by Scott McKay
“They were shooting back at us, Sam,” Mark said. “Rifle fire. Lots of it. And they hit what they were aiming at.”
Samuel went quiet. Mark took a giant swig from his beer bottle, emptying it.
“Come with me, will you?” he said to Samuel. The entrepreneur followed as Mark walked to the barn, where the ground crew had towed Abigail in for repairs.
Mark counted twenty-one bullet holes in the plane, including the one that ripped through the plywood bottom of the fuselage on the way into Cousins’ right leg. The crew was busy stitching canvas patches onto the wings and applying pine tar to close holes in the plywood.
Now it was Samuel’s turn to show a look of terror.
“We need armoring on your planes,” he said to Mark.
“We do, at that,” Mark agreed. “I don’t know how many of my guys are coming home today.”
In a few minutes they’d had their answer, and it was better than they might have thought. As the squadron returned to base, Mark counted six planes landing, and it looked like none of the air crews had suffered any life-threatening wounds.
But the planes were badly shot up. Abigail’s twenty-one bullet holes were on the low side of average of what the First Airfighter Squadron’s planes had suffered in contact with that column of Udar cavalry on the east side of the Tweade. They hadn’t even made it to the main column as it bore down on the Nineteenth Infantry in the woods across the Aileen from the city.
Word came from the hospital tent that Corporal Brantley Cousins was resting comfortably and in stable condition. He would survive his wound, but he’d lost a considerable amount of blood and had needed a transfusion. They’d had a supply of blood on hand, thank the Lord of All, but they’d need to replenish it, perhaps from the evacuees who were setting up in a camp just to the north of Carmody Farm.
It was a somber after-action review in the dining room, as the pilots and seconds related stories of running a gauntlet of rifle fire as they bombed and strafed the massive Udar force. They’d identified a river crossing the Udar had made a couple of miles downriver from Trenory, using small wooden boats and a steamer they’d stolen. Roger Craver, the pilot of Lucy, said they’d dropped a bomb on the steamer and, he thought, had sunk it.
“That should slow ‘em down a bit,” he said, as the others nodded approval.
“We need to make a strategic decision,” Gavin Henson, the pilot of Annabelle, piped up. “We need to decide if we’re going to stay at a thousand, or even fifteen hundred, feet and bomb these guys, which is safe, but I’m not confident we’re accurate with the bombs from that distance. Otherwise we’re going to need to lower the deck to fifty or seventy-five feet and come in low with guns blazing so we can suppress their fire. At three hundred feet they just take pot-shots at us, and somebody’s going to get killed.”
The pilots agreed.
“I think our tactics are going to have to evolve,” Mark said. “What we tried today, if the bad guys have rifles, it’s not going to work. I’m with you.”
“I like going in hot,” Adam said. “Terrify ‘em and make them drop their guns and run.”
“I’m going to say no on that,” Mark said. “I think we have to be more cautious. We don’t have enough planes, and we don’t have enough crew. We can’t take the kind of casualties we’re taking with our numbers.”
Samuel was in the room, and Mark turned to him. “Do we have more planes coming, Sam? And is there a timetable for a new model?”
“We have three more Model 1-A’s we can have down here in a couple of days,” he said. “We were working on a Model 1-B, but after talking with you I think we’re going to move ahead to a Model 2 design we’ve been considering, which would be a sizable upgrade.”
Mark nodded.
Samuel took him upstairs to the farmhouse’s study, where a larger ecter box had been set up. A communications engineer had been tinkering with it but stood up as the two entered the room. “It should be ready to go, sir,” he said.
Samuel put on a pair of headphones and motioned for Mark to do the same. He spoke into the microphone at his mouth. “Carmody Farm to Barley Point, Carmody Farm to Barley Point, do you hear?”
“Yes, we do,” came a voice. “Who’s this?”
“Sam Thorne here. I have Mark Bradbury with me.”
“Sam, Mark, Sebastian Cross. Good to finally talk with you. This is some contraption you folks built, Sam. Should really help the war effort.”
EIGHTEEN
Watkins Gulf, Tenthmonth Sixteenth, 1843rd Year Supernal
Aboard Adelaide, Matthew Stuart found himself probed and peered at by the ship’s doctor, a middle-aged woman named Lt. Commander Francine Gallaway. She didn’t appear very pleased at his condition and was even less satisfied when he responded to her questions.
“What about your ear?” she asked, grimacing. “How did that happen?”
“That, you get when you politely refuse to renounce the Lord of All and admit that Ur’akeen is the only true god.”
“One time?” she asked, horrified.
“Oh, no,” came the response. “Four times. Each time they slice off more of your ear.”
“How did you get this bruise?” she asked about a line of blue across the bottom of his right rib cage.
“That one came from a long, flexible stick,” he said. “I think the Udar call it a virama. It hurts some when they whack you with it.
“And what about this cut behind your knee?”
“That’s from an izwei knife,” he said. “I’m not sure, but I think they sliced through my hamstring. I haven’t been able to walk right ever since.”
“How long ago?”
“First couple of nights, if I remember right,” Matthew said.
“We’ll want to do surgery on that,” she said. “I’ll put in the order for it when we get you back to Dunnansport. There is an excellent surgeon there who works with the naval hospital.”
“Thanks kindly, doc,” he said. “Whatever gets me back into this fight.”
And on it went, as Dr. Gallaway catalogued the extensive list of punctures, bruises, slashes, discolorations and other manifestations of abuse Matthew had suffered at the hands of his captors as she went from head to toe, finishing with the ugly purple marks across the soles of his feet.
“That’s their specialty,” Matthew noted when questioned about the last bit. “They force you down on your belly and bend your legs at the knee so that your calves are vertical. Then they put your feet into wooden stocks they roll in, so your soles are straight up in the air. That’s when you get caned with the virama.”
“For what?” she said, nearly in tears.
“For whatever they want,” Matthew said. “I never got that treatment as punishment for anything that I could tell, or as part of an interrogation. They just dragged me in and did it.”
“How often?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Wasn’t every day. Maybe every other day. I honestly couldn’t tell you how many times they did it. For the most part it just really hurt for a short time and then I’d recover, but a few days ago…I think they might have broken a bone in my left foot. It hasn’t felt right since.”
She finished by asking him about other medical conditions he had that wouldn’t show up in an external examination; was his breathing normal, could he urinate without pain or passage of blood, and so on.
And when she was done, Dr. Gallaway gave him a gentle hug.
“Welcome home, Captain,” she said. “We’re all very grateful for your sacrifice, and your nation owes you a debt it can never repay.”
“Nah, Doc,” he said. “It’s nothing. All I want is that you all fix me up and put me back in the fight. I’ve got payback to give these bastards.”
Dr. Gallaway nodded, and fighting back tears, she left him to have his first shower in over a month, as she moved on to visit the other six Ardenian prisoners Adelaide was transporting back to Dunnansport.
…
Freshly fed, sh
owered and shaven and wearing a too-big Army captain’s uniform which had been provided to him, Matthew hobbled into the quarters of Commander Patrick Baker of Adelaide where he had been summoned for a debriefing.
“Good afternoon, Captain Stuart,” said Baker, as he sat at the captain’s table with a collection of officers. “With me are Major Reddick Burns of the Ardenian Army Inspector Corps, Lieutenant Colonel Steven Gaines of Marine Intelligence and Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Crate of the Army-Navy Office of Special Warfare. We’re here to conduct your preliminary debriefing and assist you in the preparation of the after-action report covering the fall of the fortress at Strongstead. Lieutenant Sandra Hill here is the transcriptionist of Adelaide, and she’ll type up everything that’s said here today.
“I recognize the events we’re about to discuss are traumatic,” Baker continued, “so at any point if you want to take a break that’ll be fine. Just let us know.”
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary, Commander,” Matthew said, taking the open seat at the table at Baker’s beckoning. “I expected we’d be doing this and I’m ready for it. Compared to what I was doin’ this time yesterday I consider this a treat.”
“So be it,” Baker said. “Major Burns, would you like to get us started?”
“Captain Stuart,” Burns asked, “what was your assigned duty within the garrison at Strongstead?”
“I was second-in-command under Major Theodore Hammond of the garrison’s gunnery corps,” he said. “Manning the cannons and chain guns.”
“Tell us what you know about how Strongstead fell,” Burns asked.
“Well,” Matthew began, “I don’t have first-hand knowledge of the initial action. When it happened, I had just bedded down after an eighteen-hour shift on the wall. No sooner had I fallen asleep, but I heard a huge clap of what sounded like a lightning bolt hitting nearby, and then a roar of thunder, I guess is the best way to describe it. It shook the bunk and then the floor gave way. I’m in my bed and I’m free-falling two stories or so.
“Finally, the bed lands on what ended up being a ledge, where the floor and the wall had given way just to one side. This was the brig, you see, so I scramble off the bed as it starts to slide into this big hole that what I later realized was an explosion had made. I grabbed the bars of what was a cell in the brig as the floor under me crumbled, and the next thing I knew I was just hanging on to these bars with no floor underneath me.
“But the wall next to the cell I was hanging on to the bars of had given way, and so I was able to climb around those bars and get my feet on the floor of the hallway. At that point I could hear gunfire and shouting, in what sounded like every direction. Above, below, all around me, everywhere.
“I ran for the armory, which was on the third floor of the fortress, same as the brig. You understand, Strongstead had five floors aboveground and three below, right?” he asked.
They nodded.
“OK, then at this point I’m two floors from the top level and five floors from the lower basement where the dungeon and coal pit are.
“I get to the armory, and I run into four other soldiers who like me had finished a shift and were racking out when all this happened.”
“Any of them officers?” asked Burns.
“No, not them,” Matthew said. “We arm up with pistols and Benchford rifles, and I take the lead up the south-side stairwell. We’re going to the top floor, where we can get some sort of visual of what’s going on.”
“What happened then?” asked Gaines.
“We get to the top floor and the soldier who’s taking point, a corporal named Harris, off the top of my head I can’t remember what his first name was, he throws open the door to the top deck and then…”
“Yes?” Burns motioned for Matthew to continue.
“Then…he just froze,” Matthew said. “I don’t know why he did, but he just stopped dead in his tracks for five or six seconds. I was standing last in a single-file line at that point so I couldn’t see what Harris saw at the time.
“But I did see what happened right after that, which is something very big appeared in that doorway, and whatever it was, it slashed him open from his shoulder to his hip, and he crumpled down where he’d stood.”
“Did you see enough of whatever it was to identify it?” Crate asked.
“No sir, I didn’t,” Matthew responded. “If I had to guess you’d think I was lying to you.”
“Go ahead and guess,” said Gaines.
“Well, and this is stupid, but I would have said it was a Blood Raptor,” Matthew said. “But those are extinct, so it had to be something else. I couldn’t say what, though.”
The inquisitors looked at each other.
“What happened then?” asked Burns.
“Well, the three guys in front of me immediately turned around and it was clear they were going to retreat from that door,” Matthew said, “so I turned as well and led them back down the hallway.
“We made our way to the commander’s turret, where there was a window looking out to the south. I figured we could at least see what we were up against. But when we got there, we saw somebody else had beat us to it. There were bodies strewn all along the corridor, and it looked like there had been a pretty good battle. I counted six of ours dead, and probably fifty Udar.”
“Was anyone alive there?” asked Baker.
“No sir,” Matthew said. “At that point we recognized there was a good chance we were surrounded in all directions, so we’d have to try to fight our way out. We decided we’d go down, and we headed for the south stairwell again.
“But when we got to the stairwell and started descending, Private Simms, who had taken the point, held us up because he said he could hear Udar below us. We decided we’d exit the stairwell on the fourth floor, which is all bunks and there’s a mess hall.”
“Then what happened?” asked Burns.
“We opened the door to the corridor on the fourth floor,” Matthew said, and what you’re supposed to see when you’re in that corridor is it opens to a small foyer and there’s a corridor intersecting it running from left to right, and on either side are bunk rooms. Then when you get to the corner of the fortress there’s a diagonal corridor that leads to the open space on the inside which is the mess hall.
“But that’s not what it looked like, because where there’s supposed to be a wall on the other side of the foyer there’s nothing but open air. It’s just dark.
“Simms had the torch, and he holds it out over where that wall had been, and the entire middle of the fortress building has collapsed, and it looks like an atrium. There are little fires everywhere, there are water pipes burst and pouring out, and we can see Udar all around in the spaces where rooms and corridors are exposed. Hundreds of them.”
“And you surrendered at that point?” Baker asked.
“No sir, we did not,” Matthew said. “The Udar saw Private Simms’ torch, and we saw we were made at that point. They started shooting arrows at us, so we pulled back to the stairs. We decided to hole up and see if we could take as many of them with us as we could.
“We then went back up the south staircase to the top floor, barricaded ourselves in an office and tried to make a plan from there.”
“The Udar then did what?” Gaines asked.
“Nothing, sir. For a day or so they didn’t attack.”
“You were armed and still in the fortress and they ignored you?” asked Baker.
“No, Commander,” answered Matthew, “that wouldn’t quite be accurate either.”
“What they did,” he continued, “was to put a few guys outside that door, and then they brought a prisoner over. They stood him just outside the door, and they got him to talk to us.”
“Talk to you how?” Crate asked.
“Well, he said his name was Ensign Hal Gadbee, and he was from Greyhill. He was twenty-one, and he said he had two of the most beautiful sisters you ever saw. He told us all about his parents, and the house he grew up in, and
the girl he had back home that he wanted to marry if he ever made it back there. He told us his whole life story.”
“They weren’t asking him about those things, were they?” asked Burns.
“Not real politely, I don’t think,” Matthew said. “Most of what he said he was screaming. I think they were taking slices of him while they made him talk. After a few hours he got faint, and they had to be more aggressive with him to get him to say anything.”
“They were torturing him?” Burns asked.
“That’s what it sounded like,” Matthew said. “What I suspected was that they were trying to goad us into opening the door to help him, but as soon as we did, we were dead. It was a very hard thing to do not to take the bait.”
“They killed him?” asked Baker.
“I assume so, yes sir,” Matthew said. “Finally, he didn’t have anything else to say, and at that point it was basically pitch black even under the door, where usually you have a little bit of light running east-west along those corridors. It seemed like it was night-time again, and it got quiet. I had the guys try to get some sleep and I kept watch on the door.
“And then the next morning they knocked that door open with a battering ram. I shot the first couple of Udar who came through the door and then that damn Benchford jammed. Simms and the other two guys, Private Freeman and Corporal Hay, had woken up and they were shooting, and they got a few of the Udar before they got overrun. Must have been fifty of them came through that door.
“I threw down the Benchford and got out my pistol. Shot three more but then one of them tackled me and another one got me in the forehead with a club or a chair leg or something.
“Next thing I knew I was hogtied in the dark, and they’d gagged me with a stone or something about the size of a chicken egg. Barely saw any light at all other than a torch-fire here and there for the last month and all I had happen to me was to get taken out for a beating or something else now and again.”
“You weren’t interrogated?” asked Crate.
“Not so much, sir, no,” said Matthew. “I got the impression I didn’t know anything they didn’t already know. What they wanted from me was more like a series of confessions.”