Read Ebook: Weapon by Bone Jesse F Jesse Franklin Bernklau Illustrator

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Ebook has 333 lines and 14831 words, and 7 pages

Illustrator: BERNKLAU

Release date: January 25, 2024

Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1961

WEAPON

Illustrated by BERNKLAU

The Dauntless was one of the most powerful ships in the Confederation space navy. Yet, in the showdown with the Eglani, victory was not necessarily to the mighty.

Bright chatter flowed around her, filling the clean conditioned air of the room with inconsequential noise that hid the tension in a froth of words. It was what wasn't being said that was important, Ellen Fiske thought as she listened to the high-pitched voices. Of course, one never paraded feelings. It was indecent,--something like undressing in public. But this matter of keeping a stiff upper lip could be carried to extremes. You went to these get-togethers, played cards and talked about dresses and children and grocery bills just as though there was no war, as though the Eglani never existed, as though the men in the Navy would come back as regularly and predictably as they did from commercial runs in the old days. But try as you did, you couldn't keep the undercurrents hidden. Fear clung to the sharp shards of sound. There was longing, grief, resignation, and hope, all mixed with a firm unreasoning conviction that if one buried her feelings deep enough everything would solve itself and wind up with a happy ending.

Her hands tightened convulsively and cards squirted from her fingers to the floor as the high-pitched keening shriek of a spaceship's jets came to her ears. The talk stopped suddenly as every woman in the room paused to listen and every eye turned involuntarily toward the ceiling. A big one was coming in. The entire house shivered, quivering in resonant sympathy to the throbbing pulse of the spaceship's drives. The sound swelled to a crescendo--to stop abruptly with a sharp finality that left an aching silence in its wake.

"I'm sorry, Anne," Ellen said as she bent to retrieve the cards scattered on the floor. "For a moment I couldn't help thinking that--" she stopped and blushed.

"Don't apologize," Anne Albertson said. "I know how you feel. Fact is I've felt that way myself--more than once." Her eyes were gray and wise in the frame of her pointed elfin face.

Ellen felt a rush of gratitude. Anne was understanding beyond her years, little Anne with her piercing giggle and gay smile. Anne with a husband already a week overdue. She didn't allow herself the luxury of worry, Ellen thought enviously, but then she had been married nearly four years now. She was a veteran of a thousand nights of waiting, not a bride of four months who had only seen her husband twice since that utterly mad and beautiful honeymoon, that precious two weeks torn from a reluctant Navy.

For centuries men had travelled the starlanes unopposed. Intelligent races were seldom encountered, and those that were were always on a lower technological level than the outward-sweeping hordes of Earth. They could be safely ignored and their worlds bypassed. There were plenty of others without intelligent life.

Colonies were planted. Civilizations were built. Wealth was produced, traded, and exploited. And in time a loosely organized Confederation was established,--a glorified Board of Trade that advised rather than governed. And as system after system passed by default into mankind's hands, the idea grew that the galaxy was man's oyster and the Creator had graciously provided him with a knife.

At that, there was some justice in the thought. An expanding civilization meeting no obstacles for centuries is unlikely to believe the minority of Cassandras. So when the expanding front of humanity collided with that of the Eglani, the first reaction was disbelief, the second panic,--and the third grim anger.

But anger was not enough. Mankind was trying desperately, but a thousand years of peaceful expansion were poor experience to pit against an organized race of warlike conquerors.

The war wasn't going too well. Even the communiques had stopped calling the shrinking sphere of human power "strategic withdrawals" and "tactical regroupments." Nowadays they either didn't mention the loss of another world, or published the new frontier line without comment. Long ago the dent in mankind's expanding perimeter had become a bulge, and the bulge a dome that cut inexorably into the worlds of the Confederation. Slowly man's domination of this sector of the galaxy was being blotted out. In slightly more than five years a hundred Confederation worlds had fallen into the hands of the Eglani as the Confederation evacuated and withdrew, bartering precious space and lives for infinitely more precious time to forge the weapons and battle skills to crush the aliens.

Ellen knew all this, but it didn't seem important. What mattered was that her man was out there on the frontier fighting the Eglani. She wanted him home with all the blind possessive selfishness of her sex. She wanted to feel his arms around her and later in the quiet of their home to tell him what he had a right to know. She laid down her cards and ran her hands over her abdomen with a curious half protective half possessive gesture, a wry smile touching her lips. She was doing her part just as Alton was doing his. Life was needed. Life had to be replaced.

Another keening shriek from the sky. Another ship was in.

And Ellen was standing up. Her face was glory.

"It's Alton!" she said with odd softness. "I'd know the sound of those drives anywhere in the galaxy." And then--quietly--she fainted....

Within minutes after landing, interrogation teams from Central Intelligence swarmed over ship and crew like vultures on a dead carcass. For hours the questioning and examination went on and not until the last tape, the last instrument, and the last crewman of the "Dauntless" had been wrung dry of information did the torture stop. Literally nothing was overlooked but the results as usual were negative--three strikes, three kills, two boardings, and nothing to show for them but Eglan corpses. As usual the aliens were thorough. They fought while they could and died when they could fight no more, and headless bodies were no use to Central Research. Reluctantly, Intelligence released the officers and crew.

The Eglan Enigma was no closer to solution than it was five years ago when the aliens had blasted a Confederation exploration ship and had started the war. But Commander Alton Fiske wasn't worried about that. Ellen was out there waiting for him and he'd been delayed too long already.

A week is never long at best,--and this had been shorter than most, Fiske decided as he picked up a ground car at fleet headquarters and directed the driver to take him to his quarters. It was a little better than an hour until blastoff, which would give him time enough to pick up his kit and say goodbye, to Ellen for the fourth time. He'd been lucky. The "Dauntless" needed modification and repair and the week planetside was his longest time ashore since his honeymoon. Of course, Ellen wasn't going to like his sudden departure, but she was a Navy wife and she knew what she was getting into before they were married. It was an abiding wonder that she had married him in the face of his Cassandra prophecies of trouble and heartache. But then--Ellen was an unusual woman.

As he left the forbidding grimness of Fleet Headquarters he almost smiled. In a way it was a relief to get away from the long-faced brass whose professionally preoccupied air was merely a camouflage for the worry that ate at the linings of their stomachs. Fiske was glad that he wasn't one of the Ulcer Echelon, that his worries involved relatively simple things such as fighting a ship and getting home alive.

As it was, the pain of leaving again was bad enough, and if it weren't for Ellen's "get-togethers" it would be greater. They were the one fault in her otherwise perfect character. How a perfectly sane and sensible woman could endure those gabfests where every blessed female was talking at the same time was more than he could understand. But Ellen not only took them in her stride, she took them three or four times a week.

His face clouded as he saw the squadron of ground cars parked before his quarters. Their significance was obvious. Of course, she didn't expect him home this early in the day, and if she'd known of the orders he'd received there probably would have been no one here but her. Still, he'd have to go inside and face that crowd of cats mewling at each other over some conversational bone. He sighed as he stepped out of the car, told the driver to wait, and walked the few steps to his quarters.

Through the clatter of shrill voices the squealing giggle of Anne Albertson cut like a knife, piercing his ears as he stood in the tiny entrance hall, reluctant to enter farther yet unwilling to leave. He winced. Sure, Anne probably had a right to squeal. Her husband had landed his riddled ship yesterday morning and had walked away from the wreckage. Sure--she had a right to squeal, but did she have to do it in his house?

Fixing his expression into a noncommittal mask, he stepped into the living room, and with his appearance the noise stopped. Twelve pair of eyes looked at him and Anne Albertson said into the silence, "I think we'd better leave, girls. We're not needed here right now." There was a murmur and a rustle, and miraculously the room was empty, except for Ellen. She stood in front of him, a slim straight girl with a face that was oddly white against the wealth of her blue-black hair. She wasn't pretty, Fiske thought. She was beautiful.

"Are you off again?" Ellen asked.

Fiske nodded. Wives, he suspected, were telepathic.

"Admiral Koenig should go drown himself," she said bitterly. "He has no right to send you off like this. You've been home only six days."

"That's twice as long as last time," Fiske pointed out reasonably. He felt proud of her. She was pure steel all the way through. No tears, no fuss, even a faint smile on her lips. If possible he loved her more than ever. "If you don't like it," he continued with a wry grin, "you might take it up with the Admiral."

"Not me," Ellen said. "The one time I saw him at close range he scared me half to death."

"Oh well, you needn't worry. It's just another try for prisoners. The Research Institute wants a live Eglan."

"Haven't they got some? Ed Albertson came in with a few last trip."

Fiske grinned. "Anyway, it's a milk run this time," he lied.

"Don't kid the troops on the home front," she said. "It's big, mean, and dirty."

"It's no worse than any other mission. Sure, they're all bad but I'm on detached assignment and there won't be a lot of other ships around cluttering up space and drawing attention."

"I wish they'd leave us alone."

"I suppose so, but I don't like to think of you out there."

"Someone has to go," he said quietly, "and besides I've always managed to come back. I'm getting pretty good at it now." He kissed her lightly on the end of her nose.

"Just keep on being good," she said. "I like having you around." She kissed him then, a fierce hungry kiss that left him breathless. "All right sailor, there's something for you to come home to. Now let's get your gear together."

Ellen followed him to the door. "I'm not going down to the field with you this time," she said. "Last time was enough. I don't think I could stand watching you disappear outside again. But I made something to take with you." She picked up a square flat package from the top of the recorder and thrust it into his hands.

"Another tape like the last one?" he queried.

"Not exactly like the last one," she smiled, "but it's along the same lines. You said you liked the other."

"I did. It was nice to hear your voice. And would you believe I never grew tired of hearing it? It gets lonely out there."

"It gets lonely here too. Now, off with you or I'll be tempted to kidnap you for the duration." She kissed him, a cool wifely kiss that was tender but passionless, pushed him gently away, and stood beside the door until his car disappeared around the corner on its way back to the Base.

She sighed and turned back to the house. That was all it was now--just a house--but for the past week it had been a home. She wondered when, if ever, it would be a home again. It was starting already--the worry, the hidden fear, the agony of suspenseful waiting.

She jumped as the doorbell rang and Anne Albertson's face appeared in the viewplate.

"I came back," Anne said as she entered the room. "I thought you might need me, and besides--I forgot something." She looked at the recorder with an odd expression on her pointed face. "Well," she said finally, "I didn't think anyone wanted it worse than I did. I thought it might amuse Ed. He's pretty low. He lost a lot of men."

"Wanted what?" Ellen asked curiously.

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