Cauldron of Ghosts (5 page)

“Okay. You stay here. The rest of you, follow me.”

Takahashi shuddered slightly. “I don’t want
to stay here. I really don’t.”

Ayibongwinkosi hesitated a moment. Then: “Come with us, then. But stay behind and don’t get in the way.”

Five seconds later, she and her section were ready at the hatch. The XO started working his magic again.

* * *

Hearing some small noises behind her, Nancy turned her head and saw that two of her people were at the hatch on her side of the cargo bay. One of them said: “We’ve got ’em here, boss.”

Anderson turned back to the
Ramathibodi
’s captain. “Okay, we’re ready to start negotiating over the pleasure units. You can transfer the credit chips, if you’re so inclined.”

Tsang gestured at one of her subordinates to take the small bag of credit chips they’d already acquired for the labor techs onto their own ship.

“Not that we don’t trust you or anything,” Tsang said to Nancy. “Still, it’s like the old song goes: ‘better safe than sorry.’ ”

“An ancient saw on Old Earth said it better. ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’ ”

Anderson and Tsang exchanged slightly derisive smiles. The derision wasn’t aimed at each other so much as at the universe in general. Slave traders have an outlook on life that a fanciful poet—or literary critic, more like—might call expansively ironic.

This sort of dickering in stages was common in their business. Indeed, it was considered politesse for the purchasing party to allow the seller to periodically move their newly acquired funds to a safe place before proceeding.

Once the
Ramathibodi
’s crewman with the bag of credit chips had left, Anderson made a motion to her own people to bring the pleasure units onto the cargo bay.

There were three of them, one female and two males. All three, as one would expect, were exceedingly attractive. Unlike most slaves, they didn’t keep their eyes down and their gaze on the floor. Their gazes were level, just . . . vacant.

Tsang smiled and rubbed her hands together. “Well, now!”

* * *

When the crewman carrying the bag of credit chips arrived on the bridge—sauntered onto the bridge, it would be better to say—his first words were:

“Hey, guys, look at this! We did better than . . .
what the fuck?
”

* * *

Showing a surprisingly limited lexicon for people whom a literary critic might call expansively ironic, Captain Tsang used the same words when Anderson and her two people suddenly drew their sidearms. Simultaneously, the tribarrel mounted on a bulkhead in the cargo bay swiveled to bring its deadly muzzles to bear on the
Ramathibodi
’s contingent. And—a final insult—the three pleasure units drew tiny pistols from who-knows-where on their scantily clad persons.

“What the fuck?”

* * *

In the end, they captured all but two of the slavers alive.

The man whose skull had been bashed by Kabweza died eighteen hours later without ever regaining consciousness. Anderson made no criticism, though. Given the difficulty of the task and the training of Torch assault troops, having only one fatality was a minor miracle.

The lieutenant colonel
was less philosophical about the matter. “I’ll never live this down,” she predicted.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Ayi,” said Anderson soothingly. “One fatality isn’t bad.”

“It’s better than nothing,” Kabweza replied. “But I’m still going to be the butt of everyone’s jokes when the rest of our people find out. Kindergarten playgrounds have more dangerous so-called ‘assault troops’ than we turned out to be.”

* * *

The death of the second slaver could not be placed at the feet of the assault troops, unless you wanted to accuse them of negligent homicide—which Anderson didn’t even consider, once the circumstances were explained to her.

When the section left the mess hall, Takahashi Ayako picked up a kitchen knife that was lying on a counter. It was just a paring knife, having a blade no more than nine centimeters long. One of the assault troops spotted her doing it, but his only reaction was amusement.

“Hey, look, I just thought she was cute,” Sergeant Supakrit X later explained to the battalion commander. “There she was, surrounded by apes armed to the teeth and armored to boot, but she still insisted on getting a weapon herself. If you can call a glorified toothpick a weapon.”

“Cute,” said Kabweza, looking disgusted.

Supakrit X made a face. “Look, Chief, I’m sorry. I misjudged.”

“Cute,” Kabweza repeated. “Glorified toothpick.”

* * *

The four slavers on the bridge had surrendered as soon as Kabweza and her soldiers burst in. None of them had been armed except the com officer, Ondøej Montoya, whom Captain Tsang had left in charge while she went aboard Parmley Station. And Montoya’s sidearm—in a holster with the flap closed—would have been useless against the heavily armed assault troops’ armor.

After they surrendered, Kabweza ordered all four slavers to stand against one of the bulkheads, leaning far forward and forced to support their weight on their hands. That rendered them not quite as helpless as if they’d been handcuffed, but Torch assault troops didn’t carry restraining gear because they weren’t usually given sappy, sentimental orders to take prisoners.

Still, they were pretty helpless. Takahashi obviously thought so. No sooner had the four slavers assumed the position than the freed slave screeched pure fury, raced forward and stabbed one of them in the kidney with her little paring knife.

The wound was not fatal. Given modern medicine, it wasn’t even very serious. But the shock and pain was enough to cause the slaver to jerk back, whereupon he tripped over Takahashi and the two of them went down—the large slaver on top of the small slave.

Ironically, he’d have done better if their positions had been reversed. If Ayako had been on top, she would have stabbed him with full force; very dramatically, her hand rising above her head before she drove down the blade. She would have cut him up quite nicely, but the assault troops would probably have hauled her off before she could have done any lethal damage.

As it was, with her underneath, Kabweza and her people couldn’t get to her. And since she was now driven by necessity she eschewed any dramatic stabbing and just pushed the blade as far as she could into the closest target, which happened to be the man’s left eyeball.

Nine centimeters is not very long—but the skull of a human male isn’t much more than twenty centimeters across in the long axis from front to back. Driven by the sort of rage possessed by Takahashi Ayako, the blade went almost halfway into the slaver’s brain. And then, shrieking and cursing, she twisted and drove the blade back and forth and up and down.

It took the Torch soldiers no more than four or five seconds to get the slaver rolled over and haul Takahashi off him, but by then she’d pretty well transformed a third of his frontal lobes into hash. The autopsy ’bot later reported that she’d carved up part of the limbic system as well.

Modern medicine is not actually miraculous, although the term is often used. For all practical purposes, the man was gone before any aid could be given him.

Or as now-corporal
Supakrit X put it with great satisfaction over the troops’ evening meal, “I’m telling you, that fucker was dead-dead-dead.”

He wasn’t especially upset by his lowly new rank. For one thing, he knew his demotion had been mostly done as a matter of principle, rather than because Kabweza was really mad at him. He figured he’d get his rank back soon enough.

Besides, the way he looked at it, he’d been busted in a good cause. It wasn’t like getting demoted for being drunk and disorderly.

“And I still say she’s cute,” he added. “Although you’d really want to be on your best behavior on a date.”

Chapter 5

“I’d miss Steph,” Andrew Artlett protested. “Just for starters. Then there’s the lousy pay.”

Princess Ruth Winton frowned. “Lousy pay? You’re being offered almost half again what you’re making here on Torch—and you’re getting top rate for starship mechanics.” After a brief pause—very brief; Ruth hated admitting to a lack of complete expertise on any subject—she added: “So I’m told, anyway.”

“Well, yeah. But going back to Parmley Station to work on
this
project is risky as all hell.” Stoutly: “I should be getting hazard pay. That’s generally figured as a hundred percent pay increase. Double-time, that is.”

There were so many fallacies and lapses of logic in those statements that the Manticoran princess was rendered almost speechless.

Almost. Speechlessness was a state of affairs that was probably impossible for Ruth Winton.

“
What?
That’s insane! Every single sentence you just said is blithering nonsense.”

She began counting off her fingers. “First off, there’s nothing at all risky for
you
in this deal. Your aunt Elfriede, maybe—”

“Don’t call her that to her face,” Andrew cautioned. “She answers to Ganny. Or Ganny El, if she likes you.”

“I
have
met the woman. I was just being formal. Seeing as how this is supposed to be an employment interview.” Ruth looked simultaneously cross and a bit embarrassed. “Of sorts,” she added.

“ ‘Employment interview’!” Artlett said mockingly. “Oh, yeah. I can see it in the want ads now.” He mimicked holding up a reading tablet. “ ‘Wanted. Damn fool mechanic for desperado duties aiding and abetting Audubon Ballroom sociopaths—”

He glanced at the huge figure of Hugh Arai, who was lounging in a nearby armchair in the princess’ suite. (Ruth called it a working office, but that was the obliviousness to luxury of someone born and raised in Mount Royal Palace in Manticore’s capital city of Landing. It was a no-fooling suite, on the top floor of the finest hotel in Beacon.)

“Meaning no offense, Hugh, I’m just saying it like it is.” Arai smiled at him.

Andrew resumed pretending to read a want ad: “—and Beowulfan cold-blooded killers masquerading as biologists—”

Again he glanced at Arai. “Meaning no offense. Just telling it like it is.” The smile became a grin.

Back to the imaginary want ad: “—for the purpose of hunting down any and all practitioners of the slave trade, which individuals are noted—no, notorious—throughout the inhabited portions of the galaxy for their cruelty and depraved indifference to human life, including that of starship mechanics.”

Triumphantly, he set down the imaginary tablet. “Ha!”

Ruth had waited for him to finish. Impatiently, because she was impatient with silliness by nature. But she’d still waited. She knew Artlett well enough by now to know there was no point in trying to derail him when he was hell-bent on riding his broad (broad? say better, oceanically expansive) sense of humor to the end of the track.

“If we might return to reality for a moment,” she said, “
your
duties will keep you on Parmley Station most of the time. A construct that is not only one of the largest space-going installations within light-years of its solar system but is by now almost as heavily armed as an orbital fortress.”

Hugh shook his head. “Bit of an exaggeration, Ruth. The defenses and armaments on Parmley Station aren’t designed to fight off a battle fleet.”

Andrew started to say something, probably along the lines of claiming that Arai was supporting him, but Hugh’s deep voice rode over him easily. “But they’ll squash any pirates or slavers who show up as easily as swatting an insect.”

He gave Artlett a beady gaze: “As you know perfectly well, since you were paid to be a consultant when we designed those defenses.”

“Still.” Andrew was nothing if not stubborn. He waved his hand in a gesture that might mean . . . pretty much anything. “Pirates. Slavers. Dangerous people, no matter how you slice it.”

He decided to fall back onto more sensible grounds. “And like I said, I’d miss Steph.”

Ruth pounced. “Why is that? I just talked to her this morning and she seemed quite amenable to relocating to Parmley Station.”

Andrew stared at her. “She . . . But—she told me—it was just a few weeks ago!”

Ruth waved her hand airily. “That was then, this is now. She’s had time since to gauge the real possibilities at either place. Here, on Torch, it seems like everybody and their grandmother is setting up a restaurant. The competition is brutal. The hours, long; the income . . .” The princess made a face, as if she had any idea of the harsh realities of trying to run a small restaurant.

Which, of course, she didn’t. But Ruth Winton never let petty details like her own ignorance get in the way of a good argument. She pressed on.

“Whereas on Parmley Station—” The royal expression became positively beatific, as she contemplated the commercial advantages of opening a restaurant there.

“It’s a busted enterprise,” jeered Artlett. “A pipe dream on the part of my great-uncle Michael Parmley—a screwball if there ever was one—who poured a fortune into building the galaxy’s most derelict orbital amusement park.”

“That was then, this is now,” interjected Hugh Arai. “As you know perfectly well, Andrew.” He leaned forward. “Today, it’s on the verge of becoming Beowulf’s central hub for covert operations against Mesa and Manpower.”

“The best clientele you could ask for!” Ruth said enthusiastically. “Beefy commando types. They eat like horses and tip like the upper crust.”

Most of that was pretty accurate. Not all covert operations people were beefy; but they did tend to eat a lot. That was a combination of a usually high-powered metabolism with near-constant physical training.

The analogy to the tipping habits of upper crust gamblers was wide of the mark, though. Wealthy people actually tended to be on the cheapskate side when it came to things like tipping. And charity, for that matter. It had been a constant for millennia that people of average means gave a higher percentage of their income to charitable causes than rich people—especially when you factored into the equation the end beneficiaries. Average people gave to those poorer than they. Rich people usually donated their money to cultural institutions—museums, universities and opera houses, for instance—of which they or their children were major personal beneficiaries. And then named them after themselves.

There were exceptions, of course, and those individuals could be spectacular in their largesse. The Winton dynasty had a long tradition of being very generous, especially for medical causes. Ruth’s misapprehension was the understandable product of her own personal experience.

But while the analogy was off, the reality remained. Covert ops people
did
tend to tip generously—and Andrew knew it, from having spent a lot of time in their company over the past period.

He ran fingers through his hair, in a gesture of exasperation. “Damn it,
she
was the one who insisted on coming here in the first place.
I
would have been perfectly happy to stay on Parmley Station. Women!”

Ruth had her own opinion—well-formed; cured; tempered; hardened; sharp on all edges and corners—as to which of the two human genders was actually prone to flightiness, inconstancy and indecision. Shakespeare’s greatest play wasn’t about a
princess
of Denmark, now was it?

But she saw no reason to squabble over the matter, since Artlett was now clearly on the verge of capitulating to logic and reason.

“All right, then,” he said. “I’ll go. If it’s okay with Steph.”

* * *

After Andrew left the suite, Hugh cleared his throat. “I noticed that you left out some particulars.”

“I wouldn’t call them ‘particulars.’ Speculative possibilities is closer to the mark.”

Arai shook his head. “You’re quibbling and you know it. What you’re calling ‘speculative possibilities’ are part of the established plans for using the
Hali Sowle.
”

“Established by whom?” Ruth countered. “Ganny El still hasn’t agreed—and if she doesn’t, the whole deal collapses.”

“I
know
you didn’t learn to lie, cheat and steal at Mount Royal Palace. So where does it come from, this brazen shamelessness? This cunning deftness at misdirection and maneuver? This dazzling expertise at deceit and deception?”

“You might be surprised at what goes on in the corridors and back rooms of Mount Royal Palace, Hugh. But, no, I didn’t learn the skills there. No more than the rudiments, anyway.”

She sniffed. “Where do you think? I’ve been studying for the past three years at Zilwicki and Cachat University.”

Hugh chuckled. “Point. Speaking of which, do you think they’re really responsible for the slaughter on Mesa?”

“I assume you’re referring to the claim being spread by Manpower through the Solarian media that they set off the nuclear explosion at Green Pines. If so, the answer is ‘no.’ It’s clear they didn’t do it. We’ll get the full story from them when they arrive here.”

Word had come from Sharon Justice, one of Haven’s representatives on Erewhon, that Zilwicki and Cachat had arrived at Parmley Station a few weeks earlier. But her message had contained no other information beyond the bare fact that they were alive.

Arai leaned back in his chair and clasped his fingers over his belly. “Explain your reasoning.” His tone wasn’t argumentative, just interested.

“Hell, Hugh, it’s obvious.” She leaned forward in her own chair, sliding almost to the edge of it. Ruth was not capable of thinking or expounding anything in a relaxed position. Within less than a minute, Hugh knew from experience, she’d have risen from the chair and started pacing.

“For starters, if they were going to set off that large an explosion, why pick that target?”

“Well, according to the news reports—”

“Oh, please!” Ruth got to her feet. Hugh glanced at his watch. Seven seconds.

“That silly business about Green Pines being a residential center for the Mesan elite? Every other apartment in the complex inhabited by a Manpower bigshot? That’s why it was targeted?”

By the time she finished, she’d taken five steps one way and was now reversing direction. Long steps, too; Ruth was a strider.

“I don’t doubt that a lot of important managerial people lived there. But you know how incredibly tough modern construction can make buildings, Hugh—
especially
when they’re intended for the use of the powerful and wealthy.”

She threw up her hands, without breaking stride. “Are we supposed to believe that Anton Zilwicki was incompetent as well as murderous? For Pete’s sake, the man used to be in charge of building entire orbital stations. If there was anyone in the galaxy who’d know in precise detail just how ineffective such a bomb would be on such a target, planted in such a way—”

She finally stopped, leaning forward with her hands on her hands. “Whoever did it set that thing off in the
open.
” She threw up her hands again. “In a stupid
park.
Most of the force of the blast would have been completely wasted! Unless your goal was to vaporize kiddies and puppies and—and—whatever else they had there. Miniature sailboats in the miniature lake, whatever.”

Hugh winced. Ruth could sometimes get so swallowed up in her calculations that she’d blurt out the most insensitive and callous things without even thinking about it.

She pulled out her minicomp. “Let me show you something.”

At that moment, the door to the suite opened and two young women came in. The one in front, much smaller than the one following her, immediately made a beeline toward Hugh and, with no ceremony of any kind, plumped herself on his lap.

The woman in the rear smiled and closed the door.

Ruth frowned at the lap-sitter. “In the long, illustrious—and very well-recorded—annals of royalty throughout the galaxy, Berry, no ruling queen I know of has
ever
just plopped herself on her consort’s lap in public.”

Berry Zilwicki curled her lip. The gesture was rather ineffective, since sneering did not come naturally to her.

“He’s not my ‘consort,’ first of all. He’s my boyfriend. And how is this ‘in public’? You and Thandi are my two best friends, even leaving aside her formal status as head of the armed forces and yours as assistant chief spook.”

Ruth was not fazed. “There are four people in this room. That defines ‘in public’ whenever royalty is engaged in pre-fornication. Which you so obviously are.”

Berry kissed Hugh in a manner that left little doubt that Ruth’s assessment was accurate. When she was finished, she gave the Manticoran princess as regal a look as she could manage. Which wasn’t much; Berry looked down her nose about as poorly as she sneered.

Hugh cleared his throat again. “Speaking of which, Ruth and I were just discussing the chief spook when you walked in.”

Torch’s “chief spook” was Anton Zilwicki, Berry’s adoptive father. Her expression immediately sobered.

So did Thandi Palane’s, although the big woman’s expression was usually pretty stern. Being born and raised on one of the Mfecane worlds didn’t lead to carefree and happy-go-lucky personalities.

“Specifically,” said Ruth, “I was explaining to him—since he pretended to be an ignoramus on matters of interstellar politics, which he most certainly isn’t even if he does look like a Sasquatch—that there was no way—”

“Hey!” Berry protested. “Don’t call my boyfriend a Bigfoot!”

She and Ruth both studied the appendages in question for a moment, which was easy to do since Hugh had one of them propped up on a small ottoman.

“I rest my case,” said Ruth.

“Well . . . Okay, he has
big feet. That doesn’t mean he’s abominable.”

Arai made a shooing gesture with his hand. “Just keep going, Ruth.”

“Yeah, I’d like to hear it myself,” said Thandi, who perched herself on the armrest of a nearby divan. The piece of furniture was sturdily built, fortunately. Palane wasn’t built along the purely massive lines of Arai, who’d been bred by Manpower to be a heavy labor slave, but she was tall, muscular, and weighed well over a hundred kilos.