by Rick Shelley
“I thought there was just this one place out in the middle of the woods here,” Alfie said. “What makes it important enough for the whole regiment to come barging in? I mean, I can see where there might be something, or someone, to drag our lot in, but everybody?”
“Two different operations, Alfie. Camerein is a Commonwealth world. We want it back. That’s what the regiment is coming in for, and they’re going to be on the other side of the world, where most of the people are. The rest …” David paused. It was time to let these few others know the entire story, but he still hesitated. Then he nodded to himself, took a breath, and started.
“Here’s the rest of our job. Just among the five of us for now.” David told them exactly why they were on Camerein early.
“After seven bloody years?” Alfie asked.
“No reason why they couldn’t keep going that long,” David replied. “This hotel was supposed to be self-sufficient. They’d have all the food replicators and whatnot they might need, and all the power to keep everything running. As long as the folks didn’t do anything foolish, and the Feddies didn’t put them in the bag, they could last a lot longer.”
“Is anyone worth all the men who’ve already been killed?” Will asked. “Just to get the king’s brother out?”
“Easy, Will,” David said. “I know what you mean, but there’s no help for it.”
Cordamon turned and walked away, slapping his visor down over his face as he did.
“He’s got a point, Cap,” Alfie said. “Ain’t nobody worth that, not but one of our own lads.”
“We don’t leave one of our own behind if there’s any way to get him out,” David said. “The king’s brother is as much one of our own as anyone else. Remember Prince William? You thought he was a right bloke. Weren’t those your very words?”
“He was different. He got right down in the dirt and fought alongside us. He was one of us.”
“And Prince George is his brother. If it comes to it, you think he won’t fight at our side as well?”
“I don’t know this one. I know the other. And I knew all the lads we’ve lost already.”
“Get your lads ready to move,” David said. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover. While we’re here, we’ll run the headquarters squad as part of 2nd Platoon. I’ll go talk with Will.”
6
The 2nd Marine Commando had been on the ground for fifty minutes before they started hiking toward their target. West of them, the grass fires continued to burn, but with less ferocity. The wind had switched direction, turning the flames back into areas that had already charred, starving them. There had been no further signs of enemy activity in the air.
David moved with the truncated 2nd Platoon, on the right. The two platoons were thirty yards apart, following parallel tracks. The going was not difficult. The terrain was mixed between open woodland and savanna. David had checked his mapboard—a specialized portable complink that folded in thirds—to see what sort of terrain they had to go through. The commando would not hit thick jungle, tropical rain forest, for twenty-five miles.
At least we shouldn’t have to worry about mines or snoops, or anything else but nature … on the ground, David thought once the platoons were finally moving. It always took time for a unit to slide into proper field rhythm. With the commando, that point in time came fairly quickly. Only six of the men who had left Buckingham had not been on at least one mission as part of the unit. Two of those were already dead.
The only remaining new man in 2nd Platoon was walking just in front of Spencer. Private Evan Fox was extremely aware of the fact that his commanding officer was right behind him. He assumed, incorrectly, that it was because he was the newest man in the unit. He found it difficult to avoid glancing back over his shoulder. The urge would build, and he would fight it. At first, that distracted him. Only when he became aware that he was not being as conscientious about watching the right flank did Fox start focusing on his proper work. But even after that, the distraction returned periodically.
I wish he’d find some bloody other spot to walk, Fox thought. Let me do my job without breathing down my neck.
Spencer had dropped out of line and let five men pass him before Fox even noticed that the captain was no longer immediately behind him.
“Freezer”
The command came from one of the men on point, over the all-hands channel. Every man in the unit stopped as soon as both feet were on the ground. They went as motionless as statues, waiting for more information.
David stared toward the point. It was the man heading the column on the left who raised an arm and pointed toward the sky, making two slow up-and-down motions. Then he touched the side of his helmet and made a gesture as if he were twisting a dial. Spencer cranked up the gain on his helmet amplifiers. The point men would have done that routinely, to improve their chances of hearing any threat sooner. As soon as David had the volume up, he knew why the point man had stopped the two columns. Aircraft.
The men were all under trees at the moment, but the canopy was not particularly thick. The risk was not that an enemy pilot might spot the men in their camouflage battledress, but that motion sensors might pick up movement. David used hand signals to order his men down, slowly. The platoon sergeants, nearer the front, echoed those signals so that everyone could see them. Like his men, Spencer sank carefully to the ground, squatting first, then stretching out into a prone position.
At first, David could not guess how many aircraft, or what type, might be approaching. He rolled half onto his side so that he could look up. Fighters or shuttles? he wondered. Or both?
David was not surprised that the Federation had sent someone to look. One or both of the pilots who had attacked the commandos’ shuttles had to have radioed news of the intercept to their headquarters on Camerein. More forces had to be dispatched to search. The appearance of even two Commonwealth shuttles would have put every Federation soldier on the planet on full alert, waiting for an invasion, and looking for survivors.
If it was me, I’d send fighters first, and have ground troops alerted to move in next, David thought while the aircraft—now clearly more than one—continued to approach. Look over the wreckage, then go in looking for the bodies. A shadow against the sky moved too quickly for him to be certain what it was, just that it was larger than any bird he had ever seen.
We ‘re not nearly far enough from the shuttle was David’s next thought. As soon as we get back to our feet, we’ve got to move again, and move fast. We’ve got to put more distance between us and the start of any search. They had been on the move for an hour, perhaps a few minutes more. The commando was only about four and a half miles from the wreckage of the first shuttle. That’s not far enough by a long shot, David thought.
He gave the enemy aircraft time to move away, then got to his feet. Using hand signals again, he got the unit moving. He was tempted to set the pace at a jog, but with the extra supplies the men were carrying, along with the normal weight of weapons, ammunition, and combat gear, running would be foolish. It would quickly result in the group making less progress rather than more.
David moved between the two columns, halfway between point and rear guard. He lifted his helmet and shouted new instructions. “Crank your earphones up to the maximum. As soon as those planes come back in our direction, take cover again. We’ve got to put as much distance as we can between us and the wreckage back there.”
Less than a minute later, they were on the ground again, waiting for the aircraft to pass a second time. Up and move, then down and wait. Two Federation fighters worked a search pattern centered on the wreckage of the first shuttle, coiling out to greater distance each time around. That meant that each orbit it took longer before one of the aircraft came close to the men on the ground. But after fifteen minutes of that pattern, the commandos heard the fighter engines suddenly accelerating away.
The 2nd Commando picked up its pace, not running, but pushing the walk. Lieutenant Hopewell, Lead Sergeant Nau
ghton, and the two platoon sergeants came back to Spencer for a hurried conference, on the move.
“We’ve got to put as much distance down as we can before the Feddies put troops on the ground to check the shuttle and look for survivors,” Spencer said, the sentence interrupted more than once by the need to suck in air. “And we’ve got to avoid leaving a trail they can follow.”
“We don’t leave trails,” Alfie said. “That’s what putting a corporal at the rear of each line is all about, somebody to make sure we’re not painting arrows.”
“Drop back and tell them to make double sure,” David said, looking at Will Cordamon as well. “We’re going to veer off to the left about ten degrees and hold that course for several hours. If the Feddies do happen to spot us, I don’t want us giving them a perfect vector to our target.”
Three hours passed before the commandos heard aircraft engines again. The time the sound was different, lower in pitch, and the movement slower. David reached the obvious conclusion that the Feddies were sending in troop shuttles. But those three hours had taken the unit more than a dozen miles farther from the wreckage. The forest was somewhatthicker now. Even if the shuttles passed directly overhead, David would not have been overly concerned about being discovered from the air. And the shuttles did not pass immediately above the commando. They went by farther south, moving east to west. It was time for another rest, and for another conference.
“If they search for us on foot, we should be far enough ahead that we won’t have to worry,” Spencer said when Hopewell and the three top sergeants gathered around him. “They won’t be able to travel any faster than we have, and we’re not about to sit and wait for them to catch us up. And it would take almost as much time for them to do the sort of slow and sure air search that might find us.”
“You’re not telling us that we don’t have to worry about the bastards,” Alfie said. It was not a question.
“No, I’m not,” David agreed. “It’s bad enough that the Feddies know we’re on the planet, worse that we lost our shuttles and a lot of good men. But what I am saying is that if we stay on our toes, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to keep at least two or three steps ahead of them.”
“We keep going as we have been?” Hopewell asked.
David nodded. “We must be seventeen or eighteen miles from the shuttle now. We’ve made damn good time. But I want to push the march hard for at least another two hours before we settle down for a decent rest. Then we’ll take an hour before we push on again.”
“Sir, the men can’t go on indefinitely without more of a breather than that,” Naughton said.
“I know, Mitch. We’ll have to take four hours to give time for the blisters on everyone’s feet to heal, give the lads a chance to kip out. Two hours on the march, one off, two on, then we’ll stop for at least the four hours.”
Naughton nodded, but said, “We won’t make as good time as we’ve made so far.”
“Mitch, you’re the only man we’ve got who’s within ten years of my age. Tell them that they can go on as long asthe old man can, and be ready to run me into the ground if they have to.”
This time Naughton smiled. “There’s a few might like to give it a try.”
David returned the smile. “I know. On second thoughts, let’s save that sort of go for when things get really sticky. We might need that trick another time.”
“Yeah, don’t go getting us into any foot races we don’t need,” Alfie said. “I’m feeling twice my age already. I don’t need any of the lads proving I’m as old as I feel.”
The commandos made every effort to stay under cover, except for brief exposures as they crossed clearings or the narrow creeks that seemed to lie across their path every mile or so. Still, none of them saw the brilliant glow of light in the sky that signaled the loss of a starship.
By the time that Spencer finally signaled for the promised long halt, the sun had been down for two hours. Traveling in the dark posed no extra hazards for the commandos. Marine helmet visors provided excellent night vision systems, a dual track using both available light multipliers and infrared.
Four hours. Walter Kaelich sank to the ground in relief. Four hours did not seem near long enough to recover from the day’s march, but he was not about to waste any of that time in futile protests, even to himself. He sat with his back to a tree trunk. He leaned back and closed his eyes, ready to sleep. But he could not sleep yet. There were things that had to come first. He removed his boots to get air circulating around his feet, and slapped med-patches on the blisters on both heels. He pulled a meal packet from his pack, stripped the wire that opened the container and heated the contents, then ate. He was too exhausted to eat quickly, but he tried to maintain a methodical rhythm, getting the food in and down without wasting time.
Kaelich was a private in headquarters squad, the captain’s clerk. That had never saved him from the twenty-five-mile hikes in training, and it earned him no specialprivileges on campaign. He had no red tape to generate or multiply on a mission like this. That was the only respite, and it was temporary. Once they were back on Buckingham, or in a more stable situation on Camerein, he would have that work to bring up to date.
I did volunteer for the commando. During the eight months he had been in the unit, he had been forced to remind himself of that fact quite often. I wanted to think that I was really contributing to this fight. Walter Kaelich was a stubborn man. He would not complain about something he had asked for, no matter how much it hurt.
The livid bruise on his left shin—although he could not see it through his battledress and the field skin underneath, he knew that there had to be a large black and blue spot on his leg—hurt more now that he was off the leg than it had on the march. The leg throbbed. He had caught a glancing blow from a small chunk of the shuttle when it was destroyed. Had he been in one of 2nd Platoon’s squads, a squad leader or assistant might have checked on his slight injury, perhaps even shipped him off on the other shuttle. But in HQ squad, there were only the captain and lead sergeant, and both had had other things to think about at the time.
I should strip down and have a look, Walter thought. The field skin had not been breached. That meant that he would need to undress almost completely to see the injury. A field skin was, in effect, a living body stocking that covered everything but hands and face, a symbiotic organism built by molecular assemblers. For a Marine in the field, it was an essential piece of equipment. A field skin recycled wastes, provided insulation against heat and cold, and could help stem minor bleeding.
But if I strip to look, others will see. Too many questions to answer. Kaelich thought about it until he had finished eating, then decided to do nothing. If the leg was any worse after he slept, maybe then. He could always slap a med-patch over it to ease the ache. The nanobugs of his health maintenance system should see to the rest.
• • •
HMS Avon had made its first transits into and out of Q-space over Camerein on schedule. After launching the shuttles, the auxiliary frigate was back in Q-space before the sighting of two Federation fighters was relayed to the bridge. Avon would not have been able to do anything about them even if the news had reached Captain Barlowe sooner. All Avon could have done was launch missiles, and the range had been extreme for that. The enemy planes would almost certainly have been able to evade the weapons, and the shuttles would still have been in danger.
Louisa Barlowe sat in her command center on the bridge with gritted teeth while the ship was in the gray limbo of Q-space. There was a great temptation to return to normal space over Camerein as quickly as possible, to see what was happening even if she could not affect it. Not giving the order took more self-control than Louisa would have anticipated. Her imagination was not deficient. She knew what might be happening. It was possible for a shuttle to avoid an enemy fighter … but it was not especially likely.
I hope they get the Marines down first, she thought. Maybe the pilots will stay down and save themselves a
s well, even if they lose the landers. The shuttle crews were navy, her people.
“We’ll stay precisely on schedule,” Barlowe informed the bridge watch after Avon emerged from Q-space on the far end of the transit, thirty-seven light-minutes from Camerein. “We’ll find out what happened then,” she added more softly.
Confirmation of the losses did not make them easier to bear. “Have the boat officers ready the ship’s gigs in case we have to use them for pickup,” Captain Barlowe instructed as Avon returned to Q-space again. She had spoken briefly with Captain Spencer on the ground. “We’ll maintain the communications schedule you and I set up,” she had assured him.
It was a promise she would be unable to keep.
There was a scheduled link late that afternoon, localtime. Avon emerged from Q-space. The two captains spoke for eighty-one seconds, using all of the available window during the ship’s sojourn in normal space. Precisely ninety seconds after emerging from Q-space, Louisa Barlowe gave the order to return.
Something happened.
Just as the gray of Q-space closed around HMS Avon, the ship shuddered violently and started to spin end over end. There was the sound of an explosion aboard ship, echoing through Avon’s skin and bones. Throughout the vessel, anyone who was not strapped in was thrown about by the violent contortions. In practice, that meant a few members of the duty watch, and nearly everyone else. Before Avon stopped spinning, more than a hundred crew members had been injured. Few got off with only bumps, bruises, and minor cuts. There were scores of fractured bones—arms, legs, ribs, clavicles … and skulls—concussions, internal trauma. Even those who were strapped in did not escape completely. Some were hit by flying debris. Others managed to slam heads into bulkheads, suffered sprains, or had bones dislocated.