Valiant Dust by Richard Baker

Author:Richard Baker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

13

CSS Hector, Gadira II Orbit

The riots in the capital lasted for three days. When the Royal Guard finally succeeded in restoring order in Tanjeer, a huge strike by disaffected workers in Nador paralyzed the sprawling offworlder industrial plants there. Hector’s landing force was obliged to execute two more evacuations of local consular offices, as well as protect a new Aquilan-owned tidal power station from an unruly demonstration, disperse a crowd immobilizing a lev train carrying Aquilan goods, and rescue a news team from High Albion that managed to wander into the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time. And those were just the disturbances that directly touched on Aquilan interests; there were two or three times as many Montréalais investments on Gadira, and the sultanate’s forces were hard-pressed to protect them all. Sikander himself made three landings within a week of the Sidi Marouf riot, and Angela Larkin at least five or six more without him.

He was just finishing a report on the news-team incident at the desk in his stateroom when his comm beeped at him again. Sikander sighed and keyed it, wondering where he’d be headed next. “Lieutenant North,” he answered.

“Mr. North, this is Sublieutenant Larkin. I’m in the gunnery office with Ensign Girard. We think we’ve made some progress on the torpedo failure.”

“You did?” Sikander had almost forgotten about the missing torpedo over the last few days. “When in the world did you find the time to work on it?”

“I’m not on the watch rotation now, so I’ve been working with Mr. Girard whenever I’m back on the ship,” Larkin replied. “I suppose it gave me something else to think about instead of riots and snipers.”

Sikander could certainly understand the desire to put the troubles down on the surface out of mind for an hour or two. “I’ll be right there,” he said. Stretching his legs and thinking about something different for a while sounded like a good idea to him, too.

He grabbed his cap and headed down to the Gunnery Department office. Larkin and Girard were waiting for him, along with Chief Torpedo Mate Maroth, the senior enlisted man in Larkin’s division. Sikander could see Larkin’s fatigue in the set of her shoulders and rumpled uniform, but her eyes remained bright and alert, and she greeted him with a confident smile. “Mr. North. Thank you for coming down.”

“I’m in need of some good news today, Ms. Larkin.” He joined the others at the table. “What have you found out?”

Larkin picked up the remote controlling the office’s vid display, and brought up an image of the schematics of a Phantom Type 12 torpedo. “You’ll recall that the older Phantom Type 12s were upgrades from the Type 11 with new warheads. The top image is the Type 12-P-2, which was the torpedo that went missing. Later Type 12s were manufactured new. The second image is the Type 12-P-5, which is the torpedo we recovered.”

“They look identical,” Sikander remarked.

“They are—almost,” Larkin said. “A Type 12 is simply a Type 11 fuselage and propulsion system with a new warhead bolted on.

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