The Regiment-A Trilogy

by John Dalmas

  It took a few minutes to still her mind, after a day so eventful, but it was no real problem. There were a few seconds during which her body seemed to resonate like a harp chord—an occasional personal symptom of readiness. Then, eyes closed, she reached.

  She was surprised at how easy it was. She was with him at once, and the meld was effortless. But not terribly informative. She stayed with Saadhrambacoora for half an hour. He was working intently on administrative matters, and apparently was not much given to ruminating on things other than business while working. But it seemed obvious that he hadn't an inkling of a new enemy force on Terfreya. If he had, it would have been apparent to her, even if his conscious mind had been engaged with other matters. It would have been just below consciousness, with a discernible unit of attention stuck to it unavoidably.

  So Lotta had pulled her attention back and returned to Romlar's command tent to let him know that so far their secrecy hadn't been compromised.

  That done, it was supper time—field rations—and by the time she'd eaten, it was getting dark. The troopers were retiring to their tents, and stillness was settling over the bivouac. She wore a visored helmet to find her way in the darkness. Romlar offered her a parked scout-craft, a small three-man floater, as a private place to sit while she sought and melded with the enemy commodore in his flagship.

  The scout sat not many yards from the command tent, just within the jungle's edge. She chose the pilot's seat. From there she could see between trees into the open, starlit valley bottom. From somewhere came a distant, keening howl; perhaps a Terfreyan wolf, she thought. She felt very relaxed now, and the trance came easily. Commodore! she thought softly, and reached outward with her attention. Commodore!

  There was brief darkness, a familiar sense of otherness, then of beingness that was not her own. The beingness ignored her; that was good—

  * * *

  Terfreya nearly filled the commodore's window, blue and white, blue-green and tan. The half that wasn't night-dark, for the terminator was creeping westward toward the ocean. Tarimenloku sat in his lounging pajamas, gazing out at it. He'd have liked a dharvag, but denied himself; he'd been drinking more than he should lately, and it was time, he'd decided, to assert his self-control.

  By ship's time it was late evening. And so it was at the marine base, 55,000 miles out. Or down. The terminator had passed Lonyer City, leaving it in darkness, or twilight at least. Darkness didn't mean relaxation and inactivity for the marines down there, he knew. Stealth was the enemy's ally, and the child warriors, the cadets, were often active at night.

  He'd gotten brigade's daily casualty report shortly before retiring: sixty-three—fifty-two dead plus eleven wounded and unfit for service. A bad day. More and more the cadets were using captured beam guns, which usually killed what they hit. Although the killed-to-wounded ratio had been surprisingly high from the beginning, reflecting the enemy's excellent marksmanship.

  The day's reported enemy body count was 115, 113 of them cadets, and 2 large black men. Tarimenloku knew from his informants that the black men were the cadets' training cadre, and renowned fighting men. He also knew that they were mercenaries, and not numerous anywhere.

  A body count of 115! If the body counts I'm given are correct, he thought wryly, then we've killed a total of more than 3,000 cadets and cadre. And all from a beginning number estimated at 500 to 1,000! Remarkable!

  He thought about having just one drink, and pushed the thought away, focusing his eyes again on the world outside his window, a world on which Klestronu colonists could prosper and multiply. One of dozens of such worlds in this sector. Again he thought of disengaging—of going home with what he'd learned. But there'd be an evaluation, legal and military, and any claim that he'd been driven away by greater military forces would be uncovered as a lie. He was fighting a small force, a single battalion, mostly of children!

  Considering the value of what he'd discovered, it was possible, though not likely, that he wouldn't be executed. But if death were all he'd have to face at home, he told himself, he might well start back tomorrow, or as soon as he could bring his people off that world out there. Disgrace was what he feared most, and disgrace there would be, for himself and his family, whether he was impaled or not. If he allowed himself to be driven away by forces less than clearly superior in numbers or armament.

  The commodore realized he was sagging in his chair, and stiffened, straightening. Getting old, he thought sourly, old and pessimistic. With the entire brigade on the ground, and far better armed, surely his marines would outlast the cadets, who might in truth be nearing extermination. It seemed likely that, in a week or two, the opposition would melt, the ambushes and raids dwindle to nearly nothing. Then he could go home with honor.

  * * *

  Lotta Alsnor opened her eyes and stared out through the night forest toward the star-lit valley. She felt depression and shook it off; it wasn't hers.

  She felt something else, too, and realized it was the T'swa seer who'd been melded with Tarimenloku when she had. Now, for a moment, he was with her, an amused but friendly presence. Inwardly she saluted him, felt a glow at his acknowledgement, and realized that now she could find and touch him at will—meld with him if she wished.

  She opened herself to deep perception. At least that was what she intended; neither experience nor education had anything to say about the possibility of deep perception. But it seemed to her it was possible, and she wanted the T'swa seer to know as much and as quickly as he could.

  Then the T'swa presence was gone, and it seemed to her that it wouldn't be back, that it was leaving surveillance in her hands. She got up and stretched. She'd report to Artus, then check on Tain. And then go to bed. It had been a long day.

  56

  Flight Sergeant Faron Gosweller sat in his LUF, LUF 1, wishing his computer had something interesting to read. He was parked at the edge of a half-acre glade, backed between two trees and concealed by the eaves of the forest. The last twilight had faded from what little he could see of the sky, and it was dark indeed.

  It had been a long day, and he still hadn't gotten a call.

  As far as Gosweller knew, the enemy wasn't aware of him. Even if they'd picked up his 360° call to the cadet force, the night before, that had been from two miles away and above the trees. The only investigation he knew of had been by local wildlife. Twice large herds of tiny deerlike animals had entered the glade to browse, stopping frequently in their feeding to look toward the floater. The herds had numbered twenty and thirty-odd; exact counts had been impossible because the animals moved around too much. There'd also been a band of much larger deer—an even dozen of them. Of these, the larger had three horns each—a central pike flanked by two lesser, out-curved horns. The smaller wore only the central pike, a matter of sexual dimorphism he suspected.

  Once a band of small piglike animals had entered the glade, where they seemed to be rooting up tubers or mushrooms. Then something like a big cat, black dappled with tan or gray, had rushed out and killed one of them. After momentary panic, the pigs had rallied, swarming at the predator, and the cat had escaped into a tree. After a little the pigs left, and the cat jumped down to reclaim its kill.

  The cat looked big enough to kill a man, it seemed to Gosweller, and he'd decided not to go out unarmed. Or at night.

  Too bad I couldn't have downloaded a book on Terfreyan wildlife before I left Iryala, he thought. Instead, everything not essential to his mission had been erased from his computer's memory, on the off-chance that the enemy might capture the craft.

  But what they really didn't want the enemy to capture was the teleport, tricked up though it was. Sitting power-up a few yards outside his floater, and connected to it by a power cable, it was Gosweller's escape hatch. If the enemy threatened to find him, he was to run to it and press three switches in order: The first targeted the port on Iryala on a reverse vector; the second activated a destruct mechanism with a one-minute delay; and the third opened the gate for a
single passage, after which the targeting program would revert to the default target, which was the teleport platform itself. If anyone tried to follow him before it destructed, they'd enter a loop and arrive at the same place and time as they'd "left." But in teleport shock, unless they'd been defused.

  A tiny light began flashing on Gosweller's console, accompanied by a soft beeping. He reached, opening a switch, knowing who it had to be. His computer screen told him it was a scrambled message via a fifteen-degree beam pulse transmission; the regiment knew, of course, approximately where he was.

  "LUF 1, LUF 1, this is Little A, this is Little A. Bring your teleport to the accompanying coordinates. Repeat: Bring your teleport to the accompanying coordinates."

  His computer copied the coordinates and he had it read them into his navigator. Then he acknowledged the message. And even as he pressed the acknowledge key, he realized he'd screwed up. He was a civilian pilot with warrior tendencies, who'd been called up from the reserve for this project, and he'd brought some civilian habits with him. He'd sent 360°; he should have sent a narrow beam aimed at the coordinates. Or not acknowledged at all.

  He swore under his breath. Well, he'd hustle—load the teleport and get away from there quickly.

  * * *

  The slowly cruising Klestronu gunship was alone and it wasn't; a narrow carrier beam from brigade's comm central was locked on it. The badly bored pilot, Flight Sergeant Sarkath Veglossu, was expecting an order to return to base; nothing had been heard of the enemy radio source since the night before.

  Instead he received a set of coordinates for a new enemy radio source less than three miles away, and an order to attack it at once. His computer gave the coordinates to its navigation program, and the gunship swung around.

  * * *

  The teleport was on an AG dolly, which made it easy to raise off the ground. Its mass and inertia were considerable for one man to handle though; otherwise Gosweller might have had the rig inside the LUF before the gunship got there. As it was, one end was in the door. He might even have gotten off the ground with it—perhaps even gotten away. As it was, Veglossu's high-intensity floodlight caught the Iryalan by surprise, blinding him for brief seconds. Long enough that he wasn't able to find any switches, let alone press them, before the gunship fired a concussion pulse that struck the side of the floater less than four feet from him.

  Veglossu saw him fall, and put a crewman down to investigate. Sweating, heart thudding, the Klestronu private made his way to LUF 1 and the teleport by a series of short sprints, hitting the dirt after each of them. He had no notion that he'd make it alive. When he did, he found Gosweller dead.

  Using his belt radio, the private let Veglossu know. Veglossu then radioed base to send out a floater and pick up the loot, whatever that consisted of.

  57

  The tree stood some thirty yards back within the jungle's edge, but rose well above any others around it. Hensi Kaberfar, age thirteen, had climbed the lianas that laced it, and lay on an ascending branch thick enough to obscure him from the road nearly half a mile away.

  The 300-acre piece of jungle he was in, he and his platoon, occupied a low bulge of quartzite, its soil shallow and infertile, bordered on two sides with fields and on the third, a road backed by scrub. On the same three sides it was surrounded by Klestronu marines. On the fourth, the north side, flowed the Spice River, eighty yards across, with extensive jungle on its opposite side. Gunships watched its brown current from a distance deemed relatively safe from cadet rockets. If the cadets tried to cross it, the gunships were to move in quickly and chop them up.

  Hensi's tree was on the south side however, and from its height he watched the marine company deployed along the road. There'd be other companies on the east and west sides, he knew. Sooner or later the Klestroni would have to make a decision. Send a company into the jungle—maybe two companies—or sit around behind their electronic sentry fields and try to starve their quarry out. Starve them out or root them out. Odds were, Hensi thought, they'd called for armored missile trucks, each carrying a battery of launchers that could pour scores of ground-to-air rockets into an area in a hurry.

  All for an understrength platoon—twenty-one cadets.

  Just now Hensi's sniper-scoped rifle was cross-slung on his back, and binoculars occupied his hands. He wore no helmet, but a throat mike was clamped to his collar. The artillery would come up the road from the west, if it came, and he was to report when it appeared. The Klestroni were a light brigade, without any real artillery, and their missile trucks were not heavily armored. They tended to use them sparingly, in favorable situations. The idea was for this to seem like a favorable situation.

  The plan had been for two platoons to ambush a company of marines on a road, by daylight, pour fire into them for half a minute, then take to "the bush," a district of mostly overgrown, abandoned farmland.

  The Klestroni didn't have an endless supply of gunships either, so troops on the road usually rode unescorted in armored assault vehicles. A gunship, or more than one, could be sent in a hurry if called for.

  The ambush had been a success. They'd holed some AAVs and killed maybe twenty or thirty Klestroni, then all but three guys had taken off into the young forest. The three who stayed were well separated and carried surface-to-air rocket launchers. A gunship was armored but not invulnerable, and given enough hits—a single hit if you were lucky—you could bring one down.

  They'd hit the bugger all right, and although they hadn't brought him down, they'd sent him veering off, clearly hurt and no doubt radioing for reinforcements.

  Klestronu scout floaters and two more gunships had arrived minutes later. And gotten glimpses now and then of a cadet or cadets moving through the scrub, glimpses most often deliberately allowed. One platoon had laid low, as planned, then slipped away unnoticed. It made no sense to expose both.

  Hensi's platoon had been larger when the ambush was made; they'd numbered thirty-one then. When someone exposes himself to a gunship, there's a good chance he'll get his ass shot off, along with assorted other body parts.

  Now Hensi saw dust. It was the missile trucks coming, he had no doubt, but he waited to make certain. When he was, he radioed. When they'd parked, gravitically locked to firing positions along the road, he radioed again. When they began to fire, he didn't need to radio; missiles slammed into the jungle with a ragged roar heard for miles. Hensi could easily have been killed then, but as usual he was lucky. And instead of scrambling back down, he sat tight; he wanted to see what happened next.

  * * *

  The launchers themselves were noisy enough that the Klestroni ignored the two gunships at first, even when they'd begun strafing. And when they became aware of what was happening, it was with disbelief, because gunships were their own—had to be. The cadets had none. So the response, briefly, was shock and indignation instead of returned fire.

  The gunships passed over two hundred feet apart, the first giving its attention to the emplaced troops, the other to the missile trucks. They didn't make a second pass. Then lobber fire began to land on the emplaced marines from behind, lots of it, accurately. Someone had established the range in advance.

  The missile trucks stilled.

  Hensi slid to the first crotch below him, then went hand over hand down the lianas toward the ground. If the Klestroni reacted as expected, their gunships were already responding, leaving the river unguarded. The platoon would be concealed along the riverbank, watching for their chance, ready to drag their boats to the water, boats that locals had stashed for them. He'd have to run all the way or be left behind.

  * * *

  When the Klestronu artillery had begun firing from the south road, the two companies along the east road had been grimly pleased. Their rifle platoons lay ready and alert, watching mainly the jungle in front of them, into which their mortar platoons began to throw their own high explosives.

  There were two companies on the east side because there was no longer any open field
there, only the road, with forest in front of them and an abandoned field, more or less overgrown with scrub, behind. This was the side the cadets had come from, and these two companies were part of the force that had pursued them, "driven" them. Its marines had been nervous till now. The cadets had long since established their capacity for tricks, surprise, unpredictability.

  But not from the air; the cadets had no air support.

  The regiment's gunships, having shot up the artillery along the south road, rounded the corner and surprised the two companies along the east. The result was more than casualties, though there were lots of those. It was also shock and utter confusion. Thus when 1st and 2nd Platoons, A Company, came out of the scrub to the rear, hoses and rifles blazing, the surviving marines, most of them clinging to the ground, hardly reacted. Grenades arced, roared.

  Then Jerym Alsnor, the assault team leader, saw another gunship line up with the road. The regiment's were gone by then. He barked an order into his helmet mike, and barreled back into the scrub, Tain Faronya beside him. She'd recorded the assault. A dozen seconds later, energy beams—butcher beams, the cadets called them—slashed angrily through the regrowth, severing fronds and young stems. Then, for the moment, it was past.

  Another hundred yards of running took them into older regrowth, dense young woods sixty to eighty feet tall. There they pulled up, breathing hard, beside the streamlet that bordered it. There were more sounds of falling fronds and branches, as if the gunship was ranging over the scrub and forest shooting blindly.

  Jerym had allowed for the gunship response. His assault line had been thin, its men initially a dozen yards apart. Thus fleeing through the scrub, they'd been mostly unseen and very scattered targets.

  Again he spoke into his helmet radio, ordering the two platoons to their rendezvous. Fourteen minutes later he arrived at a cutbank above the Spice River with Tain beside him. There were stragglers—able-bodied troopers helping three wounded. After an hour, twelve of Jerym's eighty-plus troopers had not arrived and could not be raised by radio.