S andrew swann hostile.., p.23
S. Andrew Swann - Hostile Takeover 02, page 23
Arcady nodded. “Proudhon air-traffic control has come to much the same conclusion.”
Klaus didn’t reveal the last communication GA&A had had with the Shaftsbury.
Arcady had loyalties beyond Klaus. Better to let Arcady wonder about those loyalties. Klaus said, “We don’t know what happened, but we have to assume it was hostile action.”
“By whom?”
“It doesn’t matter. What matters is the possibility that the operation might be compromised—” Klaus knew that the operation was compromised. His brother was out there somewhere, and his brother knew. “I’m pushing up the invasion schedule.”
“To when?”
“Immediately. I’m sending the Blood-Tide. The marines are to be distributed to their units. I want things to move.”
“I would prefer it if there was some time for the marines and the mercs to work together.”
Tough shit. You aren’t in command here. “Work it out on the run. We don’t want to lose surprise. Especially with your first target.”
Arcady paused for a while. Finally he nodded. “Colonel,” Arcady said, and cut the holo.
Klaus turned away and faced his staff. “I want two squads of marines equipped and sent north to pick up Magnus’ trail. Ten minutes. All the others I want on the Blood-Tide in fifteen. Off the ground within the half hour. Move.” TEC officers scattered to the wind.
Operation Rasputin was about to engage upon Stage Three: The military consolidation of all political power on the planet.
<
PART SIX
Destabilization
“The word state is identical with the word war.”
—Prince Pyotr Alekseyevich Kropotkin
(1842-1921)
<
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Cold War
“Between too good to be true and worse than you imagine, bet on worse.”
— The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“Whatever you do, just keep moving.”
—Sylvia Harper
(2008-2081)
Tetsami spent the balance of the day in one of the rear compartments, trying to dig out through the remains of an emergency air lock. She had spent about a quarter of the time actually digging at the snow. The rest of the time she worried about what kind of damage she was doing to herself while the painkillers masked her injuries.
The good news was she briefly broke the surface.
The bad news was that outside the Shaftsbury the temperature was subfreezing, the wind was close to sixty klicks per, visibility was nil, and it was closing on nightfall.
Tetsami retreated down into the cargo compartment, knowing that they’d need the Lady to get out of the mountains alive.
When she limped back to their camp, she began to feel the full weight of what she had done to herself. Not just physically, but emotionally. It had been seven days since she had pulled out of Diderot. It felt like an aeon.
She should have stayed. She missed Dom backing her up in a crisis. At least that’s what she told herself she missed.
She collapsed next to Kelly and cursed herself for not telling him to go up and dig the hole. She might not like the responsibility of tending to the three wounded men, but she should have known better than to do that digging herself.
She wrapped one of the thermal blankets around herself and fell into an exhausted sleep before she’d said one word to Kelly. She had embarrassing dreams about Dom.
When she awoke, she felt better. At least moving only hurt her a little now. Kelly must have let her sleep for a long time.
She traded watch on the wounded and told Kelly to get some sleep. She was guilty that he’d stayed awake for her, but she was also grateful. Someone should be keeping a wakeful eye on the casualties. Not that either she or Kelly could do much if one of the wounded started to slip. Neither of them were doctors, and the medkits were nearly empty.
Their camp was a clear spot on the floor of the cargo area where the portable heaters from the Lady had melted a circle five meters in diameter. Within that circle the temperature was reasonable enough for Tetsami’s breath to stop fogging.
Sometime during the middle of the night the emergency lights had failed. Now the only light was from the heaters’ crystalline heating elements, glowing behind ceramic mesh.
The cylindrical crystals’ orange light barely reached the walls to port and starboard, to carve latticework shadows.
Inky darkness swathed the cargo area to fore and aft, beyond the camp.
During the night the only sound, and the only sign of the snowstorm raging outside, was the abrasive rattle of the wind, far and small behind her. Throughout the night, the wind grew more and more quiet. Tetsami didn’t know if that meant that the storm they’d landed in was losing strength, or if the ship was buried that much deeper.
She suspected the latter.
So damn alone. It hurt, even though she’d been on her own most of her professional life. Who am I kidding? I’ve been alone most of my life, period.
With the exception of Ivor, the only parent she really remembered, she had never had close ties to anyone. The environment in the social cesspit of Godwin City didn’t foster close relationships.
“How come this never bothered me before?” she asked the emptiness.
She felt like she had in Ashley, running down endless corridors of endless nothing.
She wondered if Godwin was much different. The population pressed close, but the people were so many nulls.
Lonely, miserable thoughts, all through the night. She hung perilously close to the edge of self-pity as she stared at the darkness cloaking the front of the Shaftsbury.
She wondered how she had managed to get into this mess. It was as if her contact with Dom and Godwin Arms had erased her ability to make a graceful exit. Up to then I didn’t give a shit—
“Problem. The world still doesn’t.”
Why did that insensitive bastard fascinate her?
It didn’t matter where she was, or how screwed up the situation became—her thoughts always drifted back to Dom. It had to be some element of self-destruction in her psyche. The same part of her brain that drove her into the profession that had killed her parents.
It certainly wasn’t Dom’s control-freak personality—or she’d be drooling over Commander Jarvis here. And while power was supposed to be an aphrodisiac, that couldn’t be it. She’d met Dom in the dungeon of the Bakunin Church of Christ, Avenger. Ever since then, they had fought through mess after mess.
A month of working together and the bastard still couldn’t confide anything in her, still couldn’t trust her. She wanted his confidence. She’d had this pathological desire for intimacy with someone about as emotional as the Lady. The first time she worked with someone—
Maybe that was it.
“I’m going to run back to him, aren’t I?”
The end of the night was marked, not by any changes in the environment in the Shaftsbury, but by Kelly waking up. In addition to Kelly’s uninjured status, Tetsami also noted that the man had perfect time sense.
It was another note to put on a growing list of suspicions.
“Good morning, miss,” Kelly said.
“I hadn’t noticed.”
Kelly looked around, his smile faltering slightly. He ran his hands through his red hair.
“We’re alive—that makes it a good morning.”
Tetsami nodded. “It’ll be better when we get out of here.” Kelly didn’t argue with that. Instead he walked back to the Lady and pulled himself up to the door of the tipped-over vehicle. “Have you eaten anything?”
“Not hungry.”
Kelly disappeared into the Lady and came out with a pair of ration packages. He tossed her one as he returned to sit opposite the heater from her. “Eat,” he said. “It’ll help you heal.”
I notice you didn‘t include yourself in that statement.
As they ate, Tetsami said, “We have to get the Lady upright.” Kelly looked around a moment in confusion.
“The vehicle,” she added.
“Oh. You confused me for a second—odd thing to call such an ugly truck.”
“Don’t upset her. She’s all we’ve got.”
Kelly smiled and laughed in an odd way. For a second Tetsami had a glimpse of something beyond the boyish con-man façade. It was so brief that Tetsami didn’t have a chance to figure out who it reminded her of.
“Indeed. I send my apologies to the old girl.” Kelly looked toward the three-axled underside of the Lady. “Shouldn’t be too hard to right her. Just a matter of leverage.” Tetsami opened her mouth to say something snide about the size of the vehicle.
However, Kelly said it with such a straight face that she suspected he might know what he was talking about. She didn’t want to undermine what authority she had by riding on him.
After breakfast she double-checked the stability of the wounded. Checking their vital signs and replacing the saline-nutrient packs on their arms was about the best she could do.
Jarvis looked a little better. Gavadi was in as grave a condition as he was when she first saw him. The navigator, Marc Baetez, was still sedated. As far as she could tell, none of them were in immediate danger. However, Jarvis, and especially Gavadi, needed a real medic, not recipe first aid from a medkit’s database.
Once she was reassured that no one was going to die on her immediately, she limped after Kelly, to the overturned Lady. Her muscles were stiff from abuse, even through the painkillers. It felt like she’d just traded in her major muscle groups for a set a size and a half too small.
The Lady looked like a hopelessly beached whale. She lay on her left side, her nose angled away from the front of the Shaftsbury, her tri-axled floor facing aft. A huge drift piled up against her roof, almost completely burying that side.
In the shadowy space of the Shaftsbury’s cargo hold, the Lady’s size was even more imposing. Her cross section was four meters square, and she was easily fifteen meters long. Walking up to her underside was like facing a wall.
“Just a matter of leverage,” Tetsami mumbled.
Kelly nodded. “You’ll see.” He carried the shovel and just looking at it awoke sympathetic pains in her back, reminding her of her fruitless dig yesterday.
Kelly walked around to the nose of the vehicle, where the left front axle was buried in a pile of chain. Kelly started pulling at the chain—what was left of the Lady’s moorings— until he had nearly five meters’ worth.
She watched him tug free meters more of the heavy mooring chain and was amazed at the effort Kelly could exert without apparently working up a sweat. It was cold—but his breath wasn’t even fogging.
Tetsami stared at Kelly through an intermittent fog of her own breath.
His breath wasn’t fogging.
What had been a growing suspicion of Kelly grew into a sudden distrust that hit her like a physical blow. She took a few unconscious steps back as she tried to figure out what she was seeing. What was he?
Kelly picked up too much chain, too easily. He stepped up to the middle axle and looped the chain around the inside of the upper tire. All of these actions would’ve been relatively innocuous, if it wasn’t for Tetsami’s growing paranoia.
“Here you go,” Kelly said, handing her the ends of the chain. She could feel the chill of the metal through her driving gloves. What Kelly wore wasn’t much better, and she’d never seen a sign of discomfort from him.
In this frigid wreck she’d never seen any sign of discomfort from him. No shivering, no hugging himself to keep warm, no huddling over the space heater.
As she wondered about him, he said, “Now I’ll excavate the other side and lever her up. When I give the word, you pull.”
“This isn’t going to work.” Tetsami’s voice was distant, her thoughts elsewhere.
“Not immediately, miss. We lever it up a few centimeters and I can prop it up with the snow back there.”
That sounded unlikely. “We’ll see.”
She stayed there, holding the chain, as Kelly went behind the Lady. She noticed how the plan kept him out of her sight during the process.
Damn it. she cursed herself, he’s the only ambulatory ally you’ve got.
Kelly was the only one to come through the wreck unscathed. Tetsami couldn’t believe that. It was also hard to believe that he’d just conveniently “recovered” from the restraint buckles’ stun field.
“Pull.”
Tetsami pulled. She was surprised to feel the Lady shift its weight.
“Okay,” Kelly said, after she’d been leaning on the chain for half a minute. When she let go, the Lady was leaning toward her at a very slight angle.
The strain erased the effect of the painkillers. Deep aches burned in her joints each time Kelly told her to pull. Every time she was less able to comply. However, her diminishing ability didn’t slow the progress of the Lady. As Tetsami moved back, the vehicle continued to lean toward her a few degrees with each effort.
The process was agonizingly slow. It took at least an hour, probably more, for the Lady to reach a forty-degree angle. By then, Tetsami was five meters away from it, and barely keeping the chain taut.
By then, when Kelly called for her effort, Tetsami could barely put any tension on the chain.
Her effort wasn’t needed.
Tetsami watched as the Lady angled up, past forty-five degrees. It balanced at the halfway point for a long moment before gravity gradually took over. Slowly at first, but with a lethal acceleration, the Lady’s three axles tipped toward her. Even though she had at least two meters of clearance, she dropped the chain and stumbled backward.
The Lady’s wheels hit with a solid thump that sprayed snow and shards of ice over her. The Lady’s overengineered suspension absorbed the impact with a minimum of rocking.
Now that it was upright, it was easier to see the damage the vehicle had sustained.
Most of the exterior lights had been smashed or torn off. What had been an external antenna array was now a ragged stump. The body sported a dozen large dents in the surface, and one of the middle wheels had been bent ten degrees from the vertical.
More significant was the damage the Lady hadn’t sustained. As Tetsami circled it, hugging her aching arms to her sides, she saw that of all the new dents in the skin, not one breached the surface. None of the windows had broken, and it looked like the Lady’s hardened skeleton had retained its shape. When she checked the systems inside the Lady, the readouts showed little damage at all. None of the environment control was lost, and as far as mobility went, the only damage was a loss of power to the one bent wheel—but then the Lady could move with only two wheels under power, as long as they were on opposite sides.
The vehicle’s durability amazed Tetsami, and only made her wonder about Kelly all the more.
A Royt ATV built like a tank hadn’t survived unscathed— why had Kelly?
Tetsami left the Lady and saw Kelly bending over the wounded. She almost warned him away. She thought better of it before she acted on the impulse. Whatever her suspicions were, Kelly presumably had no reason to interfere with any of the injured men. If he had, he had already had more than enough opportunity while she’d slept.
He’d had enough opportunity to do her in.
Repeating that to herself a few times gave a check to her raging paranoia.
The only thing wrong with the guy is the fact he survived. ,..
And he doesn‘t sweat, and his breath doesn‘t fog.
Tetsami shook her head, walked up to Kelly, and placed her hand on his shoulder.
Her sleeve rode up on her wrist, and for a brief instant the skin on her wrist brushed the skin of his neck.
She started to ask, “How’re they doing?” but before she reached “doing” her voice trailed off.
Kelly was paying attention to Gavadi and didn’t seem to notice her incomplete sentence. “Baetez is improving. Jarvis is stable. But Gavadi seems to be worsening. I think he has some internal bleeding, but there’s nothing left in the medkits to help. He needs a doctor.”
Tetsami barely noticed what Kelly said. She was too busy dealing with the fact that the touch of Kelly’s skin was as cold as ice.
Tetsami had to keep telling herself that Kelly wasn’t acting like a threat. It had gotten to the point where she had to confront him. But she couldn’t do it now. She really couldn’t do it until they were out of the Shaftsbury, when she wasn’t needlessly putting the wounded into danger.
At least, she had figured out how they were getting out of here, wounded and all. She just hoped that she wouldn’t destabilize the whole wreck in the process.
She said nothing as the two of them cleaned the inside of the Lady, emptying it of extraneous equipment, clearing the bunks for use by the wounded.
Tetsami checked the Lady’s mobility. She still ran. Just as important to getting out of here, the mining laser was intact.
Tetsami turned the vehicle so that what remained of the forward lights shone toward the nose of the Shaftsbury. The cockeyed white glow illuminated an unbroken slope of snow, floor to ceiling. Tetsami guessed that the snow filled the compartment completely for nearly ten meters. Who knew how much snow was on top of the end of the Shaftsbury.
However, it was the only exit for the Lady. And the Lady was going to get them out of the mountains.
Carefully, she and Kelly loaded the wounded into the bunks.
Once they were safe, Tetsami set up the mining laser at the front of the craft. The object was to melt a hole big enough for the Lady. Kelly wanted to excavate by hand, but Tetsami overruled him. The laser might be a more dangerous way to do this, but they didn’t have much time to play with. Not only did they have a trio of medical emergencies, but there had to be an all-out search for this craft by people they didn’t want to be found by.
And she had a good idea, from her experience yesterday, how long it’d take to hand-excavate a hole big enough for the Lady.
