And by the way, this is a prime example of a deal that was too good to be true turning out to be too good to be true.
Bill Fawcett sold the Battlestation shared universe with me as co-editor. I’d been doing a lot of work in shared universes by that time, and I decided that the two volumes of the original contract would be my last for a while. I wrote my two stories, “Facing the Enemy” and “Failure Mode,” so that they’d give closure to the series. You don’t ordinarily get that with life, but it’s something I strive for in fiction.
And that brings me very directly to the six stories which open this volume. They come from a slightly earlier shared universe that Bill developed and I co-edited: The Fleet. They follow a special operations company in a future war against aliens. (Parenthetically, most of my Military SF doesn’t involve aliens; possibly because I don’t recall ever being shot at by an alien when I was in Viet Nam or Cambodia.) Each story is self-standing but they have a cumulative effect and are, I believe, some of the best Military SF I’ve written.
What the Fleet stories don’t have is closure; that too, I think, has something to do with me and Southeast Asia. The series ended and I thought I’d walked away from it, just as I thought I’d walked away from a lot of other things back in 1971.
Then, years later, I wrote Redliners, a novel about a special operations company fighting aliens until things went badly wrong . . . except that in Redliners they got a second chance. They and their society got a second chance. They got closure, and in a funny way so did I. Since Redliners I’ve been able to write adventure fiction that’s a little less cynical, a little less bleak, than what I’d invariably done in the past when I wrote action stories.
I don’t think I’d have been able to write Redliners if I hadn’t previously written the Fleet stories. I’m awfully glad I did write them.
Dave Drake
RESCUE MISSION
A Story of The Fleet
“Is it true,” demanded one of the First Platoon corporals in a voice that filled the echoing bay of the landing craft, “that this whole operation is so we can rescue Admiral Mayne’s nephew from the Khalians?”
Captain Kowacs looked at the man. The corporal stared back at the company commander with a jaunty arrogance that said, Whatcha gonna do? Put me on point?
Which of course was the corporal’s normal patrol position.
Kowacs took a deep breath, but you learned real fast in a Marine Reaction Company that you couldn’t scare your troops with rear-echelon discipline. Trying to do that would guarantee you were the first casualty of the next firefight.
“No, Corporal Dodd,” said Kowacs. “Admiral Mayne is planning coordinator for this mission, but neither he nor any nephews of his have anything behind-the-scenes to do with it.”
He glared at his assembled company.
The behind-the-scenes order had come from Grand Admiral Forberry; and it was Forberry’s son, not a nephew, who’d been snatched—no body recovered, at any rate—when the Khalians raided the Pleasure Dome on Iknaton five years before.
Nobody else spoke up; even Dodd looked abashed.
Kowacs gazed at the hundred and three pairs of waiting eyes—wondered how many of them would have any life behind them in twenty-four hours—
Sighed and thumbed the handset controlling the holo projector.
The image that formed above Kowacs’ head was fuzzy. The unit was intended for use in a shielded environment, while the bay of the landing ship Bonnie Parker was alive with circuits and charged metal.
No matter: this was the 121st Marine Reaction Company, not an architectural congress. The projector would do for the job.
“Fleet Intelligence believes this site to be the Khalians’ major holding facility for human prisoners on Target,” Kowacs said, referencing the hologram with a nod. “Their slave pen. Reconnaissance indicates that slave ships land at a pad three kilometers distant—”
A second hologram bloomed briefly, the scale of distance merging it with one wall of the big room.
“—and their cargoes are carried to the holding facility by air trucks which touch down on the roof of the Administration Building,” Kowacs continued as the image of the outlying spaceport disappeared. The building in the center of the main hologram brightened and began to rotate in three dimensions while the Marines squinted.