‘Sit down, please,’ James said, and turned back to the meeting. ‘We’re willing to lend Able and Charlie Platoons to the Commonwealth for the duration of this mission,’ he said. ‘Captain Perry is a veteran of the European Marine Force and Lieutenant McCallum saw service in the Pacifican conflict, and their men and women are likewise experienced. That’s two platoons for you, sixty marines, experienced and trained for combat in all conditions and gravities . . .’ (
And that’s quite a range . . .
Gilmore the spacer mused.) ‘. . . ready and raring to go. How is that for you, Captain McLaughlin?’
Andrew McLaughlin, whom Gilmore knew, sat across the table from James. Like many other human personnel of the Navy, McLaughlin was a veteran of the original Roving mission from Earth; he had commanded the North American Federation’s
Enterprise
. More to the point he was also the recently appointed captain of
Pathfinder
, the first of the Navy’s joint First Breed/Human starships and the nearest thing there was to a flagship. Next to McLaughlin was a Rustie which Gilmore suspected was Sand Strong, the First Breed Senior on
Pathfinder
.
McLaughlin had his back to Gilmore and hadn’t noticed him.
‘It would suit me just fine, sir,’ McLaughlin said, looking not at James but at Chase, ‘if only
Pathfinder
had the berths for sixty extra crew.’
‘There’s more than enough room on
Pathfinder
’s hangar deck. Our people can bivouac there, with your approval. They don’t mind slumming it,’ said James, a man who had never willingly slummed it in his life. ‘Their supplies and equipment can be stored in the hold.’
‘Sure,’ said McLaughlin. ‘What happens when we get there?’
‘That is for the meeting to decide,’ James said, and made as if to sit back down. Halfway there, he stood up again. ‘Point of order,’ he said, and finally he was looking directly at Gilmore. ‘Is it in order to be discussing this in front of civilians?’
‘Civilians?’ Chase said. Then he realized. ‘Oh, of course. Hi, Mike.’
‘John,’ Gilmore said.
McLaughlin twisted round in his seat and smiled. ‘Hey! Commodore!’
‘Ex-Commodore,’ James said.
‘Do you have an objection to Mr Gilmore’s presence?’ said duPont.
James gave a small, wintry smile. ‘I do understand he has no official connection with the Commonwealth Navy. He officially handed in his duties.’
‘The Comm— Mr Gilmore built up the Commonwealth Navy from scratch,’ McLaughlin said.
‘But I understand he was never formally a member. Everything he did, he did on . . . what was it . . . a
consultancy
basis.’ James almost spat out the term. ‘And I repeat, he no longer has any official connection at all. It was all over the nets. Didn’t you see it?’
Arm Wild finally spoke. ‘Michael Gilmore has offspring on SkySpy.’
James’s regret was very well acted. ‘So do many men and women. I’m sorry, Madam Co-Senior, Arm Wild, but if you are to employ the services of my marines, this meeting will have to discuss matters that are officially classified as secret on UK-1. We have no objection to sharing these secrets with highly placed individuals in the government and Navy of the Commonwealth, but we do object strongly to sharing them with civilians.’
Arm Wild may have been about to speak, but Gilmore had already got the message. More important, he sensed that the other Rusties around the table had got it too. James was appealing to hierarchy, to precedent, to the Proper Way of Doing Things, and that was how you swayed a Rustie’s feelings. And Arm Wild, like any good First Breed Senior, would be swayed by what his juniors felt.
Anyway, if James’s marines could get to SkySpy and maybe help establish whether or not Joel was still alive, and use of those marines depended upon Gilmore’s withdrawal, he wasn’t going to stand in their way.
‘Forget it,’ he said. He stood up abruptly and nodded at duPont and Arm Wild. ‘I apologize if I’ve inconvenienced the meeting and I withdraw.’
He turned and walked out, seething, and was only dimly aware of the renewed gaze of Lieutenant McCallum, RM.
Gilmore leaned against the balustrade of the terrace, his back to the white layered bulk of the Admiralty Building, gazing out to sea. It had been four hours. How much longer?
Does it matter?
said a still, small voice.
It’s not as if
you’ll be able to do anything
. Gilmore scowled. That voice was an old, old friend. He had thought he had bid it goodbye four years ago.
All his life, he had been plagued with self-doubt, but at the end of the Roving Mission, he had thought he had finally laid the ghost. He had had four years as head of the Navy, full run of the roost, able to do as he liked. And he had set up his own chain of command so that the Navy could be run with due procedure: an Admiralty, with a proper hierarchical structure, and a Space Ministry to advise the leaders of the Commonwealth on space matters and to link the politicians with the Navy under their command.
All well and good, except that Arm Wild, being a Rustie, far preferred to deal with people he knew. That was
Rustie
procedure. He would happily bypass every mechanism Gilmore had set in place to advise him and approach Gilmore directly. It was annoying for Gilmore, who was acutely aware of the sensibilities of the people Arm Wild was ignoring, and it was frankly insulting for the Space Minister and Admiral Chase, so Gilmore had forced the issue by resigning. As far as he had heard, Arm Wild now toed the line, going through the appropriate channels. It was too early to tell if Gilmore had lost a friend in the process.
Now he was out of the chain of command and powerless, just when he badly needed power. He hadn’t just shot himself in the foot, he thought, he had blown his leg off below the knee.
He wasn’t going to move from the terrace until he found out what was happening, and his mind was racing with alternative plans of his own. He looked over at the launch promontory and the assembled detritus of the Roving’s old space programme. And there, the centrepiece of the collection and its newest addition, was
Ark Royal,
the ship he had commanded when he brought Prince James to the Roving. One ship among the many sent by the Earth nations in a quest, it had turned out, to provide the Rusties with new masters following the extinction of the Ones Who Command. Gilmore never liked to overplay his own role in events, but it had to be said he had had a hand in persuading the Rusties not to take on
any
human nation as their new masters but instead to recruit their services on, yes, a
consultancy
basis, and to set up the Commonwealth instead. No wonder King James had a dislike of consultancy in general and Gilmore in particular.
But
Ark Royal
, Earth’s technological state of the art, had been bought by the Navy so that the technicians of both species could work out how to integrate their respective technologies.
Ark Royal
was the spiritual parent of
Pathfinder
and every other Human/First Breed vessel in the Navy. He remembered the day it had been brought down from orbit, supported by antigravity generators, lowered down to ground level as gently as an elevator car to touch the surface of a planet for the first and last time.
And now he was fantasizing. If
Ark Royal
could be lifted back up again, it might still be spaceworthy. The fuel tanks were still there and just needed topping up somehow. The fusion engine could be made serviceable. There would be a few miles of optic cabling that needed re-laying . . . but if he could get that and if some other ship could open up a step-through point for him and if he could find a crew then he could get his old ship to SkySpy ...
God, he was desperate, he thought with a wry smile, and then the smile vanished. He
had
to get to SkySpy. It wasn’t a joke.
‘Commodore?’ said a woman’s voice behind him, nervous, hesitant. He turned and saw the woman marine there. One part of Gilmore’s mind mentally appraised her: hair so dark it was black, cut short enough to fit into a helmet; blue eyes; not bad looking, though the profile could perhaps look a little severe.
Another part of his mind added that she was indeed about Joel’s age, which meant she was young enough to be his daughter. She took a half step forward, stopped.
‘I’m, um, I’m Donna,’ she said. He detected a faint Kiwi tang in the words.
Marine formality certainly isn’t what it was
, Gilmore thought. ‘I’d guessed you weren’t Lieutenant Peter,’ he said.
‘No, he’s Baker Platoon.’
‘And what happened to him?’
‘Broken leg. He fell down some steps.’
‘Must have been a bad fall,’ Gilmore said sympathetically.
‘Two flights of them,’ she added. ‘He, um, just kept on falling.’
She still seemed hopeful, as if he should be responding in some different way. He couldn’t work out what.
‘So,’ he said, ‘is the meeting over?’
She hesitated for a beat more, then suddenly drew herself up to a far more formal pose. ‘Yes, sir.
Pathfinder
’s still in the middle of a refit, but they’re bringing it forward and she leaves day after tomorrow with official observers from the Earth nations and us. And I, um, I just wanted to, um, pass on my, um, sympathies regarding your son on SkySpy, sir.’
‘Thank you,’ Gilmore said mildly. ‘But as your employer pointed out, I’m not the only parent in this situation.’
‘You’re the only one who knows about it, sir. Officially, SkySpy is simply out of contact, possibly due to a failure in the step-through generator, and
Pathfinder
is going to investigate.’
‘Sixty marines should certainly be able to fix a faulty step-through generator,’ Gilmore agreed. ‘Tell me, Lieutenant—’
‘Donna? We’d best get to the boat. We’ve got platoons to mobilize.’ Captain Perry had come up behind his subordinate and he was looking at Gilmore with something not far removed from hostility. ‘Don’t worry,
Mr
Gilmore. We’ll find your son for you.’
‘That’s very kind,’ Gilmore said with a fixed smile and not the slightest friendliness. ‘What makes you think I’m not coming with you?’
Perry’s answering smile was condescending and equally unfriendly. ‘Your friend Arm Wild will tell you all about that, sir. His Majesty laid down certain conditions for our inclusion on this mission and, well, people like you featured in the small print.’
Perry, Gilmore deduced, was the king’s man.
‘And what sort of people am I like?’ he said.
‘Civilians,’ Perry said.
‘Oh, that sort of people.’ Gilmore boiled inside but his tone was bland. ‘Out of interest, if your platoons have yet to mobilize, what are you doing down here wasting time when you should surely be with
your
people?’
‘We were required at the meeting,’ Perry said frostily.
‘I saw.’ Gilmore couldn’t help grinning and he hoped Perry found it offensive. ‘King James just loves to show off his officers, regardless of how much it interferes with their actual duties. Perhaps we can get together some time, we could share a beer and I’ll tell you about the number of times he shoved his oar in during the Roving mission . . .’ He suspected strongly that Perry agreed with him completely, but wasn’t going to say so if it involved criticizing the king. ‘Anyway, give my regards to His Majesty, and tell him how delighted I am we actually see eye to eye on something at last.’
‘Oh?’ Perry looked immediately wary.
‘Sending a gunboat,’ Gilmore said. ‘The definitive answer of the British Empire whenever the natives started getting uppity.’
‘Oh.’ Perry seemed to lose interest in the matter. ‘Come on, Donna.’
They turned away and Donna McCallum gave Gilmore a final glance so intense it could have been a telepathic signal. Gilmore was left with the lingering feeling that he had an ally, and he couldn’t for the life of him think why.
Well, he could worry about that later. Joel was worry number one at the moment and, as a kind of sub-worry, there was the matter of getting onto
Pathfinder
.
He took his aide from his belt and looked at it.
‘Don’t do it to yourself, Mike,’ he muttered. ‘You’re miserable enough as it is.’
But what the heck . . .
It was pleasantly shady beneath the trees but Gilmore wasn’t there because it was cool. He just wanted somewhere where the display of his aide wouldn’t be wiped out by the glare of the sun.
‘Retrieve report,’ he said. He screwed up his brow in thought. ‘Can’t remember the name. Report is pre-Commonwealth, about ninety years ago, details contact with the beings of Sample World Four.’
‘
Please wait
,’ said the aide. A moment later: ‘
Two
reports are found matching your criteria. Author: Sigil
Measure Lantern of the Ones Who Command. Full report
and digest are available.
’
‘Digest,’ said Gilmore. He sat on the ground and read.
The story he knew so well: he could have recited it like he could once have recited a nursery tale to Joel. A squadron of prideships entered an unexplored solar system and noted signs of intelligent life on two worlds. Hope flared in the hearts of the Ones Who Command who led the squadron, and of the First Breed who crewed the ships. The mission to find a replacement for the Ones Who Command, to be new masters for the First Breed, was running out of time. Even the best candidate race they had found so far was far from ideal.
The two worlds were the second and third planets of the solar system and they were dubbed Sample Worlds 4 and 5, respectively. Sample World 4 was detected first because it was emitting radio signals. Sample World 5 was radio-silent, and from orbit the ships detected signs of a pre-industrial civilization. The world was metal-poor and they didn’t see it ever developing a decent level of technology, so they decided to concentrate their attentions on Sample World 4. The Pre-Contact Team began the task of deciphering their transmissions and learning their languages. They soon worked out that Sample World 4 was recovering from a near-catastrophic war.