There. The search lights picked up the glint off the hunting rifle’s barrel first, then he saw the little red dot on the far wall. The laser sight was still on, the power pack unexpended. His breath came short. Was it a trap? Her trap, to test her followers? The sea boomed outside, and filled the tube with a wash of cold wet air; the walls glistened with it.
Closer . . . and he realized that some of the glistening surface was blood, not seawater. Smears and pools of blood, a few shreds of flesh . . . and something had been dragged, something heavy, from here to the edge of the tube, to the sea, where a crumpled wet tarp lay, its edge flapping with every gust of wind.
That damnable, conniving, fornicating Corporal Meharry must have survived the fall . . . climbed here, hoping for refuge—no, to retrieve a life raft he’d stowed here. And the commander had figured it out, had been waiting for him, only in the struggle one of them had killed the other (such a lot of blood, and he was a man who could estimate spilled blood accurately) and escaped in the raft.
But which? Logic said Meharry; Bacarion would have come back.
Unless that was part of her plot. Unless she had planned to betray them all, and escape herself. She had, after all, come down here without telling anyone. Perhaps she had counted on Meharry’s death, and the life raft was for her own use.
He chewed his lip, trying to figure it out, and finally decided it didn’t matter. They were in it up to their necks, and a witness—which witness didn’t matter—had escaped.
He would have to go on with it. Too many clues might remain, even though he had used a firehose to flush the lava tube of evidence. If they could get offplanet before the person in the life raft made contact with anyone, the plan could go on as originally formed.
He ran his thumb under his belt, along the strips of ears that he had taken. They were, he was sure, only the beginning.
Within the prison population, tension had risen in the past few days. Prisoners studied jailers in both their roles, as the predators they had been (and were in spirit) watch prey, and as the prey watch predators around them. Slyke knew exactly which prisoners were supposed to be released, but his own assessment suggested a few additions. First he had to find a way to contact the conspirators in orbit, and convince them of his identity.
Establishing the contact was easier than he’d feared.
“We heard.” The voice contact, generated from random snips of synthetic speech, would defeat voice recognition software.
“Ready to initiate Bubblebath,” Slyke said.
A long hissing silence. Then—“You?”
“Better go ahead,” Slyke said, leaving out “sir” with an effort. “Investigation of the major’s disappearance—”
“Affirmative. ETA stage one?”
Slyke had calculated this carefully. “Two-seven minutes plus original.”
“Good.”
Now he had to signal his fellows. Sergeant Copans and Sergeant Vinus looked worried, but heard him out.
“But sir—with the commander’s disappearance, Fleet Security will be all over us like crushers on a broken spacer.”
“Yes, and if we wait around here, chances are they’ll find something the commander left that will incriminate us. Either we do it now, or there’s a very good chance we’ll be in there”—he jerked his thumb at the cell block’s outer doors—“with them. Is that what you want?”
“No, but—”
“Did you earn your ears, Sergeant?”
“Yessir.”
“Then hop to it.”
R.S.S. Bonar Tighe requested permission from Traffic Control to practice LAC drops into the Big Ocean. Many of the warships which visited Copper Mountain took advantage of the opportunity to test their drop crews. Traffic Control approved the drop zone—200 klicks south of Stack Islands—and also advised them that the only traffic was a prop jet doing SAR to the northwest.
Bonar Tighe’s crew had coalesced around the charismatic Solomon Drizh, hero of Cavinatto, and just too junior, like Bacarion, to be closely investigated as a Lepescu protégé after the admiral’s demise. The conspirators had learned from the mutiny aboard Despite, and the proportion of those supporting Drizh and his allies was much higher in every ship, the chain of command much tighter. This time they were not acting for the Benignity, but for themselves . . . the Loyal Order of Game Hunters.
Fleet had gone soft, Drizh had declared; the whole Familias Regnant had gone soft as a rotting peach. With anyone of real vision in charge, there would have been no piracy, no incursion by the New Texas Godfearing Militia—and certainly no attempt to preserve the lives of those scum once they’d taken the Speaker’s daughter. All the NewTex worlds would be taken, their vicious militia subdued . . . though Drizh had to admit that he rather admired the men who would attack big ships with little ones.
The Loyal Order of Game Hunters had survived Lepescu’s death and, in the years since, had even grown. Its leaders used one political event after another to demonstrate the need for more toughness, a more realistic attitude towards war, more loyalty between brothers in arms. Weakness in high places—from the king’s abdication to Lord Thornbuckle’s inability to keep his daughter in line—proved the need for a stronger, more warlike, military arm.
Like Lepescu, they saw themselves as more loyal, more dedicated, than other Fleet members, and the others as wishy-washy, irresolute, and ultimately ineffective. They recruited widely, more often in the NCO levels than Lepescu had—as Drizh said, if their founder had a fault, it was his misplaced belief in high birth.
The removal of senior NCOs and flag ranking officers because of problems with rejuvenation gave them an obvious window of opportunity. The following burst of temporary promotions gave the group a flag rank member again. He might be only an admiral-minor, and only for the duration of the emergency—but that emergency would last long enough for his purposes.
Bonar Tighe’s three LACs dropped into atmosphere under control of the orbital Traffic Control. Atmospheric Traffic Control on Copper Mountain was minimal except near the main training centers—and the Big Ocean had none. Once below 8000 meters, they were automatically untagged on orbital screens.
Still they stayed on course until under 2000 meters, when they angled northward, towards the Stack Islands.
CPO Slyke did not know exactly how Commander Bacarion had intended to deal with the prisoners and guards who were not part of the conspiracy. For his part, he had no intention of leaving witnesses behind, even on that isolated base. When the storm passed, and the radios once more punched through with the usual demands for daily reports, he’d had to say something to divert suspicion, and had reported Meharry and Bacarion both as “missing, presumed swept away by waves.” Incredulity had followed; he knew that someone would send an investigative team as soon as possible, along with a new CO. No one must be left to talk about it. Even if the mutineers gained support of the orbital station, they wouldn’t have the whole planet by the time someone could get here and write a damning report.
His confederates first took care of those members of the staff who were not part of the conspiracy. Those bodies he left in place . . . he hoped later investigators would think it a prisoner breakout. Killing the uninvolved prisoners was another matter. He had them brought out into the courtyard and then turned the riot weapons on them. They had time to scream . . . and when the prisoners he’d recruited came out, they were more respectful, just as he’d hoped.
By the time the LACs were in atmosphere, he had the prisoners lined up and waiting. The most reliable had the weapons and PPUs out of the guardroom. When the first LAC screamed out of the sky, and settled on the cold stone of Three Stack’s landing pad, Slyke didn’t wait for the hatches to open—the men were in motion, running. The first LAC lifted, and the next settled in place. Sixty more men raced aboard, just ahead of another rain squall. Then another sixty, and another. Slyke rode the last one up.