Worlds of Honor

by David Weber

  Besides, it was time to haul her aching posterior and everybody else's out of the range of any fuel dump explosion, since it might no longer wait for the demolition charges. Peep air-to-ground equipment was usually marginal and their training worse; they could barely hit a building if they hovered over the skylight.

  "Move, move, move!" Ryder yelled. So did all the NCO's, then everybody in hearing took up the cry. She called to her radio operator to take over relaying data to Nautilus, because if the pinnace had to fight the tank it couldn't attack the ship, and the mortars and rockets might be able to hit the depot once the raiders were clear of it.

  Then it would be house-to-house fighting until they reached the open country or met the Royal Army, which had to be alerted and sending somebody besides Field Police to see what was going on. As long as the Royal Army wouldn't turn them over to Euvinophan's people, that would be coming out on top. Even if Euvinophan did catch up with them, his people might be slow to push home an attack, and the Royal Army might break up the fight before the raiders exhausted their ammunition.

  But damn it, we are taking everybody who can walk or be carried when we go!

  That was the Royal Marine tradition, but there was no harm in spreading the gospel to other peoples' forces.

  Then too much happened too fast. The pinnace came back, and Chung's turret-mounted launchers went to rapid, automatic fire, throwing out a stream of anti-laser grenades on the bearing to its airborne enemy. The cloud of aerosol hung between it and the Peeps, depriving the pinnace of the laser which was its sole light-speed weapon. The pinnace still had its pulsers, but the probability of a kill on a vehicle as heavily armored as the tank was poor, whereas the tanks' plasma cannon would blow right through the aerosol . . . and kill any pinnace ever built with a single clean hit.

  But whoever was piloting that pinnace knew what he was about. He came in fast and low, using the city's buildings to block Chung's line of fire on the approach. The Sea Fencibles' net of ground sensors told the Erewhonese colonel where the pinnace was, while the pinnace knew only the tank's approximate location. That meant the pilot would have to pop up and stay high long enough to acquire the tank. But the pinnace was vastly more maneuverable than the tank. It could dodge and weave on its approach, which meant Chung could bring his main armament to bear only on the general threat axis. He had to wait for direct observation before he could actually target his foe, while the pinnace carried missiles which could be launched even off-bore in fire-and-forget mode. If the pilot had long enough to lock Chung up at all, the missiles would do the rest whatever happened to the pinnace . . . unless the San Martin vehicle's point defense could stop modern, short-range, hyper-velocity missile fire, and that simply wasn't going to happen.

  Which meant it all came down to a crap shoot. Both combatants knew what they had to do, and what their enemy had to do, and roughly where to look for one another. The question of who would survive came down to how quickly each of them could generate a firing solution and get his shot off.

  All of that flashed through Shuna Ryder's mind in a flicker of an instant, and then the pinnace popped up and came screaming in on them, and Chung had laid his main armament almost perfectly. But the tank held its fire. It simply sat there, tracking the enemy without firing while eternities flashed by in the unbearable dragging of fractions of seconds until Ryder was screaming at her lover to shoot.

  Something in her mind screamed back that he was trying not to shoot down the pinnace in the city, where its crash would slaughter civilians.

  But then the pinnace spewed missiles—eight at least—from its ordnance racks. They plummeted at their target with accelerations that made their flight an eye-blink affair, and Chung no longer had the option of waiting.

  The missiles began hitting at the same moment the tank's turret gun slashed a melon-sized plasma charge into the root of the pinnace's right wing. The pinnace staggered once from the hit and a second time from the blast as the fuel dump erupted in a fireball a hundred meters high, then fell off on the shredded wing, fighting to stay in the air with all air-foil lift destroyed.

  It was still airborne when it passed the edge of town; then its counter-grav failed as well, and it crashed into the hillside, not far from where the second warning salvo had hit. The fuel and ammunition still aboard made another respectable fireball, but one harmless to anything except the landscape.

  Ryder forced herself up off her face, coughed to clear smoke and heat from her lungs, and looked at the nearer wreckage. Euvinophan's vehicle park and dump were completely enveloped in smoke where they weren't spewing flame. Bits of smoking debris made an ugly fringe around the area, and over the roar of the flames she could hear the satchel charges and ammunition cooking off.

  Hydrogen-enriched fuels are useful both for propelling armored fighting vehicles and for demolishing them. She reminded herself to include that in any book of tactical tips she ever had published by the Admiralty House Press.

  She saw no point in looking for Chung's tank. The playground had been well inside the fireball area. Even the ruins of the school were half-invisible, and the other half was thoroughly on fire.

  Please, God. Let the blast wave have killed him before he had time to burn alive.

  She was going to cry if she went on with thoughts like that, and she had more than a hundred of her people close enough to see her do it, which was bunching up too much if the bad guys had anything left—

  "Spread out, you damned sheep!" she yelled. "Tactical formations, now. This isn't over and it won't be a carnival even when it is!"

  The shriek of an incoming rocket made her whirl, with one ghastly moment of thinking second pinnace before she saw the Peep counterattack. It was StateSec and Navy people, with a handful of Euvinophan's greenies looking as if they were tagging along because they were too afraid to do anything else.

  The first rocket hit one of the scout cars, flinging it over on its side. The raiders' tribarrel had already been dismounted, though, and its crew was setting up. Now they dodged behind a half-ruined wall and returned fire.

  The com tech was dragging Ryder toward something she couldn't recognize but which looked solid. They ducked behind it just as a second rocket hit five meters to the major's right.

  Her rifle flew out of her hand. A rock smashed into her right cheek, and she sprawled out from behind cover. She was rolling back toward the com tech, who was huddled over his equipment, when a storm of solid rounds punched her all over, and a plasma pulse charge ripped at her legs.

  Suddenly the painkillers weren't working. Neither, it seemed, was shock. She hurt terribly in several places, tried to roll toward where her rifle had been without knowing what she was going to do when she reached it, but passed out from the pain before she rolled over more than twice.

  The last thing she thought she heard was mortar rounds, crashing down on top of the Peep counterattack.

  EIGHT

  Shuna Ryder decided that she was hurting too much to be dead, so she wasn't. When she tried to move, she hurt even more. She didn't quite keep silent, so all at once Chief Bexo was standing over her stretcher.

  "Good . . ." she said.

  "You ought to feel pretty awful," Bexo said in a flat voice.

  "I mean . . ." She had meant that it was good to see him alive and on duty, not that she felt at all good. She felt considerably worse than awful.

  Then she felt worse still, because Bexo and another SBA—a Sea Fencible—had to move her to treat her, and the pain won another victory over the drugs. This time she screamed.

  "We're all out," Bexo said, almost whispering, as if a loud voice would add to Ryder's pain. "Everybody we could find, even the dead. You're aboard Nautilus. We're going home."

  Nautilus? Wasn't there a famous submarine by that name? A long time ago, and back on Old Earth, maybe. This wasn't it. The deck was wood and smelled of fish. She smelled other things too. She vaguely remembered that they were sick bay smells.

  Well, if she hurt
this much, it only made sense for her to be in sick bay.

  She also remembered that it was a good place for catching up on your sleep.

  * * *

  Citizen Commissioner Testaniere's counterattack lasted through the second salvo from the puppet bombardment ship. At the first salvo, the Euvinophan soldiers fled. Some of them didn't abandon their weapons, though they all "abandoned the field," in the old phrase from elitist history books.

  "The ones who hung on to their rifles probably thought their chief was going to take it out of their pay," Citizen Sergeant Pescu muttered. He had half a dozen minor wounds and burns but looked ready to go on fighting all day.

  The Navy people held until a shell from the second salvo blew their CPO—whose name Testaniere wished he had learned—into bits. The same shell also wounded Citizen Sergeant Pescu in the stomach and both legs. His fight was over, and the last Field Police followed the Navy.

  At that point, Testaniere ordered a withdrawal out of range, leaving the bodies but bringing the wounded. The handful of surviving People's fighters had three vehicles. Perhaps they could reach open country, make contact with the incoming Euvinophan troops, and at least find a temporary sanctuary in the warlord's camp on the other side of the mountains.

  But the Royal Army was at last out in force, and the fugitives met the first roadblock before they'd gone two klicks. Testaniere signaled everyone else to stay in the vehicles, dismounted, and walked toward the roadblock with his hands open and empty. He would have waved the traditional white handkerchief, if everything he was wearing or carrying hadn't been black with soot and dirt.

  "I surrender, on condition of medical care for our wounded," he said.

  For a moment he thought the sergeant in command either didn't speak Standard English or was refusing the request.

  "We are combat soldiers of the People's Republic of Haven," he said. "We are entitled to honorable treatment. The Royal Army has suffered few losses today, but this might change if you do not accept our surrender."

  Several gun muzzles rose, but a first lieutenant stepped out of one of the vehicles and approached Testaniere. "Of course, we accept your surrender under those conditions." He pulled a radio from his belt and spoke rapidly in the Chuiban dialect Testaniere knew well enough to recognize as a call for medics.

  Then he stepped up to Testaniere, so that only the People's Commissioner could hear him. "Our treatment will be honorable even for you, but recall that when you return to your homeland, it may be otherwise."

  That was a large understatement, Testaniere thought. He was a dead man, and his family and friends might die with him, or at best see the inside of a prison or labor camp for more years than they could survive.

  Now the lieutenant was holding out his own sidearm, a solid-shot caseless-cartridge pistol, butt-first. "The honor you have shown to all here, and that we wish to show to you, allows a solution. I hope you are not too filled with `revolutionary consciousness' or any other such nonsense to have forgotten what it is."

  Testaniere decided not to force the lieutenant to do the shooting himself, which might make for bad relations between the Royal Army and the People's survivors. Instead he turned, saluted his fighters and the lieutenant, then walked fifty meters down the nearest alley before he put the pistol in his mouth.

  They'd pulled Fernando's body out of the burning tank. He looked dreadful, but he was alive and smiling. He even had the strength to reach into his breast pocket and pull out a small insulated packet.

  "Close to my heart, as I said it always would be when you weren't," he said. "But for now, you'd better take it. I don't want the medics staring at it."

  She understood then. It was his quite flattering tri-D shot of her, wearing what he'd called "recreational undress uniform." He was quite right about not letting it become public knowledge.

  She reached for the packet, but his hand fell back and the packet disappeared. Suddenly he was completely still, apparently unwounded but terribly pale. Too pale— she could see the grass (and why grass, in an industrial area?) through him.

  He was gone. She lifted a hand to wipe her eyes—nobody here to see her cry—and saw the grass through her own hand. She stood up, and could see it through her feet and legs, too.

  But she could still move them. Instead of wiping her eyes, she brought her hand up to the salute.

  A Marine officer always saluted the quarterdeck, coming aboard.

  All of Shuna Ryder's vital signs had flat-lined when Chief Bexo came back. He had suspected that she wouldn't be able to hear the news that the Royal Army was releasing Claymore Three, after fining them for trespass and malicious damage (three dead pigs). He hoped she'd heard the cheering when the news came in.

  Then he looked down at the visible portion of Ryder's face. It didn't exactly show a smile—too much pain, then too many drugs, for that. But it looked as though the last thing she'd heard had been something that took her attention off her mortal wounds for a little while.