The Fleet Book 2: Counter Attack Read online

  “So you’ve been down once?” Mack asked, swallowing a quick cup of caffeine.

  Kavid waved a negative, still staring at the forward viewscreen, and presented four fingers. “Four times. Once because they steered me in while the fighting was still going on. I felt like a damned pogo stick: Boing, down, up. It’s a good thing I was strapped in. Damned near lost my teeth. The other three times I brought wounded back. The prep rooms are full. I’m going to get good and drunk when I go off duty.” He punched a control button, and the view changed briefly to their aft. The gigantic ring-shaped form of Elizabeth Blackwell was quickly receding.”

  “I believe it,” Dalle said, and sipped his coffee in silence. He read down the list of shuttles and their pilots on a side screen, noting the indicator which showed whether the scooter was in the docking bay, in transit, or dirtside. “FMS-27, Jericho, bay; FMS-28, Otlind, transit; FMS-.29, Cooper, Target . . .” and all the way to one which was flashing: “FMS-47, Schawn, Target.”

  He pictured Leo as she was the last time he had seen her, laughing over a game or a drink in the rec room, surrounded by their friends. The pilots did fraternize with the doctors, at least on Elizabeth, during the year she had been assigned aboard her. There were so many who overlapped into both functions, like Mack himself, both shaman and bus driver. Leo was a birdlike female—with a long, swanlike neck, and vestigial feathers along, her forearms and the nape, of her neck—from some interesting genetic cross between an avian race and some humanoid stock. She put up with the usual bird jokes with grace, retorting with wit directed at monkeys and pigs.

  Target zoomed in on them from the corrected view. Kavid cut in the jets, and, the shuttle tilted and set down on its side in a dirt area that was obviously normally used for livestock. Empty feed troughs stood at the perimeter of the field. “Your shuttle’s that way,” Dray pointed to planetary west between two of the wooden troughs. “Sorry I can’t get you closer, but I’ve got to get moving.”

  Mack shouldered his diagnosti-kit and picked his way out of the farmyard, avoiding the newest deposits of excrement. He passed through a wooden gate into a beautifully laid out garden of exotic flowers and pretty stones. Three of Kavid’s “feather-faces” peered out at him timidly from a glassless casement, their multicolored faces almost as exotic as their garden. Dalle and they stared at each other for a moment, and then he went on westward.

  His monitor tracer gave him no clear idea where to look for the scooter. Undoubtedly, there were more wounded around than Leo had managed to pick up before she disappeared, so there wasn’t a concentration of red lights by which he could judge. He was afraid that she must be dead. He couldn’t believe that in an organization so rife with communications backups as the Fleet she could be conscious anywhere and still remain out of touch.

  A handful of Alliance marines, their tan uniforms coated with dust, saluted him as they passed. He returned the salute sharply. “Have you seen a grounded med scooter?” he asked them. They pointed back over their shoulders, and he plodded on.

  Scooter FMS-47 lay in the rubble of a blasted cottage, smooth blue-grey surrounded by splintered brown. There were five feather-face bodies lying outward near where the door had been, surrounded by pots and rolls of textiles: residents fleeing with their little household goods. A clutch of dead Khalia sprawled nearby, fur mottled with laser burns and bullet holes. No Fleet or Alliance dead. This must have been one of the more successful skirmishes. Dalle had to step right over one of them to get to the starboard hatch. He rolled the Khalian over with one foot. Its face had been punched inward and charred black with a laser blast. Dalle gave it another push so it landed facedown again.

  He put his palm on the door lock and waited. A beep deep sounded within, and the door slid back. Dalle took a step to the side. A low, wide ramp extruded itself at his feet, and he walked into the ship, bowing a little to pass under the arch.

  The two patients-were there, and one of them stirred as the door opened. “Doc?”

  “Yes?” Dalle came over to the woman and took her wrist. The stocky woman’s pulse was strong, and the monitor showed her vitals to be good. At first he thought the bandages over her eyes hid the only wound, but when she sat up, he saw that there was a leg missing. Her hair was scorched, leaving a bald place over her left eye that stretched to the crown of her head.

  “You’re not the same doc,” the marine accused, gently touching his chest with one hand.

  “I’m Mack,” he said, in a soothing, professional voice. “Hasn’t Leo been back? Is anyone else here?”

  “Nope. Just the guy breathing over there.” Mack glanced over at the other marine, who was in deep sleep. His wounds were more extensive than the woman’s, though not as severe.

  “Do you need anything, corporal?”

  “Nope,” the woman said. “Doc told me they’d try to do something about my eyes later. I’m okay for now.”

  Stoic, Mack thought. Or shock. ”Fine. I’m going to look for Leo and the rest of the wounded out there, and then we’ll be heading back to the hospital.”

  “That’s okay, Doc. Thanks.” The woman settled back onto her bunk, patting her bandage to keep it in place.

  There were no other sounds within except the chucklings of the ship’s systems maintaining themselves, but he heard shuffling feet running outside. “Leo?” he called.

  Mack was just in time to see a white-backed shape vanishing around the comer of a mostly intact house to his left. “Hello?” He stabbed at the communicator button on his sleeve, on general immediate-range broadcast. “Hello? I am Dr. Dalle. Please identify yourself.” No reply. It couldn’t have been Leo, or any other Fleet personnel. He hadn’t received even an echo from a nearby transmitter. A Khalian? A live Khalian in this area? His hand twisted forward to his sleeve.

  Mack took another quick look around for the missing pilot, his hand curled under to the arming switch that operated the weapon hidden under the medical insignia on his sleeve. It was a laser, with a self-contained battery good for three short-range but powerful shots. He admitted at last that Leo was nowhere around, and went back to the scooter to begin his rounds.

  “Doc?” the marine called out.

  “Just me,” Mack said, and started gathering equipment. The motorized travois, a rolling two-tiered gurney for four, was, moored just forward of the inside hatch. He unfastened the straps holding it in place, and manipulated the control lead, a long, curving neck of metal that terminated in a tiny ten-button keypad, until the trolley followed him at heel out of the ship like an obedient three-wheeled dog. His medical paraphernalia rode on the near end of the cart, ostentatiously marked with the same red caduceus he wore. He had no armaments in plain view, but the laser was ready. He was also running through everything he knew about unarmed combat with opponents that bite, a required course ordered by Commander Tolbert.

  He passed hundreds of featherhead natives, who all stared at him without comprehension. “I bet they don’t even understand they’ve been invaded twice,” Mack said to himself, sarcastically, stopping to run the portable monitor over the body of a very large Alliance marine. There were no wounds visible, not even bruises, but the man was deeply unconscious. Mack couldn’t even guess what had happened to him. The echo of the heartbeat and brain functions was weak, but the frequency monitor remained clearly on red, not blue. The cleanup shift would come in for the dead, later on after the battle had ended or moved on, led by the blue frequency band.

  After dispensing a “shock absorber” to the marine, Dalle pushed, pulled, and shoved him into the shelter of the low eaves of a hut. To pick him up on the outward journey made it more awkward to haul the motorized travois Dalle pulled behind him. It made more sense to haul it out empty, and pick up the wounded on his way back to the ship. He had three other life monitors on his, scope along this vector. In his condition, the man would last until Dalle came back.

  A sharp crack! s
tartled him, and Dalle stopped cold, listening. Someone was stalking him. The image of the white figure haunted him. He wished that he had been able to get a clear look at it. Pok, the sound of a footstep, came right behind him. He spun and dropped just as a laser blast seared overhead and gouged a five-inch strip of plaster out of a wall. The plaster exploded with a loud bang! Mack gulped. On his belly, he wriggled over to the travois, hid in its shelter. A second blast ricocheted silently off the shiny metal of the travois’s surface, heating up the place just in front of his head, and peeling more stucco from a building facade with a crack that echoed down the street. He peered around the gurney’s front end, readying his laser, but there was nothing to shoot at. His assailant was well hidden. Mack didn’t want to expose himself, but he could, have a long wait before being rescued, and there were the wounded to consider. He craned his neck around the metal frame, and swept an eye over the square. There wasn’t much left of the buildings on that side, but the ragged lean-tos formed by fallen timbers and panels made terrific places for snipers to hide.

  A bullet zinged past him from the other direction. Mack buried himself in the broken quartz paving and tried to scramble backward out of the way. That shot came from a walkway between two of the brown and white wooden houses. Dalle lay flat and spat out gravel. The laser shrieked again, sounding near to overheating. At the same time more bullets flew from the other side of the square.

  “Stay down, dammit!” barked a male voice. Another scream, animal this time, tore the air, and the laser bolts stopped coming. There was a rush and rumbling, and more of the masonry fell in. Dalle, with a cautious eye on the heaped rubble, rose and dusted himself off.

  “You’re a doc?” a voice gritted from the walkway. Dalle activated a powerful tight-beam torch and shone it into the alley. He let out an involuntary hiss. There was an Alliance marine sergeant lying braced against a wall with a broad hand pressed to his side. His helmet was gone, and his eyebrows were drawn down with the pain.

  “Help me.” The left side of the man’s face was torn open, and his other arm, thickly muscled, rested bonelessly on his lap. Blood dripped purposefully from his wounds, showing the heart muscle was still working hard, and nothing had clotted yet. This must have happened just before Dane moved into the middle of the firefight. Dalle swallowed, looking around for Khalia. Dead ones lay at grotesque angles all over the street, some spilling out of a crashed floater. No living ones were in sight. He knelt by the marine, prying the man’s strong fingers away from the wound. He squeezed anesthetic and antibiotic over it, and probed gently with his fingers. There were shards of bone mixed in with the shredded muscle.

  “Slug-thrower,” the marine told him through gritted teeth. “Big one.”

  “I hope you got him,” Dalle said, without looking up. He pulled bone splinters away from the great blood vessel and held the vein shut with his fingers until he could clamp it with a temporary. He unfolded a heavy soft dressing and fitted it over the tear. It would hold together until they got back to the hospital ship. He didn’t want to plant new skin on it until he had a chance for adequate debridement, and this was no place to do it.

  “I do, too,” the marine assured him. “Can you get me out of here?”

  Dalle rose to his feet, wiping his hands down the sides of his jumpsuit, leaving red streaks in the dust. “Wait here for me. I won’t be more than five minutes. I’ve got two others on scope. They’re just a little way from here.”

  “No!” The wounded man tried to struggle to his feet. “You’ve got your trolley. Take me back!”

  “I can’t yet.” Dalle tried to explain about the travois’s limited capabilities, but the marine drew his sidearm and leveled it on him. “Let’s go, doctor,” he said in a low voice trembling with pain and stress. “Now. I’ll die if you don’t get me to a hospital right away.”

  Dalle stood his ground. This was not his first battle, or his first threat. War affected strong men in odd ways. “I can’t, soldier, but more than that, I won’t. Those could be men from your command out there. Even if you won’t, I must give them every chance of survival. You’ll last.” And he turned purposely away, looking into his monitor and not at the wounded sergeant. The man had behaved in a perfectly understandable and predictable manner, and so, after much practice and many battles, was Mack’s response. He kept his muscles taut as he walked. If the man was going to shoot at him, it would be . . . Now! His head jerked up nervously in anticipation, but the shot didn’t come. He relaxed with a sigh. The sergeant would wait. The logic, however inhumane it seemed at first, had gotten through to him. It did, in eight times out of ten—and only one of those other two had had decent aim.

  The other two marines were easy to find. The were the only dull-colored humps in the midst of a particolored “rug” of Khalia and feather-faces dead in a town square.

  The square was surrounded by the typical low-eaved buildings, and one tall structure with antennas on top stood off to one side. The Alliance men’s khaki uniforms were stained with dirt and much blood, but they still managed to respond when Dalle sought to rouse them. One, who had lost a foot and had a deep bite under his collarbone, crawled onto the gurney under his own power, and helped Dalle to drag his buddy on board. When they turned him over, the doctor could see the second marine had been lasered across the back. In a way, he had been lucky: the strip of dark pink flesh showed that he’d been broadside to the gunner. On the other hand, it would take time to see if there had been nerve damage in the spine. The man could end up being paralyzed from the ribcage down. Dalle sprayed him with antiseptic, not wanting to numb the endangered nerves with anesthesia. He put a patch on the other’s wrist to feed antitoxin into the bloodstream, to counteract any infection that he might get from the weasel bite; he closed up the bite itself and the end of the leg. Mentally, he was already doing’ surgical prep on these men.

  The marine sergeant was waiting patiently where Dalle had left him. He straightened up when he heard the travois trundling toward him. “Hi, Doc,” the sergeant said, in unaccustomed embarrassment. “It’s bad luck to shoot at a doctor. Hope you didn’t take offense before. You know . . .”

  Dalle nodded. “I know. I’ll get you home, sergeant.”

  “Shillitoe is my name. Alvin Shillitoe, but my mates call me Tarzan.”

  Dalle grinned. “At least it’s not as bad as Hound Baskerville.”

  “Yeah. I knew him,” Tarzan acknowledged. “Unngh!” he grunted, using his good hand to lever himself aboard. “Another good old nickname.” He struggled to flatten out as the gurney bumped into motion. The other men gave him faint grins of greeting.

  “Yo, sarge,” one of them said, noticing Shillitoe’s insignia.

  “And they call me Sunday Driver,” Dalle smiled, watching the man try to disguise his discomfort as they moved over the ridged dirt streets. “No, really. I’m Mack, but you can call me Doctor.”

  “Thanks, Mack,” the sergeant said, relaxing.

  Dalle stopped only once more, to pick up the comatose patient. There was still no response or signs of awakening, but his heartbeat was a tiny bit stronger. Not enough, Dalle thought, with a wrench.

  “He won’t last,” Shillitoe observed.

  Privately, Dalle agreed with him, but aloud he said, “Everyone gets his chance.”

  * * *

  He got them all stowed in the bunks aboard FMS-47, patched, and started plasma on the three with deep wounds; he slapped a fibrillator alarm onto the chest of the fourth in case his heart should go into arrest in the doctor’s absence. The woman had fallen asleep, and Dalle was glad to see an improvement in her blood pressure. They should be stable enough until he got back. With a thoughtful nod, he rolled out and down the ramp for a second load.

  * * *

  The streets were so cramped along his second vector that Dalle was forced to leave the travois and step carefully among the massed bodies to search for his qua
rries. There were three on his screen, and he was still hoping one of them would be Leo Schawn.

  The rough walls caught at his sleeve with protruding wooden splinters or dribbled stinking gray plaster dust all over him. Floaters and jet-packers had been through here. Dalle could tell by the odd streaks where lasers had hit and gouged, yards above the reach of anyone at street level.

  Dead bodies, Alliance, featherheads, and Khalia, were crowded together against a crumbling wall as if they had been bulldozed aside. The Fleet personnel, most of them technicians and doctors, had all been tied up and then killed. Most of them showed bullet or laser wounds, but others had suffered more gruesome deaths. He recognized Leo’s shocked, open-eyed face among the dead, realized with a hollow feeling inside that only her head was there. Her body, dressed in its white jumpsuit, hands bound with a thong, was ten feet away, with another heap of bodies on the stones. The neck, which was narrow enough to be encircled by one of Dalle’s long hands, had been violently severed. He gagged out of sheer reaction, then swallowed and went over to place the head with the body. With a gentle hand, he closed her eyes and drew her jaw shut

  “Dalle, FMS–47, on Target,” he said into his wrist communicator, and waited for acknowledgment. A hissing crackle came, which was the dispatcher hooking in. “Confirm that Pilot Schawn, late of FMS–47, has been found. She’s dead. Khalian-style killing. Her neck was chewed through. It’s nasty.”

  A sigh came out of the grille. “I thought so, Mack,” Iris Tolbert said. “If you’ve got room, bring her back up. Otherwise, leave her for the cleanup squad.”

  “I’ll bring her back,” Mack said, grimly. “Out.”

  * * *