The Fleet05 Total War

by David Drake (ed)

  From another perspective, it was almost as long a journey from most Syndicate family navy yards to Khalia as it was from Port. A scout leaving the cluster and sneaking into Khalian space inevitably returned with data no less than a month old.

  As a result, the first battles in what was to prove one of the most costly wars the Alliance was to ever face were mostly minor skirmishes. Intelligence was deemed by both sides to be more important than real estate. Even after the general location of the Syndicate’s worlds was known, it was several more months before Duane could assemble a force that could enter the hostile cluster with any expectation of surviving.

  Actually both sides needed to know some important facts before acting. The Syndicate combat managers had to be sure that Duane’s forces would not make a drive into the cluster at a time when their aggressive actions left it comparatively defenseless. They also had to learn what use the Fleet was making of the Khalian worlds, what infrastructure of bases were being constructed, and judge how committed the Alliance was to preserving the worlds of their newfound allies. Meanwhile the changing allegiance of the Khalia was proving to be a much greater problem than had been expected when the decision was made that it was no longer cost effective to support them. Finally, the Khalian War had ended much more abruptly and sooner than expected. Final plans had to be made and ships completed before the campaign against the Alliance invaders could begin.

  On the Fleet side six months were spent just piecing together the clues and confirming the location of the major Syndicate worlds. Hundreds of ships had to be repaired and tens of thousands of replacements trained before Admiral Isaac Meier was confident Duane’s battle fleet was capable of offensive action. Finally the Alliance too had to be sure that their own much more greatly dispersed worlds would not suffer from the absence of Duane’s fleet when it did take the war into the Syndicate cluster.

  The result of all this was that after the violent intensity of the final days of the Khalian War there was a period of boredom and frustration for most of the spacemen on both sides. This delay may have served the Fleet better than their foes. It certainly provided them with a necessary period of preparation. Morale was restored and new ships replaced those lost. Still, as the months dragged by, it became harder to maintain constant vigilance. To those back home, no battles meant peace. So much so that the politicians in the Senate actually began to question the huge, new expenditures the Admiralty demanded.

  During this period the war was characterized more by personal duels than big battles. Ships and spies fought for scraps of information or to protect vital industries. These were duels whose winners were determined by many factors other than firepower. Though having the biggest gun certainly helped.

  IT HAD BEEN extremely easy for the Syndicate to recruit “adjustors” from ambitious junior executives who found the complex business structure of the Alliance too restrictive for their own freewheeling egos. Rewarded with staggering wealth for manipulating information, misdirecting supplies and raw materials, and occasionally taking a hands-on role in some of the more unpleasant business transactions of the Syndicate, these “adjustors” were run by blind control, never seen by their Syndicate masters, and only retired to a sanctuary planet in the cluster if their exposure jeopardized a continuing Syndicate operation within the Alliance.

  To combat the adjustors, the Council authorized Fleet to recruit “regulators” whose job it was to balance the books, and if possible penetrate to the core of Syndicate intelligence. Totally trusted by Fleet and the Council, regulators were given the broadest possible powers to complete their tasks; they were expected to perform miracles, with no questions asked.

  Rykker was one of the first, and certainly one of the best, regulators given an active commission by Fleet. For two years, he had moved through the industrial wasteland of the Alliance picking up the threads of intelligence that, woven together, produced a tapestry of Syndicate activity with one man in its center. Working in deep cover, Rykker set out to bring in Planetary Resources Exploitation Executive James Coleman Melton.

  * * *

  The fight had lasted the better part of the day, and it wasn’t until his partner was dead and his own life suit damaged that Rykker had decided to give up and take his chances as their prisoner. He scraped what was left of Connors off the blast shield of his helmet and, crawling back to the smoldering heap of his ex-partner, stuck his own identity disc into the still-steaming mess of congealed flesh and melted life suit. The thermal grenade had opened the side of their ground rover, and in the process only partly vaporized Connors. Rykker reasoned that they’d rush the hulk in a matter of minutes. If his luck held, he’d have just enough time to lose his ID somewhere deep inside Connors. If it didn’t, then he wouldn’t last five minutes, once they were inside the ground rover. His luck held.

  The first to reach him was a Thalmud; short, long-necked, and with the shoulder-length, greasy-looking hair that made them stand out from the other semhoms—semi-hominids—in this sector. The smell of the Thalmud’s hair was thickly sweet. They perspired through their hair, with the result that even under the best of conditions they had a faintly musty smell, like gym clothes forgotten over the weekend in a locker. The Thalmud roughly dragged Rykker across the twisted deck and wrenched off his helmet before giving him a stunning blow to the side of his head. Thalmuds were rough, but they didn’t eat you. Gerns did.

  A pair of humans had entered the ground rover through the hole created in its hull by the thermal grenade. As they began to paw through the wreckage for anything of value, a Gern carefully clicked in through the breached hull and with spiderlike delicacy moved over to Connors’s slowly cooling remains.

  Carefully, the arachnidlike alien lowered its thick body down into a pool of Connors’s body fluids and, with one of its small upper arms, pulled all that was left of the human torso closer to its small head. Using both of its stronger lower arms, it brought the charred torso up to its body and, with the aid of its vestigial legs, gracefully maneuvered the lump of flesh and melted life suit under its own dull bottle-green body.

  Slowly, as though it was making love to Connors’s body, the Gern began to gently slide back and forth on the congealing blob that had been Rykker’s partner. On the Gern’s belly, short, coarse hairs bristled as they were dragged across the charred flesh, tasting Connors’s, telling the Gern that this was human meat. With deliberation the Gern raised itself above Connors and, extending its siphon, pressed down, plunging the hard, yellow-green tube into the body. The Gern shook and jerked obscenely as it moved its siphon deeper into Connors until at last it was through the charred outer layer and into the soft, raw innards.

  Rhythmically the Gern rocked back and forth on Connors as its siphon felt out the organs deep within the abdominal cavity, its small, razor-sharp tongues pulping the meat and muscle that then was sucked up the siphon and into one of the Gern’s stomachs. As its siphon sucked out Connors’s guts the Gern used the small, crescent-shaped claws on its stunted top arms to open an incision along the side of what had been Connors’s neck. Once the cut had been made, the Gern inserted its long, curved mandibles into the wound and began chewing.

  On the other side of the ground rover’s deck, the two humans were sifting through the space lockers of Rykker and Connors when the Gern’s siphon found Rykker’s identity disc. Along with bits of heart and liver, the sharp tongues had passed the plastellic disc back to the throbbing tube that had eagerly sucked it in along with other, more savory morsels.

  The disc entered the siphon sideways, slicing and tearing the delicate membrane that lined the walls of the Gern’s feeding tube. As it moved along the inside of the siphon, drawn along by the powerful sucking action that scavenged the food, it became momentarily stuck and like the damper in the flue of a stove pipe, rotating on its axis, closing off the passage of food and fluid to the Gern’s stomach.

  The effect was both immediate and profound. The Ge
rn’s siphon collapsed, sending the Gern into a screaming frenzy of explosive pain, excruciating beyond endurance. Screaming, bits of Connors dripping from its mandibles, the Gern tried to retract from the body cavity but couldn’t. The identity disc, slightly larger than the channel that had admitted the siphon to Connors’s body, now served to anchor the siphon firmly in the flesh. Unable to withdraw its siphon, the Gern reared up on its lower back legs and began to tear at Connors’s corpse, as the sheer weight of Connors’s remains began to rip the no-longer-rigid siphon out by its roots. Insane with pain, and with its own body fluids beginning to mix with Connors’s, the shrieking Gern turned and lunged toward the two humans, who stood transfixed in terror as the spiderlike Gern came bearing down on them.

  The Thalmud fired two quick blasts from his slug gun, both driving home into the gaping wound created by the loss of the siphon. For a brief moment the Gern paused; and then, as the two slugs detonated, it exploded, spattering the interior with its cream-colored viscera. One of the humans vomited.

  The sound of the detonations brought Melton in from the Fleet tractor that Rykker and Connors had been following for the past three days. Unlike the others, Melton didn’t look like a Fleet deserter or renegade scum. He was expensively dressed in the top-of-the-line civilian life suit, one of the 9SB models that cost more than a troop of Fleet Marines would earn in a year. Like a few of the privileged executives, he wore a sword that looked like it had been in his family for generations—although to judge by the scars on the guard, Melton knew how to handle a sword. It took a good deal of skill, and confidence, to parry an opponent’s blade on the guard.

  It was the briefcase, however, that said it all. Leather. Real leather—not the chemical composite stuff that most of the elite used, but the outside covering of a cow. A cow that had lived in a field, eaten grass, given milk—Rykker had tasted bio-organic milk and beef once—and finally, after feeding the top directors of the company, had had its skin processed into leather. A leather briefcase was worth more than some minor planetary despots could extort in their lifetime. And Melton had one. He was scum, but had a great sense of style.

  Melton looked at the mess in the ground rover, but didn’t bother to comment. Instead he walked over to where Rykker was propped up in the corner, reached into one of his pockets, and produced a “come along,” a mildly hypnotic drug used by police to assist them in controlling anyone they thought might be unruly. The Thalmud held Rykker’s head while Melton placed the cup of the aerosol syringe over Rykker’s left eye. For a brief instant Rykker thought of slamming his boot into Melton’s crotch, but the stinging sensation of the drug hitting Rykker’s eye prevented him from carrying out the action. Instead, he found himself wondering how much Melton’s self-cleaning boots had cost.

  Inside Melton’s tractor, Rykker was given a more primitive form of sedative; one of the humans slammed him hard behind the ear with a blackjack, and Rykker slipped into a painfully starry oblivion.

  Rykker came to, facedown in the sand with someone’s boot planted firmly on his neck. He twisted his head enough to see that it wasn’t Melton; the boot wasn’t clean enough. That left the Thalmud or one of the humans—not that it mattered. He knew that any physical resistance—now—would just get him killed.

  That bothered him. Not getting killed; that was always a risk you took, if you were going to be what the Alliance called a regulator. No, it was the being kept alive that Rykker couldn’t figure out. For some reason Melton wanted him alive, or he would have finished him off at the ground rover. The boot on his neck moved. It kicked him in the ribs.

  Rykker felt the wind rush out of his lungs as two pairs of hands jerked him to his feet and dragged him over to an onger, one of the six-legged pack animals used by remote Alliance prospectors. Biogenetically engineered a few hundred years earlier, they were shipped in freeze-dried and provided to any prospector on any planet that had class-A vegetation. They ate little, drank less, and carried prodigious weights. They were uncomfortable to ride, but in a pinch could be eaten, although they tasted horrible. Rykker was thrown on the back of the onger and his ankles were tied together under the animal’s belly. Melton reached into another of his wonderful pockets and produced the titanium handcuffs that he ratcheted tightly down on Rykker’s wrist.

  From his vantage point on the onger’s back, Rykker was able to survey his surroundings—not that it told him much. Like most of the planet, it was desert, gritty gray sand with the odd outcropping of rock sheltering sparse class-A vegetation. Basically unproductive soil with low-grade mineral deposits, it had been a backwater where the Alliance sent miners with no future: low priority, low technology, low yield. And low lifes, like Melton.

  Melton’s sand scooter glided silently toward the cluster of men standing next to Rykker, the deep purple of its ground effects beam momentarily turning the gritty gray sand a shimmering silver as it gracefully bobbed and floated over the undulating terrain. When he was next to them, Melton paused for a moment, balancing on the sand scooter like an acrobat on a teeter board, and then signaled his men to follow. The Thalmud grabbed the lead line of the onger, one of the humans slapped in it on the rump, and Rykker and his three companions moved off single-file behind Melton and the scooter.

  They had traveled for about two hours when Melton called a halt. Rykker’s “come along” had worn off, but every muscle and sinew of his body ached from the effort of staying on the swaying back of the onger. His life suit, designed for work afoot, had rubbed the inside of his legs raw from the pressure exerted to keep from rolling off the animal’s back and under its belly; he knew that if he survived the ordeal, it would be a long time before he was comfortable sitting at the controls of a spacecraft, let alone sitting down for dinner.

  One of Melton’s men untied Rykker’s ankles and pulled him from the back of the onger, half dragging him to where Melton was sitting in the meager shade of a derelict mining shed. Melton took off his sunglasses, an expensive pair of civilian lenses with a silver laser-coat that obviated the need for the human eye to dilate in response to changes in light levels, and turning his face away from Rykker gazed out to the horizon.

  “You have been very inconvenient,” he said, slowly returning his gaze to Rykker. “Not to mention expensive.”

  Rykker tried to remain impassive, but failed as his legs gave way and he crashed to his knees. Melton stood up, brushing a few particles of sand from his life suit, and walked over to where Rykker was kneeling. Bending briefly to remove the handcuffs, he peered closely at Rykker.

  “Mr. Campbell,” Melton began, reading the name tag on Rykker’s life suit, “you are a prospector, right?”

  Rykker nodded in agreement.

  “Well then, you are undoubtedly aware of the dangers posed by deserted mines?”

  Rykker said nothing, allowing Melton to continue.

  “Not only is there the danger of being trapped in a shaft by a sudden cave-in, there is the peril of falling into a sand pit; an all-too-real peril in your case, I’m afraid.” Melton stared intently into Rykker’s eyes, as though hoping Rykker would beg for some sort of mercy. He was disappointed when Rykker spoke.

  “Look, mister, I don’t know who you are, or why you attacked my ground rover, but I can tell you this: the Fleet is scheduled to cruise by this godforsaken hunk of rock within the next two days to pick up me and my partner, and you aren’t about to get away with murder. You and your pals would be a lot better off just packing up and leaving now, before the suns up there delay things for you for at least eighteen hours.” Rykker knew as well as Melton that the sunspot activity caused by the system’s twin stars would prevent any attempt at taking off from the planet for a good while when the two stars were in eclipse.

  Melton regarded him impassively for a few seconds and then turned and headed for his scooter, sliding on his glasses as he made his way across the brittle gray sand.

  The Thalmud was perspirin
g heavily, the thin, hairlike tubes that covered his head emitting a viscous golden fluid that rolled down his head and shoulders and spread across his glistening body, protecting it from the heat generated by the twin stars that high overhead moved closer and closer into conjunction. They walked only a few hundred meters to the abandoned mine, where Melton had parked his scooter in the shade of one of the sand-scarred derricks, but in the mounting light and heat it could have been miles. Rykker was dying for a drink—even electrolytes would have been welcome—but for some reason he doubted that they were going to offer him one.

  Leaving the sand scooter in the shade, Melton motioned them to follow him to the other side of the mine. Sticking to the shade of the abandoned buildings, the five of them moved single file past the once-productive ore-processing plant and then out into the blazing light and heat and across the sand toward the pit.

  The pit was nearly fifty meters across, with steep sides that dropped sharply to a bowllike bottom. At one side, a thin sliver of shadow provided a dark crescent that pointed to a gaping hole five meters across in the center of the pit. Like a vortex in the sea, it was ready to swallow anything—or anyone—that fell into it.

  Melton produced a canteen and poured some of its refrigerated contents into his hand, letting the silvery stream trickle through his fingers and onto the parched sands, which darkened for only an instant before the ovenlike air sucked the moisture from the dessicated gray grit. Without looking at Rykker, Melton tossed the canteen into the pit, watching it slide down from the rim toward the bottom.

  The canteen had barely come to rest halfway down the side of the pit when Rykker found himself first floating, then falling over the edge of the pit and down toward the vortex in its center. He had tried to grab one of them as he went, but as luck would have it the Thalmud was the closest, and no amount of strength would provide a grip on its oily body. Despite the lower gravity, Rykker still hit hard when he finally crashed into the side of the pit.