Return to Camerein

by Rick Shelley

  “What about the fleet? Hasn’t the invasion force arrived yet?” the king asked.

  “Not yet, sir. That is the second item. Since nothing at all had been heard from Avon—she was due to report by MR no later than two days before the scheduled invasion—the First Lord of the Admiralty and I decided that it would be prudent to increase the size of the task force accompanying 2nd Regiment. The battle group returning from Shepard was sent back out at once, but that was the cause of the delay. The invasion group was originally scheduled to reach Camerein some hours ago. It will now be the day after tomorrow.”

  Henry mulled over what Truscott had said, then cleared his throat. “Those Marines we put on the ground five days ago must be frantic by now—no contact with their ship, lost both shuttles, and unable to get any reply from the invasion fleet because it simply isn’t there.”

  “I have every confidence in that detachment, sir,” Truscott said. “They might well be the best Marines Your Majesty has.”

  The king’s smile was weak. “I share your confidence in them. I hope that their mission was not in vain. It pains me that a considerable number of good men might already have died in what could prove to have been a futile fancy from the beginning. I enjoyed meeting Captain Spencer, and have looked forward to renewing our acquaintance. That reunion will be difficult with him losing men, the more so if they could find nothing of my brother George.” Henry looked down for a moment, sadness on his face. He blinked, then sighed before he looked up again.

  “Thank you for coming personally, Stasys. Please keep me informed, as soon as you learn anything, at whatever time of day or night.”

  Truscott stood and bowed. “Of course, Your Majesty.”

  He hesitated, then added, “It’s too soon to give up hope, sir.”

  The king smiled as he also stood. “I was just telling myself the same thing. George has a positively uncanny knack of landing on his feet. If anyone could come through seven years of such total isolation, it would be he.”

  Truscott bowed again and left, anxious to escape.

  18

  During the trek back to the rest of his command after his failed attempts to contact the fleet, David Spencer thought of a lot of possible reasons for the lack of success. The first, that there was simply a malfunction in the radio, he had quickly eliminated. He had tried with every helmet in the squad. The built-in diagnostics showed no faults.

  None of the other possibilities could be tested so easily. It might be that the invasion was taking place as scheduled but that none of the ships had been in normal space during any of David’s attempts to contact them. The more often he tried, the longer the odds against that explanation became, but the chance could not be ruled out completely. All he could do was keep trying. If there was a Commonwealth battle group overhead, sooner or later he would make contact.

  If there was no fleet, that was more serious. David’s imagination fed him three primary scenarios. One, the fleet had arrived and every ship had been destroyed or forced to flee before David’s first call. Two, the invasion had been postponed temporarily. Three, the invasion had been called off completely.

  Of those three alternatives, only the second left any hope for the people on the ground, so that was the one Davidspent the most time considering. The fleet commander might have decided to stage a dawn landing instead of the planned sunset assault on the opposite side of Camerein, which would mean a ten- to twelve-hour delay. That should pose little problem, only the inconvenience of spending those extra hours on their own in the bush. But if the invasion had been postponed for a day or two—or longer—life might get complicated. If there were no invasion to occupy the Federation’s minds and resources, there would be nothing to keep them from putting a maximum effort into finding the commandos and the refugees from the hotel. It would also mean that the odds of a quick rescue for any of them would become prohibitively long.

  By the time David returned to camp, he had come to only one conclusion. They would have to move farther away from the Commonwealth Excelsior and the locations from which he had done his transmitting. And they had to change direction.

  “There’s simply no help for it, sir,” he told Prince George after explaining the problem. “It might just be a matter of keeping on the move today. It could get to be more, though. I don’t have the information I’d need to be more definite.”

  “You do realize that there is no human habitation within seven hundred miles of here, save for the Excelsior,” George said.

  “Yes, sir, I am aware of that. And even though it might seem to be the obvious course to take, to the Feddies, I think we should head in that direction. I’m going to have to make occasional attempts to communicate, and if the Feddies continue to search for us—as I must assume they will—each attempt will increase the danger that they will find us. There is simply no escape from that.”

  “A pretty problem indeed.”

  “Understand, sir, I am not trying to shift the decision to you. Begging your pardon, but this must be strictly a military decision, and it must be mine. While I welcome your insights and advice, I have my orders direct from His Majesty, and I am duty-bound to do everything I can to keep you safe until such time as we can get you off of Camerein.”

  “I know that I am not in the chain of command, Captain. I will observe that it might be difficult to keep everyone moving for any length of time. While I had a stint of military service, and have been bound by the demands of duty my entire life, most of these people have never been in such circumstances.”

  “Difficult or not, it has to be done.” Spencer glanced toward where the other civilians were. “I realize that I can’t ask or expect as much of untrained civilians as I demand of my own men, but we do have to move. If the others know that the choice is to continue with us or be left alone in the bush …”

  George nodded. “Up to a point, Captain, that will work. But if they are pressed too hard, some might well take the second option—eventually from simple necessity. How soon do you intend to start moving?”

  “Immediately, sir.”

  Spencer did not ask, he told. He explained why they had to move, but he squelched every attempt to discuss it. “It’s not open to debate,” he said. “A military unit can’t exist that way, and this is a military operation. Your being civilians won’t save you if the Feddies get their hands on you. You people have missed all news of the war. I haven’t. I’ve seen firsthand what they do with inconvenient civilians, and I’ve seen how rarely they bother to encumber themselves with prisoners. Dead people don’t have to be fed and guarded. We leave in five minutes.”

  There were complaints, but David refused to respond or let himself be drawn into discussion—and he absolutely refused to reconsider his decision. “You stay with the group, or you have perhaps one chance in a thousand of surviving. It’s that simple.”

  Not everyone voiced, or felt, misgivings. Prince George did what he could to ease the situation, as did Shadda Lorenqui. And no one chose to stay behind when David gave the word to move out

  “And keep it quiet,” David ordered. “Noise kills. Our best chance of survival comes if the Feddies can’t see or hear us.”

  He did not set a demanding pace, but kept the group moving longer between breaks than he had during the night In three hours he permitted only two short rest stops. It was during the second of those that they heard Federation aircraft.

  The shuttles were moving slowly, less than fifty miles per hour, which meant that they were audible for a considerable time. There was time for a commando to climb into the forest canopy and get high enough to spot the enemy aircraft. A line of eight shuttles was moving northeast to southwest, nearly a mile between neighboring landers. They were low, scarcely a thousand feet above the ground.

  “They’re running a search pattern,” David whispered when the sentry came back down. Hopewell, Naughton, and the platoon sergeants were gathered around Spencer and Prince George. “They’ll have all their detection gear running.
” He moved toward where the other civilians were clustered.

  “Dead quiet now,” he whispered. “They’ll have sound gear good enough to hear anything. Stay down and stay quiet.”

  There was nothing to do but wait David and the leaders who had been with him retreated under dense cover and sat motionless. Eight shuttles might carry five hundred soldiers, far more than the shorthanded commando detachment could hope to stand off.

  They must have picked up one of my transmissions, David thought His head was forward, his shoulders hunched up. He might have suggested a turtle trying to pull his head back into his shell. It’s too much a coincidence if they just happened to pull that course out of a bonnet The center of that line is right over where I did most of my calling this morning.

  One of the shuttles passed almost directly overhead. David did not need to see it. The Doppler shift of its engine noises was enough to tell him where it was. The shuttle seemed to take forever to pass. For a few stretched seconds, David feared that it had gone into a hover. That would have meant that they had been spotted. But, slowly, the sound started to move away.

  David waited until he could no longer hear the shuttles before he moved back toward the trail. He gestured, first using simple hand signs that his men would recognize, and then switching to more exaggerated motions for the civilians.

  “Let’s move before they come back and land,” he said.

  There were no complaints from any of the civilians now. Even those who had been most vociferous before had been cowed—at least temporarily—by the display of Federation power.

  Jeige McDonough had not been one of the complainers. He had kept his misgivings to himself. In an almost perverse way, he was enjoying both the danger and the physical exertion, as he had nearly reveled in the labor of digging the shuttle pilot’s grave less than a week before. It gives me a sense of purpose was as close as he could come to a reason.

  The trek also seemed to be having a beneficial impact on his wife. At first, Mai had been one of the loudest complainers—about everything. During the night, and again since they had started moving again because of the Federation overflight, she had sweated profusely. Although she still refused to talk to her husband, she did not resist his occasional assistance—a hand at her elbow when she stumbled, or his offer to carry part of her load. After a short time walking, movement took so much of her energy that she had been forced to stop complaining. She didn’t have the strength for both, and she did not want to be left behind.

  It will do her good to sweat out the years of alcohol, Jeige told himself, watching her. He had never seen herperspire so freely, and the bedraggled look she had now was worlds different from the way she had looked in her perpetually drunken state.

  This might even give me a wife back, Jeige thought. If we ever get off of this world.

  Marie Caffre had a foolproof way to keep herself moving, to keep from saying, “The hell with it.” She kept her eyes on The Windsor. She promised herself that as long as he could move, she would—and at least two steps longer. She was the smallest person from the hotel. He was the tallest. The Windsor had always kept active. She had not. But she was determined to perform just that little bit better than he did—whatever it took. I’ll sweat like a peasant and take all of the pain, and show The Windsor that I’m better than he ever could be. Even when the Marine captain called a break, Marie made it a point of honor to stay on her feet an instant longer than The Windsor, and at the end of each halt, she was on her feet before he was. The Windsor gave no indication that he noticed that Madame Caffre was attempting to compete with him, but that did not surprise her.

  Henri Caffre had noticed, early on. He watched the way his wife remained fixated on the prince, damning herself to match his performance. At first, it amused Henri. Then it started to concern him. She’ll kill herself if she doesn’t relent. As troubled as their relationship had become on Camerein, Henri could not imagine life without Marie. They would escape and go home. All of their difficulties would evaporate once they were back in familiar surroundings, with their friends, acquaintances, and neighbors. But if she destroyed herself in this vain populist mania …

  “Calm yourself, my dear,” he urged. “No one is going to get anywhere faster than the rest. There is no need to compete.”

  She did not bother to reply.

  It was seventy-five minutes after the sounds of the shuttles vanished that they returned from the opposite direction. Theline of shuttles had shifted, overlapping its previous coverage by about fifty percent. There was the same slow progress, the regular spacing, the low altitude.

  “They’re looking for us, that’s for certain,” Lead Sergeant Naughton said after the shuttles had gone past again.

  Spencer nodded. “By now they must have a damned good idea who we have with us. There’d be clues enough for a brain-dead bird dog to follow back at the hotel. And the fact that they’re putting so much effort into the search has got to mean that there really isn’t a Commonwealth fleet in orbit.”

  The second passing of the shuttles seemed to have a more chilling effect on the civilians than the first had had. Once across might be coincidence. Twice removed any doubt that they were the object of an intensive search. The seventeen people from the hotel sat or lay motionless, as close to tree trunks and other cover as they could get, throughout the second passage. Most looked upward even though the canopy was too thick and constant to give them any hope of seeing the shuttles. Once more, David sent a man up a tree. This time, the scout came down without getting a look. All he could say was that they were near the edge of the search pattern this time instead of in the middle.

  They ‘re searching blind, David thought. If they hold to the pattern, next time they’ll pass off to our left. He was certain that the shuttles would make another pass, but he could not have explained that certainty logically. They’ll keep looking until they find us.

  It was not a happy thought.

  It would serve me right to die in this wasteland, Shadda Lorenqui told himself after the group started to move again. I should never have left the hotel. Even with all of the others going, I should have remained at my post. Fear kept his stomach knotted so tightly that it was sometimes nearly impossible to keep from doubling over in agony. One man at the hotel could not have inconvenienced these other soldiers. It did not bother him that the only way he mighthave been able to insure being left alone would have been to tell the Federation soldiers whatever they wanted to know, in as much detail as he could. Shadda had always possessed a most pliable conscience, even if it often caused suffering. His mission in life had always been to survive. Whatever that took was proper. Or so he had always told himself. Do whatever it takes. If it gets you through the next day, it’s right. You can’t worry about anyone else. It’s all any man can do to keep body and soul together in this galaxy.

  The comfortable years as acting manager of the Commonwealth Excelsior might have dulled his certainty about that philosophy, but it had not let him forget it. Survive the war and maybe earn a permanent post as manager of the hotel. That had been his goal. That was what he had thrown away by leaving.

  Shadda was not overly distressed by the physical demands of the march. The pace was not that rapid, and carrying food, water, and clothing did not weigh him down beyond his limits. The seven years at the Excelsior had been the easiest of his life, but they had not erased all that he had done before. He had known hard physical labor, had even served for a short time in uniform. He knew the drill backwards and sideways, and mere physical activity would never grind him down completely. But he wondered at the purpose of this march.

  Surely he can’t intend to walk us all the way to Como Nairobe, he thought. Como Nairobe was the one town on the continent, seven hundred miles off, across one line of very high mountains and two dozen significant rivers, waterways that could not be forded and had no bridges. Shadda had tried to dissuade the guests who had left the hotel early in the war from attempting that passage. He had warned them
that it was impossible, that they were signing their own death warrants by trying. As far as he could know, all of those people had died. None had come back. None had been heard from after they left.

  And no one will ever know how the lot of us died, most like. It was a gloomy thought, perfectly fitting his mood.

  “If we didn’t have all of our guests, we could have stayed fairly close to that hotel and dodged Feddies,” Spencer told Hopewell during the next break. “I’m sure the incoming fleet would try to raise us even if I didn’t call. But with the civilians, our only hope is to get as far off as possible.”

  “We couldn’t hardly go far enough that we wouldn’t hear the fleet call,” Hopewell said.

  “Once Camerein is secure, certainly, but if there’s any serious opposition, I suspect that they would use a narrow-beam transmission to cut down on the chances of an enemy intercept. That’s why I’ve got to try calling instead of just waiting.” Spencer looked down. “There’s still the other possibility.”

  “You mean that nobody’s coming at all?”

  David nodded. “The civilians have been here seven years. What’s to keep it from being another seven?”

  “This war can’t possibly go on for that long.”

  “Even if it ends. What happens if we’re here and the Feddies still control Camerein when peace comes? There’s no guarantee that we could get His Highness off safely even then.”

  “Our lads will come. The RM aren’t going to simply forget about us, all apart from the prince and the others. One way or another, they’ll come to collect us.”

  But when? David wondered. It took seven years to send us to find the king’s own brother.

  19

  The Marine squads rotated duties at each stop. An hour after the shuttles passed overhead for the second time, Alfie’s squad took over the point, moving ahead of the main body, working to keep a hundred yards between the last man in the squad and the rest of the group.