The Fleet-Book Four Sworn Allies

by David Drake (ed)

  While this decision serves well in the general situation, commanders should avoid the fallacy of attempting to apply it to specific or local situations. The continued urgency of developing new weaponry for the wide variety of situations that may be encountered necessitates a constant flow of innovation, experimentation, and testing. This has to be the case, or the sword of familiarity and training that has served the Fleet well for so many centuries will turn on us in the form of an inability to adjust or adapt to new challenges and threats.

  A final word of caution. The introduction of any new technology, no matter how seemingly harmless or irrelevant, can have disastrous effects . . .

  EM-EM-THREE-NINER—“Mom” to the crews that flew in to collect the monthly production—plodded forward a centimeter at a time, circling the power and storage hub. Her teeth skirled a cheerful song on the taconite; her fans slurped up pulverized raw ore; and deep in Mom’s belly, a vacuum furnace purred as it melted, separated, and blended.

  Every minute or two, depending on the quality of the ore, Mom’s electromagnetic drivers spat another ball bearing up her long tail of spun-ceramic hosing and into the storage drum in the hub.

  If anybody’d asked her, Mom would’ve said she was as happy as a clam.

  If she’d had enough self-awareness to know that.

  Which she didn’t.

  Quite.

  MM 39’s only purpose in not-quite life was to make ball bearings of whichever type was required by the signal from the hub, or to reproduce herself when the signal was switched off. It didn’t matter to MM 39—to Mom—whether the humans of Ouroboros enclosed her bearings in races, or used them as a source of highly refined metals and alloys. Mom’s interest was entirely in her job.

  She was a half cylinder about five meters long and three meters across the flat bottom on which she crawled over the taconite, nibbling as she went. Her broad-mouthed, compact shape was ideal for crawling, along a featureless expanse of low-purity ore, but if Mom had to reproduce under modified circumstances, her offspring would be modified too.

  For that matter, Mom herself could change. In a few weeks she’d have to extend herself another half meter or so to enclose additional magnetic drivers. The distance between the hub and Mom’s slowly expanding circle was approaching the limits of the present set of drivers. She would need more power to shoot bearings reliably up the tube to storage.

  The modifications would take her out of production for a few days, but that didn’t bother Mom. She was programmed to take the long view. Better to lose a few thousand ball bearings now than chance a clogged guide tube that would take Mom weeks to clear, as slowly as she moved.

  Mom’s teeth chirruped as the rock before her changed character. Here was an igneous dike, very low in the iron and nickel which were her target ores; but Mom’s ground-penetrating radar told her that the intrusion was narrow, so it was best to devour it and spew it out as waste—as tubing like that which guided the ejected bearings, neat coils which were easily policed up by the human service crews. Besides, the dike had some interesting trace elements Mom could add to her stores as tiny beads, in case she needed those elements in the future.

  The future of making ball bearings.

  The long view, after all.

  * * *

  Ouroboros was a cold and watery world, warm enough around the equator, frigid elsewhere. The name referred to a band of ocean and islands only a couple of thousand miles wide. A sizable fusion, weapon, set under the ice in a tectonic region, would melt enough polar cap to flood the islands to a depth of three hundred meters.

  But Mom neither knew nor cared that a squadron of Khalian raiders had landed on Ouroboros and threatened to melt both polar ice caps with a pair of such devices.

  Mom would’ve adapted to the deluge. The bearing delivery system would have to be modified to allow for the greater viscosity of water. The fusion power plant would’ve failed in time, but Mom could replace that with an array of solar collectors floating on the surface. No, the threatened flood wouldn’t affect the production of ball bearings on Ouroboros.

  But it would end the life of every soul in the human colony.

  There was no resistance to the Weasels. When they demanded the location of every potentially valuable artifact on the planet, they got it.

  * * *

  “Are you sure this is the target?” Squad Leader Ixmal snarled to Duwasson, the pilot of the Khalian transporter. “It looks like a nest-fouling bomb crater.”

  “Maybe another team got here first and nuked it,” suggested Private Moketric, gloomily combing his whiskers with the knuckles of his left forepaw. One of these days Moketric would forget he was wearing a combat gauntlet when he groomed himself; the half of his face that remained would have a right to be gloomy then.

  “The transporter thinks it’s the right place,” said Duwasson doubtfully as they neared the gray scar on the brown/ green/dun landscape. “But I dunno, I just fly ‘em . . .”

  The ground had been eaten down around a pillar in the center. That supported a small building which didn’t look a Motherin’ bit like the drawing.

  “That’s it,” said Senior Private Volvon, a smart-ass if Ixmal had ever met one—and the Great Mother knew, he’d met his share. “There at the rim, see it? Must be a piece of mining hardware we’re supposed to pick up.”

  ”Didn’t look that fouling big in the nest-fouling picture,” Ixmal grumbled into his whiskers, squinting as he looked from the half cylinder below to the three-view drawing they’d given him at the drop point while they loaded the coordinates into the transporter. You’d’ve thought they could put a scale on the nest-fouling drawing, wouldn’t ‘cha?

  Of course, he prob’ly woulda ignored the fouling figures if they’d been there.

  The transporter started to circle the crater. Ixmal flung the useless drawing out into the airstream. “Well, put us down, dung-eater!” he shouted to the pilot.

  Duwasson landed the transporter on the crater’s edge hard enough to jounce loose milk teeth. Fool musta thought he was putting down on a meadow instead of a rocky plateau as unyielding as a battleship’s armor. Never been a pilot whelped that was worth enough dung to cover his body, noways.

  “Go! Go! Go!” Ixmal shouted as he led his six-Weasel pickup team out of the cab, snarling and threatening the barren landscape with their weapons.

  There wasn’t a soul around. There wasn’t even any sound except a high-pitched screaming from the object the team was supposed to grab. It sounded like a victim being tortured, which put Squad Leader Ixmal into a better mood momentarily—until he noticed that that nest fouler Moketric was squatting to mark the site with his musk.

  Ixmal batted his junior with his rifle butt. “Up!” he said, eyes glazing as he reversed the weapon in case Moketric decided to make something out of it.

  No problem. Moketric backed away, offering his throat while making mewling noises. Ixmal squatted deliberately and overmarked the tussock his junior had chosen.

  ”All right,” he continued, now that he’d satisfied the needs of discipline. “Let’s get the fouling thing and get back before the others’ve gobbled the choice cuts!”

  Ixmal turned, jumped from the edge of the crater, and sprawled onto his short, furry tail on the smooth rock three meters below.

  He was supposed to have landed on the arched top of the object instead of just behind it.

  “Squad Leader Ixmal,” Volvon said with careful propriety. “I believe the object moves.”

  Ixmal had dropped his rifle when his ass slammed the stone. Just as well for Volvon.

  The rest of the team, leaped into the shallow crater with more circumspection than their leader had displayed. You could groom your tail tufts with the rock for a mirror, it was that smooth where the thing had passed . . .

  Something went chuk! and the team all flattened, looking for the shoot
er and wondering who’d gone to the Great Mother this time. Not a soul anywhere, though maybe the building on the pinnacle in the center of the crater—

  “Sir,” said Volvon, “it wasn’t a shot. I think the thing just spit something up this tube here.” He pointed with his disemboweling knife, then used the weapon to pick his fangs while his brow wrinkled in thought. “And I’ll bet the other one’s a power cord.”

  The object continued to advance, though the increments of motion were so slight that they had to be inferred. One of the privates backed away from the stealthy approach and said, “Sir, can’t we turn it off?”

  “Anybody see a switch?” Ixmal muttered, wondering why he had to get all the jobs out in South Ass-Sniff, without a fouling scrap of anything’s liver to eat for loot.

  “The power switch is probably on the central island, sir,” said Volvon.

  “Who the Mother-fouling nest-gobbling hell asked you?”

  “And I think we ought to take that building in too,” Volvon added, like what he thought mattered t’ somebody.

  “Can’t take ‘em both,” said Moketric, scratching at the side of the big machine as it oozed its way past him, screaming. His combat gauntlet left four deep gouges down the mild steel of the casing. “They’re too big t’gether.”

  Chuk!

  They all hit the deck again. All but Volvon.

  “Then we ought to summon another transporter,” the senior private said, looking idly skyward while his superior got up from the stone with a jingle of equipment, and a look in his eyes that would’ve curdled milk in a mother’s dugs.

  “What we oughta do,” said Ixmal in a snarl as controlled as millstones rubbing, “is the job they fouling told us ta do. Which is carry this back for pickup before some fouling slick-skin battle cruiser waxes all our butts.”

  He stared at Volvon. “Period.”

  “Yessir, but the brass probably isn’t familiar with the installation,” Volvon argued. “If they had been, they’d’ve wanted us to—”

  Squad Leader Ixmal aimed his automatic rifle at Volvon’s feet, then twitched the muzzle a centimeter to the side before he triggered a long burst. Sparks, pebbles, and ricocheting bullet fragments blasted in all directions as the power line separated.

  Volvon yelped and jumped away. The big half cylinder the team had come for halted in silence.

  Ixmal fired the rest of his magazine into the guide tube. The tough fibers tore under the bullet impacts, but the tube wasn’t completely severed.

  Squad Leader Ixmal slapped a fresh magazine into his weapon while the rest of the team stared at him with a heartwarming mixture of fear and loathing. “Duwasson!” he shouted. “Lower the bird onto this fouling thing so we can tie it on ‘n get our asses outta here!”

  He looked at Volvon as the transporter’s gravity-drive engines ran up to lift speed above the rim of the artificial depression. “You there,” Ixmal ordered. “Cut the resta that tube loose.”

  The cowed private prodded the tube with his disemboweling knife.

  “Use your teeth!” Ixmal ordered, grinning.

  Ixmal had Motherin’ sure learned one thing on this job.

  If Senior Private Volvon didn’t get his own squad soon, Squad Leader Ixmal was going to chew his throat out fer sure.

  * * *

  “All right, all right,” said Deck Chief Limouril, who looked like an elf, acted like a Weasel, and came from a planet whose name was closer to spfSelrpn than it was to anything human tongues could pronounce. “Who’s presenting on this one?”

  He kicked Mom in the side. Her sheathing belled dolefully. “Ah, I am, sir,” said Estoril, shuffling his notes as he stepped out of the clot of technicians making rounds with Limouril. Estoril was another elf—which cut no ice with Limouril. Quite the contrary. “Ah, it is, ah, an object, ah, picked up on—”

  “We all know it was picked up on Ouroboros, Estoril,” Limouril said coldly, fluffing his ear tufts in scorn. “What we want to know is what does it do? Do you intend to enlighten us this morning, or shall we check back in a voyage or two?”

  Some of the other techs giggled, puffed out their cheeks, or made clawing motions in the air—depending on their racial type—as they sucked up to the deck chief.

  “Yessir,” Estoril muttered, flushing a deeper shade of green. He’d found his place in his notes—not that it helped very much. “This is a processing plant, sir. An automated processing plant.”

  “But what does it process, Estoril?” Limouril demanded, turning his face toward the heavens—which in this case were formed by the Deck Four ceiling girders of the mothership Tumor. “I swear, I’m going to suggest to our Khalian brethren that they recruit bark fungus into their technical staff. That would improve the average intellectual quality.”

  Giggle. Puff. Claw.

  “Sir, that information wasn’t in the data that came up from Ouroboros.”

  “You mean that you didn’t find the data, Technician Estoril,” Limouril snapped, though he knew as well as anybody else that most of the documentation this time had been left behind by the Weasel snatch squads, probably because the paper didn’t look edible.

  And speaking of the devils, a party of chittering Khalians seemed to be working this way down the aisles of loot.

  Estoril got a stubborn look on his face. “The power line was severed,” he said. “I think we ought to reconnect it and note the results.”

  “By all means, Estoril,” the deck chief said. “I can’t imagine why you haven’t already done that part of your job.” Because there was only so much time. And because Deck Chief Limouril would have burned his subordinate a new one if Estoril had taken that initiative anyway . . .

  But the squad of Weasels was coming closer, and the last thing Limouril wanted was a problem in front of them. He could act like a Weasel when only his subordinates were present, but the Khalians themselves were unpredictable.

  And they didn’t take much note of rank. Among slaves.

  Something fragile shattered explosively in the near distance. Most of this region of the deck was filled with motor vehicles of all types and descriptions. Crashing and tinkling sounds continued as the Weasels pelted each other with bits of whatever their horseplay had destroyed.

  Estoril crept behind the arch-roofed machine, looking for a universal receptacle from which he could mate a length of flex to the severed cord. “Go on, go on,” Limouril said, making shooing motions with his ears toward the other technicians. “Help him, let’s get this working.”

  A ship big enough to carry the loot of a planet must be a significant fraction of planetary size itself. The Tumor was bigger than a battleship, but most of the vessel was empty space that could be configured to hold everything from holoscreens to silverware to . . .

  Well, to Mom.

  The tens of thousands of tonnes of loot gleaned from even a minor planet like Ouroboros were stuffed into the Tumor. It had been packed every which way by Khalian pirates who expected the Fleet to arrive momentarily, and who didn’t much care about anything that couldn’t be made to bleed and whimper.

  Far behind the region of engagement, the Tumor would deliver its load to the Syndicate, whose human personnel would tag, store, distribute—and mostly lose—the loot of Ouroboros; but for even that degree of efficiency, there had to be a presort on board the mothership.

  Syndicate humans didn’t operate with pirate raiders whose ships were in imminent danger of destruction or, worse, of capture. There were other races more technically adept than the Khalians, though; and serving pirate raiders was a better job than providing them with a quick lunch.

  Besides, Limouril liked what he did. He liked the power it gave him, too, except when Weasels were present.

  The squad of Khalians came around the corner just as a pop, a blue flash, and a curse indicated that the technicians had gotten the machine hooked
up again. Also that the machine hadn’t been turned off before it was brought in, which figured for Weasels.

  “Hey, what’s that?” said one of the Weasels. He carried a tangle of pipes that had probably been part of an exercise machine.

  “Dinner!” chittered another one.

  The technicians, already braced to whatever their cultures considered a posture of attention, stiffened still further. Estoril and the two roly-poly, ill-smelling Brownians who’d just connected the cable edged back behind the machine again.

  A ball bearing clanked against the hull, dropped to the deck, and rolled out in front of the technicians. Its perfect polish winked mysteriously in the overhead lighting. Limouril began to sweat.

  Mom hummed as she brought all her systems up to speed again and took stock of the changed circumstances. Power was intermittent. The Phase One response, solar collectors, didn’t seem practical here, though she wouldn’t be able to make a final determination until she’d explored the exterior of her present enclosure.

  On the other hand, the ore vein was remarkably rich.

  The machine’s cutting head rose from ground level through a 180-degree arc, determining that the joint hadn’t frozen while the power was turned off. The tiny rock-cutting blades skirled as they sharpened themselves. Limouril’s technical crew stumbled away in terror.

  “Here, catch!” called a Weasel. He flung the exercise machine into the cutting head. Mom’s teeth began to devour the chrome-plated steel with howls of delight.