The Price of Freedom

by William R. Forstchen

"I monitored your radio traffic," the man said. He smiled, realizing he was being remiss. "I'm Colonel Jacob Manley." Blair saw the smile didn't extend beyond his thin, fleshless lips. "I'm filling in as logistics officer."

  Blair looked at him. The memory locked into place. "I've heard of you. You were stationed in the Astoria System, weren't you?"

  "We both were," Farnsworth said, interrupting.

  Blair opened his mouth to ask another question. Manley cut him off with a single raised hand. "Look, Blair," he said, "we'd really like to chat, but we've got work to do. Let's do this some other time, okay?" He turned away, drawing Farnsworth after him. "Now, Tamara, about that foam…" They walked off, leaving Blair and Maniac standing awkwardly.

  "He's friendly," Blair said dryly.

  "Manley's got a rep for having brass balls," Maniac said, "and for not caring too much about how he wins, as long as he does." He glanced around. "He got cashiered from the Fleet for reckless endangerment of lives and property."

  "What'd he do?" Blair asked.

  Marshall shrugged. "After the war, he landed a billet as an advanced flight instructor at the Academy, while waiting for a squadron command to become available. He hid a squadron of trainees in an asteroid field during an exercise. One of his students got hit by a 'roid and killed. He justified it to the review board on the grounds that the ruse allowed them to get to and 'kill' their target, and increased training realism.

  "The review board let him take an early retirement rather than recommend a court-martial. The Border Worlds was hiring pilots and was more concerned with combat experience than politeness. It was a natural fit." He laughed. "Manley's as Terran as they come, but his loyalty's to his paymaster. He wraps himself in his payslip now, rather than the flag."

  Blair looked at him, startled by the acid in Maniac's voice. "I thought he'd be someone you'd like, you know, a kindred soul."

  Maniac smiled, then looked sidelong at Blair. "Sorry," he said, "but I learned long ago to never fly with anyone crazier than myself." Blair, who had similar reservations about Maniac, maintained a discreet silence. Marshall tipped his chin towards Manley's retreating back. "Hawk isn't happy that the hero rosters filling up."

  "How's that?" Blair asked.

  Maniac made a rude face. "He usually starts a conversation with the fact that he's got ninety-six confirmed kills. I think he resents you for ending the war before he got his century award. That's the kind of thing he'd take seriously." Maniac rubbed the triangular badge inked over his left breast pocket. "He liked being this ship's designated hero. He ain't happy sharing that with me, much less you."

  Farnsworths voice echoed down the hall, "Dammit, Carlson, we need more retarding foam forward of frame eleven. Get a move on it! Do you want to burn to death?"

  Blair and Maniac looked at each other. Marshall made a gesture to Blair with his hand. "This way to the bridge," Maniac said. Blair furrowed his brows at Marshall's odd tone of voice.

  They moved down the central corridor, stepping around a corpsman and several prostrate crew members. One crewman sucked from an oxygen bottle while the corpsman placed wet cloths on the others' foreheads.

  Maniac turned a corner, leading Blair to a heavily armored door embossed with the words auxiliary control room. A sign taped below that said operations/combat information center. A second, even more hastily lettered sign read chaos central.

  Maniac opened the heavy durasteel hatch. The makeshift bridge's most noticeable characteristics were the relative brightness of the room and the cleanliness of the air.

  The smoke-free bridge indicated the room had its own self-contained atmosphere. The air smelled faintly of lubricating oil and the slight staleness from being in the tank too long, but it was pure ambrosia compared to what the crew breathed.

  The carriers CIC looked to be a scrimped together copy of a Fleet CVs combat center. He took in the cramped bridge stations, smaller twins of the ones destroyed topside, and the central holographic tank. Flat screens had been bolted in place between exposed pipes to accommodate several additional fighter control stations. Even with better lighting and air, the CIC was small and cramped, and inadequate for either the mission or the staff it had to support.

  An officer broke away from the small knot clustered around the holo-tank. It took Blair a moment for his watering eyes to adjust to the bright lights. "Captain?" he asked, his voice rising in pleased surprise.

  Eisen grinned, taking Blairs proffered hand and pumping it enthusiastically. "Damn, Chris," he said, "you have no idea how glad I am to see you." Blair frowned. Eisen looked careworn and thin, as though he had aged a decade since his defection.

  Blair glanced around the cramped control room. "Well," he said, "this sure ain't the Lex."

  Eisen made a face. "Yeah," he agreed, "it's a fixer-upper all right."

  "How bad is it?" Blair asked him.

  Eisen nodded, his voice grim. "They tell me Captain Dominguez was on the bridge when the Achilles attacked them with two torpedoes. He died, along with most of the bridge crew, and anyone who was in the crew spaces. They lost a third of the crew." He looked around. "We're still picking up the pieces."

  "I'm sorry," Blair said. "Did you know Captain Dominguez?"

  "Yeah," Eisen replied, "he was two classes ahead of me at the Academy. We served together during the Venice Offensive. That was three decades ago." Eisen smiled. "Admiral Richards knew we'd worked together. So he asked Raul to handle my, urn, change of heart." Eisen's smile faded. "Now he's dead… along with a lot of others, and for what?" He lowered his head to sip from his cup. "What a waste."

  The officers by the 'tank quietly filed into a small briefing room attached to the bridge. Manley stood at the door, looking impatient.

  "Well," Eisen said, "its showtime."

  "What's up?" Blair asked.

  "C'mon," Maniac said, "you might as well see for yourself."

  Blair looked at Eisen, who made a "go ahead" gesture. The three shipmates crossed to the briefing room and entered, squeezing past a rack of data cores to stand in the back.

  Colonel Manley moved past them to the front of the room. "Now that we're all here," he said glancing without warmth at Blair, "lets get started. It was agreed that I'd preside here as I'm the senior-most officer with a Colonial commission. I thought we'd start with a review of our situation, move onto our damage control status, and then discuss what we're going to do about a commanding officer."

  Blair looked a question at Maniac, who pressed a finger to his lips.

  Manley cued a hastily installed projection map. Blair saw the Intrepid's small task group had moved back away from the jump point and appeared to be retreating across the system to the far point. The Lexington's task force and a second smaller group, labelled close action group-üi fleet? were shown as being somewhere within an ellipse based on elapsed time and movement probabilities.

  "We're down to thirty-one front line strike craft, with seventeen obsolete models—Sabers, Scimitars, and Ferrets—still in storage belowdecks. The flight deck is operational and we've got nine fighters, mostly obsolete, that we can fix, more or less. They're mostly older jobs," he looked at Blair, "with some notable exceptions.

  "The Lexington is holding steady on the other side of the jump point, though with our array down, the telemetry we're getting is spotty. Lieutenant Sosa," he said, tipping his head to the raven-haired woman, "maintains, based on traffic patterns and intercepted communications, that the Lex's command group is in disarray. She doesn't expect them to move for some time.

  "On other subjects, we've pulled far enough back from the jump point to give us some breathing room if she's wrong. We're still running at reduced speed. With the fuel residue we're leaking from the number one engine, we'll leave a trail wherever we go." He gave Farnsworth a wintery smile. "But now I'm stepping on Panther's thunder."

  He gestured towards her. "Tamara, would you care to report?"

  "WeH," she said, "the fires have been contained up to frame nine, bu
t are still pretty much out of control forward from there. We'll get it out eventually, but I can't tell you when."

  "What's the problem?" Manley asked.

  "Residual heat," she answered. "The fires are heating the metal bulkheads. Also, once we clear a room, we have to fog it to cool it enough for the fire crews to move through, and mat takes time. We've also had problems with flashback, fires crawling along insulation or conductibles, and heat exhaustion among the fire crews."

  "I see," Manley said. "And what about the reactors?"

  "Well," Tamara replied, "I'd best pass that off to Captain Eisen. He's been gracious enough to look into it for us."

  "Captain?" Manley said, shifting his attention to Eisen.

  Blair could tell from the slight stress that Manley placed on Eisen's rank that he considered it honorary.

  "All right," Eisen said, pausing as if to gather his thoughts. He glanced at Tamara, who nodded. "Since I've been filling in down in engineering, I'll start there." He paused. "The number one reactor breached before it could be scrammed and dumped into space. The whole number one drive is contaminated and is leaking fuel. We won't be able to relight it without some serious drydock time." He looked around at the grim-faced officers. "I don't think any of the engineering staff is going to make it. Most took lethal doses when the core breached, the rest exceeded their lifetime curie limits almost immediately afterwards. We don't have enough radiation abatement medication in the dispensary to handle the number of cases we have. We're going to lose at least some of the patients.

  "Also," he said, his expression sober, "we're down from three to one auxiliary power unit. The single APU is trying to do the job of all three: maintaining internal power, the fire suppression apparatus, the shields, and the floor field. It's pulling too much of a load as it is… that's why the lights keep browning out." He took a deep breath. "The unit's down to ninety percent as a result of overheating. If it drops too much more we might lose the gravity field."

  Blair winced. A momentary flux in either the floor field or the inertial dampers would subject the crew to the full effects of the ships acceleration. The ship's company would wind up as strawberry-colored smears on the rearward bulkheads. The expressions he saw on the other officers' faces told him they'd worked through to the same conclusions.

  "What are our options?" Manley asked.

  Eisen shrugged. "You have to take the strain off the unit. That's going to mean cutting all non-essentials. Jettison the frozen food, reset the thermostats to forty degrees Celsius, and drop your phase shields. That should lower your output requirements enough to let the APU cool. We probably won't recover any efficiency, but at least we won't lose anymore."

  "Tamara?" Manley asked, inviting her to comment.

  "He's the line officer," she answered, "not me. I don't have any engineering time."

  "Well," Manley said, "now that we have that out of the way, shall we move onto the next order of business?" He paused to glance at the assembly. "Our long range array is still out. Electronic interference from the gas giant is blocking our trans-light capability." He paused, taking a deep breath. "We need to figure out who's going to captain this rustbucket. We can't wait for a formal appointment from Richards."

  No one spoke. Manley scratched his cheek. "I'd like to propose Lieutenant Garibaldi for the job. He's the senior tine officer on board, and technically the next in the chain of command on the Fleet side." He pointed to a young man with flaming red hair, who looked totally overwhelmed at the prospect.

  Sosa leaned forward in her chair, giving Blair his first good look at her. Her black hair tumbled around her face, framing her porcelain face. Blair was struck both by her beauty and the ready intelligence in her face. "Isn't Captain Eisen senior?" she asked.

  Blair looked at Maniac, who mimed an hourglass with his hands and mouthed "Sosa." He raised his fingertips to his lips and kissed them. Eisen looked at them and glared, silently ordering them to behave.

  Manley frowned. "Captain Eisens ranks Confederation, not Colonial. He's not part of our fleet."

  "That's nonsense," Sosa snapped. "Captain Dominguez arranged Captain Eisen's defection. He was promised a full conversion. Full rank, seniority, and pay.

  "His arrangement was with Dominguez," Manley replied, "not us. We're not bound to honor that."

  "Don't you think we ought to ask him?" Sosa asked.

  "All right," Manley said. He looked at Eisen. "Do you have anything you want to say?"

  Eisen looked pained, as though recalling a difficult memory. "It's only fair that you know why I'm here, and given that I owe certain friends an explanation," he said with a side look at Blair, "I can kill two birds with one stone."

  He took a deep breath. "I was given the Lex when she came out of drydock," he said. "I received her commissioning pennant from Tolwyn himself." He frowned at the Intrepid officers' reaction to the SRA chiefs name.

  "I began to have some concerns when a special ops man and his lot came on board. Their orders said they were supposed to be doing assessments of pieces of captured Kilrathi hardware. This guy, Seether, had authorization from Tolwyn himself to take whatever he needed for his 'project.' No questions asked." Blair saw Eisen's face cloud at the remembered outrage. "They evicted my crew from my launch bay and set up shop. I wasn't even allowed in, and it was my damn ship. It was the most highhanded thing I'd ever seen."

  Eisen took another sip from his coffee cup. He made a face at the taste. "Seether's people then set up their own communications array and began transmitting and receiving trans-light messages. There was also evidence that they were tapping into the Lexington's array, monitoring the ships traffic."

  "And?" Manley said, prompting Eisen to continue.

  "I make it a point to review and initial the communications logs every day," Eisen said. "I noticed a lot of message traffic originating from Earth and going directly to Seether and his crew. I used my command override to check the message numbers. Within twelve hours I received a personal message from Tolwyn himself telling me to mind my own business."

  "Wait a second," Sosa said, "I thought it was the commander's prerogative to inspect the logs."

  "So I understand," Eisen replied acidly. "Three days later I got a conference call from Admirals Harnett and Petranova. They gave me the 'we're all in this together for humanity' speech. It took me a while to realize they were trying to recruit me for something. I passed on what they were selling, and within two hours my command override had been suspended."

  "That was fast work," Blair injected.

  Eisen shrugged. "You could probably tell I was having grave doubts about the missions we were flying. We were being fed information that didn't fit what I was seeing. I'd been a little skeptical of the Holy Writ that said you Border Worlders were behind the crisis on the frontier."

  "Thanks," Manley said dryly, "we appreciate the vote of confidence."

  Blair noticed Farnsworth lack him in the ankle. Eisen appeared to ignore the by-play.

  He set his coffee cup on the lectern behind him. "I took advantage of a lull to send Admiral Richards a private message."

  Blair nodded, recalling Richards' wartime reputation as the Confederation's preeminent code breaker and signals intelligence specialist. The man had first detected the Kilrathi super carriers via SIGINT and had tipped off the authorities in time to mount some kind of defense. Blair hadn't heard that Richards had returned to the Border Worlds. In a way, he was glad. No computer was safe and no network was secure with Richards and his band of electronic pirates on the loose.

  "Anyway," Eisen said, "Richards sent me a set of files and some rudimentary code-breaking programs. They weren't terribly sophisticated, just enough to crack the Lexington's protections and read the externals and address groups. We ran three hundred sequenced messages from Earth, Fleet Headquarters, and four coded systems. Seether's people were using code systems years ahead of the Fleet's. Mind you, this was supposed to be a research group, and they were receiving tactical si
gnals.

  "I ended up playing detective for Richards; copying coded transmissions, collecting mission data, and comparing those to Fleet movements. We found an early correlation when traffic would increase before a 'crisis' happened. I really began to worry when I saw that."

  Eisen rubbed his hand across his brow. "I was just getting ready to package up the whole thing for Richards when I got relieved." He shook his head, his expression rueful. "Paulson's first act was to shut off my access codes, leaving me with no way to transmit my data. I had to carry it here by hand—and that meant defecting.

  "Richards arranged it with Dominguez, who knew me by sight." He tipped his head towards Sosa. "He also sent the lieutenant here to meet me here with a porta-comp stuffed with cryptography programs." He glanced upwards. "I guess it was her bad luck that this ship got hit and lost its entire eomm-section. She's been working on getting the ship back on-line."

  Sosa raised her hand. "I have had some time to look at it," she said. She sounded slightly defensive to Blair. "It's all heavily coded, with lots of polyheuristics, but it is breakable. I think I can crack it—if given time. In the meantime we know very little about what's going on."

  "What's to know?" a pilot interjected from the seats.

  "All we need to know is that we're under attack while being blamed for raids we haven't done."

  "The details are in the radio traffic," Eisen insisted. "All we have to do is find it. If we can prove what's going on, we might be able to stop a war."

  "Or start one," someone mumbled.

  Blair saw that Eisen looked less than confident. "We're still missing a lot of the evidence. But I do know the Border Worlds and the Confed are being manipulated, pushed into a war we'd both lose." He pointed to Sosa. "Those tapes hopefully will identify who they are." He looked at Manley. "Are you satisfied I'm on the level, Colonel?"

  Manley looked around, polling the room for support, and not getting much back. "You're doubtless the most qualified, Captain," he said, smoothly changing sides, "I hope you'll fill in until Admiral Richards posts a replacement."