Juggernaut, p.39
Juggernaut, page 39
part #2 of Sten Omnibus Series
Continue to fight.
Escape.
Big X’s orders, within the very narrow confines of escape attempts, superseded all others, including those of the senior Imperial officer. And once he was appointed, his authority was absolute. Big X, the head of the escape committee in any camp, could be any rank, private to fleet marshal. It was a dubious honor. If Big X was revealed to the captors, of course he would be skedded for immediate death, brainburn, or, at the very least, transport to a death-camp.
That was not Sten’s objection.
The real objection was that Big X was normally picked because he or she was the most accomplished escaper or resister in a camp. But because all escape attempts had to be registered with his committee, he or she was honor-bound not to personally participate in any escape.
Colonel Virunga, by appointing Sten, had also ensured that he was doomed to be a POW until the end of the war. Or until the Tahn discovered the identity of Big X and had him killed.
Virunga answered Sten’s question. “Because… trust. Known quantity. These others? Unknown.”
There was no possible argument. Virunga saluted once more and left. Sten and Alex looked at each other. Neither of them could find any obscenities sufficient to the occasion, and neither of them felt that tears would be appreciated.
Very well, Sten thought. If I can’t be a personal pain in the butt to the Tahn, I’m going to create me 999 surrogates that’ll give the Tahn a rough way to go.
Nine hundred and ninety-eight, he corrected himself, looking at Alex. If I’m gonna be stuck here in this clottin’ ruin for the rest of the war, I’m gonna have at least one other clot for company.
Chapter Twelve
SENIOR CAPTAIN (INTELLIGENCE) Lo Prek stared at the battered mail fiche on his desk. A normal being might have cheered, exulted at closing on his enemy, or snarled in happy rage. But to Prek, the mail fiche merely verified what he had known: Commander Sten was not only still alive but within Prek’s reach.
He had come up with a unique method to check his theory, a method that did not require either approval from his superiors or any out-of-the-ordinary efforts from Intelligence. He had merely prepared a letter.
The letter was packeted in a routine drop to one of the Tahn deep-cover agents within the Empire. The agent was instructed to deposit the letter normally and use a return address of one of his safe houses.
The agent followed orders.
The letter purported to be from one Mik Davis. It was quite a chatty missive.
Davis, according to the letter, had gone through basic training with Sten. “Of course you don’t remember me,” the letter began.
I got washed real quick and never got to the Guards. Instead they made me a baker. Guess, probably, they were right.
Anyway, nothing much happened to me. I served my term, making dough, and got out before the war started.
Got married—got three ankle-biters now—and started my own business. Guess what it is—prog you do—a bakery.
Compute you’re laughing—but I’m making a credit or six. Guess I can’t kick on what bennies I got from the service.
Anyway, here I am out in nowhere and I saw this old fiche, talking about some captain named Sten who’s up there running the Imperial bodyguards. I always knew you were gonna rise to the top like yeast.
I told my lady, and she thought I was blowing smoke when I said I knew you back when. I decided I’d drop a line, and maybe you’d have time to get back to me.
Do me a real favor, if you would. Just scribble out a mininote so my lady doesn’t think I’m a complete liar.
No way I can do paybacks, unless you show up on Ulthor-13, and we’ll take you out for the best feed this planet’s got. But I’d really appreciate it.
Yours from a long time back, Mik Davis
That letter put Prek in a no-lose situation. If the letter was answered, he knew that Sten was still in the ranks of the Empire. If it went unanswered, he knew the same. It would have been delivered at least. Prek had a far greater faith in the Empire’s mail system than did any of its citizens. Instead, the mail fiche bounced, being returned to the Tahn agent in a packet with a very somber, very official, and very formal note.
Dear Citizen Davis:
Unfortunately your personal letter to Commander Sten is undeliverable.
Imperial records show that Commander Sten is carried on Imperial Navy records as Missing in Action, during Engagements in the Fringe Worlds.
If you desire any further information, please communicate with…
Sympathetically…
Captain Prek felt that he had begun his self-assigned mission in an adequate manner. Sten was not only alive but within reach. A prisoner. Prek refused to admit that Sten could have died of wounds or been killed in captivity. He was still alive. He must still be alive. Prek keyed his computer to begin a directory search for the records of all Imperial prisoners of war captured in the conquest of the Fringe Worlds. He felt he was getting very close to the murderer of his brother.
BOOK TWO
SUKI
Chapter Thirteen
THE FIRST ESCAPE attempt was go-for-broke.
Captain Michele St. Clair had watched closely for two weeks as the first working parties were formed, assigned tasks, and marched down into Heath. She thought she saw a possibility.
The procedure was rigid: After morning roll call, Major Genrikh would order X number of prisoners for Y number of outside duties. They would be broken down into gangs inside the prisoners’ courtyard, and Tahn guards would take charge. Each detail would have, on the average, one noncom per ten prisoners and three guards per five POWs. The Tahn were being very careful.
The ethics of the work gangs were still being debated by the prisoners, a debate that St. Clair took no part in. The debate ran as follows: Participation, even unwillingly, contributed to the enemy. Nonparticipation, on the other hand, could contribute to the prisoner’s own death. St. Clair thought both points nonsense—she knew that the eventual boredom of being in the prison would make people volunteer for any detail that was not actually pulling a trigger. And personally she was all in favor of the outside gangs. Once outside the cathedral, the possibilities of successful escape would be… she did not try to work out the exact odds, but she did not have to.
Michele St. Clair had grown up with an instinctive appreciation for the odds and was quite content with the comfortable, if somewhat hazardous, living a “gambler’s share” gave her.
St. Clair, very young, had considered the various careers available on her native world, one of the Empire’s main transshipment centers. Whoring or crewing on a spacecraft she saw as a mug’s game, and running a bar kept one from being a moving target. St. Clair had been a professional gambler from the time she was tall enough to shove a bet across to a croupier.
She learned how to play a straight game against the suckers and how to shave the odds if she was playing with cheaters. She knew when to get her money down, when to cut her losses, when to fold a bet and get offworld, and, maybe most importantly, when to stay out of the game itself. She was broke many times and rich many more. But the credits themselves were meaningless to her, as to other professionals. They were just markers on how well she was doing.
She had a hundred names on a thousand worlds, and nicknames, as well. All of them related her to the same sort of animal—a sleek, good-looking minor predator.
But for some years the odds had been coming back on her.
Since she preferred to gamble with the wealthy, she maintained a host of identities, all of them well-to-do if a little mysterious. She was very fond of one of them—that of a purchasing agent for the Imperial Navy. Since she had a certain respect for the laws of the Empire, she actually was an officer in the Empire. Standby reserve, of course.
Unfortunately, St. Clair paid no attention to politics. When war broke out, she was systematically cleaning out an upper-class tourist world in her military role, a tourist world with a medium-size garrison on it. St. Clair grudgingly admitted that she might have done too good a job setting up her various identities as unblowable, because no one would believe that she was not actually a first lieutenant, Imperial Navy. Her cover was so well constructed that three months later she was promoted to captain and reassigned as executive officer on a transport.
The convoy her ship was part of was ambushed by a Tahn deep-strike destroyer force, and Michele St. Clair found herself a prisoner of war.
Fortunately, St. Clair was, like all gamblers, an inveterate optimist. In the first prison camp she started running the odds again. What were the odds of surviving as a POW? She saw a gravsled carrying away bodies, shuddered, and estimated ninety-ten against.
What were the odds of improving her lot by collaborating?
Two other calculations were required: Could the Tahn win the war? Sixty-two-thirty-eight—against. The Empire: sixty-forty—in favor. Now, collaboration: seventy-three-twenty-seven—against.
Option: Escape.
St. Clair did not run odds on the likelihood of her getting free. That would have meant factoring in the failed escape attempts of others, and she knew damned well that she was superior to any of those other clots. Proof: They were soldiers or sailors, and she was not.
Michele St. Clair found a new career. And a new nickname—the Lucky Eel. She had made more than twenty attempts to escape, almost all of them solo. And while she had never succeeded in being free longer than four days, she also had never been executed. Somehow the commandant was feeling kindly, she had a convincing excuse for not being where she should have been, or she managed to get away from the chaos before the sorting out started.
Captain St. Clair was ready for her twenty-first attempt.
Observing the work details, she had noticed an absolute consistency to their actions. Buried in the middle of a thirty-man work gang, she hummed happily to herself, watching that routine play out once more.
Shuffle… shuffle… then wait as each work gang was singly processed through each of the three gates in the center sanctuary, being swept and counted at each gate. Then each detail moved across the guards’ courtyard to the outer gate and waited until that gate came open.
Her gang started through the process. As they were herded across the inner courtyard, St. Clair worked her way to the outside of the knot of prisoners.
The outer gate was opened, and the gang went through. It was time.
St. Clair had noticed that as each gang exited the cathedral, the Tahn guards would turn, come to attention, and salute the colors hanging on either side of the Koldyeze’s entrance.
Five seconds of inattention.
More than enough.
As the guards saluted, St. Clair elbowed a prisoner aside and darted for the edge of the path that wound downward toward the city. Six to three, she had thought, they won’t see me. Five to two there’ll be an incline I can scramble down. Eight to one, even if it’s a cliff I can spot a ledge or something I can drop to and get out of the line of fire.
One meter short of the edge, St. Clair realized that she had made another sucker bet and slid to a stop.
The edge of the path dropped straight down for more than 100 meters. All the outcroppings she could see were obviously rotten. St. Clair had no interest in ostentatious suicide.
There were shouts behind her, and a projectile snap-CRACK-D past her head. St. Clair put her hands straight up, turned around, and looked at the guards hurtling toward her.
“And sixteen to three I’ll never learn how to fly,” she managed before a rifle butt drove into her stomach and sent her down.
Sweat beading on his forehead, Alex fiddled at the lock, trying for what seemed the hundredth time to coax the strange-looking eyehook key his people had fashioned over the little nipple of metal he could feel inside. He had already turned three wheel gears, and according to theory he had just one more to go.
The key slipped, and it was all Alex could do to bury an almighty great shout of “Clot!” Instead, he wiped the sweat sting out of his eyes, bent his creaking spine, and eased the key back inside.
Behind him, his two companions chatted on, presumably critiquing Alex’s efforts. He did not know that for sure, because the entire conversation was taking place in silence.
“Patience, lads,” Alex said, although he had not heard anyone complaining. “Ah’m a wee tickle away.”
“Not to worry,” the big blond man said aloud. “Kraulshavn and I aren’t the hurrying kind.”
Kraulshavn looked up at his largish friend, Sorensen, waiting for a translation. Sorensen’s fingers signed swiftly, and Kraulshavn nodded his head in vigorous agreement. Alex shifted his attention momentarily from the lock to Kraulshavn. There was more finger wagging.
“Whae’s he sayin’?”
“That if you are even close to being correct about the contents of the room, the wait will be well worth it.”
Alex grunted his answer and tickled on with his eyehook key.
Kraulshavn and Sorensen were hands down the strangest pair that Alex and Sten had thus far roped into their growing organization.
Sorensen was the epitome of a corn-fed farm boy, with slabs of muscle, pale skin that flushed at the least effort, and a grammar-book way of speaking. He also did not appear to be blessed with a great deal of native brightness. But Alex knew from his days in Mantis how strange a breed Sorensen was. Beings like him had made up a valuable part of several Mantis teams Alex and Sten had been on. They were living battle computers. Their innocent looks and surface slowness concerning immediate things about them hid a massive calculating brain. In fact, Alex strongly suspected that Sorensen was a surviving member of a blown Mantis Team or maybe still active on a deep-cover run. There was no sense in asking, because Sorensen would not answer. Even more nagging than that was the fact that if Sorensen was Mantis and Alex knew the being’s private code word, they would have themselves the damnedest walking, talking battle computer. Which might help on the odds a bit. He shot Sorensen another sizing-up look.
Like his brothers and sisters, Sorensen knew zip about his fellow beings. His people were perfect marks for any con man or traveling carny. In fact, the Imperial governor-general of their homeworld had been forced to pass strict laws forbidding carnivals, circuses, or anything even vaguely connected with hustle artists. On the other hand, if Sorensen was shown a distance point, he could instantly calculate the range, trajectory, wind speed, and relative gravitational tug that any projectile might encounter on its way to its target.
Those talents made Sorensen a valuable find. Doubling his value was the man’s friendship with Kraulshavn.
Alex felt the eyehook catch. Gently he twisted and felt the gear wheel sliding smoothly until it clicked into place with its gearmates. Inside, the gears should have been lined up, exposing the pie-shaped wedge cut into them. Quickly, Alex pulled out the eyehook and inserted a heavy bar key. A few minor fumbles and the gears fell back with a heavy thunk. On the other side of the door Alex could hear a counterweight shift, and he stepped back to let the door creak open on its heavy hinges.
Kraulshavn signed what Alex took to be a “congratulations” at him. A little dip at the end by the being’s nimble fingers, however, looked suspiciously like “dummy.” Alex shot Sorensen a glance. The big man was looking blandly innocent.
“Ah’m sussin’ a wee joker frae y’r mate,” Alex said.
“There was not one single joke in anything he said, Mr. Kilgour,” Sorensen protested.
He turned to Kraulshavn, spelling out Alex’s comments. Kraulshavn’s mouth opened in a round merry O. He covered it with a delicate furry hand, hiding his silent giggle. Alex had to grin.
“Na. He’s nae a joker. Noo our Kraulshavn. ‘Kay. Waggle thae a’ th’ lad. In yon room thae may be’t a wee haunt.”
“Ghosts?” Even Sorensen was incredulous at that. Kraulshavn signed back what was a blatant suggestion where Alex could put his “wee haunt.”
Alex just shrugged. “Aye. Ye be’t doubters. But th’ Tahn hae tales thae’ll kink y’r curlies.”
With that, he walked inside. Despite their strongly expressed doubts, Sorensen and Kraulshavn hesitated a long moment before they followed.
Kraulshavn had particular reason to hesitate.
Like any reasonable and sophisticated adult Struth, Kraulshavn viewed stories of the spirit world with imperious amusement, as something to look down one’s beak at. Even so, ghost stories were an important and ancient signing tradition in his society. Nestlings barely able to put a few symbols together were told simple tales of ghastly elegance. In the deep past, fear of the unknown had been a valuable tool for a hen to keep her featherless, spindly hatchlings safe.
The Struth had originated on a barren and hostile world that to a nervous observer might have seemed to be entirely populated by creatures with fangs and claws and talons and sharp beaks. That was just true enough to require some fairly tricky skills to avoid being on someone else’s menu.
In Struth prehistory, they had once been a species facing extinction. Originally beings of the air, they were a little bit too large to hide and too small to defend themselves. The Struth were also handicapped by poor hearing—limited to the ultrafrequency sounds the leaders and guards of the rookeries used to guide their brothers and sisters. The advantage of that was they could not be heard by any potential enemies. Unfortunately, that meant the Struth also could not hear said enemies approaching.
