The Fleet-Book Four Sworn Allies Read online

  eventhorizonpg.com

  WE HAVE ALWAYS had our broken men, and I suppose we always shall. Nobody pays them any special heed. They are harmless, almost invisible, bits of wreckage that drift about until they sink from sight or the waves cast them ashore to lie among empty shells and strewn bones. Most never get far from the places of their ruin. A few somehow scrape together passage money or find berths on ships whose owners begrudge the cost of proper robotics. Thus they escape, once, twice, even a dozen times, telling themselves that beyond these next light-years there surely waits the opportunity, the luck, the fresh dream that is all they need to build their lives over again. At last they too strand and go no farther.

  I met this one in Wang Fang’s, on the Fever Coast of Selvas on San Valerio. Nothing much had changed in the years since my last visit. The west side of the building still stood open to catch any breeze off the bay, which glimmered oily black under the clotted red stars of Horn’s Cluster. Nonetheless the tin roof trapped smoke and stenches, while you seemed less to breathe than to drink the air. Sweat plastered shirt to skin. At the far end Madame Sylphide’s bulk still overflowed her throne. Half featherless, her parrot danced madly on the tables in exchange for gulps from the customers’ cups. The tunes out of the multi were as raucous as ever. They were local men, Chambois sailors and Maraisard swamprunners, who sat crowded, talked, laughed, growled, shook dice or slapped cards. A few girls circulated, cadging drinks. Now and then one of them got somebody, usually a very young fellow, to go into the back room with her. When he returned, his friends were apt to make game of him, and custom required that he merely reply in kind, not invite any of them outside for a slash session.

  Often you’ll see three or four foreigners as well, no tourists—the guides don’t want to risk that—but old acquaintances like me, who drop in whenever they happen by. We have enough of the patois and we know how to behave, the ritual bow to Wang Fang’s skull, the respects paid to Madame, the cognac bought for her and her bird, the offside table taken. Those men who care to talk with us will stroll over and do so; or we’ll swap stories with each other, till the bay shore treetops turn orange with dawn and we walk back to our aircars through a field of knee-deep fog. It’s a place for stories. That’s mainly why we come.

  On this night I was the only such. It didn’t matter. Ancre-Jacques left his neighbors and joined me. We had much to tell from the time that had passed. I was third mate in the Freuchen when she took Sarauw’s team to Grayworld on the expedition that found a ten-million-year-old machine still at work—

  Jacques was describing his brush with a pirate submarine in the Amazonian Sea when abruptly he broke off and squinted past me, through the smoke, toward the entrance. “Why, there’s La Balafre Triangulaire,” he said. “I thought he was out on Cap Trahison.” He raised a mighty arm and bellowed, “Eh-ah, rogue, over here!” In those parts, “coquin” comes near being an endearment. To me: “Poor devil, he’s always pitifully glad to meet spacefarers. A decent sort, makes himself useful in small ways, and he saved two children when the Fou Rieur tidal bore caught them.” They have small respect for the laws of God and man on the Fever Coast, but a great deal for physical courage, and in their fashion they are not unkindly.

  Turning my head, I saw the newcomer approach. Though tall, he was so thin that I wondered how he had carried out the rescue. His build, sunburned fair skin, and sandy hair marked him out startlingly. In clothes faded and patched but clean, he made his way among the tables with a stiff carefulness that told me he was already half drunk. When he reached us, I saw the jagged scar from his right temple to the corner of his mouth that gave him his nickname.

  Jacques invited him to sit down but didn’t introduce us. That isn’t done there, because some men have reason not to want it. My Firestar Line emblem identified me well enough. La Balafre Triangulaire nodded gravely and took a chair. Jacques shouted for more eau de mort all around. “My friend is newly in from Eisenheim, and was doing exploratory work before that, “ he explained.

  Washed-out blue eyes seemed to kindle just a bit. “Eisenheim?” said Balafre. His voice was very low. I guessed that drink was what had hoarsened it and, from the accent, that the mother tongue was English. “Second planet of Schelling’s”—he stumbled through a catalogue designation I didn’t know but recognized as naval—“if I remember rightly?” I nodded. “Then did you earlier, by any chance, call at Belisarius?” His fingers gripped the tabletop. “It’s a planet of Third Grigorian’s. In the Canopus sector. Have you heard of it?”

  “No and yes, in that order,” I answered. “We had no reason to stop there. It’s strictly a Fleet Base.”

  His words wavered. “But did you at least hear something of it, at some port along your way? Any news or—It’s so bloody far from us. We’re so isolated on this damned continent. “ He swallowed, drew the rags of his dignity about himself, and finished, “I beg your pardon. You wonder what cause a beachcomber has to inquire.”

  “Well, you’ve been a spaceman yourself,’’’ I ventured. He didn’t seem dangerously touchy.

  “Not quite,” he sighed. “Not of your kind. Although once—but that was long ago.” He looked vaguely beyond me. “How long? Let me see, I’ve been on San Valerio seven years, is it? That would be about five standard. And before then—No, never mind, I verge on self-pity, the most contemptible of emotions. Worse, I bore you.”

  “No, no,” I said, for I scented a story in him, and Jacques’s expression confirmed it. The liquor arrived and I paid. Balafre regained graciousness as he thanked me. He sipped with care, obviously trying to maintain a precise, desired level of tipsiness.

  I heard a few anecdotes from this vicinity. He had a shack under the bluffs, made his living by odd jobs and picking over the ebb tides for rock pearls, got his scar when he stumbled across a ripfish. They could have repaired the damage at the clinic in Senville, an hour away by a bus that landed weekly, but he preferred to spend the money on booze. Porto Blanco, across the ocean, might as well have been on a moon. Not that he was a mindless derelict. He spent most of his abundant free time at the little terminal in his hut, screening books, drama, music from the global database.

  After a while we realized we’d slipped into English, and offered Jacques our apologies. He laughed. “It’s practice for me to listen,” he said. “I deal with outsiders more than you may think, me. But when you speak of . . . Aristotle, the name? . . . and of what is justice, that is water over this head and I bid you good drinking, my friends.”

  He got up and sought back to his own kind. Balafre and I talked till morning. If took nearly that long to get the real tale out of him—not that he had never told anybody else, but I was a stranger and he clung to his remnant of pride. Yet I too had read philosophers and seen a fair amount of worlds. In the end he decided that my opinion was as worth hearing as some priest’s or sea captain’s or wise old fisher wife’s. Had he received justice or was he the victim of a cruel wrong?

  Assuredly they had not accorded him mercy.

  * * *

  “Lieutenant Arthur Laing, to report to Vice Admiral Derabina.”

  The ensign behind the desk nodded, touched a button, and said, “A few minutes, I think. Have a seat.” He went back to whatever he was doing on a computer. Idle hours were scarce on Belisarius, and would be till Christina had been freed of the Khalia.

  Restless, Laing ignored furniture and paced across the bleak little anteroom. Brought to this planet today, he felt light under two fifths of standard gravity. He wished the heaviness inside him could be abolished as easily.

  Well,
but wasn’t he supposed to play a part in the liberation? An important part, maybe crucial—whatever it was.

  At the wall he stopped, and stared out. Before him was not a viewscreen, only a window. The Fleet had cut every possible comer in its haste. A year ago there had been nothing on this world but rock, sand, dust, ice, and the sole official name it had had was a catalogue number, unless, you wanted to say, “Third Grigorian’s IV.”

  When it shone in the skies of Christina, we used to call it Ruby, Laing thought: But that was just to ourselves, Tess and me.

  Dwarfed, the sun hung low in a ruddy heaven. Away from it, a few stars were visible through the tenuous air. The light fell pale across wasteland and the spacefield. He saw a shuttlecraft, newly down from orbit, and several ground crewmen, their suits and helmets calling to mind robots or trolls. Along the edge of ferro-concrete stretched bare metal walls. The skeleton of a monitor tower loomed behind them.

  Here in the office, recycling was less than perfect; a chemical harshness tainted the breaths he drew. He remembered odors of growth and blossoming on Christina. How rare life was in the universe, how infinitely wonderful and precious. It seemed wrong to destroy even Khalia.

  But that had to be done, of course.

  “Lieutenant Laing?”

  The voice at his back brought him around to confront a man who bore commander’s insignia. He saluted. The man responded, then smiled half shyly and said, “Never mind about ceremony. I’m Ian Maclaurin.” His English had a slight burr. He was surprisingly young for his rank, slim, blond, boyish-faced. Promotion in the Fleet could be fast, though, when a war was under way and a person had special capabilities.

  “Oh, the, uh, psychophysicist? I’ve heard your name mentioned, but I’m afraid I’m in the dark about what you actually do.”

  They shook hands. “I’m pretty ignorant about you, so that puts us on the same footing,” Maclaurin said. “And we’re also fellow Scots, aren’t we?”

  “Only by rather distant ancestry in my case,” Laing replied. “I was born on Caesar. You?”

  “Well, Dunbar, but they’ve kept the ethnos—recreated it, actually. People from the old country on Earth come to marvel at our picturesque ways.” They sat down opposite and close to each other. “I hoped I’d find you waiting. The admiral’s predictably behind schedule, as overworked as she is. Here’s our chance to get a little acquainted. We ought to spend days on it, but we won’t be granted them.”

  In spite of the immediate liking he felt, unease tingled in Laing. “How necessary is it?” he asked. “Not that I’m being standoffish, but—What do they want me for, anyway?”

  Maclaurin watched him closely from behind the geniality. “Haven’t you tried to guess?”

  “No. “Laing constructed a smile. “I’m a scientist by trade. It’s bad form to make ‘hypotheses ‘in the absence of data. Nobody has told me anything except that this is secret and urgent. Obviously it involves my knowledge of Christina. “

  “Of what?”

  Laing realized that Maclaurin must be new here himself. Besides, the name was unofficial, casually decided on at mess one evening in honor of an actress famous at the time. She too was beautiful. “The third planet, that the Khalia are on.”

  “Och, aye. Should have deduced that on the instant, Maclaurin said. “Yes, you’re right, we require a person familiar, very familiar with it, and specifically with the territory where the Khalia are. Your name popped out of the data scan.”

  “Why me? Hundreds of people must have been on Christina from time to time since Grigorian reached this system. Yes, I know most of them didn’t do work that involved them especially, or at all, with Mozart, as we came to call that area. But I could name you a dozen at least other than me, starting with my wife, who spent years there, and—It depends on what aspect of it you have in mind, but whatever that is, I’ll bet I can tell you who’s the real expert.” Insofar as we have any, Laing’s mind added. Christina’s a whole world, as big and varied and mysterious as ever Earth was.

  “I didn’t make the choice, but I know the reason,” Maclaurin told him. “They’re civilians, who scattered from end to end of Alliance space after we evacuated them. Any whom we might locate and who might be willing to serve would lack naval training and not be subject to naval discipline. You’re the one member of the Fleet who appeared to have the necessary information.’”

  “Reservist. A glorified civilian, really.”

  Maclaurin shrugged. “Well, the Fleet could recall you to active duty and bring you here.” He cocked his head. “Surprising that you’re not a regular officer, grown up in the Fleet, if you were born on Caesar.”

  “Civilians are in the majority there too, regardless of any popular impression. My wife, now, she’s a Fleet brat.”

  “But I gather that she never enlisted, while you did.”

  Laing bridled. What the hell right had this dipnose to probe him?

  It was as if Tess stood beside him again, blade-straight, red hair ruffled by the wind that sent banners snapping and streaming, afire with pride as the graduating cadets paraded by, her brother in the first rank of them. Again she racked back a drunk in a bar, some kind of pacifist, who had sneered at the Fleet, till the wretch stumbled away from her, half terrified. Again she lay in his, her bridegroom’s, arms and murmured, “Yes, I know I have something of a father fixation, but Dad is magnificent and, and it doesn’t stop me from loving you, darling.” Again she jubilated when he told her he had decided to join, and again when he received his commission, though she knew his reasons and respected them and laughed that she’d have made a dreadful wife for any officer bent on a real Fleet career.

  “I’m sorry,” Maclaurin said. “I do apologize. No wish to intrude on your privacy, I swear. Nor to insult your intelligence. I have studied your dossier and already know the general course of your life to date, plus your psychoprofile, medical history, et cetera, et cetera. But that tells me little about the inner you. The mission has a better chance of succeeding if I get a sense of you as a whole human being, not a disembodied file of data. My job is as much art as science, and I suspect more black magic than either. So, yes, I am leading you in conversation about yourself.”

  “I see.” Mollified, Laing felt a perhaps irrational eagerness to explain, to justify. “My wife did dream of serving. Throughout her girlhood, she meant to. But gradually she found that what absorbed her more, and what she was best qualified for, was ethology. Loosely speaking, natural history. Really mastering that and doing it demanded full time.” Again they stood on the university campus under a midnight moon and she wept, “I’m not disappointing my father too much, am I, am I?”

  Maclaurin nodded. “More valuable to civilization too, I daresay.”

  “Well, somebody has to mount guard against the murderous likes of the Khalia.”

  “So you decided to enlist?”

  “Not out of altruism,” Laing admitted. “For one thing, the Weasels hadn’t attacked anybody yet that we knew of.”

  Now I, the detached and broad-minded scholar, am talking of them, yes, thinking of them like the lowest-browed slog-foot Marine. Well, I am not ashamed of myself. What they have done, what they do, is a horror, a menace, an abomination. It must be ended. That they swept into this system and disrupted our work among the amadei—the Fleet got us out barely in time—is small indeed, set beside what they wreak elsewhere. But it is what has hurt Tess and me in our own lives. Not just the cutting off of the research. The amadei were like children to us, the children we have not had ourselves.

  He pulled out of his thoughts and continued: “Ironic, eh, that I should be the one of us who did? But quite logical. You doubtless know how the Fleet helps underwrite scientific and exploratory projects that have potential, value to it. Man-habitable planets like Christina aren’t exactly common. Whether or not eventual colonization is contemplated—and in this case, our r
ecommendation against it is as strong as we could find words for—they will likely sometime become involved in operations, as places to establish bases or resupply or simply give crews on long missions a bit of R&R in a pleasant setting. So they need to be studied beforehand. But the Fleet naturally wants personnel of its own on the teams. Well, I’m a generalized biologist. My work doesn’t require the continuity that my wife’s does. It doesn’t suffer if I take occasional time off it. We found out that the Fleet would subsidize research on Christina, which we’d decided was our ideal lifetime project, if at least one of its officers was permanently engaged there. Her father pulled a few wires and, well, that’s how it came about.” He paused. “I’m rehashing what you know.”

  “Not entirely,” Maclaurin said. “Or to the extent you do, I repeat, it’s valuable to me to hear arid see you giving me your perspective on matters.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Laing requested. “I didn’t join grudgingly.” It made Tess so radiantly glad—“I like the Fleet, its people, its traditions. My tours of duty have been short, agreeable diversions, a taste of the outside universe after many months in wilderness. But I am basically a scientist, not a warrior.”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” Maclaurin assured him. “As long as you’re prepared to do your duty—”

  “Admiral Derabina will see you now, gentlemen;” the ensign called.

  They entered the inner office together. It was as cramped and gauntly functional as everything else on ‘Belisarius, but not devoid of character. On the walls hung framed copies of citations for excellent service or outright heroism, together with pictures taken at the storming of Mount Satan and the defense of Kamehameha. On the desk, besides a terminal and communicator, stood a model of an attack ranger that Laing supposed had been Derabina’s first command. He and Maclaurin snapped to attention and saluted.

  The admiral returned the gesture crisply. “At ease,” she said. “Be seated.” It sounded more like an order than an invitation. Yelena B. Derabina was a stocky woman whose face, beneath the short gray hair, made Laing think of ancient Tartars. En route he had occasionally heard her called a martinet and always heard her called humorless, but those who served under her and survived it developed a special esprit de corps. “Borisovna’s Bastards” got things done, and done right.