Worlds of Weber, Page 3

  Habibula glared at the legionnaire once more, yet the desperation in Jartha's eyes was genuine, and his own soul cringed at the thought of a child in the hands of wicked men.

  "And you'd really send the man you tricked into stealing that mortal bit of rock" —he jabbed his chin at the huge gem Jartha still held— "to the wicked hell of Pluto if I say no?"

  "Yes," Jartha said inflexibly. "And if I do, I'll be forced to send Miss Coran, as well."

  "Desperate or no, you are a wicked man," Habibula said heavily, "but I've little choice. Yet before I do this, you'll put that"—he gestured to the Dragon's Eye once more—"back where it belongs. Aye, and you'll destroy any mortal record that myself or Miss Coran ever laid hand or eye upon it. I'll not have you sending such a fearsomely beautiful lass as this to Pluto if it should happen I try and fail. Not when it was your own wicked blackmail made her trap poor Giles in the first place."

  Ethyra Coran stared at him in disbelief, and Jartha's eyes narrowed.

  "A noble sentiment," the colonel said after a moment, "and one I'm inclined to believe is mostly genuine. However, it seems to me that you've forgotten something. If I return the Eye and destroy the records, then I lose my hold on you."

  "You've no need for any 'hold,' " Habibula said with dignity. "You'll have my mortal word."

  "A comfort, I'm sure," Jartha said dryly. Habibula glared at him afresh, and the colonel scratched his chin thoughtfully. "No, Mr. Habibula, I have a counter-proposal. I'll return the Eye and destroy the records after you enlist in the Legion."

  "Enlist? Giles Habibula sign his life away to the mortal Legion of Space?!" Habibula stared at him. "You are mad!" he declared with certainty.

  "Not in the least. You do have a certain talent, and it's quite possible the Legion will need it again someday. More immediately, however, the sentence for desertion from the Legion is twenty years on Pluto—more, under special circumstances. I trust your word, Mr. Habibula, but I'll sleep better knowing I have a somewhat more secure grip upon your loyalties."

  "Ah, to think it should come to this," Habibula said bitterly. "The Legion of Space bent on shanghaiing poor Giles Habibula! It's a fearsome, wicked thing, indeed it is, to see the Legion stoop so low."

  "We do what we must, Mr. Habibula," Jartha replied calmly. He let several minutes drag by, then cocked his head. "Do we have an agreement?"

  Seventeen months later, Colonel John Jartha, commander of the Legion of Space's Office of Intelligence, opened the door of his office at the very heart of the Legion's huge headquarters building and stopped dead on the threshold.

  His last secret report from Giles Habibula was over six months old, and the colonel had come to the unhappy conclusion that not even Habibula had proved capable of breaking the defenses of the Green Hall's enemies. Jartha had come to like the fat, cunning rogue in the year they'd worked together, and he had felt a gnawing guilt for entrapping the man and sending him to his death, yet as he'd told Habibula that night in the cellars of Ulnar Chalet, he'd had no choice. He hadn't entirely abandoned all hope, but it was growing harder to cling to it, and he'd taken to avoiding responses to Ethyra Coran. The young woman had plagued his office with carefully, innocently worded inquiries about Habibula almost weekly. Her queries had grown almost desperate of late as the silence stretched out, yet Jartha had no heart to confirm Habibula's death to her when any tiny trace of hope remained.

  But now he stood just inside his office door, staring at the small, silvery box in the middle of his desk top. It bore no insignia, no marking of any sort except two small, darker ovals—about the size of fingertips—on its top, yet he knew instantly what it was.

  He crossed the office slowly and sank into his chair, staring at the box and fearing to touch it, and his mind raced. It was impossible for anyone to break the security on Legion HQ and penetrate to his office. No one could do that . . . except, perhaps, for one man with a certain talent.

  He began to smile, and then to chuckle, and reached out to the box at last. He took it in his hand and tossed it lightly on his palm, and even through his heady relief, it seemed impossible that so small and light a thing could hold the secret of so much destruction. They'd have to improve security on it in the future, he thought, and made a mental note to discuss ways to do just that with Legionnaire Habibula.

  He paused, then, and his head cocked. Speaking of Habibula . . . ?

  He set the box carefully inside the safe built into his desk and spun the combination. It should be safe enough there—from anyone except Habibula, of course—until he could have it conveyed back to the Green Hall under maximum security, and with it tucked away, he could concentrate on other questions. Like the whereabouts of the man who'd stolen it back from the Solar System's enemies and flowed through Legion HQ's security like so much smoke to deposit it on his desk. Now, if he were Habibula, where would he—?

  His intercom buzzed sharply, and he pressed the button.

  "Yes?"

  "Sir!" It was James Hazell, and his voice was high with excitement. "Sir, it's Habibula!"

  "What about Habibula?" Jartha asked calmly.

  "Sir, he's . . . he's deserted!" Hazell sputtered. "He's stolen a small space cruiser right off the Green Hall's landing field, and—"

  "Stolen a cruiser, has he?" Jartha's eyes began to gleam.

  "Yes, sir! Right from under our noses—just walked aboard with a forged set of orders on stationery from your office, sir!"

  "Well, that was a bit precipitous of him," Jartha murmured.

  "Sir?" Hazell sounded strangled, as if he couldn't credit his superior's calm.

  "I said that was a bit precipitous of him," Jartha repeated. "I'd gladly have granted him a furlough."

  There was a moment of utter, stunned silence over the intercom, and then Hazell spoke very carefully.

  "Uh, sir—Colonel Jartha—if Habibula's deserted, what about, ah . . . what about a certain box, sir?"

  "Oh, that!" Jartha chuckled. "Now that you mention it, James, I need you to organize a little security detail to return that very box to its rightful place."

  "I—it's back, sir?"

  "Well, you could hardly return it if it weren't, now could you?" Jartha observed.

  "Uh, no. No, sir, I don't suppose I could," Hazell said slowly. There was another moment of silence, and then he cleared his throat. "And what about Habibula, sir? Shall I alert the System patrols to intercept him?"

  "I don't believe that will be necessary," Jartha said judiciously.

  "But, sir, he's a deserter!"

  "Technically, I suppose you're correct," Jartha agreed, "but if we arrest him and send him to Pluto, we'll only have to let him out again the next time we need his talent. Think of all the time we'd waste."

  "But he'll get away, sir. If he could get the, ah, the box back for us, we'll never find him again if we don't go after him now!"

  "I've told you before, James, you have too little faith in human inventiveness. I found Habibula once, and I'm sure I can lay my hand on him again any time I want to."

  "You can, sir?"

  "Certainly. Tell me, did he leave on a course to Venus?"

  "As a matter of fact, sir," Hazell said slowly, "he did."

  "Just as I thought." Jartha smiled to himself. "Don't worry about it, James," he said.

  "Very well, sir," Hazell said a bit grumpily, and Jartha switched off the intercom with another smile and opened a drawer to look at the clutch of inquiries Ethyra Coran had sent him. He scooped them up and dropped them in the disposal slot, then leaned back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head in thought for several seconds, and his smile became a grin.

  He leaned forward and keyed his intercom again.

  "Major Hazell," a voice replied.

  "Colonel Jartha, James. There's one other thing I'd like you to do before you arrange to return the item we just discussed."

  "Yes, sir?"

  "Send someone out to find us a bottle of Crocyrean Brandy—the '51—
and arrange to ship it to Venus."

  "Where on Venus, sir?" Hazell asked in a resigned tone.

  "Why, I'm surprised at you, James!" Jartha chided. "Send it to the Blue Unicorn, Star Island, New Chicago. Send it care of Miss Ethyra Coran . . . and be sure you enclose a card with my name on it."

  In the Navy

  "I'm telling you, Mike, we can do this!"

  Mike Stearns inhaled deeply, counted to ten—no, better make it twenty—and reminded himself that the President of the United States couldn't go around throttling overenthusiastic teenagers. He told himself that rather firmly, then reopened his eyes.

  "Eddie," he asked as patiently as possible, "do you have any idea how many people walk through this office every week—every day, for that matter—with projects that absolutely, positively just have to be done Right This Minute?"

  "But this is different, Mike!" The wiry, red-haired young man on the other side of Mike's desk waved his hands. "This is important!"

  "That's exactly my point, Eddie. They're all important. But important or not, we only have so many up-timers with the sorts of skills to make them work. And this—" Mike thumped a solid, muscular palm on the lovingly executed sketch plan Eddie had laid on his desk between two tall piles of books "—would require skills I doubt any of us have to begin with. Besides, can you even imagine how someone like Quentin Underwood would react if I handed whole miles of railroad track over to you for a 'crackpot scheme' like this?"

  "It's not a 'crackpot scheme'!" Eddie said hotly. "This is exactly how the Confederates built their original ironclads, with rolled railroad rails for armor back during the Civil War."

  "No, it's not," Mike replied patiently. "It's how you think they built them, and that's—"

  "It is how they built them!" Eddie interrupted. "My research is solid, Mike!"

  "If you'll let me finish?" Mike's voice was noticeably cooler, and Eddie blushed with the fiery color only a natural redhead could produce.

  "Sorry," he muttered, and Mike was hard pressed not to chuckle at his expression. Eddie Cantrell, especially in the grip of one of his effervescent enthusiasms, was prone to forget that the Mike Stearns he'd known all his life had become President of the only United States that existed in this Year of Our Lord Sixteen Hundred and Thirty-Two. Which was fair enough, Mike supposed. There'd been enough times over the last year or so that he'd thought he was living in a fever dream instead of reality.

  "As I was saying," he continued after a moment, "I don't have any doubt at all that this plan of yours," he thumped the sketch on his desk again, "represents one hell of a lot of research and hard thinking. But the truth is that you don't have any better idea than I do of what sorts of hardware it would take to build the thing. Or, for that matter, who do you think is going to do the stability calculations? Or figure out its displacement? Or design a steam plant to move a boat this size and weight? Or even have a single clue how to take command of it when it was built?" He shook his head. "Even if we had the resources to devote to something like this, we don't have anyone here in Grantville who has any idea how to build it. And I've got too many other projects that people do have a clue about to justify diverting our limited—very limited, Eddie—resources to building some kind of Civil War navy."

  Eddie looked away, staring out the office window for several seconds. Then he looked back at Mike, and his expression was more serious than any Mike recalled ever having seen from him before.

  "All right," the young man said. "I understand what you're saying. And I guess I do get carried away sometimes. But there was a reason they built these things back home, Mike, and Gustav Adolf is going to need them a hell of a lot worse than Sherman or Grant ever did."

  Mike started a quick reply, then stopped. Just as Eddie had trouble remembering Mike as anything more impressive than the leader of the United Mine Workers local, Mike had trouble thinking of Eddie as anything but one of the local kids. Not quite as geekish as his friend Jeff had been before the Ring of Fire deposited their hometown in seventeenth-century Germany, but still something of an oddball in rural West Virginia. A computer nerd and a wargamer who was passionately devoted to both pastimes.

  Yeah, Mike thought. A geek. But a wargaming geek. He may be short on experience in the real world, but he's spent one hell of a lot more time than I have studying wars and armies and . . . navies.

  "All right, Eddie," he sighed. "I'm sure I'm going to regret this, but why is 'Captain General Gars' going to need ironclads so badly?"

  "Because he doesn't have railroads," Eddie replied. "That's why rivers and canals are so important to his logistics, Mike. You know that."

  Mike nodded slowly. Eddie was certainly right about that, although the youngster hadn't been present for the meetings at which he and Gustavus Adolphus had discussed that very point.

  "Without railroads," Eddie continued, "the only way to move really large quantities of supplies is by water. That's why successful seventeenth-century military campaigns usually stuck so close to the lines of navigable rivers. I know we're talking about building steamboats and steam-powered tugs for that very reason, and that should help a lot. But the bad guys are just as well aware of how important rivers are as Gustav Adolf is. When they figure out how much more efficiently he's going to be able to use them with our help, they're going to start trying really hard to stop him. And the best way for them to do that is to attack his shipping on the water, or else build forts or redoubts armed with artillery to try and close off the critical rivers." The teenager shrugged. "Either way, seems to me that something like an ironclad would be the best way to . . . convince them to stay as far away from the river bank as they can get."

  The kid had a point, Mike realized. In fact, he might have an even better one than he realized. The major cities of most of Gustavus Adolphus' so-called "vassals" and "allies" also happened to lie on navigable rivers, and altogether too many of those vassals were among the slimiest, most treacherous batch of so-called noblemen in history. Which meant that in a pinch, an armored vessel, heavily armed and immune to said cities' defensive artillery might prove a powerful incentive when it came to honoring their obligations to the Confederated Principalities of Europe and their emperor.

  None of which changed a single thing where the incredible difficulties of Eddie's proposal were concerned.

  Eddie started to say something else, then closed his mouth with an almost audible click as he realized Mike was gazing frowningly down at the sketch.

  The vessel it depicted would never be called graceful. It was an uncompromising, slab-sided, boxy thing that sat low in the water, and its gun ports and a thick, squat funnel were its only visible external features.

  "You're right about how important river traffic is going to be," Mike admitted as he ran one blunt fingertip across the drawing. "But this thing would be an incredible resource hog."

  "I know that," Eddie acknowledged. "That's why I'm only suggesting building three of them. God knows we could use as many as we could get, but I knew going in that there was no way you were going to give up enough rails to armor more than that."

  "No way in the world," Mike agreed with a grin which held very little humor. "Quentin would scream bloody murder if I gave you enough rails for one of these things, much less three! And he wouldn't be alone, either. It's going to take years and years for us to develop an iron industry that can produce steel that good. But that part I could handle . . . if I thought we'd be able to build the damned things in the end."

  "Look," Eddie said, "I admit that a lot of that plan is based on the best guesstimates I could come up with from my reference books. At the same time, some of those books are pretty darned good, Mike. I spent a lot of time researching this period when Jeff and Larry decided we just had to do a Civil War ironclads game." He chuckled. "I always was the navy specialist when it came to game design.

  "But that's not important. What matters is that it's a starting point. If you can find someone else, someone better qualified to take my not
es and my reference books and turn them into something we can build, I'll be delighted to turn them over. You're right. I don't have the least idea how to figure displacements or allow for stability requirements, and I know the designers screwed up the displacement calculations big time for a lot of the real ironclads built during the Civil War. There was one class of monitor that would've sunk outright if they'd ever tried to mount their turrets! So maybe my enthusiasm did run away with me. But it's more important that this gets done and that it work than that it gets done my way."

  Mike tipped back in his chair and considered the face across his desk. It was the same face it had always been, and yet, it wasn't. It hadn't changed as much as Jeff Higgins' face had, perhaps, but like every face in Grantville, it had thinned down over the course of the last winter and its sometimes short and always monotonous rations. Eddie had always been wiry; now he'd lost every ounce of excess weight, yet his frame was well muscled from hard physical labor. More to the point, perhaps, that face was no longer as young, as . . . innocent as it had been, and Mike felt a pang of deep, intense pain for the loss of Eddie's last years of childhood.