by Rick Shelley
Gloomy thoughts had often plagued Lon before action. After two decades as a professional soldier there was still a part of his mind that recoiled at what combat offered—threatened—promised—fear, injury, death. Why would anyone risk that? Duty. Dedication. Patriotism. The men of the DMC might be mercenaries, but serving in the Corps was still an act of service to their world. Soldiers and military matériel were the stock in trade of Dirigent. It did not have significant deposits of rare metals and minerals to offer. At times it had to import the products of better-endowed planets. Like Bancroft. Without the Corps and the munitions industry that had grown up beside it, Dirigent would still be an agricultural world, a small colony with perhaps no more than 10 percent of its current population—vulnerable, prey to any predator that came around.
With all that, how can I possibly keep Junior from joining the Corps when he’s old enough? Lon wondered, and the intrusion of that old worry shook him from his morose meandering. Colonel Crampton had a son as well, and the younger Crampton was clearly following in his father’s professional footsteps.
There’s no reason to think this will go that badly, Lon told himself. We’ve got the manpower and heavy weapons overhead. Even if we were outnumbered, we ought to be able to hold our own.
Delta arrived. Lon told Captain Magnusson to give his men fifteen minutes to rest and eat before moving down the western side of the hill to join Bravo Company for the push. Then Lon alerted Colonel Crampton and all of the company commanders in the combined force that they would be beginning their push in forty-five minutes. Lon ate a quick meal himself, forcing the food in. His mouth was dry. The food needed a lot of water to wash it down. There was nothing novel in that, either. The best food in the galaxy would have been hard to eat just then.
Lon took the magazine from his rifle, jacked the cartridge out of the chamber, and looked down the barrel to make sure it wasn’t plugged—an inspection instigated by nerves. He put a full magazine in and ran the rifle’s bolt to put a shell back into the firing chamber, then looked to make certain the rifle’s safety was on. He took his pistol from its holster and ran a similar check. The handgun’s magazine was full, so he merely put it back in. He was ready.
Twenty-five minutes remained before his force started trying to close the horns around the raiders in the valley.
Ten minutes before the designated time, Lon’s palms were sweating enough to annoy him. He wiped them on his trouser legs. Although he would remain in place, far from the greatest danger, he was at least as nervous as he would have been had he been in the spearhead, walking point toward an expected ambush.
The patrols he had sent out earlier had pinpointed the location of several small raider groups, but nothing that looked as if it might be the main body. “Looks like they left outposts,” Tebba said when he passed the reports to Lon. Girana was acting as Lon’s second-in-command in the field. “No more than a squad each place, with snoops and mines planted to give them warning of anyone approaching. We were lucky not to trip any of the mines.”
“What about their snoops?” Lon asked. “Our patrols give themselves away?”
Tebba was too far away for Lon to see him shrug. “Probably, but we didn’t pick up any emissions from the snoops our patrols spotted.”
“If we get a chance to do it safely later, I want one or two of those snoops,” Lon said. “Give the labs back home something to play with. Maybe they can pick up something to improve our gear.” “Safely” was the key word. A man couldn’t simply pluck an enemy snoop from the ground and stick it in his pack. The odds were at least even that it would be booby-trapped.
“I want those outposts targeted,” Lon said. “We drop a couple of grenades on top of each of them right as we kick off the operation.”
“Already coordinated that, on both ends, Lon,” Tebba said.
Lon changed channels to speak with Colonel Crampton. “Sixty seconds, Colonel. Your men ready to move?” “Ready.”
Again, Lon switched channels to connect to all of his company commanders. He was watching the timeline on his visor’s head-up display. “Thirty seconds.”
When those seconds had elapsed, Lon’s order went to Colonel Crampton and all of the company commanders in both units: “Go!”
• • •
From Lon’s position, there was no immediate sign of movement. It might take several minutes before he would see blips moving on his mapboard or on the overlay of position blips he could cycle onto his head-up display. The first clear indications he had of action were the sounds of grenade launchers firing RPGs, and the whistles of the projectiles as they arced toward their targets. The explosions came in a tightly grouped series of explosions—the flash of blasts, the noise of detonation, the ripping of shrapnel, occasionally the cracking of a tree limb, small clouds of whitish smoke. A second volley of grenades sounded more ragged. The explosions were not as closely spaced as the first.
Scattered gunshots—the heavier-caliber weapons that the raiders used—sounded. The reply sounded uncoordinated, and there were not many shots.
Lon shook his head as he scanned the valley. I’ve got a feeling most of them pulled out, he thought, that they just left enough men behind to keep us occupied. If they hit somewhere else tonight while I’ve got all my men and a third of the militia tied up here, we could have trouble responding quickly enough. He had discussed that possibility with Colonel Crampton before committing so many men to this operation, and Crampton had been even more convinced than Lon that they had to do it.
“Looks like the best chance we’ve had to do a significant number of the bastards” was how Crampton had put it.
Lon heard the deeper explosion of a land mine to the south. A militia squad had tripped it, though it was nearly five minutes later before Corporal Howell could relay details to Lon. Three men had been killed and five wounded by the blast. That squad and several medics stayed where they were while the next squad took over the point and kept moving—a little more slowly, far more cautiously.
On the north, the advance stopped for two minutes while the point squad used hand grenades to trip a mine they had spotted. It took several attempts to set it off.
Flanking patrols on both sides ranged farther from the main advances, looking for any indication that the raiders had pulled out along the valley. They left electronic snoops every hundred yards or so to leave a warning system in place. Extra snoops had been among the supplies brought in by Bravo and Delta Companies.
Half an hour after the start of the advance, the leading company on the north came under fire—a barrage of RPGs accompanied by rifle fire that was intense for several minutes…and then ended completely as the raider patrol that had launched the attack disengaged. Casualties in Charlie Company were light, but two men were dead. The attack was enough to slow the advance. It was all too possible that the raiders would set up a second ambush.
Lon linked to Tebba Girana and Lieutenant Crampton. “Let’s start moving down the slope,” Lon said. “No rush. Make sure your men are paying attention to any holes that might lead into a cave system here. We find anything like that, we stay above it, make sure the raiders can’t come out behind us.”
One platoon from Alpha Company and one platoon from Lieutenant Crampton’s 2nd Company would remain near the ridgeline as a rear guard.
Lon’s knees felt stiff from lying almost motionless for so long. His first few steps were awkward, almost painful. He stumbled and slid, but Jeremy Howell was close enough to steady his boss. Lon nodded his thanks.
“You’re too close to me, Jerry. You forgotten everything about proper spacing?” Lon said, as gently as he could.
“Yes, sir, I guess I have,” Howell said, the tinted faceplate of his helmet masking his grin. He moved to the side a couple of paces, but before they had gone ten yards, he had cut that separation in half. Lon noticed but said nothing.
Halfway down the slope, Lon halted the movement of his men to allow the militia company to catch up. The lower half of
the hill was more thickly wooded, with taller, thicker trees and fuller greenery. The line was still above the valley canopy, but looking out through trunks and foliage around them. With limbs and leaves overhead, the temperature felt several degrees cooler—a relief after lying in the sun for so many hours.
It took 2nd Company five minutes to get back into position. Lon told Tebba to slow Alpha’s pace as they started moving again. The two companies had descended only another twenty yards before Tebba signaled that his men had found a concealed opening, and Lon halted both companies. They were still slightly above the forest canopy of the valley floor.
“We’ll set up our line here,” Lon told Tebba and Wilson Crampton. “Above that opening, and give it some room. Looks like we’ve got more soil to work with, so have the men dig in as well as they can.”
“You want us to investigate that opening?” Tebba asked after switching channels to talk privately with Lon.
“We’re not sending anyone inside,” Lon said quickly. “Not while we’ve got the rest of this to worry about. Have your men hang a snoop into the entrance if they can do it without exposing themselves. And set up a couple of command-detonated mines in case we have to deal with a sortie from that opening.”
“I’m going to move over to where they found the opening and have a look for myself,” Tebba said. “And you don’t have to tell me to be careful. I’m not going to stick anything out to get shot off.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll tell you anyway. Be careful. You do want to retire in one piece when the time comes.” Inescapably, Lon toyed with the idea of going to have a look at the hole in the hill himself, but common sense held him where he was. That sort of operation was no longer his business. He had more than fourteen hundred men to worry about—his own battalion and Colonel Crampton’s militiamen.
The sun was low enough in the west to shoot beams under the trees on the hillside. Bright sunlight and deepening shadows, extreme contrasts that taxed the ability of helmet optics to resolve satisfactorily. Lon found himself minimizing the polarity of his faceplate so that the shadows could hide nothing, then squinting against the sun.
Lon was still waiting for a report on the hole when Captain Roim called from Long Snake: “That unidentified ship has altered course again and it’s accelerating—it looks like full out. It’s either going to use Bancroft to slingshot it out of the system, or it’s going in close to launch shuttles or fighters. If it holds course, it’ll come within one hundred and fifty miles of the surface at its closest approach—four hundred miles southwest of your location—in a little more than three hours.”
“Is either Long Snake or Taranto in position to intercept?” Lon asked.
“Beamers and missiles, at far more than optimal range. If that ship has a hardened skin, the way ours do, our weapons probably won’t be enough to stop it. Taranto can’t get Shrikes close enough to do the job either—not before that ship reaches the likely launch point, if that’s what it intends.”
“What about the Shrikes we’ve got down here? Can they get up to intercept?” Lon asked.
“Wrong munitions load,” Roim said, so quickly that he had to have considered the possibility before. “The missiles they’re carrying aren’t designed for antiship use. They’re carrying ground-support warheads.”
“They could deal with shuttles, if that’s what the ship launches,” Lon said. “Keep them from getting down here to cause us grief.”
“Taranto is set to launch Shrikes to intercept anything that ship drops,” Roim said. “If necessary, Taranto can put eight Shrikes out, though that might short you on cover later. It’s your call, Colonel.”
“I’m not going to overrule the experts, Captain,” Lon said. “We’ll do it the way you laid it out. Maybe you’ll get lucky and cripple that ship.”
“At least we should be able to keep it from crippling us, Colonel,” Roim said. “She doesn’t show any obvious armament, and if we’re too far away to be certain of hurting her, there’s even less chance for her to hurt us.”
“We’ve got that hole ringed and ready to plug, Lon,” Tebba reported several minutes later. “It does look like a cave. I inspected it through the snoop’s optics and couldn’t see how far it goes. The opening is large enough for two men to go through standing up. Then the hole slopes down and to the south.”
“I don’t want it plugged, except in an emergency, Tebba. Just as long as we can slam anyone trying to come out hard.”
“We’ve got two mines in place, and several extras close enough to stop a second or third attempt.”
“Good enough.” Lon told Tebba about the extra ship coming toward them. “My guess is they’re going to launch reinforcements—either troops or aerospace fighters.”
“How large is that ship?” Tebba asked. “What’s the most trouble they might be able to throw at us?”
“CIC says maybe four hundred men if they’ve got them packed in,” Lon said. “That’s just a guess, though. They still haven’t matched it against any known types.”
“They check that database you brought back from Earth?” Tebba asked.
“I’m sure they did. It’s in the computer.”
• • •
It was three hours past sunset before the ring was complete. There had been nothing more than scattered skirmishes during the movement of mercenaries and militiamen. They had not encountered any opposition larger than squad strength. Nor had anyone seen evidence that there might be several hundred of the enemy inside the extended perimeter.
“I know we have to check it out,” Brock Carlin said during a conference that included the two colonels and all of the company commanders, “but the feeling I have is that we’ve got a lot of nothing. The raiders must have pulled out early.”
“Don’t let that feeling make you careless, Brock,” Lon said. “We’ll pull the perimeter in the way we planned, but move as if you knew there was a battalion of soldiers in there somewhere, with mines and booby traps every step of the way. We know these raiders have planted some of those.
“We leave half the men in position, watching in and out,” Lon continued. “Move the rest in slowly, toward the ridge. I don’t want anyone rushing this. We’ll take all the time we need to do the job right. Mines, booby traps, snoops. There might even be snipers left, or cave entrances. Those don’t have to be in the side of the hill. They could be anywhere, a small hole in the ground leading down to maybe an intricate system of caves. Check everything!”
“When do we start?” Colonel Crampton asked.
Lon hesitated. “Some of the men have been on the go for nearly twenty-four hours. Much as I want to get this operation finished, we’ve got to let everyone get some rest. We put the men on half-and-half watches, and bed down until dawn—unless the raiders decide not to let us take that much time.”
Lon was surprised that the night did pass without major incident. There were only a couple of shots fired by snipers well outside the perimeter. No one was hit. Most of the men managed to get at least some sleep during the night. Even Lon got a couple of hours.
24
Lon did not get nearly as much sleep as he had hoped. He had been wakened by news of the strange ship in the system. The plan to intercept it, or any shuttles or fighters it might launch, had failed. “I don’t know whether that ship’s captain is a genius or a suicidal fool,” Captain Eldon Roim said when he gave Lon the news. “Maybe he’s a little of each.”
The ship had made several more course corrections, aiming closer to the edge of Bancroft’s atmosphere, and had continued accelerating, long past the time when the computers in the Dirigenter ships said it would have to start braking or change course to avoid going too close to the planet—to avoid being burned up in the atmosphere like a meteorite. The ship had launched six of the small attack shuttles the Dirigenters had seen before forty minutes sooner than CIC expected, so the plan to intercept them became impossible. The ship itself—its skin glowing red from heat friction in the thin upper atmosphere—had
come to within forty miles of Bancroft’s surface, still accelerating, before its speed and course carried it out of range of the DMC ships and Shrikes.
“Our computers went haywire over the data,” Roim said. “By every standard I know, that ship should have broken up or burned.”
“Forty miles, that’s still pretty high, isn’t it?” Lon asked. “I mean, there’s not a hell of a lot of air that far above the surface. Even twenty miles up you’re basically talking a pretty damned good vacuum. There’s certainly not enough air to breathe. Why not take a ship that close?”
“That ship was traveling forty thousand miles an hour when it got that low, sixty percent above escape velocity,” Roim said, his voice rising in what sounded like complete indignation. “There are still enough molecules at forty miles to do major damage to an object that large moving that fast, more damage than I could expect a full salvo of every energy weapon aboard our three ships to do.”
“So he did something we couldn’t do…or wouldn’t attempt,” Lon said. “What’s the ship doing right now?”
“It has stopped accelerating,” Roim said after a slight pause. “It even appears to be decelerating slightly, now that it’s safely out of our reach.”
“What about the shuttles it launched? Were you able to track them to where they landed?”
Roim’s hesitation was considerably longer this time. “We weren’t able to track them all the way in,” he admitted. “A combination of factors—the early launch point, the course the shuttles took, electronic countermeasures used by both ship and shuttles. Damn it, Colonel, we just weren’t ready for what they did. That’s the up and the down of it. They caught us with our pants down.”
“It happens,” Lon said. “We’ll just have to deal with it.”
“On the plus side, Colonel, we are making progress with our analysis of the raiders’ stealth technology. The lab got its best clue from the captured helmets you sent up. They use white-noise generators to cancel out electronic emissions. The algorithm appears to be orders of magnitude better than what we can manage—and that’s just from empirical testing. We haven’t been able to crack the code yet and may never be able to. Assuming that the same basic technology is used in their shuttles, that minimal static we’ve been able to detect on some occasions is the extent of the lag between emissions and blanketing, or some slight imperfection in the implementation of the technology. With helmet electronics the lag is too small for us to find it at any distance. Your men have had to be, what, within fifty yards to catch any of it? Ten years ago we wouldn’t have been able to detect as much as we can now. Ten years from now we might be able to do better. I don’t suppose there’s enough left of the two shuttles you destroyed to give us much help.”