Read Online The Thirteenth Man by J.L. Doty - Free Book Online Page B

de Maris legacy. Cesare, without a thought to the contrary, had dropped him right back into his allotted slot in the de Maris household. And until that moment Charlie hadn’t questioned that, had responded without thought to a lifetime of conditioning. He’d lay down his life for House de Maris, but he began to wonder now where this was going. With the Syndonese involved did that mean another war? Another prison camp? If not for him, then maybe for others.
    Charlie didn’t have to work hard to suddenly feel very paranoid, and it occurred to him that a healthy dose of distrust might be the best thing he could do for House de Maris. He decided to make sure he had a backup plan for everything. He’d feel a lot better if he could figure out a way to have some firepower on hand when they went to Turnlee. But it would require Lucius’s permission to bring anything more than Cesare’s flagship.
    It occurred to him there might be something he could do, and if he was sneaky enough, Lucius need never know. However, it might be wise to first have a chat with Darmczek and some of the others with whom he’d shared the chain.
    We from the chain certainly understand survival, Charlie thought, and he smiled. We can always apologize later . . . or they can assume we were sorry when we’re dead.

 
    CHAPTER 5
    NICE DIGS
    T he weather report for the vicinity about the Almsburg Palace described a cold, late-­autumn day with a nasty windchill, and as the shuttle dropped through the outer reaches of Turnlee’s atmosphere Charlie couldn’t put aside his sense of unease. Perhaps he’d gotten a bit too paranoid of late; certainly the precautions he’d taken were extreme, provoking a raised eyebrow even from the normally reticent Roacka. And Darmczek had warned him that he was breaking the king’s law by violating Turnlee nearspace. The twins had been his only supporters in this.
    He’d had Darmczek split up the individual units of his small flotilla. They were under orders to keep their power plants operating well below that of a warship, to approach the Turnlee system independently from different directions and times, to fake up their electronic identifications and claim to be noncombatant vessels—­merchantmen, freighters, and the like—­to shut down all nonessential systems so their emission signatures matched their supposed identities, and then drift slowly into Turnlee nearspace. They could get away with that because they could generate their own fake clearance codes. His hope was that nothing would happen, in which case his ships would quietly turn around and leave the system the way they’d come. On the other hand, if something did happen, he’d have some serious firepower at his disposal.
    He’d also enlisted the aid of Taggart, captain of Defender , which had brought them all here and was in orbit around Turnlee, though he’d had to lie to Taggart and claim that Cesare was privy to, and supported, his paranoid fears; just one more complication among many. Taggart knew Charlie was lying, but if Charlie’s head rolled, Taggart could claim Charlie had misled him.
    Charlie’s plan was simple: as soon as the shuttle dropped them off it would return to Defender , pick up a squad of fifty marines in full combat armor, then return to Almsburg where it would park in an unobtrusive corner of the palace’s landing field. The marines would be kept in the cargo hold of the shuttle in stimsleep, from which they could be awakened in moments, fresh and ready to fight. That meant Charlie had some firepower on the ground, close at hand, with a response time of minutes. Looking out the window of the shuttle he breathed a long sigh. He had to agree with Darmczek: he was probably just paranoid.
    Better paranoid than dead.
    The shuttle landed, they disembarked into a diamond-­clear, bitterly cold day. A band struck up a rousing chorus as Cesare’s