Dorsai!

Acting Captain

Space battles, mused Donal, are said to be held only by mutual consent. It was one of those maxims he distrusted; and which he had privately determined to disprove whenever he should get the chance. However — as he stood now by the screen of the Control Eye in the main control room of the C4J, watching the enemy ships appearing to swell with the speed of their approach — he was forced to admit that in this instance, it was true. Or true at least to the extent that mutual consent is involved when you attack an enemy point that you know that enemy will defend.

But what if he should not defend it after all? What if he should do the entirely unexpected—

“Contact in sixty seconds. Contact in sixty seconds!” announced the speaker over his head.

“Fasten all,” said Andresen, calmly into the talker before him. He sat, with his First and Second Officers duplicating him on either side, in a “dentist’s chair” across the room — “seeing” the situation not in actual images as Donal was doing, but from the readings of his instruments. And his knowledge was therefore the more complete one. Cumbersome in his survival battle suit, Donal climbed slowly into the similar chair that had been rigged for him before the Eye, and connected himself to the chair. In case the ship should be broken apart, he and it would remain together as long as possible. With luck, the two of them would be able to make it to a survival ship in orbit around Oriente in forty or fifty hours — if none of some dozens of factors intervened.

He had time to settle himself before the Eye before contact was made. In those last few seconds, he glanced around him; finding it a little wonderful in spite of all he knew, that this white and quiet room, undisturbed by the slightest tremor, should be perched on the brink of savage combat and its own quite possible destruction. Then mere was no more time for thinking. Contact with the enemy had been made and he had to keep his eyes on the scene.

Orders had been to harry the enemy, rather than close with him. Estimates had been twenty per cent casualties for the enemy, five per cent for the defending forces. But such figures, without meaning to be, are misleading. To the man in the battle, twenty per cent, or even five per cent casualties do not mean that he will be twenty per cent or five per cent wounded. Nor, in a space battle, does it mean that one man out of five, or one man out of twenty will be a casualty. It means one ship out of five, or one ship out of twenty — and every living soul aboard her; for, in space, one hundred per cent casualties mean ninety-eight per cent dead.

There were three lines of defense. The first were the light craft that were meant to slow down the oncoming ships so that the larger, more ponderous craft, could try to match velocities well enough to get to work with heavy weapons. Then there were the large craft themselves in their present orbits. Lastly, there were the second line of smaller craft that were essentially antipersonnel, as the attackers dropped their space-suited assault troops. Donal in a C4J was in the first line.

There was no warning. There was no full moment of battle. At the last second before contact, the gun crews of the C4J had opened fire. Then—

It was all over.

Donal blinked and opened his eyes, trying to remember what had happened. He was never to remember. The room in which he lay, fastened to his chair, had been split as if by a giant hatchet. Through the badly-lit gap, he could see a portion of an officer’s stateroom. A red, self-contained flare was burning somewhere luridly overhead, a signal that the control room was without air. The Control Eye was slightly askew, but still operating. Through the transparency of his helmet, Donal could see the dwindling lights that marked the enemy’s departure on toward Oriente. He struggled upright in his chair and turned his head toward the Control panel.

Two were quite dead. Whatever had split the room open had touched them, too. The Second officer was dead, Andresen was undeniably dead. Coa Benn still lived, but from the feeble movements she was making in the chair, she was badly hurt. And there was nothing anyone could do for her now that they were without air and all prisoners in their suits.

Donal’s soldier-trained body began to react before his mind had quite caught up to it. He found himself breaking loose the fastenings that connected him to his chair. Unsteadily, he staggered across the room, pushed the lolling head of Andresen out of the way, and thumbed the intership button.

“C4J One-twenty-nine,” he said. “C4J One-twenty-nine—” he continued to repeat the cabalistic numbers until the screen before him lit up with a helmeted face as bloodless as that of the dead man in the chair underneath him.

“KL,” said the face. “A-twenty-three?” Which was code for: “Can you still navigate?”

Donal looked over the panel. For a wonder, it had been touched by what had split the room — but barely. Its instruments were all reading.

“A-twenty-nine,” he replied affirmatively.

“M-Forty,” said the other, and signed off. Donal let the intership button slip from beneath his finger. M-Forty was — Proceed as ordered,

Proceed as ordered, for the C4J One-twenty-nine, the ship Donal was in, meant — get in close to Oriente and pick off as many assault troops as you can.

Donal set about the unhappy business of removing his dead and dying from their control chairs.

Coa, he noted, as he removed her, more gently than the others, seemed dazed and unknowing. There were no broken bones about her, but she appeared to have been pinched, or crushed on one side by just a touch of what had killed the others. Her suit was tight and intact. He thought she might make it, after all.

Seating himself in the captain’s chair, he called the gun stations and other crew posts.

“Report,” he ordered.

Gun stations One and Five through Eight answered.

“We’re going in planetward,” he said. “All able men abandon the weapon stations for now and form a working crew to seal ship and pump some air back in here. Those not sealed off, assemble in lounge. Senior surviving crewman to take charge.”

There was a slight pause. Then a voice spoke back to him.

“Gun Maintenanceman Ordovya,” it said. “I seem to be surviving Senior, sir. Is this the captain?”

“Staff Liaison Graeme, Acting Captain. Your officers are dead. As ranking man here, I’ve taken command. You have your orders, Maintenanceman.”

“Yes, sir.” The voice signed off.

Donal set himself about the task of remembering his ship training. He got the C4J underway toward Oriente and checked all instruments. After a while, the flare went out abruptly overhead and a slow, hissing noise registered on his eardrums — at first faintly, then scaling rapidly up in volume and tone to a shriek. His suit lost some of its drum-tightness.

A few moments later, a hand tapped him on his shoulder. He turned around to look at a blond-headed crewman with his helmet tilted back.

“Ship tight, sir,” said the crewman. “I’m Ordovya.”

Donal loosened his own helmet and flipped it back, inhaling the room air gratefully.

“See to the First Officer,” he ordered. “Do we have anything in the way of a medic aboard?”

“No live medic, sir. We’re too small to rate one. Freeze unit, though.”

“Freeze her, then. And get the men back to their posts. We’ll be on top of the action again in another twenty minutes.”

Ordovya went off. Donal sat at his controls, taking the C4J in cautiously and with the greatest possible margins of safety. In principle, he knew how to operate the craft he was seated in; but no one knew better than he what a far cry he was from being an experienced pilot and captain. He could handle this craft the way someone who has taken half a dozen riding lessons can handle a horse — that is, he knew what to do, but he did none of it instinctively. Where Andresen had taken in the readings of all his instruments at a glance and reacted immediately, Donal concentrated on the half dozen main telltales and debated with himself before acting.

So it was that they came late to the action on the edges of Oriente’s atmosphere; but not so late that the assault troops were already safely down out of range. Donal searched the panel for the override button on the antipersonnel guns and found it.

“Override on the spray guns,” he announced into the mike before him. He looked at the instruments, but he saw in his imagination the dark and tumbling space suited bodies of the assault troops, and he thought of the several million tiny slivers of carbon steel that would go sleeting among them at the touch of his ringer. There was a slight pause before answering; and then the voice of Ordovya came back.

“Sir… if you like, the gunmen say they’re used to handling the weapons—”

“Maintenanceman!” snapped Donal. “You heard the order. Override!”

“Override, sir.”

Donal looked at his scope. The computer had his targets in the gunsights. He pressed the button, and held it down.

Two hours later, the C4J, then in standby orbit, was ordered to return to rendezvous and its captain to report to his Sub-Patrol chief. At the same time came a signal for all Staff Liaisons to report to the flagship; and one for Staff Liaison Donal Graeme to report personally to Blue Patrol Chief Lludrow. Considering the three commands, Donal called Ordovya on the ship’s phone and directed him to take care of the first errand. He himself, he decided, could take care of the other two, which might — or might not — be connected.

Arriving at the flagship, he explained his situation to the Reception Officer, who made a signal both to the Staff Liaison people and to the Blue Patrol chief.

“You’re to go directly to Lludrow,” he informed Donal; and assigned him a guide.

Donal found Lludrow in a private office on the flagship that was not much bigger than Donal’s stateroom in the C4J.

“Good!” said Lludrow, getting up behind a desk as Donal came in and coming briskly around it. He waited until the guide had left, and then he put a dark hand on Donal’s arm.

“How’d your ship come through?” he asked.

“Navigating,” said Donal. “There was a direct hit on the control room though. All officers casualties.”

“All officers?” Lludrow peered sharply at him. “And you?”

“I took command, of course. There was nothing left, though, but antipersonnel mop-up.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Lludrow. “You were Acting Captain for part of the action?”

“Yes.”

“Fine. That’s better than I hoped for. Now,” said Lludrow, “tell me something. Do you feel like sticking your neck out?”

“For any cause I can approve of, certainly,” answered Donal. He considered the smaller, rather ugly man; and found himself suddenly liking the Blue Patrol chief. Directness like this had been a rare experience for him, since he had left the Dorsai.

“All right. If you agree, we’ll both stick our necks out.” Lludrow looked at the door of the office, but it was firmly closed. “I’m going to violate top security and enlist you in an action contrary to Staff orders, if you don’t mind.”

“Top security?” echoed Donal, feeling a sudden coolness at the back of his neck.

“Yes. We’ve discovered what was behind this Newton-Cassida landing on Oriente… you know Oriente?”

“I’ve studied it, of course,” said Donal. “At school — and recently when I signed with Freiland. Temperatures up to seventy-eight degrees centigrade, rock, desert, and a sort of native vine and cactus jungle. No large bodies of water worth mentioning and too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”

“Right. Well,” said Lludrow, “the important point is, it’s big enough to hide in. They’re down there now and we can’t root them out in a hurry — and not at all unless we go down there after them. We thought they were making the landing as a live exercise and we could expect them to run the gauntlet back out in a few days or weeks. We were wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“We’ve discovered their reason for making the landing on Oriente. It wasn’t what we thought at all.”

‘That’s fast work,” said Donal. “What’s it been… four hours since the landing?”

“They made fast work of it,” said Lludrow. “The news is being sat on; but they are firing bursts of a new kind of radiation from projectors that fire once, move, and fire again from some new hiding place — a large number of projectors. And the bursts they fire hit old Sirius himself. We’re getting increased sunspot activity.” He paused and looked keenly at Donal, as if waiting for comment. Donal took his time, considering the situation.

“Weather difficulties?” he said at last.

“That’s it!” said Lludrow, energetically, as though Donal had been a star pupil who had just shone again. “Meteorological opinion says it can be serious, the way they’re going about it. And we’ve already heard their price for calling it off. It seems there’s a trade commission of theirs on New Earth right now. No official connection — but the Commission’s got the word across.”

Donal nodded. He was not at all surprised to hear that trade negotiations were going on in normal fashion between worlds who were at the same time actively fighting each other. That was the normal course of existence between the stars. The ebb and flow of trained personnel on a contractual basis was the lifeblood of civilization. A world who tried to go it on its own would be left behind within a matter of years, to wither on the vine — or at last buy the mere necessities of existence at ruinous cost to itself. Competition meant the trading of skilled minds, and that meant contracts, and contracts meant continuing negotiations.

“They want a reciprocal brokerage agreement,” Lludrow said.

Donal looked at him sharply. The open market trading of contracts had been abandoned between the worlds for nearly fifty years. It amounted to speculating in human lives. It removed the last shreds of dignity and security from the individual and treated him as so much livestock or hardware to be traded for no other reason than the greatest possible gain. The Dorsai, along with the Exotics, Mara and Kultis, had led the fight against it. There was another angle as well. On “tight” worlds such as those of the Venus Group — which included Newton and Cassida — and the Friendlies, the open market became one more tool of the ruling group; while on “loose” worlds like Freiland, it became a spot of vulnerability where foreign credits could take advantage of local situations. “I see,” said Donal.

“We’ve got three choices,” Lludrow said. “Give in — accept the agreement. Suffer the weather effects over a period of months while we clean out Oriente by orthodox military means. Or pay a prohibitive price in casualties by a crash campaign to clean up Oriente in a hurry. We’d lose as many lives to the conditions down there as we would to the enemy in a crash campaign. So, it’s my notion that it’s a time to gamble — my notion, by the way, not Staff’s. They don’t know anything about this; and wouldn’t stand for it if they did. Care to try your idea of throwing a scare into Newton, after all?”

“With pleasure!” said Donal, quickly, his eyes glowing.

“Save your enthusiasm until you hear what you’re going to have to do it with,” replied Lludrow, dryly. “Newton maintains a steady screen of ninety ships of the first class, in defensive orbit around it. I can give you five.”