The Fleet 01

by David Drake (ed)

  In a moment, he had an answer. Acknowledged. Here. Assist in the kill. Morak.

  Skirting around the curving wall, he ran along familiar back passages to catch up to the waiting ambushers.

  Dalle pulled back on the rope around his wrists involuntarily every time his captor yanked him forward. It earned him a painful punch or kick from one or another of the Khalia, but he couldn’t help himself. He had no intention of being drawn farther into the darkness. There was sweat running from under his hair into his eyes, and down the middle of his back. In the cold gloom of the caves, the droplets turned icy, making him flinch in fear, as if someone had poked at him from behind. He didn’t dare to turn away from the red lamps. They were all that was keeping him moving forward, with or without force.

  Except for responding when he lagged, Dalle’s captor didn’t seem to notice that he was there at all. She was not the biggest or the strongest of the raiders. It would be possible in a moment of surprise to pull his chain away and run for it. But to where? Otlind had never had a chance to show him around, teach him the layout of the caves. With all the turns they had been taking, he couldn’t guarantee that he would succeed in finding his way back to the light. And that was what he craved most of all right now—light. To Otlind and all the others this was home, their bolthole; but to him it was a particularly cruel prison. His childhood fears hounded at him, threatening to summon up old pictures of imagined monsters. He gasped as the lights picked out a giant molded stalagmite, four or five meters high. It appeared to move, turning its wide stone head slightly toward him. Dalle’s stomach tightened, forcing a whimper out of him. The red lanterns disappeared momentarily as the Weasels holding them passed under a stone archway, and the monster vanished in a flash of retinal reaction. He had to hurry to catch up and stay in sight of the lights, keeping his eyes on the Khalia holding them.

  At that moment, there was an explosion and a white-hot flash. And then the ceiling fell in.

  The pirates were still dazed by the reverberating sound and pieces of falling rock when the colonists leaped into the corridor, guns blasting at them. The colonists’ rifles were equipped with flashguns, intended to blind and point out targets in the darkness. Two Khalia fell at once, the crash of the explosion echoing around them. The rest of the raiding party, confused as to where the shooting was coming from, spun and drew, firing at random into the cavern. Dalle looked around wildly and dropped to the ground as the battle began.

  Fritz Morak and two of his defense team, a young boy and a woman, a former Fleet gunnery pilot, moved in and rolled into position, pinpointing targets with their flashguns for the others.

  “Watch out for the human!” he shouted, tracking Dalle’s captor in his sights. The staccato flares made everything look mechanical, puppetlike. Morak felt as though he was watching an animated performance, white characters jerking on a black background. The flashing affected his reflexes. Even as he loosed his shot, the pirate he was aiming at spun around, and the bullet, meant for her chest, merely grazed her upper arm. She dropped to a crouch, and angry orange flashes scarred the night from her own gun. Morak spat, and lined up another target.

  Under shouted orders of their captain, the Khalia divided into groups of two, the buddy system. They broke away with amazing speed and ran in several directions, their footsteps leading the colonists after them. Morak had never had personal experience with the Khalia before, and he was astounded by their agility. He whistled shrilly through his teeth for the next party of ambushers to close in.

  One pair of the raiders had found the boy in the darkness by following his flashgun. He hadn’t been moving around enough. Didn’t anyone retain their training in emergencies? Morak raised his rifle, trying to pinpoint the boy’s captors in the intermittent light. They had hauled him to his feet and slapped restraints around his wrists. The boy yelled and struggled as he was pulled away. Morak lowered his weapon and snapped out a command to his men. There were closer targets. One of the others would have to rescue the boy.

  A slap from a heavy claw disarmed one of the other men. The pirates tried to restrain him, too, but he managed to break away. In the patchwork darkness, Morak saw one of them leap toward him and stoop to bite the man’s throat out with long incisors. The man fell, his head all but detached from his neck. Morak saw it happen as if in slow motion, strobed on the back of his eyes. Anger flushed through him, drying his mouth. Certainly there were other casualties in the darkness, but this was the first murder of a settler he had seen with his own eyes. It was so horribly savage that the only impulse that could get any purchase in his mind was revenge. He fired furiously in the direction of the Weasels, forgetting that they were probably already away from that spot. The cave lit up in blinding whiteness, freezing ally and foe alike in an indistinguishably bleached-out photograph. His explosive anger only wasted ammunition, he knew, but if he stopped to analyze, he might break down. With a whistle, he sent his forces after the fleeing pirates. He himself stopped beside the two fallen Khalia, and blasted their heads off, only partly because he thought they might be shamming death.

  The Khalian female and her partner, and the pair that had captured the boy, dragged their prisoners to their feet, and pulled them along the corridors back the way they came. Morak saw the humans rise, and signaled for a momentary cease-fire. The pirates took advantage of their human shields and fled, their captives floundering helplessly behind them on their tethers. Several colonists charged, but three fell with bullets in them, and another had his throat bitten out by the hindmost Weasel. Morak, revolted and angry, signaled to recommence firing.

  Dalle experienced a brief moment of hope that the pirates were taking him back outside, but when they turned off into a side passage, his legs went weak. His memory wasn’t good at retaining directions gleaned only by touch and sound, but he was sure that they hadn’t made a turn like this on the way in. He slumped to the floor, afraid of going farther into the echoing caverns.

  With an angry, warbling cry, the female turned on him and beat him with the butt of her rifle until somehow his feet went back in place under him and held him up. The boy behind him was still struggling grimly with his captors, crying out obscenities that the Weasels echoed with shrieks and grunts of their own. Dalle felt proud of the boy, who was so brave. He was heartened enough to make struggles of his own, and considered again throwing his captor off balance. Together, they could escape. The boy would know where to go, how to get out.

  Ahead of them, a male voice cried out, “Flatten out!”

  As Red-pelt turned toward the voice, a short flash burned their eyes, and two coughs came out of the darkness. Dalle knew that sound—the sound of a needle gun firing. He thrust himself back against the wall, willing himself to paper thinness. The tiny but powerful charges in a needler’s load penetrated and exploded within their victims. It was a horrible way to die. Dalle had done enough autopsies to know that. There was no sound louder than a groan, but he was suddenly deluged in blood. Red-pelt and her partner were down, and they wouldn’t be getting up again.

  The needler’s owner pushed past him. Dalle saw the light flash, heard the gun speak again. The charges missed, and impacted against the stone far down the hall, clanked to the floor. Warned, the Khalia snarled and spun around, dragging the boy behind them. The enemy, with the gunner in pursuit, ran back along the passage, their footsteps resonating in the stone chamber. Dalle could hear the boy screaming directions over his shoulder until the voices faded into unintelligibility. Unwilling to be left behind, Dalle followed with his fingertips to the wall for guidance. He was soon disoriented and lost.

  Otlind reloaded his needle gun on the run back in the direction of the second cavern. He felt his way to the message ring, and, still running, alerted the colonists that two of the enemy were heading back their way. His own echoed voice chased him along the wall, sounding hollow and unfamiliar.

  Fourteen of the Khalia were still fighting. Th
e defenders worked to herd the pairs of pirates back into the cavern. Another settler was tied up and being dragged toward the main corridor. His captor had a needle gun pressed to the side of his neck and was backing steadily, ignoring the feeble struggles of his prize. The others understood the pantomime blackmail: let them leave unmolested or the man dies.

  From behind the edge of the circular wall, a human figure emerged and closed with the Khalian. The pirate turned and stooped to bite in a single swift movement, but the element of surprise was on Otlind’s side. He expended a shell from his needle gun into the belly of the pirate, and dove, taking the pinioned man down to the floor with him, before the Weasel could fire.

  “Pat!” Morak shouted over the echoing din.

  Otlind sat up and waved, then turned at a rush of air that brushed his face to fight with a furry body in the strobed darkness. It wasn’t Fleet-trained fighting; it was homestyle: close, hard, and vicious.

  The Khalia had discovered that the sparks and flashes generated by their projectile weapons only made them easy targets before the settlers’ spotlight guns. Abandoning all but their natural defenses, they dropped their guns and started attacking the colonists with teeth and claws. Their slaving mission was a failure; their only object now to leave Basilisk alive.

  With no telltale lights to pinpoint the enemy, the settlers too were discovering they were making targets of themselves. The room was already full of smoke, so that a flash-beam might blind a gunner, rather than assist his aim. They were not bothered by the lack of light. Their numbers and their familiarity with the terrain were advantages over the superior natural weaponry of the Khalia. The fight continued in the smoky blackness. Growls and coughs and occasional screams rang over the scuffling sounds. The colonists learned quickly to have a weapon in hand in case the next thing they touched had fur. The Khalia moved so fast that one chance was all they had to defend themselves.

  Dalle found his way back into the cavern by the sounds. He caught sight of the red Khalian lightbox, which lay discarded inside the lip of the ringwall, and made for it like a child to home free. Before he could reach it, it winked out.

  The darkness was crowded. It teemed with bodies that crashed into his, sending him spinning into soft masses that grew colder as his hands rested on them. He came across a slippery rock that felt as though it was covered with bristly rubber. Recoiling, he realized it was a human head, severed from its owner by Khalian teeth. He felt for his regulation sidearm, but it had been taken from him back at the ship. Without armament he was dead if another pirate got a good hold of him. Dalle flattened himself to the floor in the darkness, occasionally getting a glimpse of the red flashes on weapons or Weasel teeth, tantalizing tastes of light. He was unable to see the combatants well. It was as if the weapons themselves were fighting each other.

  He moved back as far as he could, still keeping the battle in front of him. The acoustics were so perfectly balanced that the din was as deafening where he was as it had been in the middle of it: cries, shots, explosions, groans, the cracking of bones. Somewhere a woman went on screaming and screaming. He would have liked to find her, to help her, but he hadn’t the slightest idea where to go. Under the sheer weight of noise, Dalle felt himself cowering down, curling up with his elbows locked around his knees.

  The darkness began to crowd in more closely around him. There were hundreds of millions of stars in the galaxy; where were they? He closed his eyes, squeezing them shut with his hands. Comets shot through the blackness behind his lids. He followed them with his mind, withdrawing further from the battle. One of them veered between two big moons toward a blue-grey disk, growing in his sight; thick puffy clouds surrounded him and cushioned him, and blocked out the sounds of battle from his mind. The noises died away with the darkness. He was far away. He began to relax.

  The remaining Khalia made a scramble for the inner chamber, pursued by the defenders, still keeping to low-visibility weapons. Morak shouted to the message wall to man barricades in the lower chambers, though privately he didn’t think any of the pirates would get through. Ten Weasels were left, against over a hundred of them. Wounded colonists were being withdrawn, replaced by volunteers from the inner caverns.

  The fight went on, moving deeper into the settlement. The remaining Khalia were most definitely at bay, snarling insults through their own blood. Otlind kicked one in the stomach, and blasted it with one of the remaining charges in his needle gun. Its belly imploded, and it collapsed onto Otlind, driving him backward. He tripped over a body under his feet, too busy in the dark to tell whether it was Khalian or Alliance, male or female.

  A cry from behind him made him spin on his heel. A pirate was leaping toward him, eyes glowing in the residual light from gunfire. He fired the needIer again, from the hip, but the little gun jammed. He threw it down, and jabbed a sharp karate kick at the Weasel’s midsection. Otlind had learned from training sessions not to get any part of one’s anatomy too close to a Weasel’s mouth. He connected with some part of it. It grunted. He was not attacked again.

  “Here!” a voice cried. It was the young boy who had been taken prisoner earlier. He was standing high atop the outer arc of the message wall, his voice thundering over the sounds of battle. Safely out of reach, he switched his rifle flashgun on steady beam, and began to point out the remaining pirates for his fellow colonists. Half blinded by the brilliant white light with their pupils opened wide for the dark, the Khalia were thrown into confusion. The leader attempted to rally them, shouting hoarse commands. He was the first to fall dead, with dozens of Alliance bullets through his body.

  Very soon, the fight was over. The Khalia were dead. Otlind assisted the others in dragging the bodies outside.

  “Twenty, you said?” Morak asked, wiping his broad face with the sleeve of his shirt. Sweat made standing spikes out of his thick, black hair.

  “That’s right, Leader. There’s one more body over there by their ship.”

  “That’s all, then. Good.”

  “If you like dead Khalia.”

  Morak showed all of his teeth, white against his bristling chin, in a grim smile. “I do. As soon as they get the door open, we’ll see if there’re any left in their spaceship.”

  “What? No! Wait a minute!” Otlind yelled, and darted away. He splashed through the little stream and oyer the breast of the hill, straight into the crowd attempting to break into the Khalian spaceship with crowbars and plasma torches. Morak followed, puffing. “Stop!” he cried. “It’s booby-trapped. You’ll just be doing the pirates’ work for them.” Quaking with what might almost have happened, he pushed the others away from the door. The colonists muttered angrily about being pulled away until Otlind pointed out the trip charges attached to the bomb. There was a general retreat. The Fleet pilot nearly laughed at their rapid change of expression, from indignation to alarm.

  “Nice job,” one of the men said, having inspected the device under the engines. “We’ll put all the corpses under it, and trigger it by remote. Nice and clean.” He grimaced. “We have other things to take care of.” Otlind knew what was in the other’s mind. He would have some mourning to do, himself. All the people who had died today were friends or relatives of his, too.

  “Good idea. Maybe there’s something I can help out with.”

  “Maybe you could use our help yourself,” Morak said gently, laying an arm across his shoulder. “Medical help. You’re bleeding. You’ve been wounded.”

  “Oh, I’m all right,” Otlind began. Medical help? Dalle! “Has my friend—the Fleet doctor—been found?”

  “Oh, yes, our visiting medicine man! I haven’t seen him since you appeared. I’ll find out if anyone has any news.” Morak questioned the bearers who were bringing out the bodies of dead colonists. The wounded were hobbling out under their own power or leaning on the shoulders of others. “No. They’re still bumping around down there with portable lamps. We can’t get power back
up here until they open the creches. Might as well wait. I’m sure he’ll turn up.”

  “Thanks,” Otlind said. He waited for a time, watching the trickle of colonists coming out of the cavern. Dalle never appeared, alive or dead. Finally, his patience exhausted, Otlind barged back inside with a borrowed hand lantern.

  “Pat?” A woman stopped him on her way out to the open air. He nodded, and would have kept walking, but she caught his arm. “Hello, sweetheart. Leader Morak told us you were here.”

  “Mother?” Otlind blurted, studying her closely. She was wearing dirty overalls and had a flashgun rifle on a strap over her arm. He might have been fighting fight next her all the time in the dark, and he would never have known. There was blood in her hair over one ear. He, who considered himself a seasoned fighter and warrior, trembled for a moment at what could have happened. He might have been deprived of his family. Before today, ground battles had always seemed distant to him, not mattering, while the real fighting was done in space, between nice impersonal ships. He was rocked. It would take him a long time to get over the realities of the battle. The memory of the actual fighting was already fading. “I’m looking for someone.”