The Fleet Book 2: Counter Attack (5 page)

After dispensing a “shock absorber” to the marine, Dalle pushed, pulled, and shoved him into the shelter of the low eaves of a hut. To pick him up on the outward journey made it more awkward to haul the motorized travois Dalle pulled behind him. It made more sense to haul it out empty, and pick up the wounded on his way back to the ship. He had three other life monitors on his, scope along this vector. In his condition, the man would last until Dalle came back.

A sharp
crack!
startled him, and Dalle stopped cold, listening. Someone was stalking him. The image of the white figure haunted him. He wished that he had been able to get a clear look at it.
Pok,
the sound of a footstep, came right behind him. He spun and dropped just as a laser blast seared overhead and gouged a five-inch strip of plaster out of a wall. The plaster exploded with a loud
bang!
Mack gulped. On his belly, he wriggled over to the travois, hid in its shelter. A second blast ricocheted silently off the shiny metal of the travois’s surface, heating up the place just in front of his head, and peeling more stucco from a building facade with a
crack
that echoed down the street. He peered around the gurney’s front end, readying his laser, but there was nothing to shoot at. His assailant was well hidden. Mack didn’t want to expose himself, but he could, have a long wait before being rescued, and there were the wounded to consider. He craned his neck around the metal frame, and swept an eye over the square. There wasn’t much left of the buildings on that side, but the ragged lean-tos formed by fallen timbers and panels made terrific places for snipers to hide.

A bullet zinged past him from the other direction. Mack buried himself in the broken quartz paving and tried to scramble backward out of the way. That shot came from a walkway between two of the brown and white wooden houses. Dalle lay flat and spat out gravel. The laser shrieked again, sounding near to overheating. At the same time more bullets flew from the other side of the square.

“Stay down, dammit!” barked a male voice. Another scream, animal this time, tore the air, and the laser bolts stopped coming. There was a rush and rumbling, and more of the masonry fell in. Dalle, with a cautious eye on the heaped rubble, rose and dusted himself off.

“You’re a doc?” a voice gritted from the walkway. Dalle activated a powerful tight-beam torch and shone it into the alley. He let out an involuntary hiss. There was an Alliance marine sergeant lying braced against a wall with a broad hand pressed to his side. His helmet was gone, and his eyebrows were drawn down with the pain.

“Help me.” The left side of the man’s face was torn open, and his other arm, thickly muscled, rested bonelessly on his lap. Blood dripped purposefully from his wounds, showing the heart muscle was still working hard, and nothing had clotted yet. This must have happened just before Dane moved into the middle of the firefight. Dalle swallowed, looking around for Khalia. Dead ones lay at grotesque angles all over the street, some spilling out of a crashed floater. No living ones were in sight. He knelt by the marine, prying the man’s strong fingers away from the wound. He squeezed anesthetic and antibiotic over it, and probed gently with his fingers. There were shards of bone mixed in with the shredded muscle.

“Slug-thrower,” the marine told him through gritted teeth. “Big one.”

“I hope you got him,” Dalle said, without looking up. He pulled bone splinters away from the great blood vessel and held the vein shut with his fingers until he could clamp it with a temporary. He unfolded a heavy soft dressing and fitted it over the tear. It would hold together until they got back to the hospital ship. He didn’t want to plant new skin on it until he had a chance for adequate debridement, and this was no place to do it.

“I do, too,” the marine assured him. “Can you get me out of here?”

Dalle rose to his feet, wiping his hands down the sides of his jumpsuit, leaving red streaks in the dust. “Wait here for me. I won’t be more than five minutes. I’ve got two others on scope. They’re just a little way from here.”

“No!” The wounded man tried to struggle to his feet. “You’ve got your trolley. Take me back!”

“I can’t yet.” Dalle tried to explain about the travois’s limited capabilities, but the marine drew his sidearm and leveled it on him. “Let’s go, doctor,” he said in a low voice trembling with pain and stress. “Now. I’ll die if you don’t get me to a hospital right away.”

Dalle stood his ground. This was not his first battle, or his first threat. War affected strong men in odd ways. “I can’t, soldier, but more than that, I
won’t.
Those could be men from your command out there. Even if you won’t, I must give them every chance of survival. You’ll last.” And he turned purposely away, looking into his monitor and not at the wounded sergeant. The man had behaved in a perfectly understandable and predictable manner, and so, after much practice and many battles, was Mack’s response. He kept his muscles taut as he walked. If the man was going to shoot at him, it would be . . .
Now!
His head jerked up nervously in anticipation, but the shot didn’t come. He relaxed with a sigh. The sergeant would wait. The logic, however inhumane it seemed at first, had gotten through to him. It did, in eight times out of ten—and only one of those other two had had decent aim.

The other two marines were easy to find. The were the only dull-colored humps in the midst of a particolored “rug” of Khalia and feather-faces dead in a town square.

The square was surrounded by the typical low-eaved buildings, and one tall structure with antennas on top stood off to one side. The Alliance men’s khaki uniforms were stained with dirt and much blood, but they still managed to respond when Dalle sought to rouse them. One, who had lost a foot and had a deep bite under his collarbone, crawled onto the gurney under his own power, and helped Dalle to drag his buddy on board. When they turned him over, the doctor could see the second marine had been lasered across the back. In a way, he had been lucky: the strip of dark pink flesh showed that he’d been broadside to the gunner. On the other hand, it would take time to see if there had been nerve damage in the spine. The man could end up being paralyzed from the ribcage down. Dalle sprayed him with antiseptic, not wanting to numb the endangered nerves with anesthesia. He put a patch on the other’s wrist to feed antitoxin into the bloodstream, to counteract any infection that he might get from the weasel bite; he closed up the bite itself and the end of the leg. Mentally, he was already doing’ surgical prep on these men.

The marine sergeant was waiting patiently where Dalle had left him. He straightened up when he heard the travois trundling toward him. “Hi, Doc,” the sergeant said, in unaccustomed embarrassment. “It’s bad luck to shoot at a doctor. Hope you didn’t take offense before. You know . . .”

Dalle nodded. “I know. I’ll get you home, sergeant.”

“Shillitoe is my name. Alvin Shillitoe, but my mates call me Tarzan.”

Dalle grinned. “At least it’s not as bad as Hound Baskerville.”

“Yeah. I knew him,” Tarzan acknowledged. “Unngh!” he grunted, using his good hand to lever himself aboard. “Another good old nickname.” He struggled to flatten out as the gurney bumped into motion. The other men gave him faint grins of greeting.

“Yo, sarge,” one of them said, noticing Shillitoe’s insignia.

“And they call me Sunday Driver,” Dalle smiled, watching the man try to disguise his discomfort as they moved over the ridged dirt streets. “No, really. I’m Mack, but you can call me Doctor.”

“Thanks, Mack,” the sergeant said, relaxing.

Dalle stopped only once more, to pick up the comatose patient. There was still no response or signs of awakening, but his heartbeat was a tiny bit stronger. Not enough
,
Dalle thought, with a wrench.

“He won’t last,” Shillitoe observed.

Privately, Dalle agreed with him, but aloud he said,
“Everyone gets his chance.”

* * *

He got them all stowed in the bunks aboard FMS-47, patched, and started plasma on the three with deep wounds; he slapped a fibrillator alarm onto the chest of the fourth in case his heart should go into arrest in the doctor’s absence. The woman had fallen asleep, and Dalle was glad to see an improvement in her blood pressure. They should be stable enough until he got back. With a thoughtful nod, he rolled out and down the ramp for a second load.

* * *

The streets were so cramped along his second vector that Dalle was forced to leave the travois and step carefully among the massed bodies to search for his quarries. There were three on his screen, and he was still hoping one of them would be Leo Schawn.

The rough walls caught at his sleeve with protruding wooden splinters or dribbled stinking gray plaster dust all over him. Floaters and jet-packers had been through here. Dalle could tell by the odd streaks where lasers had hit and gouged, yards above the reach of anyone at street level.

Dead bodies, Alliance, featherheads, and Khalia, were crowded together against a crumbling wall as if they had been bulldozed aside. The Fleet personnel, most of them technicians and doctors, had all been tied up and then killed. Most of them showed bullet or laser wounds, but others had suffered more gruesome deaths. He recognized Leo’s shocked, open-eyed face among the dead, realized with a hollow feeling inside that only her head was there. Her body, dressed in its white jumpsuit, hands bound with a thong, was ten feet away, with another heap of bodies on the stones. The neck, which was narrow enough to be encircled by one of Dalle’s long hands, had been violently severed. He gagged out of sheer reaction, then swallowed and went over to place the head with the body. With a gentle hand, he closed her eyes and drew her jaw shut

“Dalle, FMS–47, on Target,” he said into his wrist communicator, and waited for acknowledgment. A hissing crackle came, which was the dispatcher hooking in. “Confirm that Pilot Schawn, late of FMS–47, has been found. She’s dead. Khalian-style killing. Her neck was chewed through. It’s nasty.”

A sigh came out of the grille. “I thought so, Mack,” Iris Tolbert said. “If you’ve got room, bring her back up. Otherwise, leave her for the cleanup squad.”

“I’ll bring her back,” Mack said, grimly. “Out.”

* * *

The sight of her open eyes stayed in his mind all along the rest of his vector, while he loaded up two surviving marines and turned back along a detour. The third man’s life monitor had turned to blue as he watched, unable to halt death, and under the circumstances, unwilling to try. This marine had caught the edge—only the edge—of a plasma blast, which had cauterized the places where his right ribcage, arm, neck, and jaw used to be. He looked as though someone had taken a giant bite out of him, like a gingerbread man. A husky male voice sputtered out of the helmet communicator, demanding attention. “Marlowe? Do you read me?”

Dalle lifted it off the dead man’s head and thumbed the switch which would normally be pressured open by the heck muscles. “This is Dr. Dalle. Who is speaking?”

“l am Sergeant Villanova,” the voice snapped in surprise. “Where is my marine?”

“He died a minute ago, Sergeant. I’m sorry.”

There was a quiet, sad growl out of the speaker. “He was talking to me. I was keeping him awake ‘til we could get back there. He was hurt bad?” It was a question.

“Very bad,” Dalle confirmed. “I don’t think I could have saved him. Are you in need of assistance?”

“Nope,” Villanova said, curtly. “Thank you, Doctor. Out.”

As Dalle stood up to drag away his travois, he saw a flash of white. The tension took over his reactions, and he turned and fired his sleeve laser in the direction the shot came from. Then he screamed. His left sleeve bad been punctured, and a laser had etched a hot pink line in his forearm up to the back of his hand. To his amazement, he heard an answering scream from his assassin.

Cautiously, he edged over and peered around the corner. On the ground a Khalian lay. The fur of its arms and upper body was bleached white, some mark of vanity, or perhaps a sign of rank. One could never tell with the Khalia.

With an eye on the claws, he checked under the pointed muzzle for a pulse. His shot had only grazed its head, but it was nearly dead from a half-dozen other wounds. There was an entry and exit wound from one of Alvin’s bullets, Dalle was sure. Its weapon holsters on crossed leather straps were empty.

“Spot check, FMS–47!” Dalle’s communicator crackled.

It was Iris Tolbert. “How’re ya doing, Mack? I’m not going to lose touch with another pilot.”

“I’m okay, Commander,” ‘Mack replied. “How do you think the lab boys would like to play with a weasel?” While he talked he was squirting anesthetic on his arm. He unwound strips of plasti-skin and pressed them over the pink line. In a moment, the pain died down. There was no need for antibiotics—lasers made clean wounds, but the sonovabitch hurt like hell.

“We’ve got all the dissection subjects we need, Mack.”

“I’ve got a live down here. He’s beat-up, unconscious, but I think he’ll make it. He’d better. I think it might be one of the ones that killed Leo.”

Tolbert was silent a moment, considering. “Good idea. We don’t get many live ones. Bring it aboard. I’ll tell Security to expect you.”

“Thanks, Commander. Out.”

The limp weasel body was astonishingly light. Dalle felt almost no strain as he carried the alien over to the cart and strapped it down. Its breathing was very shallow. There was little of life left in it, but perhaps the lab techs would have enough time to study its responses before it died. Most Khalian prisoners suicided after capture, but this one wouldn’t be given the chance. He gave it a general antibiotic booster, hoping the drug wouldn’t kill it.

Leo’s light skull rolled from side to side in its gurney bed just across from the pinioned Khalian. Her narrow jaw had flopped open, and she looked like she might be screaming. Betrayal. Dalle felt a stab of guilt for possibly saving the life of the very Khalian who had taken hers. On the other hand, making it so her killer lived the short, proscribed life of a laboratory rat was perhaps apt revenge.