Forge a New Blade (The Laredo War Book 2) Read online

  Forge a New Blade

  Book 2 of The Laredo War trilogy

  by

  PETER GRANT

  Fynbos Press

  Copyright © 2015 by Peter Grant. All rights reserved.

  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.

  Cover art by Phil Cold:

  http://philcold3d.blogspot.com

  Cover image supplied by Dreamstime:

  http://www.dreamstime.com

  Cover design by Oleg Volk:

  http://www.olegvolk.net

  This book is dedicated to my sisters, Elizabeth, Frances and Margaret.

  For other books by Peter Grant,

  see his Amazon.com author page

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Laredo: March 27-28 2851, Galactic Standard Calendar

  Neue Helvetica: April 20 2851 GSC

  Neue Helvetica: April 24 2851 GSC

  Neue Helvetica: April 27 2851 GSC

  Bactria: April 29-30 2851 GSC

  Bactria: May 5 2851 GSC

  Laredo: July 11 2851 GSC

  Laredo: July 12 2851 GSC

  Rolla: September 15 2851 GSC

  Bactria: October 19-20 2851 GSC

  Laredo: December 14-19 2851 GSC

  Laredo: December 20 2851 GSC

  Neue Helvetica: February 11 2852 GSC

  Laredo: March 12 2852 GSC

  Marano: March 13-14 2852 GSC

  Bactria: April 17 2852 GSC

  Bactria: April 18 2852 GSC

  Vesta: April 20-21 2852 GSC

  Laredo: May 12 2852 GSC, 05:00

  Laredo: May 12 2852 GSC, 07:30

  Laredo: May 13 2852 GSC, 07:25

  Bactria: June 1 2852 GSC

  Laredo: June 1 2852 GSC

  About The Author

  Laredo: March 27-28 2851, Galactic Standard Calendar

  PRISON CAMP #3, NEAR the small town of CARISTO

  The twilight was deepening as the two figures walked slowly around the perimeter track. The warning wire five meters inside the triple-layered fence was strung at knee height, marking the outer limit of the furrow worn in the dirt by the prisoners over the past several months in their aimless anticlockwise circuits every day. To cross it without permission was to risk being shot by the guards in the towers at each corner of the small compound. Even if they weren’t feeling trigger-happy, any such transgression would earn the offender ten days on bread and water in solitary confinement. Considering the sawdust consistency and flavor of the prison camp bread, that was bad enough.

  Gloria patted Jake’s hand as it rested lightly on her right arm. “I know it’s frustrating, but there’s nothing we can do with the level of technology available here. If the Bactrians had been able to treat your injuries properly – not to mention quickly – it would have made a difference, but most of their medical supplies had been destroyed, and their facilities were swamped by thousands of their own wounded soldiers and civilians. Prisoners of war were low on their priority list. By the time they got you to an operating theater, all they could do was extract the remains of your eyes and clean up the scarred sockets. They couldn’t even fit glass eyes, because that would have meant removing the scars and bio-engineering smooth sockets, and they didn’t have the time or the facilities for that.”

  Jake rubbed the bandage over his empty eye-sockets. “It’s still frustrating to know that on a more advanced planet they could give me back artificial vision at least, if not clone new eyes.”

  “Yes, but they’re not going to ship a prisoner of war to Bactria or Neue Helvetica or anywhere else to incur that kind of expense – not unless we tell them your real name, of course.”

  Jake grimaced, and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Careful! Don’t say that too loud, in case a guard’s listening over a parabolic surveillance mike. No, we’ve got to let them go on thinking I’m just Captain Jake Smith, a supply puke who got conscripted into our last big operation because of a shortage of warm bodies. If they ever find out who I really am, they’ll try to use me to put pressure on my son, sure as we’re standing here.”

  “I doubt Dave knows you’re alive.”

  “Not yet he doesn’t. At least he’s raising all kinds of hell for Bactria at the United Planets – or rather, reading between the lines of their propaganda, that’s what he seems to be doing.”

  She sighed. “I wish we had more accurate information about what he was up to!”

  “It’ll be something interesting, I guarantee you. I –”

  Her gaze had gone to a particular bush about forty meters outside the perimeter fence, as it always did when they passed this point. She tensed as a momentary, very faint pinprick of blue light flickered at its base, almost invisible unless one knew where to look for it. A few seconds later a tiny dark object arced silently upward from the bush at high speed. It hit the hard earth inside the fence, bounced three times, then rolled gently underneath the warning wire and a meter or two into the compound. The guards in the towers about fifty meters to either side gave no sign that they’d noticed anything, which didn’t surprise her. This technique was tried and tested.

  She patted Jake’s hand on her arm to interrupt him, then spoke very softly, hardly moving her lips. “A message ball’s just been launched into the compound. It’s landed about twenty meters ahead of us. You know the drill.”

  “Say when,” he murmured.

  “Stand by… almost there… now!”

  Jake pretended to trip over his own feet, clutching at Gloria’s arm for support, stumbling sideways into her. “I’m sorry!” he called plaintively as he went to his knees. “It’s these damned eyes. If I can’t see my own feet, how the hell do I know where to put them?”

  She toppled forward and to the left, reaching out with both hands to break her fall. Her right hand closed over the tiny ball. “It’s all right, Jake. I understand.”

  “Yeah, but I hate it when I hurt you!”

  “It didn’t hurt much.” She pushed herself to her feet, brushing dust and dirt from her clothing. In the process the little ball disappeared into a pocket. She reached down to Jake and helped him stand once more, speaking a little louder than usual for the benefit of any guard who might have trained a security camera with its parabolic microphone on the disturbance. “I think we’d better get you inside. You’re tired, and when you get tired you’re always more off-balance than usual.”

  “I guess so.”

  The guard in the nearest tower watched them as they cut across the compound to Hut Number 3. As they disappeared inside, she wondered idly whether the woman would take the man into her bed that night to help him relax – then shivered at the thought of a lover with empty, scarred eye-sockets looming over her, pawing at her body that he couldn’t see. Ewww! No, if that woman had any taste at all she’d look for a sighted partner instead. There were several dozen other rebel prisoners in the compound who’d doubtless be more than willing to oblige her, particularly given the ratio of thirteen men to one woman inside the wire. Besides, despite being the oldest person in the camp, she was not unattractive.

  Gloria led Jake slowly down the corridor to her room and through the door. He felt his way along the wall to her lower bunk and sat down as she drew the curtains, then took the tiny ball from her pocket. He listened to the crinkling of paper as she unscrewed the rubber-coated halves of the steel sphere and opened the message inside.

  “It says George Charlie Tango,” she read, her voice rising with excitement. “That means we’ve heard from off-planet at last! Charon want
s us to listen for him at zero-two-hundred.”

  “At last! It’s been almost a year since our big fight, with no direct word what they were up to.”

  “I guess we’ll find out later tonight. Who is Charon, anyway? Do I know him?”

  “You know better than to ask that. What you don’t know can’t be tortured out of you or given away by accident.”

  “Yes, but it’s so damn frustrating! I know you military people have several projects you’re working on, but no-one will tell me a thing!”

  Jake was unmoved. “That’s the way it should be. I’m not party to all of them either.”

  “Jake Carson! You can be so exasperating sometimes! I chaired the Council of the Resistance, dammit! Even my husband took my orders as such, and he was our Commanding General! Now I’m the only civilian leader left. I’m just a spare part, basically ignored in military affairs. It’s as if all my past accomplishments count for nothing at all anymore. How do you expect a person like me to feel about that?”

  He sighed. “I guess I hadn’t put myself in your shoes. I can see your point, Gloria; but facts are facts. We have to deal with the situation we’re in now, not the one we were in this time last year, nor the one we may be in this time next year. You led the Council of the Resistance. I commanded a regiment. Neither of them exists any longer. Both of those roles are behind us now. We’ve got to do what we can, with what we have, where we are.”

  “But what can we do? What can we accomplish? We can’t affect anything rotting in here!”

  “I’m not so sure about that – but I can’t say any more about it either.”

  “Why not? Am I any less trustworthy now than I was last year?”

  “No, not at all. It’s simply a basic principle of security. What you don’t know you can’t reveal – whether because you want to, or because you’re tricked into it, or because it’s forced out of you. The fewer people who know a secret, the more likely it is to stay a secret. That’s just the way it is.”

  ~ ~ ~

  At 01:45 the following morning they walked slowly down the dark, deserted corridor, lit only by a few dim night lights spaced far apart, to the corner room at the end of the hut. It was designated as a recreation room. A shelf on one wall supported a selection of readers, loaded with whatever books their captors had decided did not pose a security risk. They’d all read most of them by now, forced to do so by sheer boredom if not out of interest.

  They didn’t switch on the light, preferring to leave the room in darkness. She kept watch at the window while Jake ran his fingers over the reader devices, selecting a medium-sized unit with a keyboard and a smaller one with only a few selector buttons. He carried them over to a table beneath the window and set them down.

  Gloria put her writing pad and pen on the table, picked up the smaller reader, pressed three buttons in a complex sequence of keystrokes, then held it out in front of her as she walked around the little room. Her circuit complete, she did another while holding it down towards the floor, then a third pointing it up towards the ceiling. “Looks like they’re not listening,” she murmured.

  “Good.” Jake lifted a flowerpot from its drainage dish on the table. “Any water in there?”

  “A little.”

  “OK.” He picked up the dish and emptied it into the flower pot, tapping it to remove as much moisture as possible, then turned it upside-down and set it on the table once more. Sitting down, he deposited the flowerpot on the floor.

  Gloria took the chair next to his, putting down the reader and pulling the inverted drainage dish towards her. She bent low and sighted along two of the four raised bumps on its lower surface, lining them up precisely between a nick on the edge of the table and a mark on the windowsill. Satisfied, she picked up the larger reader and laid it carefully in a slight depression on the inverted dish. To the untrained eye it looked like a simple flaw, a hollow in the clay, but it held the reader firmly in a specific orientation. Daylight would have shown its top aimed directly at the peak of a distant hill, but in the darkness nothing was visible outside the window.

  “It’s aligned,” she told Jake.

  “Good.” He produced a simple pair of wired earbuds, plugging them into a socket in the reader. They were normally used to listen to music without disturbing others who wanted to read, but tonight they’d serve a far more important purpose. He pulled on the buds, separating the wire connecting them a little more, then handed one of them to her. She placed it carefully in her ear as he did likewise with his bud.

  Jake held out his hand, and she placed her pen in it. He uncapped it and used the point to pick carefully at the spacebar of the reader’s keyboard. After a few attempts the bar came loose from the clips holding it at either end. He removed it, revealing two black dots on the gray plastic case between its two clips, then returned the pen to Gloria, who poised its tip over the nearer of the dots. They waited in silence, glancing frequently at the timepiece on the wall.

  At 02:00 precisely, a tiny diode on the top of the reader glowed red. A voice crackled over the earbuds. “Sink me the ship, Master Gunner – sink her, split her in twain!”

  Gloria clicked her fingers in frustration. “That’s… who is it, dammit?”

  “Tennyson,” Jake replied. “It’s from ‘The Revenge’. The response to that challenge is from Macaulay’s ‘Horatius’.”

  “Trust an egghead to use poem challenges and responses!” She nudged his arm impudently with her elbow.

  “A lot of military men like martial poetry. Besides, I’m betting ancient verses from England on Old Home Earth are the last thing the Bactrians are likely to recognize.”

  “I’ve got to admit, it’s not a bad idea. Go ahead.” She pressed gently on the black dot with the point of the pen.

  Jake leaned over towards the microphone – the other black dot. “And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his gods?”

  There was a brief pause, then, “This is Charon, over.”

  Gloria replied, “Persephone to Charon, go ahead. Peleus is with me. Over.”

  “Charon to Persephone and Peleus. There’s a hell of a lot to tell you. Are you ready to take notes? Over.”

  She pulled the pad closer. “Persephone to Charon, ready, over.”

  “Charon to Persephone, here goes.”

  The voice talked for almost half an hour. Even using abbreviations and writing as fast as she could, Gloria was forced to interrupt several times and ask the speaker to slow down or repeat something. At last he came to the end of his narrative. “That’s the story so far. Now we come to orders for future operations. Over.”

  Gloria raised her eyebrows, glancing across at Jake. “Orders? What makes Dave think he can issue orders to us?”

  “We made him Commanding Officer of all off-planet Laredo forces, remember? And he’s now the President Pro Tem of our Government-in-Exile as well. I’d say that gives him more than enough authority.”

  Her lips tightened. “Yes, after those bastards murdered Vice-President Johns!” She was silent for a moment, struggling to control the fury that had been bubbling inside her since they’d learned that news. “Still, that only gives him authority off-planet.” She ignored Jake’s sudden frown as she depressed the ‘Transmit’ button once more. “Persephone to Charon, go ahead, over.”

  “Charon to Persephone, this is a verbatim transmission of Mercury’s words. I quote: ‘If the Council of the Resistance is still operational and free of enemy restrictions, I respectfully request that they subordinate all their future activities to the plans I’ve outlined. They should not do anything that would interfere with them. If the Council is no longer operational or its surviving members are subject to enemy restrictions of any sort, I issue the following orders to the remainder of the Resistance and the citizens of Laredo. I do so in terms of the authority conferred upon me by my orders from the Council of the Resistance last year, and also as President Pro Tem of Laredo’s Government-in-Ex
ile under the authority of the Great Seal of Laredo, in terms of the Declaration of Emergency filed by Laredo with the United Planets prior to the Bactrian invasion. Under no circumstances is any Laredo citizen to say or do anything that might be used by Bactria to undermine or counteract the policies, actions and plans of Laredo’s Government-in-Exile, particularly since the latter will have very few opportunities to discuss or co-ordinate its future actions with anyone on the planet. In particular, any co-operation with Bactrian military, diplomatic or political efforts against the Resistance or the Government-in-Exile is absolutely forbidden. I hereby authorize the Resistance to execute anyone disobeying these orders, if that becomes necessary.’ End quote. Over.”

  Gloria’s jaw dropped in astonishment. She managed to gather her thoughts sufficiently to say, “Persephone to Charon, please wait.”

  She looked at Jake. “Well! Your son’s on a tear, and no mistake! Ordering everyone on Laredo to obey him, just as if he were President – and encouraging the Resistance to execute our citizens! Who the hell does he think he is?”

  “Gloria, he is the President of our Government-in-Exile. He has the right and the authority to issue orders like that.”

  “Yes, but only to our off-planet forces!”

  “No. You’re flat-out wrong.” Jake’s voice was hard, remorseless. “Our Declaration of Emergency specified that in the event of his death or capture, the powers of our President would transfer to the President Pro Tem of our Government-in-Exile until we can hold free elections to replace him. Also, Dave qualified his message. If the Council is still operational and free of restrictions, he requested its co-operation. Well, it’s no longer operational, and its only surviving member – you – is a prisoner of war. Under those circumstances he’s issued his orders. I agree he’s being hardline, but if I were in his shoes I’d probably do something similar. He’s obviously afraid that the Bactrians may look for a way to ‘divide and rule’ by persuading the Resistance on Laredo to go along with them in some way. If we do, they can use that at the United Planets as an example of how the Government-in-Exile is out of touch with people here, and should therefore be ignored.”