The Fleet Book Three: Break Through

by David Drake (ed)

  There was virtually no firing in the immediate sector. The action here had changed from missile and cannon to close quarters and boarding. Everywhere I looked I saw Confederation ships locked against Khalian vessels, or else assisting their own. We had met the enemy and they were ours. What about the battle between the second bunch of Weasels and the Tau Ceti task force? It took only a second to get that picture on a screen. The two groups were all mixed up, and I could see occasional flashes and eye-searing streaks there. Some firing was still going on, but the action was in its last stages. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought that the Fleet had managed to do what it had set out to accomplish. Of course they wouldn’t have without our jumping the ambushing force of Khalians, but what the hell.

  “Ten seconds to longboat launching,” Jensen informed me.

  “Belay that, Commander! I’ll be going in with the second group, and I’ll need thirty seconds to get aboard.”

  “But—”

  “No buts, Commander. My authority, and my responsibility,” I snapped. Then I was out of there and heading for the stubby little boats. The grunts gave a cheer when I came aboard, but the spacer crewmen seemed uncertain. A very junior lieutenant seemed about to pipe up, so I tossed a salute. As soon as he returned it, I said, “Very good, Lieutenant. As you were.” Then, “Carry on, Cox’n. Get this bucket on over to the Weasels’ ship so we can do our duty.” That was that.

  Every boarding operation was one with a mixed crew involved. The marines went there to eliminate enemy resistance, the spacers to get the vessel boarded operational and underway. Prize crews were of necessity skimpy and makeshift groups.

  I was webbed in and watching the forward viewscreen as the longboat sailed out and headed for the drifting Khalian dreadnought. It didn’t take very long at all for us to match velocities, close, and lock to that leviathan. I felt like a flea on a rack bull’s ass, let me tell you. Size alone was intimidating enough, but the vivid lines from the tertiary laser turrets of the dreadnought coming at us just moments before had generated a pint of palm-sweat on the way in.

  We burned a lock open. The longboat was glued fast, and for the next minute or two the nyloplast foam would make an airtight way between us and the Weasel battlewagon. Once we were all inside the enemy, the same stuff would be used to seal us inside, the longboat would burn herself free, and we would be totally on our own.

  “Let’s kick some butt!” It was the NCO in charge of the unit, a grizzled old hand who had been with me in my very first action. As I looked on, he gave me a tense nod, saying, “We’ll take ’em out, General. Don’t worry!”

  He had misinterpreted my expression, but I only said, “Thank you, First Sergeant McDonnel. I never expected otherwise.” In fact, my concern was elsewhere. With an effort I cleared it from my mind and blanked my face. The marines were already plunging into the interior of the Khalian dreadnought, armed spacers following hard on their heels. As befitting one of my rank, I brought up the rear. Bah!

  The action was removed from me thereafter. I picked it up on the comband and that was it. We were in trouble. The Weasels had lost their drive and their main armament, but not many of those furry sons of bitches had bought it in the process. My men were taking heavy losses, and their advance had been halted after gaining only a toehold on a couple of decks. I hated to do it, but I had to: “Get on that communicator, Ensign, and get us some reinforcements fast!” He beamed the message out as if his life depended upon it. It did. It was touch and go for longer than I cared to think about; then the frigate Frontiersman locked on, and a swarm of wild rangers poured out of her hold. It was still a murderous fight, but from that point on it was all over for the Weasels. As usual, not one of the Khalia surrendered. That was just fine. Something unusual happened, too. Ever since that battle there in the Khalian dreadnought, no Freeborn marine has ever said anything disparaging about Verge rangers—at least not within earshot of any veteran of the Battle Off Dead Star 31, that is.

  The prize crew was getting the captured dreadnought into operational mode, so I hitched a ride to the Hydra on the Verger corvette. When I got to the big compartment where all of us brass were assembled, there was a new feeling evident. The air was supercharged with it. We had come into the battle as a disparate collection assembled under a common banner. Now the Confederation was truly an entity. The Khalia had welded us into a solid unit.

  A staff officer was giving the group a rundown on the battle between the Fleet task force and the Khalian main body. As I had thought, the Tau Ceti bunch were more than good enough sailors to handle the Weasels. They’d blasted half of the Khalia to atoms and routed the rest. In the process the Fleet had managed to grab a half-wrecked dreadnought, a pair of the big armored cruisers, and a Weasel attack destroyer. The signals flashing around the force from Tau Ceti had been filled to the brim with self-congratulations. Then somebody there got wind of what the Confederation’s navy had pulled off. That news made the flames die in their tubes pretty quickly. We’d taken three of the Khalian monsters, had a fourth one mostly wrecked in tractors, and had also managed to capture one of the three raider-class destroyers, too. In the process two of our frigates and three of the corvettes were lost. There wasn’t a single vessel in our fleet that wasn’t battered. Despite this, it wasn’t a Pyrrhic victory, unless ...

  “Message from Star Admiral Duane of the Fleet.” That sent a chill down my spine. The Alliance didn’t recognize us as a political entity. Naturally, the officers of the Fleet, who liked us even less, had a policy of regarding the Confederation’s naval force as a collection of pirates. According to their standing orders, the Tau Ceti boys would now be obliged to demand we surrender our prizes, if not our own vessels, to their authority. We were outside Confederation limits.

  The old man growled. “Patch it through to the main screen, Captain. This is something we all have to experience.” It was damned obvious that he was prepared for the worst.

  The dark face and hard eyes of Admiral Duane were suddenly before us all, about ten times life size. The thin lips opened, and the star admiral said, “Well done, Galactic Admiral Weygard.” There was a rush of expelled breaths at those words. The commander of the Fleet task force wasn’t finished, however. Could there be more? You bet. “I’m requesting permission to come aboard your flagship, Admiral, for a conference ...”

  “That you have, Admiral Duane, that you have,” the old man said without a flicker of expression. “We’re ready when you are.”

  I was on hand less than an hour later when the group of Fleet brass was piped aboard the Hydra with full ceremony. It was a banner event indeed. What Duane was risking by paying this call was incredible, but I don’t know anyone who has ever said that the combat officers of the Fleet weren’t iron men. After formal exchanges, we all sat down and did some hard talking.

  “Congratulations on your victory, Admiral,” the old man said with sincerity.

  “It was a good engagement,” Admiral Duane replied, “but the scope of our victory can’t compare with your own, sir,” he added. “It is also evident that my force would have suffered a crushing defeat had not your own intervened.”

  “Well ...” Admiral Weygard let the rest go unsaid.

  The Fleet’s task force commander nodded. “I’ve already dispatched a preliminary report to Tau Ceti. There’s a lot of unusual things about this action which HQ will have to investigate and explain. Just how your ships just happened to be here at the right time and place, for instance.” The Old Man had to grin hugely at that, and Duane returned a somewhat wan smile. “It is fortunate that there were no hostile ‘pirates’ on hand—only a very fine navy!”

  “Thank you, Star Admiral.”

  “No more than plain truth, Galactic Admiral.”

  That sort of exchange went on for a little while, but my attention was distracted. I’d been surreptitiously listening to the rescue band all the time. There were still boats crui
sing the vicinity, sweeping for survivors, recovering bodies, sorting through the flotsam and jetsam of the battle for important bits of wreckage. Excited voices had caught my ear. Another crew from a blasted STC had been recovered. I excused myself quietly and left, hitting the double as soon as I passed the hatch and was out of sight in the companionway. Startled naval personnel hastened to get the hell out of the way of a running marine general. I would have laughed, only I was too sick inside.

  “Who did they recover, Corpsman?” I asked.

  “Three grunts from one of their TCs,” he said, then turned to see whom he was answering. He nearly fell apart when he caught sight of me, came to attention, and saluted with ashen face. “Sir!”

  I didn’t bother with any of it. “Names?” I demanded. He didn’t know, but told me that only two of the three were still alive. I went past him without another word.

  Karl had lost an arm. It was his right one, in fact. That was bad, but a whole lot better than dead. Prosthetics would have a computer-linked electromechanical limb on him in a few weeks. Not only would it be nearly indistinguishable from a flesh-and-blood arm, but it would operate a whole lot more efficiently. I know because I have an earlier model leg which works just fine. He was in sick bay but conscious, “Nice to have you aboard, Karl.”

  He managed a faint grin. “Thanks, Dad. It’s sure good to be here. Have you seen Harry and Juker?”

  “Thought I’d check in on you first, if that’s all right with you ...” I trailed off because Karl was asleep. They’d surely injected him with enough narcotics to have him stay that way until surgery was well behind. The arm of his escape suit had been shredded, and self-sealants alone had saved him from instant death in space. The boy deserved a little rest. Boy? He was a graduate officer and had a pregnant wife back on Freeborn. I was getting old.

  After stopping by to check on Juker, the other survivor from my son’s crew, I hastened back to the conference. It was all over, and the Tau Ceti brass were on their way back to their ships when I arrived. I thought I’d come in unobtrusively, but there was a cheer when I sat down. Backslappings and hand pumpings concluded, someone broke out a real bottle of genuine bourbon whiskey. I mean Kentucky sour mash. We all toasted to the victory, and I drank my share—both for the boarding actions and for the fact that Karl had hit the Weasels and lived to tell about it.

  The Hydra had launched one hundred twenty STCs. Sixty-three came back more or less intact. Five more were recovered with crews alive and boat salvageable. Sixteen more crews—or surviving crewmen equaling that number—were rescued. All told, about one-half of the boats had been lost, with crew losses at one-third. That was a terrible price. Losing almost half the STCs was negligible. The little vessels were relatively cheap and easily manufactured. The lives of their crews were another matter. Analysis turned up the fact that the Hydra’s STCs had accounted for three of the Khalian dreadnoughts. You didn’t need a twenty-to-one ratio at all. Double it and add a lot of luck. Also, add more shielding to launchers and up-gun them. The Hydra had taken too much punishment from light spacecraft. Ted Cunningham was jubilant on the one hand, chastened on the other. I commiserated as much as possible. Even winning my bet was no joy. Marine losses in the boardings had been heavy. That was expected. Thanks to the Vergers, the actual casualty rate had been a bit lower than anticipated. Somehow, now that it was all over, I thought it was worth it. The Khalia had done us a favor.

  Without their alien menace, there probably would have been shooting between us and the Fleet, later if not sooner. Star Admiral Duane would probably be in retirement sooner than I could sing the Alliance anthem, but his courageous gesture, his acknowledgment of the Confederacy’s crucial part in the victory over the Khalia, spelled certain détente, at worst, between the Fleet and our navy. Men killing men in a major war could be ruled out in this sector of the galaxy for a decade or two, at least,

  That wasn’t an insignificant achievement.

  * * *

  “Isn’t that the General Hohenstein?”

  “Home for the duration, Ensign,” the scarred bo’sun’s laconic answer came.

  “She’s fitted out from the hulk of a captured Khalian dreadnought, captured four years back at Dead Star 31 you know,” the newly commissioned pilot said seriously to the spacer who was guiding the launch toward the vast starship. “They rebuilt her as a launcher because we don’t need more than four liners in the navy. Now that Colonel General Hohenstein has been retired, they went back to some old tradition and named a ship after a dirtballer.”

  That made the veteran spacer lose it. “Look, sonny! I happened to be with the general when he boarded that Weasel dreadnought in ’09. He spent more time in the chow lines of starships than you’ve put in since enlistment!”

  The young ensign stared hard at the man, disbelief etched on his clean-shaven face. He shot the spacer a wry look and finished that with a little salute. “As you were, spacer. I stand corrected.” Then he turned to watch the gigantic hulls of the new liners Freeborn, Liberated, and Verge drift past.

  BROADCAST from satellites, all one hundred and seventeen omni stations located on the earth are required to fill a twenty-four-hour schedule. This does not mean that every station is capable of programming each hour with interesting entertainment. Even over six hundred years worth of reruns has a limit. To fill the empty hours, many of the smaller stations use interviews with local personalities or heroes provided by Fleet Information.

  “Tonight—” the slick-haired host of “Hoy’s Hour” opened his show in a bored voice— “we have an officer who’s rapidly becoming one of the most decorated men in the Fleet.

  “Lieutenant, can you tell our listeners a bit about how you earned your last decoration?”

  THE ENCOUNTER HAPPENED entirely without warning, in the thick of battle at Dead Star 31. As if by design, the Fleet’s most junior lieutenant sat drumming his fingers at the controls of a state-of-the-art Fleet scoutship. Light from the monitors silvered his aristocratic profile, which expressed bitterness, frustration, and longing. The scout craft Shearborn was commissioned as a chaser, handily styled for concealment. She carried just two plasma cannon. Hit and run, or follow and hide, had been her designer’s intentions; “mop-up following engagement” read the bottom line in her battle orders. Last month, even yesterday, Commander Jensen had burned for a small part in the Alliance offensive at Dead Star 31. Today, while others were earning advancement and citations of valor for crippling the new Khalian dreadnoughts, he ached for action.

  The firing studs so near his tapping fingers were dandy, except there were never going to be enough of them to satisfy the ambition that smoldered beneath the lieutenant’s faultlessly correct Fleet bearing.

  Across the cockpit, Harris slouched in the untidy gray of his pilot’s coveralls. The wing patch at his shoulder crumpled under his fingers as he scratched himself, paused, then whistled as if at a woman. “What the hell?” His eyes widened, bright with the reflected flashes of battle off the analog screens.

  Jensen spoke frostily from his crew chair. “Have you something to report?”

  The pilot raised his eyebrows at the reprimand. His most insolent grin followed, as he banged a key for redefinition, then added in lilting admiration, “What the blazes is a tub-engined private hauler doing blasting ass across a battle?”

  Narrow-eyed and intense, Jensen regarded the offending speck on the screens, hedged now by flashes of plasma fire as she sliced through warring factions of Khalian and Fleet dreadnoughts. Overhead, the monitor on citizen’s frequency blared a curse and a startled challenge; the tone of the officer who hailed the offending merchanter matched that of Harris exactly.

  As the civilian vessel continued to hurtle across the lines, a prickle of intuition touched Jensen. His gut went cold and his fingers clenched. “That’s nobody’s merchanter.”

  He keyed his board for more data. At once the craft’s c
onfiguration flashed in design graph on his screen, ugly and ungainly as a toy assembled by a kid from unassuming bits of junk. Recognition struck Jensen like a blow to the vitals. He knew that craft, would remember her anywhere, from any angle, even to his dying moment. What could the Marity be doing carving a line across a Fleet offensive? It meant nothing but the worst sort of trouble; her captain happened to be the craftiest skip-runner in the Alliance.

  Harris stared, captivated at the analog screens. “Bugger, that pilot’s got the gift. Will you look at that evasion?”

  Jensen needed no proof of the Marity’s maneuverability. He had personally experienced MacKenzie James’s corkscrew style at the helm. Recall left the young officer sweating, not out of nerves but in memory of the aftermath, and a degrading depth of humility a proud man would kill to erase. Jensen reacted this time without thought. “Follow him.”

  Harris looked up from the screens. Blank with incomprehension, he said, “What? Are you brain-shocked? That guy’s Weasel steaks in the making, mate. He’s ducked into the Khalian lines.”

  “I saw.” Jensen turned his chair away. “I ordered a chase on that hauler. Section seven, bylaw four sixty two point zero, punishment for insubordination—”

  “Courtmartial, followed by death without appeal at conviction. I know.” Harris flipped off his pilot’s beret and scratched his red-thatched scalp. The hair sprung in snarls beneath his fingers. Challenge lit his eyes, which were blue, and about as innocent as a thief’s. “Your faith in my ability is a compliment, mate. What I’d kiss fish to guess, is what excuse you’ve got ready for old by-the-book and his-grandpa’s-an-admiral Meier. Because if your joyride doesn’t get us slagged by Weasels, the commodore’s surely going to sling your ass on a plate. Remember section seven, bylaw four sixty five point one, punishment for disregard of standing battle orders and leaving assigned position?”