Triumphant Page 3

  “That’s right,” Lochan said, trying to sound calm, acutely aware of the blood that had been on his hand. He imagined that he could still feel it, wet and warm, someone else’s life spilled onto him. “How is she?”

  “The guard? I’m told she’ll recover. The shots were aimed to kill you so they hit nonlethal spots on her when she blocked them.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lochan mumbled, thinking of his friends Carmen and Mele, who might both at this instant be running the same risks under distant stars, perhaps suffering similar wounds. And counting on him to ensure their sacrifices weren’t in vain.

  “She was doing her job,” the supervisor assured him. “Don’t let it rattle you. You’re safe now.”

  “It’s not about me being safe,” Lochan protested, stung by the idea that he was being protected while his friends faced danger. “I’ve got a job to do.”

  “I warned Colonel Ryan that there are people who do not want us to speak to Eire’s government,” Freya said. “The people who’ve attacked Kosatka and Glenlyon, and isolated Catalan, have been laying the groundwork to ensure no help comes to any of us.”

  “I don’t care what their motives are,” the supervisor said. “I do care about doing my job. Which shuttle were they going to take down?” he demanded of another guard.

  “Drop Eleven Oh Six. Departing one hour from now.”

  “Anyone who could subvert our sensors would also know these passengers were scheduled for that drop and might have some backup plan for destroying that shuttle. Instead, these people are going on this drop. Right now. And I want Eleven Oh Six gone over with tech, fingertips, and eyeballs to ensure no one’s planted any bombs on it or viruses in its systems.”

  “Bombs? Yes, sir!”

  As the guard hastened off, Freya gave the supervisor an approving look. “You know your business.”

  He shrugged. “I learned it on Rhiannon Station, screening out the crazy Reds trying to come up from Mars. I thought I’d left that kind of thing behind when I came out here.”

  “We left nothing behind,” Lochan said, thinking of what Leigh had said earlier. “We brought it all with us.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Anyone traveling by jump drive from Eire to the star that humans had named Glenlyon had to follow a crooked path. The jump drives could only enter and leave jump space at points where space-time itself had been stretched thin by objects as massive as stars, and the star jumped from and the star jumped to had to be within several light years of each other, forcing ships to jump from star to star on the way to their destination. From Eire a ship would jump across the five light years to Tantalus, where there were no good planets for humans, and then on to Kosatka, home to a nice enough world that it had already attracted the attentions of would-be conquerors. From Kosatka the ship would have to jump to Jatayu, another inhospitable star, before making a final jump to Glenlyon and proceeding onward to the planet of the same name as its star.

  If, instead of going to Jatayu, the ship had jumped to Kappa, yet another star lacking suitable planets for humans, it would have then faced a choice of jumping either to Catalan or to a star named Hesta. Catalan, hemmed in by stars controlled by Apulu, Scatha, and Turan, had yet to be attacked, but had already found itself isolated. Hesta, supposedly still independent, had been the first target for aggression. Its puppet government had been under the control of foreign stars for two years.

  But getting a ship to actually take you along those routes would be much more difficult than it had once been. Word was getting around that any star past Tantalus was in a war zone. If a ship didn’t get caught in combat, it would likely fall prey to the pirates popping up in star systems like Kappa and Jatayu. The pirates, using freighters modified to carry a few weapons and a little more propulsion, were widely known to be privateers working for the aggressive star systems. Of course, freighters owned by Scatha, Apulu, or Turan still made the journeys, but at monopoly prices far higher than anywhere else. And traveling on one of their ships meant placing yourself under the control of stars who were looking for servants, not new citizens. Lochan, Leigh, and Freya had come from Kosatka on the Bruce Monroe, which for all they knew had been the last free ship to make that voyage after starting out from Glenlyon.

  Light itself would take more than twenty years to cover the distance between Glenlyon and Eire. Scientists were still debating whether time was really uniform across such distances, or if humans were bringing their own perceptions of time with them. But then scientists were still debating what time was. Yet, if events in separate star systems could take place “at the same time,” as Lochan Nakamura and his companions were arriving at Eire, his friend Mele Darcy was on the surface of the planet named Glenlyon orbiting the star of the same name. Wearing the uniform of Glenlyon’s still-new Marine force, Mele stood facing Colonel Menziwa, the commander of Glenlyon’s still-meager ground forces.

  “What do you want, Captain Darcy?” Menziwa asked, as if she was equally annoyed and uncaring about the reason for Mele’s visit. As usual, the ground forces colonel had a severely correct uniform, not a single thread out of place, and a matching hairstyle, not one hair daring to deviate from its proper position and placement. The colonel’s desk was also as precisely laid out as a parade ground, without even a single stray paper clip to mar its order. Mele had wondered more than once if Menziwa’s primary objection to the creation of a Marine force outside of her control was really about the existence of “soldiers” occupying the wrong organizational box.

  “I wanted to propose some joint exercise activity,” Mele said.

  Menziwa frowned slightly before leaning back in her seat and giving Mele a closer look. “Joint exercise activity.”

  “Yes, Colonel.” Mele tilted her head in the direction of the ground forces barracks. “Your people have been training by having mock engagements with each other. So have my Marines. But I think my people are falling into ruts, getting too used to each other and what they’ll do. I’d like to shake them out of any training routines and confront them with new challenges.”

  Menziwa spent several long seconds gazing at Mele without speaking. “How large is your force?”

  Like Glenlyon’s ground forces, the Marines had been expanding, so Mele wasn’t surprised that the colonel didn’t know that number. “We’re currently at forty Marines, Colonel. Forty-one, counting me.”

  “We need to count you,” Menziwa said, her expression and voice leaving it unclear as to whether that was praise or a rebuke. The colonel fell silent again for a few seconds. “That’s not a bad idea. I’ve never made it a secret that I see no need for a separate Marine force, but in this case it does offer some benefits in giving my people different opponents to face in training. Let my staff know I approve of the concept and want them to work out the details with you.”

  “Thank you, Colonel,” Mele said, saluting.

  Instead of returning the salute, Menziwa fixed her gaze on Mele again. “Captain Darcy, I’ve read all of the after-action reports from Kosatka.”

  Mele waited, holding herself at attention, wondering where this latest jab would lead.

  “It’s clear,” Menziwa said, “that if not for your actions and those of Commodore Geary, the invasion of Kosatka would have succeeded. Our enemies know that as well as we do. What will those enemies do as a result, Captain Darcy?”

  “Try to ensure that we can’t intervene again the next time they try to conquer Kosatka,” Mele said.

  “Exactly. I don’t particularly like you, Captain Darcy, but you’ve got a good head on your shoulders. We need to be prepared for whatever our enemies do to try to take us out preparatory to their next assault on Kosatka.”

  “I understand, Colonel.” Mele paused. “Permission to speak freely?”

  “Granted.”

  “I don’t particularly like you, either, Colonel.”

  Fo
r the first time in Mele’s experience with her, Menziwa smiled. “Your work at Kosatka earned you the right to say that. Now get out of here.”

  “Yes, Colonel.” Mele saluted again, pivoted, and left the office, once more grateful that Menziwa wasn’t in her chain of command.

  The officers she needed to speak with about the training weren’t available, being themselves out in the field on training exercises. Mele left messages for them to contact her, then headed back to the spaceport earlier than she’d anticipated for a lift back up to the orbital facility where Glenlyon’s small Marine force was garrisoned.

  Leaving headquarters required enduring a search of her driverless vehicle and a check of her ID by the gate sentries. Menziwa clearly was acting on her concerns, ensuring that no potential threat could easily pass in or out of her headquarters.

  On the road leading away from ground forces headquarters, Mele’s vehicle passed a truck lumbering toward that facility. A sign up front indicated the truck had no driver, fully automated as usual, and was one of the routine supply deliveries to the headquarters.

  She hadn’t gone more than a few kilometers when a flash of light behind her warned of the crash of an explosion that followed immediately after. Mele’s vehicle swerved as the ground jumped beneath it in response to the shock wave from the blast.

  Ordering her car to an emergency stop, Mele checked the radiation detector on her personal pad. There hadn’t been a surge of radiation, so the blast hadn’t been nuclear. Knowing there wasn’t any risk of fallout, Mele got out of her vehicle and stared back toward ground forces headquarters. A mushroom-topped pillar of smoke was rising skyward, testimony to the amount of explosive in the blast, and pieces of debris were still falling back to the ground. The distant sound of emergency sirens wailing seemed faint after the noise of the blast.

  Their enemies had struck again, just as the colonel had predicted.

  She got back into the car and directed it to return to Menziwa’s headquarters, wondering what she’d find there.

  CHAPTER 2

  The image of Mele Darcy on Commander Rob Geary’s display had taken only a second traveling at the speed of light to reach the destroyer Saber where the ship rested in the repair dock at Glenlyon’s orbital facility. Rob studied Mele as she talked, marveling at the way she could act and speak so calmly and coolly even after what she’d just witnessed and experienced. He knew Mele better than anyone else on Glenlyon, but even Rob couldn’t be sure whether she was really that composed inside or if she was bottling it all up until it could be released in a night of drinking.

  “The truck apparently tried to drive on through the gate when the sentries ordered it to stop for inspection,” Mele told him. “Automated barriers stopped the truck, but then it blew up. Improvised explosives, but a lot of them, and very well screened from the sensors in the gate and along the road. The ground forces lost thirty men and women, including both sentries at the gate. Their base took some damage, but nothing like what would have happened if that truck had reached the main buildings before exploding. Colonel Menziwa is all right, but mad as hell.”

  “That sounds like a professional job,” Rob said. “Not the work of amateur terrorists.”

  “Whoever did it was well trained. It looks like Old Earth is deporting its professional saboteurs to the stars. I guess the mother world is glad to have some distant places to dump all of its problems.” Mele paused, her eyes clouded with thought. “Why didn’t those saboteurs try to take out Saber and my Marines at the same time as they hit the ground forces base? Why warn us with one attack on one target?”

  “Maybe they intended to hit Saber,” Rob said. “One of the shuttles up here was taken off-line this morning when a systems check showed something odd in the autopilot software. When the autopilot was isolated and our code monkeys started a close look, whatever was in there ran a suicide subroutine that wiped the system clean.”

  “Software suicide?” Mele nodded. “What would’ve happened if that shuttle had suddenly gone to full autopilot, and then accelerated at Saber?”

  “If the pilot aboard didn’t manage to disable the autopilot in time, Saber would’ve been badly damaged,” Rob said. “There’s a chance it would’ve aimed at the facility, though. The enemy might have heard about the role you and your Marines played in stopping them at Kosatka.”

  Mele shrugged, as she usually did when someone tried to make a big deal out of her fight aboard Kosatka’s orbital facility. “I think it would’ve gone after Saber. My guess is they still want to take Glenlyon’s orbital facility intact, so they’re willing to kill Marines one at a time to do that. But when it comes to you and Saber, I think they’ll do all they can to blow you both to hell. Be careful, boss.”

  “Understood. They might be targeting you, personally, as well. Maybe they sent in that truck because they heard you were at the ground forces headquarters.”

  “I’m not that special,” Mele said. “But I’m keeping my eyes out, and acting unpredictably. You know how good I am at the unpredictable thing.”

  “That’s true. Still, I’m glad they didn’t get you in that blast.” Rob heard his voice waver a bit on the last words. “You care about them too much,” his wife’s voice sounded in his memory. “You can’t afford to let it hurt you so badly when they die, because that’s the business you’re in. But you can’t change that about yourself, can you?”

  Instead of showing any reaction to Rob’s inadvertent display of emotion, Mele grinned. “Heaven won’t take me and hell doesn’t want me.”

  “That I can believe. How long until you’re back up here?”

  “As soon as they clear shuttles to lift again.”

  Rob Geary grimaced, and forwarded the message to his executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Vicki Shen. There wasn’t anything else he could do.

  Rob sat in the captain’s stateroom, a grand name for a compartment about the size of a large closet in a building on the surface of a planet. In addition to being captain of Saber, he was also the Commodore in charge of all of Glenlyon’s space defenses. Since those defenses consisted solely of Saber, and the small force of Marines commanded by Mele Darcy, the Commodore title was also a grand name for something fairly small in reality.

  Victory at Kosatka had come at a price for Saber. The damage was still being repaired, even though the worst of it had been fixed. Trained personnel would have been harder to replace than equipment, if not for the survivors from Saber’s sister ship Claymore. Plenty of those experienced men and women had been eager to join Saber’s crew, most of them motivated by a desire to avenge shipmates lost in the destruction of Claymore.

  “We can replace the people we lost in terms of skills,” Rob had explained to his wife Lyn. He rarely called her by that name, since Lyn much preferred her professional software engineer nickname Ninja. “But it’s a lot harder to replace the people as people. Those men and women we lost are gone, and every time I see one of the replacements I remember the people they replaced.”

  And Ninja, knowing that there were no words adequate to the need, would simply hold him until the darkness inside him faded.

  The blare of an alarm shocked Rob out of his reverie. His desk display lit up, revealing an emergency alert. After an agonizing couple of seconds, the image of Council President Chisholm appeared. She had a grim set to her mouth, slightly tousled hair, and a red scrape along one cheekbone. “I am making this announcement in person to ensure that everyone knows the assassination attempt against me that took place a few minutes ago did not succeed thanks to the efforts of my bodyguards. The alleged attacker has been captured, and will be questioned. Rest assured that the government of Glenlyon remains strong and stable. Our enemies will not triumph. We will not fail.”

  Rob smiled as Lieutenant Commander Vicki Shen ran up to the stateroom hatch. “What do you want to bet Chisholm left that scrape untended until after she made that broadcast?” h
e said.

  Shen raised her eyebrows at him. “Do you think she faked it?”

  “No. Not for one moment. But our president knows how important image is.” A soft ding announced the arrival of a high-priority message. Rob tapped “receive,” reading rapidly. A tasking order for the Marines, sent to him because he was in overall command of them. “Like Chisholm said, they caught the would-be assassin alive.”

  “A Red.” Shen, bending slightly to read Rob’s display, didn’t sound surprised. “Mars must have an inexhaustible supply of thugs and murderers for hire. Why do they want Corporal Oshiro to assist in interrogating the killer?”

  Rob frowned in thought, tapping in a command that brought up a list of Mele’s Marines to help jog his memory. “Oh. Yuri Oshiro. He came from Mars, too.”

  “One of our Marines is a Red?”

  Shen looked ready to say more, so Rob forestalled her. “Mele and Gunnery Sergeant Moon approved Oshiro joining. It’s possible for me to imagine someone fooling one of those two. I can’t believe anyone could fool both of them.” Since Mele was still down on the planet, he tapped the command to call the Gunnery Sergeant, and wasn’t surprised when the call was answered almost instantly. “Gunny, Corporal Oshiro’s virtual presence is desired for the interrogation of President Chisholm’s would-be assassin. Here’s the link. Set that up, and let Captain Darcy know when she gets back.”

  “Yes, sir,” Moon said, somehow appearing to look simultaneously both calm and alert for danger. “Do you know anything specific they want from Oshiro?”

  Rob checked the message again. “The prisoner has gang tattoos. Torquas?”

  Sergeant Moon nodded. “One of the three big gangs on Mars. Oshiro was a Thark before he got off the planet, so he might know what buttons to push on the Torquas guy.”

  Vicki Shen leaned closer so that Moon could see her. “What was Corporal Oshiro’s position in that gang?”

  “He was a Calot, ma’am. Entry-level strong arm. But instead of trying to get a spot on an enforcement team, he went for a low-prestige, low-chance-of-promotion assignment guarding warehouses.” Moon grinned. “Because he was smart enough to know that’d let him get to know the people running the shuttles smuggling goods, so he could work out an escape from Mars.”