The Fleet Book 2: Counter Attack

by David Drake (ed)

  Aware his captive’s composure was crumbling, MacKenzie James jerked him to his feet and spun him around. “Evans never did like to kill,” he said with contempt. “For that, you’ll leave Marity alive.”

  But reprieve was not what MacKenzie James had in mind as he hefted his captive through the companionway. Towed through null gravity like baggage, Jensen had to writhe ignominiously to keep his face from banging the bulkheads. The hiss of the lock to the cargo hold spilled icy air over his skin. Left to drift, the young officer could not see his captor, but an echoing flurry of footfalls and the clang of something metallic did little but amplify his apprehension. Then hard hands caught his legs. His view of the hold spun horizontally, and through dizziness he glimpsed customs seals and the opened hatch of the cargo capsule. Then MacKenzie James brutally started cramming his body inside. Jensen exploded in panic.

  He struggled, and got a bang, on the head for his effort. Mac James shoved his shoulders down. Scarred fingers reached for the latch.

  Jensen twisted frantically and managed to tear the gag loose. “Wait!” he said breathlessly. Desperate now, his ambition reduced to a fool’s dream, he begged. “I could take Evan’s place for you!” Except for the piloting, he was qualified; and he wouldn’t defect, not really. Once he gained MacKenzie’s confidence he could alert Fleet authorities.

  But his proposal met with silence. Shoved protesting into the cargo capsule, and panicked by the prospect of confinement, Jensen abandoned his pride. “Damn you, I’m the son of an Alliance Councilman! That should be worth enough to hold me for ransom.”

  No spark of greed warmed the eyes of MacKenzie James. Single-mindedly efficient, he banged the hatch closed over his captive’s head. Jensen kicked out in disbelief and managed to skin both his knees. The slipped gag constricted his wind. Over his ragged, frantic breaths came the unmistakable click of latches, the inexorable deadening of sound as the seals of the container clamped closed. He banged again, uselessly. He might suffocate, or die of hypothermia in Marity’s unheated cargo hold; surely Mac James would see reason, contact his father and arrange an exchange of money.

  Jensen felt the capsule bump and rise; through its shell he heard the unmistakable hiss of a lock. He screamed in uninhibited terror, then; but nothing prevented the sickening, tumbling fall into weightlessness and cold which followed. He curled up, shivering in the bitter end of hope. Mackenzie James had jettisoned him, living, into deepspace.

  The cargo capsule’s seals preserved atmosphere. For a while its honeycomb panels would conserve body heat, but with no air supply it was an even draw whether Jensen would die of asphyxiation or tumble back to fry in the fury, of Castleton’s star. At best, he might be salvaged alive by a Khalian scout ship. Worst and most galling was the fact that Mackenzie James went free.

  Jensen shouted in frustration. Unable to forget those coil-scarred fingers flexing and curling, tirelessly beating the odds, he longed for one chance to shoot his antagonist, even as he had Evans: from behind, with no chance for recriminations, just death—fast and messy and final. But anger only caused the nooses to rip painfully into his, wrists. In time, all passion, all hatred, unraveled into despair. Jensen’s tears soaked the hood of the Freer robe and curled the dark hair at his temples. After Mac James, he reviled his disciplinarian father, for stifling his career with the stipulation that under no circumstances was undue favor to be granted him. Competence became a sham. Such was the influence of fame and politics, no board of officers dared to grant promotion without performance of outstanding merit. One by one, Jensen had seen his peers advance ahead of him. Balked pride and rebellion had landed him here, trussed and sealed like flotsam in a cargo capsule. Too late, and in bitterness, he questioned why the promise of money had failed to motivate MacKenzie James.

  The air in the capsule quickly became stale. Jensen’s thoughts spiraled downward into a tide of black dizziness. His limbs cramped, then grew numb; the transmitter in the Freer sash dug relentlessly into his neck, but he was powerless to ease even this smallest discomfort. Presently, none of that mattered. Resigned, Jensen directed his last awareness to cursing MacKenzie James. As consciousness began to dim, sometimes the name of his father slipped in . . .

  * * *

  Something banged the cargo capsule. Jostled against the side panels, Jensen heard the whine of grappling hooks. Fear roused him from lethargy as they clamped and secured his prison. Suffocation seemed a kindness next to threat of Khalian cruelty, but the young officer lacked strength to do more than shut his eyes as whatever being had salvaged him popped the capsule’s release catches. Clean air rushed in around the seals, and light fell blindingly across Jensen’s face.

  “I’m surprised he left you alive,” said an acerbic voice he recognized.

  Jensen started; drew a shuddering breath, and ducked sharply to hide cheeks still wet from crying. “My god, how did you know where to find me?”

  Perfectly groomed, and correct to the last insignia on her uniform, Ensign Shields regarded him with that whetted edge of antagonism she had affected since the morning he had compelled her collaboration in his scheme to capture MacKenzie James. “Marity’s instruments weren’t shielded,” she said at last. “You’re living lucky for that.”

  Jensen tried to scrub his damp cheeks against his shoulder, and awkwardly found he couldn’t, not with his hands still bound. His embarrassment changed poisonously to resentment. He faulted himself bitterly for lacking the presence of mind to note the implications of Marity’s opened instrument panels. Evans had programmed the autopilot for the FTL jump with the keyboard circuitry wide open to surveillance; if the scout ship assigned to Shields was not one of the fancy, new brain models, she still carried a full complement of electronics.

  “You read our destination coordinates from our tempest signal,” Jensen murmured, shamed by memory of Mac James’s amusement as he allowed the transmitter to remain twisted into the Freer sash. The captain had known then that his victim would be rescued. He must have considered Jensen a fool, harmless or incompetent enough to be no risk if he were set free.

  “Maybe not so lucky after all.” Shields shoved the cargo capsule over, interrupting Jensen’s thoughts and spilling him ignominiously onto the courier ship’s lock platform. “You’ll wish you’d died in deepspace when our dispatches come in late. Serve you right if the old man himself calls you onto the carpet.”

  Stung by more than humility, Jensen twisted until he gained a view of his shipmate’s eyes. “Play things right, and we’ll get a commendation.”

  Shields stepped back. Rare anger pinched her face; Jensen had never thought her pretty, but she had slenderness, and a certain grace of movement that had half the guys back at base off their feed. “You’re obsessed, Jensen. Commendation for what? You’ve been an overambitious jackass and now, finally, the brass in Fleet Command will know it too.”

  Jensen made a vicious effort to sit up, but the nooses cut into his wrists, and he gave up with a curse at the pain. “You’ll go down with me,” he threatened. “As my senior officer, piloting a Fleet dispatch courier off course calls for court martial, not a dressing down.”

  He heard Shields’s sharp intake of breath, and could not look at her. Once he might have veiled his threats in gentler language, but now, the cruelly injured dignity inspired by MacKenzie James impelled him to roughness. “Don’t be a stupid bitch.” But he couldn’t quite bring himself to finish; by the whitely locked knuckles of Shields’s hands he saw he did not have to mention her brother, who was ill and under treatment in an Alliance medical facility, a benefit of her enrollment in the Fleet. Should she be discharged now, he would lose his benefits. But pity came second to necessity. Ambition and his driving desire to command a vessel that carried weapons instead of dispatches cut with, a need like agony. Coldly, Jensen outlined his alternative.

  * * *

  The dome at Port was packed to capacity on the day the c
itations were read. Banners overhung the stage where the Fleet high command were seated. At attention alongside Ensign Shields, Jensen surreptitiously checked his uniform for creases. Finding none, he stood very still, savoring the moment as the speaker at the podium recited his list of achievements.

  “. . . commendation for bravery; for innovative escape tactics, when asked at gunpoint to surrender to three Khalian warships, which imagination and daring in the face of danger has resulted in the furtherance of Fleet knowledge of enemy behavior; for performance above and beyond the call of duty, these two young officers will be promoted in rank, and be decorated with the Galactic Cross . . .”

  Shields went very white when the Admiral laid the ribbon with the medal over her shoulders. She shook his hand stiffly, and looked away from the cameras when the press popped flashes to record the event.

  Jensen also stood stiffly, but for very different reasons. Warmed by his father’s proud smile, he reflected that the story they had presented to Fleet command had held as many half-truths as lies. The tactics which had brought word of the takeover at Castleton’s had been real enough, though only Shields and he knew they had originated with the wiliest skip-runner in Alliance space. The weight of the Galactic Cross which hung from his neck carried no implications of guilt. At last granted the command of a scout ship with armament, Jensen swore he would redeem his honor. One day, MacKenzie James was going to regret the humiliation he had inflicted upon a young officer of the Fleet. Jensen intended to rise fast and far. In time he would retaliate, find means to bring down the antagonist who had bested him. The honors he took credit for now were only a part of that plan.

  Neuton Bedfort Smythe looked terrible. His eyes were red and his color sallow. He looked very much like what he was, a man working alone against time on a vital project. Even his obvious exhaustion couldn’t mask the enthusiasm with which he burst into Meier’s new office.

  “I have found something important, a first clue in the mystery,” he announced. “If you will.” With a flourish he inserted a memory chit into the comconsole on the admiral’s desk. The astonished officer just had a glimpse of the title. It appeared to be the occupation report from one of the levies garrisoning the planet.

  Meier had to admit the investigator had been true to his promise to stay out of the way. Except for the inconvenience of having to shift offices, approving his access to an astonishing number of files, and a personal concern about his redwood desktop being badly abused, Meier had hardly even been aware of the Alliance Council’s investigator’s presence in Port.

  Before he could reply the screen was filled with images.

  I.

  On embarkation day there were a thousand of us who marched down Maccabee Boulevard behind Colonel Bar Kochba to the reviewing stand, where Solomon Gottshaft, the Planetary President of Eretz Perdido, gave us the salute, and told us to go out and show the universe, or whatever part of it happened to be, watching, what sort of stuff Perdido’s Ten Lost Tribes were made of. We proceeded past the enormous stone doors of the New Temple, cheered by the multitudes, and then we were loaded into trucks and taken to Theodor Herzl Spacefield on the edge of our capital city of New Jerusalem. There we were loaded aboard the Fleet destroyer Swiftsure for the short trip to the dreadnought Valley Forge, which waited in geosynchronous orbit above our planet.

  The Valley Forge was twelve hundred feet long, displaced well over one hundred thousand tons, and carried a crew of two thousand and eighty. Our hundred men were assigned quarters and canteen privileges, and were given self-locating maps so we could find our way between sleeping quarters, mess hall, exercise area, PX, and recreation hall. Our own officers relayed ship’s instructions: we were to deploy immediately to our assigned sleeping places-which also served as acceleration couches, and strap down for takeoff.

  It was a fine moment when the siren sounded and we felt the tingling vibration as the ship’s sub-light converters came on. There was, no sense of motion, but strap-down is traditional, besides sometimes there can be vertigo when first getting underway. We watched our progress on overhead screens, and the readouts made clear to us what was happening.

  There was very little physical sense or acceleration, but we knew that Valley Forge was getting up to standard one-quarter speed of light very quickly, powered by the gravity potential of our nearby star, Perdido Primary. Theoretically, this ship could continue accelerating in sublight drive until it approached C, the speed of light, or until the magnetic engines came apart. In practice, the big ships rarely go beyond ½C, and use that mainly for maneuvering around planetary systems. The really long-distance traveling is done in an entirely different mode, by means of the FTL drive. Using FTL, the largest ships can cross the thousand light-year diameter of the great spherical volume of space which contains the more than three hundred Alliance planets in about three standard Terran weeks.

  Our trip would take twenty-five days, because we were going to the periphery of Alliance space, the Galactic northwestern frontier, to the planet Target, which the Fleet intelligence services had determined was the home planet of the Khalian raiders. The establishment of a Fleet base recently on the planet Klaxon had paved the way for this final assault on the enemy’s key position at Target, the planet from which the Khalian raiders attacked our shipping and raided the home planets of Alliance members.

  For this purpose, the Fleet had gathered together elements from all its far-flung frontiers and guard posts, stripping the interior defenses of the home worlds, timing everything so that one gigantic blow could be struck against the enemy. It was the largest concentration of ships in the Fleet’s thousand-year history, and it seemed impossible that any force could stand up to it; though pessimists pointed out that the fortunes of battle were uncertain, and that if the attack should fail, or be destroyed before it began by the sudden appearance of a rogue black hole or an unseasonable time-storm, we would be delivering the future of humanity into the hands of our enemy, the alien Khalia.

  The Combat Troops of the Fleet are made up of levies from the various planet members. The troops served under their own officers who were under the orders of the Fleet high command. At the time we embarked it was still a toss-up which group was going to be picked to lead the commando ground assault onto Target. Among the hundred or more who had volunteered, several of the planetary levies were suitable and trained for the job. The Zyandots of the planet Zyandot II came well recommended, as did the Mahdists of the planet Khartoum IV. The Sons of the Albigensian Heresy, from the planet Janus, were especially eager to lead the assault, because their planet had only been a member of the Alliance of Planets for seven years and they hoped to achieve recognition and status by the doing of an heroic deed. There was intense lobbying in the Chamber of Delegates at Alliance Headquarters on Earth for the privilege: planetary honor was at stake. Less than an hour after we boarded Valley Forge, it was announced that our thousand-man battle group from Perdido had won.

  This should not be ascribed to our popularity. We were the compromise candidate. The major planets lost less face if we got the assignment rather than one of their rivals.

  I know, I protest too much. It is a universal Jewish tendency. We Jews from Perdido have more than the normal amount of Jewish paranoia. This is due to the uncertainty of our status. Our co-religionists on Earth won’t admit that we are Jews, will not even consider our claim that we are descendents of the ten lost tribes who were kidnapped by aliens and taken from Earth to Perdido.

  We pointed out that it was the aliens’ fault that no torahs had been brought on the flight across space, no Talmuds, none of the commentaries of the learned Rabbis, not even Martin Buber’s stories of the Baal Shem Tov. We were aware of the existence of these things due to our racial memories, but we had no knowledge of the things themselves. The Jews of Earth said that since we had no holy books, no prayers, no knowledge of Hebrew, a very feeble grasp of Yiddish, and several more points that I forget, we
couldn’t be Jews. We pointed out that although we didn’t have those things—through no fault of our own—we did have the shrug, the habit of answering a question with another question, the habit of addressing hypothetical bystanders, the custom of smiting ourselves on the forehead with the flat of the hand when perplexed, the almost racial trigger that forced us to say “Oy, vey!” from time to time, and to reproduce out of alien foodstuffs, and in a climate hardly suited for it, the tastes of dill pickles, stuffed cabbage, varnishkas, pastrami, chopped liver, and stuffed derma with plenty of brown gravy, the latter a triumph of the will when you consider that our entire planet is a steaming rainforest and we had to create. a food like salt herring without ever having tasted one. Interesting, the Jews of Earth said, freaky, even, but hardly proving anything. My God! we cried, smiting ourselves on the forehead with the flat of our hands, if that doesn’t prove anything, what does prove anything?

  The matter is still under discussion.

  Meanwhile, not even in Israel are we considered Jews. Only on our own planet Perdido, and in some parts of New York City.

  That sort of treatment would be enough, you must admit, to make any group a little paranoid and eager to win a measure of glory for itself as a way of taking the pressure off the eternal Jewish question of identification which the Jews of Earth don’t even admit that we, just like them, suffer from.

  My name is Judah ben Judah. I am stocky, I have a round head with tight dark curls, as if that mattered. I am thirty-three years of age, and, before my enlistment in the Perdido Expeditionary Force, I was an assistant professor of Jewish Cultural Apologetics at the University of Stetelhaven on Perdido. The reason I was not a full professor has no bearing on this tale, but rests, let me assure you, on the incompetence of the examiners.