by Rick Shelley
“You’re making my head spin, Colonel. Here we go.”
The shuttle made a gentle banking turn, losing five hundred feet of altitude. Lon had never seen the location from the air before. The perspectives were different. It was not until he spotted the narrow chimney along the northwestern end of the hill where he had first discovered traces of the enemy that he was able to orient himself. He had the pilot make several passes along the valley on the west side of the ridge, gradually picking out several of the other entrances to the cave system—mostly from rock that was colored differently, scars left by the explosions that sealed off the cave. The areas of heaviest fighting could be deduced from that, though there was no visible evidence of the battle after nine years.
“Okay, Lieutenant, I guess I’ve done enough sightseeing for one day,” Lon said finally. “Let’s head back for Lincoln.”
“On the way,” Felconi said.
The shuttle was still climbing when Lon got the report. Raiders were hitting one of the newer mining camps, considerably to the northwest. Lon didn’t hesitate. “Head for those coordinates, Lieutenant. This might be what we’re looking for.”
Felconi pushed the throttles all the way to the stops, and the shuttle went supersonic. The site of the attack was eight minutes away.
Lon was too busy to notice the ride. He linked to Vel Osterman to ensure that the alert company—Delta—was on its way. The men were already boarding their shuttles and were off the ground almost before Osterman could report it. Two companies of militiamen would be no more than five minutes behind the mercenaries; they were coming from two different locations.
“The mining camp is called Xavier’s Beak, and don’t ask me why,” Osterman said. “There are about sixty civilians and forty militiamen stationed there. The mines produce copper ore and trace elements usually associated with copper deposits.”
“Any sign of raider shuttles?” Lon asked.
“Negative, and we’re doing a close scan of the area around Xavier’s Beak. First reports from the camp say there are at least fifty raiders, but we don’t have any way to confirm that yet. There is shooting going on now. The militia got three minutes’ advance warning from snoops they had planted along the valley floor, so the raiders weren’t able to just walk over.”
Before Lon could say anything, Vel started talking again. “We’ve just lost radio contact with the camp. The uplink must have been blown.” No more than fifteen seconds elapsed before he passed along confirmation of an explosion at the edge of the camp, spotted by Long Snake first, and then by several shuttle pilots almost simultaneously.
“Bravo has the base security detail?” Lon said, seeking confirmation. He didn’t wait for Vel to agree. “Get Alpha and Charlie ready to move on ten minutes’ notice. Get on to Long Snake to get shuttles down to carry them, ASAP. We hit them and hit them hard.”
“CIC is monitoring our talk, Lon. There, I’ve got confirmation on another circuit. Two shuttles will launch in seven minutes. With what we’ve got on the ground, that will carry Alpha and Charlie.”
“We should reach Xavier’s Beak about ninety seconds before Delta. We’ll stay overhead to provide close-in eyes, at least until they’re on the ground and can engage,” Lon said. “I’ll decide what I’ll do next when the time comes.”
“Just stay high enough to keep out of trouble, Lon.”
“We’ll do our best.”
The command shuttle deployed wing flaps to cut its airspeed once Xavier’s Beak was in sight. The shuttle went subsonic and Lieutenant Felconi banked into a wide turn, orbiting the area at twelve thousand feet—high enough to ensure that they would be able to escape any surface-to-air missiles that might be fired at them.
“We’ve got a good fix on the raiders, Colonel,” Felconi said before they had made one complete circuit. “I’m linked through to the militia commander and I’ve got the positions of his people and the enemy.”
“Can we give them something to think about? A couple of rockets, maybe?”
“Coming up. We should get a little closer, though, to be sure we don’t have a bird stray off in the wrong direction.”
“Go for it, Lieutenant.”
A transparent bubble came down over the crew chief’s head. Inside, he was in a virtual reality gunner’s turret. The pilot controlled the missiles. The chief operated the two Gatling gun pods. Going in close, the cannon might be needed. With the assist of a targeting computer, the cannon might even be able to destroy a SAM coming at them.
Lon keyed the controls on one of his monitors to give him a constant readout of altitude and airspeed. They dropped below four thousand feet—inviting range for a shoulder-launched rocket. Their speed fell to 450 miles per hour—a crawl—as the pilot used air brakes and reverse thrust to slow the shuttle.
Not for long. As soon as the two missiles were launched, Lieutenant Felconi increased the shuttle’s speed and climbed out of harm’s way, accelerating rapidly enough that Lon thought he was near to graying out as the g-forces pressed him back against his seat. There was a roaring noise in his ears, the feel of blood pressing against skin, fleeing his face. It was difficult to draw a deep breath. Then it ended. Too much weight was replaced by a few seconds of virtual weightlessness as the shuttle nosed over.
“Right on target, Colonel,” Felconi announced. The view on one of Lon’s monitors changed, showing smoke coming up from under the trees in the valley below Xavier’s Beak.
“Good shooting, Lieutenant,” Lon said. “Get ready to go in close to provide covering fire when Delta’s shuttles arrive. They’re going to land right on the strip there at the edge of the camp. Let’s give them a chance to get the men out of the box.”
“Yes, sir,” Felconi said. “I show them about forty seconds from touchdown, coming in fast from the southwest.”
“Let’s go get the bad guys, Lieutenant,” Lon said.
Felconi nosed the shuttle over and started gliding toward the raiders, holding airspeed down to allow safe use of the Gatlings—if the shuttle were flying too fast it might overrun the bullets. Like the pilots, Lon watched for any indication of a shoulder-fired SAM coming toward them. Below five thousand feet, they were especially vulnerable.
The shuttle launched two more missiles. As soon as they were away, Chief Tink started strafing, using only the lower turret gun. The missiles exploded. More bits of the wooded hillside got thrown around. Tink’s shells started chewing through leaves and branches. He kept firing even after the command shuttle had to bank away and start climbing again.
Two Shrike fighters made passes at the raider positions, one following the other, rockets and cannons chewing up more of the hillside. By that time, the attack shuttles carrying Delta Company had landed and the men were pouring out of the troop compartments and moving into their initial defensive perimeter. That drill took DMC soldiers less than thirty seconds.
“We’ll hang around until the Bancrofter militia arrives,” Lon said as his shuttle leveled off two miles above the mining camp. One camera had already picked up the local shuttles speeding in, though the aircraft were only dark points against the sky without magnification.
12
The two Dirigenter attack shuttles took off before the BCM arrived, and circled overhead—ready to contribute to the fight on the ground. As soon as the militiamen were out of their shuttles and moving to flank the raiders—while Lon’s Delta Company kept them pinned down—Lon told Felconi to land.
“I want to see this from the ground,” Lon said. He had been monitoring the radio traffic among Captain Magnusson and his platoon leaders and sergeants. The fighting was not heavy. Only scattered rifle fire was coming from the raider positions.
“Yes, sir,” Felconi said, staring to nose the shuttle around to line it up with the landing strip. “The LZ should be secure.”
“I should hope so,” Lon said, more to himself than the pilot. Between Delta and the two BCM companies, the odds on the ground were about those of a battalion to a platoon�
�twelve to one—without considering casualties that Lon’s shuttle and the Shrikes might have inflicted.
Still, as soon as the command shuttle came to a stop on the ground—along a ridge across the valley from the buildings of the mining camp—Lon was out of his safety harness and moving toward the exit as quickly as if he knew that hostile fire was coming. Phip Steesen, Jeremy Howell, and the squad Phip had assembled from the headquarters detachment moved out of “the box” with Lon and stayed around him…just in case. The firefight was continuing, but not with any great ferocity—scattered bursts of rifle fire, none of it near the landing strip.
“Just what did you have in mind, Colonel?” Phip asked. He and Corporal Howell were so close to Lon that they were physical shields—which annoyed Lon.
“I want to see what’s going on, take a look at any raider casualties they leave behind,” Lon said, moving away from his companions. They moved right with him, giving up only a few inches after a glare. The defensive squad gave them more room, arranged in a semicircular perimeter, facing out, rifles ready. “The sooner we get some kind of handle on the action, the sooner we can bring the contract to a successful conclusion. Let’s move toward the camp, see what’s going on with the miners.”
The squad with Lon moved in a double column, keeping Lon, Phip, and Jeremy near the center. They detoured past the village on the opposite slope before descending and crossing the narrow valley, giving the firefight as much room as possible. That fight was beginning to move. The raiders were attempting to withdraw, but were being pressed too heavily by the DMC and BCM forces to have much chance.
Xavier’s Beak mining camp consisted of a half dozen buildings—including the ore refinery—and five separate excavations. The latter included mine shafts and two deep bunkers for explosives. The buildings were hastily constructed in frontier style, using available wood—large log cabins for the miners and militia to use as barracks, a slightly larger building to serve most other functions—built along the slope above the eastern side of the valley, high enough to be safe from flooding if the narrow creek that marked the lowest contours ever flooded. Rough paths connected buildings and the excavations. A broader path led from the camp to the landing strip that was the only access between Xavier’s Beak and the rest of Bancroft.
The largest building had been turned into a medical facility. The single trauma tube that the miners had was in use. The two tubes that Delta Company had carried were being set up as Lon arrived. One of Delta’s medical technicians was directing several miners to help with the work and give first aid to a half dozen wounded men who had been brought in.
“We’re doing pretty good, so far, Colonel,” the medic said when Lon came up to him. “None of our people have been brought in yet. Several miners and local militia were wounded before we got here.” He shrugged. “Don’t know about the other side yet. Not much worried about them.”
“If you need help, a couple of the men with me are trained as medics, and we’ve got another trauma tube in the shuttle,” Lon said. The portable trauma tubes the DMC carried into the field were not quite as sophisticated as those that would be found in a permanent medical facility, but they did the job. If a wounded man survived long enough to get into a tube, he had better than a 98 percent chance of complete recovery. A tube provided life-support machinery plus hordes of medical-repair nanobots to repair damage done to the body. Only extensive damage to the nervous system or amputation were likely to require extensive periods for recovery and regeneration. Anything less and the wounded soldier would normally be ready to return to duty in four hours or less.
“Colonel, we can always use more trauma tubes,” the orderly, Corporal Allison, said. “And I’ll take any help I can get.”
Fifteen minutes later, the fighting at Xavier’s Beak was over. Three wounded prisoners were brought in for treatment. Captain Magnusson had two platoons, led by his senior lieutenant, pursuing the twenty or more raiders who had managed to withdraw. One militia company was also engaged in the pursuit.
“We’ve come off pretty good, so far,” Magnusson said when he came to report to Lon in person. “I’ve got two men with minor wounds, no one killed. There are seventeen raider bodies out there.” He gestured vaguely toward where the firefight had occurred. “I didn’t want to risk men keeping any of the enemy from escaping, not at the start like this.”
“You did right. I would have told you if I wanted more. I’d rather have them on the move, giving us some clue as to where their base might be. CIC has its eyes open, and the shuttles and Shrikes are doing what tracking they can. Were you able to get a good count on how many of them there were?”
Magnusson shook his head. “Three captured, seventeen bodies, at least twenty escaped. Might have been twice that number that got away, depending how they were originally deployed and whether any moved out before we got close. Doesn’t look like they got close to any of the loot they were after. I’ve got men collecting weapons and equipment. And these.” He pulled a small plastic tag, just over an inch in diameter, from a pocket and gave it to Lon.
“ID tag?” Lon asked, turning the disk over. There was no visible writing, just a sketchy logo that Lon did not recognize.
“That’s my guess,” Magnusson said. “All the bodies we’ve checked had them strung around their necks.”
“The computers in CIC should be able to decipher anything on them,” Lon said, giving the tag back to Magnusson. “We’ll ship all of them up to Long Snake, along with samples of the weapons and equipment. They were using active electronics, shielded too well to let us get precise fixes on position.”
Magnusson nodded. “Good battle helmets. Not exactly like any I’ve seen in my twenty-odd years with the Corps, but close enough. The rifles were the same ones shown in the database from the last time the Corps came here. Martian manufacture.”
Lon looked around to make certain no Bancrofters were close. “How did the militia do?”
“No complaints. This wasn’t really a good test, but I’d say they’ve kept their standards fairly high.”
“I hope so,” Lon said. “They had it quiet long enough that they might have relaxed.”
“If these raids started a year ago, they’d have had time to whip their people back up,” Magnusson said. “At least we don’t have to train them from scratch.”
Lon grunted. “Let’s take a walk. I want to see what we’ve got left on the ground here.”
Squads of Bancrofter militia were combing the area around the village, looking for bodies or wounded men. The dead were not being collected yet, but weapons, gear, and personal effects were—labeled as to which body, or fragment of a body, they came from. The smell of battle lingered on the hillside, a mixture of gunpowder, burned wood and flesh, and death. The cannon and rockets had done considerable damage to the trees. Outcroppings of rock were chipped and blackened.
The remaining militiamen, and the other two platoons of Delta Company, had established a wider perimeter around the mining camp, alert against the small chance that the surviving raiders might dare another assault against Xavier’s Beak.
“Something bothers me about this attack,” Magnusson said while he and Lon stood over the body of one of the dead raiders. Phip, Jeremy, and most of the squad that had come with them were close, still providing up-close security for their commander.
“Like what?” Lon asked.
“The timing, mostly,” Magnusson said. “They came in the middle of the day, and managed to trip an electronic snoop before they were close enough to do any good. They should have been able to figure that we’d show up before they could neutralize the militia contingent here and make off with anything. I mean, we do assume that they know we arrived, don’t we?”
“Almost a certainty, Ron. That might be the point of this raid, just to see how fast we can respond given the most favorable conditions for us.”
“Waste that many men to feel us out?”
“We’re not dealing with humanitarians,” Lon said.
“Earth has more people than it can deal with. They won’t mind losses. We played hell capturing any raiders the last time here. It wasn’t until the last battle that we bagged any live prisoners.”
Magnusson turned until he was looking in the direction of the buildings. “We’ve got some now. Ought to be able to find out quite a bit about the opposition from them.”
Lon nodded. “Whatever they know.” Maybe we’ll be able to end this job in a hurry, he thought. Find out where the enemy base is and hit it hard. Once the prisoners came out of the trauma tubes, they would be questioned under the influence of truth drugs that could not be resisted or fooled—at length, by men who knew how to get the most out of an interrogation.
“Colonel Nolan, we’ve got a big problem.” The call came from Corporal Allison. Lon was still walking over the site of the firefight with Magnusson. “All three prisoners are dead.”
“What?” The shout was unintentional. Lon grabbed Magnusson’s arm, then gestured and they started back toward the buildings. Lon forced a brisk pace.
“Couldn’t help it, Colonel. I infused them with stabilizers to keep them going until we could get them into trauma tubes. Less than five minutes later, they started going into convulsions. Before I could do anything, they were all dead. I’ve never seen anything like this before, Colonel. Never even heard of that kind of reaction.”
“Any sign of any of the other wounded reacting?”
“No, sir, and I used the same batch of infuser on two Bancrofters.”
The three prisoners who had died were lying on blankets, by themselves, along the east wall. Corporal Allison was standing over one of them when Lon and Magnusson entered.