The War for Profit Series Omnibus

by Gideon Fleisher

  “It’s dark enough. Move out.”

  The Ajax tanks pulled back first and got on the main road out of town heading east. The rest of the task force fell in behind them and convoyed along the paved highway. The Interceptors circled high overhead and attacked any Mosh fighter-bombers that got too close to the convoy. The task force made it back to the Jasmine Panzer Brigade Compound a couple of hours after sunrise and stood down.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Captain Davis, the Fire Support Officer for the Jasmine Panzer Brigade, stood wearing her soft cap over her curly brown hair, a strand of it in the corner of her mouth. Her thoughtful amber eyes stared toward the horizon as she chewed the end of her hair, her strong jaw line moving side to side slowly, her high, round cheeks bulging slightly with the practiced effort. Her gray and green mottled combat coveralls were cinched to her waist by her gun belt, giving her an appearance of more of an hourglass figure than usual, the loose material of the coveralls allowing extra room for her full figure.

  Ahead of her were parked the five Ajax tanks. It had been a week of hard work, getting them back up to ten-twenty maintenance standards but it was worth it. They were now clean and serviceable and as functional as they had ever been, except for one important detail. The busted concrete beneath the tracks they left pulling into the motor pool gave evidence of their greatest flaw. With the lifters removed they weighed 95 tons. The lifters had reduced their footprint to fifteen tons, but the lifters were removed and shipped to Fairgotten, to prevent that technology from falling into Mosh hands.

  That disability made them useless as tanks, but the Ajax vehicles were still excellent fire support vehicles. She heard footsteps approaching from her right and looked. Colonel Galen Raper approached. When he was within six paces, she gave a proper hand salute. “Good evening, sir.”

  Galen returned the gesture. “I heard you’re fit to fight.”

  “Yessir. The assault guns, the self-propelled howitzers, and the Ajax are all straight. No deficiencies noted on the final service inspection.”

  Galen said, “It’ll be a couple of weeks before the rest of the task force will be ready for more action. You and your people can enjoy a little down time.”

  She said, “Thanks. It’s getting a little chilly.”

  Galen said, “Winter is coming. Wouldn’t surprise me if it snows next week.”

  “Might have to find my jacket.” She rubbed her arms.

  “Major Polar has winter gear ready for issue. We’ll hand it out before we leave the compound again.”

  “Too bad about Chong-gok. I really liked it there.”

  Galen said, “It’s a shame. The Mosh tore it up, and a brief attempt at a counterattack by the Mandarins leveled the whole place.”

  “It’s weird, remembering a place that is no longer there, where I can never visit again. It claws at the soul.” She stuffed her hands into her pockets, shivered slightly.

  “I…I know. And the fact that we’re partly responsible, that hurts too.”

  They stood and stared at the Ajax line. Galen said, “Have you heard about the solar flares?”

  “Yessir. That’s part of the reason I’m out so late. When it gets darker we might be able to see the ionosphere light up from here.”

  Galen peered at the horizon. It was getting dark, and as it got darker the sky to the north began to glow with blue and green streaks, lights that danced like flames of a distant fire from the horizon to the sky, to an angle as high as nine hundred mils in places.

  Captain Davis said, “It’s beautiful.”

  “Yes.” Galen put his left arm around her shoulders.

  She didn’t object, grateful for the heat of his body next to hers. After a moment she said, “I’ll bet ops has plans for that solar storm.”

  Galen said, “In two weeks we’ll be under it. Right now it’s just blowing out the side, barely clipping our atmosphere. Ops has plans. The EM of the flares will screw up unshielded gadgets. Everything inside the armored vehicles will function normally, but fighting will be all line of sight and dumb bombs. Good for you, for artillery.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Air defenses won’t be able to stop your rounds. Better yet, the Mosh bomber-fighters aren’t shielded well enough to fly under those conditions.”

  She said, “What about our aircraft?”

  “Have to ground the helos, of course, but out Interceptors and the Marine’s assault boats, they can fly. They’re aerospace craft, designed to deal with the radiations of raw space.”

  “I like that. We’ll have a clear advantage, a real opportunity.”

  Galen’s voice wavered, “Tad said the same thing. But for now we have a couple of weeks to rest.”

  Captain Davis said, “You need a hug?”

  Galen said, “I didn’t think I was your type.”

  “You’re not. I just want to stand here like two human beings for a while.” She turned into him and wrapped her arms around his waist. He wrapped his arms around her shoulders and they turned their faces to the north and watched as the lights in the sky grew in intensity. After a few minutes they stepped apart and went their separate ways.

  ***

  Colonel Baek entered Tad’s office and said, “Can we talk?”

  Tad sat up on the couch where he’d been sleeping, stood and removed the poncho liner and said, “Sure, have a seat.”

  Baek sat. “I’m sorry to disturb your sleep.”

  Tad sat at his desk and said, “No problem, sir. I’m at your disposal.”

  Baek rubbed his hands together. “Do you have a plan for extraction?”

  Tad flexed his hands. “Working on it. The problem is known jump points. The one I have in mind takes us to Alamo, but I think it’s known to the Mosh. The other two points, one is blocked by the Mosh right now. The second one, the Mandarin Space Force is parked near it. I’m not so sure they’ll let us go.”

  Colonel Baek said, “I have a pirate point that puts us in the star system of the capitol planet of the Capellan Confederation.”

  Tad turned and pulled back the curtain of the window behind him, pointed at the lights in the sky. “That will make space travel difficult.”

  Baek said, “We’ll have another go at the Mosh before we leave, of course. In eight weeks or less, that solar flare up will end and then we can get the hell out of here.”

  Tad said, “I’ve been looking at possibilities. Do you think the Mandarins will go for a negotiated peace with the Mosh?”

  Baek scratched his head, shrugged. “Anything is possible.”

  Tad closed the curtain, stood facing toward Baek. Colonel Baek stood and said, “Thank you for you time.”

  “Not a problem, sir.”

  Baek turned and left, closed the office door on the way out.

  Chapter Twenty

  Capellan Marine Pilot Michael Stovall took up a light jog as he made his way down the flight line to his Interceptor. The sun had just come up and the solar flares were clipping the atmosphere. He didn’t feel any excessive solar radiation but he didn’t want to be exposed any longer than necessary. Mandarin’s orbit would soon bring it right under the solar flares. Going outside unprotected would soon be harmful or fatal. Today, it was just enough interference to make sensors and targeting systems unreliable at standoff ranges.

  This mission was basic. Flight Control’s ground-based sensors had detected a Mosh drone but were unable to engage it. The drone flew in before sunrise and was on station at high altitude to scan the area around Mandarin City, the capitol city of Mandarin. It had to be on its own, pre-programmed to get on station and likely programmed to fly back to its base after sunset, loaded with useful information for Mosh tactical planners. Stovall would fly up, get a visual, shoot it down and then come on back to base and then take the rest of the day off.

  His ground crew stuffed him in his plane and the crew chief gave him a thumb up. Stovall taxied to the end of the runway, saw the light on the control tower turn green, then acceler
ated along the runway and angled his nose up to eight hundred mils and shot into the sky at three times the speed of sound. He stayed on vector and leveled off and saw the drone to his left, twelve hundred meters away. The lights of his comms gear showed red and amber status indicators, so he didn’t bother with trying to report. He’d do that later, in person.

  He made a wide turn and came back toward the drone and gave it three good blasts with his dual medium lasers. One blast was sufficient but he wanted to slice up the debris as well. Out of habit, he nosed up a bit to get over where the target had been and then went into a shallow dive, looking back over each shoulder, back and forth, head on a swivel. To his high left rear he saw a bright streak, a trail like a tiny meteor might make. But it changed direction and vectored toward him. Stovall climbed and rolled so he could get a better look at the object. Looking straight up through his transparent canopy he identified a boxy, awkward Mosh space fighter.

  It fired its lasers at him, narrowly missing. Stovall then swung around behind it, to follow the Mosh space fighter in its shallow dive. Easy money, the Mosh spacecraft had no atmospheric control surfaces, just flat surfaces causing immense drag. The space fighter was sluggish here, this deep in the planet’s gravity well. Stovall judged that the Mosh fighter couldn’t get out of its dive, and its dive was steepening; it was doomed to crash.

  Stovall matched its mach 3.2 speed and casually lined up his rail gun’s visual sights. He said, “Dumbass,” and fired a two second burst square into the Mosh fighter’s flat rear panel. The space fighter disintegrated. The debris passed under Stovall’s Interceptor but the ejection pod which contained the Mosh pilot in his detached cockpit managed to clip the tip of Stovall’s left stabilizer. He slowed to under Mach 1 and felt the aerospacecraft’s new flight characteristics. He then looked down at the terrain and realized he was vectored toward Mosh territory.

  A warning light flashed. Stovall looked and saw that he’d lost a great deal of atmospheric thruster fuel, an entire two blocks jettisoned by the Interceptor’s computer when it thought a collision was imminent. Sensors, unreliable because of the solar flares, caused the computer to make that mistake. Stovall did some quick mental calculations and realized he couldn’t make it back to base. He looked for a place to land, or ditch.

  Ground fire greeted him, some Mosh anti-aircraft guns near their front line of advance. Stovall accelerated and climbed, avoided the attack easily. But he was now over Mosh territory. Better to ditch in the rear area, far away from front-line troops who’d have the good sense to kill first and think later. Stovall found a soybean field with a wooded area at its far end. He flew low, fifty meters off the ground, and when he was over the field he punched out of his Interceptor. The cockpit separated, detected the atmosphere and deployed its parachute. It set him down in the woods, the landing hard enough to stun him but not hard enough to injure him. Stovall shook his head and listened for the explosive sound of the Interceptor self-destructing. Too late to hear that, some time had passed while he was blacked out. He then raised his canopy and took off his harness, assed the detached cockpit.

  He stood on his seat and looked around, grateful for the woods that screened his position, gave him shade from the sun and its flares. He grabbed the survival pack and hung it on his back, removed his flight helmet and put on his ground-troop brain bucket, checked the load of his sidearm and climbed down to the ground. He used his feet to scuff aside some leaves to clear a patch of dirt and knelt and drew some lines, figured he was forty klicks inside Mosh territory. He could cover that distance in a couple of nights, moving at night to avoid those damned solar rays. He knew that after three or four more days, the flares would be bad enough to fry him at night unless he found a rat hole to hide in…for the next two weeks. Too long.

  He stood and ate an energy bar and then started walking. Better to get out of here now, risk today’s negligible exposure to the radiation in order to cover some ground. He’d just left the tree line and stepped between rows of soy beans when he heard a loud pop and felt shoved from the left, hard. He fell on his right side and rolled, entangled in a net. Two Mosh warriors smiled down at him. One held his sword at the ready, the other held a large-mouthed shotgun-like weapon. The second Mosh opened his weapon’s breach and inserted a cartridge that looked more lethal than a net-capture round. He pointed the weapon at Stovall while the first Mosh used his sword to cut away the netting. He then sheathed his sword and removed Stovall’s pack, gun belt and helmet, and then lifted Stovall to his feet.

  The Mosh then drew a shock stick and prodded Stovall to get moving toward the road at the edge of the field. Stovall said, “You guys speak Standard?”

  The Mosh Warrior said, “Yes,” and poked Stovall with the shock stick again. “Shut up.”

  They walked a hundred meters along the road and had Stovall climb up into the back of a light duty truck. After a few minutes, four more Mosh warriors came and got in the truck and it carried them back to a Brigade-sized headquarters camp. There, Stovall was bound and gagged and blindfolded and tossed into the back of another truck that carried him and a squad of wounded Mosh warriors through the night, arriving at the outskirts of the ruined city of Cherry Fork just as the sun was rising.

  Stovall was unloaded and untied, his blindfold and gag removed. He stood for a moment and then an older Mosh warrior walked up and said, “Follow me,” and then turned and walked away. Stovall gave it some thought, shrugged, followed the old warrior into a tent. The Mosh pointed at a fold-up chair by a field table and said, “Sit.”

  Stovall sat. A tall, young, full-figured blonde woman in a leather bodice and knee-length red skirt came forward and put a glass of water and a field ration on the table and said, “Eat,” and stared at Stovall. He took a sip of water and reached for the ration. She turned and left.

  The old Mosh warrior said, “I am Olaf, second son of Hallgarth, the High Chief of the Five Clans of Mandarin.” He pointed at Stovall. “You are my bondsman.”

  Stovall’s face scrunched, confused.

  The High Chief said, “You are not familiar with our customs. You have proven yourself worthy, you and your Interceptor pilots. You have fought well and with honor and have killed many of my warriors. You are now my bondsman for one year and during that year you will make up for those losses.”

  Stovall said, “I don’t understand.”

  The High Chief turned away and said, “Jackson! Explain this to him!”

  Jackson was an unarmed man, of medium build and height, clean-shaven. He wore khaki coveralls, “Right, Chief!” He stepped up to the table, slid up another chair and sat. The Mosh High Chief left the tent. Stovall weighed his options, his chances of escape. Not yet. There would be plenty of time for that later, after dark.

  Jackson said, “The Mosh. What do you know about them?”

  Stovall noticed Jackson’s short black hair, light brown complexion. “Their pilots suck.”

  Jackson laughed. “They began as a slave race, selectively bred and genetically altered to serve as cheap labor for a terraforming corporation. A group of them rebelled and took off to deep space more than a thousand years ago. There, they created more worlds and established a loosely confederated empire. Now, they are back in old Terran Empire space to loot and plunder.”

  Stovall said, “So what?”

  “Their gene pool is getting a little stale.”

  “Inbred.” Stovall laughed.

  Jackson pointed at Stovall. “You are going to fix all that.”

  “What?”

  Jackson said, “You and your Interceptor buddies have killed more than two hundred Mosh warriors. They want those lives back. You will breed with Mosh women, sire at least five hundred children, to ensure they get back at least two hundred males worthy of warrior status.”

  “I can give them enough material for that in a couple of days. What happens to me after that?”

  Jackson smiled and said, “No, they like it all natural.”

  Stovall sipp
ed more water. “You mean…”

  “That’s right. The Mosh don’t like test-tube babies. They figure that a sperm that’s been caught by a lab tech and jammed into just any old egg can’t produce the best offspring. They figure there is a reason the right sperm has to get out ahead of the others, and that not every egg is suitable, that some eggs are so defective, no self-respecting sperm would ever bore into them.”

  “So they don’t use artificial insemination?”

  “They do when they have to, they aren’t complete fanatics. They use artificial insemination, mechanical gestation, even cloning when they are desperate, but they don’t like it. They try to live life naturally when it’s feasible. They are looking to restore their humanity, give life a natural balance. It’s not a completely achievable goal and they know that, but it kind of makes sense. They try.”

  Stovall said, “So during the next year I’m supposed to knock up five hundred women the old-fashioned way.”

  Jackson winked, “You have a year. They’ll have a schedule, healthy women of childbearing age who come to you when they are ovulating. Three to five a day, depending on who’s ready and available. I know that the Mosh don’t really expect you to produce five hundred pregnancies in a year. Just make an honest effort to keep up and you’ll be treated well.”

  Stovall said, “What happens to me when that year is over?”

  Jackson said, “You’ll be free. As a bondsman, you won’t have to serve the Mosh. You can go home or join their warrior class and go on raids if you want. Or just retire and take a wife and they’ll give you a lodge and a farm.”

  “For real?”

  Jackson nodded. “For real.”

  “What about you? Are you a Bondsman?”

  Jackson laughed, “I wish! No, I’m just a servant. I serve this Clan Chief as manager of his lodge. Right now it’s this crummy tent. After Mandarin is conquered, it will be a grand lodge on a thousand hectare farm. It is good, to serve the Mosh.”