The Fleet Book 2: Counter Attack

by David Drake (ed)

  The problem was beyond the equipment and experience of the Alliance troops that made up the bulk of the ground elements involved in Bethesda’s recovery.

  But it was made to order for the 121st Marine Reaction Company.

  Kowacs slid on his helmet. “Go ahead,” he said as his hands fumbled with the shirt he’d hung over the back of the chair he was sitting on. The information would be dumped into the unit’s data bank, but he liked to get his orders directly as well. It made him feel that he was involved in a human process, not just an electronic game.

  Of course it would be the computer which decided whether they made the strike by truck or loaded onto the Bonnie Parker to drop straight onto the weasels, trading longer preparation time for faster transit to the target area. Computers were great for that sort of computation, but humans—

  “Captain Kowacs,” said the synthesized voice of an artificial intelligence. “You are directed to report to District Governor, Admiral the Honorable Saburo Takami, immediately.”

  “Huh?”

  “A vehicle has been dispatched for you. It will arrive in one-point-five minutes. That is all.”

  “Aye, aye,” Kowacs said dazedly, not that the electronic secretary would have given a damn even if it hadn’t broken the connection already. Priority fucking One.

  He’d set it up so that all Priority One calls were slaved through the barracks loudspeakers. Everybody was staring at Kowacs as he stomped toward the door, sealing his shirt front while his hands were full of the equipment belt which he hadn’t had time to sling on properly yet.

  “Daniello,” he called to his senior lieutenant, “hold the men in readiness.”

  Nobody bothered to ask what they were to be ready for.

  Corporal Sienkiewicz was already waiting outside with bandoliers of ammunition and two unloaded assault rifles. She handed a set to her commanding officer.

  Because of the weasel raids, the military government was still treating the Fourth District as a combat zone. Personnel leaving Controlled Areas—bases and defense points—were ordered to carry weapons at all times, though the weapons were to be unloaded except on approved combat operations.

  And Sienkiewicz was right: there was no telling what Kowacs was going to hear from Admiral Takami, or how fast the District Governor would expect him to respond.

  It was just that Kowacs didn’t like to have a gun around when he talked to administrative types. It turned his thoughts in the wrong directions.

  The jeep was strack and expensive, running on vectored thrust instead of the air cushion that would have been perfectly satisfactory on the plastic roadways of the base. The vehicle arrived within seconds of the time the AI had given Kowacs; and the driver—an enlisted man—had a voice almost as superciliously toneless as that of the machine when he said, “My orders are to transport one only to District Headquarters.”

  “Then your orders were wrong,” said Kowacs as he and Sienkiewicz got into the jeep. He hadn’t intended her to come, and he didn’t need a bodyguard at District Headquarters—the sort of guarding that the big corporal could do, at any rate.

  But neither was some flunky going to tell him he couldn’t bring an aide along if he wanted to.

  The jeep sagged under the weight of a big man and a very big woman. Cursing under his breath, the driver lowered the surface-effect skirts and pulled back into traffic on the air cushion’s greater support.

  Base Thomas Forberry was loud with vehicles, construction work, and the frequent roar of starships landing or lifting off from the nearby port. During lulls in the other racket, Kowacs could hear the thumping of plasma cannon from the perimeter. Some officers of the units on guard duty were “clearing their front of areas of potential concealment.”

  Blasting clumps of trees a kilometer away wouldn’t prevent the infiltration attacks the surviving Khalia were making; but it did a little to help the boredom of guard duty in a quiet sector.

  The civilian detention facility lay along one side of the road. Scores of wan indigs stared out at the traffic, careful not to come too close to the electrified razor ribbon that encircled the prison camp. The military government had already started rounding up Bethesdans who were reported to have collaborated with the Khalia. They’d be held here until they’d been cleared—or they were handed over to the civilian authorities for trial.

  When the Fleet got around to setting up a civilian administration.

  “Poor bastards,” Kowacs muttered, looking away from the bleak hopelessness of the internees as the jeep crawled past at the speed of the trucks choking the base’s main north-south boulevard.

  Sienkiewicz shrugged. “They live in the same barracks as us,” she said. “They eat the same rations. They sit on their butts all the time without a goddam thing to do, just like we do.”

  Kowacs met her eyes.

  “So tell me where their problem is?” she concluded.

  “Same place ours is,” Kowacs agreed without much caring whether the driver could hear him also. “And we’re going there now.”

  * * *

  The parade square in-the center of Base Forberry had been covered with plastic sheeting as soon as the three-story Base HQ and the District Government building were finished—and before crews had completed the structures on the other two sides of the square. Tracked machinery had chewed up half the sheeting and covered the remainder with mud of a biliously purple color.

  It was the same color as the silt which had seeped into Admiral Takami’s office when storm winds flexed the seams of the pre-fab building.

  Kowacs saluted as carefully as he could; but he’d never been much of a hand at Mickey Mouse nonsense. The District Governor frowned—then scowled like a thundercloud when he noticed the Marine was eyeing the purple stain along the edge of the outer wall.

  The other naval officer in the room, a commander with good looks and only a hint of paunch, smiled at Kowacs indulgently.

  “Well, Kowacs,” Admiral Takami said, “Sitterson here tells me we need you in this district. I’m not going to argue with my security chief. What’s a government for if not security, eh?”

  “Ah?” Kowacs said. He couldn’t understand what the governor meant.

  He prayed that he didn’t understand what the governor meant.

  “What the governor means,” said Commander Sitterson in a voice as smoothly attractive as his physical appearance, “is that the ground contingents are all well and good for large-scale operations, but we need a real strike force. The governor has had the 121st transferred from Naval command to the Fourth District government.”

  Well, Kowacs had never believed God listened to a marine’s prayers.

  “Well, I’ll leave you men to get on with it,” Takami said dismissively. “I have a great deal of work myself.”

  As Kowacs followed the security chief out of the office, he heard the governor snarling into the microphone embedded in his desk. He was demanding a work crew with mops and scrub brushes.

  “I thought you’d rather hear about your reassignment from the governor rather than from me directly,” Sitterson said in the anteroom. “Not a bad old bird, Takami. Won’t get in the way of our carrying out our job. Did you keep the car?”

  “No sir,” Kowacs said. He was trying to grasp what had just happened to him and his unit. He couldn’t.

  “No matter,” Sitterson said, though his frown belied his words. “We’ll walk. It’s just across the square.”

  He frowned again as he noticed that Sienkiewicz, carrying both rifles, followed them out of the building.

  “My clerk,” Kowacs said flatly.

  “Yes, that reminds me,” Sitterson replied. “I’ll want one of your men on duty at all times in my outer office. I have living quarters in the building, you know. I can’t be too careful.”

  Kowacs’s skin burned as anger drove blood to its surface.r />
  “Ah, sir,” he said. “We’re a Marine Reaction Company.”

  “Well, I want men who can react, don’t I?” Sitterson retorted.

  Kowacs said-nothing further.

  Security Headquarters was kitty-comer from the government building, a hundred meters away; but Kowacs had never thought Sitterson needed the vehicle for any reason but status. It was a windowless single-story structure, three times as long as it was wide—a module rather than a pre-fab. The door was at one end; Sitterson buzzed for admittance instead of touching the latch himself.

  The door opened to reveal an aisle running half the building’s length. There were four closed doors to the left and eight barred cells on the right. The individual civilians in five of the cells leaned with their arms against their sides and their foreheads resting against the back wall.

  It was an extremely painful position. The petty officer who’d opened the door had a long shock rod with which to prod any of the prisoners who sagged or touched the wall with a hand.

  “Interrogation rooms,” Sitterson said, gesturing toward the closed doors. He chuckled and added with a nod toward the cells, “I like my visitors to see that we mean business here. This is the only entrance to the building.”

  “What have they done?” Kowacs asked in a neutral voice.

  “That’s what we’re here to find out, aren’t we?” Sitterson replied with a broad grin.

  One of the women in the holding cells was sobbing, on the verge of collapse. Kowacs lengthened his stride, drawing the security chief a little more quickly with him to the door at the far end of the aisle.

  They weren’t quite quick enough into the office beyond. As Sienkiewicz shut the door behind them, Kowacs heard the reptilian giggle of the shock rod loosing its fluctuating current. The woman screamed despairingly.

  The senior petty officer behind the huge desk threw Sitterson a sharp salute without getting up. He didn’t have room enough to stand because of the data storage modules in the ceiling, feeding the desk’s computer.

  Sitterson tried to project a sense of his own power—but the quarters assigned his operation were a far cry from even the jerry-built luxury of the District Government Building.

  Fleet officers assigned to admin duty on the ground weren’t usually the best and the brightest of their ranks. That was something Kowacs had to remember—though he wasn’t sure how it would help him.

  “Colonel Hesik has reported, sir,” said the petty officer, nodding toward the tall, intense man who had leaped to attention from the narrow couch opposite the desk.

  “Wait here, Hesik,” Sitterson said as he strode between desk and couch to the room’s inner door.

  Kowacs eyed—and was eyed by—the tall man as they passed at close quarters.

  Hesik’s uniform was of unfamiliar cut. It was handmade, with yellow cloth simulating gold braid on the pockets, epaulets, and collar tabs. The slug-throwing pistol he wore in a shoulder holster was a Fleet-issue weapon and well worn.

  Hesik’s glare was brittle. Kowacs wouldn’t have had the man in his own unit in a million years.

  Sitterson’s personal office had almost as much floorspace as the governor’s did, though the ceiling was low and the furnishings were extruded rather than wood.

  On the credit side, the floor didn’t seep mud.

  “Have a seat, Captain,” Sitterson said with an expansive gesture toward one of the armchairs. Another door, presumably leading to living quarters as cramped as the reception area, was partly screened by holo projections from the interrogation rooms they had walked past. In the holograms, seated petty officers confronted civilians standing at attention, nude, with their clothes stacked on the floor beside them.

  “We’ll be working closely together, Captain,” the security chief was saying. “I don’t mind telling you that I regard this assignment as an opportunity to get some notice. It’s a job we can sink our teeth into. If we handle the situation correctly, there’ll be promotions all around.”

  The bearded civilian in the projection nearest Kowacs was babbling in a voice raised by fear and the clipped sound reproduction, “Only eggs, I swear it. And maybe butter, if they asked for butter, maybe butter. But they’d have taken my daughter if I hadn’t given them the supplies.”

  “Ah, Commander,” said the Marine, wondering how he would complete the sentence. “I’m not clear why my unit rather than . . .”

  Rather than anybody else in the universe.

  “Your daughter was involved in this?” asked the hologrammic interrogator. “Where is she now?”

  “She’s only eight! For god’s sake—”

  Sitterson made a petulant gesture; the AI in his desk cut the sound though not the visuals from the three interrogations.

  The security chief leaned over his desk and smiled meaningfully at Kowacs. “I know how to handle collaborators, Captain,” he said. “And so do you—I’ve heard what went on at Target. That’s why I asked for the 121st.”

  For a moment, Kowacs couldn’t feel the chair beneath him. His body trembled; his mind was full of images of his drop into the Khalian slave pens on Target—and the human trustees there, with their torture equipment and the abattoir with which they aped the dietary preferences of their Khalian masters.

  Every trustee in his sight-picture memory wore the features of Commander Sitterson.

  Kowacs didn’t trust himself to speak—but he couldn’t remain silent, so he said, “Sir, on Target the prisoners were turning out electronics, stuff the weasels can’t make for themselves.”

  He lurched out of his chair because he needed to move and by pacing toward the wall he could innocently break eye contact with the security chief. “That stuff, giving the weasels produce so they don’t put you on—on the table instead—that’s not collaboration, sir, that’s flat-ass survival. It’s not the same as—”

  But the words brought back the memories, and the memories choked Kowacs and chilled his palms with sweat.

  “Well, Captain,” Sitterson said as he straightened slightly in his chair. “If I didn’t have responsibility for the safety of the hundred and forty thousand Fleet and allied personnel stationed in this district, I might be able to be as generous as you are.”

  The commander’s stern expression melted back into a smile. “Still,” he went on, “I think your real problem is that you’re afraid you won’t see any action working with me. I’ll show you how wrong you are.

  “Send in Colonel Hesik,” he told his desk. The door opened almost on the final syllable to pass the tall man.

  Kowacs started to rise but Sitterson did not, gesturing the newcomer to a chair.

  “Hesik here,” the commander said, “was head of the resistance forces in the district before our landing. He’s been working closely with me, and—” he winked conspiratorially toward the Bethesdan, “I don’t mind telling you, Captain, that he’s in line for very high office when we come to set up a civilian government.”

  Hesik grinned in response. The scar on his right cheek was concealed by his neatly groomed beard, but it gave his face a falsely sardonic quirk when he tried to smile.

  “Tell Captain Kowacs what happened to your unit three months ago, Hesik,” Sitterson ordered.

  “Yes sir,” said the indig—who had better sense than to try to make something of his shadow ‘rank,’ which if real would have made him the senior officer in the room. He was willing to act as Sitterson’s pet—for the reward he expected when the Fleet pulled out again.

  ‘“We were organized by Lieutenant Bundy,” Hesik said. He kept his eyes trained on a corner of the room, and there was a rote quality to his delivery.

  “Technical specialists were landed six months ago to stiffen local resistance,” Sitterson added in explanation. “Bundy was a top man. I knew him personally.”

  “We were hitting the weasels, hurting them badly,” H
esik resumed. His voice had bright quivers which Kowacs recognized, the tremors of a man reliving the past fears which he now cloaked in innocent words. “There were other guerrilla units in the district too—none of them as effective as we were, but good fellows, brave . . . except for one.”

  The Bethesdan swallowed. As if the bobbing of his Adam’s apple were a switch being thrown, his head jerked down and he glared challengingly at Kowacs. “This other unit,” he said, “kept in close touch with us—but they never seemed to attack the Khalia. Avoiding reprisals on innocent civilians, they explained.”

  One of the hologram civilians had collapsed on the floor. Her interrogator stood splay-legged, gesturing with a shock rod which did not quite touch the civilian.

  “And perhaps so,” Hesik continued. “But we heard very disquieting reports about members of that unit frequenting the spaceport, where the Khalia had their headquarters. We tried to warn Lieutenant Bundy, but he wouldn’t believe humans would act as traitors to their race.”

  “Kowacs here could tell you about that,” Sitterson interjected. “Couldn’t you, Captain?”

  Kowacs spread his hand to indicate he had heard the security chief. His eyes remained fixed on Hesik.

  “They called us to a meeting,” the Bethesdan said. “We begged the lieutenant not to go, but he laughed at our fears.”

  Hesik leaned toward Kowacs. “We walked into an ambush,” he said. “The only reason any of us got out alive was that Lieutenant Bundy sacrificed his life to warn the rest of us.”

  “Doesn’t sound like selling butter to the Khalians, does it, Captain?” Sitterson commented in satisfaction.

  “Them?” Kowacs asked, thumbing toward the hologram interrogations.

  “Not yet,” said the security chief.