“You’ll be wondering why I hauled you in from Egeria. Convince me that you are the right man for my mission and I have a high enough priority rating to get your transferal processed immediately. We’re in Intelligence here; I suspect you already know that.”
“Sir, I’m happy in Training,” drawled Yankee with a quizzical grin.
Fry appraised his recruit. This Yankee was going to be a man who sniffed his soup before he drank it “A negotiator, are you? Why would you be happy in Training, for Finagle’s sake?”
“I don’t see a more important job than training elite fighters. With all due respect to ARM, sir, I think we did a very sloppy job in the war. We won more by wild good luck than with steady competence. Chuut-Riit was assassinated-Buford’s what-the-hell shot-in-the-dark. The Outsiders happened by at just the right time to sell us the decisive hyperdrive. By chance we woke up a Slaver from his billion year sleep just in time to disorganize the kzinti before our attack. That’s a lot of luck.”
“In war one seizes luck and uses it!”
“Agreed. But after the Battle of Wunderland it was thirteen years of slugging. Our luck was dry and our leadership mediocre, begging your pardon, sir.”
“Have you read Chumeyer’s War?”
“Of course Chumeyer was a genius! He demolished the Patriarch’s supply lines and communications brilliantly. Yet his book is already obsolete. That was the last war! Chumeyer had hyperdrive ships and surprise against lumbering kzinti transports who had yet to hear about the Battle of Wunderland! We owe the war to Chumeyer. Yet his victories were in interstellar space. What about the assaults on kzinti strongholds? We have to go back to the Great War of 1916 to find parallels to such stupidity. Many heroes; staggering casualties; ill-trained leaders. For the next war we dare not depend on luck. We’ll need better discipline, much better discipline. We’ll need planning and a radically new strategy. It’s the training we do now that will forge the navy we’ll need sooner than any of you veterans think”
“That from a man who starts fistfights he can’t win?”
“I didn’t start that fight, sir. I raised my voice.”
Fry was grinning. He knew how to hit a man hard without raising a finger. “And, of course, they hit you first?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re very good at training, I hear.”
“I think so, sir”
“I have a better job for you.”
“There isn’t a better job, sir”
“What’s this? You’re going to refuse to take orders from me?”
Yankee knew very well that the general was referring to mutiny. It was a delicate point and he hesitated, beginning an answer he didn’t have the words to finish-so he started over. He was damned if he was going to kiss a Belters butt “Yes, sir I do what is in the best interest of the navy.”
Fry garumphed in his throat. “In that case, I’ll have to clock you in the crotch to persuade you. Everything is fair in a fisticuffs fight, right? Are you ready? Stick up your dukes. How would you like to rescue your cousin?”
Clandeboye had to repeat that last sentence to himself He was dumbfounded. “Nora?” Even after he said her name, he was disbelieving, checking his memory frantically for other cousins he might have forgotten.
“We have information that Lieutenant Argamentine may have been captured.”
“Is she alive?”
“We don’t know. She was captured with her hyperdrive scout. We’d really like to find out what happened to it”
“Where is it?”
“We don’t know. Your assignment might involve a tour of duty inside the Patriarchy”
“I don’t think anyone in the navy would trust me inside the Patriarchy”
Lucas Fry smiled enigmatically while he rubbed his hand through the strip of white brush topping his side- shaved skull. “The men you brought back alive trust you.”
This conversation was unnerving Clandeboye. “But do you trust me, sir?”
“Of course not! What I’m interested in is the look on your enemies’ faces when you come back with evidence that the kzinti are building an armada of hyperdrive dreadnoughts.”
Clandeboye sucked in his breath. ‘We don’t know what happened to Nora’s ship, sir?”
“But we have to find out, don’t we?”
“Yes, sir” Yankee was too stunned to say more. “So it’s yes then, is it? You start today.” Immensely pleased with himself, General Fry brought out the miniature of Nora Argamentine. “And, if we can, we’ll try to find her, too. If our heroine is alive we can’t leave her out in the boondocks with only ratcats for company. Ungentlemanly. Soldiers take care of each other.”
Chapter 5
(2436 A.D.)
Yankee Clandeboye had nostalgic waves of emotion on his return to interstellar duty even though he was stationed at a different star and the war had been over for three years. He was ever the provincial flatlander gawking at the new sights. Then it had been the brilliant white dwarf companion beside Procyon in the sky of We Made It, now it was Beta Centauri floating beside Alpha from the viewports of Tiamat. Only a flatlander connected by megayear ties to Earth would be awed to be a tourist in a binary system.
The Wundervolk, having suffered during the war as slaves of the kzinti, treated him differently than had the crashlanders-they carried their slave history as a kind of martyrdom that allowed them to feel they had won the war all by themselves. They almost resented the presence of UNSN personnel. He could sense it in the way they handled his requests for information. The aloofness of Interworld Space Commissioner Markham was typical.
Yankee’s UNSN Intelligence team were all Belters and they had set up shop in Alpha Centauri’s Serpent Swarm, on the asteroid Tiamat where his men were comfortable because it had originally been tunneled and tamed by Belter colonists. Yankee promised himself a side trip to more earthlike Wunderland but there was work to do first, sorting through the wreckage of kzinti warships, checking the reasoning of other teams but with eyes primed for a different theme.
On his tenth day in Tiamat, in a mood of angry frustration, he ran into an old crashlander friend from the era of his Virgo mission. The man was unmistakable, a seven-foot-tall albino, slender with almost skeletal limbs stooping in an archway that was too small for him.
“Brobding!” He wasn’t sure it was his friend Brobding Shaeffer-all crashlanders looked alike to him, and when the pale eyes stared at him without comprehension, he was sure he had made a mistake until a sudden smile cupped the large nose.
“Yankee! Didn’t recognize you-all flatlanders look alike to me! I thought you were rotting in irons!”
“They didn’t know how to pin my sins on me!”
“Finagle is sending you on another wild chase?” The Virgo mission had jumped off from the naval yards of Procyon’s We Made It. Yankee remembered the underground warrens of Crashlanding City and had become fond of his albino mechanics and the tall willowy women who liked to touch a real flatlander. In those days of war, not so very long ago, the nervous crashlanders took very good care of the soldiers who defended them. “Where to this time?”
“You could call it a wild chase; I hope not as far as the nether regions of Virgo.”
“Then you like it here among our Wunderland hosts?”
“Not really,” mused Yankee ruefully. “They’re all so sure they won the war single-handed-don’t seem to appreciate the part Sol and We Made It played in their liberation.”
“But they make good Verguuz.”
“Haven’t tried it. Hear that it’s like a hand grenade that sneaks upon you with a sugar coating.”
“I know a place. It has authentic antique Landholder artifacts on the walls glorifying the good old days before the invasion when Landholders were Landholders and the yolk, respectful.”
