“Indeed, sir,” I said slowly, holding her gaze with mine. Could this gray-eyed Valkyrie be yet a natural woman beneath the veneer of discipline? “It is a fair world you have brought forth.” In that moment, a thought surfaced, blazing bright betrayal of my just-coined policy of polite fable. I am not a man to leave a thing alone, even in face of a desirable woman’s desperation, but surely he had not breached the chain of command so horribly as to get children upon his exec. There were no other women among
Broken Spear
’s crew list.
“Who are your daughters, sir?” I asked.
Like a metastable solution leaping to a crystalline state at the tap of a technician’s stirring rod, Cordel’s face hardened to wrath in that moment. Lehr, oblivious to anything beyond the soft stones of his eyes, said nothing.
A long minute of silence passed, underscored by the whistling of the hot wind outside and the slow, steady hiss of dustfall within, before I saluted again and excused both myself and my party. We retreated beneath twin masks of blind indifference and bloody hatred, heading for the forge of sunlight beyond the shadows of this ruined starship palace.
We returned with all due haste to my own ship,
INS Six Degrees
.
As an expeditionary cruiser, she was designed and built for descents into the treacherous territory of planetary gravity wells. The constraints of naval architecture generally kept ships in orbit, safe from weather, natural disaster, or the less sophisticated forms of civil disturbance. Not
Six Degrees
. She was wrought as a great disc, capable of sliding through atmosphere layers without expending overmuch power; but now she sat balanced on tripodal struts atop a karst outcrop some kilometer and a half from Lehr’s location. It was a natural vantage for defense, with a view of the broken valleys that led toward the crystalline cliffs and a clear line of sight to the dull bulk that had once been
Broken Spear
.
When aboard, I abandoned my resolve to enforce justice among my officers in favor of a swift council of war with respect to the soon-to-be-late Captain Lehr and the matter of his ship. We had reviewed a dozen major action plans in the long, cold months of transit to this system, but despite my secret hopes none of our contingencies had included finding any of the crew alive.
I had secret orders that not even the weasel Beaumont had seen, pertaining to the handling of
Broken Spear
and her cargo.
Six Degrees
carried a planet-buster in her number two hold, most unusual armament indeed for an expeditionary cruiser, but some of the outcomes modeled in the files of my sealed orders suggested that I might be called upon to execute that most awful responsibility of command—ordering wholesale death visited upon an entire world. Even if all we eliminated was the buzz of strange arthropods, it would still be acknowledged a great and terrible crime.
It did not rank among my ambitions to be recorded in history as de Vere the Planetkiller. But
Broken Spear
’s secrets needed to stay lost—a determination that I was given to understand had been reached in the highest of the ivory-screened chambers of the Imperial House.
But no one had imagined that Lehr yet lived, king of a broken kingdom, attended upon by Cordel. And who were his so-called daughters?
My sons, as it were, surrounded me. Deckard, wise-acre but loyal, stood at one end of the wardroom, his head deep in the hood of an inform-o-scanner brought in for our purposes.
Heminge, stolid as his pistol but equally reliable as both peacekeeper and weapon, sat at the conference table, which had been pulled up from the deck and secured into place, a red marker in hand as he reviewed reconnaissance photography of this world, still damp from the imaging engines. The good Doctor Marley, paler and more slightly built than the rest of us, sly and twisty as ever, a master of challenge without quite rising to the level of insubordination, was down in the sick bay, making notes about his observations of Lehr and Cordel with a promise to return shortly.
And of course there was Beaumont. My Imperial Bureau of Compliance liaison, by courtesy holding rank of Lieutenant Commander and serving without apparent qualification or experience as executive officer on my ship, forced upon me by the nature of this mission. I would have been unsurprised to find that he had separate knowledge of my charge with respect to the planet-buster. Here was a man created by Nature to climb the ladders of power like a weasel in a hydroponics farm. Were I free to do so, I would have strapped him to that bloody bedamned bomb and dropped them both into the nearest star. Instead, he currently sat opposite me, his face set in that secretive smirk which seemed to be his most ordinary expression, hands steepled before his lips as though in prayer, his black eyes glittering.
Beaumont spoke into his fingertips: “So, Captain de Vere, such a pretty trail you have set yourself to. Do you plan to offer aid and comfort to
Broken Spear
’s survivors?”
“Imperial Military Code is clear enough,” I replied. “We are required to render such assistance as our capabilities permit and to evacuate however many survivors we can accommodate, so long as those left behind are not so reduced in numbers or required skills as to be in peril of their lives.”
“Codex three, chapter seven, subchapter twenty-one. Good enough, Captain.”
“I’m so pleased to have your approval,
Commander
. I doubt that they will come. They were not pleased to see us.”
Heminge interrupted without looking up from his photographs, though he was most certainly listening intently. “Where is the command section? The portions of
Broken Spear
that are identifiably hull down on this world do not include the command section.”
“Does it matter?” snapped Beaumont.
Heminge looked up, met the political officer’s eyes. “Yes. It does matter.
Sir.
Captain Lehr was sitting in a command chair. That means the command section was either at one time on the surface, having since departed, or that it survived undamaged in orbit long enough for interior components to be removed and brought down by other means.”
Deckard spoke from the depths of his viewing hood, his voice only somewhat muffled. “There are several metallic bodies in high orbit. One might assume they represented missing sections of
Broken Spear
.”
“Which suggests Lehr allowed the ship to be broken apart in orbit and made an emergency landing with the main hull section,” I said. The cargo at issue on board
Broken Spear
had been carried in the captain’s safe, immediately behind the bridge on that hull type. Had they landed the command section as well and taken the cargo off? Or moved it to the main hull section before bringing that down?
It had been a terribly dangerous thing to do, whatever the reason. And the nature of Lehr’s throne underscored the fact that the object of my search could be anywhere.
I considered my regret for the planet-buster in the belly of
Six Degrees
. Marley bustled into the wardroom, speaking quickly as he always did: “Only one woman on that ship, de Vere, which is one more than our lot has got. Don’t know why he thinks he has daughters—Allison Cordel hasn’t been gravid any more than I have. Not here. She would never carry to term.” Marley slid into a chair. “Lehr’s dying, I’m fairly certain. In this environment, one must assume cancer or radiation poisoning. How he lasted this long is more than a small mystery. Delusional, of course, too, seeing green fields beyond his inner horizon. Gentlemen, how are we now?”
“Shut up,” Beaumont suggested.
“We are being signaled,” Deckard added, emerging from his hood. He touched the personal comm unit strapped to his wrist. A cluster of microphones and screens and speaker grilles unfolded from the overhead.
“Attention
Six Degrees
,” said a strange, flat voice, the caller devoid of emotion or inflection. I could not even determine whether it was a man or woman who spoke. “Do you copy?”
“This is
Six Degrees
, de Vere commanding,” I replied in my crispest training academy voice, waving madly at Deckard to indicate that he should track the source of the signal. “Please identify yourself.”
“I am Ray Gun.”
I exchanged glances with my command crew. Beaumont’s face was sour and pinched . . . he never had a sense of humor nor an imagination. The others displayed varying degrees of thoughtful interest, though Marley was smiling strangely behind his hand.
“And you are who and where . . . ?”
Deckard flashed one of Heminge’s photo prints, an image of one hemisphere of this world as shot from our approach to the planet. He circled it with his finger.
“Orbit?”
I mouthed.
My chief engineer nodded.
How could that be? But an unknown agency of Lehr’s in orbit was no stranger than what we had already seen. The associated comm lag explained the strange rhythm of this conversation, for one.
“Ray Gun. I am one of Lehr’s daughters. Bound to Cathar, who loves me as the stars love the horizons of evening.”
Marley twirled one index finger around his temple.
For a woman, Ray Gun had a remarkably sexless voice. Not for her the tingling tones of Cordel’s strong contralto, an overlay of womanly charm and matronly discipline that went straight to my gut . . . and other parts. Ray Gun’s strangeness made me wonder about this Cathar.
“And you are in orbit, Ray Gun?” I said. “How may I help you?”
Deckard shook his head, while Beaumont looked increasingly sour. I knew perfectly well what both of my officers were about . . . trying to puzzle how there were more women in this place—unless Lehr had begat children on Cordel, shortly after arrival. But who would place a girl-child in orbit—and
how
? Why? This world was a conundrum and then some.
“My father has divided his kingdom between the best of his daughters,” said Ray Gun primly. “We who love him most shall carry his standard. It is I who rule the skies above.”
Deckard was back under the sensor hood, Marley made more notes, while Beaumont now stalked the deck in angry thought, glaring at me as Heminge watched him carefully. I glared back. Perhaps I could leave him here with the madmen and women.
“I’m very pleased to hear that,” I told her.
“Good.” Ray Gun’s voice fell silent a moment. Then: “Do not listen to Cordel. She will betray the king my father’s dream. You should leave. Cathar says so, and he is never wrong.”
I was leaning toward Marley’s theory. “Thank you for the information.”
“Cathar and Kern will move against her soon. Best you stay away. Leave now,
Six Degrees
, while your purpose and dignity are intact.”
Who the hell was Kern? “I shall take your remarks under advisement.”
“Ray Gun out.”
I looked at my command crew. They stared back at me, Deckard emerging from the sensor hood.
“That was very strange,” Heminge said.
Deckard nodded. “I got a signal lock. It’s one of those metallic objects I found earlier. Command section would seem to be likely.”
“So who is Ray Gun? Not to mention Cathar and Kern?”
Beaumont swung around, breaking the momentum of his pacing to face me with barely suppressed menace, as if he thought I was to be intimidated by a darker sort of passion mixed with the threat of his connection to the secretive political puppet masters of the Empire. “This is stupid, de Vere. All of it. You know what to do. Everything else is just pointless theater of the mind.”
Heminge’s voice was quiet. “The bomb?”
The planet-buster was hardly a secret aboard my ship. It filled the number two hold, a modified reentry vehicle designed to be launched from orbit. Any man could deduce its intended use. A smart man wouldn’t comment on it. Especially not in front of Beaumont.
“Yes, the bomb, you moron,” snapped Beaumont.
“So whatever is in our secret orders—” Heminge put his hand up, palm out. “And don’t get excited, we
must
have secret orders, since we’re not carrying that thing on a cargo manifest. As I was saying, whatever is in our secret orders must be very important indeed, for you to take such disregard for the lives of
two commissioned officers of the Imperial Navy
. Not to mention crew and dependents, regardless as to their number or sanity.”
“They’re dead.” Beaumont’s voice was flat. “They’ve been legally dead since
Broken Spear
was taken off the ship list. Lehr and Cordel are walking around breathing, but their commissions lapsed twenty-eight baseline years ago.”
“So whatever
it
is, this great, terrible secret is worth their lives, regardless of their legal existence?”
I stood, took a deep breath. “Yes. Though it burns me to agree with my good Lieutenant Commander Beaumont.” I cast him another sidelong glare, sickened by the look of triumph on his face. “Our view of the outcomes may be the same, but our view of the process differs. I prefer to dance a few measures in this theater of the mind. Our Captain Lehr holds secrets behind the marble of his blind eyes, gentlemen, and I propose to have them out of him if possible. They might just save his life at that.”