The Fleet Book Three: Break Through

by David Drake (ed)

  Still, most human families still are formed on the old nuclear structure of parents and offspring. Unfortunately everyone in the media knows what dull programming this makes.

  STEVE LOOKED AT the check the Thalassian weapons merchant had just handed him: 150,000 credits—enough to pay off the repairs on the Sargasso VI, with a little left over for discretionary activities.

  He shook the creep’s hand. It was a bad idea. Too late, Steve remembered why Thalassa was known among scavengers as the slime planet. He wiped his palm against the wall. Then he threw in a business plug.

  “Don’t forget, Sargasso Salvage can meet your needs anytime, anyplace in the known galaxy.”

  “B-z-z-z-z,” the Thalassian said, blurring and spreading like a balloon about to pop.

  Then Steve woke up. He almost would have preferred to be covered with pieces of slime merchant.

  “Goddamn it! What time is it?”

  The buzzing chronometer read 1300. But as far as Steve was concerned, whenever he awakened was morning. And he hated morning. The best things in life happened at night. Late. He slapped off the alarm and punched the intercom access.

  “Sandera—you were supposed, to wake me up two hours ago!”

  Instead of his sister’s usual distracted reply, he heard only the faint hissing of the open intercom line. Where the hell was she? The bathroom? There was a comlink in there that usually worked. The armory? Like any other mechanical engineer, she loved to tinker with weapons. She’d blow them both into subatomic particles one day.

  “Sandera, this is Steve, your only brother. Remember me?”

  Silence. What was she up to? She couldn’t have gone for a walk outside. Especially if they were still in FTL drive. He listened for the engines. Silence. That meant they were only one day out from the Delta Station base near Trinitus.

  Steve dressed, relieved himself, and checked his reflection in the bathroom’s plasteel mirror. His long, dark hair needed combing, and his blue eyes were so bloodshot that the color was almost camouflaged—he should have stuck to beer last night. He shook his head, trying to clear it, and went in search of his twin.

  She was not in her bunk. He usually could find her there. Updating her personal weapons log, keeping tally of all the killing machines that passed through her hands. Ditto the armory. Well, what about the pilothouse? She had to be in the pilothouse.

  He climbed up the old-style suspended staircase that was serving as a makeshift entrance until the lift was fixed, then walked into the pilothouse. It was deserted. A blinking light in the corner caught his eye: a vid screen that flashed his name urgently. He keyed up the message:

  HAVE GONE ABOARD ALIEN SHIP TO INVESTIGATE SCAVENGING POTENTIAL. MEET ME THERE.

  What alien ship?

  Steve’ switched on external views and gasped. A cruiser of unfamiliar design was anchored off the Sargasso VI’s starboard. It had a strange, boxy shape, antennae bristling from it like the limbs of a square inverted spider. It dwarfed their own cigar-shaped vessel. He cursed silently and tried to raise Sandera on the ship-to-suit hailing frequency. No answer. He would have to go over there and get her.

  His twin’s appetite for adventure had brought them plenty of trouble in the past. However, it also paid the bills whenever she stumbled across a profitable cache of guns or armor. Thanks to the Fleet’s ban against selling weapons, there was a thriving black market in arms of all kinds.

  But what did she think this was, the Fleet? She didn’t have a platoon of combat-ready troopers waiting to back her up. All she had was Steve.

  Sighing, he checked the autopilot setting and grabbed his saber. He strapped on two laser pistols for good measure. If there were Fleet personnel around, all he’d get was a fine for carrying illegal weapons. Better a live scavenger in debt than a dead one for want of his gun. Steve suited up for the transport between ships. He hoped his twin hadn’t gotten them in over their heads.

  * * *

  As soon as the scuttlebutt, had reached them about the decommissioning of the Delta Station base, he and Sandera blasted away from Freeborn, heading for the Trinitus system. That was two solar days ago.

  Steve didn’t like to go scavenging with so little crew, but Hrif and Tol, their regular freelancers, were visiting family and weren’t available. Sandera was adamant.

  “This will be a solar breeze,” she declared, setting the coordinates into the board.

  “You always say that.”

  “Steve, you know it’s not every day that the Fleet decommissions a base. Of course, it’s expensive for them to maintain all these outposts, and I guess this one was just too far outside the regular shipping lanes. Besides, that asteroid’s orbit is getting pretty unstable. Soon it won’t be safe to land on it.”

  Her words didn’t reassure him. One of the last things he wanted to do was go visit a wobbly asteroid.

  “So why are we rushing over there?”

  She assumed her I’m-being-patient voice. Just because she was three minutes older, she thought she knew everything.

  “Any Fleet base is a gold mine for us. And we won’t even have to risk waiting for the end of a battle or a bounty hunter to kill someone. We can sell Fleet materials right back to Fleet dealers. This is an invitation to make an easy fortune!”

  He grudgingly agreed. “I hope you’re right.”

  There probably wasn’t much that the two of them couldn’t handle together, he thought. They’d been coping on their own since age six, when their mother had left Freeborn for an extended vacation with somebody other than their father. Since then, they’d done all right looking out for themselves—and each other.

  And there were bound to be plenty of fat pickings at a decommissioned base for smart scavengers who knew where to look. Any bulky equipment could be handled by mechanicals.

  So they’d headed out from Freeborn. When they stopped to fuel up at Kate’s Rock, the market was loud with space talk about Delta Station. At least three suppliers asked Steve if he was going to the base. Every scavenger in the quadrant would be picking over that place.

  Steve fought his impulse to race back to the ship. The base would still be there when they arrived, and he never went anywhere before checking the “daily” on Fleet activity. The last thing he wanted to do was blunder through a military maneuver and get the Sargasso riddled with puncture wounds again. Those repairs had almost bankrupted them, and they still weren’t in the black.

  Scavengers followed Fleet battles like hyenas behind a pride of hunting lions. At a safe distance. Steve liked it that way. He knew it was not only dumb, but dangerous, to get too close to the action.

  On the other hand, Sandera would happily carry a plasma converter right into the front lines. She’d say she was carrying on the family tradition or some other foolish rationalization. The fact was, his twin thrived on excitement.

  Besides, Dad had only been a lieutenant anyway. And now he was dead, thanks to a bad business deal.

  His legacy was his Fleet pension, which barely covered the groceries, and a declassified Fleet scoutship, refitted for scavenging, the result of a lucky poker hand. So much for tradition. The only tradition to which Steve adhered was that of preserving the flow of his own blood through his own veins.

  * * *

  He had to stoop to keep from bumping his head in the low-slung, gunmetal corridors of the alien ship. It was dark, the winding corridors dimly lighted by red wall units mounted at shoulder height. There was a strange acrid-yet-musky odor that set his teeth on edge.

  He thumbed the key to his suit’s communications system and received a faint answering beep; at least Sandera’s tracer was on. But she refused to respond to voice contact. Odd.

  He scanned the hall right to left. The first door he came to was locked, as was the second and third. Cursing, he pressed the entry panel on the fourth door. With a low whine, the door sprang op
en.

  Inside, Steve saw a wide, bay-like room with an observation window and a wall covered with gauges and buttons—controls of some kind. He peered through the window in the murky light. The hold was deep. It spanned several floors. But all he could see were canisters of some kind. Weapons? Well, Sandera wasn’t in here.

  He stepped back out into the corridor, taking care to duck his head. What was this place, a ship for elves?

  The next doorway led to a ramp that sloped upward and downward in a continuous spiral. He took the ascending path and almost tripped over a small body in partial armor, sprawled across the floor, a dark stain on its chest. A pool of blood fanned out under it, drifting downhill. Steve prodded the body with his toe. No response.

  He crouched down, yanked off the helmet, then dropped it when he saw what it had protected. He stumbled backward, heart pounding. The acrid stench was overpowering.

  The corpse’s head was that of a large rodent: dark-furred, gray-lipped mouth pulled back in death’s grimace, displaying rows of cruel, pointed teeth.

  A Weasel dead from a gunshot wound.

  Suddenly, the low ceilings and dim lighting made more sense. Sweat pasted Steve’s suit liner to the back of his neck. Sandera had led him aboard a Khalian ship!

  The Weasels were small, but they fought like devils. Their response to human trespassers was sure to be quick and deadly, which could account for Sandera’s silence.

  Steve didn’t want to think about that. He checked the tracer; the yellow homing beacon was getting brighter. She was nearby. But was she still alive?

  He pulled the safety catch from his handgun and made for the direction of that beacon, running uphill as fast as he could.

  * * *

  The lights on the control panel blinked purple-and-green patterns. They were hard to ignore in the dim room. Besides, they were the only friendly looking thing on the bridge. Sandera watched their random patterns and thought she might get more sympathy from the electronic equipment than she would from her alien captors.

  The musky smell on the bridge almost choked her. She wondered what significance scent had for these rodents. Was it another defense system, like a skunk’s scent? Whatever it meant, the smell was potent.

  Since she’d come aboard, she’d found this ill-smelling, dark ship a baffling riddle. She was almost sorry she’d decided to board it. But her father had always told her to trust her hunches. And when the Sargasso VI’s viewscreen had picked up this unexpected blip, all of Sandera’s personal alarm systems had gone off. She just knew it was a gold mine for her and Steve. And now, here she was, a captive of the Khalians, thanks to her intuition.

  The Weasel commander came toward her, holding an evil-looking gun at her chest. She glared angrily at him.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Sandera lowered her eyelids, feigning indifference, and pretended that she didn’t care if he shot her point-blank. She shrugged.

  “I could ask you the same thing, You know you’re violating Fleet territory.”

  “Our navigation device misfired.”

  Sandera smiled nastily. “I’m sure you want me to think that. Well, what I really think is that you’re on a spy mission. The Fleet has probably detected your ship already. They should be here soon, and they’ll blast you into pieces so small that nobody could find you with a microscope!”

  “By then you will be dead. You are the spy! Explain what you are doing on our ship!”

  She ran her hands through her short brown hair, leaving it standing on end, then shook her head in irritation.

  “I’ve already told you. I thought you were a derelict. You didn’t respond to my hail. So I figured there was nobody home. And in space, that means finders keepers. I’m in the scavenging business.”

  “This is no concern of ours. If, as you say, you mean us no harm, why did you shoot our junior officer?”

  “What else was I supposed to do? Stand there and let him shoot me? He shot first, before I could speak. So I returned the compliment.” Sandera’s voice grew shrill with impatience.

  “Human, the only reason we have allowed you to live this long is to discover your true mission and how many other spies are aboard your ship. We will discover this with or without your help. The only choice you have now is to work with us or die.”

  “That’s an easy choice.”

  Sandera started to reach inside her chest guard for the dagger she always kept there. It had gotten her out of more than one after-hours party. Maybe it would get her out of this one.

  But the other Khalian said something in a strange language, and her interrogator turned toward him. They both gestured toward a red light blinking on the control console, conferring in guttural barks which echoed off the walls of the bridge.

  Sandera left her knife where it was; she could always pull it out later. She could have sworn she’d felt Steve’s presence on the ship; she’d turned on her suit intercom for his benefit. So where was he?

  She ground her teeth with impatience. How satisfying it would be to pull out her pistol and blast both Khalians and their control panel. But they’d confiscated her gun. Besides, her soul recoiled at the thought of ruining all that nice merchandise.

  The engineer in her eyed the alien hardware greedily, while her scavenger side computed potential earnings from it. But even that got boring. She was sick and tired of these overgrown rodents. If they were going to kill her, they were certainly taking their time about it.

  She turned her head to check on the Khalians. They were still barking at each other over that red light. She hoped it meant that their nuclear power plant was going critical.

  Reaching behind her, she felt a metal knob on one of the wall panels. She turned it gently. It gave. Carefully unscrewing it, she pulled it free and sidled slowly toward the door. When she was almost there, she tossed the knob into the far corner of the room. It clattered noisily, and both Khalians stopped their arguing to turn in that direction. Sandera made her move.

  “Halt!” An imploder shot rang out, missed her, hit the door frame.

  She ducked out the door and hit the lock coordinates, scrambling them for good measure. Behind her, she heard furious pounding. She wondered how long they’d need to get out. That lock wouldn’t hold forever. And she couldn’t wait around for her brother to show up.

  * * *

  Steve bolted through the next exit, keeping a sharp eye out for Weasels. The first door he came to was locked, and his twin nowhere to be found. He had listened with growing horror to Sandera’s interrogation by the Khalians. The sound of that shot almost froze his blood. Who had fired it? Was his twin hurt? Dead?

  The door popped open, and a Weasel nearly bowled him over on his way out. He spun and fired, blasting the Khalian into the far wall of the corridor. The Weasel landed hard, twitched a couple of times, and did not get up.

  He felt something brush past him and turned to see another Weasel rushing down the hall, firing wildly over his shoulder, then vanishing through a doorway. Strange behavior for a ruthless warrior, Steve thought. Cursing, he followed the Weasel. The door led to a ramp. Empty.

  “Steve?” He heard a muffled voice in his helmet.

  “Sandera! Where are you?”

  “On the floor below you. Check your tracer.”

  “I shot a Khalian. Another one got away.”

  “He must be down here somewhere. I’m directly below you. Hurry!”

  Steve scurried down the ramp. Sandera was waiting for him at the bottom. He was so relieved to see her that he almost forgot that she was responsible for getting them into this mess. He restrained himself from giving her a lecture, even if she did deserve it. But first things first—there were Khalians prowling the halls, hunting them.

  An imploder shot cut short any greeting Sandera might have made. The twins jumped back inside the ramp doorway as a short figure
raced past them down the corridor and around a corner.

  “Spies! I’ll kill you both!” the Weasel shouted as he ran past them. His footsteps receded.

  Steve poked his head out the door. The hallway was empty. Where had the Weasel gone?

  “I thought they had some fancy sense of smell,” he said. “So how did he miss us?”

  “I think our suit filters it. Or maybe he has a cold.”

  “I’d like to give him something more serious than a cold.” Steve glanced down at Sandera’s suit-holster. It was empty.

  “Where’s your gun?”

  Sandera looked sheepish. “They took it away. But that was after I killed a crew member.”

  Steve pulled out his spare. “Here, take this. It should be more effective than that nasty little shiv you carry.”

  “Thanks.” She placed it in her holster and peered out into the hallway. “They’ve probably got the airlock guarded—we’ll never get back to the Sargasso alive unless we get rid of these Weasels. I guess we’d better go looking.”

  They entered the hallway cautiously. Every door they came to was closed. The first door they tried was locked. So were the second and third.

  When they reached the fourth door, which was unlocked, they heard the sound of footsteps behind them. Sandera shoved Steve through the door and jumped in after him. They flattened themselves against the wall and waited.