Valiant Dust

10

CSS Hector, Gadira II Orbit

The brown, gold, and blue surface of Gadira seemed to drift slowly past the wall-sized vid display in the wardroom. From the altitude of three thousand kilometers, almost half of the hemisphere was visible. Sikander gazed absently at the view from his seat at the large table in the middle of the room, enjoying a coffee break as he mentally organized the rest of his day. Judging by the position of the terminator dividing the planet into day and night below him, it was midday in Tanjeer, but there was little point in adopting local timekeeping for ships in low or middle orbit; Hector currently circled the planet in a little less than three hours. The crew instead observed Naval Standard Time, and accepted the fact that visits or communications to the planet below might sometimes come up in the middle of the ship’s “night.” It’s close to noon for Ranya, Sikander noted. I wonder what she does for lunch?

Magdalena Juarez helped herself to some coffee from the service on the nearby credenza, and gave Sikander a wicked smile when she noted his absentminded gaze. “Thinking about the amira?” she asked—a lucky guess indeed.

Sikander pulled his attention away from the image of the planet below. “I suppose I was,” he admitted. “Ranya el-Nasir is not what I expected to find here.”

“You seem to have made quite an impression on her.”

“She made an impression on me, as well. She’s a very intelligent woman—insightful, curious, and quite fluent in Standard Anglic, which I imagine is at least her third language. Mr. Garcia says that she just about runs the place for her uncle.”

“The dashing offworld prince descends from the stars and meets the bookish princess,” Magda teased. “To his surprise he finds a woman of fiery passions stifled by the expectations of those around her! The romance novel almost writes itself.”

“Did you just call me dashing?” Sikander grinned. “I like the sound of that, but I have to admit that our conversation was not in the least romantic. The amira asked about Kashmir and Aquila.”

The chief engineer gave him a measuring look as she sat down in the opposite seat. “Really? What did you discuss?”

“She was curious about how I came to be in the Commonwealth Navy. From there the conversation turned to colonial relationships and interstellar politics, and the similarities between Gadira’s situation and that of Kashmir a generation or two ago. Nothing about her fiery passions, thank you very much!”

“Too bad,” said Magda. “It was a lot more interesting in my head, I suppose.”

Sikander shrugged, and sipped at the dregs of his coffee. “What did the sultan talk about while I was off strolling with the amira?”

“Nothing at all to do with politics, insurgencies, or colonial affairs. However, I’m now certain that the sultan’s gardens will be well prepared for any eventuality.” Magda smiled. “I think Captain Markham had hoped that indulging his botanical interests would establish a bit of a connection, which in turn might shed insight on the strategic situation. Unfortunately, all we gained from the conversation was a vastly increased understanding of Gadiran sunrose varietals.”

“You never know when that might be useful,” Sikander replied. “For example, you might—”

He was interrupted by the ship’s info assistant. “Ms. Juarez, Mr. North, your presence is requested in the captain’s cabin,” the computer announced. “The matter is urgent.”

Sikander exchanged looks with Magda, and read the same sudden disquiet in her expression that he felt. It was not all that unusual to be summoned for an impromptu discussion, but the “urgent” wasn’t included unless something was in need of immediate correction. “We’re on our way,” he said to the computer, and pocketed his dataslate as he stood.

“What’s going on?” Magda wondered aloud. She allowed herself one long sip from her just-poured coffee, then set down her mug and stood as well.

“I’ve no idea,” Sikander answered, even though he knew she hadn’t really been asking him. The two officers hurried out of the wardroom and headed forward, climbing up one deck to the captain’s cabin. Sikander did not quite run, since that would have been undignified. But he did reach the captain’s door less than two minutes after the announcement.

He knocked once and entered, Magda a step behind him. Captain Markham waited by the small conference table in her cabin. “You wished to see us, ma’am?” he asked. Then he noticed that Peter Chatburn and Isaako Simms were already seated in their customary places. Apparently the captain had summoned all the senior officers, not just Sikander and Magda.

Captain Markham merely nodded at the empty seats by the table. “Ms. Juarez, Mr. North, have a seat. Events are taking an unpleasant turn down on Gadira.”

Sikander took his customary seat, halfway down the table. The vidscreen on the cabin wall showed a scene on the ground, the highly magnified ship’s-eye view of a tree-shaded boulevard filled with the flashing lights of emergency vehicles and what appeared to be a crash site of some kind. He studied the view for a moment. The lights flashing, the hastily erected barricades, the firefighting vehicles and medical transports … he knew the scene well. It’s like Sangrur, he realized. Something has happened to the sultan.

There was a knock at the cabin door, and Hiram Randall entered, a dataslate open in one hand. He had finally shed the arm sling he’d been wearing for the last two weeks. “My apologies, Captain,” he said as he came in and took his seat at the table. “I thought it best to pull together the newest intel before joining you.” As operations officer, it was Randall’s job to keep a close eye on all planetside developments and determine which of those merited the direct attention of Hector’s leadership team.

“Good thinking,” Captain Markham replied. “Go ahead and bring everyone up to date, Mr. Randall.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Randall shifted in his seat to address the rest of the officers at the table. “Insurgents shot down Sultan Rashid’s flyer with surface-to-air missiles thirty-five minutes ago. We picked up a major military alert about twenty minutes ago, and the news is just now breaking on Gadiran vid channels.”

Sikander nodded; his intuition had been all too accurate. Around the table, his colleagues likewise winced, straightened in their seats, or took in sharp breaths as they absorbed the news. “Is the sultan dead?” Chatburn asked.

“We don’t believe so, sir.” Randall reached for the display controls. “Let me bring up the live newscast feed—that’s our best source at the moment.”

He clicked the wall display over to a Gadiran broadcast channel. The screen shifted from the overhead view of Hector’s vidcams to a live street-level view from a local news team. Ground transports were parked unevenly on both sides of the tree-lined street, and ugly black smoke climbed up to stain the colorless sky over the nearby buildings. In the middle of the image, charred debris soaked in firefighting foam was scattered down the boulevard, leading to the wreckage of a large luxury flyer. Text in Jadeed-Arabi crawled slowly across the bottom of the screen while a woman—the news anchor, or so Sikander guessed—spoke rapidly in a voice-over.

“Dear God,” Magda murmured. “Where is this, Mr. Randall?”

“It’s in Tanjeer, a few kilometers from the palace,” Randall replied. “The sultan was on his way home from an official visit to Nador, where he’s been for the last few days.”

“Is anybody claiming responsibility for the attack?” Dr. Simms asked.

“Not yet, but our best guess is that we’re looking at the work of a large and well-funded group of urban insurgents,” said Randall. “Surface-to-air missiles would almost certainly be offworld arms, and the attackers fired off a whole volley at the sultan’s skycade—three of the escort flyers were hit at the same time as Rashid’s transport. It appears to have been a coordinated ambush.”

“The Royal Guard has a major security leak,” Chatburn observed. “The insurgents had to know the sultan’s schedule and the flight plan in order to set up this kind of attack. Someone on the inside is feeding them intelligence.”

“Not necessarily,” Captain Markham said. “I’d bet that someone watching the sultan’s comings and goings from the palace over a few months could make a very good guess about the Royal Guard’s typical flight paths, and an observer on the ground at Nador could call ahead to provide a couple of hours’ advance notice. For that matter, orbital observation could provide the same information.”

Sikander studied the imagery, wondering how many of the sultan’s bodyguards had lost their lives. That thought led to another, more personal concern: Ranya el-Nasir had told him that she’d be accompanying her uncle to Nador. “What about Amira Ranya?” he asked. “Was she with the sultan? Was she hurt?”

“The amira?” Randall checked his dataslate. “One moment.… The reports indicate that she received minor injuries and is currently being treated.”

“Thank God for that much.” Sikander allowed himself a sigh of relief, surprised at the depth of his sudden worry. He’d met Ranya only once, after all, but he had enjoyed his conversation with her; the amira was intriguing and, as Magda had pointed out, the centerpiece of a situation that seemed almost designed to inspire visions of romantic folly. He tried to ignore the speculative look that Magda gave him.

“Agreed,” Captain Markham said. “If the sultan is out of commission for a time, she might be able to hold things together.”

“How are the Gadiran people reacting to the news?” Chatburn asked.

“Not well,” Randall replied. He adjusted the vidscreen, showing several different feeds from other locations around the planet—an unruly crowd gathering in front of a large government building, another march or protest of some kind proceeding down a wide street in a city Sikander didn’t recognize, a column of police vehicles taking up position on a bridge. “It’s just breaking, but we already have indications of demonstrations and riots shaping up in different areas, including Tanjeer’s offworlder district.”

The captain looked back to the operations officer. “Is our consulate threatened? I can’t imagine why locals would react to the attempt on the sultan’s life by attacking offworlders, but we’d better be ready to do something about it if they do.”

“I don’t know, ma’am. Let me see if I can find a better view.” Randall opened his dataslate and rapidly entered several commands, taking control of one of Hector’s high-resolution vidcams. The vidscreen abruptly jumped to a new image, a view of an elegant older neighborhood in the downtown area. The image was distinctly off-vertical, since Hector’s orbit now carried her away from the capital, but it still clearly showed a walled courtyard-style house with an iron gate. Several dozen Gadiran men gathered in the street just outside, shaking their fists and waving signs. Randall adjusted the view, zooming out a bit to show the area for several blocks around. A much larger crowd seemed to be taking shape about five blocks away.

Sikander watched the silent scene, looking for signs of weapons or rioting. He didn’t see any, but he did spot a small group of Tanjeer police a block away from the large crowd. They milled around, evidently conferring with each other as they watched the crowd. Then they got into their vehicles and withdrew from the scene. “I think the police were just called away,” he pointed out. “Or they decided that the crowd was too big for them to handle.”

“Or they were instructed not to interfere,” said Randall. “I have to say it strikes me as a bad sign that the Gadiran police are getting out of the way.”

“It doesn’t look good,” Captain Markham agreed. She leaned back in her chair, and studied the vidscreen for a long moment. Then she arrived at her decision. “Let’s ready a landing force and have it standing by in case we need to pull out the consulate personnel. Mr. Randall, touch base with Consul Garcia and find out what he needs from us. Mr. North, tell Sublieutenant Larkin to pull her people out of the watch rotation and muster in the hangar bay.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Sikander nodded. During the transit to Gadira, they’d done some preliminary planning for evacuating civilians from just this sort of situation. That involved organizing a thirty-hand landing force from the ship’s crew and having them brush up on their small-arms handling, since Hector did not carry a contingent of marines. Angela Larkin had the most recent security training among the junior officers, so she’d been assigned as the officer in charge. It was a perfectly sensible way to make the decision … but as he watched the crowds gathering in the streets of the capital, Sikander found himself growing uneasy.

Captain Markham noticed his hesitation. “What is it, Mr. North?” she asked.

“Captain, with your permission, I think I’d better accompany the landing force.”

“You lack confidence in Ms. Larkin?” Chatburn asked sharply.

Sikander did, but he was not willing to denigrate one of his subordinates to the XO and the captain. “I think she is more than qualified for tactical command of the landing force,” he told Chatburn, which was mostly true. “What I worry about is that this might not be a tactical situation—a certain amount of judgment or restraint may be called for. I would feel better if a department head were on the ground.” And no other officer on this ship has actually commanded troops during civil disorders, he added silently. In the tense months leading up to the attack that had resulted in his departure from Kashmir, Sikander and his older brothers had each deployed with the Jaipur Dragoons on several occasions. Even as a teenager, Sikander had been expected to meet the duties of a North; he’d gained a hard education in political violence as a result.

Captain Markham hesitated, perhaps reviewing her instructions about appropriate duties for a prince of Kashmir. But whatever those might have been, Sikander was correct: Hiram Randall and Magda Juarez were needed on board, and no other officer on board was more qualified for command of a landing force unless she decided to send down Peter Chatburn. “You make a good point, Mr. North,” she said. “Take charge of the landing force, and stand by for orders. Dismissed.”

Sikander stood, saluted, and made his way out of the cabin, followed by the rest of Hector’s leadership team. He’d been looking forward to the opportunity to visit Tanjeer again and explore a little more of the city, or perhaps find an excuse to call again on the amira. This, however, was not the sort of sightseeing or café hopping he’d had in mind. I doubt that the marketplaces are going to be open today, he reflected. Instead he was likely heading into a riot, but perhaps he’d find a way to check on Ranya and make sure she was all right while he was on the ground.

“Message for Sublieutenant Larkin,” he told the ship’s info assistant as he hurried down the passageway. “The landing force is to muster immediately in the hangar bay. Arrange watch substitutions as needed. I will join you there shortly.”

Sikander headed first to his stateroom to change. He pulled out his Navy battle dress—a mottled blue-gray urban-camouflage uniform reinforced with panels of light, flexible armor—and tossed it on the bunk. For routine duty a matching fatigue cap completed the uniform, but Sikander took a moment to add the inserts that turned the cap into a light helmet. People tended to throw things during riots, and he had a feeling he might need it when he got down to the ground.

Three soft knocks came at his stateroom door, and then Darvesh Reza entered. The valet studied Sikander’s change of clothes. “Are we going ashore, sir?”

“I’m afraid so,” Sikander answered. It never failed—throughout his Navy career, Darvesh’s ability to sense when his services might be needed was simply uncanny. If his duties took Sikander anywhere near personal danger, then by order of Nawab Dayan, Darvesh had to be close by. “How did you know?”

“Chief Trent informed me the landing force was needed. She also mentioned your intention to join the shore party—which, I must note, you are not assigned to.”

Word travels fast in the chief petty officers’ quarters, it seems. Sikander supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised by that; things had been much the same since the days of oared galleys. “The situation calls for more experience and judgment than we might expect from a sublieutenant,” he told Darvesh. “I’m afraid Captain Markham doesn’t have many other choices.”

Darvesh regarded him with a stern look. “You know very well that you should not go out of your way to find dangerous situations to leap into, Nawabzada. This is exactly the sort of duty your father would disapprove of. For that matter, I disapprove of it, too. There is a difference between accepting the ordinary risks associated with the naval service, and putting yourself in the middle of thousands of angry people when you are not required to do so.”

“The fighting around Sangrur or Manigam was worse than what’s going on here.”

“Yes, but your father deployed whole battalions of soldiers on those occasions. Thirty armed sailors is the very definition of a token force.”

“It’s more than enough to defend a building or deter a crowd armed with cudgels and stones.” Sikander stripped off his jumpsuit and began to don his battle dress. Darvesh was correct, up to a point; he was obligated to avoid unnecessary risks. But he was also obligated to do his duty without shirking. He pursued his career in the Aquilan navy not only to learn, but also to teach. If an Aquilan officer would be expected to do something, then Sikander had to show the men and women around him that a Kashmiri officer would do no less. “Besides, I can hardly reverse course now.”

Darvesh stood in silence for a moment, then collected the jumpsuit from Sikander and folded it neatly. “No, sir. I suppose you cannot. But in the future I must insist that you take your father’s wishes into account before volunteering for such duty.”

“I have my reasons.” Sikander shrugged on his camo uniform, then gave Darvesh a confident smile in an effort to downplay the bodyguard’s concerns. “I can finish here. You’d better get dressed—we may be called away at any moment.”

Darvesh gave Sikander a stiffly formal bow to express his disapproval one more time. “Very good, sir. I will meet you on the hangar deck.” Then he left to gather his own gear.

Sikander glanced around the stateroom, looking for anything he might have missed. The vidscreen on the bulkhead showed the same Gadiran news feed he’d been watching from the wardroom; the news crews focused on live reports from the crash site of the sultan’s transport, although smaller windows showed images of unrest in various places.

Ranya’s lucky to have survived, he realized as the news vid zoomed in on the wrecked flyer. He found himself unable to look away, wondering what those last few moments in the flyer must have been like, whether she’d realized what was happening or even had time to be terrified. He remembered how he’d felt on the night of that last Bandi Chor Divas celebration, and the streets of Sangrur—

—echoing with the pounding of a hundred drums and the singing of ten thousand voices. Fantastic floats and troupes of dancers pass before the nawab’s box in the review stand as the warm dusk settles over the city like a blanket.

Sikander entertains himself by picking out pretty girls from the crowds. He can’t take his eyes off the young woman dancing on the grand float just now entering the city square. It’s designed to resemble a fantastic castle, and the lead dancer holds the place of honor on the loftiest of the colorful battlements. He wonders who she is, and whether he’ll be able to find her later when it’s time for the revels to begin.

Nawab Dayan gives a small nod, and the whole family rises together, holding the light globes before them. By old custom the nawab will make a few short remarks, and then his children—all young men and women now, none of them small any longer—will release their hoverlights to drift away over the crowd, joining hundreds of other lights overhead. Sikander and his siblings turn expectantly to Nawab Dayan to hear his words.

Then the bomb goes off.

Later on, the Khanate investigators would determine that it was hidden in the chassis of the ground transport beneath the castle float, and that no one in or near the gaudily decorated vehicle had any idea what was about to happen. It’s a small device, only a few kilos of molecular explosive, which is why the death toll is limited to scores instead of hundreds or thousands. The bomb is still powerful enough to knock down everyone within sixty meters, and performers dancing on top of the float are flung six or seven stories in the air. The blast hurls Sikander and everyone else in the nawab’s stand back over their seats. The flimsy grandstand buckles; he lands in a tangle of chairs and scaffolding.

Ears ringing from the blast, he struggles to his feet, clambering over the wreckage. There is no sign of the pretty girl he’d been watching in the center of the float. At first he hears nothing but the echoes of the explosion rolling back from distant buildings, but as his ears clear, he hears the first of the screams.…

Sikander shook himself and turned off the vid input.

“Enough of that, Sikay!” he muttered aloud. The bombing at Sangrur was ten years ago and three hundred light-years away; it had no more power to hurt him, not unless he allowed it to. Ranya is not seriously hurt, he reminded himself. Then again, he hadn’t been seriously hurt at the Sangrur bombing, had he? But he carried scars of a different sort.

He hesitated, then turned the vid unit back on and activated the messaging system. “Hello, Ranya,” he said as he looked into the recorder. “I just heard the news about the attack. I am terribly sorry that your uncle and others in your escort group were injured; it was a cruel and callous act. My family has been targeted by such attacks, too, and I know how you must be feeling now. I … I am very relieved to hear that you survived, and I wish you a quick recovery. If there is anything I can do for you, I hope you’ll let me know. And I promise that if I can help in some way to bring the perpetrators to justice, I will. In the meantime, may God be with you and your family today. Sikander, out.”

He thought over what he’d said, and decided that it captured his sincerity and concern well enough. A few taps on his dataslate cued it for delivery. Strictly speaking, it might not be appropriate for a serving officer to address a personal note to a high-ranking royal of another government. There was a real risk of creating a diplomatic faux pas or offending local sensibilities, and no captain would care for a subordinate causing that kind of trouble. But Sikander could defend his actions as an expression of sympathy on behalf of the Kashmiri government if he needed to—and, more to the point, he thought Ranya was his friend, and as far as he could tell she was probably having a very bad day.

He pocketed his dataslate and donned his fatigue cap, heading down to the hangar bay. But before he got ten steps from his stateroom, Michael Girard overtook him. “Excuse me, Mr. North?” he asked. “I think I have a question about that assignment you gave me.”

Sikander stopped and waited for him, suppressing his impatience. Girard carried an oversized programmer’s dataslate under his arm, and his brow was furrowed with intense concentration. “Make it quick, Mr. Girard. I need to get down to the hangar bay.”

“Which torpedo model am I supposed to be emulating, sir?” Girard asked.

Any hope that Sikander might have felt about his most junior officer somehow noticing something that everyone else had missed evaporated. CSS Hector carried only one model of torpedo—well, two, counting the practice shots. In fact, pretty much all the cruisers and a good number of the destroyers in the Aquilan navy carried the exact same weapon. He’d known that Girard could be unusually focused on his own specific duties as fire control officer, but Sikander would have thought that all of the ship’s officers knew what kind of torpedoes the ship carried. Don’t cut him down, he admonished himself. The whole idea was to give him an opportunity to excel at something without expectations.

“The practice models, Mr. Girard,” he said patiently. “Phantoms Type 12-P. God help us if our war shots have the same fault, but that’s a problem we can tackle after we figure out what happened on the Aberdeen range.”

To his surprise, Girard actually waved off the answer. “Oh, I know that, sir,” he said. “What I mean is, which series of manufacture? Type 12-P-2, 12-P-5, or 12-P-6?”

“There’s a difference?” Sikander asked. Now it was his turn to be confused. He’d learned a lot about warp torpedoes in the last few weeks, and he hadn’t seen anything that suggested that there was any variance at all between manufacture series. “The maintenance procedures for any 12-P are the same, aren’t they? And the control software, too, as far as I know.”

“Well, no, there isn’t any difference in software or maintenance procedures,” Girard said, “but the torpedoes are actually just a little bit different. The 12-P-2s were fleet depot yard upgrades of the old 11-P Phantoms. The two torpedo models have the same drive and the same casing, so when the fleet switched to the Type 12, they just replaced the old warheads, control boards, and software with an upgrade kit. The 12-P-5s and later series were manufactured new. So which one did you want me to set up the emulator for, sir?”

Sikander stared at him for a long moment. Then he quickly referred to his own dataslate. A few quick keystrokes in the ship’s magazine records confirmed what Girard was saying … and maybe, just maybe, solved the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Torpedo Mystery once and for all. He grinned in triumph. “The 12-P-2, Mr. Girard,” he answered. “Our missing torpedo is a Phantom Type 12-P-2. And the one that we recovered was a Type 12-P-5. In theory they’re identical, but now we know that somehow they are not.”

Girard frowned. “Sir, I know I asked the question, but after the depot upgrade, they’re really the same torp. I was just trying to make sure I had the precise versions for the emulation program.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Sikander told him. “I think you may have cracked the case, whether you know it or not. Hold off on running that set of emulations I requested. What I want you to do now is set up a component-by-component comparison of the series-2 and the series-5. Find out exactly what is different between them.”

Girard began nodding. “And that will tell us which specific software updates and maintenance procedures to focus on as the cause of the torpedo failure.”

“Exactly.” Sikander adjusted his cap on his head. As curious as he was about what Girard would find, that was clearly a secondary priority at the moment. “Advise me as soon as you have any progress—”

He was interrupted by the ship’s info assistant. “Lieutenant North, the landing force has been ordered to deploy. Your presence is requested in the hangar bay.”

“Understood. I am on my way,” Sikander answered the computer. He turned back to Girard. “Thank you, Mr. Girard. Good work. I look forward to your report.”

“I’ll get on it immediately,” Girard promised. “Good luck, sir.”

“Thanks,” said Sikander. “It sounds like we might need it.” He clapped the young ensign on the shoulder, then hurried on down to the hangar bay.