The Fleet Book 2: Counter Attack

by David Drake (ed)

  She hurried away as the sound of the explosion reached her. What a satisfying noise! It made up in part for the losses her mission had taken; these were now echoed by worse losses for the Khalia.

  The return was much faster than the trip out had been. Now she was able to use feet and hands to full effect without the enormous burden of the weapon. She could clamber along branches that were too weak to support her loaded weight, and leap from tree to tree instead of trudging along the ground.

  She hesitated as she approached the ship. Henry’s naked body, its mouth open in the rictus of the agony of death, reminded her of the slaughter within. But she had to enter, because she had to make contact with the other ship. They were supposed to coordinate after their missions were accomplished, and compare notes on the outlook for avoiding capture by the enemy during the coming week. It could get pretty tight. The broadcasts were coded; if the enemy ever broke the code, there would be real trouble. But of course if the enemy had cracked the code, this mission would never have made it to the surface of the planet. The ship’s special radio would be a real prize for the Khalia!

  She nerved herself for the blood and entered the ship. She stepped over the, bodies again and went to the radio chamber. She activated it and gave her message: “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. FOUR LOST. STATUS? QUITI.” Then she touched the Send key, and the radio fired out a compacted blip of coded information that only an alert and properly tuned receiver could catch, and that only a Fleet receiver could interpret. On a primitive planet like this, with its nearest base a smoking ruin, the chances were excellent that the enemy would never even realize that a message had gone out.

  In a moment the radio gave the response, in its machine monotone: “MISSION DITTO. NO LOSSES. STAND BY FOR UNION. GOOD JOB, QUITI. LUTHER.”

  She slumped with relief. She had feared that something similar could have happened to the other, crew. Soon, they would be here to clean up the mess and make the necessary reports, and she, could go back to being innocent, ignored “Cutie.” Then she could relax the hypnotic block that kept her sane and functional during this crisis.

  Cutie. Something bothered her about that. Of course she resented that demeaning nickname, but that wasn’t it. There was something else.

  She wanted to get out of the ship, away from the horror it contained. But she delayed. What was nagging her? Her intuition, supposedly a foolish female trait, was operating, and she had learned never to ignore it.

  Something about the message. She reactivated the radio. “Replay message,” she told it.

  It repeated the message, exactly as before, concluding with “Good job, Quiti.” And of course the signoff of the mission leader, Luther. It was the first time he had complimented her on her work; he was just as bad as the others about her status as a participant. But of course she had done a good job; she had completed the mission when the men could not. The compliment was in order.

  So what was bothering her?

  She played the message back another time. Then, abruptly, she had it.

  Luther had given her name correctly. Luther wouldn’t have done that. None of them would. To them she was “Cutie” arid nothing else. Except “honey,” or possibly “monkey.” That alone was irrevocable, because it was unconscious.

  Luther had not sent that message.

  That galvanized her. She almost leaped into the “tack” chamber and grabbed several slabs of hardtack. She gulped down water. Then she took a survival pack, stuffed the hardtack into it, and another package of water, and slung it over her shoulder.

  She almost danced over the bodies, heedless of the tacky blood her toefingers encountered. She plunged out of the port and ran across the glade, adjusting her pack. She flung herself into the foliage at the edge of the slope.

  She continued on up the mountain, her ears alert for the approaching scoutship. It should take it a while to arrive, since it had to orient on her ship, and its crew might not have been ready for an instant takeoff. But she had to cut the risk as much as possible.

  She made it to the ledge where she’d left the plasma tube in half the time she had taken before. The weapon was undisturbed. There was no sign of activity at the defunct battery; evidently it was after all only a minimal complement, with no reserves for the unexpected. That was a break for her.

  She hefted the tube in its harness; it was now cool. She carried it back toward the ship, but not along the precise route she had taken. She located an outcropping that overlooked the site of the ship. The ship itself was not visible; they had of course parked it under the cover of overhanging trees at the far edge of the glade. The lengthening shadows covered any other evidence of the landing. But she had a fair notion where it was.

  She set up the tube, aiming it down toward the ship. Then she waited.

  After about fifteen minutes she saw it coming, flying low and somewhat clumsily. It came in for a landing some distance from her own ship.

  As its motion ceased, she reoriented the tube and touched the firing stud. The arriving ship went up in a fireball, and the sound smote, her. The range was almost too close for such a weapon!

  Now, belatedly, she experienced doubt. Suppose she had misread the situation and Luther really had used her proper name? Had she just murdered the rest of her mission?

  Feverishly she descended, leaving the tube behind again, and her pack of supplies with it. She was tired, but the route was now familiar; it seemed only a moment before she was there.

  The first thing she saw was part of the body of what looked like a monstrous weasel, evidently blown from the other ship.

  She had not been mistaken. That was a Khalian!

  Obviously there had been an enemy agent on the other ship, too. Not only had he stopped the mission, he had contacted the Khalia and turned the ship over to them, together with its invaluable radio. That was why they had been able to answer her coded message. Had she not been tipped by that single failure of sexism, she would by now be captive again, or dead. Instead, she had reversed the ploy, and taken them out.

  She was, then, the only survivor of the mission. She would have to pilot the ship herself, and try to do the job the other ship had not done: take out the second enemy battery.

  Well, she was a qualified pilot, and she knew the approximate location of the battery. She could do it.

  Or could she? That battery would not be caught off guard; the destruction of the first one would have alerted it. Any alien vessel approaching it would be vaporized in short order.

  She considered a moment. Then she got into her ship, went to the pilot’s cubby, and activated the system. She started it moving, and taxied it out into takeoff position. She set the auto-pilot for the destination, with a two minute delay before implementation. Then she got out, and ran for the mountain again.

  The ship took off without her. In moments, it was airborne. It rose to low cruising height and oriented; then it flew directly toward the battery.

  Quiti climbed the mountain. She had hardly made progress before she heard the boom of the exploding ship. The battery was alert, without doubt.

  With luck, the Khalia would assume that that was the end of her. It would seem that she had lured them into a trap, destroyed the other ship, then set out to finish the job in her own ship—exactly as she had considered doing. They might send a crew to clean up the mess in the glade, but they would not set out in pursuit of her, because they thought she was dead. She hoped.

  Now she was alone, without a ship, stranded on a foreign planet. What was she to do?

  She knew the answer. She had a mission to complete. She had to take out that other battery before the Fleet passed this region. She had one charge left in the plasma tube.

  But the battery was a hundred and fifty kilometers away.

  She sighed. She would simply have to walk.

  First she slept, for night was closing and she knew better than to w
aste her strength traveling blind. Then she walked. She hauled the plasma tube down the mountain and through the jungle at its base. Away from the glade the vegetation closed in solidly with brambles, spiked yuccas, and thorny vines. She had to don her shoes to protect her feet, but then it got worse and she realized that she could not make progress of the kind she had to, through this mess. She had no more than a week to reach that battery and take it out with her final plasma charge; that meant she had to cover at least twenty kilometers a day. On a flat plain, carrying only her travel supplies, that would be a significant hike. On that plain, carrying half her weight in the mass of the awkward plasma weapon in addition to her supplies, it would be a savage workout. Across this tangled, ragged morass of jungle, it was practically impossible. She was healthy, not superhuman.

  An enemy aircraft flew over. She ducked under cover. That was another problem: the closer she got to the battery, the more enemy surveillance there would be, hindering her progress.

  She rested, panting. There had to be a better way! She would have to eat ravenously just to maintain her strength, and her supplies were far too limited. She should have brought out all the hardtack before sending the ship on its doom flight. She was making mistakes, and she couldn’t afford them! She would have to forage—and she had not been briefed for that for this planet, as no such trek had been contemplated by the brass.

  The brass spent too much time on their fat posteriors, and not enough in the field! Foul-ups and emergencies were always, possible; she should have been briefed for every contingency. If she had been in charge—

  She shrugged. Such speculation was pointless. They would never let a woman be in charge of anything. She was here, and she had a job to do. How was she to do it?

  If she couldn’t trek to the battery in time, was there another way to take it out? Yes. All she needed was to establish a line of sight. From the ground, that meant getting close, but if she fired from an elevation, she could do it from here. All she needed was a suitable mountain.

  The trouble was, there were too many mountains here!

  She would have to climb the tallest, so as to see over the lower peaks. She had taken out the first battery from the lower ledge of a mountain close to it, but the farther one was much more of a challenge. She dreaded hauling that heavy tube up the steep slopes! The added weight of her supplies made if that much worse.

  But if the vertical distance was small, she could make separate trips for supplies. And if there was a spring or river in the vicinity, she could go frequently to it for drinking water. And if there were edible fruits, or animals she could laser and cook, she could forage. There was an advantage in operating in a set location; foraging would be much easier. She could even make temporary trails, or at least she could memorize the local characteristics of the terrain, so that she would not blunder into anything bad.

  There would still be a lot of work, but at least it was feasible. She felt better. Now, she could afford to eat and look about.

  That afternoon she found her mountain. It was not the tallest in the vicinity, but it was taller than most, and had a fairly nice ridge along the side away from the direction of the battery. That meant there would be few brambles or tangled masses of foliage to drive through. At the base was a spring; she had found it because of a faint animal trail leading to it. That meant that the water was potable, and that no civilized creature used it. (She was assuming for this purpose that the Khalia and their minions were civilized.) Near it was a tree bearing unfamiliar fruit; the presence of scattered rinds and seeds near it suggested that animals ate the fruit, which meant it was unlikely to be poisonous. Nothing was certain, of course, on an alien planet, but the odds were in her favor. At any rate, it was a gamble she had to take. The fruit was fleshy and juicy; she would eat it here, and save the dry and solid hardtack for the upper reaches, as it was structured for traveling.

  Next day she hauled the plasma tube to the base of the mountain, not too close to the spring. There was after all no sense in making her presence obvious. Then she returned to the region where the ship had been, because she needed the cord that Henry had used to tie her with. It should come in handy in the difficult upper region of the mountain. Also, it occurred to her that the less evidence of what Henry had tried to do to her, and how she had escaped, the better. She doubted she would ever have occasion to use such a pin again, but others of her sex might.

  She knew by the smell when she got close. The rope was there, as was Henry’s body and that of the Khalian. Flies were feeding, very like the ones on her home planet, and indeed, like those of any planet. The little winged predators seemed universal, with only their insignificant detail differing. She got the rope first, untangling it and coiling it about her arm and shoulder, then went to inspect the enemy more closely. She had seen mock-ups of the Khalia in training, but this was the first actual body she had encountered. She was surprised to discover that it did not look like a monster, but more like a slaughtered pet. Only the hind section was here; the head and forelimbs had been torn off in the explosion. It was furry, with short legs, like a magnified weasel, and about one small ankle was a metallic bracelet.

  Military identification? Or jewelry? Could this have been a female, like herself? Soft like a woman? That bothered her, and she turned away. She felt no grief for the traitor Henry, who had mercilessly killed her companions and tried to rape her, but the concept of the alien female got to her.

  She knew better than to bury the bodies of either species, or even to disturb them. That would only create evidence of her survival, and the lack of such evidence was her greatest protection. So she left them, breathing easier as she got away, and not merely because of the clearing air.

  Then she heard something. She ducked under cover and waited.

  It was a party of creatures, not wild ones. The enemy was coming to this site!

  She drew her laser pistol. If they discovered her, she would have to fight.

  They passed close enough to alarm her, but evidently were not aware of her. One Khalian, walking somewhat awkwardly on its short hind legs, and two of what were evidently the natives: man-sized humanoid bipeds with feathery scales. The Khalian was clothed only in its fur, but the natives wore uniforms of some sort. But the only one to carry a weapon was the Khalian; that made the relationship clear enough.

  For a moment she was tempted to laser the Khalian. She could so readily kill it from this ambush! But she refrained, partly because she didn’t like one-sided slaughter—she had seen too much of that recently!—but mostly because she intended to do nothing that would give away her existence. She would kill if she had to, but not unprovoked.

  The party went on into the glade. There was a burst of alien chatter. Evidently they had found what they sought: the remnant of the violence here. They were simply an investigatory party.

  Quiti used the opportunity of their distraction to remove herself from the vicinity. The encounter was reassuring, actually; it seemed to confirm that the enemy had no awareness of any human survivors. Her ploy with the scout ship must have been’ successful.

  She brought the rope to her mountain base camp; then ate some more fruit and settled into a tree for the night. That was one thing about this perilous mission: the nights made her feel right at home!

  Next day she started the hard work. She hiked up the ridge, carrying her supplies and rope. She used hands and feet to grasp the projections of rock, and to get her safely across a fissure that had a solid fallen trunk as a natural bridge. She was not merely climbing—she was scouting out the best route for her next trip. When she was uncertain of a particular path, she climbed back down and tried another. What she could do when lightly loaded did not necessarily establish what she could do with the heavy load. How glad she was for the bug, repellant in the survival kit; a cloud of flies followed her constantly, now.

  When she found a suitable landing that she deemed to be at the reasona
ble limit of her hauling capacity, she fixed its location in her mind. Then she left her supply, pack, and started back down, carrying only her laser pistol. She did not intend to be caught defenseless again.

  Back at the bottom, she ate more fruit, drank deeply, and curled up in her tree for the night. She had to conserve her strength for the next day’s effort. She had used three days getting properly set up; she hoped to complete her mission in three more, with a leeway of one; It was always best to have a margin for the unexpected.

  In the morning she hefted up the plasma tube in its harness and set out. She had planned well, and made good progress at first. Then the heat of the day and her own exertions caught up with her, draining her strength. She sweated profusely, but had no water; that was in the spring below, and at the camp above. All she could do was rest briefly, cooling a little, then go on.

  The tube had been heavy at the start. It grew heavier as she went. It overbalanced her, making her steeper ascents dangerous; she was afraid she would reel and fall and injure herself, ruining everything. Sweat made her hands and feet slide, and her grip weak. She felt like an ant carrying a spaceship up a vertical cliff.

  Then a storm came up. At first this was a relief, for it brought down gusts of cool air. Then the wind intensified, as if trying to pluck her from the slope and hurl her down. Then the rain splashed across, making the entire mountain slippery. But she plowed on, knowing she had no alternative.

  She reached her camp behind schedule; it was almost dark, and her fatigue had drained her of hunger. She forced herself to eat a little, and to drink a little, and slept. Perhaps an hour later she woke, and ate and drank a little more. She had to restore her body for the next day’s effort.

  Somewhere in the night she decided to take a gamble. She needed to find the final site on the next day. That meant she could leave the pack here, because she wouldn’t need to worry about eating after she fired the plasma tube. Food was just to sustain her for the great hauling effort. She could travel faster without the pack, and would save more strength.