Alliance, page 30
part #2 of Linesman Series
When Song passed out, they helped her to her quarters. Afterward, Kari Wang walked back to the spaceport with Wendell.
“What are we going to do about Song?” Wendell asked, as they paused at the gate.
She’d been wondering that herself. “Lambert paid her a visit yesterday. He might convince her to spend more time on her ship.” After which it would be their job to merge her in as a functioning member of the team.
Not that Kari Wang wanted to be a member of that team, either, but she didn’t say that to Piers Wendell.
* * *
THE next day Jon, Fitch, and Grieve all asked if she’d enjoyed her night out, and teased her about her nonexistent headache.
“I’ve some salts if you need them,” Fitch offered.
“I’ll suffer,” she said.
The mystery of the familiarity of the Eleven’s weapons bays continued to haunt her. That afternoon, as she listened to Admiral MacClennan outline Speaker Rhodes’s latest grievance, it finally struck her what it was.
She sat up, cutting across MacClennan’s words. “The new weapons we were testing on the Kari Wang. They were based on alien technology.”
The admirals looked at her as if she were alien herself.
“That’s not logical,” MacClennan said.
“It has to be.” She looked around the table. “The weapons setup we were testing. The weapons bays were exactly like those on the Eleven.” Or close enough to it that she could recognize them.
“Gate Union doesn’t have alien technology,” MacClennan said.
“They do.” What’s more, they’d had it for a while. “Weapons aren’t the only things they’ve built based on that technology. The MacIntyre, the Burnley. They’re building ships based on it.”
Galenos blew out his breath. “What makes you think that?” He looked exhausted.
“Other than the weapons bays they built on the Kari Wang?”
He nodded. “Ships, you say.”
“The honeycomb design they’re using for the newer ships.”
Orsaya said, “I can honestly say I never heard any mention of alien ships or alien technology while I was at Gate Union.”
“Me either,” MacClennan said.
Neither had Kari Wang. “They’ve got an alien ship somewhere,” she said. “They’ve had it awhile. Will was right. We weren’t testing new weapons at all. We were testing the weapons bays.”
* * *
AFTER the admiral’s meeting, as Grieve took Kari Wang home, he said, “I’ve done some research on those contractors. The ones who did the stairwell. They’re dead. All of them. Their bodies were found three days ago.”
“What? They fell through one of their own jobs?” but Grieve still wasn’t responding well to jokes.
“They’d been dead seven days.”
The stairs had been done six days ago.
“Are you sure?”
“The coroner’s sure. They got dumped in the Darling trench, which is twenty kilometers out to sea.”
Murdered, he was saying. The day before they’d worked on the stairs.
Grieve’s smile was grim but triumphant. “Opinion is the bodies weren’t dumped by a local because the locals know you never dump anything there, even weighted. There’s a microscopic sea creature that feasts on dead flesh. It fastens on and starts to dissolve flesh, bone, and muscle. Eventually, body parts drop off.” Grieve gave a half shrug. “They float up. The coroner can tell from the growth patterns and thickness of the growth on the limbs how long the sea creature has been reproducing.”
“How long before that did you hire them?”
“Two days. They checked out. They still check out.” The last was almost defiant. A subconscious attempt to tell her he hadn’t slipped up. Even if he didn’t realize it.
“How many jobs have these imposters done since ours?”
“None,” Grieves said. “Everyone is crying out for tradesmen. They could have kept going until the police arrived to pick them up. But they didn’t. After they did your stairs, they disappeared.” She didn’t need him to spell it out, but he did. “Someone weakened that frame deliberately. They wanted you to fall.”
The aircar pulled up at the barracks. Kari Wang stood up.
Grieve blocked her way. “Somebody tried to murder you,” he said. “Is it wise to go out of the safety of your own rooms before we determine who it is?”
“Someone tried to murder me on my own ship, too.” Her voice was brittle.
“That was different. Back then, you weren’t the captain of an alien spaceship.”
For a moment she saw black rage. “You say my crew is less important than this? My crew’s being murdered is nothing, compared to now, when I was almost murdered because of what I can do for you. When I—” She pushed past him, so hard, she knocked him against the door of the aircar. She misstepped, and tumbled out onto the landing floor.
It hurt, and she wasn’t sure she hadn’t done more damage.
“Don’t say anything,” she said to Grieve, who’d jumped out behind her. “And don’t, whatever you do, call Fitch,” for he’d taken out his comms. “Or Jon.”
“But you might be—”
“Give me a minute.” Captain’s voice. Commanding. “Let me sit until I recover.”
He put his comms away and hovered.
She sat on the ground until the nausea subsided. “Thank you,” she said when she could stand up. “Can you help me up please?” He would anyway, and she’d prefer she controlled the stand-up.
He helped her stand.
“I apologize for my behavior before.”
“I apologize,” Grieve said. “I shouldn’t have made it sound so trivial.”
She cut him off before he could dig himself in deeper, or before she misconstrued whatever he said next. “The workers on the frame. Did they look like the original crew, or didn’t they bother to disguise themselves?” She didn’t want to know, but she didn’t want to talk about her crew.
Thankfully, it turned the conversation.
“Right down to the eye color,” Grieve said. “One of the murdered men was a native Gallardian, with that distinctive purple ring you get around the iris.”
Kari Wang nodded.
“They brought in a native Gallardian to replace him.”
It was the sort of puzzle that would have fascinated Will. He’d be looking at all the nuances around it, too. Like how, when everyone was complaining about getting jumps, could they possibly have gotten a native Gallardian in time to replace someone who’d only been booked two days earlier.
And how much rank had Grieve pulled to get the job done so quickly, given the long waiting list for work.
Grieve might have been reading her thoughts. “We pulled in a lot of favors. It’s one of the reasons we didn’t pick it up earlier. Everyone thought the workmen were still doing our job—because they hadn’t done anything since.”
Forcing someone off the side of a building was usually a sure way to kill them. Kari Wang shivered. She’d been lucky to get away with skin scraped raw and some bruises.
She remembered the last time she’d been badly bruised. The out-of-control aircar, and Mael and Tinatin pushing her to the ground. What if that had been deliberate?
“You’re certain someone is trying to kill me?”
“Yes.”
“Remember the first time I broke my comms, when Mael and Tinatin picked me up.”
“How could I forget? We had half the barracks out looking for you.”
“Maybe you should investigate that. I think someone might have tried to kill me then as well.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
EAN LAMBERT
VEGA WAS WAITING for Ean at the shuttle bay when he arrived back on the Lancastrian Princess after training.
“Linesman,” and she walked with him.
He hesitated. He’d planned on going back to his cabin, wasn’t sure what he should do now. She hadn’t asked him to come to her office.
“This won’t take long.”
He kept walking.
Vega glanced at Radko, who followed them. “If you’re going to listen in, you might as well come closer, so I don’t have to raise my voice.”
“Yes, ma’am,” and Radko moved up so she was only two lengths behind them. Ean glanced back at her. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking. He couldn’t tell what Vega was thinking, either.
“The investigation into the incident at Barracks 24 is complete.”
The “incident” where Radko and the others had nearly died. Where Radko had saved his life. Again. He couldn’t tell what Vega thought. There was the usual hint of impatience through the lines he always associated with Vega but no strong emotions like irritation.
“They got in through the ceiling.”
Ean could have told her that.
“The gas they used knocks you out after ten minutes, kills you after thirty. They carried oxygen. We surmise they planned on waiting till everyone was unconscious, giving you oxygen, and sneaking you away, leaving the others to die.”
They wouldn’t know Bhaksir’s team carried oxygen with them everywhere.
“We have confirmed that the two people who died were part of the team that attacked you earlier that night, which means both attacks were from the same source.”
Ean knew that as well. The other man, though, the one who’d “helped” in the first incident, hadn’t been at the barracks. He was sure of that.
“Luis Mendez,” Vega said. She gave a sour smile. “Luckily—or maybe unluckily for you—you aren’t the only one people are trying to kill. Captain Kari Wang took an unexpected dive off a building recently. Most people wouldn’t have survived it. Sometime before that, she was almost hit by an out-of-control aircar. You admired her bruise, I believe.”
Kari Wang hadn’t said someone had tried to kill her back when she’d had that first bruise.
“That makes at least three times,” Radko said. “If you count the destruction of her ship.”
“Yes,” Vega said. “It’s almost as if having missed killing her the first time, they’ll keep trying until they do.”
Ean shivered.
“That’s Nova Tahiti’s problem,” Vega said.
“She’s captain of the Eleven,” Ean said. “We have to keep her alive.”
“She’s doing fine by herself so far. And you can be sure Nova Tahiti will do its best. It is to their advantage, after all. She’s not my concern.”
Ean waited. There must be more.
There was.
“Remember Professor Gerrard, whose ship was destroyed the same way Kari Wang’s was?”
How could he forget? “You think whoever destroyed Gerrard’s ship, and the Kari Wang, have come back to kill Kari Wang?”
“I’m sure of it,” Vega said. “What’s more, we now know who sponsored Professor Gerrard’s research. Research that conveniently took him away from studying line ships. A company called SevenHills Consolidated.”
She paused, as if expecting Ean to recognize the name.
Radko rescued him. “Redmond?”
“Redmond,” Vega confirmed. “And it may be coincidence, but SevenHills Consolidated is a major shareholder in the company that designed the weapons the Kari Wang was testing.”
“You think Redmond is trying to kill Kari Wang?”
“Probably,” Vega said. “There’s more. Our friend Luis Mendez was kicked out of the Roscracian fleet on suspicion of selling military secrets. They couldn’t pin it on him—otherwise, he’d be in prison now, not free here on Haladea III. He sold those secrets to SevenHills Consolidated.
* * *
EAN wasn’t surprised when Abram called him up the next day and arranged to meet him on the Eleven before line training.
Abram brought Kari Wang, Piers Wendell, Jita Orsaya, and Marsh MacClennan with him. They stopped at the air lock of the shuttle bay and let Kari Wang enter first.
“Requesting permission to come aboard,” Abram said, formally.
It made Ean shiver.
Kari Wang was equally formal. “Permission granted.”
Ean hadn’t seen an admiral on the ship since the early days. Come to think of it, this had to be Wendell’s first trip.
He let Kari Wang lead the way and fell in beside Wendell. “It’s impressive, isn’t it?”
Wendell nodded as he looked around.
“So what’s this about?” Ean asked. No one looked likely to tell him if he didn’t ask.
“We’re trying to work out if Redmond has an alien ship hidden away somewhere,” Abram said. “Or maybe saw these ships before Haladea did.”
After Vega’s pronouncement, it wasn’t unexpected. “Maybe someone sold them pictures of the Eleven.”
Abram shook his head. “If they have one, they’ve had it for years.”
Redmond had tried to take over Haladea before the war had escalated. The then-Alliance had sent in ships in exchange for access to the Eleven. Maybe Redmond knew the ships were nearby. Maybe the Eleven hadn’t been alone.
“Let’s look at the weapons bays,” Orsaya said.
Ean let Kari Wang lead.
“On the way, we’ll check how the sections interlock,” Abram said to Wendell.
They stopped at each of the sections, so Wendell could see.
“Maybe,” Wendell said after the third. “The MacIntyre does link together in a honeycomb like this.”
Captain MacIntyre had shown Ean over the whole GU MacIntyre. He’d been proud of his ship. “The sections are made of titanium-bialer alloy,” Ean said, digging the knowledge out of his memory. “They can withstand the direct hit of a million-terajoule bomb.”
All three admirals turned to look at him.
Ean colored. “Captain MacIntyre—” had been the first captain who’d treated him like a level-ten linesman. “He was proud of his ship.”
“He was proud of it,” Wendell said. “Justifiably so.”
Ean dug out more memories. “If one section gets damaged, you can unlink it from the rest.”
“Much like you can with the Eleven, I imagine,” Abram said. He tapped eleven-beat on a nearby console. “Let’s see a weapons bay.”
Wendell took one look at those and shook his head. “Never seen anything like these.”
“Not even on the MacIntyre?”
“The MacIntyre had the same weapons we had.”
“So they had ship knowledge before they had weapons knowledge. They’ve had it for years, and none of you had heard about it.”
Orsaya and MacClennan shook their heads. Kari Wang, too.
Wendell, frowning, didn’t.
“The weapon system we were testing was designed by a private company,” MacClennan said. “We all knew about it, but it was horrendously expensive. Too much for a single world. It was a Redmond company, but Redmond didn’t have the ships or the money to test it. They proposed a joint trial. There was no mention of alien technology.”
Orsaya nodded.
“Gate Union put up half the money on condition a Gate Union ship tested it. Roscracia tried hard to have one of their ships test it, but they were overruled because Will Merricks”—he nodded respectfully to Kari Wang—“the Kari Wang’s third-in-command, was a weapons expert.”
“There was no mention of special ships when they installed the weapons system,” Kari Wang said. “My crew would have picked up on that.”
Ean dropped behind to walk with Wendell on the way back. “You knew about the weapons?”
Wendell shrugged. “Gossip only. Ric MacIntyre had it from one of the engineers who worked on his ship. They mentioned a weapons system and implied it was line-based.”
Alien ships. Linesmen. That made sense. “If it’s based on alien technology,” Ean said, “there has to be a ship out there. How could anyone keep that a secret?”
“We don’t know how long the Eleven was here before Haladea found it,” Abram reminded him. “They still haven’t said how long they knew about it before they called us in.”
“Even the confluence was discovered by accident,” Orsaya said.
Wendell said, “The MacIntyre was a prototype, the first of four. A company called TwoPaths Engineering built them.”
Another Redmond company? How significant was that?
Orsaya wrinkled her nose as if she smelled something bad. “All these alien ships appearing in human space suddenly. I’ll take the coincidence of the Eleven and the Confluence fleet. I somehow feel they’re related. But I can’t believe a third ship just ‘appeared,’ given the last and only ship we have found before this was five hundred years ago.”
“If two ships can appear, why not three?” Abram asked. “Provided we assume they all arrived at the same time.”
When MacIntyre had given Ean the grand tour, he’d told him they’d spent years designing and building the ship. How could ships like the Eleven and the Confluence have been around so long without anyone’s finding them?
TWENTY-EIGHT
EAN LAMBERT
THEY’D REACHED AN impasse on line seven. Community, linking, completeness, and a very strong sense of the void. Ean was starting to wonder if Fergus was right, and line seven did something in the void that humans weren’t equipped to work with. For most humans—except him—the time in the void was a microsecond. Maybe they didn’t stay long enough to discover what line seven did.
Next time he was in the void, he was going to ask the lines there, but no one would let him jump just to ask line seven a question.
Meantime, they kept trying.
Maybe they were asking the wrong ship. Most of their testing was done on the Lancastrian Princess.
Maybe it was time to bring in others.
He took Fergus, Rossi, and Hernandez out to the Eleven with him. And Radko, of course. Captain Kari Wang hadn’t arrived yet. It was the day after the revelation that Redmond was building their ships to an alien design. Ship mood was somber.
