Rebel Fleet (13 page)

He pushed Mia toward me, and she slashed at his hand, but they parted ways with no further violence.

Mia sauntered over to my ship and slid her tail around my waist. She looked like she’d caught herself a mouse. Perhaps, in a way, she had.

Ra-tikh turned around and stalked away. Dalton ignored him. He was already chatting up the three remaining cat-girls, asking who was third in line.

The crowd melted away, disappointed. They’d been hoping for blood.

=21=

After the crew switch, just about everyone was happy—except for Ra-tikh and Gwen.

Ra-tikh was stuck with Dalton, so I could understand his displeasure. The guy had been annoying from the first moment I’d run into him back on Earth, and that had never changed.

Dalton himself, however, was in heaven. He couldn’t thank me enough for the new arrangement. He’d managed to land a fuzzy girlfriend within hours, and as I’d expected, an extra male in the pride made all the females happier.

As far as Ra-tikh went, I could wish Dalton the best of luck on holding his own, but who was I kidding? I hoped he got his ass kicked.

In my own group, both Dr. Chang and Samson were naturally curious about the new girl. Gwen wasn’t so thrilled. She stopped talking to me, and shut herself in her cubicle much of the time.

Me? I had the time of my life. Sure, it was weird at first, but Mia and I quickly adjusted. She learned what I liked, and I learned what she liked. There wasn’t much mystery. She let me know instantly if she didn’t like what I was doing.

“Are you concerned about Samson?” she asked me a week after she’d joined the crew.

“What about him?”

“Is he lonely?”

I looked at her, suspecting she was getting an idea.

“He’s fine. He’ll find a mate, don’t worry.”

She looked at me with her strange eyes. “Are you sure? There is only Gwen, and there’s no indication that she will mate with him. The other crews frequently have too many males. A male without any females… it’s a sad thing.”

Releasing a sigh, I knew what I had to do, and I had to be direct. You couldn’t hint around much with Mia. It was a waste of time.

“If you want him, go to him. Right now!”

“Really?”

“Sure. But you won’t be my first anymore. You won’t be my anything.”

She pouted. “No… That’s not what I want. I apologize.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes.”

And that was it. She dropped whatever had been twisting in her mind, and she didn’t bring it up again. Perhaps the whole thing had been some kind of test.

We worked hard for a week, keeping
Hammerhead
flying and training constantly. Space was unforgiving, and every time we took our fighter out it required plenty of service afterward. We were finally becoming proficient at the process. Like everything aboard
Killer
, maintenance had been simplified as much as possible, but you still had to do it right or your fighter might just kill you with sudden decompression or an engine overload.

To keep my mind off the looming threat of war, I studied the technical data down-streamed from the command deck.
Killer
was a big carrier ship, but she wasn’t designed that way for aesthetics. There were particular reasons why her swollen, lumpy design worked so well.

It all came down to the FTL drive. In order to jump over intervening light years, the ship had to use a stellar drive that physically required a lot of bulk and power. It was expensive, too. That meant Fleet didn’t like to lose carriers. They’d designed smaller ships like
Hammerhead
to do the dying, giving the big ships had a greater chance of escaping a battle that went badly.

Effectively, my ship was a screen to defend the critical carriers. We were highly expendable.

The day finally came when we were to leave the Solar System and head toward the front, my palms were sweaty. We were ordered out of our pods and into our fighters when it was time to depart. That way, we could turn on our anti-grav units and be safe. There were stories about accidents where crewmen had been found later, crushed flat by the gravity waves dumped by the big ship upon reaching its destination.

Using my sym-link, I listened into the bridge chatter. I piped it down to the rest of the crew, along with the visuals I was getting, just so they could know what was happening to them.

They all wanted to hear what was happening, naturally enough. We’d never traveled to another star before.

“Beacon star is Rigel,” said a voice.

“We have a lock on Rigel.”

I didn’t know the pilots who flew this monster, but I’d often heard their voices when the big ship maneuvered.

“
Killer
is cleared for departure,” said Captain Ursahn as she appeared on our virtual screens.

Ursahn was a large woman with a hulking physique. Tufts of honest-to-God
fur
stuck out of her suit here and there. I would have pegged her as some kind of omnivorous forest creature if there hadn’t been an intelligence in her eyes.

“Initiate final singularity check,” she ordered.

A series of voices reported back to her in response.

“The containment shield is as smooth as glass.”

“Plasma core is cycling at seventy percent.”

“Reactor is good. We’ve got nine hundred terajoules in the capacitors and climbing.”

“Keep revving the core,” Ursahn said. “Are all sectors secure?”

“All sectors reporting secure. All decks reporting secure.”

The chatter went on like that as the big ship geared up to launch with the others. The Kher engineering was marvelous, but it wasn’t perfect. Like first time fliers on Earth, we were concerned because we knew something might go wrong.

“Has this captain ever scattered a ship?” Gwen asked Mia nervously.

Mia looked at her in surprise. Gwen had never treated her as anything but a rival, let alone asked her a question before. I suspected Gwen’s paranoia had outweighed her dislike of the girl.

“No,” she said, “I don’t think so. This is a big jump, but we’ll make it.”

Gwen looked worried anyway. Everyone watched the screens as the big ship began to make a thrumming sound.

“What’s that?” Gwen demanded.

“Don’t worry, it’s normal,” I told her.

She fell silent, but I could tell she was freaking out. We were, after all, about to jump something like twelve hundred lightyears toward the Orion Spur. None of us had ever done anything like this before.

Dr. Chang wasn’t nervous at all. He seemed excited.

“This is amazing,” he kept saying. “Do you realize we’ll be the first humans to leave our star system?”

“You want a prize, doc?” Samson asked.

Samson was nervous too, I could tell, but he wore a tough-guy look to hide it.

“Strap in everyone,” I ordered, “they’re down to the final sequence.”

“Strap in?” Samson asked. “We’re floating.”

It was true. We were drifting with our butts an inch away from our seats.

“If something goes wrong, you’re going to wish you were strapped in.” I told him.

“Oh…”

We all strapped in, and the computers counted down the time left in this part of the galaxy.

“Six…”

“Five… We have a portal… Stabilizers on! We’ve got a radiation spike!”

We stared at our screens, and I used my perception system. The rip in space appearing in front of our carrier was swirling. My sym made the invisible visible, and it showed me rays of white, deep violet and blue shooting out from the vortex. I knew that the radiation would be lethal if we weren’t shielded.

“Four…”

“Three…”

“Two… Engaging pulse drive. We’re moving to the portal.”

The spinning region of space in front of us grew larger. I wasn’t sure if this was really happening, or an illusionary effect caused by our approach. In a way, it didn’t matter. The carrier was dwarfed by the maelstrom of colored light and blasting radiation in front of us.

Other ships, all a great distance away, vanished into their breaches one at a time. They’d each opened a path and followed it to its terminus. We were about to do the same.

Unable to help myself, I leaned away from the images bombarding my mind. My hands gripped the armrests of my seat like claws.

“One… Entry!”

We were moving. Plunging through a rip between two places in the galaxy, using Rigel as our beacon star.

From what I understood of astronavigation, big hot stars like Rigel helped the starship’s computers target our desired destination. The gravitational influence and high radiation output served like a lighthouse in space, providing a reference point to navigate by.

Rigel was a stellar monster, two hundred thousand times as bright as our tiny yellow Sun. It was a blue-white super-giant, spectral class B.

At last, we plunged into the vortex, and we left behind our old lives, our old existence.

When our vision cleared, we were somewhere new. Somewhere humanity had never visited before.

=22=

When we arrived in normal space, I immediately reached out with my sym’s far-seeing awareness again. With relief, I saw a dim red star. We were in some kind of star system, at least. That was good, because if you scattered, you could end up way out in the dark.

The red star wasn’t too far away, indicating the navigators had done their job well. We’d ended up where we were supposed to be as far as I could tell.

All around us, more carrier ships appeared, winking into existence in blue-white flashes of light. That proved my theory. We were on-target.

“We haven’t scattered,” I told my crew. “This must be the right destination. There are ships popping up all around us.”

Killer
sailed serenely toward the small red sun with us inside her belly. We all relaxed, and soon we were given the all-clear to exit our fighter again.

Stretching on the deck, I pretended I’d never felt a moment of concern.

“These guys know what they’re doing,” I said. “I was a Navy pilot back on Earth. I know a professional when I see one at work.”

Everyone was happy—including me. To demonstrate her approval, Mia walked past me and ran her tail up the back of my leg. I knew what that meant. She wanted a good tail-pulling tonight.

Truthfully, the girl was hard to satisfy. Unlike women from Earth, she wasn’t at all shy about demanding regular attention, and she became quite irritable without it.

And now that we’d just felt the terror of the unknown and survived, a good tension release was in order. A little passion was always a good way to throw off the unsettled feelings that resulted from such risks.

We couldn’t indulge ourselves right away, unfortunately. I had a ship to care for. Technically, we’d taken a small flight. Every system had to be checked. Every sensor, module and subsystem must be given a diagnostic, and the results logged.

We worked on
Hammerhead
for nearly an hour before the “day” ended. We retired into our group pod. There, to Gwen’s disgust, Mia and I vigorously indulged ourselves in our private cell.

Because the cells weren’t very soundproof, everyone else in the group was forced to listen to the distinctive noises emanating from our lovemaking session.

When I left my private cell, I was in a much better mood. Gwen had her arms crossed and wouldn’t look at me, but I didn’t care. It was time to get back to work.

“They’re sucking up new recruits from a nearby planet,” Dr. Chang said. “You want to watch them bash each other?”

“I’ll pass,” I said.

Samson and Dr. Chang huddled up to watch the vids, which were broadcast to everyone aboard on our cloth-thin computers. Mia joined them and laughed.

“This reminds me of your group,” she said. “It was a great battle—very dramatic. Some races are so dull.”

“These guys look like turtles that someone has yanked out of their shells,” Samson commented.

“The print says they’re called Terrapinians,” Gwen told him.

“Turtles to me.”

Gwen rolled her eyes at him.

Intrigued, I glanced over Mia’s shoulder. I couldn’t help myself. The species was lumpy, and their skins were mottled and greenish. They had a wrinkled reptilian look all right. Their big skulls were wedge-shaped too, which
did
make me think of turtles.

By the time we were back on duty again, the gathering up of turtles and their first bloody contests were over. The fighting had been brutal, and the surviving turtles were all banged up.

“I think it’s their thick skulls,” Mia said. “The losers had to be beaten with those clubs for quite a while to stay down.”

We all watched them play king-of-the-hill for the final contest with knowing smiles. We couldn’t help ourselves. This was
Killer
’s boot-camp, and we’d all been there. We gasped, winced and gritted our teeth—but in the end, it was over. One group won with only two members standing. Soon, they were in the group pod again, recovering.

“Let’s go meet them,” Mia said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Please?”

“All right… why not?”

My crew followed me out. We were armed with disruptors just in case. They wouldn’t work unless the ship was attacked, but we were in the war zone now. It felt good to be armed.

The turtle-team gazed at us with unblinking eyes that looked like black drops of oil.

“We’re humans from Earth,” I said to them.

They said nothing. They didn’t even move.

“We went through the same recruitment process you did,” I continued. “We—”

“I want that one to hold my tail,” Mia said suddenly, pointing at the largest turtle. “That one, Leo. Make him do it! He’s looking at me with those evil lizard-eyes.”

“No, Mia,” I said. “We’re not here to play games.”

“Why are you here, then?” asked the largest turtle at last. He took a sweeping step toward us.

Their wide, bowed-out legs caused them to take large steps. They looked slow, but I knew that every step covered a lot of ground.

“We wanted to meet new people,” I said. “Underneath, we’re all genetically related. Officers will come soon and explain this to you.”’

“You’re not an officer?” he demanded. “And yet you dare to waste my time?”

“I thought maybe we could be friends.”

“Why would you think such a thing?”

“Make him hold my tail!” Mia insisted.

The turtle turned his black eyes to her.

“Disgusting creature of fur and weak bones,” he said. “I will not hold your tail, except to prevent your escape while I beat you with this club.”

Rebuffed, Mia backed away, showing her teeth.

Things were getting out of control, so I threw up my hands.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know you’ve had a difficult time getting here. We’ll leave you in peace.”

“No,” said the furious Terrapinian, striding forward and reaching for Mia, who danced away.

That’s when Samson shot him. His disrupter hummed and the turtle went down, clutching his chest.

I was shocked to see that the weapon worked, but then I remembered we were on the front lines now. Captain Ursahn must have activated our sidearms.

“It burns!” the turtle hissed.

“Dammit, Samson,” I said. “Let’s get out of here before this turns into a bigger shit-storm.”

The other Terrapinians gathered around their injured leader. They stared at us with hate in their obsidian eyes.

As we left them, Shaw appeared. He pointed to Samson.

“Was he authorized to damage my new recruits?” he demanded.

“No,” I said, “but he acted to defend Mia.”

Shaw looked from one of us to the other. “Next time, use your hands.”

“But what if they’re stronger than we are?” Gwen asked.

“Then you get beaten down, naturally.” Shaw said firmly. “These recruits are of such low status, I’m shocked you even came out to meet them. They’re worth very few points, and you gained nothing by shooting them. In fact, you probably lost a few for the violation.”

I didn’t bother to try to explain to him what my plan was, or how I’d hoped these Terrapinians would be different.

There was little logic to that hope, I knew. We were all Kher, and deep down that apparently made us mean, competitive and violent.

All my life I’d ascribed to the view that aliens, should we ever meet them, would be more civilized than the rowdy people of Earth. What a culture shock the truth was. It appeared that humans were more civilized than most other strains in the cosmos, from what I could see.

Among the Kher, kindness and consideration were greeted with a suspicious snarl. Friendliness was assumed to be a trick, a pretense to put an enemy off-guard, nothing else.

The more I thought about it, the less surprising it seemed from an evolutionary standpoint. The strong survived, the weak perished. That was the rule of life. There was no creature more ruthless than a predator who ran down other creatures to eat them. And who might come to dominate a planet and gain technological knowledge, other than a predator?

Even these Terrapinians appeared to be meat-eaters. They might look like shell-less turtles, but they had rows of sharp teeth in their mouths that had to be overkill when it came to eating lettuce.

“Befriending them was worth the attempt,” Dr. Chang said to me, as if he could read my mind. “But it was likely to fail.”

“I just wanted to make a connection.”

“Think about what they’ve just been through,” he said. “Only a few hours ago, the syms were infecting them with violent passion. Even if they’re normally peaceful, they’ve been at one another’s throats for days building to a climax that ended recently. You didn’t see them at their best.”

I nodded, thinking that made sense. “But I can’t get the idea out of my head that we could do better, as a group, if we cooperated more.”

“A noble goal,” he agreed, “but one that goes against our instincts. These turtles are like any Kher-variant from any planet. They’re vicious killers at heart. It was predictable that they wouldn’t be interested in making friends with humans.”

“I still believe a commitment to teamwork is the best way to accomplish any goal, especially military ones.”

“Really? That isn’t a historically based perspective. Every military on Earth is a linear dictatorship from the top to the bottom. Ranks are clear. Pecking orders are rigid. The same holds true in other organizations that function well, such as companies.”

“But this is different,” I said, “we’re not exactly the same. We’re so different in appearance, behavior, and culture.”

“Like the Golden Horde…” he muttered

“What?”

“Over a thousand years ago, Mongolia conquered the majority of Asia, and a good portion of Europe as well. They didn’t start with many soldiers, but they pressed others into service. Each time the Mongols conquered a city or a nation, they added them to the horde. There was no love lost between any of them, believe me, but they were very effective in battle anyway.”

“Yeah…” I said with a grunt. The good doctor was kicking my ass in this argument, and I wanted out. “Well, we’ll see how this organization behaves when we meet the enemy.”

“I suspect it will do quite well,” Dr. Chang said, “but it all depends on the strength of the enemy. If they outnumber or outgun us, we’ll lose.”

I had nothing further to offer.

He shrugged and headed for bed. I lay down and Mia lay next to me, curling herself up. She was hot to the touch, and her breath was warm and moist.

I stayed awake for a long time, pondering this Fleet of strangers I’d signed on with. Was I going to live or die at their side? Would I ever get to meet or talk to the real enemy in the ships on the other side? Or would we die in the cold of space, never even knowing what hit us?

There was no way of telling, and that fact made it difficult to sleep.