But there were no leaves in the military cemetery, or trees to shed them, only endless rows of stark white crosses that marched away to top a low rise.

  As the last notes of taps died away, Chief Warrant Officer “Guns” Naisbit stood at rigid attention. A squad of marines fired the traditional salute while some civilians lowered his only son into the ground.

  Under normal circumstances marines would’ve done that, but it was wartime and marines were in short supply.

  Not bodies, though. No, there were lots of those, and more on the way. They kept ’em frozen until they had enough to justify a run. Then they brought ’em home stacked like cord wood in the hold of some ship. So many, buried so often, that the media didn’t come anymore.

  By the virtue of some good or bad luck, Naisbit wasn’t sure which, he’d been dirtside when Tony was killed. The official records called it “a major ship-to-ship action in defense of critical supply vectors,” but Naisbit had been in the navy for a long time and had sources of his own. Sources who informed him that Tony’s squadron had been jumped by a superior force, had called for help and been ignored by an admiral who didn’t want any part of an action he might lose. So Tony, along with five hundred and sixty-three other men and women, had died.

  Naisbit remembered his son’s graduation from OCS, how proud he’d been, how much Tony looked like his mother.

  She’d looked good too, standing there by her second husband, clapping with delight when her son’s name was read and he accepted the insignia of his new rank.

  Second Lieutenant Tony Naisbit, USMC. It had a ring to it, a meaning, a significance.

  But that was gone now, nothing more than a series of on and off impulses in some giant computer, a debit in the game of war.

  The strange part was that Tony had died defending something that earth had so much of, water, the same substance he’d loved to sail on.

  But there had been no sailing off Callisto, no joyful rush of wind and wave, only the giving and taking of death. A process as old as man himself.

  Naisbit bit back tears as the black staff sergeant handed him the flag that had draped Tony’s coffin and give him a salute. Naisbit returned it, handed the flag to his ex-wife, and made himself a promise.

  The Feds were going to pay. Nothing comes free. Not even blood.

  The orders had been sitting in Lieutenant Commander Nathan Shimmura’s electronic in-box for more than a week before he got around to reading them. Paperwork, reports, and the other fine points of administration were not Shimmura’s strong suit.

  Shimmura was a technoid pure and simple, a being who lived on a plane where all things were expressed in terms of stress ratings, algorithms, gear ratios, atomic structures, and power loads. Things he could depend on, manipulate, and control.

  For the last two weeks Shimmura had been totally consumed by the job of fitting new drives into the battle cruiser Lincoln. A touchy job even in a fully equipped dockyard and almost unheard of anywhere else, especially in the asteroids, at a Level III maintenance facility.

  The Lincoln’s commanding officer, a woman named McIntyre, was well aware of Shimmura’s orders and, being no fool, did nothing to bring them to his attention. Shimmura was her only hope, and she’d be damned if they’d get him till the drives were in.

  But McIntyre was fair if nothing else, and once the drives were installed she arranged to have the orders brought to the engineer’s attention and ordered a scout to get Shimmura to his next duty station on time.

  Although why an officer of Shimmura’s rank and abilities had been assigned to some rust-bucket of a freighter McIntyre couldn’t fathom. But so what? Everyone knew admirals were crazy and this proved it.

  As for Shimmura himself, or just plain “Shim” as he preferred to be called, once aboard the two-person scout he found any number of problems that required his attention and began to fix them.

  Shimmura hummed as he worked, hands caressing tools, mind probing ahead. It made little difference where he was headed or what waited at the other end. He had problems to solve and the means to solve them. What more could he ask?

  Willie Lawson fired the sled’s braking jets, checked to make sure the locator beacons were on, and examined his ship. There was a scratch across the front of his faceplate and it caused things to ripple when he turned his head.

  The Alice B. was the only one of many ships being refitted for wartime duty. She hung there like a desperately ill patient, countless tubes and cables running in and out of her durasteel body, dependent on others for her every need.

  Her already powerful drives had been taken apart and completely rebuilt. The holds that had once hauled tons of supplies from earth to the roids had been subdivided, filled with weapons systems, and reinforced. A new tac comp lived deep in her hull; its fiber-optic circulatory system pumped information out to every part of the ship, and brought more back as sensors came on-line.

  Yes, in a few days, a week at most, the Alice B. would be ready for war. Or as ready as she’d ever be.

  The funny part was that she’d look exactly the same, the big, vaguely delta-shaped hull, with none of the aerodynamic grace common to atmospheric craft. Not a warship, not a liner, just a beat-up old freighter.

  And that was the idea behind Q ships. Hoping to capture the freighter intact, Federal raiders would come in close, weapons suddenly would be revealed, and presto—victim becomes predator.

  That was the plan anyway, and Willie hoped it would work.

  Willie took a moment to look around.

  This was the U.N.’s only base in the asteroids. It was protected by a number of heavily fortified rocks and ran round the clock. The heart of the complex was a large planetoid some four hundred miles in diameter called “Big Red,” after the reddish color of its outer surface.

  Heavily mined years before, Big Red was nearly hollow and crammed full of factories, offices, living quarters, storage facilities and more.

  With Big Red as a backdrop Willie watched as tugs pushed smaller asteroids toward the huge, free-floating processors, where they would give up their precious manganese, platinum, cadmium, chromium, molybdenum, tellurium, vanadium, and tungsten. These minerals and many more were required in order to fight a protracted war.

  The problem was that these were third- and fourth-rate rocks, asteroids too light in valuable minerals to justify attention during peacetime, and barely worthwhile now. That along with the fact that you can’t eat and drink metals.

  The multitude of colonies that now swam in near earth orbits needed a steady flow of organic matter and liquids in order to balance their biospheres. The asteroids were a source but a damned poor one, since very few were rich in light elements such as hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen.

  Still, a whole generation of rockrats had eked out a dangerous living pushing asteroids in toward earth, risking their lives in ships that were little more than pressurized tin cans.

  Willie knew. He’d been one of the few to strike it really rich, to find a “melon” as the rockrats called them, and to turn that find into something more than a three-month drunk.

  Willie had started the company now known as “Atar, Inc.” and sold most of it before getting in over his head. Willie Lawson wasn’t qualified to run a multimillion-dollar corporation, and knew it.

  What he was qualified to do was run supplies out to the rockrats, load up on refined metals from small processors out in the belt, and haul the stuff back. That’s what Willie and the Alice B. had been doing for a lot of years now, and between that and his company stock it was plenty.

  But the bad old days were over, the belt was close to picked clean, and the good stuff was on Jupiter—well, not Jupiter herself, but on her moons, especially Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Huge ice balls that could provide near-Earth-orbit habitats with life-giving water. Water that was a lot cheaper to obtain than lifting it from earth. Water worth fighting and dying for.

  So the idiots who ran earth started a war. A nasty affair, which pitted the Southern Hemisphere and its orbital holdings against the North, and its holdings, leaving Willie in the middle.

  The truth was that Willie didn’t care who won as long he and the Alice B. made it through. The Alice was more than a ship, she was a symbol of an opportunity lost, and he’d stand by her to the end.

  Willie heard a woman’s voice in his headset. “Commander Lawson . . . this is Red Area Control. Please report to compartment one-niner-four, level six, grid coordinates twenty-one seventy-six at sixteen hundred hours standard, over.”

  Lawson swore under his breath. Another damned meeting. If meetings were battles the U.N. would win hands down. During the last couple of weeks he’d been to meetings on logistics, strategy, physical hygiene, tactics, intelligence, morale, and god knows what else. He’d slept through most of them.

  “That’s a roger, area control, one-niner-four, level six, grid twenty-one seventy-six at sixteen hundred hours standard, over.”

  Willie fired the sled’s jets, put the skeletal vehicle into a tight turn, and scooted toward the huge illuminated 4. It was one of Red’s six launch bays, each one handling a different kind of traffic, and filled with activity.

  Even from a distance Willie could see the flare of braking jets, green and red navigation lights moving across the blackness of space, the blue wink of welding torches, and the white stutter of alignment beams as a ship slid into dock.

  A few moments later Willie added his lights to all the rest as he entered Bay 4 and grounded the sled.

  It was a huge, cavernous place full of space-suited figures, automated machinery, stacks of cargo modules, and blue-green light.

  Enlisted personnel saluted the flashes welded to each shoulder of Willie’s space suit and he felt silly repeating the motion.

  Willie had long regarded his commission in the naval reserve as something to put up with rather than work at. It was law. A hassle imposed on anyone with a master’s certificate and a certain amount of experience. And once you had the commission, rank came with the passage of time. Willie supposed that if he lived long enough he’d become an admiral! The thought made him laugh.

  An hour later Willie had taken a quick shower—there wasn’t any other kind on Big Red—and donned a new uniform. It at least met Willie’s standards for usefulness and simplicity. It was space-black, equipped with a multitude of velcroed pockets, and baggy enough to be comfortable.

  The corridors were heavily traveled and it took a while to reach the point where corridors 21 and 76 came together. Willie looked around, and sure enough, there was compartment 194. The hatch was open and he stepped inside.

  The compartment was small as meeting rooms go, with an oval table, and seating for six. Only one person was present, however, a large man in a captain’s uniform, with white hair and a spade-shaped beard. He had piercing blue eyes.

  The man stood and held out his hand. “Commander Lawson . . . I’m Dr. Forbush . . . oh damn. I’ve done it again. Sorry about that. Captain Forbush now . . . not that it makes much difference. Thank you for coming. Pick a seat, any seat, it’s just the two of us.”

  Willie selected a chair and sat down. “Just the two of us, sir? I’m surprised. I’ve been to a hundred meetings during the last few weeks and they were always packed to the overhead with attendees.”

  Forbush chuckled. “I know what you mean. In this case however you are the only commanding officer present by virtue of the fact that the Q-25 is the only ship of her kind.”

  “Q-25?”

  “Q-ship number twenty-five,” Forbush answered patiently. “If all goes well the U.N. will commission twenty-five vessels, starting with number twenty-five, and working backwards.”

  Willie shook his head in amazement. “Don’t tell me, let me guess. The designation ‘Q-25’ sounds better than ‘Q-1.’”

  Forbush grinned agreeably. “See? You’re already thinking like an admiral. Now let’s get down to business. I understand you’re something less than pleased with the Q-ship concept, and fond of asking, ‘Who the hell thought of this anyway?’”

  Willie started to say something in reply but Forbush held up a hand.

  “Don’t bother to deny it—I know it’s true. The answer, by the way, is ‘me,’ I’m the one who suggested the use of Q-ships. I’m a military historian, but more than that, a military historian with good political connections. Good enough that when I suggested Q-ships some important people were willing to listen.”

  Once again Willie tried to speak and Forbush held up a hand. “And before you launch off into a diatribe against my blatant use of political influence, let’s talk about you. A rather wealthy captain who used his political influence to get assigned to his own ship.”

  There was a long moment of silence while the two men stared at each other before both broke into laughter. It went on for some time.

  Finally Forbush reached under the table and brought up a half-empty container of Scotch and a couple of plastic glasses. “How ’bout a drink?”

  Willie agreed, and found the historian’s whiskey to be very smooth. “So, we’re both rotten, now what?”

  Forbush swirled his whiskey, He held it up the light and examined it with a critical eye. “Now we help win the war.”

  Forbush talked nonstop for the next two hours. He started with the Trojan Horse, worked his way up through the early privateers, and ended up talking about the Q-ships of World War II. He did it with such conviction and passion that by the time he was finished Willie believed in them, too. Not that he wanted to command one especially, but believed in them and their capacity to hurt the Feds.

  According to Forbush the U. N. had a temporary advantage. After early successes by the Feds things had finally shifted. The U.N. had a slight advantage. They were getting more supplies to the people who needed them than the Feds were.

  As a result the Feds were doing everything they could to capture U.N. freighters intact, thereby gaining both a ship and its cargo. They had even converted some huge passenger liners like the Kenya and the Argentina to military use, turning them into commerce raiders. These ships were powerfully armed and carried extra personnel to function as prize crews.

  That allayed one of Willie’s worst fears, that the Alice would be blasted on sight and never have a chance to fight back.

  So given the fact that the Alice B. would be the first of her kind, and would have the advantage of surprise, Willie tended to agree. And by the time the meeting was over he was even slightly enthusiastic. Or was it the whiskey? Well, whatever it was it felt good, and he stumbled off to bed.

  One of the few good things about the Alice B’s conversion to a Q-ship was the fact that it made her roomy by comparison with other warships.

  Even after the installation of weapons and additional armor the space previously taken up by her holds translated into a few extra square feet of room for each compartment, including the wardroom.

  Like the interior of most warships the wardroom had a rough, functional look, with lots of exposed conduit, junction boxes, and air ducts. A long rectangular table dominated the center of the room, its surface covered with coffee containers, food, empty glasses, and printouts. All of the officers, plus the ship’s senior ratings, were seated at the table, an arrangement that Willie liked and Perko didn’t.

  Perko had argued against including the ratings, indicating that such familiarity “. . . would break down the necessary distance between leaders and subordinates.”

  Willie had countered by saying that “these ‘subordinates,’ as you call them, will decide whether our rank-heavy asses live or die. It would be nice if they knew what was going on.”

  His face bleak, Perko sat on Willie’s right. He was a handsome man, like a recruiting holo come to life, with even features and a square jaw.

  Willie was still getting to know his XO but some things were already apparent. Perko was extremely intelligent, competent, and unhappy. Having read Perko’s file, Willie thought he knew why. Perko came from a military family—his father was a general, no less—and was as they say, “career-motivated.” His kind would see the war as an opportunity for advancement, the kind of advancement that comes on a tin can or cruiser, not an experiment like the Q-25.

  Then there was Christoferson. She wore her black hair military-short, sported a nose stud, and chain-smoked non-reg stim sticks.

  Everyone liked her, and Willie was no exception. She was beautiful but didn’t use it, and extremely competent.

  There was a haunted look in Christoferson’s eyes though, the same look marines refer to as “the thousand-yard stare,” and Willie wondered how long she’d be able to keep it together. Her file said she was okay, cured of post-combat stress syndrome, but Willie had his doubts. She’d bear watching.

  Willie shifted his gaze further down the table to where Naisbit sat, or “Guns” as everyone called him. Here at least was a true professional. Naisbit had sixteen years in, had risen through the ranks, and knew every weapons system the navy had. Neither his file nor his behavior hinted at problems of any kind. A solid asset.

  And speaking of assets, seated at the far end of the table was Lieutenant Commander Nathan Shimmura, black hair hanging down into his face as he used a pocket tool kit to work on a component Guns had brought to his attention, blissfully unaware of his surroundings.

  Here was absolute proof that one could rise on ability alone, because Willie felt sure that Shimmura had never had a political thought in his whole life, and never would. He never ordered his techs to do something he wouldn’t do himself, and had a hard time keeping his hands off the tools. The Alice B. was in good hands.

  Also present were Petty Officer First Class “Doc” Tresner, a cheerful woman of intermediate age with medical responsibility for the entire crew, and Petty Officer Third Class “Sparks” Yetter, Doc’s best friend and the ship’s leading com tech.

  The rest of the crew was not present but probably listening in via jury-rigged mikes. Some COs spent a lot of time sweeping for bugs but Willie didn’t bother. The truth was that if the wardroom had been a little larger he would’ve invited all of them in.