Crisis

by David Drake

  grasping at ghosts ... of gray-furred glory

  from poets’ patter ... of precious past pride.

  But, brethren, behold! ... blood-bonded battle mates,

  masters of mind ... and mechanical magic,

  maneuvered by militant ... might from maintaining

  positions prophetically ... planned for perfection,

  falter before ... the fire-flood of foemen.

  How can heroes huddle, ... heart-heavy and helpless,

  while gold-greedy givers ... of grief gain ground?

  Impossible! Peaceable ... pets seek permission;

  warriors wait but ... for weapons to wield,

  to limn lofty legends ... in laser-born lightning!

  Articles of War

  Article XXXVIII

  All Papers, Charter-Parties, Bills of Lading, Passports, and other writings whatsoever that shall be taken, seized, or found aboard any ship or ships which shall be taken as Prize shall be duly preserved, and the Commanding Officer of the ship which shall take such a prize shall send the Originals entire and without Fraud to the Court of the Admiralty ...

  Article XXXIX

  No Person subject to this Act shall take out of any Prize or Ship seized for Prize any money or goods, unless it shall be necessary for the better securing thereof, or for the necessary use and Service of any ships and Vessels of War ...

  From Khalia all the destruction and ruin was visible as no more than an occasional twinkling among the otherwise uncaring stars. As the fighting grew in intensity, streaks of light representing falling warships became more common.

  Duane’s attempt to pierce the Syndicate formation stalled, but forced the opposing admiral to commit his reserves. As the edges of the cone caught up to the dreadnoughts, the battle developed into a test of sheer attrition. Eventually the greater experience the Fleet personnel had gained fighting the Khalia began to give them an edge. Even so, the Syndicate ships continued to push forward until they were close enough to Khalia that several stray missiles actually exploded within the planet’s atmosphere.

  Then, even as Duane prepared to order the planet-based missiles into action, the Syndicate ships began to back slowly away from the planet.

  IN THE MIDDLE of battle there was absolute silence. It brought back memories of other battles, other times. Bethesda and then Khalia itself, the ready hangar of the Screaming Eagles, the Scout Fast Attack Group. It had been lit just the same way and the waiting was just as hard.

  Backlit schematics stained the darkness with nursery colors, far too innocent for the symbols on the main screens. On the tracking board ships did not die in a barrage of shrapnel and steel. They made fireworks in violet and tangerine, electrons that didn’t record the reality of dying. Here in the bunker it was all perfectly still, impeccably clean.

  A solitary human stood before the board. Even though he was surrounded by his own troops he was completely alone. His “men,” as he thought of them, strained at their stations in the observation center, trying to emulate his rocklike immobility. They almost succeeded, although it was against their nature.

  They did not have his reasons for standing so still, his need for something like prayer. Fixed on the board he interpreted the symbols as if he himself could see the battle that raged above.

  They had all known that it was Khalia that the Syndicate wanted. Matsunaga could have told them that weeks ago, long before any recon reports had come back and before the Intelligence and Tactics Divisions had gotten hold of anything substantial. Matsunaga had known the same way he had known that the Khalia could be trusted and that the Syndicate was on the edge of breaking. He felt it in his gut.

  An alien came up beside him. Matsunaga could smell the being, the raggy pelt and the rasping breath, and he turned slowly. It had taken him months to learn not to flinch from that smell.

  “Shall we prepare now, sir?” the Khalian asked him. Only a few months ago he would have called the being a Weasel and his only conflict would have been should he aim for the head or the chest. Now this one was his most competent subcommander.

  “Not yet, Asheko,” Matsunaga answered softly. “Patience.” The Khalian growled and bared its teeth. Matsunaga looked away. Little children, that was the best they were. That, but terribly fierce. They were useful. He had to remind himself of that constantly, when the odor of wet fur and an undercurrent of disruptive growling became nearly unbearable.

  Hadn’t his ancestors been able to handle the unbearable when it was necessary? Hadn’t it been one of their sources of pride, of propriety, to do so? And was his own duty and honor any the less because he lived now instead of then and his masters were the whole of the human race?

  It helped to remember. He had already endured enough to make sure his plan worked. If it was needed. Part of him hoped that it would not be necessary. The other part, the larger, prayed that it would. Then he could finally prove his worth, his loyalty.

  Again he thought of his very favorite story. When he was little his mother had told him about the forty-seven ronin every night for three years. Their lord murdered, these samurai had not followed him into the void. For three years they waited and endured insults. They were ronin, bandits, the lowest thing a samurai could become. And they let the stories about them grow, making people believe they had left honor and duty behind. They had waited for years, but eventually they had their revenge on the man who had murdered their lord. Then, their true duty done, they had chosen seppuku.

  He had played at being one of the ronin, had imagined it when school lessons were boring, had known that there was no honor higher than those who had suffered to get their revenge. They had been his heroes, and Kazuo Matsunaga had always wanted to be a hero.

  Then the Fleet had given him the chance.

  He’d been one of the Screaming Eagles’ top jocks, twenty-seven Weasel heads stenciled on his fighter’s belly. Twenty-seven kills in vacuum combat and those Weasel raiders weren’t wet behind the ears, either. Top of the line plasma cannon and homers on gyro tracers, all very state of the art.

  There had been something magical about single combat with a raider. They were fast and good and turned like a dream. They could cut your tail at max and shoot smart goods at the same time. And, being built the way they were, the Khalia didn’t have to worry so much about blacking out on high-speed turns and dives. They just went.

  It had taken all his brain and all his ice-cold courage to fly those missions. Every one of them had been a surprise, doing escort duty for a bunch of whining indies who couldn’t care from shit, out patrolling long hours in a hard seat with no toilet nearby, and then, all of a sudden, a Weasel appeared on the screen.

  The first moments were vital. At long range the Fleet fighters held the edge. Their smart torps were faster with a better lock. No matter how the bandit flew the torp would get him once it pinned on target. But close in the torps were dangerous. He knew one guy who flew into one of his own ordnance in the middle of a fight. Talk about buying the farm the wrong way.

  But escort patrols were so boring and long that sometimes it was easy to zone out and not notice the incursion in the first seconds, when a flyer could still squeeze the advantage, before the bandits closed in. He’d done that twice, and both times came closer to the void than he wanted. There wasn’t any honor in being stupid. His sensei would have been horrified at his lack of concentration.

  Which was how he got twenty-seven kills. Not just on smart torps, but on closing scissors on the gomer and slagging his wake down. The raiders might be faster than the Fleet fighters, but Matsunaga knew that his craft had the staying power, that he had the fuel to burn, and he could flush out an enemy and run him down like a wolf pack tiring its prey. Some lessons the old sensei taught were deeper than bone.

  And the carrier was good, too. The Jeanne d’Arc held seventeen fighter groups on convoy duty and that was about all she did. The pilots knew each other like family and with convoy work, well, the indies might be a bunch of fat ingrates b
ut they did lift over supplies every once in a while. Especially every time their asses got saved. And so the Jeanne d’Arc had the best wine cellar in the Fleet, the most recent entertainment tapes, the best-equipped rec deck in the entire history of human spaceflight.

  And so life had been perfect, a thing that his ancestors would have found perfectly familiar and that Matsunaga found suited him better than any story could have. Go out and fight hard, clean, live or die. Then come back to wine, music, a long extra-hot bath, and a beautiful lady who was as dangerous in a fighter as any man. Heaven.

  That had been before Bethesda had fallen. During the first skirmishes above Target there had been a glorious thrill in the clash; knowing that every strike brought humankind that much closer to freedom from the Weasels. Then they’d won and gone down to base. And found out they’d been lured out, decoyed, and this wasn’t the Khalia home world at all. He’d been cheated. They’d all been ripped off of their victory.

  Bethesda had been a nightmare then, and he’d been glad to be back sealed up in space again where he’d belonged. But the Jeanne d’Arc was no longer the pleasure cruise of the Fleet. Something happened in Bethesda, when they saw what the enemy could do. How ruthless and utterly inhuman the Weasels were. Somehow the indie-supplied luxury had gotten in the way of their mission, and after Bethesda the mission became paramount. No one missed the wine, the tapes, the delicacies of thirty-some worlds. This time they were going to hit the Weasels once and for all, exterminate them where they lived. That was all that mattered. It had all the marks of a good fight and Matsunaga had been ready, if not so eager as the first time. Hell, he wasn’t a green kid anymore, anyway. A vet had to have some of the shine rubbed off.

  The Jeanne d’A rc had been in the worst of it at Khalia. He’d been out, far from the pack and on to two hotshots at the same time when she’d been blown. He shouldn’t have been that far away, should have stayed tight with the group. But damn, he wasn’t Killean’s wingman and Killean had this tendency to stay on the flight leader even when it wasn’t the best tactics. So it wasn’t really his fault that he’d been out.

  There’d been that hunch, too, early in the day. Something about the carrier had seemed unreal. He didn’t know how to describe it. Just one of those hunches, one of those things that happens in a vet who survives, one of the things he learns never to question.

  So he was way out gunning for these two raiders who were turning so fast on each other you’d swear they were dancing Swan Lake. Got both the bogies, too, but that didn’t make up for the Jeanne d’Arc. She was gone and she’d been home, and all the people that had mattered since he’d left Seimpo had been on her.

  He’d lost it then, and still didn’t have enough memory to quite piece together what he’d done. Managed to cut through all the way down to the ground, gutting his plasma cannon till they were shooting dry. Wiped out a whole division of raiders sitting on their fannies waiting to lift when he’d flamed the fighter down. Got the Galactic Cross for it, too. Not that he cared.

  No, Matsunaga had managed to keep most of that battle repressed in subconsciousness. The shrinks on the Elizabeth had done their best and then decided to leave him alone. He didn’t do anything bizarre on the ward, played chess and acey-deucey with the other patients, joined the Thursday night crowd in the lounge for two hours of omni’s best shows, complained about the food.

  Maybe it was the complaints that convinced the staff that Kazuo Matsunaga was completely recovered, both body and, wits, and discharged him. Only there was no unit to go back to, no Screaming Eagles with their own patches on their shoulders and their calligraphed headbands. The few survivors of the Jeanne d’Arc had been reassigned, spread into various units, given charity chores to keep them busy.

  Matsunaga hadn’t minded his job at first. Collecting up all the Khalian raiders; that had been worth something. Every time he came across one of those tiny one-seaters, all overburdened with guns and power and not enough control, he had wanted to celebrate. Just like getting them in the old days, only this time the tech boys stripped them down before the good guys got to torch them.

  Lieutenant (j.g.) Kazuo Matsunaga had been in charge of confiscating even the shredded remains of Khalian raiders in sector seventeen. He had done his job happily at first, until his contact with the Khalia became more complex. He had to know more about them to understand where they might be hiding scrap and repair modules. He had to learn their language, at least the technical vocabulary, so that he could make his desires clear.

  And the more he learned, the more he remembered his old lessons, the ones that the Screaming Eagles had all thought were so quaint and silly at the time. Things about the way a true warrior lives and acts, about how honor was not about acting out in a scout fighter because he’d been in a blind rage. The Galactic Cross had begun to leer at him in the mirror, knowing perfectly well that there had been nothing heroic in his actions at all.

  The Khalia stirred a memory in him. It went deeper than his training, deep down into the race memory itself. They truly lived the way sensei had taught him a warrior lived. No turning away, no surrender, a willingness to live perfectly in the now. The now was all they had. Even the Khalian language was hazy on time in their verbs, and what was ancient and heroic and what was modern and well known and what was somehow only real in the imagination were all woven together in their poets’ great sagas.

  The language twisted and turned, mocked him with paradoxes and simple truths that he had forgotten the same way he had forgotten the flaming entry into Khalia’s sky. The Fleet xenopologists were not wrong; the Khalia did live for battle. Death and life completed each other, halves of a perfectly balanced whole. And the balanced and perfect moment of being was neither life nor death, but the sword of honor that cut through the fabric of both.

  Slowly Matsunaga came to the conclusion that he understood the Khalia to the bottom of his soul. He still found their faces unattractive and unreadable, their language unpleasant, and their smell nearly unbearable, but there was something in himself that he recognized every time he confronted them. The Khalia did not live by greed alone. They were bushi, in a way his old sensei had said no longer existed. They were bushi in the way Kazuo Matsunaga had dreamed of being bushi, following ‘the way of the Warrior like the true samurai of ancient lost Japan.

  He understood when human in the Khalia language shifted from something that meant, “hairless defenseless prey” to “worthy opponent.” There was no dishonor in being beaten by a superior force. There was no dishonor in seeking to serve it.

  This was not something Matsunaga’s colleagues were about to accept. Lieutenant Jarmon Reeves had told Matsunaga so rather bluntly when they torched the last turned-in raider’s ship: “I don’t like it when they turn stuff in,” Reeves had said thoughtfully. “I don’t trust them. One of those is going to be booby-trapped, and blow from here to Tau Ceti. All this ‘respect the worthy opponent’ bullshit is just so we buy in, that’s it.”

  Matsunaga had kept quiet that time. He knew better. The true warrior ethic of these people had spoken to his soul. It was a thing Reeves could not understand. Jarmon Reeves had never swept the archery garden because he had hit the target more than the others, even when it was swinging, even when he was blindfolded. Most of the Fleet didn’t understand the strength of being only and totally who you were, not the way the Khalia did. They were berserkers who wrote poetry like the samurai of old, and if they didn’t have the refinement to fold the poems into little paper boats with candles in them and float them down the river under falling maple leaves, well, perhaps that was a bit too much to want.

  So he had played with the children in the school, teaching them the first katas he had learned. What better way to make contact than through their mutual warrior past? And what better way to gain the confidence of the society than through the children? He could come and sit and listen to their stories and learn about these people the way they learned about themselves.

  Then Matsunaga�
��s cultural delicacy was rewarded. A Khalian youngster, who had admired his discipline and courtesy along with his complete lack of tolerance for even the slightest evasion of the law, had led him to the bunker.

  The youngster was Asheko’s younger brother, and the bunker had been fully operational, and utterly untouched. One of the caches left by the Syndicate to insure their war of attrition was waged to the very end, no doubt. The loyalty that inspired such building, and that had turned it over to him, was something he bowed before with respect. These beings, however alien, had an intrinsic understanding of the fact that only in serving something more than yourself could anyone find true honor.

  But he had been right and, damnit, Reeves had been wrong. Once defeated, they were loyal. It was something the Fleet didn’t understand most of the time. Maybe that was why Ito had left, come home to Seimpo. And to serve the victor, to love it for its deadly elegance. It was pure, it was bushi, it was something Matsunaga understood perfectly.

  These aliens, they were primitive, and so they had the advantages of the primitive. They believed and acted all at once. It was a thing Matsunaga had always admired. It was something he had studied and strove for and had missed every time his arrow had hit the mark. He was still aiming, even blindfolded. The arrow had always been an invasion when he shot it, not the completion of the harmony of the target. It was the essence of Zen, of bushi, of everything his throwback imagination loved. It was the one thing he hadn’t been able to achieve.

  He should have brought back a Marine decontamination squad right then. But twenty-four perfectly armed little raiders, deadly and beautiful like the steel-tipped arrows of a bow, they were too perfect and useful to simply waste. Matsunaga looked at them and one of his hunches had overwhelmed him, clutching at his head and his belly and his knees. More than any order, more than any battle plan, he could see that to destroy these weapons would be more than criminal waste. It would be even worse than dangerous.