Alliance, page 16
part #2 of Linesman Series
He went into the bathroom to do it because it felt like there were a hundred people in their room right now.
The silence was blissful.
“How did you know it was me?” he asked, when he got back.
“Is the sky on Lancia purple?”
“Yes, but—”
Radko took out her comms.
* * *
NOT long after that an armored troop carrier descended to take them back to headquarters. Ten soldiers exited and left at a run for the building where Mendez had last been seen. Four armed soldiers stayed behind and stood guard.
Two medics set up portable stations while two other soldiers set up lights for them. In minutes, the outdoor area was as bright as day.
“We already checked them,” Tinatin said.
They examined Ean and Fergus first.
“I’m fine,” Ean said. They always checked him first. He wished they wouldn’t. “Look at the others.”
“Told you he was important,” Mael muttered to Tinatin.
“Of course he’s important,” Tinatin said. “He’s got ten lines on his shirt. Haven’t you noticed?”
“You didn’t notice that before. Someone had to tell you.”
The medic left Ean with a canister of oxygen and a mask over his face—“Don’t take it off”—and moved on to one of the unconscious guards.
“I really get tired of oxygen masks,” Ean said to Fergus, who was by now similarly masked. “Don’t you?”
“Can’t say it’s been a problem for me to date,” Fergus said.
Fergus was a single line, unaffected by the inhuman beat of line eleven. Ean couldn’t think of anything to reply.
* * *
IN the barracks hospital, they were put into pressure chambers to normalize the oxygen in their blood. As he went in, Ean heard one intern whisper to another, “They’re under guard. They’re probably dangerous political prisoners.”
It reminded him of Tinatin.
Afterward, he and Radko ate a late lunch with Bhaksir and Sale.
“Mendez had an aircar waiting,” Sale said. “They were away before Radko called us. If I see him again, I’ll kill him personally.”
She’d have to get ahead of Radko, then, because Radko wanted to kill Mendez, too. She’d told Ean that, and there’d been a determination in her voice that had shocked him.
“We’ll find him,” Bhaksir said.
“We literally, or we figuratively?” Ean asked.
“We as in the New Alliance,” Sale said. “It will take weeks. We’re not doing it.” She yawned. Ean yawned with her. “I want you back in space, Ean. Where it’s safe. Unfortunately, Nova Tahiti is hosting a dinner tonight to welcome Captain Kari Wang. Ean’s been invited.”
“That was quick,” Radko said. “They’ve been planning this awhile then?”
Sale shrugged.
“The consensus is that it’s only been planned since the formal agreement to appoint a captain,” Fergus said. “Somewhere between then and each world’s choosing a captain to nominate, someone thought of Kari Wang. Most people think it was MacClennan, who’s been watching her career.”
Radko had once said Fergus could get gossip from a twenty-year-dry well.
Ean’s comms sounded. He knew, without even looking at it, that it would be Rigel again. He didn’t answer it.
SIXTEEN
SELMA KARI WANG
KARI WANG SOUGHT out Admiral MacClennan, determined to make him listen. She found him in his outer office.
“Captain.” Sharp, with a bite to it.
She should have made an appointment. One didn’t walk into an admiral’s office and expect to be seen immediately. Especially not when said admiral was annoyed about something.
MacClennan turned to his aide, a swivel that ground his heel into the floor. “Get me the results of Dr. Fitch’s Havortian tests. We’ll send him instead. Provided nothing untoward comes out of his checks.”
He turned back to Kari Wang, indicated his office with a jerk of his head, and waited until she entered in front of him. He closed the door with a bang.
“Our security check on Dr. Arnoud turned up a link to Redmond,” he said, even though she hadn’t asked. “He’s been passing information to them for years. If we hadn’t run these checks, we’d never have found out.”
He looked as if he’d like another door to slam. “Enough of traitors. What can I do for you, Captain?”
“You want to put me into another ship.”
He nodded, a single downward movement of his head.
“I do not want the job,” she said. “It is inappropriate.” Not to mention cruel.
He frowned at her. “Sit down,” and went around to his own chair to sit down himself. Even that had a distinct thump to it. “Before you fall down,” and waited until she sat before he spoke again. “I agree with everything you say.” His frown lightened to a grim smile. “And everything you’re not saying. But I will not change the decision.”
“Then I resign.” Once the fleet had been her whole life. Resigning from it would have been unthinkable. She’d have been better off dead. But then, she was better off dead, wasn’t she?
“Amendment 184.2.1,” MacClennan said.
Amendment 184 of the Nova Tahiti Charter had been brought in two hundred years earlier. Nova Tahiti had been under attack from a neighboring world. Back then they’d had difficulty getting soldiers to fight in the war. Section 2 dealt with conscription. Part 1 of section 2 was all about how the governing body of Nova Tahiti had a right to conscript any citizen in times of war.
“You can remain in your current position and retain the benefits of seniority,” MacClennan said. “Or you can resign, and I will conscript you.”
If she called his bluff, would he go through with it? Probably, because if he didn’t need her, why would he want a broken soldier?
“Surely, Captain, you’ve been in positions yourself where you had to weigh up how to save the most people with the least loss of life.”
“You’re telling me this is a life-or-death situation.”
MacClennan sighed. “No, Captain, this is politics, pure and simple.” He pressed something on his comms, and, a moment later, an aide came in with two glasses of tea—which he couldn’t possibly have had time to make in between the order and delivery. MacClennan waited until the aide had gone again. “I can’t tell you much about this mission.”
The tea was hot. Kari Wang left hers on the desk to cool. Like most spacers, she preferred her tea lukewarm, where if something untoward happened—like an unexpected gravity fluctuation—it wouldn’t burn you if it slopped out of the glass. The admiral drank his hot. He’d been a long time out of space.
“What I can tell you.” MacClennan paused. “This is a cooperative venture. You will have crew from all nations of the New Alliance. Two from each world, initially, then more once the first lot have integrated.”
It sounded like a disaster in the making. “Who do they take orders from?” Each one of them would have their own chain of command.
“Their captain,” MacClennan said, then added, “And whoever else they report to. On ship they will report to you.”
Her tea wasn’t cool enough yet, but she drank it anyway. It burned her tongue.
“Which ship?”
He didn’t answer that.
The old Alliance didn’t name their ships for their captains. She hoped the New Alliance didn’t plan to either. She didn’t want another ship to replace her ship. “Most fleets would have the decency to retire out a captain who’d lost their ship.”
If the barb hit home, it didn’t show on MacClennan’s face. “This isn’t about decency. It’s about politics. The New Alliance needs an experienced captain. They don’t come up often.”
The relationship between ship and captain was undeniable. The commonly accepted theory was that because the lines were pure energy, and the Captain’s Chair was built into the line chassis, the energy of the lines irradiated the person who sat in it. It was—whispered at the moment but gaining more credence each year—that the irradiation acted as an enhanced receptor in the basolateral amygdala of the brain, leading to a modified form of paranoia, which the recipient translated to something along the lines of “I can’t live without my ship.” Personally, Kari Wang believed the last was absolute rubbish, but it was a fact that once you chose to captain a line ship, that was as high as you went on the career ladder because you never left your ship until they forced you out at retirement. Or you died on the job.
Retirement was one thing she’d avoided thinking about.
“Worlds of the New Alliance are doing everything they can to cement their power.” MacClennan scowled at his tea. “Nova Tahiti sees you as a piece on a massive gameboard right now. They’re—” He corrected himself. “We’re playing to win. Decency doesn’t come into it. The fact that you should be on psychiatric leave doesn’t come into it. You’re a captain. An experienced captain who doesn’t have a ship right now. You are our chance at controlling one of those ships.” He looked up at her, his expression bleak. “You have no say.”
“And Nova Tahiti’s fleet motto?” We look after our people. If she killed herself—she should be dead anyway—they wouldn’t have a captain.
The expression grew bleaker. “War makes monsters out of everyone, Captain.” He finished his tea in one long draught although it must have been hot, then said, as if it were a normal reassignment, “You will report to Admiral Galenos of Lancia. And to me, of course.”
“Admiral Galenos?” Last she’d heard Galenos had been a commodore, in charge of security for the Crown Princess of Lancia. Lady Lyan—the Crown Princess—had long been a thorn in Nova Tahiti’s side.
MacClennan steepled his fingers. “And not before time, either. Unfortunately, his promotion means he manages this project by default, because Lancia did, after all, bring the ships out of the void.”
Kari Wang picked up her own tea. She blew on it to cool it, thinking about what he’d said. And what he hadn’t.
* * *
GOED Lutchen was hot and sunny. It reminded Kari Wang of the day Agda Ayemann had been elected to the council. The tarmac, as they walked out to the shuttle, heated the soles of her feet through her boots. Every step was hard work.
“You should preserve your strength,” Jon suggested, inclining his head at the orderly who followed discreetly, wheeling an empty chair. “It’s going to be a long day.”
It already was a long day, but she was determined not to use the chair. She wished the shuttle they were making for wasn’t on the outer perimeter of the landing field. “I’ll be fine.”
She had her own entourage. Jon Ofir, the psychiatrist, Benjamin Fitch, the doctor, and the aide with the chair.
It was the first time she had been outside since she’d arrived on planet. She’d last been off ship twelve months before that, when she’d spent a two-day furlough on Roscracia while a linesman serviced her ship.
“We’re lucky we got a jump,” Jon said. “They’ve been waiting for it for days.”
Kari Wang concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. That slight, annoying height difference was more pronounced on the unfamiliar surface.
Fitch moved closer to her. “I hear Admiral MacClennan commandeered the first jump to Haladea III.” Out here in the sunshine, he looked nothing like Will; it was almost a shock.
The Haladean cluster was halfway out to the rim, so far from other worlds they were in a separate line zone. They were politically affiliated with the Alliance—old Alliance, Kari Wang reminded herself—but they were poor cousins in that lumbering political party, tolerated more because they were founding members than for any power they had.
“Why Haladea?” Kari Wang asked.
They both looked at her, and she got the feeling she’d asked something extremely stupid. Even the aide was looking at her strangely.
“We forget, sometimes, that you don’t know what’s happened,” Fitch said. “This must all be strange to you. Haladea III is the New Alliance headquarters. They’ve moved there from temporary headquarters on Confluence Station.”
Everyone knew what was at Confluence Station. Alien spaceships. They’d all seen the vids. Her own crew had been talking about it before . . . She refused to think about that. Even she’d known it was the spaceships that gave the New Alliance the edge in the war between them and Gate Union.
Kari Wang had some catching up to do.
They finally reached the shuttle. When they stopped, Kari Wang’s legs were shaking so much, she had to borrow the chair from the aide to support her.
Arnoud and Fitch had explained it to her. “The muscle in these legs have never been used. You have to tone them.”
Why in the lines couldn’t they have built her an old-fashioned pair of neo-alloy legs, where the strength was immediate, instead of grafting on real flesh and bone? She could take neo-alloy legs off when they ached, like her legs were aching now.
She could almost hear Will in her head. “Ah, but think of the stumps. They’d itch.”
She looked at the steps in front of her. Thirteen steps. Right now, she’d give anything for a jetpack and an antigrav unit.
“We can help you up,” Fitch offered.
She looked at him.
He stepped back in pretend fear. “It was a suggestion, Captain,” and smiled tentatively.
She almost smiled back.
“You go up,” she said. There was no sense all of them waiting out in the hot sun while she waited for her legs to start working again.
Nobody moved.
“At least two of you go up. Jon. Fitch.” She glared at them. “Move.” It would be unfair to order the aide to go, given that his job was to transfer her. “That’s an order.”
Jon scratched his head. “You can’t order us, Captain.” Even though she outranked them. “If it’s your medical or psychiatric well-being that’s at stake, we override your orders.”
“Oh, for—” Surely they weren’t going to draw demarcation lines here. “I intend to walk up those stairs. I need my legs to recover first.”
“We’ll make a deal,” Fitch said. “You sit down while you wait, and we’ll go up.”
“Turn the chair around,” she said to the aide, because now that she had stopped, she wasn’t sure she could even walk around to the front of the chair.
He did so.
She sat.
Jon opened his mouth to argue. Fitch pushed him up the stairs in front of him.
“Thank you,” Kari Wang said, and watched them go. Fitch would have made one hell of a psychiatrist if he hadn’t chosen to be a doctor.
She wasn’t foolish. She waited until she knew she could do it.
“Apologies for keeping you out in the sun,” she said to the aide. She checked the name on his shirt, and his rank. “Spacer Grieve.”
“It’s not a problem, ma’am.” He was so fresh-faced, he looked to be straight out of academy, but while his uniform looked crisp, his boots were worn in. Kari Wang suspected he’d still look fresh-faced when he was sixty. The sun didn’t seem to bother him, anyway.
Kari Wang forced herself to move, and mounted the stairs one careful step at a time. At the top, she thought momentarily about using the chair again, then decided to enter on her own slow legs.
She was glad that she had, for when she entered the shuttle cabin she found she hadn’t merely been holding up her own party. Admiral MacClennan was seated in the front row.
* * *
IT felt strange to be on a ship that wasn’t hers.
Captain Abene Fierro greeted her briskly. “Welcome aboard, Captain,” with no betraying emotion in her voice, but Kari Wang could see the pity in her eyes and was glad when the captain turned to Admiral MacClennan without saying anything else to her. “We’ve fifteen minutes before we jump.”
MacClennan nodded and was polite enough not to say Kari Wang had delayed them. Would they have sent someone out to collect her if she had spent another fifteen minutes waiting for her legs to stop shaking? She made for her cabin as soon as the introductions were done. She didn’t want to be on a ship that wasn’t her own. She shouldn’t be alive.
She spent the rest of the ten-hour trip watching the news feeds, concentrating on the political channels, interrupted at hourly intervals by Fitch or Jon coming to check if she needed anything. She told them the same thing. “I’m fine. Catching up on news I missed while I was in the hospital.”
She felt the ship change course just before Captain Fierro called. They were an hour out of port. “We’ve been given permission to fly by the alien ships. The best view will be from the bridge.”
“Thank you,” Kari Wang said. Her own crew would have fallen over themselves to see this. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see it on her own. She stood up.
By now she knew it was the accusations and counteraccusations over the destruction of her own ship that had finally catapulted Gate Union and the New Alliance into outright war. It didn’t bring anyone back, but there was a bitter pleasure in knowing that the deaths of her crew had some effect.
There had been incursions, but no major battles to date.
She knew that Confluence Station—with its attendant alien fleet—had moved, and was now orbiting Haladea III. Who in their sane mind would move a station once it was set in place? She knew that Lancia, Aratoga, and Balian controlled one faction of the New Alliance government, Nova Tahiti and Yaolin another.
She also knew that most political commentators expected the New Alliance to fail spectacularly. Some gave it two years, some gave it ten, although one unfashionable observer predicted they’d last twenty. “After all,” he told Galactic News reporter Coral Zabi, “there’s no denying they have an edge right now,” and he’d glanced significantly at the fleet of alien ships on the screen behind them.
