The Fleet-Book Four Sworn Allies Read online

It is impossible to evaluate or delineate the channels through which the Fleet should obtain qualified personnel. Those skills and attitudes that are needed in effective Fleet personnel are often developed in circumstances far from the normal channels of fleet recruitment. It is the inability of the Fleet to recognize this, combined with the human penchant for self and family aggrandizement, that led to the Fleet’s lowest ebb in the period immediately preceding the Shannon incident and the Corporate Wars. These painful lessons should never be forgotten. Never again should the control of the Fleet rest within the hands of a few chosen families. Even those with the most respected traditions of service cannot equal the potential of billions of other individuals, human and allied, for producing the exceptionally talented leader or technician.

  “Allison is so long-winded,” Auro lamented as he looked away from the image generated by the study cube, shutting off the display. Absently he rubbed his eyes and wondered what Abe Meier had thought when he had read those words. Meier’s grandfather was Admiral of the Red, in charge of all Fleet combat actions. The former cadet then looked at the rusted interior hull of the Red Ball, flagship of the obsolete freighters Meier commanded, and decided that if this was nepotism, it was a less than appealing failing. No wonder Abe had opted for a cushy inspection tour now that the war was practically won.

  The young officer candidate glanced nervously at the chronometer as he stretched the kinks from his back. He had duty in an hour, arid the lieutenant’s exam was less than a week off. And he had yet to even start memorizing the Standing Orders and Rules of Engagement. With renewed determination Auro plunged back into Allison.

  The most productive source of recruits will always be the Fleet’s own efforts. These are most effective on the more technologically advanced planets, where, carefully planned propaganda and indoctrination serve the double purpose of attracting recruits and engendering support for the financing of Fleet activities.

  “MOLLY!” a young man’s voice bounced around the metal walls of the hangar deck, echoing in the half-empty space. “Molly Haskowin! Is that you?”

  A short, aging woman built from hardened muscle and stringy sinew straightened from her work on a pitted ship nearly as ugly as she. Brushing protective goggles up from her small blue eyes, she squinted in the direction of the voice and impatiently silenced the hiss of the fusion torch in her hand.

  A young officer in Fleet uniform strode across the deck, smiling widely. His reflection in the steel floor gave the illusion that he was walking on muddy water. “Goddamn!” he called out cheerfully, “Molly Haskowin! It is you. What are you doing out this far?” He made a motion as if he were about to hug her.

  She brought the doused fusion torch up in front of her to ward him off, the rubber hose snaking ominously. “What the hell does it look like, Junior?” she growled, “I’m using these wonderful amenities provided by this backwater outpost so I can get off this gaddamned mud hole.”

  The officer seemed to take no, offense; instead, he looked up at the aging, decrepit ship in affection. “I can’t believe the Molly’s Folly is still flying.” He patted the hull of the ship, burnished to a dull polish from years of constant abrasion from microparticles in space and atmospheres of countless planetfalls.

  The old woman grimaced at the ship without a trace of fondness. “Most of her ain’t. There’s not a whole lot original left on this hulk.”

  The officer peered closer at a section of the ship, a knobby conglomeration of oddly colored and stained parts of varying ages fused together into an ungainly whole. He reached up and scratched at alien lettering faded into partial obscurity on the side of one section. “This looks Khalian,” he said.

  Molly grinned tightly, a lipless mouth stretched into a humorless grin. “No shit,” she commented wryly. “The poor bastards weren’t using it at the, time and I needed it a lot more than they did.”

  The officer looked back at her in surprise, eyes wide in his smoothly handsome face. “How in the hell did you end up salvaging a Khalian ship?” he asked.

  She snapped the goggles from her head and scratched idly at her thinning white hair. ‘‘Well,’’ she said slowly, “I didn’t actually salvage it, but if you’re really interested in the tale, y’might buy a poor old lady a couple of drinks, Junior.” She grinned, and revealed small steel teeth glinting with feral-pointed sharpness in the overhead lights. She fumbled in the pockets of her wrinkled, dirty overalls and fished out a reddish cigar-shaped object, frayed at one end. Biting down on the gnawed tip, razor-sharp teeth burying into it, she chewed vigorously as they walked away from the Molly’s Folly.

  From under a sleek new ship grapple-locked and secured halfway across the hangar, a furtive shadow darted toward the Molly’s Folly.

  “God, how long has it been?” the officer was saying, his voice fading as they reached the hangar bay’s double doors. “Ten years? You haven’t changed a bit.”

  “Flattery don’t get you jack, snotnose, and it’s been fourteen years if it’s been a . . .” The hiss of the closing bay doors cut off Molly’s words. The shadowy figure crept into the light, eyes flashing with the alarm of a nocturnal animal. A young man with a small pack dashed toward the Folly’s airlock, scrabbling at the security lock. After a few minutes, the airlock grudgingly opened and he vanished inside the darkened ship.

  It was cold inside the cargo bay of the Molly’s Folly, and crates strapped together in rows and bolted through the hull creaked as he sought a space among them to hide. He braced his pack as a cushion, wedging it between two narrow rows, and tried to relax. Suddenly he was startled out of a half slumber by a rough, unintelligible voice in the gloom. Molly Haskowin stumbled drunkenly up into the airlock and, after a few unsuccessful attempts, unlocked the f’ward main cockpit. Her monotoned soliloquy, sputtered out as she climbed up into the pilot’s bridge. The airlock to the f’ward cockpit stayed open, and the young man hiding in the darkness listened to the creak of the pilot’s chair. The silence stretched out tense minutes as he strained his eyes, staring unblinkingly at the faint flickering of lights from the pilot’s bridge. He started violently, nerves jittering, at the sudden loud sound from the cockpit, then nearly laughed aloud in sheer relief as he realized the grinding, awful noise was the snore of Molly Haskowin.

  His eyes felt gritty as they popped open hours later, sleep driven off by Molly’s long groan.

  “Ahhh, shit,” the old woman mumbled in pain. “Where’s my gaddamned ant-alc tabs?” He could hear her searching, anonymous compartments opening and slamming closed, objects falling from them to clang loudly on the ship’s floor. “Gaddamned hangovers . . . gaddamned snotnose . . . gaddamned tabs . . . Christ in hell, where are they? . . . Ahhhhhh . . .”

  He listened to her gulp down the tablets dry, then huddled farther into the darkness as she began closing up the ship. Her silhouette passed between the crack of the crates where he was hiding, and he heard the f’ward main cockpit airlock wheeze shut. The ancient sub-light grav engines whined irritably to life, and he felt his ears pop as the cabins pressurized. He shivered more in excitement than cold as his stomach lurched from the ship’s reluctant thrust through the planet’s atmosphere, fighting upward through the gravity well.

  He wasn’t prepared for the shift in “up” and “down,” as the floor rapidly became a wall. Sliding “down” along the floor, he smacked into the bulkhead behind him, his shoulder taking the impact painfully. His pack slid down and hit him squarely in the face. Nose stinging, eyes tearing, he fought the pack and managed to shift himself to a slightly more comfortable position in the cramped space. He began to wonder how long he could stay at the bottom of the row of crates in the hold, arms and legs wedged in a growing ache, when he heard the grav engine noise change. Barely had he noticed it and before he had a chance to absorb its meaning, “up” and ”down” vanished altogether. Gravity winked out to weightlessness and the stowaway was spun out from the crates acr
oss the cargo hold. Arms and legs sprawled helplessly in the air before he slammed awkwardly into the forward bulkhead. His fingers wriggled desperately for a hold as he bounced away, spinning into a collision with his floating pack. The straps of the pack tangled around his head and he clawed at it, somersaulting into a row of crates. His foot jammed between a binding and its crate, snapping his body like a whip away from the tangling pack. He cried out in pain as his ankle twisted in the sudden torque. His pack, slapping a buckle against his ear in a final insult, spun away, spewing his meager possessions out in a weightless jumble. He surveyed his situation from his snagged vantage point, feeling discouraged.

  The f’ward cockpit hatch hissed open. Molly Haskowin peered into the cargo hold, her white hair floating around her shadowed face. Even in the darkness from across the hold he could see her face contort in anger as she spotted him dangling.

  “What in the hell . . .” she said, as if to herself. “Get over here!” she demanded.

  “I can’t,” he said, struggling in vain with the band snagged around his foot. “It’s stuck.”

  “Gaddamn it, “she said, and launched herself easily across the weightless compartment. Like a flying squirrel, she landed with all fours on the opposite side and scampered agilely across the rows of crates. None too gently, she extracted him from his snare and jumped the distance back to the airlock as easily as before, dragging him with hard fingers locked implacably around the collar of his shirt.

  Once inside the airlock, she closed the hatch and the ship’s artificial gravity came on automatically. He fell to his hands and knees, a watery sensation in the pit of his stomach. With her foot, Molly flipped him over to a sitting position.

  “Who,” she said, “are you?”

  Looking up at her leathery face, her hard eyes glinting, he felt his heart pounding. He had made it! He had gotten off-planet, away from his tedious, boring job on an obscure agro-world, away from a bleak future with his feet cemented into the mud of the AgroPlants, and the Farming Co-ops. It was his dream, his fantasy, and although it wasn’t quite starting out the way he’d imagined it, he felt justifiably daring and courageous. He was sure he could impress this one small freight hauler with his bravery and skill. “My name’s Jayson Tabott” he said proudly, throwing his shoulders back.

  There was an uncomfortable silence as she stared at him, then she said, “So?”

  He wasn’t sure what she meant. “So . . .” He tried to think quickly.

  “So what the hell are you doing on my ship?” Her voice had that same sarcastic edge as that of one of the plant bosses, as if he were a particularly dull worker. It nettled him.

  “So I want to be a pilot,” he declared defiantly.

  Her expression relaxed slightly, and he thought she might even smile. “So you want to be a pilot,” she said, her tone almost friendly. “And you snuck on board this ol’ rusty tub. Why didn’t you pick a better ship than the Folly, boy?”

  “This was the only ship with a secure lock I could break into,” he said, shamefaced.

  “I see. That oughta tell you something, shouldn’t it? And I guess that you were hoping to find an irascible but basically down-deep good-hearted old freighter captain who’d be so impressed with your chutzpah and good looks that she’d be sympathetic, right? Take you under one wing and teach you the ropes, that sort of thing?”

  He was fairly sure by now that she was making fun of him. “It’s not quite like that . . . I’m not some stupid kid,” he protested.

  “Ah. And I’ll just bet you’re a real hotshot back home, buzzing the neighbor’s sheep with some Skyscooter, or some gaddamned thing.”

  “I had an Arrowdart IV, and I never buzzed sheep,” he said, growing angry. “And I am good, try me.”

  “Try you,” she said mildly. “Try you, is it? Y’know what I should do?” She reached down and grabbed him by the arm and shirt, hauling him to his feet with surprising strength. “What I should do is throw you right out an airlock.” She propelled him across the floor toward an oval hatch. He began to struggle with growing alarm. Even though he outweighed her, even with young muscles hardened by long summers in the agrofields, he was losing ground, the hatch coming nearer.

  “This is a cargo ship, snotnose,” she said, “not a training school. I can’t afford you suckin’ up my air and scarfing down my food.” Her words came in pants as she struggled with him toward the hatch. “Y’cost too much, boy . . . Don’t need a copilot . . . Out y’go.”

  “You can’t do this!” he gasped back, hitting her with panicky fists. She was unbelievably strong and with her shoulder and arm shoved him against the hatch as she reached for the lock switch. “It’s murder!”

  “Yeah?” She took a hard punch to her face as her fingers groped for the switch. She staggered and for a moment he thought he might beat her back. But she slammed him twice against the hatch, knocking the breath from him, and kneed him in the crotch. Stars exploded in the back of his eyes. “By the time somebody finds your frozen ass, there won’t be anyone alive who’d give a damn.” Bony fingers grabbed the hatch switch and the door slid open into a lightless maw. “See y’later, snotnose,” she said, and with a solid kick to the gut, she sent him sprawling into the darkness.

  The door hissed shut as Molly Haskowin watched his stunned face disappear behind the hatch. Then she bent over, hands on her knees as she struggled to regain her breath. She straightened slowly, painfully, and touched her cheek where Jayson had hit her, feeling the bruise start to swell. She grimaced, at the blood on her fingertips and wiped them on her overalls. “Damn. Gettin’ old,” she muttered to herself.

  She regarded the closed hatch door for a moment, then grinned, the red-warning lights in the cargo hold airlock reflecting from her steel teeth with the color of blood. She chuckled to herself and moving gingerly, climbed back into the f’ward main cockpit.

  Jayson stared into the absolute darkness, a black so deep he couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or not. His heart hammered in his ears; his bladder felt like a stone in his gut. He sat on the cold metal floor, waiting, his mind screaming in silent fear. Any moment the outer airlock would hiss and the vacuum of space would spit his body out of the ship. Any moment he would feel the suck of cold space against his skin, the last sensation he would ever feel.

  Any moment.

  He waited.

  After a while, the shrieking in his head died down and his uncontrollable trembling lessened. He got shakily to his hands and knees, groping blindly in the dark. Everything felt huge and ominous under his blind fingertips as he searched the inner hatchway for the airlock switch. As he touched the control panel he found, with a sinking feeling of dismay, not one switch, but dozens, anyone of which could open the inner door, or send him hurtling out the airlock.

  Now he understood. She was playing with him; like an animal trapped in a steel jaw, she would make him kill himself as she enjoyed the entertainment of watching him flush himself out of the ship.

  His anger quickly replaced his terror, building up his rage. He was determined not to give her the satisfaction, and sat on the floor, arms crossed. He realized he would starve to death just as easily, and his rage grew. He finally sprang at the airlock panel—not caring which door it opened, just to get the unbearable tension over with—and hit the switch.

  A blinding light flooded the airlock. He screamed reflexively, arcing away from the panel and landing on the floor shaking violently, eyes screwed tightly shut. Then, as nothing happened, very slowly he opened one eye and looked around the compartment.

  Three battered and patched pressure suits hung on one wall, helmets hanging beside them, like the forlorn shed skins of decapitated lizards. A shelf stack on the opposite wall held miscellaneous boxes and bottles bolted into place. In the corner, a fusion tank clung to the steel-lined rib of the ship, its hose curled around it, and a battered instruction pamphlet twenty years out-
of-date hung by a rusty chain to its side.

  The only door out of the compartment was the one he’d come in. It wasn’t an airlock at all.

  When he came through the f’ward cockpit hatch, she didn’t even bother glancing in his direction. Instead, looking up at the chronometer overhead, she said, “Forty-seven minutes. You’re a real genius, snotnose. Whatsamatter, couldn’t find a suit in your color?”

  He stood, the secondhand pressure suit hanging off his slender body, the hardglass helmet in his hands. His breath came hoarsely through clenched teeth. “You bitch,” he said, his voice strangulated and shaking. His mind couldn’t conceive of a curse bad enough to express his rage . . . “You stinking goddamned bitch.”

  With that, she turned in the pilot’s chair and grinned down at him from the pilot’s bridge. “That I am, boy,” she agreed affably, “and I’m a liar and a cheat and a smuggler and a thief.” Her words held a hard edge to them even more menacing. “And if you give me any grief, I’ll knock your teeth out your ass. Got that?”

  He couldn’t trust himself to answer, so he nodded and climbed up to the copilot’s chair on her left.

  She turned back to the instrument panels, gnarled hands playing the controls and guidance computers with slow, easy confidence. “Do up your tabs, boy,” she said quietly.

  He fumbled for a minute at the multitude of snaps and cords and straps on the pressure suit. “I don’t know how,” he finally admitted sullenly, feeling helpless as a child.

  She turned to him and started fastening the suit, jerking it roughly into place. “Yup,” she said sarcastically, “I can see you were just born to fly, kid. You’re a real natural.”

  Stung, he jerked away from her. “I’ll do it myself.”

  She grinned and leaned back, clasping her hands behind her head, and watched. It took him nearly an hour to figure out the suit while she chuckled and checked the instruments one-handed. When he finished, she shook her head ruefully, opening a tiny metal box bolted under the arm of the pilot’s seat. Taking one of the long, reddish cylinders stacked inside, stripped off the yellow band with its alien markings from around it and stuck one end of it into her mouth, biting down sharply.