9
The great mind knows the power of gentleness
Only tries force, because persuasion fails.
—Robert Browning
The refrigerated air of the Base Operations Center made Johnnie stumble as he stepped through the door. Dan looked at him in amusement and said, "You've acclimated quickly. That's good. I hadn't counted on it."
"How cold do they keep it?" the younger man asked as he looked around the entrance hall. It was dim and a little dingy as well as being cold. Not cool, cold.
"Eighty degrees," Dan said. "Which is wrong—it ought to be pegged to no more than ten degrees below the ambient, but people like to be comfortable when they can . . . and they don't worry about what's going to happen in action, even on a dreadnought, when the cooling plant takes a direct hit."
The door marked "Commander in Chief" was open, but that was just the outer office. The secretary/receptionist at the central desk and electronics console wore the bars of a senior lieutenant.
"Good morning, Commander," the lieutenant said. "Admiral Bergstrom asked if he might have a few minutes alone with Captain Haynes before you joined them."
Captain Haynes demanded a few minutes alone with Admiral Bergstrom, Johnnie translated. His face grew taut. He remembered what his uncle had said about control, but he wasn't able to relax.
Despite all the sophisticated hardware associated with the desk, there was an acetate-covered sign-out chart on one wall of the room. It was printed with boxes in which the names and destinations of officers were written in grease pencil. On the opposite wall was a holographic seascape: pelicans banking over dunes sprinkled with sea oats, while a gentle surf foamed up the strand.
The seascape showed a memory of Earth. Nowhere on Venus was there a scene so idyllic.
"Sure, that's fine, Barton," Dan said easily. "We'll wait in the hall and keep out of your hair."
There were bulletin boards in the hall. One of them listed a handful of apartments in Wenceslas Dome. Dan nodded to it and said, "Leases that got opened up three months ago. They've been pretty well picked over by now."
"Is it going to be all right?" the younger man asked tightly. "With Haynes already there?"
"We'll make it all right, won't we?" Dan said. "Just follow my lead, is all."
He grinned in what seemed good humor and added, "You can think of it as your baptism of fire, John. Only, no matter how bad you screw up, nobody's going to die."
The expression changed minusculy. "For a while, that is."
"You know," Johnnie said, "in all the years I've known you, Uncle Dan, there's only once I've seen you really angry."
Dan chuckled. "You've seen me angry, lad? When was that?"
"Yesterday. In the Senator's office, when you told him he was a—that he didn't have any balls."
"Oh, that," the older man said. He chuckled again. "And that's why you decided your father was a coward, is it? Well, you mustn't mistake tones for emotions. The Senator reacts very emotionally to anything involving you—that's just biology, after all. So I—"
He spread his right hand and looked critically at the nails. "—had to get his attention on the level at which he was operating."
Johnnie blinked and turned away. "Then it wasn't true?" he said, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice.
"Look at me," his uncle said. "Look at me."
"Yessir."
"What's true is that Mankind has a chance to survive and spread to the stars," the mercenary officer said without raising his voice. "What's true is that I'll do whatever I need to do in order to protect that chance."
Johnnie was standing rigid. Dan relaxed with a visible shudder and attempted a grin.
"One more thing and we'll drop this, John," he said. "I want you to remember. I've killed people because it was my job. I've killed people because I was scared. But I've never killed anybody because I was angry."
Johnnie nodded. "Sure," he said. He would have made the same reply if his uncle had told him it was noon, and the information would have made as much difference to him.
"Commander?" called Lieutenant Barton from the office doorway. "The Admiral will see you now."
Dan put his arm around Johnnie's shoulders. "Buck up," he said as they strode forward. " 'Forward into ba-at-tle, see our banners go!' "
"I'll be fine, Uncle Dan." He really believed it now.
"Sure you will, John," Dan replied. He settled himself and his sweat-marked uniform into the semblance of the third-ranking officer in the premier mercenary fleet on Venus. "You wouldn't be here if I weren't sure of that."
Dan motioned Johnnie through the inner doorway first. Captain Haynes, seated in one of the two chairs in front of the Admiral's desk, snapped, "Not him."
Johnnie paused. Dan's touch moved him into the office.
"Yes, him, Captain," Dan said as he closed the door and stepped past his nephew. "Recruit Gordon's presence is necessary for this discussion."
He nodded toward Admiral Bergstrom. "But the explanation won't take very long."
Admiral Bergstrom's office was large without being spacious. It was filled with enough scrap and rusted metal to suggest a salvage yard.
One wall held a stenciled swatch of a gunboat's bow panelling. The last digit of the number, Z841–, had vanished into the hole blown by an explosive shell.
Above the panel was a hand-held rocket launcher of a pattern at least thirty years old. Beside them both was the sun-bleached, shrapnel-torn pennant of a flotilla commander; and, to the right of that in the corner beside the door, was the empty circular frame which had once held the condensing lens of a high-resolution display.
All four walls were similarly adorned, and larger pieces of junk took up floor-space besides.
Souvenirs of a life spent in the service of war.
Admiral Bergstrom looked like a clerk with tired, nervous eyes. His left hand was withered, though he used it to play with a miniature mobile of shrapnel chunks as he looked from one to another of his visitors.
The rumor Johnnie had overheard in conversations in his father's house was that Bergstrom had a maintenance-level drug habit. The Admiral's dilated pupils suggested the rumor might be true.
Dan sat. "Sir, it's necessary that Recruit John Gordon be given officer's rank and made my aide without the usual formalities. His background is such that he'll be a credit to the company, but—"
"That's absurd!" said Haynes, his face darkening.
Don't be sorry. Be controlled.
"But it isn't because of that that I make the request," Dan continued. "I presume you've realized that Recruit Gordon is my nephew . . . and Senator Gordon's son. Unfor—"
"If there was ever a good time to provide, uh, untrained civilians with commissions," Haynes said, "it's not now when we're facing the most severe test in the Blackhorse's history."
The catch in the captain's voice suggested that he'd intended a less flattering phrase than "untrained civilians." Discretion, and memory of just how powerful a politician's brat Johnnie was, had bridled his tongue.
"Untrained . . . ," Dan repeated, as if savoring the word on his tongue. Then, sharply but not hostilely, "Johnnie, keep your eyes on me!"
"Yessir!"
"There's a lens frame on the wall behind you. Shoot withi—"
The double cra-crack! of the pistol shots surprised everyone in the office except Commander Cooke; even Johnnie, especially Johnnie, because if he'd thought of what he was doing he'd never've been able to do it. Two rounds, and he didn't turn until the second was away, shockingly loud in a room without a sound-absorbent lining.
Johnnie thumbed the catch and replaced the partial magazine with a fresh one from his belt pouch. His fingers worked by rote. His first round had starred the concrete wall just beneath the eight-inch ring; his second had struck in the center of the target. Both of the light, high-velocity bullets had disintegrated in sprays of metal against the hard surface.
The door burst open. "What the—" shouted Lieutenant Barton. His eyes widened and his hand dropped toward the butt of the pistol he carried in a flapped service holster.
Johnnie slipped his own weapon into his cutaway holster and turned his back on Barton. His ears rang, and the air was cloying with the familiar odor of powder smoke.
"That won't be necessary, Lieutenant," Dan said, lifting one leg lazily to hang it over the arm of his chair. "Everything's under control here."
The door closed. Johnnie focused his eyes on a signed group photograph on the wall above Admiral Bergstrom's head.
"Under control . . . ," Haynes said. "Cooke, you're insane."
"Now that we've covered the matter of Recruit Gordon's training," Dan said, "there's the serious matter of why—"
"There's more to training than skill with small arms, Daniel," said the Admiral quietly. "As you know."
"As I know, sir," Dan agreed. "In everything but hands-on experience, Recruit Gordon compares favorably to the best of our junior lieutenants. But the reason it's necessary that we commission him isn't that we need another officer—useful though that may be . . . but rather, because Senator Gordon doesn't trust us."
"What?" blurted Captain Haynes.
What? Johnnie's mind echoed in equal surprise.
"The Senator has been following our attempts to associate a supporting company with increasing irritation," Dan continued smoothly. "He called me to him to demand an explanation—"
"That's not yours to give, Daniel," Admiral Bergstrom said with an edge to the words that Johnnie hadn't thought within the capacity of the commander in chief.
"I know that, sir," Dan continued, nodding. "But I know my ex-brother-in-law also, and there was nothing to be gained by claiming those negotiations were none of my affair, so he'd have to talk to one of you."
He dipped his head first to Bergstrom, then to Captain Haynes.
"But that's ridiculous," Haynes protested. "There've been some delays, certainly, but they weren't through any fault of ours."
"I told the Senator that, yes," Dan said, bobbing agreement.
"And in any case, now that I'm back it's just a matter of working out the last details of our agreement with Admiral Braun of the Angels," Haynes continued.
"That I couldn't tell the Senator," Dan said, "because as you know, I don't believe it myself."
"Right!" blazed Haynes. "You don't believe it because Admiral Braun's a friend of mine. What do you propose, Commander? Working a deal with your great good friend de Lessups in Flotilla Blanche?"
Johnnie couldn't see his uncle's face as he met Haynes' glare, but his voice seemed as calm as if he were ordering lunch as he replied, "Admiral de Lessups offered me his number two slot last year, Captain. But neither he nor I would expect the other to act dishonorably when our companies were already engaged by rival domes.
"Any more," Dan continued in a sudden, jagged snarl like that with which he had hectored the Senator, "than I'd expect your Admiral Braun to act honorably at any distance greater than pistol range!"
"Listen, you—"
"Gentlemen!"
"If Braun meant to sign, he'd already have signed!" Dan shouted.
"I needed to take care of business back at Wenceslas," Haynes retorted with a hint of defensiveness. "I'll meet him face to—"
"You had to see your wife, you mean!"
Admiral Bergstrom's right fist rang deliberately on a section of dimpled armor plate on his desktop. "Gentlemen!" he shouted.
Captain Haynes had jumped into a crouch. He blinked like a sow bear at her first sight of Spring sunshine, then sat—or flopped—into a chair again. His right hand clenched and relaxed; and clenched again. Johnnie couldn't be certain, but he thought the visicube on the desk before Haynes contained an image of his wife.
"Now that I'm back," Haynes resumed in a voice that was almost falsetto, "I'll go to Paradise Base and knock down the final details." He raised his eyes to meet those of the Admiral. "With your agreement, sir?"
Bergstrom grimaced. "Yes, yes," he said without enthusiasm. "I would have thought that perhaps Hackney's Wizards were a better bet, but—"
"The Angels have the big-bore throw weight that'll be crucial, sir," Haynes said earnestly.
"Yes, well," the Admiral said. "It's really too late to begin negotiations with another fleet, now. And anyway, the Angels will certainly be satisfactory. Almost any company would be, given our own strength."
Almost under his breath, Bergstrom added, "I don't understand why they seem to be treating the Blackhorse as a pariah. We've always kept up the highest standards. . . ."
"Yes sir," Haynes said. He rose. "I'll take a hydrofoil to Paradise immediately."
"And you'll take Ensign Gordon with you," Dan said from his seat.
"I'll do no—"
"Because by taking Senator Gordon's trusted observer," Dan continued with icy, battle-order precision. "The Senator's spy, if you will . . . we'll be proving to him that we have nothing to hide."
Dan stood, a smooth uncoiling of his body from the seat as graceful as the motion with which his nephew drew and fired behind his back. "Isn't that so, Admiral Bergstrom? We have nothing to hide."
Bergstrom grimaced again. He closed his eyes briefly, looking more than ever like an overworked bookkeeper at the end of the day.
"Yes, of course," he said at last. "You'll be taking some staff with you to Paradise Base, Captain. I don't see any reason why Ensign Gordon shouldn't be among them."
Johnnie was looking at his uncle. Commander Cooke grinned.