"Because the Krag had to find the jump points by following the resonance lines and then had to compute from scratch the coordinates for their counterpoints, even with no defenses in place in any of those systems it took them nearly twelve hours before they managed to pop into the Milvian system. When they came, they did that thing they do where they jump a bunch of s.h.i.+ps at a time instead of just one, which is the only way we can do it, and suddenly there were two battles.h.i.+ps and six heavy battlecruisers right there.

"We were ready for them and opened up before they could recover from the jump. We got four right away, but the rest cleared the datum, and inside of ten minutes there were another eight right behind them. Everyone knew that if they did that one more time, we would be outnumbered again; the Krag would take the system, and that would open up the jump point to Syrtis Minor, leading right into the heart of the whole Washtenaw cl.u.s.ter: eighty-nine worlds full of farmers and fishermen and families with nothing to defend them.

"Fuchida ordered every s.h.i.+p but the Texas back to a defensive formation around the jump point leading to Syrtis and then steered his s.h.i.+p right into the jump point just as the next wave of Krag came through. Of course, his s.h.i.+p and every s.h.i.+p coming through the jump were instantly converted into pure energy. The explosion fried most of the Krag fleet in the system and so disrupted the fabric of s.p.a.ce-time that the jump point was unusable for 78 days. This put a real monkey wrench in the Krag plans, kept them out of the Washtenaw cl.u.s.ter until we could get some s.h.i.+ps in there to defend it, and probably kept them from winning the war in that year. It bought us time to get most of our fleet out of mothb.a.l.l.s, manned, and put to s.p.a.ce.

"Just before he hit the jump point, Fuchida sent a last message. It said: 'We will meet again in that place where warriors go to take their rest.' We've been fighting ever since. And though we've fallen back, no Union system, station, or vessel has ever, ever surrendered to the Krag. And none ever will."

He paused a moment, as if to attend briefly to some echo of the past, still petting Clouseau.

"So, now, if you ever hear anyone say that a man is as brave as Commodore Fuchida or that a s.h.i.+p has gone on to rendezvous with the Texas, you'll know what they are talking about."

"Chief?" Will Robinson had another question. Always another question.

"What is it?"

"How many men were on the Texas?"

"On the Texas? Let's see, Hesse cla.s.s battles.h.i.+p... just under fourteen hundred. A drop in the bucket of those who fell that day."

"Did they die for nothing?"

"No, son, they didn't. You and I are going to make sure of that."

CHAPTER 21.

10:49Z Hours, 6 February 2315 After the c.u.mberland had paid a call at the abandoned asteroid mining station in an uninhabited system that harbored the first of its hidden supply caches and had restocked its missile racks and fuel bunkers, Max was feeling a little better about the next phase of his mission. It was about time for him to meet the Krag prisoner taken when the Loch Linnhe was boarded.

The intelligence officer had been interrogating it extensively and Max had read Smith's report. Jones's report. Jones? Yes, Jones. Because their names were entirely fict.i.tious, why couldn't they have names that were easier to remember? The last one Max had worked with was "Johnson," the one before that "Gray," and the one before that, who looked distinctly Germanic and had a slight Teutonic accent, was imaginatively named "Schmidt." Why not "Beddingfield" or "Kleinknecht"-something that a brain can hang on to?

Max entered the brig, which held seven wedge-shaped cells arranged like slices of pie with their ends cut off, all opening into a circular central guard area. The prisoners could be isolated from being able to see or hear one another by extending wall panels that telescoped out from the bulkhead between each cell to a clear part.i.tion that surrounded the guard. Since the human spy had been executed and Green was in the gym for his exercise period, the Krag was the only prisoner. The outer wall of the cell was a polymer barrier two centimeters thick with a door in it. The wall could be rendered transparent or opaque by polarization. At the moment, it was opaque-a flat black.

"Okay, Futrell, let me see Squeaky here."

Marine Lance Corporal Futrell turned a dial, and the wall went from black to transparent, revealing the Krag curled up on the cot. Literally curled, the way a mouse curls up when it sleeps. The cell brightened from the wall being made transparent, alerting the Krag that it was being observed. It sprang to its feet, looking for all the worlds like a man with hunched shoulders, spindly legs, short but powerful arms, a tail, and a rat's head. There was a wary intelligence in its eyes, and the top of its head was dome-shaped to enclose a brain capable of inventing star drives and formulating plans for the eradication of humans from the galaxy. Just looking at one made Max want to pull out his boarding cutla.s.s and start hacking.

"Activate the translator."

No one actually spoke the Krag language, as human vocal apparatus could not duplicate many of the squeaks and chitters that made up about half of the sounds it used. And no human could understand Krag because many of the squeaks were above the range of human hearing, and many of the chitters were so fast and so similar to one another that most human ears could not distinguish them. Supposedly, Krag had similar difficulties understanding human speech.

At Max's command, the upper left-hand corner of the wall went from transparent back to opaque and displayed text in large amber letters: "Standard (spoken) to Krag (written) and Krag (spoken) to Standard (written) translation matrices activated. Begin when ready."

The Krag made some chittering and squeaking noises interspersed with a few sounds that vaguely resembled human speech. The translation matrix considered the Krag's statement for a few moments and displayed: "When I get back home, I must inform the zookeeper that he has left the monkey cage unlocked again. If you are looking for a banana, I'm afraid I have none with me."

The Krag homeworld had both monkeys and bananas. Only, unfortunately, it was the rodents instead of the primates that had developed big brains, harnessed fire, and mastered nuclear fusion.

What was it about so many alien races that compelled them to make fun of how humans were descended from primates? Every sentient species evolved from some wild creature. The Krag developed from scurrying rodents, the Vaaach from some sort of carnivorous tree sloth, the Pfelung from bottom-feeding, pond-dwelling lungfish. What made having apes as ancestors so worthy of ridicule? No one started off interrogating a Pfelung by asking if he knew his grandmother would taste good fried in cornmeal with hush puppies on the side.

"Make all the monkey jokes you want, Mickey, but I'm the zookeeper and you're the one in the cage. And don't you forget that I can do whatever I want with you. You give me information I can use, I might just keep you around and turn you over to the Prisoner of War Authority. They can put you in reasonably comfortable confinement until we kick your skinny little rat tails back to where you came from, and then send you back to your rat buddies to live out the rest of your miserable little rat life.

"If you don't, I'll just put you in an airlock, vent it slowly, and watch as your eyeb.a.l.l.s pop while you roll around on the floor twitching, bleeding from your ears and r.e.c.t.u.m, and vomiting your entrails all over the deck." It wasn't pretty. But it was, to Max at any rate, intensely gratifying.

"Then we shove your carca.s.s out into s.p.a.ce and you get to spend eternity dancing with the stars."

The Krag moved its head to its left and slightly down, a tiny, almost imperceptible s.h.i.+ft of which it was almost certainly not aware. The interrogation reports Max had read said that this was an unconscious sign of submission or resignation. More rodent noises. "I have answered all your questions. I have told you everything that I know."

"Bulls.h.i.+t. You were on board a freighter bound for Krag s.p.a.ce carrying tons of gold, but you say you don't know about any other s.h.i.+pments, the recognition protocols, rendezvous points, payment arrangements, and who else you are dealing with. You insult my intelligence."

It made little barking noises, the Krag equivalent of laughter. "Any accurate reference to your mental capacity would be an insult to your intelligence, I am afraid. Perhaps with your chattering primate sociability, your species is in the habit of spreading important tactical information beyond those who have a need to know it, but that is not our practice. With us, information of this kind is rigidly compartmentalized. I was given only the information strictly necessary to complete my mission. I have given that to you, as I could not help doing with the interrogation drug you gave me.

"Kill me, if that is what you prefer to do. Or not. I no longer care. I have told you all that I know. I can tell you no more. If I am to die, that is my lot as a member of the Warrior Swarm. If I am to live, that is my lot as well, and I will carry on with the shame of failure, of giving information to monkey-blasphemer-deceivers and not striking back at you for cloaking your evil souls in misshapen, crude mimicry of the Creator-G.o.d's True Handiwork."

"Don't push your luck, Jerry. I could have you in that airlock in two minutes."

"Gloat in your power over me while you can. The Creator-G.o.d will erase you and your kind from His holy creation. The galaxy shall be cleansed."

"Maybe so. But not today. Rat." He turned to Futrell.

"Lance Corporal, opacify. I don't want to see that thing any more."

The wall went black and the Marine deactivated the translator. Max took a few steps toward the exit, then stopped.

"Lance Corporal?"

"Yes, Skipper."

"I've heard that some Marines on some s.h.i.+ps can 'forget' to provide food and water to Krag prisoners. Make sure the detachment understands that I won't tolerate any memory lapses like that on my s.h.i.+p. Whiskers gets as much water as it wants and the standard Krag ration at the prescribed times. Understood?"

"Understood, sir. I'll take care of it. No memory problems on this s.h.i.+p, sir."

"Thank you. Carry on."

Leaving the brig, Max was not in the best of moods. He hated every time he had to come face to face with a Krag. Seeing their beady little eyes, watching the twitchy way they moved their arms and their noses, hearing their squeaking and chittering speech, all triggered too many truly horrific memories for him to be able to experience such an encounter with equanimity.

He was lost in his own thoughts, trying to bury even more deeply the sights and sounds that kept on trying to surface in his mind, and was not paying attention to his surroundings. So, it was not with perfect amiability that he responded to an ordinary s.p.a.cer third who, when Max was pa.s.sing in front of the s.h.i.+p's store on the way back to his quarters, bawled a little too loudly, "Hey, Skipper. You gotta see this."

Every wars.h.i.+p has a s.h.i.+p's store. This is where personnel obtain items such as stationery, toiletries other than the basics issued to them, gum, candy bars, sundries, book and periodical download codes, and trid vid cubes.

But most of the business in s.h.i.+p's stores was in s.h.i.+p's souvenirs: T-s.h.i.+rts, caps, jackets, coffee mugs, and patches that said "Navy" or that displayed the name of the s.h.i.+p or the s.h.i.+p's emblem. The men bought these items not just for themselves but also to give to family members and sweethearts. Most s.h.i.+ps did a particularly brisk business in children's items such as child-sized T-s.h.i.+rts and baby pajamas, all with the s.h.i.+p's emblem so that everyone could see where their fathers or grandfathers or uncles served and that they were "children of the s.h.i.+p."

The c.u.mberland's store had done very little of that sort of business, as there was little demand for these items and no one had ever taken the trouble to design an emblem for the vessel.

Max was probably not wearing the most receptive-looking face when he looked around to see who had called for him, but his expression rapidly turned to surprise. The s.p.a.cer who had yelled at his skipper was pointing to the line in front of the s.h.i.+p's store. The line that had twenty men standing in it. Max had never seen so many as two people in line before. Careful to stand slightly to the side to make it clear that he was not cutting in front of twenty men who were waiting patiently for something, he stepped up to the store's window, a roughly one-by-two-meter opening set chest high in the wall of the corridor, opening into a small shop behind that was manned by a clerk who sold the items and handed them over the counter to his customers.

The clerk visibly brightened when he saw Max, and he began to talk breathlessly. "Captain, sir, we just got these out of the FabriFax half an hour ago, and we done more business in them thirty minutes than in the last ninety days put together.

"We got the T-s.h.i.+rts, the ball caps, the pins, the coffee mugs, and the pillow cases right now, and by tomorrow we gonna have the pendants, charms for the wives' and sweethearts' charm bracelets, polo s.h.i.+rts, shot gla.s.ses, T-s.h.i.+rts in kids sizes, and workout shorts, all with the new emblem thing. It's gonna be a few days on the throw pillows and Christmas tree ornaments, but there's no rush on them ornaments, it being only February and all-"

"Petrone," Max broke in, clueless, "what 'emblem thing'?"

"This." Wearing the biggest grin that Max had ever seen on this s.h.i.+p, Ordinary s.p.a.cer Third Cla.s.s Walter Petrone held up a T-s.h.i.+rt with an enormous emblem on it that Max had never seen before. But after looking at it for a few seconds, Max found himself grinning even more widely than Petrone.

The emblem covered the entire front of the T-s.h.i.+rt and was almost twice as large as such things were customarily printed. The whole thing was encircled by a gold ring, two or three fingers wide, into which was inscribed along the top in Navy blue, "USS c.u.mberland DPA-0004." Below that, inside the circle, was depicted a deep cleft in a range of green-forested mountains, presumably the c.u.mberland Gap on Earth. Beyond the Gap, one could discern a tiny image of the destroyer herself, leaving a stylized "swoosh" in her wake from having flown level through the Gap, her bow now pointed almost straight up at a cl.u.s.ter of stars in the sky high above her.

Perhaps the best part, and Max's rudimentary grasp of Latin let him instantly understand what the men must have just made the s.h.i.+p's new motto, was inscribed in the bottom of the gold ring: "Per laboram ad victoriam." Through hards.h.i.+p to victory.

Right on.

A few minutes later, having been rebuffed in an effort to buy a T-s.h.i.+rt and a ball cap by Petrone, who informed him (quite correctly) that, under immemorial naval custom, the captain never pays for anything with his s.h.i.+p's name on it, so long as it is for his personal use, Max had stowed his new s.h.i.+rt and cap and was in his day cabin, sitting at the coffee table, sipping some truly outstanding coffee with the doctor and Jones.

"Have you decided what to do with the Krag?" Sahin asked. "I ask purely out of academic interest, because if you intend to kill him, I was hoping you would do so in such a way that would preserve as many of his tissues as possible in undamaged condition and cause minimum biochemical change. An air embolism perhaps? I have never gotten to dissect a Krag, and after having repaired this one's arm, I am very curious about many of the details of his finer anatomy."

"Doctor, I'm afraid that you will have to do without the dissection. I am planning to let it live."

"Really?" Jones smiled enigmatically, like someone who has heard something he wants to hear but is very surprised nonetheless. "Why is that?"

"I generally kill only when I have good reason, and I don't have any good reason to kill it. This particular Krag has committed no crime for which I am required to execute it. Since there are no other Krag on board, I can't use the death of this one to threaten the others. There's just no benefit in killing the thing, and letting it live doesn't do any harm that I can see. Maybe someone at an interrogation center can get more out of it than we have. This one has basically had its incisors pulled. It's got no bite left."

"For what it's worth, I concur," said Jones. "It was a low-level operative possessing a tiny sliver of compartmentalized knowledge, which we have successfully extracted. It may prove useful in the future if we can break it to voluntary cooperation and we capture another Krag that it knows. Then it might help us break the second Krag, who might possess some knowledge that is more valuable. Not a likely scenario, but in total war you don't throw away any tool, no matter how small or apparently limited its usefulness."

The doctor shook his head. "You two offer the most cold-blooded reasons for an act of generosity, mercy, and humanitarianism that I have ever heard."

"Doctor," said Max, "for all you know, all I told you was a tiny portion of my true reasoning on the issue. Perhaps I am sparing the Krag primarily because the Sermon on the Mount says, 'Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.'"

"I would feel better if that were your true reason, but if you do not open your mind to me, I will never know."

"Then you will never know. Besides, we have bigger fish to fry now. The first transponder shows that one of your art dealer friend's freighters carrying Krag cargo left Ras.h.i.+d IV several hours ago. According to the schedule, it will be jumping into the S'regor system at 00:14 tomorrow and rendezvousing with another freighter to transfer its cargo at 05:52. There's only one jump point in that system that leads to anywhere near Krag s.p.a.ce. It goes to Keldof. It will take the freighter at least fifteen hours to get from the rendezvous point to the jump point. We're already on our way to Keldof following a different route. We'll get there a few hours ahead of him and lie in wait, then either take or destroy the freighter, depending on what kind of s.h.i.+p it is and what kind of escort it has, if any."

"If that's all you have for me, Captain, I have a report to write," said Jones, thoroughly uninterested in the business of attacking and taking freighters. He left.

"I heard that the crew has finally come up with a coat of arms, as it were, for the s.h.i.+p," said the doctor.

"Indeed, they have. Take a look." Max retrieved the T-s.h.i.+rt and unfolded it on the table in front of the doctor.

"Very, very interesting," he remarked. "This is good news, indeed."

"How so?"

"Max, whatever your drills and efficiency ratings are telling you, this emblem that you hold in your hands right now says that you have already won the most important battle-the one for the hearts of the crew. You have turned these men around. You have given them back their pride, their honor, and their self-respect. Experience shows that once you have done that for a group of men, they will follow you to the very gates of h.e.l.l."

CHAPTER 22.

00:12Z Hours, 8 February 2315 The freighter turned out not to have any escort at all. When the s.h.i.+p carrying the Krag-purchased cargo arrived in the Keldof system, the c.u.mberland was already doing its now well-rehea.r.s.ed imitation of a Romanovan Revenue and Inspection cutter. Because it had doc.u.mentation showing its cargo to be entirely legitimate, the Igandii freighter Frenkung-Tan had no reluctance whatsoever about heaving to for inspection by the representatives of the Romanovan Imperium.

When the appropriately costumed doctor and Marine boarding party went aboard her, they were not surprised to see the vessel crewed by humans, as the Igandii rarely ventured into s.p.a.ce themselves and usually crewed their s.h.i.+ps with humans from one of the neutral systems. "May I see your ID cube please," the doctor asked the freighter captain, who identified himself as Brigham Johnson.

As the man fished the cube out of his pocket, the doctor noticed that the front zipper of the uniform, a utilitarian jumpsuit that had one zipper running from the crotch to the neck, was pulled down to roughly the middle of the man's sternum, revealing a bare and distinctly hairy chest. The man was not wearing any kind of unders.h.i.+rt, which was nothing unusual for a freighter rat. A quick scan of the bridge showed two other crew members at their stations, one of whom was drinking hot coffee from a mug. A glance at the mug sitting at the Captain's Station showed that he was drinking coffee as well. One of the crew, a hard-looking sixtyish woman at the Maneuvering Station, appeared to have just noticed that a pack of cigarettes was protruding from a stack of personal items in a rack near her seat and was trying to cover it up without drawing notice to herself.

The reader showed that the ID cube was a forgery that Romanovan equipment would read as the genuine article. The captain's entirely false biography appeared on the screen, including his date and place of birth, residence history, piloting certificates, and so on.

"So," the doctor said, in a conversational tone, "you are from New Zarahemla."

"Yes, I am. We all are."

That too was nothing out of the ordinary. A lot of people from New Zarahemla became freighter rats. The local economy had been struggling for the past several years; the planet had a strong s.p.a.ce-faring tradition; and transit companies liked to hire from there because the people of that world had a reputation for being honest, hard working, reliable, and family oriented, and for being less p.r.o.ne than most to abusing alcohol and drugs on long, lonely freighter runs.

"Raised there?"

"Yes. We all grew up there together. We're old friends and we like to s.h.i.+p out on the same crew."