by Rick Shelley
“Major Osterman is homing in on him, Colonel,” Captain Berger announced. He had a headset on to allow him to communicate without disturbing Lon. “They’ll be overhead by the time the pilot gets to the ground.”
“Stay with it until they have him,” Lon said. That was all the attention he could spare. The fighting on the ground had started.
Sefer Kai’s Charlie Company had formed up and started toward the raiders. He reported spotting at least twenty of the enemy. After the last pass by the Shrikes, the raiders had formed up again and started moving toward Erskeine, leaving two men to treat the wounded and tend to the dead.
“Get the men treating the wounded!” Lon yelled, interrupting Sefer’s report. “They might have what we need, the antidote to keep the wounded alive.”
“We’ll try. We’ll get whatever they’re carrying,” Kai said. “I’m leaving one platoon to handle that. We’ll circle around to keep after the rest of the raiders. Need the angle anyway. Delta is only six hundred yards off.”
The shooting started less than two minutes later. Lon listened to the traffic among the officers and noncoms of the two companies on the ground, concentrating, trying to follow the confusing babble of voices. There were at least three dozen raiders active. Maybe four dozen. Charlie Company counted, in passing, fifteen dead from the Shrike attacks, and found traces in the clearing that a shuttle had used it. But there was no shuttle there now. One of the men acting as a medical orderly resisted and was killed. The other had taken off, running. He had not been caught yet. A squad had been sent after him.
Delta Company got close enough to join in the firefight, stopping the raiders who had continued moving toward Erskeine. Now the remaining raiders were trying to move out of the middle, toward the northeast, over a hill that was too steep to allow them any easy route out.
The Shrike pilot was on the ground, reporting that he was safe, uninjured, and maybe a half mile from the clearing he had spotted. Someone aboard the command shuttle gave him a course. The shuttle was gliding in for a landing. One of the other Shrikes was overhead to provide cover in case there were more enemy assets in the area.
The first company of Bancrofter militia landed at Erskeine. The men debarked, and the shuttles took off to allow the other company to land. Contact had been made with the militia detachment and miners stationed at the camp. There had been no casualties there…except for the militiaman who had been shot by his commander. The start of the entire sequence.
“Sergeant Steesen is taking a fire team to meet the flier,” Berger reported. “Should make contact in less than a minute.”
Lon leaned back and rubbed at his eyes, then sucked in a deep breath. He was as keyed up as he might have been if he had been on the ground, physically part of the battle.
“Let me know when they have him aboard the shuttle,” Lon said.
The firefight ended.
“We’re still sorting things out,” Sefer Kai reported. “There’s a chance some raiders got away, but we’re trying to make sure we’ve got security here, checking prisoners.”
“You get that one medic?” Lon asked.
“Not alive. We’ve got all his gear, though. The other one is still on the loose. We won’t do more than bandage the wounded prisoners, hope they stay alive long enough to be useful.” Sefer did not sound particularly optimistic.
“Move them to the landing strip at Erskeine, Sefer,” Lon said. “Bring them in.”
“What about the raiders still on the loose?”
“We’ll leave Delta to coordinate with the militia. It’s your people carrying those tin cans on their backs. What kind of casualties on our side?”
“No dead—thank God—just two minor wounds. We got lucky.”
This time, Lon thought. He closed his eyes in a wordless prayer of thanks. “It’s about time we caught a little luck, Sefer,” he said. “Good job. And pass that on to your men.”
16
“The militiaman who was shot for trying to deactivate the snoops at Erskeine was from Miranda, not Lorenzo,” Deputy Governor Daniel Henks said. He had come to Lon’s office before nine o’clock in the morning. Lon had barely beat him to the office. Lon had decided to sleep in an extra couple of hours to make up for the sleep he had lost during the night.
“Miranda? That’s a CHW world, isn’t it?” Lon asked.
Henks nodded. “One of the original worlds that supported the breakaway Confederation on Union. And one of the largest populations.”
“There aren’t many CHW worlds that permit emigration,” Lon said. “Except for punitive reasons.”
Henks shrugged. “It expands the problem for us, however it came about. The first traitor came from a world that was in the process of joining the Second Commonwealth. The next comes from one of the core worlds of the Confederation. We have close to a hundred people on Bancroft who came from Miranda. Add in the other emigrants from Confederation worlds and the total must be more than six hundred.”
“There probably wouldn’t be many agents planted, Colonel,” Lon said. “And there’s a chance that some of them might have switched loyalties since coming here. Have you learned anything yet about these two men?”
“Nothing obvious,” Henks said. “Nothing to point to their contacts or confederates. Have you been able to get anything from the raiders who were captured during the night?”
“Only two of them made it back here alive, and neither is in any condition to talk yet. Since we can’t treat their injuries without triggering whatever their bosses infected them with, we can’t be certain either man will survive long enough to be questioned. Your people and one company of mine are still on the ground out there, trying to track the last of the raiding party.”
“What about the items you took from their medic?”
“Still being analyzed.” Lon hesitated. “If we find one of the fluids that doesn’t measure up as a known medical treatment, we might try injecting one of the wounded men with it, then stick him in a trauma tube and see what happens.” He shook his head. “I’m not particularly fond of that option. We could be killing the man to no point.”
“No, you could be giving him his only chance to survive,” Henks said.
For a time, Lon thought. Bancrofter justice would be less certain. “We should have some indication on what we have before much longer,” he said. “If we’d been set up to do the analysis here, we might have it already, but I sent the samples up to Long Snake. Their lab is considerably more sophisticated.”
“You’ll keep me posted?” Henks asked, getting to his feet.
Lon stood as well. “Of course.” He walked to the office door with the deputy governor, opened it, and then shook hands with Henks as he left. Lon stood in the open doorway until Henks left the building.
“We can’t give you a one-hundred-percent guaranteed answer, Colonel Nolan,” the chief lab technician aboard Long Snake said. “We would need much larger samples and a lot more time for that.”
“What can you give me?” Lon asked.
“You sent us four samples. Samples two and three are identical and are normal first-response treatments—stabilizers and blood generators. We believe that samples one and four are identical to each other, but different from the others. We can’t be certain what one and four actually are, or that they are indeed the same. So far we have been unable to complete any structural or functional analysis. The nanoagents in those two samples actively resist, attacking the probe nanoagents—with some success—and changing themselves in the process, apparently some sort of fail-safe device.”
“Which means those samples are probably the ones we need to counteract whatever the raiders have been infected with to keep them from talking,” Lon said.
“There’s no way to be certain, Colonel, but that would be my guess. I must emphasize, though, that it is only a guess, not something I would care to bet my life on. For example, one of them could be the antidote you’re looking for and the other could be the infecting agent.”
“We have found nothing, ah, out of place in those samples,” the technician said. “The analysis is not complete. We are still disassembling the active nanoagents. But there have been no surprises so far.”
The two wounded prisoners were being held in the infirmary inside the militia base. It was a small facility attached to the headquarters building, four beds and four trauma tubes, added since the DMC’s first contract on Bancroft. Lon went to the infirmary after ending his conversation with the lab technician aboard Long Snake. The battalion’s senior medical technician, Sergeant Enos Carvel, was standing between the two occupied beds. He moved away from them, meeting Lon halfway to the door.
“How are they doing?” Lon asked.
Carvel shook his head, and moved farther from the two prisoners. Lon moved with him. “The one might die almost anytime if I can’t get him into a trauma tube, Colonel. Frankly, I’m not certain a trauma tube can save him after this much time—even if we have the antidote to keep his own system from killing him. The other one, well, all I can really say is that he’s not quite as bad off. Apparently his body’s maintenance nanoagents stopped the internal bleeding and his major organs aren’t affected, but he’s running a fever and his system isn’t keeping up with the infection.”
“Is he conscious?”
“No. Any word on those vials we took off the dead raider medic?”
Lon gave him the short version of what Long Snake had said.
“If we don’t take a chance,” Carvel said, “at least one is going to die. Probably both of them. And since we don’t know the proper dosage, or how long to wait between injecting the antidote and beginning standard treatment, we can’t be certain that we’ll save them even if we pick the right one.”
“No chance at all without, minimal chance with?” Lon said.
“That’s about the size of it, Colonel.”
“Try one of them on the man who’s in worse shape. Make your best guess on dosage and the waiting time. And save enough for the second man. I’ll record the order to cover you,” Lon said.
“Thank you, Colonel.” Carvel hesitated, then said, “One thing: Even if we don’t save the first man, we should be able to tell if we’ve got the right vial. Afterward.”
“You mean if it doesn’t leave the man the way the ones we treated before ended up,” Lon said, and the medtech nodded.
“The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll know,” Lon said. He went to the infirmary’s main complink and keyed in his order for the risky treatment, signed it, and displayed the screen for Sergeant Carvel.
Lon waited while the medtech got the vial from which the first sample had been taken and charged an injector. Carvel talked through the process, for the complink, to make certain there was a step-by-step record of what he did, and the results.
“I have to assume,” he said at one point, “that a medic would carry enough of the antidote to treat the highest estimate of possible casualties among the men under his care, and that the delay between antidote and standard treatment would be minimal. Otherwise, they could lose people they didn’t have to. That is, at least, how we would handle the situation—in the unthinkable event that we would intentionally poison our men to keep them from talking if captured.”
Carvel called two men in to help him move the treated prisoner from bed to trauma tube. Lon helped as well. Carvel made the connections from tube to patient, then, standing with his hand over the contact that would turn the medical apparatus on, he looked at Lon.
“Do it,” Lon said, nodding.
The medtech touched the switch, then let his hand drop away from it. Carvel watched the gauges at the head of the trauma tube. Lon stared at the face of the man in it.
“It took several minutes before the first raiders we attempted to treat went bad,” Carvel said after he had turned on the trauma tube. There was nothing visible happening—and wouldn’t be, unless this patient’s system turned on him the way the earlier ones had. The man’s open wounds had been covered with bandages, so the two men watching would not even see the wounds knit.
At the moment, the trauma tube reminded Lon of a glass coffin, perhaps from some children’s fairy tale. There won’t be any handsome prince to come along and save this poor bastard with a kiss, he thought.
“This is going to be borderline, even if we guessed right,” Carvel said. Two minutes had passed since he started the trauma tube. “He lost so much blood the tube might not be able to replace enough in time. Heart, lungs, and kidneys were all near the point of failure. Brain waves are…depressed but still there.” The whole time he talked, Carvel never looked away from the gauges on the trauma tube.
Lon scarcely dared to breathe, hardly blinked as he stared at the face of the man in the tube. Time seemed suspended, distorted beyond recognition of its passage. He was so focused that he might have been trying to heal the man by willpower alone. It had gone beyond the point of merely wanting a live enemy to question, it was the desire to see a man survive.
Live, damn you, live.
Five minutes. “No sign yet of his system trying to self-destruct,” Sergeant Carvel said. “It was…about this long with the others. The medics who treated them couldn’t say precisely how long. But when they went bad, they went in a hurry. Every organ in their bodies seemed to rupture or hemorrhage simultaneously, turned their insides to mush.”
“I saw the bodies,” Lon said.
“If we guessed right, I think he’ll survive. This much time, the tube has had a chance to get the essentials covered. I wish we knew for certain how long it took for those other wounded to go bad. I’d sure like to know how much longer before I can breathe right again.”
“We can breathe later,” Lon said. “Let’s be certain first.”
Ten minutes. “It couldn’t have been much longer than this, no matter how far off the medics were,” Carvel said.
I think you’re right, Lon thought, but he said, “Give it another five minutes to be certain. Maybe you should check your other patient.”
Carvel started, visibly, as if he had completely forgotten that he had another patient in the infirmary. “Yes, of course,” he said, looking around, then moving to the bed that held the other captive raider. He did not spend much time with the man, just long enough to check his heart rate and respiration—less than a minute.
“He’s hanging in,” Carvel said when he returned to his position at the head of the occupied trauma tube. “He can stand a few more minutes’ waiting.”
“Refresh my mind, Sergeant. Once the tube finishes working on this man, any foreign substances in his system should be flushed out and destroyed, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Including any of these destructive nanoagents?”
“I can’t see any way they could disguise themselves to avoid detection, Colonel. Either they act or they don’t. And if they don’t, they should be gone. What are you getting at?”
“Being able to question these men once they’re out of danger,” Lon said. “We need to know anything they can tell us about raider operations on Bancroft.”
Carvel hesitated for a beat. “I don’t see why they won’t be fit for questioning—assuming they come out of the trauma tubes alive and fully repaired. This man, I think he may need more than four hours before the tube releases him. He was awfully close to gone.” He looked at his watch. “It’s been nearly thirteen minutes since I turned it on.”
“Let’s get the other man into a tube, ready for the injection of the antidote—the presumed antidote,” Lon said. “Soon as we’re sure of this one, you can start the other.”
They waited past the fifteen-minute mark—closer to twenty—before Sergeant Carvel gave the second man a dose of the “sample one” fluid. Then Lon waited until ten minutes after the trauma tube had been activated for the second man.
“I think you’ve done it, Sergeant,” Lon said, standing between the two trauma tubes. �
��So far, Colonel,” Carvel said.
“Just remember that they’re prisoners. I’ll make sure there are guards here before they can be a problem.”
There was a noticeable pause before Carvel said, “Yes, sir. Of course. I hope you’re not in too great a hurry to question them, Colonel. I’d like to give them at least a couple of hours after the tubes release them, time for a meal and some oral fluids, a chance for me to make absolutely sure.”
It was Lon’s turn to hesitate. Then he nodded. “At least two hours, Sergeant, but I won’t guarantee a lot more than that.”
17
By sunset, it was clear that the pursuit of the survivors of the failed raid on Erskeine was going nowhere. The miners had been evacuated from the camp. Lon had pulled the last of his men from it. Colonel Crampton had left one company of militia—on the long chance that the raiders might double back and try to make up for their failure—but pulled the rest back to Lincoln, including the detachment that had garrisoned the site.
“We have prisoners now,” Lon reminded Crampton when the militia commander came in to share supper with him. “Before the evening is over, we should know everything those two prisoners know about raider operations here.”
“I can hardly wait,” Crampton said. “That also goes for the governor and deputy governor. I came here from Government House, and they’re having difficulty containing themselves.”
“As long as they keep the secret.” Lon had explained to Sosa and Henks why it was necessary that no one else learn that they had prisoners who could—and would—talk. “We don’t know what sources of information the raiders have.”
“I haven’t told anyone, not even my staff and company commanders, and they’re all from old families,” Crampton said. “Once we do question the prisoners, we’re going to have to mount an operation in a hurry.”
Lon nodded. “As quickly as we can without botching it. Plan first, then go in. Get the job done right.”