Читать книгу Revenge of the Damned (Sten #5) - Allan Cole - Страница 20

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

BIG X WAS flexing his muscles.

Through his cutouts, Sten had deployed the surveyors. The surveyors were reluctant prisoners who were given improvised metric rules and told to measure everything and anything. Sten was trying to find out what he had to work with and work from. Since there were no plans that he could find or steal for Koldyeze, he would make his own.

The details reported back. A hallway measured so many meters wide, long, and tall. The rooms branching off that hallway measured B meters wide, long, and tall. The wing itself measured C meters wide, long, and tall. And none of the figures matched in Sten’s mind. He wished desperately that Alex and his team could move a little faster on the computer. What the clot! Probably wouldn’t work, anyway.

Sten tossed aside the bits of paper he had been figuring on. Later for that drakh. In the meantime, which meant on the morrow, he was on a work detail.

The work detail was commanded by someone who seemed to be the first of the Tahn quislings.

* * * *

Chief Warrant Officer Rinaldi Hernandes seemed to call everyone “my friend”—except the Tahn guards, whom he referred to, with a completely obsequious bow, as “honorable sirs.”

“My friends,” he cajoled. “Come, now. Lift together. We can do this.”

“Doing this” was muscling a huge generator that should have had a McLean sled to raise it up a ramp into a cargo ship.

“You aren’t trying, my friends,” he said. “I am disappointed that I shall have to report you to our commandant when we return. Remember, we are being given a fair day’s ration, and we should be prepared to deliver a fair day’s work.”

Sten grunted, along with twenty others, and slowly the generator groaned up the ramp into place. He, like the others on the work crew, hated Hernandes. Suddenly Sten realized that in spite of the constant threat, no one assigned to Mr. Hernandes’s work crews had ever been reported for anything.

Interesting.

The generator loaded, the prisoners sagged in exhaustion. Hernandes walked among them, patting, joking, and ignoring the muttered obscenities he heard.

“That wasn’t bad, my friends. Come on. The shift’s barely begun. Come on. We’ve got to show our honorable masters we’re as good as they are.”

The prisoners groaned to their feet. The next task was simpler: loading crates into another offbound ship.

Sten realized he was spending less time watching Hernandes than watching Heath’s spaceport. Which ship could be stowed away on? Which ship was outbound for where? What were the security measures taken once a ship was loaded?

He humped a crate up a laddered ramp. Hernandes was standing at the ship’s cargo door in his typically baggy oversized coveralls.

“Hi-diddle-diddle,” the officer chanted. “Right up the middle, friend. We’ve got to get this ship loaded and offworld.”

Definitely, Sten thought, a traitor. But isn’t he a little obvious to be an agent?

“There are troops freezing on an arctic world,” Hernandes went on. “We’ve got to make sure they have what they need.”

Sten glowered at the warrant officer and continued on, part of the antlike procession, into the ship’s hold, where he dumped the crate he was carrying. And then he stared at the loading slip on its side: Uniforms, tropical, working dress.

He quickly scanned some slips on other crates: Recreational equipment, E-normal environment (low-caloric); Rations, beasts of burden (not for Tahn Consumption); Livies, medical, educational, avoidance of social diseases; Livies, counselatory, what to do when your mate leaves; Spores, seedable, rock garden, for issue to general officers and above.

That should have had an interesting effect on any Tahn crunchie—on whatever frozen world the ship was bound for—who had to unload or consume any of the crates.

As he made his way back toward the ramp, Sten looked at Mr. Hernandes a bit differently. To make sure, he bumped against him. Mr. Hernandes’s coveralls clanked.

“Careful of what you’re doing, my friend,” the grandfatherly warrant officer cautioned.

“See me tonight,” Sten ordered in a low voice.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Big X,” Sten said. What the clot. If he was blown, he was now thoroughly blown.

* * * *

He was not.

In case Hernandes was wired, Sten had him strip searched and then, finding he was clean, took him for a long and aimless walk down one of the wing’s corridors.

Rinaldi Hernandes was a building tradesman, a general contractor who had been a master plumber, carpenter, plas-man, ceramic specialist, and so forth, who had joined the service at the beginning of the conflict. He had been assigned to the Imperial construction units—for once the grinding bureaucracy that was the military had put a square peg into a square hole.

Hernandes desperately hated the Tahn. His only grandchild had been killed at the beginning of the war. Then Hernandes himself had been captured. He had survived and, during the years of his captivity, resisted—resisted in ways that would keep him alive until the time came when he had a weapon in his hands and could kill.

“Although, my friend,” he said sheepishly, “since I’ve never killed anyone in my life, I really don’t know what I would do.”

In the meantime, he had learned the Tahn worlds and sent shipments intended for garrisons to the front, and vice versa. He had stolen and then destroyed any protruding bits of military hardware that he could. He had surreptitiously tugged connections loose wherever he could when he was permitted aboard any Tahn ship.

Hernandes hated the Tahn so thoroughly that he was willing to sacrifice the opinion of his fellow prisoners. So they believed he was a quisling, a traitor, a double. Perhaps they might even kill him. That was the risk that Hernandes was willing to take. In the meantime, he was as trusted by the Tahn as any Imperial prisoner could be. He often wondered, he told Sten, how many—if any—Tahn he had killed. He had never seen any of them die.

Maybe he was not really accomplishing anything.

Sten thought that perhaps Mr. Rinaldi Hernandes had killed more Tahn than any Imperial battleship.

And now he had his jack-of-all-trades.

Big clottin’ deal, Sten thought. I’m assembling all these troopies. Giving them a mission.

But so far I haven’t come up with any mission.