The Fleet-Book Four Sworn Allies

by David Drake (ed)

  * * *

  “It’s gotten awfully quiet,” Loadmaster Rao mumbled. His elbows were on the desk, and he cradled his face in his splayed hands. It was impossible to see whether or not his eyes were open.

  Anyway, Base Commander Smythe’s eyes weren’t focusing even though they were open.

  “Maybe we got ‘em all,” Loadmaster Jiketsy said. He was facing the display screen. There was absolutely no emotion overlying either his words or his visage.

  “Fat frigging chance,” Smythe said. “Shouldn’t the Carbuncle be back from Ouroboros by now?”

  “It’s only been three days,” Jiketsy said. “It’ll take another three days at best.”

  “Feels longer,” said Smythe.

  “It’s gotten awfully quiet,” mumbled Rao.

  A phone rang.

  Smythe raised the handset, concentrated, and poked the button for the correct line with the single-minded concentration of someone spearing the last pickle in the jar.

  “This is Mobile Three!” barked the pilot of the only transporter still operating. “There’s something happening out here.”

  The transporter had been trapped on the other side of the crater wall when the boojums started shooting back. Any attempt to land at the base since then would have left Mobile Three where all its fellows were crumpled on the crater floor after being shredded by converging streams of ball bearings.

  Smythe was willing to bet that the Weasel pilot was just as happy to be out of the action anyhow, though she didn’t have enough energy left to get angry about it. “Just show us, will you?” she pleaded with the phone. “Don’t talk. Please don’t talk.”

  Loadmaster Jiketsy touched a control without looking down at the console “Upper right quadrant,” his flat voice said as that portion of the screen filled with the picture sent by the cameras of Mobile Three.

  “Good God almighty,” Smythe said, shocked out of her lethargy.

  Something was happening, all right. The horizon was crawling with what looked like huge lumps of rock—and likely were just that; slabs of regolith would make excellent armor against even the plasma weapons of Bileduct Base’s outer defenses.

  Speaking of which—

  “Jiketsy!” Smythe snapped. “Why aren’t the defensive outposts engaging those things?”

  “I’ll take over on manual,” Jiketsy said without concern or any other sign of emotion. His fingers tapped keys.

  “That’s funny,” he said, no longer emotionless.

  Other views of the crater rim showed that the heavy batteries were rotating, all right: inward, toward the base.

  The captain of a destroyer decided he’d had enough. Without orders—against orders—and facing a drumhead court martial and execution as soon as all this business was sorted out, he lifted his ship from the crater floor.

  At least thirty of the plasma cannon in the defensive outposts fired simultaneously, wrapping the destroyer in a blue-white glare for the instant before it crashed back onto the ground.

  Where its valuable materials could be recovered at leisure by the boojums.

  There were bursts of firing from all over Bileduct Base. The boojums inside the perimeter had laid low until their armored bigger brethren had arrived from manufacturing centers kilometers away. Now they were coming out to take part in the final struggle to make Bileduct safe for ball bearings.

  “It isn’t quiet anymore,” Loadmaster Rao muttered into his hands.

  * * *

  The Carbuncle could hover, but it wasn’t the maneuver for which Khalian corvettes were optimized. Her gravity thrusters hammered the hull, threatening to shake the vessel apart three kilometers above the surface of Bileduct.

  Or wherever the nest-fouling hell they were.

  “Where the nest-fouling hell are we?” Slevskrit shouted.

  ”We’ve arrived at Bileduct Base, sir,” said the corvette’s navigator. His lips were drawn back to show that he would defend his statement with his life, if need be.

  It might well come to that, the way Slevskrit was feeling. “You dung-brained idiot, there’s no base down there!”

  He turned and pointed his full paw at Estoril. The Weasel’s claws extended reflexively; the elf’s ears curled. “You!” Slevskrit said. “Slave! Do you see any base down there? Do you?”

  Estoril’s face was warped into a rictus of terror. He peered at the console’s landing screen and said, “Ah, it looks like the crater, but . . .”

  “Not even the crater’s right,” Slevskrit grumbled, but he let his whiskers twitch loosely. The engine vibration was jellying his brain; he couldn’t manage to stay angry.

  They had to do something.

  “Right!” Slevskrit said. He held down the General Announcement key on his console. “Landing parties, prepare to disembark in radiation suits. Gunnery Officer, prepare to fire one, I say again, one torpedo with a one by ten-kilotonne warhead, fused for an air burst with ground zero at marked point . . .”

  The captain’s paws slid the mechanical crosshairs over his console display, halting them over what had been the northwest quadrant of the crater when there was a base in the center of it. There might still be a base there, though Slevskrit certainly wasn’t seeing it.

  “Mark!”

  “Target marked, sir,” crackled the gunnery officer’s voice through a rush of static. The com system wasn’t taking to the prolonged hovering any better than Slevskrit himself was.

  “Fire one!”

  “Fi . . . n!” sputtered the response.

  The torpedo’s release was lost in Carbuncle’s engine vibration. Light bloomed on the display screen, white which faded to red even before the shockwave struck the corvette three kilometers above it. The modest nuclear explosion buffeted the Carbuncle with a pillow of vaporized rock, the first atmosphere Bileduct had known in a million centuries.

  “Now,” Slevskrit barked in satisfaction, “set us down in the middle of what the blast cleared!”

  The Carbuncle began to settle, slanting toward the dull glow. Estoril peered at the screen, twitching his aquiline nose in concern. “You know, ah, sir . . .” he said. “The crater walls don’t look quite—”

  Slevskrit turned brown, furious eyes on the elf. Estoril swallowed and braced to his race’s posture of attention, feet crossed at the insteps and hands crossed in front of the crotch.

  “You,” the Weasel captain said. “You’re ready to broadcast the ball-bearing signal? Or you’re lunch.”

  “Yessir, master,” said Estoril. “Yessir, master, the transmitter is ready, master. It’ll be triggered as soon as we land, master.”

  Either the Carbuncle greased in to an unusually smooth landing, or the pounding they’d, taken while they hovered made it seem that way. The shallow bowl of glass had frozen hard. An occasional quiver of residual radiation lighted the slag.

  As Estoril had said, the ball-bearing signal blasted out at the full strength of the corvette’s transmitters as soon as Carbuncle’s hull crackled down on the fresh glass.

  Slevskrit snorted in relief. “All right,” he said. “What happens now?”

  “Wow!” said Estoril.

  “Wow!” barked Slevskrit and his navigator together.

  Lifting the solar panels that camouflaged them into a close approximation of the rock walls they had devoured, the latest generation of Mom’s kids was sweeping down on the Carbuncle, dribbling bearings behind them. The boojums moved particularly fast for the first part of their rush because they were skating on the layer of ball bearings that already carpeted what had been the surface of Bileduct Base.

  They moved sufficiently fast on the glass of the bomb crater also, though they sank much deeper into the shattered substrata than the relatively light corvette had done.

  Carbuncle’s plasma cannon fired a few useless bolts, but the gunnery officer had no ti
me to launch nuclear missiles. That was good from the boojums’ standpoint, because blasts so close might have destroyed the vessel itself.

  Mom’s kids had realized that they were going to run out of trace elements very quickly unless they preserved the radio and databanks of this vessel, instead of recycling it totally as ore the way they had done with the rest of their prey . . .

  They took the long view, after all. Mom would have been proud of them.

  * * *

  Syndicate Inspection Vessel Matsushita hung in a powered orbit above Bileduct Base.

  “That’s all they’re saying?” Sub-Syndic 1st Class Whisnant demanded, knuckling his bald scalp.

  “Yes, Lord Whisnant,” said Cuvier, the Regional Inspector’s chief aide. He cleared his throat and repeated, “Welcome honored guests. Join us for the Birth Celebrations of the Brightwater Clan.”

  “That’s insane,” Whisnant said.

  Cuvier cleared his throat again, “It’s in Khalian, of course.”

  “What’s a base like this doing under Weasel control?” Whisnant wondered aloud. “Of course, that might explain why they apparently haven’t completed any repairs in the past three months . . .”

  The Regional Inspector and his aide stared at the holographic image of Bileduct Base. There must be over three hundred ships backlogged around the HQ Tower and repair bays.

  There was something funny about the ships’ outline—a fuzziness, almost—but that was presumably a fault in the hologram projector.

  “Right!” Whisnant decided. “Tell the captain to set us down. We’ll soon sort things out!”

  INTERLUDE

  Admiral Dav Su Allison, retired

  Rules of Command

  27.57.CSA13.7

  Security/Internal/Enforcement

  . . . personnel best suited for the identification and observation of potential security risks are by their very nature those least suited to the neutralization or elimination of these risks. The physical and mental attributes necessary for successful long-term surveillance is almost the exact opposite of those needed for effective neutralization. It therefore falls within the purview of the active service personnel to second the efforts of the security services in such situations.

  Such an arrangement has the further additional value of limiting the gross power of what by definition is a clandestine organization. While security and similar support services are a vital part of any military action, they are distant in nature from the mental set of typical Fleet personnel. As such, this separation tends to curb the otherwise almost unchecked power of any clandestine organization. This separation of physical and bureaucratic power is more effective than the only other technique usually used to contain the power of support services, i.e. the creation of numerous competitive support and surveillance agencies. The result of this choice is the natural tendency of each agency to spend more efforts competing than performing its designated function.

  One unfortunate side effect of this policy is the involvement of line combat units in duties for which they are not totally suited. When such an action is necessary, the units chosen should be among those whose duties already involve unusual or innovative missions; the rangers, special reconnaissance and drop forces being the most obvious choices. It can be noted that all three of these groups are comprised of action- and effect-oriented personnel. As such, they should be given clear and deliberate guidelines for their behavior in, what will be for them, an unusual combat environment. These are, in a totally different manner, as highly specialized personnel as any security agent, and only by recognizing this can serious disasters be avoided.

  THIS TIME, when English stuck his head into the psych evaluator, his palms began to sweat. So he fiddled around, adjusting his face’s contact with the chinrest and goggles, hoping he could get himself under control before he had to put his hands on the joysticks.

  He had a sore throat, a touch of the flu. He’d picked up an imported bug from ASD-Fugawi or MCA-YouNameIt, brought into the staging area by somebody else’s Reaction Company. That was all. Sticking his face, for the third day in a row, into something that looked like the front half of a recon helmet with integral night-vision goggles didn’t have squat to do with why he felt like this.

  “Touch of the flu today, by the way,” he told the automat on the other side of the glass-partitioned console into which the psych evaluator was set.

  Captain Tolliver English, 92nd Marine Reaction Company (Redhorse), had learned, in three days of “standard psych evaluation” sessions, to hate the automat the way he hated Weasels. Hating Weasels was his job. Hating an artificially intelligent debriefing program on wheels was no part of that job. The automat—a squat, insect-eyed, blue-chromed, waldo-armed, self-mobile console—was programmed to take top-secret depositions and cleared for whatever it might hear in the process of certifying veterans of X-class missions fit for duty.

  If it hadn’t been for the Bull’s-Eye operation, Toby English might never have encountered one. Then he wouldn’t be sitting here sweating bullets while his mind threw up tempting scenarios starring Toby English as he a) hacked the automat into bits with a laser torch; b) knocked it off its wheels so he could listen to it bleat helplessly as he disassembled it with his pocket multiknife; c) shot it in the monitor-eye with his kinetic pistol; or d) spaced it with extreme prejudice.

  Spacing it would be the choice, considering he didn’t want to be billed for replacement costs. Of course, if he spaced it, he’d probably lose his command and never get to whack another Weasel. A psych discharge wasn’t anything he’d ever expected to have hanging over his head. He wasn’t looking for one now.

  If his hands would only stop sweating, maybe he could get this over with today. It couldn’t go on forever. Just his luck that Redhorse had gotten stand-down orders for MCA-0578/ASA-Zebra. ASA, as in Artificial Staging Area. If Redhorse had been handed downtime on a planet, then maybe he’d have sailed through his Psych because he’d have had a human evaluator who wasn’t cleared to ask about the performance of experimental hardware such as Toby English’s 92nd had carried into battle on Bull’s-Eye.

  But then, that hardware was probably why the 92nd was cooped up here on the ASA, under tight security. Rumors might float on a planet, even though you did your best to keep your mouth shut. On a planet there were civilians in the bars and women with children and dogs and birds and you got a taste of what you were fighting for. Human folk treated you like you mattered, because you were risking your ass to keep them safe among the stars.

  ASA-Zebra was a collection of docks, repair bays, com modules, command, hospital, and resupply prefabs in orbit around an otherwise unremarkable G-type star with no planets hospitable to man or Weasel. On ASA-Zebra, everybody was on the payroll and on duty. Everybody had a rank and a vested interest. Everybody went out of their way to cut you slack if you were in for decompression. They did that because if, like Redhorse, you were in here for decompression, you flat couldn’t be anywhere else:

  You were too torqued down to ship into combat.

  You were too privy to ship behind the lines, where there were press badges and civilians and politicians.

  You were too dangerous to ship home.

  You were too combatized to ship behind a desk.

  Or, like Toby English, you were just too smart for your own good.

  If it weren’t for the fact that everybody—everybody—who’d fought on Bull’s-Eye, including the whole of Miklos Kowacs’s 121st (Headhunters), had been ordered back to ASA-Zebra for refit, English would be absolutely certain that somebody’d found out about the X-class suit his 92nd hadn’t turned in the way they were supposed to do.

  The X-class suit was hidden, even now, among the 92nd’s gear aboard the Haig. Not even the Haig’s commander, Jay Padova, knew it was there. Most of Redhorse didn’t know it was there. English and Sawyer had been coming back from watching Grant, the
ISA “Civilian Observer,” summarily grease all the human prisoners taken on Bull’s-Eye, and the suit had appeared right in their path.

  At least it had been empty. If Nellie or any of English’s other Beta team casualties had been in the suit, English and his line lieutenant, Sawyer, might have turned right around and marched back there to shoot Grant in the ear, the way they were feeling.

  But there was the suit, empty as deep space, complete with Associate AI-helmet, ELVIS (Electromagnetic Vectored Integrated Scalar) pack, and APOT (A-potential) rifle lying butt to-clamshell against it. Grant had given clear and precise orders that every piece of the X-class gear be returned and any that couldn’t be returned be accounted for.

  They’d already accounted for the suit as part of their casualty list: one of Beta had been inside it. English and Sawyer had looked from the suit to each other and the only question either of them asked was how they were going to smuggle it aboard the Haig. They were both content to let the real question, how they were going to use the suit to hang the Observer, Grant, wait until later.

  But then they hadn’t known they were due for R&R on ASA-Zebra.

  If English or Sawyer let it slip that they had the APOT weapons system concealed aboard the Haig, they were going to be looking at high security automats for the rest of their lives, however long that might be.

  So Toby English had more reason to sweat than he was telling the automat. Chills and a sore throat were one thing; bad dreams were another; weird after-action effects from using the APOT gear were a third. But smuggling classified test equipment—so classified that nobody was admitting it was anything more than “non-developmental items” (NDI) put together in a new way—that could get you an all-expenses-paid trip to Club Dead, courtesy of Fleet Intelligence.

  Not all Jay Padova’s clout, or all the best wishes of JCOPSCOM or citations for valorous service or even the intervention of the Haig’s Intel officer, Manning, would do English or Sawyer a damned bit of good if the automat figured out what was really wrong with Toby English.