by JCH Rigby
The approaching whine of engines signaled the arrival of a transport which landed and disgorged a half-troop of Dennisonian cavalry to back us up. I was amazed at how well the horses seemed to cope with being airlifted. Half an hour later the transport returned with an infantry platoon.
Our new friends in the cavalry thought this was the best thing ever and they took off down the moor, with loads of rearing up and circling round, all accompanied by weird horsey commands. I knew they were part-timers, like nearly all the military here, but you could see they reckoned they were the local aristocracy from the way they were sneering at the infantry. God only knows what they thought of us.
A couple of the little VSTOL fighters thundered overhead scorching away in the direction taken by the enemy cavalry, but we heard nothing resembling a contact on the air-ground net. I don’t know what the hell the fighter jets thought they were going to do if they found both sets of horse guys having a bit of a saber-up.
My attention turned back to my immediate surroundings. It was a better than even bet that the enemy cavalry had taken the opportunity to go after the wreck and its weapons. Broken fragments of solid missile fuel, flares, cannon shells, bomblets, bang seat propellant—it could all be taken to pieces and plundered for its lethal yield. Pure military gold on this under-industrialized planet. But it wasn’t what you’d got, it’s what you did with it that counted.
I remembered a vid I’d seen: some horrible, boggy islands Earth side, somewhere off the coast of South America. 1,000 baffled, soaked, and miserable conscripts, indifferently supplied and badly officered, were positioned around a detachment of naval weapons technicians. In the pictures, you could see their high-tech anti-ship missiles had been crudely mounted onto some commandeered trailers towed by farm tractors, which meant you could just about launch them, but how the hell did you target the bloody things?
In the event, and despite all their kit, the whole shambles were rolled up by an attacking paratroop battalion supported by VSTOLs not so very different from the plane lying broken in front of me.
Over 300 years later, twelve light years away, still pissing down. Same shit, different planet.
IT GOT BUSY AFTER our little incident. This seemed to have been the moment when the gloves came off and the European New Settlements Army took a crack at getting in some strategic plusses. They must have realized that bringing in the English VSTOLs would prevent them moving serious forces forward, hence the missileers as a counter move. The cavalry would have been on hand to have a quick look at what was what, and pass a message back. If the missile guys succeeded in swatting all the fighters, then they had the perfect opportunity to move their infantry battalion forward. A quick radio message back and the battalion would have been boots on, packs on, rifles up—or swords or whatever—and heading for the transports.
And that could still happen. So the orders came from Command. The English VSTOLs went careering off down to Frontera to knock the Europeans off balance before they could organize. The English VSTOLs worked as advertised, bringing down or destroying on the ground the European. I wondered how accurate my technician pal Gerry had been with his forecast for aircraft availability.
One way or another, Epsilon Indi seemed to have acquired a war. Earth First politicians would love this. However, for now, we were headed back to the airstrip on a returning transport.
On our arrival, Mahmoud took off to the ops tent to report; Keegan, Yu Ling, and I handed the prisoners over to the security police guys while Irwin and Barclay got Billy King and Kirov into the Med Unit. I knew Irwin would hang on there for a bit to ensure King and Kirov got speedy treatment. I waited for the others to finish their task before we took ourselves off to the mess tent via the armory.
As we waited in line, ignoring the stares and mutters from a few militia who’d gotten there ahead of us, it was the usual banter. We were bouncing the chat between us on admin net and datalink as well as voice, turning over the day’s events and slagging each other off. Half an hour ago, Kirov said what I bet all of us were thinking: “Jump jets and cavalry. What a bloody day. What a bloody place. What next? Frequency-agile clubs with nails in? Stealth chariots?”
An unfamiliar female voice sounded out above the rest. “Why did you have to kill the horses? You stupid idiots!”
I looked around searching for the speaker. Further along the food line, a Russian militia woman was almost crying with rage. Everyone was looking, and there were a lot of nodding heads from the other locals. I looked at the faces of my comrades and their faces were screwed up in misunderstanding in a reflection of my own. None of us seemed to know what she was going on about.
Keegan tried first. “I’m sorry about them, but we made sure they didn’t suffer—”
Her attempt to explain only seemed to outrage the woman even more. “This isn’t about animal rights, you halfwit. Those were valuable working animals which we can’t afford to lose. We could have used them. They’ll take a couple of years to replace. The breeding tanks are working flat-out as it is, and you breeze in here with your planes and your guns and your gadgets and kill them. We needed the horses more than we need you. A shame the New Settlers didn’t shoot you instead, you useless morons.”
The whole room went quiet. She was right, and we all knew it.
I was probably a bit quieter than usual, because I couldn’t shake the weirdness of being on a planet orbiting Epsilon Indi. Where were we—twelve light years from home? How far was a light year? That’s 3,000 kilometers a second, that’s something like 18,000,000 kilometers a minute, that’s… what is it?
For some reason, I wanted to use my own brain—not the internal software. A bit over a billion kilometers an hour, twenty-six billion a day; each year, it’s… no. I couldn’t do the annual total, so I gave in. Use the software. Light went over nine-quadrillion kilometers every year, if I was right about the starting figure. I’d been told we were twelve light years from home. I couldn’t face that number. The figures were spinning in my head. Where the hell were we, and what the hell were we doing here?
The light from the sun which I’d known all my life was twelve years old by the time it got here. If I used a big enough telescope I could see twelve years ago. It made no sense. All the physics I’d ever learned said I couldn’t be here.
But here I was, under another sun, squelching around in alien mud, and I’d been looking at dead people born further away from home than I could begin to understand. If they’d been born here, did that make them not human? I knew how that went—enough people thought the Enhanced weren’t human. They were just different, or were they?
No, I’d recognized the killing glare on Brown Horse Bloke’s face straight away. Oh, he’d been human, all right. He qualified on every scale that mattered.
There was no way back from here without being completely dependent on someone else. Not a feeling I liked. Wherever I’d been before, I had always been able to walk out, swim out, fight my way out to somewhere else if it came to that. Even at home, on L5, I knew how to work the escape capsules. The stuff I knew, the people and places, the landscapes, the wildlife, the food—it all came from under the same sun, the Sun, and if I didn’t recognize something or know what to do about it, then I could find out. Wherever I’d been, I could see that same sun.
The sun in this sky was huge, weird and orangey-red; the night sky strange, the day the wrong length for the gravity, the year lasted three months and the air stank. Even worse, there were supposed to be three suns, but I was damned if I could see the other two of them.
I couldn’t get off the planet into orbit if nobody wanted to take me, and, apart from our little ship, the nearest starship would be light years away again by now, and I wouldn’t even understand how to make it back home if I was on board. I’d never felt so lost. I was starting to breathe faster.
I felt a hand on mine, gradually I realized it had been there for a few moments. Angie Barclay speaking softly in my ear. “It’s all right,
Steve, it’s all right. It’s weird, isn’t it? We’re all feeling the strangeness. Don’t worry. It’s all right.”
I felt weak and stupid and vulnerable, as though I’d been caught doing something shameful. Angie’s hand rested lightly on mine, and we were sitting at one of the tables. I had no memory of picking up a plate full of food, putting it on a tray, getting a cup of tea and bringing it to the table. Every action completed as if I had been on automatic pilot.
I forced myself to look up, to look around me at my Section. Kirov, Irwin, and Mahmoud had turned up—I’d never even heard them. They were all watching me, and I couldn’t read a one of them. Mahmoud looked at each of us in turn, finishing with me.
“Angie’s right, Steve. We’ve all got it. The weirdness. It’s going to be like this from now on, and we’d better get used to it. They’ll punt us around the colonies whenever they want, and they’re under pressure not to use us Earth side. Don’t expect to see home again for quite a while.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The Circus Rolls On
“Wars would not last if one side only were wrong.” –De La Rochefoucauld
Rheparion, 2338
We specialize in ambushes, I sometimes think. If there’s one thing that gives the Tsar a nice warm feeling, it’s the idea a bunch of his special forces are lurking somewhere, ready to dispense some carefully-measured mayhem. We’ve been tasked with all kinds of things in the past, from assassinations to covert intelligence-gathering to stay-behind tasks when an enemy’s advancing, but the most common one is the good old-fashioned ambush.
I’ve lain in swamps, in jungles and deserts, in strike ships and in submersibles. Always there’s some red-hot intelligence that this time there’ll be some critical supplies, or the enemy’s big cheese, or something else equally wow, heading down the track or through the pass or over the river or whatever. Each time we’re told all we have to do is lie low for long enough to let them wander into our killing zone, and there’ll be nothing to it. I’ve learned not to trust that ‘nothing to it;’ usually the intelligence is wrong, and the target’s either gone through already, or else it’s so heavily protected even we won’t try to take it on.
But sometimes it works. This time it’s supposed to be the Human Fundamentalists’ nuclears. That’s always guaranteed to bring us out, a hint of a chance at thermonuclear weapons. It’s always the same; they’re so cheap to make, and so disproportionately powerful, you can bet a losing side will try them on sooner or later.
On Rheparion, the Fundis and ProEx, the Pro Expansionists for those not used to the military shortening every title to something inexplicably strange, have been slugging it out for three standard years now, and the Fundis have been taking harder and harder hits. The government got a feeling things were going to go nuclear a little while back, and shipped us out here. The locals can do anything they want to each other, and they’ll be allowed to get on with it. But as soon as there’s a hint of nuclear, people sit up and take interest. Bad for business, trashing planets.
Mahmoud and Barclay have been down here for a bit already, getting up to speed on the background and sneaking behind the lines of both sides, feeling out what’s going on. I do mean both sides: if you really want to know what’s going on, you need to distrust your friends just a little. The rest of us have been up in orbit catching some dreamtime, letting the bodies readjust after too much Overdrive too often, and I think we’re going to start paying that back soon.
Mahmoud tells us ‘The Ambassador of The Worlds’ has called in the governments of both sides, and warned them against going nuclear, surprisingly enough, no one seems to have paid any attention. Now there is a newsflash. As Mahmoud says, pretentious titles aren’t worth a lot if the people they’re intended to impress don’t listen to a word you say. If the U.N. is to keep what little influence they’ve got out here, they’d best start backing up what they say with a bit more than the occasional Enhanced operation. They could try spending some money on a few economic and infrastructure fixes, for instance.
I’m pretty sure we can handle this mission without big problems, but it hardly seems worth it if it’s not going to be followed through by the politicians. It seems as if the U.N. is simply going through the motions, trying to keep a lid on the conflict without direct heavy involvement. As long as there’s no danger of this war spreading off-world, the U.N. will keep it at arm’s length. We’ve seen it all before. Perhaps too many times however, that’s somebody else’s problem.
We are in a classic ambush site: the dirt road emerges from woods and heavy undergrowth to cross a stream before climbing away again to the foothills. The vegetation has been cleared away for 100 meters or so on either side of the stream, presumably to prevent attackers from lying up close to the ford. In fact, this works in our favor, as the ground’s too boggy to let vehicles deploy, so we just get a bigger killing zone and clearer firing lines.
The Fundis aren’t stupid, so they’ve already swept the area with infantry deplaned from rotorcraft. Good plan, if we hadn’t been there already, sowing passive detectors. We sat twenty kilometers away and watched as the helis dropped the troops in, before lifting and circling overhead providing over-watch for the infantry sweep. Combat engineers checked the stream for mines, and then the whole circus rolled on to the next problem, leaving a platoon behind to hold the crossing.
We allowed them to crash around moving into position. After a half hour they settled and a relative peace returned to the river crossing. We came in low and slow, using imaging mini-drones to find every last member of the Fundi platoon. Having scoped them out Mahmoud was able to tell us where their perimeter was porous. They had no idea we were there as we ghosted through their perimeter, setting up the heavy weapons and decoys, swimming the missile launchers in to within a few hundred meters of the crossing. All that’s left now is waiting, but at least all this preparation by the Fundi’s tells us there’s something big inbound. We take turns to get our heads down, resting before the ambush.
The Fundis have a blind spot about us: The Enhanced are such an abhorrence to human fundamentalists they can’t bring themselves to consider our capabilities. If they had, they’d have used dogs around here, or whatever the local equivalent is. Lots of pack hunting animals go loopy when they detect us, and there’s little we can do to remove the last-minute traces of scent, except stay downwind.
It’s obvious to me they’re expecting a Slow enemy raid at worst, and we’re so far behind their lines ProEx are unlikely to mount an attack. So, the Fundis don’t seem to have heeded the UN ambassador’s warnings, which means business for us.
In the event, it’s thirty-six hours before things start to happen. That’s a hell of a long time for a Slow to maintain field-craft discipline, and soon enough we’re getting their positions confirmed every few minutes, with troops moving about, smoking, cooking meals, and so on.
The first sign that the convoys on its way is a sweep-heli cutting low overhead in the midst of a swarm of drone gun platforms. We stay motionless, listening to the thwock of the blades. My proximity alarms are yowling away, so I trip them out and lie still, looking at my knuckles. My left hand has turned a mottled green to match the vegetation, but I can see some ragged silvery skin where the camouflage pattern has failed on the right one. The fingers look a bit battered, too; best have them checked when we get back.
The heli clatters away behind us, and two kilometers down the trail Yu Ling spots the first of the big armored carriers. Once it emerges from the trees, the side and back doors open and out pours a stream of tiny figures, thirty or forty of them. Rangs. Genetically modified orangutans, dressed in scruffy cam jackets and clutching assault rifles, scatter from the carrier and form a ragged skirmish line to cross the open country ahead. Their leader shambles to the center and, with a great deal of nipping and snarling at the rest of the brood, gets them moving across the boggy ground while the infantry platoon commander watches them with a look of wary contempt.<
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I’ve never understood how the Fundis can sneer at the likes of us when they breed creatures like these. Hardly more intelligent than a dog, they can barely cope with the most basic weapons; and they can only follow simple orders. Thankfully for us, they can’t even follow scent too well, so the only thing they’re good for, as far as I can see, is cannon fodder.
Right now, they’re probably supposed to flush attackers out of hiding, but the savage little things are too busy fighting amongst themselves and dodging the leader’s club to be at all effective. They give us a few more targets to hit, but there won’t be any real trouble from them once the shooting starts.
A string of armored carriers starts to edge past the Rangs’ vehicle. I eye them up a bit more seriously. There’s probably a quick reaction force inside a couple of them. One is plainly the escort commander’s, from the antennas and markings. The point vehicle crosses the ford and comes a little deeper into the killing ground.
A short pause before the first missile transporter noses out into the clearing. Yu Ling confirms the back vehicle has passed him. It’s all coming together. I tense up a little.
As soon as the lead carrier starts to climb the slope toward us, Mahmoud gives us the word on datalink. Across the stream, Keegan sets off the tree-top claymores sown by the mini-drones above the platoon positions. The autonomous little vehicles follow this up with ripples of flechette fire down onto the survivors. This side, Barclay launches the first missiles which whoosh across the boggy ground toward the vehicles.
The lead carrier explodes, flame and fragments boiling out of the still-open doors. A crump in the distance beyond the stream marks the destruction of the back vehicle, so everything’s nicely boxed in. Columns of smoke are already climbing up through the trees.