Читать книгу Vortex (Sten #7) - Allan Cole - Страница 11

CHAPTER FOUR

“AH’LLGIE TH’ POSS’BIL’TY y’ may hae saved me,” Alex grudged. “Nae, lad. Tis m’shout this round.”

He got up, walked to the bar, paid the barman, and brought back the tray. Four mugs of beer and four single shot glasses of clear liquid. Sten indicated the shot glasses with a questioning finger.

“Quill. Nae stregg. Thae’s none ae that off the Bhor Worlds or away frae th’ Emp’s palace, so this’ll hae t’ cure the dog.”

Sten was still a little skull-fried from his marathon dinner-drunk-orders group-plotting session with the Emperor some days earlier. Obediently, he dumped one shot down his throat, gagged politely, and chased it with a beer.

“Y’ll note, Ah’m but bein’t civil an’ keepin’t y’ company,” Alex said as he did the same. “Dinnae be haein’ th’ thought Ah’m still a wee alky. Gie it all up, Ah did.”

The two of them sat, anonymous in gray shipsuits, near the back of a spaceport bar near Soward City’s vast spacefields. The bar was a businesslike hum of sailors getting drunk enough to transship, or drunk enough to realize they had finally ported, and the whores and hustlers were helping both sets toward their missions.

“I really did save you?”

“Oh, aye,” Alex said. “She was wee, she was wily, she was gorgeous, and she e’en had her own money.”

“Maybe you should have married her.”

“Ah clottin’ near did. Th’ banns were read. Th’ hall wae hired. Ah found a sky pilot thae’d go through the ceremony wi’oot gigglin’. Ah’d e’en introduced hert’ m’ wee mum.”

“What did she think?”

“She consider’t, an’ said thae i’ Ah hadda marry, still so young an’ barely beyont th’ cradle as Ah am, she c’d live wi’ th’ lass.”

“I say again my last: maybe you should settle down. Start thinking about the next Laird Kilgour of Kilgour.”

Alex shuddered gently. “Ah dunno, lad. Thae wae a moment . . . but then Ah thought a’ myself, years gone, brain gone i’ Ah e’er had one t’ begin wi’, teeth gone, chewin’ on pap, puttin’ milk i’ th’ brandy, wi’ bairns bouncin’ around an’ all. Cacklin’ on aboot how th’ old days are gone, an’ modern clots dinnae lift a candle t’ th’ mighty ones thae’re gone, men frae the old days, when men were men an’ th’ sheep ran like hell.

“Disgustin1. Clottin’ disgustin’. So Ah considers . . . looks at your signal . . . writes oot a well-reasoned arg’ment an’ slips out th’ back afore dawn.”

“Mr. Kilgour,” Sten said. “An act of cowardice! You at least should have stayed and explained.”

“Rotate around it, lad. Th’ way th’ lass impress’t m’ mum was by beatin’t her ae arm wrestlin.’ Ah’m mad, but Ah’m noo daft.”

Sten checked the time. “We’re due at the Victory in ten minutes. Let’s drink and get.”

Kilgour blurred into motion, old battle reflexes reappearing. The beer and alk on the table vanished. He burped politely, rose, and started toward the exit, threading his way between tables, Sten in his wake.

Alex’s way was blocked by a very large quadruped, whose gray hide looked as if it would make an acceptable suit armor. The being emptied the large plas balloon he had been sniffing and bounced it away into a corner. All three of his — her? its? — eyes glared around separately, then settled on Kilgour. The being’s twin manipulating arms flexed.

“Men! Don’t like men!”

“Ah dinnae either,” Alex said equably.

“You man.”

“No.”

“What you?”

“Ah’m a penguin. Frae Earth. A wee slickit cowerin’t birdie thae lives on herring.”

Sten ran through various ET handbooks, trying to ID the being. Nothing in his memory had four legs, three eyes, two arms, a dim brain — last undetermined for certain, given probability said being was blitzed — stood two and a half meters tall, weighed several squillion kilos, and had a terrible attitude.

Oh, yeah. Not very vestigial claws on the arms. Sten felt mildly sorry for the being as it accused — “You not penguin.”

“An’ how d’ye know, lad? Y dinnae hae th’ look ae a passionate penguin pervert aboot y’.”

“You man.”

“Look, son. Y’re tired. Y’hae a bit t’ . . . snuff, snort, swill, or suck. Hae y’self ae sitdown, an’ Ah’ll buy y’ a wee new balloon.”

“Don’t like men! I hurt men! First I hurt you, then hurt him.”

“Ah well,” Kilgour said. “Sten, y’ bear witness t’ m’ wee mum Ah’m noo goin’t out an’ gettin’ in th’ bloody frae like Ah wae a cub again.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“Ah knew Ah c’d rely on you.”

The being was reaching for Kilgour’s neck — what little neck the tubby man had.

Kilgour’s hands circled the being’s arms, just where a wrist would be on a humanoid. And he levered down. The being scrawked in pain and collapsed down on what were maybe knees, just as gracelessly as an Earth camel. Kilgour, still holding the being’s “wrists,” stepped forward — and the quadruped collapsed back into a sprawled, seated position.

“Noo,” Alex said. “Y’ see how easy pacifism is, when y’ put y’r mind t’ it?”

“If you’re through playing, Mr. Kilgour?”

“Ah’m through, Admiral. But Ah hae t’ buy m’ friend his round. As Ah promis’t.”

Kilgour, an upright and honorable man from the high-gee world of Edinburgh, Sten’s long-time aide and accomplice and one of the Empire’s most highly trained elite commandos, did keep his word — and bought the now quiescent monster a balloon before they left for their inspection tour of the Imperial battle cruiser Victory.

“ Tis all i’ th’ the leverage,” was his only explanation to Sten. “Like tearin’ a phone book apart.”

“What’s a phone book?”

* * * *

“ ‘Tis quite a ship,” Alex said, three hours later.

“Aye,” Sten agreed. He took off the sensor hood he had been wearing and stopped his run through of the Victory’s tertiary and redundant TA systems.

Alex’s eyes swept the room before he spoke. There weren’t any crewmen within earshot, and the com box wasn’t picking up. “Perhaps Ah’m gettin’ old,” he went on, still tentatively, “but the way this scow’s set up’s noo like it would have been back in the — the old days.”

“You mean before the Emperor’s assassination.”

“Aye,” Kilgour said. “Thae’s a bit too much flash ae filigree fr this to suit th’ old Emp. Or am I rememberin’t th’ past ae better’n it wae?”

“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Sten said. He touched keys, and the computer obediently threw a three-meter hologram of the Victory into the air over the mess table they were sitting at. Another key combination, and the computer began peeling the hologram, displaying the new battle cruiser from all angles and deck by deck.

“Ah’d heard this wae t’ be a ‘maphrodite,” Alex said. “But it looks more like a three-way or four-way arrangement t’me.”

Sten nodded agreement. He wasn’t happy, on a number of levels. First was the entirely pragmatic consideration of the Victory as a warship. Sten had experience with tools, vehicles, and ships that were ostensibly dual- or multiple-purpose. Almost without exception that meant that the tool did quite a number of things badly, and nothing well.

Battle cruisers, for instance, were based on aeons-old designs of ships that had enough muscle to beat up almost anything — except battleships or monitors — and enough power to run away from the biggies. Quite frequently, though, it worked out that the class was too slow to be able to catch and destroy smaller ships, and played hell getting away from the monsters. Plus, once the ship was caught, its armament, quite capable of bashing a stray destroyer or such, was too light to damage a battleship, and its defensive systems, active or passive, were too weak.

Sten had gone through the builder-promised specs on the Victory, cross-correlating them with the actual performance the battle cruiser produced during its trials. Unless the Imperial procurement people were on the take — not an impossibility, but not very likely — it looked as if the Victory might be an effective weapon.

The problem was this tacship capability the Emperor had evidently decided was vital. The Victory’s rear third was dedicated to hangar/weapons/quarters for a complete tacship flotilla — three squadrons of four ships each. The tacships were Bulkeley-II class ships, developed and refined during the Tahn war. They were just-over-hundred-meter-long needles of destruction. They were built to get in at speed, hit hard, and get out. Anything else — crew comfort, defensive capabilities, armor — was secondary or nonexistent. Sane pilots hated the tacships — they required constant hands-on pilot response and were unforgiving, as in kill you, of the slightest error. Sten loved them.

So on one hand the Victory’s added capability was something Sten appreciated. But it also meant that the rear spaces were flying time bombs, packed with sensitive explosives, fuels, and weaponry. The large hangar and maintenance areas meant any hit in those spaces might destroy the battle cruiser. Plus the Victory was more than a bit blind and defenseless around the stern. “Thae’ll be a problem,” Kilgour had observed. “Means thae i’ we cannae break an’ run, we’ll hae t’ retreat backwards, clutchin’ our bustle an’ flailin’ wi’ our wee ladylike brolly.”

That image of Earth Victorian times brought up the Victory’s final oddity: complete luxury. Sten already knew the ship had been outfitted for luxury — even the lowest-rank wiper had his own tiny compartment. Paneling appeared to be wood and stone on many of the passageways. The kitchens could efficiently prepare and serve Imperial conference banquets with no strain.

Sten appreciated this to a degree. A lean, clean fighting machine might sound good in the livies, but Sten knew from his tacship experience that after three or four weeks into a mission, one thing not appreciated was a fresher one had to squeeze oneself into to degrease the body. Especially if that fresher just happened to have a sharp corner cleverly located where elbows and knees went.

But then there was the Imperial Suite, which included living quarters large enough, it seemed, for an entire Imperial court, plus guest area and troop support sectors, including armories and gymnasiums. Sten was glad to see the latter — he was still aware of the smallish handles he had previously noted in the Imperial mirror.

The Imperial Suite — if that was the correct label for such a large area — covered the upper quarter of the Victory between the tacship decks to the forward command spaces for the Victory’s own crew. A frontal cross-section would show the Imperial area as a T, the figure’s leg extending deep into the ship’s center. Like all flagships, the Victory was designed and built so the Imperial — or flag — quarters were independent of the warship’s own areas. For thousands of years every admiral had known he was a better captain than the flagship’s own captain, and would frequently drop the larger concerns he was paid to worry about and play skipper-for-a-day.

Yes. Sten agreed with Alex that this Imperial Suite was a bit much. The heads had gold fixtures. The basins were real marble. The bedchambers were richly upholstered. As for the beds themselves, particularly the ones — plural correct — in the Imperial private quarters, Sten wondered how they would be described in the inventory:

* * * *

BED, Mark 24, perhaps. Multiple-user-capable. Structurally reinforced to allow occupants limitless creativity. Bed fitted for hydraulic modification while in use, which includes adjustment overall area from polyhedron to circular to conventional; vertical adjustment of any portion of bed for height. Internal and external multiple capabilities, including, but not limited to, internal illumination, external illumination, holographic projection, holographic recording. Includes refrigeration and snack area. Includes full communication capability. Overhead rack (can be hidden) capable of supporting as many as three beings. Fitted for light array to include, but not limited to, stroboscopic or holographic imaging.

* * * *

The owner of such a bed, Sten summarized, would be listed as orgy-qualified and -experienced.

The Emperor?

Sten did not give a damn — but it was odd that during his time as captain of the Emperor’s Gurkkha bodyguard, he hadn’t noticed that the Eternal Emperor seemed particularly sex-driven. He hadn’t thought much about it, but sort of guessed that after a few thousand years maybe the possibilities had been completely explored.

But now?

Hell, he was not even sure he was right — it wasn’t as if Sten had personally explored every inch of Arundel Castle to ensure that what was listed as a storeroom might not, in fact, have been an Imperial bordello.

The problem was going to be, Sten thought, sleeping in that bed himself. Why you puritanical little clot, his mind jeered. There have been times, he prodded himself, that he’d been known to roll about in a big pile with friends. And speaking of which, his thought went on, who’s going to see you sleeping in that humongous great bed, anyway? You might as well have been a clottin’ castrato of late.

Sten brought himself back to the issues at hand. “Mr. Kilgour,” he said, “I’m not at all sure what this goatrope they call the Altaic Cluster is going to be. But I’m getting the idea our boss isn’t giving us all these goodies just because he likes my legs.”

“Prog: ninety percent,” Alex agreed.

“Which means I’ll be needing all my assets. So, uh, do you think it’d be a proper utilization of your talents, Laird Kilgour, for you to skipper this solid-gold whorehouse?”

Kilgour appeared taken aback. “Me? But thae’s an admiral rank. Twa-star, Ah’d hazard. An’ th’ highest rank Ah e’er held, last time Ah meter-metered the matter, wae but wee warrant.”

“I don’t think that would present a problem,” Sten said. “And it wasn’t what I asked.”

Alex considered. Then slowly shook his head. “Ah dinnae think so, lad. But Ah’m touched ae the thought. T’now, thae’s nae been a Kilgour been an admiral. ‘Ceptin’ the pirates, a’ course.

“M’mum’d be pleased, an a’.

“But . . . nae. Marchin’ swabs here an’ bye, pushin’ all this steel aroun’ th’ sky . . . thae dinnae tweak m’ testes. Ah’m more int’rested in all thae clots we’re goin’ out to straighten oot — Ah think thae’s m’ main talent, skipper.”

Sten was very damned elated. Beyond the value he placed on Kilgour’s friendship and quite literal back-guarding ability, he knew that the man whom the Emperor called Sten’s personal thug had real talents at diplomacy, situation analysis, and solution breakdown.

Then a notion crossed his mind. Sten grinned — it was just a shade farcical. But it would bear consideration.

He shut down the computer and stood up. “Come on, Laird Kilgour. Let’s go back to the bar and see if that rhino’s ready to buy us a round.”

Alex came to his feet, then frowned and checked the wall-chrom. “Nice thought, boss. But we cannae. We’ll be haein’ vis’tors back ae our quarters.”

“Visitors? Kilgour, are you running another number on me?”

“Noo, lad. Hae y’ e’r, e’er known me to stick ae match under y’r breeks jus t’ see how high y’ll jump?”

Sten didn’t even trouble with an answer, nor with kicking his “diplomatic adviser” in the slats.

* * * *

“I shall be entirely gotohell,” Sten said.

“Is that all you’re going to say? No ‘Clottin’ Kilgour did it to me again?’ No ‘But duty calleth, M’lady, and I must away?’”

“Nope.”

Sten crossed from the entrance to his suite in Arundel Castle to the sideboard. “Best I can do,” he said, “is I just came from a room I’d like to show you, someday.”

“Do I get an explanation?”

“Nope.”

“Do I get to see that room?”

Sten did not reply. He picked up a decanter and eyed its contents.

“Stregg?”

“Yes . . . stregg.”

“It’s early — but I’ll have one if you’re drinking.”

Sten found two corrosion-proof shot glasses, poured them full, and took one across to Cind. She half sat, half lay on one of the room’s couches.

Sten had met Cind many years earlier under circumstances both would have preferred to be different. Cind was a human woman, a descendant of the warrior elite who had once defended the religious fanatics of the Lupus Cluster, known as the Wolf Worlds. Sten had overturned that corrupt and militant church government during his days as an undercover Mantis Section operative.

When the bodies stopped bouncing, Sten had decided — with the Eternal Emperor’s ex post facto grudging approval — that the victors and new champions of the Wolf Worlds were the Bhor, the excessively nonhuman, obsessively barbaric, insistently alcoholic gorillas who were native to the cluster.

Cind grew up in a failed warrior culture — and studied war. Studied war until it became her love and her obsession. She joined the Bhor and became a warrior — sniping and ship-to-ship boardings among her specialties.

Part of her youthful obsession was the superstalwart that had destroyed her own Jannissar culture. A man of myth named Sten. Then she met him. And found he was not the bearded ancient she had envisioned, but a still-young, still-vibrant soldier.

In hero worship, she found her way to his bed. Sten, however, was in shock after a combat mission had led to the death of his entire team and had no interest in romance, especially from a seventeen-year-old naif. Yet somehow he had managed, entirely accidentally, not to make Cind feel like a fool or himself like a complete idiot.

During the fight to destroy the privy council, they met again and again — but always professionally. Somehow, they became friends.

Then, when the Emperor returned and the privy council was destroyed, Cind traveled with Sten to her home worlds, the Lupus Cluster. Their perceptions of each other had changed during this time. Still . . . nothing happened between them.

And when Sten left to assume his new tasks as Imperial ambassador plenipotentiary, Cind soldiered on, but with less of an interest in hands-on slaughter than in studying the causes and results of war.

Now both soldiers sipped stregg, shuddered, and sipped again.

“I assume,” Sten said, “that you’ve arrived as part of my Imperial circus and diplomatic mission to the Altaic Cluster.”

“Is that where we’re going? Alex said the AOR was classified.”

“It is. You can draw the area briefing fiche from Mr. Kilgour.”

Silence in the room. The old sexual tension between them warmed that silence. “You look well,” Sten said.

“Thank you. Since the last time I saw you, I decided I should become more familiar with civilian dress.”

Sten admired — she had done her homework. Cind, just past twenty, trim in the conservative four-piece suit, hair close-cropped, makeup just enough to enhance without being seen, would have been taken by most as a CEO of a top multiworld corporation.

No one could have seen — and few besides Sten would have theorized — that the heel on her dress flat was the haft to a hideout knife, that her pouch contained a miniwillygun, and that her necklace could do double duty as a garrote.

Cind eyed him. “Do you remember the first time we met?”

Sten gurgled stregg through his nostrils, a distinctly unpleasant sensation.

Cind laughed at his reaction. “No, not that time. Before . . . at the banquet. I was in the receiving line.”

“Uh . . .” Sten thought back. The woman — then girl — had worn . . . seemed to him she had just been wearing a uniform of some sort. But he felt he would be an utter ass if he so said.

“I wore walking out semidress,” she said. “But that wasn’t what I first chose.”

It was now Cind’s turn to look away, as she blushingly described the sleek sex-outfit she had paid nearly a campaign’s bonus for, put on, and then ripped off and thrown away.

“I looked like a clottin’ joygirl,” she said. “And . . . and later, I figured out all I really knew how to look like — how to be — was a soldier. Which also meant a soldier’s whore, I guess.”

And there it was again, Sten thought. For some reason Cind was able to say astonishing things to him, things that other women had only said deep in intimacy and after long knowledge. And it was the same for himself as well, Sten realized.

He also realized that he wanted to change the subject. “May I be formal?” he asked.

“You may, Admiral.”

“Not Admiral. This time around, I’m a civilian.”

“Very good.”

“Why so?”

Cind smiled once more. Oh, Sten thought. No chain-of-command drakh. No “It’s not military kosher to want to hold hands with a lower (higher) ranking soldier.”

“I am in a most uncomfortable position,” Cind said, stretching into a more comfortable position and thus placing Sten in a slightly uncomfortable position. “I am a major now.”

“Congratulations.”

“Perhaps. Would you like to meet my ranking private?”

Sten waited. Cind rose, went to an adjoining door, and opened it. “Private? Post!”

There was a sudden clashing of leather, and a creature lumbered into the chamber. Just 150 centimeters tall, it must have weighed around 150 kilograms — twenty more than the last time Sten had seen the horror. The creature’s knobbed hairy paws brushed against the ground, as did its enormous brush-tail beard, as the monster pushed its great trunk semierect and bellowed.

“By my mother’s beard,” came the shout. “Here are you two, ambassador and major, drinking all of the stregg, and leaving a poor, thirsty private, who loves you like a brother, to die of thirst, forlorn, abandoned in the outer darkness.”

“What,” Sten said, “in the name of my father’s — your father’s, hell, Cind’s father’s — frozen buttocks are you doing here, Otho?”

“I am but a simple soldier, following in the way of a warrior, as the great gods Sarla, Laraz, and — who the clot’s that other worthless godling? oh yes — Kholeric have told me.”

“He’s been into the stregg,” Sten said.

“He’s been into the stregg,” Cind agreed.

“Bring in the rest of the motley crew,” Sten said. “Buzz down for Kilgour. Tell him to have the kitchen stand by for a buffet in-chamber. Tell him to order up more stregg, some of that horrible stuff the Emperor calls Scotch, and, oh yes, indeed, a case of — hell, whatever goes into a Black Velvet. And get his butt in here with a good thirst. Now, Otho. How many goddamned Bhor do I have?”

“Only a hundred and fifty.”

“Oh, Lord,” Sten said. “And we’re still weeks from departure. Major Cind, have you arranged billets for your beings?”

“I have. There’s an entire wing set aside on a new officers’ quarters, just inside the Imperial grounds here. Set up for clean and black work.”

“So the Bhor won’t be able to get out and maim, pillage, and loot Prime?”

“With luck.”

“Good. Now, Private Otho. Pour us all a drink, and explain. Quickly.”

Sten needed an explanation, because when he had last been in Otho’s brawling company the being had been a chieftain, the ruler — if a Bhor could be said to rule anything save by acclamation — of the entire Lupus Cluster.

Now here he was as a rear-rank warrior, as if he were a young Bhor whose beard was yet to sprout.

“I didn’t know,” Sten said, after the third stregg, but before Kilgour and the rest of the Bhor had descended on him and sobriety vanished into the night, “you beings had second childhoods.”

“Don’t be a scrote,” Otho growled, refilling his horn. “First — the Lupus Worlds are at peace. Clotting well better be, if they don’t want to get killed.

“Which is good — I guess. But it is a meatless plate, my friend. Back then, back when we were being exterminated by the Jann, I never dreamed how boring peace can be. So I ran away to join the circus.”

He sighed — or Sten arbitrarily assigned the value of “sigh” to the alk- and stregg-laden gas blast that erupted from Otho’s bowels to typhoon across the table. “And I am becoming civilized.”

“Say clottin’ what?” Alex said as he entered, and Otho’s tale was interrupted by the obligatory roars, shouts, embraces, liquid kisses, and toasts that made a Bhor greeting synonymous with second-degree assault.

Then the Taittinger and Guinness arrived. Sten was forced to demonstrate Black Velvets to his guests. Otho said the stuff was weak mix for suckling babes. Alex preferred his Guinness straight from the pump and drunk in Eire. Cind touched her flute to Sten’s. They drank, and their eyes held the moment.

Then Sten brought the conversation back to some kind of a track. “Otho, you said being here had something to do with your becoming civilized.”

“By my father’s icy arse, so it does. Using human standards, even. If I am civilized . . . and a great leader — which, considering my beard is yet uncut, I may be — then I am now spending my wilderness years. Which I understand must be spent among primitive beings.

“I found a fiche recently, the biography of what, evidently, you humans consider a great being. His name was Illchurch, or some such. Now, when he had done his first stint as a leader, where did he spend his wilderness years?”

The Bhor chieftan gestured with his glass, sloshing drink over the edge. “I’ll tell you where. Among a primitive Earth tribe he called Americans. Since I could find no remnants of such a tribe, I decided to settle for what must be the second best primitives . . .”

Otho raised his glass in toast. “To the human race.”