The Fleet Book 2: Counter Attack

by David Drake (ed)

  “The avatar—” began Admih, but was interrupted by Commander Horder.

  “We don’t want to upset you,” He told them. “Isolated like this, you haven’t had the chance to see how things have changed. It’s unfortunate that it takes a war to—”

  The vision faded and the cramped room was once again bright.

  “You can count on the Fleet to do everything we can for you,” said Spandril, adding, “This war is going to demand a lot from all of us.”

  “Don’t you think that’s laying it on a bit thick?” said Ecrilla. “We just found this place. Give ‘em some time to get used to us.”

  “There isn’t time,” said Spandril.

  “You headquarters brats are all alike,” Varnig complained.

  “And you junior line officers are better?” Spandril asked.

  “Stop it,” said Commander Horder with fatigue. “We have to settle this before we head for the next city.”

  “I don’t see how you can call a ramshackle place like that a city,” Varnig said under his breath, his complaint dutifully translated by the spirit-box.

  “I said stop it,” Commander Horder repeated more loudly. “We have work to do here.”

  “Do you think we can do it outside before the stench kills us?” Ecrilla asked sarcastically.

  “Good idea,” Horder said, and turned once again to Admih. “Let us return to the gates of . . . of Kel.”

  “Our pleasure and duty are one,” replied Admih as he bent double to Commander Horder. “To obey a God is the highest joy.”

  “All we ask is some help for the Fleet,” said Spandril. Commander Horder turned back to Varnig. “Start preparing a report for Captain Branker.”

  “Us or the others?” asked Ecrilla.

  “Have Fondo do it,” said Commander Horder. “I want it on its way before morning.”

  Ecrilla sighed. “Full report or initial survey?”

  “We can’t file a full report yet, can we?” Spandril answered for Commander Horder.

  Night had taken hold of the land when the Highest Caste and High Priests of Kel left the celestial ship. A high veil of clouds hid the stars so that the vision which had been shown to them was all the more wondrous.

  “I’ll be glad when I can transfer back to a real ship,” said Commander Horder as He looked at the gates of Kel. “These scouting missions are a waste of time.”

  “Not if it helps us stop the Khalia,” Spandril pointed out.

  Commander Horder shrugged. “How much chance do you think we have of doing that? Especially here? Lost colonies usually got that way for a good reason.” He gave his attention to the Highest Caste and High Priests of Kel. “We will return as soon as possible.”

  “Will there be a battle? Will the Khalia come?” asked the High Priest of Durga.

  “I hope not, for your sake,” said Commander Horder.

  “We are not yet prepared?” asked Admih.

  Horder laughed unhappily. “Nowhere near.”

  “No one’s prepared,” said Spandril before Commander Horder could stop him.

  “Ah. Then the deciding battle is yet to come. There is time.” Admih gestured to the High Priests. “We have much to do.”

  “We all have much to do,” said Commander Horder. “That is why we have to depart now.”

  The Highest Caste and the High Priests of Kel made gestures of reverence and bowed their farewell. “We will strive to be ready when you return.”

  “That’s good,” said Commander Horder. “We ought to be back within the year.”

  “Unless the Khalia change that,” added Spandril.

  The spirit-box was silent; the God and His attendants went back to the celestial ship, leaving the Highest Caste and High Priests of Kel huddled against the gates of their city, watching as the celestial ship rose into the air and rushed into the sky.

  By morning only two of them—the ancient Derir and the High Priest of Yeimei—were dead and the others were able to stumble back to the Central Temple to prepare to offer the bodies of the newly dead to Durga.

  Thus it was that we of Durga came to serve the All-Mother in her aspect of the Destroyer, as She is known when She is Khali, when she strews the ground with corpses and garlands Herself with skulls. We, who feared for so long that our prayers and sacrifices were displeasing to Her, that our devotion was not sufficient to bring her favor to us again.

  With the guidance of the High Priests of Kel, our plans were made, and so it was that upon the return of the God Horder, his incarnate flesh and the incarnate flesh of His attendants was offered on Durga’s altar in Earthly Fire.

  There is no sweeter sacrifice to Khali than flesh, and surely the ruin which has come to Djanrez at the hands of the Khalia shows that we are restored at last to Her favor. It cannot be long before either the Gods of the Fleet or the avatar Khalia claim us with Celestial Fire, and we are at last free of the Turning of Lives, transformed as the creatures of Target were transformed to the higher state where even the Gods are welcome sacrifice to the All-Mother.

  The assembled admirals sat in various stages of relaxation. One had brought a bottle of Ohio champagne and was passing it around. The Strategy Board was pleased with itself.

  The landings on Bethesda had been costly but successful. The Khalia were evacuating Triton and Dibden Purlieu. The Omni was filled with praise for the Fleet, the successful defenders of the Alliance. Outside of Port no member of the Fleet paid for his own drink. Everyone on Port was Fleet, so they bought each other drinks.

  Even Smythe was cheerful in his restrained manner. “Let me begin with my congratulations.”

  Several glasses were raised in response.

  “Initial analysis supports our earlier conclusions. The large quantities of materiel captured could not have been manufactured by the Khalia. Nor did they seem capable of more than the most rudimentary of repairs. We have yet to find even one Bethesdan who met a Khalian engineer or scientist.”

  Several admirals chuckled their approval. If the enemy didn’t have any scientists, all the better.

  “There was also one disturbing piece of information.” Smythe sounded concerned now. “Virtually half of the ships we fought at Bethesda were new.”

  Several glasses froze in midair.

  “New?” Meier repeated, the implications of this development just sinking in.

  “Dozens, and more were expected,” Smythe confirmed.

  Meier rose and faced his fellow admirals. “Today we celebrate one victory. But it appears the war will not be over until we can find the source of the Khalian ships and destroy it.”

  Several here, heres agreed.

  Smythe spoke again, trying to end on a note of optimism. “We have just freed thousands of Alliance citizens on Bethesda. After a brutal occupation, they should be united in their desire to assist us. Perhaps they will have the solution to our mystery.”

  “CAPTAIN MIKLOS KOWACS?” asked whoever was sticking his hand through the canvas curtain to tap Kowacs on the shoulder as he showered with his men. “Could I have a quick minute with you?”

  “Whoa! I dropped the soap, sweetie,” called one of Kowacs’s Marines in a falsetto. “I’ll just bend over and pick it up!”

  Kowacs lifted his face to the spray of his shower for an excuse not to look at the guy interrupting. The horseplay of his unit, the 121st Marine Reaction Company—the Headhunters—was as relaxing to him as the steamy hammering of the water. He didn’t want to think about anything else just now, and he didn’t see any reason why he should.

  “If I was Nick Kowacs,” he said, “I’d have just spent six hours in my hard suit, picking through what used to be the main spaceport on this mudball. Bug off, huh?”

  He turned his head slightly. Some of the water recoiling from him spurted through the gap in the canvas to soak the intruder in its rainbow sp
ray.

  “Yeah, that’s what I wanted to check,” the voice continued flatly. “I’m English—I’ve got the Ninety-Second—and we—”

  “Hell and damnation!” Kowacs muttered in embarrassment as he slipped out through the canvas himself. The decontamination showers were floored with plastic sheeting, but the ground outside the facility had been bulldozed bare and turned to mud by overflow and the rain. It squelched greasily between his toes.

  “Sorry, Captain,” he explained. “I thought you were some rear echelon mother wanting to know why I hadn’t inventoried the week’s laundry.”

  “S’okay,” English said. “The Haig’s about to lift with us, and I needed to check one thing with you about the port.”

  The Ninety-Second’s commander didn’t carry Kowacs’s weight, but he was a hand’s breadth taller, with curly hair and the sort of easy good looks that made him seem gentle to somebody who didn’t know English’s reputation.

  Kowacs knew the reputation. Besides, he’d seen eyes like English’s before, pupils that never focused very long on anything because of the things they’d seen already.

  Kowacs had eyes like that himself.

  Sergeant Bradley, the Headhunters’ field first, slipped out of the shower behind his commanding officer. “Anything I can do to help, sir?” he asked.

  Stripped, the noncom looked as thin as a flayed weasel. He was missing one toe, a plasma burst a decade before had left half his scalp hairless and pink, and much of the body between those two points bore one or another form of scarring.

  “No problem,” Kowacs said—and there wasn’t, but it was nice to know that there was always going to be somebody to watch his back. It kept you alive in this line of work; and more important, it kept you as sane as you could be. “Captain English heads up the Ninety-Second. This—” shifting his gaze to the taller officer—” is. First Sergeant Bradley.”

  “Toby,” said English, shaking with Bradley—both of them with hands wet from the shower. “Not ‘captain’ yet anyway, though maybe after this last one . . .”

  “Hey!” said Bradley with enough enthusiasm to ignore the fact that English was obviously distracted. “You guys did a hell of a job on the port! Nothin’ left but rubble and cinders. Say, they got you looking for that weasel commando that shot up Post Bessemer two nights ago?”

  “Ah,” said English. “No, we’re about to lift. As a matter of fact—”

  Bradley didn’t need the glance Kowacs gave him. “Sorry, sir,” he said as he ducked back into the shower facility. “Damn good to meet you!”

  English spent a moment marshaling his thoughts after Bradley had left the two officers alone again—if alone was the right word for men standing beside one of the main roads crisscrossing the huge base.

  Base Thomas Forberry—named to commemorate symbolically the hundreds of thousands of civilians whom the Khalia had murdered—had been woodland and farms gone to brush when the Fleet landed to retake Bethesda less than a month before. Now it had a hundred kilometers of perimeter fence with bunkers and guard towers; a nearby spaceport and naval dockyard ten times bigger than the port that had served the planet before the Khalian invasion; buildings to house more people than there were indigenous humans in the portion of the planet now under the Fourth District Military Government installed here at Base Forberry—

  And seven thousand five hundred hectares of mud—the inescapable result of any military construction project save those undertaken in deserts, ice caps, or vacuum.

  “Ah,” said Kowacs—he’d have helped English say what he needed to if he’d had the faintest notion of what it was. “Bradley was right. I don’t think—” he paused; but it was true, so he said it, “anybody could’ve done a better job on the port than you guys did. You’ll get your second star for sure.”

  “Had a lotta help from the indigs,” English said, letting his eyes slant away toward the horizon. “They got us through the perimeter, you know?”

  “No shit?” said Kowacs. He hadn’t heard anything about that.

  He was vaguely aware that he was standing stark naked beside the road. Some of the admin types who’d landed when the shooting pretty much stopped might take that badly, but modesty wasn’t a useful virtue among troops who spent most of their time either in the field or packed into the strait confines of a landing vessel.

  “I guess . . .” said Toby English with a diffidence that must have been as unusual to him as it would have been in the man to whom he was speaking. “That what your sergeant said was the straight goods? Nothing left at the port?”

  “Oh, look, man, I’m sorry,” said Kowacs who finally thought he knew what was bothering the other officer. “Look, we recovered two of your people. But the third one, the suit transponder still worked but there was half the tail of a destroyer melted across him. Nothing we could do, but we tried.”

  “Thanks,” said English with a smile that was genuine but too brief for that to have been the real problem. “Dead’s dead. Don’t mean nothin’.”

  “Yeah,” said Kowacs, agreeing with the meaning rather than the words. “We’ve all sent home eighty kilos of sand with a warning to the family not to open the coffin.”

  “Ah,” English continued, looking away again. “I guess you’d’ve checked if there was any bunkers under the Terminal Building? I thought there might’ve been.”

  “No bunkers,” Kowacs said, keeping the frown off his forehead but not quite out of his voice.

  “That was downwind of one of the destroyers that cooked off,” he continued carefully. “The fission triggers of her torpedo warheads, they burned instead of blowing. But it was hot enough that our suits are still in there—he pointed toward the plastic dome of the decontamination building, “and they thought we ought to shower off pretty good ourselves.”

  English smiled falsely. “Yeah,” he said. “Look, lift-off was twenty minutes ago, and—”

  Kowacs put a hand on the other Marine’s arm to stop him. As gently as he could, he said, “There were a lot of bodies inside, but only indigs and weasels. No Marine equipment. What happened out there?”

  English shrugged and said, “Don’t matter a lot. I told you, the indigs got us through the perimeter. I think most of ’em got out again before things started to pop, but—the On-the-Spot agent running the unit, Milius . . . she was keeping the weasels occupied inside the Terminal Building.”

  He met Kowacs’s gaze with clear, pale- eyes of his own.

  “She had balls, that one.”

  “Trouble with sticking your neck out . . .” said Kowacs softly, looking toward a distance much farther in time than the horizon on which his eyes were fixed. “Is sooner or later, somebody chops it off.”

  “Don’t I know it,” English agreed bitterly. His voice and expression changed, became milder. “Don’t we all. Look, I gotta run.”

  He paused, then added, “Hey. If it can’t be the Ninety-Second gets those weasel hold-outs, I hope it’s you guys.”

  “I hope it’s us lifts-off tomorrow,” Kowacs called to the taller officer’s back, but English was already busy talking to a truck driver, bumming a ride to the spaceport and a no-doubt-pissed naval officer.

  The Ninety-Second was one of the half-companies shoehorned into Fleet combat units instead of being carried in a purpose-built landing craft the way the Headhunters were. People whose proper business was starships generally didn’t have much use for the ground-specialty Marines . . . but at least the destroyer Haig hadn’t lifted off while the Ninety-Second’s commander did his personal business.

  Most of Kowacs’s marines were done showering and had filed back into the changing room. They’d have to don the same sweaty uniforms they’d worn for six hours under their hard suits while searching the shattered port, but the shower had raised their spirits.

  Bradley was still waiting behind the canvas. So was Sienkiewicz, who looked as to
ugh when naked as she did with her clothes on—and who was just as tough as she looked.

  The twenty nozzles down either side of the canvas enclosure were still roaring happily, spewing out water that had been brought twenty kilometers through huge plastic aqueducts. The drains that were supposed to carry it away were less satisfactory. At least half the water spilled out of the enclosure and found its own way slowly toward the lowest point in Base Forberry.

  In an unusual twist of justice, that point was the parade ground surrounded by base headquarters and the offices of the military government, located in a valley where they couldn’t be sniped at by the few Khalia still alive on Bethesda.

  “Everything copasetic, sir?” Bradley asked with a smile to suggest that he hadn’t been listening through the canvas while the officers talked.

  “No problem,” Kowacs grunted. And there wasn’t, not one you could do anything about. Couldn’t help the dead, like English had said. “Let’s get back to barracks and find fresh uniforms.”

  “Ah—we were wondering about that, sir,” the field first sergeant said. “The trucks are still pretty hot, even after we hosed ’em off.”

  Kowacs shrugged as he strode toward the changing room. “It’s that or walk,” he said. “I’ll get ‘em into a drydock over at the naval base as soon as I can, but Marine ground equipment is pretty low priority over there.”

  “And this place—” he waved toward the closed chamber in which robot arms were scrubbing the hard suits, “isn’t big enough to hold trucks.”

  Sienkiewicz laughed in a throaty, pleasant—feminine—voice. “What’s the matter, sarge?” she asked Bradley. ”You expect a little low-level radiation to kill us?”

  All three of them laughed, but there was no humor in the sound.

  * * *

  The summons set off the bell and red flasher at either end of the barracks. It was a Priority One call. Marines threw down their mid-afternoon tasks and jumped to arms even before they heard the specifics of the message.

  There was only one thing on Bethesda now that could justify a Priority One call to the Headhunters. A single Khalian unit, an infiltration commando, hadn’t died in heroically useless defense with the hundreds of thousands of other Khalia. The hit-and-run attacks of that surviving handful of weasels had been making things damned hot for the invasion forces.