"I think they're in the building that's burning over there, Officer," Dean said. Valdez glanced at him, a sickish expression on his face that turned instantly to rage. He slapped the explosive-shell magazine into place on his Brady. "Let's go, Marine!"
As they stood to walk around the cruiser, two huge trucks came roaring at them out of the flames in the street. Without hesitating. Dean fired at the lead truck. His bolt struck the front of it and bored a hole into the engine compartment. A second later the engine block let out a loud crack as it shattered from overheating. His second bolt hit it squarely on the side of the cab as it slewed off the road and crashed. Valdez fired three explosive rounds at the second vehicle, which impacted in the cab and in the engine block. The truck lurched to a stop. Several men jumped out of the back and began firing at them with plasma weapons. Their bolts went wild, but Dean, target-range calm in the offhand firing position, coolly squeezed the firing lever six times. Each bolt struck its man. Shoulder-to-shoulder, Valdez and Dean marched forward into the maelstrom.
Claypoole fired his last bolt at the door. The blast was so close it singed his eyebrows and the hair on his head, but it was far less intense than the conflagration raging right behind the five men. Without waiting for the molten metal to cool, Lanning pried the door open with his collapsible nightstick and held it open for the others as they rushed through into the cool night air outside. They stumbled in the darkness, breathing in the fresh air gratefully.
"Thank God for the Marines," one officer said, embracing Claypoole.
"You guys can make love later," Lanning rasped. "This alley runs about half a block behind these buildings to a side street. We can follow that back to the main road and see what's happening at the warehouse." He lumbered off in the direction of the side street, the others clomping along behind him. From the main street came the unmistakable firing of several plasma weapons and several explosions.
"It's Dean! It's Dean!" Claypoole shouted. "That wonderful motherfucker's come through again!"
They were at the side street. Lanning turned to his left, and when they rounded the end of a building, they were standing at the opposite end of Teufelfluss Promenade, facing back toward the warehouse. The street was as bright as day from the fires. Two more vehicles, trucks by their size, burned fiercely in the street, and beyond the flames, barely visible through rolling clouds of dense, greasy black smoke, they could just see the outline of an apparently intact Stadtpolizei cruiser blocking the road.
Eight men broke suddenly from the cover of the burning warehouse and ran toward the small group of police officers. They fired as they came. Projectile weapons. Standing two-handed in a boxer stance, weapons on semi-auto, the policemen took aim as the men came on. Bullets whizzed and smacked everywhere around them. The four Sigs went "crack-crack-crack" again and again, but only two of the attackers dropped. It had come down to this: the policemen could not let these men pass, but they could not take cover either.
The attackers stopped advancing about twenty-five meters from the thin line of policemen blocking their way, and paused to take better aim at their targets. Claypoole was unarmed now. Fernandez tossed him his backup pistol.
Survival instinct, honed by training, took over as Claypoole flopped into the prone position. The policemen flopped down beside him. Aiming carefully, using their sights, they began squeezing their rounds off. It took less than thirty seconds for the bandits to crumple under the fusillade.
The five men lay in the street for a full ten seconds before any of them realized the fight was over. After the noise of the firefight, it was almost quiet now, despite the crackling of the flames ahead of them.
Two figures walked slowly out of the roiling smoke between the burning vehicles. The muzzles of all five guns zeroed in on them as one. "Halt!" Lanning croaked.
"Ricardo!" one of them called out. "It's Valdez! Look at all this mess you've made here!" Valdez spoke into his communicator, and instantly it seemed the street was crowded with emergency crews and more police officers; firemen began dousing the flames and medics rushed in with their life-support systems. Chief Long came up with Commissioner Landser close behind. The dapper little commander was highly animated, shaking hands with his officers and loudly congratulating everyone. Lanning and his little group holstered their weapons.
"Well," Dean said, sauntering up to Claypoole, his blaster at sling arms over one shoulder, "you sure manage to draw fire just about everywhere you go."
"Me?" Claypoole exclaimed.
"Where's your blaster?" Dean asked.
Claypoole returned Fernandez's backup gun. "When on Wanderjahr..." Claypoole began and shrugged. "We did it the hard way," he said.
"One of these guys is still alive!" a medic shouted. Everyone crowded around a prone figure.
Claypoole, looking over a medic's shoulder, stiffened. "I know this bastard!" he shouted. "Dean, it's Garth! It's that bastard Garth!"
Garth had been hit by two bullets. One had destroyed his left shoulder, and fragments had penetrated his carotid artery on that side of his neck. He'd lost a lot of blood, but it was the wound to his head that was fatal. A large chunk of his skull had been blown away along with pieces of his brain. He was still conscious, however, and he looked up at the faces standing above him and recognized the two Marines.
"My name is not Garth," he said weakly.
"You are Garth, you bastard!" Dean shouted. "I remember you. You work for Multan!"
Garth licked his lips. "My name is... my name is Sublieutenant Tang. Peoples Liberation Army..." His voice trailed off. Claypoole knelt at the man's side and shook him violently.
"What? What did you say?" The dying man opened his eyes with effort. They were beginning to glaze over. "You set off those bombs!" Claypoole shouted. "You shot at us!"
"Easy, easy," a medic cautioned, laying a restraining hand on his shoulder. Claypoole shook the hand off.
The dying man who called himself Tang tried to speak again. "I... did... not. Spying on Multan..." He closed his eyes and lay still. The medic shook his head.
"Don't die, you fuck! You owe us some answers!" Claypoole shouted, oblivious of the crowd that stood silently watching. "If you didn't, who did?" he demanded.
Tang opened his eyes and looked straight at Claypoole. He smiled. "You fools," he said in a normal tone of voice. "You don't understand anything. I never hurt you or anybody."
"Then who did?" Claypoole raged.
Tang stared up at his interrogator, his lips moving but no sound coming out of his mouth. "Titties," he said at last, and lay back on the bloody pavement.
"Okay, that's it," a medic said, and several policemen pulled Claypoole away.
"What did he say, what did he say?" Claypoole asked of the men in the crowd. Dean just shook his head.
" 'Titties' is what I heard," Chief Long said. He took both Dean and Claypoole by the arms and led them out of the crowd. "Are either of you injured?" he asked. When they shook their heads, he said, "You've had enough police work for tonight, lads. Come back to headquarters with me and we'll talk about 'Titties.' "
Chapter Thirteen
"Back in your bed. Lieutenant," Commander Hing snapped as he stepped into Pincote's small chamber off the main mine shaft. The medics had turned the chamber into a makeshift hospital room. "Your burns aren't bad enough to kill you, but if they get infected, the infection will."
Pincote looked up from pulling her uniform pants on to look up at him. In the dim light of the dying glowball, Hing saw that she was glaring. He also saw that she'd somehow managed to pull on her brassiere without dislodging the synthskin that swathed her left arm, shoulder, and side, and was attempting to put her left leg into her trousers without troubling the synthskin that ran along the outside of her left leg. That was as far as her dressing had gone. Nearby, the IV tubes she'd pulled from her arms dangled uselessly.
"I can move, I can give orders, and I can kill," she snarled. "If I am careful, nothing will go wrong." She grimaced as the
waistband of her trousers caught against a patch of synthskin above her ankle, jerking the connections it was growing into the underlying tissue. Just one leg on the ground, she teetered.
In an instant, carefully avoiding her left shoulder, Hing was on her, his left hand firmly gripping her right arm, his right between her shoulder blades. More gently than he wanted to in his anger at her foolishness, he pushed her back and down while keeping her from falling backward. She tried to resist, but in her weakened condition he was much stronger, and she bent with his push until she was back on her narrow bed. Hing released the hold he had on Pincote and squatted in front of her with one hand clamped on her right thigh to prevent her standing again. Almost immediately he regretted his position; his eyes were level with her chest, which was much more impressive covered only by the bra than it had seemed before her disastrous ambush patrol. Only a foot below her chest he could make out the dark triangle of her uncovered pubis. It was too long since the last time he'd been with a woman. But this was the wrong place and the wrong time. And even if she wasn't injured, Sokum Pincote was definitely the wrong woman. He yanked his eyes toward hers.
"We are not sending out another combat patrol. Not yet. Not until we understand what happened to your ambush."
"The Confederation Marines can make themselves invisible, and we weren't prepared for that, that's what happened. Now that we know this, we can take steps." She flexed her leg muscles, but her left leg hurt too much for her to resist the downward pressure he maintained on her good leg. A small muscle twitched in his jaw, and she remembered the way his eyes had flicked over her nearly naked body.
Hing rose to his feet and stood over her, his hand on her good shoulder holding her down. From that vantage, looking down into her eyes, her body was less visible. Not much, but enough that it was less of a distraction.
"Yes, now that we know the Marines can make themselves invisible, we can take steps. But we don't have the equipment for it here. We have to get it. And you aren't taking steps of any kind until that synthskin has properly grafted itself to you." He looked over his shoulder to the chamber entrance and called out, "Cildair!" A moment later one of the medics rushed in.
"Sedating her for pain isn't enough," Hing said. "She's not good enough at obeying orders to stay in bed and heal. Put her completely out."
Pincote glared up at Hing while Cildair prepared the sedative and pressed the inductor against her good thigh. Then her eyes slowly closed, and she didn't feel the gentleness with which the two men removed her bra and pulled her trousers away from her ankle, then laid her back and covered her with a sheet after Cildair reattached the fluid drips.
* * *
Acting Shift Sergeant Schultz was feeling good. His self-confidence was back. Fear was as much a stranger to him as it had ever been. He no longer gave a damn what kind of animal could kill and eat a Wanderjahrian cow. The one-sided fight against the guerrilla ambush had fully restored his equilibrium. Thinking of the FPs, he had to admit that during the several days since the firefight they had begun to look more like soldiers. Nowhere near like Marines, of course, but maybe as good as Confederation Army recruits halfway through basic training.
Yes, Schultz was feeling good—good enough that he wanted to take his shift back out and find some guerrillas, see how his troops would perform. He was feeing so good he didn't even notice that he was beginning to think of it as his shift, as though he actually was the commander, a proper NCO. Nossir. Acting Shift Sergeant Schultz wasn't some kind of NCO, he was a Confederate Marine Corps lance corporal, just what he wanted to be. Not a man in charge, not the responsible one. And his men were finally listening to him, doing what he wanted them to. His men were turning into, by-damn! soldiers.
Acting Shift Sergeant Chan had his doubts, but then Chan always had doubts. Was he doing everything he could to turn his shift of FPs into proper soldiers? Were they progressing fast enough? They were improving every day, that was evident. When he looked around at the other platoons and shifts in the 257th Feldpolizei, he saw that his shift was improving as much as any. During occasional moments of objective honesty, he even saw that his shift was improving faster than many of the others. Already he trusted his men to follow his orders in the field. Soon, he thought, they would be able to go on short patrols without Marine supervision and acquit themselves well—maybe they could do that already. He needed to talk to Sergeant Hyakowa, see if something could be arranged.
* * *
Acting Shift Sergeant MacIlargie was experiencing the frustration and pride of mixed emotions. It was almost half an hour since he'd sent his shift—under the leadership of their normal commander. Acting Assistant Shift Sergeant Nafciel into the woods south of the 257th's headquarters. The instructions he'd given them were simple: patrol the area, don't be seen. He gave them ten minutes, and then, invisible in his chameleons, went into the woods after them. This should be easy, he'd thought. It shouldn't take more than five minutes for him to find them. He'd chuckled quietly in anticipation of how started they'd be when he began moving along their column, whispering in their ears, tapping them on their shoulders.
Now, after almost twenty minutes of fruitless searching, he was feeling pride in how effective his training in field movement had been. After almost twenty minutes of searching, he hadn't found them. That fruitless searching was likewise the source of the frustration he was feeling. He was a highly trained and skilled Confederation Marine. Something had to be wrong if he couldn't find fifteen half-trained, not very skilled local yokels in a patch of nearly open woodland that was hardly more than two kilometers along its greatest axis.
Then it dawned on him what they must be doing and he got angry. He'd taught them too well about how to avoid their sergeants and officers; they'd probably snuck out of the woods and gone someplace else to goof off, as he would have in that kind of training situation. Well, they weren't going to get away with it. He was going to find them, and when he did, he'd have a piece of every one of their hides. And a bigger piece of Nafciel's hide! Nobody was going to get away with pulling this kind of drek on PFC MacIlargie. Nossir! He knew how to do something they didn't know he could do. He hadn't hunted bunniwolfs when he was growing up back home on Saint Brendan's for nothing. He knew how to track, and he was going to track them down. And then there was going to be hell to pay!
MacIlargie raced back to where the shift had entered the woods and examined the ground. There were the signs, plain as day. A curved line in the semisoft ground showed where someone had planted a foot. A U marked the heel print of someone else. A few meters into the woods he saw a broken stemmed treelet someone had carelessly stepped on. A little farther, a snapped twig. There, a fragment of another U-shaped heel print. Every five or ten meters one of those clumsy FPs left some kind of sign. He was probably following them faster than they were moving when they left these signs, he thought. I wasn't possible that such clumsy men could evade his view. He'd catch up with them in no time at all.
It didn't occur to him that if fifteen men left one sign every five or ten meters, that meant they were leaving an average of one sign per man every one hundred-plus meters. If it had, he would have realized the men of his shift were moving very very well indeed.
After fifteen minutes of tracking, MacIlargie found himself deep in the middle of the woods. He stopped examining the ground, stood erect, and stared unseeing into the trees while he thought about it. His shift had to have been right here after he entered the woods looking for them. So if they were in the middle of the woods after he began looking for them they probably hadn't left them to find a place to goof off. That meant that instead of patrolling, they'd set up an ambush. Either that or they found a place to hide and relax while he wasted his time and energy trying to spot moving men.
Well, they weren't going to get away with that either! They were supposed to be patrolling, not sitting in an ambush—and certainly not relaxing in some hidey hole. He was definitely going to have some hides!
Moments
later, MacIlargie found several signs clustered in one small area. He hadn't seen most of them before, shallow cups depressed in the ground—knee prints; a few flattened areas where men had gone prone. The shift had stopped here. Why?
It wasn't long before a suspicion began to grow in his mind. Fifty meters from where the shift had stopped, their signs led to the place where he'd stopped looking for them and backtracked to where they'd entered the woods. From there the signs followed the route he'd taken. Why, why... those... They didn't! They couldn't possibly! He was in his chameleons. They couldn't see him. It wasn't possible that they were following him! As impossible as it seemed, the signs continued to follow his route.
Again MacIlargie stopped and thought. Abruptly, he spun around and examined the woods to his rear. Nobody. He shook his head. This is weird, he thought. He resumed tracking. The tracks continued to follow his route almost to where he'd begun tracking them. Fifty meters from the edge of the woods he again found signs of the shift stopping. From there the signs cut across and began following the route he'd taken tracking them.
Again he stopped. "This is absurd," he said aloud. He turned around and carefully examined the woods behind him. He couldn't see any sign of anything animate. What was going on here? He lifted his hand to his helmet and lowered his infras.
Instantly, he saw red splotches. Man-size red splotches.
He focused on one of the red splotches and lifted the infra visor. His focus was on the base of a grospalm about sixty meters away. He dropped the infras back into place and focused on another red splotch. When he lifted the visor, he was looking at a meter-high fernlike bush. He did it a third time with the same result. Shaking his head, he began walking toward the red splotches his infras told him must be his shift. He was less than twenty meters away from the nearest red splotch before he could make out the man with his naked eyes.
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