The Far Stars War

by David Drake

  God, I’ll never live that down.

  WHEN MAC convinced the League of Free Planets to join his crusade, pride and legalities prevented the League from placing itself under another government. With a burst of insight, the problem was solved when Mac simply ordered those worlds and ships under his command to apply for membership in the League. Mac, of course, was appointed admiral of the now reinforced League fleet.

  As time passed, the League of Worlds gradually merged into the League of Man. If the Gerin had been a less determined opponent, the intensity of xenophobia developed might have been less. Certainly the total destruction of all life on three worlds and over thirty million civilians on virtually every League world inspired the League’s early policies. There can be no question that repressed guilt over the fate dealt to the Gerin inspired many of the League’s late excesses. Nor can the Mac’s own fanatic hatred of the Gerin be underrated. Certainly as its first chairman, Chu Lee MacDonald was obsessed with ensuring no other race could repeat the havoc wrought by the Gerin.

  IT WAS the good time for him, the quiet time: the time when no one shot at him anymore, the time he had dreamed of for so very long. LeI Askhenazy had survived the war. Sometimes he found that miraculous.

  In retrospect it seemed to have gone on forever, some ways. His first battle had been with the Castleman’s fleet, when they hit DuQuesne. That was the time he had almost died. Beginner’s luck, everyone had said: explosive decompression in the weapons room of the Bantry Bay, his body picked up and slammed against a stanchion—the only thing between him and the howling, snowswirled tornado of freezing air bursting out of the hull. The one man in a pressure suit, the one man who had managed to hang on, who had grabbed him and managed to drag him into the airlock when the air was all gone, and seal it, and save them both: that was Revi Abhrahindar, who hated his guts. He was dead now, his ship dragged out of warp by a Gerin cruiser and fried, somewhere in the Battle of Ten Moons.

  In fact, most of the people he knew were dead. LeI sat back in the command seat, thinking that this line of recall was morbid; but a man had to grieve sometimes, didn’t he? He thought of the people on board Crimea when he had been transferred there, all the medical staff and the crew. He had been barely more than a skin-bag of shattered bones, which they had carefully, patiently pieced back together like an old familiar puzzle. McLuhan, the crazed neurology specialist, who took such cheerful pleasure in running unnecessary tests on the response of Lel’s healing nerves; Irisai and Vuuonen, the nurses, completely “ignoring” him while they changed one after another of his numerous dressings, and discussed his probable social life in improbable detail; Spencer, the captain-surgeon, as comfortable with a laser as with a scalpel: all gone now, blown up when the Gerin went after the support craft responding to the bombing of Klaremont, and Crimea fought rearguard so that some could get away.

  And all the crews of Maestricht and Prinz Willems Land, which LeI had served on after he was stitched back together: also gone during Ten Moons, every mother’s son and daughter of them. Cruiser crews tended to get to know one another too well, so few of them in so much ship—there was a tendency to band together against the size of the thing, the way party guests in a large ballroom will clump in a corner, as if there were no more room for them at all. Lel remembered Katya, from Maestricht, and the way she used to laugh at him of nights, and push him down on the bed. Gone, she and her blond hair both.

  And Azusa, that had been his first command, and the one LeI loved best: gone too, a month after he had left her, with all hands, at the Battle of Olympus. Mad Rostropov, his exec, and big hairy dark Leif, Leif the Turk, as everyone called him, for some reason—LeI never found out why. And Mary Turner, the weapons officer, with her little sly smile, and Murik Janislav, and Ceyrat, and Bergues, and Illhauesern—all gone. Ghosts.

  But a few, somehow, had survived. He was going to see one of them. There was some consolation in that. We survivors, he thought: and then let out a breath of laughter at his own pretentiousness. There was no great honor in still being alive. Some skill, a lot of luck—that was all.

  “Lorne,” he said over his shoulder to his exec, “how close are we?”

  “Another half hour of warp, sir,” Victoria said in her soft little voice. “We can accelerate a bit, if you like.”

  “No, we’re fine.”

  She nodded and turned her attention back to her navigation board. Lel looked at her, wishing she would say a little something else. Like what, though? he thought. Only a month with this group, and they’re a little skittish yet. Give them time to sort you out. And no question, they must find the tall, hunched, black-eyed, grim-faced figure somewhat difficult to deal with. Even the surgery of the day had not been able to do much about some of his scars: and as for his face . . . “I’ll have you know” he remembered Spencer saying, annoyed, “that I took six hours carving you that face out of our last piece of osteo, which could as well have gone for that compound fracture of Wallis’s. Not to mention the time I took installing it. And it wasn’t my fault that the stuff had been in storage past its sell-by date. You don’t like the workmanship, fine. Come on in my office and we’ll take it off. Shouldn’t take a minute.” And Spencer had run his hand over his bald spot, the way he always did when trying to keep from punching someone.

  LeI sighed at the memory. It vanished like a ghost. But it’s not just me that these people are reacting to. They’re going to have to have time to sort out not being shot at.

  That was the strangest part of it all, really. After what seemed a lifetime—after Crimea and Maestricht and Prinz Willems Land and Azusa, and then Boston II and Raden Mas and Irizar—then had come the fall of Gerin Prime, and suddenly there was no more war. Crews used to living holding their breaths suddenly had to learn how to let those breaths go, and draw new ones. It was difficult at first, as the fleets were reshuffled, as Mac bent his great talents to a new task: bringing order out of the chaos the Gerin had left.

  For chaos there was. The League of Man found itself an enemy without an enemy left for its allies to fight: and such a vacuum was dangerous. The allies were dangerous, too. Alien creatures—

  They fought alongside us, LeI thought. But it doesn’t change the fact: there s no telling with aliens. Their mindset isn’t ours . . . and allies today might be enemies tomorrow. Worse enemies than the Gerin . . . for they know our secrets, now. . . .

  LeI got up out of his seat and paced around the cruiser’s cramped little bridge, trying to work one of the numerous kinks out of his back. Boyne was a good ship, but she always seemed smaller than the other ones he had commanded. Though that was ridiculous. She was Stockholm-class, as they all had been.

  Is it just that we’re not fighting?

  He sighed. Certainly going out as a part of a formation, to bomb another tactical group, or attack a planet, was more straightforward work than what was ahead of them now. Mac was as nervous about the alien allies as the commanding admirals of the other human worlds were. They must be made ... secure. Usually this meant visiting their homeworlds and seeing how the “people” there viewed the rule of the League of Man. If they welcomed it, or accepted it, well and good. Hostages were received and guarantees taken, and a tax was levied to support the armed forces of the League and protect the worlds associated with it from any further trouble. However, if the planet proved hostile in attitude, or lukewarm, stronger measures had been prescribed. They came in measured levels, according to response. They ended with the destruction of the planet. Fortunately, that had been needed only once or twice.

  LeI had the whole careful set of instructions on tape, on data solid, and in a big looseleaf book in his cabin. It made poor bedside reading, he had found, and he had left it strictly alone after his first couple of dips into it. Depressing stuff. But policy was policy: without secure boundaries, and neighbors it could be sure of, the League of Man would have no certainty of peace in the future. And that was wh
at the worlds were crying out for: peace. There would be no future for them without a quiet time to grow and heal.

  LeI, at least, had a slightly more pleasant mission than some of late. He had done some wangling for it, had sent repeated polite communiqués through every channel he dared: and finally someone in Mac’s office—he hardly dared think it was Mac himself—had probably said, “Oh, give him what he wants, and get him off our cases.”

  And so the orders had come through for LeI to go to ‘en’Harha, and take the mandate of the League of Men to the D’Tarth.

  He had almost felt like hugging himself at the time. He almost felt like hugging himself right now. For Irrhun was there, and she was expecting him. Irrhun was one of the ones who past belief, past expectation, was still alive. It was odd—how the mere fact that she had made it, as he had, made him feel somehow more alive himself. They would sit down and talk over old times, they would—

  He walked over to his hot seat again and sat down, trying to maintain some measure of control. There was no controlling the smile, however crooked it drew the lines of his face. That was one of the things Irrhun had never seemed to care about. The smile grew to a grin, thinking about it.

  “Fifteen minutes, sir,” Victoria said.

  LeI nodded, savoring the way he felt. It was an odd feeling, a sensation of homecoming, though there was no real cause for that. It was three years since he had set foot on Luyken, his last home, and he wasn’t even sure whether the Gerin had hit it again after the first strike, which had killed his parents and sent him into the military. All that seemed very far away now: only the old hatred of the Gerin was at all immediate. And even that no longer had a proper home, with the Gerin fleets hunted to extinction, and Gerin Prime bombed into the stone age . . . since plague and famine were doing for the few remaining millions what the bombs had not.

  LeI sighed and let the thought go. For a little while he watched his bridge crew go about their business, quiet and efficient.

  How will she look? he thought. The last time he had seen her was at her decoration, with numerous other officers, after the Battle of the Red Giant. There was rather less to her uniform than to his: considering that she spent her days wearing a fur coat, it seemed only fair. D’Tarth officers wore a sort of harness, suitable for their insignia and equipment, and with pockets and holsters for their voders and sidearms. Irrhun had been resplendent that day, every fitting shining, the leather gleaming softly—where she had come by saddle soap, LeI had no idea. And when she rose up on her haunches to accept the White Cross, with both clusters, Irrhun had snarled right in the face of the admiral making the presentation. He hadn’t flinched, to his credit: but Lel still doubted whether the man knew that Irrhun had been joking with him. One only snarled at one’s friends, or one’s potential food.

  LeI chuckled softly to himself, and all over the bridge, heads turned. He glanced over at Victoria: she looked hurriedly away, and said, “Three minutes, sir.”

  “Very good,” LeI said, and breathed out softly, looking out the port at the stars swirling by, slowing gently toward the drop-out point.

  * * *

  D’Tarth was a large planet, by most standards: the kind of place where one could look out toward a horizon and find it unusually high up the sky. There was less sea than usual, and more land: the oceans were small and landlocked. Rivers were plentiful, and there were mighty mountain chains: the ice caps were large, and there was a greenish tinge to the atmosphere, something to do with higher-than-usual percentages of nitrogen and argon. By the standards of human worlds, there were very few cities, and most of its people were scattered far and wide over the planet. Not to say that they were backward, by any means. Their communications network was among the best in all the worlds: by use of personal comm equipment and public comm establishments, you could be in touch with anyone on the planet in a matter of seconds, whether he was in a town den or thousands of miles from anyone else, out in the open country.

  LeI had Boyne land in the place prepared for it in the planet’s eastern-hemisphere spaceport. The number of landing cradles and repair facilities suggested that the D’Tarth fleet must have been quite something before the war: they did not differentiate between military and civil spacefaring, and both kinds of ships shared the field. But only one dock in ten had a ship in it: even allowing for those out trading, LeI had to shake his head at the punishment their fleets had taken.

  The delegation came out from the nearby official buildings, a cluster of bright glassy bubbles, to meet the shore party. LeI stood with Victoria and Asbury, his tall lean scowling weapons officer, and watched the five D’Tarth come, loping along the scorched, stained surfacing in that long easy gait that he had become used to with Irrhun. She had always made it look more graceful, though, a sort of cheeky, leisurely dance along the ground. The only time that grace had deserted her had been in free fall: she would twist and swear and spit as she tried to orient herself. Most D’Tarth had less trouble with it: Irrhun’s inner ear had simply refused to make the adjustment. But when the power to life support and grav went out in Anderal that time, and the whole ship was plunged into a dark that drove humans screaming mad of disorientation and fear, she had kept her head, fought her way down through the corridors to the backup control room, and brought everything back online again. LeI remembered the hot, feral gleam of her eyes when the lights and gravity came back on . . . and how she had been most loathsomely sick immediately afterward.

  Most of the approaching D’Tarth had a similar look on their faces, though it seemed to LeI that they were trying to control it. Lorne and Asbury showed no sign of seeing anything unusual about their expressions ... well, they had had less practice than LeI had. In all but one case, the D’Tarth’s great lips were wrinkled up and back, as if they smelled something bad; their whiskers bristled, and the stiff bright ruffs of fur around their faces seemed ruffled too far forward. The fifth D’Tarth, white-muzzled, his plush gray-striped coat- scarred with old burns, had a face as impassive as a carved lion’s on a monument.

  They paused a few feet away, rose up on their haunches in courtesy, and greeted the shore party politely enough, giving their names: Commander Lahhim, Port Admiral Eher, Commodore Juhhir, Captains Khirrith and Rhai. LeI greeted them as gravely, introduced himself and his people, and walked with them back toward the port buildings, watching the discomfort evident in the way they moved, and wondering why Irrhun was not with them. Surely she knew he was coming: word had been sent days ago.

  The meetings took the rest of that morning and most of the afternoon. LeI sat down cross-legged at the low round table in the meeting room, looking over to where the huge feline forms lay at what looked like their ease, and patiently spelled out the terms of the League of Man as regarded the D’Tarth. There were many disgruntled glances, but no overt gestures, and no words of disagreement. Port Admiral Eher, who seemed the most senior of the group—and seniority counted for a great deal among the D’Tarth—accepted, on behalf of the planetary government, the dictates regarding how many human forces were to be garrisoned on and around the planet, at the D’Tarth’s expense; accepted the tax, which LeI privately found close to extortionate; and almost graciously offered to arrange for the hostages himself. Lel accepted all this, and found himself wondering why he wished they would make more trouble for him. He searched the old port admiral’s great green eyes, as they talked, for some kind of hint; but there was no expression in them that he was able to read, and shortly LeI began to feel like a child trying to stare down one of his elders.

  Finally they finished: the last of the documents of cooperation—submission, actually—signed and saved to data solids and to the curious liquid-gallium memory storage that the D’Tarth used for data. The less senior of the D’Tarth officers made their goodbyes, all politely, and loped out of the big bleak office where they had done their work. Only the port admiral hesitated, and LeI seized the moment.

  “Sir,”
he said, “I was hoping I might see one of your people here today, before we have to leave.”

  The port admiral blinked at him, a sleepy-cat look: but there was nothing sleepy about the eyes, not oblique now, but alert. “One of my staff, rrhn-Askhenazh’?”

  “No. I mean, not now, but formerly. Senior Commander Irrhun. “

  “Ah.” It was a sound that seemed as if a growl might have followed it, but was being restrained. “My apologies, rrhn. She was detained. She left a commcode for you, and coordinates.”

  Why did he wait till now to mention it? LeI thought.

  Well, never mind—business before pleasure, after all. “Thank you, sir,” he said.

  The port admiral recited a series of figures and standard characters, then said. “The coordinates are at some distance. We would be delighted to loan you a lowflier if it will expedite your visit.”

  —if it’ll get you out of here quicker, Lel heard under the rumble of words. He nodded. “Port Admiral,” he said, “I thank you very much.”

  LeI dismissed his crew to the ship and followed the port admiral a thousand meters or so across the field to a little fenced area, where several trim little hoppers stood. All their control couches were made for D’Tarth, naturally, so that a pilot would work on his belly rather than sitting up, but Irrhun had taught him the way of it a long time ago, and flying cat-style was no problem for Lei. He walked around the craft with the port admiral, accepted the starter solid from him, thanked him, got into the craft and sealed it up, and began his preflight checks.