He fired half a dozen times, maybe more, until no one was standing, then quickly replaced the clip. He had five clips left.
Parvati sank farther down, almost touching the western horizon.
As dozens of flickering figures appeared in the twilight, running toward Trystin, he kicked his reflexes into high as a shower of bullets spang’ed above and around him.
Trystin tried to concentrate, to make each shot deliberate, but there seemed to be far too many revs, and he switched to semiautomatic, running through the clip, and slipping the next into place, and then another. Figures fell, but more seemed to replace them.
The second grenade bounced off the door and exploded somewhere behind Trystin, spraying his leg with needles of shrapnel and pain.
He ignored it, and ran through another half clip before he looked at what seemed like rows of bodies strewn before the vehicle-bay door.
Lying on his side, he put the last clip in the slug thrower, and waited.
A flickering appeared to his right, then vanished. He watched. Another flicker, just momentary. Trystin nodded. The rev was trying a slow approach in the dim light so that Trystin wouldn’t be able to see him.
After the next flicker, Trystin squeezed off two rounds.
The rev, less than ten meters away, launched himself toward the doorway, collapsing less than three meters from Trystin.
Trystin took a deep breath, realizing he didn’t have much air left himself. There were aux tanks in the back of the bay, and the scooter tanks, but did he dare move? If he didn’t, like the revs, he was going to be dead because he couldn’t breathe.
Slowly, slowly, he inched himself back and to his right, trying to move so quietly that no rev could see. His progress was slow, since pain stabbed through his right leg, and the leg didn’t respond well.
Once he was clear of the opening and behind the shredded edges of the door, he staggered up, rifle ready, as he backed toward scooter number one.
He could sit in the scooter seat and cover the door. It wasn’t ideal, but it allowed him to breathe, which was better than the alternative, far better.
Another flicker caught his eye, and he fired. The image dropped from his sight. Trystin wanted to kick himself. He wasn’t thinking well. He dropped his reflexes a notch and called up his night vision—except the effort brought stars to his eyes.
Edging backward, his intermittent vision on the opening blasted in the big door, he almost fell into the scooter. Awkwardly he tubed into the air supply. His vision cleared a bit, and his thoughts somewhat as well. Enough that he remembered to use the Sustain in the helmet nipple.
Then he waited, his night vision stabilizing.
The three grenades exploded where Trystin had been lying earlier, rearranging fragments of composite armor and metal and raising dust.
Trystin managed to struggle down to a position half sitting on the plastcrete floor while remaining connected to the scooter’s air supply. His eyes were fixed on the opening in the door.
Thwump! Thwump!
The second set of grenades exploded farther back, raising dust and splinters of plastic, but none of the fragments went the nearly fifteen meters back to the scooter where Trystin waited, rifle ready.
Two revs burst through the door.
Trystin got the first one in midair.
The second turned in the wrong direction, looking toward the station lock doors, and spraying them with a short burst.
It took Trystin three shots in the near-darkness, and he yanked out his oxygen plug with the third.
Slowly, he levered himself back next to the scooter before replugging into the tank.
Then he waited. And waited. And waited. At some point, he remembered to drop his reflexes to normal—far later than he should have, but his thoughts weren’t as clear as they should have been.
And his leg burned, and burned. And burned.
Trying to keep his mind off his leg, for a time, he tried to figure out the revvie tank design, and how the revs had managed to get them on radar-transparent paragliders. And where had all the shells come from? Shells had to have metal casings—or the equivalent—and casings were heavy. For all his speculations, he didn’t really know any more when Parvati finally rose, bringing rosy light to the destruction around him. He did know that his leg was a mass of pain, and useless. Scooter one’s oxygen supply was nearly gone as well. Still, he dragged himself to the corner, and pounded on the hatch before spotting the emergency comm jack. It took him a while to plug in.
“Hisin. This is Lieutenant Desoll. I think I need some help.”
“Lieutenant. You been out there all night?”
“Call it guard duty.” Trystin tried not to wince. “How’s your oxygen?”
“It’s about gone. I’d have to come out soon and get some more.”
The hatch opened slowly, and Hisin’s suited figure clambered out.
“Ser?” Hisin’s voice rattled in Trystin’s helmet.
“I’m here. Feel like shit, and can’t move worth a damn.”
Hisin’s eyes went down to Trystin’s leg.
“Yeah.” He swallowed, but his throat was dry and his tongue felt swollen. “I haven’t seen a rev since early last night. So, could you see if you could raise us some help?”
Hisin looked toward the shredded vehicle bay door.
“They had tanks.”
“Tanks?”
“Little ones, but they had big enough guns. Now … about that call for assistance …”
“Ah … yes, ser.”
“First, help me over there where I can plug into scooter two’s tanks.” Trystin tried to straighten his leg, but couldn’t, as he dragged himself into the second scooter’s seat. His eyes blurred as he watched the tech edge across the bay and into the station.
Later, how much later Trystin couldn’t say, not with the effort of trying to stay alert, Hisin clumped out from the tech room, his movements in the suit awkward. “Tech team is on the way, ser.” The words were scratchy through the helmet phones.
“How soon?”
“I don’t know. They didn’t say. It couldn’t be more than a few hours.”
“Great.” Trystin squeezed his lips together and looked down at the mangled mass of armor and leg. Then he looked at the line from the auxiliary oxygen tank. So far, the positive pressure was keeping his breathing supply clean. But Mara’s slightly corrosive atmosphere was feeling more than slightly corrosive on the exposed parts of his leg.
“You all right, ser?”
“So far, Hisin. So far.” He looked out at the shredded door to the vehicle bay, and at the bodies, and the one grounded tank. “I hope we’ve got plenty of oxygen. It’s going to be a lot longer than a couple of hours.”
“Ser?”
Trystin took a deep breath. They had no fuel cells, no place that was atmosphere-tight, except the bolthole, and there wasn’t really any way he could climb down the ladder. There were probably revs and revvie armor everywhere. Somehow, he couldn’t imagine PerCon exactly hurrying out to pick them up until the dust settled. He took another deep breath. It was likely to be a long wait. He hoped it wouldn’t be too long.
13
The med center room smelled of rysya overlaid with an orange citrus odor too sharp to be real. Trystin lay propped against the pale green pillows, his eyes flickering occasionally to the tubes and wires running to the fluid-filled harness around his right leg. The bedside table was empty except for the cup of medicated Sustain that tasted even worse than regular Sustain.
For about the third time in as many minutes he used his implant to flash through the med center’s net library. Nothing looked interesting, and his leg kept burning. The med techs and doctors assured him that the burning was a good sign, that the nerves were regenerating as anticipated. That was fine. Their legs weren’t burning. They weren’t the one restricted to bed with tubes stuck everywhere to carry off the results of their normal bodily processes.
He tried the pubnet again, this ti
me accessing a news update, one showing the brown-clad bodies around a perimeter station.
“ … in a devastating demonstration of blind faith, revvie forces …”
Trystin flicked off the pubnet. Blind faith? Some of the revs seemed blind, but the officer he’d questioned had made a deliberate choice to believe. Could anyone choose, intelligently, to follow such a faith?
Trystin looked up from the med center bed. A black-haired woman in Service uniform, wearing a subcommander’s gold triangle on her collar, stood by the doorway, a green folder in her right hand.
“Might I come in, Lieutenant?”
Trystin gestured. “Please. I apologize for not being able to—”
“Don’t worry.” The subcommander slipped into the high stool beside the bed, her eyes level with Trystin’s. “I’m Subcommander Mitsui, Midori Mitsui, integrative intelligence. My job is to follow up on the perimeter attacks.” She raised the folder. “I also brought over some official papers you can look at later. No … don’t worry.” She set the folder on the table, then pulled a small recorder from the clip in her belt. She put the recorder on top of the folder and gently cleared her throat.
“This is official?” Trystin’s eyes flicked to the recorder.
“Don’t worry.”
Whenever senior officers said not to worry, Trystin did.
“I know. Whenever a senior officer tells you not to worry, it’s not a good sign.” The commander smiled. “We’ve got a lot of problems, but right now, your biggest problem is to get your leg healed. Some rest won’t hurt your neural system, either. What I want is background information on the attack on East Red Three—your impressions, your opinions, your conclusions. The scanners and data banks don’t pick up those sorts of things that well.”
“The scanners didn’t pick up the revs too well, either.”
“We’re working on that. But how did you find them? According to the records, you reacted before the scanners did—almost two minutes earlier.”
“I didn’t trust the scanners after the past attacks. When we got DefCon One, I didn’t want to be surprised again. I was looking for dust, changes in the light patterns, anything. I saw the dust first. Then we got the shells, and then the tanks. The rev troops didn’t come until a lot later.”
“What about the tanks? Did you notice anything unusual about them?”
“You’ve got most of that on the net, I’m sure. They were small and used hovering to turn the gun—no independent turret. That meant weight was a problem—either they wanted numbers, or they didn’t have enough fuel for heavier tanks. It seemed like they were designed to cross the plains.”
“Why did you think that?”
“I didn’t—not then—but it makes sense now.” Trystin ran his hand through his hair. It was getting too long. “Some of the badlands are rough. They’d have to be careful where they moved the tanks. Too rough, and they’d lose their air cushion—and the tank. That’s not a problem on the plains. Of course, the hover assembly is lighter than treads. At least it should be, according to standard design.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. I didn’t get close enough, and the scanners weren’t worth an immortal’s damn.”
“Plains travel was one of the thoughts we had,” she confirmed. “ResCom examined the immobilized tanks. They would have been very fast on the high plains, and, for hover vessels, they’re extremely fuel-efficient. I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up adopting some of the design features.”
Trystin nodded.
“Was there anything else about the tanks?”
He pulled at his chin, then laughed self-consciously. “I remember thinking that they carried awfully big guns for such little suckers.”
The commander nodded. “Very high projectile to gross ration.”
“Big guns for little suckers,” Trystin repeated with a grin.
Mitsui watched him, then asked, “How did you manage to immobilize them?”
“You know …”
“We know that you managed to ground them, but I’d like your impressions.”
“Well … I tried the gattlings, and one of them wavered, but it didn’t stop it. My first rockets just sort of splattered across the armor. So I figured that if those didn’t even slow it, I’d better try something else. Some of the soil is really fine … .” Trystin licked his dry lips. “So I tried to blow holes in the ground just enough in front of them that they couldn’t avoid nosing down. I sort of figured … It’s really just a feel, I mean, you don’t calculate that sort of thing when the revs are throwing heavy shells at you and the station’s coming apart around you. Anyway, I felt that they didn’t know how fine some of the subsoil was, and they were throwing dust when they moved. I had the feeling that they might dig in. And once they stopped, they’d settle, and rocking would just make it worse. Plus, I hoped that the grit—it’s really fine—would help gum up their systems.”
“All that happened. Two of the tanks at your station burned out their engines. How did you know that would work?”
“I didn’t. I just knew nothing else was working, and I didn’t have much time.”
“That was another thing. Why didn’t you use all the gattling rounds on the tanks?”
Trystin shrugged, then pursed his lips as the motion carried down to the immobilized leg and the tubes and wires around it, and a flash of fire ran back up toward his back. “It didn’t seem like a good idea. That is, the revs just attacking with tanks. You can’t take a station without troops. If I used all the rounds on the tanks, then what could I do when all those revs swarmed out of the hills?”
“So you let them batter the station when you still had weapons left that could have beaten them back for a time?”
Trystin opened his mouth, then shut it, before finally answering, “Not exactly. The rockets and gattlings weren’t stopping the tanks. They did stop troopers.”
“According to your tech and the pickup team, rather than use the bolthole, you stayed in armor almost twenty-four hours.”
“Yes.”
“Why? You were wounded.”
“Because we’d have been dead if I hadn’t done what I did.”
“How do you know that?”
“Commander.” Trystin tried not to sigh. Getting irritated at superior officers, even dumb ones, was not a good idea. “I’ve interrogated several revs. Most of them either wanted to kill me or tried to, or both. They regard us as golems, some sort of machines. They also don’t have facilities for taking prisoners. That meant holding them off or getting killed. You can’t hold someone off from a hole in the ground.”
Even when Trystin thought there couldn’t be any more questions, the commander kept asking them. Trystin tried to keep the irritated tone out of his voice, but knew he was failing.
Finally, when the commander had apparently exhausted her stock of what had seemed endless questions, he asked, “Could you answer a few of my questions, Commander?”
“I don’t know. Ask.”
“How did the other stations do? East Red Two—and Four?”
“East Red Four—Major Farli, I think—”
“Freyer, Ulteena.”
“Major Freyer managed to immobilize all four tanks sent against the station and neutralize all revs. East Red Two was a total loss.”
Trystin frowned. Quentar? “Personnel in East Red Two?”
“A total loss.”
“East Red Four—how did Ulteena—Major Freyer—do that?”
“She used a turner to dig a line of trenches before the revs got there. She filled the trenches with ultrafine grit.”
Trust Ulteena to figure it out ahead of time. Trystin took a deep breath. “Can you tell me how things turned out overall?”
“We managed to beat them back. We lost almost two thirds of the stations. They didn’t have enough tanks to target every station. We had to bring in atmospheric space scouts and some very heavy weapons.”
For a long moment, Trystin just sat there.
“That informati
on is restricted, but you deserve to know. I will deny telling you, and you’ll face serious disciplinary actions if you repeat it. But you and Major … Freyer were the only ones to survive assaults of more than a pair of tanks.”
“How is she?”
“She’s fine. She’s on the way to her next assignment.”
Trystin nodded, then licked his lips. “I’ve had some time to think … .” He forced a laugh. “I know that’s always dangerous for junior officers. But I don’t understand. When I first started as a station watch officer, we’d get a few rev attacks. Pretty scattered, never more than a squad, and we captured some, and killed some. Now, all of a sudden, we’ve been getting hammered. Lots of heavy weapons, at least heavy for respirator-suited troops to haul across the badlands, and enough firepower to crack stations they couldn’t touch just a few months ago. So what’s happening?”
“The revs were smarter than we thought.” The commander’s black eyes met his. “The attacks from the early glider drops were just to cover that they were bringing in those minitanks and guns. They’ve been caching equipment in the badlands for nearly three years—maybe longer. All underground with a couple of permanent depots.”
“And no one could discover this until they wiped out half the perimeter stations?” Trystin found his voice rising. He tried to lower it as he spoke. Senior officers got upset when junior officers implied they were incompetent. In the back of his mind, he wondered if junior revvie officers had the same problems. They couldn’t; they didn’t think, did they, just followed their Prophet?
“Lieutenant. A planet is a damned big place. We’re spread pretty thin. If we start building up defenses, then we have to divert from planoforming, and we’ll never get the place habitable. Plus … the revs haven’t been that sneaky ever before, and there weren’t any signs we could pick up from the satellite scans.”
“Exactly. If the satellite plots had better resolution, it wouldn’t have happened.”
“Maybe not,” the subcommander admitted, “but better scanners cost more, and with as many stations as the Coalition has, what else do we do without?”
“So they’ll keep doing it because we can’t see them?”
The Parafaith War Page 11