by JCH Rigby
PART Vi
STEVE ARDEN
2335 – 2338
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
A Stradivarius at War
“It is the flash which appears; the thunderbolt will follow.” –Voltaire, 1694-1798
Date Redacted
We lay motionless in the darkness of the ravine, watching the target building within the farm complex and waiting for Mahmoud to give us the word. Just us; no interference from the local loyalists. We’d left them to block the road from the village, doing their best to look tough with their antique shotguns and rifles. They even had a couple of halberds. When I had first seen the six feet long wooden pool topped with an axe blade and a metal spike I thought I had traveled back to the fourteenth or fifteenth century, until Mahmoud pointed out how easy and inexpensive the things were to reproduce, and would I want to find myself on the receiving end of that nasty looking axe? The locals were enthusiastic, untrained, and ill-disciplined; we don’t want them anywhere near us.
With their assortment of weaponry, we knew we couldn’t hope for much help from them, but they’re all we have to work with on this mission. Command has even got us using local firearms, so any evidence we leave behind won’t point in the direction of Enhanced troopers. At least Mahmoud and Keegan insisted on properly re-engineered kit, so it shouldn’t pack up on us, I’ve ended up with this beautiful old 5.56mm assault weapon firing cased ammunition. It feels like going to war kitted out with a Stradivarius. Ancient, but a nice piece of kit.
Our mission was to deal with some revolutionaries, though I’m not clear who they’re rebelling against, or why. Earth First again, probably. Too be honest I’m not even clear where I am: on Earth, or somewhere else? This earth gives off a rich, spicy smell which makes my nostrils prickle; the idiot processor attached to my brain decides that I want to know more, and starts to reel off a string of molecular structures across the upper strip of my right eye. I blink away the irritation and concentrate on the job at hand.
A scruffy-looking dog is tethered to a nearby shed, snuffling in its sleep. I can clearly make out the heat profile of the solitary guard loitering by the main door of the building we interested in. Several minutes of scanning have shown no trace of anyone else. Idiots. If they were worried enough to put out protection, why not double up the guards at night?
A brilliant point of light flares in my night vision. The guards smoking; we wait until he draws on his cigarette, when his night vision is at its poorest.
Kirov springs forward, knife held low in his right hand. The sentry takes the smoke in deeply with his last breath, grunting as the blade severs his windpipe and cuts deep into the spinal column. Neatly catching the falling rifle, Kirov lowers the body to the ground.
We burst out of cover, rushing the building. King tosses Kirov his assault rifle. King will blow the door for Mahmoud and Kirov. Keegan and I go for the windows; explosives set, King reclaims his assault rifle and boosts onto the rooftop to work downwards. Barclay and Yu Ling are 300 meters away with the local guys, lying in ambush on the trail to the enemy village. That’s where any trouble is going to come from.
The window pane shatters as I come through. I’m rolling forward, firing; my rifle bolt cycles lazily back and forth. At least this museum piece I’m carrying hasn’t jammed.
There’s a group of six or seven watching a vid, eating, reading. I’m aiming front left, away from Keegan. She’s already through the window over to the right, fractions of a second faster. My cartridge cases tumble slowly toward her in a brass arc.
Smoke billows slowly through the doorway. Mahmoud and Kirov are firing precise, careful bursts as the door drifts downwards. Two card players are reaching for weapons, mouths open with shock as the rounds hit. I’m impressed they’ve reacted that quickly.
A man is falling slowly down the stairs; I can see his jacket rippling under the impact of at least three strikes. A pistol bounces down ahead of him. Upstairs, King is clearing the room without much opposition, judging by the sound.
We drop back out of neural overdrive, slowing our responses, at a command from Mahmoud and the world slows down to normal speed.
Noise. Rifle bolts slam back home. The bodies of the card players crumple backwards and hit the floor in a chaos of table, chairs, cards, and shattering bottles and glasses. The door finishes falling in; fragments of glass hit the floor. The larger of the two guys rolls over, coming to rest against the casing of a comms set. His chest is a bloody hole. The falling man hits the bottom step and lands on top of his pistol. Twenty or thirty cartridge cases bounce around the room; the echoes of our fire die away along with the boom of King’s door breaching charge.
We set the explosives and leave, heading at a gentle lop for the rendezvous. The dog is howling and snarling at the end of its rope till Kirov bares his teeth and snarls in turn. It slinks back, whimpering. In the distance, we hear shouting from the accommodation block down in the village; the other rebels have heard the noise, and reinforcements will be on their way. Barclay confirms she’s ready. We’ll destroy the other buildings once the ambush is sprung.
I wonder who the hell were these guys? Where are we, and what was all this about? I hate it when Command do this to us. I like to know who I’m killing, and why.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The Fire Brigade
“Air power is a force coming from God knows where, dropping its bombs on God knows what, and going off God knows where.” –Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, 1920.
2335
The whistle-scream meant atmospheric fighters. Nothing else sounds like that. The noise faint and distant, coming from somewhere out on the far side of the makeshift airfield. I turned to look, up and outwards away from the dust bowl where our landers sat.
Head stabilized, I can barely make the fighters out on full zoom. Stubby little T-shapes against the bloated red sun, a pair of our Vertical/Short Take-Off/Landing aircraft were bobbing over the hills and running in toward the makeshift airstrip. The image flickered with heat haze. Until recently this place saw only Dennison State’s half-dozen or so transport utilities, and an occasional freight shuttle. Military craft were new around here.
“Arden, look in. Forget them.” Mahmoud wanted my attention back on the briefing.
The fighters were about two or three minutes away from touchdown. Best do what the boss wants. I looked in at the militia captain, hissing his information through a breathing booster that covered his mouth and nose. Few of these makeshift buildings had full atmosphere; another thing that would have to wait until more money was available to the colony on Epsilon Indi Four.
“…where we believe the terrorists have installed themselves in enough numbers to pose a significant threat. They’ve restricted themselves to cross-border attacks on civil administration targets, so far, but it’s only a matter of time before they link up openly with the New Settlements Army and move in strength against our Border Security Force.” The captain highlighted an area on the map split by a thin red line his slate was generating.
“Once they establish a firm base on the other side of the border, we’ll have to conduct high-profile search-and-destroy missions to dislodge them. That’s currently politically unacceptable, so we need to prevent them from making link-up. The Tsar’s wish is we keep Dennison State secure from foreign terrorists.”
I spared a quick glance at Pavel Kirov, he was daydreaming, I could tell. His eyes were set on the officer, but I guessed his attention lay elsewhere. He’d be recording the briefing to play it back later; I’d seen him do it before when he was bored. The silly twit doing the thoughtful nodding officers always liked, but he was probably listening to music or watching a vid. Pavel had a trick of flipping into Neural Overdrive from time to time, replaying the backup if he thought he was going to be asked a question. One day he was going to come unstuck. So
would I, if I didn’t listen in to what the captain was saying.
“The European New Settlements Army’s nearest base is at Frontera, 200 kilometers away, over the mountains. The border area is only lightly patrolled by the New Settlements’ own frontier force, but we know, at best, they’re not offering any hindrance to the Earth First terrorists. At worst, they may even be giving a little covert help—intelligence updates on our movements, the odd hand with transport, that sort of thing.”
I couldn’t help it, my attention wandered to what was going on around us. Outside, frenzied work continued on more newly arrived stumpy-winged fighters. Ground handling crews were stripping the protective covers off equipment as fast as the loadmasters could pull it out of the landers, airframe techs practically pushing them aside in the rush to install modifications.
The work was frantic. Fuel tanks, ground-attack weapons mounts, bomb and missile cassette loads, and 1,000 less identifiable items were scattered all over the place. More fundamental stuff like power pack intake filters, vectored thrust nozzles, rebuilt lifting surfaces, and landing gear were all sitting on pallets right out in the open.
We’d arrived on Epsilon Indi Four the previous day, climbing out of the lander and immediately falling foul of the English Air Force techs as they rushed the little fighters off their freight platforms and bolted them together. The English had never liked the Europeans, and ever since the burgeoning super state and the then United Kingdom had parted ways in the early twenty-first century rapidly followed by the collapse of the UK into its four composite entities their mutual dislike had turned into open animosity.
Across the taxiway, another of the fighters stood in a dispersal, drawing up fuel from a horse-drawn bowser. The plane’s auxiliary power unit whined, making the big-footed draft horses nervous. They were wearing breathing boosters, and they didn’t like that, either. This was the first time anyone had tried to operate combat aircraft anywhere off-Earth, as far as I knew, and the local infrastructure wasn’t up to it.
I quietly dropped into overdrive and played back a conversation I had earlier this morning. I’d been having a coffee with one of the tech flight sergeants who’d arrived with us. Gerry Di Marco. He’d convinced me you couldn’t yank fighter planes off an Earth-side flight line, FTL them out to the colonies, shuttle them down, and start flying. Gravity and atmosphere variations made a hell of a difference to the aircraft’s performance, if you could fly them at all, and everything else gave you a load of engineering problems.
“You know, Arden, none of the locals seem to realize how bloody well we’re doing—getting the planes here, getting them flying, getting the weapons on them, sorting out the flight and armaments software. Different air means odd performance from the missiles. If the weapons heads are set to detonate within fifteen meters of an aircraft, you don’t want them running out of drive when they’ve only gone ten meters from your own.”
“Yeah, I can see how that would be a problem for the pilots.” I joked. Di Marco didn’t appreciate it giving me a stern look.
“We’ve even brought all the bloody fuel with us, and every last spare. There’re no more here, and none coming, either. This is it, and it’s not sustainable. One or two engagements, and that’s your lot. Even with air supremacy.
“We’ve no credible battle damage repair capability, and these New Settlements clowns could have SAMs.” I’d learned the air force loved its acronyms even more than the army. This one meant surface-to-air missiles. For all his bitching Di Marco was right though; getting the little fighters in from Earth was chore enough. Converting them all, and trying to maintain a combat air patrol so quickly after their arrival, stretched the English Air Force detachment to its limits.
“And you can’t defend an airbase; if the opposition want to get on badly enough, they will.” Di Marco spat the words out. “You watch—we’ll be spending half our time trying to fudge up solutions for stuff we haven’t got, and the other half standing guard.
“If a plane is damaged, it’ll be finished. You boys can wave goodbye to close air support after the first few days. You’re going to need all your fancy built-in kit. Best of luck, and thanks for the brew.”
After Di Marco had left I considered what he had said. It looked like any fighting was going to quickly get real up close and personal.
I exited overdrive having missed only a few seconds of what the captain had been saying.
“…and it looks like the European New Settlements have got an infantry battalion preparing to move from Frontera.” Here, in Dennison State, infantry really were foot-soldiers, with the planet too recently settled for a vehicle industry, and starship space too scarce for importing luxuries like military wagons. 200-ks in this country, with its thin, dusty atmosphere? Ten days’ march on foot for the enemy infantry battalion. Less if they use their own cargo utilities, and leapfrog the troops forward, exactly what the fighters that were being assembled around us were supposed to stop.
“Probably a squadron or two of their cavalry, and we think they’ll have some light guns.” I try not to laugh out loud at the captains comment. For God’s sake, it was like the Napoleonic Wars, or something.
“The locals hadn’t got very far with a chemicals industry so there was a tight limit on fuels, and not much in the way of pyrotechnic ammunition, either. Personal firearms were handguns and a few sniper weapons; fire support was precision guided artillery, using as little ammunition as possible.”
The captain had a point. No one wanted to use up valuable starship space ferrying out ammo. Rifles would turn into bayonet mounts after only two or three minutes of contact. Consequently, a lot of swords and pikes. However, frequency-agile radios, targeting and ranging lasers, cam-suits, body armor, slick reaction times with the freight utilities, pretty good data management, some navigation information from the few satellites the Europeans did have.
Cavalry, light infantry, horse-drawn artillery, a big emphasis on marksmanship, a lot of edged weapons, and some weird tactics drawing on the seventeenth and the twenty-second centuries Earth side. Thank God we had our usual weapons. We probably brought more ammunition with us than the rest of the planet put together.
So here we were, a section of Enhanced troopers turning up like the bloody fire brigade, with half a dozen VSTOL fighter aircraft, the only friendly troops being a scratch battalion of local militia.
It was like something out of a comic vid. The English Air Force providing protection for the Russian Tsar’s local infantry. A European-backed neighboring state giving cover for Earth First irregulars. Supposedly a United Nations brigade was on its way out from the Jovian moons, I’d believe that when I saw them land. Not a lot of hope that anything would reach here, if Earth First got its way. A soft chuckle came out of me unbidden. You couldn’t write this stuff.
I turned my attention back to the captains briefing, trying to find the right hearing sensitivity to make him out, without the approaching aircraft deafening me.
“…won’t be able to push a force through the hills for another ten days or so. We’ve got just that long to find the principal terrorist groups and neutralize them.” I liked the way he said we. It seemed we agreed about the ten days, at any rate.
“By then, the U.N. brigade will be here, and we’ll have no more trouble with the New Settlers.” Sure, they’ll be here; the U.N.’s got a wonderful history of making tough decisions really quickly. There won’t be any problem at all for ARTOK squeezing the starship time out of NipponDeutsch AstraLift—but it’ll cost, and when did the U.N. like voting serious money?
Oh, the UN troops would get here all right, but ten days? Not a chance. Our own lashed-up little ship could carry its flight crew and exactly ten passengers. They were hanging around handily in orbit somewhere, but our little ship wasn’t going to bring in anything useful in the way of reinforcements. Mahmoud hadn’t exactly said it, but we all knew the ship was our get-out-of-jail-free card if everything here turned smelly.
The scream from jet engines grew, turning to a roar as the fighters crossed the runway threshold and drifted onto their final approach. I stared out the window again. Scruffy, jury-rigged-looking things. The aircraft showed the marks of a lot of hurried work; mismatched color schemes where new panels were fitted, identification marks missing, untidy modifications everywhere.
They were coming in dirty: gear down, those weird one-piece bendy lifting surfaces fully extended and warped, missile and bomb pods open. They needed all the help they could get to reduce airspeed in this thin atmosphere. I guessed they weren’t trying vertical landings until they knew more about doing it the old-fashioned way.
Everywhere I looked, people stopped work to stare at them. The draft horses were bucking and rearing in their traces now, terrified of the din. Their handler—a local—bellowed something into the ear of one of the ground crewmembers, unhitched them from the fuel cart, and hopped onto one, riding the pair away quickly. They didn’t take much urging.
Something made me look over at Kirov again; he was almost helpless with laughter. Somehow, I couldn’t find it funny; we might have to depend on this farce for close air support in the next few days. Maybe Gerry di Marco had got to me.
The tight formation seemed dangerously close, a bit too showy for this dirty little airstrip. I was wrong: they weren’t truly flying, but holding themselves in the pattern on their pillars of superheated air, hurling clouds of abrasive dust across the entire airfield. My bones seemed to rattle in the blast.
The captain gave way to the inevitable, giving up trying to brief us. He simply stood there, tapping his pointer against his leg, looking pissed off at his big moment being interrupted. I suppose he hadn’t had a lot of chances for this sort of thing.