The Fleet Book 2: Counter Attack (15 page)

“Cheers,” he said. We drank, “Are you hungry? I could send for some lunch for you?”

“There’s a Nedge here named Otaî,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind a bit of him, roasted, baked or boiled, whichever is most convenient.”

Tostig chuckled. “I wish I could oblige you. But Otaî works for me, and he betrayed you only in order to fulfill his Guild Oath. Perhaps a nice salad instead? I understand you humans can eat green stuff without becoming ill.”

“Nothing at the moment, thank you. I don’t understand about that Guild Oath stuff.”

“Well, that’s because you haven’t been here fifty years. I requisitioned the services of a Master Tinker, you see, and the Guild sent Otaî. But he couldn’t do what we asked of him. They had sent me an untrained young cub who had gotten his Guild affiliation through a highly placed uncle. Yes, these things do happen here. Well, naturally, I was cross, and was about to turn him over to my chef for filleting and marination, when Otaî said he would fulfill his Guild Oath by bringing me a substitute whose skills would be sufficient for my needs.”

“And that was me.”

“Yes, though not you personally. Any human would have done, because your entire race is renowned as peerless Tinkers. Not bad fighters, either, I must say, but exceptional when it comes to fixing things.”

“Baron Tostig,” I said, “or whatever your title is . . .”

“‘Baron’ will do nicely,” Tostig said. “Has quite a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

I shrugged. “Baron, shmaron, it’s all the same to me. If you think I’m going to help you, the most dangerous enemy humankind has yet encountered, you’ve misjudged me entirely.”

“Well, of course, you have to say that,” Tostig said, “But suppose I make you an offer you can’t refuse?”

Tostig had learned a few things during his stay at the London Zoo, that much was evident. “What’s the offer?” I asked.

“Suppose I can prove to you that the assistance you give me will benefit your own people as well?”

“I doubt very much whether you will be able to prove that to me.”

“But suppose I can? And suppose I promise that, upon completion of the job, I will set you free, unharmed?”

“No matter what you do to me, I will never betray humanity.”

“That remains to be seen, doesn’t it?” He sat up and pulled on his boots. “But don’t think it will come to that. Let me show you what I have in mind, and then you can decide, rather hastily, I fear, but I can give you a minute or two. But that’s putting the hindquarters before the front paws, as we say in Khalia. Come with me. This will interest you.”

Tostig marched to the entrance, his long cloak swirling behind him. I followed. What else was I to do?

XI.

Tostig was a credit to his race, as the goyim used to say about some of us on Earth. The same could not be said for his followers. They lounged around passageways, drinking their fermented milk and getting quite drunk, telling jokes, slapping each other on the back with loud guffaws, farting rudely whenever possible, and jeering at the hapless human prisoner trotting along at the heels of their leader. In this they behaved like troops all over the galaxy, but it tried my patience nonetheless.

For Tostig they showed a mixture of easy familiarity and poorly disguised awe. This was the only proper attitude to take with a battle leader as famous as Tostig. Like the Norsemen of old Terra, these Khalia had sworn personal fealty to Tostig, and he had led them to much glory and more booty.

He led me through a bewildering array of passageways hewn out of the rock, and then down irregularly spaced stone staircases which Tostig negotiated on all fours, and a lot quicker than I on two legs. We came out on the floor of the cavern. Ahead of us lay the colossal grouping of spaceships, and toward that we walked.

“You seem to have quite a few of the smaller ships,” I remarked. “More, it seems to me, than you Khalia put into the line of battle against the Fleet, to judge by the reports I’ve heard.”

“That’s quite correct,” Tostig said, leading me down the wavering aisles that ran between the masses of ships. “Nothing we could do about that, of course.”

I was silent. If he believed that, I certainly wasn’t going to tell him differently.

Here and there among the ships I could see parties of Khalia working. Each crew seemed to be under the command of an older Khalian, and these overseers, or whatever they were, wore silver-grey tunics and oddly pointed hats made of felt or some similar material.

“What’s going on?” I asked Tostig.

“It should be obvious enough,” he said, never lessening his stride, or rather, his lope, as we hurried toward some unknown destination. “Those are repair crews. We’re fixing the damaged ships. I’m sure you have similar procedures.”

I watched the Khalia for a while. They were removing modulized components from the ships, and taking them somewhere else. The overseer was checking the identification numbers of the modules against a master list in his paw.

“It’s all quite straightforward,” Tostig told me, noticing my interest. “Each ship has a status panel which identifies a misfunctioning part and gives us its location, serial number, and removal procedure. We take out the damaged part and put in a new one.”

“And you get the new one from some other ship,” I said. “Is that correct?”

“Of course. How else does one get parts?”

I nodded as if his method were obviously the only one that could be followed. Now I understood the significance of this graveyard for spaceships. It was the closest equivalent to a warehouse the Khalia had. We humans would have put up an automated warehouse which we’d keep stocked with freshly manufactured spare parts ready to be used as needed by the ships of the Fleet.

It was evident now that the Khalia had no warehouse system, not even for a battle as important as this struggle for Target. There could be but one reason for this: they had no industry with which to manufacture replacement parts. Nor, apparently, did they have an outside source.

This insight, later confirmed, was obviously of overwhelming importance to Fleet Intelligence. When one of the Khalian ships broke down, all they could do was replace the entire module in which the breakdown had occurred. If they could find one. Otherwise the ship had to stay out of action.

And the importance of this spaceship graveyard was now clear. Parts from this collection of broken spaceships were probably keeping a major part of the Khalian fleet in operation. Destroy this dump and who knows how far they’d have to travel to find replacements?

Fixing things—the basis of technological civilization—was of little interest to the Khalian. There was a caste among them who did do a certain amount of repair work. They might, in time, have developed into a guild of scientists and craftsmen. But they chose instead the mystical path, and became the seers and singers of a magical and poeticized pseudo-technology. I was to learn more about this from Homer Farsinger, the Destination Master of Tostig’s band. But all that came later. Now I was just catching up with Tostig, who had come to a stop at last beside a medium-sized spaceship, somewhat smaller than one of the, fleet’s cruisers.

Tostig turned to me. “Now, my friend, comes a time of decision for you. I have a simple proposal to make.”

“My mind’s already made up,” I said, “if your proposal is what I think it is.”

“And what is that?”

“I figure you want my help in getting these ships working again. So you can fight our Fleet again, and, perhaps this time come out better. The answer is no.”

“I wouldn’t blame you for refusing that,” Tostig said. “That would be treason, and that’s something no warrior of honor asks of another. But such a task would be beyond any one man’s capabilities, and is not what I have in mind.”

“What is it then?”

“Behold this ship,” Tostig said, “It is my own personal ship. You know, perhaps, that we Khalia go to battle under our chosen war leaders, each of whom has his own ship. Actually, we don’t go to war, since that implies a contest that can be brought to a decision. We fight for booty, and above all, we fight for glory. Where neither booty nor glory are to be had, some of us, many of us, consider it no disgrace to break off an engagement and go elsewhere, where things may be more to our liking.”

“I can assure you,” I said, “I am all in favor of you going elsewhere.”

I was speaking ironically, of course. But Tostig took it seriously.

“In that case, Judah, there should be no problem between us. Because, what I want you to do is help me get this ship spaceworthy. As soon as it is, I will load up my men and we will go somewhere else. Some place more amusing than Target has turned out to be, especially in this last phase.”

I turned it over in my mind. “Would you give me your word that you’d go away from Target?”

“Certainly. “

“And that you would not attack humanity again?”

“Don’t be silly,” Tostig said. “Of course I’m going to attack humanity again. That’s the game, you see. I mean, there’s nothing else for a Khalian warrior to do.”

“I don’t know,” I said, “whether that would be helpful to humanity or disloyal.”

“Well, you can’t know entirely, can you?” Tostig said. “But it seems to me that this way we both get to keep our lives, and who can say what the future will hold for either of us, or for either of our races? You give up a tricky situation here and maybe it turns up somewhere else. Or maybe not. The point is moot, I think. It will certainly save the lives of your men on Target. But one thing is certain. If you don’t help me, you’ll die in this place before I do. That’s a promise, not a threat. Since I’ve taken a liking to you, I won’t eat you, in the event I must kill you. But die you will if you turn me down. But don’t let that influence you. What do you say?”

As you can imagine, I did a great deal of thinking in a very short time, there on the chilly cavern floor, beneath the steely loom of Tostig’s spaceship lit vaguely by the cavern’s green phosphorescence. I had a natural desire to stay alive, of course. But my decision was based upon objective considerations.

As an Intelligence Officer, or just as an intelligence source, it was necessary for me to stay alive, and to bring back this new knowledge which I had acquired about the Khalia. The lack of a manufacturing source for the ship’s replacement parts was crucial knowledge. Given that fact, spaceship graveyards acquired an importance we had not considered before; they were sources of materials that kept the Khalian raiders in action. The importance to them of this spaceship depository was why they were fighting so fiercely for this planet. If I could get back, I could direct the Fleet’s telemetry to the approximate location. They could blow away the spaceship graveyard here in the wilderness without risking any Nedge lives.

Finally, there was this: if the Khalia were unable to manufacture their own spaceships, as seemed now to be the case, who was manufacturing them? And why were they doing it? This was something the Fleet leaders had to ponder. And to be exposed to the question, I had to get back to tell them.

Would he actually let me go?

I hoped he was a weasel of his word.

I had to take the chance.

“I’ll do it,” I said.

“Good fellow!” he cried, with evident warmth. “Come along then. You’ll want to meet the Destination Master. He’ll tell you what’s needed.”

XII.

Tostig led me down to a crude building which had been set up a few yards from the cruiser. It was a one-room shack, put together from bits and pieces of metal, old doors, metal shielding. Tostig found a patch of ground to lie down in, and motioned for me to put myself at my ease.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“The Destination Master is inside, talking to the gods. We mustn’t disturb him. He’ll come out when he’s finished.”

“What, exactly, is a Destination Master?” I asked.

From what Tostig told me, our nearest equivalent would be a navigator. But the Khalian Destination Masters were also in charge of maintaining the navigational equipment through prayers and meditation. Destination Masters, I learned, are always chosen from the Poet Class, since, by common consent, the Poets of Khalia understand about Traveling and Fighting, since they compose the heroic verses which are woven into the Sagas and constitute the soul of the Khalian race. Only this dedicated Poet caste can be trusted to communicate the correct messages to the ship’s computer.

I was just beginning to grasp the meaning of all this when the Destination Master came out of his house. He was considerably older than Tostig, who was himself noticeably older than most of his followers. His name, translated into our own language, was Homer Farsinger. His fur was a grayish brown, grizzled white at the ends. He walked with great dignity, but with more than a hint of the rheumatism that affects so many Khalia in their old age.

His voice was-high, quavering, unpleasant.

“Baron Tostig,” he said, “why have you brought this racially impure human to the Shrine of Communication?”

At first I thought he was being anti-Semitic, but then realized that he considered all humans racially impure. Perhaps from the viewpoint of a weasel that made sense.

“Now Homer,” Tostig said, his voice conciliatory, “you know we discussed this. Human beings are very good at fixing things. With his help, you’ll be able to sort out the computer in no time and we can be on our way to fresh booty. And glory, too, we must never forget that.”

“A Poet-Bard of the Khalia is unapt to forget glory,” Homer remarked. “I do not need this creature’s help. I am perfectly capable of conducting the Diving Startup Procedure.”

“Yes, I know,” Tostig said, “But the fact is, we still can’t get the damned thing going.”

“The Gods of Communication will grant us passage,” Homer said. “We must not try to rush them.”

“I must point out,” Tostig said, “that some among the Khalia have come to believe that computers are responsive to straightforward cause and effect principles rather than the purely hypothetical Communication Gods.”

“Don’t speak sacrilege in my presence,” Homer said. “You may be Baron Tostig, the greatest hero the Inchidian Clan of the West Khalia has yet produced. But religiously, you’re still a pup.”