Wing Commander #07 False Color

by William R. Forstchen

  `Don't be too hard on yourself, Commander," her CO said. "The Bear caught me doing the same thing once when he was my Wing Commander and I was supposed to be the hottest new squadron CO in the Confederation Navy, so I figure you're in pretty good company."

  Babcock didn't respond to that. She was too busy frowning at the readout from her warbook screen. "Computer's ID'd the target," she reported. "It's . . . a Confederation shuttle, Type R."

  "Not one of ours," the Wing Commander said. "Landreich never picked up any of the new R-types from the Confed fleet."

  "Stay on your toes, Commander," Richards advised.

  "The Kilrathi have captured their share over the years. That could still be some kind of a Trojan Horse."

  Bondarevsky's voice was thoughtful. "Didn't they start refitting cruisers of the Tallahassee class with R-type shuttles last year?" he asked. "For search and rescue work, wasn't it?"

  "That's right," Admiral Tolwyn replied. This was getting to be a regular chat line.

  "Inside weapons range. Still no sign they even know we're here." She paused. "Visual in thirty seconds. Drifter, you hang back and keep an eye on them. If they get me . . . well, you know the drill by now."

  She tuned out the conversation between the senior officers that was still going on over the commlink and focused all her attention on the approaching ship. It showed up as a bright light against the void, just another star, but swelled visibly as the range closed. For the past several minutes she'd been allowing the computer autopilot to gradually adjust her vector so that she would be able to quickly match course and speed with the target if that seemed wise. As they came closer, the differences in their vectors were going down fast, and the approach seemed to drag out.

  Finally the other ship was clearly visible. It was a human design, all right, a little sleeker than the Landreich's older shuttle designs but clearly nothing like the multi-hulled knife-blade shapes the Kilrathi favored. As her Hornet flashed by she got a look at the hull, where blast damage had blackened parts of the fuselage.

  "Did you see that?" Bondarevsky demanded. "The sensor pod images . . . Sparks, play it back for me. Yeah . . . there. Those are Juneau's numbers on the bow."

  "Survivors?" Richards sounded incredulous. "We didn't pick up any trace of Juneau or her consort."

  Well, they could be human survivors," Bondarevsky said. "Or the Cats managed to pick up a trophy before the fight was over:"

  "Any sign of hostile activity, Commander Babcock?" Richards asked.

  "That's negative, Admiral," she replied, swinging the fighter around on a course parallel to the shuttle. "I'm

  closing the range now IFF's still not responding, and I'm getting nothing but static from my automatic hails. I'm not even sure he's spotted me."

  "Electronics could've been fried," Bondarevsky said. "If he's been operating out here around the brown dwarf very long, a shuttle's shields might not have protected all the electronics too well."

  "Yeah. Maybe."

  Babcock trained one of the sensor pod's video cameras on the shuttle's cockpit and started boosting the magnification. There were figures visible inside, the images becoming clearer as she continued to adjust the zoom and cut in a computer-enhancement program. "I see a man at the helm," she said. "Two men . . . no, second one's a woman. Humans. Looks like we found survivors!" As she spoke, one of the figures aboard the shuttle looked her way and plainly spotted her Hornet for the first time. After a moment a spotlight lit up over the cockpit, pointing toward Babcock's plane and flicking on and off in the standard semaphore code of the Terran Confederation. Her computer read the signal and provided a running translation.

  TCS - JUNEAU - SHUTTLE - SURVIVORS - OF ENGAGEMENT - NINE - MONTHS - AGO - WHO - ARE - YOU - INTERROGATIVE

  She responded with the same primitive signaling method, identifying her ship and the Landreich navy. THANK - GOD - NEED - ASSISTANCE - CAN - YOU - LEAD - ME - TO - YOUR - SHIP INTERROGATIVE

  Babcock didn't answer right away. Instead she bucked the question up to Admiral Richards. If he wanted to kibitz while she was flying, she thought with a grim smile, the least he could do was take care of the tough decisions for her.

  "N ot Independence," came the admiral's reply. "He's already on course for Karga. Tell him we'll meet him there."

  "Paranoia?" Bondarevsky asked.

  "Most paranoids have real enemies, son," Richards said. "This guy could be legit . . . or he could be a human captive with a Kilrathi laser pistol pointed at the back of his head. And if that shuttle turns out to be carrying something dangerous, like enough explosive to do some real damage . . . well, this old girl's already seen enough trouble that a little more won't make much difference."

  She passed on the instructions to the pilot of the shuttle, who made a brief acknowledgment but sent no further messages. Shuttle and fighter continued on course, with Drifter's Hornet following at a discreet distance.

  Darlene Babcock heaved a sigh of relief as Karga came in sight. It looked like she wasn't going to have to face the Cats today after all.

  Starboard Flight Deck, ex-KIS Karga

  Orbiting Vaku VII, Vaku System"

  1040 hours (CST)

  The Confederation shuttle came in through the stern end of the flight deck, where there was less damage, but the craft still maneuvered carefully. Watching the boat settling to the deck using magnetic clamps to hold her down in zero-gravity, Bondarevsky felt a sense of relief. Despite the admiral's continued fears of a possible Cat trick, it looked as if they'd been lucky indeed. It was rare for anyone to survive the loss of a capital ship in combat, but apparently some had managed it here at Vaku.

  Still, they didn't take any chances. Bhaktadil had his marines deployed watching the shuttle, and most of the survey team was still strapped in and ready to fly at the first sign of trouble. Bondarevsky, accompanied by Harper, had persuaded the colonel to let him help greet the new arrivals. As the most recent ex-Confederation senior officer available, he might be able to elicit more information from them than the colonials could.

  They waited for the shuttle to open up, and Bondarevsky passed the time studying the battered craft's hull. It had clearly taken quite a beating at some point. The plating along the port side was pitted and scarred, and several external weapons and sensor mountings were missing. There was no sign of a commlink antenna, either, which probably accounted for their inability to communicate. That bird was lucky to still be flying

  Then the port side hatch began to open, and the tension among the watching marines became thick enough for Bondarevsky to feel. A pair of humans were standing at the top of the ramp, clad in Confederation-issue suits. Behind them, a bulkier figure moved, then another one.

  "Cats!" one of the marines shouted, raising his rifle to the ready.

  "Don't shoot!" someone called. "Don't shoot . . . they're friends!"

  One of the humans, the man, climbed down the ramp.

  He was wearing magnetic boots, and moved awkwardly, but it was plain he was trying to hurry before the situation got any worse. "I'm Commander Graham," he said. "Chief Engineer of TCS Juneau. The former TCS Juneau."

  "Do all your friends have fur, Commander?" Bhaktadil asked.

  "They're castaways just like us," Graham responded. "From two Imperial ships we engaged nine months back. One of them this carrier here. This is Jhavvid Dahl, Assistant Communications Officer of the Karga. And Mirrach lan Vrenes, Supply Officer from the escort Frawqirg. And my Engineering CPO, Ellen Quinlan."

  "Don't get me wrong, Commander, we're glad to see you," Bondarevsky said. "But you have to admit the company you're keeping doesn't recommend itself to just anyone."

  Graham shrugged. "When both groups made it down, we had a choice between fighting to the death or cooperating and staying alive. We decided we could always kill each other later, and we've been working together down there ever since. We struck an agreement that whichever side got here first, the others would surrender to with the understanding they'd be rep
atriated." He paused. "Believe me, friend, neither group would be here today if we hadn't teamed up. It's been rugged."

  "Well, it's over now. I'm Jason Bondarevsky." He stepped forward, extending his hand.

  "First to Kilrah!" Graham said, gripping it firmly through their suit gloves.

  "It wasn't much of a movie," Bondarevsky said dourly. He still regretted letting himself be talked in to cooperating with the picture. Even now, it continued to haunt him. "This is Colonel Bhaktadil, Free Republic Marine Corps. And my aide, Lieutenant Harper."

  "The fighter that escorted us in identified itself as Landreich Navy," Graham said, frowning. "But what are you doing out here, sir? A ConFleet officer . ?"

  "A long story, Commander," Bondarevsky said. "For the moment, I hope you won't object to a little paranoia on our part. When you see Terrans and Kilrathi together on the same shuttle where neither group has any good reason for being alive in the first place, you get a little nervous. Colonel Bhaktadil would like to have some of his men look over your shuttle . . just a precautionary measure."

  "Hell, sir, for all I care you can strip it down to scrap and sell it to the Firekkans as trade trinkets. There're about two hundred people, Terran and Kilrathi, down on that moon who are going to see home after nine months in purgatory. That's the only thing that matters right now."

  Wardroom, FRLS City of Cashel

  Near Vaku VII, Vaku System

  1822 hours (CST)

  "So there we were, three shuttles packed full of survivors, coming in over the crash site. The Cat destroyer must've been worse damaged than they figured. Something failed on final approach, and that sucker set down hard."

  Bondarevsky passed another cup of tea across the wardroom table to Commander Graham, who took it eagerly. Gaunt and drawn, the young engineering officer had spent most of the time since reaching what passed for civilization eating, drinking, and talking.

  They had decided to send the City of Cashel to pick up the survivors on the moon, which Graham called Nargrast. Apparently that was the name for one of the hells of Kilrathi mythology, and the description his Cat opposite number had provided of the place it was an apt name indeed. Nargrast, the planet, was a frozen waste, habitable only by a generous application of the word's definition. It was a massive world, about twice the mass of Terra, with a gravitational pull of nearly two gs and a dense oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. A greenhouse effect allowed the planet to retain enough of the brown dwarf's energy output to keep it from being completely unlivable, and screened out the worst of the secondary radiation as well, but it also gave rise to fierce storms. Most of the survivors were sick from the overpressures and the cold, and they probably couldn't have lasted too much longer.

  Now the transport was en route, and Richards had ordered Bondarevsky to accompany Graham and his party to arrange the rescue of the colonists, turning over the survey work to Sparks and Harper. City of Cashel, designed as a combat troop transport, was the logical choice for the job. She had plenty of space for extra passengers despite carrying the crew destined for the Karga, and her fleet of shuttles and assault craft could make a quick job of the evacuation of the planet's surface.

  Bondarevsky was glad to get away from the Kilrathi carrier and its crew of ghosts and corpses. He doubted the Goliath project would have much chance of success anyway, and was glad the expedition could do some good, at least, by rescuing the castaways of the Battle of Vaku.

  "Two of the shuttles mounted weapons pods, so we had a little bit of firepower available," Graham went on. "But the Cats weren't much of a threat. There were some survivors from the destroyer, but they were in a bad way. Some fighters had also put down there, Darkets and a pair of Strakhas. Those scared us, I've got to admit, but by the time they'd touched down they were out of fuel and weapons, so none of them even tried to come after us. And there were a couple of big lifeboats off the carrier, but they weren't armed either. I don't really know to this day when it dawned on me, but I decided to hold off opening fire until I had a parley with them.

  I know it was stupid, but I couldn't see slaughtering a bunch of refugees who were in the same boat we were, enemies or not."

  Bondarevsky shook his head. "Not stupid," he said. "You may have just proved that we can get along with the Cats . . . if we find a common cause that's good enough."

  "Yeah, maybe so. They're not near as bad as they're portrayed in the propaganda back home, either. Sure, they're tough, and they don't think like we do, but there're a few of them I'd gladly trust my life to. Have, in fact, several times over the last few months." Graham took another long swig from his cup. "Anyway, their leader turned out to be this youngster, Murragh. He came out to meet me on the open field away from the crash site, and even though he tried to bluster he sounded like a scared kid even through the computer translation. I think it had all been just too much for him to take in, the fight, the mess planetside, his first command . . . he seemed relieved to find out he didn't have to fight to the death like a hero out of one of the Kilrathi Codices. We struck a deal. Both sides would share the resources we had available—our manpower and their wreckage, basically—and we agreed that we'd pledge to let the other side return home if our side was the one that found us first. There've been a few clashes, of course, but I've seen as much fighting between members of the same species, human against human or Cat against Cat, as I've seen between the two groups. Mostly we don't have time for that crap. We're too busy hying to keep everybody alive."

  Bondarevsky frowned. "You could have some problems with your deal, Graham," he said quietly. "The Landreichers might not think they have to honor an agreement struck between Cats and Terrans. Neither group's too high on their list of favorites right about now."

  "You don't think there'll be trouble, do you?" Graham put down his cup and stared at Bondarevsky as if he'd grown another head. "I've given my word, sir. And that means everything to these people."

  "I'll do what I can. I've had . . . a certain amount of experience making Max Kruger do the right thing. But it might take some time. Help me explain it to the Cats when we're organizing the evacuation."

  "But what's the trouble? The war's over, isn't it?" "You're pretty well up on current events for a castaway, aren't you?" Bondarevsky asked, eyeing him with interest.

  "We managed to put together a hypercast receiver out of comm systems from the destroyer and our shuttles. Not a very good one, and we never had hopes of getting enough power to rig a transmitter planetside, but we could pick up traffic from both sides of the border when the atmospherics were just right and all our fingers were crossed. We heard about Kilrah."

  "Any trouble?"

  "Some mutterings. Fortunately the bulk of the able-bodied Kilrathi were Cadre from the carrier, handpicked specialists loyal to the hrai of Nokhtak. They didn't care a whole hell of a lot for Thrakhath or the Emperor, and the general consensus seemed to be that whatever those two had brought down on Kilrah was their own damned fault. Some of the survivors from the fighter crews and the destroyer were a little less philosophical. Several killed themselves, messy show and I thought that might get the others going but Murragh calmed 'em down. He's got a great future in politics, that kid. Knew just how to push their buttons."

  "Well, the war is over, at least as far as the Confederation's concerned. But there's a Kilrathi warlord named Ragark stirring up trouble on the border, and the Landreich's getting ready to fight back. So around here things haven't changed much, peace treaty or not, and your Cats will be treated as hostiles no matter how cooperative they've been with you." Bondarevsky sipped his own tea. "Like I said, I'll do what I can. Your bunch sounds reasonable. I doubt they'll want to throw in with Ragark. But if we can get back to business, tell me this. What were you people doing making runs out to that derelict with your shuttle missing half its systems?"

  Graham shrugged. "Scavenging run. We used to make them regularly, gathering up supplies and gear we thought we could use planetside. One by one, though, our shuttles have been
giving out on us. Even with the junk we've brought back from the flight decks of the Karga we can't keep a proper maintenance schedule on them, and spending so much time exposed to the brown dwarf's weird radiation, even with shields, has taken its toll on our electronics. The bird we were on this morning was the last one running, and it took over a month to get it back in service after we tore apart all the others for spare parts. We don't have decent sensors, a working commlink, or any of the original weapons mounts. We had to do our course calculations on a jury-rigged Kilrathi wrist computer and then feed the data into the navigation system manually, and at that we had to hope our figures for the Karga's orbit were close enough to put us in the ballpark."

  "You thought there was something on board valuable enough to take that kind of risk? I'd've thought you would have stripped all of the important stuff a long time back."

  "He's a big ship," Graham answered, using the Kilrathi masculine pronoun for the carrier without even seeming to notice. "And the most important thing was to try to get our transmitter back on-line."

  Bondarevsky remembered the report of a garbled signal picked up from the hulk when Vision Quest first investigated the system. "So you did get a hypercast system up and running."

  "Well, not very successfully, I'm afraid," Graham said. "Had to cobble the whole thing together to run off of one of the emergency power circuits, and we could never get enough juice into it to do much. The background radiation pretty much jammed the signal most of the time, and the transmitter went down a few days after we got it running anyway. But by that time we weren't flying anything, so there wasn't much we could do about it."

  "Couldn't you get the mains back on-line to get the power you needed?" Bondarevsky asked. If a Confederation engineer working with Kilrathi Cadre couldn't even bring one of the primary generators back on-line to supply power for a comparatively minor subsystem, it looked more doubtful than ever that the Karga could be salvaged as a spaceworthy fighting ship.