Firemask

by Chris Bunch

  The off-course lim was challenged once, twice, made reply.

  "Two kilometers," Running Bear reported. "On final."

  He brought the lim in fast, flared it, and slammed the antigrav on at the last minute. The lim bounced once, was down, and the canopy flew open.

  The mother ship was about fifty meters away, two guards in front of its lock. They gaped, then one lifted his weapon. Alikhan shouted for him to surrender, but the blaster was aimed. Ben Dill dropped him, and the other Musth ducked behind barrels. Garvin lofted a grenade after him, and there was an explosion and a dying scream.

  Alikhan stopped, paws moving in confusion.

  "Move," Dill shouted, and the Musth went up the ramp through the open airlock, the rest of the first attack team behind him.

  Overhead, the Musth pilot, barely out of training, dropped down to take a closer look.

  Running Bear heard the whistle, saw the oncoming aksai , grabbed Jasith, threw her over his shoulder, and ran across the flat tarmac toward the barrels. The aksai pilot decided something was wrong and climbed, arming his weapons systems, then dived and launched two missiles.

  One went wide, the other blew the lim into fragments.

  Jasith sobbed, close to the evil-smelling tarmac as the blast rang around her. She lifted her face, realized she was lying in a pool of Musth blood, and not two meters away was the shattered body of the guard.

  The aksai pilot low-flew the field, saw no movement, snarled across the perimeter. Only one AA site fired, and the missile was late, never acquiring its target.

  Then the transport was down, locks sliding open, and raiders streaming out.

  The aksai skidded through a turn, came back low.

  Striker Mar Henschley swung her Shrike launcher, centered the aksai in her sights, and touched the trigger. She was the first to launch, and her missile blew the fighting craft in half. Another missile fired by another gunner flew through the cloud of expanding gas, decided there was nothing solid enough to be worth exploding for, and flew on until it self-detonated.

  Henschley yelped in sheer glee, then reloaded.

  On board the ship, the strike team moved steadily upward. They found half a dozen Musth, about the size of the maintenance crew Alikhan had thought to be aboard, and called for their surrender. Only one was armed, and Garvin shot him. The others charged gun muzzles, trying to close. They died either bravely or stupidly, depending on perspective.

  Occasionally the team heard dim explosions from the outside, wondered about the fighting. Then they were on the bridge. The watch officer was down before he could draw his blaster, and the ship was theirs.

  Alikhan walked forward, toward the controls, the scuffing of his pads loud in the silence.

  "Well?" Dill asked.

  "I can fly this," Alikhan said firmly.

  Half a dozen aksai , more wynt , were wrecked around the field, their green pilots no match for the Force's missilemen.

  They gave welcome cover to the raiders as Musth warriors debarked from other wynt and attacked.

  A canny velv captain flew a roundabout course, popped up, and acquired a target and launched, just as a Shrike blast tumbled his locators and sent him spinning into a hillside.

  His missile, at full speed, crashed into the drive area of the transport, and it blew up spectacularly, the fiery ball illuminating the near-night sky.

  Almost twenty-five raiders and the transport's crew were killed in the blast, and the Musth mother ship rocked.

  Wlencing, on D-Cumbre/Whar saw the blast on one of the field's many remotes, and knew what the worms were intending.

  "No, you hatchling sports, they're after our ship! Kill the ship!" he roared into a closed com, then swore again, wondering why he seemed to be the only one who could figure out the human strategies.

  Garvin stared out of a port at the boiling chaos around the ship.

  "How long 'til you can lift?"

  "Five of your minutes," Alikhan said calmly. "I have it now on antigravity."

  Garvin reached a decision.

  "Dill! Get everyone aboard. I mean everyone! We'll have to take 'em with us."

  The big man ran for the airlock.

  Njangu spat blood from the explosion, got up, hearing Dill's shouts:

  "The ship! Into the ship!"

  He staggered, realized what was going on, echoed Dill's commands, and the shouts were picked up by others.

  'Raum and soldiers went for the mother ship, some in calm retreat, others in blind panic.

  He saw an incoming aksai , saw a Shrike gunner standing calmly in the open.

  The aksai and Mar Henschley fired at the same time, and both vanished in the double blast.

  Njangu wondered who the unknown hero was, went back to pushing the last few raiders aboard. One of them was Running Bear, carrying a semiconscious woman in civilian clothes, her face hidden by dark Musth blood. Njangu realized who she must be.

  "How is—"

  "Just shocky, sir." Running Bear went on into the ship.

  Njangu realized he and Lir were the only two left not aboard, and the ramp was humming, moving.

  "Goddammit, Top, quit playing last standing hero!" Lir gave him a single-fingered salute, sent half a drum stammering through a wave of Musth. Njangu gave up, jumped through the lock, Lir just behind him as the hatch slid shut.

  The mother ship came off the ground, teetered, and climbed.

  A flight of aksai banked after it as the ship sped upward.

  One launched, missed, then the mother ship was out of range.

  Seconds later, it was on the fringes of C-Cumbre's atmosphere, and recklessly vanished into stardrive.

  Wlencing looked again and again at the images from the remotes, saw the lim approach, land near the mother ship and beings leap out.

  He no longer bothered to bring up a close-up of the renegade Musth.

  Very well. The cub was a traitor. He knew why, who had poisoned him, where he was going, even his intention.

  Wlencing got up, turned to Daaf. The aide flinched away from Wlencing's terrible gaze.

  "I want immediate contact with Kef fa."

  Chapter 23

  Langnes 77837?/World unknown

  The world was thrice-ringed, one red, one brown, one green, or so the mother ship screens showed.

  Alikhan hissed a response into the mike that hung, unsupported, in front of him. His three screens flashed data, then blanked, in keeping with the Musth practice of not worrying a pilot until something started going wrong.

  A voice came back to him and a staccato conversation began.

  A large screen appeared, and the other three obligingly moved aside for it. The screen showed clouds, then went infrared, and there were landmasses below.

  Alikhan spoke without turning his head, as his fingers brushed sensors on the panel in front of him, and the humans felt the drive hum change, deepen. "You may speak if you wish," he said. "We have been cleared to land."

  Garvin, Njangu, and the two scientists watched silently from a corner of the control room, and Ben Dill sat in a control chair behind and to one side of Alikhan, his fingers echoing, tentatively, Alikhan's movements, without ever touching the panel in front of him.

  "This is gonna work?" Njangu asked suspiciously. "You're just gonna ground, stroll out, buy the right chart, and off we go again?"

  "Why not?" Alikhan said. "We have done nothing to cause alarm, and the ship's trading account is very plus."

  "You Musth don't have to worry about customs, health quarantine, security clearance?" Ann Heiser asked.

  "Why? My clan's business is its own, until we show some intent to harm those who own this system."

  Garvin and Njangu exchanged looks. "Oh to be a pirate in these sunny climes," Garvin chanted.

  "First let's make sure, bucko," Njangu said, "the Musth have goodies worth pirating."

  The screen went back to normal vision. Alikhan found a sensor, and the view came in to about five hundred meters above the ground,
swept across veldt, small wooded copses, ponds, and the occasional small settlement.

  "Now this," Alikhan said, "is what a proper world looks like, not all those revolting greens you prefer."

  "We never invited you in the first place," Dill said.

  "True," Alikhan said. "Now, silence. Even though I am without question the finest pilot the cosmos has seen, I still lack sufficient experience with this wallower. And be grateful for slaved emergency power controls that override my momentary lapses."

  On-screen, a scatter of buildings appeared that grew into a small, high-towered city. Alikhan brought the mother ship vertical, and another screen opened, showing a wide landing field studded with other starships and support buildings. Alikhan brought the antigrav up, reduced the secondary drive, and backed down. About 150 meters above the field, he cut the secondary drive, and grounded without a jar.

  "Was that not smooth?"

  "For a beginner," Dill said.

  "Now, I shall attend to business," Alikhan said. "You might not want to admit any curious visitors."

  Off D-Cumbre and in N-space, Alikhan had taken the first two jumps on the star chart he'd chosen from Njan-gu's thievery.

  The Force medics were occupied with the wounded, and Garvin, Njangu, their noncoms, Poynton, and her appointed leaders were busy sorting out I&R's seventy survivors and the slightly more than a hundred 'Raum, and exploring the ship for compartments to house them.

  There was no need to discuss options—the raiders would have to stay with the ship, their fate linked to Alikhan's success.

  Alikhan, Dill, Ho, and the scientists sorted through the mother ship's charts and discovered, unsurprisingly, there wasn't one for Senza's homeworld, known as "Reckoning," aboard.

  "So we use this chart to make the first planetfall. It's a system well within our area of influence, and then we get the chart we need."

  Dill had goggled. "No overconfidence here ."

  Half a dozen times, casualties died, and were buried in space. Alikhan was surprised, wondering why they simply weren't recycled into the ship.

  He was similarly perplexed by Garvin's refusal to allow the dead Musth to be recycled.

  They, too, were treated as the human dead, and, even though Garvin wasn't sure they, or anyone else, had a soul, he whispered the unfortunately all-too-familiar words of the Confederation's burial ceremony as the lock cycled.

  The first pleasure for the miners and the insufficiently clean soldiers, was bath after bath after bath. The Musth 'freshers were entire rooms, with rain-shower ceilings that could be set from mist to typhoon. The water's taste, as human wastes were cycled into the system, tasted less coppery as time passed.

  Less enjoyable were the Musth toilets, being mere holes in the deck. Garvin was muttering about these jakes, and Poynton said, smugly, "See the advantage of growing up poor, without any luxuries like being able to sit down? Or a tail?"

  Njangu added, "Easy for me to live with, too, sir , not having grown up with a silver crapper in my… never mind the rest."

  Also unsatisfactory were the stored Musth rations.

  Alikhan said the Musth fed their crews well, so the meals were highly seasoned and properly aged.

  "Like a friggin' rotten corpse," one striker said after disobeying orders and unsealing a pack, then promptly going into projectile vomiting mode.

  Dr. Froude calculated that, given the rations the Force had carried aboard, they could survive for a while. "Maybe three weeks, maybe a little more. Then we turn to cannibalism." He seemed rather ghoulishly interested in that eventuality.

  But a solution was found—Alikhan spent some time in the ship's larder, found something acceptable for human palates. It was nourishing in a bulky sort of way, nearly tasteless, with the texture of pablum when mixed with water.

  They supplanted the human rations. Lir, having taken a course in nutrition once, thought there'd be enough necessary trace elements in their own packs to keep everyone alive, not enough of the Musth trace chemicals in the musth rats to kill anyone that quickly.

  Alikhan told Dill these were the rations for the punishment details, deliberately intended to provide no more than nourishment. Dill didn't share the information with anyone except Garvin and Njangu.

  Fortunately the ship had an efficient autopilot, so, except when it came out of hyperspace and its navigational computer needed a little fine-tuning, the bridge could be left with only a single watch officer.

  Dill and Alikhan corralled the surviving Shrike gunners, plus volunteers, and started learning how to use the mother ship's missile array.

  Twice, in normal space, they chanced launching—the medium-range bombardment weapons, the close-range antiship missiles like Shrikes, and the long-range heavy missiles that could be programmed to have nearly the evasive ability of an aksai .

  Musth gunners wore helmets, as did human mis-silemen, to give a rocket-eye perspective, but used eye motion for guidance instead of the human joysticks.

  That, plus the fact that Musth helmets weren't configured for human skulls, didn't help human accuracy.

  Every time a missile exploded, lighting up emptiness, Njangu moaned about another deathblow to his promising career in interstellar piracy.

  Garvin was starting to think he was serious.

  One nice thing about the Musth ship was the number of viewscreens. Human ships generally had screens only in control rooms, with a scattering in other compartments, generally showing either nothing or the stomach-wrenching color swirl of N-space "reality."

  Musth screens, and there were many in nearly every compartment and corridor, translated the pickup into rapidly changing pictures of the normal space around them.

  Many humans found this fascinating, and sat, tour-isting the stars, for hours.

  Others did not—'Raum who'd made only a few trips back and forth to C-Cumbre, even a handful of Forcemen. Combining claustrophobia and agoraphobia, they crept whimpering into screenless compartments and huddled.

  "I'd knock 'em out," the medic Jil Mahim said, "but we don't have the drugs to spare. All we can do is hope they don't go completely mad before we get onplanet somewhere."

  Even though the men and women had been told off to specific compartments, some found lovers, and places to be alone with each other; some Force people, some 'Raum, some intermixed.

  First Tweg Lir wanted to bring that to an end, but Garvin nixed the idea, so long as nobody was screwing inside the chain of command.

  Not only was Lir's notion senseless petty tyranny, but he, Jasith, Njangu, and Jo were among the compartment-creepers.

  Garvin and Jasith stared at a screen, looking at the Musth ships on the airfield, star, in-system and onplanet, and at the sweeping plains of this unknown world.

  "Wouldn't it be nice," Jasith sighed, "if we were visiting here on… on some kind of vacation, maybe?" Or on any purpose other than war , Garvin thought.

  About two E-hours after they'd landed, a lifter grounded beside the mother ship.

  Alikhan got out, carrying a parcel, and the lifter took off.

  Ben Dill met him at the lock.

  "Just that simple?"

  "But what else should it have been?"

  After the strange ship had taken off, a Musth clearance clerk ran the ship's numbers through a registry.

  His head darted, and he hissed in surprise as he read the on-screen scroll.

  Chapter 24

  N-Space

  It was ship-night, and there were only a few awake on the mother ship.

  Two were Alikhan and Ben Dill. Dill was determined to "qualify" as pilot, and be the first human to have a Musth starship in his logbook. Alikhan was obliging and, as he taught, became more skilled himself.

  Besides, there wasn't much else to pass the time. The few books that had been brought on board were religious in nature, and both beings had decided what they believed or didn't believe in years earlier.

  The ship broke out of N-space, and the two checked the computer for the nex
t jump.

  "Five more jumps, and—"

  Quite suddenly, there was another starship in the utter emptiness.

  Alikhan's paw flashed to a sensor, and N-space swirled, as Dill saw a flash from the other huge ship.

  "What… who was that?"

  "It looked like a clanmaster's ship," Alikhan replied. "Who it is, where it came from, I know nothing."

  "It sure wasn't our friend. Sucker went and launched at us!"

  Alikhan slapped sensors, and the mother ship went back to normal space, then jumped again.

  "Numbers," he growled. "Give me human random numbers!"

  "Three… one… EVERYBODY UP, battle stations," and the sleeping Forcemen on the bridge came awake, and the com man, the "talker," readied his infantry backpack set, "… one… eleven…"

  Dill realized Alikhan wanted human values to key his jump times to, hopefully foxing the pursuer.

  On the eleven count their huge enemy came into the same space, fired again as the mother ship vanished.

  "Gunners to stations," Alikhan managed. "Have them try to destroy that other ship."

  "One more time: Who the hell is it?"

  "Colors are gray… red… you have no word for the third," and a missile exploded close enough to blank a screen for a moment. Another missile went off, and Dill felt shock roll through the ship.

  "We're hit," he announced unnecessarily, and Garvin and Njangu were on the bridge.

  "We've got a big fat enemy all over our asses," Dill announced. "Looks like—"

  Description wasn't necessary as the ship reappeared. Alikhan hissed, ears cocking, and again they were in hyperspace.

  "Ben, take the controls and count again."

  " 'Kay," Dill said. "Three… four… nine… sixteen, son of a bitch, can't give 'em that much time, that one almost got us… Garvin, you might want to get everybody saddled up for debarkation… four…"

  "Missile stations manned," the talker reported tonelessly.

  Alikhan was at a secondary board for an instant, consulting records. "Gray, red, plat … not good. That is Keffa's clan. One of Paumoto and my father's fiercest allies."

  "So how in blazes did he find us?"

  Lir was on the bridge. "Boss, that rocket that hit us appears to have done some damage. We've got compartments all through the ship self-sealing. So far, nobody's gotten trapped, but…"