The Thirteenth Man

 

EPIGRAPH

Beware the curse of the thirteenth man, for should he not fall, all may fall before him.

 

CONTENTS

 

PROLOGUE

HOMECOMING

C
harlie awoke with a start, peered into the utter darkness of the ship's hold, and realized someone sleeping nearby had inserted the point of an elbow into his ribs. After five years sleeping chained to his comrades he'd gotten used to that.

Five years in a Syndonese prison camp and you got used to a lot of things.

Charlie shivered—­feeling hot and cold all at once—­and allowed himself a moment of self-­pity. He'd managed to survive five years of the most abominable living conditions, only to succumb to a minor scratch. It had started out as nothing, but had refused to heal. Then it began to fester, and each day grew steadily worse. And now, with his fever returning . . .

He shook himself free of that train of thought and prayed that this time he could remain lucid for more than a few hours.

He closed his eyes and listened to the darkness. Someone jerked nearby, grunted, and started scratching furiously; the never-­ending battle against fleas and lice. In the distance someone else snored happily, and close at hand someone wheezed in a restless attempt to breathe through lungs racked with tuberculosis. Two thousand men—­chained together in the stinking hold of a ship—­made a lot of noise in the darkness.

Five years ago there had been almost five thousand of them, most wearing the livery of Cesare, Duke de Maris, many wearing that of old Rierma, Duke de Neptair, with the remainder evenly distributed among the other seven dukes, and even some from among the king's men—­all of them the legacy of a nasty little war that had cost both sides dearly. During those first days in the prison camp they'd lost many to battle injuries, but after that their losses had stabilized at one or two per day, men lost to any of a hundred minor diseases or afflictions which, lacking any medical facilities or supplies, were too often fatal. Before they'd been dumped in the hold of this ship they could remove the dead in some way: bury them, burn them—­something. But here, in the dark, the Syndonese didn't bother themselves with the dead, and Charlie and his comrades now shared the chain with close to a hundred corpses, some of them many days old and quite ripe.

Charlie decided to sit up, though he moved slowly to avoid disturbing his comrades. He got his good leg beneath him and rested his back against a bulkhead, then carefully adjusted his hand and leg manacles so he didn't accidently jerk someone else's chain. He fingered the chain for a moment: metal, heavy, rusted, noisy, like the hand and leg irons. The Syndonese could have used plast, which would have been cheaper, stronger, more humane, more efficient, but the Syndonese weren't interested in efficiency—­and certainly not in humanity. Plast didn't weigh you down, didn't rattle and chink as you dragged it behind you, didn't abrade your wrists and ankles until they were raw and bloody, didn't drag the spirit down with each painful, shuffling step, didn't . . .

“Commander?” Charlie recognized Roger's whisper. “Is that you? You awake?”

“Morning, Roger,” Charlie whispered.

“Is it morning, Commander?”

Charlie shrugged, a useless gesture in the dark. “I don't know. Could be.”

“How many days you make it?”

Charlie paused for a moment and considered the question carefully. The Syndonese had long ago deactivated their implants, so their only sense of time came from the distribution of the daily meal of unflavored protein cake and water. Back in the hellhole they'd lived in for the past year and a half—­an iron-­ore mine on some barren rock somewhere—­at mealtime each day he'd gouged a mark in the rock of the mine tunnel where they'd lived. Before that he'd scored their calendar for two years in the stone wall of their cell in some dungeon on some moon circling some planet orbiting some star. And before that there'd been a year and a half in a prison camp on some planet while the Syndonese decided what to do with them. After five years less than half of them remained alive, after five . . .

“Commander,” Roger whispered. “You still with me?”

Charlie started. “Ya, I'm still here.” In the darkness of the ship's hold, with nothing but plast and steel around them, Charlie had scratched a notch in a fingernail each day at mealtime. “I make it twenty-­seven days.”

“What do you think this bucket'll do, Commander, two, maybe three light-­years a day?”

“If that.”

Charlie's former gunnery officer wheezed and went into a fit of coughing—­deep, hacking spasms that left him gasping for breath. Back home, a few days in an infirmary and he'd be as good as new. But here, Charlie gave him no more than another month or two before tuberculosis finished him. Roger rested for a moment before continuing. “That's fifty to a hundred light-­years. That's the farthest they've ever moved us.”

“Well, wherever they're taking us, we're there. We down-­transited—­I make it six, seven hours ago.”

Roger accepted that without question. They'd all learned long ago to accept Charlie's uncanny ability to sense transition, an ability none of them shared. “Maybe just a nav fix, Commander.”

Charlie shook his head. In twenty-­seven days he hadn't been able to stop making useless gestures in the dark. “No, we haven't up-­transited, and a nav fix wouldn't take more than an hour.”

“Guess we've come to our new home, huh, Commander?”

Charlie's leg started throbbing again. The pain was relatively manageable at this stage, but after forty odd days of slow, steady deterioration Charlie knew the pattern well. The pain and fever would both steadily grow in intensity, and in another hour or two it would drive him into a semi-­comatose delirium. Roger wouldn't admit it, but Charlie knew from the dreams that haunted him at those times that he ranted and raved at unseen ghosts. “Once they park this boat,” Charlie said, “I want you to call a meeting of the executive staff.”

“Sure, Commander. What for?”

“It's past time we chose a new CO.”

“No way, Commander. You're doing just fine. As soon as your leg's—­”

Charlie cut him off. “How often am I lucid now? One, maybe two hours a day. And it gets worse every day.”

“But the immune augs are helping—­”

“The immune augmentation treatments are six years old. Too old to cure gangrene, and not old enough to let it have me quick and clean. They're just prolonging the agony now.”

Roger answered with another fit of coughing.

“Shit, Roger. I'm not even going to outlast you. What have I got? Another five or ten days, maybe twenty on the outside?”

Roger got his coughing under control and sighed heavily. “It could be worse—­you could be de Lunis.”

Charlie chuckled. That old, childish saying had become their motto.

“Who's it going to be, Commander?”

Charlie looked at Roger, could see nothing in the dark, but Roger seemed to know his thoughts. “Not me, Commander. Hell, you said it yourself. I'm barely gonna outlast you.”

“What about Darmczek?”

“He's an old warhorse, Commander.”

“He's got the rank, and the respect of the men.”

In his mind's eye Charlie could almost picture Roger shaking his head, matted, lice-­infested hair hanging well past his shoulders, beard halfway down his chest. “Hell, Charlie, he's got rank over you, but that doesn't make him our CO. Everyone knows that. Even he knows it, and he's not ashamed of it either. Darmczek's a good CO on a fighting ship, but this is a prisoner-­of-­war camp. Darmczek won't understand how to fight this enemy. I grant you, the CO's got to be someone who knows how to fight a ship. Otherwise, he won't command the respect of these men. But what we need now is someone who knows how to keep us alive with this shit.” Roger gave his chains a bitter jerk. Charlie felt it, and no doubt other men along the chain felt it also. “What about Andrews, Commander?”

Charlie had been considering that option for days now. Seth Andrews had been XO on one of Cesare's ships and had proven he could command. “Seth is right for the job, but he doesn't have the rank, and after I'm dead that'll just put him and Darmczek at odds.”

“There's a way to handle that too, Commander.”

“And that is?”

Charlie could sense Roger's hesitation. “You could give him a promotion, give him the rank he needs. Decree it . . . as Charles, son of old Cesare.”

“Absolutely not. I can't do that.”

“Look, Commander, I know we're not supposed to say it out loud—­or even admit we know it, or even think it—­but we all know he's your father, whether he's acknowledged you or not. We also know you're his favorite, and we know when he needs a military solution he looks to you first, and—­”

“But to use his name that way . . . that would be illegal.”

Roger laughed into the darkness. “Ya, it would. So are you worried after you're dead they're going to dig you up to hang you?”

Charlie laughed at that. “You've got a point. And Andrews is the right choice.”

“Then it's settled.”

“Ya, I guess so. But I gotta talk to Darmczek first; try to square it with him. He deserves that. I'll find a way to get him alone, so don't say anything until I do.”

Roger coughed for a while, one of those bad fits that lasted several minutes. The pain in Charlie's leg began to intensify and he drifted off into a troubled sleep, but the clang of a docking boom jerked him awake as it echoed through the hull of the ship. From the grunts and groans and intensified frequency of scratching going on about him, Charlie knew his comrades were waking.

Charlie happened to be looking in the direction of the cargo hatch when it cycled open, flooding the hold with a white, incandescent glare. After twenty odd days of pitch darkness it blinded him painfully, and he closed his eyes, covering them with one hand. But in that one instant the glare had etched an image in his memory of several figures standing silhouetted in the open cargo bay. He recalled the image, studied it for a moment against the back of his eyelids: half a dozen ­people. Oddly enough, one of them was apparently wearing the flowing robes of a churchman.

In that first instant after the cargo hatch had opened, the steaming, sweltering air of the hold had flowed around their visitors and he could hear them as they gasped and choked on the stench of urine, feces, unwashed bodies, and death. For Charlie and the other prisoners, though,
stench
had become a rather academic concept.

They switched on the lights in the hold, filling the entire space with that bright, incandescent glare, forcing all of the prisoners to shield their eyes and cower. Charlie heard their visitors talking among themselves in muffled and distant voices. He squinted through his fingers and tried to catch a glimpse of what they were doing.

To Charlie's surprise one of them appeared to be a woman. She wore spacer's coveralls, but there was no mistaking the small waist and curves, and she wore her hair much longer than most men—­probably some Syndonese bitch-­princess come to gloat over the enemy prisoners.

The whole scene took on a surreal air, the half-­dozen figures wandering among the seated and chained prisoners, tendrils of steam rising from the bodies on the chain as they picked their way carefully through the men, their hands cupped over their noses. Charlie looked at Roger, who was also squinting through his fingers. Charlie's image of tangled, matted, lice-­infested hair and beard had been quite correct. “Do I look as bad as you?” Charlie asked.

Roger looked his way and grinned. “Worse. At least I'm usually kind of cute. In any case, the fleas like me.”

He would have smiled, but the pain in Charlie's leg blossomed into a throbbing, fiery burn. He gritted his teeth and forced his hands away from the open, weeping wound. Seeing it for the first time in days, the sight was almost enough to sap any hope from him. The cycle was beginning again, and soon he'd lose all touch with reality.

Charlie looked back at the silhouettes of their guests. One was definitely a woman—­he hadn't seen a woman in five years—­and another definitely a churchman. That was odd, because the Syndonese didn't embrace the church. And there was something about the churchman too, something familiar, as if he was part of a distant and long ago dream.

“My god, Roacka,” the churchman said, shaking his head sadly. “This is the worst we've seen.”

Roacka!
Charlie knew that name, and the voice that called it, and he knew then that he was hallucinating, that the delirium had begun again.

“Ya, it's the worst, churchman, but then every batch is worse than the last.” That voice had the timbre of a crusher turning rock into gravel. Charlie wanted to weep with fear and anger. Roacka, and Paul, such a cruel hallucination.

“Duke Rierma,” the Paul hallucination said—­Charlie knew that name too. “Look at this. I can't believe they'd be so inhumane.”

Charlie removed his hand from his eyes and struggled to see the three men whose voices he knew so well, voices he had thought never to hear again. But his eyes still hadn't adjusted to the light and all they did was tear and weep. He squinted, blinked frantically, and watched their silhouettes approach as they wove among the prisoners. The Roacka hallucination squatted down to examine one of the bloated corpses on the chain. The churchman squatted down next to him. “This one's gone,” Roacka said.

The churchman scanned the hold of the ship. “It's unbelievable,” he said, his head slowly turning to take them all in. His eyes met Charlie's and his head stopped turning. They stared at one another for a long moment; the churchman frowned and stared more intently.

Charlie spoke to Roacka, his voice barely above a whisper. “Even a hallucination should guard his back better than that.”

Roacka's head snapped around as if he'd been struck. His eyes narrowed, then slowly the large, bushy mustache under his nose rose upward as his lips broadened into a wide grin. He stood, his eyes still locked to Charlie's, crossed the space between them and squatted down in front of him. The churchman followed, glancing back and forth uncertainly between the two of them.