by Jack Colrain
He heard a couple of shotgun blasts as the Hardcases made sure the fallen Gresian was out of the picture, and then the only sound remaining was the engine of the Super-Bradley. It stopped, and Bella Torres popped the hatches open. “Need a ride, folks?” she asked. They all chuckled with tired relief.
“Are we glad to see you,” Pipsqueak said.
Nineteen
Bella Torres floored the Super-Bradley’s accelerator and swung the vehicle northwards. “Think they’re following us?” she asked.
Daniel, watching from the APC’s turret, shook his head. “No, but then, they don’t need to.”
“Yeah,” Kinsella said. “Logically, they can communicate with any and every other settlement we might run into and alert them to be ready for us.” She pondered for a moment, and then said, “The martial skills of their military must have—”
“This wasn’t just their military,” Daniel thought aloud. “The gear of the ones who originally ambushed us was too varied. This was the whole local community.”
“If that’s true, then the whole damn community must have turned out to defend itself. I guess you have to admire that,” Kinsella pointed out, and Daniel glared at her. “Oh, come on, L-T, military folks have always been able to admire the skills of their opponents without implying support or sympathy for them.”
Daniel had to admit that was true.
“That’s hardly surprising, you know,” Lizzie said over the APC’s speakers. “Every Gresian joins the military for a whole decade upon reaching maturity.”
“They have a draft?” Daniel asked.
“Is that so surprising?”
“I guess it shouldn’t be...”
Lizzie sniffed, or at least made the sound. “It’s more than the sort of draft you have, Daniel. Gresian service is more like compulsory high schooling for the Gresians. It’s the most vital part of their education: to learn to defend themselves and their society and species, no exceptions or exemptions. They’re all trained as infantry. And when I say all, you know I mean all.”
“For ten years,” Kinsella murmured. “I dread to think what they give out at their version of juvie hall.”
“It’s part of what makes their society so glued together,” Lizzie continued. “The Gresians shooting at you may be out of practice, but they are well trained soldiers.”
“Even though they’re civilians.”
“There are no real Gresian civilians. They’re effectively all reservists. Well, aside from the kits and cubs, anyway.”
Daniel cleared his throat. “And you didn’t think this was worth mentioning before, Lizzie?”
“You never asked. Which you should have. It’s the best way to learn things, asking.”
Daniel ground his teeth. “OK,” he said as he forced himself to relax a little. “They definitely know we’re around.”
“And there are no civilians,” Kinsella added.
“That makes things morally easier, I guess,” Daniel said, more to himself than to anyone else. Or so he told himself anyway.
Lizzie appeared in his vision with a tired-looking chuckle. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But I reckon you’ll actually find morality’s a bit more complicated than that. Well, confusing anyway. One of those two. Maybe both—”
“Are you going to ask me how we define civilian now?” Daniel interrupted.
“Pfft,” Lizzie began. “That’s an easy one. Civilian, like civilization, derives from the old French for civil, which in turn derives from the Latin civilis, which is simply the word for a townsman. One who lives in a city, so an urban dweller.”
That wasn’t the sort of lecture Daniel had been expecting. “That’s how you define it?”
“Certainly not. The meanings of words evolve, like everything else.”
Daniel wasn’t interested in that, not at this particular time, though when he’d been at Yale, he’d have been willing to sit up all night discussing something like this so long as the discussion was fueled by beer and involved a pretty girl. “Bailey, I want to check our bearings.”
“Right, sir.” He looked at the monitor on his panel. “We’re on the right side of the river, and if the imagery we do have from the orbital drones is correct, there are no other topographic barriers en route to the Firebird objective.”
“Good. All we have to do now is catch up to Trap Two.”
“Ah, one SNAFU, sir,” Bailey said hesitantly. Daniel raised an eyebrow. “Trap Two doesn’t show up. At all.”
Daniel momentarily started, but then realized that if it had been destroyed and its crew killed, he would have felt the loss of Hope. He could still feel her, and sense her calmness, so he knew she was alive and not in any immediate trouble. That meant the rest of Trap Two’s crew weren’t likely in difficulty either. “Trap Two from Greyhound. Sit-rep, over?”
Only static replied.
Bailey tried, as well. “No response. Their radio must be dicked up. This is some stock that’s not going into a portfolio for Sam’s college fund.”
Daniel switched to his Exo-suit comms, calling out to Erik Palmer directly, suit to suit. “Greyhound calling Trap Two. Sergeant Palmer, report.”
Unusually, there was no response. Daniel was momentarily confused; suit comms had never failed before, although they did have a more limited range. He couldn’t see how Palmer and his team could have suddenly gotten out of range, though, not without having been scooped up by a shuttle and flown a couple of hundred kilometers.
“Lizzie, the Gresians don’t have teleportation like in Star Trek, do they?”
“No, which is actually pretty much a good thing.”
“That’s putting it mildly.” Daniel thought for a moment, and then it struck him. “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains—”
“However improbable...”
“The Gresians have learned to jam suit comms,” Daniel said flatly. ‘Hope, are you there?’
‘I’m here. Where are you?’
‘About twenty miles north of that fucking town. We couldn’t raise you on radio or suit comms. The Gresians are jamming both.’
‘That could be a big problem.’
‘Do you know where you are?’
‘Not really,’ Hope admitted. ‘We got turned around in the fighting and along the curves of the river.’
‘Damn.’
‘Our GPS read is down. We’re heading north as best we can. Can you spot our locator tag?’
Daniel turned to Bailey. “Do we have a read on Trap Two’s lo-jack transponder?”
“Nothing.”
“Could it be damaged? Without the transport being destroyed, I mean.”
“Maybe, or it could be de-powered if something went wrong with its battery pack. Or it could be jammed,” Cole suggested.
“They’re not just jamming the radio, but they are jamming suit comms too…. Could go either way.”
Daniel passed this along to Hope, who thought back, ‘They know those of us wearing Mozari suits are the more dangerous, and the more able to sneak around.’
‘You make too much sense,’ he opined.
‘Is it even possible to make too much sense?’
‘Too much of the kind of sense that’s bad news, yeah, that’s definitely possible.’ Aloud, he said, “Well, whatever the cause, the location transponder is down somehow, and their radio is out, as well.”
“That’s not the worst part,” Lizzie interrupted. “The worst part is that Doug Wilson is in that Super-Bradley now instead of this one.”
Daniel’s heart sank. “It’s not as if I’d be leaving anyone behind anyway, but this definitely makes rendezvousing with Trap Two our first priority. We need him if we’re going to have a hope in hell of completing the mission.”
Feeling that it was reasonably safe to do so, Daniel first had Torres stop the vehicle, and then he popped the hatch above the shotgun seat. In a minute, he had launched the scout drone once more. “Let’s just make sure they’re not in the vicinity of the town,”
he said aloud.
It didn’t take long for the drone to get back over the town, where there was still plenty of Gresian activity. More tanks and troop transports were arriving, and it looked pretty clear that the aliens were using it as a staging point. There was definitely no sign of Hope’s Super-Bradley, though, and right now that was all that mattered to Daniel.
There was, though, something he had to do before searching the open country on the other side of the river for the missing APC.
“Superman, call the Sydney.”
“Greyhound, go ahead,” Barnett came on the line, “and welcome back.”
“Thank you, sir. I calling to ask if I can have an orbital bombardment on the following coordinates ASAP.” He gave the numbers, and then added, “the Gresians are using the town as a staging area for armor and troop transports. And I also need to be sure none of their vehicles are following me.”
“Understood, Greyhound, I’m passing the target on to the Islamabad, which is in the best position to take care of that for you.”
“Thanks, sir.”
Barnett was as good as his word. Within three minutes, a storm of the 100kg tungsten alloy slugs were raining upon the town at .01c.
Watching from twelve miles away, Daniel and his team were even more awed than when the same thing had cleared the forest for them. Multiple mushroom clouds billowed into the sky, and the ground shook at a good four or five on the Richter scale, if Daniel was any judge. The town was obliterated.
“Target destroyed,” Daniel confirmed to Colonel Barnett. “Thanks.”
“Thanks to you, too, Dan. You did zone three a big favor by spotting that armor for us.”
“We have another piece of intel that needs to be passed on to other units, sir. The Gresians have learned to fake our comms, and create false messages in English—totally accent-free, and with appropriate terminology and call-signs.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Barnett replied in a hollow tone.
“No, sir. We were in an exchange of communications with a voice claiming be a Lieutenant Caine, from the downed shuttle we were attempting to hook up with. There was no downed shuttle, and no Lieutenant Caine; it was all Gresian fakery. The whole expeditionary force needs to know that and beef up comms security.”
“Understood, Greyhound.” Barnett paused. “There’s more good news for you. Lizzie has done pretty well stabilizing things up here by limiting the Gresians’ use of the gateways as weapons. That means air support is getting back to normal, and I’ve dispatched two ground attack fighters to give you some escort coverage en route to your objective. The ground assault is also proceeding well. We have almost eighteen thousand troops on the ground securing advanced positions throughout the countryside. The Gresians are being routed and our forces are expanding their areas of control.”
“You mean the Gresians aren’t laying on a full insurgency?” Daniel was slightly surprised. Given how they had fought back on Lyonesse, he’d expected them to fight to the last man—or equivalent.
“Apparently not.”
“Interesting, sir. I wonder how come the regular battalions didn’t run into the same kind of civilian resistance that we ran into.”
“Probably just numbers,” Barnett said thoughtfully. “There are a lot more ground troops expanding and consolidating outwards from the LZs. One platoon is something they thought they could handle, but a company of battalion strength is a much larger force, so they saw sense and got out of Dodge. But that’s just my speculation.”
“You may be right, sir. The odds were more in their favor when they ambushed us.”
“At any rate, it’s only a matter of time before the closest division secures the ground around your target.”
That cheered Daniel up . “The air support will be more immediately useful, sir. We’ve lost contact with Trap Two, and Wilson is aboard. I have… some contact with Captain Ying, so we know they’re alive, but their instruments and beacon are down, and they can’t tell where they are.”
“Situation understood, Greyhound. Daniel, you know that finding Professor Wilson needs to be your top priority.”
“That’s our plan, sir. No Wilson, no mission.”
“You never know, Dan; you might not even need your platoon. By the time you and Wilson get there, the two of you might just be able to walk right into the facility with a Marine guard.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice?” Daniel agreed drily.
When, five minutes later, two delta-winged Mozari-derived fighters swooped low over the Super-Bradley, Daniel knew exactly what to ask of them first. “Glad to have your eyes, Eagle One. I need you to find one of our APCs; visually resembles a super-sized M2.”
“Roger that, Greyhound,” the flight leader replied. “We’ll be your eyes in the sky.”
While the pair of fighter aircraft banked north and west to begin searching the countryside for Trap Two, Daniel was finally able to call a break for chow-time, and for Kit Gregory to check up on the wounded and make sure their suits were healing them properly. Daniel wanted to be sure everyone was in top form when they reached the Shaldine facility.
Cole and Stewart, meanwhile, were passing out newly nano-forged ammo of various kinds, especially for the railguns. ‘Hope,’ Daniel sent, ‘have you got a better idea of where you are?’
‘Somewhere northwest of you, I think. We have no GPS and limited instrumentation. Everything’s being jammed.’
‘We’ve got air cover incoming; they should be able to give us a fix on each other. How is Wilson?’
‘Surprisingly quiet. I think he’s concentrating on what he has to do if we reach the objective before you get there.’
‘Good.’
‘And that’s—’ her thoughts became suddenly focused, and he felt the tension in them. ‘What the hell was that? I have to go. Tell your air support we’re under fire!’ She cut their connection, all her concentration going to the situation at hand.
Daniel was on his feet and on the comms to the fighters immediately. “Eagle One, Greyhound. Trap Two reports being under attack.”
“Roger that. We’re reading weapons fire two miles north of us.”
As Daniel signaled his people to mount up,
the lead fighter pilot came back on the radio. “Greyhound, this is Eagle One; I think we have a visual on your missing APC.”
“Where are they?” The pilot gave the coordinates, which were about fifteen miles from Daniel’s current position. “How do they look?”
“In bad shape, Greyhound. Looks to have taken heavy hits from multiple anti-armor rounds. It’s toast.”
Twenty
Daniel couldn’t actually believe that the Super-Bradley could go as fast as the speed that Torres was somehow getting out of it. Everyone inside bounced around as the APC took every bump and blade of red grass like a launching ramp, and they covered the fifteen miles in ten minutes, guided by Eagle One. ‘Hope?’ Daniel kept sending, trying to get some response, but there was nothing specific. He could feel her being out there, still alive, but she was clearly either pretty busy or unconscious.
The landscape was like moorland again, but with low cliffs separating the moors from a smoother plateau that was rose to the west. “It’s over the next ridge, Greyhound. I—” the pilot’s voice was almost drowned out by a sudden scream that Daniel recognized from the platoon’s own landing on this planet: a missile lock.
“Break break!” Eagle Two shouted, and suddenly both planes shot over the APC at about two hundred feet, their engines screaming as a missile slammed into a piece of cliff face beyond them. Two Gresian fighters were diving out of the weak sun, plasma fire snapping at the Eagles’ tails.
One of the Eagles pulled a tight Immelman turn, and then the pair were circling in opposite directions, trying to get the Gresians in a crossfire. The Gresians were trying much the same thing, and, to Daniel, the pairs looked pretty evenly matched.
“That’s going to be a tough one,” Torres said.
“Sho
uld we fire on the Gresian craft, sir?” Beswick asked from the turret. Daniel really wanted to say yes, but knew that could be a double-edged sword.
“Not unless fired upon,” Daniel decided. “Let’s not draw their attention when we still have to get to our people. It’s the fighters’ job to keep them off of us, and we don’t need to make them fail at that job.”
“CAG, Eagle One requesting reinforcements,” the radio squawked. “We are engaged with Gresian fighters...”
“Roger that, Eagle One. Eagles Four and Six are inbound, ETA six minutes...” Daniel turned the radio monitor down as Beswick said from the turret, “I see Trap Two… and it’s well-buggered.”
Trap One pulled up beside an APC that was missing half its wheels. The turret was loose on its mounting, tilted at a jaunty angle. Daniel felt his blood run cold, and tried again to think to Hope. A woozy-feeling ‘Dan…?’ came back after a minute or so..
The Hardcases dismounted, but most of them kept their eyes on the sky, where both sets of fighter aircraft had climbed out of sight, only vapor trails and sonic booms indicating the progress of their combat. ‘Where are you?’ Daniel asked, his thoughts driven by a mix of worry and relief.
Trap Two’s rear door was open, hanging loose like a strip of flesh cut from an animal’s flank. The coppery reek of blood was detectable from inside, along with the smell of metal and burnt plastic. Otherwise, it was empty, with no sign of bodies—living or dead. Daniel felt anger pinching at him; he had seen this before, on Lyonesse, when the Gresians had taken away the wounded from a downed shuttle. ‘I’m not sure. I took a knock to the head…. Just a minute.’ There was a pause, and then, ‘Some sort of cave. Overlooking the APC.’
“Looks familiar, doesn’t it?” Daniel asked Kinsella quietly, hoping that Torres wasn’t able to see the sight from her position in Trap One.
“Too familiar,” Kinsella agreed, instinctively glancing over towards Torres, who had once been held by the Gresians after that shuttle crash.