by David Drake
And they didn’t care. As often as not, a field team huddled in a sheltered spot within a klick of the base instead of humping through the rain to service the sensors for which they were responsible. In the morning, they returned with the circuit marked complete—and there wasn’t a curst thing Daun or Anya could do about it.
“Three no trump,” Anya bid. She grinned coldly around the table.
Daun had already drafted an assessment for the Frisian Defense Forces Maedchen Command, back in the capital Jungfrau. In it he stated flatly that the system wasn’t working and could never work as presently constituted.
Nieuw Friesland should either withdraw support from the Central States, or the FDF should insist that the Central States hire a detachment of Frisians sufficient to perform all field as well as base servicing tasks. Otherwise, the inevitable failure would be blamed on Frisian technology rather than the ineptness of the Central States Army at using that technology.
Anya wouldn’t let Daun transmit the assessment. It wasn’t that she disagreed with him—quite the contrary. But she didn’t believe anything a Tech II said could change the policy of bureaucrats on Nieuw Friesland …and there was a good chance Daun’s opinions, once released, were going to become known to the Central States personnel she and Daun shared a tent with.
There are a lot of ways to get hurt in a war zone. Pissing off the heavily armed people closest to you wasn’t a good way to survive to a pension.
But the situation grated on Daun’s sense of rightness, as well as making him feel he was a bubble in a very hostile ocean.
“Too rich for my blood,” Hendries said. “I pass.”
Daun stared at his cards again. They hadn’t changed for the better. He had four clubs, three of each other suit, and his high card was the jack of hearts.
He knew his partner was asking where his support was greatest; and he knew also that the proper answer was: nowhere.
“I pass,” he said aloud.
Anya grimaced.
“Pass,” said Bondo.
Daun laid out his wretched hand. His partner’s expression softened as she saw just what Daun had dealt himself. Hendries glared at his cards to determine a lead, a nearly hopeless task under the circumstances.
The tent flap tore open. “Hey!” called the Central States soldier who stuck his head in. “Smart guys! Your fucking pickup’s gone down again. The screen in the TOC’s nothing but hash!”
“Bloody hell,” Anya muttered. She laid her cards down. “My turn, I guess,” she said to Daun. “You were out all morning with the satellite dish.”
Daun stood up, waving his partner back. “Look, you were up the mast last night. Besides, I’m dummy. I’ll catch this one.”
“Hey!” the messenger from the Tactical Operations Center repeated. “Colonel Jeffords isn’t real thrilled about this, you know.”
That was probably true. The amount paid to Nieuw Friesland by the Central States government for Anya’s services was comparable to what the colonel himself earned. Daun’s pay was at the scale of a senior captain. The money didn’t go into the two technicians’ pockets, much of it, and if it had there was still no place to spend money out here on the tableland. It still provided a reason for some of the locals—Jeffords certainly, and apparently this messenger—to get shirty about off-planet smart-asses whose equipment didn’t work.
“I’m on the way,” Daun said. “Just let me get my gear.”
He buckled his equipment belt around his narrow waist, pulled on his poncho, and tried to punch the larger working canopy down into its carrying sheath. He could only get it partway into the container, but that would hold it while he climbed the mast.
The slick fabric still shone with water from when Daun had had to use it that morning. It didn’t matter—to the job—if he got soaked, but rain dripping into an open box could only make a bad situation worse.
The messenger disappeared. Daun sighed and followed him. “I’ll catch the next one, Niko,” Anya called as Daun stepped out into the rain.
The flashlight strapped for the moment to Daun’s left wrist threw a fan of white light ahead of him. He could switch the beam to deep yellow which wouldn’t affect his night vision, but it didn’t matter if he became night-blind. He’d need normal light to do his work anyway: many of the components were color-coded. The markings would change hue or vanish if viewed under colored light.
Rain sparkled in the beam. Reflections made it difficult to tell what was mud and what was wet duckboard. The crates were likely to shift queasily underfoot anyway.
Three months more. How the locals stood it was beyond him.
Daun couldn’t blame the soldiers he tried to train for being apathetic. It was all very well to tell the troops that their safety depended on them servicing the sensors properly, but a threat to lives so wretched had little incentive value.
Daun and Anya complained, but professionalism and a sense of duty would carry the pair of them through no matter how bad things got. The vast majority of the Central States personnel were conscripts, and the conscripts with the least political influence in Jungfrau besides. Daun was sure that at least eighty percent of the outpost would have deserted by now, if there was any place to which they could desert.
Light through the walls of the tent turned the TOC into a vast russet mushroom, though the fabric looked dull brown by daylight. Daun could hear voices, some of them compressed by radio transmission.
It was conceivable that the problem was inside the TOC, either in the console or the connecting cables. Daun was tempted to check out those possibilities first, but he decided not to waste his time. The console was of Frisian manufacture and sealed against meddling by the locals.
The cables had been laid by the previous pair of FDF advisers. They’d done a first-class job; Daun had checked and approved every millimeter of the route the day he and Anya arrived. Unless somebody’d driven a piece of tracked construction equipment through the TOC, the conduits should be fine. The indigs were capable of doing something that bone-headed, but Daun would have heard it happening.
The thirty-meter mast was a triangular construct set in concrete and anchored to the trailer housing the battery commander. The unit telescoped in three sections. Daun could lower the mast to save most of the climb, but re-erecting it would require help to keep the guy wires from fouling. He didn’t trust the indigs to do that properly even during daylight.
He squelched to the base of the mast, hooked his safety belts, and began to climb the runglike braces which bound the three verticals together. The mast was formed from plastic extrusions, not metal, but the rungs still felt icy to Daun’s bare hands. They were also slick as glass.
The sensor wands’ removable recording cartridges provided extremely precise information on all movements within the coverage area. If a human passed within two or three meters of the wand, the retrieved cartridge could determine the state of health based on body temperature and pulse rate. Such data were remarkable but useful only as the raw material for a historical overview.
Base Bulwark collected coarse sensor readings in real-time, via coded frequency-hopping radio signals. As the messenger had implied, this was the second miserable night in a row that the ultra-high gain antenna atop the mast had failed.
Last night a matchhead-sized integrated circuit had blown: the sort of thing that happened only occasionally with Frisian hardware, but always at a bad time. Anya had unplugged the blown chip and replaced it with a good one.
Anya, simply glad to have the antenna working again, had pitched the bad chip out into mud and darkness. If she’d instead saved the fried unit, Daun would have examined it to determine the cause of failure. Long odds the problem was due to manufacturing error, but there was always a possibility that a short within the box was causing a hot spot.
The chance to diagnose the underlying problem instead of merely fixing the symptom was much of the reason Daun had volunteered to climb the mast. Besides, he liked the hardware part of his work
well enough that he preferred to be doing it instead of playing cards with strangers he couldn’t respect and didn’t much like.
There were guy wires on each of the three sections of the telescoping mast. When he reached each set of guys, Daun unhooked one of his two safety loops, rehooked it above the wires, and repeated the process with the second loop. At no time did he trust merely his boots and grip to keep him on the mast. Daun wasn’t so much cautious as perfectly methodical. The notion of cutting corners to lessen his exposure to the chill drizzle didn’t cross his mind.
Viewed from the top of the thirty-meter mast, the lights of Bulwark Base had a surreal innocence, like the gleam of will-o’-thewisps in a nighted meadow. Rain softened the patterns and dusted glare into sparkle. The scene wasn’t beautiful but it had a dignified tranquility, far removed from the muddy truth. The glowing canvas of the TOC could be the entrance to the Venusberg, and Daun could imagine that flashlights in the tents on the perimeter were cupids twinkling around the goddess of love.
The receiving antenna at the mast peak was enclosed in a weatherproof capsule about the size of a soccer ball. The covering was dull gray plastic which was reasonably sturdy but remained transparent over most of the electromagnetic spectrum. Wherever possible, the sensor wands transmitted over microwave frequencies, but those without a line of sight to the receiver used VHF or UHF as circumstances required.
Daun arranged the working canopy over the capsule. When he had it stiffened into position, the monomolecular sheeting blocked the rain completely. Before then, however, he managed to pour what felt like a liter of cold water down the back of his neck from the canopy’s folds.
He sighed, clipped his light to a strut so that it shone down on the work, and opened the antenna capsule. Two of the micro-miniaturized circuits were black instead of the healthy gold color. That was neither surprising nor a problem. When one chip blew, it could easily have overloaded its neighbor. Daun’s repair kit contained at least three replacements for every chip on the chassis.
He opened the cover wider as he prepared to pull the failed chips. An irregularity on the inner face of the cover caught his eye. The plastic had blistered and turned silvery on the side facing the chips that had failed.
The antenna didn’t draw enough juice to heat the cover even slightly. A short circuit which blistered the plastic that way would have vaporized the circuitry, chassis and all, instead of popping a chip or two.
The energy that had caused the antenna to fail had come from outside. The most likely outside source was a precisely aimed X-ray laser on one of the enemy-held hilltops overlooking Bulwark Base.
Feeling colder than rain could make him, Daun reached up to key his commo helmet and alert the camp. The shock wave proved he was too late.
The warhead went off with a hollow Klock! that blew one of the TOC trailers inside out in a sleet of aluminum. The weapon, a laser-guided anti-tank missile, was configured to defeat heavy armor with a shaped charge. A straight fragmentation or HE warhead would have been better suited for the present task. This was along the lines of killing mosquitoes with an elephant gun.
On the other hand, an elephant gun will kill a mosquito. Little survived of the trailer, and nothing of anyone who happened to be in it.
The canopy flapped skyward in the blast. The antennas whipped violently and a guy wire parted, either overstressed or cut by flying shrapnel. Daun hugged the mast with both arms as his feet slipped from the rungs.
Buzzbombs and crew-served automatic weapons raked the bunkers on the north and west perimeter of the base. Tents collapsed or exploded, flinging out the corpses of troops huddled beneath canvas for shelter.
While the antenna was deadlined the previous night, the Democrats had moved an assault force into position in the gullies close to Bulwark Base. Tonight they had taken the antenna out of commission again in order to make their final approach through the rain. The Democrats knew they had nothing to fear from the garrison’s patrols or the watchfulness of the troops on duty on the perimeter of the base.
Another terminally guided missile impacted, this time on furniture near the center of the TOC. The tent shredded in a reddish appliqué over the white flash at the core. Bits of missile casing, and fragments of equipment converted into secondary projectiles, riddled the three remaining trailers.
The mast swayed even more violently. Daun lost his grip. He was hanging by his safety belts. The broken guy wire whacked across his helmet and bound his outflung arm to the antenna mast.
Half a second later, a third missile detonated in the Technical Detachments tent.
For an instant, the flash threw the silhouettes of the dozen startled occupants against the canvas. Then the tent was gone, the flash was a blinding purple afterimage on Daun’s retinas, and Sergeant Anya Wisloski shrieked into her commo helmet like a hog being gelded.
Daun’s legs flailed as he tried to find the rungs again with his feet. The mast had torqued and bent over so that he hung out in the air. Most of his weight was on his left forearm, bound to the mast. He thought the bones might have broken. The pain was inconceivable.
He didn’t scream. His ears still rang with the sound of Anya’s cry.
Figures, some of them waving weapons, lurched from tents. The TOC’s instrumentation ran off a portable fusion power plant adapted from the drive unit of a Frisian armored vehicle. There was plenty of excess capacity. Most of the living quarters within the berm had electric lights run through a variety of jury-rigged conductors, with telephone line predominating.
The Central States personnel were backlit by their own illumination. Democrat troops had quickly crossed the skimpy wire entanglements by throwing quilted padding over the barbs. They opened fire from the berm, knocking startled defenders down like bowling pins.
Daun managed to grip a rung with his right hand and take some of the weight off his tangled arm. The mast swayed, dipping slightly with each movement. Sooner or later one of the twisted poles would snap and collapse the whole tower. Daun had to get free before then.
A ricochet moaned past his face. The bullet sounded lonely, like a dog unjustly kicked. Daun thrashed his lower body and finally hooked his right leg around the tilting mast.
In one of the gun pits nearby, the crew was trying to depress their 150-mm howitzer to fire directly on the attackers. A buzzbomb described a flat arc that climaxed on the gun’s recoil compensator. The projectile burst with a white flash and a blast of shrapnel that was invisible except for its effect on the crew.
The gunners spun away and fell. Open powder charges sprayed across the gun pit and ignited in a fierce red flare. The gun captain crawled back toward her position through the flame, dragging loops of intestine. She pulled herself onto the trail and died, reaching vainly for the firing lanyard.
Trip flares attached to the wire on the south side of Bulwark Base began to go off. The sappers leading the Democrat assault had disconnected the flares on their approach routes. Members of the garrison stumbled over their own mines while fleeing into the night.
A truck, one of the few vehicles assigned to the base, drove south out of the engineer compound. Scores of troops clung to the cab and body. Some of them shot wildly.
Democrat riflemen and machine gunners opened fire. Bullets sparked on the frame and slapped troops from the vehicle. The truck continued to accelerate, skidding on the slick surface. Its eight driven wheels cast up a rooster-tail of mud, water, and duckboards.
Two buzzbombs sputtered toward the moving target. One missed high, sailing over the berm to vanish. The other went off close alongside. Would-be escapees tumbled from the bed, but the run-while-flat tires permitted the truck to keep going.
The gate to the road south from Bulwark Base was three X-frames connected by a horizontal pole and strung with barbed wire. A flangelike extension of the berm was intended to force vehicles to slow for a right-angle turn when entering or leaving the base.
The truck hit the gate, crushed it down, and roared over th
e berm’s sloped extension in low gear. A Central States soldier ran along behind the vehicle, trying to climb aboard. He lost his footing on the berm and sprawled.
As the truck disappeared, the soldier rose to one knee and tried to shoot at the vehicle. Mud clogged his rifle. He flung the useless weapon after the truck. A moment later, a Democrat machine gun nailed him into the berm with a burst of golden tracers.
The leg Daun had flung around the mast cramped because of the awkward angle. That pain was lost in the red throb of blood returning to his left arm now that he didn’t dangle by it.
With no tools and one good hand, Daun couldn’t unwrap the guy wire that held him. It was spliced into his safety belts and apparently pinched by a fold of the slowly collapsing mast. He’d lost the wrist light when the first missile went off.
He supposed that was a good thing, because otherwise he’d have been a lighted target. He giggled hysterically.
Daun heard a thump over the shooting. He looked down. A dark parcel lay on an expanse of softly reflectant aluminum. Someone had tossed a satchel charge onto the roof of the battery commander’s trailer.
Daun clutched the mast with his free arm and tried to find footing for his other leg. He closed his eyes instinctively. Blood vessels in his eyelids reddened the yellow flash that streamed through them.
The blast flattened the trailer and flung Daun upward like a yo-yo shooting the moon. The guy wire broke again, but the safety belts held.
The mast toppled with the grace of a falling tree, slowly at first but accelerating as it neared the ground. Daun was underneath. Remaining guy wires zinged as they parted.
A Democrat parachute flare drifted down through the overcast to illuminate the encampment. The mast rotated as light bloomed. Daun stared down through the latticework at the ruin of Bulwark Base instead of up into the clouds that would otherwise have been the last thing he saw.
A pole in the base section had broken, causing the mast to twist on the remaining verticals before it hit the ground. Daun slammed into the mud, beside rather than beneath the structure to which he was bound.