Colonel

by Rick Shelley

  Defenders had serious advantages in a tactical situation like this, and a thousand years of history to reassure themselves with. They were dug in. The attackers had to move, expose themselves, cross open ground, and those were invitations to casualties on an unacceptable scale. Lon hoped that the aircraft coming in would help negate the defenders’ advantages. Men would move closer to the enemy while the Shrike II fighters forced the New Spartans to keep their heads down. If the fight went on long enough, the Dirigenter artillery would have a chance to get the ammunition being brought in by the shuttles, move close enough to get into range, and pound the New Spartan positions until they were untenable—if their commander let the fight continue that long.

  The sound of gunfire reached Lon and Phip then. “They know they’re under attack,” Phip said. “That was coming out of the New Spartan positions. Our beamer boys must have hit something.”

  “Someone,” Lon corrected, almost a whisper, a correction more for his own benefit than Phip’s. The targets were human beings, not silhouettes on a firing range.

  The first few scattered shots soon escalated into complete engagement all the way around the New Spartan perimeter, coming and going. Muzzle flashes winked like chains of Christmas lights. The noise built on itself, audible even over the two miles that separated Lon and Phip from the fighting, but at this distance it sounded more like a holiday fireworks display than what it really was. Lon saw the flashes of the first grenades that exploded before he heard their distinctive report. He glanced skyward, though he could see nothing through the leaves of the trees that sheltered his command post. It was time for the first pair of Shrikes to hit. One of the pilots had reported that they were within fifteen seconds of their initial points for the run.

  Rockets first. Leaning forward, Lon saw the fiery trails of four missiles, though he could not—and would not—be able to see the fuselages and wings of the black aerospace fighters, or the rockets themselves. After the missiles—tipped with explosives and tightly wound coils of depleted uranium wire for fragmentation—were away, the pilots would start to pull out of their dives, braking to allow themselves perhaps a second and a half to strafe with their Gatling-style cannons. Once they were across the target area, they would climb and go to full power, to get out of danger—away from any shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles the New Spartans might have.

  The first run would be the easy one—comparatively speaking. The enemy might not have SAM launchers ready, or they might not be looking in the right direction; they would have little time for corrections once the aircraft started shooting. The second time through, they would be waiting. The Shrikes would come in from a different direction the second time, and they would not come as low, or slow down quite as much, and they would be ready to deploy electronic countermeasures the instant their instruments reported that they were being targeted by SAM launchers. The pilots would be nervous but focused—as long as possible. They knew that they had less than two minutes before New Spartan Javelin fighters would catch up with them. CIC had been tracking the progress of a pair of the enemy aerospacecraft.

  Four explosions, spaced along the New Spartan perimeter. The chatter of the Shrikes’ cannon, a much deeper sound than that made by rifles. Lon could not see Dirigenters on the ground rushing forward in the seconds of maximum impact on the enemy positions, but he knew that hundreds of men would have taken the chance to get a little closer to the enemy. The men of the Corps were well trained, and obeyed orders as long as it was humanly possible.

  The dying has started, Lon thought. He looked away from the battle—just for an instant—and shook his head, trying to force destructive thoughts out of his mind, and trying to settle his stomach, which was threatening to rebel. Don’t go morbid, idiot! he told himself, feeling anger at the distraction. You know what this business is all about, and you know what will happen if this attack doesn’t succeed. He forced himself to look back at the scene, scanning the front through his binoculars. Even with them, there was not a lot of detail he could see.

  “It could hardly look less real if it was an old action vid on the entertainment nets,” Phip said, talking over their private radio channel now. “Not even a whiff of gunpowder.” He sounded angry, as if the lack of odor were somehow an insult.

  Lon did not bother to reply. The first pair of Shrike IIs made their second run and burned for orbit. The second pair was about three minutes away. Lon scanned radio channels, stopping to listen whenever he heard anything from the men who were up close. The runs of the Shrikes had decreased the amount of fire the New Spartans could put out, but only briefly. Once the fighters were climbing away, the volume picked up again—increased, even, according to the report of one lieutenant to his company commander.

  There were calls for medtechs, and reports of men killed. A little ground had been gained. In three different areas the grenadiers were finally close enough to go to work, dropping their loads of shrapnel in and around the foxholes and slit trenches of the enemy. If the New Spartans were short of ammunition, there was no sign of it in the early fighting. They were not stinting.

  The New Spartan aerospace fighters came in, making one pass across the Dirigenter lines west of the perimeter, then climbing, rushing to meet the second pair of Shrike II fighters as they came in. Lon switched channels to monitor the Shrike pilots, to make certain they knew that trouble was heading for them. The talk between the two pilots assured Lon that they knew what was coming and were ready to meet it. They were receiving constant updates from their control room aboard Odysseus. The four fighters passed each other without anyone hitting anyone else with rockets or cannon fire. The time it took for the various craft to maneuver at high speed meant that the Shrikes were able to make their first pass at the New Spartans on the ground before they had to worry about the enemy fighters coming after them again.

  When the competing pairs of fighters approached each other the second time, the situation was different. They were not moving head-on toward each other until the last couple of seconds. The planes launched missiles at each other and followed up with cannon fire. In an explosion that lit up the predawn sky like a premature sunrise, two of the fighters collided. There was clearly no chance that either pilot survived. The other fighters veered away, but both were caught by debris from the explosion. Lon listened as the pilot of the second Shrike II informed his controller that he was going to have to eject. The remaining Javelin was corkscrewing away, out of control.

  “Get someone moving to make pickup on that pilot,” Lon told Fal Jensen. “Your people are closest.”

  Lon lost most of Fal’s reply because Lieutenant Colonel Ted Syscy broke in with an urgent report. “Colonel, we’ve got men to the enemy line, right on the northeast section. My Delta Company has closed in and the fighting is hand-to-hand.”

  That’s Junior’s company! boomed in Lon’s head, almost overriding his reply to Syscy. “Push everyone you’ve got in after them, Ted. Try to widen the break. I’ll get help to you as quickly as possible.”

  Lon immediately called Vel Osterman and Ben Dark to inform them of the breakthrough and to order them to push as hard as they could, sliding the companies they had flanking 1st Battalion in to follow the units that had reached the enemy perimeter. Then he keyed in the radio channel that the officers of 1st Battalion would use among themselves—simply to listen, hoping to hear his son’s voice.

  Then all he could do was wait, dreading every interminable second.

  26

  Ten minutes. Twenty. Lon found it almost impossible to concentrate on anything but listening for his son’s voice, or some indication that he was still alive and well. Hand-to-hand fighting. Anything can happen once it gets that close, he worried. Ability isn’t always enough. Blind chaos, and no one can guarantee your luck, your survival. Lon had been in that kind of situation more than once in his career, but the incident that came to mind was the first combat contract he had been on, still an officer cadet, on a colony world called Norbank. That was
where his mentor, Arlan Taiters, had died, in hand-to-hand combat on a wilderness hilltop.

  The fear of uncertainty was almost paralyzing. Lon scarcely noticed the flashes of gunfire or the first attack by the next pair of Shrikes that came down—this pair from Agamemnon. Watch yourself, Junior! Lon urged silently, projecting his thoughts to where his body could not go, as if willpower could perform some extrasensory miracle. His mind drew images from memory, populating a grassy slope with men in slightly different patterns of camouflage fighting with bayonets and fists, bullets and knees, in an impossible confusion—a waking dream … or nightmare that refused to release Lon from its grasp.

  Reports came through. Lon managed to acknowledge most of them, though he continued to find it difficult to spare attention for anything but the fear that was gripping him, so real it became a physical pain in his gut, so severe it was all he could do to keep from doubling over in agony. I can’t let this stop me, he told himself. He sucked in a deep breath and straightened up, forcing himself to confront the pain and … slowly, ignore it. He consciously straightened up without exposing too much of himself. Another deep breath. He lifted his faceplate long enough to wipe the sweat from his face. A quick sip of water. Do your job!

  Two companies of Elysian troops, starting with three hundred eighty men, forced a second breach of the New Spartan lines, but at the cost of seventy men dead and another hundred wounded. Lon warned away the next flight of Shrikes. They could no longer be certain of a clear field of fire, and Lon did not want to risk friendly-fire casualties.

  Dawn—a rising line of light in the eastern sky—brought a reddish glow to the horizon as precursor to the appearance of Elysium’s sun. A dirty yellow haze hung over and around the oval territory—less than a mile long and three-tenths of a mile deep—that the New Spartans were defending, dirty air from gunpowder and the blasts of grenades and rockets.

  Lon heard a voice—no more than two words—and strained at the memory. Was that Junior? He wasn’t certain, and nearly called back on the channel to ask. Nearly. He did not, though the effort caused him to bite his lower lip, drawing blood. He leaned against the dirt piled up in front of his foxhole and searched the battlefield through his binoculars, as if he might somehow be able to pick out his son from the hundreds of other soldiers wearing identical helmets and battledress … at a distance of two miles.

  “Colonel?”

  How long can the fighting go on now? Lon asked himself. We’ve been inside their lines for more than half an hour, pouring more men in every minute. Don’t they know they’ve lost? Why don’t they give it up?

  “Colonel Nolan?”

  Lon blinked rapidly and shook his head a little. “What is it?” he asked, not even certain who had called him.

  There was something …. Lon blinked again and raised up a little more. He couldn’t hear gunfire any longer.

  “Colonel, this is Ted Syscy.”

  Oh, no! Lon thought; his heart started to pound almost out of control at the fear that Syscy was calling to say that Junior had been killed. His vision dimmed, almost as if he were ready to black out.

  “It’s over, Colonel. The New Spartans have surrendered. Their commander is being escorted to my CP to make it formal. We’ve won, Colonel.”

  Lon’s mind needed a few seconds to grasp what Syscy had said, an instant of vertigo that left him hanging onto the ground in front of him.

  “Your son is partly responsible for this, Colonel,” Syscy continued, oblivious to Lon’s momentary difficulty. “While the rest of his company opened a way, Junior led his two platoons through until they were within a hundred yards of the New Spartan headquarters. That’s when their colonel surrendered. Junior is leading the escort bringing him to me now.”

  “Thank you, Ted,” Lon said, finally finding his voice. “I’ll get everyone notified. Get help to the wounded. Start collecting the weapons and electronics of the New Spartans. You know the routine. Destroy or disable anything they might be able to use against us later. I’ll be there to meet the New Spartan commander as quickly as I can. I suspect I’ll need at least forty minutes, maybe fifty to reach your position.” Lon had signaled for Phip. Jeremy Howell also had moved closer.

  “We won?” Howell asked after Lon lifted his faceplate.

  “This part of it, at least,” Lon said, wiping his face with his sleeve. He was drenched in sweat. “The enemy on the ground has surrendered. I haven’t heard anything about their ships, especially about the new fleet coming in. Phip, we’ve got to get our skates on. The New Spartan commander is being escorted to Ted Syscy’s CP. We’re going there to accept the formal surrender.”

  Phip nodded. “Junior?” he asked.

  “He’s okay.” Lon let out a long breath. “Better than okay, I guess. Ted says it was Junior who got through to the enemy headquarters and forced the surrender.”

  “Jerry, go get everyone ready to move out,” Phip said, gesturing to Lon’s aide. “We’ve got a two-mile hike ahead of us, and the sooner we get started, the sooner we get done.” He waited until Howell moved away, then stepped closer to Lon. “How about you?” he asked. “You okay?”

  A smile tried to climb onto Lon’s face but failed. “I will be,” Lon said very softly. “I’ve never been so damned scared in my life.” He turned and leaned against the edge of the foxhole, his back to the east, toward the enemy and the bulk of his own troops. “I’m not sure I could have taken much more of it, Phip,” he whispered, so softly that he was not sure he could hear his own voice.

  “You’d have managed, Lon. You always have.”

  “I don’t think I can risk putting myself through something like this again, Phip. Not …”

  “Look, I know what you mean. But, well, once we get home, you’ll get over it.”

  “Maybe,” Lon allowed, mostly to avoid continuing the discussion. “Come on, let’s get moving. I want to know if it’s all over or if we’re going to have to go through it again when that new fleet gets here.”

  The meeting was civil and very reserved. The New Spartan commander introduced himself as Colonel Armond Kaye. Lon guessed that he might be sixty years old. Kaye was about six feet, three inches tall, thin, with washed-out blue eyes and a deeply tanned complexion. He had a field dressing around his left biceps, with a little blood that had seeped through showing. “Nothing, a scratch,” Kaye said when Lon inquired about the wound and whether Kaye needed the attention of a medtech.

  “It is a difficult thing to do, this,” Kaye said. “I thought we could do the job, either alone or by holding out until our reinforcements could arrive.” A shrug. “Events proved otherwise, Colonel Nolan. I compliment you.” They were sitting on folding chairs, and Lon wasn’t quite certain where they had come from. Jeremy Howell had found them somewhere, and made sure they made it to the site of the meeting.

  “About those reinforcements, Colonel Kaye,” Lon said. “That is something we do need to discuss.”

  “As mission commander, my surrender is binding on all New Spartan forces participating in the mission, including those now on their way. As soon as you permit, I will transmit orders to the incoming fleet to avoid engaging, or whatever you require.”

  Lon looked over Kaye’s head. Junior was standing about twenty feet away, his rifle at his side, looking as if he expected the enemy commander to stage some sort of nasty surprise, even though Colonel Kaye had been relieved of his weapon and electronic devices. His words could carry no farther than he could shout.

  “We would want all fighting ships to bear away from Elysium, Colonel,” Lon said, bringing his attention back to his opposite number. “And we will discuss arrangements for bringing your transports in to pick up your soldiers—with suitable precautions, you understand.”

  “Of course, Colonel,” Kaye said, nodding.

  “Now, if you require assistance with your wounded …?”

  The rest was details. And waiting to make certain that the commander of the incoming New Spartan reinforcements would abi
de by Colonel Kaye’s pledge.

  Epilogue

  After discussion with the president and chancellor, Lon approved an amendment to the contract. Seventh and 15th Regiments would be relieved, go home, and the regiment on its way to reinforce them would complete the six-month contract—surety against a New Spartan decision to come back, or another effort by the Confederation of Human Worlds to force Elysium into its fold.

  It was the twelfth of April when 7th and 15th Regiments returned to Dirigent. The dead, those whose bodies had been recovered, were the first to land, their shuttles carrying them directly to the port within the confines of the Corps’ main base. The living landed at the civilian spaceport and made their usual parade through Dirigent City. Casualties had been high, primarily because of the shuttles that had been shot down before they could land their troops, but the contract had been successfully fulfilled. Of the 974 Dirigenters who had died on the Elysian contract, 605 had died in the shuttles.

  Colonel Robert Hayley retired from the Corps for medical reasons—the unbridgeable gaps in his memory. Fal Jensen was promoted and given command of 15th Regiment.

  New recruits were brought into the two regiments from the training battalion. A few score men, mostly commissioned or noncommissioned officers, were transferred from other units. It would take nine months to bring 7th and 15th Regiments back to full strength.

  The Corps went on. It always went on.

  On the last day of July 2830, Sara Nolan gave birth to identical twin daughters, Amanda and Ariel, without difficulty. All four grandparents were on hand to help Lon through the birth and the first days at home of his new children.

  Elysium proved to be the last combat contract that Lon Nolan, Senior, would participate in. Twenty-three months after his return, he was—to his great surprise—elected General. The vote was thirteen to one. His had been the only dissenting vote. Three days after the end of his year in office, Lon retired from the Corps—to the surprise of his peers on the Council of Regiments and many of his own officers and men. Phip Steesen retired the same day.