Fleet of the Damned

by Chris Bunch

  Mahoney back-flipped to his right as a hammer blow just grazed the side of his head. He half rolled to his left, then rolled to the right, hearing the chunk of something terribly heavy and sharp smash down.

  As he came to his feet, he could sense a large blackness rushing at him. He fingertipped out a tiny bester stun grenade, hurled it, and then dropped to the floor, burying his head in his arms. His shoulders tensed for the blow, and then there was an almost X-ray flash through his hands.

  It took Mahoney many shaky seconds to come up again. He woozily tried to figure out what had happened.

  The bester grenade produced a time blast that erased very recent memory and time to come for some hours. As near as Mahoney could figure, he was missing only a few seconds.

  He peeped his beam to the dark shape slumped near him. Oh, yes. It was the soldier who had been sleeping on duty. There must be some other alarm system besides the one he had dismantled.

  Mahoney found it and disarmed it. He dragged his peacefully snoring opponent out and tucked him back into his bushes where he belonged. Then he rearmed both systems and slid back to his room.

  He made loud, cheery good-byes to his new Tahn friends the next day, passing out presents, jokes, and kisses where kisses belonged.

  Mahoney gave the snoozing sentry a few extra bottles of cider, and the man beamed broadly at him, clapped him on the back, and told him to be sure to stop by if he was ever in the area again.

  The invitation was sincere.

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  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  "I COULD TELL you how to solve your Tahn problem,” the farmer said, “and we don't need the damned government to do it!"

  The farmer was a short man with an expansive waistline and soft hands. His spread was many times larger than the Tahn communal farm Mahoney had recently visited, and from what Ian could gather, the Imperial settler spent his days tapping in figures on his computer or huddled with his bankers.

  Mahoney beetled his brows in deep interest. He was seated at the dinner table with the man, his tubby pink-cheeked wife, and their large brood of obnoxious children.

  One of the snotty so-and-sos was trying to get his attention, tapping his sleeve with a spoon dripping with gravy.

  "A moment, son,” Mahoney soothed, “while I hear what your father has to say.” Little clot, he thought, I'll wring your bloody neck if you touch me with that thing again.

  "Go on,” he told the farmer. “This is a subject that concerns all of us."

  "Clottin’ right,” the farmer said. “The Tahn are lower than drakh and bleeding us all."

  "Please, dear,” his wife admonished. “The children.” She turned to Mahoney. “I hope you'll forgive my husband's language."

  Mahoney gave an understanding smile. “I've heard worse."

  The woman giggled. “So have I. Still ... If you had to live with these Tahn, you'd understand why my husband becomes so heated. They really are—” She leaned closer to Mahoney to make her point. “Different, you know."

  "I can imagine,” Mahoney said. He settled back with their good after-dinner port to listen to the farmer expand on his subject. It was enough to chill the blood of a tyrant.

  Mahoney was absolutely sure what was going to be in his report to the Eternal Emperor. But he had decidedly mixed feelings about it. Like, who were the heroes and who were the villains?

  "Yes, please,” he said. “Another splash of port would go down just fine."

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  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  IMPERIAL FLIGHT SCHOOL, Stage or Phase Two, began in deep space. Sten and the others in his class, now referred to as “mister,” regardless of sex or whether they were even human, started with pressurized spitkits—space taxis.

  Learn ... learn in your guts ... which direction to apply force. Understand when to brake. Learn how to calculate a basic orbit from point A to (radar-seen) point B. Then do it again.

  Once they were competent, the next step put them in actual ships. More time passed as they learned, still in space, the use of the secondary—Yukawa—drive.

  As they grew proficient, the navigational bashing intensified. A ship under AM2 drive, of course, could hardly find its “course” under any but mathematical conditions.

  Sten, in spite of his worries about calculating, was getting by. He still needed occasional offshift coaching from Bishop, but things were coming more easily.

  One thing that helped, Sten thought, was that he was hardly a raw recruit. During his time in Mantis, he had gone through a great deal of real combat, from mass landings to solo insertions to ship-to-ship combat. There was a large mental file based on personal experience backlog that made it easier for Sten to translate raw numbers into a clotting great asteroid that he would rather not intersect orbits with.

  On the other hand, Sten's experience also made it hard for him to keep his mouth shut on occasion.

  Phase Two of flight training differed from Phase One in that the IPs seemed as if they wanted all the students to graduate. But it was far from being perfect.

  Too much of the tactics was theoretical, taught by IPs who had never flown combat in their lives or who were reservists called back as part of mobilization.

  A lot of what was taught, Sten knew from experience, was a great way to suicide. He wondered about the teachings he didn't have a reference point on—were they equally fallacious?

  It was a great subject for B.S. But only Bishop and he could really debate the point; with the others it quickly became a great excuse to slander whichever IP was on the “Most Hated” list for the week.

  Training progressed. All the students were rated as at least acceptable in deep space.

  Then the hard part started: landings, takeoffs, maneuvers on worlds with various atmospheres, weather, and gravitation. Thus far training had washed out only a dozen cadets and killed just three.

  But then it got dangerous.

  * * * *

  Lotor had one bad habit—and it killed him.

  A somewhat talented pilot, he stood above midpoint in the class standings. His failing, Sten learned later, was not uncommon.

  Lotor felt that a flight was over and done with when he had his ship within close proximity of its landing situation. Sh'aarl't had told him repeatedly the old cliché that no flight is complete until one is sitting at the bar on one's second round.

  Lotor's oversight couldn't be considered very dangerous in a time when antigravity existed. He probably could have flown privately or even commercially through several lifetimes without problems.

  The Empire trained for emergencies, however.

  Situation: A combat team was to be inserted on a near-vacuum world. The ground was silicate dust pooled as much as twenty meters deep. Sharp boulders knifed out of the dust bowls.

  Requirement: The combat team had to be inserted without discovery; a landing on Yukawa drive would stir up enough dust to produce a huge cloud that would hang for hours and surely give the team away. Also, the ship had to be landed in such a manner as to leave no lasting imprint in the dust.

  Solution: Hang the ship vertically about fifty meters above the surface. Cut Yukawa drive and back down on the McLean generators. Hold centimeters above the surface long enough for the mythical combat team to unload, then take off.

  The IP gave the situation to Lotor, who analyzed it and found the correct solution.

  The two of them were in a Connors-class delta-winged light assault ship. Flight training not only taught emergency situations but, very correctly, sometimes used unsuitable ships. Sten agreed with that—he'd spent enough time in combat to know that when one desperately needed a wrench, sometimes a pair of pliers would have to make do.

  But the wide wings were the final nail.

  Lotor nosed up and reduced Yukawa drive. The ship dropped a meter or so, and he caught it on the McLean generators. He slowly reduced power, and the ship smoothed toward the dust below.

  The trap of an antigravi
ty screen, of course, is that “down” is toward the generator and bears no relationship to where “real” vertical should be.

  The ship was three meters high and, to Lotor's senses, descending quite vertically. Close enough, he must have decided, and he slid the generator pots to zero.

  The ship dropped a meter, and one wing hit a protruding boulder. The ship toppled.

  According to the remote flight recorder, at that moment the IP hit the McLean controls at the same instant that Lotor figured out that something was very wrong.

  Lotor kicked in the Yukawa drive. By the time he had power, the ship had already fallen to near horizontal. The blast of power, coupled with the McLean push, pin wheeled the ship.

  Cycloning dust hid most of the end. All that the cameras recorded was a possible red blast that would have been produced as the cabin opened like a tin and the ship's atmosphere exploded.

  It took most of the planet day for the dust to subside. Rescue crews felt their way in, looking for the bodies. Neither the corpse of Lotor nor the IP was ever recovered.

  Sten, Sh'aarl't, and Bishop held their own wake and attempted to sample all the beers that Lotor had not gotten around to trying before his death.

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  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  OTHERS IN THE class were killed, some stupidly, some unavoidably. The survivors learned what Sten already knew: No amount of mourning would revive them. Life—and flight school—goes on.

  The barracks at Imperial Flight Training were not as luxurious as the psychologically booby-trapped ones in Phase One. But passes were available, and the pressure was lightened enough for cadets to have some time for consciousness alteration—and for talk.

  A favorite topic was What Happens Next. Sten's classmates were fascinated with the topic. Each individual was assuming, of course, that he would successfully get his pilot's wings.

  They were especially interested in What Happens Next for Sten. Most of the cadets were either new to the service or rankers—they would be commissioned, on graduation, as either warrant officers or lieutenants. Sten was one of the few who was not only already an officer but a medium-high-ranking one. The topic then became what would the navy do with an ex-army type with rank.

  "Our Sten is in trouble,” Sh'aarl't opined. “A commander should command at least a destroyer. But a destroyer skipper must be a highly skilled flier. Not a chance for our Sten."

  Sten, instead of replying, took one of Sh'aarl't's fangs in hand and used it as a pry top for his next beer.

  "It's ambition,” Bishop put in. “Captain Sten heard somewhere that admirals get better jobs on retirement than busted-up crunchies, which was all the future he could see. So he switched.

  "Too bad, Commander. I can see you now. You'll be the only flight-qualified base nursery officer in the Empire."

  Sten blew foam. “Keep talking, you two. I always believe junior officers should have a chance to speak for themselves.

  "Just remember ... on graduation day, I want to see those salutes snap! With all eight legs!"

  * * * *

  Sten discovered he had an ability he did not even know existed, although he had come to realize that Ida, the Mantis Section's pilot, must have had a great deal of it. The ability might be described as mechanical spatial awareness. The same unconscious perceptions that kept Sten from banging into tables as he walked extended to the ships he was learning to fly. Somehow he “felt” where the ship's nose was, and how far to either side the airfoils, if any, extended.

  Sten never scraped the sides of an entry port on launch or landing. But there was the day that he learned his new ability had definite limits.

  The class had just begun flying heavy assault transports, the huge assemblages that carried the cone-and-capsule launchers used in a planetary attack. Aesthetically, the transport looked like a merchantman with terminal bloats. Sten hated the brute. The situation wasn't improved by the fact that the control room of the ship was buried in the transport's midsection. But Sten hid his dislike and wallowed the barge around obediently.

  At the end of the day the students were ordered to dock their ships. The maneuver was very simple: lift the ship on antigrav, reverse the Yukawa drive, and move the transport into its equally monstrous hangar. There were more than adequate rear-vision screens, and a robot followed me sat on tracks to mark the center of the hangar.

  But somehow Sten lost his bearings—and the Empire lost a hangar.

  Very slowly and majestically the transport ground into one hangar wall. Equally majestically, the hangar roof crumpled on top of the ship.

  There was no damage to the heavily armored transport. But Sten had to sit for six hours while they cleared the rubble off the ship, listening to a long dissertation from the instructor pilot about his flying abilities. And his fellow trainees made sure it was a very long time before Sten was allowed to forget.

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  CHAPTER TWENTY

  STEN LOVED THE brutal little tacships. He was in the distinct minority.

  The tacships, which varied from single- to twenty-man crews were multiple-mission craft, used for short-range scouting, lightning single-strike attacks, ground strikes, and, in the event of a major action, as the fleet's first wave of skirmishers—much the same missions that Sten the soldier was most comfortable with.

  That did not logically justify liking them. They were overpowered, highly maneuverable—to the point of being skittish—weapons platforms.

  A ship may be designed with many things in mind, but eventually compromises must be made. Since no compromises were made for speed/maneuvering/hitting, that also meant that comfort and armor were nonexistent in a tacship.

  Sten loved bringing a ship in-atmosphere, hands and feet dancing on the control as he went from AM2 to Yukawa, bringing the ship out of its howling dive close enough to the surface to experience ground-rush, nap-of-the-earth flying under electronic horizons. He loved being able to hang in space and slowly maneuver in on a hulking battleship without being observed, to touch the launch button and see the battlewagon “explode” on his screen as the simulator recorded and translated the mock attack into “experience.” He delighted in being able to tuck a tacship into almost any shelter, hiding from a flight of searching destroyers.

  His classmates thought that while all this was fun, it was also a way to guarantee a very short, if possibly glorious, military career.

  "Whyinhell do you think I got into flight school anyway?” Bishop told Sten. “About the third landing I made with the Guard I figured out those bastards were trying to kill me. And I mean the ones on my side. You're a slow study, Commander. No wonder they made you a clottin’ officer."

  Sten, however, may have loved the tacships too well. A few weeks before graduation, he was interviewed by the school's commandant and half a dozen of the senior instructors. Halfway through the interview, Sten got the idea that they were interested in Sten becoming an instructor.

  Sten turned green. He wanted a rear echelon job like he wanted a genital transplant. And being an IP was too damned dangerous, between the reservists, the archaic, and the inexperienced. But it did not appear as if Sten would be consulted.

  For once Sh'aarl't and Bishop honestly commiserated with Sten instead of harassing him. Being an IP was a fate—not worse than death but pretty similar.

  * * * *

  Sten's fears were correct. He had been selected to remain at Flight Training School as an instructor. Orders had even been cut at naval personnel.

  But somehow those orders were canceled before they reached Sten. Other, quite specific orders were dictated—from, as the covering fax to the school's commandant said, “highest levels."

  The commandant protested—until someone advised him that those “highest levels” were on Prime World itself!

  * * * *

  The biggest difference between the army and the navy, Sten thought, was that the navy was a lot more polite.

  Army orders blun
tly grabbed a crunchie and told him where to be and what to do and when to do it. Or else.

  Naval orders, on the other hand...

  You, Commander Sten, are requested and ordered, at the pleasure of the Eternal Emperor, to take charge of Tac-Div Y47L, now being commissioned at the Imperial Port of Soward. You are further requested and ordered to proceed with TacDiv Y47L for duties which shall be assigned to you in and around the Caltor System.

  You will report to and serve under Fleet Admiral X. R. van Doorman, 23rd Fleet. More detailed instructions will be provided you at a later date.

  Saved. Saved by the God of Many Names.

  Sten paused only long enough to find out that the Caltor System was part of the Fringe Worlds, which would put him very close to the Tahn and where the action would start, before he whooped in joy and went looking for his friends.

  He was going to kiss Sh'aarl't.

  Hell, he felt good enough to kiss Bishop.

  * * * *

  Graduation from Phase Two was very different from the last day in Selection.

  The graduates threw the chief IP into the school's fountain. When the school commandant protested mildly, they threw him in as well.

  The two elderly officers sat in the armpit-deep purple-dyed water and watched the cavorting around them. Finally the commandant turned to his chief.

  "You would think, after all these years, that they could find something more original to do than just pitch us here again."

  The chief IP was busily wringing out his hat and didn't answer.

  * * * *

  Sh'aarl't, Bishop, and Sten bade leaky farewells, vowing to write, to get together once a year, and all the rest of the bushwa service people promise and never do.

  Sh'aarl't was still awaiting orders. Bishop's orders were exactly what he wanted—pushing a large, unarmed transport around the sky from one unknown and therefore peaceful system to another.

  Sten wondered if he would ever see either of them again.

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