“Wind,” Diaz said. “Let’s hope it doesn’t pick up.”
The remaining two figures were racing after the cage, which dragged along the surface as Manticore was blown around. They caught it, and a second one boosted into the cage.
The warship lurched again, sliding sideways, the motion transmitted to the cable below. Once again, the third figure ran after it, stumbling over rocks, the other two reaching out and down.
“Come on,” Diaz breathed. “Do it!”
One of those in the cage got an armored hand locked onto the third figure and began pulling it in, assisted by the second.
A bigger gust of wind hit, twisting and pushing Manticore.
Down below, the third figure clung desperately to the outside of the cage as it skittered and bounced over rocks. Either by accident or design, one bounce brought the soldier up and over to fall on top of the other two inside the cage.
“Get us out of here, Kapitan,” Marphissa ordered.
Diaz reached with great care to touch the control that would start the automated maneuvers for bringing Manticore up out of atmosphere.
Marphissa, accustomed to the heavy cruiser leaping under the thrust of her main propulsion, had to grit her teeth in frustration as the warship rose at what felt like an incredibly gentle rate. But she could see the hull stress and temperature readings that told her that even at this apparently slow acceleration the heavy cruiser was going as fast as could be dared inside even the thin atmosphere of this planet.
After what felt like an eternity but was only a few minutes, the sky around Manticore changed from a disturbing shade of blue to the familiar black of space.
“Anything from the planet?” Marphissa demanded as the ship rose high enough to view a large chunk of the world once more.
“Nothing, Kommodor. No indications of enigma activity.”
“Coming into orbit,” Diaz said. “Not stable yet, but the thrusters can handle any problems.”
“Good. Shut off main propulsion and bring in that cable.”
Once again, a fairly quick process felt like it took forever. As the cage at the end of the cable neared Manticore, crew members in survival suits went out to collect the three soldiers and disconnect the cage. The soldiers were hauled along the hull to the nearest air lock, while the cage was shoved down toward the planet to vaporize during an uncontrolled descent to the surface.
“They’re inside,” Diaz reported. “Air-lock outer hatch sealed. Towing cable recovered and locked down.”
“Get us out of here, Kapitan,” Marphissa said. “Take us to the jump point for Midway, and don’t waste any time getting there. I’m going to go see our new guests.”
“Yes, Kommodor!”
Marphissa, bracing herself against the surge of acceleration as Manticore whipped out of orbit and headed for the jump point, walked carefully off the bridge.
To her surprise, she heard cheers breaking out through the ship. No words were identifiable, just sounds of jubilation. A group of specialists on their way to their watch stations saluted her, grinning broadly. “We did it, Kommodor! Thank you, Kommodor!”
She could not help smiling back as she returned the salutes. It did feel good right now.
The rescued soldiers were packed into the small compartment that served as a medical office aboard the heavy cruiser. They were still being helped out of their armor by unusually solicitous crew members who commonly expressed disdain for their ground forces counterparts. But now there was none of that rivalry.
The three soldiers, two men and one woman, were thin, with haunted, confused eyes. “They look like hell,” Marphissa said to the senior medical specialist who was examining them. All three had already had med packs slapped on their arms, the packs providing intravenous nourishment, fluid replacement, and antishock drugs.
“They’re in awful shape, Kommodor,” the medical specialist paused to report.
“Keep working,” Marphissa said. “Brief me as you work.”
“Yes, Kommodor,” the medical specialist replied gratefully, maintaining the formal tones of an official report as he continued working. “Living in battle armor for so long is stressful under the best of conditions. They were also conserving energy, and their available food and water, and running their armor life support on filters that should have been cleaned or replaced long before.”
“Are any of them in danger?”
The specialist paused to consider the question. “No, Kommodor. Not now that they are receiving proper care. They will require extensive recovery time.”
The soldiers, though dazed, had slowly shifted their gazes to Marphissa and appeared to have realized that she was a superior. All three began trying to rise from their seats and come to attention. “Sit down!” Marphissa ordered, and the three instantly dropped back down. “Report.”
One of the men blinked, then began reciting a standard Syndicate accounting for himself. “Capek, Katsuo, Worker Third Class, First Squad, Eighth Platoon, Third Company, Nine Hundred Seventy-First Ground Forces Brigade. Immediate Superior Worker First Class Adalberto Horgens. Unit Commander—”
“Enough.” Marphissa looked at the other two. “Your names and ranks, only.”
“Dinapoli, Mbali, Worker Fourth Class,” the woman said.
“Keesler . . . Padraig . . . Worker Fourth . . . Class,” the second man managed to recite. He was in the worst shape of the three, his eyes having trouble focusing on Marphissa.
Marphissa looked at Capek, who was watching her with a bewildered expression as he tried to figure out her rank from her uniform. “What happened?”
“Honored, um—”
“Do not worry about titles. Just tell me what happened.”
Capek blinked again, but with a clear order to follow he managed to rally his thoughts. “We were on a wide patrol . . . checking out areas far from Iwa City Complex. Our orders were to search for . . . for . . . anything out of the ordinary. My supervisor told me that we were searching for . . . infiltrators. On the third day of our patrol, we received an emergency alert that hostile forces had entered the star system. We were ordered to . . . return to Iwa Complex to defend the city. Two hours later, we were ordered to hold positions and . . . prepare to ride out orbital bombardment.”
He stopped, his gaze on Marphissa growing troubled. “Are we prisoners, honored . . . ?”
“No,” Marphissa said. “My ship, our forces, did not attack Iwa. What happened after you received orders to dig in?”
“Our unit commander told us to head away from the city. Get as far away as we could, he said. All units were . . . dispersing.” Capek paused, trying unsuccessfully to swallow and continue his report.
“We got far enough out,” the woman took up the tale, her voice thin with exhaustion. “We saw the rocks come down and felt the impacts, saw the flashes and the debris clouds even from as far away as we were. All comms lost. We could not contact anyone. Worker First Class Horgens ordered us to head back toward the city.” She paused, her face twitching. “Toward where the city had been. We would fight to the death, he said.”
Capek managed to start speaking again. “We traveled for over a day, on foot. It got very hard when we hit the bombardment zone. Very hard.” He appeared to be about to cry. “They destroyed . . . everything. We saw their ships coming down. Not like ours. Not Alliance.”
“Like turtles?” Marphissa prodded. “Big turtle shapes?”
“Yes,” the woman soldier agreed. “Different sizes. They came down. Worker Horgens led us toward them.”
“Dispersed column formation,” Capek said. “Standard dispersed column formation. Horgens was in center. Then . . . his head exploded. We went to ground. Others dying. We could see. I realized our links . . . were . . . being . . . targeted. I told Di— Dinapoli and K—Keesler, only two near to me, to kill links. Total elec . . . tronic silence.” He stopped again, staring
at nothing but clearly seeing the slaughter of his comrades.
“You three survived,” Marphissa said, “because you went totally passive. Did you see the enemy?”
Capek focused back on Marphissa as if momentarily uncertain of where he was, then shook his head. “Long-range smart rounds . . . I think. Nobody close to see us. They came much later, we are certain. To take away bodies.”
The woman spoke once more. “We didn’t move for . . . an hour? Then Worker Capek said we should get spare power packs and rations off the dead. We would need them. But don’t take packs already plugged in. If the enemy saw armor had been looted . . . they would come looking for us.”
“That was smart, Worker Capek,” Marphissa said. “You’ve been hiding since then?”
“Hiding, watching their ships come and go. No ships for a while, though.” Capek’s eyes went distant again for a moment. “Long time. Lying quiet, conserving power. Not transmitting. Cold. Air getting bad. Not enough water, food. Make it last. Someone will come. Someone will come.”
She thought about how many days those soldiers had spent suffering and in fear, nursing a wild hope that rescue would arrive. Marphissa looked over them again, seeing how thin they were, their badly cracked lips, the bleeding skin sores from their long time in Syndicate armor, the eyes that twitched around as if expecting to wake and discover that this was a dream. “How did they manage to run to the cage?” she asked the medical specialist.
He shrugged. “In extreme conditions, people find strength sometimes. They knew if they didn’t get in that cage they would die.”
“But they will be all right now?”
“It will take some time, Kommodor. I will soon sedate them and strap them down, because”—he tapped his head—“nightmares come, you know. After this sort of thing. Nightmares come.”
“I know.” She stood up, stopping with a stern gesture the automatic attempts by the three soldiers to rise again as well. “You will rest now. You are safe. I will speak with you again when you are better.”
Capek tried to stand yet again despite his unsteadiness, and shakily recited the standard Syndicate Acceptance of Responsibility. “This worker is responsible for the failure. My coworkers did not—”
“There was no failure,” Marphissa said.
“You came,” the woman said. “You came for the CEO. We failed to—”
“We came for you.”
“But . . . we’re just workers.”
“You are our comrades,” Marphissa said. “We do not leave anyone behind.”
As she walked back toward her stateroom to try to get some rest, Marphissa realized that was why the crew had cheered. It wasn’t simply that they had plucked three soldiers away from certain death, it was that those soldiers were “just workers.” They hadn’t been saved because they were high-ranking executives or CEOs. The risk had been run, the chance taken, even though the objects of the rescue were “just workers.”
The Syndicate never would have approved such an operation, Marphissa knew. It wouldn’t have been cost-effective. The risks would have been out of proportion to the possible gains, as precisely calculated in spreadsheets that assigned the same sort of carefully calibrated values to human beings as they did to pieces of equipment. The workers would have been left to their fates, slowly dying as they waited in vain for rescue.
It surprised her to realize that it had never occurred to her that the person or persons who needed to be picked up from the planet might be “just workers.” That simply hadn’t mattered.
She reached her stateroom and closed the hatch, falling gratefully onto her bunk fully clothed, and thinking that maybe, perhaps, it would be possible to overcome much of the toxic influence she and everyone else aboard Manticore had inherited from their years as servants to the Syndicate.
* * *
MARPHISSA could not really relax until Manticore finally entered jump en route Midway. They had only been intermittently able to see the portion of the planet where the enigmas had been working, but during those periods no activity could be detected. Either the enigmas were continuing to lie low until the human warship was gone, or the distance to the planet had grown too great to spot the small surface indications of the work deep underground.
“I tell you,” Diaz commented, “I was expecting some enigma warships to pop up at any moment while we were inside atmosphere and simply blow us apart.”
They were sitting in Marphissa’s stateroom, Diaz having stopped by after leaving the bridge. Being in jump meant he could relax somewhat as well, and the stateroom offered far more privacy for candid talk than did the bridge.
“I was expecting that, too,” Marphissa confessed. She ran one hand through her hair, sighing. “I am guessing that what we did was so unexpected that the enigmas were still arguing over how to react by the time we were done. They had never seen a human warship do what we did, so they had no idea what to do about it.”
“Doing the completely unexpected does sometimes help you out,” Diaz admitted. He stretched slowly. “Damn. I think I’ve been tensed up every minute we were at Iwa. And at Moorea. It’s a good thing the crew can’t tell how scared we are at times.”
“I think they may figure out a lot more than we give them credit for,” Marphissa said. “Speaking of figuring things out, did your people finish downloading and copying the data from those soldiers’ battle armor?”
“No.” Diaz made a helpless gesture with both hands. “They were going to try, since we told them to do it, but fortunately before they started I asked the right question, and they admitted that they were not familiar with ground forces’ software, so there was every chance that the access and download attempt would have triggered an autowipe of all the data by Syndicate-installed security subroutines.”
Marphissa clapped a hand to her face, exasperated, then slowly lowered it. “Every time I think we’re getting the workers past their Syndicate training . . . and look I just called them workers instead of specialists, so I’m also defaulting to that . . . they start to mindlessly obey an order instead of letting us know there might be a problem.”
Diaz shrugged. “Under the Syndicate, telling a supervisor there might be a problem with an order could get you shot. They learned to obey first and think not at all. Anyway, I told them not to touch the armor. We can turn it over to Drakon’s ground forces when we get back. They’ll know how to access that data. What are we going to do with the three soldiers?”
“Give them to Drakon, too, I guess.” Marphissa saw the look that Diaz couldn’t quite hide. “President Iceni trusts him. He’s backed the president in every way. And Honore Bradamont says that General Drakon is a good man who never really acted like a CEO.”
“I believe Bradamont,” Diaz admitted, “even though her judgment might be a little influenced by her involvement with that ground forces colonel. I just hate the thought of those soldiers thinking that we betrayed them after all. My medical specialist is keeping them asleep to aid their recovery, but he says every time he lets them wake a little they always look terrified until he can remind them that they were rescued. In their heads, those soldiers keep going back to that hellhole.” He grimaced and looked down. “I wonder if they’ll ever leave it, or if they’ll spend the rest of their lives feeling like they are still there.”
“You know how it is for us,” Marphissa said softly. “There’s a battleship I served on soon after becoming a junior executive. We got on the wrong end of a nasty battle. Everything knocked out, then the Alliance Marines came aboard. I don’t know how many times I’ve woken out of a nightmare where I am still fighting that battle in the darkened passageways of that doomed ship, blood and death everywhere, all my friends dying, some of them dying slow so they had plenty of time to know it—”
Her voice choked. Marphissa breathed in and out slowly, blinking back tears, aware that Diaz was conspicuously not looking at her.
/> “I know,” he finally said, still looking away. “There are two kinds of people in the Syndicate service. Those who died horrible deaths, and those who survived to remember. How did you survive?”
“The Alliance got driven off. Their Marines pulled back off the ship before they could take our defensive citadels.” Marphissa rubbed her eyes irritably. “Then those of us who were still alive were ordered to handle the casualty detail, collecting the bodies of our former friends and comrades, and getting the battleship into good enough shape to be hauled back and scrapped for parts and materials.”
“Nobody ever accused the Syndicate of being sentimental. It’s not good business.”
“True.” Composing herself, Marphissa nodded to Diaz. “We are the lucky ones, you know. Yes, we remember those who did not live, we remember how they died, but we can still try to make things better, try to save those that we can.”
Diaz smiled briefly. “Like three ground forces workers who expected to die?”
“Like them. It matters,” she insisted. “They matter. That’s why we must win—because we believe that.”
Diaz nodded, then smiled again. “But also there is this. We must win because if we lose, you and I will surely be killed in a very painful and public fashion.”
“That is another good reason,” Marphissa agreed.
* * *
CAPTAIN Honore Bradamont had mostly gotten over the occasional ugly flashback caused by being aboard Syndicate-design warships crewed by men and women in what were still basically Syndicate-style uniforms despite minor changes and new rank insignia. She had grown familiar with having bodyguards watching her to ensure none of the crew decided to act on their long-nurtured hatred of the Alliance and everyone who wore its uniform, even though that very familiarity with the practice disturbed her. And she had been able to accept that these men and women were not the “Syndic” monsters she had been taught to hate, who had killed many of her friends, and whom she had spent much of her life killing and trying to kill.
But to be riding a former Syndicate battleship, poised to assume command of a flotilla of former Syndicate warships if necessary, felt too bizarre to be real. To be sharing meals with former Syndicate officers whose own warships she had fought, and destroyed, at places like Varandal Star System, and who were supposed to follow her orders? If not for the orders that Admiral Geary had given her to do everything she morally could do to ensure the survival of the new regime on Midway, and her own belief that anyone who could win the loyalty of Colonel Donal Rogero as General Drakon had done must be a person worth following, Bradamont might have felt too disoriented to command at all, let alone well.