The Fleet Book 2: Counter Attack (11 page)

“You read our destination coordinates from our tempest signal,” Jensen murmured, shamed by memory of Mac James’s amusement as he allowed the transmitter to remain twisted into the Freer sash. The captain had known then that his victim would be rescued. He must have considered Jensen a fool, harmless or incompetent enough to be no risk if he were set free.

“Maybe not so lucky after all.” Shields shoved the cargo capsule over, interrupting Jensen’s thoughts and spilling him ignominiously onto the courier ship’s lock platform. “You’ll wish you’d died in deepspace when our dispatches come in late. Serve you right if the old man himself calls you onto the carpet.”

Stung by more than humility, Jensen twisted until he gained a view of his shipmate’s eyes. “Play things right, and we’ll get a commendation.”

Shields stepped back. Rare anger pinched her face; Jensen had never thought her pretty, but she had slenderness, and a certain grace of movement that had half the guys back at base off their feed. “You’re obsessed, Jensen. Commendation for what? You’ve been an overambitious jackass and now, finally, the brass in Fleet Command will know it too.”

Jensen made a vicious effort to sit up, but the nooses cut into his wrists, and he gave up with a curse at the pain. “You’ll go down with me,” he threatened. “As my senior officer, piloting a Fleet dispatch courier off course calls for court martial, not a dressing down.”

He heard Shields’s sharp intake of breath, and could not look at her. Once he might have veiled his threats in gentler language, but now, the cruelly injured dignity inspired by MacKenzie James impelled him to roughness. “Don’t be a stupid bitch.” But he couldn’t quite bring himself to finish; by the whitely locked knuckles of Shields’s hands he saw he did not have to mention her brother, who was ill and under treatment in an Alliance medical facility, a benefit of her enrollment in the Fleet. Should she be discharged now, he would lose his benefits. But pity came second to necessity. Ambition and his driving desire to command a vessel that carried weapons instead of dispatches cut with, a need like agony. Coldly, Jensen outlined his alternative.

* * *

The dome at Port was packed to capacity on the day the citations were read. Banners overhung the stage where the Fleet high command were seated. At attention alongside Ensign Shields, Jensen surreptitiously checked his uniform for creases. Finding none, he stood very still, savoring the moment as the speaker at the podium recited his list of achievements.

“. . . commendation for bravery; for innovative escape tactics, when asked at gunpoint to surrender to three Khalian warships, which imagination and daring in the face of danger has resulted in the furtherance of Fleet knowledge of enemy behavior; for performance above and beyond the call of duty, these two young officers will be promoted in rank, and be decorated with the Galactic Cross . . .”

Shields went very white when the Admiral laid the ribbon with the medal over her shoulders. She shook his hand stiffly, and looked away from the cameras when the press popped flashes to record the event.

Jensen also stood stiffly, but for very different reasons. Warmed by his father’s proud smile, he reflected that the story they had presented to Fleet command had held as many half-truths as lies. The tactics which had brought word of the takeover at Castleton’s had been real enough, though only Shields and he knew they had originated with the wiliest skip-runner in Alliance space. The weight of the Galactic Cross which hung from his neck carried no implications of guilt. At last granted the command of a scout ship with armament, Jensen swore he would redeem his honor. One day, MacKenzie James was going to regret the humiliation he had inflicted upon a young officer of the Fleet. Jensen intended to rise fast and far. In time he would retaliate, find means to bring down the antagonist who had bested him. The honors he took credit for now were only a part of that plan.

Neuton Bedfort Smythe looked terrible. His eyes were red and his color sallow. He looked very much like what he was, a man working alone against time on a vital project. Even his obvious exhaustion couldn’t mask the enthusiasm with which he burst into Meier’s new office.

“I have found something important, a first clue in the mystery,” he announced. “If you will.” With a flourish he inserted a memory chit into the comconsole on the admiral’s desk. The astonished officer just had a glimpse of the title. It appeared to be the occupation report from one of the levies garrisoning the planet.

Meier had to admit the investigator had been true to his promise to stay out of the way. Except for the inconvenience of having to shift offices, approving his access to an astonishing number of files, and a personal concern about his redwood desktop being badly abused, Meier had hardly even been aware of the Alliance Council’s investigator’s presence in Port.

Before he could reply the screen was filled with images.

I.

On embarkation day
there were a thousand of us who marched down Maccabee Boulevard behind Colonel Bar Kochba to the reviewing stand, where Solomon Gottshaft, the Planetary President of Eretz Perdido, gave us the salute, and told us to go out and show the universe, or whatever part of it happened to be, watching, what sort of stuff Perdido’s Ten Lost Tribes were made of. We proceeded past the enormous stone doors of the New Temple, cheered by the multitudes, and then we were loaded into trucks and taken to Theodor Herzl Spacefield on the edge of our capital city of New Jerusalem. There we were loaded aboard the Fleet destroyer
Swiftsure
for the short trip to the dreadnought
Valley Forge,
which waited in geosynchronous orbit above our planet.

The
Valley Forge
was twelve hundred feet long, displaced well over one hundred thousand tons, and carried a crew of two thousand and eighty. Our hundred men were assigned quarters and canteen privileges, and were given self-locating maps so we could find our way between sleeping quarters, mess hall, exercise area, PX, and recreation hall. Our own officers relayed ship’s instructions: we were to deploy immediately to our assigned sleeping places-which also served as acceleration couches, and strap down for takeoff.

It was a fine moment when the siren sounded and we felt the tingling vibration as the ship’s sub-light converters came on. There was, no sense of motion, but strap-down is traditional, besides sometimes there can be vertigo when first getting underway. We watched our progress on overhead screens, and the readouts made clear to us what was happening.

There was very little physical sense or acceleration, but we knew that
Valley Forge
was getting up to standard one-quarter speed of light very quickly, powered by the gravity potential of our nearby star, Perdido Primary. Theoretically, this ship could continue accelerating in sublight drive until it approached C, the speed of light, or until the magnetic engines came apart. In practice, the big ships rarely go beyond ½C, and use that mainly for maneuvering around planetary systems. The really long-distance traveling is done in an entirely different mode, by means of the FTL drive. Using FTL, the largest ships can cross the thousand light-year diameter of the great spherical volume of space which contains the more than three hundred Alliance planets in about three standard Terran weeks.

Our trip would take twenty-five days, because we were going to the periphery of Alliance space, the Galactic northwestern frontier, to the planet Target, which the Fleet intelligence services had determined was the home planet of the Khalian raiders. The establishment of a Fleet base recently on the planet Klaxon had paved the way for this final assault on the enemy’s key position at Target, the planet from which the Khalian raiders attacked our shipping and raided the home planets of Alliance members.

For this purpose, the Fleet had gathered together elements from all its far-flung frontiers and guard posts, stripping the interior defenses of the home worlds, timing everything so that one gigantic blow could be struck against the enemy. It was the largest concentration of ships in the Fleet’s thousand-year history, and it seemed impossible that any force could stand up to it; though pessimists pointed out that the fortunes of battle were uncertain, and that if the attack should fail, or be destroyed before it began by the sudden appearance of a rogue black hole or an unseasonable time-storm, we would be delivering the future of humanity into the hands of our enemy, the alien Khalia.

The Combat Troops of the Fleet are made up of levies from the various planet members. The troops served under their own officers who were under the orders of the Fleet high
command. At the time we embarked it was still a toss-up which group was going to be picked to lead the commando ground assault onto Target. Among the hundred or more who had volunteered, several of the planetary levies were suitable and trained for the job. The Zyandots of the planet Zyandot II came well recommended, as did the Mahdists of the planet Khartoum IV. The Sons of the Albigensian Heresy, from the planet Janus, were especially eager to lead the assault, because their planet had only been a member of the Alliance of Planets for seven years and they hoped to achieve recognition and status by the doing of an heroic deed. There was intense lobbying in the Chamber of Delegates at Alliance Headquarters on Earth for the privilege: planetary honor was at stake. Less than an hour after we boarded
Valley Forge,
it was announced that our thousand-man battle group from Perdido had won.

This should not be ascribed to our popularity. We were the compromise candidate. The major planets lost less face if we got the assignment rather than one of their rivals.

I know, I protest too much. It is a universal Jewish tendency. We Jews from Perdido have more than the normal amount of Jewish paranoia. This is due to the uncertainty of our status. Our co-religionists on Earth won’t admit that we are Jews, will not even consider our claim that we are descendents of the ten lost tribes who were kidnapped by aliens and taken from Earth to Perdido.

We pointed out that it was the aliens’ fault that no torahs had been brought on the flight across space, no Talmuds, none of the commentaries of the learned Rabbis, not even Martin Buber’s stories of the Baal Shem Tov. We were aware of the existence of these things due to our racial memories, but we had no knowledge of the things themselves. The Jews of Earth said that since we had no holy books, no prayers, no knowledge of Hebrew, a very feeble grasp of Yiddish, and several more points that I forget, we couldn’t be Jews. We pointed out that although we didn’t have those things—through no fault of our own—we did have the shrug, the habit of answering a question with another question, the habit of addressing hypothetical bystanders, the custom of smiting ourselves on the forehead with the flat of the hand when perplexed, the almost racial trigger that forced us to say “Oy, vey!” from time to time, and to reproduce out of alien foodstuffs, and in a climate hardly suited for it, the tastes of dill pickles, stuffed cabbage, varnishkas, pastrami, chopped liver, and stuffed derma with plenty of brown gravy, the latter a triumph of the will when you consider that our entire planet is a steaming rainforest and we had to create. a food like salt herring without ever having tasted one. Interesting, the Jews of Earth said, freaky, even, but hardly proving anything.
My God!
we cried, smiting ourselves on the forehead with the flat of our hands, if that doesn’t prove anything, what does prove anything?

The matter is still under discussion.

Meanwhile, not even in Israel are we considered Jews. Only on our own planet Perdido, and in some parts of New York City.

That sort of treatment would be enough, you must admit, to make any group a little paranoid and eager to win a measure of glory for itself as a way of taking the pressure off the eternal Jewish question of identification which the Jews of Earth don’t even admit that we, just like them, suffer from.

My name is Judah ben Judah. I am stocky, I have a round head with tight dark curls, as if that mattered. I am thirty-three years of age, and, before my enlistment in the Perdido Expeditionary Force, I was an assistant professor of Jewish Cultural Apologetics at the University of Stetelhaven on Perdido. The reason I was not a full professor has no bearing on this tale, but rests, let me assure you, on the incompetence of the examiners.

I enlisted in our planetary levy and was given the rank of captain and put in command of a ten-man assault squad. We took basic training together at Camp Sabra. After a few weeks we had worked out our basic disagreements and my squad had voted to take my orders unconditionally, at least for the present. Some peoples of the Alliance have found it strange that we Perdidans—to use a neutral term for us—ask each other things rather than give each other orders, and that so entrenched is this custom among us that we stick to it even in our armed forces. Why do we do it that way? I can only say that through trial and error, we have discovered it’s a lot easier to talk matters over with us than to try to tell us what to do. Asking may take a little longer, but it ensures that the job gets done cheerfully and well. And if you’re told no, you just shrug your shoulders, perhaps mutter, “Oy Vey,” and go ask someone else. That’s the way we handle these matters. It seems so logical. Not everyone sees it that way, obviously.

II.

Colonel Bar Kochba called me and the other squad leaders to his quarters soon after the ship was in FTL drive and we were able to move around again. Kochba was a short, bull-necked man with a neatly trimmed white-flecked black beard and the upright bearing of the professional soldier. He was one of the few trained soldiers of field rank on Perdido, having graduated with honors from the Fleet College at Academia on Hellas II. We try to keep a few trained officers ready at all times, even though our planet has never had a real war in the sense of large professional armies and navies fighting it out with their counterparts. Perdido is too isolated and too poor to tempt anyone except the Khalian raiders. We had had more than enough of those, however, and were looking forward to this opportunity of striking back with what we expected would be a crushing blow.

Bar Kochba proceeded in logical fashion. There was going to be a great space battle centered on the planet Target. This battle would be preceded by a commando-style raid on the planet itself. Bar Kochba explained that we would be taken to the surface of the planet in destroyers specially equipped for the mission. By taking out their main armament, the destroyers could mount multiple screens and probably avoid detection long enough to put us on the ground. He outlined the order of battle, issued maps of bur region which were little more than blank spaces with coordinates, since we had not been able to map Target yet. Our attack was to he made in just sixteen hours; now that the assault had been announced, it was imperative to get it moving before the Khalia had time to learn about it through their various allies.

After dismissing us, Bar Kochba asked me to stay behind.

Lighting his large and malodorous pipe, he told me that after reviewing the qualifications of his ten officers, he had decided to ask me to take on the job of Intelligence Officer. I was a little puzzled. “I wasn’t aware that I had any particular qualifications.”

Bat Kochba smiled in his affable way. “I have chosen you,” he said, “because the records show that you are an inquisitive fellow, always poking your nose into matters that do not concern you. That is exactly the sort of fellow we need to do our intelligence work.”

“Just what did you have in mind, Colonel?” I asked. “You’re not expecting me to spy on my fellow soldiers, are you?”

The Colonel was surprised. “What gave you that idea? That’s Counterintelligence and it’s not at all what I’m interested in. I need an intelligence officer to help me find out what to expect on this planet we’re going to, this place called Target.”

I shrugged. “You’ve seen the briefing reports, same as I have. What more is there to say?”

“Nothing, yet. But in sixteen hours—closer to fifteen, now—our battle group spearheads the assault, on Target itself. Once on the ground, I suspect, we’re going to be staying a while. There will be important things to be learned, things that can affect the whole course of the war. I need a man to collect and coordinate all the discoveries made by our battle group.”

I thought it over. It sounded like an important job. “I’ll do it,” I told him.

“That’s fine,” Bar Kochba said. “But let’s get one thing straight. I don’t mean that you, personally, should do it. I’m not sending you out on a spying mission. I’m asking you to collect and coordinate information, and that’s all. Is that understood?”

“Of course, sir,” I said. I saluted and left, and went back to prepare my squad for action. I thought about my new job. And I realized that I had not, in fact, promised. not to do any spying myself. I had merely agreed that I understood that Bar Kochba had asked me not to. I mention that because there was some talk of a court-martial after what actually happened later, after Wyk-Wyk Kingfisher came to our camp.

III.

The Land Combat Forces of the Fleet, drawn as they are from hundreds of planets with differing levels of military technology, to say nothing of local preference and personal taste, always equip themselves, carrying with them a small ordnance department to keep the weapons working and to handle ammunition and repairs. Our group was no different. We had adopted the standard Gushi Plasma Piece, the GPP, as our standard artillery arm. These weapons look like lengths of pipe four feet long by six inches wide. They can fire three five-pound cartridges without reloading, but are limited to line of sight operation. They produce a fireball upon impact with their target, and the energy release is on the order of half a ton of TNT. My squad had four such weapons, more than is usual for ten men, but we were the spearhead.

Aside from that we carried our own weapons as developed on Eretz Perdido. We had several varieties of dart gun, a simple laser pistol, and various types of grenade. And it is with these we were armed when the time came to board the Fleet Destroyer
Reliant
and go down to the surface of Target below us.