by B. V. Larson
“This is a pointless waste of time, Blake,” Abrams complained. “You might have at least have identified a suitable group of targets. I spent all night building this prototype for nothing.”
“We’ll find them, Doc. Don’t worry.”
I soon resorted to doing a database search on personnel. That would flag some people’s screens, but it couldn’t be helped.
“Ah-ha,” I said, eyeing the results. “They’re down in the construction area. That makes sense, I guess. They’re working on their ship.”
“But that’s a useless test area. We have to have a mix of human’s and Kher.”
“Right… I’ll send a team down there from our own engineering department.”
After pulling some strings, I sat down to eat. Abrams watched me in disgust.
“Seriously?” he asked. “You’re going to stuff your face while I’m standing here with nothing to do?”
“Take a seat. I’ll pay.”
Still grumbling, he took my offer and gulped a few eggs. That was about all I ever saw him eat. Eggs, and maybe a cup of coffee now and then. Maybe that was how he stayed so thin.
At last, we got the signal. My engineering team had sent a group to deliver another power coupling unit. It was timely, as I guess the last one had shorted out due to overuse.
“Let’s go, and keep that thing handy.”
We marched down to the bedrock under the station. Mars’ space dock was located on the larger of the two moons, Phobos. The real reason was one of gravity. The small moon had enough to facilitate construction, but not enough to make a trained man become fatigued. Better still, with no atmosphere and a low escape velocity, our new ships were easier to launch.
Under the base itself we found the icy-encrusted black rock the station was built upon. The area was pressurized, and we kept our faceplates open despite the bitter cold.
The Terrapinians were there, suspiciously watching everything the human workers did. To my surprise, they did nothing to help. Maybe they weren’t familiar with our equipment, or maybe they were just too good for it. Either way, their scrutiny seemed to irritate my yard-dogs more every minute. No wonder they’d gotten into fights down here.
“You know,” I said, “maybe we can solve this without—”
But Abrams wasn’t listening. He had his toy out, and he lifted it as I spoke. He pulled the trigger.
Nothing seemed to happen for a moment. There was no hum or sparks. Nothing.
But then… the Terrapinians stopped moving. They’d been walking around the human workstations—not helping, but observing. They’d been inspecting each piece of equipment with vast suspicion.
One such inspector froze—then all of them did it.
“Hey, hand that back,” a machinist told on Terrapinian.
The Terrapinian didn’t react. He just stood there, unblinking. His black eyes were like marbles of obsidian. He didn’t move. He didn’t even seem to breathe.
“Hey!” the machinist said, grabbing the equipment from the alien harshly.
The Terrapinian lurched slightly when the device was removed from his grasp, but his hands remained frozen in the air in front of him.
“There’s something wrong here, Doc,” I said.
“What was your first clue?” he asked in a bitter tone. He was already tapping away at a programming unit. He shook his head and sucked air through his teeth. “It has to be the code… why is it always the code?”
The Terrapinian who’d had a box-like unit of equipment plucked from his fingers had never quite recovered his balance. He toppled right then, doing a facer into to a carton of heated rivets.
Wispy vapor came up from the alien. Could he be burning his face off?
A few of the yard-dogs, concerned now, moved to help, but they couldn’t stand the rigid alien up again. Others circled around the other Terrapinians, snapping their fingers in their faces. Some laughed, others commented on how weird the situation was.
Reaching toward Abrams, I grabbed hold of the transmitter he’d been toying with. He squawked and tried to hold on—but it was an unfair contest.
I wrenched it away from him, and the trigger he’d held down all this time snapped back.
That was when everything changed—all hell broke loose.
=26=
The Terrapinians came alive again—but they didn’t just stagger and blink. They all flew into an instantaneous, insane rage.
Making mindless grunting and choking noises, they attacked whatever was closest to them. In most cases, that was a curiously staring human being.
Even the poor bastard that had fallen on his face in the carton of hot rivets went mad. His face was smoldering and black where the metal and branded his thick hide, but he didn’t seem to care or even notice. He grabbed the nearest man by the throat, someone who’d simply been trying to help him up.
With powerful arms, he forced the man’s head into the hot rivets and a screeching sound began. The sound was grim, but it was quickly drowned out by a dozen similar cries of shock and pain.
All around the big construction chamber, Terrapinians were attacking everyone—even each other. They smashed down foes with tools, fists and even workbenches plucked from the ground. They drove power drills into men’s guts, crushed helmets with picks and shovels, and generally behaved like murdering automatons.
The mayhem was kicked up a notch moments later when the yard-dogs got over their shock and began to fight back. They’d been taken by surprise, but they weren’t soft people. Snarling with the simmering rage they’d been feeling toward these outsiders all along, they attacked them just as brutally as they’d been dealt with themselves.
My trio of security people surged forward, but I put up a hand. “We have to handle this carefully,” I said. “This riot is not a natural one. Just try to save the badly wounded.”
They did as I ordered, darting in to retrieve fallen bodies that were in danger of being trampled or worse.
“Blake!” Abrams called out. “You have to stop it—they’ll kill each other.”
I grabbed him by the skinny neck and pointed at the mess. “You said it would work!”
“It is working—too well. When we cut them off from their syms, they went catatonic. The sudden reconnect threw them into a berserk rage—that was your fault.”
“Why would they go ape just because they couldn’t hear their syms for a while?” I demanded.
“I don’t know anything about these creatures. Perhaps they’ve been conditioned, perhaps they’ve been listening to their syms whispering in their minds since they first hatched—how could I know?”
I let go of Abrams and turned around. Blame didn’t matter now. As the captain, everything was my fault. That’s how it worked.
For about three full minutes, the melee raged. That’s a long time when you’re getting your ass kicked. We got involved only when someone appeared to be seriously injured. We pulled helpless combatants to safety and let the brawl rage on.
When it looked like it was winding down, I put my fingers in my mouth and released a blasting whistle. Several of them looked at me—not all, but several. Everyone was exhausted, swaying on their feet or trying to crawl away.
“This exercise is over!” I announced loudly. “Security will fire on anyone who doesn’t disengage right now!”
They looked at me in confusion. Most separated, but a few continued to struggle. I ordered my bewildered security men to use their disruptors on low settings. They burned the diehards repeatedly until they were on the deck, writhing and whimpering—or, in the case of the Terrapinians, hissing incoherently.
“Yes,” I said, marching among the fallen, “this was an exercise. The Rebel Fleet has been reinstated. We’re operating on Rebel Kher rules now—and I’ve got to say, I’m proud of what I just saw.”
This last statement, possibly more than any of the other lies that had been dribbling from my lips over the past minute, seemed to stun everyone.
“That’s right, proud!” I told them.
“You fought like demons. Like real warriors. I’m awarding rank points to everyone. One point per fighter, two for those who are still standing at the end.”
“How is this permitted, Captain?” a wounded Terrapinian asked.
Turning, I recognized him. He still had burnt holes in his face in the shape of rivets.
“I have the authority. I’ll award status points from my own personal score if I must. Congratulations—you’ve earned three.”
Strangely, this pronouncement calmed the Terrapinians. The humans still seemed confused and in shock—but I wasn’t as worried about them.
Twenty minutes later the wounded had all been picked up from the ground and given at least basic first aid. There had only been six deaths, three on each side—a drop in the bucket by Kher standards.
Beginning to think I’d pulled off my ruse, my face fell when I received a call. It wasn’t Admiral Vega, or the base commander—it was Captain Verr.
“Blake,” he said, “what fresh idiocy is this I’m hearing about?”
“It wasn’t all that bad, Verr. Some of your boys lived. Those who did got extra status points. They seem pretty happy about that.”
“You aren’t authorized to hold such an event without consulting me first!”
“Wrong. I’m in command of the local defenses for the Rebel Fleet. I’m—”
“You are not,” he said with certainty. “I contacted Rebel Command using a message probe. I questioned Secretary Shug himself. He said Fex is not in league with the Imperials.”
“Huh…” I said. “That doesn’t fit with my sources.”
“What sources?”
“You just heard Fex himself confess.”
Verr made an odd, snorting sound. “I’ve figured out that bit of trickery. I was hatched over four centuries ago, after all.”
My heart sank. All my bluffing was turning into sand in my grasp.
“What trickery?” I asked, putting the best face I could on it.
“Fex did this. He told you he was working for the Imperials to cause terror. It worked, too. Look at us, scrambling to defend this backwater planet against an imaginary enemy. I’m taking my ship home the moment it’s serviceable.”
“Fex did this… sure,” I said, unable to come up with a better reply.
He soon disconnected in disgust, but first he took the time to blame me for overreacting and mishandling the situation.
“Trouble, Captain?” Dr. Abrams asked.
He’d been standing nearby, listening in on my side of the conversation. His lips were pursed tightly. His expression was part anger and part smirk.
“Nothing I can’t handle,” I told him, and I walked out.
Behind me the wounded groaned, and the dead stared at the rough-hewn ceiling. The day had been a thorough disaster.
It didn’t take long for news of recent events to reach Admiral Vega. He contacted me promptly to ream me out.
“This is incompetence, Blake. Straightforward failure. I want to hear how you’re going to fix this mess.”
“That’s too harsh, Admiral,” I told him. “Abrams was only doing his best—and I’ll think of something.”
I waited for the response to travel home to Earth and come back again.
“You’d better,” the Admiral said. “And by the way, we’re not going to get away with blaming this disaster on Abrams, much as I’d like to. If Captain Verr leaves Earth behind with tons of our equipment in his hold, I’m giving command of your vessel to Commander Hagen. Vega out.”
So that was it then. The Admiral wasn’t handing out any more second chances. He wanted the Terrapinians manning the walls along with Devilfish, or I was being removed from command—again.
=27=
Thinking it over, I decided I was going to have to contact Captain Verr again. The key would be convincing him to stay without letting him know how much I needed him.
The plan went wrong almost before it got started. The moment I contacted him, using my sym to connect to his, he brushed me off.
“I’ve got no more time for you, Blake,” he said. “I’m removing my crew from your station as we speak. The repairs have gone well, and we—”
“—are a bunch of ungrateful cowards,” I finished for him. “Full of tricks and underhanded behavior. I’m surprised you don’t have a tail as long as Fex’s—oh wait, you do have a short one, don’t you?”
There was a sputtering sound that reminded me of static, but it sounded too angry.
“Now, you go too far. Has your sym gripped your mind? How can you—?”
“No,” I said, cutting him off, “how can you run out on a friend? I’ve fought with your kind before. Never have I met one so anxious to evade a fight and ditch his comrades on the eve of battle.”
“Clearly, you’ve gone mad,” Captain Verr said.
“No, I don’t think so. I think I’m just starting to figure things out. You came here to Earth for help, and you got it. Now, you’re running. In fact, I have evidence that indicates you started that fight between my troops and yours on our base. That was your best trick—manufacturing a convenient excuse to leave.”
“These words are foul. You have no evidence and no couth. My people are anything but cowardly, we—”
“That’s right…” I said, sounding suddenly thoughtful. “It doesn’t fit that you’d piss yourselves and tremble in fear like this—can it be treachery then? Are you actually in league with Fex? Or the Empire?”
A hand closed around my arm. I looked down to see Gwen. She’d come out from Earth to check up on me while we were docked—effectively, she was spying for Vega. I knew that.
Gwen’s eyes were big and round. She gave me a slow shake of the head, indicating I should tone it down.
But I couldn’t. It was this or nothing. If Verr pulled out, I’d lose my command, and we’d probably all die when Fex came back anyway.
“You are insane,” Captain Verr said in my ear.
“I’ve been called worse. But you can explain this to me: why would a brave, honorable warrior race run like this? After agreeing to fight at our side? I refuse to believe it has anything to do with a few scuffles aboard our station. I know your kind. Your people have never been so weak.”
Verr paused. By praising him, I’d put him in a tough spot. He couldn’t run off now without proving all my accusations true, and all my compliments false.
“You are, of course, correct,” he said at last. “We would never leave a comrade. We would never take gifts and return nothing. We would never flee because we’d failed to defeat another in a fair fight.”
“Good!” I said. “We’re going on maneuvers in the morning. Are you ready? Your ship and mine need to train together.”
“What of the rest of Earth’s Navy? Why isn’t it here? We’ve scanned the skies, and we haven’t—”
I cleared my throat, interrupting him. “That’s something I wanted to talk to you about. You haven’t detected the approach of Earth’s fleet because most of them are capable of stealth.”
“Stealth? In space? How can you cast out an exhaust plume the width of a planet and maintain stealth?”
“Well… we do it through phasing. That’s a secret, but you might as well know the truth now.”
“Phase-ships!?” he demanded in horror. “The ultimate dishonor! Never has a rebel world built such abominations. No wonder we’ve had our doubts about you—you dishonor yourself and all other rebel worlds by deploying such monstrosities!”
I gazed at the steel roof and took in a deep breath. Phase-ships were considered dirty weapons by the Rebels. Only the Empire deployed them. But Earth, starting off with no fleet of her own, had built them in order to have a fleet in space very quickly. Of all the ships we could have constructed, phase-ships were the most effective given their relatively low production cost.
“We’ll see if you feel that way on the field of battle,” I told him. “You might like knowing there are invisible ships all around you when we face Fex’s fleet.�
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“That’s still a matter under review,” Verr said, but he sounded like he lacked conviction.
“Don’t worry about your weaker officers,” I said. “Sometimes the young are cowardly, and they will make up all kinds of excuses to evade a difficult fight. But you’ll convince them. Your iron will must prevail.”
“Yes…” he said unhappily.
I got out of the call as soon as I could after that. Gwen was standing next to me, her face almost white with worry.
“Did you hear that?” I demanded. “I nailed it—I nailed him. He can’t weasel out now.”
“I heard you all right. It made me physically ill. You don’t believe all that bravado, do you?”
“Well… sort of. Terrapinians are tough. I just need to shame them in to staying and fighting with us.”
“Why is that so imperative?”
I took a few minutes to explain the situation to her. The grimmer details about Admiral Vega threatening to remove me from command slipped out of the story, but the rest of it was accurate.
“Hmm…” she mused. “This is serious. Do you think you managed to shame Verr into sticking around?”
“Maybe. He’s wily for one of his kind. He’s been around long enough to have heard bullshit before. You don’t get to be four hundred years old by fighting to the death all the time.”
“Yeah…” she said, thinking it over. “That’s true. He likes to survive. No matter what he says about honor and honesty—he’s got to be a survivor.”
Gwen walked away, and I thought about what she’d said. It was a good insight. I’d have to keep it in mind.
Soon I was back on the bridge of my ship. Now that the Terrapinians were pulling out, there was less need for my people to patrol the base—besides, for some reason the locals were tired of us.
Just as my shift was ending, Chang made an odd, humming sound.
“What’s that, Chang?” I asked.
He didn’t look at me. Instead, he kept frowning at his instruments.
“An anomaly, Captain. I was plotting our patrol path, taking us near several likely spots an enemy might open a rift in this system.”