Intrepid

by Mike Shepherd

  “I have a short-term record, Kris.”

  “Include that in a tight-beam to the Wasp as soon as it comes over the horizon. Add my voice to a picture of Gramma Polska—‘I am Princess Kris Longknife of the Wardhaven Navy, and I strongly advise people to follow Gramma Polska’s advice. A time of reckoning is coming, but it is not now. Don’t do something that causes these outlaws to hurt your friends.’ ”

  “I will tight-beam it as soon as the Wasp is up.”

  “Good. How long did it take Thorpe to respond to our first broadcast?”

  “Ninety-two minutes. He was almost below the horizon when he sent the martial-law decree.”

  “Let’s get our reply to that one up as fast as we can.”

  “Kris, in a minute Thorpe’s ship will be out of line of sight. Shouldn’t we be getting back to the trucks?” Nelly said.

  “Time flies when you’re having fun.” Kris sighed.

  “Let me come with you,” Gramma Polska said. “My family will feel better about going if they see me with you.”

  So Kris headed out of the huge sod-covered barn with food, full fuel tanks, and two extra trucks. One of them knew just the farmstead to head for, so it took over the lead.

  The time with the Wasp went quickly. Captain Drago got the message responding to martial law and rebroadcast it in less than a minute. Information continued to be thin. It looked like Jack’s scouts had made initial contact with Colonel Cortez’s lead troops. At least Cortez’s vanguard was no longer charging up the road as fast as they could drive, but had slowed down and now had people walking point and flank guards. That would give Kris more time to get south.

  And Cortez more time to bring up his full force.

  Every coin has two sides to it.

  And, if Kris could read anything out of the cloud of noise around that vanguard, Jack was drawing them in to exactly the ambush they’d planned.

  Make that ambushes. Two is always more fun than one.

  Kris rode in the back of the truck this time, letting Jamie and his old man share the cab. She studied the rolling terrain, then eyed the troops in the trucks around her.

  The Polska truck was in the lead, navigating across the sea of grass by whatever system these folks used. Here and there residual stands of broom trees stood, their land covered with underbrush that the locals avoided driving through. That would give away a lot to overhead observers.

  But it was the troops Kris studied. In trucks with mostly Marines in the back, the troops had posted a watch, then flaked out to sleep. If you got time to spare, grab a wink had been the advice of the old sweats since before Caesar.

  It was the other trucks that caused Kris to squint hard . . . and worry. The volunteers were up, looking around, fondling their rifles. A few cleaned their weapons. But the smart ones were very few. How would these people handle it when they saw their targets fall? When the man beside them fell, his head half-gone? What could Kris expect from these amateurs? They were fighting for their very lives. It was their freedoms that were on the line. But had they had enough time to realize the stakes? Could they find in their guts what they needed to go on when everything that was natural and human screamed run?

  Kris sat down with a new problem to chew on. How do you train civilians into fighters in the short time she had? A very short time, Kris found, when she called up the map. Jack would spring the first trap in a bit more than one and a half orbits.

  21

  Colonel Cortez did not like the smell of what lay ahead. The ground was low and stank of marsh. Not the honest stench of the marshes humans had known forever . . . and drained on Earth. No, somehow this waterlogged mess had an acridly sweet smell to it. Nothing was right on this godforsaken planet.

  If Cortez hadn’t already issued orders to put a stop to the bitching about “Why not let the damn locals have the damn place,” he would have muttered something like that himself.

  He searched what lay before him with his binoculars. As the photomap Thorpe had sent him showed, there was swamp as far as the broom trees let him see. And directly in front of him a grassy mound ran straight and narrow for about three klicks.

  It wasn’t exactly a road. Like everything on this planet the natives called Pandemonium, it was different. No solid gravel or asphalt road for these folks. No, they’d planted this causeway with one of the perennial grains that the locals harvested. From the stubble, someone had actually come along recently and cut a crop off it. Must not get much traffic.

  One of the officers from the psalm singers had a couple of local hostages wading in the ditches on either side of the causeway. They were nearly up to their necks.

  “I told you it’s deep,” one local hollered, loud enough that no one could avoid hearing. “We had to get the dirt for the road from somewhere. We dug it out of the muck beside where we put the road. And we kept a lookout posted with a rifle handy. There’s something in this water that likes to nibble on toes.”

  That last claim Colonel Cortez didn’t know how much to credit. But it got a lot of the white berets around him muttering prayers and eyeing the water darkly. You couldn’t see six inches into the muddy stuff.

  “What do you make of it, sir?” Major Zhukov asked as he climbed aboard Cortez’s command vehicle, one of the few army green battle rigs on the planet.

  Cortez shook his head. “Here is where I’d ambush me, if I had anything like a formal fighting force. Your Guard Fusilier could lurk out there in the water and only surface to shoot this bunch to a bloody pulp. Not so?”

  “Just so, sir. Just so,” Zhukov said, with an expressive sigh. Zhukov had been sent along on this joyride by the wise fathers of Torun to make sure that the lone company of Guard Fusiliers they rented out was returned in good shape. Some battle experience gained . . . with someone else paying the bills . . . but no real damage to the merchandise.

  Cortez had wanted to rent the entire Fusilier battalion, but the penny-pinching fathers of Torun had learned something about defending their planet from that unidentified squadron of battleships that suddenly appeared over Wardhaven while their own fleet was elsewhere. Cortez got one company from them and had to settle for filling out the rest of the battalion from New Jerusalem.

  Oh, and the financiers had been glad for the savings.

  Colonel Cortez turned to the major. “Do the engineers attached to your Guard company have sensors that would let me see warm bodies in that muddy water or pick up the electrical impulses of a sharpshooter’s heart if he’s standing half a klick away behind that ironwood tree?”

  “Certainly, sir. We have a fully capable company of engineers on Torun,” the major said with a bleak smile. “ ‘But engineers, we don’t need no stinking engineers on this pissant planet.’ Isn’t that what your investors told you and Thorpe when you asked the Council of Torun Elders to rent some to you?”

  “Your treasurer set a mighty high price for a platoon of engineers.”

  Major Zhukov snorted bitterly. “Their expensive engineer toys were bought while he was cashing the checks. He squealed at every penny as it fell through his tight fist. The gear my infantry is wearing is ten, twenty years old. A lot better than anything we’ve seen on this planet, mind you, but not something our glorious treasurer had to pay for. He let it go ‘cheap.’ ”

  “I’m just glad he let it go. I don’t know what we’re facing, but it’s got to be better than these psalm singers.”

  “Don’t knock them. They didn’t look too bad on the march up. You got any estimate of what this Longknife kid has?”

  “Nope. Thorpe’s not telling me a lot about her. Cusses her plenty, but not a lot of hard data behind all the noise.”

  “I don’t have anything on Thorpe and her, but one of the junior officers from the Lord’s Ever Victorious Host did confiscate this from one of his soldiers.”

  Zhukov pulled a plastic flimsy from his shirt pocket and unfolded a large picture of a busty redhead in a white dress that looked only thinly painted on over her many curv
es.

  “That the Longknife girl?”

  “Unfortunately not, Colonel. That’s Miss Victory something. Originally, the article came with a picture of her and Kris Longknife, but the kid who had this said she was just a thin beanpole. He zoomed up the Peterwald girl and ditched the Longknife kid.”

  “Rather shortsighted of him.”

  “At the time, I don’t think he ever expected to meet either of those girls, except maybe in his dreams.”

  Cortez glanced at the story. “ ‘Guilty of many sins for which both harlots will burn deep within the worst fires of hell.’ What kind of rubbish is this?” Cortez began to wad up the flimsy, but Zhukov put his hand out to stop him.

  “It’s from New Jerusalem, sir. They can’t put pictures of near-naked girls from other planets on the covers of their tabloids without assuring the guys reading them that said girls will burn in hell.”

  “And that matters to me why?”

  Zhukov flipped the paper over, ran his finger down the second column quickly, then stopped. “Read that paragraph.”

  “ ‘Miss Longknife committed many licentious acts on New Eden, including riding in cars with men she was not related or married to, masquerading as a soldier, violating planetary data censorship rules, associating with hooligans of the worst sort.’ Zhukov, this does not leave me quaking in my boots.”

  “Keep reading, Colonel, the last sentence.”

  Cortez skipped down a half inch. “ ‘After a major disturbance of the peace that left thousands dead of gunshot wounds and explosives, Miss Longknife was escorted off New Eden by Wardhaven Marines only moments before she should have faced judgment for her many sins.’ ”

  Colonel Cortez looked up as he finished reading. Zhukov raised an expressive eyebrow. “How many Marines does it take to escort a debutante, and how heavily armed were they? Are they still with her?”

  Now Cortez did read the graph, slowly, wringing it out. Not one extra drop of information dripped out for him. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “Thorpe showed me pictures of the ship she rode in on. Small freighter.”

  “What’s a Longknife doing on a small merchant ship?”

  “What’s a Longknife doing interfering with our little rape, pillage, and put-under-new-management scam for this planet?”

  Zhukov took off his helmet and wiped at the sweat running down his face. “What is a Longknife doing here?” He put the helmet back on. “So, sir. What are we about to do here?”

  “If I run this collection of rattletrap trucks down that mound of dirt, there’s going to be no way to turn them around.”

  “So we walk?”

  “And leave our spare ammo, water, and heavy machine guns behind? I think not, Major.”

  Major Zhukov made no more attempts to answer his own question. He paused, an expectant expression on his face. The one smart junior officers learned early in the Torun Guard.

  “We will wait for your Guard Fusiliers to catch up, and for Thorpe to make another pass and see what’s changed in front of us. Then, all together, we take the battalion across, with plenty of hostages out front.”

  “They will think twice about shooting,” Major Zhukov said.

  “While we’re waiting, Major, you might get some of the prayer group down on their knees . . . with knives.”

  22

  Kris wasn’t surprised by the picture Captain Drago unloaded to her next orbit. The hostile forces still sat where the road crossed the swamp. This Colonel Cortez could read the ground as well as she. And it spelled ambush in easy-to-read letters.

  He was looking things over and giving it a long think.

  It also let his rear guard, the only troops he had in armor, catch up. Smart man. So much for Kris’s prayer for a brash, dumb one. Nelly had not been able to find out anything about a recently cashiered officer by the name of Cortez.

  As further proof he was not dumb, the colonel didn’t waste his time. He had some of the white-beret soldiers slowly making their way forward up the causeway on their hands and knees.

  Kris zoomed the picture in as much as she could, then studied it carefully. Yes, one of them held something in his hand that glinted in the afternoon sun.

  Kris chuckled. So, someone had saved money by skipping mine detectors. Whoever was in charge was using those white hats to fish for mines with their knives.

  Jack wasn’t under orders not to mine the causeway. Of course, that didn’t mean he would.

  Kris swallowed her chuckle. Ten hostages stood close to the slowest mine hunter. If Jack had put explosives out, things were going to get bloody a bit sooner then they wanted.

  These developments were something Kris would like to talk over with her officer and NCOs. However, her LT was busy laying down two alternate tracks for this advance to contact.

  And now Gunny and the other sergeants were riding along in rigs with civilians. Talking to them, telling them the bare necessities that might keep them alive. A glance at the trucks around Kris showed that the NCOs had the rapt attention of the listening farmers.

  Kris assessed her progress. Measured where she needed to be by first light tomorrow. The two looked to balance.

  Dear Lord, but she hated the waiting.

  “The situation in front of you has not changed in the last ninety minutes,” Thorpe’s image observed from the clear air in front of Colonel Cortez. In front of the ground pounder, the map flimsy updated itself. “Quit wasting time and get that show of yours on the road,” the starship captain ordered smartly.

  Easy for him, his neck wasn’t heading into an ambush.

  Cortez had worked with Thorpe before. He’d learned to take calls like these in private. That didn’t mean he liked them.

  “Do you have any information about what kind of Marines Kris Longknife left New Eden with?”

  The feed from the ship looked like it froze. Certainly, the face Thorpe showed the colonel did not change. Not so much as a breath of change.

  “What kind of Marines . . . ?” he finally said.

  “One of our lieutenants came across some information about Kris Longknife getting in trouble on New Eden.”

  Thorpe interrupted. “That woman is always in trouble.”

  “Yes, sir,” Cortez said, but did not allow his train of thought to be derailed. “Miss Longknife was reportedly escorted off planet one step ahead of the law. The information did not identify how many Marines or if they were fleet Marine force, recon, or embassy Marines. Nor did it say if she still had them with her.”

  “Thorpe said slowly. Wardhaven Marines,”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What did it say about them?”

  “Nothing, sir. It was a gossip column that mentioned the Marines in passing.”

  “Civilians never care about the troops,” Thorpe spat.

  “Yes, sir. But Longknife and Marines. Are they still together?”

  “Why would Marines waste their time with her? No, Colonel, once the Marines got her out, they got her out of their hair.”

  “I would certainly think so, sir. However, there is this little matter of what she is doing here. We did not expect her. No source suggested we might encounter her here. But here she is, claiming to command a Wardhaven ship. What’s the name of it? Wasp? Not exactly the name for a merchant.”

  “But she is carrying cargo for one of the farmers here. She said that when she refused my order to sheer off.”

  “There is that, sir. I admit, matters are very confusing.”

  “The woman could confuse a bronze statue,” Thorpe snorted, then eyed Cortez. “Are you going soft on me, Hernando? Has she got you so confused you’re chasing your tail? You want to cut and run in front of this . . . this . . . rich brat?”

  “No, sir. Not at all,” Cortez exploded. Back home in an officers’ club, such talk might result in someone being invited outside. And that someone might be on sick call the next day.

  That someone would not bear the proud name of Cortez.

  Now the colonel swal
lowed and went on. “However, Captain, my forces are gathering here in front of where I would have arranged an ambush. Before I stick my head into it, I’d like to know as much about the situation as I can. I do not like what I have learned. Do you know anything I should?”

  Cortez managed, with effort, to turn that last remark into a question. A question it might be, but it was still good for taking an inch of skin off of William Tacoma Thorpe’s proud hide.

  The starship driver’s face did not turn beet red. Not quite. He heard everything that Cortez had included and intended. He took a long moment to reply.

  When it came, his words were deceptively soft. “Colonel, you have your orders. We have good reason to believe that whatever forces Longknife has landed to train and equip the local terrorists are ahead of you. Advance and destroy them.”

  Cortez saluted. “Yes, sir.”

  Thorpe returned the salute. “Execute your orders. Let’s kick some Longknife butt.”

  The image in front of Cortez vanished into the air. Cortez had his orders. Now all he needed to do was make them happen.

  He shook his head.

  23

  Colonel Cortez adjusted his body armor as he stepped down from his command vehicle’s control center and let the door slam shut. Major Zhukov approached him but did not salute.

  That was nice of him.

  There were snipers out here; Cortez could feel them on the back of his neck. The young major was restraining himself from sending them a message. “Here’s the man you want. Kill him and make me commander here.” Cortez wondered if by sundown today he might wish someone had put him out of his misery.

  He certainly hoped for a happier ending.

  Ten paces off waited the four company commanders; Cortez waved them to him. Captain Afonin was the only one in full battle gear. He led the company of Guard Fusiliers. His record was spotless, lacking only combat experience. If he survived the coming battle, he would be far ahead of his peers in the race for a general’s star. The young man’s grin showed he knew all that and was eager to begin.