The Fleet-Book Four Sworn Allies

by David Drake (ed)

  English went forward to sit with Trask, who was flying the bird.

  Manning touched English’s leg as he passed. He shunted onto dual-com and said, “What is it?” on her helmet’s channel.

  “Are you sure about the—last part?”

  “No, but I’m gonna do it anyway because I’m a stubborn bastard and I can’t have shit hanging over my head like that. You clear it like you’re supposed to. Say whatever you think makes sense. Okay?”

  “Okay, Captain. I was just confirming.”

  He shifted over to all-com, monitoring the banter to see if it was anywhere near healthy-sounding.

  It was close enough. They all knew this was an error-free environment, repercussion-wise. Except, of course, if you got yourself dead.

  Trask was glad to see him. “How many Fleet commanders does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

  “Dunno,” English admitted.

  “Ten: one to hold-the ladder, one to do the screwing, one to write the after-action report, and seven to stand around saying, ‘Shit, I coulda done that.’”

  The stars outside seemed so clean and pure that English couldn’t look at them. So he looked at the ASA instead. “How soon to the first dock?”

  “Six and twenty . . . three secs. I’ll put it on your sweep . . .”

  “Put it on everybody’s.”

  Everybody got the timetable in the right quadrant of their heads-up displays, with the designated two-team’s callsign blinking beside it.

  He heard them moving into position; Sawyer and the dropmaster were both back there. He didn’t need to do anything but watch for error-makers or untoward opposition.

  In the copilot’s seat was the joystick for the new underbelly cannon. KKDs—kinetic kill devices—came out of those cannon at 30,000 mph; when you were shooting a five-pound metal slug that fast you didn’t need explosives.

  The APC had conventional hardware for ground support as well, but English didn’t think he was going to need it.

  If somebody tried a nonsched flight, and it was an obvious cut-and-run, they’d have to deal with it, though. That was one case of the five that English had determined as shoot to kill/shoot on sight.

  The rest of the possibilities had discretionary parameters. Naw, you don’t have to shoot the guy in his pjs if you break into his room and he’s with his girlfriend; you don’t have to shoot the girlfriend, unless she shoots at you . . .

  The first docking maneuver-was at the agronomy bay. Trask mated the APC to the module without a hitch. The Alpha team deployed.

  All of Toby English’s hair stood on end.

  Communications were going to be dicey if Manning had been wrong about her ability to route their helmet chatter through security-only x-bands. But she’d been sure she had it knocked.

  When everything English could want to see and hear, including full frontals from the recording helmets, came up on his own visor when he asked for them, he relaxed and shut them down to emergency-interrupts.

  That made his two-man Alpha team into a pair of little dots in their grid on the upper left of his visor. You can only handle so much data in your heads-up display. If you get more than you can use, you and your com system go into a descending efficiency curve.

  The command helmets offered more than anyone could want; what you learned was how much to ask for, and when.

  He’d get a prompt, a little goose like a minor electric shock on his left wrist, if Alpha sent signals outside what was considered operationally normal. Unless that happened, it was his choice how much or little he wanted to monitor of their mission.

  He didn’t want any of it, beyond what he needed to keep them alive. And there wasn’t much any of the rest could do to help a team in trouble, until everybody was in place—and not a hell of a lot then.

  The ASA targets were top damned spread out. But English had gone over arid over it—in his head, with Sawyer, even with Manning, and decided simultaneous was best.

  Otherwise, by the time they got to the tail-end of the list, they were going to have suicides and booby-traps and who knew what-all.

  These people knew who they were; once the action started, they were going to get real unpleasant to encounter.

  Redhorse wasn’t running a Beta team—too close to having one get dead. They dropped their next three teams at the main personnel module, and English checked his real time against his projected time: three seconds early, so far.

  Trask took the APC over the top of the ASA and dropped her vertically through the middle, to get to the science modules, where they dropped the next two teams. Then they accessed the command dock and, after that, three repair bays.

  With more than half their teams deployed, they were still ahead of schedule. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Nobody left in the APC was saying a word.

  You could hear their breathing in the all-com, and the effect of all that respiration in this situation was surreal.

  So much so, English almost missed the little blip, going away, that Trask saw scooting out of the command module’s private garage.

  “Where does that asshole think he’s going to go?” Trask wanted to know.

  There wasn’t anyplace out here to land where you could survive. The blip was a little speedster, a personal vehicle, nothing with interstellar range.

  “I got it,” English said. These really had to be his decisions; it was what command was about. “Stay on timetable with your drops, Trask.”

  He fired one of his KKDs, after a quick lock-on and a servo-change to a smart round with heat-seeking.

  “We’ll figure out who it was from who we missed and what the ship’s ID is when we look at the data later.” He wanted it on the record that he’d been assiduous in his pursuit of perfect performance. You couldn’t tell for sure, of course, that some teenager hadn’t chosen just the wrong moment to steal a joyride.

  But the data that the APC was able to take gave him a target that fit preprogrammed parameters; the lock-on would have created a warning beep on the other craft. If it had sent the APC something benign enough, English’s fire order would have dudded out.

  When the smart KKD sped away, the rest was academic.

  This equipment didn’t fail. It was you who took that chance.

  They dropped all but Trask, Manning, Sawyer, and the drop master before English had time to think about anything but his battle management electronics.

  Then came the hard part: “Okay, gang. We’re going to these coordinates.” English pecked them into the console himself. He didn’t want any doubt about whose responsibility the ensuing action was going to be.

  Then he slid out of his seat beside Trask and went back into the hauler’s body. “Git forward,” he said to the dropmaster. “You too, Manning,” he told the small suited figure sitting beside Sawyer, their helmets together.

  Once she’d done that, Sawyer and he closed the slider between compartments and locked it.

  “Ready?” English asked Sawyer.

  “You bet,” Sawyer said, and checked the air pressure of the crew compartment manually before he started getting the components of the APOT suit out of the locker where they’d stowed it.

  English found, when he’d stripped out of his issue suit and was faced with the X-class equipment, that his hesitancy to get into it was nearly overwhelming.

  He just stood there, because that was about the best he could manage.

  Sawyer must have realized how hard it was; because the other’s gloved hand came down on his naked shoulder: “You ready, sir?”

  They didn’t have any way of knowing whose suit this had been—Nellie’s or somebody else’s. They’d gone through it for blood, guts, brains, pieces of human anatomy, and found only some dust. They’d checked it for penetrations or violations and found no such.

  But this APOT suit/weapon combination had been part
of Beta’s complement of three. All the men and the other two suits had been lost, but for part of a scanner. Then this suit had popped back into real-time . . .

  Maybe this one had some malfunction that was going to dump English out into some alternate space-time when he fired it up.

  If it did, that was just what was going to happen, because he was going to put it on, seal it up, slip on the ELVIS pack, put the APOT rifle in contact with the ceramic clamshell, potentiate the Associate Al-assisted expert system and all the electronics connected with it, and go get himself a Weasel-symp infiltrator.

  Let ‘em try to figure out who the hell it was, doing what he was about to do, with his 92nd all nice and recognizable, spread over the whole of ASA-Zebra.

  “Let’s see the list again,” he said to Sawyer, and Sawyer got it out.

  English looked it over one more time and put it between his teeth. Then he started fitting himself into the X-class suit he and Sawyer had smuggled aboard the Haig after Bull’s-Eye.

  When he had the ELVIS pack over the clamshell and the gloves mated to the suit’s sleeves and the helmet on his head, visor up, he took the list from between his teeth.

  “Got a match?”

  Sawyer grinned at him bleakly and put a glow on the end of his standard-issue plasma rifle. Touched to it, the list flared into a puff of smoke between English’s gloved fingers. “Okay, boss?” Sawyer wanted to know.

  “Yep,” English said, before he pulled his visor down. “Next stop, XO-command module.”

  Sawyer dropped his own visor, and they spent the next few minutes getting the so-called NDI suit to talk to Sawyer’s standard-issue suit.

  “One more thing,” Sawyer asked as their clock ran down to seconds, “you’re sure about calling that strike?”

  “Sure as I’ve ever been about anything in my life,” English said. Which wasn’t saying much, but that was another issue.

  They didn’t let the dropmaster, Manning, or Trask back off the flight deck. No need for Manning to see the APOT suit. No need to involve Trask, either.

  Orders were orders. And they had theirs. They were supposed to do this stinking job, and they’d do it.

  The whole time English had been struggling into that APOT suit, feeling like he was sharing it with a ghost, Sawyer had been doing the command monitoring for the whole company.

  English ported the data into his system, doing a quick, verbal headcheck to verify.

  So far, so good: the 92nd had three live prisoners, which was plenty. They’d had seven additional encounters—two firefights were under way. If you call something a firefight when you had field gear and the adversary was in his jogtogs with a rubber-bullet spitting sidearm.

  Still: they shoot at you, you shoot back.

  A rubber bullet in the brain would get you just as dead as a plasma bolt. He reminded everybody of that on all-com, and verified that the three teams with prisoners should go to the pickup area, not attempt to reinforce those still working.

  What he needed to know was, where everybody was. And to make sure nobody wandered into any areas they couldn’t be told to avoid. That kept Sawyer and English as busy as if they were trying to coordinate a drop over ten miles of Weasel-infested jungle.

  It kept English busy all through the final docking maneuver and their debarkation procedure. Then he and Sawyer were in the ASA heading down halls they’d only been through once before. At an intersection, English and Sawyer split up, and Sawyer gave him a clap on the back that wouldn’t show on any signature recorder.

  Then he was by himself, stalking around the command module in his nonreg armor, his APOT rifle semi-ported because it had to be in contact with the suit to fire.

  When he found .the door he wanted, he didn’t bother to knock. He melted it with the APOT rifle. It made a nice, satisfying sizzle he could hear on his audio, and his air purification system turned itself up a notch.

  The room with the huge desk wasn’t empty. He’d been afraid it would be. He’d been worried the son of a bitch would have cleared out, lock, stock, and incriminating transcript.

  But Grant wasn’t the man in there. Just about the time English realized that, his APOT system was on full bore, hosing down whoever was behind the desk, and especially the electronics and database and screen.

  He’d forgotten about the APOT effects: he was seeing . . . what? Someplace else, intermittently; someplace with grass and trees and people on it. Young people. Old people. People with four arms . . . And furry birds in a green sky.

  He didn’t realize he was yelling at the top of his lungs until he managed to stop firing the damned thing. His shooting hand felt like it had been chewed on by an electric eel.

  But there wasn’t shit left of the whole inside wall of Grant’s office. Metal partitions came slamming down to seal it off from the rest of the complex. Sprinklers began raining from the ceiling.

  Fuck! You couldn’t predict what this APOT system would do when it was wet. English backed out of there without even checking what was left of the body that had been rising behind the desk.

  There wasn’t much of anything in there that he was willing to remember.

  He felt like some monster, tromping through the command module. People saw him and ducked away, under their desks. Women screamed and hugged filing cabinets. He was sure glad his name wasn’t stenciled on his helmet, or his unit patch.

  He kept worrying about the droplets of water on his shoulders, on his faceplate, on the rifle.

  Sawyer had shot one of these things lying in a puddle once, and the results had been uncontrollable.

  He had one more thing to do before he ditched the suit. He hoped Manning had done what she’d been told.

  He was damn sure that Sawyer did what he’d been told.

  It took less time than English expected to get to the debriefing module. By then, he’d been in contact with ASA security once, with Sawyer twice, and with every one of his 92nd, making sure that nobody needed him more than he needed to do what he had in mind.

  This was for himself, for his team, and for everybody else who’d been on Bull’s-Eye. Only he couldn’t let its importance supersede his duty, such as it had devolved into.

  Damn, he was feeling sick about that Eight Ball officer in Grant’s chair, but only because he’d never met him. Every one of his troops had either shot or arrested some stranger on this mission; he couldn’t let that get to him. Eight Ball Command was responsible for the loss of English’s Beta team, and for these damned APOT weapons being in the field.

  Because they’d be in the field. There was no stopping a technology that promised higher kill ratios, not unless those kill ratios turned out incontrovertibly to be among the users. And that day was a long way off, with the kind of security Eight Ball was invoking.

  Interagency Support Activity, my ass. Insulate Superior Asses, more likely. Well, if he’d been lucky, it would have been Grant.

  He didn’t need luck; he had competence. All the records of the Bull’s-Eye drop that the automat didn’t have were in that console. Manning had confirmed that for him. And she’d said, when he’d asked her why the hell she was involved in something like this:

  “I’m . . . trapped, English. Just like you guys. Because of you—Sawyer, really. And look, we’ll handle it. Grant’s got a mongo promotion coming through. He’ll get home-world posting. It’s crazy to try to touch him. Yes, he picked on your company because of me, but he was able to jack me around because of how I’ve . . . come to feel . . . about your Redhorse. So we’ll live with it. It’s an honor, supposedly, to be pulled up out of something like Reaction into an elite core of Intel support—”

  “Bag the rationalization, okay, Manning? I got some stuff I want you to do. For the honor of it.”

  And she’d been good under pressure, so far.

  And he’d had some slack on the list: two Intel officers, uns
pecifiable except in response to above actions.

  English was cleared to kill anybody who tried to cut and run, or waved a gun at him, from the Intel contingent. And, thinking back on it, he was sure he’d seen a gun in the hand of the guy behind Grant’s desk.

  When he found the automat debriefing chambers, he went carefully. He was still listening to his all-com chatter, but as they’d arranged, Sawyer was running the field plays. English was interjecting only enough to make sure that everybody’s com systems recorded him as taking part in the mission.

  The hallway of the automat chambers had six doors on it. Weapon high, he slammed his armored shoulder into the first, telling the wide-eyed respondent in the interrogation chair to “Get the hell out, and take the others with you.”

  Once he’d made sure that the guy had a good look at a suit that was like nothing he’d ever seen before, English shot the automat in the console with the APOT rifle, just as it was saying, “Place your face in the psych—”

  It went up like a firecracker and that made him feel good.

  The guy he’d rousted was banging on doors as he went, but English had to invite three more respondents to leave. That was all right. These APOT suits had such weird characteristics, you could never tell who the hell, from when, might be in one. And nobody was going to want him to start making that argument. The suit, after all, didn’t exist. Not yet.

  When no more automats existed, Toby English barred the door of the last debriefing room with what was left of the last automat and stripped off the APOT suit.

  Then he opened the closet door there, only at the last moment entertaining an assessment of how royally fucked he was if Sawyer and Manning hadn’t done what he’d asked, perfectly and without any margin for error.

  Waiting there was a regulation combat suit, with 92nd’s Redhorse stenciled on the helmet, and his own name besides.

  He nearly collapsed as he got into it. Next he put the APOT gear in the same closet, then went trotting down the hall.

  Once he’d checked to see that absolutely nobody remained in that module, he could call in his APC strike.