Retief and the Rascals (25 page)

            "That was my C, Ben," Foof corrected,
"and what's a trifle of forced copulation and strangulation compared with
the violation of the most hallowed principles of civilized savagery? Eh?"
The diminutive admiral relaxed his 73 and rearranged his ocular members in a
somewhat mollifying 70 (Severe Disappointment in a Subordinate's Performance).

            "Me? Your subordinate?" Magnan yelled.
"Why, the cheek of it! I'll have you know—"

            "Later, Mr. Magnan," Retief cut in. "Listen."
Magnan cupped an ear, and Foof deployed a single stalk from his dozen or so
auditory organs to scan the sky above.

            "About time," he muttered. "To
have come perilously close to blowing the mission entirely."

            "Who?" Magnan yapped. "What
mission? Do you have anything to do ..." His voice trailed off. He
watched  with  horror  as  an 
Overwhelming-class
super-dreadnought
clearly of Bogan manufacture curved grandly into view above the horizon, like a
rising moon. The billion-tonner approached, brushing aside units of both the
CDF and Rex Promo's naval detachment, while the Groaci force bunched up and
kept a wary distance from the intruding monster. The titanic vessel was
descending rapidly, its turrets scanning left-right for suitable targets. Foof
and Hish had gone into conference, ten eyestalks whipping in rapid sequences of
Top Urgent symbolism.

           
"General
Hish!" Magnan wailed,
"if you've any influence over this atrocity, now's the time to call it to
heel!"

            "Not broody likely, Ben," Hish replied
gloatingly. "Brag Gab has his orders—"

            "Ha!" a coarse voice rang from the
wily Groaci's lapel talker. "I heard that, Hish! It'll be a hot day on Ice
Nine when
you
give
orders
to me!"

            "Good Lord!" Magnan gasped. "Then
the rumors were true: you're in collusion with the most notorious criminal gang
in the Arm!"

            Hish, busy reprogramming his talker to the
privacy mode, waved away Magnan's plaint.

            "Envy is a sorry spectacle, Ben," he
hissed. "It's true that Freedom Fighter Brag and I have arrived at an
accommodation. Look at them run: your vaunted Navy, as well as the ragtag
dacoits of the CDF!"

            "That's not the Navy," Magnan
objected. "Only a mutinous detachment illegally intruded here by the
renegade, Rex Promo!"

            "Same thing," Hish dismissed the
rebuke carelessly, "Just wait until Brag has his command at rest
on-planet, and we'll see who's to dictate terms in Bloor City tonight!"

            "If we live until tonight!" Magnan
yelped. "That thing will crush the blockhouse like a glimp egg!"

        "Not so, Ben,"
Hish corrected urbanely. Then, to his talker: "Brag, I want you to pull
back to five miles and shell the city and its environs, with due care to avoid
any damages to the Customs shed where I have established my command post."

            "I'll do what I please, you sneaky little
bug!" the bandit leader yelled.

            "Treachery!" Hish moaned.
"Brag!" he yelled. "Remember the solid gold planetoid, me
lifetime preferred membership in the Playtoy Club, as well as—"

            "Skip it, Hish!" Brag bellowed.
"I'm not settling for no handouts! I guess I know where the powers at
here!"

            "The rascal!" Hish wept. "After I
supplied him with a dreadnought, and promised him the emoluments of a Groacian
National Hero, too! He should have out-done himself to fulfill his part of the
bargain—instead, he tries to hold me up for impossible demands!"

            "Would you really have made him a
GNH?" Magnan inquired. "I thought only—"

            "Certainly not!" Hish snapped.
"That's an honor bestowed only by the Council of Drones in solemn congress
assembled! But he, poor unsophisticated creature that he is, had no way of
knowing that! He should, according to the Manual, paragraph Nine-f, have gone
along, naively dreaming of Imperial honors! It's not to be borne!"

            "There's none so righteously
indignant," Retief commented, "as a con man whose sucker slips off
the hook after the gaff is set. All that hard set-up work wasted. Sad, isn't
it, Ben?"

            "To be sure, when one considers it in that
light," Magnan commiserated.

            "Bah!" Hish scoffed. "What do you
oh-so-righteous Terries know of the trials and rewards of skulduggery raised to
a fine art? I'll make Brag rue the day he turned on
me\"

           
"You oughta learn ta switch off yer
blab-box when yer letting yer head-tendrils down," Brag remarked without
rancor from the Groaci officer's talker. "OK, I don't hold no grudges,
see? It don't pay. I'll just take care o' these here Cluster Defense bums, and
then I'll hit old Buck Promo where he ain't expecting it, see, he don't know
about the reinforcements here, and—"

            "What?" Promo's irate voice blared
from the open mike. " 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend' remember? And
I'm here to neutralize the CDF, among other things! That makes us allies—or
better yet, it qualifies you to place your force under my command!"

            "That'll be the day!" Brag scoffed.
"Tell ya what, Buck: you put yer little group unner
my
command!
Then we'll nit old Pete where it hurts. I can nail the suckers onna ground!
Whattaya say?"

            "I never NEVER!" Promo yelled.
"Chief Reilly run out the aft battery; we'll give these bandits a whiff of
grape, so to speak," he went on in an aside.

            "Now whose mike's open?" Brag crowed.
"Get set, boys," he told his own lapel talker. "Set up a Q and a
half, we'll fake them Navy clowns outa position and hit 'em right up their
stern-tubes! Do it!"

            The group on the ramp watched as the
naked-eye-visible spacecraft maneuvered smartly, each intent on crossing the
other's T, while, from a distance, Switchback's fresh-from-maintenance force
shifted into position on their flank. Meanwhile, the Indestructible force had
split in two, and the two halves were moving to confront each other.

            "Hey, Mister Magnan!" Thrash's hoarse
voice blared from Magnan's defective talker. "This here wiper, this
Obtulucz, is taking that phony title you give him serious! He's tryna take over
command here. In fack, he's got my Second Division—"

            "I know! You must give no provocation,
Sarge! Let him think—"

            "I'm the Grand Admiral," Skunky's
voice came in. "You said so yerself! And don't start plotting against me,
or I'll—"

            "Uh-oh," Magnan remarked. "I fear
there's to be carnage wrought here today, with Hish's command playing a role
that will resound in the annals of betrayal! Look there, at Switchback's ships:
they're easing around left-end. I'll bet Foof is going to hit Promo and Brag
simultaneously, and deal with the Colonel afterward. And Thrash and Obtulucz
are joining battle!"

            "Sound tactics," Retief conceded.
"Except that General Hish wouldn't like that, eh, General?

            He turned to the crestfallen alien, who was
madly twiddling the controls of his command talker. "Foof!" Hish
snarled, "I
command
you—and that's a direct order, mind—to drop
back and take out Switchback's flagship as your first priority. The scamp has
already laid his prime batteries on your command, ready to blow you out of
space as soon as you go for Promo and the traitor Brag!"

            "Hmm," Magnan murmured. "Hish is
a better field commander than I'd suspected. Watch! He's—"

            "Sure," Retief agreed, "and Promo
is all set to do a Carousel and take him from below as soon as he lets fly with
his first salvo."

            "Brilliant!" Magnan exclaimed.
"But disastrous for the cause of Goodness and Rightness! Promo is our only
hope, Jim! If he retains any loyalty whatever to Naval discipline, he
can—"

            "Don't worry," Retief soothed.
"Brag isn't about to be left out of the fun. He's pretending to be busy
setting up a standard Ferris, but I'll bet you a fancy dinner at Mae's East
he's going to—"

            "You're right!" Magnan yelped.
"There he goes! It's all over for the Groaci, but Buck Promo won't take
this lying down!"

            "It matters little," Hish put in,
"whether the notorious renegade Buck Promo lies prone or even supine: he's
forestalled. You see, gentlemen, I anticipated the possibility of Brag Gab's
defection, and detached a couple of special units disguised as tenders, to take
up positions commanding his primary route of withdrawal, and— what's that! The
miscreant Pete is spoiling everything!"

            "Right, General," Pete confirmed.
"I trusted you five-eyed little sneaks about as far as you can see with
all five eye stalks tied in a square knot, which is what they'll be in about
ten seconds, give or take a rear-squad action or two!"

        "Ben!" Hish
whispered. "You wouldn't let him ...?"

            "I just might," Magnan purred,
"unless you order Foof to envelop Switchback as soon as his first advance
units reach NEV, and board his vessels and turn them against Rex Promo."

            "Well," Hish temporized, "I
suppose that in the really big pattern, it wouldn't hurt.

            "Regardless of the proportions of the
graphic representation," Lieutenant Ape interjected formally, you better
do like Mister Magnan tells you, Hish, or I'll do the job myself." So
saying, he made a grab for the Groaci's neck, by which time the thoroughly cowed
officer was barking commands to Foof as rapidly as he could inflate his throat
sac to activate his vocal apparatus.

            "—to do it smartly now, mind you,
Foof!" Hish hissed. "Or you'll attend your court-martial with your
oculars knitted into the form of a tea-cozy! Foof!" he snarled. "Do
as I say!" then, to Magnan: "Ben, I call you to witness, the
insubordinate rogue is deliberately defying me and laying into Brag's ragtag
force!"

            Averting his eyes from the scene of carnage
developing above, a swarming confusion of fire-spouting war vessels that boiled
across the sky from horizon to horizon, Magnan moaned. "I never before
grasped the fullness of the concept of chaos," he gobbled. "Promo is
attacking Pete, Pete is savaging Switchback, who in turn is fully occupied with
Foof's tricky feint, and Thrash and Skunky are going at it, even while fending
off independent strikes by Brag and various units of all of the above! One
hardly knows for whom to root!"

            "To hope the scoundrels eliminate each
other!" Hish remarked. "Look at that fool, ex-Admiral Foof! He's
turned on Switchback's negligible force now, while he allows Pete to form up
the CDF in a Knitsie enveloping his entire anterior quadrant!"

            "We can't just stand by, Jim," Magnan
said sternly. "We have to figure out which of the combatants represent the
forces of G and R, and do what we can to aid them!"

            "We can start," Retief suggested,
"by letting General Hish call Foof out of the fray, eh, General?"

            "Never!" Hish spat. "Or rather,
to be a capital idea, Jim!" He proceeded to issue further orders to Foof,
quite in vain, since the admiral had his grasping members full in attempting to
disengage from Pete's violent counterattack. Meanwhile, Hish was hissing
frantically into his CM.

            Retief ripped the device from Hish's lapel and
spoke into it: "Fun's over, Foof. Forget about the CDF, and ground what's
left of your command soonest!"

            Foof's faint voice came back, in a complaining
tone: "Who are you, vile Soft One, to essay to command a Groacian flag officer?"

            "Better tell him it's official,
General," Retief recommended to Hish, "if you want to salvage
anything out of this riot."

            Hish obediently repeated Retief's orders, and
the Groaci units promptly disengaged and settled in, aligning themselves in a
crude South Forty across the adjoining tundra.

            As soon as the Groaci units had settled in they
were followed by Brag Gab and the CDF.

            "Debark crews and prepare for
inspection!" Hish commanded harshly.

            "Tell them to lie facedown, with tentacles
extended" Retief told the general, who complied sullenly.

            "A wise precaution," Magnan commented.
"I've a notion the scamps were forming up for an assault on Gab's
contingent."

           
"
Ah
contraire!"
Hish hissed. "The said Brag is, in point of fact,
about to commit an act of aggression directed at Admiral Foof's disciplined
command who have trustingly cooperated with your illegal orders. Intercede at
once!"

            "Pete," Retief addressed the lanky
pirate chief as he came running up. "Tell Lieutenant Ape to double-time
his group around the perimeter of the port, to discourage Brag's reserves.
They're getting set to blow the south fence."