Starship Alexander (2 page)

Her blush deepened.

"Well, you told me the truth straight out and you didn't blow smoke up my ass." He surprised himself by grinning. "I can respect that. My … certain reputation, as you so delicately put it, is nobody else's fault but my own. I guess I can't blame you."

She returned his grin. "Do you have any comment about the recent unexplained failure of three jump Gates?"

Hammett shook his head.

"How about rumors that Spacecom might decommission the
Alexander
?"

That took the grin right off his face. "No. No comment." He turned away, not wanting her to see how much the question upset him. He retrieved his parcel, tucked it under his arm, then took a deep breath before turning to face her.

"I'm sorry," she said. "No more nosy questions, okay?"

He made himself give her a thin smile. "All right."

She handed him a business card. "Call me if you decide there's something you want to get off your chest. It can even be off the record, if you like." Her grin returned, just for an instant. "I'd rather it was on the record, though."

He pocketed the card without comment.

"Thank you for your time, Captain. I won't bother you any further." She turned and left the alley, and he watched her calves as they swished back and forth under the hem of that businesslike skirt. Those shoes were ridiculous, but he liked what they did for her legs.

He followed her to the end of the alley, leaning against the corner of an office building as he watched her stride up Fleet Avenue. The adrenalin in his blood stream stirred up old ghosts. When he closed his eyes he saw narrow corridors jammed with men who fought and screamed and bled and died. His hands trembled, and he exhaled, focusing on Janice Ling. Those legs of hers made an excellent distraction. In a few moments his ghosts were all back in their lockers. He leaned out to keep Janice in view until she disappeared around a curve in the street.

"Good job, Richard," he muttered to himself. "You finally meet a pretty girl, and what do you do? First you throw her against a wall, and then you get all stiff and offended." He smiled at his own foolishness. Pretty girl? She was young enough to be his daughter.

Still …

"There's no fool like an old fool." He tucked the sword more firmly under his arm and continued on his way, leaving Fleet Avenue and moving onto a side street. He indulged himself in an unlikely fantasy where she was really determined to get a sound bite from him, and they went back to her hotel room …

The daydream faded as he saw his destination on the far side of the street. Amazing Armaments, the sign read. A pair of holographic knights stood on either side of the doorway, stern figures in full suits of armor. One knight lifted a visor to peer at him as he approached. The other put a hand on the hilt of a vast broadsword. Hammett ignored them both and entered the shop.

A long counter ran the width of the room inside. The walls were hung with medieval weapons of every description, and Hammett paused to admire a couple of halberds.

"Can I help you?"

Hammett turned. The man behind the counter was tall and broad-shouldered, with long black hair that brushed the straps of a heavy apron. By the look of his arms he still did metal work by hand. He was in his thirties, with a polite expression that was tinged with impatience. He looked like a man who did specialized work for existing customers and didn't have much use for curious street traffic.

Hammett set his parcel on the counter. "I'm hoping you can help me with this." He unsealed the box and flipped the lid back.

"Oh, very nice." The man looked at the jewelled sword nestled in black velvet. "May I?"

Hammett nodded.

The man lifted the sword from the box. It was a cutlass with a straight blade, the hilt decorated with a thick violet gemstone. The man held the sword up to the light, examined the blade minutely, then replaced it in the box. "What can I help you with?"

"They gave me this today," Hammett said. "Thirty years of service as an officer. I'm supposed to wear it on ceremonial occasions."

The man nodded.

"The problem is, it's about as dangerous as a barstool. I'm a professional soldier. I'm not going to carry around a toy."

The man nodded.

"Can you sharpen it for me?"

"That's a good question." The man stuck out a strong, calloused hand. "I'm Constantine."

"Richard." Hammett shook his hand.

"Pleased to meet you, Richard. You have a sword and you want it to be something more than a prop. You're my kind of man."

Hammett smiled.

"Now, then. I could do an analysis of the blade, but I don't think it's particularly good steel. It's shiny, and it won't rust, but I don't know if it will hold much of an edge. And then there's the balance."

Hammett lifted an eyebrow.

Constantine lifted the sword and made a couple of practice cuts in the air. "Here. You try." He set the sword on the counter, hilt toward Hammett.

Hammett mimicked him, slicing up the air. "It seems fine to me."

"No." Constantine shook his head decisively. "It's dreadful." He reached under the counter and brought out a basket-hilt rapier. It was a plain weapon, made of unadorned steel, but it was superficially similar to Hammett's cutlass. "Try this."

Hammett lifted the rapier and smiled. The difference was unmistakable, though he would have had trouble explaining it. The rapier had roughly the same mass as the cutlass, but it seemed weightless in his hand, like a lethal extension of his arm. He tried a few practice cuts, marvelling at the sense of precision and control that it gave him. "You're right. My sword's dreadful."

"So," said Constantine, rubbing his hands together. "Options. I could sharpen your sword. It won't take long, and if you can't shave with it, at least it will be sharper than it is now."

"I've suddenly lost enthusiasm for that option. What else can you do?"

Constantine took the rapier from him. "If you want this kind of balance, I'll have to make you a new sword." He put the rapier away under the counter. "You've got two options. Machine-made, or hand-made. Some people want a blade that's been made by a man swinging a hammer at a forge. They want authenticity."

"Is the blade any better?"

"Nope," said Constantine cheerfully. "Just more authentic. It costs more and it takes longer, and you wouldn't believe how often that's a selling point."

Hammett chuckled. "I'll pass."

"Good. I'm a busy man." Constantine fingered the gemstone in the hilt. "I can replicate a stone that's pretty close to this one. Or I can take this one out and use it in the copy. How much do you care about getting the original sword back?"

Hammett thought of the solemn ceremony where they had presented him with a ridiculous oversized letter opener. "I don't care in the slightest. I barely need one sword. What would I do with two of them?"

"Good point. I need about fifteen minutes to program the machine, and maybe half an hour tonight to take the gemstone out, and another half an hour tomorrow to put it into the new sword. I could have it done by about nine tomorrow morning."

"That sounds fine," said Hammett. "Will it be a perfect match?"

"The shape of the blade will be slightly different. The hilt will be a just about identical, though. If you were to put the two swords side by side, you would see minor differences, but I can pretty much promise you no one will notice."

"Excellent. I'm going to need that delivered."

Constantine nodded, his fingers curling as he prepared to type into a mid-air keyboard visible through his implants.

"Send it to the captain's cabin,
SS Alexander
."

"The
Alexander
? What the hell?" Anna Velasco bounced out of her chair, fighting to contain the knot of frustration in her stomach. The middle-aged man sitting behind the desk in front of her was her cousin, but he was also an admiral in Spacecom. She could push him, but only so far. "Dammit, Alvarez, that ship is a joke."

"That's Admiral Castille to you," he admonished. "You've just been promoted. We talked about this. You need some time on ships."

She caught herself touching the commander's bars on her chest, and she lowered her hand. The promotion was barely two weeks old, and it still didn't feel quite real. "Time on real ships," she said. "Not relics from the war."

"It's the biggest ship left in the entire fleet," he said. "Someday you'll be the only officer around with time put in on a real cruiser. You can serve on a corvette any time. Everybody does that. How many people can say they've served on a cruiser? And the window of opportunity to get that experience is about to close."

"Exactly! The ship's getting mothballed. And I'll be her executive officer. It's embarrassing!"

"It's a temporary assignment," Castille said. "That's what you wanted, isn't it? A few months on a ship so no one can say you're just a desk sailor."

Velasco slashed at the air in a gesture of frustration. "I wanted to serve on a ship I could be proud of!"

"The ship has a proud history," Castille said mildly, "but that's not the point. The point is that she'll be decommissioned in three or four months. You'll be back in your office by winter. Do you know what a senior officer's term of service is on a corvette?"

"I …" She let her voice trail off as she realized she had no idea.

"It's usually a year at a minimum. Six months, if the officer is a really bad fit."

Velasco let that sink in. A year traipsing around the dusty corners of the alliance? You didn't rise through the ranks by wandering around millions of kilometers from the Admiralty.
I didn't join the Navy to ride around on ships.

"Trust me," Castille said. "I have your best interests at heart. Now, your first voyage is going to be a good networking opportunity for you." He held up a warning finger. "It won't seem that way at first. It's a training mission, and the ship will be full of cadets. But these will be the enlisted personnel and officers serving under you for the rest of your career."

He gestured at the chair beside her, and she sank back down. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad. She would be counting down the days, however, until the
Alexander
finally hit the scrapyard.

Kasim al Faisal tilted the shuttle
Albatross
a couple of degrees to port so he could watch the Earth fall away beneath him. The Baja Peninsula was a long brown finger stretching into the cool blue Pacific. The city of Hawking glittered like a jewelled ring at the base of the peninsula. It was a nice city, but he was deeply grateful to be heading back into space. He felt reduced when he was planetside, like some gravity-bound slug dragging himself along the surface. Beyond the cloying reach of the atmosphere, at the controls of a small ship, he felt free.

He felt like a god.

The bulk of a supply ship loomed ahead of him, and beyond it the long, dark shape of the
Alexander
, with bright corvettes hovering around her like attendants. The proper thing to do – the sensible thing to do, if he wanted to avoid yet another disciplinary notice – was to trudge along behind the wallowing metal hippo in front of him and wait his turn to dock with the cruiser. He queued up behind the supply ship and behaved himself for forty-five interminable seconds.

"Oh, to hell with this." He leaned over in his seat and glanced into the passenger bay. The shuttle was filled with cadets, just like on the last trip and the trip before. They would be anywhere from 18 to 21 years old, and they'd be almost as bored as he was with this sedate bus ride. Why, it was practically his duty to show them there was still such a thing as real flying in the galaxy.

He turned on his microphone. "Attention, passengers. This is your captain speaking. In the interests of rounding out your woefully inadequate educations, I will be providing you with a demonstration of tactical evasive and pursuit maneuvers. If you're not already buckled into your seats, right now would be a very good time to strap in."

Then, grinning in anticipation, he overrode the shuttle's AI and wrapped a hand around the control stick. He accelerated, surging straight at the back end of the supply ship, and a couple of cadets in the front row cried out. Kasim chuckled, then twisted the stick and sent the shuttle corkscrewing sideways. They cleared the stern of the supply ship with a good meter to spare, maybe even a meter and a half.

No one could call Kasim reckless.

The shuttle blasted past the supply ship, and Kasim maintained the corkscrewing motion. Centrifugal force pushed him against his shoulder straps, and he heard a babble of excited voices from aft. The sky spun around him as he zipped past the nose of the larger ship. He jerked the
Albatross
down until she was directly ahead of the supply ship, then accelerated hard. The
Alexander
swelled as he rushed toward her, and an alarm blared. The
Albatross
was being targeted by weapons systems on the
Alexander
and the surrounding corvettes.

"Oops." He fired the nose thrusters, decelerating hard.

"Shuttle
Albatross
. What the hell are you playing at?"

"Just demonstrating some maneuvers for the cadets." He winced, waiting for a reply.

"Kindly explain to the cadets that approaching a warship at ramming speed falls somewhere between stupid and suicidal on the official list of things you shouldn't do," said the clipped, starchy voice over the radio.

"Roger," he said. "Thanks for helping me, ah, impart such a valuable lesson."

"Let's not repeat the lesson,
Albatross
.
Alexander
out."

Somewhere behind him a cadet snickered. Several more cadets gave him a mocking round of applause.

"Thank you. You're too kind. Hang on for just a moment longer; we'll be docking with the
Alexander
shortly. A good ten minutes sooner than if you'd had any other pilot, I might add."

That brought fresh applause, and he smiled. With just a little bit of luck, none of the weapons crews upstairs would bother mentioning him in a report. No cadets had puked. Kasim figured he had a better-than-even chance of getting away with his stunt.

He brought the shuttle up under the belly of the cruiser, marvelling he always did at the sheer bulk of the warship. The sleek corvettes that surrounded her seemed inconsequential, like a flock of sparrows around an eagle. They were shinier, prettier, quicker and more manoeuvrable. Their hulls were smooth and flawless, not marred by patches and seams from refits. They were better suited to the duties of the modern Navy, patrolling the vast borders of the scattered republic, intercepting smugglers, and doing customs inspections.

The
Alexander
, though, was built for war.

She was five decks high, but narrow, no more than forty meters across. She was long, almost two hundred meters from her steel prow to the massive engines in the stern. A missile bay decorated her port side, and a shuttle bay jutted from the bottom of her hull.

He tried to imagine the old days as he brought the
Albatross
in close to the shuttle bay and let the
Alexander
's tractor beams take control. Before Kasim was born, when his father was still a child, Earth's colonies had rebelled. They'd gone to war with Earth and each other. The Navy had been a very different organization in those days. Instead of customs and police work, fast warships had slugged it out in the depths of space.

Very little remained from the days of war. A handful of officers and enlisted men. One ship.

The
Alexander
.

A gentle thump echoed through the
Albatross
as they set down on the deck of the shuttle bay. Kasim rose and stretched, nodding to the cadets as they shuffled past him and into the larger ship. Most of them smiled as they nodded back. One young woman gave him a thumbs-up and said, "Great flight." No one looked upset or annoyed, and Kasim smiled. It was going to be all right.

Then a flash of colour caught his eye, and the smile froze on his face. A man and a woman stood at the back of the lineup. Instead of the drab green jumpsuits of cadets, they wore officers' uniforms. The man was poker-faced, but the woman transfixed Kasim with a glare of pure outrage.

Kasim kept smiling, but his stomach sank as if the ship's gravity had failed. He nodded to the last of the cadets, hiding his dismay, with only one thought in his head.

I'm screwed.