Firemask

by Chris Bunch

  He thumbed a grenade into a doorway and heard screams after it exploded. Suddenly there was a large hole in the wall beside him, and Njangu dived for the dirt, landing in muck and something that smelled like a latrine, rolled, sprayed rounds, came up, ran on.

  At the end of the winding lane was a largish building, and men and women were coming out. Njangu started to shoot, saw most waving white—clothes, towels, undergarments, heard a blaster go off, and one of them went down.

  "Cease fire, cease fire," he was shouting, and slowly the shooting died away, and it was quiet except for someone sobbing, and a man somewhere calling for his mother as life bubbled away.

  An hour later, I&R was assembled in the square. In front of them were thirty-eight sullen, frightened men and women, plus five very young children.

  I&R had taken five casualties, one killed.

  Dill's Grierson was landed on the beach, the flight of Zhukovs orbited overhead. The aksai had vanished as thoroughly as it had arrived.

  Wlencing and his two aides were looking at the prisoners interestedly.

  "Now there ssshall come a trial?"

  "Yeh," Garvin said. "The lifters are inbound for them now."

  "And what will the resssult be?"

  "Guilty," Garvin said.

  "And the punissshment?"

  "They still kill people for doing things like this," Jaan-sma said, and the taste of victory was suddenly flat. "I guess that'll be what'll happen to anybody who doesn't have some kind of reasonable explanation for what he's been doing."

  "That isss good," Wlencing said. "A failed brigand isss worthless."

  "But a successful one?" Njangu asked. Unlike Garvin, he considered the captured raiders, and their probable fate, as coldly as Wlencing.

  "That one," Wlencing said, "will become a lord of the universsse, if he or ssshe is not caught."

  "There isn't that much difference between us, is there?" Njangu said. "You're just more open about things."

  Ben Dill trotted toward them.

  "Good going, folks," he said. "My wingmen made it back to Mahan, no problems. All I want now is the pilot of that goddamned aksai who kept me from getting more."

  "That wasss interesssting," Wlencing said. "I did not think it wasss posssible for one of thossse aerial beassts you fly to outmaneuver an aksai ."

  "It isn't," Dill said. "I just got hot."

  "My cub will not be pleassed," Wlencing said. "I ssshall jape at him, even though he did well. He ssspent too much time ssstudying peaccce, rather than war."

  "Your cub, I mean child?" Dill asked. "Alikhan?"

  "You have knowledge of him?"

  "Yeh," Dill said. "Tell him from me that the only reason I kicked his butt is he was surprised. I'll give him a rematch anytime he wants."

  "I ssshall give him that messsage sssometime," Wlencing said. "When he isss adequately humble." ■

  "Why," Garvin said, "didn't you tell us you had your own air support? Didn't your Leader say something about interspecies cooperation?"

  "Becaussse," Wlencing said, "you did not asssk."

  Chapter 6

  "It looks like we'll be fighting the Musth pretty soon, boss?" Dec Ho Kang, formerly an electronic counter-measure specialist on Garvin's Grierson, now an aircraft commander, said the last word a bit tentatively. She still wasn't used to the I&R customs.

  "No secrets around here," Haut Hedley sighed. "It's got a good probability to it."

  "And we know not very much about 'em?"

  "Slightly less than bubkus."

  "Would it help any to know something about their empire? Like where their worlds are?" Ho persisted.

  "Hell yes," Hedley said. "Give us a chance to think about raiding them, if we ever score any flipping warships."

  Ho came to attention.

  "Request two weeks detached service, and permission to visit C-Cumbre, sir."

  "You want to tell me why?"

  "Nossir."

  "You got permission from Garvin or Njangu?"

  "Nossir. If I'm gonna hang my ass out, I'd like as few witnesses as possible."

  "Problem with I&R," Hedley grumbled. "Too many primas, not enough donnas. You look like you're on to something. Go."

  Even spiced and four meters away, the decaying meat that was the Musth equivalent of a stiff drink stank to the heavens.

  Garvin Jaansma tried to ignore it, concentrating on his plight and his ship's unfamiliar controls.

  Ahead of him, no more than two planetary diameters off their homeworld, fourteen bulbous Musth deep-space attack craft came toward him. Garvin's alarm systems were screaming that he was targeted by all of them.

  "I don't like this."

  "Who does?" Njangu Yoshitaro said. His ship, along with two other Confederation small corvettes, were behind and above him.

  All four Confederation ships had just emerged from hyperspace to find the Musth fleet mounting their attack.

  "Options?" Njangu suggested.

  "Flash and flurry, I guess," Garvin said. "Try not to give them too good a target."

  His hands swept the controls, and his ship flashed back into hyperspace for an instant, came out between the Musth and their planet.

  "Target… nearest starship, set for auto-home as soon as possible," he commanded.

  "Acquired," the robot system told him.

  "Two missiles… fan spread… fire."

  "Launched… evasion impossible."

  Garvin "jumped" a second time, emerged outside one flank of the Musth formation.

  "Nearest starship… same procedure… two missiles… fan spread… fire."

  "Launched… tracking…"

  An alarm gonged.

  "I have a three-missile launch inbound… impact three zero seconds."

  Garvin dimly noted a ball of gas half a PD away, realized his first launch had impacted, jumped a third time, to the far side of the Musth formation, set up for another launch, saw on-screen that his other ships were engaged, and then the world spun, went black.

  He took the helmet off, and a moment later, Njangu, sitting at the next panel, did the same.

  "You're dead, too?"

  "Guess so."

  Wlencing and half a dozen other Musth got up from their consoles, came toward him. One was Wlencing's cub, Alikhan.

  "That wasss not a predictable, logical resssponssse."

  Garvin blinked, stood, stretched, not used to being killed.

  "Whose logic?" he asked, maybe a little snappily.

  Wlencing stopped.

  "Why… the obviousss, the way a warrior ssshould fight, ssshould be trained to fight."

  " 'Kay," Njangu said. "What should we have done?"

  He walked to a long table along one wall of the room, opened one of the bottles of the beer that sat in an ice-filled tub that the Musth had provided specially, drank. There were simulator consoles in a ring around the room, then, in its center, a lowered area. Soft pads had been stacked in two places as improvised seats for the humans.

  "You want one?"

  Garvin nodded and Njangu brought him one.

  "What you ssshould have done," Wlencing said, "was consssider the oddsss, and then take flight."

  "Couldn't your ships have caught us?" Garvin asked.

  "Probably, but that isss not for cccertain."

  "Was this a real battle?" Njangu asked.

  Another Musth, Argolis, answered: "It wasss. It wasss one of the early encountersss when Man and Musssth fought, yearsss ago."

  "What happened then?"

  Neither Wlencing nor Argolis seemed to want to answer.

  "Your ships entered combat," Alikhan said. "The lead scout attacked our flagship with missiles, which were engaged and destroyed before they struck. It then dived into the flagship, destroying it. Another of your ships did the same to one of our flanking attack craft, giving the other two chance to escape."

  "So I got killed," Garvin said. "Just like happened in the olden days. But this time I took three of your ships with me."
He shrugged. "If you've got to go, that's not the worst way."

  Njangu looked skeptical. "So you say."

  "Hell, you got dead, too," Garvin said.

  "But not out of any desire to play hero. I just screwed up and zigged when I should've zagged."

  Garvin grinned.

  "Yet another thing not to understand," Wlencing said. "You two are commander and underling, but you do not ssshow the ressspect to each other you ssshould."

  "I hope to hell not," Garvin said. "We're friends."

  "A word I know only the definition of," Wlencing said. "Poorly denned, not meaning battle-allied, sssubor-dinate/sssuperior, breeding partner."

  "Try someone you don't mind being around," Njangu said. "Even if you can't breed with them."

  "Outside of the parameters my father just gave," Alik-han said, "the concept remains alien to us Musth."

  "What about fun?" Njangu asked. "Is there a working definition of that? Don't you have any more relaxing way to spend off-duty time than playing war games?"

  "Cccertainly," Wlencing said. "We eat, we hunt, which isss not possssible on this world, we sssleep, we intermingle."

  "What's that last?"

  "We sit and share experiences," Alikhan said.

  "About goddamned time," Njangu said. "Let's try that for a change, although I don't mean to be rude, since you invited us here to the Highlands."

  "It wasss a reccciprocal event," Wlencing said. "In resssponssse to your allowing usss to particccipate in one of your actionsss."

  "So break out some more dead whatever it was," Garvin said. "I'll drag the beer closer, you guys get comfortable, and let's start the bullshit session."

  "I do not underssstand the referenccce to excrement," Wlencing said.

  "I do, I think," Alikhan said, and spoke rapidly in Musth.

  Njangu moved closer to Garvin.

  "This shows every sign of being a long goddamned evening."

  "Shaddup and be civil. We're showing the flag, and exchanging courtesies."

  "Which is why I never wanted to be a diplomat," Njangu grumbled, but painted on a cheerful smile.

  The Musth mining base on C-Cumbre was silent, shattered in the hot, dry sun. Wind whispered dust across the ruins.

  The base had been destroyed by a 'Raum suicide mission and abandoned within days by the aliens.

  Ho Kang pushed through the broken oreship, past the desiccated corpse of a Musth, head back, fangs gleaming in a final snarl against the flames that had killed him. She refused to let the corpse, or the three others in the wreckage, bother her, other than to wonder what Musth death ceremonies were, and went into the control room she'd been able to cut her way into the previous day, just at dusk.

  Ho oriented herself… control chair there… there… pilot… copilot, maybe. A bank of charred instruments… ship's engineer?

  One seat was to the side, below a ruptured screen. Behind it was a panel, unscathed by fire.

  "I don't understand what I'm looking at, but I think I understand I'm looking at what I hope I'm looking at, I think," she muttered to herself. She used her thumb to depress and unlatch two of the convex buttons the Musth used for screws, pulled away the panel cover.

  Inside was a single half cylinder. In a cabinet below were others. Ho collected them all.

  "Now for wiser heads," she muttered. "Assuming any have the proper clearance."

  "So what's your opinion of those furry folks?" Njangu asked, as he piloted the Cooke down from the Highlands toward Leggett and the bay. It was a couple of hours past midnight.

  "Interesting," Garvin yawned. "Not the best cocktail chitchat I've ever had, though."

  "Kinda limited," Njangu agreed. "If it isn't about conquest or killing, it doesn't seem to matter much to them.

  "Although Wlencing's kid, Alikhan, acted like he wouldn't mind talking about other things. But I guess baby Musth don't interrupt."

  "We ought to have sent a couple of old-timey warrants up there," Garvin said. "The ones who never get tired of telling war stories."

  "Am I being horseshit," Njangu wondered, "or do I detect a certain lack of humor in our invaders?"

  "Couldn't prove they've got any by me," Garvin said. "Although that Alikhan might be able to develop one in half a dozen centuries or so."

  "So why'd they ask us up there? I sure don't believe it was just because we took them out banging heads."

  "Probably," Garvin said, "because most of them haven't spent any time with one of us, any more than we have. I'd guess those others were Wlencing's staff or something like that."

  "Get to know your enemy before war breaks out?"

  "Something like that."

  "Which works both ways," Njangu said. "I think I got more out of them, starting with the way they think war should be fought, than I gave back."

  "Let's hope so," Garvin said. "And let's hope they weren't playing downy naive chicks for our benefit."

  "You're always such a cheerful son of a bitch."

  "Ain't I, though."

  Ho Kang was more than a little disappointed. She'd expected the "greatest physicist in the Cumbre system" to be a little on the short side, a little heavy, straight hair, probably not tended as carefully as it should, dress clean if a little rumpled—in short, something like Ho Kang.

  Instead, the woman, Ann Heiser, was slender, hair waved in the very trendy brushover style, vivacious, dressed as if she were a Rentier or an executive—even, Ho grudged, pretty.

  At least her colleague, Danfin Froude, looked like a mathematician—hair in a stook like he'd been electro-shocked, old-fashioned coat seemingly never pressed, pants baggy, and his expression kindly and vague. He even wore archaic glasses. He was one of the few humans who had a reading knowledge of Musth.

  The two had been suggested and vetted for security purposes by Hedley and their presence requested at Camp Mahan.

  One of the small half cylinders Ho had taken from the wrecked transport was in front of Hedley. He introduced Ho, then explained where the cylinder had come from.

  "A chart," Heiser said.

  "I thought," Ho said, "if we could translate it, that might give us some information on the Musth worlds, so we could—"

  "Put it to the appropriate use," Hedley interrupted. "Which doesn't have to be your concern at this point."

  Froude picked up the cylinder. "This could be a long long investigation. And I'm hardly naive enough to think we have much time. 'Twould be nice if we had at least one known point to work from."

  "Maybe we do," Ho said. "I got interested because I noticed that almost all Musth entries into this system were reported by one or another of the stations on the outer worlds. Most were reported at roughly the same coordinates."

  She handed a microfiche across.

  "This is the transcription of twenty-five reports, all ships tracked to C-Cumbre. I thought most of them would be ore transports."

  "Seems within the bounds of supposition," Heiser agreed.

  "Then I wondered if I could find one of those ships, and one of their charts, if that's what this is, that would have either as a start or end point, depending on whether they were coming into or exiting the Cumbre system, congruent with the places our sensors discovered the ships."

  Froude's face was flushed with excitement. "One plot," he said. "A beginning. A very definite beginning.

  "We have computers, secure facilities set aside," Hed-ley said. "We'd like for you to begin your investigation at once. If you need anything… assistants, apparatus, whatever, you have the highest priority, for reasons I'm sure you can figure out.

  "Again, I must insist, though, that you discuss this matter with no one who hasn't been cleared by us, for obvious reasons. I've detached Dec Ho Kang to work with you on this."

  Ho and Heiser got up, and Hedley summoned a guard to take them to their assigned offices. Froude lingered behind.

  "I do want to thank you, Haut Hedley, for letting me possibly help. But I was, well, hoping you wanted me for something
else," Froude said, a trifle wistfully.

  "Such as?"

  Froude looked behind him, closed the door.

  "One thing your Force lacks," he said, "is scientists."

  "We're soldiers, in case you haven't noticed."

  "Which means you're full of strange oaths, jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel."

  Hedley grinned. "Maybe. But I'm not bearded like a pard, whatever a flippin' pard is. So what do you think you could help us with?"

  "I'll give you a quick example. You're the former Commanding Officer of Intelligence and Reconnaissance. Don't look startled, I'm a bit of a military buff, and keep up with things. You take young soldiers, give them some very intensive training in scouting and such, wash out at least half of all applicants. Is it worth the effort?"

  "Hell yes," Hedley said.

  "Can you quantify that? How many missions, tasks, can one of your highly trained soldiers perform before he becomes a casualty, physical or psychological? How much more, or less, functional would an average infan-tryman be, given the same tasks and, possibly, accepting a casualty rate somewhat higher, compensated by the ease of replacement? And we'll ignore the problem that an I&R soldier might remain a striker for quite a time, given the general excellence of those around him, and thus contributing less to the Force's needs, whereas in a normal unit he'd quickly be promoted to warrant rank?"

  "Allah-be-damned if I know."

  "I do," Froude said, a bit smugly. "By my figures, he's good for perhaps a dozen missions, whereas the average soldier, without the stiffening your rigorous selection puts him through, would probably break after four, perhaps five. As for promotion, that's not really a factor, given I&R's greater casualty rate, so even with restriction in ranks, a good… and lucky… trooper will probably be promoted as rapidly as if he'd remained in a normal unit.

  "That is the sort of thing I hoped you'd be interested in."

  Hedley ran a hand over his head, surreptitiously glanced at his fingers to see if any more hair was falling out.

  "Dr. Froude, I'm damned if I know any of the answers, and maybe we should pay more attention to scientists. But can we bring this up later?"

  "Of course. I merely wished to give you something for future consideration," Froude said.