The Fleet05 Total War Read online

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  THE MERCHANTMAN JABBED at the marauder with a spear of light—but the smaller ship leaped aside, almost seeming to disappear and reappear. The huge Terran vessel jabbed again, this time with its rear cannon, but the tiny marauder danced away, mocking them.

  “By all that’s holy!” the navigator swore. “Only a quarter our size, and we can’t hit them! What’s the matter, Captain? Don’t your boys know how to aim?”

  “I was top gunner at Target, Lieutenant,” the first officer snapped back. “But these aren’t exactly state-of-the-art lasers—and I only have two of them. Damn that mosquito!” He jammed the heel of his hand on the firing patch.

  On the screen, light blossomed where the smaller ship had been a half second before.

  “This is a liner and freighter, Lieutenant,” the captain said heavily. “We only carry minimal armament—not like that Navy ship you pushed until you signed on with us.”

  “If I’d known . . .” the navigator muttered—but he broke off, because the Khalian destroyer was suddenly much larger in the screen, and swelling.

  “He’s inside my guns!” the first officer yelled. “I can’t lock onto him, he’s too close! How the hell . . . ?”

  A grinding crash jolted the whole ship. The captain was the first to recover enough to pull his webbing loose, crying, “Pass out small arms to every able-bodied passenger, and fight for your lives! That ship just grappled us! They’re going to be cutting through and boarding, any second!”

  The crew scrambled to their feet, broke open the gun locker, and headed out into the passenger compartment, arms full of weapons.

  They were barely into the cabin before a section of wall blew in. Passengers screamed as sinuous Weasel shapes materialized out of the cloud of smoke, ruby beams stabbing out at the crew.

  The navigator howled and went down with a hole through his chest, exactly circular and neatly cauterized. The navigator and captain dodged aside, dropping the extra weapons and snapping shots at the invaders. One speared a Khalian through the shoulder; the creature screamed but caught the gun with its other hand and fired. The captain leaped back toward the bridge, and the Khalian’s beam scorched the wall. But the first was firing, enough to make a Weasel duck before he shot back. The beam reflected off the officer’s insignia and cut a furrow through a passenger’s arm, setting her sleeve ablaze. She screamed, and her husband shouted, batting out the flame. Then a slug thrower cracked, and a hole appeared in the wall right near the captain’s head. He returned the fire, and a Weasel shrieked—but so did the passengers as they felt the wind of atmosphere swooping toward the hole in the ship’s side and the vacuum beyond. Then the slug thrower cracked again, and the first dropped, blood spreading out from his shoulder.

  But a large, bulky shape rose up behind the pirates, a civilian in a business ensemble, drawing out an old-fashioned blackjack and clubbing at a Khalian. He connected, and the Khalian tumbled just as it squeezed off a beam at the captain, a beam that scribbled across the hull and went out just before it reached another screaming passenger. The captain’s own beam speared the largest Khalian, sending up smoke from leather armor, but the Khalian howled and shot back, and the captain tumbled, his gun falling loose.

  The big civilian swung at the armored Khalian.

  Another Weasel swung his arm up, deflecting the blackjack with a yell, and the big Khalian swung around in time to see the sap swinging toward him again. He screamed and ducked down, hurtling forward, and knocked into the big human, jolting him back into the aisle and shredding his jacket with sharp claws. The human started to lift the blackjack again, but five needle-sharp talons poised over his face, and the Khalian shrilled, “The course of wisdom is to relinquish your weapon.”

  The Terran dropped the blackjack, as much from astonishment as from fear, and the Khalian erupted into the squealing hiccups that served as the laughter of his race. “Yes, you are startled to see that I speak such excellent Terran, are you not? But then, warrior-in-disguise, I was a translator in our Khalian Intelligence during the war. And you? Surely the only one of these monkeys who dared fight must have been a warrior once. What is your name, what was your rank?”

  “Sales,” the Terran ground out. “Lohengrin Sales. Lieutenant Commander.”

  “Ah, yes! The quaint custom of your kind—to give name and rank only! But was there not something more? A number? Yes, you Terrans are numbers as much as names, are you not?” And the Weasel gave his shrill, piping giggle again.

  “And you?” the Terran grunted. “Your name?”

  The talons danced dangerously. “Be wary, Sales. I honor you for having fought, but not so highly as to give you the power of my name. You are vanquished, after all.”

  “No.” Sales spat. “We conquered Khalia.”

  The claws darted down, but halted a fraction of an inch from Sales’s eyes. He kept his face carefully immobile—and was shocked to see that the Khalian was doing the same. The Weasel had exercised self-control!

  “You did not conquer,” the Weasel hissed. “Some few of my more tenderhearted countrymen were infuriated to discover that we had been deceived by our supposed allies of your kind, the Syndicate, and in their anger allied with you.” The talons danced again. “Is that not so?”

  Sales ignored the glittering points. “If you know that, why have you attacked us? We are not of the Syndicate! We are your allies!”

  “No, not mine,” the Khalian hissed. “Alliance with an enemy? Never! I, at least, would not accept such dishonor! See what comes of it—monkeys like these around us, thinking that Khalians did surrender! No, never will I be party to so disastrous an alliance! I will die fighting you, if I can, as I should have before the truce! And all of my crew wish to do so, too. But we will take as many of you as we can, first! We will slay you all, any of your race! We will punish all humans—the Fleet, and its Terran sheep—for killing Khalians.”

  “It is wrong,” Sales gritted. “Deaths in war should not be avenged during peacetime.”

  “Peace has not come for me! The war has never ended! Rightly or wrongly, the only safety for Khalians is punishing those who kill Khalians! And we will slay those of the Syndicate, for exploiting us—suborning and then betraying us. We will bring you all down to death, or dishonor.”

  “Your own people have commanded all Khalians to lay down their arms! If you do not do so, you will be an outlaw.”

  “An outlaw,” the Weasel agreed, “never to see my ancestral hold again, never to feel the earth of Khalia beneath my feet, never to scent its sweet breezes!” The talons danced, and one drew a line of pain down Sales’s cheek. “You are unwise to remind me of this!”

  Sales ignored the pain, and the alarm that fed it. “The ways of wisdom do not always accord with the ways of honor.”

  “Honor, yes. Honor demands signs of victory.” The Khalian’s gaze darted down to Sales’s chest, and his snout split with a grimace that was a Khalian smile. His other hand moved at Sales’s throat, and the Terran tensed, but the Khalian laughed. “Softly, Sales, softly! What is a strip of cloth, after all, against a life?”

  Everything, Sales knew—to a Khalian. Any sort of trophy taken from one of them was dishonor. But he was a human, so he lay frozen as the Khalian whipped the brightly colored band from around his neck. “Is it not pretty?” the Weasel cried, then whistled the same phrase in his own language—and his crew laughed with him.

  They sounded like a psychotic calliope, Sales thought. He knew what the big Khalian had said to his men, because he knew Khalian as well as the Weasel knew Terran.

  The leade
r draped the tie around his own neck and bent it into a clumsy knot. “There! See, I too am a Terran businessman! This is my trophy! Do each of you also take one!”

  With whistles of agreement, the Khalians turned to tear at the civilians’ neckties. With cries of dismay, the men untied their decorations quickly.

  “Thus shall you know me, if ever we meet again,” the big Khalian told Sales.

  The Terran smiled, without mirth. “Shall I? Or shall we all burn, when you are done looting this ship?”

  “Oh, we shall take the whole ship for our loot! But you have a launch, have you not? A ‘lifeboat,’ that is your term for it. Yes, we shall set you adrift in that, those of you who are not foolish enough to fight, and not skilled enough to die fighting.”

  Sales reddened.

  The Khalian showed his teeth in a grin. “Be glad, Sales. Your clumsiness has saved your life. No, I will let all of you go, alive, to carry word back to your fellow Terrans of me and my crew—that they may know not to dare ply the space about Khalia again, lest we fall upon them!”

  “Indeed,” said Sales, with the closest he could come to scorn. “And how shall we tell them of you, when we do not know your name—you who are so good of heart as to let us live?”

  His sarcasm was lost on the Khalian. “Good of heart? Why, that will be a most excellent name! Yes, tell them I am Goodheart, and that they shall know me by these brightly colored strips of cloth my crew and I shall wear! Tell them of Goodheart, that they may tremble in fear!”

  “Goodheart,” Sales agreed, with a sour smile. “Goodheart, the pirate.”

  “Goodheart!” the Khalian shrilled to his crew in his own language. “Do you hear? He has given me my name, the name which shall make Terrans tremble! From this time forth, I am Captain Goodheart!”

  The crew’s approval was a chorus of whistles that fairly drilled through the Terrans’ brains.

  * * *

  The launch was jammed full, and the Khalians were none too gentle about pushing the passengers aboard. The women screamed in fright, and some of the men, too. Then Captain Goodheart snapped, “Stand clear!” and two of his Weasels stepped in, brandishing rifles. The crowd screamed and pressed back away from them, jamming up against one another.

  Then, while the two crewmen held them back with their rifles, two others brought in an improvised stretcher with the captain’s unconscious form on it. They went out, then returned with the first officer, again unconscious. Lastly, they brought in the draped body of the dead navigator. They stepped out, and the passengers were silent, awed. Then the two guards backed away, and Sales stepped in.

  He turned to face the big Khalian in the hatchway. “I thank you for your courtesy to my fallen countrymen.”

  “I honor them,” the pirate answered. “They fought, willingly if not well.” Then his lips writhed back in a grin. “Remember me, Sales—and remember my kindness.”

  He hit the pressure patch, and the hatch swung closed. “Oh, don’t worry,” Sales murmured. “I’ll remember you, all right.”

  “You damn fool!” a passenger cried. “You damn near got us all killed back there!”

  The crowd, given a scapegoat, suddenly turned into a mob, all shouting blame and accusation at Sales.

  He whirled about and, in his best quarterdeck voice, bellowed, “Grab hold!”

  Cries of incredulity answered him, but some of the civilians had been in the Fleet, and grabbed for the nearest seat-back or rack, yelling to others to do the same. Sales himself just barely managed to grab hold of a tie-ring before a giant kicked their ship like a football, and it shot out into space.

  People screamed, and the ones who had ignored Sales slammed down against one another, then ran stumbling backward to be plastered against the aft bulkhead. Sales felt sorry for the ones on the bottom of the pile, but he knew someone had to direct this launch, or they’d be off course before they even began.

  Assuming, of course, that the Weasels weren’t planning to use them for target practice.

  He didn’t think they were, Sales thought, as he struggled fore through the press of bodies. The Weasels wouldn’t have wasted a good ship that way. Goodheart had already shown that he cared a lot about public opinion; he wasn’t about to shoot down helpless refugees.

  He elbowed the last passenger aside, ignoring his angry shout, and pulled himself into the cockpit. Just then, the acceleration eased off, and he almost fell against the forward port, but caught himself in time, pushed himself back into the pilot’s chair, and pulled the shock webbing across his body almost by reflex. Then he reached out and turned on the board. Lights winked across its surface, and the big screen next to the port glowed into life. Sales slapped at patches, activating the sensors, but not the beacon.

  The merchantman was already moving. Goodheart wasn’t wasting time—he was getting out, before Sales could call for help.

  Passengers jammed the hatch behind him, and a man called out, “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing!”

  “Calling for help,” Sales answered. But he kept his eyes glued to the screen as he turned on the log recorder, watching and noting coordinates until the merchantman suddenly blurred and winked out, into hyperspace. Then, finally, Sales reached out and turned on the beacon.

  He turned around and said to the men jamming the opening, “Tell everyone to find seats, if they can, and see if there’s a doctor or a nurse to keep an eye on the captain and the first.”

  One of the men turned away to carry the message, but another glared in outrage. “Who the hell put you in charge?”

  “Yeah!” said the other man. “Who do you think you are, anyway?”

  ”Lohengrin Sales,” he answered. “Lieutenant Commander, Fleet Intelligence.”

  * * *

  “Sit down, Commander,” the admiral said, not looking up from his desk screen. Sales relaxed a little and took the straight chair in front of the desk. The walls were almost invisible in the murk left by the single pool of light on the admiral’s desk. The glow of the screen was brighter, though, and lit the man’s face from below, giving him a supernatural look. Good, Sales thought. It takes something supernatural to fight demons.

  The admiral looked up. “You acquitted yourself admirably, Commander. It’s just lucky for those civilians that you happened to be on a mission to Terran HQ.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “But why did you have nothing but a blackjack, may I ask?”

  “Spaceport security, sir. Civilians aren’t allowed to carry weapons aboard, and blackjacks don’t show up on screens—if they don’t have any metal parts.”

  The admiral nodded. “We’ve sent your courier pack on to Terra with another messenger. It was lucky those pirates didn’t think to search you—diplomatic documents with Khalian seals would never have gotten past them.”

  ”They would have used them for kindling, sir. Now that that mission’s out of my hands, may I request reassignment?”

  The admiral smiled. “To what, Commander?”

  “To pirate extermination, sir,” Sales answered.

  The admiral nodded. “Good idea. I was just about to assign you to track down Captain Goodheart, as it happens. And, by the way, you’re promoted—to full commander.”

  * * *

  There was discussion among the crew about the captain’s taking of a Terran name, of course.

  “I could understand his giving the humans a name to call him by,” said Pralit, one of the CPOs, “but abandoning his family name, his clan name? How can this be good?”

  “There is a way,” Xlitspee, a crewman, assured, if somewhat desperately. “There must be—for our captain is the bravest of we orphans of Khalia. “

  “What did you say?” Houpiel snapped.

  “That the captain is the bravest,” Xlitspee answered, frowning.

  “No—you said we are ‘orph
ans of Khalia’!”

  They were silent, letting the implications of the term sink in.

  “If that is so,” said Pralit, “perhaps his taking of a new name is fitting.”

  “Even if it is only a human name, translated to the Khalian tongue?”

  “Of course.” Pralit managed a grin. “We understand the meaning of it, in all its sarcasm.”

  “Not that there is not something of truth in it,” Houpiel temporized, “though more of irony.”

  “Far more of irony,” Xlitspee said, suiting his tone to the word.

  They looked up as Saulpeen, the first officer, came in. “What says he?” asked the second. The officers had so far been silent.

  “That we, too, should take new names,” Saulpeen answered. “More, he wishes you each to take a name that is an aspect of his.”

  The wardroom filled with shrill cries of consternation.

  “Be still!” the second cried. “You have seen sense in his change of name; hear his sense in changing ours!”

  “Why,” said Saulpeen, “the sense is that your names will show your allegiance to him—as will be needed, if your clan names are forgot.”

  “Forgot!”

  “Forgot,” Saulpeen said, his tone hardening, “for the captain means to gather in your fellow exiles—all they who are Khalia’s new orphans—and he does not wish that age-old clan feuds should arise to divide we outcasts, who need each other most. “

  The wardroom was quiet as the crew looked at one another, then looked away. They were all men of one clan, and the thought of alliance with enemies was detestable—but Khalian enemies were better than human.

  “And,” said the second, finishing the train of thought, “if there are no clan names, there can be no clan feuds. It is very wise, Saulpeen.”

  “Very,” the first agreed, “but from this time forth, I am Saulpeen no longer. I shall henceforth be Throb.”