The Fleet-Book Four Sworn Allies

by David Drake (ed)

  If the damned suit, like some albatross, came back after that, then there was nothing Toby English was going to do about it.

  He stood for a moment in the empty module, his plasma rifle butted on his hip, one arm against the doorframe, his visor down, seeing on it his outfit’s blips as they made their way to the pickup point.

  It was always a strange feeling to stand somewhere you knew was going to cease to exist once you’d called your fire down.

  But nobody was going to get hurt—nobody else, anyway. Everybody had done just what he’d been told, and Sawyer affirmed for him that the 92nd hadn’t taken a single hit.

  So he said, “Let’s do it, girls. I got one I can’t handle in grid-square 101A, with heavy hardware and a ship at the dock. Take it out, Trask—ain’t nothin’ but hardware and the one shooter to loose.”

  Then he shut the door, whacked the safety bulkhead on his way out, and headed for the tubeway.

  Pickup was for fourteen forty-five hours and he didn’t want to be late. He had a lot of electronic pilfering to do, from Sawyer’s action log, before he’d look like he and the suit he was wearing were any part of the cleanup that Eight Ball Command had ordered on ASA-Zebra.

  When the bang came and the warning lights lit and sirens began to howl, he was already in the tubeway, safe in his pressurized car. For just a second, he allowed himself to enjoy the aftershock from the destroyed debriefing module. Shit, he did like his APC.

  Then he toggled his all-com and said, “Nice job, Redhorse. I’m on my way down. Officer Manning will receive and log your prisoners.”

  He almost wished there weren’t any to Iog, especially if they were innocent. But one way or another, the prisoners would disappear just as surely as the Headhunters’ prisoner had. It would be a cold day in hell before Eight Ball Command asked the 92nd to do another cleanup, what with all the property damage they’d inflicted.

  You had to understand the way the system worked, and not lose your temper. Then, almost anything was possible. Especially when there wasn’t a Bull’s-Eye transcript kicking around this man’s universe. Or an unaccountable APOT suit.

  If English’s 92nd had to get a reputation for this sort of thing, you just needed to make sure it has the right reputation. So far as the spies went—well, maybe they were Weasel agents after all.

  That was what English was going to tell his Redhorse to say, anyhow. It was what he was going to say to the 121st’s captain when he found him, as soon as English got through writing to the families of his Beta casualties.

  No need to have the Headhunters up all night worrying that the 92nd had just begun its sweep.

  Brevet Lieutenant LeBaric woke as his forehead hit one corner of the study cube. Grimacing, he came awake and fingered the bump. A quick look at the chronometer explained his exhaustion. He had been studying Allison on Command for seven straight hours. This was certainly service above and beyond the call of duty. If only they had given him more warning of the exam. But the date had been set at Port, and these things took time to filter out to the far edges of the Alliance. Carefully he tried to reconstruct what he had just read, but his mind was a blank. A few hours sleep, he promised himself, and back to the grind.

  At this point, the intercom in his cabin buzzed. Slapping off the privacy seal he had given himself as acting captain, Auro saw it was Remra, the Red Ball’s Hruban pilot and his executive officer until Meier returned.

  “We have been ordered to make an orbital adjustment,” she informed him. It was hard to tell with any alien, but her expression seemed concerned. The pilot’s next comment confirmed it. “Have you been injured?”

  Auro tried to look awake and fingered his forehead. He must have blackened one eye. That would impress the review board.

  “Just a minor accident,” he assured the Hruban. “Am I needed on the bridge?”

  “Technically, yes,” Remra explained. “As acting commander you are responsible for the ship’s movements. Even though this one is to a preset orbit and will be entirely handled by the flagship’s computers.”

  There was a short pause. Remra looked worried again.

  “Look, I’ll be right up,” Auro decided. Even a minor glitch this close to the exam would disqualify him. Better safe, if tired, than sorry. You never knew what could go wrong.

  IT HAD BEEN their success in finding Bull’s-Eye that had brought Roj Malin and the Olympus-class brainship Minerva to the attention of Fleet Strategic Planning. Admiral of the Red Meier had praised them both to the skies, promoted Roj not one kick up but two—and then explained why. They could have refused the mission, of course; the wily old bastard had left them that much of a loophole, but after all the yaha on the Omni channels backing out had become impossible. Of course. That he “should only grow headfirst in the ground like a turnip . . .” was the least of the things Minerva had wanted the admiral to do after that. He didn’t oblige. So here they were, back in Khalian space, back in the fixtures and fittings that disguised RM-14376 Minerva as the Khalian Fencer B-4bis that she most definitely wasn’t.

  With all systems shut down, the brainship was little more than a cylindrical extrusion on the mass of metal that had once been an Alliance troop carrier. Before a flight of Khalian ships had bounced it during the battle for Bull’s-Eye and left it less than scrap. One of the transports that Abe Meier and Auro Le Baric—respectively the admiral’s grandson and the Hero of Bethesda, no less—hadn’t managed to save despite their crazy stunt with the freighters. Neither parentage nor fame had done this ship or its people any good at all. It was just one more piece of battle garbage among a thousand others, a Fleet ship apparently rammed and wrecked by a suicidal Khalian, rotating its slow, unnoticed way deep into the lethal quadrant of space surrounding the world called Khalia.

  And forty hours in its wake was an invasion fleet.

  * * *

  It was called CASE WHITE. The fleet had been on hold over Bull’s-Eye for almost a week before the go-code came through. There had been the usual multiple-eventuality plans, each one with its pros and cons carefully weighed out by the Strategic Advisory, but every scenario boiled down to the same move: hit Khalia, and keep hitting it until the Weasels yelled uncle. It would have been far simpler to use Plan POSEIDON, a massed flight of thermo-tipped seeker remotes keyed to home on plate-faults and crack the planet like an egg, but always there had been the need to get onto the surface and gather information, about surviving Khalian raiding-ships, about codes and cyphers, about the Syndics. And those strategic demands meant an invasion. Men on the ground. Men’s guts on the ground . . .

  Despite all of that, the risks and the projected massive casualties, people like Kowacs’s Headhunters were looking forward to returning long-accrued interest on what the Weasels had been so good at dishing out. Every second ship in the initial wave was a ground-assault dropship carrying Marine Reaction units, and the 121st was slated to be first in. CASE WHITE called for orbital bombardment of selected sites followed by low-altitude strategic suppression as the Marines went in. Parts of Khalia would be glazed over and what was left subjected to a much more personal trashing. That—the ultimate personal treatment—was what CASE WHITE was all about.

  Before the military suppression by bomb and ASM and plasma cannon, another was required. The Khalian indigenous population had to be discouraged from overenthusiastic resistance. That was Minerva’s mission.

  The initial plan put forward by Fleet Strategic Planning had been to air-burst a chain of stratospheric thermos and fill the atmosphere of Khalia with enough cobalt-thorium to leave the planet glowing for a hundred years. After further analysis, they realized that it wouldn’t have worked—not that ninety-seven years was too long to grill the Weasels on a radioactive spit, because it wasn‘t—but even with a degraded half-life, the most optimistic projections pegged twenty years after deployment before anything could walk on the surface of Khalia and come back
to talk about it.

  ERMs were out for the same reason. Enhanced radiation and reduced blast—the vaunted neutron bomb of the history books—were tac-use only, with warheads of about one kiloton max, and what the planners were talking here required a total yield of six thousand megatons. Which brought in a cumulative flash/blast factor that took them right back to the reasons for scrapping POSEIDON.

  The special operation known as FIREFROST required only one fast ship with drones and rotary launchers carrying a very particular ordnance package: the biodegradable short-persistence agent known to the Fleet as GK -2.

  Nerve gas.

  Delivered onto targets already cross-referenced against earlier data as suitable assault-landing sites, it would kill, disable, or force into shelters any would-be aggressive civilians in the area. Any military defenders without time to suit up would be taken out in the same firing pass, and it would reduce the effectiveness of the remainder by keeping them wrapped in NBC clothing and respirators for six long, hot days during which they could neither eat, drink, piss, or shit outside their suits. Strat/Tac analysts reckoned that with the faster Khalian metabolism, six standard days would be just enough to take the edge off them before the Marines went in. Because, outnumbered God alone knew how-many-to-one, the Marines were going to need every edge that they could get.

  * * *

  “Back in Khalian space, pretending to be Khalians,” said Minerva, apropos of nothing. “We did this before, and I didn’t like it then.”

  “Yeah. And you volunteered then, too.” Roj Malin didn’t look up from the schematics board in front of him. As brawn to an Olympus-class brainship, there was nobody to look at, unless you happened to count the big main-survey lens on the armor cladding of Minerva’s core. “Number two drone, systems status?”

  “Drone two: all onboards green, one hundred percent.”

  “Confirmed.” The constant-analysis transmissions between the schematics readout on Minerva’s weapons board and the two dozen MARV drones hangared in a cavity within the wrecked troop-transport were by tight-beam laser, with no chance of signal overspill or monitoring, but he still felt unhappy at having to break silence at all. They were less than five AU out from Khalia and getting closer all the time, and regardless of the pounding the Weasels had taken in the combats high above Bull’s-Eye, there were still too damn many of them, all with ears. But the ears that concerned him weren’t all of them pointed and furry, not this time.

  They had a passenger. Colonel Cully, 22nd MRF. Except that if he was Marine Reaction Force, then he was the first that Roj had seen whose uniform was bare of all the tabs and patches that the Marines wore with such pride. All Cully had was the look. The look of a killer.

  Roj had an uneasy feeling that he and his big mouth were responsible for the colonel’s presence. There had been no indication at the initial mission briefing that Minerva would be carrying anyone besides her usual brawn—at least, until the brawn stood up, snapped to attention, and let the brass know what he thought of FIREFROST.

  All right, so they were only Weasels, and all right, the Weasel atrocity record was unmatched in the history of the Fleet, and all right, GK-2 was as legitimate a weapon as a plasma cannon. But the several-times-emphasized fact that its deliberate use against civilians was an integral element in the gas-deployment plan stuck in his throat, and he said so.

  It might have been the arid, acronym-ridden computer-speak always employed when the military spoke of the unspeakable, or it might have been no more than a desire to get his own feelings out into the open, but having made the initial move of leaving his seat and drawing every eye in the briefing room, Roj refused to do the tactful thing and sit back down again. He was a well-read and educated young man; his anger made him eloquent, and that angry eloquence led him into the mistake of referring to his present duties by a very particular archaism—and he did it in front of both Admiral Meier and General of Marines Hugo Stroessner. Given the ancestries of those two officers, comparing Plan FIREFROST with the activities of einsatzgruppen was a stupid thing to do.

  Minerva, though patched through to the briefing, had said nothing, either then or later, even though Roj had the unshakable feeling that she had winced as much as a brainship’s core-mind could. He had never troubled to look over her service record as she had once looked over his, and he found himself wondering what duties she might have carried out in the past that would have kept her normally opinionated voice so quiet. The more he thought about that, the less he wanted to know.

  “How’s our guest?” he asked, to silence that train of thought. For all that he was alone on the brainship’s bridge, Roj spoke quietly.

  “Still in his cabin, flat-lined.” Minerva’s reply was just as quiet. “The good colonel really does like his sleep.”

  “Are you sure he’s sleeping?”

  “That’s what my sensors say. Why, suspicious?”

  “Curious.” More than curious, less than suspicious, if the truth were known. He wondered why Cully had been sent along at all. If the man was there to keep an eye on a potentially unreliable officer, then staying out of sight was a strange way to go about it. There were no bugs or monitors on the bridge: Minerva would have told him if any had been put in place—and anyway he had swept the area with a little device designed to reveal such gadgets. Minerva hadn’t liked that second-opinion gesture, not at all, and they were hardly a happy team right at the minute.

  It wasn’t that Roj didn’t trust her; just that—all right, he didn’t trust Cully. There were probably ways and means for a properly trained operative to do things aboard a brainship so that the brain-core couldn’t remember afterward that they had been done at all. Anyway—and that was what rankled—he had no intention of doing anything other than seeing the mission through to a successful conclusion. Goddammit, he was an officer in the Fleet, not some loudmouth pacifist whose noise came only from the fact that he had never been shot at, never had to thumb-scrape the remnants of a friend off his uniform, never . . . never thought that he was going to die in ways that the people back home couldn’t imagine in their worst nightmares.

  Roj had seen the vids on the Omni. Captain Hawk Talon, he of the ever-popular series, had friends who were killed, usually in the act of saving the captain or his brainship, Derv. Yet they always expired neatly, with a little curl of smoke from the plasma burn on their tunic and a dignified trickle of blood at the corner of their too-often-smiling mouths as they uttered one last witty comment, one last joke, one last good line to go out on. The men Roj had seen die hadn’t gone that way. A close-range plasma bolt left a human looking like a Weasel—because they were both little, curled, crisped things that stank like burnt pork. Khalian slug throwers weren’t even as clean as that; they had a rate of fire that acted like a chain saw in meat and sprayed the tatters all over the surrounding landscape.

  Oh, no; if what FIREFROST was supposed to do would bring that to an end, Roj was ready to roll each GK-2 cylinder into place by hand. The problem was convincing the brass to believe it.

  * * *

  “Roj?” Minerva’s voice; it wasn’t urgent, but at the same time there was something about it that brought Roj out of his reverie like a kick in the tail.

  “Here. What’s wrong?”

  “Contacts. Long-range scanners. On screen . . . now.” Four blips at extreme range; normally nothing to worry about, but then normally Roj and Minerva were not this close to what Fleet Intelligence had ID’d as the Khalian home world. Of course; Intel had said the same thing about Bull’s-Eye, and probably about Target—but this time they were more likely to be right. More factors confirmed the analysis than denied it, and even if they were mistaken, there was nothing wrong in taking out another planet as vital to the Weasel war effort as Bull’s-Eye had been.

  “Trying for an ID,” said Minerva, and punched in the comparison program from the fire-control board. She cranked up sensor enhancement u
ntil the signal started to break up, let the static sizzle for a few seconds across the screen, then said, “Aw, shit . . .” in a disgusted tone of voice and cut the boosted pickup back to standard. “Too far out. But they’re on an inbound vector at maximum sub-light. We’ll know soon enough.”

  “Great. Any guesses?”

  “What do you think? Bogies. Going to Condition Two, yellow alert.” The panel lights on the Offense/Defense systems glowed amber as they silently went to standby, and Roj had the feeling that Minerva was watching him. More to the point, there was a wicked amusement in that scrutiny. “Now, what about Colonel Cully, Roj?” she said carefully. “Should I page him, or . . . ?”

  Roj turned slightly in his seat and grinned full at the braincore’s main pickup. “No need. I, uh, I think full audible alarms would do the trick. Hit it.”

  Minerva gave the alarms everything she had, and a bit more besides. Regardless of the fact that Roj had heard the racket before, and was expecting it this time, he jumped almost out of his acceleration chair. Colonel Cully was on the bridge before the uproar had a chance to die down, and there was a bright red bruise on his forehead just below the hairline. So you were asleep after all, thought Roj grimly. He was a good two inches shorter than the colonel, and his bruises—from sitting up too suddenly in his bunk and cracking his head against the stanchion that some idiot designer had put there—had been that same two inches higher up the forehead. He had often wondered what came first with class-class brawns, concussion or replacing the startled sit-up with a startled roll-sideways . . .

  “What’s the matter?” Cully, it seemed, would be damned if he was going to be anything other than the bucko Marine colonel, even though his expression was that of a man who wanted ice packs and painkilling medication.