Firemask: Book Two of the Last Legion Series (30 page)

CHAPTER
24

N-Space

It was ship-night, and there were only a few awake on the mother ship.

Two were Alikhan and Ben Dill. Dill was determined to “qualify” as pilot, and be the first human to have a Musth starship in his logbook. Alikhan was obliging and, as he taught, became more skilled himself.

Besides, there wasn’t much else to pass the time. The few books that had been brought on board were religious in nature, and both beings had decided what they believed or didn’t believe in years earlier.

The ship broke out of N-space, and the two checked the computer for the next jump.

“Five more jumps, and — ”

Quite suddenly, there was another starship in the utter emptiness.

Alikhan’s paw flashed to a sensor, and N-space swirled, as Dill saw a flash from the other huge ship.

“What … who was that?”

“It looked like a clanmaster’s ship,” Alikhan replied. “Who it is, where it came from, I know nothing.”

“It sure wasn’t our friend. Sucker went and launched at us!”

Alikhan slapped sensors, and the mother ship went back to normal space, then jumped again.

“Numbers,” he growled. “Give me human random numbers!”

“Three … one … EVERYBODY UP, battle stations,” and the sleeping Forcemen on the bridge came awake, and the com man, the “talker,” readied his infantry backpack set, “… one … eleven …”

Dill realized Alikhan wanted human values to key his jump times to, hopefully foxing the pursuer.

On the eleven count their huge enemy came into the same space, fired again as the mother ship vanished.

“Gunners to stations,” Alikhan managed. “Have them try to destroy that other ship.”

“One more time: Who the hell is it?”

“Colors are gray … red … you have no word for the third,” and a missile exploded close enough to blank a screen for a moment. Another missile went off, and Dill felt shock roll through the ship.

“We’re hit,” he announced unnecessarily, and Garvin and Njangu were on the bridge.

“We’ve got a big fat enemy all over our asses,” Dill announced. “Looks like — ”

Description wasn’t necessary as the ship reappeared. Alikhan hissed, ears cocking, and again they were in hyperspace.

“Ben, take the controls and count again.”

“ ‘Kay,” Dill said. “Three … four … nine … sixteen, son of a bitch, can’t give ‘em that much time, that one almost got us … Garvin, you might want to get everybody saddled up for debarkation … four …”

“Missile stations manned,” the talker reported tonelessly.

Alikhan was at a secondary board for an instant, consulting records. “Gray, red,
plat
… not good. That is Keffa’s clan. One of Paumoto and my father’s fiercest allies.”

“So how in blazes did he find us?”

Lir was on the bridge. “Boss, that rocket that hit us appears to have done some damage. We’ve got compartments all through the ship self-sealing. So far, nobody’s gotten trapped, but …”

Garvin gnawed a lip.

“Ben,” he said, “leave us out in normal space long enough for somebody to get a clean shot. Talker, all stations, anybody near a missile launcher, tell ‘em to shoot anytime they want to at that big bustard.”

“I think,” Alikhan said, “I should be looking for an emergency landing place.”

“A short jump first,” Garvin ordered. “Now a long one.” Dill obeyed.

“Bring us out … Gunners, SHOOT!”

Missiles spat from the mother ship.

“JUMP!”

“The fiche shows a haven,” Alikhan said. “Three more jumps.”

Their pursuer emerged, fired as the mother ship jumped, and hit again. The ship lurched, and the com crackled.

“Boss,” the talker reported. “Irthing reports one of the compartments that was hit … we lost some people in there.”

Garvin grimaced, said nothing, and the ship jumped again. Once more he ordered the missile crews to fire as Keffa’s ship emerged, saw two flashes as they jumped back into N-space.

“I would imagine,” Alikhan said, “that someone back on Silitric recognized me, notified my father, and he would probably be able to theorize where I might be going. He would notify his allies, probably have a bulletin sent out to all ports of some sort of disaster, and our stop for a chart didn’t go as well as I thought.”

“Old news,” Njangu said impatiently. “Alikhan, can you com Senza, tell him where this landing place is, ask him for help?”

“I can send a message, we will not have time to know if it was picked up, let alone receive a reply,” Alikhan said. “Ben, when we break out this time, we should be close to the world we want. Take us closer. Be bold in your navigation. I shall ready that message.”

He swept off the bridge.

“Here we are, here we go again,” and Dill hit the sensors.

When the mother ship emerged again, it was in the middle of an E-type system. A light green world hung not far distant.

Keffa’s huge ship popped into being, took a hit, and went back into hyperspace.

“Now, young Musth, I’ll show you a trick I’ll bet you don’t know,” Dill muttered, fingers tapping sensors.

“Now, we’re either going to be a part of that there planet, or …”

He hit a sensor and the mother ship jumped in, out of N-space. His stomach lurched.

“Brilliant, Ben, if I do say so myself,” Dill said. “That big chubby planet is now between us and that ugly shit. Repress nausea and admire me.

“Now I guess we put it on the ground and take things from there.”

“We have a hit in the stardrive section, serious, and another in the main fire control,” the officer told Keffa.

“What of the traitor’s ship?”

“He became lucky, was able to interpose the planet between us and him. We suspect, since he has also taken damage, he will land.”

“What about that world?”

“Normal to the nth place, but thus far uncolonized.”

“Go after him,” Keffa ordered. “Destroy his ship before he can land. If he already has …” Keffa paused, wishing he had taken a full complement of warriors aboard.

“… we shall land as well, and destroy this cub, and all his fellows while repairs on our ship are made.”

• • •

The mother ship was shouting madness as laden men and women scurried away from it.

Alikhan had brought the ship in on its side near a large lake, with vertical buttes around it. Woods dotted the rolling hillside before the mountains.

“Away from the ship … come on, let’s move … get your asses into line and let’s get moving … that shit-head’ll be along shortly and we want to be invisible … come on, ladies, hustle your butts,” noncoms and officers raved.

Columns were formed, and started away, as fast as possible, into the hilly ground.

“You notice,” Alikhan puffed as he passed Ben Dill, who was carrying one end of a stretcher and a tubed Shrike on his back, “what a perfect world I found.”

“And I’ll be the first to move that it be named after you. I just hope you got your goddamned message away and momma comes quick and kisses bruises.”

An E-hour away from the ship, the sky boomed and shook, and Keffa’s ship crashed overhead.

Garvin ordered the raiders to take cover and, while they obeyed, trotted up a promontory and lay flat. He could just see their ship about four kilometers distant.

Keffa’s ship hurtled back into view, dived at it. Garvin ducked, expecting nuclear fire, but the ground rumbled with blasts of conventional explosion.

“The bastard wants to crucify us personally,” he snarled.

He chanced looking up as the command ship came in for a vertical landing about a kilometer beyond the flaming ruins of the mother ship.

Monique Lir sprawled beside him, scanned the command ship with a small pair of binoculars.

“I think,” she said, “we have the sons of bitches right where we want them.”

There was a tight, pleased smile on her face.

CHAPTER
25

D-Cumbre

“Your mate’sss behavior isss intolerable,” Wlencing said. “What sssort of ssspecies are you, when one of the highessst in your sssociety losssesss all control and becomesss a bandit?”

Loy Kouro squirmed, not wanting to offer his belief that Jasith was nothing more than a typical woman, besotted with a damned soldier.

“I can’t explain,” he said. “She’s been behaving strangely lately. I think she is having problems with her mind.”

“I am not unfamiliar with madnessss,” Wlencing said, not allowing himself thoughts of Alikhan. “But it doesss not matter, for ssshe will be dessstroyed when Keffa findsss the ssstolen ssship.”

Kouro started, fought for control.

“Good,” Wlencing said. “You took that like a warrior. Now, who will become in charge of her interessstsss, particularly the minesss?”

“Why … I suppose I shall,” Kouro said, brightening noticeably.

“And ssshould anything happen to you?”

“Like Jasith, I have no immediate family.”

Wlencing considered him for a time.

“Then it ssshould be bessst for the two enterprisssesss you have inherited for there to be peaccce between our ssspecies, would it not?”

“Of course!”

“You are advisssed, then, to do all possssible to keep order, for I am placccing you on our lissst of potential hossstagesss.”

Kouro held back fear and anger, wanting to snarl that it’d be really goddamned convenient for them to shoot him, as they had so many others, and end up with all that he had, but he kept silent.

Finally, he said, sullenly, “I think the record will show that I have gone out of my way to help you and your people, War Leader.”

“Then now we are assssured you will do even more,” Wlencing said.

If Kouro had known more about the Musth, he would have realized that the following hiss from the back of Wlencing’s throat indicated amusement.

• • •

“Erik,” Tregony, a very rich Rentier sputtered, “I never thought you were capable of this.”

“I’m
sure
I don’t understand,” Penwyth drawled.

“Bringing these terrible, terrible holos to me … trying to blackmail me.”

“Now, Mister Tregony,” Erik said, “that’s a terrible thing to accuse someone of who grew up with your sons. I ran across these holos, which I’m sure are fakes, and went to a bit of trouble and expense to acquire what I b’lieve are the only copies. And I give them to you now as a present. Where’s the blackmail in that?”

Tregony scowled. “But if I chose to reimburse you, that wouldn’t go amiss.”

“If you wish.”

“How much?”

Penwyth named a figure, and Tregony goggled.

“Gods, man. Do you think I’m Croesus?”

“That figure is exactly twenty-five percent of the annual bonus Tregony Holdings gave you this year, no more.”

“How’d you learn that?”

Penwyth smiled, didn’t answer.

“I’ll issue a draft,” the older man growled.

“To Bearer, please, which’ll not be me. Also, if you’ll be a gem and notify your banker that the sum should be available in smallish bills?”

Tregony nodded jerkily.

“One other thing. Some friends of mine might want to use your island for a retreat for a time. They’re a bit irregular in their ways, and might arrive without announcement and there might be more’n two or three of them. So if you’d notify your staff not to be s’prised at anything out of the ordinary …”

“How many of your dissolute friends will we have to put up with?”

“Five, six, or two hundred.”

Tregony jerked. “This
isn’t
blackmail, is it?”

“I
said
that at the beginning.” Penwyth smiled.

• • •

Angara blanked the screen. “I see what you mean about time’s goddamned wing-ed chariot, Jon. We’re losing men almost as fast as we would if we were in full combat.”

“Not so much time as this flipping jungle, sir. The men don’t have a truly stable base — even the people here on Mullion Island are always looking over their shoulders, waiting for a flipping Musth to come out of nowhere.

“Jungle rot, accidents, shitty food, no passes … this nibbling gets to people.”

“Them and us,” Angara added. “And using that island Penwyth hustled up for a day or two of relaxation isn’t enough.”

Hedley sighed.

“I wish, sometimes, I was religious, like when I was a sprat, and could believe in flipping miracles.”

“Like our pet Musth being able to pull off his trick.”

“I say again about flipping miracles. Hell, I’m even hoping Redruth shows up and stirs things up a bit, on the dumb-ass theory that new trouble can be better’n the old stuff.”

Angara got up from his field desk, went to his cot in a corner of the bunker, and opened a footlocker. He took out a bottle, gave it to Hedley.

“Here. You’re on a one-day pass. Don’t share it with anybody of our sex, and no more than two of another. The hangover’ll give you something else to snivel about.”

“Thanks, sir. With my flipping luck, I’ll just have gotten buzzy when the bastards throw an attack.”

• • •

The Musth weren’t much more cheerful. There was peace, but warriors kept dying. In the cities, the aliens were always watched, always followed by packs of grim-faced children — the Musth hadn’t figured a way to reopen schools that didn’t violate their “no crowds” policy.

After curfew the streets were empty, but a patrol could expect the flat smash of a single blaster bolt from nowhere, then feet scurrying into silence, while a warrior writhed in agony.

They were watched even more closely than they knew. An aircraft would be spotted by someone, and its flight path passed on to one of the “merchants,” and its passage tracked across D-Cumbre as closely as if a thousand radar were following it. If opportunity came, a Shrike might soar out of nowhere.

The Eckmuhl, and the centers of other cities, were no-go zones, unless the Musth went in company-sized formations, with tactical air support. Even then, they’d be sniped at, and take a casualty or two.

Only the main islands were firmly held by the aliens.

But little by little, the Musth were winning. Some humans fell sick, a few were captured or killed. But most of the steady drain was a man or woman giving up, slipping away and vanishing into the civilian sea. No one blamed them much, no one sought these deserters — there’s not much tougher than fighting a guerrilla war with no forseeable end.

But the Force fought on.

• • •

Wlencing’s screens gave no more cheerful a set of figures than Angara’s. It wasn’t the continual casualties so much as other hard figures.

Cumbre cost more, vastly more, to occupy than it gave back in profits to the clans exploiting the system. Only a trickle of ships took back minerals, luxury goods to the Musth worlds.

The clanmasters who’d backed Asser and Wlencing would not continue the course into bankruptcy.

Something must be done. Wlencing wished he had a clue as to what.

• • •

The block warden was quite proud of himself. He’d spotted the ambush team, two men, two women, waiting below his building for the security patrol, and notified the Musth on the special com he’d been given.

The team was efficiently counterambushed by three dozen Musth warriors. Probably the assassins wouldn’t have tried to surrender, but the Musth didn’t give them the chance, blasting the four until their bodies were unrecognizable lumps of flesh.

The warden was rewarded with credits, and begged the aliens not to praise him publicly.

They agreed, but two nights later, just after midnight, the warden’s apartment was fire-bombed. He, his wife, their four children, and his wife’s mother died in the flames.

His successor was a great deal less ambitious and more nearsighted.

• • •

The ten-man human patrol was trapped against cliffs in the piedmont near the Highlands. Unable to break contact, they fought back.

Wlencing ordered his attack ships in. The crags were rocketed, bombed. But when the ringing explosions died away, and the dust settled, a defiant blaster would open fire from rocky concealment.

Wlencing sent in warriors on the ground. Three days later, the last of the ten were killed. The Musth lost four
wynt,
an
aksai
and forty-three warriors.

Both sides considered the engagement a defeat.

• • •

There was an explosion in one of Mellusin Mining’s deep shafts on C-Cumbre, of unknown but almost certainly natural causes.

The surface had contact with the survivors down the mine, trapped in one of the stopes two kilometers underground, water rising from lower levels.

The frantic rescue teams, realizing they couldn’t open a rescue shaft in time, called on the government for help.

“Who are these miners?” Wlencing asked Daaf.

“Mostly ‘Raum. A scattering of military prisoners and some criminals.”

Wlencing thought for only a moment. “The request is denied. The present emergency forbids the expense.”

Daaf chanced it: “War Leader, is that an honorable response?”

Wlencing hissed rage, reflexively moved his claws in, out.

“Do not ever use insolence like that again, or I shall have you returned to your clan!”

Daaf stared at Wlencing for a moment, then left the compartment without an answer.

Wlencing stared out at Silitric’s desolation, watched a storm building against the mountains, wondered what his response might have been a system-year ago.

But that was then. Wlencing had never left a task unfinished, and this one would be no exception. There were too many Musth lives spent here, from Aesc to the lowest engine wiper, just to give up.

As a cub, he’d wondered if the human-Musth war might not have ended in victory for the Musth if only his race had kept fighting, pushed harder.

Now, on Cumbre, he would not let himself think about becoming a shirker like they had been.

• • •

The slow drowning of almost a hundred miners sent a shock wave across the Cumbre system. Rumor spreaders and Force merchants spread the word for a general strike.

Wlencing heard of it, forbade it on the pain of reprisals.

But on the set day, only a handful of businesses opened. Wlencing sent troops into the streets to force merchants to open their shops, but there were almost no customers.

Worse, few of his human administrators, clerks, janitors, translators showed up for work.

Wlencing raged, ordered all of them discharged, and his underlings obeyed.

The strike ended, but the Musth stayed frozen without the human grease for their alien wheels. A few Musth appealed the ruling, but Wlencing announced firmly that once he had issued a dictat, it could not be rescinded.

Very quietly, the more capable Musth leaders rehired, sometimes under false names, most of their old staff, and life returned, mostly, to as before.

• • •

“It doesn’t look like there’s any surprises here,” Angara said.

“I haven’t found any,” Hedley said.

Angara reran the computer speculation, then got up and paced the underground command center on Mullion Island. “Damn,” he said irrelevantly, “but it’s stuffy down here. I’d make a shitty ‘Raum.”

Hedley was still staring at the screen.

“We need to do something big, for our own sakes if nobody else’s,” Angara said.

Hedley nodded. “The plan’s approved. Let’s move the day after tomorrow.”

• • •

Hedley’s agents had noticed a swarm of ships around the Highland base. Other agents found out these were the first of the freshly trained fliers, newly assigned to the fighting zone.

Remembering a ghastly moment in Man’s history, Hedley named the plan Operation Nits.

Just after dawn, as the Musth pilots were assembling, preparing for the day’s assignments, a wave of Zhukovs, armed yachts, and the Force’s sole remaining
aksai
attacked the Highland.

They hit the field hard, rocketing anything they saw, strafing AA positions, aircraft still on the ground, anything moving. One pass, then another, and they fled, back toward their hideouts.

But there were human casualties, ships shot down, crashed, or just crippled. One led to total disaster.

Jacqueline Boursier, high overhead in her
aksai,
cursed as she saw a yacht, trailing smoke, limp over Mullion Island’s narrow beach, a
wynt
and two
aksai
harrying it.

“Come on, you shitheel, bail out, goddammit, don’t let ‘em follow you home!”

But the yacht’s pilot wasn’t listening, and pancaked his ship down in the middle of the secret base’s landing field, skating out of control, ripping away camou nets over bunkers, tents, gun emplacements, and revealing the long-held secret.

Boursier swept down, fired, knocked out the
wynt
and with a second launch, blowing an
aksai
out of the air. But that was her last missile, and she watched the last Musth ship disappear back toward Dharma Island.

• • •

Three days later, the Musth attacked Mullion Island in full force — it’d taken that long for Wlencing to move troops from Silitric, and ready his formations for battle.

They found no one — the Force had dispersed two days earlier.

But they left machine shops, aircraft under repair, supply dumps and armories.

The Force had lost its headquarters, its only effective base.