Their Master's War (30 page)

no weapons capacity, but the ship has spatial mobility, and it's capable of short jumps."

"Do we know where we are?"

A dim green light glowed in the navigator's tank. The interpreter's equipment translated.

"We know where we are. We are away from the normal avenues of combat. Do you require the coordinates?"

The median shook his head. "It would appear that our duty is clear. We should proceed, in short stages, to the nearest Alliance base and await orders."

The lantere made a noise that was a cross between a grunt and a bellow.

"That might be open to a certain amount of discussion," came the translation. The median's voice was cold and particular. "Surely any such discussion might be construed as treason when our duty is so obvious."

This time the interpreter spoke for itself. "There are those of us who don't see it as quite so obvious. Some might say that fate has freed us from the Therem and our duty might, in fact, be to pursue that fate."

"We still belong to the Therem Alliance," the median argued. There was a rumble from the dauquoi. "You mean we still belong to the Therem." "We still belong to the war."

The navigator blinked and bubbled. "Ah, yes, the war. It was never a war of our choosing."

"There is no escaping the war."

"Do the other humans share their median's devotion to our master's war?" the interpreter asked. Rance looked around, wondering who was being addressed. Then he realized that everyone had turned in his direction.

"I... don't think we're crazy about going back to the war. Is there any alternative?" The median cut him off. "There is no alternative."

"Let the humans speak for themselves."

The median took a step forward. His tone was now coolly threatening. "My men don't need to speak. They do what they're told."

Rance started receiving a telepathic image. It showed him and his men burning down the medians. He realized that the men were seeing it, too. They were looking to him for direction. The median must have also received the image. He started to draw a sidearm.

"You men will stay exactly where you are!"

Rance fired without thinking. The other men did the same. The three medians were cut down by a withering hail of MEW lire. The troopers kept on firing until the medians' bodies were nothing more than shapeless blackened stumps. The interpreter was making a high-pitched keening. Rance slowly lowered his weapon.

"What now?"

The interpreter got its voice back under control. "You must pardon me. I find it very distressing to be in close proximity to death."

"We've just committed grand mutiny. What are we supposed to do now?"

"You have killed all your remaining superiors. What you do now is your decision."

"There are no more medians and no officers?"

"The human officers' level was destroyed in one of the first explosions. No one survived. The other medians died later."

"What do you intend to do?"

"We have a plan that we will outline."

The aliens' plan was a relatively simple one. They would take the
Anah 5
and get as far away from both the Yal and the Therem as possible. Their offer to the

troopers and the other humans still on board was a free ride to the planet of their choice. The best choice, as the aliens saw it, was a planet in a system three jumps away. It had recently been terraformed by a party from the
Anah
cluster.

"The existence of the planet would only have been recorded in the cluster's brain net. Now that has been destroyed; only we know that it's there. It's a bleak, bare place where it rains a lot of the time, but over the years," conditions will improve. The important thing is that the odds against being discovered are astronomical."

Rance shook his head. "I don't know if the surviving men can stand up to three jumps in quick succession."

"Di-trexane."

"What?"

"Di-trexane. It was issued to the medians and officers to ease them through the jump. It wasn't issued to you."

The anger among the men was like a physical presence.

"I fucking knew they had something."

There was real disappointment that nobody was left to kill. The jumps had been bad enough when they'd seemed unavoidable. Not it was like some hideous conspiracy of pain.

"But why?"

"The Therem move according to strange logic." "Don't they just." There was one other major flaw in the aliens' plan. It was Renchett who voiced it. "We don't have no women." "I beg your pardon?"

"Women. We don't have none. It going to be a pretty sad little colony with just a bunch of old soldiers getting older."

"I'm sorry, I don't understand you." "Seems simple to me." Rance stepped in. "Without females, our species cannot reproduce."

"We didn't know that."

Renchett was getting angry. "Everybody knows that."

"We are all specialists. None of us have a grounding in comparative biology."

"That's as may be. The question still remains. What are we going to do about it?" The interpreter moved an unhappy tentacle. "There seems to be nothing we can do about it." Renchett bristled. "There damn well is."

"There is?"

"We could head back to the last recstar and liberate the women there." There was a murmur of agreement from the humans. Then the lantere boomed.

"That's impossible. Even if this ship had operational weapons and shields, it couldn't take
6n
an asteroid base."

The other aliens signified agreement.

"We can't go back into combat space."

"And we ain't sitting around on some mudball waiting to be the last one to die." Rance held up a hand. "Wait a minute. There could be a way to do this. How many fighting men could the ship muster if it really came to it?"

"Perhaps two hundred if we armed the technical personnel."

"We could take a recstar with two hundred motivated troops." Renchett grinned. "And we'd sure as hell be motivated."

The navigator emitted bubbles. "It's impossible."

"No, it's not. Listen, we could approach the recstar pretending to be exactly what we are, the lone crippled

survivor of a destroyed cluster. They must know by now that the
Anah
was wiped out in the JD4

system, and they won't suspect anything. We limp in, and we dock. While we're docking, the ground troops drop to the surface of the asteroid. We hit 'em hard before they know what's happening. The women will join with us. We'll have the ship ready-powered so we can jump immediately everyone's back on board."

The interpreter conjured an image of men silently floating down across the asteroid's rocky terrain. "It has a certain plausibility."

The dauquoi didn't agree. "The rest of us can't risk our new freedom for the comfort of one species." The lantere rumbled agreement.

Rance looked meaningfully at his weapon. "As a representative of that species, I can assure you all that we take our comfort very seriously."

Topman Benset moved up beside Rance. "It's more than comfort. It's the continuing freedom of our species. We're prepared to fight for that."

There was a sudden tension in the dome. The interpreter started pumping out calming abstracts, but they had little effect on the increasingly belligerent lantere.

"Are you threatening us?"

"We're trying not to, but if we don't do this our way, I think you're going to have problems with our future cooperation. We do have the firepower."

Weapons were being hefted to emphasize the point. The interpreter seemed to accept the situation.

"I think we have to go along with the humans' proposal."

The lantere was still being stubborn.

"If we were to attack the asteroid base, I could find myself fighting against my own kind." Rance nodded grimly at the charred bodies of the medians.

"That can sometimes be the price of your freedom."

There was a long silence. Finally the lantere gave in.

"Very well, I will agree to this foolhardy expedition, but I still have grave doubts." Renchett whooped and spun his weapon. "Let's get ourselves some girls!" Rance looked at him. He wasn't smiling.

"This may not be that easy."

Sixteen

"The suits don't work," Dyrkin told Rance.

"What do you mean the suits don't work?1

"Try one. They go on the way they always did, but once they're on, there's no flexibility. You can't move your arms and legs. Also, they're secreting something that's got everyone close to throwing up."

"What the hell is going on? We're only hours out from the recstar. There's never been a problem with the suits before. Why now?"

Rance followed Dyrkin to the messdeck. The ship had completed its third and final jump, and preparations were under way for the attack. A problem with the suits was little short of a disaster. Rance immediately stripped off his dress tans.

"Somebody throw me a suit."

Hark tossed across one of the shapeless black blobs.

"It's like they know what we're doing and they're refusing to go along with it. It's like they won't go against the Therem."

"That's ridiculous superstition. The suits don't have the brains for anything like that." Rance placed the suit on the deck and stood on it. The

suit began to crawl up his leg, but it moved more slowly than usual. The slowness was easy to interpret as reluctance. When the suit covered his body, he experimentally flexed his arms. The suit resisted. The same happened when he tried to bend his legs.

"See what we mean?"

"We're not going to be able to use them."

"What are we going to do? We can't go into combat without suits."

"We could use radiation armor."

"It's goddamn bulky. It's going to really cut down on our mobility."

"What the hell else can we do?"

"Nothing. We'll have to go with the radiation suits. Dyrkin, scout around and see how many you can come up with."

"What are we going to do with the suits?"

Rance shook his head. "I don't know. I'm going to talk to the aliens and see if they've got a line on any of this."

The meeting with the aliens was brief. They had nothing to contribute as to why the suits should be behaving the way they were. Strangely, they seemed more inclined than Rance to accept the men's idea that the creatures were actually refusing to act against the interests of the Therem.

"Even though it seems at the time to defy logic, an intuitive feeling may be a pointer to the truth." "Sure."

"We don't feel that these things should be allowed to remain loose in the ship. The current loss of function may be only the start of an entire destructive cycle. We have no idea what might be built into their genetic code. We urge you to destroy them."

"The suits are not that easily destroyed," Rance reminded them.

"So simply jettison them into space."

"You want us to do that?"

"It would seem the obvious solution."

"The men aren't going to like this. They've been a long way with those suits. Remember that we and the suits are symbiotic."

"The men would probably like it even less if someone else disposed of the suits."

"You've got a point there."

The men didn't like it. The announcement was received by a hard silence. No one cursed'and no one complained, but also no one moved. Nobody wanted to be the first. Finally Dyrkin broke the deadlock.

"He's right. They're going to have to go. They ain't working with us no more."

"Maybe it's just a delayed-action side effect of the jumps. Maybe they'll come back to normal."

"Damn it, you know that ain't true. They've left us, and we've got to dump them. They could turn on us." Rance quickly took control before the mood could alter. "Load them on a pallet and let's get it over with. Dyrkin, pick a squad to take care of this."

To his complete surprise, Dyrkin turned on him with something close to a snarl.

"No way, Rance. Each man does his own. As each man gets his radiation armor, he goes to the lock and blows out the old suit."

Rance nodded. "As you want it."

It became a solemn procession. The radiation armor was brought down to the messdecks. It had been hastily sprayed black so those wearing it wouldn't present too obvious a target. Each man in turn received his issue, fitted the suit, and checked the servos. Then he picked up the black blob of dormant suit and started the long walk to the nearest lock. Each would pause for a mo ment as his suit floated into the void, and then he'd turn and make the walk back. Communications started coming in from the asteroid. The survival of one of the
Anah
cluster seemed to be causing some degree of excitement. There were constant demands for information. The ship sent a broken, ragged signal of modulated static, as if the communication equipment were much more badly damaged than it really was. A number of shuttle craft came out to meet the
Anah
5, but they seemed content to remain at a distance, merely inspecting the disabled newcomer. The asteroid base appeared to be accepting the slowly limping ship on face value. The men moved into the lower drop bay from where they were going to launch their attack. They were very quiet. Rance had worried that the discarding of the suits would have had a dampening effect on the men's spirits, but it seemed to have had quite the opposite result. They were quiet but deadly. They were fighting for themselves, and they weren't going to let anything stop them.

The asteroid was starting to broadcast warnings. They wanted the
Anah 5
to stand off in deep space. Shuttles would be sent to take off the crew. This was understandable. Those on the asteroid had no idea of the levels of damage. For all they knew, the ship might be five minutes away from blowing itself to atoms. The
Anah 5
ignored the warnings and kept on coming. It went right on broadcasting the unintelligible signal. The messages from the recstar began to sound more than a little spooked. The two bodies were now in visual contact. On the asteroid, they had to be entertaining the idea that the
Anah 5

wasn't capable of stopping and was going to run right into them. The warnings started to be a good deal more threatening. There was a first tentative mention of force, although it was actually too late for that. The ship and the asteroid were now so close that neither could damage