by John F. Carr
Fort Camerone was built by The Book, and duplicates could be found on a dozen worlds. A rectangle of adobe and fused silica walls, towers at the corners; a plowed strip surrounding it, and barbed wire beyond that to keep civilians from straying into the minefield. The fort would hold out for something less than thirty seconds against modern weapons, but it was not intended to do so.
Few colony worlds were allowed heavy weapons. The only artillery would be in the hands of CoDominium forces. When the Marines engaged forces as well equipped as their own, their strongpoints were quite different; but throughout most of the CoDominium’s space and stars, this would do.
In a way though, Fort Camerone, for all its resemblance to Beau Geste’s Fort Zinderneuf, was immensely powerful. Along two walls were sloping solid shapes like barn roofs, immense slabs of reinforced concrete that held the phased-array radars that could track aircraft, missiles, and spacecraft. Climbing the slope atop his camel gelding, Colonel Trelawney could not see the power plant with its massive cooling equipment, or the mirrors that would focus the intercept laser beam that protected this part of Haven from space and air attack.
Radars whirred atop the towers, too, and out in the fields around the fort would be body-capacitance detectors. Marine forts were built by officers who were not always engineers, and they used local equipment and materials. The basic design was simple and, considering the origins of the Services, the resemblance to a Legion desert fort was probably inevitable; but the officers of the old Legion Etrangère would have been awed at the firepower Fort Camerone held.
Inside the walls were aircraft revetted with mounds of sandbags and concrete, and a battery of rockets as well. Troopers walked interior guard along the line separating the housing and administrative buildings from the artillery park.
They walked indifferently, and few paid any attention to the column. The main gate sentries had the same attitude. No one walked tall. One sentry roused from his torpor to turn out the guard as Colonel Trelawney’s groaning camel topped the final rise up from Eureka and broke into a trot at the sight of the gate. The Colonel considered cursing the contrary oont, but consoled himself with the knowledge that he would never have to ride it again.
“Know any funny stories?” the Colonel asked as he walked into the day room. Since Major Pritchard was still in hospital and Captain Staines was dead, there was only one officer present.
“Afraid I do, sir,” Captain Yeovil said. “Come daybreak we looked over that piece of Medina where the Mahdi’s raiders kidnapped the last bootmaker we could depend on.”
“And?”
Captain Yeovil handed the colonel a bagful of cartridge casings.
Colonel Trelawney spread them across the billiard table. The clean, untarnished brass was all of the same caliber and from the same factory— probably all fired in the same burst.
The Colonel put his monocle in place and studied one. “Not ours, is it?”
“Afraid not, sir.” Although CoDominium Marines were inured to finding Levant casings and ammo behind every insurrection and half-baked rebellion, the militia had known of that planet’s meddling only by hearsay. Levant’s principal industry was cheap, patent-violating copies of whatever the customer wanted; all currencies, VISA and MasterCard gladly accepted. Now it was obvious that someone was either landing or dropping supplies to the Mahdi’s growing horde.
“I don’t suppose we could do anything about it?” Captain Yeovil’s tone was wistful.
“We can dig in and hang on and hope the CoDominium thinks we’re important enough for a rescue operation.” Colonel Trelawney gave the captain a bleak look. “If we’re not worth it, maybe the gallium is.”
“Medina is empty, sir, as of last night. Permission to burn it down?”
“Good Lord no!” Colonel Trelawney exploded. “My cook, my maid, my gardener—all kinds of decent people live over there. We can’t go alienating them like that. If we could just get hold of that Mahdi fellow they’d all be back to work overnight.”
Yeovil was inclined to doubt this but he was a captain and Trelawney was a colonel.
FIVE
ONE of the universalities of human nature is the tendency, when confronted with some strange and revolting meat, to say, “It tastes like chicken.” In the case of camel this is a libel even unto those unfortunate fowl who hatched into the Plastic Age and reached their hormone-spurred insipidity in four weeks. Bactrian Camel tastes—very remotely—like mutton. Not lamb. Mostly though, camel tastes like an animal evolved to extract the ultimate in efficient use of whatever water is available. Who stands downwind of a urinating camel does so at considerable personal risk. Whoever eats one is experiencing hunger in the extreme.
Colonel Trelawney’s mount was renewed each day and was partial expiation for his trips into town. Evenings he walked downhill and made do with whatever his wife had been able to scrounge up. The remainder of the Fort Camerone garrison ate camel. The only thing worse was muskylope which tasted so bad it had to be eaten to be truly appreciated.
Officers and men suffered in the democracy of deprivation at the same trestle table. They were just settling in to scarf down the gag-worthy camel and lentil stew when the first incoming round came.
Captain Yeovil had never before experienced combat, apart from a few patrols before it became too dangerous to venture out into the desert, but he knew the thump-crump of a mortar. This sounded more like a recoilless rifle!
The Cornish garrison, like their Cousins Jack who mined throughout the CoDominium worlds, were hard men inured to danger and no strangers to explosives. Without waiting for orders, each snatched up his bowl of stew and trotted quietly off to battle stations. The recoilless rifle settled down to pouring a round every thirty seconds into the east-facing wall of the fort, which faced the desert, looking toward Crater Lake and away from Eureka. The shells were hitting low, where the wall joined the rocky mesa.
Colonel Trelawney had stepped out on his nightly hike downhill into Eureka some fifteen minutes before the first shell hit. Captain Yeovil hoped the old man made it. He had no high opinion of the colonel’s intelligence or ability but Trelawney was a likeable old fart and Yeovil would not have wished being out there alone in the dark on his worst enemy.
All battle stations were manned. Only the darkest of Haven’s moons was high enough to illuminate anything. Yeovil risked his night glasses and his head to peer down through the crenellations at the outside base of the wall. The captain had read his history and could see exactly what was happening. In 1453 the Turks, with cherry wood-barreled cannon, had stitched away at the walls of Constantinople and within a week walled towns were obsolete on Earth. Now the Mahdi’s gunner—there seemed to be only one gun out there—was doing likewise to Fort Camerone.
What in hell, Captain Yeovil wondered, was wrong with the radar that it couldn’t pick out a piece of metal as big as a recoilless rifle? Then he remembered that damned solid metal core of the ice ball that had come skidding and thumping in. Was it a lucky accident or did the Mahdi possess sufficient knowledge to have deliberately chosen his position with all that metal behind him?
Another shell came whooshing in and Yeovil instinctively ducked even though he knew he would never hear the one that got him. He put aside the night glasses to scan the flat for a muzzle flash. No luck. The gun had to be fairly close-by—between here and the lake. But the flat was not flat enough. Mesquite and chaparral imported from Earth grew in isolated clumps which channeled the wind in odd swirls of erosion. In the months since he had been at the garrison Captain Yeovil had seen one dry channel barely aborning grow deep enough to hide a camel.
How many shells would it take to undermine Fort Camerone’s fused silica walls? Who was defying the CoDominium and furnishing the Mahdi’s horde with this kind of arms? Where the hell was the CD? Where was the poor old colonel?
A shell came in high, shattering the top of a crenellation and down below near the power plant somebody gasped and howled. Captain Yeovil studied t
he killing ground with his night glasses. Nobody there. Then he heard a burst of automatic fire from the opposite, Eureka-facing wall.
“Hold fire, damn it! Do you want to shoot your own Colonel?”
No one, apparently, did. Yeovil heard the creak of hinges at the sally port and a moment later the old man was at his side up on the firing bench. “Getting to where it’s not safe to walk after dark,” the colonel grumbled.
Yeovil wondered not for the first time if that blank air might not conceal a keen sense of the ridiculous.
“I don’t suppose you’ve seen aught of the scoundrels?” the Colonel asked.
“No, sir,” the Captain admitted. “But I’m sure we will before long.”
“They would have to pick our radar’s blind side. Makes one wonder if there might be spies among us.”
Captain Yeovil was about to make some cutting remark about the mess orderlies who were now among the disappeared population of the Medina when he caught the faintest hint of a smile on the colonel’s bland, blank face.
Another shell came in high, which meant powder loads were not consistent or else the gunner was probing to see if he had already done sufficient damage to the base of the wall. Fused silica spalled from the inner side of the wall at the point of impact and dusted Yeovil and the colonel with glasslike shards.
“Ee bah goom,” the Colonel remarked. “Long as it’s been firing, that gun ought to be fairly warm by now.”
As Yeovil went down to the plotting room he reflected that there might be other reasons why he was a captain and that inoffensive old fool was a colonel. Why hadn’t it occurred to him to start looking for an IR signature?
The corporal on watch already had the apparatus warmed up. He was using the radar too—on the other three sides away from the lake. Yeovil studied the screens and saw no hint of motion. “Up periscope,” he said, and they both studied the infra-red detector’s screen.
“Yup, there it be,” the radarman said. Yeovil picked up the phone and read in the coordinates. An instant later the interior of the fort lit up for a moment as a single rocket rose at 45 degrees. The faint IR signature on the screen was abruptly drowned in the huge flare of an explosion. The captain knew it would be at least thirty minutes before the area cooled down enough to make another sweep for the gun, which was probably making tracks elsewhere as fast as men could run. He went back up on the firing bench.
Hornicott, one of the larger of Cat’s Eye’s satellites, was now flooding the landscape with reddish light and the motion detectors sensed nothing. At least the recoilless gun was no longer firing. Yeovil looked at his watch in the brilliant moonlight. Dawn was still eight hours away.
He went down to the galley to see if the cooks could come up with something for the men on watch. The galley was empty since the cooks were all up on the parapets. It was so quiet the men would grow sleepy before long. He called the names of those cooks he could remember and detailed them to brew up that revolting root-and-herb stimulant they had all drunk since the citizenry of Medina ran off with the last of the coffee.
At first dawn Yeovil checked all the detectors and, satisfied, detailed a work party outside to reinforce the weakened wall and lase over the patchwork to glaze and waterproof it. The laser was actually a weapon and not intended for construction, which made it necessary for the laser and crew to back off a hundred meters lest they sizzle in the backlash. The laser had barely warmed up and was functioning when an alarm went off.
“Behind you!” a man on the wall called out with his bullhorn.
The work crew were not in proper armor and had nothing but sidearms. But there was not that much difference between this machine and the one they used every day underground to do what had once been done with timbering. Wordlessly, they grasped the tail of the weapon and rotated it on its carriage, incinerating undergrowth in a half-circle.
Abruptly from beneath the sizzling chaparral a human wave of shrieking fanatics came roiling forward like a flash flood. Some brandished yataghans. Most carried automatic rifles.
The first rank went up in steam and smoke as the laser traversed. Then the other lasers and projectile weapons inside the fort got into the act, vaporizing the Faithful wholesale while the work detail backpedaled, dragging their weapon a hundred meters to the gate.
As the gate opened Captain Yeovil was thoroughly prepared to see a recoilless round go through the opening but the gun was not in evidence this morning. As the gate slammed shut behind the repair party he hoped that rocket last night might have actually taken out the gun.
The Mahdi’s human wall did not give up the attack until they realized that the plowed strip was mined with repeaters. Planted in sticks of ten, each time a mine detonated another moved up from underneath ready for the next foot.
The mines were of an ancient design which lofts waist-high before detonating. The main charge is contained within two steel plates to direct its hundreds of ball bearings horizontally a meter above ground. Though the actual name varies from war to war, infantrymen call this mine a piss-cutter for reasons obvious to any battlefield surgeon. It was mid-afternoon before the Colonel deemed it safe to inactivate the minefield long enough for a dozer to sweep up bodies and body parts and bury them downwind.
“Four thousand, sir,” Yeovil reported.
“Good Lord, where do they all come from?” Colonel Trelawney groaned.
“From the poorest and most desolate parts of Earth, sir.”
“But—I mean, there’s only four and a half million people on this whole damned planet. I know there’s probably more of them than us— and the buggers do breed like cockroaches, but how long can they go on taking these kind of losses?”
* * *
“Until the last man, the last woman, and the last child,” the Mahdi shrieked. “Until the last Infidel is wiped from the face of New Islam.” Since the Mahdi’s rise to prominence no one called it Haven any longer.
“Allah is angry with us. Allah has visited disaster and plague upon the Faithful. Allah’s anger will continue until our Jihad has killed them all. Be not plagued by doubts. There are traitors and murtaddim among us. The Giaour will call upon Allah under the bright edge of a sword. In the Name of the Merciful, the Compassionate, kill them all. Allah will know his own.” The Mahdi went on in this vein for some time, catching his breath and gathering strength for the next outburst each time the multitude shrieked its roaring approval. For whole instants widows and bereaved mothers almost forgot their loss.
“Allah is great; victory is ours!” After an hour-long harangue the Mahdi was finally finished. It was the brightest part of the trueday afternoon and the mob dispersed, hunting whatever shade was available. The Mahdi retired to his tent to consult with his general staff.
“Pigs?” The Mahdi was not sure he was hearing correctly. “You want us to handle pigs?” The Muslim injunction against pork is, if anything, stronger than that of Orthodox Jews.
“If we’d taken a few prisoners we could make them do it,” Sayeed Mansour said. “But the owners of the pig farm have gone beyond where we can influence them. The pigs have not. If Allah did not want us to explode all those mines, why did he provide us with all those pigs?”
“But the uncleanliness we’ll have to pass through—”
“Giaour blood is unclean yet we shrink not from wading in it.
For once the Mahdi did not have a ready answer. He fretted for a moment but Allah sent him no inspiration. “All right,” he said. “Go ahead and do it.”
* * *
After the unsuccessful assault on the fort Captain Yeovil sent out a small flame-throwing tank. One whoosh was sufficient to send any stragglers on their way but the tank did not pursue the enemy. Fort Camerone was too short of fuel for anything so ambitious. Instead, the tank dragged a gang plow behind it and shot an occasional jet of fire at brush too heavy to plow. Within an hour the killing field had been widened to double and surprise would be correspondingly more difficult next time. The night passed without
incident.
Next morning the pigs came.
Even ten-shot mines cannot last forever. Captain Yeovil scanned the field with his seven-fiftys. The Faithful were herding the swine forward on a fairly narrow front, not over a hundred meters—but the porcine column must be half a klick long! He nodded at the sergeant who instructed the gunners how high to raise their sights before they opened fire.
The Militia’s ancient 12.7mm machine guns were capable of pumping out 300 rounds per minute providing cooling water was adequate. The first traverse wiped out the swine front and made the following ranks less manageable. The second traverse took out more pigs and several herders. One gunner raised his sights another notch and began creating chaos in the middle of the column. Within minutes shrill-screaming swine were stampeding in all directions. Including the direction of Fort Camerone.
“Turn off the minefield,” Yeovil yelled into the telephone.
The hogs were into the plowed strip now, dizzying themselves in panicked circles, creating as much confusion among the Faithful as they were to the defenders. The Mahdi’s mob hung back out of range and limited themselves to prodding swine back toward the fort whenever they threatened to escape.
“Cease firing!” Yeovil ordered. It was pointless to waste ammo on this circus. He could not understand whether the Arabs knew the minefield could be turned off or did they perhaps think the previous assault had fired every mine?
“Ingenious,” Colonel Trelawney said.
Yeovil jumped. He had not heard the old man’s approach. “I beg your pardon, sir?”
“Tramp around long enough and they’ll have the dirt packed too hard for anything less than an elephant to set off those mines.”
Once more Yeovil pondered the fact that he was a captain and this inoffensive old codger was a colonel. Did Trelawney ever miss anything? Then Yeovil knew there was a way out. “Once they think they’re finished and the field is full of humans instead of pigs I can manually fire the top charge in every stick.”