Rebel's Quest, page 1
part #6 of The Long View Series
Rebel's Quest
F. M. BUSBY
REBEL'S QUEST A Bantam Book I January 1985
1. Prologue:
Bulletin on Tregare
Testing—one, two—all right, the recorders working. Alden Bartlett dictating. Shelly, do this one up and get it into Distribution right away. I'll just rough it; you fill in from the files and streamline the chat. This hot number came down from Committee Chairman Minos Pangreen his own brass- bound self.
"What it is, is an All-Worlds, All-Ships Bulletin on Tregare the Pirate, so use official headings: United Energy and Transport, Presiding Committee, old Pangreen the Chairman, UET crest, all that. Do it up pretty.
"All right; subject, Bran Tregare. Born Australia, New Year 9 or 10—look it up—to Sean Tregare, citizen of North America, and Lisbeth Duggan. No surviving family on Earth or at any legitimate colony, so we don't have that kind of handle on him.
"Entered the Slaughterhouse—oops, Space Academy—at age thirteen, graduated in normal sequence at sixteen. Good scores but no outstanding cadet promotions. Two turns in the Special Punishment cell, which should have told somebody something.
"On graduation, did his cadet cruise on the MacArthur,
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Arger Korbeith commanding. I hear the Butchers still complaining he should have spaced that kid while he had the chance. Put four or five others out the airlock, that trip, but missed the kingsnake. Everybody guesses wrong now and then....
"Back here at Earth, Tregare was transferred to the Tamurlaine as Third Officer. The ship went as directed to the Twin Worlds—Tweedle first—and then to Penfoyle Gate. Then lifted for Terranova but never arrived there, so it's assumed that's when the ship Escaped. At next contact it was renamed Inconnu and Tregare was captain. It's usual enough that the old captain doesn't survive a mutiny but this guy seems to have wiped out all his superiors. Boil this all down a lot, will you, Shelly?
"That next contact was with the Hannibal under Commodore Sherman. Tregare blew the ship apart, but its scouts got away and reached Johnsons Walk safely, which is why we know the story. And from then on...
"Some of these reports contradict each other. That is, unless someone invented a faster-than-light Drive and Tregare has it, he couldn't have been to all the places and done all the things listed in here. My guess is that when a ship or colony of ours gets creamed, they figure they'll look better if they blame it on the Bogey Man. But leave my guesses off, Shelly; this thing's going out over Pangreen's name.
"After the Hannibal incident, next contact was when he hit three ships off Shegler's Moon. He got the armed ship Cortez with a missile and his turrets crippled the Goering, so that it spiraled down onto Shegler's primary. That world is like Venus only a lot bigger, so there went the Goering. The Charlemagne got away to tell us about it.
"There's a lot more, but I have an appointment coming up, so could you crib the rest from the files? Don't bother trying to sort out what's relativistically possible and what's not; I can't figure the Long View of space-time myself and won't ask you to try it.
"But here's some speculations that haven't been filed yet. That Tregare's allied himself with some unknown species of aliens possessing FTL travel. That somewhere he's found or set up ship-building facilities, and is building a fleet of ships— twenty, fifty, maybe a hundred. Well, to say the least, these things are unlikely—but the guesses have official sanction, so put them in anyway. Labeled as guesses, of course.
"Another is that he's the one who hijacked the ship with all the frozen sperm and ova and conceived-zygotes, and the Zoomwombs to hatch them in, and is force-growing thousands of Instant Troops to attack us with. If you put that one in, Shelly, look up the dates and add those, too. I think that ship disappeared while Tregare was still on the MacArthur.
"But its not our business to tell our bosses they work too hard at scaring themselves. If Tregare did even half the real items they say he did, he's the single biggest menace our government faces. So just set down the facts and let our beloved readers, All-Worlds and All-Ships, do their own editorializing. Right?
"Hmmm—I see here that somebody wants Tregare boosted to the top Wanted slot: Escaped Target Number One. Could be a reasonable priority, at that. I mean, how long has it been—twenty years, maybe?—that anybody's heard anything about Cade Moaker and Cut Loose Charlie? But Tregare, we hear a lot about—enough that Upstairs gets nervous and we catch it. Actually, the way this Tregare operates—well, never mind that. Pangreen will either up the Target rating or he won't.
"End Bulletin draft, subject Bran Tregare known as Tregare the Pirate. Alden Bartlett out.
"And Shelly—if you can get this out today, tomorrow I buy you a three-drink lunch and we take the afternoon off. "
A long time later, so long that the readout paper had yellowed and gone brittle, Bran Tregare read that Bulletin. Smiling a little, he shook his head. They had a few things right, UET did, but not many. The fake ID had held up, he noticed—UET had no idea he was the son of Hawkman Moray and Liesel Hulzein, and nephew to Erika Hulzein whose Establishment in Argentina was a major thorn in UETs paw. Not that those connections did him any good: Erika had been after his hide, and his parents had run off and left him to the nonexistent mercies of the Slaughterhouse. And had gone to the world called Number One.
UET had some of the early stuff straight. Yeah, he'd blasted the Hannibal. He hadn't known before that his second armed-ship kill was the Cortez, or that he'd also nailed one of the other two; he'd been too busy trying to cope with a crippled Drive. He wondered how the Escaped colony on Shegler's had fared after discovery by UET, but the Bulletin didn't say.
They couldn't know of his stops, once he was captain of Inconnu, at the Hidden Worlds of New Hope and Freedoms Ring, and his visit in between, to UET's base on Hardnose, was considered to be a hoax by someone else. On the other hand it had been Raoul Vanois in Carcharodon, not Tregare, who raided the mining colony on Iron Hat.
UET's speculations about alien alliances and FTL Drives made him laugh out loud. Well, the wilder their beliefs, the less apt they were to be set for what he was planning!
He did wish they were right about the shipbuilding part, but to his knowledge only one Hidden World had built any kind of ship: Number One had a cargo shuttle that worked fine for in-system work but lacked interstellar range.
He read more: yes, this escapade was his; the next wasn't. And so on. He wished to hell he had been the one to wipe out the slavers on Dixie Belle, but that was the work of a man named Dominguez, whom Tregare had never met but would like to, someday.
And of course the Zoomwomb-and-zygotes caper was long before his time. It had given the planet Number One its rather surprising population in a hurry, but by none of his own doing.
"Bran? I thought you said something about a drink. I am certainly ready for one. " Still dripping from the shower, Tregare's wife wrung water from her long, dark hair and put a towel around it. To look at Rissa Kerguelen one would hardly guess that she and Bran had married in a dueling ring, after she had fought—naked and unarmed—with a man twice her weight, and killed him. It had been a long time since Stagon dal Nardo had any place in Tregares thoughts; he didn't stay there long.
"Sure. A minute. " A quick scan covered the rest of the Bulletin; he set it down. "You want some chuckles, look this over. " He stood, and went to make the promised drinks.
Thinking: UET didn't know about his alliances, either—
Limmer on Lefthand Thread, for instance. Hell, they didn't even know that Kickem Bernardez had taken the Hoover.
And reminiscing: Number One, yeah. That's where it all really started.
2. Number One
Tregare was dozing. Jargy Hoad, his oldtime Slaughterhouse roomie and now his Third Hat, had the watch as Inconnu neared the planet. Tregare had a lot of thinking to do, but right now he was too tired to do it.
Second Hat Erdis Blaine, his sometime lover, was leaving the ship at Number One. The trouble with Erdis was that she thought life should be played fair. She didn't realize, and couldn't accept, that fighting the monolithic tyranny of UET a man had to use whatever worked. In Tregares view, treachery was rewarded by death. Back at Shegler's Moon, Inconnu's most recent stopover, Port Administration had tried to cover its ass with UET by selling Tregare out. After he'd fought clear of the ambushing UET ships—all three of them—he went back and blew Port Admin purely to hell. The word would spread, and the lesson needed to be made clear. But Erdis couldn't see that, so she was getting off. Well, if he was a monster, as she said, he'd had plenty of help....
Before the breakup, Erdis had for some reason decided to get pregnant. That wasn't Tregares worry, since she hadn't asked his consent. His problem was figuring how to buy out her officers-shares in the ship itself. Might be best to pay largely in cargo bought, back at Freedoms Ring, especially for delivery here. But Freedoms Ring's contracts were with the Hulzein connection on Number One, and that meant Liesel Hulzein, Tregares mother. And probably his father Hawkman Moray and his sister Sparline. Long ago, appalled and heartbroken when he knew they'd left him in UET's Slaughterhouse when they went off Earth, he'd vowed never to see or speak with any of them again. Thirteen he was, then; even now, maybe close to ten subjective bio-years later, that hurt was fierce.
But he'd figure something out, some way to handle things. ... Bran dozed.
The intercom brought him awake. "Bran. Jargy here. "
Getting his face out of the pillow and throwing covers back, Tregare sat up and flipped the talk-switch. "Yeah? Anything wrong?"
"Nothing at all. But come up to Control anyway. We're close to hitting air, and I don't think the view is anything you'll want to miss. I mean, on tape it couldn't be quite the same. "
Tregare shook himself fully awake. "Sure. I'll be right up. "
The view from Control was something, all right. With the downscreen on hi-mag, Tregare saw first an endless-seeming plain, just below the ship, now, was a huge water sink. He checked, as planned. Inconnu was coming down headed toward the Hidden Worlds arbitrary West—traveling with the terminator and expecting to land before crossing it from dawn into darkness.
Ahead lay several parallel ranges of hills. Jargy pointed. "Take a good look. I read about the Big Hills, on the data sheets, but now I believe them. "
Still a bit sleepy, after all, Bran said, "They don't look so much. " Then he checked the instruments. "We're still forty kilos up? I just changed my mind!" Because the slanting afternoon sunlight now showed him something of the sheer size of those rounded masses—foothills, they weren't.
"Aircars can't cross them, " Jargy said. "Even with oxy for the passengers, the cars simply won't climb that high. And you notice how far they extend, north-south—not feasible to go around. So this perfectly good plain, less than a hundred kilos from the main port, is hardly explored at all. "
Flipping through the info, noting the average height of the Big Hills, Tregare could see why. He said, "Gives me an idea.
Remember, I'm thinking of a base here? Well, how about on this side of the Hills? With the ship and the two scouts we could move supplies over—and sure's hell the locals wouldn't bother us!"
The locals! Who was he kidding? His family, here on this world, was what still worried him. Too many nights he'd lain, shivering in fear of Slaughterhouse brutality, hating his parents for leaving him there while they escaped to a safe world. But so what? He didn't have to see them, did he? Maybe not—but why was his body giving him all the sensations of panic?
Grimly he shook his mind loose from the problem. Those people weren't his real enemy, UET was. And this wasn't Airlock Drill on the MacArthur, standing naked in the line of cadets and waiting for Butcher Korbeith to have one of them spaced. Bran had vowed to kill that man someday; if he ever did, maybe these flashbacks of fear would vanish. But to do it, first he had to get on with the job at hand: gather ships under his command, and attack. Not that the Butcher was his only target, he was after any part of UET's cruel reign that he could bite off. And here was where he planned to start it....
The Long View—the fact that up near light-speed ships might experience one year while planets went through twenty—the Long View made things difficult. The trick, though, was to learn how to use it. By passing info to every Escaped Ship met in space and to the Port computer of every Hidden World he visited, Bran Tregare was building a longterm communications net. He wasn't the man who'd first begun it, but he knew a good thing when he saw one.
So someday, he hoped, there would be a rendezvous of ships to join him, here on Number One. And he'd need a base to service them and arm them—as many as he could round up, but six or eight at the very least, or it wouldn't work.
So for now, get his base set up. And when he'd prepared it the best he could, for the gathering he hoped to bring about eventually, take off again on a two-purpose mission: to make more contacts with Escaped Ships, and to bite UET's tail to the bone!
Jargy Hoad's voice broke Tregares fugue; for a moment he couldn't remember what he'd been saying. Oh yes, about the locals not bothering them, east of the Hills. Jargy's grin indicated that he agreed, and he said, "You know, that's not a bad idea. " So, approaching the Big Hills the two men scanned the terrain in search of a good site. At first Bran liked a ledge area to one side of a canyon, but a better look showed it slanting too much. Jargy picked a dry lake, but as Tregare pointed out, nothing said it was dry all the time. Then Bran spotted, on the long slope where the Big Hills themselves began, an ancient crater with a fairsized ringwall and a floor more flat than not.
"It's closer and it's better, " he said. "I wouldn't risk landing the ship there yet, but a scout I would. Hang a bulldozer outside the scout, and in four, five days—a week, maybe— we'd have us a nice flat port. "
He realized he'd said the plan in shorthand, but Hoad knew what he meant. "Sure. Except, do you know anyone who knows how to run a bulldozer?"
"Course not. That's what groundsiders are for. We hire some. "
Radar confirmed eye judgment that the flatlands on the west side of the Big Hills were nearly a kilometer lower than the eastern plain. A little to the north of their path Bran spotted the major settlement: "The capital city, or whatever. " One Point One, it was called, and it was bigger than any town he had yet seen on a Hidden World. Well, with the Zoomwombs and all, it would be. First Hat Gonnelson, doing pilot, swung course toward the place.
The port looked fairly large, too, and now held three ships, none of them armed. Earlier, at hailing distance, Tregare had talked with the port's spokesman-on-duty, and had been impressed by the way this place simply took incoming ships in stride. There was no hassle, no apparent anxiety. Finally he'd asked: "You people don't seem nervous about new ships, the way some places are. How come?"
A little bit. then, the voice flattened out. "Most places don't have our grade of missile defense. "
A hard line to top, so Bran said, "Well, now I know. " Certainly he appreciated the logic. Now as Gonnelson brought Inconnu down, drifting expertly toward One Point Ones port Tregare saw something odd. off to the north—across the Big Hills ran a zigzag mark. There wasn't time to do more than swing an aux screens camera over thai way, and put it on hi-mag and hi-speed, both, so he did that much. Later he'd have a look...
* * *
On the landing circle the port had designated, Gonnelson brought Inconnu to rest without a jar. "Good job, " said Tregare, and clapped a hand to the mans shoulder-—briefly, because he knew that Gonnelson was no more comfortable with touching than with talking: a little went a long way. But a little couldn't hurt, either.
Bran watched Gonnelson run down through the grounding checklist; halfway through, realizing he didn't need to monitor, he turned to Jargy Hoad. "On the commercial stuff, you deal for the ship. The talking part, I mean. Anybody asks for me, I'm busy. And—"
"Wait a minute. " Hoad waved a hand. "I don't know prices, any of that stuff. Bran, how can I—?"
"We have folks who do. Groden, down in Stores, for one. "
"Ol' Gripin' Groden?"
"Not any more. Held back too long on promotion, was all. He's a lot different now. And anyway, you can punch most of the info out of Tinhead. "
Jargy frowned. "Still, though—Third Hat, dealing for the ship?"
"Second. Didn't I tell you? Erdis; she's getting off. And rules or no rules—compared to you, Al Druffel just doesn't hack it. " Before Hoad could ask anything, Tregare said, "The thing is, most of our cargo for here is consigned to Hulzein Lodge. I have my own reasons—tell you sometime, or maybe not—I'll deal with those people but I won't talk with them. So you handle that part. "
After a pause, Jargy nodded. "If you say so. "
To the port Tregare gave the correct protocol, both from upstairs and after landing. Such as "Bran Tregare, captain, speaking for the armed ship Inconnu. " They wanted the ship's history and he gave it straight: nothing to hide, here. But when it came to commerce he said, "Our Second Hat, Jargy Hoad, is authorized to handle all that. Don't bother me with it. " And mostly, nobody did.
He had one bad moment, going into Control while Jargy was on a direct circuit to Hulzein Lodge and dickering on delivery charges, to the Lodge rather than directly to the port. On the screen Bran Tregare saw his mother Liesel Hulzein, and noticed that now her crown of braided hair carried a lot more grey in it. Behind her stood the tall man, Hawkman Moray— he hadn't changed much. For seconds Bran looked to see if maybe his sister Sparline might be in the group, then he shook his head and moved to make sure that he himself wouldn't be seen from the far end.
He was moving to leave Control entirely when Liesel's voice cut through, saying, "I've had enough of this! Liesel Hulzein speaking, and I know damned well that the captain of Inconnu, the armed Escaped ship, is Bran Tregare. I want to talk to him! I have the right—after all, he—"
