The Independent Command:
Volume 3 of The Flight Engineer
by James Doohan and S. M. Stirling
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright (c) 2000 by Bill Fawcett & Associates
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 0-671-31951-5
Cover art by David Mattingly
First printing, November 2000
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Doohan, James.
The independent command / by James Doohan & S.M. Stirling.
p. cm. — (The flight engineer ; v. 3)
ISBN 0-671-31951-5
1. Space warfare—Fiction. I. Stirling, S.M. II. Title.
PS3554.O566 I54 2000
813‘.54—dc21 00-058664
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH
Printed in the United States of America
The FLIGHT ENGINEER series:
The Rising
The Privateer
The Independent Command
BAEN BOOKS by S.M. Stirling
The Draka series:
The Stone Dogs
The Domination
Drakon
Drakas
!(anthology)
The General series with David Drake:
The Forge
The Hammer
The Anvil
The Steel
The Sword
The Chosen
The Reformer
With Jerry Pournelle:
Blood Feuds
Blood Vengeance
The City Who Fought
(with Anne McCaffrey)
The Ship Avenged
The Rose Sea
(with Holly Lisle)
Snowbrother
Saber & Shadow
(with Shirley Meier)
PROLOGUE
Excarix entered the presence of his queen with terror thrumming in his thorax. Like all queens Syaris was easily twice as large as he was, her pedipalps capable of severing his head from his body in one neat snip, her temperament such that this was an all too likely conclusion to any interview. Therefore the abject fear instinctive in a male of his species when approaching the most puissant female of the clan was greatly increased.
Over time he had, perforce, learned to ignore his feelings. But a private audience, like this one, arranged for a male of no consequence, like himself, strengthened his terror almost to the point of pain.
Yet no sign of his turmoil was apparent. He moved with solemn dignity, holding his pedipalps in a position of worshipful subservience.
Syaris seemed unaware of him as she idly stroked a writhing, silk wrapped bundle suspended from the ceiling. That she was not hungry was apparent to Excarix by scent. But not to the bound prey that mewled in terror as she tapped its cocoon to make it spin.
As he drew near to her desire grew in him and added its own rhythms to the disturbance within.
So beautiful
,he thought as the power of her pheromones began to work on him.
It was not merely the influence of her scent that made him find her ravishing. By the standards of his species the young queen was indeed very lovely. The exquisite shape of her head at the end of her unusually long and graceful neck, the subtle shadings of her gleaming, reddish-brown body, the slender length of her legs, the charming placement of her eyes—especially the anterior dorsal pair, the “gates of the soul” as the poets put it—all this made her a bewitching sight.
At this point he would have found it very difficult to withdraw from her presence, even if he were actively threatened.
She wants me
,he realized in dawning joy, and felt distant surprise. For he knew that she had been trained by her mother queen to have great control over the passion inducing secretions. The release of these particular pheromones implied permission to approach the queen and receive one of the highest honors a male could achieve.
The simple privilege of mating with a female so beautiful was worth aspiring to. But to deposit his seed with the
queen
! He had plans and hopes, of course he did, but there was no reason at this juncture for her to anticipate and agree to them. Even in his own somewhat arrogant estimation he had not earned such an honor.
And yet… by his own unmistakable reaction she was deliberately arousing him.
Excarix struggled to maintain his impassive appearance even as her scent caused his throat sac to swell with sperm. He struggled to resist the urge to stroke her slender body and to spin silk around her delicate limbs.
Excarix stopped at a respectful distance from the queen and lowered his fore-body submissively.
After a few more spins of her bundled prey she turned her gleaming eyes upon him.
“Yes?” she asked in a voice both musical and indifferent.
Excarix rose to a speaking position.
“It has begun, my queen,” he said, noting with dismay the lustful depth of his voice.
The queen’s chelicerae adopted a position of pleased amusement.
“Our forces are…” he said, his voice trailing off helplessly. He struggled to maintain his focus, to dispense his message with appropriate dignity.
“Come closer,” Syaris purred. “I would see you better.”
He approached, embarrassed to hear his breath hissing audibly. Inhibition slipped away like illusion. Without her permission he reached forward and stroked the delicate down on one of her legs.
She made a pleased, sighing sound. “Closer,” she invited.
With a nimble leap Excarix found himself upon her back, stroking her abdomen with all of his limbs. All thought of restraint was forgotten as his spinneret whipped back and forth, spinning strands of silk to bind her to him.
“Bold,” she cooed and fell onto her side, allowing him freer access to her larger body.
Disbelief prompted him to caution and he rose over her, slowly, so as not to startle. Carefully, carefully Excarix stroked her tender underside, moving ever closer to the dainty hairs of her genital opening, just below the juncture of her last pair of legs. Syaris hissed her pleasure and with this encouragement he moved forward. Using the very points of his clawed hand he traced the outline of the inviting, forbidden zone. Boldly he reached out and sank the sharp tip of one claw into the tender inner flesh.
The queen’s legs thrashed helplessly, then began to stroke his back as she encouraged him with a wordless murmuring. He continued to stroke and tickle her as he gathered a droplet of his sperm in his chelicerae. She opened to him and he leaned forward, intoxicated by her scent.
Excarix struck the wall with great force. For a stunned moment he feared that he might have cracked his chitin. Then she was upon him, his slender neck held in her powerful pincers.
“Ambitious!” she sneered, her chelicerae still showing pleased amusement. “But as yet you’ve done nothing to make you worthy of such an honor, have you, Third Minister?”
“I… I apologize for offending your majesty,” Excarix stammered. “I misunderstood.”
“Y-esss, you did misunderstand, Third Minister.” She straightened, lifting the smaller male by his neck. “You were being invited to give me pleasure. And you gave me precious little of it before you made a grab for what you wanted, didn’t you?”
“I was foolish, Majesty, I am truly sorry to have offended you.”
“You have done worse than offend me, worm.” She dropped him in contempt. “You have disappointed me.”
She slashed him several times with her tailwhip, each strike depositing a healthy dose of acid on his chitin. The humiliation was worse than the pain.
“Leave me,” she said, turning her back on him. “I don’t want to see you again until you are whole.”
Excarix slunk from the room, smoke writhing around the holes in his carapace. It would be months before he would be allowed into her glorious presence again. And he had not delivered his message.
CHAPTER ONE
Commander Peter Ernst Raeder gazed contentedly at the scenery flashing by, sipped his perfectly chilled champagne, stretched out his long legs and crossed them at the ankles.
The mag-lev train on which he was a passenger was an antique, a feature of travel on Come By Chance, and the most luxurious method of travel he’d ever sampled. The extra cost of first-class private accommodations was well worth the money. The seats were wide and comfy, the leg room ample, the windows enormous and the company… Raeder glanced at Lieutenant Commander Sarah James and caught her watching him instead of the lush mountains they traveled through.
He smiled, she smiled; warm, fuzzy, blissful, idiot happiness infused the air. Raeder could care less about anything just now but the rightness of things as they currently stood between him and Sarah James of the rich russet hair, the smooth lips, the…
They clinked glasses and gave each other the conspiratorial grins of people in love. The glorious forest-meadow-mountain vistas of Come By Chance came in a poor second to the limitless horizons they saw in each other’s eyes. The scent of pine and spring flowers went by unnoticed.
Suddenly Peter began to chuckle.
“What?” Sarah asked.
“Oh, it’s just that this,” he gestured around him with his glass, ended by tipping it in her direction, “is a switch.”
Sarah gave him a look of smiling confusion.
“A switch from what?” Her eyes betrayed the flash of thought,
Us
?
“I’m not under suspicion, on suspension or awaiting trial.” He leaned in closer. “Or alone.” Her lips twitched in acknowledgement. “In fact,” Peter continued, leaning back with a slightly smug smile tugging at his lips, “everything is going incredibly smoo—”
There was a jerk, and the ear-torturing, inhuman screech of metal scraping against metal with phenomenal force. Raeder and Sarah were shaken and tossed like dice in a box, flung back and forth against each other and the sides of the compartment. The bellow of ripping steel struck the ear like a blow; so loud that Raeder couldn’t hear his own voice when he shouted Sarah’s name…
Things are back to normal
, he thought.
All screwed up. And here I thought the gods had relented
.
Memory scrolled through his mind. He hoped it wasn’t the end-of-life flashback you were supposed to get; at least it wasn’t his whole life. Just the start of his latest planetside leave…
* * *
Raeder gripped his carryall a little tighter and squared his jaw. He exited the tiny shuttle to find himself at a landing area so small it barely existed, just a circle of cerement large enough to hold the shuttle and a few antennae. He walked towards the security shack, which was no more than a roofed cubicle for the soldier on duty, and handed over his ID and Dr. Pianca’s invitation. With a wordless salute the soldier took them and began inputting a query.
It had been a brief and uneventful trip from Marjorie Base, on Come By Chance’s lone moon, to Camp Seta, Star Command’s hospital/convalescent center on CBC itself. Raeder would have welcomed a delay somewhere along the line, but wheels had turned with miraculous smoothness and here he was in incredibly short order. Luckily, he was completely superfluous on the
Invincible
while the dockyard crews worked her back up—a fact that they’d made abundantly plain.
The guard in the security shack handed back Peter’s documents with another salute and Raeder walked out into the open. The warm, moist air held a delicate scent of spices and flowers, making it a pleasure just to breathe.
Peter gazed about himself. The camp was set in a verdant valley cupped between craggy, snow-capped mountains, under a clear sky full of wings—most too far away to show that they were scaly leather instead of feathers—and it had an aura of serenity about it. The buildings were sleek and modern with large windows and colorful native woods bright against the white stucco architecture. Each ward-complex had its own unique fountain and brightly flowered courtyard. The foothills beyond were lush with tropical vegetation; many of the trees were a species of giant bromeliad and the colors varied from a green so deep it was almost black to hot pink, deep red, rusty orange and good old Earth green. Beyond the buildings, just visible between two low, green hills, the hint of a lake sparkled, fed by a waterfall that leapt from stone to stone down a tall, narrow cliff in a glittering white cascade.
As though resisting the charm of this place a vague anxiety stirred within him concerning duties left unfinished on the severely damaged
Belay that
, he ordered himself.
You’ve left Main Deck in very competent hands
. Now what did he do about his anxiety in regard to this visit?
Sarah James’ doctor, Regina Pianca, had called and invited him to visit her. “She says she misses your sparring matches,” the doctor explained with a smile.
The physical or the verbal ones
?Raeder had wondered.
But just the idea of visiting Camp Seta, universally known in the service as Camp Stick ‘Em Together Again, gave him the collywobbles.
Spent too much time getting repaired at one of these myself
,he thought.
Which was true, but unreasonable in this case. He wouldn’t be visiting Sarah in the burn ward, covered with pink, regenerating goo. He wouldn’t see her in the reconstruction section, struggling to master a new electronic limb. He’d be visiting her in the psych unit.
Well… maybe that’s what really has me scared
.The doctor hadn’t gone into detail regarding Sarah’s problems. But the fact that her physician was making the invitation seemed ominous to Raeder.
When she’d shipped out for Camp Seta Sarah was holding herself together by sheer willpower. The Mollies hadn’t had her in their hands long, but it had been more than long enough to torture her.
Raeder remembered the last time he’d seen her—she’d smiled at him, her voice had been controlled, her hand steady as she saluted the captain. But her eyes had told a different story; wide and shocked and wild. It made him glad that Star Command policy was to send anybody recovered from Mollie captivity for psych evaluation.
He looked forward to seeing her; he dreaded seeing her.
Dr. Pianca had told him that they’d taken Camp Seta over from a very exclusive spa. “No sense in trying to keep it open with the wartime travel restrictions in place,” she’d said. “The environment is wonderful for the patients, and the Commonwealth is paying the owners a pretty good rent.”
Raeder noticed that each building was so positioned that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to see into another’s windows.
Leave it to rich people to insure their privacy
“Commander Raeder?”
Peter turned to find a young medic at his elbow.
“Warren Bourget,” he said and held out his hand. “Welcome to Camp Seta.”
Civilian
,Raeder thought.
“Where’s Doctor Pianca?” Peter asked, shaking Bourget’s hand.
“Unfortunately she’s been delayed by an emergency, Commander. I’ll show you to your quarters and give you an escorted tour, if you’d like, while you’re waiting.”
Raeder struggled against imagining the type of emergency a psych specialist would have.
“When do I get to see Lieutenant Commander James?”
“Ah, well, Dr. Pianca would prefer to brief you before you actually see the patient,” Bourget said with a smile.
Raeder’s features hardened.
“Why, is there a problem?”
“No, no, Commander. I should more properly have said,
debrief
you, sir. Then, when you’ve spoken to the lieutenant commander, the doctor will want to interview you again. It’s standard procedure, nothing more, I assure you.”
Raeder gave him a look. Then smiled and nodded.
“If you’ll show me to my quarters,” he said affably, “I’ll just unpack and then maybe wander around for awhile. Then I’ll check back to my quarters to see if you’ve left me a message. How’s that sound?”
Bourget hesitated.
“Very well, Commander, that sounds fine. I’d just like to caution you that Doctor Pianca would like to speak to you before you see her patient.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” Raeder murmured.
Sarah was bored and restless and getting fed up.
She’d been through an awful experience, she’d been ashamed of herself for getting caught, for being tortured, she’d had issues about being in control. But she’d talked it all out, understood the advice the doctor had given her and was trying to incorporate it into her behavior.
The fact was that what she really needed was to get back to work. Instinct told her that only time could help now, and useful work would help that time pass constructively.
If I could only convince Regina of that
,Sarah thought glumly. She turned off the music, part of her therapy, and rose from her couch.
I’ve got to move around
, she thought. Slipping on her running shoes, she went out for a jog.
As she trotted down the manicured paths of Camp Seta bits of the music the doctor had assigned flitted though her mind and she found herself humming. The sun felt good, and the soft, warm air against her face, the racing of her blood, all felt wonderful. Realizing she was happy just to be alive, Sarah smiled.
If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands
, she thought and laughed.
She stopped and looked nervously around, pretending to take her pulse.
Laughing without visible cause, what would my shrink say about that
“Sarah!”
She spun on her heel and stared openmouthed at Commander Peter Raeder.
“Peter?” she said, unbelieving.
“Lieutenant Commander?” he responded with a lopsided grin.
“So they finally bagged you,” she said, laughing, reaching out her hands to him. “Don’t worry, when the doctors are finished with you you’ll be as sane as anybody in the military.”
He took her hands with pleasure, enjoying their smooth warmth.
“Oooh,” he said and winced. “That bad, huh? We’d better spring you from this place PDQ, then. I wouldn’t want you
that
sane.”
Raeder watched as a weariness came over her and took the sparkle from her eyes. Though she still smiled and stood proudly erect he could see it was an effort.
“So,” she asked, elaborately casual, “what brings you to Camp Stick ‘Em Together Again?”
“Your doctor. She wanted to talk to me, presumably about you. But now that you mention it…”
Sarah grinned. “It’s good to see you, Peter. Let me show you around.”
Peter glanced around them, looking a bit furtive.
“Um… The good doctor wanted to talk to me before I saw you,” he said. “Maybe we could go somewhere private and you can fill me in on your adventures in psychiatry.”
“How about here?” She sat down on the grass, long tanned legs out before her.
Peter looked around. They were in a little fold in the path, surrounded by foliage. No one was visible and there were no sounds that indicated people were nearby. So he followed suit and they sat awhile in silence until he began to feel awkward.
...
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