Battle Cruiser (2 page)

“Open the gun port or I’ll do it myself.”

Rumbold did as he was ordered.

I suspected it must be hard on a man of his years to take orders from someone who might be as much as a century younger. But he did it, just the same. I valued his service more in that moment than I ever had, and if this ended well I vowed to reward him if I could.

“Firing solution completed,” he said. “We’re locked on target.”

“Retarget the cannon. Fire two kilometers off his bow.”

Rumbold did as I asked with a sigh of relief. I was surprised he’d thought I was mad enough to direct lethal fire at a ship without authorization. I wondered, too, if he’d have done it if I’d given the order—it was my belief that he would have.

“Ready,” he said.

“Fire on my mark…mark!”

Rumbold fired the forward cannon, and it sent a spray of invisible radiation toward the target.

Cutlass’
primary armament was a single particle-beam weapon. A pulse of neutrons were released, an optional function of the same continuous reaction in the ship’s core that drove the engines. The pencil-thin beam wasn’t quite as accurate as a laser might have been, but it was more deadly at this range.

We waited several seconds while our threat was perceived. I was gratified when the channel opened at last and an irate man with an odd accent appeared on my cracked screen. He sounded as though he might have been European.

“Are you crazy?” he demanded. “Fuck you, you goat!”

The man’s face was red and veins stood out on his neck.

“This is Captain William Sparhawk of the Guard,” I said calmly. “You’re hereby ordered to heave-to or suffer the consequences.”

“William Sparhawk,” the man said slowly, as if memorizing my name. “This will be the end of you.”

I made a show of lifting my arm above the camera pickup on my board. I allowed my hand to hover out of view. “Obey me, or I will be the end of you right now.”

The screen went dark. The operating system automatically returned to projecting our course visually.

Still expecting some kind of response, I said nothing until Rumbold spun the ship around and began braking hard to slow us down.

“What are you doing?” I demanded.

“The smuggler is slowing down, sir. We have to brake now, or we’ll plunge right into Earth ourselves.”

I blinked at the controls. Rumbold was right.

I dared to grin. The smuggler had believed my bluff. He was slowing down, and he was going to allow us to board.

While the two ships matched speeds, I had time to wonder about my threat. Had it been a bluff? Would I have fired upon the smuggler’s ship?

It was the first time I’d been in such a situation, and I felt untested. I’d searched dozens of small vessels, some innocent and others packed with contraband. But I’d never shot one down before.

Technically, I’d be within my rights to do it—but that’s not always how these things worked out. There would have been an investigation afterward, and if some prosecutor could argue successfully that the smuggler had been performing an innocent emergency landing due to a systems failure, I’d have been in trouble. I might not have been court-martialed, but my career would have been at an end.

So, I asked myself as we slid through space and prepared to search the floating vessel in low orbit—would I have done it?

Yes, I admitted to myself, I might have fired in an attempt to disable her engines. That could have resulted in the destruction of the spacecraft.

Why fire? Because I was a Sparhawk. My House had been famous for producing stern leaders with harsh tempers for centuries.

-2-

Most people think of space as being infinite, and I suppose that in the abstract, it is. But when one is hunched inside a cramped ship with engines that strain and shudder whenever thrust is applied, space seems finite indeed.

Searching the smuggler’s ship was one of the tightest squeezes I’d ever endured. There were pockets where a man could stand if he hunched, but they were few and far between. Every centimeter of space was crammed with goods.

Despite the crowding, the smuggler’s ship appeared to be well-maintained. Every system was operating with perfect efficiency. It did nothing for my mood to see the relative wealth of the other side.

The worst part was I couldn’t find anything on the contraband list aboard her. I wanted to cite the pilot for smuggling—but I couldn’t.

He stood with his arms crossed as Rumbold and I inspected his vessel, worming our way over packages from the forward cockpit to the frozen confines of the aft hold. It was in the depths of the hold where I finally found something interesting.

“What are these?” I asked, holding up a silver tube with a screw-cap and a temperature readout on the side.

“That’s an embryonic storage unit,” he said. “That’s someone’s child, unaltered.”

I stared at the tube in surprise.

“Why would you be carrying something medical?” I asked.

He snorted. The pilot’s name was Edvar-something, and he hadn’t been the most gracious smuggler I’d ever met.

“That’s how they do it out in the rocks,” he said. “You can’t conceive normally. There aren’t a lot of eligible mates running around for most spacers. Some get the urge, and they buy a premade like these.”

I opened a large carton. There were dozens of them. Silver tubes with rounded ends and readouts on the side.

“Frozen…” I said thoughtfully. “I’ll have to open one to check your story.”

The man looked at me balefully. “That will ruin my stock. These aren’t cheap and many of them are special orders.”

“All the same, I can’t simply take your word for it.”

“Can’t you just check my manifest?” he demanded. “They’re all listed and cataloged.”

I shook my head. “Such things can be easily doctored.”

Edvar groaned and shook his head. “Do it in the hold, then. Just open one, and do it where it’s cold enough to keep the contents from melting. Open it delicately, all right? And reseal it as if it were your own kid you were exposing to space.”

Eyeing him, I frowned. I didn’t like the idea of endangering someone’s future child—but it couldn’t be helped. The man had no company listed—no one he was working with. There wasn’t anyone I could call and ask for confirmation. He was an independent operator, something that was rare on Earth, but common on the fringe of the system.

“All right,” I said. Taking the tube into the hold while Rumbold kept his eye on the man, I carefully unscrewed the top.

I don’t know what I expected to find inside. A vial of white powder, perhaps. Or maybe instant death as a bomb went off in my face.

But I discovered nothing so dramatic. The tube was a tiny, monitored environment. The embryo inside floated in a tube of frozen yellow liquid.

I photographed it, ran a quick scan, then carefully sealed it again. When I returned to the cab, the smuggler leered at me.

“Did you snort it all?” he asked. “Most inspectors leave some for me. Good stuff, isn’t it, peacock-man?”

I glanced at him sharply, but I ignored the insult. Rude people who were angry with guardsmen often called us “peacocks” as we were considered ineffectual show-offs.

Without a word, I tapped out a citation and touched his computer with mine. The ticket was instantly transferred and logged.

“What’s that for?” Edvar demanded.

“Read it. Resisting search, refusal to obey an officer pursuant, etc. I had to fire across your bow to get you to stop running. That’s a crime.”

“You dick!” he raged at me. “My customers are big! They won’t like this.”

I dared hope he would throw a punch—but sadly, he knew better. Instead, he filled the air with invective as Rumbold and I retreated from his ship. When we were safely through the airlock and gone, he fired up his engines and dove down toward Earth. I could see his anger in every course correction.

“You haven’t lost your touch, sir,” Rumbold remarked.

“He was hiding something. No one runs from the Guard for the hell of it.”

“Yeah, probably…but then again, maybe he’s just a man with a vile personality. There are many who become spacers because no one else can stand to have them around.”

Returning to my station, I found the com light blinking again.

“Message incoming from
Altair
, sir,” Rumbold said. “Looks like the boss pulled up behind us while we were inspecting that ship. He’s not in the best mood, I’d imagine.”

Sighing, I answered the call. Captain Singh’s lips were pulled back to show his teeth. The effect was unpleasant.

“Mission accomplished, sir,” I said.

“What mission? You weren’t given orders—”

“My orders are clear, sir. See the rules of engagement signed March 22
nd
—signed by you, Captain. They stipulate what to do in the case of a fugitive with possibly dangerous cargo heading for—”

“What fugitive? He had nothing! I’ve seen your automatic logs. That was abuse, Guardsman. Pure and simple.”

I frowned. Singh wasn’t always a reasonable man, but he generally came down on the side of the law. What had Edvar said about having powerful friends? I’d expected perhaps to hear from an irritating space-rights lawyer, maybe even one who would manage to drag me into an auto-court to make a deposition. But this…

“Sorry if I was overzealous, sir,” I said. “It was my belief that the man was a smuggler. I’m still not sure that he wasn’t hiding something. Searching a spaceship properly takes a full ground crew of yard-dogs.”

“Oh, are you going to request that next?” Singh demanded.

I hesitated, but then I nodded slowly. “That might be a good idea.”

Singh threw up his hands and waved them at me as if I was a misbehaving animal. “Forget I said that. We’re returning to the station. There’s something else I need to talk to you about.”

“What’s that, sir?” I asked, happy to change the topic.

“Your presence has been formally requested on Earth. You’re going down to the capital tonight. Put on your service dress, and make sure you shave first.”

I didn’t know what to say for a few moments. “Is this in regard to the incident with the smuggler?”

“He wasn’t a smuggler. You just confirmed that fact.”

“I reported that I couldn’t find anything with a cursory inspection.”

“Never mind. No, this isn’t about your obsession with small-time criminals. I’ve been ‘asked’ by CENTCOM to deliver you to Capital City.”

“Ah,” I said, understanding at last.

A major part of my mistreatment among the guardsmen came from the fact I was a member of a prominent family. My father was a Public Servant, one of several hundred such individuals on Earth. Together, they ran what passed for our government. As my father hadn’t approved of my joining the Guard, we hadn’t spoken in over a year. He was a stern man when things didn’t go his way.

But that reality had never sunk in with most of the guardsmen I knew. They hated me for being from House Sparhawk. Everything I did was second-guessed and assumed to be motivated by arrogance. If I was promoted, it was because of my family name. If I failed in some task, it was because I was incompetent. It was assumed without question I’d only gotten to my station through cheating and favoritism in the first place.

There was no winning with those who harbored these attitudes, so I didn’t bother. Fortunately a few men, like Rumbold, judged me as one more man in the Guard, rather than as an heir to a fortune.

“What’s the occasion, sir?” I asked Singh.

He made a flippant gesture. “Who knows? Maybe they’ll give you command of my ship. Or maybe it’s a royal wedding of some kind. Or maybe, your father is going to give another of his long speeches on the net tonight and he can’t bear to be apart from you during the ceremony.”

That last part made me smile. “My father might be giving a speech, it’s true,” I said. “But if he’s requested my presence, it isn’t because he’s dying to see me.”

Singh leaned forward, peering at me for a moment. “I get it. You disappointed him, didn’t you? You rebelled by joining the Guard, the last ditch holdout for romantics and oldsters who don’t want to quit working.”

“That’s an unfair assessment of my motivations,” I said, “but it’s a good analysis of my father’s opinion.”

“He heads the Equality Party,” Singh said, “the short-sighted geniuses who move to slash our budgets every single year. Yes, I can see how joining the Guard offended him. You offend everyone, Sparhawk.”

“That’s not my goal, Captain.”

“I’ve got a new goal for you, then,” he said, a sly grin spreading over his face. “I’m sending you down with a full squad as a color guard.”

“I’m not sure if that’s the best—”

“I don’t care, Sparhawk. Your old man can reach out and stick a pin in an admiral, forcing him to make a special request regarding you. But he can’t control every detail of your visit, any more than I can control how you run that tiny ship of yours.”

“But, sir…”

“Get cleaned up and dock at the station in three hours. Dismissed.”

The screen faded then flickered as it returned to the normal status display. I glanced over at Rumbold, who was pretending he hadn’t listened in.

“My father isn’t going to like this. I don’t think he’s ever seen me in my uniform.”

“We’d better get our dress-blues on then!” he said. “I’ll open the locker.”

“We?” I asked. “Who said you were going?”

“Did you hear the captain? He said you’re going down with a full color guard. As your second in command, I must attend.”

I eyed him doubtfully.

“I’d love to see a high-society gathering, Skipper,” he said.

“All right,” I said with a sigh. I flopped back in my creaking command chair the moment he went below decks.

This was looking worse all the time. I couldn’t imagine a more conspicuous character than Rumbold who might attend one of my father’s gatherings. Loyal he might be—but beautiful and well-mannered he was not.