The First Casualty

by Mike Moscoe

  The source of the rocket’s problem, if it had been wise enough to seek out and solve problems, was a collar that had been added around its payload section. A thick cylinder of sand, barely held together by glue, covered the entire warhead.

  Two of the rockets shed their dusty mantles. Three more could not solve the problems created by them and wandered off on their own track. None of them heard Commander Umboto’s proud shout. “Crossbows away, Captain. Thirty-one running hot, straight and normal.”

  • • •

  “What’s that?” Rita and Ray asked at the same moment.

  Hesper worked her board with quick, deft fingers. “Stealthy something, not well guided. They’ll miss the destroyers by a wide margin. Doubt if the cans’ll waste a shot on them.”

  “Hope all their defenses are as shabby,” Rita prayed.

  The first sensor reports came in—video of the crater. A couple of piles of ice stood out, but they looked like ship armor that had been dumped there for later processing. “Give me some other scans,” the major breathed. “Infrared, electromagnetic. We can’t go in there on visual alone.”

  A new scan started working its way down the screen. “Electromagnetic. Good,” the major smiled.

  The picture went fuzzy, then turned to static.

  “Hesper, get that back,” Rita ordered.

  “No signal,” ECM answered.

  “Fix it.”

  “Can’t, Skipper. It’s not us. We got a beam from the flag, but it’s just noise.”

  “Is the Dry Lightning gone?” Cadow choked on the question.

  Rita glanced at her display. “Everybody’s still squawking.”

  “Hesper, can you get me the flag’s command net?” Longknife asked softly.

  “Lurk on it regularly, sir.”

  “Please put it on speaker,” the major requested. He never gave an order on Rita’s bridge. If he wanted something, he went through her. Rita didn’t begrudge him today’s directness.

  “Comm,” the admiral shouted from the speaker, “get me through to those tin cans.”

  “No can do, sir, we got a brick wall ahead of us. No comm to or from them.”

  “Sensors, what kind of brick wall?”

  “Damned if I know. Those missiles that missed started exploding and suddenly we got dust and something else all over the place.”

  “Gun squadron, begin acceleration at three gees. Now.” My, but the admiral was sounding a tad hysterical. “Transports.” Ah, the admiral finally remembered them. “Execute…”

  “What?” Cadow yelped.

  “Signal lost,” Hesper reported.

  “Can we accelerate?” Ray asked.

  “We’re in landing mode,” Rita answered. “Even if we go to three gees, we’ll float over their base like target balloons.”

  The major pursed his lips. “Set us down at Rosebud One.”

  “Once grounded,” Rita nodded, “we can always launch out into the opposite orbit.”

  Ray considered it for a moment, then shook his head. “Political officer would have my head on a platter.”

  Rita snorted.

  “And these folks have just landed. It must be a mess down there. I’ve got seven hundred combat veterans. What have they got? A mob that’s never had a shot fired at them.”

  “That’s what the jollies tell us.” Rita spat the epitaph for political officers.

  “We got to find out sooner or later who’s right. If he is, I damn sure want to find out sooner. Land us at Rosebud One.”

  “I’ve got the conn,” Rita snapped, taking the sticks back from Cadow. “Just once, Ray, I wish you’d let somebody else find out if the buzzsaw is unplugged. Just once.”

  “Where can you set us down?”

  “How close you want to be, grunt?”

  “About thirty klicks from the pass,” Ray ordered. “It’ll make for a short approach march. Put the transports safely out of range, and you can keep the rockets warm if we come running back and need a quick ride out of here.”

  “Just make sure you come back.”

  • • •

  Mary jumped when the infrared signals started screaming again. Six ships, rockets pointed her way, sunk over the horizon. “Landing force arriving,” she announced, ready to get to work. To do, as she had done every day of her working life, the job she was paid for.

  She checked the digger; still not to the escarpment. They had to get a chance to talk to the colonials! But what do you say? They sure as hell hadn’t included that in boot camp. She glanced at her board; she was ready to fight. That they’d taught her well. How do you not fight in a war when everybody else is?

  • • •

  Grandpa always told Ray a soldier expects problems, and problems were staring Ray in the face the second he disembarked. His largest transport, the Loyal, stood at an angle, one landing gear in a crater. The right edge of the roll-off ramp was down—the rest hung in space. Engineering platoon was rigging a derrick to offload the artillery the hard way.

  The light assault teams of Companies B and C bounced buggies off their transports and went about preparing for as fast a start as Ray would have done when he commanded a company. Good people.

  “Santiago.” Ray called up his exec. “Use A company for site security and to help the engineers. I’ll move out with the vanguard. Get the heavies in D and E company moving as quickly as possible. I’ll need artillery as soon as possible.”

  “Right, sir” was all the answer Ray needed.

  Ten minutes later, the light companies were mounted up and impatient to lead the charge. “Santiago, how soon can you give me artillery?”

  “How about two rocket launchers right now?”

  “You’re a miracle man. Good luck.”

  “Good luck yourself, and Godspeed. Give ’em hell. See you for supper tonight in one of the Earthies’ luxury chow halls.”

  “With real steaks and fresh potatoes.”

  Longknife swung aboard C company’s command rig as it passed and plugged himself into the brigade network. Security was guaranteed by the communication filament trailing out from the carrier to the command post back here. His orders would not be intercepted or garbled. Second Guard was experienced and ready. He couldn’t help pitying the poor bastards up ahead.

  • • •

  Mary followed the descending ships, handing them off to battalion, who in turn bucked them to brigade. As Mary lurked in the background, they ended up talking to a very angry Navy type, a Commander Umboto, who was pissed as hell that nobody had any long-range rockets ready to go.

  “Miller, you store those coordinates and I’ll go kick butt. If we can’t get some rockets off the ground, my boot will damn sure get some lieutenants flying in that direction.”

  The comm link went dead with a loud click, as if the commander had bitten off her mike. Damn, there were some real hard cases here. Mary wondered if they were tough enough to win. She checked her digger…almost to the escarpment. What would happen to Umboto if their platoon cut its own peace? She’d probably live through it. They all would. Come on, digger.

  Mary called up her squad leaders: Lek, Cassie, Thu, Dumont, and Berra. “What’s it look like?”

  Cassie and Dumont were Mary’s backup, neither willing to say who was primary. After a long pause, Dumont spoke first. The kid was subdued. “We’re dug in. I guess we’re ready.”

  There was a beep. Mary focused on her heads-up. “Lieutenant, we got rolligons headed our way.”

  “Thanks, Sergeant, I make out a dozen.”

  Lek coughed gently to make himself known on net. If the LT was surprised to find a lurker, he said nothing. “Computer makes out ten wheeled vehicles spread out in the lead. Two columns with another ten coming up behind them. A tracked vehicle is pulling up the rear of both columns. Looks like another pair of columns about five klicks behind the first.”

  “Corporal, put that through to my and the sergeant’s heads-ups immediately.”

  “Yessir,” Lek answe
red.

  “Sergeant, looks like we got two companies coming our way. The tracks are probably artillery of some sort. Damn, I wish we had rockets with longer reach than ten klicks.”

  The regular issue was short-ranged. The LT knew nothing of what Dumont’s girls had gotten them. Just now, Mary wasn’t ready to let him know what she had up her sleeve. He’d just want to start whopping the enemy sooner. Mary wanted to keep her hole cards back for a bit. Maybe, if nobody was hurt, nobody would have to be hurt. She checked the mole she’d sent across. It was at the escarpment, but making slow headway.

  Mary adjusted a few of her sensors. When next she looked up, the enemy was at the escarpment, eight klicks away, rolligons scattered loosely. One man had dismounted and stared her way, taking in the gap and the rim around it. A gleam came off the fiber-optic cable streaming from his suit.

  “Whatcha gonna do, man?” she whispered, hoping he wouldn’t do anything until her mole could find his comm wire.

  • • •

  Major Longknife studied the ground before him. Unlike the flat plain they’d just crossed, this was rolling and broken by boulders from the time of the creation of the huge crater, and small craters since. He’d walked similar terrain with grandfather, examining his defense of Goundo Pass Three on Yama-8. Grandpa had earned his colonelcy there. He’d also stopped just the kind of attack Ray was about to make.

  Eyeing the ground with twenty years of training and experience, he liked what he saw. The plain, rim, and pass looked untouched since creation. He maxed the zoom on his suit binoculars. At the crown of the pass were footsteps. One set.

  “So you had to see for yourself.” The man facing him was curious, or just needed to get personal with his battlefield, get past the vid and heads-up.

  Good man. Longknife would use that against him.

  The major called up his deployment on his heads-up. Two companies here. One coming up, heavier with artillery. Santiago was holding the last company back. He’d send them forward with the last of the heavy stuff. For a moment, Longknife cursed not having his command van with its full sensor suite. The XO had taken him at his order, artillery first. Still, it would have been better to have slipped the van in somewhere in the middle. Weight of salvo was good, but intelligence would be nice directing that salvo.

  “Should have thought of that when I was giving the order.” Usually Santiago used his head better in reinterpreting his orders. Not today. Well, C company had recon assets.

  “Tran, talk to me about that rim.”

  “Sensors show standard-issue snoops and not much else. Well, we got something that might be a whiff of nitrogen, but it only showed for a second and we can’t get it back. No hot spots. No dust. It’s clean. We are picking up something underfoot. We’ve turned lose a counterminer to hunt it down.”

  “You got anything to send over there?” Longknife asked.

  “One Dervish Mod Three is up, other two are busted. We couldn’t fix them on the way out here…”

  “Not much a tech can do in three gees,” the major said to absolve the support staff. “If you will, Captain, launch what you can.”

  “Yes, sir. Tech Sergeant Callahan, boot that mother.”

  The Dervish was away in a blink.

  • • •

  “What the hell?” Mary yelped. Coming at her in a crazy dance, now up, now down, now right, now left—way too fast to track—was something.

  “It’s a scout,” the LT observed. “A Dervish, I think. Laser, up and ready,” he ordered. “Sergeant, feed us a track.”

  One of Dumont’s kids had tested fastest on the one laser rifle the platoon rated. Despite Lek’s best scrounging efforts, one was all they had. Nobody would trade anything for what few antimissile weapons they had. Dumont had his fire team sleeping with theirs. Only 12 millimeters, it was small compared to the big Navy guns. Still, it was their laser.

  Mary passed numbers and hoped the team was as good at the real thing as they’d been with the vid-game they trained on. The scout reached the base of the rim, dodged right, rose, then jinked left. At the top of the rim, it went right, then left, and slipped over the crest. If Mary hadn’t had her sensors covering every square inch of the place, she’d have lost it.

  “Dumont, it’s yours,” she said.

  Even as she did the handover, the laser rifle spat a bolt.

  First shot missed clean as the scout went right. Next shot was closer, but the damn thing jumped five meters. It jinked to the left—directly into a bolt.

  Whether the kid guessed right, or just missed in the right direction, he’d done it. Chunks of wreckage shot out in a dozen directions and began to fall slowly.

  “We did it, we did it!” the youngsters screamed as one.

  But had we done it soon enough? Mary turned her attention back to the wheels on the plain. Some were already negotiating their way through low places in the escarpment.

  “Here they come,” she announced on wide net, then gave full attention to her far digger. It had to find that cable.

  • • •

  Longknife zoomed the picture on his heads-up display and scowled. None were completed before the Dervish was popped. Infrared showed hot spots everywhere but a dust down around the rill. Had the idiot deployed his people in there? That was either stupid or a desperate move by an unprepared force. The electromagnetic scan that would show him the location of every racing heartbeat was…jammed!

  In theory that was possible, but he’d never had it done to him before. The major blinked hard. What was he up against here? Someone had downed his Dervish fast. Good shooter or dumb luck? He wasn’t supposed to be facing good troops, just hasty conscripts who’d break at the first tap. “Was the dust down for real,” Longknife mused, “or just to confuse me?”

  “Major, we’re ready to move out.”

  Longknife smiled. It was time to commit, and there was nowhere near enough to go on. For twenty years he’d faced this, just like Dad and Grandpa before him. Let’s kick over this anthill and see what happens. Which was all there was to do.

  “Companies advance, C on the right, B on the left. Keep your intervals loose. Your objective is the rim wall. Keep your heads up, use what cover you can. Until things develop, hang loose and keep ready for anything. Good luck and Godspeed. Now let’s show ’em Second Guard’s the best there is.”

  The fire teams answered with a shout as the carriers moved out. Ten rifles to a carrier and two carriers to a platoon. The Earthies still used the fifty-man platoon. In a few minutes, they’d learn what the twenty troopers in a Unity platoon could do. One hundred to a company, two hundred rode by his command. D company was four klicks out with three more launchers and a pair of tube artillery. If he used his two launchers now, they’d be reloaded before the troops reached the crater.

  “Rockets, pop their sensors on the rim. Use the rest of your load to lay down a salvo on the other side. Standard long box pattern. Use the rill as your center line.”

  “Roger. Salvo on the way.” The tracks had leveled themselves on jacks as soon as they halted. Rockets began budding from their launchers as the words echoed in his ears.

  Three meters from Ray, the ground erupted. He smiled; the counterminer had bagged its bug, too. The Earthies were losing all their sensors. Hot damn!

  • • •

  “Damn,” Mary groaned as the digger across the plain went dead. Mining diggers weren’t rigged with sensors; still, Mary had picked up readings through the rock. With something digging ahead of her, she’d pushed her digger to the max, hoping to get a fast patch into the Collies’ comm net. The digger was gone, and with it their one chance to settle this nice and easy.

  Her heads-up went wild.

  “Rockets, incoming,” Mary shouted. Pair after pair of missiles appeared on her display.

  “Expect sixteen if they’re the large ones, sixty-four if they’re pelting us with the little stuff.” The lieutenant again provided the military analysis. “Those dinky things can’t touch u
s in our holes, so stay low men and hug your boots.”

  • • •

  Dumont didn’t need the LT to tell him to stay low. He and Tina crouched as deep in their hole as they could, holding each other tighter than when they made love.

  “We got ’em.” Blacky’s voice rang in Dumont’s ears.

  “Got what?” he asked, like they were back on the Pitt, cruising for rags.

  “The rockets. Watch me pop ’em.”

  Dumont blinked his heads-up to life. It overwrote his eyeball, mottling Tina’s pale complexion with the tracks of fast-moving missiles. Mary had promised that what she could see, she’d show them all. And what Blacky saw, he shot at.

  “Damn it, Blacky, those things’ll home on you.” Around Tina’s nose a second and third dot winked out.

  “Not while I got ’em in my sights,” Blacky crowed.

  A fourth disappeared.

  “Private, get that rifle in your hole,” the lieutenant shouted, his voice cracking. “Your ammo won’t hold out. You’re only making yourself a target.” Two more dots just below Tina’s eyes vanished. But her forehead looked like a bad case of acne. And they were changing direction, arrowing straight for Blacky.

  “Can’t you do something?” Tina whispered.

  “Run over to Blacky’s hole just in time to get blown to jelly with him.” Dumont wasn’t about to do that, even if a corporal was supposed to. And nobody had told him a corporal was. Two more dots disappeared.

  “Damn, it’s not shooting anymore,” Blacky screamed. “Amy, switch me to another juice bag.”

  “Not enough time,” Mary yelled. “Pull it in and get down!”

  “I’m going. I’m going,” Blacky hollered.

  Dumont wanted to look, see if Blacky had finally done what someone told him to. He kept his head down. Don’t make yourself a target. He could check on Blacky when the barrage was over. Check on what was left of him. On Dumont’s display, the dots were flocking to Tina’s lips. He wanted to kiss her. Damn suit. Some of the dots farther back, around her eyes, were still spread out. Dumont held his breath and Tina tight. The explosions began. He pissed in his suit and his bowels let go. Tina screamed as he was thrown against her. He gripped the walls of their hole, trying to hold himself, not smash against her again.