Lieutenant Colonel

by Rick Shelley

  “I’ve got no argument with that.”

  The two men were eating in Lon’s office—Colonel Crampton’s office before the arrival of the mercenaries. Lon ate with more appetite than he had since landing on Bancroft. Crampton had done little more than pick at his food. He was visibly excited by the prospect of learning the secrets of the raiders. Early on, he had pressed Lon about how soon they could start the interrogation. Crampton intended to be present for it.

  “If we get enough information from the prisoners to allow us to do the job without more intelligence,” Lon said.

  Crampton had been lifting his glass. He stopped with his drink still a couple of inches from his mouth. “What do you mean by that? Why wouldn’t we get enough?”

  “First of all, we’re assuming that there isn’t a second level to the raider fail-safe nanoagents, that our equipment must have cleansed them completely from the men’s systems. We think we have, but if we’re underestimating the enemy’s technology, injecting the prisoners with the truth drugs might still trigger a lethal reaction. Second, we can’t be certain that the two men we captured will be able to give us enough information to locate the enemy’s base camp and assess their strength.”

  “You think they blindfold their own men coming and going?” Crampton asked, setting his glass back on the table.

  “As far as we know, we have a couple of privates, or the equivalent. Grunts. Maybe conscripts. We know they were treated with a lethal agent to keep them from talking to an enemy. But we don’t know how much information the raiders share with the rank and file. If they’re moved in and out of their base camp by air, there’s not a reason in the world for their leaders to give them map coordinates.”

  Crampton simply stared at Lon.

  “We can’t let our hopes get too high,” Lon said. “We should be able to get a lot of useful information, but we can’t count on getting everything we want. Or need.”

  “I take it you didn’t tell the governor that,” Crampton said after letting out an audible sigh.

  “I told him not to expect too much, but I didn’t go into detail,” Lon said. “I thought Dan Henks, at least, would figure it out once he had a little time to mull it over. Once the initial excitement faded. He’s got the background in police and military affairs. We’d have to get one of their officers to expect anything really precise on locations. Maybe a noncom. And I don’t think we got either.”

  “You certainly shot holes in my excitement,” Crampton said. He sounded deflated. “Now I don’t know whether to look forward to the questioning or dread it. Like a boy who wants Christmas to come but fears he won’t get the gift he’s set his heart on.”

  Lon smiled. “I’ve had trouble keeping my own expectations from getting too high,” he said. “We’ll learn what we learn. My adjutant and senior medical technician will handle the injections and the questioning. You and I will simply be spectators and advisers. We listen and, if we think there’s a specific question that should be asked, we put it to Captain Berger, let him ask the prisoner. Having only one voice to deal with helps.”

  “Your Captain Berger knows what to ask?”

  “We spent a couple of hours discussing lines of questioning. Torry is good. There’s not much chance we’ll have to interrupt to get him to ask something he hasn’t thought of.”

  The room where the questioning would be conducted was adjacent to the infirmary—soundproof, without windows, illuminated to highlight the subject and obscure witnesses. The first prisoner—the second man treated that morning— was wheeled in, strapped to his bed. A mild sedative had already been administered. Sergeant Carvel was one of the men moving the…patient. The medical orderly with him left the room and closed the door as soon as the bed was in position.

  The two colonels were seated on the far side of the room from the bed, behind the lights, in shadows too deep to let the man on the bed make out their features. A table was in front of them, and each man had a portable complink. If they had questions for Captain Berger to ask, they would key them in on the complink; he would see them on a screen behind the prisoner’s head. Sergeant Carvel stayed next to the bed; he would remain there throughout the session, administering drugs and observing the instruments that monitored the patient’s vital signs.

  “Is the patient ready?” Berger asked, standing just across the bed from the medtech.

  “Vital signs are stable and proper,” Carvel said.

  “Administer the medication.”

  Carvel applied two med-patches to the prisoner’s neck, one over the carotid artery, the other over the joint between two vertebrae. The man on the table was conscious, but just barely. His eyes were open no more than halfway, and he moved his head little, except as a direct result of Carvel’s activities. The man did not, could not, resist.

  “Three minutes,” Carvel said after he had applied the second patch. Three minutes was how long the nanoagents in the patches would need to penetrate and work their way through to their “duty stations” in the prisoner’s brain, ready to dispense minuscule doses of several drugs as necessary.

  Torry Berger glanced at his watch, noting to the second when he would be able to begin questioning. Across the room, the two colonels each glanced at their watches, in perfect unison.

  I’ll never be comfortable with this, Lon thought. It’s too damned creepy. It was only the fourth time he had directly witnessed an interrogation. The three minutes seemed to drag interminably. Lon found himself clenching his teeth and had to force himself to relax. He glanced to his left. Crampton was fidgeting visibly, crossing and uncrossing his legs, waiting for the questioning to begin.

  Three minutes. Torry Berger leaned over the bed, until his face was eight inches above the face of the prisoner. “Tell me your name,” Berger said, loud enough to make certain that he got the drugged prisoner’s attention immediately.

  The prisoner whispered something, too softly for Lon to hear, almost too softly for Berger. “Tell me again, louder,” the captain ordered.

  “Coffee. Brind Coffee.”

  Name. Age. Place of birth. Berger started the questioning gently, staying with personal questions, getting Coffee used to answering, weakening any mental reluctance, assisting the drugs.

  Brind Coffee. Twenty-four years old. Calgary, North American Union, Earth.

  He had worked for the Colonial Mining Cartel less than three years. Trained first as a security guard in West Africa, which included coursework on how to recognize and evaluate samples of minerals and metals. Selected then for additional training. Military training. Transferred to a permanent paramilitary unit; used to help put down a riot in a deep-water mining habitat; sent off-world then. The unit spent six months protecting a mine on Gardner. The unit was given two additional months of training, on the same world. Then they received orders to move again. They were not told the name of the world until after they landed.

  Gradually Coffee’s answers became less reticent, more coherent, plainer. Lon worked hard to conceal his impatience. He knew the reason for the lengthy prologue. It helped to have the subject used to answering questions like this, reliving his life, speaking of the routine, the common, the familiar. It helped to further submerge any notion of resistance once the important questions were put to him.

  Thirty minutes into the session, Carvel replaced the patches on Coffee’s neck. Berger was silent during that procedure, and while Carvel waited to check the gauges. It wasn’t until the medtech nodded that Berger resumed his questioning.

  Berger asked Coffee about his arrival on Bancroft, details of landing, setting up camp, and about the men with him. The questions were still not pointed, not directed toward anything that the mercenaries and their hosts could use. The ship that had brought Coffee and his comrades—“How many?” “Six hundred”—had parked in synchronous orbit on the far side of the world from the settled regions. The landers had operated only when it was dark on the colony side of the world, taking detachments in each night, needing nearly a wee
k to get everyone to the ground with their supplies—“And picking up the stuff that the first company had collected since they’d been here.”

  Gradually Berger worked the more important questions in. Coffee wasn’t certain how many troops the CMC had sent to Bancroft altogether. Six-hundred-odd in his ship. Fewer than that before. Each time a ship had come to take off the “goods” they had collected, a few more men were left behind—replacements and reinforcements. Coffee guessed that there might be more than a thousand of them now, even allowing for the casualties he knew about. They were not all stationed in the same place. He wasn’t certain how many camps there were. He didn’t know exactly where any of them were, not even his own, just that it was a system of caves, somewhere away from any of the settlements. They always moved out at night, marching to a clearing not too far from the cave. A shuttle picked them up, took them near their objective, and brought them back after they had finished.

  Wes Crampton groaned softly. Lon frowned at him, but Coffee gave no indication that he had heard the sound.

  Berger worked around the problem. He asked Coffee to describe the scenery he could see from outside the cave where he was stationed. “Trees, hills, sky.” None of the men was allowed outside much during daylight hours, just a few on sentry duty. Coffee took his turns at that, but there was never much to see, certainly none of the enemy he was to watch for. He couldn’t say what kind of trees there were, just a mix, not unlike trees he might have seen on Earth. The hills—a line that the caves were in, another to the west, several miles away; he knew it was west because of the sun.

  There was another interruption in the questioning, another replacement of the med-patches. Sergeant Carvel gave Coffee a sip of water through a tube. Captain Berger moved out of the ring of light to get a longer drink himself. Fruit juice. He toweled the sweat from his face.

  Wes Crampton leaned close to Lon. “I don’t think we’re going to get much more here,” he whispered.

  “Maybe not,” Lon replied, “but we’ve got to go the whole route before we work on the other man. Tomorrow morning. There’s no way to do it all tonight.”

  “Different people working the second man?” Crampton suggested.

  “Best to let the same team do both. And these are the best I’ve got.”

  “We got more than I expected,” Lon told Crampton after the session with Brind Coffee was over. They had returned to Lon’s office. Someone had provided a pitcher of cold beer and two steins. Lon poured for both of them.

  “What do you mean? We didn’t get anything useful,” Crampton complained as he reached for his glass. “Not one bleeding clue to where their camp—camps—are.”

  “We know they have more than one camp. We have a better estimate of their total numbers than before. We know that one group at least, of about six hundred men, is living in a cave system, and that there’s a clearing large enough for a shuttle close enough that the raiders can get from cave to clearing in an hour or less. We know they’re using those little shuttles extensively, and no matter how good the stealth technology they have, we’ll find a way to get around it.”

  Crampton shook his head. “I know you warned me not to expect much, but I thought we’d get something useful.”

  “We did.” Lon held back a sigh. There was obviously going to be no pleasing Crampton. “We just didn’t get an instant fix. In the morning we’ll question the second man. We probably won’t get anything startling from him either, but by comparing what the two men say, we might come a little closer to building our picture of raider operations.”

  “The governor isn’t going to be very happy with tonight,” Crampton said. He seemed to be talking more to himself than to Lon, so Lon didn’t bother to answer. A few minutes later, Crampton excused himself and left. He still had to visit Government House before he could go to bed.

  Phip Steesen came into the office as soon as Colonel Crampton had left. “You look all done in,” Phip observed as he crossed to where Lon was sitting.

  “I am. Help me with this beer. I hate to see it wasted.”

  Phip refilled the stein that Crampton had used, then took a long drink and smacked his lips in appreciation. “Major Osterman said there wasn’t a whole lot in what the first prisoner said.”

  “Nothing we can use to mount an operation,” Lon said.

  “It was all recorded in CIC,” Phip said. “The computers and analysts will be through it backwards and sideways by morning.”

  “We have a little more for the search,” Lon said, yawning. “The physical description of what the man could see outside the cave. It’s not much—a large cave system in a hill. Fairly broad valley to the west. Landing strip within a few miles.”

  “Seems to me we’re not going to be able to do anything major unless CIC figures a way to track the shuttles the raiders use,” Phip said. “Unless we manage to flush a group and follow them to their lair, the way we did the last time we were here.”

  Lon snorted. “If what Coffee said about how his group was moved for raids holds for the rest of their force, we won’t do that. All we could do is track them to where they’re supposed to be picked up by a shuttle after a raid. My guess is the raiders would abandon a detachment rather than risk having us get a shuttle or follow it to wherever it’s going. Even if we manage to catch and wipe out every raiding party, it’s not going to be a quick job. If they’ve got a thousand or more men here, it might take forty or fifty operations to get them all.”

  “And take a lot more than the three months this job is supposed to last,” Phip said.

  “We need a break.” Lon pushed his beer mug away. “And I need to get some sleep. My head is starting to spin, and I haven’t drunk enough of this to account for it.”

  For a time, getting into bed was too much of a chore to contemplate. Lon sat on the edge of it, arms resting on thighs, waiting to gather the energy to undress and slip between the sheets. Again. Over a period of several minutes, his only motion came when he yawned.

  We need a break, he thought. Something. The job was supposed to be simple. Find the raiders and close them down, using whatever force might be needed. He had not suspected that finding the raiders would be so difficult. We came prepared…for the last fight. Like so many other armies in the past.

  Lon got one boot off, then rested before attempting to remove the other. I didn’t make it all the way last night, he remembered. Slept in his clothes. Didn’t have a chance to shower and change until after the action was over at Erskeine.

  He didn’t remember getting the second boot off, didn’t recall lying down. When his complink beeped to announce an urgent message, three hours later, the room lights were still on.

  Captain Eldon Roim of Long Snake was on the link.

  “An unidentified ship just emerged from Q-space,” Roim announced when Lon clicked the accept key on his complink. “At its current speed, it’s seventy-four hours from Bancroft. It’s not broadcasting any standard ID codes.”

  “Have you challenged it?” Lon asked.

  “I wanted to check with you first, Colonel.”

  “Do it,” Lon said. “What kind of ship is it—civilian transport or military?”

  “The profile we’ve picked up doesn’t match any known military craft, but it’s not a standard civilian transport either, none that I’ve come across.”

  “Will Taranto be able to intercept if it’s hostile?”

  “If they keep coming in, yes. But if they decide to make a run for it right away, probably not.”

  “Have Taranto start moving now,” Lon said. “Give us all the leeway we can get.”

  “That will leave you without fighter cover, or just with the Shrikes on patrol now, if Taranto doesn’t wait to recover them.”

  Lon’s hesitation was minimal. “Have the Shrikes on patrol now land at Lincoln’s spaceport when it’s time. We’ll service them on the ground and make do until Taranto gets back in position. If that ship is connected to the raiders, I want it disabled or destroyed.�
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  “I’ll pass the orders on,” Roim said.

  “And keep me posted. This might be a major break for us.” Despite exhaustion, Lon had difficulty getting back to sleep.

  18

  It scarcely mattered that Lon was wakened again before reveille. He had slept only fitfully after being wakened the first time. Within ten minutes, he knew there would be no third try. He was up to stay.

  The call that woke Lon was from Colonel Crampton. “The raiders have hit a dry hole, a mining camp known as Damron’s Scar, due east of here, on the last ridge of hills before the coastal plain. The miners, garrison, and everything they had processed was lifted out yesterday. I’ve got two companies on the way. Maybe we can catch this batch.”

  “I’ll get my alert company out as well,” Lon said. “At least we don’t have to worry about civilians on the ground.”

  When Lon made the call to send the alert company, he learned that the two Shrike fighters that had been patrolling when he sent Taranto to try to intercept the incoming ship had landed twenty minutes before, for refueling. The pilots were in the spaceport terminal, looking for a place to bed down for a few hours. That had to wait. Lon ordered them back up, as soon as their fighters could be readied.

  Two minutes later, Colonel Crampton was back on the link. “Another raid, this one at Long Glen, forty miles northwest of here. They just hit. Colonel, Long Glen is a big village, maybe five hundred people live there—families. I’m diverting the shuttles I had going to Damron’s Scar and getting another company ready to move as quickly as the men can get to their shuttles. We have to protect those people.”

  “I’ll divert our alert company as well,” Lon said. “Get the next company out. Send them to Damron’s Scar. We can’t let the raiders think they can overwhelm us by hitting more than one place at a time.”

  By the time Lon finished issuing those orders, Captain Roim was waiting to talk with him.