The Fleet-Book Four Sworn Allies

by David Drake (ed)

  He watched her as she ignored him, watching the play of lights from the computer guidance screens and chewing serenely. Finally, his anger edged out his hurt pride. “So why didn’t you just toss me out an airlock, anyway?” he demanded.

  “No profit in it,’” she said, unconcerned.

  For a moment, his hope flared up. “You mean . . . ?”

  “Can’t extract payment from a corpse,” she finished. “You breathe my air, you eat my supplies, you gotta pay for it. One way or another.”

  He slumped down in his chair. “So you’re going to take me back,” he said dejectedly.

  She laughed. “Take you back? Hell, I ain’t taking you back to that mud ball. I got a cargo hold full of bootleg booze I just happened to run across to deliver to Vega IX. How you get back is your problem, snotnose.”

  “Vega IX!” he protested. “That’s on the Edge! There’s nothing out there but Khalians.”

  “Nothin’ but bored, overworked, thirsty miners and a shitload of duty-free, nearly pure and only slightly illegal Vegan Bloodstone Dust,” she agreed. “Strong young man like you could cut a contract with them enough to pay your bill to me with even a little left over.” She handed him his hardglass helmet, her eyes crinkled in amusement at his dismay. “Just be glad I’m an ethical person, son. I could just as easily sell you to the Vegans for scut labor and you might never see daylight again, never mind fly. Should only take you two or three years at the most to work up enough for passage off planet. Now put this on.”

  He pushed his head into the helmet and fastened it to the collar ring of the pressure suit. He noticed that she had left her helmet off.

  “Why?” he asked, watching her flip a series of controls, then push dual handbars down flush with the Command Flight Controls on her armboards.

  His head felt as if the skull had suddenly been squeezed too tightly around his brain, and his stomach liquefied in one sickening lurch. With an uncontrollable convulsion, he threw up. His hands scrabbled at the helmet as the blurry former contents of his stomach, trapped inside his helmet, floated in the abrupt weightlessness. Her hands slapped them away.

  “Leave it on, or I’ll break your fingers,” he heard her say warningly, her voice vague through the hardglass. His hands fell away from the helmet, and he held on to the tabs of the pressure suit that were keeping him secure in the copilot’s chair.

  The swirling muck got sucked into his nose as he tried to breathe and he choked, sputtering miserably. He closed his eyes and breathed through clenched teeth to filter the air.

  For several minutes he suffered from the smell and the feel of slime tumbling inside his helmet.

  The sound of whirring cool air against his skin startled him, and within seconds, the vomit had been filtered out of the helmet. He opened his eyes, his lashes caked with mucus, to see Molly squirting clean water into a port in his suit, laughing. The suit sucked out the residue, and after a few more cleaning applications. Molly helped him to remove his helmet.

  He still felt nauseous.

  “Whatsamatter, kid? FTL bother you?”

  He rubbed at his eyes with the sleeve of the pressure suit. “I thought . . . FTL envelope . . .” He struggled past the nausea.

  She shook her head, amused. “You’ve seen too many holoshows, snotnose. The Folly doesn’t have an FTL envelope. She’s too old, too heavy. She doesn’t have a lot of fancy hardware, too expensive. We just ride it out like the old days, when men were men and space was the Vast Unknown Frontier. Ain’t that what you wanted, kid? Adventure, glory, the whole bullshit?”

  He groaned. “I feel sick . . .”

  She rammed the chewed end of the red stick into her mouth and turned back to the control boards, shutting down blank sub-light instruments one after another. With a whine, the FTL panels slid down into place, enigmatic lights plinking lazily in the FTL continuum. “You’d get used to it after the first dozen jumps or so, but then you won’t be around long enough to worry about it. As it is, you’ll be here for a couple of weeks, so sit back and relax.”

  He stared at her. “A couple of weeks!” he protested, then clamped one hand over his mouth, gulping air.

  With a final check of the instruments, which to Jayson seemed inadequately few, she folded her arms and yawned, stretching sleepily in the weightlessness. “The Folly’s a freighter, boy, not a Fleet destroyer, and you ain’t on any pleasure cruise.” Within minutes, she was snoring.

  The nausea did abate after a day or so, but his appetite never completely returned. The same queasy feeling stayed with him the entire flight, although he did his best to try to hide it from Molly Haskowin.

  She seemed truly unconcerned with his presence, and he constantly explored the ship out of boredom. The Molly’s Folly seemed pretty much as dull and ugly on the inside as she was externally. The entire ship consisted of layers of odd holds and ill-fitting compartments fused along the remains of the original craft, creating a maze of honeycombed holds, some jammed full of various cargoes, some depressingly empty. Cables snaked in naked spaghettied confusion along the ribs and the bulkhead, punctuated with bleak, utilitarian circuit translator boxes, some with their original lids, some without. Hatches had been bored out of the original hull, dribblets of fused metal around the airlocks showed where they had been connected to compartments cannibalized from other ships of questionable origins. Steel hand ladders led to some hatches, others had no such accommodations. The Folly was a study in stark pragmatic economy, and yet Jayson sensed a tenacity and strength that years had not stripped out and covered up.

  Several holds leading to other levels were locked, and not with the ancient, flimsy secure-lock the Folly’s outer cargo airlocks used. He tried every way he knew to break their seal, but to no avail. He tried to shine a light through the smoked hardglass ports in the airlocks to peer inside, but there were some secrets the Folly kept to herself, containing what he couldn’t imagine.

  He attempted to maintain a stubborn silence with the old woman, but that quickly became boring, too. She barely acknowledged him and seemed perfectly content to alternately doze and check the controls, making computations on the computers. Occasionally, she listened to various mol-tapes, and he grimaced at the screetch of strange music and incomprehensible rasping babble that sounded like nothing he had ever heard. Finally, too bored to maintain his masque of silence and sick of the irritating sounds she listened to, he tried to draw her into a conversation.

  “Don’t you have a viewing port to look outside?” ‘

  She didn’t seem surprised that he’d ended his pique. “What for?” she asked. “Don’t need ‘em. Guidance system and the computers tell me all I need to know.”

  “It’s not the same. Wouldn’t you just like to see the stars?”

  “Nothin’ to see in FTL. It’s all the same. Just pretty sights in sub-light. Useless.” She spat out a bit of the chewed stick.

  He grimaced as it spun to the floor and stuck. “What is that stuff?”

  She took the stick out of her mouth and regarded the glob of splattered mess hardening on the floor. “Have no idea,” she said finally. “Got it off a Khalian cruiser.”

  “But why do you chew it?”

  She replaced it in her mouth and grinned, steel teeth gleaming, pointed and sharp. “Bubblegum’s bad for my dental work, Junior.”

  He tried again to maintain a dignified silence, but the old woman made him curious. After an hour, he asked, “Why did you get steel teeth like that? Implants are as good as real teeth.”

  Her head snapped around and she surprised him with her sudden anger. “You ask too many stupid questions, boy. Shut your gaddamn mouth and leave me be.”

  Unfastening her suit from the pilot’s chair, she propelled herself out of the f’ward hatch, leaving him staring after her with his mouth open.

  He stayed carefully out of her way for the rest of the day and
was drifting off to sleep, curled up, arms floating, when she spoke to him again.

  “Titanium,” she said.

  His eyes opened sleepily, feeling gummy. “Huh?”

  In the dimmed light of the f’ward cockpit he could see the shadows in her face, white hair floating like a halo around her head. “Titanium,” she repeated in a clear, unemotional voice. “The teeth are titanium, not steel.”

  He didn’t know quite how to respond. “Oh.”

  “There wasn’t any steel onboard.” It seemed as if she were talking to herself. “We had plenty of titanium, though. Lots of titanium. Lots of time. Just floating around, most of us dying of Spacer’s Ricketts. All I lost was my teeth. Lucky me.”

  He knew of Spacer’s Ricketts. In prolonged null-gravity, the body’s calcium degenerated, bones became brittle, muscles wasted away. Internal grav units and faster flights had made Spacer’s Ricketts as obsolete as bubonic plague or smallpox or herpes. He said nothing.

  “Dr. Dentum,” she mused to herself, rolling the name around. She leaned closer to him and he could smell the alcohol on her breath as she smiled. “Hell of a guy. No doctor, shit, no. But he was the best damned metallurgist I ever met. Could’a turned lead into gold, if he had to. Made me a fine set of teeth. Hell of a bite. Damned shame he didn’t make it off the Peter Donneville.”

  The name startled him. The Peter Donneville had been a military cargo freighter carrying several thousand tons of war matériel and 600 military personnel across disputed shipping space. The Cartel of Vannavar fired on her as she came into their inner system, touching off a war between the Alliance and the Cartel lasting four years. For four years, the gutted Peter Donneville orbited Vannavar, Fleet vessels unable to rescue the survivors, the Cartel uninterested in prisoners. Only fifty-seven people survived aboard her when the Cartel finally signed a treaty with the Alliance. But that had been back in . . . and that meant . . .

  “Holy shit,” Jayson Tabott breathed with respect. The old woman looked up at him blearily. “No wonder you hate everybody.”

  She pulled a flask from inside her partially unfastened pressure suit and drank from it. “Don’t hate everybody”—she grinned—“haven’t met everybody, snotnose.” She leaned over and patted his knee. “Old joke, boy. Very old.” She hiccupped and finished off the flask. Within minutes, she had passed out, snoring lightly.

  The gentle thud of the flask bouncing off his forehead as it floated in the f’ward cockpit woke him. He glanced over at Molly as she dangled serenely upside down from his point of view, held to the pilot’s chair by only two straps. He pushed her foot away from his face as it twisted slowly by him and stared drowsily at the blinking red lights flashing on the FTL systems.

  “Molly,” he said, alarmed and waking up fast. He pulled her into her seat by hauling on her pants, and shook her. Her head flopped loosely and she opened bloodshot eyes. “Molly, wake up . . .”

  She coughed, a rapid series of explosive grunts deep in her chest, and frowned at the blinking panel. “Gaddamn it . . .” she muttered, and smacked the side of the instrument board with the flat of her hand. A blaring siren screamed to life. Clutching her head in pain with one hand, she hit the FTL board with clawing fingers, finally silencing the warning blare. “I gotta work on that one of these days . . .”

  “What is it?” Jayson asked nervously, watching her as she fastened herself into the pilot’s chair, swinging around to the navigational bridge. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothin’. We’re getting ready for sub-light.” She grinned viciously at him. “This is my favorite part . . . Y’know, with an FTL envelope, we’d be able to check our entry down to the micrometer.”

  He looked at her with dawning comprehension. “But you said . . .”

  “Yup,’” she agreed cheerily, “the Folly’s as blind as a bat in FTL. No envelope, no internal gravity, no cushy jumps . . . no fancy pants reentry navigational aids. Just like the good ol’ days.”

  “But . . . how do you know where we are?” He stared at the FTL board with horror, realizing now why it seemed so small.

  She tapped one finger against her temple. “Brains, snotnose, something all your hotshot pilots seem to have forgotten how to do . . . navigate.”

  He regarded the old woman and the outdated ancient guidance controls and sluggish computers with equal apprehension. “But how do you know we won’t jump straight into a planet’s atmosphere, or another ship . . . or the middle of a sun?”

  “Don’t,” she said, unconcerned.

  “But . . .”

  “Bang. We’re gone.”

  “But . . . but . . . you’re not supposed to be able to do that!” he accused her suddenly. “You can’t bypass the safeties . . . they got laws . . . that’s illegal, goddamn it!”

  She laughed, and he felt himself growing red. “Y’want to get out and walk?” she said, amused and exasperated. “Look, kid, I know where we were. I know just how fast the Folly can cruise in FTL. I know where we’re going. Space is a big place. Chances are we won’t hit a thing.”

  “But . . .” he said weakly.

  She looked at him, suddenly serious, her voice uncommonly gentle. “You wanted to be a pilot. This is what it’s about, kid. All the latest and complex technology in the universe won’t get you shit if you don’t know how to fly. It takes old-fashioned guts and common sense. Y’want to be safe? Y’want to be a hero without risking your ass? Y’should have stayed home.” She handed him his hardglass helmet. “Settle in, snotnose.”

  He cradled the helmet in his lap, excited and determined that this time he would not throw up. His stomach tightened in anticipation and dread.

  If anything, the jump back was worse. While one part of his brain was crying in joy that they were still alive, the rest was trying to escape through his nose. He jammed his face into the opening of the hardglass helmet, just in case. His guts rippled convulsively, and he held his lips tightly shut. Sweat broke out on his forehead and then it was over. He swallowed hard and looked up.

  As the FTL panel slid back into its recess, the Sub-light Guidance System blinked back to life. Green lights flickered data on the guidance computer screens in soothing, silent rhythmic patterns. He grinned triumphantly at Molly.

  “Nothin’ to it,” he said, with slightly queasy pride.

  “Just thrilled to hear it, snotnose,” she replied, but she was distracted, intent on the data screens.

  His elation died away as he heard the first ping of something hitting the outer hull of the Folly. An irregular beat began to machine-gun against the ship, like a hailstorm building in intensity hammering down on a tin roof. He glanced at Molly, feeling helpless, as the old woman hunched over the computers, eyes intent and gleaming, her hands flying over the controls. A sharp crack and the hiss of escaping air burst through the din, jolting him from his paralysis. “We’ve been holed!” he shouted, slapping the flutter of dust and loose debris from his face as it was sucked out through a coin-sized hole above his head.

  Molly squinted up from the controls, noting the hole, and fished a partially chewed Khalian stick from her pocket. “Put your hand over it, boy,” she suggested calmly, chewing thoughtfully while her hands danced over the data screens, dust winking in the lights of the computers.

  He slammed his palm over the hole, covering one hand with the other, and yelped in sudden pain. “Oww! This hurts! Do something!”

  Taking the stick from her mouth, Molly examined it. She reached over his head, jerking his hands away from the hole, and rammed the stick into the opening. It quivered, bulging, but filled up the hole neatly, hardening into place. The hiss of air stopped.

  “Hell,” she said speculatively, “maybe that’s what they’re really for; who knows?”

  He stared into the palm of his hand, the ruptured skin oozing blood from the partly crystallized frozen wound. She glanced at it and tsked. “Nasty,”
she said. “Hurt much?”

  “Next time, you stick your own hand over the hole,” he said angrily.

  She was no longer paying any attention to him. The rain of debris on the outer hull had stopped, and she worked to stabilize the internal life-support systems. She punched several controls and three screens he hadn’t seen her use before whined down into a semicircle above the bank of Sub-light computer screens. She worked a receiver bug into one ear, listened to the faint Sub-light transmissions for a moment and grunted.

  “What’s going on?” he demanded. “What was that?”

  “That,” she said, “was somebody who thought he was a hotshot pilot, snotnose.”

  He stared at the three screens, seeing a fast flicker of data that somehow managed to imprint its information on him. To her right, compressed readouts flashed, questions and answers from the onboard guidance computers as they coordinated information faster than a human being could squeeze out. On her left, above his head, patterns blipped by at a rate that left impressions on his retina, and changed. It took a few seconds before he realized that they were diagrams and systems of ships, each with a color and data spread below it. Molly seemed to ignore the screen to her right, glancing now and then whenever the screen above him beeped and held its image for a moment longer.

  The screen directly above her showed as fine a picture as he had ever seen in any holoshow. A computer simulation of a red sun gleaming to one side while a brown, nondescript planet with two moons orbited on the screen. Tiny green script floated beside each object, and Jayson made out the shapes of Fleet destroyers flying in a slow, intricate pattern around a behemoth dreadnought. A wave of blue-colored ships circled the Fleet ships, silhouetted in red, like a slow, languid ballet dance, weaving around one another.