Ричард Бейкер - Valiant Dust

Word travels fast in the chief petty officers’ quarters, it seems. Sikander supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised by that; things had been much the same since the days of oared galleys. “The situation calls for more experience and judgment than we might expect from a sublieutenant,” he told Darvesh. “I’m afraid Captain Markham doesn’t have many other choices.”

Darvesh regarded him with a stern look. “You know very well that you should not go out of your way to find dangerous situations to leap into, Nawabzada. This is exactly the sort of duty your father would disapprove of. For that matter, I disapprove of it, too. There is a difference between accepting the ordinary risks associated with the naval service, and putting yourself in the middle of thousands of angry people when you are not required to do so.”

“The fighting around Sangrur or Manigam was worse than what’s going on here.”

“Yes, but your father deployed whole battalions of soldiers on those occasions. Thirty armed sailors is the very definition of a token force.”

“It’s more than enough to defend a building or deter a crowd armed with cudgels and stones.” Sikander stripped off his jumpsuit and began to don his battle dress. Darvesh was correct, up to a point; he was obligated to avoid unnecessary risks. But he was also obligated to do his duty without shirking. He pursued his career in the Aquilan navy not only to learn, but also to teach. If an Aquilan officer would be expected to do something, then Sikander had to show the men and women around him that a Kashmiri officer would do no less. “Besides, I can hardly reverse course now.”

Darvesh stood in silence for a moment, then collected the jumpsuit from Sikander and folded it neatly. “No, sir. I suppose you cannot. But in the future I must insist that you take your father’s wishes into account before volunteering for such duty.”

“I have my reasons.” Sikander shrugged on his camo uniform, then gave Darvesh a confident smile in an effort to downplay the bodyguard’s concerns. “I can finish here. You’d better get dressed—we may be called away at any moment.”

Darvesh gave Sikander a stiffly formal bow to express his disapproval one more time. “Very good, sir. I will meet you on the hangar deck.” Then he left to gather his own gear.

Sikander glanced around the stateroom, looking for anything he might have missed. The vidscreen on the bulkhead showed the same Gadiran news feed he’d been watching from the wardroom; the news crews focused on live reports from the crash site of the sultan’s transport, although smaller windows showed images of unrest in various places.

Ranya’s lucky to have survived, he realized as the news vid zoomed in on the wrecked flyer. He found himself unable to look away, wondering what those last few moments in the flyer must have been like, whether she’d realized what was happening or even had time to be terrified. He remembered how he’d felt on the night of that last Bandi Chor Divas celebration, and the streets of Sangrur—

—echoing with the pounding of a hundred drums and the singing of ten thousand voices. Fantastic floats and troupes of dancers pass before the nawab’s box in the review stand as the warm dusk settles over the city like a blanket.

Sikander entertains himself by picking out pretty girls from the crowds. He can’t take his eyes off the young woman dancing on the grand float just now entering the city square. It’s designed to resemble a fantastic castle, and the lead dancer holds the place of honor on the loftiest of the colorful battlements. He wonders who she is, and whether he’ll be able to find her later when it’s time for the revels to begin.

Nawab Dayan gives a small nod, and the whole family rises together, holding the light globes before them. By old custom the nawab will make a few short remarks, and then his children—all young men and women now, none of them small any longer—will release their hoverlights to drift away over the crowd, joining hundreds of other lights overhead. Sikander and his siblings turn expectantly to Nawab Dayan to hear his words.

Then the bomb goes off.

Later on, the Khanate investigators would determine that it was hidden in the chassis of the ground transport beneath the castle float, and that no one in or near the gaudily decorated vehicle had any idea what was about to happen. It’s a small device, only a few kilos of molecular explosive, which is why the death toll is limited to scores instead of hundreds or thousands. The bomb is still powerful enough to knock down everyone within sixty meters, and performers dancing on top of the float are flung six or seven stories in the air. The blast hurls Sikander and everyone else in the nawab’s stand back over their seats. The flimsy grandstand buckles; he lands in a tangle of chairs and scaffolding.

Ears ringing from the blast, he struggles to his feet, clambering over the wreckage. There is no sign of the pretty girl he’d been watching in the center of the float. At first he hears nothing but the echoes of the explosion rolling back from distant buildings, but as his ears clear, he hears the first of the screams.…

Sikander shook himself and turned off the vid input.

“Enough of that, Sikay!” he muttered aloud. The bombing at Sangrur was ten years ago and three hundred light-years away; it had no more power to hurt him, not unless he allowed it to. Ranya is not seriously hurt, he reminded himself. Then again, he hadn’t been seriously hurt at the Sangrur bombing, had he? But he carried scars of a different sort.

He hesitated, then turned the vid unit back on and activated the messaging system. “Hello, Ranya,” he said as he looked into the recorder. “I just heard the news about the attack. I am terribly sorry that your uncle and others in your escort group were injured; it was a cruel and callous act. My family has been targeted by such attacks, too, and I know how you must be feeling now. I … I am very relieved to hear that you survived, and I wish you a quick recovery. If there is anything I can do for you, I hope you’ll let me know. And I promise that if I can help in some way to bring the perpetrators to justice, I will. In the meantime, may God be with you and your family today. Sikander, out.”

He thought over what he’d said, and decided that it captured his sincerity and concern well enough. A few taps on his dataslate cued it for delivery. Strictly speaking, it might not be appropriate for a serving officer to address a personal note to a high-ranking royal of another government. There was a real risk of creating a diplomatic faux pas or offending local sensibilities, and no captain would care for a subordinate causing that kind of trouble. But Sikander could defend his actions as an expression of sympathy on behalf of the Kashmiri government if he needed to—and, more to the point, he thought Ranya was his friend, and as far as he could tell she was probably having a very bad day.

He pocketed his dataslate and donned his fatigue cap, heading down to the hangar bay. But before he got ten steps from his stateroom, Michael Girard overtook him. “Excuse me, Mr. North?” he asked. “I think I have a question about that assignment you gave me.”

Sikander stopped and waited for him, suppressing his impatience. Girard carried an oversized programmer’s dataslate under his arm, and his brow was furrowed with intense concentration. “Make it quick, Mr. Girard. I need to get down to the hangar bay.”

“Which torpedo model am I supposed to be emulating, sir?” Girard asked.

Any hope that Sikander might have felt about his most junior officer somehow noticing something that everyone else had missed evaporated. CSS Hector carried only one model of torpedo—well, two, counting the practice shots. In fact, pretty much all the cruisers and a good number of the destroyers in the Aquilan navy carried the exact same weapon. He’d known that Girard could be unusually focused on his own specific duties as fire control officer, but Sikander would have thought that all of the ship’s officers knew what kind of torpedoes the ship carried. Don’t cut him down, he admonished himself. The whole idea was to give him an opportunity to excel at something without expectations.