The Fleet05 Total War

by David Drake (ed)

  “Are you trying to tell us . . .” Grissom saw it now—he just didn’t want to believe it.

  “Yes, sir. The JAG office wants you gentlemen to deliver an indictment against the Commandant of the Fleet Marine Corps, and whichever of his subordinates you consider equally responsible, for dereliction of duty.”

  Rodman lit up the screen again. The whole group watched as Martini and her squad moved back into the boarding tube, stepping aside as another Marine corpse, carelessly stuffed into a body bag, was carried through by the medical detachment.

  “After all, gentlemen. It is they who are responsible for those deaths, is it not? And they who will be responsible for more if we must fight the Syndicate at our current state of readiness!”

  “But surely it is merely human nature . . .” Grissom was grasping at straws now. Rodman could see he knew he was beaten.

  “Human nature almost got us beaten by the Khalia, Admiral Grissom. We must insure it does not interfere with our actions against the Syndicate!”

  In silence, the officers watched the last of the Marines limp out of the boarding tube. Marines who had no idea of exactly how well they had done—or how much they might yet have to pay for it.

  BACK ON PORT the word “morale” was being written more often with a question mark than a period. The question being asked by this was almost invariably “how bad was it there?” The answer rarely was encouraging. This was hardly surprising. The Fleet, after hundreds of thousands of casualties and four years of major effort, had thought they had won a war. Its personnel, having joined in a burst of patriotic fervor, prepared to return home as conquering heroes. Instead, the men and women of the Fleet now found themselves faced with an even greater conflict. A battle against a human foe, who may have penetrated their ranks, and whose size and location were still unknowns. A war likely to last longer and be harder fought than the one they had just “won.”

  Internal security forces had found literally thousands of Syndicate agents had penetrated both the Fleet and related civilian enterprises. Nor did they question that they had missed thousands more. Hypnotesting and careful interrogations found men and women loyal to their “family” everywhere. It had been too easy, with all the Alliance’s attention riveted on an alien species as the enemy, for humans planted by the Syndicate to infiltrate every vital office and department. Men who had served or worked together for years now watched one another suspiciously.

  Slowly it became apparent that the new enemy, the Syndicate of Families, was a massive opponent. The interrogations of those spies captured alive painted a picture of a confederation of hundreds of worlds. No less than a total mobilization encompassing all the resources of the Alliance could be expected to prevail. A few prisoners belligerently predicted the Alliance would be smashed within months by massive Syndicate fleets. Others taunted their interrogators on how easily the Alliance had been deceived into thinking the barbaric, unsophisticated Khalia had been their real enemy. None of those captured expected to be prisoners long. A few even bragged that they had been promised appointments as planetary managers after the Alliance was conquered.

  None of this did anyone’s morale any good. Several attempts were made to improve this situation. Unfortunately bad morale is more stubborn than a drill instructor. Sports failed, tours by celebrities just reminded personnel, many of whom had been shipbound for over three years, just what they were missing back home. Perhaps the worst part was not knowing just how bad things were going to get. Discipline became lax in even the elite units, while drunkenness and addiction increased dramatically.

  Then as weeks passed the Syndicate made a fatal error. No major battle occurred. Small conflicts brought home to the personnel of the Fleet that they were still a victorious and effective fighting force. Men can only wait so long for defeat. Then their frustration turns to defiance. Regardless, often despite the inept attempts by the Admiralty on Port to improve their morale, ships and infantry units regained their fighting trim. Each in their own way found how to cope and prepare for the total war they now faced.

  When the Fleet first launched its squadrons

  to police the worlds of men,

  we discovered Khalians waiting

  and engaged in war again.

  Oh, we cursed and muttered, “Weasels”—

  learned to hate a furry face—

  for we found ferocious foemen

  had encroached on human space.

  Then we beat them back to Target,

  where we thought their homes would fall,

  but we found the vanquished Khalians

  weren’t the natives after all!

  So we curse and mutter, “Weasels,”

  when we spot a furry face

  pouring out embittered anger

  at the captors of their space.

  When at last we won their home world,

  what we conquered gave us pause:

  the defenders—most civilians

  were reduced to clubs and claws.

  So restrain your groans of “Weasels,”

  and don’t shoot that furry face,

  for the enemy you’re blasting

  is too young to go to space!

  Well, we couldn’t fight forever,

  so we made uneasy peace.

  Now our struggles should have ended,

  but instead they’ll soon increase.

  Now we smile when we say, “Weasels”—

  learn to love a furry face—

  for there’s greater danger lurking

  out beyond the Khalians’ space!

  HER INTERCOM SCREEN blinked. Amalfi Trotter looked up from the frustration of her life-support system reports, grateful for an interruption.

  “Captain requests a meeting of all officers. Wardroom at 1630.”

  “Fardles, that’s barely time enough to get there!” As a life-support systems officer, she was quartered on 9 deck, in the bowels of the troop carrier Mandalay.

  With one hand, she toggled the acknowledgment switch as she began to strip off her coverall, stinking dirty from her latest wriggling tour of the air-conditioning systems. She’d been positive that she would find dead vermin to account for some of the pong that soured the Mandalay’s air. She was a conscientious officer and had done her best with filters, purifiers, and deodorizers to neutralize the pervasive reek.

  She lay awake in her bunk night after night, trying to figure out what could be generating or perpetuating the odors. The odors that, she was certain, were one of the chief reasons why she—and most of the complement of the Mandalay—didn’t sleep well. It was that kind of a nightmare combination of stench. Perversely enough, the heads on all decks were reasonably free of unpleasant odors.

  In fact, Cookie had told her that it was getting to be a joke: go to the head for a cleaner breath of air. Cramming her fouled coverall into the reconditioner, she stepped into the jetter, turning swiftly in the thin mist allowed her for such ablutions. Thirty seconds for soaping and then the mist returned to rinse her body. It did her morale no good to realize that she had just added her sweat and ventilator dust to the pervading odor, but one didn’t appear before the captain with visible dirt.

  Could he have called an emergency meeting about the air quality? She had done her utmost to improve it. She knew how depressing it was to breathe bad air, and morale on the Mandalay was low enough. But she had tried.

  After the Khalian surrender (the official one, although many enemy units refused to accept their defeat and the ignominy of yielding), while the Mandalay was on the surface undergoing minor repairs, Amalfi Trotter had scrupulously replanted the entire ’ponics garden, coaxing broad, shiny oxygen-supportive leaves from her vines with careful dollops of fas-gro. She had crawled through all the major ventilating shafts on an inspection tour and used remotes to sweep those that were too narrow for even her slight
frame—was that why a pint-sized person was invariably made lifesupport officer?—and replaced everyone of 743 vent filters.

  Despite her best efforts, once they lifted from the planet, even the “new” air had quickly taken on the taint of hot metals, acrid plastics, body odors too intense to neutralize, and the faint but throat-souring smell of Khalian Weasel fur. Even after she had located and destroyed five badly preserved Khalian pelts, she hadn’t quite eradicated that taint. The residue was probably due to having to flush out the systems while they were still on a Khalian-occupied world, and had given the air its final touch of pollution.

  Her only success was in eradicating the sweet sickly smell of blood and singed flesh. Perhaps, she thought grimly, there was simply no way to eradicate the rank odor of fear on a troop vessel. And why now? The Khalian War was over. They’d all be heading back to the Alliance ports and demob. Surely the fear contaminant should be fading.

  The fighting men and women of the 202nd Regiment, the Montana Irregulars, on board the Mandalay had survived nineteen major engagements. The MIs were crack troops, a great point of pride to the naval crew who transported them to the various theaters. With the war over, why were these veterans still churning out the sour pheromones of fear? She could understand it if they were moving on to yet another battle area. But they weren’t. They were in a holding orbit, and as soon as essential repairs were finished, the entire squadron would very shortly be leaving it on a course for an Alliance world.

  She fastened the closings on her clean shipsuit and grabbed up her clipboard of printouts on the air system. Complaints about the air, while justified right now, were analogous to complaints about weather on primitive planets. It was at least an impersonal, unemotive issue to bitch about. But she couldn’t help feeling guilty when someone did. Clean air was her responsibility.

  Maybe the captain had gotten the orders that would release them from orbit. Maybe that would reduce the stink. They’d been hanging about a long time now, going nowhere in never decreasing circles. Hope of that reprieve made her hurry down the narrow companionway to the g grav-well.

  Once the troops knew they were going home, the air would clear up from the barracks’ decks where it hung, an almost visible miasma of accumulated fear, stress, and pain. And when the old Mandy was back in a decent human port, she would scour the air system of this old bucket with good clean civilized air on a properly photosynthesizing planet.

  Everything will improve, she assured herself, when we’re on the way home. She scrambled off the null-grav lift onto the wardroom level. Her palms were sweating again. They always did when she anticipated criticism.

  Her keen nostrils caught a new odor, a pleasant one, refreshing. She sniffed about her and realized that the smell was seeping from the wardroom. She identified the aroma with some astonishment. Lavender? In the wardroom? They were desperate.

  She rapped the panel courteously and then entered, closing the door quickly behind her because she didn’t want the outside air to dilute the fragrance inside. The odor came from a lighted candle on the wardroom table, around which ranged both naval and Marine officers. She slipped into the only remaining seat, between Marine Colonel Jay Gruen and Major Damia Pharr, head of the medical team. They gave her a nod but something about their tenseness communicated itself to her. The clipboard slipped out of her sweaty hands and clattered to the tabletop.

  She muttered apologies that no one noticed. Then she, too, found herself trying not to stare at Captain August. His face was so expressionless that the flimsy that drooped from his fingers must contain bad news. The lavender was to soothe them all?

  A sudden premonition shook Amalfi. They were not going home. She clutched the edge of the clipboard now as if she were squeezing the breath out of whoever issued such orders. Where in the Nine Pits of Hell could they be sent now? Not another pocket of Khalian resistance? Was that why there was such a stench of fear? Only how could the soldiers know the content of a message the captain could only have received within the past half hour? Scuttlebutt was quick but not that quick, and any important stuff came in code, which took longer to seep into general scuttlebutt.

  Captain August stood. He had been a lean man when she first joined the Mandalay seven long years ago. He was gaunt now, the flesh stretched across the bone of his skull, the skin under his eyes dark with sleeplessness and stress. He’d been in command of the Mandalay since the outbreak of hostilities with the Khalia. He spread the flimsy, its message black ink bleeding tracks across the dirty cream of the recycled paper.

  “In code, we have been given orders to proceed to a rendezvous in two weeks, GGMT, with the supply ship Grampion, which will have replacement personnel for you, Colonel Gruen, to bring the regiment up to full strength.”

  “Replacement personnel?” Gruen demanded, his light, oddly flecked eyes bulging slightly as he challenged the captain. “Full strength?”

  “Yes, Colonel,” August said. He scowled as he glanced around the table, at the stunned expressions that ranged from horror through disbelief to despair. “We are to reprovision to battle readiness.”

  “Battle ready?” The words exploded from Hamish Argyll, the gunnery officer.

  On both sides of Amalfi came the mutter of mutinous curses.

  “But, Captain, who’s left to battle with?” No sooner were the words out of young Ensign Badeley’s mouth than he tried to melt under the table from embarrassment.

  “That information is omitted from this communique!” Captain August let the flimsy fall from his fingers. He scrubbed his fingertips on his thumb as if he’d touched something unclean. The sheet drifted slowly to the tabletop, all eyes following it.

  “Then the scuttlebutt is true?” Colonel Gruen asked in a hoarse voice.

  Captain August turned his head slowly toward him. “And you believe the scuttlebutt you hear, Colonel?”

  “When it’s affecting the morale of my soldiers, you bet your last tank of oxy, I do.” Waggling a finger at the captain, Gruen went on. “I got to tell you, Captain, the morale of my troops is so low, I shall withhold this information from them as long as it is humanly possible.”

  “How can you keep it from ‘em, Jay?” Major Loftus, the adjutant, demanded, raising his hands in resignation. “They know most things before we do. The air’s full of fear stench.” He darted a quick glance at Amalfi, who tried to scrunch even smaller between the two larger bodies.

  “How could they possibly know orders which were only issued thirty-five minutes ago?”

  “They don’t,” the colonel replied bluntly. “They won’t. They’re sunk so low in battle fatigue right now, such orders would result in a rash of suicides, brawls, and possibly even a mutiny attempt . . .”

  “Not on my ship . . .” August began.

  “You’re exaggerating . . .” Brace, the naval science officer, protested.

  “We can’t cope with that,” added Major Pharr.

  Colonel Gruen eyed everyone dispassionately. “I’ve been the regimental commander now since we were mobilized to fight the Khalia and there’s no fight left in my soldiers. I’ll tell you this, I stay awake nights trying”—and his fist came down on the table—“trying to figure out some way to revive their morale. Right now, I doubt they’d even suit up. There’ve been wars before where there weren’t any soldiers to fight it.”

  “How can you have a war if there’re no fighters?” Ensign Badeley piped up.

  “You have been apprised of my orders.” Captain August rose to his feet. “We break orbit at 1200 tomorrow. If it’s any consolation, the entire squadron is headed in the same direction, not just the Mandalay.”

  “It is no end of consolation, Captain,” Gruen replied with bitter sarcasm, “to know that High Command isn’t picking on us alone. I’d like permission to make a private call on the secure band, sir.”

  Captain August gave a curt nod and strode quickly out of the
wardroom.

  “Wait here for me, “ Gruen said, pointing a commanding finger at the others as he rose to follow.

  “You bet!” Loftus replied, glancing about the table to see if anyone would be fool enough to leave.

  Gruen’s wife served on Stone’s flagship Morwood and had often been able to discreetly reassure those aboard the Mandalay to their advantage.

  ”There is no way that I, as chief medic,” Damia Pharr began in her gravelly voice, “would certify these troops as battle-ready. They can dress ‘em up and kit ’em out and load ’em up but they won’t fight!”

  “Surely they’ll follow orders?” Badeley asked, his round, youthful face screwed up in droll surprise.

  He was alternately a headache, a laugh, and a raving bore. It was the universal opinion that he was likely to remain an ensign. Two years on a troop ship that had made four landings on hostile planets—and in which he had had to defend the Mandalay from vicious attacks by would-be boarders—had not shaken the down from his cheeks or given him any significant insights into Life and the Real World. He could be counted on to ask just such a stupid question as he had.

  “No, laddie.” Hamish’s accent became thickly ethnic when emotional. “They wouldn’t. And I, for one, would not lay a feather of blame on them.”

  “But . . . that would be tantamount to mutiny!” His eyes bulged.

  “Wouldn’t it!” Argyll agreed too amiably.

  “It’s inhuman to ask any soldier in his current depressed state to trundle off and fight another one.” Loftus brought both fists down on the table, his expression deeply troubled.