by Rick Shelley
“That’s us,” the same voice said. “Didn’t expect to see you folks quite so soon. Not that we really see you yet.”
“You showed up at an opportune time,” David said. “Thanks.”
“You put the hurt on them. Any of them still in one piece?”
“Probably not,” David said. “Their electronics went out rather suddenly. But we’ll wait for reinforcements before we go looking. I’ve got a couple of men down.”
“We’re not going to, ah, startle your reinforcements, are we?”
“I’ve already passed the word that we had help. You’d best stay where you are for now, just in case there are any Feddies left around feeling hostile. We’ll have company in about four minutes.” A voice on his command channel had just told David that the reinforcements would arrive in less than half that time.
Caution, not distrust.
Two platoons from Charley Company reached the site, and put out their own security teams. Medics went to Zimmerman and Prinz. Roger would be fine after time in a trauma tube. Prinz was dead. Most of his head was missing. No trauma tube could handle that. There were five dead Federation soldiers, and two wounded who probably wouldn’t survive to reach a trauma tube.
The Buchananers came up to the Commonwealth soldiers in a group, their rifles and shotguns held high above their heads.
“Keep your weapons,” David told them. “We may run into more of these jokers. We’ll take you back to our command post. I’m sure Colonel Zacharia would love to have a chat with you.”
“We’ve a few questions of our own.” The same Buchananer had done all of the talking for them. “I’m Doug Weintraub, a member of the Buchanan Planetary Commission.”
“He’s also the crazy man who set off that message rocket,” another man said. “I’m Albert Greer.”
First Battalion’s command post had been set up close behind H&S Company’s position. It was a bunker hurriedly dug in the clearing where David and his men had landed the morning before. The only lights inside were infrared. David took Doug in and introduced him to Lt. Colonel Zacharia.
“Your people took out those three shuttles?”
“A lucky chance. It’s the only blow we’ve managed to strike for our own freedom. After that, all we could do was hide until you folks showed up. They had a round the clock air search going until you folks chased them off.”
“Not the only blow,” Zacharia said. “If you hadn’t managed to get that MR off…”
Doug shrugged. ” That was desperation. I set it to jump to Qspace immediately after launch.”
“I’d give you all an escort home tonight, but we haven’t moved into your towns yet,” Zacharia said.
“There are still Federation troops out there, and most of them turned off their electronics before we could account for them.”
“I think we’d prefer to help free our world, if you have places for us,” Doug said.
“Could be useful, sir,” David said after clearing his throat. “If we’re going to have to hunt down all the Feddies, it might help considerably to have locals who know the terrain with us.”
Zacharia hesitated. “How does that sound to you, Mr. Weintraub?”
Doug grinned. “Quite satisfactory, Colonel.”
“We’ll get you and your companions proper battle kit, of course. By the way, what is that you’re wearing?”
“Hippobary hide.” Doug laughed. “I imagine it’s a bit rank by now, but it kept us hid from their infrared detectors.”
The sun was rising before David and his squad got back to the line. Weintraub was with them, in full Marine kit now, right down to the field skin. That had bothered Doug, and the other Buchananers, at first. It was something they had never heard of.
“A bit more compact than those hides,” David said when he instructed them on how to put the field skins on. “And a lot handier.”
“Be nice if we had a chance to clean up a little first,” one of the other locals had said. “We’ve been living in a cave for ages.”
David nodded. “We don’t have much in the way of facilities. But field skins are the next best thing. It’s all nourishment to them.”
“They’re alive?” one of the younger men asked. David had heard the name but didn’t recall it, one of a pair of twins.
“Nanobugs,” David said.
“Ages past anything we’ve got in the way of nanotech,” Doug said.
“They’re fairly recent,” David admitted. “The first ones came into use about the time I joined the RM.
Military secret until five years ago. The latest models are still on the restricted list.”
Doug and two of his companions would stay with First Battalion, Doug with David’s platoon, the others with line companies. The other six Buchananers would be divided among Second and Third Battalions.
“We’ll get you back to your families as soon as possible,” David told Doug as they settled in on the line.
“It’ll be good to get home,” Doug said. “Damn good.”
Doug stretched out in the shallow foxhole. A keppu log covered part of the hole, giving some extra protection. Finally, he had time to think, time to sort through all that had happened in the last few hours.
Taking part in the firefight had been strangely exhilarating, even if Doug and his friends had been largely ineffectual. He knew that they had been no more than a casual distraction to the Federation troops. But the Commonwealth Marines had welcomed them warmly, as companions in arms, eagerly awaited allies, not as useless farmers who couldn’t be trusted to keep out of the way while the “professionals’ ‘ did their work.
Right friendly sorts, Doug allowed. He felt fifty pounds lighter wearing the Commonwealth field skin and combat fatigues, even with the heavy battle helmet. Doug had quickly accepted that he couldn’t hope to master half the capabilities of his helmet in any reasonable length of time. Spencer had explained the basics but, clearly, efficient use of the helmet required extensive practice as well as more detailed tutorials.
The fight shouldn’t last that long now, Doug told himself with a grim smile. The Federation troops on the ground were on their own now, abandoned by their ship, and vastly outnumbered.
We can win. We can really win. It was a heady thought.
The sun was up. There was limited movement among the Commonwealth Marines—but no unnecessary movement, Doug noted. Immediately around him, Marines were eating and trying to get a little rest when they could, but not everyone at once. Doug had eaten two complete meal packets, one in the command bunker, the other after he joined the intelligence and reconnaissance platoon on the line. The extent of his hunger surprised him. The weeks of little more than partially digestible hippobary had sapped him more than he had suspected. He was still hungry, but decided that he wouldn’t make an issue of it, not among the soldiers in the field. I’ll eat when they do.
Doug looked out under the keppu log toward Sam and Max. He couldn’t see the towns. The river was a mile away, through forest that was thick in places, and the settlements were beyond that. But Elena and Jamie were there, and Doug worried about them, caught in the middle of this pending battle. He could hear the sounds of war from time to time, Commonwealth fighters making combat runs, more rarely bursts of small arms fire on the ground—always at a distance. There had been no sound of activity anywhere near.
Better people who know their business than amateurs, Doug decided. Less chance of folks getting hurt. Or killed.
20
The larger room in Admiral Truscott’s day cabin looked crowded. Truscott sat at the center of one side of the chart table. Captain Hardesty sat directly across from him. Commander Georgia Bentley, the fighter wing commander, sat at one end of the table. Ian and Prince William stood along the wall, behind the admiral, more spectators than participants in the conference. But Admiral Greene and the captains of the other ships in the flotilla were present only by fullscale holographic projection, as was Colonel Laplace, the Marine commander.
; ” I’m open to suggestions,” Truscott told the others. ” We have more than six hundred Federation soldiers, perhaps considerably more, on the ground. We need to locate and neutralize them as quickly as possible. The first constraint is that we must do as little damage as possible to the interests of the legal inhabitants. The second constraint is that I want to be as economical of our own personnel and materiel as possible. If a general abhorrence of wasting lives isn’t reason enough for you, just remember that this war is young. One battle won’t end it, at least not to our advantage. But if this task force should go missing the way the ships sent to Camerein have, the effect on Buckingham might be overwhelming.” He turned and glanced up at the prince. ‘ ‘Would you care to elaborate on that, Your Highness?”
“You said it very well, Admiral,” William said. “There is tremendous concern in the government already.
Since the Commonwealth depends on the voluntary cooperation of member governments, and its military forces depend on voluntary enlistments, a continuing series of military disasters might lead to a serious erosion of support. I’m certain we can count on continued full support from Buckingham and the core worlds of the Commonwealth, but support on outer worlds would become less certain with each setback. And our base is, in any case, much narrower than that of the Federation. They control many times the number of worlds than are members of the Second Commonwealth, and many of those worlds are older and more populous than ours.”
“Precisely. We have problems the Federation doesn’t,” Truscott said. “They have at least five times the number of worlds and perhaps a dozen times the population to draw on. There is still conscription in the Federation, and with their highly centralized political control, they have less concern about defections, either of worlds or individuals. Most of their worlds have been too thoroughly subjugated to provide trouble for them.”
“Ah, excuse me, Admiral,” the prince said. “I wouldn’t count too highly on that information. Conscripts are unlikely to be assigned to highrisk enterprises outside the Federation itself. They tend to be posted as garrison within the Federation, or spread out among professional units on larger expeditions.”
This time, Truscott turned completely around to look at the prince. “I assume that your information is more up to date than mine.” Ian doubted that anyone else in the conference could pick up on the subtle change in Truscott’s tone. He was upset, and holding it back, but Prince William wasn’t the focus of that chagrin.
“Any information I have is available to you, sir,” William said. “I would have offered to compare notes before had I suspected.” He had obviously noted the change as well.
The admiral cleared his throat, nodded to the prince, then turned back toward the table. “In any case, we need to mop up this operation as quickly as we can without being wasteful of our resources, particularly human resources. The Federation soldiers on Buchanan doused their electronics and went to ground.
How can we find them, short of patrolling every square foot of the surface and flushing them out one man at a time?”
“If they prepared their fallbacks carefully in advance, we can’t,” Colonel Laplace said. “It’s that simple, sir. But my guess is that any preparations were likely rushed and incomplete. We must have arrived long before they could have expected us, if they had any cause to suspect that we would intervene at all. Our best bet is probably detailed mapping, including ultrasonic as well as the standard EM frequencies. That can turn up quite a bit in the way of shallow bunkers and caves. We can turn to the local residents for help as well. Past those measures, it may still come down to my Marines walking grids to flush the enemy.”
“My people are working with the Colonel’s intelligence staff to take directional sound detection devices down to the surface,” Paul Greene said. “If we can’t pick up locations from the air, we’ll have to go that route. But rather than walk Marines into every potential ambush, we can search each grid with microphones. There’s a chance we’ll be able to pinpoint enemy positions by their unavoidable sounds.”
“Heartbeats and respiration?” Colonel Laplace asked. Greene nodded. “I don’t think that microphones will work a damn bit better than the detectors built into every combat helmet, and they’re not doing a bit of real good. There’s far too much interference for that sort of thing to work.”
“The first step, surely,” Captain Hardesty said, “is to move troops into the settlements, make contact with the locals, get what assistance we can from them in locating Federation positions. The more data we can get that simply, the less we have to worry about these other possibilities. You did suggest that time is of the essence, Admiral.”
Truscott nodded. ‘ ‘Colonel Laplace, how are your troops situated for moving into the towns?”
“Whenever you order it, sir. But we have no idea how much resistance we’ll meet. As quickly as they disappeared, a considerable number of the Feddies must be in the towns. The faster we move in, the higher the likelihood of civilian casualties.”
“Have your intelligence people talked with those guerrilla fighters yet?” Truscott asked.
“At length,” Laplace said. He shrugged again. “They’ve been out of touch with events in the two towns for too long to have any useful information about where enemy troops might be. The last contact they had was when they blew up those shuttles at the starport, two weeks before we arrived.”
“What value, if any, do you place on the cooperation of these guerrillas?” Captain Miles of Khyber asked.
“Considerable, if it comes down to searching out pockets of Federation resistance in the countryside,”
Laplace said quickly. “They know the terrain, the wildlife, the most likely sites for caves or bunkers.”
“Ah, excuse me,” Prince William said, very deferentially. “I’m not part of the military chain of command, and it’s certainly not yet time for me to begin my diplomatic function on the surface. But may I point out that one of these resistance fighters is a member of Buchanan’s governing planetary commission, a person of considerable importance to his own people, and therefore to us. Anything we can do to make these fighters feel a freely accepted commitment to us can only help ease the subsequent political phase.
We hope to win their free adherence to the Commonwealth, not just a temporary alliance which they might see as political necessity. The trouble we take with the people of one world now will pay off thousandfold later, on scores, perhaps hundreds, of other worlds.” The prince looked around, smiled apologetically, and spread his hands. “My apologies for being a longwinded politician. It’s a hereditary defect, I’m afraid.”
Truscott quickly suppressed a grin. “Not at all, Your Highness.” He looked around at the others. “It’s an important part of the equation, something we may have needed reminding of.” Behind Truscott, Ian raised an eyebrow. There seemed to be nuances in the relationship between admiral and prince that he hadn’t been aware of.
“Colonel Laplace, I think it’s time to start moving your men into, er, Sam and Max. If and when they run into active resistance, we’ll take each incident independently, as cautiously as possible, to minimize casualties and damages. That means that we won’t be able to use our Spacehawks as freely as we might otherwise.” He glanced at Commander Bentley, who nodded. ‘ ‘The birds only go in if we can be sure of striking Federation targets without endangering civilians.”
“That’s the way we’d want it in any case,” Bentley said.
“You want more manpower for this, Colonel Laplace?” Truscott asked. “I’ll release one more company of the reserve if you think you need them.”
Laplace took a deep breath. “I think we can do the job with the assets we have dirtside now, Admiral.
I’ll strip the units east of the river of a couple of companies, bring them across to establish a beachhead behind the towns.”
“Let’s get busy. I think that’s all for now. Ah, Captain
Miles, if you’d stay on the link for a few minutes’?
”
“Of course, sir,” Dever said.
Except for Dever Miles, the holographic projections were gone from the room. Hardesty and Laplace had gone as well. Truscott asked Prince William to remain. “I think this is something you should be aware of,” he said.
“As you wish, sir,” William replied. Ian had made no move to leave. If the admiral didn’t want him present, he would expressly ask him to go. That didn’t happen very often.
“Both of you, sit down and be comfortable. There’s no need to keep this stiff.” William and Ian sat across the table from the admiral.
“You have something additional for me, sir?” Captain Miles said after it was clear who was going and who was staying.
“Yes,” Truscott said, turning his attention back to the only remaining projection in the room. “I’m cutting Khyber loose for a few days, sending you back to Buckingham on a special mission.”
“That will put us out of this operation completely, sir,” Miles said, a trace of puzzlement in his voice.
“I don’t think so,” Truscott said. “We—or, more precisely, you—are going to demonstrate that intersystem voyages don’t need to take nearly as long as they’ve taken in the past.”
“Sir?” Miles said.
“A continuation of what we’ve already seen and done here, Dever,” Truscott said. “We made our entrances considerably closer than doctrine allows, without the slightest hint that we were crowding any real safety limits, and we have the example of that MR that made the transit to Qspace within feet of the surface of Buchanan, without any deviation in course or damage, either to the MR or to Buchanan.”
“Exactly what sort of demonstration do you have in mind, Admiral?” Miles asked, beginning to see where this was heading.
“I have a number of dispatches for you to take to the Admiralty,” Truscott said. “I’m also sending duplicates via two MRs. One MR will be programmed to make the voyage in the customary three jumps, but with virtually no interval between Qspace transits, no significant spatial separation. The second Mr will be programmed to make the voyage in two jumps, with minimal intervals.”