An Honorable Defense Book 1 Crisis of Empire

by David : Thomas, T Thomas Drake

  “What has happened?” the governor demanded.

  “They’ve stopped fighting,” Thwaite replied.

  “I can see that. Why?”

  No one had an answer. The crowd around the tank murmured, but no one spoke up—until Halan Follard did.

  “It was just a rumor . . .” he began, almost to himself.

  “What is that?” from Deirdre Sallee.

  “Something from the training camps . . . Colonel Firkin?” Follard called to the bridge. Patty had taken her place there, with the other Cluster Command officers. Even if she was not of their corps, it was her station.

  “Yes, Halan?”

  “Do you remember the messages you brought me? From the Upland’s training base? About—”

  “About an alien alliance? Yes, of course, but you dismissed it. You said no ‘brotherhood’ could arise among—what did you call it?—‘siloxane and hemoglobin, stewed in misery.’ You waxed very poetic about it, Halan.”

  “So I did. But look out there.”

  “I’m looking. I was right, wasn’t I?”

  “You were, Lass,” he agreed.

  “Would somebody, please,” Governor Sallee interrupted, “tell me what you two are reminiscing about?”

  “When we were training the alien troops who fought at Batavia,” Follard said, “Colonel Firkin discovered evidence of an alien organization, encompassing many species. It was underground, of course, but did not seem to be structured toward the usual fitfully hopeless rebellion.”

  “I should hope not!” the governor exclaimed.

  “They were rebels,” he went on. “Out there, aboard the ships from Arachne—as aboard our own—are aliens of every sort. Despite their intense xenophobia, the Arachnids and their Haiken Maru colleagues know they need the aliens as wipers, spare hands, flash maskers, fetchits, and playmates. The Humans who pilot and command the ships dismiss these aliens as menials. So they are: the aliens do every sort of low and dirty task. They also go everywhere, see everything, touch everything, know how everything—”

  “Works. Yes, Kona Tatsu. And we have made our decision.”

  The voice came from against the back wall of the operations compartment. It was a low voice, wheezy, but with carrying power. The screen of Human bodies on that side of the room parted and the owner of the voice came toward the tank.

  It was a Dorpin, turtle creature from a high-gee world. Bits of Human waste—a scrap of paper and a twig butt—clung to the side of its beaky nose. They had obviously stuck there as the Dorpin went about its assigned task, which would be cleaner and maintenance tech. As if removing a disguise, one heavily clawed and padded paw reached up and brushed off the scraps.

  “You are—?” Governor Sallee asked, with some embarrassment.

  “My shipboard name is Squeezebox, Your Excellency. For obvious reasons. My proper name is Rathid . . . Eighth Elder Rathid, of the Star Shorn Clan. Before I came into Pact space, I was planetary regent for nineteen systems. That was over four hundred of your years ago, of course, but I believe we can still deal as equals—my dear.”

  “How do I address you?”

  “In your own language? ‘Lord Rathid’ will be sufficient.”

  “What Follard says about an alliance—it’s true?”

  “Most certainly. In fact, I had wondered how anything so big, and known to so many, could fail to become general knowledge. Then I came here and understood. Humans have a reflexive view of the universe. They are dream tellers. They see—their minds make them see—only what they want to. Or what they need to. Mostly what they see is themselves. You have a fraction of your population which exercises this talent so strongly that even you are made aware of it. You call them schizophrenics, and say they have a disease. I think, personally, they are merely your most developed specimens . . .

  “But I ramble. The answer to your question is yes,

  “What does this alliance intend?” Here the governor waved a hand at the navigational tank, where the battle still hung suspended.

  The Dorpin waddled forward and lifted briefly on its hind legs to look down into the tank. To Tad, the movement looked painful.

  Lord Rathid dropped down and seemed to consider.

  “To cure you?” the alien asked tentatively. “That’s a long-range goal. It will require millennia, I think. In the meantime, we have many opportunities. Too many.”

  “But what about that fleet?” Sallee asked, an edge of hysteria creeping into her normally cool tones.

  “Oh, that. Blink of an eyelid. We couldn’t very well let the schizophrenic among you, that man Aaron Spile, come close to his private dreams of power. That would set the patient back . . . centuries.”

  “So you are supporting Aurora?”

  “No.”

  “Then you are, after all, loyal to the Pact?”

  “Not especially.”

  “Then what . . . ?”

  “My dear, we—those among us entrusted with making decisions—are loyal to a conviction. That you Humans, with your nascent creative talents, can be brought to a larger, well, what some of you used to call ‘world view.’ Think of it as ‘galactic view’ now, because worlds are so insular.

  “Not all of us share this conviction to an equal degree. Some of our members are innately hostile to you. The Deoorti, who might almost be your brothers, must overcome incredible inhibitions even to associate with you. The Ghibli, on the other hand, whom you despise and fear for their appearance, are very hopeful for you.”

  “And the Dorpins?” Follard asked, softly.

  “Dorpins don’t project. Or not more than once in a long lifetime. We observe, but don’t judge . . . Now you should pay attention to that wonderful gizmo there.” Lord Rathid poked his beak at the navigational tank. “Because we are at the end of even the most optimistic estimates.”

  “Estimates of what?” the governor asked.

  “Of the time our brigade could hold out on Spile’s flagship. He has surrounded himself with some very dedicated men. Men who don’t mind burning through doors and flesh of any composition to get what they want.”

  “Right now his intentions would be—?” from Follard.

  “To leave this place,” the Dorpin replied.

  Bertingas looked into the tank quickly. One of the blips, bigger than any of the others, was supposedly the Arachnid flagship. It would be cruiser-size, the largest they had brought against Gemini. And where in the space of the tank was it? Tad searched the field rapidly; his eyes compared sizes, weighed anomalous movements. One blip, quite a large one, was swinging slowly around its own center of gravity. Its screens were still down—which meant, by the twisted physics of hyperspace navigation, that it could jump freely.

  “There!” He pointed. “Quadrant—”

  “Twenty-two, thirty-nine,” Captain Thwaite sang out. “All ships, open fire. Salvo. Salvo!”

  From two, three, four points adjacent to the cruiser the plasma streams sprang forth. Without a second’s delay, the flagship’s screens snapped up, giving the fie to her dead play. They smoothly doubled to absorb the incoming attacks, going deeper into the green.

  “Keep them hot,” Thwaite ordered. “Overload them if you can.”

  By chance, the point of battle was not beyond the reach of Gemini’s batteries. The Central Fleet base added the power of its weaponry along one hemisphere. The flagship was wrapped in the white fire of continuous detonations.

  “Even if the screens admit only radiation in the visible spectrum,” Follard observed, “it must be getting pretty hot in there.”

  Thwaite grunted. “You can fry them that way.”

  “I intend to.”

  Like an ear of com popping in a field fire, the whitened oblong of the flagship began to shiver and shed pieces of itself. Each of the pieces flared to a cinder as it passed through the sphere of superheated plasma sheathing.

  “What are those?” Sallee called out.

  “Life pods, Your Excellency,” the bridge crew responded. �
�Unscreened, of course. We don’t detect any—”

  With a sudden rise in brightness, the warship disintegrated. The blast blew out the enveloping plasma in strands, like a tiny sun going nova. Beneath them, the blackened bones of her steel carcass—actually they would be incandescing at about 2,500 degrees Celsius—stood out. From that carcass, one last tiny blip darted.

  “There’s controlled energy readable on that one,” the bridge said. “Could just be the automatics, but—”

  “Have it picked up, General,” Deirdre Sallee ordered. “And if, as I suspect, it contains Governor Spile, I want you to extend to him every courtesy. Make him comfortable in this ship’s brig under close personal supervision . . . of the Cernians.”

  That brought a smile to Follard’s lips. “What about the rest of the fleet, Your Excellency?”

  “Have our captains begin taking surrenders. Negotiate where you have to, and don’t blow up the stragglers. I want those ships intact. This isn’t over yet.”

  Chapter 24

  Patty Firkin: UNMASKING

  “Forty hours left,” Firkin said, retracting her probe from the nested globes of the e-mag antennae. “And that’s just holding the field. If these ’trodes have to pass plasma, figure fifteen minutes. She’ll fly, but she won’t fight . . . Call it, Tad.”

  Bertingas sighed, then appeared to make up his mind. “Transport duty. Leave an entry in the active log that the next captain should avoid hostilities if possible; withdraw from fire when necessary.”

  Firkin made notes. Even though, technically and administratively, a colonel outranked a Director of Cluster Communications, she let him make the decisions. These ships were to be Aurora’s responsibility, let their own representative say how to dispose of them.

  “How many does that make?” she asked.

  “Saved or shot?”

  “Both.”

  “Fifty-two.”

  “Just a blur to me now.”

  For half a solar day, Patty Firkin had stared at burned insulation and ravaged steel, locked into airless hulks, run dummy patterns on AIDs so hysterical that they tried to tell her about Jesus Xanthus, tested screen antennas, bounced mass inverters, and pounded hull plates with the flat of her hand. The ships that had some life in them she and Bertingas, working in concert with a dozen other survey teams, had marked for repair and retrofit. Those that could still hyperjump and checked out whole, they sent for transport service—a role many of these hulls had started in service with the Haiken Maru. Ships so burned and blasted they could never be made tight again, the pair wrote down for salvage. The hulls would be mined for their silicon, titanium, and good scrap steel. Then the exhausted ceramic shells would be accelerated on one last, short, looping orbit into the belly of Kali.

  While Firkin and Bertingas processed the captured ships, Halan Follard, Hildred Samwels, and Mora Koskiusko conducted the fastest prisoner of war interrogation in Pact history. Follard knew tricks. He could dope a roomful of squatting men, put just three electrodes against each sleeping skull, and let a top-secret AID of his read their blurry dreams. The inspector general claimed he could detect intentions, loyalties, even last Tuesday’s Lotto pick, from the mind murk that his electrodes flushed out.

  Let him. Central Fleet would be in charge of the prisoners, and if they got a few dedicated baddies in among the honest souls Follard recommended for amnesty, that was their lookout.

  The sailors and officers he salvaged from the Arachnid and Haiken Maru fleets would mostly be career soldiers who had simply followed whatever leader fate—or the last high secretary—had put in charge of them. It was no crime for a good soldier to fight on the wrong side. Firkin had done it herself a time or two.

  Those who flunked the Follard test would be considered untrustworthy in any regime: gangsters, tribe splitters, hate-filled specists, deviationists, and would-be dictators-in-waiting. Like Aaron Spile. What ultimately would become of them, even Follard would not say. Better not to ask. And Patty Firkin made a note to herself never, not even in a drunken moment of good fellowship, to pump Samwels or Koskiusko for what they had seen. The Kona Tatsu knew ways to make a body disappear, both logically and physically, in datafile and in corpore, that made the colonel shiver.

  All except Spile. He would be kept, like some bacillus in a sealed vial, to be exhibited before the Council of Electors. He was Deirdre Sallee’s passport and pledge—which she would need after her failure to return the correct “signals of loyalty,” per the Central Center directive she had once received.

  Maybe Governor Sallee would even live to deliver Spile.

  “Let’s get back to the base,” Bertingas said. “Neither one of us is likely to be thinking straight after twelve hours of this.”

  “All right.”

  They made their way, hand over hand, to the ship’s lock. As they gathered up helmets and packjets, Bertingas muttered, “Maybe I’ll get a chance to talk to her.”

  “Who?” Firkin asked.

  “Mora.”

  “Don’t. Not yet.”

  “Well, why not? Mora has a cool head, a sense of humor, and she’s good looking to boot. Not to mention, she’s full Human, too. For a while there, in the thick of things, Mora and I were practically—”

  “Whatever you two were, you aren’t now. She’s been through a lot. Give her time to adjust.”

  “You saw how Samwels came up to her,” Bertingas said bitterly. “Like some land of Central Fleet boarding party. ‘Ho, Mora, my love! You’ve returned to me! Never be parted from my side again!’ Preening like a peacock. Strutting. Pulling her away from me like she was some kind of parcel.”

  “Yes, Tad. And I saw the look in her eyes as he did it.”

  “Moonstruck.”

  “Well, I don’t—”

  “Aww, what would you know about it?”

  “And what is that supposed to mean?”

  “After all, you’re just a—”

  “Say it, Tad. Whatever it is. ‘Just a meat-brained soldier.’ Or, ‘just a dickie-girl.’ Why don’t you open your mouth and spit it out.” She balled up one square fist. “A few of your teeth would look real pretty floating through here.”

  “I could punch you out, too, you know.”

  “No, you couldn’t. Not even on your best day as a backwoods boy.”

  Bertingas looked at her thoughtfully. “I don’t suppose any Human ever could.”

  Firkin felt suddenly disoriented. She sagged, drifting sideways in the zero gee, and shut her eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Patty . . .” He sounded distressed. “I keep forgetting how closely you must identify.”

  “How—how long have you known?”

  “Known? Not until seven seconds ago. But suspected? Ever since I saw you in action that day in my apartment. Humans are tough. Even some of our women are tough. They’re not tough enough to ride a dragon, on the outside, as it tips for the long slide.

  “You’re good at what you do, Patty. The make-up and microsurgery help a lot. But you have to learn to give in, flake out, loosen up once in a while. You’re too perfect, all the time.”

  “It’s part of our Hive training. Call it a guerrilla tactic for surviving in Human-dominated space.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, inadequately.

  “Can you keep a secret?”

  “You mean about—?”

  “Yes.”

  “Only if you’ll keep one for me.”

  “What is it?”

  “That—whatever happens, whatever she chooses—I love, have loved, will love Mora Koskiusko until the day I die.” He smiled at Firkin sadly, with the forlorn face of a man who was exiling himself to cold space.

  “Done.” She made a gesture of spitting on her suit glove and stuck it out to him.

  Bertingas shook it.

  Then, with their helmets sealed on, she punched the lock cycle.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Patty said, after a long pause. “We may none of us live too long.”

  Outs
ide, in the reflected light of Castor and Pollux, the captured ships moved in slow orbits around the minuscule mass—by planetary standards—of Gemini Base. Cutting her own orbit, at greater distance, was the governor’s flagship, the Charlotten Broch.

  Firkin and Bertingas took a bearing and then kicked off for the base, thrusting to intercept one of the outside access ports as it came around on the limb of Gemini’s metalled surface. They were halfway across to the port when the near space around them, the drifting, wheeling star pattern that swung with Gemini’s orbit around the binary planet, suddenly changed.

  The points of light flared, expanded, leapt inward. They became hulls locked into a perfect englobement. The strange ships’ initial drop out of hyperspace, camouflaged against the stellar background, had probably fooled even Gemini’s AID sentries. Twenty ships, and twenty more, and twenty more, they mobbed the Central Fleet base.

  If Firkin had thought Spile’s warships had executed an orderly englobement, it was for lack of comparison. These ships ordered their interlocking orbits like the wheels and gears in an old-fashioned chronograph. They rode in stately circles like the painted horses of a carousel. Sleek ships, undamaged by war.

  “Let’s get under cover,” Patty said, grabbing Bertingas’ forearm and thumping the emergency thrust on her packjet. Moving at seven meters per second, they hit the catchnet over the port. She could feel its cords part under the impact. They clawed their way out of it and cycled through the lock.

  “—tingas, report to the Command Center,” the all-call annunciator was saying. “By order of Her Excellency the Governor, Taddeuz Bertingas is to report to the—”

  Bertingas punched in an acknowledgement and then headed for the drop tube. He was still in his pressure suit, with helmet fittings and packjet straps looped over his shoulders. Firkin followed close behind.

  In the Command Center, functionally equivalent to the Broch’s operations deck, the brass were gathered: Deirdre Sallee and her consort, that funny man, Regis; Pollonius Dindyma and some of his own Cluster Command colonels; Halan Follard, standing aloof in his role as master of secrets; Admiral Johan Koskiusko, his daughter Mora, and a clutch of his captains, including the beaming Samwels.