by David Weber
"Major!"
It was the junior Marine of the advisory team, a buck sergeant with a demolitions specialty.
"We've secured the fuel dump and the Sea Fencibles have it rigged to blow. Four charges. But we can't do anything. There's a school full of kids on the other side of the wall. Right in range of the fireball."
Ryder thought rude things about the Kingdom of Chuiban's urban planners, then nodded.
"All right. You and the Fencibles watch the charges. Disarm them if you're in danger of being overrun. Wait for my signal—`Hallucination' will be the code word."
"Hallucination. Yes, Ma'am. I kind of wish it was one, too."
"You aren't the only one, Marine."
SEVEN
Ryder sprinted after the demolitions sergeant, found herself at the base of a low wall, and scrambled up on top of it before anybody or anything (including her own second thoughts) could stop her. Nobody shot at her, but about fifty pairs of large, mostly brown, eyes stared up at her out of as many faces.
"Evacuate the school!" Ryder shouted. She would have given ten years off her life for a loudspeaker, to be heard inside. The school had a tile roof, a timber frame, and dozens of glass windows. The blast wave would slaughter everyone inside when it hit, even without the fireball's help.
She wanted to scream, but realized that might cause a panic. Instead she pointed at the exit. "Run, now!" she called. "The fuel dump is on fire and might explode. Get out of the school now and keep on running."
The children turned slowly and walked off toward the exit still more slowly. Ryder wondered if they somehow thought that the Sea Fencibles were firefighters, who would provide a grand spectacle whether or not they put out the fire before the explosion.
Two bits of luck saved the children. One was the first incoming round from Nautilus. It was an air-bursting smoke round, timed to detonate three hundred meters up. It made a bang audible all over town, even over the firing, and left a cloud of white and purple smoke big enough for a low-yield nuke. Ryder hoped that it would, in the words of an old drill instructor, "warn everybody to keep their heads down and their mouths and—ah, sphincters—shut."
Seeing and hearing the explosion started the children on the playground hurrying. It brought more of them out of the school, followed by a teacher shouting at them to get back inside and sit down!
The teacher went on shouting until she caught sight of Major Ryder, standing on top of the wall, dripping with weapons, hands and face black as fresh tar, and altogether looking like something sprung from Hell. The teacher let out a shriek that must have sounded like the noon lunch whistle in factories halfway across town and darted for the exit with an alacrity that did credit to her condition if not her courage.
She not only swept most of the children out of the exit along with her, her scream brought other teachers out—and Ryder's warning finally got through to them. In five minutes the school was empty, and the street beyond its gates crowded with children and teachers, all of them still moving.
Chung came on the radio, to say that the first round had got some of the Euvinophan people moving, and "in a retrograde direction," but not all of them, and three more truckloads had just pulled up. Nautilus was going to drop a couple more rounds on the hillside behind the Esplanade, but if that didn't discourage loitering, she was going to have to fire for effect.
"If we clear the Euvinophan people out of their assembly area, we'll have a clear shot at Blue Temple Avenue, which takes us straight out to the air base," he concluded.
Personally, Ryder thought they would do better to hold Market Square, which would block any counterattacks by either the Euvinophan people at the training barracks or the Peep Navy types at the air base. But Chung was definitely offensive-minded, and if he could capture any local vehicles, he might just bring it off.
"All right. Just be careful going through Market Square," Ryder said. "Street merchants are bad people to have mad at you. They'll slick up the pavement with spoiled fruit if they can't do anything else!"
* * *
Jean Testaniere could only hope that the second convoy of Euvinophan's infantry wouldn't follow the example of the first. It would probably help them to take a few casualties, so that they would have somebody to be angry at. They could not possibly be as angry at anyone as he himself was at Paul Weldon, but it would be a start.
The second salvo from the sea was only another demonstration of firepower. The sixty-odd infantry looked in all directions, and most of them turned as pale as their complexions allowed. They neither charged nor fled. Some of them actually unslung their rifles and started loading, while a couple of adequately loud NCO's started forming squads.
That was all Testaniere saw before Citizen Captain Weldon finally replied.
"People's Will Flight One to People's Will Ground One. We have sighted, bombed, and destroyed a Republican air freighter. One major secondary explosion, and minor ones continuing. Any hostile personnel in the area have taken evasive action and are under cover. I intend to search and strafe."
"I do not advise that," Testaniere said. The words came out like an order, rather than advice, but he could not have used any other tone to save his life. He wanted to scream, "Get that piece of tin and your useless behind back here half an hour ago!" but managed to avoid that extreme as well.
"Major hostile attack on Buwayjon," he said instead. "Air-lifted Manticoran puppet forces in company strength or above, with offshore fire support. Repeat, I recommend an immediate return to the city and that you make your first priority target the bombardment vessel. Black hull, yellow superstructure, white funnel, older vessel."
"A surface ship, in broad daylight? Can't you engage it with the tanks?" Weldon sounded genuinely bewildered.
Testaniere hated to admit the truth. "The vehicles and dump were the first hostile target. The puppet troops have made the area inaccessible, until the Euvinophan reinforcements now arriving permit us to counterattack."
A long silence with only the background noise of the pinnace's engines, then, in eloquently perfect diction:
"You, Citizen People's Commissioner Testaniere, are an ass."
Testaniere wanted to laugh. He doubted he would stop if he began, so he only said, "Like calls to like, Citizen Captain Weldon. We can divide up the blame for this mess once we've cleaned it up. That still needs you and your pinnace here, now!"
"On the way."
Several Sea Fencibles and the Marine demolitions sergeant joined Ryder on the wall before the last of the children was out of range of the explosion (or so she hoped).
"Are they ready to blow?" she asked.
"Not quite," the sergeant replied. "They're salvaging a whole bunch of Peep ammo that we can use—satchel charges, rocket launchers for anti-tank rounds, a couple of vehicle-mounted tribarrels with power packs—all sorts of stuff."
"Tell them to hustle," Ryder said. "If we don't blow the main dump, we'll have to blow the tanks individually. We may not have that much time."
"Oh, they're already putting demo or satchel charges under each tank," the sergeant said. "Double fuses and everything else. I don't think those youngsters have ever had so much fun in public."
Then the sergeant's eyes widened and he shouted, "Get down!"
Ryder was already moving; she'd seen the green fatigues of Euvinophan troops at the playground exit. Neither she nor the sergeant was down before one of the enemy let fly. The burst only hit the sergeant with three rounds, but one of them knocked off his helmet and another hit him in the throat, so that he was mortally wounded twice over when he hit the bricks head first.
Ryder and the Sea Fencibles returned fire, shooting low to keep overs from hitting the children. The children immediately started running again, and the soldiers seemed to have enough nerve to attack—at least for about ten seconds.
After that, more than a dozen of them were down, one of them propped up against a swing set, choking on his own blood. Ryder suspected that she would see that man in her
nightmares for a while.
Then some of the school windows blew out, and more hostile fire smashed a Sea Fencible off the wall. A moment later an explosion tore a hole in the playground wall to the left. As bricks crashed down and the dust blew away, one of Euvinophan's Peep-surplus tanks came grinding improbably across the rubble.
Still more improbably, it swung its turret and let fly with both its plasma cannon and the ball-mounted bow tribarrel at the school's upper floor. Both were firing at maximum elevation, but that was enough. Suddenly the school had much less of an upper floor than before, and bricks, tiles, timber, furniture, and bodies (all adult-sized and in uniform, mercifully) rained down onto the playground.
A scout car with a ring-mounted Peep tribarrel followed the tank over the rubble. It cleared its field of fire just as several Euvinophan troops hurried in the gate, brave enough to try rescuing their fallen comrades. Their courage did not keep them alive against tribarrel fire, but some of them got off shots, and one of them actually hit Shuna Ryder.
It didn't penetrate the armor, and anyway she had been described as well-padded in the relevant area. She did pick up a selection of bruises and scrapes when she hit the ground, not to mention what felt like a couple of cracked ribs. She also knew that she would be standing up when awake and lying on her stomach when asleep, until the bruise healed.
Somehow an SBA was beside her even before she tried moving. Before the SBA finished, Fernando Chung was standing over her, looking unprofessionally concerned.
"Would you believe where I was shot?" Ryder muttered.
"I see where the painkiller is going in," Chung said. "I will modify my massage techniques."
Ryder felt more like blushing from that remark than she did from having her pants around her knees.
When the painkiller had taken hold and the scan showed no fractures or internal injuries, the SBA let her stand. "I really think a medevac is—"
"Going to have to wait," Chung interrupted. "I want to get a few more tanks out, if we have time. The power packs for the plasma guns only hold about ten full shots apiece, but that's enough direct fire that we won't need Nautilus risking a miss. I wish we could block the access road, but that would mean pushing tanks out too far—"
A sonic boom sent glass cascading out of windows. Ryder wiped a suddenly stinging cheek, and her hand came away smeared with a grisly mixture of blood, sweat, and camouflage paint.
The SBA laid a field dressing over the demolitions sergeant's face, and watched the silver shape of the pinnace race overhead.
Her eloquent curse spoke for everyone.
Testaniere saw the Navy people from the airbase drive up just as he saw Citizen Sergeant Pescu leading a handful of ragged SS survivors from the direction of the vehicle park. Then everybody stopped to stare or cheer as the pinnace blasted the city with its sonic boom.
Testaniere doubted that the People's Republic would appreciate the bill for the chimneys, roofs, and windows broken by the supersonic approach, but he would take his share of the responsibility for it. After all, he had ordered the pinnace to hurry.
The pinnace was now slowing and banking, to let its on-board fire control systems pick out the enemy bombardment ship and paint an accurate picture of it for the missiles. The commissioner hoped that Weldon had not shot off too much of his ammunition, and that he would not go in close, to grab glory and also come within range of any air-defense weapons the ship might have. Those, he suspected, would be Manticore-supplied; the precision of the incoming fire and the modern ammunition would have been beyond the primitive technology that their Kirk imposed on the Canmore Republic.
Meanwhile, the SS personnel had their personal weapons and some ammunition, and Pescu was no longer the only one who looked like a warrior. The Navy people looked scared half out of whatever wits their training had left them, but all were armed and they had brought several crated anti-tank missiles as well. Two of them were even driving a hover truck with a light plasma gun in a fixed bow mount.
Testaniere wondered how Weldon had managed to acquire the extra weaponry. But that was a question that would not need answering until after they had saved the People's mission to liberate Silvestria.
Or at least kept it from being driven from the field in its first battle.
Testaniere knew that was defeatism, but in the privacy of his own mind he could refuse to observe political propriety when it didn't match the facts. The leaders of the People were not only going to have to learn that all over again, they were going to have to teach it to a great many of their fighters and workers.
"We have the resources for a quick counterattack. If somebody can have Euvinophan's people reform on the left flank, and the next trucks bring their people around to reinforce us, and somebody gets at least one freighter airborne with a bomb load—"
"The Royal Army has put a no-fly order into effect until further notice, and they have a tracked missile-launcher bearing on the air base," a citizen petty officer said. She looked and sounded as if she would rather have confessed to child molesting.
Testaniere understood how she felt. He swallowed. "We can still make a useful ground counterattack with what we have here or can rally."
"Won't that make us a big target?" the citizen petty officer asked. She had a rocket crate slung across her back, a helmet on her cropped head, and an assault rifle in her hands, so he knew this was not a coward asking.
"If we form out here, the enemy won't dare strike us for fear of hitting the city. Once we've closed in, they'll be afraid of hitting their own people. No reactionaries or elitists can be superhuman."
He thought he heard someone mutter, "Neither can the People's fighters," but all his attention was suddenly elsewhere. As the pinnace raced overhead, white smoke and some kind of silver vapor suddenly filled the sky ahead of it. The pinnace banked, increased speed, shredded the smoke and vapor clouds with its slipstream, then vanished to the south.
For once Testaniere did not suspect Weldon of cowardice. He didn't know what the raiders had suddenly sprung, either. He hoped that in the pinnace, Weldon would have a better view and the weaponry to handle it.
* * *
Ryder had seen the tank suddenly hurl smoke grenades and chaff into the sky, and the pinnace's reaction. She'd hoped to see the pinnace's turbines simply ingest debris and fall out of the sky that way, but either there wasn't any solid debris or the pilot was both smart and lucky.
Then the tank's turret hatch opened, and Fernando Chung stuck his head out.
"I told you we were going to need some Peep hardware. What's more, we've been lucky. The San Martinos built all the weapons on these things with anti-air capabilities, and high-elevation mounts, and either the Peeps left well enough alone or one of their ordnance software people has the brains God gave cave slugs."
"Is everybody out of the buildings?" Ryder shouted. She wanted to say something to Fernando, but knew that her voice might not be quite steady for anything but orders. A tank-vs.-pinnace duel was both unavoidable and mortally dangerous.
Besides, it was time to haul her aching posterior and everybody else's out of the range of any fuel dump explosion, since it might no longer wait for the demolition charges. Peep air-to-ground equipment was usually marginal and their training worse; they could barely hit a building if they hovered over the skylight.
"Move, move, move!" Ryder yelled. So did all the NCO's, then everybody in hearing took up the cry. She called to her radio operator to take over relaying data to Nautilus, because if the pinnace had to fight the tank it couldn't attack the ship, and the mortars and rockets might be able to hit the depot once the raiders were clear of it.
Then it would be house-to-house fighting until they reached the open country or met the Royal Army, which had to be alerted and sending somebody besides Field Police to see what was going on. As long as the Royal Army wouldn't turn them over to Euvinophan's people, that would be coming out on top. Even if Euvinophan did catch up with them, his people might be slow to pu
sh home an attack, and the Royal Army might break up the fight before the raiders exhausted their ammunition.
But damn it, we are taking everybody who can walk or be carried when we go!
That was the Royal Marine tradition, but there was no harm in spreading the gospel to other peoples' forces.
Then too much happened too fast. The pinnace came back, and Chung's turret-mounted launchers went to rapid, automatic fire, throwing out a stream of anti-laser grenades on the bearing to its airborne enemy. The cloud of aerosol hung between it and the Peeps, depriving the pinnace of the laser which was its sole light-speed weapon. The pinnace still had its pulsers, but the probability of a kill on a vehicle as heavily armored as the tank was poor, whereas the tanks' plasma cannon would blow right through the aerosol . . . and kill any pinnace ever built with a single clean hit.
But whoever was piloting that pinnace knew what he was about. He came in fast and low, using the city's buildings to block Chung's line of fire on the approach. The Sea Fencibles' net of ground sensors told the Erewhonese colonel where the pinnace was, while the pinnace knew only the tank's approximate location. That meant the pilot would have to pop up and stay high long enough to acquire the tank. But the pinnace was vastly more maneuverable than the tank. It could dodge and weave on its approach, which meant Chung could bring his main armament to bear only on the general threat axis. He had to wait for direct observation before he could actually target his foe, while the pinnace carried missiles which could be launched even off-bore in fire-and-forget mode. If the pilot had long enough to lock Chung up at all, the missiles would do the rest whatever happened to the pinnace . . . unless the San Martin vehicle's point defense could stop modern, short-range, hyper-velocity missile fire, and that simply wasn't going to happen.
Which meant it all came down to a crap shoot. Both combatants knew what they had to do, and what their enemy had to do, and roughly where to look for one another. The question of who would survive came down to how quickly each of them could generate a firing solution and get his shot off.