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  A COMPANY OF HEROES

  Book Five

  The Space Cadet

  Ron Miller

  A Company of Heroes

  Book Five: The Space Cadet

  Ron Miller

  Hundreds of years in the future, the pioneering space flight made by Princess Bronwyn has evolved into an empire of interstellar commerce---an empire always on the shakey verge of rebellion. It is also a world that ranges from dense industrial slums to the glittering towers of the legendary Vortex Patrol. Into the former is born an extraordinary girl who finds herself fighting, cheating and stealing her way from the gutters of the spaceports of Blavek to the ranks of the Patrol itself.

  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.

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-369-0

  Copyright © 2014 by Ron Miller

  Cover art by: Ron Miller

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  Electronic version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  Dedicated to

  Judith, the original.

  And With Acknowledgments and Thanks to

  Morgan Robertson.

  PREFACE

  This is the first and only authorized and authentic history of the infamous space pirate, Captain Judikha. For the first time the Captain herself has taken an active part in the telling of her own story and not one word of the following volume has failed to pass her critical scrutiny. She was not only the source of much of its factual information, but oversaw the production of the manuscript and checked its every minutest detail, not allowing one word to escape her scrupulous personal inspection. Although there have been countless versions of her life told before, recounting more adventures than any one person could have undertaken in ten lifetimes, and although everyone, young or old, is familiar with her name, mostly through the medium of innumerable unauthorized “biographies,” novels, comic books, films, videos ad nauseam, few know the true story of her early life. For example, how many recall—or even know—that she was once a trusted gunner in the Space Patrol and well on the way to honorable advancement when a Fateful Discovery cruelly turned her onto the road of outlawry...

  PART ONE

  SHANGHAIED

  -I-

  The sound of the klaxon drilled through Judikha’s head like a knitting needle through a yam, which vegetable her head did indeed seem to resemble in many important and even sensational, if not strictly botanical, respects. She had no idea whether the unpleasant effect was internal or external, though she very much suspected the former since it seemed part and parcel with numerous other equally unpleasant physiological anomalies, such as an acute tinnitus, a gritty pressure behind her eyelids and a fuzzy tongue that still burned with the sour taste of vomit. The interior of her mouth felt and tasted like it had been host to a very sick mouse. There seemed to be at least two brains violently contending for the same limited space within her skull, a volume that appeared to be rapidly growing smaller—and both of them seemed such miserable specimens that she hoped neither survived, leaving her cranium a pleasantly empty, quiet shell, like a well-picked walnut.

  A voice mixed in with the siren, as though the raucous screaming were suddenly modulated into speech: “Hey! In there! What’s the matter? Hey! Come on—on your feet you miserable Musrum-cursed ringworms!”

  Judikha found the voice neither more nor less interesting than the siren—certainly no less irritating—and felt no particular compulsion to consider the meaning, if any, of the words. Her own pitiable condition was much more compelling. It was not more than five or six seconds after this thought that she found her larynx being painfully knuckled by a hairy and horny fist. Choking, she felt herself being dragged forcibly outward until she fell three feet to a bone-wrenching collapse onto an icy, riveted steel floor. Then again she heard the angry, strident voice—

  “Get to your work, you bloody slacker! Get to it or I’ll make you wish you were in hell!”

  This was something of a coincidence, since Judikha had just that moment been thinking perhaps that was exactly where she was. She managed to croak through her abused larynx: “Woss...what’s going on?”

  Cracking a gummy eyelid she saw through it the blurred image of a squat, bulky figure silhouetted against a lighted doorway. Around her were bunks and hanging from the stanchions between them were bits and pieces of spacesuits, ragged clothing and greasy duffel bags. From the open door at the end of the room, and around the porcine figure that blocked most of it, flooded the cold blue light of nauseatingly flickering fluorescents along with a draft of dank, oily air that only served to make her gorge rise further in her bruised throat.

  “Get up from there and glom onto one of them valve-clabbers,” bellowed the figure. “Quick, or I’ll boost you with my foot!”

  Judikha was not quick, neither in her movements nor mental processes; her head was throbbing and her brain (or brains)—still yam-like—was (were) reeling from the aftershocks of the drug—for drugged she was convinced she’d been. Even the shattering fall to the hard plates of the floor had failed to shake the scales from her mind. So, true to his promise, the man’s foot boosted her and the impact rolled her a foot or two nearer the door. Fortunately, her ribs remained unbroken, though she was less thankful for the new bruise. Arising unsteadily, yielding to pushes and punches which she only half-heartedly tried to fend, trying not to yield to a stomach that danced and sloshed wetly, like a cocktail shaker, she staggered through the door. Beyond was a large, roughly circular, dimly-lit machine room—perhaps a hundred and fifty feet in diameter—where a dozen half-naked males and females of various species were already at work, as pale and vaguely phosphorescent as maggots excavating the chest cavity of a cadaver.

  “Get ahold of one of them valve-clabbers,” the authoritative voice shouted in her ear, following up this invitation with a blow that launched Judikha headlong into a group of men who had been manhandling a bank of enormous brass handles that she assumed must be the valve-clabbers her tormentor kept harping on. She was accustomed to obedience, but not to being struck to obtain it. Only her disorientation saved the man from having one of the massive tools imbedded in his temple like a toothpick through a martini olive. Instead, she grasped her clabber—whatever that was—and began aping what the others around her were doing, automatically, without thought or volition. She blended almost immediately, as indistinguishable as an individual dancer in a chorus line. And, in fact, there was little enough to distinguish her from her fellow laborers. Though some were old and some were young—and she was the youngest—and though some were fat and some were thin—and she was neither the fattest nor the thinnest—and though some were as muscled as stevedores and some as weak-looking as a consumptive—and she was neither the weakest nor the strongest—and though some were short and some tall—and she was far from the shortest and not quite the tallest—and though a number of them were not altogether human—though she was entirely so—all of these mere physiological differences were made inconsequential by a shared expression of defeat, unintelligence and fear. All of these sad creatures were more or less dressed more or less alike, those that were clothed at all: among the dozen beings working in the chamber there were—if all the bits and pieces of clothing were to be cleverly if gingerly assembled—three and a half pairs of trousers, two and three-quarter shorts and seven shirts. No one but the officers wore either shoes or a complete outfit of clothing.

  The pump-room would have been as voluminous as a basketball court had it not be
en filled almost to capacity with a confused tangle of pipes, valves, cables, ducts, conduits and busbars. And pumps, of course. Dozens of massive pumps, squatting on the metal deck like a herd of sullen elephants. There was none of the ordered and cleanly-painted metalwork of a Space Patrol vessel. Instead, there was rust, darkness and disorder. The heat was stifling. The dank atmosphere was filled with oily vapors and puffs of steam; condensing water and oil dripped and drooled in a perpetual, greasy drizzle. Judikha felt as though she were entangled in the moist entrails of some enormous beast—a beast sadly afflicted with a flatulent dyspepsia.

  Judikha felt the bizarre half-waking disorientation of not knowing if she were dreaming, or if the past five years of her life were a dream from which she was just awakening. She seemed to have been transported in space and time back to the Transmoltus, back in an indiscernible heartbeat to a place she had spent the first fifteen years of her life fighting to escape, as though she had just landed on that dreaded square that sends the hapless player back to the beginning of the game.

  * * * * *

  The Transmoltus, the vast, sprawling district separated by the Slideen River from Blavek, had been the wildly throbbing heart of Tamlaght a century and a half earlier, before the abdication or defection (depending upon the bias of the historian) of the famous or infamous (see previous reference to bias) Princess Bronwyn Tedeschiiy had signaled the Great Depression that had only been relieved by the advent of spaceflight and the discovery that Blavek was ideally suited as a spaceport.

  The ancient princess was a particular heroine of Judikha’s, who read everything about her she could beg, borrow or steal (but never purchase). She took the condition of the Transmoltus and her place in it as a given for which she did not blame the princess. Like Judikha, Princess Bronwyn had also found her position in the world distasteful and oppressive. It had been a revelation to the half-feral street urchin to discover that someone could have been dissatisfied with life in the great Palace that squatted on its piers astride the Slideen River like a fastidious hippopotamus. She knew from the picture books and rotogravure supplements that the royal family had lived a life of almost unimaginable luxury, a world dizzyingly kaleidoscopic with silver and crystal and shimmering fabrics and food so fine she scarcely recognized it as such. But if the princess had not been satisfied with all of that, then—Judikha had realized with a kind of transcendental revelation—there must be something more desirable. For years she grappled with the implications of that great question, reading and rereading the scanty biographies in an effort to glean from them some clue as to what that mysteriously desirable something might have been and why someone would wish to abandon a life of safety and luxury, trading it for a life of enormous danger, peril, discomfort, injury and distress. And ultimately, of course, the amazing dénouement where, offered the throne by an abject Privy Council, Princess Bronwyn turned her back on her native country and disappeared forever into the great world. Where had she gone? What had she gained? What had all her suffering been for?*

  The government of Tamlaght, already disabled by the deprivations of Bronwyn’s brother—the prince and erstwhile king—and the reign of terror instigated by his evil chamberlain, Payne Roelt, was shaken to its rotten core. Tamlaght’s neighbor to the north, Crotoy, already testing the firmness of the ill-defended border, invaded with self-assured impunity. War, then civil war resulted. Crotoy, the smaller and poorer of the two, overreached itself and collapsed. Tamlaght, like a mad dog, turned on itself in its agony. Londeac, tied to Tamlaght by politics, history and blood, stepped in and consolidated the two weary opponents under a single flag. A bridge, long blocked by the xenophobic Tamlaght, was thrown across the Straits that separated it from Londeac and continental traffic poured into the beleaguered country, whose citizens were too tired and apathetic to care any longer. If someone was willing to take over their government, businesses, factories, shops and services—well, they were welcome to them.

  Londeac also brought to Tamlaght something else the Princess Bronwyn had a hand in: the introduction of spaceflight. The first successful round trip to one of the two moons (of which only one now remains, of course, though the earth does possess a lovely ring in place of the missing satellite) was an international sensation and every industrialized, up-to-date nation eagerly threw itself into similar projects. Progress was rapid. After only a century and a half, most of the planets of the solar system had been explored and several were even occupied by flourishing colonies. When the Academy of Science of Londeac (since renamed the Princess Bronwyn Tedeschiiy Memorial Institute of Science and Technology) developed the Ether Bender, the stars themselves became vulnerable to the human virus.

  Blavek, the capital of Tamlaght, seemed ideal for the establishment of a major spaceport. Though far from the equator (at 45° north latitude), it nevertheless possessed two appealing advantages: vast, relatively unoccupied territories to the east (so that rockets falling out of the sky would drop on no one except the odd peasant), and the unparalleled industrial complex that was the Transmoltus. The launching fields were duly constructed and half the interplanetary commerce of a continent flowed though the amazed city, leaving behind unprecedented wealth, like the silt deposited, unnoticed and unmissed, by some great river.

  While the city flourished like a withering bloom welcoming a benevolent shower (or, maintaining an earlier simile, benevolent fertilizer), the Transmoltus had not checked its decline, which only became worse for the contrast. With all the nourishing wealth filtered first through the fine screens of Blavek, there was little left to sustain the source of that wealth. The Transmoltus lay there, at the perfumed feet of the glamorous capital, like the carcass of a poleaxed ox.

  Blavek glowers and glows and twinkles only a minute’s stroll across Palace Bridge, while the factories of the Transmoltus belch flames and the burning refuse streaks the night with lurid rainbows. Smoke of a hundred hues from a hundred stacks floats over the district, turning the streets into the stuff of nightmares and darkening the very thoughts of the inhabitants, such as they are. The factories light the horizon with stars and ribbons of light and the lovely people in the shining hotels and apartments look upon them and comment how pretty they look, and then turn and take another cocktail in private toasts to the good fortune that had put them on the proper side of the river.

  Against the increasing yellow of the evening, the vast blocks rise densely black, and the great, slim smokestacks group themselves in dim, accidental grandeur, like bare ribs, as they pour their curses on the sky with grunt and spit and bellow.

  While the gangling, scrawny kid—full of the colt’s quiver—with legs as long and flexible as carpenter’s rules—had grown up a semi-orphan deep in the heart of this dying beast, she had in fact (though this is a biographical detail of which previous to the compilation of this manuscript even she had been totally unaware) been born to a tenant farmer and his wife in the drought-devastated plains to the far west of the city.

  II.

  There would have been little hope for a crop the year Judikha was born even if it hadn’t been for the volcano.

  Two years of unrelenting drought had converted most of the farm to a fine, dry dust that was carried away by ceaseless westerly gales. Sunsets all over Guesclin, and as far away as the Continent, were made gloriously lurid by the airborne farmland, though housewives and maids in the capital were forced to repeatedly clean their furniture of the fine, grey, gritty film that accumulated almost hourly and grumbled at the inconvenience.

  Rains finally did come, but they were torrential and fell during the winter when the ground was hard and lifeless. Whatever of a farm still clung tenaciously to the bedrock was scoured and carried off by thousands of muddy freshets. The streams and then the rivers became swollen, opaque and brown. The Wladir River, which drained the western country, looked like a broad, chocolate-colored highway. One could sit motionless on its bank and watch all of the dissolved West pass by. Fishermen and ship captains complained bitterly tha
t the silt was choking the channels and that fish were dying in the turbid, oxygenless water. The dredgers were constantly busy while new docks had to be built ever further downstream on the increasingly unnavigable river.

  Now the volcano had erupted and what it had not buried beneath its gritty ash it obliterated beneath the pasty lava that poured from its flanks. Geologically, the landscape was not the least volcanic. The eruption was the result of a kind of accident that had occurred more than two hundred years earlier (an accident, perhaps not surprisingly, with which Princess Bronwyn had some connection*). For most of that time, the benign outpouring of lava had engendered a flourishing tourist trade. The volcanic region of Strabane became a popular tourist attraction and its hotels, resorts and spas had been a generator of income for hundreds of miles around—directly, for thousands of employees, indirectly for the vast infrastructure of farms, orchards and dairies that surrounded the region. Hotels, restaurants and shops catered to the people who came to enjoy the bizarre plutonic sights and to indulge in whatever benefits they imagined lay in the sulfurous hot springs and pools of bubbling mud. Then something happened and Strabane had burst like a lanced carbuncle.

  Now the molten rock had spread in a vast, incandescent sheet almost to the door of the farmer’s small house. Where there had once been the stubble of shriveled crops, there was now an endless black plain, simmering, steaming and bubbling through its sintery crust like a hot meat pie.

  Obviously, something had gone very wrong.

  The farmer and his wife watched the daily eruption with a kind of bovine resignation. The volcano proper was invisible, since it was only a relatively low dome easily hidden behind the smoldering horizon, but during the day the heavy column of ash and smoke that poured from its vent boiled high into the sky. At night its location was marked by a lambent shimmer, like distant lightning or forest fire. At every hour, day or night, its discontented grumbling made the earth shiver like a chastened dog.