Lieutenant Colonel

by Rick Shelley

  “A spy in Government House or the BCM?” Lon tried to make it sound light, skeptical, but did not completely succeed.

  “They’ve had a lot of new people come in. Why couldn’t Earth have planted a few ringers?”

  “No reason, except maybe practicality.” Lon never talked about the details of his own mission to Earth, the fact that Dirigent had resident agents working there.

  “What practicality?” Phip asked. “Putting a couple of people out, every world they could, that might be the most practical idea they could have. Tell them where they might find easy pickings, what the target was worth, and have a helping hand available if they decided to come in. Like here.”

  “Okay, it’s possible, and I’m sure the Bancrofters know that as well as you do. They still can’t put everyone who’s come here in the last nine years under truth drugs to ask. And we can’t treat every member of the militia as a potential enemy. We’ve got to work with them or this contract is impossible.”

  “Maybe, but we should make sure our people know to keep their eyes open, even with ‘friends’ covering their backs.”

  “Go easy, Phip. Vigilance is one thing. I don’t want to turn everyone paranoid.”

  “Sentry lists are posted,” Phip said. “Besides regular posts, I’ve set it up so that one shuttle crew is on duty at all times, ready to use their weapons as well if the raiders try to have a go at us. I remember those little shuttles they used.”

  “Long Snake and the other ships are watching for surprises like that, Phip. We should have plenty of warning if any of them get in the air anywhere within a thousand miles.”

  “Yeah, right,” Phip said. “Like when they hit us at that mining camp nine years ago.”

  “We didn’t know the raiders had shuttles then, Phip. We know to look for them now.”

  “But we don’t know how good their stealth technology is. They might be able to hide better than we can seek.”

  Originally, Governor Sosa had planned to host a formal dinner for Lon and his senior officers their first evening on Bancroft. After his close call, the governor decided to postpone that reception for twenty-four hours. Lon ate with his staff and company commanders instead, and it was a working meal, with discussions of each company’s readiness and initial assignments.

  One company would always be on alert, ready to board shuttles and head to any trouble spot within fifteen minutes. The other three companies would share responsibility for the security of the base—mounting guards and sending patrols out in the vicinity—until the Dirigenters had enough intelligence to go hunting the raiders. Already, CIC was putting together bits of information that might lead to action within a day or two. They were using new technology developed largely as a result of the previous Bancroft contract, techniques that might make it possible for the Dirigenters to find raiders without necessarily waiting for them to strike. Might.

  “There’s one thing that’s been puzzling me,” Captain Kai of Charlie Company said as the meal was winding to an end.

  “What’s that, Sefer?” Lon asked.

  “That cave system where you had the raiders bottled up last time—did the Bancrofters ever open it back up to see if there were any other caches of stolen metals and minerals?”

  “He wants to know if they still owe us any percentage,” Tebba said, laughing.

  “Deputy Governor Henks and I talked about that this afternoon,” Lon said. “He was the one who brought it up.

  They opened those caves thirty months after we left. They found only negligible amounts of stolen goods, supplies and munitions, and fourteen bodies—raiders who didn’t make it out.”

  “Did they account for everyone who was here?” Kai asked.

  “Henks thinks that maybe three or four weren’t accounted for, that they must have died on their own, either prey to local predators or from starvation or whatever.”

  “Or maybe they survived until these new raiders landed,” Captain Magnusson of Delta suggested.

  “I don’t think they’d be much use to the new lot if they’d been living in the wild for nine years,” Captain Carlin of Bravo said. “More of a liability.”

  “In any case, not something we should have to worry about,” Lon said. “Let’s not borrow trouble. For now, we wait, ready to head out the minute we have a contact or a fix on raider positions from CIC. Nothing shows in the next couple of days, we start putting patrols out near the last few raids, see if there are trails to follow.”

  Lon’s quarters on the third floor of the headquarters building were…considerable. The bedroom was twenty-eight feet square, with windows on three sides, high enough to look over the outer wall of the compound. He could stand on one side of his room and look out at the city of Lincoln, a growing, modern city. The tallest buildings were six stories high, and Government House was visible at the far end of a broad avenue. If Lon crossed the bedroom to look out the opposite windows, he could see across the cleared defensive zone into untouched old-growth forest—woodlands that stretched hundreds of miles with only minimal breaks. On the third wall, the view was mainly forest, but with the city beginning to intrude—new residential neighborhoods that had grown over the past nine years.

  Sunset. Dusk. Night. The only light in the bedroom was the dark blue glow of a blank complink screen on the table next to the full-sized bed—a bed larger than the one that Lon and Sara shared at home. Lon was in no hurry to try this bed, in no hurry to tempt sleep. He paced softly, slowly, then stood in front of one window or another to stare out, perhaps as long as ten minutes before moving to the next window.

  Thoughts. Worries. Memories. Scenarios—growing wilder as the evening progressed.

  What the hell am I doing here? he wondered more than once. This was the time for doubts he could not let his subordinates—even those who knew him best—see. Alone in the dark, he did not need to hold the mask to his face. The cracks in his public facade could widen. There would be time to repair them, time to sleep and let new mortar set.

  Thoughts flickered through and vanished, often unconnected bits of trivia as the flip-flop blocks of random association struggled to fill the voids of consciousness. It was near midnight when a series of frames came together to pose Lon a question that jerked him clear of his reverie.

  What happened to the second shuttle that attacked us the last time we were here? Two raider shuttles had come down that valley after dropping men on jet packs to hit the mercenaries with gunfire and rockets. One shuttle had been shot down, the wreckage available for inspection.

  “We never found the second shuttle,” Lon said. “It didn’t show up while we were here. I wonder if the Bancrofters ever found it.” He went to his complink and keyed in a note to himself, to ask the locals in the morning. Then he undressed for bed and put a sleep patch on his neck.

  11

  “No, we never found it,” Daniel Henks said when Lon asked about the raider shuttle the next morning. They were speaking over a complink hookup. “I’d damn near forgotten about that, Colonel. We were so overjoyed at the way your lads and mine smashed the raiders in that last big fight it completely slipped my mind for the longest time. By the time I thought about it again, you had already made your first Q-space jump toward home.”

  “Did you look for it then?” Lon asked.

  “I didn’t have the facilities or equipment for an exhaustive search, but I did have our shuttle crews looking, off and on. We did spend time searching the area around those caves where we cornered the raiders, figuring it was most likely they’d have kept their transport close to base. From the air and on the ground. We found a clearing they had apparently used for shuttles, but no sign of anything other than the one your people shot down. Is it important?”

  “I don’t know yet. It could be. It’s a loose end, something that popped into my head last night. If that shuttle got off-world, made rendezvous with a ship, it would explain where any stragglers got to, and it would mean that the CMC would know how we caught their people. Could me
an they’ll be ready for us if we use the same tactics we did last time.”

  “And if it didn’t get off-world, that shuttle, or at least wreckage, should still be around, somewhere.”

  “Something like that,” Lon said. “We’ll look for it. Our close-in surveys ought to spot that much metal on the ground even if it’s under trees or covered with camouflage netting. As long as we know what we’re looking for.”

  “We know this new batch of raiders has similar shuttles,” Henks reminded Lon. “We’ve never spotted more than two at a time, but that’s no guarantee that’s all they have.”

  “And we haven’t spotted any of them yet,” Lon said, as much to himself as to the deputy governor.

  “This and that and three other things,” Vel Osterman said when Lon mentioned the missing shuttle. “You’d think we’d be able to detect any craft on the ground. We’re running electronic detectors, magnetic detectors, mapping scans on dozens of frequencies from ultraviolet through infrared, microwave, and I don’t know what-all else in addition to visible-light video. And if any of them get airborne, we ought to know within seconds.”

  “That’s the theory,” Lon said. “The samples of the wrecked shuttle we had analyzed showed extensive passive stealth technology, but we should still be able to catch them.”

  “Active stealth?” Vel asked. “ECM?” Electronic countermeasures.

  “If we’re dealing with equipment from Earth, that’s likely,” Lon conceded. “Hard telling how advanced. That’s not the kind of thing they let out.” Lon wasn’t certain if there was anything on that in the material he had brought back to Dirigent from Earth. There was so much material on the data chips that they had not been completely analyzed before the battalion left Dirigent and made its first transit of Q-space.

  He leaned back and closed his eyes, letting out a soft sigh. “This is a little on the screwy side, Vel,” he said. “Not a regular combat scenario at all, even though we’re talking fairly substantial numbers. No fixed lines, areas of enemy control, or anything. We have to find the enemy before we can even begin to engage them.”

  “If they know we’re here, and we have to assume they do, they might go to ground and just try to wait us out,” Vel said. “Good chance we wouldn’t find them.”

  “Wrong. We’d find them,” Lon said. “We came prepared to look for caves this time. We can use echo ranging from the shuttles to find cave systems, if it comes to that, then send people in on the ground to do close-up slap-and-grab charting to see if the caves have anyone in them.”

  We’ll find them. Lon kept telling himself that, but every hour that passed without any sighting, without anything that said Here they are, he felt his tension increase. It did not help much to remind himself that the battalion had been on the world little more than twenty-five hours.

  CIC’s computers had been running pattern recognition searches—location of raids, time between attacks, size of raiding party, even the specific metals and minerals stolen—looking for sequences that might help determine the location of the main base of the raiders…or the time and place of their next attack. So far the computers had not been able to find anything that could be definitely posited as more than random.

  “There have never been two precisely simultaneous attacks. That’s the only thing that’s struck me so far,” Lon told Phip when Steesen came in and found his boss staring at the complink screen, watching the computer sequence the location of attacks and the duration between them. Lon had been staring at various visual summaries for nearly an hour, often going for minutes without even blinking, nearly hypnotized by the program.

  Lon turned away from the screen, swiveling his chair until he was directly facing his lead sergeant. “Two and a half hours apart is the closest two raids have come, and the targets were sixty-eight miles apart.”

  “In other words, it’s just barely possible the same people hit both of them,” Phip said.

  “Can’t rule it in or out,” Lon said, nodding. “The lack of any recognizable patterns, either it’s all blind luck or the opposition is being directed by a damned military genius.”

  “Or a good computer program,” Phip suggested. “One that’s able to outsmart our CIC brain boxes.”

  “Where’s my shuttle?” Lon asked.

  Phip glanced at his watch. “Should be leaving Long Snake right about now. It went up to refuel and load some of the extra scanning gear. Maybe to switch crews as well. I’m not sure about that.”

  “Pick out a good squad to go along. I want to get out and have a look around for myself,” Lon said. “Maybe that will give me more ideas than staring at the complink.”

  “Can’t hurt,” Phip said. “You, me, Jerry, and a squad?”

  Lon hesitated before he nodded. “Full battle kit, just in case. And make sure CIC knows what we’re doing and has a Shrike or two ready if we turn up any worms.”

  The cockpits of the DMC’s larger attack shuttles had three seats—pilot, copilot, and crew chief. A command shuttle, though it was smaller, added a fourth seat in the cockpit, above and behind the pilot—empty except when the infantry commander chose to occupy it. Lon strapped himself into the fourth seat, pulling his harness as tight as it would comfortably go.

  “Just what do you have in mind, Colonel?” the command pilot, Lieutenant Art Felconi, asked.

  “A little prowling, Art,” Lon said. “I’ve got to see things for myself. Maybe we’ll get lucky and stumble onto something.”

  “Like those rockets yesterday?” Felconi asked. “I’d rather not go that route again just yet, thank you.”

  “That’s not quite what I had in mind, but it would give us a location on some of the enemy. Let’s start west. We’ll make a tour over as many of the sites that have been raided as we can. Maybe follow a few valleys, see if we happen to turn anything.”

  “You’re the boss,” Felconi said.

  Petty Officer Steve Tink, the crew chief, came into the cockpit and strapped himself in. “Everyone’s aboard and the box is sealed tight, skipper,” he reported.

  “Colonel?” Felconi asked.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” Lon replied.

  Lon had ridden in the cockpit of a shuttle only four times before, in all his years in the Corps. The first time hadn’t even been in a Dirigenter shuttle, but in one of the transports the Bancrofters used—Taking off from this same place, Lon thought as the pilot pushed the throttles forward and the aircraft started to tremble at power being held back by brakes.

  When the shuttle lunged forward, quickly gaining speed, Lon forced himself to keep his eyes open, though his instinct was to close them. Seventy yards from standstill to airborne. The pilot pulled the nose of the shuttle up while the copilot opened the throttles farther. They climbed at a seventy-five-degree angle. Lon concentrated on his breathing as acceleration pushed him into his seat, telling himself that this would only last a few seconds. When the pressure eased and the shuttle nosed forward into level flight, Lon could feel blood moving forward in his head again. For an instant he felt almost dizzy, but a couple of deep breaths—covering an involuntary sigh of relief—brought him back to something approaching normal.

  “Where do we start, Colonel?” Felconi asked.

  “Head for the southwest limit of the primary sites,” Lon said. “The valleys and ridges are all pretty much southwest to northeast, so we can go up and down for a while. I’m going to want to get low enough to have a look at the villages and larger camps.” The weather was perfect. There were only a few wispy clouds, high, nothing that would obscure the view.

  “The garrisons know we’re coming? I’d hate to have even a friendly missile chasing my butt around.”

  “They’re supposed to know, but I’ll call Colonel Crampton’s headquarters and make sure,” Lon offered.

  Hills and valleys, creeks and rivers, almost endless trees. Most of Bancroft, even in the area that had been settled, remained mostly as it had been before the first humans landed. There still weren’t t
he numbers to do great damage to the environment, even though Bancrofters preferred to grow most of their food rather than use nanotech assemblers to construct it from patterns out of whatever organic materials came to hand. A hundred people here, a thousand there, only a handful of population centers were larger.

  To Lon’s right, the crew chief kept busy monitoring the scanning equipment, in case they got lucky and found human activity where it didn’t belong. Lon watched out the front of the shuttle, mostly, supplementing that with glances at the two small monitors in the console in front of him.

  The pilot kept the shuttle’s airspeed low—slow enough that Lon could occasionally see more than just a blur of trees racing past. When they approached one of the mining villages or camps, the pilot made a series of S-curves, banking from side to side to give them more time overhead to look the terrain over.

  I don’t know what I hope to see, Lon thought after an hour of looking. No one’s going to stand in a clearing and give us the finger. He didn’t expect to spot raiders beginning an attack. That would be too much to ask for. Maybe we’ll turn up one of their shuttles. That might happen, if luck was running with them. A magnetic or electronic signature that did not belong in unspoiled forest, a flash of matte black surface, the glint of light off a cockpit windshield. Something.

  One of the monitors in front of Lon kept him posted on their position, indicating the names of villages and camps. The flight had been in progress just minutes short of two hours when they went over the cave system where Alpha Company had bottled up the raiders and then destroyed them nine years before.

  “Let’s take a closer look,” Lon told the pilot. “We’re just about out of valleys. Past the next ridge to the east, the ground starts to flatten out and slope toward the sea.”

  “You don’t think they’d go back to the same place, do you, sir?” Lieutenant Felconi asked.

  “Odds and evens,” Lon said. “No, I don’t expect that they’d go back to the same place. Even if there were no survivors to tell them what happened, they could see that the entrances had been destroyed by explosives and guess. But if they thought we’d think that, it might seem to be the safest place. With a few extra safeguards to try to avoid the same fate.”