Starfishers Volume 1: Shadowline (32 page)

Mouse’s comm roused him from a troubled sleep. “Storm here.”

“Contact with
Hittite
, sir. She’s coming in.”

“I’ll be right down.”

When he reached Combat, the senior watchstander told him, “We’ve fed them our data, sir. We’ve established a continuous instel link. She’s got a couple of Provincials with her, for what they’re worth. They’re going to go for the command ship and transports first.”

“How soon?”

The man checked the time. “They drop hyper in two hours and eight minutes, sir. They’ll be coming in with a big inherent and only a couple degrees out of the slot to target.”

“How much warning will our Sangaree friends have?” Mouse nodded at the red blips on the display.

“Depends on how good their detection gear is. Anywhere from five minutes to an hour.”

It came up closer to an hour. “Damn!” Mouse spat. “Look. They’re pulling back.”

Within a half-hour it was obvious the raidships were being moved to protect the command ship and transports, and that they were still under that relentless outside control.

“I guess we’ll see just how mean one of those big-assed Empire babies is,” Mouse said.

“I suppose we will, sir.”

Hittite
dropped hyper and went into action in an awesome blaze of weaponry. She and her escort settled into a quiet, deadly routine of systematic destruction. The Sangaree seemed unable to touch her. But invincibility proved an illusion.

“Hello, Iron Legion.
Hittite
here. Boys, I don’t want to tell you this, but I have to. We’ve taken some drive damage. We’ll have to pull out or lose our screens. Sorry.”

“Sorry?” Mouse snarled. “Sorry don’t help nothing.”

“At least we softened them up a little for you.”
Hittite’s
Communications Officer had not heard Mouse. “We make it eleven solid scratches and a whole lot of bloody noses. Good luck, guys. Hittite out.”

“Run the numbers,” Mouse snapped.

“They’re still going to get through, sir. Unless those bloody noses are worse than they look.”

“Bloody hell! I didn’t want to hear that.”

Frieda made her first appearance of the new day. “What’s going on?”

Mouse explained.

“Damn it all, anyway!” She flew out of Combat.

Mouse was returning to his quarters when he saw the body lying on the stretcher in the corridor. A girl of about fifteen. He did not recognize her. She had to be a daughter of one of the enlisted men.

“What the hell?” He knelt, felt her pulse. She was alive. Just unconscious. Or sleeping.

A sound startled him. He glanced up, saw two old men go into a cross corridor carrying a youngster on a stretcher. The one to the rear gave him a furtive look.

He started to run after them, became distracted when he passed an open dormitory door. The lights were on. A half-dozen retirees were lifting children onto stretchers.

“What the hell is going on here?” he demanded.

They stared at him. Nobody said anything. Nobody smiled or frowned. Two hunkered down, lifted a stretcher, came toward him.

He grabbed an arm. “I asked a question, soldier.”

“Mouse.”

He turned. Frieda stood framed in the doorway, not a meter away. She held a weapon and it was aimed at him.

“What the hell are you up to, Mother?”

She half smiled. “We’re loading you youngsters aboard the
Ehrhardt
. We’re sending you to your father. The Fishers will give you covering fire.”

His thoughts zigged and zagged. That was a good idea. It should have occurred to him. Gets the children out. It would be risky, but
Ehrhardt
was one of the fastest ships ever built . . . But Frieda seemed to be including him in this Noah’s Ark venture. He would not have any of that.

“I’ve got a job here.”

She smiled weakly. “I relieve you of command, Mouse. Bring a stretcher, men.”

“Don’t try to pull anything on me . . . ”

“Take your father a kiss for me, Mouse.” Her finger tightened on the trigger.

Mouse tried to jump aside. He was not quick enough. The stun bolt scrambled his thoughts. He was falling, falling, falling . . . He never reached the floor.

Forty-Nine: 3032 AD

Storm flung himself out of bed. A real nightmare had closed in on him. An attack on his home . . . That was it. That was what he had overlooked. This was a war against his Family. He had left a flank unguarded.

“Is that true?” he asked, able to think of nothing else.

Thurston looked baffled. “Why would I lie about that?”

“Don’t mind me. I’m just confused. Let’s go.”

Mouse had reestablished a continuous instel relay by the time Storm reached the war room. “Mouse, what’s it look like?” he demanded.

The burst went out. The response came back, it seemed, no swifter than the speed of light. “It doesn’t look good, Father. They’re coming at us like they’ve gone crazy. No maneuver or anything. And it looks like they know our weak spots. We’re holding, but we’re losing outstations faster than the program allows. I think we need outside help.”

Helmut whispered in Storm’s ear while Mouse was talking.

“Okay, Mouse. Just do what you can. Helmut says we’ve instelled Ceislak and asked the Fishers to pass the word to Beckhart.” He listened to Helmut a moment more. “Oh. You’ve done that, too. Good. Look. The arrangements are made. You’ve got a heavy battle group on its way from Canaan, two squadrons headed there from Helga’s World, and
Hittite
somewhere in your vicinity on shakedown cruise. The whole damned Navy is headed your way.”

Navy would, anytime, anywhere, drop everything else for a dustup with Sangaree.

“Hang in there, Son. The Fortress will see you through. I designed it myself.”

Mouse laughed. “Thanks, Father. Mother sends her love. I’ve got to get back to work now.”

Mother? Storm thought. Who? . . . Ah. He meant Frieda. How was Frieda handling the crisis? He shrugged. She would cope. She was a soldier’s daughter and a soldier’s wife.

Time would tell the tale. If the Fortress cracked before Navy arrived, he would be a poor man again, in several senses. All his treasures would be gone, with most of the people he held dear. He would be left with nothing but the financial wealth of the Legion . . . He forced his attention back to what was happening in the Whitlandsund.

Havik was taking a beating, but he was holding. An infantry battalion was assembling at the shade station. If Havik held till they crossed back to Darkside, Storm was sure he would win again.

He could do nothing but work up an ulcer here, he decided. “Thurston. Take over. I’m going for a walk.”

“It’s raining out, Father.”

“I know.”

After a while he realized he was no longer walking alone. Pollyanna, without intruding, was slouching along beside him. He had not seen her since the day Wulf died.

“Hello.”

“Hi,” she replied. “Is it bad?”

“They’re attacking the Fortress.”

“And nobody’s there.”

“Mouse is. And the families.”

“But no one to fight.”

“They’ll fight. As well as any Legionnaire. It’s mostly automated anyway.”

“Couldn’t you ask for help from Navy?”

“It’s on its way. But it might take a week to get there. That’s a long time to hold out if the raid-master is determined.”

“And it’s all because of Plainfield. Michael Dee.”

“My brother is a pawn too. The shadow-master is a Sangaree named Deeth.”

They walked a block in silence. Pollyanna said, “I like the rain. I missed that at the Fortress.”

“Uhm.”

“I couldn’t go walking on The Mountain. The skies were too big.”

“Uhm.” Storm was not listening. His thoughts kept turning to the Fortress. “He must’ve gotten upset with the way things were going here. Or maybe because of Helga’s World. I don’t know. It doesn’t make any tactical sense to move against the Fortress right now.” He talked on, using a soft voice to describe how Helga’s World had become a deathtrap for a major Sangaree raidfleet and how the Shadowline War might still go the Legion’s way.

Pollyanna was not listening to him any more than he was listening to her. “Down here,” she said, pausing at the head of a descending stairway. “I want to show you where my father lived. Where my heart still lives, I guess.”

He followed her down to the tiny apartment she had shared with Frog. The dwarf’s ghost was its only occupant now. Pollyanna now lived in quarters provided by Blake.

Storm felt right away that the place was a shrine. It made him uncomfortable. He remained carefully, neutrally attentive while Pollyanna told the story of each of her museum pieces. He felt like a voyeur peeping through the keyhole of her soul. The slightly dotty, obsessive monologue helped him understand Pollyanna Eight just a bit better.

From there they went to his rooms and made love, then lay curled together in the twilight afterglow and murmured of nightmares that had come true and dreams that had turned into smoke.

“I want to go back to the Modelmog, Gneaus,” she said in her tiny, weary voice. “I was really happy there. Lucifer . . . I think we could have made it if it hadn’t been for the rest of this.”

“That’s life, pretty thing. It won’t leave you alone. It keeps hammering away till it finds the weak places, then it starts yanking everything apart.”

“Does it have to be that way?”

“I don’t know. Some people slide right through. They never have any bad times, never hit that tough piece of road. Or so it seems.”

“Can you play something on that funny black thing? Whenever you do, you know, I get this image of this lonely old man way up on a mountain . . . A hermit, I guess. He sits there looking down at this city wondering if maybe he missed something. But he can’t figure out what it is because he used to live in the city and he did everything there was to do . . . Aw, you’re laughing at me.”

“No. I’m just a little surprised.”

“Anyway, hearing it always makes me sad. I guess I want to be sad now. Because I guess I’m feeling like that guy on the mountain. I was there but I missed something.”

“You’ve still got a lot of years to find it.”

“It wouldn’t be the same. I’m not the same Pollyanna anymore. I’ve done a lot of things I don’t like me very much for. I hurt people. Frog taught me never to hurt people.”

Storm moistened the reed of his clarinet, startled Pollyanna with a couple of rollicking Hoagie Carmichael pieces.

She smiled when he finished. “I didn’t know that thing could be happy. You never . . . ”

“It could be happier. I didn’t have my heart in it.”

“That was really strange music. Kind of wild and primitive.”

“It’s very old. More than a thousand years.”

“Thanks. I feel better. Come here.”

They made love once more, and fell asleep lying side by side, reading Ecclesiastes.

His comm’s shriek wakened him. An almost incoherent Helmut blurted, “They took the Fortress! It just came in, Gneaus. From Frieda. She sent a personal message . . . You’d better come here . . . ”

Grimly, Storm began dressing.

“What is it?” Pollyanna asked, frightened by the sudden hardness of him.

“We lost the Fortress.”

“Oh no! Not . . . Your wife! And your children . . . ”

“Be quiet. Please.” Feeling numb, he finished dressing. He did not remember the walk to the war room. Suddenly, he was there. Something within him would not allow him to react completely to the news. It felt like another in a parade of disasters that had happened to somebody else.

“Bring me Frieda’s tape, Helmut,” he said when he realized where he was.

“Gneaus?”

He looked up. Helmut was standing beside his chair, holding the microtape. Time had stolen away on him again.

He loaded the cartridge with the exaggeratedly careful motions of a drunk. It began with a continuous status report from Fortress Combat. He advanced it till Frieda’s pale face formed on screen. Her thin, severe, colorless mouth writhed, but he did not hear anything.

What’s happened to Mouse?
he wondered. He had not been visible in the Combat views.

Don’t take him, too
, Storm prayed.
He’s our only tomorrow
.

Frieda was saying something about there being fighting on Dock Level. He upped the sound.

“ . . . penetrate Residential. They’re tough, Gneaus. Primitives, I think. Definitely human. I’ve put the kids into the
Ehrhardt
. She’s set to boost whenever the computer decides she has her best shot at breaking through.

The Seiners say they’ll try to cover her. We’ll lose contact with them soon. The raiders are getting close to our wave guides. There it goes. The cruiser. Wish them luck getting through.

“Gneaus, I’m going to cut this short. I want you to remember me as a good soldier, but I’m so damned scared I might make a fool of myself. Forgive me now for whatever hurt I may have done you over the years. Remember my love, such as it was. And remember me to Father.

“We’ll hold them as long as we can. Tell Navy to come get them.”

She smiled weakly, pursed her lips in a last long-range kiss, then secured her screen. The instel relay continued. An old man calmly chanted ordnance data from the Fortress’s Combat Information Center.

Storm sighed and closed his eyes. Getting the youngsters out was something, anyway. He shuffled around the dark places of his mind, collecting the old scraps of rage and hatred and hiding them in an out-of-the-way dust bin for nonproductive emotions. More than ever, now, he needed to keep a tight rein on his feelings.

“Helmut, give me an update on the situation here.”

The news from the Whitlandsund was little better than that from home. Havik faced virtual human wave assaults. Michael appeared to be growing desperate.

The shade station was sending reinforcements, but only in driblets. Most of the functional crawlers were still far out the Shadowline.

Helga’s World was the bright spot. The Fishers said the Sangaree raiders had been obliterated. Marines were taking over for Ceislak’s commandos. The latter were taking ship for Blackworld. Already.