The Fleet05 Total War

by David Drake (ed)

  “Jesus!” screamed Harris from the pilot’s seat. “We’ve dumped slap into a war zone!” He spun the spacecraft, tossing Kaplin and Jensen hard into their couch stations.

  The lieutenant strained against the pull of vertigo and managed to punch up an image on the screens. Instantly his eyes were seared by the glare of an expanding plasma explosion. Sail had not entered a war zone; instead, the station logged as her destination had been detonated to a cloud of gases and debris. Harris responded, reflexively kicked Sail’s grav drives into reverse with a scream of attitude thrusters. Small fragments rattled against the hull. The gravity drives accelerated into the red, and buzzers sounded warning.

  Jensen stared at the blowing burst of destruction that Harris labored feverishly to evade. What could possibly have gone wrong? he wondered, and his shoulders tensed in anticipation of Kaplin’s acerbic, “I told you so, you arrogant, stupid fool.”

  But Kaplin said nothing, only sat with her face in her hands, caution lights from the recon unit a glare of yellow against her knuckles.

  “Je-sus,” Harris repeated, the Eirish accent of his childhood breaking through the more cultured tones he had acquired in air-tactics academy. A gifted sixth sense and instinct enabled him to quiet the drive engines; Sail described a smooth course just beyond the event horizon left by the explosion. “What now?”

  Nobody spoke. None of the three in Sail’s cockpit cared to contemplate what might have been had their scout probe broken through FTL just half an instant sooner. Jensen looked at his hands, found them clenched whitely on the arms of his crew chair. Since he could not change the fuckup, he forced his brain to work.

  And the obvious stared him in the face.

  “Kappie,” he said sharply. “Engage sensors, sweep the vicinity for the presence of other warcraft.”

  “What?” Overdue, the ensign’s reproach was cutting. “Have you gone nuts? You set a live charge on Chalice station, and now you’re after the culprit who blew it?”

  Lieutenant Jensen repeated his command, his voice back under control. “The charge I had rigged was a contained net explosive. If anybody set it off, even accidentally, it might have burned one sector. Not the whole station. We’re seeing the afterimage of a plasma bolt. Now, make your sweep. Our lives depend on it, because the enemy who manned the weapon is still out there.”

  “Could be renegade Khalians,” offered Harris.

  Nobody had time to suggest otherwise. An alarm cut across the cramped cockpit, one that signaled an inbound distress call.

  Kaplin locked in on the signal. “A survivor,” she called crisply. “He’s in freefall with no life support beyond a service suit.” She listed distance and vector, then added figures for Harris to calculate drift factor. The human bit of flotsam moved with the debris from the station, no less a victim of the blast. “He’s got a maintenance coding,” Kaplin finished. “Probably a repair man who was caught outside when the charge hit.”

  “Set course for intercept,” Jensen ordered. “By regs, we’re bound to pick the fellow up, and maybe he can tell us what happened.”

  A pilot other than Harris might have protested; laying course through a high-speed, tumbling mass of debris was hardly the safest of undertakings. But Harris leaned over his console, a half-crazed grin on his face. As he began the maneuver, he relished telling Kaplin that she’d better not unbelt to fetch a Dramamine. The vector changes were going to be fast, and violent, and if she was going to be sick from inertia, better that than wind up splattered against a bulkhead.

  The interval that followed became a hellish parody of a carnival ride. Harris alone found the gyrations enjoyable. He leaned over Sail’s console with his nose thrust forward like a jockey, every sense trained on the attitude displays, and his hands almost wooing the controls. The spacecraft responded to his measure, rolling, twisting, and sometimes outright wrenching a clear path through pinwheeling debris. Harris pressed Sail to the edge of her specs and reveled in every moment. His voice as he announced that the survivor was now close enough to grapple aboard sounded near as he came to elation.

  Lieutenant Jensen issued orders through his vertigo. As Kaplin set hands to her couch belt, he told her to stay on station. “Keep the scanners manned. If we’re not the only craft out here, I want to know it fast.” Then, as if Sail’s cockpit were too small to contain his restlessness, he strode out to manage the loading lock and grapplers on his own.

  In keeping with most scout craft, Sail’s utility levels were a warren of bare, corrugated corridors as poorly lighted as a mine shaft, and unequipped with simulated gravity. Experienced enough to disdain magnetic soles, Jensen made his way aft through the service hatch, hand over hand on the side rails. Although he had logged more space hours, Kaplin was more agile than he. She could zip through null grav like a monkey, never the least bit disoriented. Jensen’s jaw muscles tightened. A lowly female ensign should not make him feel threatened; but thanks to the almighty wishes of his politician father, others as inexperienced had earned their promotions ahead of him. Kaplin might easily do the same, despite the fact she was apt to act flighty on duty, and her record held a collection of demerits.

  The frustration of being continually passed over caught up with Jensen at odd moments. Intent on the injustices of his career, he drifted over the open-grate decking to the space bay, flipped open the grappler’s controls, and slipped on the headset inside. He clicked the display visor down, powered up the unit, and initiated recovery procedure as if the drifting speck on the grid represented no castaway, but an enemy target in a weapon scope. Since Jensen held a citation for marksman elite, the mote of human flotsam was recovered in commendably short order. Jensen tossed the headset into its rack. Poised before the trapezoidal entry to the lock chamber, he engaged the space bay controls, then waited, his hand on the bulkhead to pick up the jarring vibration that signaled closure of the outer lock. His ears measured the hiss of changing air pressure as atmosphere flooded the chamber. Only greenhorns and fools trusted to idiot lights on the monitor panel. Electronics were never infallible, and there were prettier ways to die than voiding an unsuited body into vacuum.

  The pressure stabilized within the bay. Jensen flipped off the manual safety and unsealed sliding doors through the innerlock. Inside the steel-walled chamber, the figure he had recovered drifted limply in null grav, clad in the bulky, ribbed fabric of a deep-space mechanic’s suit. The elbows showed wear, the knees were grease-stained, and the tool satchels were scuffed with use. The hands in their fluorescently striped gloves did not rise to undo the helmet, and a second later, Jensen saw why. The face shield was drenched from the inside, with an opaque film of fresh blood.

  Nausea kicked the pit of his stomach. He had not expected a survivor who was injured, or maybe dead. Hindsight made his assumption seem silly. The emergency tracer signal emitted by the suit did not necessarily trigger manually. The backpacks and tool satchel compartments were typical of a repairman’s, and such gear often had a proximity fail-safe: if the worker wearing the rig accidentally came adrift from a workstation, the alarm would set off automatically. Jensen swallowed back sickness. He had seen death before, had once blown a man’s brains out pointblank from behind. Now, duty demanded that he ascertain whether this suit contained a corpse, or a medical emergency.

  Queasiness reduced to irritation, Jensen pushed off into the lock chamber. He bumped against the drifting figure, clumsily captured it in an embrace, and managed to hook onto the handrail before he caromed off the far wall. With one elbow crooked to maintain position, he wrestled the suited body upright, then flipped the clasps on the helmet.

  As he lifted the face shield, the figure moved against him. A space-gloved hand gripped his waist from behind, and a hard object jabbed his side.

  Probably just a tool appendage, Jensen rationalized, his pulse quickening. But the face behind the blood-streaked shield dispelled his last vestige of delusion. T
he lieutenant looked down into slate-colored eyes and an expression that held only ruthlessness.

  “Godfrey, you boys are predictable,” said the voice of Mackenzie James. The cheek in shadow beneath the face shield showed a smear of new blood, but the hold that gripped Jensen, and the arm that shoved what surely was a firearm against the lieutenant’s side, were not those of a wounded man. Mackenzie James was bearishly strong, with reflexes not to be trifled with. Jensen had cause to remember.

  Shocked by the skip-runner’s presence and enraged to have lost the upper hand to a castaway, the lieutenant fought to stay calm. “I presume you deep-spaced the man who owned the suit you’re wearing.”

  The query prompted an insouciant smile. “Cut the crap,” said James, his voice multiplied by echoes off of the lock bay walls. “If you’ve got any scruples about killing, they’re faked.” He shook back mussed brown hair and nudged the gun barrel in the ribs of his victim. “Unfasten my suit clips.”

  Jensen saw no option but compliance; if James decided to shed the bulky suit, a way might arise to seize advantage while his enemy was encumbered by the sleeves. Convinced that the pirate had tripped the charge in the bogus crate of brain crystals, and that an accomplice on Marity had seen the explosion and opened retaliatory fire on Chalice, Jensen talked in an attempt to distract his enemy’s thinking.

  “You’ll never get away with a hijacking. Sail’s courses are automatically logged, and she runs under check-in protocols. All transmissions are coded and routinely traced.”

  Mackenzie James said nothing.

  “Give yourself up, man.” Jensen set hands to the last shoulder clip. “If our schedule is disrupted a millisecond, we’re presumed to be boarded by enemies. We’re tagged and targeted for armed search, with orders to be slagged on sight.”

  The clip unlatched with a click. James raised insolent brows. “Let go,” he instructed. As Jensen hesitated, James swung his body and wrenched the officer’s fingers. Painfully freed. Jensen felt himself spun around, his right wrist looped neatly in a tool tether.

  The lieutenant struggled, tried to jab an elbow in his enemy’s face. The move was both anticipated and countered; after years spent in freefall standing ambush. Mac James had mastered null grav to a fine point. He did little but shift one hip. The result provoked a spin as he and his captive drifted in tandem from the rail. Jensen’s fast movement added vector that hammered him sideways into the wall. James was protected by his suit; Jensen, caught on the inside. got the breath crushed from his lungs, and a bruise on the temple that nearly stunned him. Weakly he clawed for the lock. If he could reach the control, he might signal and warn the bridge.

  The tool tie on his wrist jerked him short and rebound slammed him backward into James. Jensen tried to fight. A punch that ineffectively dented suit padding was all he could manage before a kick in the groin killed his resistance. Amid the chaos of motion provoked by his shoves and thrusts, the tool tie looped his other wrist. Mac James controlled his random tumble. He shucked the suit, revealing blunt features and a pair of nondescript coveralls soaked like camouflage with bloodstains. Plainly the suit’s original owner had died from exposure to vacuum. Left queasy by pain, and by the coppery sharpness of the droplets drifting in freefall that unavoidably got inhaled with each breath, Jensen cursed.

  The gun barrel was no longer pointed at his face. James’s hand on the grip was relaxed, even negligent as he loosened the neck of his coverall; this action was an effrontery by itself since Jensen was not fully helpless. His feet were left free to kick; but to do so in null grav without use of his arms was asking for a nasty crack on the head. Mac James understood that Jensen was experienced enough to know this. The skip-runner relied on that wholly, an arrogance his captive found infuriating.

  Jensen cursed again. He despised the notion that a criminal could so easily guess his mind. He decided any effort was worth the inevitable concussion, but on the point of action, James caught the tool tie and jerked it like a leash.

  Snapped in line like a disobedient puppy, Jensen wrestled with shoulders and forearms, half gagged by the taste-smell of blood. His struggles skinned the flesh of his wrists, no more; Mac James towed him expertly through the inner lock. Crimsoned, coil-scarred fingers tapped across the control panel. The skip-runner was no stranger to Fleet vessels, Jensen observed in bleak rage. The lock hissed shut, fail-safe seals engaged.

  “You lost your ship, at least,” Jensen managed through clenched teeth as he was dragged past the service access to condenser and drive-engine compartments. “I hope she was blown to a million bits as a result of your late misjudgment.”

  Mac James half turned. A glimpse of his snub-nosed profile showed a sardonically lifted brow. “Misjudgment? Godfrey, boy. I’m exactly where I planned to be, which is more than you can say for yourself.”

  Jensen returned an epithet, clipped short as he twisted to stop a nose dive; Mac James towed him through the access hatch into the upper level of the ship, and gravity slammed his shoulders into the deck grid. The breath left his lungs and his feet drifted stupidly in the gravity less well of the service corridor.

  “Up,” said Mackenzie James. The pellet pistol was back in his hand and fixed in nerveless steadiness on the vitals of his captive. “Move, now!”

  An impatience colored the skip-runner’s tone that only a fool would question. Jensen rolled, pulled his knees beneath his body, then flinched as his captor clapped a hand to his shoulder. He was ruthlessly hauled upright, spun, and marched ahead. The tool tie tautened, stressed his arm sockets without mercy, while the pistol nuzzled the base of his skull.

  “Now,” said James in his ear from behind. “We’re going to the bridge. At the companionway, you will stop and instruct your pilot to set course for Van Mere’s station in Arinat.”

  Jensen automatically began to protest. A shake from Mac James caught him short.

  The captain qualified. “Your current orders permit you to act on discretion. And discretion, if you wish to stay alive, says Sail engages FTL for Arinat.”

  Aside from the weapon at his neck, curiosity urged Jensen ahead. That James knew the fine print on his orders was a cold and disquieting puzzle. “Why Arinat? And what’s at Van Mere’s except a trading colony for a remote agricultural outpost?”

  “Quite a bit,” James said uninformatively. Then, as if stating everyday business, he added, “The Marity didn’t blow to bits along with Chalice. She’s spaceworthy, and awaiting rendezvous, and will go under your escort through the security zone checkpoint to Arinat.”

  At which point Jensen knew searing rage. He had played blindly into an ambush. Months of intricate planning had led him to this: not as the hunter, but the trapped prey, forced to play puppet for the skip-runner Mackenzie James.

  “Carry on, Lieutenant,” the gruff voice instructed in his ear.

  Jensen did so purely out of hatred. He swore he would find a way to turn the tables, to bring this pirate to a justice long deserved.

  Skip-runner and captive reached the galley nook; beyond lay the companionway to the bridge. The hand that poised the gun at Jensen’s neck tightened ever so slightly. Since Mac James was never a man to act by half measures, Jensen squared his shoulders. He stepped up to the companionway, faced through toward the cockpit, and crisply called out orders.

  “Ensign Kaplin, discontinue your search pattern. Harris, I want this ship on a new course for Arinat. Plot FTL coordinates for the security zone checkpoint, and from there to Van Mere’s station.”

  Harris shot out of his habitual slouch. He turned his head, stared at his superior officer with an insolence peculiar to pilots, and said, “You want what?”

  The pistol nosed harder against Jensen’s neck. He swallowed stiffly. “Harris. You’re insubordinate.”

  “When isn’t he,” Kaplin commented with her usual flat-toned sarcasm. She shut down systems for travel and spun her station
chair, in time to see Harris narrow his eyes.

  “No,” the pilot said, quite softly. “We’ve done too many assignments together for me to buy on this one. I’ll set course for Arinat on one condition, sir. Step in here and show me both of your hands.”

  Jensen had no chance to warn, no chance to act, just one instant of crystallized fear as Mac James shoved him aside. The pellet pistol went off, a compressed explosion of sound. Jensen staggered off balance, heard Kaplin’s scream, and knew: Mac James had gunned down his pilot, even as he, on a past mission, had killed the Marity’s mate. In his own way, but for different reasons, Jensen shared such ruthlessness. He was not shocked, but only whitely angry, when he recovered his footing and saw the fallen figure sprawled in the helm chair. The pilot’s beret had tumbled off, and the fiery thatch of hair dripped blood. The long, lean fingers that had performed feats of magic at the controls were not relaxed, but twitching in an agitation of death throes. Mac James’s pellet had taken Harris through the forehead. He’d probably died between thoughts.

  A muffled sound across the cockpit reminded Jensen of his other, surviving crew member. Sarah del Kaplin looked sheet white; yet the makeup like garish paint over her pallor masked an unexpected death of character. Scared to the edge of panic, she hadn’t lost it enough to stand up.

  Which was well, for the murdering skip-runner shoved onto Sail’s bridge and snapped his next orders to the ensign. “Lady, your training included flight rating, and you’d better know the material, because you’re going to push that body off the helm and fly this vessel to Arinat and Van Mere’s.”

  Kaplin turned a shade paler. She lifted wide eyes to her senior officer; and prodded by the gun in twitchy hands at his back, Jensen said, “Kappie. Just do it.”

  She returned a jerky nod, rose, and struggled with Harris’s cooling corpse, her hands with their extravagant nail polish shaking and shaking, but able enough nonetheless. She sat in Harris’s spattered chair and engaged instruments to plot the skip-runner’s course.