Cursed Command (Angel in the Whirlwind Book 3) Read online

  “No one dared cross Captain Abraham, sir,” Goodrich said. “He was a right fucking tyrant.”

  And he wound up dead, William thought. Sabotage? It wasn’t impossible . . . and any evidence would have gone down with the shuttle. Or perhaps it had been just punishment for neglecting his ship. But he wasn’t the only one who had died.

  “Right,” he said instead of revealing his suspicions. “What else needs to be fixed before we can leave orbit?”

  Goodrich stared at him. “We can’t leave orbit.”

  William stared back. “Why not?”

  “They say this ship is cursed,” Goodrich insisted. “Sir . . .”

  “Cursed,” William repeated, straining to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “I suppose the effects of poor maintenance, not bothering to do any repairs, and general carelessness would seem like a curse.”

  He rounded on the engineer. “We are due to leave orbit far too soon,” he snapped. “So tell me, Mr. Goodrich, what needs to be done?”

  “The power core needs to be replaced,” Goodrich said finally. “Our air filters need to be replaced . . . it’s possible that the system has been clogged in several places. Our internal sensor network needs to be reconfigured, our external sensor blisters need to be replaced completely. And a number of . . . ah . . . transferred components need to be replaced too.”

  “Transferred,” William repeated.

  Goodrich flushed. “The captain okayed it . . .”

  “I’m sure he did,” William snapped. “And how long do you think it would have been before someone noticed?”

  He rubbed his forehead, telling himself—again—that cuffing the chief engineer would be pointless. Transferring, perhaps selling, components from Uncanny wouldn’t have lasted long, not when someone noticed that the serial numbers of the components in place didn’t match their records. The entire scheme would have unraveled the moment the inspectors compared notes and discovered that all of the components came from the HMS Uncanny. Even if they’d been sold to civilian ships instead, something that was definitely against regulations, the scheme couldn’t have lasted forever.

  Someone would have noticed the parts missing, if the IG ever did an inspection, he thought grimly. And putting in a request for replacements would have tipped them off.

  “Captain Abraham okayed it,” Goodrich said. “It was his order . . .”

  “Perhaps his scheme,” William said. Perhaps Captain Abraham had wanted the money more than he wanted his career. But Captain Abraham was dead. “Leave it for the moment.”

  Goodrich looked relieved. William had a nasty feeling that that wasn’t going to last.

  “I want you to put together a complete list of everything that needs to be replaced or repaired,” William ordered. “Everything. I don’t want to find a single item left off the list. Go through the entire ship with a fine-tooth comb.”

  “That could take a while,” Goodrich said.

  “You have forty-eight hours,” William stated, bluntly. “If you have been doing your job, Mr. Goodrich, it shouldn’t take you that long. Err on the side of caution, if you have to—I’d sooner replace an intact component than run the risk of having something fail on us.”

  He gritted his teeth in fury as he looked around the engineering compartment, which actually looked to be in better condition than the bridge—but only a couple of crewmen were visible, both clearly pretending that they weren’t listening. At least a dozen engineering crewmen should be in the compartment at all times, even when the ship was in orbit around the local moon. It was impossible to escape the simple fact that Goodrich simply hadn’t been doing his job.

  “If you need additional crewmen,” William added, “put in a request to my terminal.”

  “Yes, sir,” Goodrich said. “But they won’t be forthcoming.”

  “We will see,” William said. “Now get to work.”

  He turned and strode out of the compartment, walking around the engineering section before heading back towards Officer Country. Uncanny followed the same basic layout as Lightning, a vessel he knew like the back of his hand, but there were quite a few differences that worried him more than he cared to admit. Lightning had always felt warm and welcoming, even though he’d never been her commanding officer. Uncanny made him feel as if he needed eyes in the back of his head, as if someone was sneaking up behind him with a knife. He hadn’t felt so . . . concerned . . . since he’d served on a cloaked starship slipping into enemy territory, knowing that the slightest mistake, the faintest emission, would betray their presence.

  And Captain Abraham had died, he thought.

  Perhaps his passing was an accident. The IG had certainly thought so when they’d chalked it up to yet another manifestation of the ship’s bad luck. If Captain Abraham had been as bad as Goodrich suggested, his death may not have been an accident. If someone on the crew had been willing to assassinate their commanding officer, there was no reason to assume they wouldn’t want to kill a second CO. Unless he managed to turn the crew around.

  He paused. His feet had led him to Officer Country. Bracing himself, he stepped through the hatch and strode down the corridor to his cabin, taking a long look at Commander Greenhill’s hatch as he passed. It would have to be sealed, at least until Commander Greenhill was formally remanded to the shore patrol for investigation. William knew he was short on officers and men, but he was damned if he was keeping Greenhill around. The man was either staggeringly incompetent or insane.

  Just like Admiral Morrison, he thought. But at least there isn’t an entire fleet at risk here.

  There should have been a marine standing guard outside his hatch, but the entire section seemed deserted. William hesitated, unsure if he truly wanted to proceed, then pressed his hand against the access panel. There was a long pause, long enough to make him wonder if someone had sealed the compartment, before the hatch ground open. A faint whiff of . . . something touched his nostrils as he stepped inside, the lights coming on automatically. He started to look around. The cabin was surprisingly neat.

  Tidy, he thought. He glanced into one of the lockers and saw a number of fancy suits and ties. A couple were standard uniforms while a third was an expertly tailored dress uniform; the remainder looked expensive enough to be beyond William’s price range. He’d been advised to buy a formal dress outfit after he’d been knighted, but he was too frugal to buy something ridiculously expensive. How much money was Captain Abraham spending?

  He scowled as he searched the remainder of the cabin. Captain Abraham hadn’t left any notes behind, save for a private computer that refused to accept William’s command codes. He’d have to hand it over to the IG in the hopes that one of their hackers could break through the encryption without wiping out the entire system. Then . . . he supposed it would depend on just what they found. A list of contacts for a smuggling ring, enough blackmail information to ensure that no one took a close look at Uncanny or . . . he didn’t know.

  Shaking his head, he sat down in front of his terminal and began to compose a message. He would need help, additional manpower as well as security, or there would be no hope of meeting the departure deadline. He would fail . . .

  . . . and he knew all too well that he couldn’t fail.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Katherine,” Duke Falcone said as his daughter hovered at the door to his office. “Come on in.”

  Kat forced herself to walk forward. She’d always had mixed feelings about the office back when she’d been a child. She and her siblings had been banned from their father’s workspace save for the times when they got in trouble and the household staff marched them to one of their parents. She’d spent far too long listening to her father’s stern lectures, knowing deep inside that she wasn’t receiving all of his attention. He’d always been a very busy man.

  “They gave him Unlucky,” she said curtly. “Did you know they’d give him Unlucky?”

  “Officially, the decision was made by the promotions board,” her fathe
r said, motioning for her to take a chair. “Unofficially . . . the decision was hard fought.”

  “I’m sure it was,” Kat said.

  She leaned back in her chair, wondering why her father had never changed the room’s decor. With no window, the only source of illumination was a single light hanging above a massive desk. Three of the four walls were lined with bookshelves; the fourth displayed a large portrait of the family, painted when Kat had been five. Her mother had had to bribe her to sit still long enough to let the artist make the preliminary sketches, Kat recalled with a flicker of shame. It was almost as if they’d never heard of a camera.

  “You are aware, of course, of the political realities,” her father said. “And really . . . Uncanny is better than he had any right to expect.”

  Kat didn’t miss the irony in his tone. She’d been given a heavy cruiser too—and far too many people had rightly believed that her powerful father had pulled strings to make sure she got the command. It had made it much harder for her to gain respect, at least until the war began. And now her former XO, one of the people who’d been slow to warm up to her, faced the same problem. And . . .

  “Father,” she said, “the ship is . . . unlucky.”

  “We need her in service,” her father pointed out. “Give us two more years and we’ll drown the Theocracy in starships, gunboats, and everything else we need to make war. But for now . . . we need every ship we can get on the front lines.”

  “Or en route to Jorlem,” Kat said. She would have been astonished if her father hadn’t known the content of her orders. He’d probably been informed long before she’d been told. “What happens if we’re needed back here?”

  Her father lifted his eyebrow. “If the enemy puts together an assault powerful enough to crack the planetary defenses,” he said, “what difference will two heavy cruisers make?”

  He looked up at her. “Katherine, the political situation is unstable,” he reminded her. “Right now, it would probably be a bad idea to make a fuss.”

  “He’s been set up to fail,” Kat replied.

  It was all she could do to keep from cursing. There was no shortage of people on Tyre who questioned the value of the Commonwealth itself, who worried about the effect it would have on the planetary economy . . . quite apart from the political structure. A handful of particularly talented immigrants could be assimilated quite easily—the aristocracy worked hard to ensure that their children married talented outsiders—but hundreds of millions? Some of those people even blamed the Commonwealth for the war. Would the Theocracy have attacked Tyre, they asked, if Tyre hadn’t created the Commonwealth?

  Even if we managed to maintain our independence when their expanding border overran us, she thought grimly, we would still be destroyed eventually.

  She’d seen the brutality of the Theocrats personally, seen what they did to individual prisoners as well as entire populations. Tyre itself had seen just what the Theocrats were prepared to do to score a brief advantage during the opening hours of the war. Terrorist attacks, bombings and shootings . . . chaos programs loaded onto the planetary datanet, causing dozens of deaths . . . Now, with the war grinding on and no end in sight, some politicians were starting to wonder if there was a better way. Maybe, just maybe, they could come to terms with the Theocrats.

  But it would be a mistake, she told herself, sternly. You can’t compromise with utter evil.

  Her father was speaking. She realized, embarrassed, that she hadn’t heard a single word he’d said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said irked. “Can you repeat that?”

  “Perhaps your ears should be cleaned,” her father said. “I was saying that he might not fail.”

  “I wish I knew,” Kat said.

  She shook her head in irritation. There were plenty of rumors about Uncanny, but most of them were nothing more than tall tales from deep space. Spacers were notoriously superstitious, and Kat knew it was quite possible that a handful of incidents might have been blown out of all proportion by rumormongers. Yet she’d checked the records and one of Uncanny’s commanding officers had been summarily discharged after his ship opened fire on a friendly vessel.

  And since then, she’s hung in lunar orbit, she thought. She might be in worse shape than Sixth Fleet.

  The thought brought her no pleasure. Sixth Fleet had been on the border, the first target of the Theocracy when the invasion had been launched, yet the fleet’s readiness had been depressingly low and her crews had been demoralized. Kat had honestly wondered if Admiral Morrison—she felt a flicker of bitter hatred at the thought—had been working for the Theocracy all along. His command had barely escaped the first engagement of the war . . .

  . . . And she knew, all too well, that it wouldn’t have escaped if she hadn’t organized a number of junior officers to prepare for the inevitable attack.

  “It would depend on the ship’s condition,” she said slowly. “And if she’s spent the last six months doing nothing, with half her crew sent elsewhere . . .”

  She met her father’s eyes. If her former XO—her friend—had been set up to fail, there would be political repercussions. The doubters would have proof, they’d claim, that someone from off-world couldn’t be trusted with a heavy cruiser and thus have an excuse to ram back integration still further. The consequences would be dire. She knew, better than many others, just how much resentment had been building up over the last two years. There simply wasn’t time to handle the matter gently.

  “We need to help him,” she said.

  “If he asks for our help,” her father said. “And even if he does . . .”

  He shook his head. “We still don’t know who was behind Admiral Morrison.”

  Kat grimaced. Admiral Morrison had been incompetent, stunningly incompetent. She’d never met anyone so capable of sticking his head in the sand and ignoring reality when all the signs insisted that a full-scale war was imminent. The Theocracy had done the Commonwealth a vast favor, she was sure, by removing him from command, although by then Cadiz couldn’t be saved. Then she’d discovered him held prisoner in a Theocratic POW camp and brought him home . . .

  . . . where he’d died in an accident. An accident that shouldn’t have been allowed to happen.

  She leaned forward. “You still don’t have a clue?”

  “Nothing,” her father said. “And all we really know is that they were working for the Theocracy.”

  “Or expected to benefit from a Theocratic victory,” Kat said. “Fools.”

  “It depends,” her father pointed out. “We’ve got more industry in this system alone than the entire Theocracy. Someone could position themselves to serve the Theocracy and ensure their survival, if nothing else.”

  Kat shook her head. She’d seen the Theocracy at work. A handful might be ruthless pragmatics, like Admiral Junayd, but others were fanatics. They wouldn’t want to leave someone, anyone, in control of Tyre and its industrial base, not when they had a holy duty to spread the faith to the entire galaxy. Besides, a person in control of Tyre could turn the planet against the occupiers once the attractions of serving as a quisling began to pall. The Theocracy was so determined to impose itself on everyone else that they hadn’t even bothered to delay reshaping Cadiz—and the other occupied worlds—until they won the war. Some of the stories from behind enemy lines were truly horrific.

  “They’d have to be out of their minds,” she said curtly. “Father, do we have no clue?”

  “None,” her father said sharply. “Someone with vast political power, of course, but everyone with that sort of power should know the dangers of playing games with the Theocracy.”

  “True,” Kat agreed. “But someone has clearly been playing games.”

  Her father cleared his throat, changing the subject.

  “That may be,” he said. “There is, however, another issue I wish to bring to your attention.”

  Kat took a guess. “We have interests in Jorlem that you don’t want to see misplaced?”


  “A little closer to home than that, I’m afraid,” her father told her. “Have you heard from Candy?”

  “I’ve been trying to avoid Candy,” Kat said. Her older sister had been inviting her, time and time again, to boring parties with boring guests . . . and, given what had happened at the last party Kat had attended, she had no intention of going to another. “What does she want?”

  Her father gave her a look that mixed understanding with irritation. “She’s put one of her clients forward as your XO.”

  Kat needed a moment for his words to sink in. “What?”

  “She’s put one of her clients in as your XO,” her father repeated. “And she didn’t have any help from me.”

  Kat stared at him in disbelief. She’d known Candy was building up her own patronage network—establishing a set of friends and allies throughout the government—but she hadn’t realized it reached so far. “She’s . . . how?”

  “I believe Candy spoke to two of her . . . contacts . . . in the Navy,” her father said. “She was quite convincing. The Honorable Sirius Crenshaw will be serving as your XO.”

  “Oh,” Kat said. She fought down the urge to scream in frustration. She’d already selected the officer she wanted to serve as her XO, someone with experience on Lightning and whose command style matched her own. To have someone else slotted in was irritating to say the least. “I’ve never met him.”

  “You’ve probably been at the same gatherings,” her father mused. “There’s a complete profile in the family processors, if you’re interested.”

  Kat bit off a curse. She knew the Crenshaw Family—the aristocracy wasn’t that big—but she couldn’t recall meeting Sirius Crenshaw. If he was a Commander, even with such powerful connections, he had to be at least five or six years younger than she was. He would probably have grown to manhood while she’d been in Piker’s Peak, embarking on her first cruise. He would have been too young to be interesting while she’d been a teenage girl. She’d spent most of those years trying to avoid aristocratic gatherings like the plague.