, then hesitated. He remembered the meeting in the Baffin boardroom. Carruthers hadn't been there. Hammett had brought some woman. What was her name?

Velasco. Commander Velasco.

Wasn't Carruthers a lieutenant? Hornbeck didn't keep up to date on military ranks, but he was pretty sure a commander outranked a lieutenant. He thought back to that long-ago meeting and the three or four brief times he'd met Velasco since. He'd sensed something from her, especially when she and Hammett were together. She wasn't his puppet. In fact, if Hornbeck was any judge, she saw right through Hammett. She recognized him for a dangerous fool.

Would she see her greater duty?

Would she support a mutiny?

Hornbeck straightened up. The pain in his stomach wasn't so bad now. It was a dull ache, just enough to remind him of the consequences of settling for the status quo. He knew what he had to do. Now it was time to assemble his team.

He squared his shoulders and headed aft. Ben Wyatt would be his first recruit. He'd always struck Hornbeck is a sensible, reasonable man. Once he was on board, the Baffin team would follow. That would mean the effective support of every civilian on the ship, except that reporter woman. It was probably best to leave her out of it. She seemed pro-military.

Deep in thought, he rounded a corner and almost collided with a brawny young man with flaming red hair that showed dull brown at the roots. Two more young men flanked him. All three of them were rough-looking and uncouth. Hornbeck tried to move around them, but a beefy arm blocked his way.

"Well, well, well. Look what we have here. Dingleballs Hornbeck, in the flesh."

Hornbeck gave him a stern look. "I'm in a hurry. I'll need you to get out of my way."

"You're not going anywhere." The man stepped close, looming over Hornbeck, and his companions circled around, blocking every escape.

Hornbeck found himself perversely wishing Crabtree would show up. The thought annoyed him, driving the rising fear from his mind. He snapped, "What do you want?"

The red-haired man blinked, taken aback. Then he scowled. "We want proper food." He grimaced. "We're tired of this muck they're handing out. But a fancy man like you? I bet you're getting the good stuff."

For a long moment Hornbeck stared up at the man, weighing his options. He was deeply irritated, but he made himself bite back a sharp retort. These were desperate times, and the men confronting him could be valuable. He needed every tool he could get his hands on, and someone, after all, would have to face Crabtree.

He smiled.

Red Hair gave him a suspicious look.

"The food is about to get worse," Hornbeck told him. "After all, it has to last another four or five weeks."

The man's brow furrowed. "What do you mean? We're supposed to be back on Earth in a couple of days."

Hornbeck nodded. "Yes, that was the original plan. But the captain has spotted some more aliens, and his response to just about any stimulus is to blow something up." He let them see his disgust. "His current plan is to destroy Gate Eight."

The man looked horrified, as well he might.

"I don't plan to let him," Hornbeck said. "We can still be home in two days. I just have to put someone else in charge. But I can't do it on my own. I need your help."

The three imbeciles exchanged glances.

"I need you to do what you do best," Hornbeck said. "Intimidate some people, and make sure you get your fair share." He rubbed his stomach. "And act as my personal bodyguards."

"What do you mean, get our share?"

Hornbeck smiled. "Help me effect a change in leadership, and I'll see to it that you eat the captain's personal meals for the rest of the voyage. He won't object. He'll be in the brig."

I'm going to be an admiral.

Velasco repeated the phrase under her breath, over and over, like a mantra. It was the only thing keeping her going.
I'm going to be an admiral. It won't always be like this. I'll be one of a tiny handful of officers with actual field experience against the aliens. This will catapult my career.

I'm going to be an admiral.

In the meantime, her life was a nightmare of cloying trivialities. Her years at Spacecom headquarters seemed like a sparkling golden dream. She'd been walking the same corridors as the most powerful people in the Navy. Building a power base. Building relationships. Building a career.

And now she was drowning in the minutia of keeping a battered starship running.

Her current task was mapping telephone lines. Most of the installation had been done by technicians from Baffin. They had done a credible job, but they hadn't documented a single thing. Now Velasco, armed with a couple of notebooks and a pencil, was working her way through the ship from stem to stern, tracing every wire. The idea was to create a master document that would make it faster to diagnose and fix problems.

It was beneath her, but Hammett insisted. He said she needed to know the ship, and this was certainly one way to learn it.

We're two or three days from Earth,
she fumed.
I should be preparing my reports for the Admiralty. I should be preparing my strategy. I need to think about who to talk to, in what order. What information to give out, and what to hold back. Not tramping through a lot of corridors following wires.

The problem with Hammett was that he had no political sense. It was why he faced retirement with the lowly rank of captain. He didn't value what she did, didn't understand why it was vital to her. He honestly thought that mapping out wires and learning the ship was more important.

The Navy isn't about ships, you fool. It's about people. And the people who matter are back on Earth.

A sailor with a pistol on his hip stood in front of an armor-plated door a dozen paces away, staring at the bulkhead across from him. She wished he would go away. It embarrassed her to have a witness as she did such menial work. He was guarding the
Alexander
's weapons locker, which was locked and unlocked by the ship's computer. That meant it was permanently unlocked until the ship could get a refit, so there was a sentry around the clock. He wasn't paying any attention to her, but she could imagine what he was thinking. Her cheeks burned as she worked her way along, one slow pace at a time, trailing her fingers along an insulated wire held by brackets glued to the bulkhead.

Wires would run along side by side, then veer off in different directions. Sometimes they crossed each other. There was no pattern to it that she could detect. The only way she could be sure which wire was which was to trace every miserable centimeter as she worked her way from one handset to another.

At last she came to a junction in the corridor and followed the wire around the corner, out of sight of the sentry. That made it easier to pretend she wasn't humiliated.

Feet rustled on the deck plates behind her, and she turned, irritated, to glare at a timid-looking cadet. "Well? What is it?"

"Message for you, Ma'am." The cadet thrust a scrap of paper at her, then scurried away.

Velasco sighed, pushed the hair back from her forehead, and looked at the paper. It was a page torn from one of the countless notebooks that everyone seemed to carry now. She recognized Hammett's blocky printing. His penmanship was improving, she decided. Instead of awful it was merely quite bad.

I need you to take charge of food supplies. We will be four more weeks in space. Plan accordingly. Hammett.

She stared at the note, disbelief warring with fury inside her. Four more weeks? It was unthinkable! Meals were already close to intolerable. The last of the fresh food was long gone. They had some flour, which meant several slices of bread every few days. There were canned supplies, but they were nearly gone.

The staple of every meal was a gruel made up of powdered protein mixed with a carbohydrate paste. There were machines back on Freedom Station that would reconstitute those raw ingredients into something almost indistinguishable from fried chicken, or mashed potatoes, or corn flakes.

Those wonderful food processing machines, though, had been left behind. The kitchen staff of the
Alexander
could do nothing more than mix it with water and dump it into bowls. The taste wasn't really so bad, not for the first meal or two. By now she was long past the point of being merely sick of it, and she wasn't the only one.

Well, there wasn't enough to feed everyone for four more weeks anyway. Missing a meal here and there would give everyone a whole new appreciation for the gruel.

"Oh, my God. Four more weeks? Why the hell aren't we going home?" What was that idiot Hammett doing?

She sighed, put her notebook and pencil away, and started toward the galley. She passed a civilian going the other way, a middle-aged woman in an expensive dress that should have been sonically cleaned only. The dress had obviously gone through the ship's industrial laundry facilities a few times. Fabric that should have billowed and flowed around her now hung limp and lifeless. She looked ridiculous, and Velasco felt a mix of sympathy and irritation. Civilians could be so impractical!

The woman glanced at Velasco as she passed. Her eyes widened, and she picked up her pace. Velasco could hear the woman's heels clicking on the deck plates in a rapid-fire drumbeat behind her. She heard the woman call out, "I found her!"

Velasco stopped. Muffled voices echoed through the corridor behind her, and she heard more hurrying feet. After a moment the bedraggled woman returned. "Commander Velasco? Could you come with me, please? It's very important. Some people really need to talk to you."

Velasco felt her pulse increase. She didn't know what was going on, but she knew political maneuvering when she saw it. She smiled for the first time that day. At last she had a role to play in a game she understood. "Lead the way."

Six men and two women waited in a tool room just outside the shuttle bay. They were all civilians, she noted, and they all had the tense posture of conspirators. She recognized Hornbeck, the administrator of Freedom Station, and Wyatt, the man with the barbaric accent who ran things on Baffin. There was a fiery light in Hornbeck's eyes. The buttoned-down little bureaucrat was gone, replaced by a zealot with a mission.

She looked at Wyatt and saw doubt. He looked troubled, like a man reluctantly going along with something distasteful but necessary. He would be vulnerable if she needed a lever to use against Hornbeck. The rest of them were followers, and she ignored them, turning her attention to the administrator.

"Thank you for coming," said Hornbeck. His eyes flicked over her uniform, and she caught a hint of a grimace at the corners of his mouth. He didn't approve of her, but he thought he needed her.
Well, I can work with that.

"We want to speak to you on behalf of the civilians aboard the
Alexander
." His diffident tone was at odds with the gleam in his eye.
He's hedging his bets. He won't lay his cards on the table until he has a sense of which way I'll jump.

She said, "I take it you have some concerns?"

He nodded. "This plan to destroy the Gate and spend another four weeks in deep space. It's unacceptable."

Destroy the Gate?
That was news to her, and it shocked her. She was good at hiding her reactions, but she could see in Hornbeck's eyes that he saw. They were two of a kind, probably the two most accomplished politicians on the ship.

What was he up to? What did these people want? There was one obvious way to get them to show their cards, at least a little. She said, "I don't know if that's an entirely wise decision."

The tension level in the room, almost painfully high, dropped perceptibly. Plenty remained, though.

Hornbeck gave her a searching look. Finally he spoke, choosing his words with obvious care. "Some people have been wondering if it's possible to stop Captain Hammett from doing something rash and irreparable."

Aha! Now we get to the crux of the matter.
Speaking with equal care, she said, "Stop the captain? How, exactly?"

Hornbeck's eyes narrowed.
He wants to see my cards before he shows me everything. I can understand that.
"We have a window of opportunity," he said. "A window that's rapidly closing. Once the ship jumps again, Hammett will fire a nuclear missile at the Gate. Then it won't matter how determined we are, or how right we are. We'll be trapped here. This ship has survived two battles with the alien fleet, at a terrible cost in human lives. Will we survive a third battle?"

A cold hand seemed to squeeze Velasco's stomach.
Christ, he's right. The clock is counting down. How long has it been since the last jump? How much time do we have left?

"You don't want to do anything hasty," Hornbeck said softly. "I understand that. People in a leadership position have to consider their options carefully. After all, it's the innocent people who follow them who pay the price for blunders."

She stared into his eyes. He was a very persuasive speaker, and she sensed that, though he was perfectly capable of playing people with consummate skill, in this instance he was utterly sincere. She gulped.

"There is no time, however, for meticulous decision-making. If we are to act, we must act quickly." He held his hand up between them and made a fist. "We have an opportunity, and we must seize it. It will not be available to us for much longer."

"I …" She felt a precipice yawning before her feet. It terrified her, and she stared at Hornbeck, unable to speak.

He gave her a searching look. Then he said, "You need time to think on what we've said. When the time comes to take action, I'm sure you'll make the right decision." It was a perfectly innocent statement, but loaded with deadly layers of meaning. "We don't want you to do anything your conscience wouldn't allow," he told her. "We just want you to know that there are concerned civilians who would rather we hurried back to Earth."

She nodded and turned toward the door. A pair of goons stood just outside, big knuckle-draggers who gave her suspicious looks and glanced at Hornbeck before letting her pass. She moved between them, gained the corridor beyond, and started to walk. As soon as she turned the first corner she broke into a trot. Before long she was almost running.

What the hell just happened? Was I in danger? If I'd threatened to turn them in for fomenting mutiny, would they have let me leave?

Mutiny.

The word, cold and ugly, confronted her, and she slowed. Finally she stopped, leaning against a bulkhead as she caught her breath. A cadet approached, started to speak, and she glared at him. He blanched and hurried past.

Mutiny. They hang people for that, don’t they? Or they would, if it ever happened. I don't think it's happened in a hundred years. Because no one would cross that line.

I should report them. Go to Hammett, give him names, let him round them all up before they …

Before they what? Remove him from power? Put me in command instead?

I could countermand the order to nuke the Gate. I could fly us through instead. We could be home in no time. Hornbeck said we're one jump from the Gate. We could charge through, not stop. We could be in Earth orbit in a day.

They could hang me.

She imagined military policemen marching her to a gallows, her hands manacled behind her, utterly disgraced. But another vision intruded. Throughout history the truly exceptional leaders – the ones whose careers had really taken off, the ones who had left their mark – had been those who rose to meet the challenge of exceptional circumstances. She would never distinguish herself by following every order issued by a bad captain. But if she was the one officer with the courage, the vision, to step in and take decisive action to avert disaster …

I could be the hero of New Avalon. My career wouldn't have to stop at the admiralty. There would be no limit to the possibilities. No limit at all.

She took a deep breath and headed up a staircase, following in reverse the path she'd taken to the clandestine meeting.
I bet they've all scattered by now. Just in case I turn them in.

At last she rounded a corner and reached the weapons locker. The same bored sailor stood there, giving her a brief incurious glance before resuming his examination of the opposite bulkhead. He would be the first casualty in the coming conflict.

I should warn him. I should tell him he's in danger. He's done nothing wrong. He doesn't deserve the fate that's in store.
She stopped in front of him. He met her eyes, and she took a deep breath, not sure what she was going to say until the words came out.

"I need into the weapons locker."

He lifted an eyebrow, then stepped aside and pulled on the armored door. "Light's not working," he said. "Sensor's fried."

She walked inside. The locker was small, maybe three paces wide by five deep, with racks of weapons and bins of ammunition. Would laser weapons still function? Well, old-school chemical guns were a safe bet. They didn't have a single electronic component. Velasco selected a pistol, loaded it, and pocketed a spare clip and a handful of cartridges. The gun belts tempted her, but she needed to be discreet. She put the gun in the back of her waistband and tugged her jacket down to cover it.