The Fleet05 Total War

by David Drake (ed)

The sweetness of victory and the sure promise of promotion made his recent humiliation worthwhile. Gripping the stun pistol in his swollen, lacerated hands, Jensen pushed to his feet. He had details to arrange, a criminal to secure, and no choice but presume that the spies on Van Mere’s monitored military com channels. He’d need to withdraw from Arinat system as if nothing untoward had happened, and initiate FTL before he dared call for an escort. Marity was still at large. The mate left on board would know James had encountered problems when rendezvous failed behind Kestra. Yet unless MacKenzie’s man wished to broadcast Fleet connections and face reprisal from Van Mere’s, he’d be powerless to pursue until too late.

  Jubilant, drunk on his own triumph, Jensen cleared the companionway door. He gave the stunned body of his captive a vengeful, self-satisfied kick, then squeezed past to free Kaplin from the supply cubby. She could damn well reset their course log, since her infernally manicured fingers were probably not mangled to incapacity. As he stumbled on nerve-deadened feet, Jensen acknowledged that he desperately needed to use the head. He considered his ruined uniform, and wondered, between planning, whether his efforts to escape the hanging locker might have bloodstained his best battle jacket.

  * * *

  Well after the code check at 1700, Ensign Kaplin drifted cross-legged in the dimly lit corridor by the space lock. Unimpressed by Jensen’s bubbling elation, and unconcerned that her hair needed fixing, she sullenly chipped enamel off a broken thumbnail. Her thoughts centered darkly around the admiral whose record was impeccable, but whose past was anything but. Her future in the Fleet would become deadlocked as a result of the tape she had witnessed. The lieutenant was a fool if he thought the captive held trussed in the lock bay was going to sweeten an admiral whose private shame had been leaked to the crew of a minor class scout. As Kaplin saw things, Mackenzie James might never see trial; more likely he’d die of an accident, or someone would pull strings to set him free. He hadn’t gotten where he was without connections in high places. His record of success was too brilliant.

  Kaplin jabbed at her fingernail, plowing up a flake of purple lacquer. Jensen was an idealistic idiot, and Admiral Nortin a desperately cornered man; no need to guess who’d survive when the dirt inevitably hit the fan.

  A discreet tap at the lock door disrupted the ensign’s brooding. She started and looked up, saw the haggard face of Mackenzie James drifting by the small oval window. His hands were bound; he’d managed the knock by catching the pen from the bulletin alcove between his teeth and rapping the end against the glass.

  “Damn,” Kaplin muttered under her breath as her grip slipped and mangled a cuticle. She sucked at the scratch, pushed off from the floor grate, and, still cross-legged, peered through the glass. “What do you want?”

  Other than a leak, she mused inwardly. If the stun drugs had just worn off, that’s what most people wanted.

  Mac James ejected the pen from his teeth. “Talk,” he said, his succinctness blurred by echoes. He bunched his shoulders against the webbing Jensen had contrived to confine him. The result would have tethered a bull elephant, Kaplin felt, but hell, she was only the ensign. She unfolded elegant legs, set her shoulder against the lock, and lightly braced on the door frame. “Should I listen?”

  James managed a grin. His forehead had somehow gotten cut during transfer from the bridge to the lock bay, and a bruise darkened the stubble on his jaw. “You might want to.” He tossed back tangled hair and added, “I’d hate like hell to be left at the mercy of an admiral whose secrets were compromised.”

  Kaplin pursed her lips. “You’re quick.”

  James’s grin vanished. “Always.”

  The ensign considered her torn thumbnail, then elegantly unfolded her body and tapped the controls to her left. The lock unsealed, and a rush of cold air from the barren metal bay raised chills under her coverall. She shivered. “Speak fast. I’m not sure I should be listening.”

  “Be sure,” said James. “I can get you reassigned. To another division, under another admiral, with a few less demerits on your record.”

  Kaplin regarded him carefully. Trussed hand and foot, his massive shoulders twisted back, James did not seem discomforted. His expression was much too confident. He watched, his eyes steely and level; as she noticed the scar over his right carotid artery, and as she lingeringly weighed the rusty stains that remained of a Chalice mechanic that patched his threadbare flightsuit. He was a man who had seen death from many angles. The possibility the next might be his own failed to move him.

  “You’d have to free me, get me back to rendezvous at Kestra,” he finished in a voice that was dry with disinterest.

  A pirate should have owned more passion, Kaplin felt. The list of criminal charges did not seem to fit with the man. She thought deeper, while those gray eyes followed; her hand tapped involuntary tattoos on the railing. Mackenzie James, skip-runner, should have gunned the other crew down with Harris. His hold over the admiral was all he truly needed to commandeer Sail without questions.

  As her oval chin rose obstinately, Mac James seemed to follow her reasoning. “I didn’t kill Jensen because I need him. His obsession is a tool, invaluable because it’s genuine. A man’s hatred is always more reliable than the best of laid plans.”

  Kaplin narrowed her eyes. “Who are you,” she demanded. “You’ll tell the truth, or we don’t talk.”

  Now Mac James studied her. He no longer seemed boyish, or hardened, but only unnervingly perceptive. “I take orders from Special Services,” he said, his face like weather-stripped granite. “And my criminal record is genuine. I could be tried and convicted on all counts, and no pardon would come through to save me. I am legitimately skip-runner, traitor, and extortionist, and because of that, I have served as the Alliance’s contact to disclose the motives of the Khalia and, now, the Syndicate behind them.” A strange thread of weariness crept into the prisoner’s voice. He tried, but did not entirely hide a ghost of underlying emotion. “Sometimes it takes a bad apple to know one. And through Sail’s surviving officers, the Fleet is free to deal with what Van Mere’s is actively covering. Marity is not involved, my cover is kept intact, and the Syndicate’s best outpost is exposed to counterespionage before anyone inside knows they’re compromised.”

  He was not pleading, Kaplin decided. He was appealing to her loyalty on a higher level; loyalty to humanity above her oath to serve the Fleet. She considered what he had not said, the threats he had not outlined: that Marity was yet at large, that Sail was still a long and lonely distance from the nearest battle cruiser or station, and that the Special Services branch of Intelligence often stooped to ugly tactics to free its operations from interference.

  Fractionally, James shook his head. “Gibsen won’t pursue. He’s under my orders, and he won’t break. Not to spare me from arraignment. The Syndicate outpost was always our target, whether I am sacrificed or not.”

  Kaplin chewed her lip. “Damn you,” she whispered into the echoing chill of the lock. “What about the interface cores? And the outright murder of Chalice station?”

  Now James lowered his lashes. His inscrutable expression cracked into a grimace of wounding compassion. “The cores we traded were genuine. The thirty pieces of silver, as it were, to confirm the presence of the enemy. And Chalice personnel, curse their bravery, defended their post with their lives.”

  Kaplin drew a shuddering breath. She bunched her hand and slammed the closure button; and the lock hissed shut, leaving the skip-runner and his haunted bit of conscience to the solitary chill of the space bay.

  “Oh, damn you,” Kaplin muttered. “Damn you to deepest hell.” She needed a coffee, she decided; and every other habit that was ordinary to quiet a vicious inner turmoil. For the favor that Mackenzie James requested for the higher good of the Alliance was nothing short of mutiny. As she left her post and propelled herself through null grav toward the galley, she reflected that Jensen was
going to dismember her.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Jensen snapped awake to the realization that Sail’s vibrations had changed. She was no longer traveling FTL, but powered by her more obtrusive grav drives. The lieutenant glanced at his chronometer, his worst fear confirmed. Sail had deviated from his chosen course and orders. He leaped from his bunk, jammed his legs into the nearest set of coveralls—Harris’s by the smell of beer and sweat—and raced full tilt for the bridge.

  He found the pilot’s chair deserted. The course readout on the autopilot confirmed trouble well enough: Sail was currently under gentle acceleration out of the Arinat system. Directly astern, like a thing cursed, lay the cratered lump of rock some forgotten mapper had named Kestra.

  Jensen was too enraged to swear.

  He spun, plunged through the companionway hatch, and hurried with all speed through the service corridors.

  He reached the lock to the space bay. A furious survey showed Kaplin drifting cross-legged in the chamber, twisting and twisting the shock webbing that once had confined Mackenzie James. She had been weeping. The mechanic’s deep-space suit was gone, of course, along with the skiprunning criminal who had killed its owner for hijack.

  “My God, Kappie, why did you let him go?” Jensen’s voice was a scream of unmitigated anger.

  The ensign looked up, startled to fear. “Sir! He’s Special Services, and on our side.”

  Jensen heard, and a greater rage crashed through him. His handsome face twisted. “Damn you, girl. He’s the biggest con artist in the universe. You were had, and he was lying. You’re nothing but his pawn, and a traitor.” There would be an inquiry over Harris’s death, Jensen’s frantic mind understood. A trial would follow, and under investigation and cross-examination, the flimsy plot arranged at Chalice would surface and ruin his reputation.

  The lieutenant ceased thinking. He reacted on the reflex of a cornered animal, and hammered the green, then the yellow, then the orange button on the console. The lock door hissed shut, cutting off Kaplin’s panicked scream. Warning lights flashed, but the hooter that signaled a deep-space jettison never sounded. Kaplin had disconnected the alarm to release Mackenzie James for his rendezvous.

  For that reason, her pleas could be heard very clearly. “Jensen! Listen to me! You’re Mackenzie’s best pawn, and he knows it!” She launched away from the wall, hammered her model’s hands against the innerlock. “We could stop James, both of us could stop him! Blow his cover with Special Services, and he’s lost his righteous reason to keep skip-running. You didn’t see his face, but I know. The remorse would put him over the edge.”

  Jensen’s lips stayed fixed in an icy half smile. Deaf to pity, mindful of nothing beyond the ambition that was his life, he ground his palm hard on the red jettison button. The outerlock doors cycled open. Atmosphere vented outward, along with the corpse of the ensign who had dared to turn triumph into failure.

  * * *

  Admiral Nortin’s office on New Morning was sumptuously large, but bare to the point of sterility. On the hard metal bench by the doorway, Jensen sat in his dress uniform. He kept his eyes straight ahead, resisted the urge to search the impeccable white of his jacket for bloodstains the cleaners had soaked out. He waited, rigidly correct, while the admiral’s pearl-white fingers paged front to back, through his report.

  The words matched the circumstances closely enough: Sail had happened across a raid on Chalice station and picked up the trail of a skip-runner who had stolen core intelligence crystals. The lieutenant in command had given chase, followed the space pirate Mackenzie James to Arinat, Van Mere’s station. The log spool on the admiral’s desk held proof positive of a Syndicate spy post, in the form of a recorded transaction between James and a covert network on Van Mere’s. Sail had maintained a standard patrol pattern, then pursued as the Marity made her getaway. Battle had resulted. Sail’s bridge had sustained severe damage, her pilot and her ensign dead in the course of duty. Jensen, sole survivor, had nursed his command back to base.

  The admiral finished reading. He raised bleak eyes to the impeccably dressed lieutenant before his desk. He did not point out the unmentionable, that the log spool might hold proof of a Syndicate spy post, but events differed drastically from the report. Neither Jensen nor the admiral wished the particulars of that tape examined for documentation. Jensen staked his future on the surity that Nortin held the power to misplace, or alter, or erase, the flight logs and checkpoint records of Sail’s passage between Chalice and Arinat. Jensen balanced everything on an extortionist’s secret embedded within proof of his own crimes. Only the admiral’s guilt could spare him from certain court-martial and a firing squad.

  A minute passed like eternity.

  The admiral’s cragged face showed no expression when at last he drew breath for conclusion. “Young man,” he said sourly. “For outstanding service, and for your discovery of a Syndicate spy base, you’ll report for commendation, decoration, and promotion. Then you’ll be transferred into Admiral Duane’s division, and I trust we’ll never need to set eyes on each other again.”

  THE SYNDICATE policy of exploiting aliens was often more ruthless in theory than fact. It is good business to have a healthy and productive population. Nor did the managers of the families overlook the value of greed as an incentive. Still, occasionally there was a race too valuable to not exploit. When your family’s need is for protection, you seek out a race that could protect your leaders. When the need is for production, you deal with production, you deal with races that are suited to factory work. When you are building toward a military conflict, a race whose culture has bred them for unswerving, if unthinking, loyalty and almost mindless courage is invaluable.

  Among the several hundred stars that comprise the Syndicate cluster, almost a hundred alien races have developed. In most cases these were deemed not worth exploitation and their planet was merely watched to insure it was no threat to the Syndicate worlds. You never know when each race might be useful later. Those races that develop into a threat were quickly “adjusted.” Sometimes a plague was judged to be most effective, occasionally bombardment from space.

  The planetwide culture of the Kosantz was at a level comparable to the Earth’s bronze age. Being descended from the unusual combination of herd animals and omnivores, the centaur-shaped Kosantz were endowed with fanatical loyalty to their group and equally fanatical ferocity. Once considered a likely candidate for adjustment, their value in the upcoming war with the Alliance was recognized by the Fleish family.

  The Fleish were not one of the fifteen families whose Fathers shared unquestioned power over the Syndicate. They were one of the two dozen lesser families whose holdings rarely were greater than a single world. Two centuries ago there had been over four dozen of these lesser families and ten great ones. Of the two dozen that had made a bid for major family status, five had succeeded and the others had been totally destroyed. Among those expected to attempt to better themselves in the near future, the Fleish family was considered by many the most likely to succeed. With the Kosantz, the ruling Fathers of the Fleish family thought they had found the way. They would ride to prominence on the backs, figuratively, of the Kosantz. The family that controlled the elite infantry of the Syndicate could be no less than a great house.

  The Fleish worked with careful patience. They had already been trading with the centauroid aliens for decades. Over a period of five years the Kosantz clans were wooed and traded with. Able to offer wealth and items far beyond their primitive technology’s ability to produce, it was not long before the Fleish family representatives became a dominant part of the Kosantz culture. Rather than moderate the Kosantz love of battle, the Fleish then began two years of conquest. It’s not hard to be a brilliant general with satellite observations and the careful application of high-tech weaponry. Soon the humans were recognized as the unquestioned leaders of all the Kosantz clans. Those who had questioned this author
ity were dead or in hiding. In great numbers the Kosantz warriors swore their fidelity to the Fleish family combat managers. An oath they felt was binding for life. Upon taking their oath each Kosantz warrior was given a tempered steel knife and badge sporting the Fleish family crest, signs of their fidelity. Most would die before allowing either to be taken from them. All would attack suicidally, without hesitation, when so ordered.

  THE PARTY of armed Khalian warriors backed up against the bulkhead of the Fleet destroyer Colin Powell. Crouching in a defensive position, they growled fiercely at the surrounding company of Marines. A few of them flicked nervous claws at the safety catches on the Fleet laser rifles they clutched.

  The leader hissed out a warning, which was translated by a tall, brightly feathered Nedge who stood well out of the way of the action. “Do not attempt to follow us,” the Nedge repeated in heavily accented Alliance Standard to the human Marines surrounding them. “We do not need you softskins to help us kill Khalian traitors. We are more than capable of dealing with them ourselves.” Fiercely, the Khalians feinted toward the open hatch of the lift leading to the shuttle bay. The Marines, with long-suffering glances toward their sergeant, moved to stop them.

  The Colin Powell was hurtling toward the last-known destination of the Khalian pirate Captain Goodheart. After running hard for thirty hours, it had passed the last-known location of the ship that had been carrying the late and now-legendary Commander Lohengrin Sales in pursuit of the pirate vessel. Traces of debris and matter swirling through the space around the Colin Powell had been analyzed by the sensors as belonging to a Fleet vessel and another ship. By the telltale impurities, the second one was judged to have been constructed of materials manufactured in both Alliance and Syndicate shipyards. Evidently, the Fleet ship and the pirate had destroyed each other.