To Do or Die (A Jump Universe Novel) Read online

  “You definitely aren’t what you appear to be, are you, ship farmer?”

  “And if I’m found out, my body will be floating down the river tomorrow.”

  “Like so many each morning.” Barbara gazed ahead. “The line is long at the mission. I better get back. Alice Blue Bonnet is watching your car. Sometimes, she sells drugs. She used to sell her body, whatever it took to get by. She taught herself to read. I’m giving her time on my terminal for schooling. She’ll be with Mouse and Tiny tomorrow. I think she’ll have something interesting to show you.”

  “Can I trust her?”

  “Probably,” was all the answer Ruth got, as Major Barbara made a straight line for her mission’s front door.

  Sitting on the hood of Ruth’s car was a girl of maybe fifteen. Her shirt and pants were worn black Unity fatigues. On her head perched a small blue pillbox hat. Hardly the bonnet Ruth had worn to work in the fields. Then again, where she grew up, police were safety volunteers, not crushers.

  Different human worlds took a lot of getting used to.

  “I kept your car safe, lady,” Alice drawled, sliding off the hood.

  “Looks that way. Thanks,” Ruth said, fishing in her pocket for more quarters.

  “You don’t owe me nothin’,” the youth said. “Major said do it. I done it.”

  Ruth recognized the sound of pride, when pride was all you had, and almost she pulled her hand from her pocket, empty. Almost.

  This poor kid had done a lot worse to keep body and soul together. And when her money ran out, she’d do it again. A few quarters might delay that time. Ruth caught one of the young woman’s hands with one of her own, then forced four quarters in it.

  “You don’t owe me,” Alice insisted.

  “I pay the people who work for me,” Ruth insisted back. “Ask Mouse and Tiny.”

  “They’re just free ridin’. Havin’ more fun than workin’ for you.”

  “They’ve shown me a few things I needed to see, and gotten me out of a few places I didn’t want to be. Major says you can help me, too. Tomorrow.”

  “She did?” Eyes that had been distant, almost dull, lit up. A smile almost creased the disinterested, undemanding face. Almost.

  “What she want me to do?”

  “She’ll tell you. I’m not sure, yet.”

  “Some boss. You don’t know what you want?” The challenge lacked force. Still, the young woman had found enough of herself to make it.

  “Sometimes, not knowing what you want is where you discover what you need.” Ruth smiled back. “I’m going to enjoy working with you.”

  “I got to hurry, or all the food will be gone,” Alice said. “See you,” she tossed over her shoulder as she rushed for the mission.

  TEN

  COLONEL RAY LONGKNIFE was frustrated. When frustrated, he was used to giving orders that ended said frustration . . . often with loud booms.

  In the 2nd Guard, it worked.

  It wasn’t working this morning.

  The three astronomers, a dozen technicians, and the two psychologists assigned to help them fumble around in his memories had succeeded in tracking eight jumps all morning. Just eight!

  On Santa Maria, Ray, Matt, and his jump master, Sandy, had done two in a few minutes!

  “This is not working,” Ray growled as lunchtime approached. He pushed himself back from a conference table with its heavy load of star projectors, star charts, and data records. At least this conference room was less ornate that most in his ministry.

  “We’re getting the hang of it,” the senior astronomer assured Ray. “Things will go faster this afternoon.”

  The senior shrink looked ready to say something unctuous, again. If Ray heard another soothing comment about how stressed out he was and what he could do to better control his stress, he was going to show these people just how stressed they could be.

  Instead, he gritted his teeth and tapped his commlink. “Get me the skipper of the Second Chance. It’s at the Nuu docks in orbit.”

  There was a brief pause as connections were made. The professionals around him fidgeted, flipped through their readers, and otherwise showed clear disapproval of this interruption.

  “Captain Abeeb here, what can I do for you, Ray?”

  “Send down Lek. I’m going to scare up the stone we brought back from Santa Maria, and I want him to do that hookup he did there. Folks here want to know the star charts in my head, and we’re going way too slow to keep me happy.”

  Rita maybe, but not me.

  “You sure you want to go fast on that stuff?” Matt answered with the wise diplomacy Ray had come to expect from a merchant skipper who’d been haggling over cargo prices for more years than Ray could contemplate.

  “Whose side are you on?”

  “I’ll have Lek down there in two hours,” Matt quickly said.

  “Where’s the stone from Santa Maria?” Ray asked the astronomers.

  “It’s being evaluated,” told Ray little.

  “By whom?”

  “Interested parties,” added nothing.

  “You tell those interested parties I want to borrow that rock for a day or two. They’ll learn more watching me and Lek put it through its paces than they will navel gazing at it for a year.”

  “It not rated for human use,” the counselor said, as if looking for a door to escape out.

  “I used it, Matt and his jump master used it. That’s man rating enough for me.”

  “We’re still assessing its potential impact on you,” the research neurologist said, eyeing Ray as he might a pinned insect in someone’s collection.

  “Doc, there’s no better place to study something than from inside it. Now, let’s go visit some ‘interested parties.’ Oh, and you better have someone deliver lunch there, or I’m going to start biting off heads.”

  Wherever they’d set up the artifact from Santa Maria, no one was in a hurry to show Ray. Still, nobody refused to take the man who killed President Urm where he wanted to go. They just did it slowly—and after a sit-down lunch.

  Ray’s patience lasted an hour before the irresistible force took over. “Enough. Where’s the rock?” he said, wadding up his linen napkin and tossing it onto the plate with its half-eaten steak and potatoes.

  When they reported to Rita how they’d tried to delay him, they should at least report that he’d eaten all his vegetables.

  A young woman in a lab coat showed up at his elbow at the same split second. He remembered her. “Trudy Seyd, isn’t it? You run infowar for him,” which was as good a way of naming the nameless spy as Ray could think of.

  “Yes, Colonel. If you will follow me.”

  He did. She led him up, down, around, and through a maze of corridors, elevators, and halls. His legs were just starting to protest, this being the longest walk he’d attempted since giving up his canes, when she stopped at an elevator door.

  “What has us stopped dead is that the damn thing doesn’t do anything. It just sits there. Nothing we do activates anything.”

  “I got it going,” Ray said.

  “I know, Colonel. How?”

  Ray tapped his head. At last check, the tumor that he’d suddenly grown on Santa Maria was still there. God knows, the dreams were still there. And, as this long walk had proven again, his war-battered back was still fixed, and his legs were no longer half-dead.

  “You think it will only work for someone who has the . . . ah, additional communication port?” the woman said, not sounding at all convinced.

  “What do you say we put it to the test? By the way, Lek, the tech who put the comm package together for me on Santa Maria, is headed down. Make sure some rat shows him through this maze of yours.”

  “Lek,” Trudy said, nonplussed. “Isn’t he that self-taught electrical technician?”

  “Child,” Ray said, letting just a whiff of his temper loose, “that self-taught tech got that gear working when my life and a whole damn planet depended on it, and he did it a hell of a lot faste
r than you have.”

  “Yes, sir.” The woman started talking into her commlink.

  The elevator door opened, and Ray walked into a pristine lab.

  Brightly lit, it was windowless. The air tasted of crisp, sanitary security. Ray doubted an electron got out without showing ID.

  The astronomers had lost their technicians, Ray’s team was down to just him, three stargazers, and, for some reason, the two shrinks.

  Their persistence did not hint of good sense, but that was their problem.

  Ray’s stone stood on an elevated platform in the center of the lab. It, and other stones cut from Santa Maria, were the only things in the lab that didn’t gleam, whirl, or blink.

  Ray approached it slowly. One of the four sides of the obelisk seemed to summon him. He avoided that side and would until Lek checked it out. Just because Ray had used the technology of the Three, the races that built the jump highway between the stars when humans were struggling to maintain fire or utter their first words, didn’t mean he understood it any better than the next guy.

  The Three had vanished a million or two years ago, leaving behind their jump points—and a half-mad something on the world humans named Santa Maria.

  The elevator behind them whirred again; this time the door disgorged a thin, bald man of ancient age in a wrinkled and smudged shipsuit. He took in the lab with one glance.

  “Fancy place you got here, Colonel. Can it do anything?”

  “So far they haven’t gotten the rig up, Lek. You want to check it out with Ms. Seyd and her team?”

  “No problem, sir.” The man whipped out a tech reader from his breast pocket and opened it. A holo picture appeared above, showing the jury-rigged contraption as it had existed on Santa Maria.

  Ms. Seyd signaled three of her specialists. “Let’s go over the layout with this man.”

  Ray settled into a desk chair, put his feet up on the nearest flat surface, and prepared for what he expected would be a short wait.

  The astronomers collected as far from him as they seemed able to in the spacious lab.

  The research neurologist joined them. The counselor sidled up to Ray.

  “You figure that man can get it working when those other specialists haven’t?”

  “Yep,” Ray said, getting comfortable.

  “What makes you feel that way?”

  “Doc, I’m a combat trooper. If my informed grasp of the situation, aided by any intuition I trust, is right, I win. If I’m wrong, I’ll need a surgeon, not a shrink.”

  “You were wrong, once. You lost most of your command and barely got out with a broken back.”

  “Yep,” Ray swung around to face this magpie, dropping his legs firmly on to the floor. “I served my time with the surgeons.”

  “How does it feel to be walking again?”

  “Great. Any other answer, and I would be crazy. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Doc, I got a . . . some planning to do. I need to think.”

  Clearly stonewalled, the doctor joined his comrade, saving Ray from having to answer his next question. Saving him from admitting that he’d almost said he had a battle to plan.

  Saving him from admitting that the battle was with his wife.

  * * *

  Ray drove Rita and himself home as dusk settled over the capital of Wardhaven.

  “I understand you got the stone working,” Rita finally said to break the long silence.

  “Yes,” Ray admitted to the cool evening air. “We plotted eight jump points that will take you from here to Santa Maria without the wild ride we had.” He felt mighty proud of that.

  “We would have gotten even more done, but that Spy’s infowar specialist wants us to wring some kind of weapon out of that rock. I think she’s chasing up the wrong tree. Lek needed the help of a part of Santa Maria’s world computer to make it do what it’s doing for us. We can no more reprogram it than a caveman could program a course into a starship. We’re going to have to settle for what it does.”

  “And what does it do?”

  “I suspect you know. They got several hundred jump points debriefed out of me. We’re concentrating on those in known human space and working out from them.”

  “So I heard.”

  Ray reached across, let his finger brush her stomach. “Honey, I’ll be back before this little butterfly that you feel fluttering around within you is stomping around enough for me to feel him, her, whomever. You haven’t told me if it’s a boy or girl.”

  “I haven’t asked,” Rita answered. “I don’t intend to.”

  Ray accepted that with a shrug. He was doing what he felt he had to do. That didn’t leave him much room for telling her what to do. “I’ll be back quickly.”

  Rita turned away to look out her own window. In her reflection, Ray saw a tear work its way down her cheek.

  ELEVEN

  RUTH NEEDED TO talk, to Trouble, to Becky, to lots of people.

  She got out of the warren of slums fairly easily but found her way back to the embassy blocked by a long line of tanks and troop carriers slowly making their way up the main avenue that led past the embassy’s front door.

  Ruth used side roads, now unusually busy, to find an underpass and her way to the parking lot beside their quarters. As she expected, Trouble was not at home.

  On a hunch, Ruth headed for the tanks. Sure enough, her Marine captain was happy as any kid at Christmas, inspecting the hardware inventory lumbering by.

  “Not worth shit,” Gunny grumbled beside Trouble.

  “Looks that way.” Trouble nodded.

  “Looks pretty impressive to me,” Becky Graven, the senior Foreign Service Officer, said, joining them.

  “Not to infantry swine what hunt tanks for fun,” Gunny growled.

  “Enlighten me,” the woman from the embassy said.

  “To start with, notice the paint,” Trouble offered.

  “Fresh and shiny,” Becky observed.

  “And put on nice, thick, and in all the wrong places,” Gunny said, butter melting in his mouth.

  “For Christ sakes”—his good humor vanished—“some five-thumbed nitwit painted over the laser range finder on that one. Those ladies don’t know shit from Shinola.”

  All Ruth saw was a big, lumbering, thoroughly painted mass of heavy metal. Apparently, Becky was just as unenlightened.

  “I don’t get it.”

  Gunny started to point, but Trouble cleared his throat, and the sergeant turned the gesture into an ear scratch, then let his hand fall back to his side.

  Trouble turned to Becky, and in a voice that carried just barely above the rumble of the tanks said, “We’re watching them. They’re watching us watching them. I don’t want to tell them anything I don’t have to, but notice where the turret meets the hull of the tanks.”

  “Yes,” Becky and Ruth said.

  “There should be a black gasket showing there. They’ve painted over it. Not good for the gasket, not good for the tank. It leads cynical folks like me and Gunny to suspect that tank hasn’t moved its turret for quite some time.”

  He paused to take in more of the parade, then went on.

  “Notice the mantle on the next three tanks coming up. That’s the big blocky thing where the gun joins the turret. Solid paint. That gun hasn’t gone out of battery since it was painted. All the guns in this battalion are at the same angle. I don’t think they’ve used ’em since Christ was a boot. I don’t think they know how to use ’em.”

  “What’s it tell you, Marine?” the diplomat asked.

  “These tanks might be able to hold their own in a fight—with unarmed civilians. Then again, if the civilians knew how to concoct Molotov cocktails, maybe not so much.”

  “Captain, new battalion coming up,” Gunny noted.

  There was no break in the three-abreast parade of metal monsters, not to the untrained eye. Under Gunny and Trouble’s tutelage, Ruth now knew what to look for.

  These guns were pointed up, but at slightly different angles. The tanks h
ad been painted recently, but unlike the ones before, they didn’t look like they’d been dipped in the paint bucket.

  Places had been missed. Places that Ruth now knew shouldn’t be painted.

  Becky nodded beside the two Marines. “Then again, some do know shit from Shinola.”

  “Looks that way, ma’am,” Gunny agreed. “Looks that way.”

  Ruth took the pause in the conversation that followed to run through her day.

  As she described the side of Petrograd she’d visited, a scowl grew on Trouble’s face. When she finished, he turned to Gunny.

  “I want a load out from the Patton. Three units of fire of nonlethal area suppressants for a platoon. Include both personal and squad-size canisters.”

  “Yes, sir,” Gunny answered.

  “Ruth, you don’t leave here tomorrow without a couple of those personal canisters. Gunny will see that you get trained in them.”

  Ruth refused to answer yes, sir. “If you say so, love.” Neither Gunny nor Becky attempted to hide their smirks.

  “Yes, I do say so, Mrs. Captain, love.”

  Ruth refused to let the blush rising on her cheeks fluster her. “Becky, what do you make of this story about the plant managers keeping the different nationalities fighting?”

  “Interesting,” Becky said slowly. “I’ve wondered about that. I don’t have any good answers. We don’t have any intel from inside the plants, either, until now. We should have, but before the war, this planet was handled by the commerce side of galactic affairs, not political. Might explain a lot of missing holes in my model of this place’s operation. Ruth, will you debrief with one of my people on everything you’re finding?”

  “I’d prefer she debriefed with you,” Trouble cut in. “This building leaks like a sieve.”

  Ruth would have rather said that herself. She elbowed her husband.

  “I have to agree with you.” Becky laughed. “Too many holdovers from the old regime inside as well as outside. And I’ll take that nudge to be agreement in content if not the process of delivery, Ruth.”