Of Treasons Born (8 page)

One of the marines said, “Aw, you're no fun.”

York recognized Cochran's voice when she said, “Shut up, Thorp.”

They killed the lights as the whine of the pumps echoed through the hull, evacuating
Three Bay.
Butterflies fluttered through York's stomach when he heard a loud clatter, then the doors of the service bay parted just a crack, and a faint mist filled the bay as the vacuum of space sucked out what little air remained.

“Stay calm, Ballin,” Cochran said. “Just a milk run. Nothing to worry about.”

The gap in the doors of the service bay widened, and York saw the pinprick lights of a few stars on the black background of space. Then the stars slid to one side as
Dauntless
maneuvered, and the harsh glare of the nearby sun filled the widening gap between the doors.
Three Bay
had turned into a black and white world of bright glare and sharp shadows.

Because the internal gravity fields compensated for all motion, York didn't feel anything when
Three
's
service gantry telescoped the gunboat toward the open bay doors, though he got to listen to whining servos. The gantry released
Three
with a loud clang just as they reached the doors, and the gunboat floated away from its service bay. The screens in York's turret showed the massive hull of
Dauntless
as
Three
drifted away from her. Then Rodma cut in the gunboat's grav drive, and the transition ship dwindled into the distance.

“Turrets out,” Rodma said.

He recognized Sissy's voice when she said, “Time to rock and roll.”

York's turret slid forward on telescoping supports, putting his turret pod two meters beyond the hull of the gunboat. He now had an unobscured line of fire over far more than a hemisphere.

York put a navigation summary in the corner of one of the turret's screens. It provided a lot of information, but all he understood was that they were two thousand kilometers outside the planet's atmosphere. At that distance, it was a huge sphere that almost filled his field of view, and there wasn't much to see beyond large landmasses and several bodies of water.

“What's this place called?” one of the marines asked.

Rodma said, “It's the Thealoma system. Planet's just a number: Thealoma Two.”

“No prime station,” someone said. “Must be a real backwater place.”

“It was in feddie hands until a year ago, and they've still got sympathizers down there.”

Cochran said, “You turret gunners listen up. Intel says some of the sympathizers are hostile, might have some lightweight surface-to-air stuff, but nothing that'll reach outside atmosphere. We're still far enough out we got nothing to worry about yet, but intel's been wrong before, so stay alert.”

Milk run or not, this was real, and the butterflies in York's stomach wouldn't allow him to relax. He'd promised Sissy, Jack, and Chunks he wouldn't fuck up, and he hoped dearly he could keep that promise.

The planet slowly grew larger on his screens, then filled his field of view completely. Twenty minutes later as
Three
dropped down into the outer atmosphere, he could make out large cities. He tried not to gawk, tried to stay focused on the job.

When
Three
leveled off at an altitude of ten kilometers, York turned off his internal gravity field just to feel something. When the boat hit a little turbulence, he noticed that the image in his screens didn't shake with the motion of the craft. The images were compensated as well.

“Ballin,” Cochran said. “Why'd you kill your grav field?”

“Sorry, Sergeant, just experimenting.”

York switched his grav field on.

One
and
Three
settled down on the concrete apron of a large landing field, and Rodma said, “We're zoned.”

York didn't relax until Rodma retracted his turret and Cochran said, “Ballin, shut her down, come on out and stretch your legs a bit.”

York keyed his helmet to retract into the suit collar and climbed out of the turret, saw the other gunners climbing out of theirs.

“Keep the suit on,” Rodma told him. “We're only going to be here a couple hours.”

Sissy, Jack, and Chunks sat down to play cards.

The hatch in the side of the gunboat was an open invitation to breathe real air. “Can I step outside?”

“Sure, kid. But don't wander away from the boat.”

York stepped out onto the concrete of the landing field just as two large trucks pulled away. For the first time in months, he stood on the surface of a planet beneath a blue sky—it actually had a slightly pinkish tint—with hazy clouds obscuring a sun a little too red. Cochran had deployed one squad of marines as a ring of armed guards around the two boats. York learned that the trucks were carrying the other squad as an armed escort for the spooks.

“Spooks?” York asked.

“Ya,” Rodma said. “Covert ops. This place is unstable as hell. Got every kind of faction you can imagine, all trying to kill each other off.”

The war! York didn't know anything about the war. It had simply been in the background noise of his life, something far away and not of any great concern. Why think of the war when Maja's next unpalatable meal was of far greater concern? He wondered if Rodma might know a thing or two, and was trying to think of a question to ask him when the pilot suddenly glanced about, looked at York, and his eyes narrowed. “Want to have some fun?”

“Like what?” York asked.

“Come with me.”

Rodma stepped through the hatch back into the boat. York followed him as he made his way to the cockpit where a woman sat dozing in the copilot's seat. “Look lively, Meg,” Rodma said.

Meg opened her eyes and blinked several times. “Wah?”

“Kid's gonna get a driving lesson.”

Meg had shoulder-length auburn hair tied into a utilitarian ponytail. She lifted herself out of the seat and regarded York with dark brown eyes. “He's a driver?”

“Not yet,” Rodma said, dropping down into the pilot's seat. “But he scored pretty high on the sims. Let's see what he can do for real.”

York's heart fluttered as he said, “Me, drive the boat?”

“Don't worry,” Meg said as she pushed him down into the copilot's seat. “You can't crash this thing, especially with Rodma next to you.”

Sissy, Jack, and Chunks gathered behind her, peering over her shoulder. Jack said, “You never let me drive.”

“You're damn right,” Rodma said. “Not with your sim scores.”

York gripped the control yoke as Meg left to tell the squad guarding the boats to spread out a bit. She and Rodma seemed to think this would be a real lark, but as York's gut tightened, he didn't share their sense of adventure.

“Don't crush the yoke,” Rodma said. “Relax.”

York's knuckles had turned white, so he let go of the yoke and flexed his fingers.

Jack said, “Bet his dick turns white like that when he fucks.”

Rodma hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “You three go back and strap down. Probably going to shake and rattle a little while the kid's learning.”

He looked at York. “Okay, let's get this boat hot. You do it. I'll watch.”

York heard the hatch slam shut as he brought the boat's systems up, and Meg leaned over him a moment later. “So far, so good. Seems to know what he's doing.”

“Now,” Rodma said, “simple lift, straight up, and hover at about a meter.”

York made sure the attitude yoke was neutral, then gripped the thrust stick beside his acceleration couch.
Stay calm
, he thought,
move slowly
. He applied the tiniest bit of power to the boat's underbelly grav fields and nothing happened. He increased the power slightly and still nothing.

“He's cautious,” Meg said. York glanced up at her and she added, “That's a good thing, York.”

York applied more power in tiny increments until the boat lurched and lifted off the concrete. It startled him, and he cut the power. The boat settled softly back to the concrete.

Rodma and Meg had him try again, and the next time he lifted the boat and held it at one meter. The gunners cheered. The pilots made him lift and settle back down repeatedly, until he felt comfortable doing it, and he began to relax. They were hovering at one meter when Rodma said, “Now this is the tough part. This boat's so heavily gyroed and compensated, anyone can do this. Let's see how you do on full manual.”

He reached out and hit a switch on the console in front of him. The computer said,
Disabling stability controls is not—

Rodma gripped his thrust stick and control yoke as he interrupted it, “Override, override, override.”

The boat canted to the right side, York compensated, overdid it, and the boat swung to the left. He overcompensated again and swung back to the right, then York's controls suddenly went dead and the boat leveled off. Rodma had taken control.

York said, “Sorry.”

“No,” Meg said. “You did good, kid.”

They tried again, and the next time York managed to stabilize the boat and hold it hovering on full manual control.

Meg said, “Kid's a fucking natural.”

York beamed with pride, lost his concentration, and the boat canted to one side.

Rodma had York doing simple attitude maneuvers with the boat hovering at about ten meters, moving the boat forward and backward, right and left, all on full manual control. They'd been at it for a couple of hours when the trucks returned from the embassy. York climbed back into his turret, and the gunboats lifted into the air to return to
Dauntless
.

He'd learned that the marines were always looking for good boat drivers, and his scores on the sims had been good enough to earn him the chance to try it for real. And he'd done well enough that Rodma and Meg were going to recommend that Shernov accelerate his pilot training.

As the boat lifted higher into Thealoma Two's atmosphere, York ignored the view and daydreamed about making a real life for himself in the navy. Maybe he could get promoted to something better than spacer apprentice. He was thinking on that when the turret's alert klaxon blared at him.
Incoming,
the computer said, and two red blips appeared on his screens, identifying two missiles arcing toward them, trailing plumes of rocket smoke behind them.

York's heart pounded up into his throat and he knew he was going to screw this up. He focused his eyes on one of the targets, and following his eye movements the computer marked it with a tracking reticle. He swung his turret toward it, locked a target designator onto it, and fired a short burst of smart rounds.
Trust the target designator and the smart rounds
,
his training had told him time and again.

He swung the turret toward the other target, now ignoring the first, locked another target designator onto it, and fired another burst. The alert klaxon was still screaming at him when both targets blossomed into small suns much too soon for his second burst to have reached the target. One of the other gunners had killed the second target, and his second burst of rounds trailed off harmlessly.

The klaxon went silent, and the only sound in the turret was the pounding of his heart.

“Nice shooting, Ballin,” someone said.

Sissy said, “And almost a twofer on his first time out.”

Chunks said, “Ya, girl. I think he was targeted pretty good. If you hadn't taken that second one out, it would have been a twofer.”

He recognized Meg's voice. “Kid's a natural.”

Cath said, “Wonder if he can do a twofer when he gets his real cherry popped.”

Even though he was alone and no one could see him, he blushed.

Chapter 8:

A Throwaway

York had barely stripped out of his vac suit when Cath and Bristow cornered him. They were in a festive mood as Cath said, “Come with us, kid.”

They took him into the armory where they stored their combat harnesses and weapons, an area off-limits to everyone but marines. They led him through an outer room with racks of grav rifles and crates of other weapons, and into a strange space where human-shaped suits of plast hung in rows on rails suspended from the overhead deck. “We'll use mine,” Cath said. “I'm only a little bigger than him.”

She stopped at a row of suits, hit a switch, and the suits cycled past them.

Only once before had York seen full-combat plast armor, the day he'd received fifty strokes of the lash. He'd been too frightened then to pay much attention, had only noticed the mottled gray-black finish on the plast and the silvery glare of the helmet visor. There still wasn't much more than that to see.

Cath stopped the track at a particular suit. She muscled it off the track and said, “Here.” She threw it over York's shoulder.

To his surprise, it weighed a lot less than he expected. “It's not so heavy,” he said as he followed her into the outer room.

“By itself, the plast isn't much,” she told him. “But when we feed power into it, it'll stop some serious firepower. It's the reactor pack and weapons that weigh us down.”

Bristow and several marines were waiting for them.

York asked, “What are we doing?”

Bristow grinned. “We're going to see if you're full of shit. You better not be, cause I got some money riding on you.”

They bundled York into Cath's armor undersuit, then into the armor itself, and had him sit down on a bench in the locker room with the helmet visor open.

Standing over him, with Cath beside him and the other marines looking on, Bristow said, “We're going to be up-transiting­ here shortly. You said you can feel that, right?”

York nodded, which didn't work too well inside the armor.

“Bristow and me, we're betting on you,” Cath said. “I've put the suit in isolation mode, and I'm controlling it with an external maintenance feed. So when I close that visor, you're not going to be able to see or hear anything, including allship. It might be twenty minutes, it might be an hour, but when you feel transition, you give us a thumbs-up, or wave your arms, or something. Got it?”

“Yes, ma'am,” York said.

Cath reached toward him and closed the visor. It sealed with a faint click and a huff of air. Cath had told him the visor could be set to provide an immersive projection of the outside world, or a virtual console for almost any function on ship, but it was completely opaque now. A faint red light filled the inside of the helmet, though all York saw was the visor's dark interior surface.

In the silence, the suit made strange sounds, a click here, a pop there, but York quickly grew bored, then drowsy. He struggled to stay awake, didn't want to disappoint Cath and Bristow by sleeping through transition. But his eyes grew heavy, and he slipped in and out of a light doze. Then that tickle crawled up the back of his spine, startling him into full wakefulness. He raised his arms and waved them about, but nothing happened.

He wondered if they'd forgotten him. Maybe he had slept through transition, missed it completely, and in their disappointment they'd left him there as punishment. The marines had seemed kinder than that, and it saddened him to think that they were as callous as everyone else in his life.

The visor popped open, Bristow standing in front of him grinning, behind him Cath whooping and cheering. Bristow said, “Well, I guess you ain't full of shit, kid.”

Cath leaned over his shoulder and said, “Oh, he's full of shit, all right. Just not the kind of shit we thought.”

They helped him out of the armor and the undersuit, then Cath wrapped her arms around him and gave him a big kiss on each cheek. She was pretty, and that stirred something within him he'd never paid much attention to before.

She and Bristow collected quite a bit of money from the rest of the marines, though York noticed that his gunner mates hadn't done any betting. York asked Sissy, “You didn't bet?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “But we're glad you ain't a liar.”

Holding a fist full of currency, Cath looked at Bristow, nodded toward York, and said, “What do you think?”

Bristow frowned, looked at York, and said, “Ya.”

The two pooled their earnings, then split it three ways and gave York a third. He'd never seen so much money before.

“That's shipboard script,” Cath said. “Only good on board. You'll have to deposit it into your pay account if you want to convert it to any local currency.”

“Pay account?” York asked.

She and Bristow traded a look, and Bristow said, “You do know you got a pay account, don't you, kid?”

York learned that the navy was paying him, a nice little sum every tenday, though he'd forfeited all pay while in the brig. And while Cath and Bristow considered his pay grade as a spacer apprentice downright paltry, York had never had any money before, so to him it was quite a fortune.

York didn't get to spend much time with his gunner mates, though he would have liked to because they were a little closer to his own age. Bristow continued to march him up and down the deck, drilling him in parade-ground techniques York thought were probably useless. York also spent as much time as possible training in the turret and flight simulators. He made another trip down to the surface of a planet as a turret gunner, but nothing happened going down or coming back up. While down there, he did get in a couple more hours practicing gunboat piloting with Rodma, actually took the gunboat up to an altitude of a thousand meters and brought it back down nicely. Rodma told him the marines had an attitude about skill sets: If you were old enough to wear the uniform, you were old enough to do whatever you proved you were capable of.

One afternoon, York was at the firing range practicing with a grav rifle. It had a heck of a kick and fired a round at Mach 2, which made a small sonic boom with a rather hollow sound. He heard a loud, thunderous roar boom through the firing lanes, a sound very unlike that made by the grav rifle, and a light cloud of bluish-gray smoke drifted in front of him. It smelled rather unpleasant. The thunderous roar boomed again, so out of curiosity York cleared the breech on his rifle, cut the power to it, laid the rifle down, and stepped back from it. He pressed a switch on the wall of his lane, signaling to the range marshal that his firing lane was now clear.

About three lanes over, he spotted Cath holding some sort of bluish, metallic pistol. She aimed down the lane, and when she pulled the trigger, the pistol emitted the loud boom and the bluish-­gray smoke. She fired a few more times, then noticed him standing there watching her. She stepped back, hit the switch clearing her lane, did something to the pistol she held, dropping several small shells into the palm of her hand.

“Curious?” she asked him.

She handed him the bluish metal gun, which was quite heavy. “It's an old-fashioned, chemically powered slug thrower.” She handed him one of the shells. “It contains a chemical explosive. When you pull the trigger, it ignites the explosive, which accelerates the bullet down the barrel. No energy signature.”

“Why would you want one of these when you could have a grav gun?”

She shrugged. “They're actually pretty reliable, a good backup piece if your grav gun fails. And”—she said it again—“no energy signature. If someone does a sweep looking for energy weapons, they won't find this. You should get one for yourself, kid.”

“Where would I get one?”

“Just about any place that advertises marine equipment. But be sure to register it with the master-at-arms when you board ship.”

She gave him a short lesson in how to handle the gun, allowed him to fire a few rounds. It kicked even more than the grav gun.

A month later, they down-transited just outside Toellan nearspace, and a couple of hours after that they docked at Toellan Prime, a massive space station orbiting the planet. There was a sense of excitement in the air that York didn't understand until Bristow said, “Come on, kid. We got shore leave.”

York asked, “We're going down to Toellan?”

Bristow shook his head. “No, but there's some great bars on Toellan Prime.”

They joined Cath, who was carrying a small cloth bundle, and the three of them set out with a group of a dozen marines that included Sissy, Jack, and Chunks. York followed them as they made their way up several decks to a large open hatch in the side of the ship. Next to the hatch stood a young female officer. One by one, the marines approached her, touched the identity cards clipped to their chests, and saluted, saying, “Request permission to leave the ship, ma'am.”

She raised a palm-size instrument and scanned each ID card, then saluted and said, “Permission granted.”

The marine then turned to the flag of the Lunan Empire, which was draped on a bulkhead next to the hatch. He saluted it, then stepped through the hatch.

Like so many other things, no one had bothered to tell York about this little ceremony; they had probably assumed he already knew. When it was his turn, he tried to imitate the marines before him, touching his ID card, standing at rigid attention, and snapping a crisp salute. “Request permission to leave the ship, ma'am.”

She scanned his ID card, returned his salute, and let him go.

York saluted the flag, then stepped through the hatch into a passageway about three meters long. He noticed it had expansion joints, and guessed it was some sort of flexible coupling to the station. At the far end, he stepped out into an avenue large enough for a couple of trucks to drive down side by side. It reminded him of a wide street filled with people in a hurry, walking toward some destination, though there were no vehicles, just pedestrians. He spotted Cath, Bristow, and the marines clustered on the far side of the street beneath a flashing sign that read
JANDO'S BAR AND GRILL
.
York wove his way through the foot traffic to join them.

He asked Cath, “Are we going in there?”

She looked up at the sign for Jando's and said, “No, that's not for us marines.”

She looked at York and frowned. “And that reminds me.”

She tossed him the bundle she'd been carrying. “Put that on. Where we're going, you don't want to look navy.”

York shook it out, discovered it was a marine tunic. He pulled it on over his coveralls.

York followed the marines as they wandered down the avenue. They passed a lot of bars and restaurants, some quiet and dark, with dim lights and a subdued atmosphere, some so loud that even through closed doors the noise spilled out into the street. They made their way to one of the noisier places, a bar with a bright flashing sign that read
THE DROP ZONE
.
Beneath the bar's name, a colorful display depicted a cartoonish simulation of armored marines amidst a barrage of exploding shell bursts. And beneath that, double doors swung both ways on spring-loaded hinges. Every time a marine pushed through one of the doors, the roar from within erupted into the street like the shriek of an angry animal.

Bristow said, “There's gotta be a bar with that name in every port in the empire.”

Cath said, “Bet the feddies call 'em that, too.”

York followed them through the doors and into the noise. Cath threw an arm around his shoulders and said, “Food's good, booze ain't watered down, the whores are clean, and they're all legal, at least sixteen standard years old. What's your preference, kid, boy or girl?”

“Uh …” York said, realizing he sounded like an idiot. “I … uh …”

Cath leaned away from him to look at him carefully, her eyes narrowing. She studied him for a moment, then leaned close and whispered in his ear, “You're a virgin, aren't you?”

Bristow said, “Stop busting the kid's chops.”

“Don't worry,” Cath whispered. “Your secret's good with me.”

They ordered a round of drinks. Back on Dumark, Cracky and Ten-Ten had introduced York to the hard stuff once, and he'd spent the night puking his guts out, had decided he didn't like alcohol. But he wanted to fit in, especially since his gunner mates ordered drinks, so he ordered a beer.

They found an empty table and commandeered it. Some of the marines broke out a deck of cards, while Cath and Bristow kept up their constant banter.

Cath suddenly pointed to a display above the bar and said, “Shit! We got a new SDO.”

York asked, “SDO?”

“Ya,” Bristow said, “Senior Drop Officer. Shernov's our drop officer, but the SDO's the most senior drop officer in all of Fleet, the one with the most time in uniform at any rank.”

Cath said, “The feddies have a standing reward of one million imperials for whoever takes down the SDO. Makes an SDO's life interesting.”

“And short,” Bristow added.

The marines slammed down drinks at a rate York couldn't keep up with, so he didn't even pretend to try. Bristow wandered off with one of the female prostitutes, and Cath went upstairs with another marine. Sissy approached a male prostitute and they went upstairs, while Jack and Chunks stayed with the card game. York wandered over to the bar to get another beer, and while he waited for it, Cap'm Shernov leaned on the bar next to him.

York stiffened and straightened, but Shernov held up a hand and said, “At ease, Ballin. No saluting here. We're all on leave.”

When the bartender brought York his beer, Shernov ordered one for himself. York was trying to think of a polite way of escaping the situation without just turning around and walking away, when Shernov said, “My people are saying good things about you.”

York wasn't sure what to say about that.