The siege of arista, p.3
The Siege of Arista, page 3
This ship, everybody on it, and everybody who went groundside, were equally doomed. Barring a miracle.
“Do you believe in miracles?” he asked her.
“Only today,” she said.
“How’s that?” he asked.
“That McMurtry got back at all—that was a miracle.” He thought about it, running his hands up her round, white arms, and then over and across one of her round, white breasts. “Yeah, you’re right. Okay, do you believe in two miracles?”
“On one day?” She grinned wickedly. “Well, I got you back into bed, so I guess I’ll have to say yes to that.”
“You what—?”
Then he was sorry he’d asked, embarrassed. Women always confounded him. “Damn,” he mumbled at last, “if I’d known you were that hard up—”
“We’re both hard up, Ace.” She settled into his lap. “I still think it might be worth it to get a Portuan who speaks good Hothri and try to talk our way out of this—even pay reparations.”
“Is that what you want me to do?”
He really wanted to use his bug spray. He had his heart set on it.
“Yes. That’s what I want. Even knowing that, if I’m wrong, then we’ve lost whatever element of surprise we have left,” she said dreamily.
“Yeah, but I’m not so sure—”
Bang.
The first salvo of the Hothri attack on the carrier blew their compartment to smithereens, and settled that argument for eternity.
* * *
Human vermin, like any other vermin, had one saving grace: once they were dead, you could eat them. Or so the Hothri command structure consoled itself as it continued firing upon its self-appointed enemy.
The Hothri’s second salvo, from a closing globular formation of dreadnoughts, staggered so that no friendly fire would hit a Hothri vessel, ripped the Aristan carrier apart at midships.
The cleanup, ordered by the Hothri command structure in order to make sure that the enemy did not have time to warn its bases, took less time than expected.
When all of the human aggressors were dead, on the planet and around it, the Hothri turned up the shipboard infrared and let the crew bask for a while, as was the right of the victorious.
In the command echelons, some considered the possibility that one of the enemy spacecraft had escaped early on. But the command males and females were already twisting in the hot red light of celebration, and these could not be convinced that their victory was anything but complete.
Victory complete, peace assured. War was, after all, a thing to be avoided. War ravaged economies, destroyed trading cultures. Witness what had happened on the planet below.
All that was left of their human trading partners was fit only for food. Hothri cryoengineers were readied for debarkation to the planet’s surface. There they would attack the task of preparing to transport all that food shipboard.
A way must be found to store all the human meat. The Hothri did not waste food. It was a sin against nature to waste food. It was also a sin against the species that had attacked the Hothri. A dead enemy was no longer an enemy.
A dead species, even one that breathed only barely-palatable atmosphere, was still protein.
Some way must be found to take the rusty taste out of so much valuable protein. Otherwise, nature would be offended. Nature was always offended when its bounty was misused. A way would be found to make this dead flesh of human enemies palatable—if not to the Hothri themselves, then to some other trading partner.
Of course, no thing capable of life and death was ever truly useless. Fertilizer was in demand on some planets. Calcium was highly sought in other places. One of the Hothri recollected a race which liked to carve bone and had carved all its big mammals to extinction.
Some use would be found for the bodies of the enemy. This was certain. That way, the slain Hothri’s souls would not be offended when they returned through new eggs to life.
Not that the conquered planet itself couldn’t be useful. Breeding stock to repopulate it was now the most pressing priority to the Hothri—Hothri breeding stock. It was a lucky thing that, wherever these human monsters must be eradicated, Hothri could thrive. Once planets were sterilized of this now-hereditary enemy, Hothri colonizers could be brought in to settle. Thus, eventually, trading would resume.
In the meantime, there was much to be gained by collecting what was left of the enemy artifacts and studying them. Even though peace was at hand here and now, wherever and whenever Hothri met the hideous human enemy, war would begin again. Whenever Hothri met human, if that human was living, that human would be considered a hideous enemy.
It was important to learn as much about the enemy, and his capabilities, as possible before man and Hothri met again
The Hothri sent out salvage parties to bring back every shard of human equipment that had escaped total destruction. Soon the Hothri flotilla was as busy as a hive, with workers coming and going, storing bits of enemy and bits of enemy equipment.
The command elements watched, lazy in the bright glow of infrared luxury—the prerogative of command—as order was restored above the world they had just taken as their own.
It was not important, they told themselves, whistling softly, touching heads and scratching eyes, if one of the enemy had escaped. The advantage, they told themselves, was still theirs.
They had met this enemy once and defeated it easily. The scoured planet below was proof that, if confrontation came again, nature was on the side of the Hothri.
* * *
They were still in the Portu light cone when McMurtry saw the flare on his topo monitor.
He yelled, “Russell!”
Russell, who was readying for the jump out of Portu spacetime, yelled back, “What, damn you? Can’t you see I’m busy?”
McMurtry was out of his web harness by then, over at the bulkhead.
They were approaching half-C, where spacetime was breachable. Anybody but a crazy man would be sitting in his goddamn acceleration couch, not bucking all that G-force in order to roam around a flight deck where everything, including people, ought to have been battened down tight.
Russell turned from the waist, very carefully. You didn’t try to tum your neck at these speeds. Spacetime affects and G-forces could combine with human stubbornness to snap your neck and kill you, if you were very unlucky. Most of the time, you just bought yourself one hell of a headache and some extremely sore muscles.
But there was McMurtry, on his feet. Leaning against the bulkhead.
Russell carefully reached up and pushed back his helmet enough to really hear what the sluggish sound waves were carrying toward him in real-time: thump; thump; thump.
Russell had probably heard it through his com link; he’d just ignored it.
Now he couldn’t: McMurtry was slowly, methodically, pounding his head against the bulkhead wall next to the expert-system rackmounts.
“McMurtry, sit the hell down. You’re going to kill yourself.”
Of course, that didn’t work. Russell had seen men do lots of crazy things during after-action stress-outs, but he’d never seen a man with quite as much hysterical strength as McMurtry was displaying.
At least it was aimed at McMurtry himself, and not at Russell. Russell had been leading men into and out of tight spots for most of his professional life. He ought to be able to talk McMurtry down—at least talk him back into his seat so that Russell could execute the jump.
But you never knew.
So Russell slipped a stunner out of his couch’s map pocket and chambered a wire-guided round before he said, “Come on, McMurtry. Sit down. We’ll talk this through together.”
Thump. “They’re dead.” Thump. “They’re all dead.”
“On the carrier, you mean? Probably. I know what you saw. I saw it—the topo flash—too. They’re dead and we’re not. I save your ass, and this is the thanks I get.” Russell knew he was taking a terrible risk. Special Forces people grew unhealthily close to their teammates on long hauls. And McMurtry had been out a long time. “Maybe I should have left you to die with your buddies,” he continued when he got no response, “but I didn’t want to. Know why?”
Thump.
Oh, great. “Because we need you, alive and well, to back up what’s on that disk for any number of senators and industrialists who flat aren’t going to want to believe what’s on that disk unless there’s a man there to look them straight in the eye and say, ‘I was there. I did it. I saw it. We’re in deep shit, gentlemen. You have my word on it.’”
Thump.
Russell actually considered trying to get out of his acceleration couch at this speed—or slowing down enough that doing so made sense. But that was crazy. As far as Russell was concerned, he was still fleeing possible Hothri pursuit.
“Now, look, McMurtry, if you’re not going to help me with my problem on Arista, you might just as well have stayed back there and died. But I can’t let you stop me from making the jump. Somebody’s got to get word home. Don’t you think the human race deserves some decent intelligence—just this once, when it really counts?”
Russell held his breath.
For a long time, McMurtry didn’t say anything. But the thumping had stopped.
Then, when Russell, looking to his AI for guidance, saw that he had sixty seconds to either prepare his dual-flow engines to jump or throttle back into normal mode and try another run up to speed, McMurtry said, “Yeah, okay.”
And the brawny special forces sergeant made his way carefully back to the copilot’s couch, sat in it and strapped his webbing on, all as if he wasn’t bucking some serious G-force to do it, even with grav-adjust.
Russell let out a deep breath. He was no hot dog pilot. If not for the expert system, he’d probably have blown them both to hell by now, trying to hover at the jumpspeed threshold.
“You know, McMurtry, you had me worried.” Carefully turning his whole torso from the waist, Russell looked over at the SF sergeant.
McMurtry had a bunch of hematomas on his forehead that made him look like he had a case of volcanic acne, but otherwise, he looked better than Russell had hoped.
Tears were streaming openly down the sergeant’s face—tears of grief for lost comrades.
Men who cried didn’t run amok and kill everybody in their general vicinity. Russell took a deep breath and said, “It’s okay, man. They did great. You did great. We’ll find a way to make it worth it. This was bound to happen, sooner or later, the way those ants behaved: they were ready for you guys. Waiting for a pretext. Trust me. This is my area of expertise . . .”
“Yeah,“ McMurtry was nodding through unashamed tears. “We’ll warn everybody. We’ll get prepared. It’ll be . . .”
Russell pushed the button and even McMurtry couldn’t talk under the onslaught of Dirac-transforms that popped them out of relativistic spacetime into an expert-calibrated n-space.
“. . . worth it, if we save everybody,” McMurtry continued when he could, as if the breaths in one dimension and the breaths in another were connected.
Russell said, “Look, intelligence is the only edge we’ve got: the kind between our ears, and the kind we can give them back home. You’ve got to hold on with me, McMurtry. We can, and will, win this eventually.”
“How can you say that?” McMurtry wanted to know.
“Because we’re men, damn it. We think for ourselves. We reason. We don’t just react like those ants do—some huge knee-jerk response to stimuli.”
“You saw what they did to us back there . . .”
“We walked right into it. You step on a snake, it’s going to bite you. You tromp a hill full of red ants, they get pissed. Little ants didn’t overwhelm mankind. Big ants won’t either.”
McMurtry was palming his face dry. “I should have died with my—”
There it was. Russell wasn’t going to let that one get started. “Hey, soldier. You got a job to do. You aren’t responsible for your orders, or command screwups that gave you mission parameters that were bound to get people killed. You were responsible to do the mission and survive if possible, right?”
“Right,” said McMurtry with a sniffle, Rough-hewn SF sergeants didn’t cry enough that they knew what to do when their noses started to run. McMurtry wiped his hand under his nose. “But you know you can die in performance of—”
“Some sensible damn duty, which this wasn’t. Nobody asked for suicide commandos on this. Nobody with brains does that, ever. There’s nothing that isn’t survivable if it’s planned by the right people and executed by the right people—nothing that should be planned and executed. Got me?”
“You civilian intel—”
“Yeah, we’re nasty. We play dirty. We know we’re good and we’re proud that we stay alive by breaking the rules. You bet. And if you’ll let me, I’m going to teach you lots of things you didn’t learn in jump school, mister. Enough things that you can fight this war to the finish and end up, alive, with your foot on a Hothri nest, if that’s what you want.”
“That’s what I want, all right,” said McMurtry with a bleak grin.
Predictable, Russell thought. But he said, “Okay, we’ve got a deal: you brief ‘em till they cry for mercy, and I’ll get you over on my side of the playing field, where one guy can do the darnage of a hundred grunts, no matter how special, and live to bitch about the assholes who sit around wringing their hands over the nasty way we go about winning. You have me on your scope, sergeant?”
“Yep,” said McMurtry. “I’d join up with the devil himself, long as I get to kill ants.”
“I promise you, you’ll have all the ants you can stomp, and then some.”
Russell flipped his earpiece back over his right ear and faced front. He still had to get this piece-of-crap ship docked, and get McMurtry, safe and sound, into the right briefing rooms. But he’d do everything he’d promised the marine he would.
In Russell’s line of work, where everything was off the record and nonattributable, your word was your bond.
And McMurtry was the only weapon that Russell had at hand to make sure that the human race didn’t get caught with its pants down.
Again.
But he’d been living by his wits long enough to get a good gut take on the situation. And his gut was telling him that McMurtry’s eyewitness account of what had happened back there in Portu Prince was going to be enough.
And that was all you ever asked of the universe: a fighting chance, a second of warning—just enough.
Once more he looked at the marine, hoping McMurtry understood that, even if he did feel like he’d started this whole war all by his lonesome, he was still the only man who could whip Arista into readiness.
And readiness was what counted. More, even, than intelligence itself.
The AI beeped and Russell flipped through his heads-up displays until he found the topo map it wanted to show him.
This way to Arista, Mr. Russell, he could almost hear the AI whisper. Time to save the world.
If you can. If they’ll let you. If you can convince them.
The shaken marine sergeant would go a long way toward convincing anyone who saw him.
The rest was a matter of putting things in terms that the Aristan senate could understand: wounded global pride, financial risk, possible profit.
And, of course, personal survival.
Russell hadn’t gotten this far—alive—by under-estimating the lure of personal survival. To anyone.
On his side of the house, the civilian side, the professionals knew who and what they were, and what good they were to Arista.
Other people thought about manifest destiny and history and the Aristan ethic.
Russell’s kind thought about survival. So that was what they called themselves, among themselves-the survivors.
They survived administrations. They survived general staffs. They survived wars and famines. They survived purges and peaces,
If he could just show McMurtry that one man, well placed, with good intelligence and experience, could make a difference, then McMurtry’s life was going to make one hell of a difference to Arista.
And to McMurtry himself.
Sometime during the flight home, while Russell was getting in line for a parking orbit, McMurtry leaned over and grabbed his arm.
Since it was Russell’s throttle arm, he took the touch very seriously.
He froze and said, slowly pulling his headset back off his ear, “Yeah, McMurtry. What can I do for you now?”
“I just want to thank you, sir—Mr. Russell—not only for saving me in the first place, but for talking me down.”
“Don’t sweat it, McMurtry. I have every intention of taking that little favor out of your hide for the next two or three months.”
McMurtry grinned and let him go.
It occurred to Russell, as he resumed throttling down, that McMurtry might not know that Russell never lied unless it was absolutely necessary.
After all, safeguarding the truth was part of Russell’s job.
And the truth was about to come home to Arista in a big way, in the person of a Special Forces sergeant named McMurtry, just in time to keep the human race from blundering into Armageddon one more time.
BOTH THE HOTHRI and humans had star drives that were fairly efficient. Maximum speed was in theory unlimited, but navigationally, few ships could surpass ten light-years per day. Due to fuel costs and strain, most merchants and transports could actually travel at little more than a fifth of this speed. The entire FTL drive for the smallest ships was the size of a Ford van.
