The Fleet Book 2: Counter Attack

by David Drake (ed)

  The sight of her open eyes stayed in his mind all along the rest of his vector, while he loaded up two surviving marines and turned back along a detour. The third man’s life monitor had turned to blue as he watched, unable to halt death, and under the circumstances, unwilling to try. This marine had caught the edge—only the edge—of a plasma blast, which had cauterized the places where his right ribcage, arm, neck, and jaw used to be. He looked as though someone had taken a giant bite out of him, like a gingerbread man. A husky male voice sputtered out of the helmet communicator, demanding attention. “Marlowe? Do you read me?”

  Dalle lifted it off the dead man’s head and thumbed the switch which would normally be pressured open by the heck muscles. “This is Dr. Dalle. Who is speaking?”

  “l am Sergeant Villanova,” the voice snapped in surprise. “Where is my marine?”

  “He died a minute ago, Sergeant. I’m sorry.”

  There was a quiet, sad growl out of the speaker. “He was talking to me. I was keeping him awake ‘til we could get back there. He was hurt bad?” It was a question.

  “Very bad,” Dalle confirmed. “I don’t think I could have saved him. Are you in need of assistance?”

  “Nope,” Villanova said, curtly. “Thank you, Doctor. Out.”

  As Dalle stood up to drag away his travois, he saw a flash of white. The tension took over his reactions, and he turned and fired his sleeve laser in the direction the shot came from. Then he screamed. His left sleeve bad been punctured, and a laser had etched a hot pink line in his forearm up to the back of his hand. To his amazement, he heard an answering scream from his assassin.

  Cautiously, he edged over and peered around the corner. On the ground a Khalian lay. The fur of its arms and upper body was bleached white, some mark of vanity, or perhaps a sign of rank. One could never tell with the Khalia.

  With an eye on the claws, he checked under the pointed muzzle for a pulse. His shot had only grazed its head, but it was nearly dead from a half-dozen other wounds. There was an entry and exit wound from one of Alvin’s bullets, Dalle was sure. Its weapon holsters on crossed leather straps were empty.

  “Spot check, FMS–47!” Dalle’s communicator crackled.

  It was Iris Tolbert. “How’re ya doing, Mack? I’m not going to lose touch with another pilot.”

  “I’m okay, Commander,” ‘Mack replied. “How do you think the lab boys would like to play with a weasel?” While he talked he was squirting anesthetic on his arm. He unwound strips of plasti-skin and pressed them over the pink line. In a moment, the pain died down. There was no need for antibiotics—lasers made clean wounds, but the sonovabitch hurt like hell.

  “We’ve got all the dissection subjects we need, Mack.”

  “I’ve got a live down here. He’s beat-up, unconscious, but I think he’ll make it. He’d better. I think it might be one of the ones that killed Leo.”

  Tolbert was silent a moment, considering. “Good idea. We don’t get many live ones. Bring it aboard. I’ll tell Security to expect you.”

  “Thanks, Commander. Out.”

  The limp weasel body was astonishingly light. Dalle felt almost no strain as he carried the alien over to the cart and strapped it down. Its breathing was very shallow. There was little of life left in it, but perhaps the lab techs would have enough time to study its responses before it died. Most Khalian prisoners suicided after capture, but this one wouldn’t be given the chance. He gave it a general antibiotic booster, hoping the drug wouldn’t kill it.

  Leo’s light skull rolled from side to side in its gurney bed just across from the pinioned Khalian. Her narrow jaw had flopped open, and she looked like she might be screaming. Betrayal. Dalle felt a stab of guilt for possibly saving the life of the very Khalian who had taken hers. On the other hand, making it so her killer lived the short, proscribed life of a laboratory rat was perhaps apt revenge.

  He saw a few of the feather-faces robbing supply packs from the dead. He made no move to stop them. Those that the Fleet reclaimed would get tossed into the disposer anyway. Someone may as well get use out of them. Except for their scratching and quiet conversation, there was no sound at all for miles under Target’s sun.

  * * *

  Dalle bandaged the Khalian’s injuries and left it strapped down on a bunk, ignoring the questions of his other patients. “Prisoner of war,” was all he would tell them. Tarzan squinted a question at him, but Dalle looked away. The last vector he needed to cover showed only two pinpoints of red. Out of curiosity, he turned the monitor dial to blue for the same tangent, and cringed at the vast number of indicator lights that appeared. Some sectors were just overlapping blurs of blue. Quickly, he snapped the control back to its original position, unable to deal emotionally with the scope of violent death. He chided his subconscious. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen war before, but he never got used to it. He didn’t want to get used to it.

  * * *

  One of the two soldiers was kicking and twitching his arms feebly by the time Dalle brought him back to the scooter. His eyes were open, but he was not seeing Dalle. He was reliving the battle, fighting off the assailants who left the pattern of deep scratches, on his skin and shredded his uniform. He must have been beset by a whole gang of weasels. The knife Dalle had found near his hand was bloody, but his slugthrower had never been drawn from the holster. He was a good candidate for inducer-rest. Perhaps the man would need psychotherapy anyway, but his anxiety level could be significantly reduced in the meanwhile.

  He hit the hatch control and guided the travois up the ramp. At the top, he nearly let go of the metal leash in shock. The room was an abattoir. His patients lay in their own blood, dead, unable to have defended themselves. Some had died without ever having regained consciousness from their first encounters. And the bunk where the Khalian had been was empty, the straps chewed through. “By the hand of the goddess, what have I done?” Dalle whispered. He dashed around to each bed, searching for signs of life. It was a vain pursuit, except for two bodies, the female marine, knocked unconscious with a heavy plasma canister that lay nearby; and another, stretched out on its side on the floor.

  “Doc,” Alvin croaked, his jaw and neck covered in blood from his face wound. One eye was glued shut and bruised. “Your pet weasel—”

  “Where is it?” Mack looked around, but all he saw were dead men.

  “Don’t know. It attacked me and I grappled it. Damned things don’t weigh much, and I could a taken it down in spite of my busted arm, but see what it did to my eye? Kicked me in the gut, too.”

  “Yeah,” Mack said, retrieving a flat, blue leechpak from the refrigerator unit. It didn’t draw out blood, as its name suggested, but did assist in promoting circulation in hematomae. Alvin put it over the side of his face.

  “Little bastard. Why’d ya bring it in anyway?”

  Dalle took a moment, teeth in his lower lip, to confirm that, all of his other patients were dead. Where was the Khalian now? “Did it get out of the ship, Alvin?” he asked, ignoring the marine’s question.

  Shillitoe cringed at the sound of his given name. He glanced around. “No. It’s in here somewhere behind the panels. It couldn’t figure out how to work the controls.”

  Warily, Dalle moved to the console, turned on the ship’s security, system. He didn’t have any taste for playing hide-and-seek with a bloodthirsty monster, in spite of the fact he must have a good two feet in height on it. There, on the schematic, was a life form moving toward the other five life forms, his and the living patients. Dalle twisted, stared. The Khalian, dripping blood, was racing toward the open hatch.

  Quickly, Dalle pounced on a control, slammed the heel of his hand down on it. The door whooshed shut almost on the alien’s claws. It let out a panicked squeal. Whirling, it dodged toward the tiny bridge, and even as Dalle lunged for it, discovered there was no door to shut on its pursuer, and backpedaled toward the ba
nk of storage cabinets.

  Mack ran after it, trying to guess what its next move would be. Having been in the thick of hand-to-hand skirmishes with Khalia before, he probably knew as much or more about their fighting style than any other doctor in the Fleet. They were smaller, weaker, lighter than human beings, but they were faster than hell, and they had a lot of energy.

  He got a sudden inspiration—he could throw it under the inducer. Kayo it with waves, and it would be no more trouble. He cursed, looking at the bodies of the dead and, wishing he had thought of that solution earlier. Keeping his eye on the Khalian, he sidled over to the device, a more portable version of the one in his lab, and switched if on. The inducer’s gentle hum filled the air.

  The Khalian’s shiny black eyes followed Dalle suspiciously. It had no idea what the soft-skin’s machine did, but it had no intention of getting anywhere near it to find out. The device smelled dangerous. Teeth and claws were no use’ against the walls of this ship, and its position of mere soldier had never allowed it to learn such intricacies as technology. It would have to make him open the door before it tore his throat out.

  Dalle moved purposefully toward the weasel, seeking to maneuver it toward the inducer. It cringed, flattening its back against the wall and spreading out its front claws. Dalle feinted toward the left, driving it out of its niche to the right. It flashed across the room, pounding on the control console to make it open the door, then turned at bay. Mack moved inexorably toward it, cornering it, until it found that it had its back to the deadly machine.

  The weasel sprang at Dalle, teeth bared. It was still very weak from blood loss and its wounds, but it was determined to go out fighting. Dalle looked at the long, sharp incisors, and regretted not pinning it down with metal straps when he had gone out. Ironically, it was his own fault that the weasel had enough strength to fight. The shock absorber and local anesthesia had done their work; the weasel didn’t feel its wounds. He had set it free to kill. It made him sick to see the mangled dead strewn about his control room.

  The Khalian leaped at him. One claw whistled through the air. Dalle nearly loosed off another of his laser shots, but remembered in time how much damage it would do to the inside of the ship. He stiff-armed the weasel in the face, bending backwards to grab the heavy plasma canister off the floor. The weasel raised a back claw and raked down his leg, came up again, and grazed the cloth over Dalle’s abdomen. It ducked its head around his arm to bite at the exposed side of the doctor’s neck. To its owner’s surprise, the claw caught in the fabric, halting the Khalian’s strategy momentarily. Dalle Iet go of the weasel’s face, linked his arm under the leg, and flipped it up and over.

  The weasel went flying, but it regained its feet in a blur and fixed its teeth into Dane’s shoulder. Mack screamed, and a tingling raced down his left arm to his fingers, followed by a shock of numbness. The can fell from his hand with a boom! as it hit the deck. Instantly, the weasel tried to break to the right. In automatic response, Dalle’s arm tightened around it and squeezed.

  The weasel gasped involuntarily through the comers of its mouth. Its front claws let go, but its teeth didn’t.

  Ignoring the deadening of his left hand, the doctor locked his right hand on his left wrist, and lifted the small Khalian off its feet, waltzed it struggling toward the inducer. As a creature so close to base animal, Dalle was confident that the effect the waves had on the low brain in so many Allied species would put the beast quickly under.

  He body-slammed it against the side of the table, trying to bend it backwards, but its spine was designed to bend only forward and to the side. He was afraid he would snap its backbone, and twisted instead to the side, pinioning the Khalian’s paws over its head. It brought them both within inches of the edge of the inducer’s beam. The weasel doubled over between its own forepaws, jaws reaching for Dalle’s throat. The doctor recoiled, remembering what had happened to Leo. His head moved just under the focused beam of the inducer.

  Dalle saw the writhing white figure of the Khalian change, until the face was Leo’s, screaming at him as his hands closed around her throat. It was a waking dream, and he was fighting the urge to fall asleep as much as his furry opponent. He kept convincing himself that it wasn’t Leodli he was fighting, but a Khalian, and the face changed over and over again. He was determined not to lose his prize. He wanted to bring the alien home still breathing. It became Leo again, this time pleading with him not to kill her. “No more,” she begged.”

  The Khalian took advantage of his uncertain grip to scratch at him again. Dalle felt the gouge across his belly and thigh from very far away. It was as if it was hurting someone else, not him. The soft, cottony wadding of unreality around his mind was starting to work on the rest of his body. He realized that his brilliant stratagem was more dangerous to him than to a weasel. If he moved fully under the inducer’s beam, he would be instantly asleep. There was no telling how long it would take the Khalian’s unaccustomed brain to be affected. In the back of his consciousness, he could hear the intercom screaming at him, Commander Tolbert wanting a progress report. He heard the murmur of voices in the background near him, but none of them made any sense.

  * * *

  He batted away a claw he couldn’t quite see. It kept metamorphosing as it moved closer to his face. He was losing the fight. If he moved one more inch under the hood, he would be helpless, and his opponent could quite easily kill him. He was becoming groggy. It was overwhelming him now, pushing him, forcing him . . .

  His attention was dragged back to the surface just then by a magnificent, full-throated yell. His limbs twitched and jerked, all control lost from the startlement.

  But that was nothing compared to the reaction of the Khalian. It jumped high in the air, whiskers out, fizzing and spitting, and spun at bay to face the attacker who loomed behind it, gigantic in the glaring white light.

  Without the alien’s pressure to keep him on the table, Dalle slid out of the inducer’s influence to the floor, where he banged his head on the tiles. He rolled over, gained his hands and knees by inches. The war cry sounded forth again, forcing the weasel into an attitude of defense. Alvin stood before him, waving the plasma canister and uttering the huge sound that had the weasel frozen in its place. Without hesitation, Dalle wrenched himself upright, enveloped the small figure of the alien in a hammerlock, and threw it bodily under the inducer beam. In a few moments, it was still. Mack let go and leaned back against the wall, panting, then grinned up at Shillitoe, who was supporting himself against the travois. The other two patients were cheering.

  “Now I know how you got your nickname,” Dalle joked weakly.

  * * *

  Colonel Bar Kochba of the security occupation force, from the planet that orbited Magen Perdido, was on hand with five of his men to assist with the transfer of Mack’s prisoner. They put restraints on the helpless Khalian before dragging it out of the inducer unit. Until they were gone, Mack was more than half convinced he would be led away in irons too, to face court martial for letting an enemy murder helpless patients. Instead Bar Kochba threw him a casual salute and grinned through his beard at him. Mack returned the salute, and bent to care for the survivors. Gently, orderlies from the Morgue lifted Leo Schawn’s body from the stretcher bed. Mack watched them roll away with her and the other dead before turning to care for the remaining living passengers of FMS–47.

  He went to visit Alvin in the ward after the big sergeant had been through surgery and recovery. The torn place on the sergeant’s face was patched up, with a ring of white wadding around the eye to keep seepage out of the new skin graft. Mack’s other three patients were all doing well, and seemed to bear Dalle no ill feelings for accidentally turning a Khalian loose among them.

  “Fortunes of war, doc. If the brass let you off, I can forgive you,” the female marine told him philosophically. If anything, they respected him for capturing one alive single-handed. Shillitoe promptly o
ffered to take him on as medic for his unit, the Apes.

  “No, thanks,” Mack said, laughing. “I’m happy at what I’m doing: Research and Diagnosis. If I can ever get back to my lab and do some.”

  “You’re missing a great opportunity, Mack,” Alvin chided him, shaking his head. “Ooooh.” He touched a hand to the eye patch.

  While he and Alvin were chatting, a mate came up and touched Mack on the shoulder. “Excuse me, Captain, Admiral Duane requests your presence on the Caffrey. We’ve got a wounded Khalian. It’s unconscious, I think.”

  “Why me?” Dane demanded.

  The aide shrugged. “The Admiral’s decided you’re the closest thing we have to an expert.

  Dalle ignored the grin on Shillitoe’s face as he followed the aide out.

  The acrid tang of the fallen foe

  still seared my tongue and stung my nose

  when the unseen skulking smooth-skin,

  whose greatness of size and strength

  outweighed a heritage of skill,

  shackled me to defeat and life.

  From forbidden captivity I cast my complaint,

  not to the kin who mourn my death unknowing

  but to the void we traveled, wizard-guided,

  in whose depths my words at least find rest.

  Dishonor binds and weights my chest

  where once my weapons shone with pride.

  (Yet my brave sons may rest secure,

  for no witness to my disgrace survives

  to erase all traces of my tainted line.)

  My claws ache to rend furless flesh,

  to drown with alien blood my shame