War To The Knife

by Grant, Peter

  March 31st 2850 GSC, 00:00

  CARISTO: ON THE HILLSIDE ABOVE THE GARRISON

  Dave pulled the command headset over his eyes, and blinked at the sudden visual overload. A schematic of the garrison buildings was laid out before him, transmitted from the sensors of the hoversat they’d launched to fly directly overhead. Icons showed the position of each member of the attacking unit, and each building was labeled with its purpose, size, and the number of people it was supposed to contain.

  “Damn, this is a useful little toy!” he whispered to Sergeant Hein beside him. “I wish I’d had it available for some previous operations. Now I understand why some of our ambushes failed, if the Bactrians were using this sort of thing against us.”

  “Is everyone safely tucked up in bed, Sir?” Hein asked. The NCO and Corporal Bujold had stuck to him like glue during the approach, and accompanied him to the overwatch position without bothering to ask for permission or approval. Dave knew they were quite prepared to ‘sit on his chest’, as the Sergeant-Major had put it, and make him behave if they had to.

  “Everyone except those in the guardroom and whoever’s in the Captain’s office – its light is on, but with the blinds closed I can’t see who’s inside. Let me check the outlying areas.” Dave expanded the area of surveillance. The hoversat’s sensors scanned the entire area within the fence surrounding the base, but showed no sources of body heat or movement. “Looks like nobody’s out and about,” he confirmed.

  Hein observed, “Now that their Captain’s gone, taking the best troops with him – not that that’s saying much, mind you – most of the others are probably drunk.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Corporal Bujold whispered from Dave’s far side. “In a way I guess they’re lucky. Hangovers usually make me feel as if I want to die. They’re going to experience the reality before the feeling can set in!” Dave and Hein snorted in subdued amusement.

  As the time display in the headset ticked down the minutes, Dave watched the icons representing his assault team. They’d spread out to their assigned positions smoothly and silently. He knew that Sergeant-Major Deacon would initiate the attack on schedule, and all he had to do was sit back and watch; but he couldn’t help feeling – irrationally, he knew – as if he were somehow letting his people down by not being there with them.

  ~ ~ ~

  TAPURIA: COMMAND BUNKER

  Lieutenant Yazata replaced the comm handset with a grimace of distaste as she turned to the Major in command of the evening watch. “Caristo has nothing to report, Sir.”

  “Very well. You seem unhappy about something?”

  “I think the Sergeant-Major to whom I spoke had been drinking, Sir.”

  He shrugged. “Hardly surprising in a punishment posting like that. Caristo was the last one, right?”

  “Yes, Sir. None of our outlying garrisons have seen any sign of increased rebel activity.”

  “Good.” The man’s voice was brusque. She knew he resented her running the Military Governor’s errands, thereby denying him the opportunity to report directly to his boss and be noticed, but he had the good sense to keep his feelings under control. “Does the General want us to obtain further updates during the night?”

  “No, Sir. This was just a precautionary check. The General wanted to be sure there was no rebel activity that might indicate an attack. He still thinks they might try something to take attention away from tomorrow morning’s parade.”

  The Watch Commander shrugged as he glanced around the Operations Center. “They can’t have more than a couple of hundred people left, scattered all over the continent. We’ve captured or destroyed most of their heavy weapons. What sort of credible attack could they possibly mount?”

  “I don’t know, Sir,” she said neutrally. “I’ll tell the General all’s well.”

  She found her boss rising from his desk as he switched off his terminal display. “All’s quiet, Sir. No sign of rebel activity.”

  “Thank you for checking.” He stretched, a bone-creaking release of the day’s tension. “I’ll be glad when this is all over. I wonder how the Satrap is enjoying his new palace?”

  She smiled. They’d both watched the feed from the sensors installed throughout the building to guard against rebel infiltrators. They had shown the Satrap and the Crown Prince enjoying an opulent meal.

  “I wonder if we could conscript the Satrap’s cooks for duty with your Headquarters, Sir?” she asked mischievously.

  He snorted with amusement. “Do please make sure you don’t repeat that where the Satrap can hear it. I’d hate to lose the services of so efficient an officer due to a charge of lèse-majesté.” He winked at her.

  She solemnly returned it. “Does the General require any further assistance?”

  “No, I think I’ll try to get a few hours’ sleep before the big day. I suggest you do the same.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  ~ ~ ~

  CARISTO: GARRISON

  Sergeant-Major Garnati scratched at his stubbly jowls as he replaced the handset. Damn that interfering busybody Lieutenant! he thought resentfully as he rose from the heavily cushioned chair. Who the hell does she think she is, taking senior NCO’s away from a well-earned bottle at the end of the busiest month they’ve ever experienced, just to find out that nothing’s going on as usual? Paranoid bitch!

  He lurched towards the door opening onto the walkway in front of the administration building, already unsteady on his feet from the half-bottle of moonshine he’d consumed before being summoned urgently to the Captain’s office to take the call from Tapuria. His glance fell on the glass-fronted liquor cabinet, and his eyes suddenly gleamed. His new boss might be an asshole, but his family was rich enough that he could afford to indulge in the finest food and drink. He’d brought a lot from Tapuria, along with his own private chef, waiter and valet – all of whom he’d taken back to the city with him for the parade.

  Garnati bent, opened the doors and pawed through the serried ranks, muttering to himself as he read the labels. He straightened with an ornately fluted crystal bottle in his hand. “Huh! ‘Satrap’s Private Reserve, matured in the cask for 20 years’. Well, I’ll be damned! This ought to give me the most expensive hangover I’ve ever had!”

  He stripped the foil from the neck and used the Captain’s silver corkscrew to roughly, impatiently yank out the stopper, hands shaking with sudden need. He put the bottle to his lips and upended it. A trickle of brown liquid flowed from the corner of his mouth and ran over his chin and down his neck as he swallowed, head tilted back, eyes closed in ecstasy.

  “Damn, that’s good stuff! Beats the local firewater all to hell!” He lifted the bottle mockingly to the empty chair behind the Captain’s desk. “I’ll be sure to drink a toast to you with the last mouthful, you pompous pimp! I reckon you’d have been pissed if you’d seen my non-commissioned ass sitting in your princely chair just now. Better be careful – it might give you boils!”

  Chuckling semi-drunkenly to himself, he fumbled at the door of the office, swung it open, and stepped onto the walkway outside. He frowned as he saw four dark figures crouched around the door of the guardroom, further down the building.

  “Hey, you! What – ”

  ~ ~ ~

  CARISTO: ON THE HILLSIDE ABOVE THE GARRISON

  Dave’s heart lurched in his chest as the door to the Captain’s office swung open and the familiar figure of Sergeant-Major Garnati stepped down onto the walkway. He swung towards the guardroom where four members of the assault party crouched, ready to burst through its door. Dave couldn’t hear any words from this far away, but he saw one of the assault team spin around. The whip-like crack of a shot echoed across the garrison compound and up the hillside. Garnati’s head snapped back and his body crumpled bonelessly to the walkway.

  Over the radio Dave heard Sergeant-Major Deacon’s voice. “Go-go-go!” His well-trained, experienced assault teams didn’t turn a hair at the unexpectedly early signal. They burst through the doors at w
hich they’d been stationed, turning their weapons on the bleary-eyed, fumbling, sleep-dulled members of the garrison. Several more alert individuals scrabbled for their weapons, but only a few were able to reach them and only one managed to fire a shot before they were all cut down.

  Dave ignored the barracks, all his attention on the guardroom. The duty watch was supposed to remain awake and alert, but he knew that after a month of unexpectedly rigorous drill and inspections they were more likely than not to be as drunk as their comrades on liberty. He fervently prayed, Please, God, don’t let them get to the alarm button! It was on a direct circuit to the Bactrian operations center in Banka, and was the only means of communication Sergeant Dixon could not suppress. His heart leapt into his mouth as the four-member assault team burst through the guardroom door, and pounded unmercifully as shots sounded from within.

  Almost immediately a voice came over the circuit. “Guardroom secure, no alarm sounded, no casualties.” It was followed by the other teams in sequence, as they’d trained.

  “Barrack One secure, no casualties.”

  “Barrack Two secure, no casualties.”

  “Barrack Three secure, one casualty, need corpsman ASAP.”

  “Barrack Four secure, no casualties.”

  “Gatehouse secure, no casualties.”

  Sergeant-Major Deacon replied, “All teams check enemy dead. Corpsman to Barrack Three. Come on in, Captain.”

  “On my way,” Dave replied, then ripped off the headset, blinking as his eyes were suddenly deprived of the light sources to which they’d become accustomed. He hurriedly put on his helmet, activating its visor’s night vision mode that gave him a hundred-and-forty-degree field of view almost as clear as daylight, and seized his rifle. “Come on, Sergeant, Corporal, let’s go!”

  ~ ~ ~

  CARISTO: GARRISON

  “Who is it?” Dave asked as he burst through the door of Barrack Three.

  “It’s Todd,” Jaime said, his voice filled with worry. “One of those bastards must have been awake in his bed. He bounced up, grabbed his carbine and got off a wild shot before we could nail him. It ricocheted off that bunk stanchion there,” he pointed with the barrel of his weapon, “and hit Todd’s inner thigh below his protective gear. He’s bleeding real bad.”

  Dave looked down at the medic kneeling in a pool of gore on the floor, struggling to save Todd’s life. He knew better than to disturb him with pointless questions at a time like this. Judging from the amount of blood and its rich red color, the round had punctured Todd’s femoral artery. His eyes were closed, his face a ghastly pallor, his breathing rapid and shallow.

  “Keep me posted. I’ve got to check the rest of the base.”

  “Will do.”

  Dave turned on his heel and left, whispering a a soft but heartfelt curse. Todd had been in his basic training class as a fellow recruit. He’d moved up steadily through the NCO ranks, even as Dave had progressed to a commission and ultimately command of a rump company. It hurt to see a comrade-in-arms of such long standing fighting for his life… but it was hardly the first time he’d experienced that.

  He quickly checked the other barracks, finding all in order, and ended up outside the guardroom. He was puzzled to see a bottle lying on the Bactrian Sergeant-Major’s chest. Its contents had gurgled out all over his torso. “Guess you were the first to die in this operation, Sergeant-Major,” he said in a conversational tone as he picked up the bottle and sniffed at its neck. His eyes widened at the tantalizing aroma of top-quality liquor as he read the label. “Where did you find this? I’ve only known you to drink rotgut before.” He looked through the open door of the office, and immediately spotted the still-open liquor cabinet. “Stole it from your new boss, did you? Well, if he survives tomorrow he’ll just have to find something else in which to drown his sorrows. I hope he’ll have plenty to drown!”

  “Talking to the dead, Sir? They say that’s a bad sign,” Sergeant-Major Deacon called from the guardroom, chuckling.

  “It probably is,” Dave agreed as he set the lock and closed the office door. No sense in leaving an open liquor cabinet in plain sight, he thought to himself. I want my people sober!

  “Is everything OK on your end, Sergeant-Major?” he asked as he entered the guardroom.

  “Yes, Sir. I’ve just called the airvans to move in. They’ll be landing next to the hangar in five minutes.”

  “Then we’d better get over there and have the doors open ready for them. We’re going to be busier than all get-out for the next few hours.”

  They were pushing back the last leaf of the second door when two airvans whispered out of the night and touched down on the hardstand. Their doors opened and the pilots and WSO’s emerged. Three of them began unloading the strike team’s field packs and other gear, while Tamsin came over to Dave.

  “All OK?” she asked with a smile.

  “Yes, but Todd took a bad hit. The medic’s working on him now.”

  “Damn!” Her face fell for a moment until she visibly collected herself, bracing her shoulders back. “Let’s check out the armory.”

  He accompanied her into the armory that opened off the rear of the hangar. The Sergeant-Major had already unlocked it using the master key fob from the guardroom. She walked rapidly up and down the rows of weapons, pointing while Dave made mental notes.

  “I want eight of those four-missile racks for the shuttles going to Banka. Each of them can handle one under each stub wing – they’re in the hangar ready for installation. They’ve got multi-mode sensors and a decent-size warhead.”

  “All right. How many people do you need to prepare them?”

  “I trained two teams to insert the missiles’ batteries, run system checks and get them ready for mounting. I’ll need half a dozen more for the grunt work.” She indicated two powered carts with extended arms. “Those things will pick up two missiles at a time and carry them to the tech area over there. We’ll spend a few minutes preparing them, then load them onto the rack. As soon as a rack is filled it’ll be moved out to a shuttle and mounted. Working on two missiles at a time, we can probably mount three to four racks every hour if we move fast. While we’re doing that, other teams will refuel our old shuttles and restock them with any battle stores they need.”

  “OK. I’ll leave all that in your hands. Anything else?”

  She pointed to a stack of flat rectangular ordnance pods. “I’ll have another team filling four of those with a mix of sensor-fused munitions and anti-personnel fragmentation bombs. The pods don’t have to be mounted – the shuttles will pick them up from the ground using their tractor beams, and lock them in place beneath their bellies once they’re airborne and their wheels have retracted. There’s also the plasma cannon, of course.” She counted rapidly. “They’ve got twenty loaded ten-round magazines in stock. I’d have liked more, but beggars can’t be choosers. We have five for our two old shuttles, so that’ll give each shuttle going to Banka six mags, with one left over. I’ll snaffle that for our SS shuttle to replace the one we used in the Matopo Hills to bring down the hillside. We can’t use these missiles in space – they depend on aerodynamic forces for control, and there aren’t any in vacuum – so I’ll have to rely on the cannon if we need a weapon.”

  “Won’t we burn out the barrel if we fire too many rounds?”

  She snorted disdainfully. “We probably will. These single-barrel cannon are a lot less efficient than the tri-barrel units we had before the war. Unfortunately, all ours got burned out or destroyed long ago. We’ll just have to use a lower rate of fire unless things go critical, in which case to hell with the barrel!”

  “All right.”

  “First things first. I must check that these two birds are fully fueled and ready to go. I’ve got to get them out of here as soon as they’re armed so we can bring out the refueling gear for the other two. You get on with something else, love. I’m going to be too busy to talk to you for a while.”

  He squeezed her arm wordlessly, t
hen turned and walked out of the hangar. Already the others in the team were readying hoses to transfer reaction mass, opening boxes of ration packs to fill the shuttles’ lockers, and making sure everything they’d need was to hand.

  Jaime walked towards him, shoulders slumped, head down. His body language told Dave what he was going to say even before he spoke.

  “Todd… didn’t make it, Boss.”

  Dave hugged him gently. “I’m sorry, Jaime. I know how close you were.”

  There were tears in the man’s eyes. “All the way from basic training through three and a half years of war, and just about to retire and go into ranching together… and now this!”

  “Look at it this way. He’s the first of a whole lot of our people who’ll die today. He’ll be in very good company up there. Know what you can do to honor his memory? You and Rissa name your first boy for him, and raise him to be proud of the godfather he never knew.”

  Jaime raised his head and braced back his shoulders. “I… we’ll do that. Thanks, Boss. I almost lost it there for a moment.”

  “Just make sure you don’t lose it when little Todd poops all over you while you’re changing his diapers.”

  “Y’know, Boss, it’d be just like big Todd to inspire little Todd to do that!” He looked up at the night sky and shook his fist at the stars, the ghost of a smile on his face.

  March 31st 2850 GSC, 03:00

  TAPURIA: SERVICE TUNNEL

  Jake watched as Corporal Harper delicately inserted the narrow tip of a glass funnel into the hole he’d drilled at the top of the lock. He turned it until he was sure it rested on the parts he wanted to access, then reached for a bottle in the small container at his side. He carefully began pouring the liquid inside it into the funnel, a few drops at a time.

  “I suspect you’ve done this a time or two before,” Jake said in a soft whisper.

  “Yes, Sir. I used to be a thief before the Bactrians came. The authorities let me out of jail on my promise to fight. I’ve been stealing from the enemy ever since, every chance I got.”