The Fleet Book 2: Counter Attack

by David Drake (ed)

  In that instant, if anyone had asked him, he’d have said that Milius was the bravest single soul he’d ever met, fighting her heart out with these doomed bastards day after day, in this kind of grinding misery, and knowing it wasn’t going to do a damned bit of good to anybody alive here, even if her wildest dreams were realized and the Alliance took out the spaceport.

  * * *

  Sunset was fast on Bethesda, like the dropping of a smoke bomb. He had everybody in position, thanks to Milius, who’d found them a rickety bunch of wagons and jeered them into action when they balked at the audacity of her plan.

  Or jeered him into action. English couldn’t quite fathom how he’d ended up taking orders from that crazy lady, but he had. She knew the weasel mindset on Bethesda better than he could ever hope to, and her little band of indigs supplied milk to the spaceport, as well as fresh eggs.

  So in went the unit, behind the milk in the ox-drawn carts, under the eggs in a false-bottomed lorry, and every other way but shooting.

  The trick was getting the equipment out and emplaced, and getting back in the wagons, before Milius’s indigs had to leave.

  She’d said to him, when he worried over it, “Don’t sweat it. I have a . . . relationship—” She grinned without humor at him, and there in the port, under the arc lights, she was pretty in a tortured way. “—a relationship,” she repeated, “with the weasel port commander, and with some of the human trustees. I usually stay late.”

  He didn’t understand. “You mean—”

  “They all like whiskey, fool. And you know they like party games. This convoy’ll hold until twenty-three hundred hours, or I won’t be alive to wonder what went wrong. If you can’t set your charges by then, well . . . that’s what the auto-weapons are for, right? Fighting your way out’s got to be easier than fighting your way in and out.”

  “No arguing with that,” he’d admitted. Off she’d gone, scrambling up through the false bottom of the truck he was hiding in. He’d heard her heels on the boards above, then switched on his electronics to amplify what he could of her conversations with the trustee guards.

  Then he’d heard the damnedest thing. A weasel must have joined them; Milius greeted somebody with a name that had to be barked. Her bark wasn’t half-bad, considering the nature of the language she was trying to speak. Anyway, it was answered by a longer series of barks from somebody who’d been barking from birth.

  And she responded. It had never occurred to him that she might speak Khalian. It had never occurred to him that any human did, although of course, among the intelligence services, somebody must, or you couldn’t do signals, or communications intercepts.

  Then he was damned sure she walked away with the barking weasel—he could get enough isolation/amplification from his scanner to verify that.

  It made him queasy, but he kept telling himself that if she’d been a collaborator, he and his men would already be prisoners—or dead. There’d be no reason for the weasels to wait.

  The Ninety-Second waited until the mark was reached, dark was everywhere, and it was time for recon to do what its specialists did best.

  Milius had given them coordinates and design specs for the power grid. Blowing it wasn’t going to be the hardest thing they did tonight; the auxiliary had to blow with it.

  While the recon specialists did that, Tamarack and English eased out of their hidey-holes and headed for the big ships by the route Milius had suggested—back alley stuff, skittering from shadow to shadow, getting as close to the destroyers as they could before the power went down.

  While he and Tamarack went for the destroyers, the rest of the unit, in groups of three, were detailed to the twenty fighters. Slap a charge under a fuselage, or in a thruster pod, and keep going.

  English could see every one of his soldiers on his visor’s mapping display, and it was damned difficult on strange terrain, keeping track of them and his own mission, and counting weasel-parameter blips as they came up into critical mode.

  Tamarack saw the first blip of real concern, while English was too busy worrying about Beta team and their exposed position to be covering his own ass.

  He was telling Beta, “Six o’clock, and kill ’em quiet, please, if they scope you,” when Tamarack’s grunt on the dualcom made him realize that the sergeant wasn’t in front of him, but behind him.

  English turned just in time to see the broken-necked weasel go down, and Tamarack already had his knife out, severing the tail for his coup-coat.

  “Thanks,” English said into his helmet.

  “Welcome,” Tam said, stuffing the bloody tail in his belt. “We gonna take the lights out, or what?”

  “Only when I say so,” English told the sergeant very slowly, and waved Tamarack on ahead.

  He was embarrassed about letting the weasel sneak up on him. Luckily, it hadn’t been a full-kit weasel; it had had no electronics on it that English could see; it had sounded no verbal alarm.

  But the moment when he’d have to call the power-down was rapidly approaching. He really wanted to hold off until he’d buggered his destroyer. Those ships had their own lights and they could lift off at the first sign of trouble. It would be crazy to lose the targets after going through so much to get this close to them.

  So English stalked among the hangars and the trucks and the repair gantries and the fuel wells, and watched the progress of their soldiers on his visor.

  When half of the Khalian fighter craft were successfully mined, his Beta got into trouble. His helmet display threw up the typical confused blip patterns, and audio shunted him a clear call for help from one of the corporals.

  English was, by then, scuttling toward his objective, a destroyer, magnetic-shaped-charge in hand. He did what he felt was right: he called the power-downs; he sprinted for the destroyer closest; he jumped for its main exhaust well. As his gloved hands hit the rim and he slapped his magnetic charge into place, he hung there, verbally empowering his shift video. For some few seconds he was blind to his own situation, seeing through the camera of one of his embattled corporals.

  Then he shouted into his all-com channel for Sigma to help Beta. The lights went out, all over the base. He got his shift video disengaged and went back to real-time display as he let go of the exhaust well’s rim and dropped to the ground.

  He couldn’t see Tamarack, not even with starlight intensification. He searched through his com bands, and his video bands. Tamarack’s camera was blacked out—either shattered, disabled some other way, or taking a good picture of nothing at all.

  He yelled on all-com, “Tamarack’s out; Recon, find his charge and set it; Sawyer, you’ve got Tamarack’s files.”

  Sawyer slipped smoothly into the first sergeant’s duty slot and English relaxed as he ran, rifle on, hot and ready, toward the second destroyer.

  When English got there, he met weasels. Weasels came at him out of the dark, jumping down from fins overhead, illuminated by a sudden burst of automatic fire. He hoped to hell the fire wasn’t coming from his own men.

  “Sawyer,” he shouted as he dropped to the ground, rolling, shaking off a weasel who had a slippery grip on his Clamshell, and shooting another as it hurtled toward him out of the air, “can you make sure you guys ain’t shootin’ at me? I’m at T-2 with Tamarack, who’s real dead. Where the fuck are you? I’m-covered with weasels!”

  And he was. They were coming at him like attacking insects, out of the dark—weasels in coveralls, with wrenches and knives. He kept rolling and shooting and kicking and trying to dodge the occasional ricochet or burst that came too close.

  “Right here,” said Sawyer, a figure looming suddenly. “Don’t move, okay?”

  English was still saying, “What do you mean, don’t move? You’re not going to shoot—” when Sawyer, with a clip of low-penetration rounds slapped into his auto, shot the weasels gnawing on English.

  It was
the most terrifying moment of English’s life. He could feel the rounds slam into the weasel bodies, and ping against his armor. Point-blank range, yet.

  But suddenly there were no moving weasels on him, and Sawyer was helping him push the weasel corpses away and get to his feet.

  “No weapons,” Sawyer said, and English realized that the recon sergeant’s voice in his com referred to the weasels, who’d been mechanics or maintenance personnel of some sort. But there were other weasels, others with weapons. The darkened spaceport was flickering with auto fire and plasma blooms now, like myriad flashbulbs going off between the ships.

  English sprinted for Tamarack’s corpse and picked up the dead sergeant’s plate-like magnetic charge. “Let’s set this and blow this place,” he said to Sawyer through gritted teeth, finally feeling weasel damage where his arms and legs had taken it.

  But there was enough adrenaline in him to hold off the worst of the pain. When he came down from the exhaust well of the second ship, Sawyer was right there, weapon ready, standing guard over him. And he had tails from dead weasels in his belt. There must have been a dozen.

  English wasn’t about to argue over whose tails those were going to be. He had a company to care for. He was going to get lots of grief for going into this action the way he had, instead of staying in the damned egg truck. He could hear it now. But then, to hear it later, he’d have to live that long.

  He let Sawyer run point for him, and they did the last destroyer, while the recon boys formed up there and held off what was beginning to become serious opposition: weasels in gun trucks, weasels with plasma rifles. The only break the Ninety-Second got was that the weasels were afraid to fire on their own ships, here where there was so much fuel around

  “Time for a diversion.” English didn’t know he’d spoken on the all-com; he was thinking out loud.

  “Let’s blow one fighter, and run like hell toward the other end of the line,” Sawyer replied. And, suddenly on a private channel: “It means leaving Tamarack’s body, but they don’t get any deader. We’ll give him all these tails you and me got today. Dumb ass, stopping to count coup in the middle of an op like this.”

  “Yeah, well, we did that too. Okay; let’s let him stay.” The privacy channel wasn’t monitored for the record. “Call roll and form up while you’re movin’, guys. Blow 13-Zed, once everybody’s accounted for. To X point, now!”

  Everybody moved. On his visor display, it was like watching a space battle. The blips that were the Ninety-Second found their way around the blips that were the enemy, and the ones that weren’t moving, well . . . they were dead.

  You had to play it that way, in the dark against these odds. English gave a five-second warning when the fighter was going to blow, and everybody hit the deck. He could see the results on his scanner.

  The blow was hotter than he’d counted on. It shook the ground and taxed his helmet’s polarizing capability. His breathing apparatus went up a notch in tone, and began to filter in earnest.

  There was no time to worry about what was happening back there, among the enemy ships. There was only time to pray that everybody alive made the X point, and to call the APC.

  That APC was going to move a hell of a lot faster than they were, summoned on the emergency freq English was using: “Dropmaster, this is a Nonstandard Pickup, Immediate. X Point precalibrated. Move!”

  If they got out before the burning fighter blew, and ignited another, and then another, English would call it a win.

  If they were still running for cover when that chain reaction caused one of the destroyers to blow prematurely, English wouldn’t be counting anything.

  God, this wasn’t supposed to happen. It shouldn’t be happening. But those damned weasels left their fuel tanks too close to—

  English almost stopped running, despite the display grid on his visor which told him he was just keeping up with his men, and plotted the relative times to the X point of every moving blip in his company. He almost stopped, because he’d just realized that those fighters were being fueled up for something, loaded and armed and being readied for some kind of scramble.

  Did that mean word of the Alliance strike had leaked? Were the big guns pointed skyward with nukes up their spouts? If so, it was going to be one hell of a bang before the smoke cleared.

  He could hear his own breathing now, labored despite his respirator, as he charged toward the X point, the place where recon had melted the fencing once they’d taken down the power grid.

  It was an easy out, and he was halfway through it before he stopped. Panting, holding a plasma rifle that read empty, though he couldn’t remember shooting it anywhere near that much, he froze there. As if he had all the time in the world, he counted his remaining corpsmen.

  Besides Tamarack, they’d lost three others, one from recon. Not great, but pretty damned good.

  He said, “Sawyer, it’s all yours. Get ’em on board the APC. I’ll catch up if I can. But don’t wait more than five minutes, and not that long if it starts looking like a cook-off to the AI.”

  And he started walking away, then trotting, back toward the egg truck.

  “Sir? Hey, English—what the fuck?” Sawyer was coming after him.

  English didn’t turn or slow. “I forgot my o.t.s. agent,” he said into his privacy com channel.

  “The hell you did,” said Sawyer, and clipped him in the small of the back with the butt of his rifle. “Sir,” Sawyer added as English fell, stunned, and the other man gathered him up.

  Consequently they were both facing the landing pads when the fighters began to blow, spewing purple and gold and orange fire in oily clouds full of radioactive filth from their weapons.

  English’s anti-radiation meters began to beep, telling him to get the hell out of there before his suit couldn’t handle the load, and throwing up numbers as, to how long before his equipment overloaded, and blacking out his faceplate. Then his weapon began to heat so badly in his hands that he had to drop it before it melted, and the shock wave hit everybody, knocking them to the ground.

  It was a crawl-for-your-life situation, and the Ninety-Second did just that, English bringing up the rear. He’d wanted to go back for Milius, he really had, But without a suit in the kind of firestorm this was shaping up to be, she needed more than a friendly marine to assure her safety.

  She needed an act of God.

  Admiral Meier stared out at the landing field. Ships of every size rose at careful one-minute intervals and disappeared into the purple sky.

  The Khalia, still far from beaten, had already reappeared in other sectors with even bigger fleets comprised of new ships. The Alliance’s neighbors were also mobilizing, seeing the opportunity to take advantage of the Fleet’s distraction.

  Most of the Fleet was either defending the frontier or searching for the Khalian home worlds. Every other ship that could be found was busy rallying every Alliance planet to the cause. The scout corps had been doubled and the search for lost colonies had taken on a manic air. Their first reports were on his desk. Some pretty strange planets had already been discovered, many capable of valuable contributions. The Alliance was going to need every resource it could gather.

  As he watched a wing of exploration scouts rose in unison. Statistics said one of them would not return, would be lost among the countless unexplored stars within the three-thousand light-year sphere claimed by the Alliance.

  Grand Admiral Meier lifted his glass of Michigan wine and saluted them. Smythe had given him a case the day before in honor of the victorious action off Bethesda. The admiral offered to the dwindling ships the traditional toast of his home world: “Good luck and may the gods guide you.”

  FROM THE TIME that the Celestial River carried us from the Source to this place, we have lived in the ways of our ancient laws, revering the Books that were given to us for wisdom and our welfare. We have kept to the ways from the Found
ing, and adhere to them as we have been instructed to do, for to do less would endanger our lives, every one of us.

  The days of our coming are lost in antiquity, but there are High Caste families on Durga who count back their station for more than a hundred generations, and whose Founders are listed among those in the Sacred Passenger Manifest. It is that sacred writing, those telling of the years of the Founders, which shows that they were yet older than their venturing on the Celestial River, which flows from Janja to Durga and to the Realms of the Gods. The sacred writing states that at the time of setting out, the number of years was counted at 2144. We know that we have been here, on Durga, longer than we lived at the Source, nourished and sustained by the holy waters of Janja. We passed a short time in that holy place, and then were sent out on the Celestial River.

  While some have insisted over the centuries that those were mystic numbers, not intended to relate to actual years, there are others who say that they must be regarded as accurate, for accuracy is stressed in the Sacred Maintenance Codes. Others have debated that in that most sacred of places, a year was measured in other terms than what we use now. There has never been debate over the numbers, for they are A.D. numbers, and therefore known to be Above Doubt.

  It was stated in the Contracts that there would be Visitors from time to time who would aid and guide us in our work here; sent out from the Source, they were to be our inspiration, avatars of the High Gods who would mark our progress on this world and judge our acceptability to return to the Source, for the Oldest Text has promised us that we will all return to the Source.

  Over the generations, many have despaired and taken to strange worship because time went by and no Visitors came. No avatar approached us to show us our way. Those of High Caste said it was because time was less important to Gods, and that the battle which has raged among them forever must still continue. The Oldest Text, the Beved Hajit, tells of wars and more wars fought among the Gods, Who are in eternal conflict. It was known that we were sent upon the Celestial River in a time of crisis and that Janja sent out thousands of her children on similar voyages, though what became of them only the Gods know.