The Fleet Book 2: Counter Attack

by David Drake (ed)

  Diego tried to listen to them all, look at them through himself and from the rateri eyes. Together the pictures showed one single, overwhelming scene and Diego was so sad that he was tempted to cry. His whole life, everything he had ever wanted or dreamed had been dry and dull, always perfectly anticipated and predictable. Grey shot through each time frame, the storm cloud topped mountains merging with his cadet-grey uniform blending to the grey water of Lake Remembrance where he and Emily had half succeeded in seducing each other.

  Compared to Diego, to the time held in the layers of glistening polish on the wooden table, the people around him were beautifully vivid. The feathered masks came alive as quasi-human birds hovered over the club and his own metallic snake turned to catch the glitter of the scattered light. The scents that had been unpleasant moments ago fractured, and alone each was redolent of humanity and history and a vitality that seemed to have passed Diego Bach without a glance.

  The livingness of it called out to him and he wanted it, like he had wanted a last perfect run down Mt. Coatl, the way he had wanted warmth and food and hot soup, waiting to be rescued. He understood Jurgen now, knew why he had gone over. Ultimately there was no choice, not when he knew what it meant to live like the dead for twenty-three years and to suddenly wake up. Eyes fully open and aware, there was no way he could turn back any more than Jurgen could. It was worth death. It was even worth dishonor. His life to this moment. had been the meaningless jerking of a marionette.

  In his frenzy of understanding Diego sought Jurgen, to let him know that there was no enmity anymore. But the dark man with the midnight snake had vanished. In truth, beyond the immediate swirl of colors and the faint memory of music, the club had vanished as well. The Tandeleistrasse lay against the grey dawn battened against the assault of those still out on the street.

  Diego was not the only one lying on the picturesque sidewalk under the soft yellow illumination of an antique streetlight. He watched unmoving as one by one the lights went out as the day began. Images of the night before coalesced in his clearing head, and his first reaction was sorrow. It had all seemed so easy, so beautiful in the club when all he had to do was reach out and touch the life around him. Understanding Jurgen had opened him to an understanding of himself that didn’t dissipate with the morning.

  A soft moaning nearby penetrated his thoughts and he turned just slightly to see Jurgen sitting with his back against the light pole. In the harsh early light Diego saw the plain marks of age and anguish mixed with the clear signs of rateri addiction mixed on his face. He moaned again, this time nearly inaudibly, and dragged himself closer to Diego. The iridescent black-purple feathers that hung from the shoulders of his jacket seemed incongruously jaunty, the only hint at the gaiety of the night before.

  “You’re from Sein?” Jurgen asked haltingly, stumbling over the words.

  Diego nodded, unable to pronounce the words. This Jurgen had a different voice, heavier and not so arrogant as the man he had met at the club. Then Jurgen grabbed the light pole and pulled himself up. “Come on,” he said thickly. ”We’ve got to be out of here before the catchers come.” He made a weak gesture at Diego.

  Bach honestly tried to get up and honestly failed on the first attempt. It wasn’t like any hangover he’d ever had. His head felt perfectly clear and his body was absolutely limp. It took two more tries before he was even able to sit up, by which time Jurgen was already staggering along the wall, hauling himself hand over hand against the rough cut stone.

  “Move,” he commanded sharply. “Don’t care how just do it.”

  Diego never did figure out just how he managed to drag himself to his knees, to force one palm out in front of the other on the sidewalk, pushing with legs that were one step removed from gel. He noticed one or two others who were making as good an attempt to leave as he was, and a few more who lay with fearful recognition in their eyes.

  The questions churned in the back of his mind but Diego kept most of his concentration on getting out of the Tandeleistrasse. Just why could wait for a minute or two, for when Jurgen was able to tell him. Suddenly he thought to wonder if it had been the same Jurgen after all, or if in the rateri dream he had seen whatever he expected to see. Only that was too simple, and that was assuming Zoe was far more than what she appeared. Keep an open mind, he told himself severely. Never underestimate the enemy, and never assume that because someone appears friendly he is. Or she.

  They rounded the comer and passed through the wide wrought iron gate just before the star Efrin blazed over the horizon. Diego glanced back to see what looked like people in blue-grey uniforms picking up those addicts who hadn’t been able to move. Only there was something wrong about the people in uniform, something that from this distance he couldn’t quite define. They weren’t right somehow, that much was certain.

  “Let’s stop,” Diego gasped. “Here.” He indicated a pastry shop across the street with a nod. The white and pink and brown cakes on their individual lace doilies were making his stomach contract painfully.

  “Won’t serve us,” Jurgen mumbled without looking back. “Soon.”

  Soon turned out to be only half a block more. Jurgen stumbled up steps scrubbed a glistening white and fumbled with an old-style key in a brass plate. Once inside he led Diego up the stairs.

  It wasn’t as pleasant as Diego had imagined the night before. The building was obviously clean, reeking of disinfectant like a hospital ward, and appointed with about as much charm. Jurgen opened another door at the top of the stairs and disappeared in darkness.

  There was no window in this room, Diego noted with distaste. It wasn’t any larger than his own temp quarters in the union hall and it wasn’t particularly more personal either. Which was reasonable. If Jurgen was an addict then nothing besides rateri really mattered.

  If it hadn’t been for the matter of the ship Diego would have left then and there. He had stopped thinking of Jurgen, whatever his real name had once been, as a fellow officer, an Intelligence operative. Now he was only a broken fool stranded out on Efrichen. The drug weakness was wearing off rapidly now and movement was no longer difficult. Diego almost felt good again, all the more reason to get out of this pit, get something decent to eat and report in. Then go home.

  Jurgen flopped on the disheveled sleeping platform and smiled evilly. “I have a trade for you,” he said thickly. “Money. I need money, maybe a new ident.” He fingered a microreel card carefully. “The reports. Everything.”

  “I thought you’d gone over,” Diego said slowly. “With their ship.”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear.” Jurgen said harshly. “They had to send a baby. You can’t even keep your fingers dry. Anyway, trade. The reports, everything you and Sein and everyone else wants to know for fifty bigs. In small negotiables, jewels, collectables. Nothing in the system and nothing traceable, you understand?”

  Diego nodded.

  “We’ll meet back at the club. You bring my payment, I bring this. Deal?”

  Diego hesitated. “I don’t know that’s any good,” he said finally. “I could pay you and that tape could be blank, or full of garbage or something. I want to see what I’m getting before I hand over that much.”

  Jurgen chuckled. “Maybe you aren’t such a baby. But I’d need security. Because you could run off without paying me and take the goodies with you. All that word of honor shit doesn’t mean I trust you at all.”

  Diego thought quickly, then unfastened the St. Barbara medal and held it clenched in his fist. “This for security? It isn’t worth quite fifty on the open market, but it is gold. And it’s worth a lot more than that to me.”

  “Sentimentality. What would we do without sentimentality? It’s only one of our weaknesses. That’s why we’re going to lose in the end, you know. Not because the Khalia are smarter than we are, or stronger, or even meaner. It’s because they couldn’t care less.”

  Dieg
o leaned forward and snatched the card at the same time be dropped the medal. It fell against the tangled sheets.

  “What makes you so sure I wouldn’t kill you?” Diego asked as he turned away. The question had really been directed at himself and he didn’t know he had spoken aloud until he heard Jurgen answer.

  “The same reason you’ll come back for this,” Jurgen said. “Sentimentality. And nerve. I’ll bet you’ve never killed anyone, and you’re not going to start now. Not the same as a ship. Crossing the line.”

  Diego left. It seemed longer going back to the union hall, maybe because he couldn’t get Jurgen out of his mind or maybe because he couldn’t ignore the openly hostile stares on the street. When he returned to his union cubby he tossed the reel aside and spent the better part of an hour washing the bitter memories from his skin. Then he ate a hideously overpriced sausage dish with a respectable glass of beer before he felt ready to face Jurgen’s tape.

  Three hours and two beers later he found what he had been looking for. And it was worth the snake and the rateri and the assignment to play narc in the backwoods. It was even worth the Fuentes’ St. Barbara medal. He played the section of the tape a second time to make sure he wasn’t imagining it all.

  A Khalian trade ship arrived yesterday. I went down as one of the responsibles in the club. No doubt they were unloading rateri. When we got our allotment the club chief rounded us up to go. I got lost and lingered. Before the ship lifted a second consignment was brought aboard. I couldn’t see very well, but it appeared to be a line of slaves. Efrichen don’t deal in slaves, not in their listed economy. I watched more closely, and at least two of the consignment were tattooed with rateri marks.

  Pictures followed, blurry the way they were when the camera was handheld in a concealed position. But he could see clearly the brilliant colors of the club tattoos on the people nearest the camera. And the blankness on their faces that seemed devoid of intelligence. Enough rateri over enough time, maybe on the right people with the right psychological makeup, Diego thought.

  He shuddered. The rateri seduction was still close, still clinging to him in the shape of a violet serpent that sprawled over his ice white skin. Behind those vacant masks, how many of those new slaves were dreaming of vivid colors and vital activity, he wondered. He could still feel it breathing on his flesh, the need to experience utterly, to throw off the careful shackles of breeding and ambition and lose himself in a universe of sensuality.

  He keyed the board absently, losing his place in Jurgen’s narrative. The face in the screen flickered, suddenly looking far more haggard than it had before, as if the other had aged years over the course of ten minutes.

  The Khalian vanguard ship is due in two months. There are rumors around the club about the “friends.” Some insist that they are going to liberate us from the Efrichen Bund government, others say that they are going to level the planet and take the rateri friends away. Still others are convinced that the Khalia are surveying to settle here. My analysis of the various actions of the Khalia in this sector over the past two years indicates that they are searching for a staging outpost in this region. Efrichen is particularly well suited to such use. It is already fully habitable and self-sustaining with a ready trained workforce, the port facilities are relatively modern for an agrarian world and in excellent repair. There are large areas, including whole continents, of virgin land for expansion and additional facilities. Only two or three other colonies in this entire quadrant offer as much. What makes Efrichen unique among them is that it is at the Mowbrey point in colonial development, the colonists first and most violent clash with their own value structure. At this point, the colony is now generating enough wealth for the first time to provide the luxury of dissent, and many of the young people of the colony are disenchanted with the philosophical/agrarian goals of the colony. In two more generations, according to the normal model, the colony should have gone from primary agriculture to primary industry in an agricultural base stemming directly from this rebellion in thought. However, at this point the younger generation on Efrichen is excited by anything new, and especially anything alien. They are unquestionably ripe for an alien drug to be introduced. There is no question in my mind that rateri is the first wave of a Khalian invasion into this sector through the corruption of the Efrichen culture and economy.

  Diego drew a deep breath as the tape ran out. The enormity of it frightened him. In the back of his mind he could hear his father the admiral droning on, “Your first duty is to humankind as a whole. That takes precedence over the individual.” And he could hear his mother the admiral, also, saying, “It is better to make a mistake than not to act at all.”

  The chrono blinked steadily in the corner of the screen. He had five hours, six on the outside, before he had to return to the club and meet Jurgen. Now there was no choice. It wasn’t simply a matter of losing the medal, no matter how much that meant to him. But he was afraid of losing his soul. That was the one thing Sein had never mentioned.

  He was trained to kill ships, had done so many times in simulations and didn’t doubt his ability in real time. Ships were inanimate objects, enemies that were provided as targets. Faced with the shape and speed of the metal hulk it was easy to forget there were sentient beings inside, and everything encouraged them to forget. Besides, whoever was there, wasn’t human. Khalia didn’t look like people, Diego reminded himself. They looked and acted like malevolently animated pack animals.

  This was different. Jurgen had once had a name, a full name that classmates at the Academy would remember as belonging to the Commander of the twenty-third. He’d had a family and a career, a history and a home planet. He was made of the same flesh and feelings. Diego knew that only too well. The seduction of the rateri dream lay only half-dormant at the edge of consciousness and only an act of supreme will kept him from leaning back and reliving it in all its vivid splendor.

  One step at a time. Even in simple terms what he wanted to do wasn’t easy. In fact, Bach wasn’t sure if he could do it at all. First, he had to assume that Jurgen was leaving on that Khalian vanguard ship. Zoe had implied as much, and Jurgen had cryptically told him about the same thing. Beyond that, he had to assume it was as a member of the pirate band and not a slave. If they took Jurgen as a slave, the whole plan was ruined. Not that Diego knew all that much about Khalian ship design, but he did know that the cargo hold was not next to the main engines and that there were no delicate ships’ controls down in that area. That much was just sense.

  No, it was more risk than he had been instructed to take. Bring back the report and let the Fast Attack Wing move In the way they were supposed to, that was the way Sein would want him to handle it. Diego turned the thought around and it left a bitter, metallic taste in his mouth. He knew he was tasting his own fear for the very first time and it amazed him.

  One step at a time. Being prepared didn’t mean taking the risk, not until he was ready to throw his chips on the table. He had never gambled before. It had been strictly forbidden, and Diego Bach wasn’t about to risk his career for the chance to play cards for credits. He hadn’t known just how terror and excitement would mix to produce this supernormal awareness.

  There was no choice but to make the assumption that Jurgen would be at least partly accepted as an ally by the Khalia. That would mean that he would be permitted to watch the FTL acceleration from the bridge, at least if the data on Khalian courtesy were accurate. That meant there was exactly one moment and one chance.

  Diego surveyed his wardrobe and pulled on a mud brown worksuit that covered every trace of the snake and hung on his body like an old sack. No way he wanted to be affiliated with rateri or Tobishi Lines or anything else. He wanted to be a perfect blank in the mind of anyone he might encounter. To be perfectly average is to be invisible, so his mother had once said. He hoped she was right. His shoulder-length blond hair would be memorable on Efrichen, where it was associated with the rateri cl
ubs, but he couldn’t cut it until after the rendezvous with Jurgen that night. Not good enough. He stared at his reflection for a good five minutes until a solution came.

  The microscale washroom did actually have a dispenser for first aid gel, and Diego combed it through his hair with his fingers. The result was so inspiring that: he wadded together several cotton balls and inserted them, between his gums and lower lip. To complete the effect he took more of the gel and smeared it on the cuffs of his pants. When he was finished and finally satisfied with the results, Diego could pass for a mental deficient. There were plenty of them in every city and they were routinely used for simple errands and routine cleaning work. Maybe it would have been more economical to use mechanicals, but this gave people work and dignity as well as a place in society. It was the sort of thing governments usually wanted to change, but the tradition was ubiquitous and no one wanted to bother finding something better to replace it.

  Diego studied himself with pride. He’d never worked on disguise before. In front of the mirror he practiced walking with the slightly hunched, heavy gait he remembered from one of the assistant gardeners at home. It took more than a few tries before he was satisfied enough to leave the confines of his cubby.

  The computer-generated note in his pocket had been creased and refolded several times, cash chits attached. He entered the first decent jewelry store he encountered and handed over the note with the money. A human clerk gave him a pityingly disgusted look and then set out to fill the list. While Sein had made sure he was adequately covered with the kind of negotiables Jurgen wanted, no one had foreseen the changes in plan Diego had made. No one had equipped him with the latest gadgets Intelligence had for just this occurrence, and so it was up to him to provide for himself.