“I guess so,” Rogero said, hoping that he had revealed no reaction to Garadun’s words and deciding to change the subject as quickly as possible. “How certain are you that there aren’t any snakes or snake agents among the workers and supervisors that we recovered?”
Garadun shrugged. “As certain as we can be. You know how often snakes on stricken mobile forces units mysteriously fail to make it to escape craft. When we were picked up by the Alliance, there weren’t any openly known snakes among us. Every once in a while, someone among the prisoners would get tagged by their fellows as a covert snake. We’d hold a trial, without the Alliance guards knowing, of course, and if the charges held up, we’d deal with the snake. Then we’d turn the body over to the guards with one of the usual excuses about falling down stairs or off a building or something.” He gave Rogero a knowing look this time. “It’s a little worrisome how easily the workers came up with excuses like that. I can’t swear there aren’t still some covert snakes among our numbers. I don’t think so. But they can be very hard to spot.”
“I know,” Rogero agreed. “How many of those with us do you estimate will want to be let off?”
“Off the top of my head? Maybe fifteen hundred. No more than that. Most of those won’t be loyalists any more than I am. They’ll be people wanting to go to their families at places other than Midway, or people who can’t stomach even a whiff of Alliance involvement with you, or both. How long until we jump?”
Rogero checked his data pad. “Assuming nothing happens between now and then, about five hours.”
“It can’t happen a minute too soon for me.” Garadun stared toward the hatch leading into the passageway where workers sat with their backs against the bulkheads. “I never thought that I’d leave here, not unless it was on some prison transport taking me to a camp somewhere deeper inside the Alliance. I never thought I’d go home again, see my family again, have a chance at anything again. And now . . .” He exhaled heavily. “If that Alliance officer had as much to do with it as you say, well, maybe someday I can look her in the eye and not have to hide how I feel.”
ROGERO made sure to be on the freighter’s command deck as the small convoy approached the jump point that led to Atalia. The six freighters lumbered along steadily, not far from each other but not in anything resembling the ordered formations that mobile forces units always adopted.
The three Alliance warships had fallen back, opening the distance between them and the freighters. They had never communicated with the freighters, and didn’t seem likely to say good-bye. Rogero wondered whether he should send a message to the warships.
Bradamont came onto the command deck, her eyes going directly to the display where the three Alliance warships loomed nearby.
“Should we say something?” Rogero asked her. “Thank them for their assistance? Just say farewell?”
“No.” Bradamont’s voice sounded hollow. “You can’t acknowledge that they did anything for you. It could get them in trouble.”
“But everybody knows. It was obvious.”
“Yes, everybody knows, but nobody is admitting that they know.”
Rogero shrugged. “All right, but it sounds like how we did things in the Syndicate.”
“I didn’t need to hear that.” She clearly wasn’t taking the comment humorously.
He watched her, seeing the look in Bradamont’s eyes as they prepared to leave Alliance space and leave behind Alliance warships, everything that Bradamont knew and held dear. Everything except him. And for him as much as anything she had given this up, official orders or not.
“Ready,” the freighter’s executive said.
“What about the other five?” Rogero asked.
“Yes. Ready to go. See those lights on the display? We’ve got our jump orders linked. When I go, we all go.”
“Then go,” Rogero said.
The stars vanished.
The endless gray of jump space filled the display.
Captain Bradamont left the bridge.
After a long minute, Rogero left, too. It would be four days in jump space before they reached Atalia. At least in jump space, everything traveled at the same speed, and they would reach the other star as swiftly as the fastest battle cruiser.
TWO days in jump, and Rogero was feeling uneasy. Uneasiness was normal in jump space. People didn’t belong here, and the longer they stayed, the worse it felt. But that kind of discomfort usually took a bit longer than two days to be noticeable. This was something else.
He walked restlessly around the freighter, having to step over innumerable workers sitting in the passageways because there was not enough room elsewhere for them. The air had already gone a bit stale, life support not quite up to the task of handling so many people. It wouldn’t become dangerous in the time they would have to live with it, but the smell would get worse, and headaches would become increasingly frequent.
Rogero found that his steps had brought him to the quarters occupied by Honore Bradamont. He frowned slightly as he realized that this was the source of his unease. Why? Since entering jump, Bradamont had stayed inside that small compartment, out of sight of the workers, not wanting to flaunt her presence before those who still saw her as the enemy. The two soldiers of Rogero’s who were standing sentry outside Bradamont’s door at this hour were alert. What, then, bothered him?
He walked up to the soldiers, who both came to full attention and saluted him. “How does everything look?” Rogero asked.
Syndicate soldiers were trained to not ask questions, to not volunteer information, to do what they were told and nothing more or less. Rogero’s soldiers, like many of those in General Drakon’s forces, had been given different training for the last few years. Observe. Think. Tell someone if something looks wrong.
So when he asked how does everything look? these soldiers knew that he meant it as a question to be answered.
The more veteran of the two chewed his lip for a moment. “We’re being watched, Colonel, sir.”
The other soldier nodded.
“By who? How often?”
“Pretty often, Colonel. It’s a feeling. Someone is watching. Like on a battlefield, even when the armor sensors are saying there’s nothing there, you can still tell there’s a sight on you. They’re staying low, though. So many workers go by all the time, they can just meld in with them.”
The second soldier nodded again. “Especially when we’re doing turnover, Colonel, relieving the shift before us or being relieved. Whoever it is pays close attention at those times.”
“But you haven’t seen anyone in particular?”
“No, sir. Just the feeling. The others who’ve been standing guard have mentioned it, too, Colonel.”
Worrisome. Very worrisome. Veterans developed a feel for such things, sort of a new sense, or perhaps a very old sense brought to life again, one that had been mostly lost as humans developed tools.
No one person could be watching the soldiers that often. This was a group effort. Would someone try to get at Bradamont? The two sentries could stop one or two attackers, but what if there were many? What if an overwhelming number of workers came down this passageway, bent on revenge against the woman who represented the enemy and was within their reach?
Rogero studied the door. A freighter’s internal door. Just a flimsy, lightweight panel that provided some privacy but little else. Like most living compartments on the freighter, this one couldn’t even be locked.
She would be trapped in there.
But there were no better rooms, no more secure place on this ship, and he knew better than to suggest that she share his room. Bradamont would not agree under these conditions, and if, impossibly, she did agree, the blowback against him from everyone else on the freighter would be huge.
There must be something he could do. The vague sense of warning had grown stronger. If I do not think of some extra mea
sures to protect Honore Bradamont, she might not make it to Atalia. I must think of something, and I must do so quickly.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
TWO hours until the freighter left jump. Two hours until they reached Atalia. One hour until “dawn” as measured by the freighter’s internal time. Colonel Rogero lay on his narrow bed in his very small quarters, staring up at the tangle of wiring and ducts that made up the overhead.
The sense that something was going to happen had been growing. Indefinable, perhaps only a new manifestation of the old jump-space nerves, but still it had kept him from sleeping much this night and brought him fully awake well before he needed to get up.
He sensed a trembling through the structure of the freighter before he could consciously feel it. The trembling grew with shocking suddenness, turning into an irregular beat of many feet in the passageway outside. Whoever they were, they were moving quickly and silently.
Rogero’s feet were hitting the deck when he heard the sentries outside Bradamont’s new quarters down this same passageway shout warnings and commands. He paused only for the barest fraction of a second, deciding between his sidearm or heavier armament and choosing the latter. He was reaching for the door when the shouts of the sentries were submerged in a roar of sound that erupted in the passageway as at least a hundred throats shouted hate.
As he opened the door, a crash sounded down the hall, the unmistakable sound of a grenade detonating nearby and only slightly muffled by having exploded inside some room off the passageway. Almost certainly, that room had been Bradamont’s quarters. A small portion of Rogero’s mind wondered where the mob had acquired a grenade, and resolved to find out. If one of his soldiers had lost or bartered away a grenade . . .
But that would be a priority for later.
Rogero came out of his stateroom, not wearing armor but his pulse rifle powering up. Every passageway on the freighter tended to have a lot of people in it, but right now this passageway was packed solid with the mob pushing toward Bradamont’s quarters.
One of the uglier things about iron discipline was that when it cracked, it didn’t simply cause minor disruptions. Any crack tended to be catastrophic. Which meant responses had to be immediate and overwhelming.
He would have had to react the same even if Bradamont had not been the target of this mob.
“Comply!” Rogero shouted over the tumult, then without waiting fired a shot into the worker immediately in front of him. The pulse rifle blew a hole completely through the worker and knocked down another in front of that man. “Comply!” Rogero yelled on the heels of the shot and fired again right after that.
This time three workers in the congested passageway dropped, Rogero pushing forward over their bodies. “Comply!”
A third shot, two more down, but the others finally grasping what was happening, workers reacting from habit and fear drilled into them, twisting to put their backs to the nearest bulkhead, raising their arms to place both hands on their heads, staring outward without speaking as Rogero bellowed the command a fourth time. “Comply!”
There was a small group before the door to Bradamont’s quarters, trying to push their way inside past a door loose on its hinges but still somehow holding them back as if solidly braced from behind. Traces of smoke from the grenade explosion drifted past the edges of the door from inside. Caught up in their efforts, reacting more slowly to the sounds of the shots and the commands, some were still pushing when Rogero fired a fourth, fifth, and sixth time without pausing.
Silence fell then, except for a couple of wounded workers gasping in pain. Everyone else had their backs flattened against a bulkhead, hands locked on their heads in compliance.
The two soldiers who had been on guard were trying to struggle to their feet when Rogero reached them. He wasted a precious second looking them over, searching for evidence of whether they had resisted the mob or just given in. But uniforms were torn, bruises and scratches were evident, and one of the soldiers, face drawn with pain, cradled an arm broken in at least one place.
“We locked arms,” the other soldier reported. “But we couldn’t hold.” She stood at attention now, almost trembling in anticipation of two more shots aimed at punishing her and her comrade for their failure.
But Rogero lowered his weapon. “You tried.” The grenade detonation and the shots he had fired had set off alarms inside the freighter, the frantic tones stuttering warnings that no longer had any purpose. “There should be more soldiers here very soon. See that you are checked in the freighter’s autodoc.”
He turned to the broken door and carefully knocked in a special pattern. After a moment, the door finally gave way, falling inward to reveal a figure in battle armor standing amid the wreckage created by the grenade explosion in the small room. “Are you all right?” Rogero asked.
Bradamont nodded, unsealing the suit’s faceplate to speak to him directly. “The armor took some damage from the grenade. I’m all right, though. With the help of the armor, I could hold that door for a while.”
It had been the only possible solution. While all eyes had been on Bradamont as she shifted her belongings out of her old quarters and began walking to this one, while this passageway had been temporarily cleared of anyone else in the name of security for Bradamont’s move, Rogero had quickly brought his own armor out of his quarters and slid it inside Bradamont’s new living space. If the soldiers outside held long enough, and she had any extra warning, Bradamont would be able to get into that armor and hold off an attack until relief arrived. So he had hoped.
The alarms cut off as someone on the freighter’s bridge shut them down, the silence now filling the passageway holding an ominous quality as Rogero turned to confront the workers and low-level supervisors lining the bulkheads, all of them trying their best to be motionless but more than one quivering with terror.
Executive Ito came running down the passageway, her face contorted with anger. “Who did this? Who led this? Talk, you miserable low forms of life!”
Rogero stopped her with one raised hand. “Get the names of everyone here. Organize a working party to get the bodies packed up.” He looked down at the two still-living-but-wounded workers trying not to writhe in pain, both of them literally biting their lips to keep from moaning.
A few moments ago he would have killed them without hesitation. Now they were helpless. They might have information.
A half-dozen soldiers came dashing up, grim expressions taking in the scene. Lieutenant Foster saluted, his own face rigid. As immediate unit commander, he might also face the severest form of discipline for any failure of his soldiers to protect Bradamont.
But she was unharmed. How would I have reacted if she had been badly hurt or killed? Hopefully even then I would have recognized that punishment would serve no purpose when men and women had done their best.
Rogero jogged his head toward the two battered guards. “Your soldiers did their duty. See that they are looked after. Try to keep those two wounded workers alive. I want them able to talk.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Post half of your unit on guard here, four-hour shifts on and off, until Captain Bradamont leaves this ship.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Captain Bradamont, I recommend you remain in that armor until we can get you aboard a shuttle at Atalia.”
“Yes, Colonel,” Bradamont said, her own voice subdued but betraying no feelings. She looked outside, at the carnage wrought by the mob and by Rogero’s suppression of it, and he wondered what she was thinking.
She was seeing the Syndicate way. Cowering workers against the walls and deadly force against disruptions. He had never liked it even when it was necessary to prevent worse things. I know what Honore will think of it. What will she think of me?
Rogero walked back to his room, the pulse rifle radiating heat in a glow that reflected back from the cowed workers lining the passageway. Behi
nd him, Ito was savaging the workers as other senior supervisors showed up to verbally lash the rioters, tossing in occasional physical blows to emphasize their points. The workers took it passively, as they knew they must.
He had become used to such things. But now he was imagining seeing them through the eyes of Honore Bradamont, and the ugliness of it all was hard to bear. We are changing things. We’ll change this, too. It will take time, but the day will come when I will not have to face down rioting workers with a combat weapon.
Close to two hours later, the freighter flashed back into normal space, the stars gazing down impassively on six ships full of humans who were finally accepting that they were free. Rogero, still depressed over the riot and his suppression of it, gazed morosely at those stars. I don’t want to do this anymore. But what else can I do? And if I don’t, who takes my place? General Drakon says he needs me.
The four light cruisers and six Hunter-Killers were still here. Far off, light-hours distant, the two heavy cruisers waited at the jump point for Kalixa.
A virtual window popped open near Rogero, the image of the commander of the light cruiser Harrier looking out at him. “Welcome back. We were taking bets on whether you would miss them.”
“Miss who?” Rogero asked.
“Black Jack’s fleet. They jumped for Varandal three days ago. You must have passed each other in jump space.”