The Fleet Book Three: Break Through

by David Drake (ed)

  Not surprisingly, Omnilar’s viewership diminishes as you approach the frontier sectors.

  “YOU WANT US to what?” Captain Tolliver English of the 92nd Marine Reaction Company (Redhorse) shook his curly blond head as if he couldn’t believe his ears. The impassive, can-do facade he assumed when confronting strangers and navy brass slipped, revealing naked emotion: anger, frustration, and open revolt. “You’re out of your mind. Sir.”

  English squinted at the stranger in dark civilian clothes as if at a distant target suddenly in his line of sight. The marine captain’s hips jutted and his hands rested there, where his equipment belt would have been if they’d been groundside instead of parked high above Bull’s-Eye (MCA-l187) in the Haig along with half the damn Alliance Fleet, shaking off the effects of the recent space-to-space “victory” and getting ready for the Bull’s-Eye operation’s next phase.

  “Toby!” cautioned Jay Padova, the Haig’s paunchy commander, taking the cigar from his lips as he hurried around his desk to put himself physically between the two men.

  The civilian put out his hand, fingers spread, stopping Padova in his tracks. “At ease, sailor,” he ordered the ship’s commander absently. “I’ll handle this.” His head half turned, but his flat stare never left Toby English as he called over his shoulder, “Manning, get us some coffee, or something.”

  English had nearly forgotten about Johanna Manning, the Haig’s staff intelligence officer, over behind Padova’s desk with her porta-base hooked into the auxiliary com console.

  He braced himself for the inevitable explosion from Manning, who was prickly at best. There wasn’t even the slam of the porta-base’s lid. Manning slipped by in English’s peripheral vision without turning a short-cropped hair, her thin face expressionless, as if the stranger’s command had turned her into a stewardess.

  Nobody spoke until long after the door to Padova’s office had exhaled her and sighed shut again, which gave English more than enough time to reevaluate the civilian. Shoehorned into maddeningly tight quarters on an Alliance navy destroyer with his fifty marines still mourning the loss of three of their company on Bethesda, English had become so attuned to detecting one kind of deadliness in a man that he’d failed to recognize another in the stranger.

  English’s men tended to cook off like the Bethesda spaceport had, with plenty of warning glow and noise and heat. Violence close to the surface was one thing the Redhorse captain had learned to spot; his marines were made that way—it kept them alive.

  But this man was a different sort of dangerous, the kind that gave no warning, no signal, unless the sheer absence of display was warning enough. And it hadn’t been, not to Toby, not when Padova hadn’t seen fit to brief him beforehand. But I should have known, he chided himself. What the hell was a civilian doing in Padova’s inner sanctum in the middle of strike prepositioning?

  Looking over the “civilian observer” again, English saw everything he’d missed because he really hadn’t been looking for it. The flat expression on a face that might have been handsome if there was any human emotion on it; the perfectly groomed home world haircut and clothes on a body too fit for a noncombatant and too relaxed for a soldier. The weird little tics that didn’t quite fit: a red silk cord knotted on one wrist in an intricate pattern, an expensive universal chronometer on the other; the belt too wide to be there only to hold up his pants and a jacket cut to accommodate concealed hardware; the predatory, attentive amusement that came from nowhere and everywhere but his eyes.

  But then, none of that would have meant anything unless you’d seen the way he ordered Padova and Manning around. Slouchy guys with nothing much to say, who didn’t flap no matter what, weren’t the sort you worried about unless you’d been somewhere like Xeon where, after they’d come and gone, you found some of your own guys floating face-down in the Purple River—the ones who’d been asking out loud the sorts of questions everybody wonders about but most have more sense than to ask.

  Just when it all cycled for English and he muttered, “damn” under his breath, the stranger said, “Let’s take it from the top, Marine. We want you to take some NDI—nondevelopmental items—down to Bull’s-Eye on your sortie against that Khalian naval repair facility, instead of the antiquated tech you’ve been using. This isn’t a field test; this equipment’s going to upgrade your Redhorse’s effectiveness by thirty percent. Since you’re at half-strength compared to, say, the One-Twenty-first, and doomed to stay that way as long as you’re hitching a ride on this navy tub, you ought to thank us, not bitch.”

  “Thanks. Sir. But no thanks.” English crossed his arms.

  Padova opened his mouth to speak, changed his mind, shoved his cigar into it, and lumbered heavily back to sit behind his desk, shaking his head slowly where Toby English couldn’t help but see.

  “You’re under the mistaken assumption that I’m asking, Captain,” said the civilian. And now there were deep lines around his eyes as he looked past English, to where the bulkhead door was. “So let’s get that straight. I’m a civilian observer, you bet. My name’s Grant. I’ll be dropping with your Redhorse to see how you boys perform with your new toys.”

  “We’re not guinea pigs. We’re not paid to provide burn-in time under fire for some technospook program—” The severity of Padova’s headshake warned English to shut it down. English jammed his hands into his pockets.

  Grant said, “I just told you this was NDI, not experimental, hardware. Are you calling me a liar? Because if you are, don’t. I’m going to be your best friend or your worst enemy for the duration of this Bull’s-Eye vertical insertion, mister. Unless, of course, you want to sit up here in Padova’s brig while I put Redhorse through its paces. Who’s your senior lieutenant?”

  “I—” English’s mouth was dry. They’d lost Manning (no relation to Johanna Manning), along with Tamarack and Louis, on Bethesda. “We’re waitin’ on command replacements, not that we need ’em ... we’re at by-the-book full strength. Right now my old recon first, Sawyer, has that slot.” And Sawyer was a couple rounds shy of a full clip lately. “Look, Grant, sir—changing gear just before a drop’s bad luck. Everybody knows that. Don’t back me into a corner on this. My guys are real short fused, and the last thing they need is changes just before they’re supposed to secure eight klicks of dry dock on a world where Khalians are the indigs.”

  “Don’t you think we know what you need, Marine?” said the purported civilian.

  “You want to give me some idea of who the hell you are and where you come from, talkin’ to me like this?” English turned to Padova, hand out as if for help. Again, Jay shook his head, and the look on his face was sour, as if his cigar tasted real bad today.

  “How’s OPSCOM suit you?” asked the stranger.

  “It don’t suit me at all. Not with you runnin’ around in a funny suit givin’ orders to a naval destroyer commander and me both like you was tasked for it.” OPSCOM was military. “You got some sort of—?”

  The man in civilian clothes reached into his jacket pocket, and English stiffened reflexively.

  Grant tossed a holographic ID at him.

  Even before he caught it, English wished he hadn’t seen the insignia on the back. “Okay,” he said, after flipping the ID in his fingers. He’d about guessed; he was just hoping he was wrong. Interagency Support Activity personnel sat wherever they wanted, and right now this one wanted to sit beside Toby English’s 92nd while it secured an area twice the size it should have to secure. At least, for once, their intelligence would be current. “You could have saved lots of time, tellin’ me this in the beginning, sir,” he said to the GS-15 from Eight Ball Command. “Let’s go see this so-called NDI of yours.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, as he handed the ID back to the Observer, English could see Padova wipe his forehead with the back of his hand. He couldn’t figure what Jay had been worried about. English never would have let push come to sh
ove, not with a mission thirty-six hours away.

  On the way out, he thought maybe he understood what was bothering Padova after all: as he was leaving with the Observer, Manning came back in with a tray, a coffee pot, and an opaque glare on her thin face.

  “Hey there, Bushbaby,” said the man called Grant to Padova’s chief of intelligence. “Just in time. Come on, you ought to see this stuff before you have to use it. There’s no place on this little boat to do much in the way of familiarization: the run-through I’ll give you is all you’ll get until we’re on the ground. Unless you want to bunk in with the 92nd for the night, that is, which would be one hell of a waste.”

  English had never dreamed that Manning might go groundside with them. He’d never dreamed he’d see anything, like the look on her face at that moment—not from Manning, not ever.

  She went chalk white; her lips turned blue and her eyes got very bright. Slowly and deliberately she set down the coffee and poured herself a sipper full. “Let’s go, then,” she said to the Observer without looking up at him, although he was a big man, English’s height. “If you’ll excuse me, sir?” she called past them to Padova, very professionally, very controlled, through still bloodless lips.

  “Dismissed,” Padova replied with evident relief. English began wishing he was going to wake up from this weird-ass dream sometime real soon.

  * * *

  The so-called, NDI was about as nondevelopmental as something you could spray on Weasels to make them lose their fur. The whole point of NDI gear was that it would work: it was supposed to be pretested, field-proven, off-the-shelf technology, maybe packaged or combined some new way, but generally familiar.

  English had been hoping for something simple, or something noncrucial at least. How much could Eight Ball Command want to change just before an insertion? If it worked, you didn’t go in and muck around with it, and the gear that the 92nd was using had been keeping them alive and dangerous to the enemy’s health well enough to suit anybody who had to use it.

  But now here was all this new shit, with no time to train, let alone get up to speed, with it. English had trucked two full kits from the resupply pod down to the 92nd’s wardroom so that he and Sawyer could shake the stuff out with everybody watching. But you couldn’t shoot the damned APOT (A-potential) guns in here, and you couldn’t try the modified scanners, or they’d screw up the ship’s astronics. Same for the Associate-assisted helmets. So there was no way of knowing whether the beam weapons would really freeze and/or explode the Weasels in their tracks (so long as you kept the weapons in contact with your new suit like the manual said), or whether the hand-helds would give you any better lock-on than conventional direction finders, or whether any of the new electronics would integrate with the 92nd’s conventional systems, or just jam things up.

  They shouldn’t be worrying about integration, English told the horror-struck men of the 92nd; anyway, they had whole new hard suits coming, and field packs as well.

  “Why are you doin’ this to us?” somebody wanted to know.

  English looked up from the pile of gear he wanted to touch about as much as he’d have liked to stick his bare hand in between a mother Weasel and her nursing pup, and saw that it was Trask, the new field first, who’d spoken.

  “Wouldn’t want you to get bored, Sergeant. You think these goodies are neat? Wait till you put on that helmet and hear your Associate electronics telling you what they think you should do in any and every combat situation. Ain’t technology wonderful? Now we don’t have to think at all—just carry the gear from one place to the next and do what it says.”

  Sawyer, who had been up all night in the resupply pod alongside English, working with the NDI, rubbed a shadowed jaw. He’d saved English’s ass on Bethesda, and probably everybody else’s in the wardroom some time or other. Good recon specialists were like that. He could exude confidence like a tranquilizer spray, and there wasn’t a scar on him after fifteen years in the field, which helped you believe he knew what he was doing.

  He turned on that aura of invincibility and said with an easy, gap-toothed grin, “Come on, girls, what’s the damned difference what we kill ’em with, so long as we kill ’em? We’re looking at one-type-kills-all weaponry, here. OPSCOM thinks this is what we need, then this is what we need. Intel thinks maybe there’s so many Weasels down there that we aren’t gonna want to change clips.” He really did look like he believed what he said, even though he knew the part about OPSCOM wasn’t exactly true.

  Demonstrating, he shouldered the power pack for the APOT rifle. “You just spray ’em like this, just like hosing down a perimeter with defoliant. You want the tails for your coup-coats? You set it to low. You want to blow ’em to smithereens? You set it to high. You want to stun instead of kill? You set it to mid position.”

  “How much does it weigh?” A corporal named Bucknell asked the inevitable question.

  “We’ve been through that with the technical Observer who’s going to drop with us. It’s all well within milspec,” English said very quietly, suddenly drained of energy now that it was clear the men weren’t going to be as balky as he’d been—thanks to Sawyer. Having slipped that data in so that nobody’d be surprised about the Observer, he said, “I’m going to leave you with Sergeant Sawyer. Just remember—it’s not too heavy and it’ll jump, so we don’t have any reason to bitch about it.”

  “Unless it don’t work,” said Corporal Bucknell.

  Sawyer threw an APOT rifle at him, and the corporal lunged to catch it. “It works better than you do, Nellie, and that’s for sure.”

  As he left them to their own study of the new equipment, English heard Sawyer telling the men in a low voice meant to be comforting that this mission was “so slick, so Priority One, so black that the Observer and the ship’s Intel officer are going down with us. Not only that, I heard that Padova’s own feet might touch the ground on this one—that if we need, we’ve got ... even the Haig sittin’ on her ass on Khalian turf waitin’ for us.”

  As long as nobody was sure English had overheard Sawyer, English didn’t have to deny the rumors. For all Toby knew, what he and Sawyer had overheard passing between the Observer and Manning might be true.

  But there was other stuff passing between the Observer and Manning that English didn’t want to think about, personal stuff—especially because there was something similar going on between Manning and the 92nd’s line lieutenant, which, was why Sawyer had been so testy lately.

  For the first time in the whole damned war against the Khalians, English really wished he could sit this one out.

  At least he didn’t have to ascertain personally that every one of his marines had exactly the suit fittings and fit that could mean the difference between victory and defeat. Sawyer would handle that. It was going to take all night.

  Sawyer had begged for the duty, even though it wasn’t really either man’s job, by the book. By the book, there was nothing scary about all this new equipment on the eve of a major engagement. If Sawyer hadn’t volunteered to oversee the refit, English would have felt obliged to stay.

  This way he could try to get some sleep, something Sawyer felt compelled to avoid for reasons that probably had way too much to do with Manning and the on-board Observer and that, unless and until they impaired his lieutenant’s performance, were none of English’s damned business.

  If they had been, he’d have told Sawyer days ago that fooling around with one of Padova’s ranking officers was a bad idea. Sawyer knew that, and knew that English knew what was going on and didn’t like it. And that hadn’t stopped him.

  The only good thing to come out of this whole mess was that, for reasons of his own, Sawyer had decided to shape up just when English really needed him. But then, that was the way of it with the marines of Redhorse.

  * * *

  “One more time, girls,” said Sawyer to the jump-ready troops in the free-falling APC li
t with strobing red light. “Our orders say we take prisoners, if possible, remember. That’s what the ‘game bags’ ”—the sergeant bared his teeth—“and the tape is for. But them orders also say don’t lose none of these goodies, which includes the suits we’re wearin’. So we ain’t takin’ any casualties, neither.”

  There was a general mutter from the marines in the ready bay, too subdued for English’s liking.

  “So what it cuts to,” Sawyer continued in a voice that bounced around like sliding gravel in the APC’s belly full of bare-headed marines, “is we don’t leave nothin’ behind—not a scanner, not an ELVIS pack, not a Weasel with a breath o’ life in ’im and sure as shit none of these APOT rifles.” Sawyer glanced at the A-potential weapon in his hand with all the affection he’d have showed an Eirish python. “Now let’s go over this e-quipment one more time. E-L-V-I-S stands fer electromagnetic vectored integrated scalar, which means it powers the rifle you’re holding. Lose the pack, this multibuck piece of hardware’s good maybe for a bayonet or a club. Your suits and gloves, once they’re sealed to the suit, are part of the weapons system: they feed the energy from the pack into the rifle. Keep the rifle in contact ...”

  English was worried about that. There was no way to explain the APOT system to the men any better. They didn’t know anything more than they needed to about superconductivity, zero-point potentials, or Aharanov-Bohm effects in currents conducted through composite-metal rings. And all they needed to know was, if you kept the APOT rifle in contact with the suit and pulled the trigger, the gun would kill what you were pointing at, vegetable, animal, or mineral.

  English knew a little more, enough to be worried for more than superstition’s sake, enough to guess how come the Observer was making the drop, if not the jump, with them. The APOTs, driven by the forty-pound ELVIS packs and modulated by the “Associate” electronics in the 92nd’s new helmets, punched virtual holes in space-time to get at the unlimited energy under the surface of what English and his men knew as reality.