The Fleet Book 2: Counter Attack (3 page)

Then she realized that Pachue was tilting. “Straighten out!” she called, but the private heeled over and headed for the ground. “Cut out!” Lutane screamed.

Pachue couldn’t have heard her, but must have understood the look on Lutane’s face, because her jets died. Below her the squad scattered, pulling back into a circle as momentum turned Pachue upright again; When her head was at two o’clock, Lutane slapped her fist into her own chest, hoping Pachue would understand the impromptu sign. It must have gotten through, because the jets roared out again, breaking the kid’s fall just in time. She hit hard, but she remembered to fold at the knees, and Lutane turned back to the com center with a sigh of relief. Too bad they had to have replacements, but everyone had to be green once.

It left Lobrin without a partner, though. Lutane thumbed her altitude jet, swooping over to him, then straightening up again just as they reached the window. “Back!” Lutane called, and they both flattened themselves against the wall on either side of the window, throttling their’ jets down to maintain altitude, just as a fountain of bullets sprayed out of the window. Exactly what she herself would have done, Lutane thought grimly, and waited for a pause in the stream of bullets. It came, and she dodged into the embrasure, jamming the trigger down. Lobrin was a quarter-second behind her, but he matched her to the beat when she ducked back out again, loosing another geyser of bullets from inside the building. That was all it took, though; the defenders had had to turn back to Lutane’s side, and Nol’s troops at the opposite windows poured in hot lead as though the building was a crucible. Lutane waited, and waited;, the hail of bullets seemed to go on, and on, and on . . .

Finally it stopped. The com center was quiet.

Very quiet.

Somebody had to take the chance. Lutane ground her teeth.
What are lieutenants for, anyway?

She spun through the window, rifle blazing—and let the burst die.

Four Khalia lay on the floor—all around. What was left of their bodies was hamburger, with a few jigsaw puzzle pieces thrown in.

Her stomach heaved, and she just barely managed to choke it back down, lifting her glare to the com gear. There was a lot of smoke rising, but a few consoles seemed intact.

“Come on in,” she called. “Don’t look down.”

Nol ducked in, then Lobrin at Lutane’s back, then the rest of them. Some looked at the floor, and looked away again quickly, turning a delicate shade of chartreuse. Maybe, Lutane thought, that was why they called new troops “green.”

The veterans could have taken it, but they had sense enough not to look. Porthal and Elab went straight to the two intact consoles, frowning down at the dials and sliders.

“Can you figure it out?” Lutane demanded.

Porthal nodded slowly. “Take a little experimenting, Lieutenant—but this grille is either a mike or a vent, and that meter’s either amps or volts.”

Elab didn’t speak; he was already kicking aside the tilt-board and pulling a chair over.

Lutane stared. A chair? What was a chair doing here? The Khalia’s tilt-board backrests, sure—but why would there be chairs in the com center, too?

Later. Speculate after the job’s done. Lutane pressed the patch on her bracelet and talked into the mesh. “Everybody in. Squad one, hold the door and the stairwell. Squads two and three, search the building by the square foot. If there’s anything bigger than a gnat, I want it dead.”

“Yes, sir,” her bracelet answered in duplicate.

“And watch out for booby traps!” Lutane snapped. She lowered her arm and turned about slowly, surveying the big, open room. There—the lift. It was over against the side wall, doors open—and filled with dead, bloody bodies. Lutane nodded with grim satisfaction—she’d been right. The last Khalian alive downstairs had pushed the up button, and died as the lift rose.

She turned back to Nol’s squad. “Anybody with a strong stomach, help me throw this mess into a tarp and find the mops and buckets. Everybody else, get busy repairing equipment.”

She shouldn’t have left it open like that. It came down to Nol and herself on the cleanup crew.

* * *

The floor was so clean that it glared. The equipment had stopped smoking, and the soldiers had started to repair it.

“All set?” Lutane asked.

Porthal nodded. “It works, Lieutenant. Long-wave and medium-wave audio. Video, too, but there’s nothing to feed into it yet.”

“We’ll find the pick-ups soon enough,” Lutane assured him. “Okay, power up.” She raised her voice. “Who speaks Weasel?”

“Here.”

“I do, Lieutenant.”

“Me, too.”

“Okay. You three, over to the pick-ups.”

The three’ troopers came over and sat down next to the signal operators.

“Send this out broadcast,” Lutane said. “This city has been conquered by the Terran Fleet . . .”

“Uh, Lieutenant?”

“I know, I know, we don’t know for sure that we’ve conquered anything more than this center! But we’re after propaganda, not news. Just broadcast it, Private.”

“Yes, sir . . .”

“All civilians are to remain indoors until further notice. Do not obey orders from any Khalian. Instead, report their locations to the nearest Terran soldier.” Lutane frowned in thought for a moment. She had to make it sound like a good deal for the slaves. “Citizens, rejoice! The conqueror is vanquished; your freedom is won!”

“Yes, sir.” The translators turned back to their pick-ups and eyed the operators, who scowled at their panels for a moment, then nodded. The translators began to talk in falsetto, trilling syllables. Lutane watched them for a few minutes with grim satisfaction, then lifted her big commset and keyed in Captain Rakoan’s code. She waited impatiently until the little plate lit up with his face, frowning.

“Lieutenant Morna?”

“Yes, sir. Objective accomplished—we’ve taken the com center.”

“Yes, I heard your broadcast. You might want to add to it that the other platoons have taken their objectives, too.”

“Yes, sir.” Lutane felt her belly weaken with relief and realized that, at the back of her mind, she’d been haunted by the possibility of being a Terran island in the middle of a Khalian sea.

“How many enemy have you taken?”

“None, sir. They all died fighting.”

Rakoan nodded as though he had expected it. “That seems to be the rule. Your fellow officers only took two alive, and they’re so badly mangled that we may not get anything out of them. Any noncombatants?”

“No, sir.” Lutane frowned, realizing for the first time that there hadn’t been any slaves in the building.

Rakoan nodded again. “That’s the pattern. Featherheads in the houses, slaves of all species in the streets—but none in the objective buildings.”

“Slaves wouldn’t have anything to do with running the place, anyway,” Lutane said cautiously.

“No, but I would have expected a few of them to be in the government buildings, just as servants.” Rakoan frowned, brooding on the question for a moment. Then he shrugged it away. “Well. There’ll be time enough to find out why when we’ve mopped up. Well done, Lieutenant. Listen in on the com and pick out the details to broadcast.”

“Yes, sir. Out.”

Rakoan’s picture vanished. Lutane racked her commset on her belt, and turned to frown out over her new domain. Something niggling at the back of her mind had become clear—the fact that the com equipment wasn’t placed to full efficiency in the room. The consoles were set around in a horseshoe which made sense for a single officer in charge—but the horseshoe sat in the center of a rectangle, with all kinds of room between it and the walls. Even allowing for technicians needing access for repair, there was still way too much space left over. That, plus Rakoan’s comment about the lack of slaves, ignited an insight—she was looking at a conversion. Sure, the original building predated interstellar technology—but presumably, it would have had the same kind of function in the early industrial civilization that preceded it.

No, it hadn’t. Why else would there be so much room left over?

Lutane nodded slowly. She was looking at the inside of what had been a public meeting hall of some kind, adapted for use as a com center.

“Here, Lieutenant. We found an extra.”

“Huh?” Lutane looked up just as a private shoved a chair toward her knees. “Oh. Thanks, Londol.” She folded into the chair, then had to fight to keep herself from folding, period. “You were a journalist back home, weren’t you, Londol?”

“Yes, sir. I worked on the
Galathian
with Bullam over there.”

“Well, the two of you, get busy being reporters again. Listen in on the com, then call in and get the details on how each unit won. Then assemble them for broadcast.”

Londol smiled. “We know the process, sir.”

Lutane just nodded wearily, and settled back to watch as the room quieted. There were comments back and forth between technicians, broken by occasional warbling announcements in Khalian—but aside from that, the com center was mostly quiet. Londol and Bullam settled themselves at desks and began making calls. Lutane listened idly, feeling a glow of accomplishment—and the regret of having killed sentients, no matter how vicious they’d been.

After a while, she frowned, realizing that a pattern was building up. The units reporting in had taken terrible losses, between thirty and fifty percent, but the Khalia had been virtually annihilated, since they fought ferociously and refused to surrender. The only prisoners were the ones who were wounded too badly to fight back—and most of those would probably die in a few hours.

But that wasn’t the case with their “allies,” as Captain Rakoan had called them. The featherheads were running at the first sign of a fight, which wasn’t surprising, since none of them seemed to be armed. They didn’t even carry belt knives. But they did have an appalling tendency to get caught in the cross fire, and there were more dead featherheads than dead Khalia.

“Lieutenant!”

Lutane looked up to see Olerein coming up to her. Then her eyes widened, and she came to her feet, because in front of Olerein marched two featherheads, hands pressed to their chests, trembling—and in front of them was a much smaller one, doing a good imitation of an earthquake. Lutane stared at the little one, remembering the two other little ones she’d seen in the featherhead house, and a lot of things began to make sense. She lifted her head and called, “Anybody speak featherhead?”

The room was quiet. Then Londol said, “No Lieutenant.”

Lutane cursed and yanked out her commset. “Lieutenant Lutane calling Captain Rakoan.”

The plate glowed. Then Rakoan’s face appeared. “Yes, Lieutenant?”

“We have some featherhead, prisoners, sir.”

“Those
we have plenty of, all sizes. Anything interesting about them?”

Lutane eyed the aliens. “Guess not, sir; I was, uh, hoping you could, uh, spare, a translator.”

“‘Fraid not, Lieutenant. The ones we have are all busier than a beekeeper without a mask. Let me know if you find out anything interesting; all right?”

“Uh . . . yes, sir.” Lutane killed her commset and racked it as she looked up at Olerein. “I hate to give up my chair, but it’s the only thing to tie them to. Make ‘em sit down, Olerein. Londol!”

“Yes, sir?”

“Bring some rope.”

She studied the featherheads as Olerein and Londol bound them. There wasn’t enough chair for the two big ones, but at least they had some support for sitting. She picked up the little one—it squalled frantically and struggled like an eel—and put it on the laps of the big ones just as Londol looped a rope around it. “Bring another chair as soon as you can find one, Olerein. Where’d you find ‘em?”

“Ground level, Lieutenant. There’s a lift-tube at the back of the building . . .”

“A lift-tube?” Lutane looked up, startled.

“Yeah.” Olerein grinned. “We could have come up the back way and caught the weasels in a cross fire. But, the door that opens into the entry fits the wall so tightly we passed it by. Besides that, there’s just the room at the back, where I found these two. They were cowering in a corner, hugging each other.”

Lutane’s eyes narrowed. “What else was in the room?”

Olerein shrugged. “Just knives, ladles, pots, ovens . . .”

“Food preparation.” Lutane scowled at the featherheads, who shrank in on themselves at the sight of her glare. “What have we got here, the cook, the butler, and the pot-boy?”

Londol nodded, “That would make sense, sir. From the way they’re cowering, I’d sure say they aren’t soldiers.”

“Yeah.” Lutane frowned and pulled out her commset. “Lieutenant Lutane to Captain Rakoan. Over.”

The plate glowed to life, with Rakoan glowering out at her. “This had better be good, Lieutenant.”

Lutane swallowed hard. “I hope so, sir. Remember your hypothesis, that the featherheads might be allies instead of slaves?”

Rakoan frowned. “Of course.”

“Well, mine are quaking in their boots, sir. I don’t see any way they could have been
any
kind of soldiers.”

Rakoan’s frown softened to brooding. “Yeah. You’re not the only one who’s said that. In fact, everyone who’s taken featherhead prisoners says they’re scared gutless.”

But Lutane heard a report coming in to Londol. “Wait, sir! The assault on the admin center?”

“Successful, Lieutenant, though they took more than fifty percent casualties. They had to fight their way up those ramps, inch by inch. Why?”

“Because of the stairs!”

“Stairs?
What
stairs, Lieutenant?”

“The ones in this building, sir! The admin center was one of the new ones, wasn’t it?” She rushed on, not waiting for an answer. “And our com center is, one of the old buildings! It has stairs!”

Rakoan was turning thunderous. “Explain the import of this contrast, please, Lieutenant. What difference does it make if they’ve updated their architecture?”

“Because they would have had no reason to change from stairs to ramps, sir! None of the Khalia ships we’ve captured have ever had stairs—and their bases, haven’t had them, either! Khalia have very short legs; ramps are much more convenient for them! They probably never even invented stairs!”