The Fleet-Book Four Sworn Allies

by David Drake (ed)

  And the whole of Redhorse would take it up the ass because of a phenomenon known as guilt by association.

  Damn, they’d never asked to be Eight Ball Command’s guinea pigs. That ought to count for something. But the drop onto Bull’s-Eye had been so full of near-insubordinate acts by Captain Tolliver English of the 92nd, he’d used up whatever good win he had coming.

  When you and your line lieutenant nearly shoot an ISA Observer and make no attempt to cover it up, you limit your options. English and Sawyer had been so overt about what they’d done and how they felt about, the Bull’s-Eye fiasco, even the mechanics on the Haig knew about it.

  Their helmets had been running an ongoing log the whole time; never mind the purple, blinking bead that purported to off-the-record privacy when engaged during conversation.

  Blinking lights on your visor display meant ISA encryption, and the Interservice Support Agency had its own playbook. Messing with Eight Ball, Command was just a little less fun than getting head from a Weasel.

  And in defense of Redhorse’s survivability, in the face of equipment malfunctions that endangered his entire company and had gotten his Beta three-team killed, Toby English and his first officer had messed with Grant as much as they could, short of killing the sucker.

  Which, in retrospect, probably would have been a good idea.

  But you couldn’t go back in time, any more than you could undo a screwup. When he remembered to pay attention to where he was, English was still sitting with his face in the psych evaluator in a hermetically sealed-observation room on ASA-Zebra.

  And the automat was saying in its simulated voice, “Captain English, your session cannot continue until you grasp the joysticks firmly with both hands. Your less-than-optimum physical condition has been noted and allowances will be made by recalibrating your ‘normal’ to the readings we acquire at the beginning of this session.”

  “Well, I dunno,” English said, his hands locked firmly in his lap, sensing an advantage and pressing it. Could he get out of this, today, just by bitching enough? He’d never thought to try; he was too can-do by nature. But, still . . .

  He took his head out of the psych evaluator, so he could see something besides the blackness of the unpotentiated unit. Peering around it, he made a face at the automat. “I’m really feeling crapped out. Can’t we just lock this down with yesterday’s session?” Among the Marines of the 92nd, AI had come to stand for Almost Intelligent. Maybe he could outfox this thing if he wasn’t so damned scared of it.

  “Captain English,” said the automat, “please insert your face in the—”

  “Okay, okay.” He didn’t want to collect insubordination points.

  “Place your hands on the joysticks, now,” said the implacable automat.

  He did, finally, and as his hands made contact with the joysticks, the goggles showed him a red dot that blossomed into a fractile simulation of the Tenring firefight on Bull’s-Eye.

  He knew what he was seeing was drawn from data taken from his helmet scans during the action, not pulled out of his subconscious, but that didn’t help one bit. The reconstruction of events began when he and Sawyer had crossed beams and he’d started seeing dinosaurs and giant amoeboid things and patches of other dimensions, but none of that was on view.

  His reactions, and Sawyer’s, were—though—reactions that appeared to be sharply out of phase to what was going on.

  That was what he was doing here, reliving everything for the record and giving the subjective data that the system hadn’t recorded.

  Except this time, maybe it had. He saw a flicker in the sky over the zero-point beams’ crosspoint, just above the whiteout where the fire had overloaded the scanners. And he said, jumping up from the psych evaluator because he was so damned excited: “There! Did you see it? That patch of sky, humping up and splitting and showing palm trees and—”

  “Sit back down, Captain English,” said the automat in a sharp, commanding tone. “Resume contact with the equipment. We’ll take up the sequence from where we left off.”

  Could an automat get pissed?

  This one certainly sounded pissed. English snuck a look at the one-eyed monster torturing him before he sank down into his chair and started to stick his head back into the apparatus.

  He couldn’t. He just couldn’t. He didn’t want to go through all that again. Maybe he’d lose it if he did. What the hell was he going to do when the transcript got to the part where he and Sawyer decided they were going to shoot Grant? And then nearly did it?

  “You’re wasting valuable time, soldier,” said the automat as if it were a drill sergeant.

  Training reasserted itself. You didn’t get off Eire and become a Marine captain in this man‘s Alliance without learning to love discipline.

  English, faced with retroactive combat, narrowed his field of focus down to the inevitable hellishness ahead. “Ain’t worse than a recurring nightmare,” he said aloud, very softly, through gritted teeth, and grabbed both joysticks so hard the console creaked.

  The funny thing was, for some reason known only to Eight Ball Command, the purple “off the record” bead that he and Sawyer had engaged during the action seemed to have worked: there was plenty of hell in the transcript, so far as English’s frayed nerves were concerned, but there wasn’t anything that could be construed as a plot to murder a superior officer. Or any sign that they’d expropriated that APOT suit.

  And that was nice. Although it might have been nicer if so much else Toby English had seen on Bull’s-Eye hadn’t been missing as well.

  * * *

  Manning was in the low-lit Columbia Club when English got there, and she was shitfaced. So was Trask, English’s field first, sitting beside her in a corner, elbows splayed on the table among enough empties to give one apiece to the 92nd at full field strength of fifty.

  English waved vaguely in their direction as he headed for the long, brass-railed bar. He’d gotten through his debrief clean, and he wanted to celebrate: he needn’t go back to see the automat tomorrow, or any day. They’d scrolled through the whole transcript. The automat had told him he’d passed with flying colors.

  Now all Toby English had to deal with were the weird dreams and the funny muscular twitches that followed the dreams. And the letters he had to write to the families of his Beta team, of course. And too much time to kill with nothing to fill it but memories and second thoughts and regrets.

  The only cure for what was ailing English was unavailable on ASA-Zebra: he needed a mission, the tougher the better, with lots of complex preparation and an enemy at the end of it. Weasels to kill, so he could add their furry tails to his coupcoat.

  Suddenly he wanted to see Sawyer, compare notes. But Sawyer wasn’t in this bar. There were a dozen open bars on ASA-Zebra, plus the service clubs. Sawyer might still be in debrief.

  English stepped up to the bar, oblivious to the men on either side of him, and waited for the big bartender to notice him. Then he ordered a beer and asked to use the infone.

  If he’d had his gear, he could have cued up Sawyer on his dual-com, instead of leaving word where he was with the company’s service. If he’d been aboard the Haig, he’d have known where to look for Sawyer. If either of the above had been true, he’d have been armed and dangerous when the scuffle broke outback in the corner, right about the time the head on his beer went flat.

  He didn’t turn around to face the trouble right away. He had troubles of his own: Bull’s-Eye just wouldn’t let him be.

  And the bar had bouncers . . .

  But glass started breaking. Furniture flew. He looked up into the bar mirror. “Damn and Weasels.”

  Trask and Manning were in, the middle of the scuffle. Manning might be Naval Intelligence, but she was his shipmate. And he was flat responsible for Trask, the way he saw it. Short of Weasels, human adversaries would do just fine, the mood he was in.


  He was halfway to the melee, now comprised of six problem-causers and another six would-be problem-solvers, when he realized that somebody was moving right with him and calling his name.

  “Hey, English? Need a little help?”

  “Piss off—Ah, Captain Kowacs? Yeah, that’s my Top, and my NIO, in the middle there.”

  “Right,” said the Headhunters’ captain. Kowacs gave a sharp whistle and aimed a couple handsigns in the general direction of the melee. “Let’s keep this in the family.”

  As fast as English and Kowacs moved in, his Headhunters were quicker and closer.

  By the time English reached the combat zone, it was already demilitarized. A dozen Headhunters were dispersing the combatants; three more were righting chairs and tables.

  A Headhunter who looked like a lady wrestler was dressing down a pair of bouncers so hard that the huge guys were retreating from her.

  And Kowacs said to English, “If I were you, Toby, I’d offer to pay for the damage. Then everybody sits back down . . .” Kowacs’s eyes were pale and demanding.

  “Yeah, okay. Thanks, Nick . . . I can handle it from here.”

  “Nope. I want to talk to you a minute. “Kowacs turned his head. “Sie,” he called to the lady wrestler who had corporal’s stripes under her Headhunters patch. “Square this away and get us a bill.” Then Kowacs took English by the arm and led him away from Manning, Trask, and the Headhunters policing the area.

  In the opposite, corner at a table that emptied when Kowacs stood in front of it, the 121st’s captain said, “Sit a minute.”

  English sat. There was a half-full glass in front of him, bubbles rising in the beer. “I said thanks, Captain.”

  “Don’t mean nothin’. Look”—Kowacs flipped a chair and straddled it—“you’ve been in auto-debrief, right?”

  Then English thought he knew what Kowacs wanted out of this. “Yeah. It’s not as bad as you’d think. The automats back down if you get pumped up. Just going through the motions, for the record.”

  “And off the record?” Kowacs asked softly.

  “Off the record’s off the record.” So maybe he didn’t know what Kowacs wanted. The 121st had taken thirty percent casualties on Bull’s-Eye, and lost their ship, the Bonnie Parker. Kowacs was probably hurting worse than he was.

  “What’s the record say about Bull’s-Eye not being Target not being the Khalian stronghold it was supposed to be?” Kowacs wanted to know.

  What the hell was this? English’s hands began to sweat again. He put them on the cool glass in front of him. “We were doing some Intel-related burn-in and I can’t talk to you about it at all.”

  His voice sounded as sick as he felt. Did everybody who’d been on Bull’s-Eye know about Grant frying the 92st’s human prisoners, the way everybody knew about the Headhunters’ bad luck?

  “Yeah, I can’t talk situation reports to anybody but an automat these days, either. But did you know we had a human prisoner, alive, when we dusted off? Course, we don’t have ‘im now, and nobody, knows where up-chain he went, but he’s a sure sign of an Intel screwup so massive we all ought to start thinkin’ about what it means.”

  “It?” Toby English was beginning to shiver because the sweat wasn’t just on his palms, now; it was running down his spine and over his rib cage and soaking into his shirt. If he’d had his gear, his suit’s climate control would have taken care of it . . .

  “It. Bull’s-Eye wasn’t Target, the Weasel rnotherload. Bull’s-Eye didn’t have shit for Weasels on it, right? No Khalians to mention. Just lots of command level equipment . . . and humans running that equipment. Think about what that means in terms of who fucked up how, friend, while you’re waiting for your outfit to be filled out and tour refit spec’d up. Think hard.”

  “I’m missin’ somethin’, Captain.”

  “We all are, Toby. In particular, I’m missing my prisoner. Of course, nobody’s told me we didn’t take him . . . yet.”

  “I think maybe I should . . .” English changed his mind.

  “Maybe we should go find out from my Intel officer what started that row.”

  English got up. Kowacs didn’t. “Comin’?” English wanted to know.

  “That’d be Manning, right? From the Haig? Watch out for her. She’s a purple suit.”

  “A what?”

  “Where you been, soldier? A purple suit: Naval Intelligence, like her papers say. And something else, as well—a dual hatter. In this case, Eight Ball Command—spooks du jour.”

  Kowacs wasn’t coming with him to that table, English realized. “I . . . Thanks for the help, Captain—”

  “Nick’s still fine, Toby. You guys stay alive, okay?”

  “Yeah, we’ll do that.” So Manning was getting her orders from Eight Ball Command. After Bull’s-Eye, that was no big surprise. English could have figured it out for himself if he’d been paying attention. But all he could think about was his automat debrief, that APOT suit, his lost Beta three-team, and almost killing Grant.

  Then Kowacs said, without moving, his lips, “And, English . . . watch out for the witch hunt, friend. Weasels are one thing, embarrassed Eight Ballers are something else again.”

  Men like Kowacs didn’t spread rumors. Kowacs was telling English what he thought English needed to know because, in Kowacs’s estimation, ASA-Zebra was a war zone. And also because, in Kowacs’s estimation, English didn’t have a clue to what was going on.

  That was true enough. Kowacs’s lady corporal carne up as he was leaving and handed Kowacs the bill for the trouble English’s people had caused.

  Kowacs handed it to English. He looked at it, blinked because he didn’t know how the hell he was going to pay for it except out of his own, and was muttering his thanks to Kowacs when the woman said to her captain, “Sir, did you happen to ask the Redhorse captain to give us a clean bill of health?”

  “Easy, Sie. I’m not sure the scuttlebutt’s right on this one.”

  “What the hell is going on, Captain?” English’s voice was too loud. He lowered his head and waited out the stares stubbornly. He wasn’t moving one inch until he got this straight. He snuck a look at the muscular corporal. It was like watching a Doberman smile at you through a chicken-wire fence.

  “When they ask us,” Kowacs said calmly, “if we think there are any human symps or infiltrators or agents of the Khalia in Redhorse or on the Haig or anywhere up your command chain, we’re going to say—“ Kowacs lifted his head and looked straight into English’s soul. “Hell no. I guess Sie was hopin’ you’d be glad to do the same.”

  “Mother of God,” English said. “You don’t think—Yeah, you do. Shit, I’ll tell the world you guys are straight up, anybody bothers to ask me.”

  “That’s good,” Kowacs said with a nod, and reached out to drink the half glass of beer somebody’d left.

  Clapping English on the back so that he lost his balance for a second, Kowacs’s corporal said, “That’s fucking great. Sir.” She raised an arm, made a quick fist, then extended her middle finger. “Peace, love, an’ all, sirs.” And she backed off.

  “Yeah. Peace, love, Corporal,” English said, and walked dazedly away, afraid even to look back at Kowacs.

  Manning had some explaining to do.

  He slammed the damage bill down in front of her and stood there, hands on his hips. “What was that about, Manning? I don’t mind payin’ Redhorse’s tab, but if you started that brawl, you can damn well kick in . . .”

  Trask, beside her, pushed away from the table. The field first had a black eye and a cut lip and an inebriated wobble as he rose. “Get off her case, okay? Sir?”

  “Siddown, Toby,” said Manning, and reached up to yank on his shirt.

  This was crazy. Discipline was coming apart, here on ASA-Zebra. Everybody was coming apart. Rather than let Manning rip his shirt, English sat between her
and Trask.

  “What’s Sawyer going to think when he shows up and finds you and Trask blitzed and banged up like this? And what was the meaning of that fight? I got a right to know . . .”

  “Meaning? Right?” Manning looked up at him blearily. Her shoulders were hunched and she was cradling her ribs with her arms. “You don’t know anything, English. Captain English. Not even when it stares you in the face. Now you’re asking about meaning? The meaning of Bull’s-Eye, buddy, soldier, idiot, is that we’ve got bigger problems than Marines’re gonna handle.”

  “Put her to bed, Trask. That’s a direct order.”

  Trask got up to do that. “You ought to listen to her, sir. They’re gonna task us one nasty mission, and maybe you ought to think if it’s our job . . . or ought to be.”

  “Just put her to bed, and get some sleep yourself. You’re next with the automat.” He didn’t want to hear it. And then he did. “Hey, Trask. Who’s ‘they’?”

  Trask was lifting Manning bodily out of her chair. “She’s got cracked ribs, I bet. Her team, sir. You know. ISA.”

  “No, I don’t know. Nobody’s talked to me about anything. He was beginning to get frustrated.

  “Nah, we had a fistfight instead,” Manning mumbled. She had a butch haircut, a prickly manner, a nasty streak. She’d given Toby English more trouble in the briefing room than any Intel officer he’d ever known. But if he was hearing her right, she’d just tried to change his orders for him. Never mind that it was before he’d gotten them.

  “Anybody wants to talk to me, Manning, I’m going to be right here for the next little while, trying to figure out how to pay for all the glass you broke.”

  She struggled in Trask’s arms and pulled something from her blouse. While English was thinking what Sawyer would make of it if he saw that little scene, she threw a card down on the table. “Charge it to us, Captain. You’re on our payroll as of . . . whatever time the fight started.” And she grimaced, nearly retched, then let Trask drag her away.