The Fleet-Book Four Sworn Allies

by David Drake (ed)

  The technicians stared at Mom in awe while Khalians laughed and nipped one another playfully. One Weasel slipped the pistol from another’s holster and tossed the weapon into the whirling cutters. As the gun sank into Mom’s mouth, half of the twenty-round magazine went off in a spray of noise and bits of flying cartridge casings. The Weasels laughed even harder.

  A Brownian yelped as another ball bearing bounced off his knee. That was an accident, though, an item already in the delivery chute before the power was cut.

  Mom wasn’t primarily interested in making ball bearings anymore. The signal that carried specifications for ball bearings had been turned off.

  Now she was supposed to reproduce.

  Limouril got up from the deck carefully, dabbing at the line a fragment of something had cut beneath his right eye. His coveralls were fluid- and stain-proof, so he ought to be able to get back to his quarters before it became obvious that he’d fouled himself in panic.

  Two Weasels were chittering at one another in fury, but the angrier of the pair didn’t have a pistol anymore, and that seemed to be keeping a lid on the potential violence.

  “Come on,” said another of the Khalians. “Let’s see what else it’ll eat!”

  He hacked at the cable tying down a rubber-tired ground car, then looked over his shoulder. “You there!” the Weasel ordered. “Slaves! Push this thing to it!”

  Limouril blinked in horror. Was the vehicle battery-powered, or did it have fuel tanks? In which latter case—

  ”Noble masters,” he blurted. “Instead, I think we should—”

  A Weasel threw an empty liquor bottle at the deck chief.

  Limouril hunched away. “Well, hop it!” he bleated to his subordinates. “Obey your master’s orders!”

  It didn’t take long to carry out the Weasel’s command. It never took long to carry out a Weasel’s command if there were to be survivors among those doing the work. Shards of the car’s plastic body spit out of the cutting teeth momentarily; then Mom extruded a hood to enclose the workpiece and avoid losing potentially valuable raw materials. Waste not, want not . . . it was part of the long view.

  The car was, thank the Spirit of the Live-giving Soil, battery-powered. Limouril breathed almost normally for a moment, but the way a solid one-tonne object vanished as though it were sinking into water was more than disturbing. What in the name of Forest Fires had they got here?

  “Ah?” called Estoril from behind the machine, balancing one fear against another in his voice. “Sir? Masters? I think it’s extruding something. Or, ah, it’s growing.’”

  Right the first time. Mom was extruding a casing for the Kid. Quite a different design from her own, of course; scarcely any family resemblance. For one thing, with this amazing bounty of ore to mine, the Kid could be much smaller than Mom, who’d been configured to process low-purity taconite.

  For another, the power source in this new vein had proven untrustworthy once. The Kid would need a power storage system. Fortunately, the present meal was providing just the right elements.

  Mom wouldn’t simply adapt the car batteries. She could do much better than that, though that step would require some additional processing time before the Kid was ready to go off on his own.

  Ready to make perfect ball bearings, as soon as he was asked to do so.

  Limouril slid toward Estoril to stare at the closed forty-centimeter-diameter steel tube that extended itself from a port in the back of this damnable machine. The deck chief couldn’t imagine what it was.

  “Looks like a bomb,” one of the Brownians muttered. Great. Might his children all get root-rot.

  The car had vanished completely. “Let’s see what it does with sumthin’ real big,” a Khalian suggested. “Let’s, you guys, push one a them trucks up here!”

  “Are you insane?” Limouril blurted.

  He felt all the blood drain out of his face. Oh, that had been a bad mis—

  The Weasels didn’t pause for thought, much less to issue orders. Three of them seized the deck chief in their short, immensely strong arms and hurled him into Mom’s waiting mouth.

  The cutting blades screamed longer than Limouril did, but that wasn’t very long at all.

  For a moment, nobody said anything. Then Estoril piped, “Well, come on! Let’s get that truck up here!”

  Waste water, which was most of the deck chief’s volume, drained from vents on Mom’s underside, and ran across the plating. She’d found some interesting trace elements, though.

  For a while, the Weasels stood around chirping with pleasure to watch Mom’s cutting head grind its way across the truck in slow sweeps, as though she were a gigantic vacuum cleaner. Her raw material storage compartments filled long before the fine processing on the Kid was complete.

  Mom began to dribble out ball bearings as she marked time.

  The Khalians lost interest. One of them fired at the windows of a stored car. After a while, the whole squad wandered away in a flurry of shots, ricochets, and popping glass.

  Limouril’s leaderless technicians stared at one another. They crept away in the opposite direction, heading for their quarters by a roundabout route. Only the Khalians on the Tumor’s bridge could assign the technicians another deck chief until the mothership docked.

  And none of the late Limouril’s crew wanted to come anywhere close to a Weasel before then.

  Mom chuckled to herself. She couldn’t’ve been happier.

  * * *

  Not long after the technicians left, Mom crawled several meters away from the hull so that the Kid could be born without deformities from the tight space. The move would have overstretched her new power cord, so she extruded plenty of slack while she was at it.

  Ball bearings continued to whang onto the decking, more or less as an afterthought. They were no longer Mom’s prime imperative . . . but in her universe, you could never have too many ball bearings.

  When her internal furnace had digested a sufficient quantity of the car and truck she’d swallowed, Mom nibbled a stretch of the deck. The plates were of wonderful metal, almost perfect for bearings without additional alloys; but the floor was thin and Mom knew better than to cut herself off from the main supply of ore by letting her immediate appetite rule her.

  The Kid’s slim, segmented body, optimized for tight spaces and incredibly rich forage, dropped to the deck. His caterpillar tracks were larger than the tiny spiked wheels on Mom’s underside. As the junior of the pair, it was the Kid’s duty to migrate to a distant part of the ore vein before he started to work on his own.

  The long view. If Mom and the Kid stayed close together, their offspring would soon be stumbling all over one another. That would seriously handicap production despite the wealth of available resources.

  For a moment, the Kid remained linked to Mom by an umbilicus of power cord. A relay clicked open and the Kid’s internal batteries took up the load. They would support him as he crawled to the opposite side of the deck, where his magnetic sensors had already located another universal outlet.

  The Kid’s treads rattled purposefully as he set out, waggling the length of power cord behind him. Tiny motors in his tail controlled spines which stiffened the cord; when he reached his destination, he would plug himself in more easily than the technicians had connected Mom.

  Mom and the Kid exchanged affectionate radio signals as they parted. Mom was already’ beginning to turn herself around.

  She didn’t want to eat the flooring that supported her.

  But there was no reason not to devour the metal of the Tumor’s outer hull.

  * * *

  It didn’t bother Mom in the least when her cutting head ground its way completely through the hull plating and vented the atmosphere of Deck Four in the middle of a sponge-space transit.

  It bothered the surviving members of the mothership’s crew a great deal. />
  It took more than half an hour for the emergency crew to reach the problem. The slave technicians were clumsy in their suits. The lights of Deck Four were no longer scattered into an ambiance of illumination by the air, so the crew stumbled in sharp reflections and hard shadow through the ragged aisles of loot.

  They argued about what could have caused the trouble until they saw Mom.

  The technicians slapped a temporary patch over the hole. The squad of Weasels escorting the slaves emptied their guns into Mom, doing some cosmetic damage to her casing. They also unplugged her, however.

  Mom radioed the Kid just before the power died. She needed to warn him not to eat all the way through the hull just now. It seemed to negatively affect long-term production.

  On the Tumor’s bridge, Captain Slevskrit stopped chewing long strips of paint off the bulkheads for long enough to order a course change. They’d have to divert to Bileduct, the nearest repair station that could handle the major structural work, which the Tumor now required.

  Mom had eaten a main spar before the emergency crew arrived. The deck around her was littered with perfect ball bearings, and the casing of her next offspring was almost complete.

  * * *

  The commander of Bileduct Base was a sub-syndic 3d class, the equivalent of an admiral in the action service. Her name was Smythe and she was human.

  Smythe’s office was in the peak of the HQ Tower, giving her an unparalleled view of the base. She looked with disgust at the rank upon rank of battered warships, which had limped here following their attempt to block the Alliance landings on Bull’s-Eye.

  With a little planning by the action services, these ships could have been spaced over a reasonable period of time instead of descending on Bileduct in a bolus that choked Smythe’s facilities.

  Or with a little luck, at least half the vessels out there might have been destroyed instead of staggering back to disrupt her base. That would have had the additional benefit of getting rid of a lot of the wretched, chittering Weasel officers with whom Smythe must now deal.

  Like this one, Slevskrit.

  Smythe turned from the tangled backlog, outside to the Khalian across the desk from her. “Yes, I assure you, Warrior Slevskrit, that my staff has carefully considered your proposal to give the Tumor crash priority.”

  She paused. If things hadn’t been so screwed-up, this pushy Weasel with bits of what looked like paint, for God’s sake, in his whiskers, would never have gotten as far as the outer office. As it was, with Chief Loadmaster Rao out sick from overwork and Loadmaster Class 2 Jiketsy swamped with trying to straighten out the situation in Bay H, there wasn’t anybody else handy . . .

  “And I concur with them completely,” Smythe went on, letting her voice show a little of her own frustration. “Warrior”—it was policy among the Syndicate’s human personnel to ignore relative rank among their Khalian surrogates—“how in God’s name did you manage to fracture a main spar in sponge space?”

  All the chairs in Smythe’s office were configured for humans. Slevskrit scratched furiously at his plush armrest—and yelped as the electrified mesh just beneath the fabric bit him hard enough to singe his fur.

  “It was unusual,” Slevskrit mumbled as he licked his paw. “Many people have been punished.”

  “Right,” said Smythe dismissively. “Well, we’ll get to the Tumor sometime this generation, with any luck. Until—”

  “Wait!” Slevskrit protested. “You don’t understand. We’ve got a full cargo, very valuable loot, and it can’t sit—”

  “It can do as I damned well say it can, warrior!” Smythe retorted furiously.

  If the Weasel lunged for her, lasers in the office walls would turn him to shaved meat in midair. Besides, if this Slevskrit had any balls by Khalian standards, he’d have been in charge of something other than a space-going furniture van.

  And anyway, Smythe was too tired to care.

  She waved her arm at the scene beyond the circle of windows. “Look at it!” she demanded. “We’re set up here to repair a mean of forty-one vessels a week. There’re three hundred and twelve vessels out there. Warships! Can your minuscule Weasel brains imagine how badly those ships are needed right now?”

  Smythe had been right about her Khalian. Instead of going into a killing rage—which would’ve solved one of Smythe’s problems, though the office would need cleaning afterward—Slevskrit stared glumly out the windows also. At the best of times, the view wasn’t a particularly enticing one. Bileduct was an airless planetoid 2000 kilometers in diameter, the only significant satellite of a small white star. The base was in the center of an ancient meteor crater. If you looked carefully, you could see portions of the base’s automatic defensive system glittering like diamonds on the ring of the crater’s walls.

  The HQ Tower and eight repair bays of Bileduct Base sprawled in the center of the crater like an exhausted spider. And now, of course, the excessive hundreds of ships awaiting repair rayed out from the base like a ragged web.

  “My crew is specialized,” Slevskrit said gloomily. “Our job is very important. Whatever they say about us in the home burrows . . .”

  Smythe’s mouth opened in surprise. Whoever would have thought a Weasel would have a good idea—or even be the occasion of one?

  “Right,” she said. “Leave a skeleton crew aboard the Tumor and send the remainder of the combat complement here to Reassignment Section.” That was what Smythe had decided to do with most of the waiting ships anyway; using the crews of idle vessels to replace battle casualties on the ships the base had been able to repair.

  “But in your case,” Smythe continued, “send your technical crew—they’re slaves, I suppose?”

  “But . . . ! But . . . !”

  “Yes, of course they are,” Smythe said, shaking her head at her own silly question. “Tell your technical crewmen to report directly to Loadmaster Jiketsy at Bay H. We’ll put them to good use.”

  It took some minutes before Smythe got the frothing Khalian out of her office, and for a moment or two she thought the wall lasers were going to be needed after all. Still, the interview had been the base commander’s only positive experience for a solid week.

  She looked out her circuit of windows again, savoring the silence after the door finally closed behind Slevskrit. The huge lump on the outer fringe of ships was probably the Tumor herself; there wasn’t anything else that big awaiting repair, thank God.

  Smythe’s eyes narrowed. Some sort of nonstandard excrescence rode the mothership’s hull at about the level of Deck Four. It looked like an array of solar collectors, of all things. Presumably some sort of nonstandard field modification dreamed up by Supply in order to make life difficult for the people in Repair.

  The base commander sighed and went back to her paperwork. As if things weren’t already difficult enough for the people at Bileduct Base.

  * * *

  The Kid stayed busy, but not too busy to remember Mom. One of his first actions was to create a miniature, twenty-centimeter-long version of himself which trundled back across the expanse of Deck Four and plugged Mom back into the wall.

  With that mission accomplished, Kid, headed for an elevator shaft on a colonizing trek to Deck Three. He paused frequently along the way to top off his tiny battery pack and to ingest more metal.

  At regular intervals, another mirror-perfect ball bearing plinked onto the deck behind him.

  Though the Tumor’s fusion plant met their present needs, Mom and the Kid had learned not to trust wall current. Gingerly, drilling holes no larger than the superconducting cables required, the larger von Neumann machines set up solar arrays. The sun hung in one position above Bileduct Base, and the amount of incident light slanting into the crater was quite sufficient for collectors as efficient as those which shortly sprouted from the Tumor’s outer skin.

  Then Mom and the Kid got down
to the work of reproduction. It was, after all, the only real job they had until their masters switched them back to the creation of ball bearings as their primary duty. They were very good at reproducing; as perfect as machines could be without true sentience.

  And maybe a little better than that.

  Mom had been designed to process taconite, though she could function sub-optimally within the Tumor. The Kid was as good a Tumor-miner as could be imagined, and several of both machines’ next-born were configured just like the Kid.

  But Mom had extended sensors through the hull along with the solar array, and she could see that there was a nonmind-boggling richness of ore bodies on the floor and rim of the ancient crater. She couldn’t even speculate as to what might lie still farther out on the surface of Bileduct.

  But she and her brood could learn.

  On the Tumor’s bridge, Captain Slevskrit spent his time morosely drinking a mixture of esters and alkaloids. He hurled the empty bottles at members of his staff when he caught them peeking around the corner at him.

  Objects of various shapes crept down the mothership’s hull from time to time and picked their way across the barren landscape. The new machines ran on drive motors powered by the solar sails which they kept precisely perpendicular to the sun’s rays. They didn’t look much like Mom anymore, but they were perfect for the new conditions.

  Captain Slevskrit never noticed the boojums. A handful of the Tumor’s crew did. Two even discussed it and came to the same conclusion. Syndicate business was none of theirs, and Syndicate secrets were not safe to steal. The little widgets trundling toward other ships and the outer stations of the defense array probably had something to do with the Bileduct Base facilities.

  Which, in a manner of speaking, was precisely correct.

  * * *

  “Wow!” said the elf technician, Estoril. “Look at that destroyer! I can’t imagine how it was able to make it back.”