Shadow of Victory - eARC (52 page)

“I won’t pretend I’m not grateful for the way you’re…looking after her, Sinead,” she said, after a moment. “I’m not too sure how happy the Commodore’s going to be with me when he finds out I let you travel in steerage, though!”

“You just leave Aivars to me.” Sinead’s smile returned. “Besides, he’ll understand.”

“You’re probably right about that.” Ginger shook her head, gazing down into her whiskey glass. “I think he tries to hide it sometimes, but he always seems to be able to spot anyone under his command who’s in trouble. Don’t get me wrong, Ansten FitzGerald stayed on top of everything that happened to any of the Kitty’s people. But it just always seemed that whenever I looked up, the Commodore was always…I don’t know. He was just always there, whenever anyone needed him.”

“That’s Aivars’ way,” Sinead said. “And…there’s probably another reason it seemed that way to you, dear.”

Ginger’s eyes snapped up from her glass, meeting Sinead’s across the table, and her mouth opened. But Sinead held up her hand before she could speak.

“Ginger,” she said gently, “I don’t for one instant believe anything remotely improper ever happened between you and Aivars. One of the very few immutable certainties of this universe is my husband’s fidelity. But ever since his return to active service, he’s had an even greater tendency to…mentor, let’s say, promising young officers. Especially promising young female officers.”

Ginger had closed her mouth again, but her eyes were still distressed, and Sinead shook her head.

“I’ve known Aivars Terekhov for the next best thing to fifty T-years, and because of that, I know he’d never allow favoritism to color his actions or his decisions. But I come from a Navy family myself,” she said with, Ginger reflected, massive understatement, “and I also know he understands a senior officer’s responsibility to groom, train, and support promising junior officers. He’d do that for anyone he thought was as good at her—or his—job as you are. But there’s a reason he’s especially supportive of his female junior officers. A reason which applies rather strongly in your own case, I suspect.”

“A reason?” Ginger repeated when the older woman paused.

“Yes.” Sinead’s eyes softened. “You look a great deal like me, Ginger. But you look even more like Anastasia.”

“Anastasia?”

“Our daughter,” Sinead said quietly, and Ginger stiffened.

“Nastyen’ka was never interested in the Navy, unnatural child that she was,” Sinead continued with a wistful smile. “She was interested in planets, and she begged, pleaded, and pestered until she got her way. She was a little too much like both her parents in that respect, I think. But about the time Aivars returned to active service after the Battle of Hancock, she was accepted into the Sphinx Forestry Service’s intern program. I never saw her happier in her life! And then, about a year later, she fell from a crown oak during a treecat rescue mission and her counter-grav failed to activate.”

Ginger inhaled sharply, and Sinead nodded.

“She suffered catastrophic brain trauma,” she said in a steady voice. “The SFS airlifted her out immediately, but she was gone by the time they reached the trauma unit. If she’d lived, she’d be about a year younger than you are now.”

“I never…” Ginger shook her head, and Sinead reached across the table to lay one hand on her forearm.

“Ginger, Aivars would have recognized the qualities which make you the officer you are even if you’d been male, two meters tall, and covered with hair! And I am not telling you he values you because you remind him of Nastyen’ka. I’m simply saying he sees an echo of her in every promising young woman he meets, and that because you look so much like her, he probably sees that echo even more strongly in your case. And one of the reasons I’m telling you this is that I do, too. Neither of us thinks you’re a replacement for our daughter, and both of us value you for who you are, but I think it’s right for you to know about her. And perhaps it’ll help you understand why I’m perfectly content down in ‘Snotty Row’ with young Paula. She’s a Queen’s officer, not a child, but she’s also young woman who’s lost her entire family. If she needs a non-Navy shoulder to cry on, just a bit, I have one that’s perfectly serviceable.”

* * *

Well, well, well, Rufino Chernyshev thought. Isn’t that interesting?

He pursed his lips, whistling softly for several seconds as he considered the message which had just reached him through the covert channel to “Manticore” Dennis Harrahap had set up for Tomasz Szponder and the Free Thought Crusade.

A part of him felt almost guilty, he realized. That was probably inevitable—to really succeed at this sort of thing, an operator had to be able to genuinely empathize with the people he was manipulating—but what he mostly felt was intense satisfaction.

He gazed at his display for another few seconds, then nodded and opened a window to post a memo and keyed his microphone live.

“Confirm receipt,” he said, watching the words appear. “Assure them support will be there within twenty-four hours either side of their proposed execution date.”

Chapter Forty-Six

“Shuman Central Control, this is Victor-Lima-One-Seven-Seven. Request final docking clearance.”

“Hold one, Victor-Lima,” the thoroughly bored traffic controller aboard the Donald Ulysses and Rosa Aileen Shuman Space Station (more commonly—and not especially affectionately—known as Dumber Ass, from its initials), the Swallow System’s primary space station, replied. “Checking the boards.”

“Roger, Shuman Central. Victor-Lima-One-Seven-Seven copies. Holding at the approach beacon.”

The controller brought up her schedule, and flight VL177 blinked a bright, authorized green. Well, of course it did. VL177 was a Tallulah mining shuttle, and Tallulah’s shuttles and courier boats and freighters—and the armed sting ships of Tallulah Security Enterprises, based right here on Dumber Ass—went wherever the hell they liked and did whatever the hell they wanted, although why a mining shuttle was coming up from Swallow was an interesting question.

Probably down for some major overhaul, she thought. Damned things may not be configured for atmosphere, but that doesn’t mean they can’t handle it if they have to. And if they go slow enough!

“Victor-Lima-One-Seven-Seven, Shuman Central. I have you on the schedule. You are cleared to dock at the Alpha-Tango-Seven beacon. Confirm copy.”

“Shuman Central, Victor-Lima-One-Seven-Seven copies cleared to approach on docking beacon Alpha-Tango-Seven. Initiating thrust.”

“Confirmed, Victor-Lima. Have a nice visit,” the controller said and watched her radar as the bulky shuttle’s reaction thrusters—impeller wedges were banned this close to the station—sent it towards its assigned docking bay.

* * *

“Well, so far so—” the shuttle pilot began.

“Don’t say it!” the purple-haired woman in the copilot’s seat cut him off sharply. He looked at her, one eyebrow quirked, and Staff Sergeant Rachel Lamprecht, Solarian League Marines (retired) shook her head. “You don’t go around jinxing perfectly good operations that way,” she told him severely. “I thought we’d taught you people that, Truman?”

“Guess I forgot,” Truman Rodriguez replied with a casual air that fooled neither of them. “And, by the way. If I forgot to mention it before we lifted, thanks for coming along.”

“De nada,” Lamprecht said, waving one hand.

Rodriguez nodded and turned back to his controls. She might have waved it off, but he hoped she knew how much he’d meant it. Unlike him, the only dog Lamprecht—or, for that matter, Laszlo Hiratasuka and Alexandra Mikhailov—had in this fight was their decades-long friendship for Vincent Frugoni. That was something a Swallowan could understand—even an adopted Swallowan like Rodriguez—but it still wasn’t her fight.

It was Truman Rodriguez’ fight, though. He was as much an immigrant to Swallow as Vincent Frugoni and Sandra Allenby, and his job as a Tallulah Resource Extraction Enterprises pilot paid remarkably well, for the Swallow System. But he’d been assigned to this star system for over thirty T-years. He had a wife, four kids, and an extended family which included Floyd Allenby.

And I’ve seen what something like Tallulah means for my kids and my grandkids, however good it may look for me, he thought grimly. No freaking way is that happening to my girls!

“Docking collar in fifteen minutes, Vinnie,” he said into his mike. Then glanced over his shoulder at his flight engineer.

“Send it, Joyce,” he said, and Eileanóra Allenby’s niece nodded.

“Sending,” she said, and tapped a transmit key.

* * *

“Fifteen minutes, Jase! Signal just came in!”

“Then I reckon it’s ’bout time we got this here excursion underway,” Jason MacGruder replied.

At the moment, his air lorry was cruising idly through the MacIntyre Gap, coming up on Fort Golden Eagle, the central command post of the Swallow System Army. Since the Swallow System had a unified military, that meant Fort Golden Eagle was the central command nexus for all of Swallow’s armed forces. More to the point MacGruder’s present perspective, however, was that it was also the SSA’s central equipment depot. At any given time, somewhere around eighty percent of Felicia Karaxis’ ground combat vehicles and more like eighty-five percent of her aircraft were neatly lined up at Fort Golden Eagle. The numbers were a bit lower than that at the moment, given the presence Karaxis had built up around the Cripple Mountains in response to the Cripple Mountain Movement, but that was fine with MacGruder. The CMM knew exactly where all those armed air cars, APCs, and light tanks were…and thanks to Eldbrand’s generosity, there was something they could do about it.

Just as MacGruder was about to do a little something about Fort Golden Eagle.

He touched the transmit key on his dashboard com.

“Gemma, you got those power cells for me?” he asked casually.

“Told you I did,” a voice came back. “Why? You running low?”

“Nah,” he said, feeding more power to the turbines and settling to a slightly lower altitude as he accelerated down the Gap towards Fort Golden Eagle. “Just checkin’. Know you can be a bit forgetful sometimes.”

“Ha!” The reply came back with fine disdain. “That’s rich, coming from you! But don’t worry. I’ll get ’em to you right on time,” Floyd Allenby’s sister told him.

“That’s a real comfort,” MacGruder replied, and smiled as the Fort Golden Eagle perimeter beacon came up on his HUD.

* * *

“What does that idiot think he’s doing?” Major Brinton Avery demanded as the civilian icon swept towards the outer perimeter. “Don’t tell me he doesn’t know this is restricted airspace!”

“Dunno about that, Sir,” the duty sergeant replied. “Got a lot of people taking the shortcut through the Gap. Some of ’em aren’t all that careful about their navigation, either.”

“Well, this one’s about to get his ass in a heap of trouble!” Avery said, and hit the guard frequency.

“Unidentified civilian traffic at three hundred meters, eighty-five kilometers, west-southwest, this is Golden Eagle Flight Ops. You are entering restricted airspace. Turn away immediately.”

Nothing happened for a moment, then—

“Golden Eagle Flight Ops, this is Tallulah-Sierra-Niner-Two,” a voice came back. “I know it’s restricted airspace. Check your clearance list.”

Avery frowned and snapped his fingers at the duty sergeant, then pointed at her terminal. He hadn’t seen anything about a Tallulah special flight when he came on duty!

“Nothing showing here, Sir,” the sergeant said after a moment while the air lorry swept steadily closer.

“Tallulah-Sierra-Niner-Two, Golden Eagle Flight Ops. I do not—repeat, do not—show you on the clearance list. Turn away now.”

“Look, laddie,” the voice came back, “if you want to explain to General Karaxis why the stuffed snow bear Ms. Hampton told me to deliver to her for Mister Altman isn’t in her office by sundown, that’s fine with me. But if you don’t want to explain that, then you’d better find me on your list!”

Oh, crap, Avery thought. The one thing that’ll get my ass canned in a heartbeat is to piss off the General. But, damn it, they aren’t on the list!

He punched in a command, swiveling the main camera head, and his frown deepened as the oncoming lorry sprang into sharp focus on his visual display. The vehicle was definitely painted in Tallulah’s livery, and its shiny, freshly polished look suited someone delivering a personal gift to Felicia Karaxis from Alton Parkman. It was a full-sized Torro-class heavy-lift lorry, not a mere van—way too big to be transporting a single snow bear. But, of course, that wasn’t necessarily the only thing it had aboard.

None of which solved his problem.

He frowned for another long moment’s thought, then drew a deep breath as the lorry crossed the inner perimeter.

“Tallulah-Sierra-Niner-Two, Golden Eagle Ops,” he said. “You are not—repeat, not—cleared to the primary field. Divert to Bravo Three. You’ll be met by a security team and—”

* * *

“…a security team and—”

“Reckon it’s about time.” Jason MacGruder’s tone was relaxed, almost casual, but sweat beaded his forehead as the glanced at the young man seated beside him. “Jessop?”

“Go for it,” Jessop Allenby replied tautly.

MacGruder slammed the throttle through the gate and the turbines, borrowed from one of Cripple Mountain Search and Rescue Command’s high-speed, heavy-lift rescue ships, howled.

* * *

“Good seal,” the docking bay controller announced as Truman Rodriguez’ shuttle settled into the buffers and the personnel tube mated with its hatch.

“Thank you,” Rodriguez acknowledged pleasantly, then smiled as Vincent Frugoni and ninety heavily armed men and women stormed through that tube and into Donald Ulysses and Rosa Aileen Shuman Space Station.

Fortunately for the bay controller, he was a very fast-thinking man. He got his hands up in less than 2.5 seconds.

* * *

“What the—?!” the duty sergeant began, and Brinton Avery’s stomach turned to ice as he realized he’d waited too long to divert the Tallulah air lorry.

It sprang forward at at least twice its listed maximum velocity, and a corner of his brain wondered exactly what had been done to its engines. It was only a very tiny corner, though. All the rest of it was focused on the deadly stream of cluster munitions spilling from its belly hatch. The programmable weapons’ stubby wings popped out, they banked sharply away from the lorry, and Avery watched in something that longed desperately to be disbelief as they blanketed Fort Golden Eagle’s primary ground armor park in a red-and-white surf of chemical explosives.

His hand darted out without any conscious decision on his part and his thumb jammed down on the emergency alert button. Alarms began to warble all over the base, duty sections raced to man their weapons, but no one had expected anything like this! As he watched, the improvised bomber changed course. It swept across the parked air cav mounts and atmospheric sting ships with that seemingly inexhaustible store of cluster bombs still tumbling from its belly hatch, and the bright blue flare of exploding hydrogen reservoirs ripped through them in its wake. It didn’t get all of them, of course, but it got most of them. And as it dropped down on the deck, screaming across the military reservation at just under Mach 1, false panels on its exterior blew free and a quartet of Rattlesnake Ground Attack Missiles blasted from their concealment.

One of the pre-programmed, precision guided weapons took out the three ready-duty sting ships on the parking apron. The second impacted directly on the base’s central air-defense station; and the third and fourth blew the transmitting masts atop Felicia Karaxis’ HQ building into blazing wreckage.

* * *

The man in the Tallulah Security Enterprises uniform looked up in astonishment as the door to TSE’s on-station com center opened abruptly and half a dozen heavily armed men and women swept into the compartment.

“Don’t!” the tall, brown-haired woman at their head said sharply, but instinct had already betrayed him. His hand scrabbled at the pulser holstered at his side, and a single shot from the ugly flechette gun in her hands cut him almost in half.

“Damn,’” Master Sergeant Alexandra Mikhailov (retired) said almost mildly. “Wish he’d been smarter.”

* * *

Major Avery stared sickly at the flame, smoke, and debris rising in the air lorry’s wake, trying to understand how a single vehicle could have wreaked such havoc. Flames vomited from the HQ block, the Rattlesnake hit on Air Defense Central sent an evil, anvil-headed cloud heavenward, and he saw men and women bursting out into the open, staring up in shock and confusion. The lorry squatted low to the ground, screaming directly west across the thousand-square kilometer area set aside for training maneuvers at barely fifty meters. No one on the ground was remotely capable of effective action as it swung further north, streaking back up MacIntyre Gap at that same, preposterous speed.

And as it sped north, drawing every eye to its passage, over a dozen more heavily modified civilian vehicles—lorries, vans, and at least one search-and-rescue skimmer—came slicing up from the south.

Air Defense Central’s destruction fatally compromised Fort Golden Eagle’s aerial defenses, and those vehicles spread out across the base. Heavy tribarrels, delivered courtesy of Harvey Eldbrand and fitted to most of those “civilian vehicles,” spat rivers of explosive darts. They went through the surviving air cavalry mounts and the armored ground vehicles like chainsaws of fire, leaving broken, blazing wreckage in their trail, and two of them swooped down on the already blazing HQ block and put a dozen smaller missiles—mixed high explosive and incendiary—into the SSA’s central command nexus.

* * *

Leroy Yelland looked up from his cards as the ready room door slammed open.

“What the f—?!” he began, then froze and sat very, very still as Master Sergeant Mikhailov showed him the muzzle of her flechette gun.

Abiola Wilhelmsen, the other ready-duty sting ship pilot, and Ramiro Maxwell, one of the squadron’s maintenance techs, sat just as still. Wilhelmsen laid his cards face down on the table and carefully raised both hands. Maxwell simply sat paralyzed, his eyes huge.

“Nice to see some sanity this time,” Mikhailov said with a thin, cold smile. “Now if the lot of you will come this way, please?”

Her twitched flechette gun summoned all three TSE employees out of their chairs like a magic wand. Two of the armed civilians with her took charge of them, ushering them roughly, though not brutally, out of the ready room and into the lounge area next door.

As they entered the lounge, Yelland saw another forty or fifty TSE and Tallulah Corporation personnel seated at the food court’s tables. One of his own keepers used her military-grade pulse rifle to point at an unoccupied table.

“Why don’t you fellas have a sit-down?” Her genial tone fooled none of them. “You just keep your hands on the table top or the top of your heads, whichever you prefer, and you’ll do just fine. Let those hands go wanderin’, though, and—”

She shrugged, but one glance at the pair of flechette gun-armed men positioned to cover the entire room without intruding into one another’s lines of fire completed the sentence quite adequately in Leroy Yelland’s opinion.