Forty Thousand in Gehenna Read Free Page A

lifted the glass. “Easy done.”
    “Huh, easy. The last such lot I dropped was glad to get off alive.”
    “What last lot? You do this weekly?”
    “Ah.” Engles sipped at her glass and arched a brow. “You’ll not be telling me I’m to brief you on that.”
    “No. I know what the program is. And the ship knows, does she?”
    “We have to. What we’re doing, if not where. We’re the transport. We’ll be seeing you more than once, won’t we? Keep us happy.”
    “By then,” Conn said, “any other set of faces is going to come welcome.”
    Engles gave a one-sided smile. “I expect it will. I’ve run a few of these assignments. Always like to see the special op heading it up. Far less trouble that way.”
    “Ever had any trouble?”
    “Oh, we haven’t.”
    He lifted a brow and drained the glass. There were photofaxes on the office walls, ships and faces, some of the photos scarred and scratched. Faces and uniforms. He had a gallery like that in his own duffle. The desk had a series of pictures of a young man, battered and murky. He was not about to ask. The photos never showed him older. He thought of Jean, with a kind of grayness inside…had known a moment of panic, the realization of his parting from Cyteen, boarding another ship, leaving the places Jean had known, going somewhere her memory did not even exist. And all he took was the pictures. Engles offered him a half glass more and he took it.
    “You need any special help in boarding?” Engles asked.
    “No. Just so someone gets my duffle on. The rest is coming in freight.”
    “We’ll take your officers aboard at their leisure. Science and support personnel, when they arrive, are allotted a lounge to themselves, and they’ll kindly use it.”
    “They will.”
    “A lot smoother that way. They don’t mix well, my people and civs.”
    “Understood.”
    “But you have to make it mix, don’t you? I sure don’t envy you the job.”
    “New world,” he said, a shrug. The liquor made him numb. He felt disconnected, and at once in a familiar place, a ship like a dozen other ships, a moment lived and relived. But no Jean, That was different. “It works because it has to work, that’s all. They need each other. That’s how it all fits together.”
    Engles pressed a button on the console. “We’ll get your cabin set up. Anything you need, you let me know.”
    The aide came back. “The colonel wants his cabin,” Engles said quietly.
    “Thanks,” Conn said, took the hand offered a second time, followed the black-uniformed spacer out into the corridors, blinking in the warmth of the liquor.
    The scars were there…the aide was too young to know; scars predating the clean, the modern corridors. The rebellion at Fargone; the war—the tunnels and the deep digs…
    Jean had been with him then. But twenty years the peace had held, uneasy detente between Union and the merchanter Alliance. Peace was profitable, because neither side had anything to gain in confrontation…yet. There was a border. Alliance built warships the Accord of Pell forbade; Union built merchant ships the Accord limited to farside space…cargo ships that could dump their loads and move; warships that could clamp on frames and haul: the designs were oddly similar, tokening a new age in the Between, with echoes of the old. Push would come to shove again; he believed it; Engles likely did.
    And the Council must believe it…making moves like this, establishing supply, the longterm advantage of bases on worlds, which were unstrikable under the civilized accords; most of all assuring an abundance of worldbred troops who could not retreat. Union seeded worlds, strategically placed or otherwise…every site which could marginally support human life…an entrenched, immovable expansion which would bottle Alliance in close to their own center and thoroughly infiltrate any territory Alliance might gain in war or negotiations.
    The building of carrier ships like Venture was part of