Return to Camerein

by Rick Shelley

  “Thank you, Captain. I shan’t ask for details of everything that has happened since I fell out of things, but whatever you can tell me now—all of us—should make our transition back to society less difficult.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “You said that you were about to send a squad to find us a place?” George said as a reminder.

  “They’re already off, sir. I gave my orders before.”

  “Then I might as well get off of my feet and make other portions of my anatomy take their turn at supporting me.” George took a step to the side and sat.

  Alfie Edwards decided to lead the patrol himself. It was not that he doubted the ability of his squad leaders. He had trained every one of them himself and made sure that they were up to his standards. It was just that, under the circumstances, he wasn’t absolutely certain that any of them would find a spot as well suited to the purpose as he might himself. And he wanted to be confident that they had His Highness in the spot with the best concealment, and the best opportunities for defense.

  After they made it through seven years on their own, we can’t have it be said that they came to harm because we stopped by to collect them and bollixed it up, he reasoned.

  The squad moved west, parallel to the river, in more typical tropical rain forest. There was little undergrowth, except in and around tree-fall gaps and, three quarters of a mile from where the rest of the commandos and their charges were waiting, along a small stream that moved south toward the larger river.

  “We might find something suitable in there,” Alfie whispered to Corporal Ted Perth, his assistant squad leader. “You keep your fire team here. I’ll take my lads in for a closer look.”

  “Watch out for them bleedin’ snakes,” Ted advised. “I doubt His Highness would care for a quick cuddle with one of them.”

  “The snake wouldn’t dare.”

  Alfie gathered the four privates of the squad’s first fire team and moved closer to the thick tangle of greenery closeto the stream. Between the vines and young trees trying to win their way through to the forest canopy, there appeared to be nearly a solid wall of vegetation fronting the creek. When Alfie and his fire team did penetrate, they could see that there were even stringers spanning the waterway, almost roofing it over through one stretch. They moved along the edge of the dense thickets, prodding each hint of an opening toward the water, looking for shelter and defensibility. Alfie knew that there was some urgency to the search, but he was not about to compromise on anything less than the best he could find. He took forty-five minutes before selecting a site on the west side of the creek.

  “This will do.” He called Ted Perth’s fire team in. They had been paralleling Alfie’s movements, out in easier terrain. “Get your lads in there and do what you can to make it homey. We can put all the civies in there and find our own places around about. I’ll take my team back to guide them in.”

  After he started away from the location, Alfie stopped to look back once more. It should do, he thought. We should be able to hide from anything in there for a day or so.

  Prince George and the other civilians were tired enough that no one started to ply the Marines with questions once they were settled in. Questions, and the answers to them, could wait. Sleep, or at least the chance to lie flat and renounce all exertion beyond breathing, was more important. Not all of the civilians were able to drop straight off despite exhaustion greater than they had known in many years.

  The prince was one of the first to get to sleep. His last thought before losing awareness was At least I won’t have to worry about those bloody cachouris this morning. That was a satisfying tonic. Close by, Vepper Holford watched George until the rhythm of the prince’s breathing showed that he was asleep. Then he too closed his eyes, ready to escape.

  Shadda Lorenqui was one of the last civilians to slide off. He would have anticipated that, had he retained energyto think beyond the instant. He was certainly as tired as any of the others, perhaps more so. Every morning at the hotel he had been one of the first to wake, and at night he was generally the last to retire to his room—and even then, sleep never came easily. What worried him most this night was the fact that he was no longer at “his” hotel. I deserted my post, he reminded himself. No matter the extenuating circumstances, the basic fact could not be changed. He had been entrusted with maintaining and running a valuable piece of property, and he had simply walked away. He had very nearly run from it.

  Among the Marines, sleep had to be a rationed commodity. David Spencer made his defensive allocations, then put the commandos on a half-and-half watch. In each fire team, two men would sleep while the other two remained awake, watching the night for any hint of enemy activity.

  The detachment was well dispersed. One squad had been left east of the stream to make certain that no one could sneak up from that side. One squad, the headquarters people, remained with the civilians. The rest were scattered around the perimeter, fifty yards or more out from the people who had been removed from the Commonwealth Excelsior, each squad charged with defending a certain section.

  Once he was satisfied with his dispositions, David decided to give himself four hours of sleep. Uninterrupted, I hope, he thought as he settled in. There would always be someone in charge, awake. David would share watches with Lieutenant Hopewell and Lead Sergeant Naughton.

  Before he slept, David went quickly through his plans for the morning, looking for any possible improvements, trying to assure himself that he had not forgotten anything essential. No amount of worry would do that completely, but a Marine learned to sleep when he could. David Spencer slept.

  When Mitchel Naughton woke Spencer at four o’clock, the jungle was still firmly in the grip of night. Sunrise was twohours away, and morning would face its usual struggle to illuminate the denser areas of tropical jungle.

  “Been perfectly quiet, Cap,” Naughton whispered. “Just the jungle noises, I mean, nothing else.”

  “Let’s hope it stays that way, Mitch.” Another couple of hours of sleep would have been supremely welcome, but David was awake and alert, ready for another long day. On campaign, sleep was a luxury to be enjoyed rarely, and seldom for as long at one stretch as the four hours that David had managed. “Try to get a little more sleep for yourself. I’ll take you and the headquarters squad when I go off to radio the fleet.”

  Several of the civilians were snoring, one quite loudly. David winced at the noise as he made a quick tour of the camp. A good sound detector would pick up that racket from a half mile away, and be able to home in on it with little difficulty.

  Can’t do a thing about it now, David thought. Besides, there was always the chance that the loud snorer was the prince.

  He checked at the nearest outposts, then returned to where he had slept and sat with his back against a tree trunk. After eating a hurried breakfast, one of the hotel boxed meals, he started thinking through his plans again. Early-morning thoughts were different from late-night thoughts. Now, he kept coming back to one idea. With any luck at all, we might be off this world in another five or six hours.

  Lieutenant Hopewell woke a little before sunrise and made his way over to where Spencer was sitting. “You still figure to go off to make your call?”

  David nodded. “I’ll take Naughton and the headquarters squad. You’ll be in charge here and have both platoon sergeants to help. All you need to remember is that our whole reason for being here is to keep His Highness safe until we can deliver him. Him and the others, but especially him. If something happens and I don’t get back, it all falls on you.

  Unless there’s a damn good reason for moving, I think you should stay here. You’ll play hell finding a better spot than this and … well, you know the limits of our guests. Can’t move fast or quiet with them.”

  “We’ll manage.”

  “I’m sure you will, Tony. Once the prince wakes up, you’ll have to handle all of the questions he’s likely to recall. And the others are going to want to know what’s be
en going on through all the years they’ve been stuck here.”

  “I knew there was a reason you decided to go wandering off through the bush yourself.”

  David did manage a smile.

  Walter Kaelich volunteered to take the point when the headquarters squad left camp. “That way I can be sure one of those snakes won’t sneak up on me from behind, sir,” he told Spencer. “Have the whole lot of you behind me.”

  “Okay, you’ve got it,” David said, trying hard not to grin. Kaelich had sounded deadly serious. I think that snake would have spooked me as well, he conceded. Anyway, whatever it takes to keep his mind on the job. “We cross the stream here, go east for two hundred yards from the far bank, then change to a northeasterly heading. I want to get at least three miles from our guests before I break radio silence to contact the fleet.”

  Walter nodded, repeating the instructions to himself so that he would be sure to remember.

  “Any time you want somebody else to take the point for a bit, just let either the lead sergeant or me know. We’ll find you a cozy spot in the middle.”

  They crossed the creek where there was cover from overhead vines, the stringers that reached from trees on one bank to trees on the other. The stream was no more than twenty feet wide, and less than eighteen inches deep where they crossed. The sun was just high enough to illuminate the western edge of the stream—where it could pierce the jungle canopy.

  On the east side, they worked through the line of dense undergrowth and past the squad that was watching that side. The first hundred yards of the trek would be, Spencer hoped, the most difficult. Beyond the wild growth nourished by the creek, the forest floor opened out again.

  There was the dark green basic color that touched everything. Even the air seemed to be tinted by the sunlight that filtered through the canopy. The mostly empty expanse on the ground was broken by the stark trunks of old trees. There was little in the way of leaves between the forest floor and the lowest branches sixty feet up. David could not tell how high the domes of the canopy might be, almost certainly more than a hundred feet above the moss and detritus of the forest floor.

  Except for the Marines, the lowest level of the forest appeared to be virtually deserted, void of any animal life larger than insects. But the forest was not dead, or silent. The life was all in the canopy, and loud in the first hour of daylight. Birds and small animals made their presence known, one way or another. The predators might be silent, but their prey gave loud warnings whenever a threat was spotted. For the most part, the commandos blocked out those sounds. What they would note was any interruption to those noises that did not appear natural.

  Walter Kaelich sweated, even through the first part of the journey, before the heat of the sun started to percolate through the stagnant air under the forest canopy. While the squad was in the densest area of cover, he was most nervous. He had slept little since having that snake crawl up to him—a lifetime ago, it seemed. Once away from the undergrowth near the stream, Walter breathed easier. He steered his course as far from tree trunks as possible, sticking to the most open path he could find.

  What I want is open fields with the grass cut short as a cricket pitch, or paved over, he thought. A place where I could see a snake coming a half mile away. In his twenty years of life, Walter had never seen a snake before coming to Camerein, not even in a zoo. He had since convincedhimself that one was enough to last a lifetime.

  Even with occasional distractions such as that, Walter tended to business. There seemed to be virtually no chance of running into Federation troops, but he kept a sharp watch for any of the telltales that might give him even a second’s warning if they were around, and he kept a rough count of his paces so that he would know when to make the turn and when they had covered the three miles that Captain Spencer had specified.

  There was little chance of running into those other Feddies we ran into, he reminded himself. But there they were, right in front of us, waiting. Bad as snakes. From time to time he would take one hand or the other off his rifle to wipe the sweat from it on his trouser leg. Not for the first time in his stint in the 2nd Marine Commando, he found himself wondering how he had managed to get himself into such a fix. I thought clerking was clerking anywhere, and having that commando patch would make me stand a little taller with the lasses. The latter had been correct at any rate. On pass in Cheapside, the commando insignia on his off-dress khakis had brought more action with the women who frequented the area, but for the rest … He shook his head, reminding himself that if it hadn’t been for his ego he could have opted out of commando training at any point.

  My head’s just too big for my shoulders, he decided.

  Without out-of-shape civilians to slow them, or an enemy to bar the way, the squad made good time. The three miles took less than an hour, even at a relatively casual pace.

  “This will do,” Spencer told Kaelich. Then he turned to Naughton. “Get the lads spread out in a perimeter here. We’ll take ten before I get on the radio.” He looked up at the sky through a rare break in the canopy. “It’s early days yet. If the invasion is on schedule, the fleet is liable to be busy.”

  Exactly ten minutes later, David switched to his primary radio frequency for contacting the fleet He made his call and waited. There was no response. He waited a minuteand tried again. When he still received no reply, he switched to the secondary channel and tried. There was no answer on that either.

  It worried him, but not excessively. They could be running a bit late, or they might just be too busy at the moment, he told himself. Right in the middle of the assault, after all. And they might just not have a ship in position to get a call from this side of the world yet. There might be other reasons why there was no response to his calls, and most of those reasons would be innocuous. David shrugged, then told Naughton that there was no answer.

  “We’ll move on for a half mile or so, still northeast, before I try again,” David told him. Movement was essential. If the enemy were using direction finders and intercepted the signal, they might think that the commandos were all moving on that heading.

  Over the next three hours, David tried to reach the fleet another half dozen times. There was still no reply.

  “We’ll stay here another thirty minutes,” he told Naughton after another series of failures. “I’ll keep trying, in case they’re popping in and out of Q-space all the time and we’ve just been unlucky with our timing. If they still don’t answer, we’ll head due west, all the way to that stream, before we turn south.”

  “What then?” Naughton asked softly.

  Spencer shook his head. “I don’t know yet.”

  17

  Admiral Sir Stasys Truscott, Chief of Naval Operations, rode from the Admiralty to St. James Palace in silence. He sat so motionless in the rear compartment of the staff floater that he might have been a statue. He would have preferred to make this report by complink, but His Majesty would have none of that. It had to be in person.

  A sailor for sixty-five of his eighty-five years, Truscott wore the uniform as if it had been designed especially for him. Of average height, and less than average weight, for Buckingham, he was totally unprepossessing in civilian clothes. In uniform—and few people outside of his family ever saw him any other way—he was entirely different. Today the uniform was full-dress blues, with the white and red piping, and a white hat. The left breast of the uniform jacket was covered with decorations and service medals. Enough to make me list twelve degrees to port, he often joked. The nautical reference was a common conceit among naval officers, few of whom had ever stood on the deck of a seagoing vessel. The navy of the Second Commonwealth had only one such ship in its inventory, a floating museum transported to Buckingham from Earth in the year of the Commonwealth’s founding—and inextricably linked to that event. USS Missouri was permanently docked at Haven, northwest of Westminster. Truscott made the trip, pilgrimage, to Haven whenever he could find or invent an excuse—rarely in the last five years.

/>   Truscott’s current aide—he had gone through five in the not quite five years since Ian Shrikes had been promoted out of the position—sat on the far side of the compartment, equally silent and motionless. Commander Engels watched his boss, knowing that he dared not distract the admiral when he was in this sort of mood. Engels had only held the job of aide to Truscott for three months, but it had seemed an eternity.

  The limousine pulled up to the west entrance to St. James Palace. Admiral Truscott was met with ceremony. The major domo was present with three butlers and the king’s naval aide, a senior captain certain to make admiral soon. After a modicum of time wasted with court formalities, Truscott was escorted to an office on the second floor. His Majesty was waiting.

  “You have bad news for me,” King Henry said as soon as the ritual greetings had been exchanged and they were seated. Their aides, the only other people in the room, remained standing.

  “I don’t know for certain that it is bad news, Your Majesty,” Stasys said, “but it is certainly not the good news I had hoped to be bringing you by now.”

  Henry nodded. “Give it to me straight, Stasys.”

  “The important bit is that we have no word on your brother yet, sir, neither good nor bad. What we do have is two separate items, one worrisome, the other merely a temporary annoyance. We have finally had an MR from Avon. They suffered some sort of mishap entering Q-space over Camerein. That destroyed their Nilssens and left them marooned in Q-space for several days. They escaped by rigging the Nilssens from their MRs, but that has left them stranded a long way from anywhere. They have had no contact with the Marines who landed on Camerein. Those who survived the initial landing.” He went on to tell the king about the interception as the shuttles were going in.

  The loss of both craft and an unknown number of Marines. “We assume that the bulk of the detachment did survive and are on the ground, but we have had no word from them since the first day.”