All that pricked at Polian, he reminded himself, was an undercurrent of suspicion that ran counter to everything Polian felt about Gill. But Gill himself had told Polian that it was an intelligence officer’s duty to be suspicious.
“Major, Number Six is loaded out!” A combat engineer, bright and earnest, saluted as he approached Polian’s skimmer.
Polian returned the salute, which was the only right thing for an officer to do. Polian watched as the engineer walked down the skimmer line, bent against the arctic wind, and checked loading manifests. Returning a salute was a right thing that was easy for an officer to do. But not all right things were easy. If a Yavi officer, police or military, believed beyond reasonable doubt that he had encountered an Illegal, it was the officer’s sworn duty to summarily execute him.
Eighty-two
Three weeks to the day after Celline and Kit bought my plan, I sat outside my billet, in the chill moonlight, on a rock bench. I bent over a fire-warmed pot of soapy water, washing grease off my hands and forearms so that I could see what new blood blisters, tool gouges, and cuts decorated my skin.
Celline walked toward me holding two steaming mugs of tea. When she handed one to me, then sat down across from me, I saw that she was as stooped from fatigue, and as grimy, as I was. But tonight her green eyes glowed in a face that had begun to show the wear of years locked to a struggle spiraling downward.
I raised my cup to her, and the thin veil of steam softened her features for a blink. “Thank you, ma’am.”
“No, Lieutenant. Thank you.”
I shrugged as I wiped my hands with a rag. “I’ve never been afraid of a wrench.”
“For that, certainly.” She shook her head. “But more for rekindling hope. I see it in the faces of my soldiers. I’ve failed to inspire them, for far too long, to anything like this. If we fail, the rebellion will be done. But if we succeed visibly, we may inspire others to challenge the RS. By the thousands.”
I threw down the rag. “I’d like to see a few thousand of ’em show up tomorrow.”
Celline bent a tired smile and raised her eyebrows mockingly high. “I thought a Trueborn would say, ‘The fewer men, the greater share of honour…I pray thee, wish not one man more.’ ”
I rolled my eyes. “I didn’t know the Trueborns had pushed Shakespeare this far out along the jumplines.”
“Actually, Henry V is no favorite of mine. Your father would say it’s too gung-ho. That there is no glory in war.” She set down her tea, rolled up her sleeve, and washed dust off an old and purple shrapnel gash that furrowed her forearm from elbow to wrist. “Though, as Shakespeare wrote in Henry V, I’ll strip my sleeves and show my scars from this day to the ending of the world, alongside anyone who’s ever shed his blood with me.”
I nodded. “Ma’am, I’ll shed my blood for a friend. I have. But not for somebody’s idea of glory.”
“Ah.” She nodded back. “The disenchantment of the soldier, who by definition can’t choose his war. The idealist, by definition, always chooses hers. That’s a source of tension between you and your Colonel Born, isn’t it?”
I shook my head. “Mine? Hardly.”
“Alia seems to disagree.”
I paused. “What happens to her tomorrow?”
“She will remain here, safe under the protection of Pyt. At first she will call it bad luck to miss the fight, as Shakespeare’s actor does. But someday she will understand how many dead soldiers would ache to share her luck.”
I should have known that Celline would have thought not only about her troops but even about the simple war orphan who had fallen under her protection.
I raised my eyebrows. “Pyt’s staying behind? He doesn’t seem the type to miss the fight, either.”
“Pyt knows where his greater duty lies. He will do that duty, from now until the ending of the world.” She shifted herself on her stone bench, and shifted the subject, too. “Are they ready, then?”
I shrugged. “We’re out of time and daylight to make them any readier. But they should be fine. Your idealists are surprisingly good scroungers. Is your side of things ready?”
“After so many years and so many battles, there are no surprises. Except for Colonel Born, whose strength is a welcome one.” Celline yawned, then stood. “Until tomorrow, then, Lieutenant?”
I smiled in the moonlight and touched my forehead. “Or until the ending of the world, ma’am.”
Eighty-three
Polian felt himself nodding off in the skimmer’s right-hand seat as the convoy whispered south, changing direction at random intervals, the outriding skimmers alert for any sign of ambush. His driver slewed the hovercraft ninety degrees, and Polian rocked against the side curtain so hard that he half awakened.
The Trueborns, even with any help they could bluster or borrow from the Iridians, even with the great good luck they had thus far enjoyed, had to be off balance about this entire operation. No more, Polian thought, than he was about Ulys Gill.
The skimmer changed direction again, and leaned Polian inboard this time. Regarding Gill, Polian didn’t know which way to lean. Fortunately, when it came to denying Yavet the treasure he and this convoy carried, neither did the Trueborns and their meager allies.
Eighty-four
“Here it comes! Right on time.” The Iridian staff sergeant who stood at my side pointed to the south, out between the fern fronds that concealed us. He peered through brass binoculars, while I wore my snoops set for full daylight. We saw the writhing black smoke plume that hung above the Tressen Patrol Train’s locomotive before we saw the train itself.
I shifted my focus eight hundred yards to our immediate front, to the railroad tracks. The ground looked completely normal. I smiled. If that was what I saw, the train’s engineer and lookouts would see the same thing as they stared ahead at the flat, unthreatening monotony of the Bloody Corridor. The name had in recent years become merely historic, but we were about to change that.
Our force had left camp before the dawn that followed my discussion with Celline about soldiers and ideals. The trek that had brought us to this vantage overlooking the Corridor had taken us all of the following day and night.
I shifted the snoops back to the approaching train. I could see it now: engine, tender, troop car with roof pillbox, and the usual flatcar pair behind, both empty.
“Perfect!” said my staff sergeant.
Two minutes later the patrol train was five hundred yards short of being directly in front of us. I heard its wheels as they clacked over the joints between rails, saw the helmeted guards swaying lazily atop the troop car, even smelled steam and burned engine oil as the wind drove the engine smoke toward our hiding place.
Someone, among the other six men I directly commanded, who were huddled around the sergeant and me, hissed, “Now!”
I nodded up my snoops for an instant and glanced at my staff sergeant. His fingertips were white where they gripped his binoculars.
I nodded my snoops back down and flicked my gaze from the locomotive to an apparently empty space alongside the tracks. Now just four hundred yards separated them. I swallowed, myself. Now!
The train rattled forward.
I muttered, “Do it!”
I felt my heart pound as I stared at the empty spot.
The flash blackened my snoops for a heartbeat. Then I saw a smoke-and-dust cloud hovering in a ball above the roadbed. One rail curled toward the sky, the coppery spider silk of our det wire dangling from it and glinting in the sun. The companion to the curled rail remained arrow straight, but it protruded at an angle from the ground fifty feet to the side of the roadbed, where the explosion of our charges had spun it. Then the explosion’s thunder boomed across us there in the forest.
The locomotive’s drive wheels froze as it braked. One hundred fifty tons of train screeched atop the rails, squeezing fountains of orange sparks up along the locomotive’s flanks, that glowed even in the daylight. The engineer tried to halt the train short of the gap we h
ad blown in the tracks, lest it derail, then accordion onto itself in a jumble of wreckage.
The engineer could have taken his time. The commander of our lead infantry platoon, concealed fifty yards off the tracks in a camouflaged hole, had detonated the charges so far in advance of the train’s passage that the train would halt easily fifty yards short of the gap. We didn’t want to derail the patrol train. We just wanted to borrow it.
Our loan was, however, subject to the approval of the Tressen infantry aboard the train, and we expected them to be tighter about it than bark on a tree.
Boom!
The commander of our second infantry platoon detonated our second charge as soon as the train’s tail had passed forward of her concealed position. The first purpose of the second charge was to cut the tracks behind the train, to assure that its engineer couldn’t reverse back in the direction it came, to safety.
The charge’s other purpose was to signal our two infantry platoons to attack, even before the train had shrieked to a stop and its defenders began to realize the trouble they were in.
Two platoons of Iridian soldiers rose up from the flat soil of the Iridian Corridor like armed zombies on Trueborn Halloween. They stormed the troop car and the engine before the troops atop the car could think about traversing the crew-served machine gun and depressing its elevation to engage the attackers.
Inside the car, small-arms fire crackled for perhaps thirty seconds. One Tressen dove out through a window, rolled to his feet, and ran. An Iridian bullet cut him down within thirty yards.
Then there was silence, except for the periodic hiss of steam as the locomotive’s brakes automatically released pressure, and the wind that blew in from the sea and across the Bloody Corridor.
I won’t say it was a fair fight. But a fair fight is the last thing a soldier wants to give his enemy. The Tressens never knew what hit them, and that’s the way we planned it.
The commander of the lead infantry platoon, whose timing had been critical to the success of the ambush, climbed an outside ladder at the end of the troop car, swung a leg up, and stood atop the troop car’s roof. She waved a green scarf that she held in her left hand, which signaled us, hidden back in the treeline, that the train was secure.
I zoomed my snoops to look also at her upraised right fist, from which her index finger extended in our prearranged signal for number of Iridian casualties suffered. I also looked at her face. Kit wasn’t smiling. One casualty suffered was a miraculous number, considering. But any number greater than zero isn’t miraculous to the commander whose unit suffers it.
I peeled off my snoops and turned to my staff sergeant. I turned around and pointed at two lurking objects camouflaged beneath mounded fern boughs. “Sergeant, let’s get the twins moving.”
Fifteen minutes later, my crew of seven and I led the way as our two-vehicle column of smoke-belching, clattering, squealing crawler tanks rolled forward. Over the past three weeks, their crews and I had resurrected and rebuilt two operable tanks by cannibalizing the other two of the four in Celline’s junk-heap arsenal. Meanwhile, engineers had cleared a path from camp to this spot, one that the old crawlers could navigate. Now the resurrected machines lurched across the uneven ground at the tree line and into the sunlight for the first time in four decades, like regrown dinosaurs.
The Iridian crawlers were the first tanks used in combat on Tressel, during the final Iridian-Tressen war. Like so many things in the parallel human cultures that had grown up within the parallel environments of the outworlds, the Iridian tanks resembled the first tanks used in combat on Earth. The Trueborns invented their versions during the war that the Trueborns had designated as their first, but hardly last, world war.
The tanks were probably alike because the wars that spawned them were alike. The British Mark V and Iridian Thunderer crawler tanks were both designed to shelter advancing infantry formations, which had been getting slaughtered and reslaughtered in back-and-forth assaults across open ground, swept by machine guns, that lay between trench lines.
Both tank designs rolled on continuous, flexible tread bands that rotated around their armored flanks. Both were riveted-together, rectangular steel boxes that looked like a giant had kicked them in the ass, causing the box top to slide forward relative to the box’s base, creating a rhombohedral profile. The up-angled prow that the shape created enabled the tanks to crawl up and over obstacles that weren’t crushed beneath their thirty-ton weight.
Both lacked the familiar top turret of later crawlers and contemporary hovertanks. The old crawlers’ main cannons fired sideways, swiveling within enclosed sponsons that bulged from the vehicles’ armored flanks like steel saddlebags. Four machine guns whiskered out below aiming slits, one from the nose, tail, and the side of each sponson.
Even an early 2000s Trueborn crawler could travel cross-country at nearly fifty miles per hour. But it took our crawler pair ten minutes just to rumble across the few hundred yards of open plain between the treeline and the railroad. That was because both the British Mark V and the Iridian Thunderer were designed to be too slow, and in fact were too slow, to outrun the walking infantry that sheltered behind them as they advanced toward enemy machine guns.
By the time our little convoy lumbered alongside the patrol train, our infantry had removed intact rails from the roadbed behind the train, carried them forward on their shoulders, and were spiking them into place in front of the train to replace the rails that Kit had blown.
We didn’t care about leaving a gap in the tracks behind us. In fact, we wanted a gap, to slow down any trainload of Tressens that might pursue us from the south. We were taking our borrowed train not back south, but north, into the heart of Tressen.
Kit’s soldiers had also cut the telegraph cables that ran in the roadbed, which was supposed to preserve for us the element of surprise as against our enemy in Tressen.
We also uprooted ties from the roadbed behind us. These we used to construct ramps, then drove the crawlers up onto the two flatcars. Then we chained our thirty-ton girls into place for the journey north. Finally we tied tarpaulins fashioned from sailcloth over the tanks, in hopes that they would attract less attention when the train rolled past strongpoints and, once we crossed the border into Tressen, villages and towns. Most of that travel would happen during the oncoming night, after moonset, but we needed all the surprise we could get.
The last thing we did was attend to the dead.
The lone Iridian casualty, who had been a widower corporal, we buried back within the wood line in an unmarked grave. Celline said a few words, and there were moist eyes, including hers and mine, though the moment was brief. We didn’t really have the time to spare, but nobody wanted the Tressens to get hold of the body.
The Tressen dead, who numbered ninety-seven, we could have pitched into the shallow fighting holes along the roadbed in which our infantry had hidden. But the Tressens entombed their dead above ground, covered with stones.
It took us two hours that we couldn’t spare, and we could barely scavenge enough rock to veneer each body. But Celline insisted.
When we had finished, Kit, Celline, and I stood on the open back platform of the troop car as the train inched forward. In the locomotive’s cab, an Iridian private who had once worked on the railroad opened the engineer’s throttle.
We looked back across the makeshift grave mounds. Here and there a bit of uniform or even a limb was exposed.
Celline sighed. “It’s unfortunate that we couldn’t have done a more thorough job.”
It seemed to me that a ninety-seven-to-one kill ratio was plenty thorough. But, of course, she was referring to the burial. As the train accelerated toward the Tressen border, I raised my eyebrows. “After what Tressen’s done to Iridia, ma’am? I wouldn’t have blamed you if you pissed on ’em.”
Maybe that was why she was a duchess and I was a soldier.
But twenty-four hours from that moment, Celline, myself, and everybody now aboard that train would be soldiers
. Or worm food.
Eighty-five
The first skimmer of the convoy from the Arctic, with Polian in its right front seat, a command pennant flapping from its windscreen, slid to a halt. The hovercraft drifted in front of the first gate that marked a passage through the rows of concertina wire that now surrounded the spaceport.
The gate guard came to attention and saluted. Then he raised the gate bar and waved the convoy through. Two minutes later, the cavorite that would change the balance of power in the human universe came to temporary rest inside the shuttle strip’s hangar.
Gill was waiting for Polian, smiling alongside a small mountain of plasteel cargo containers waiting to be repacked, first with contraband cavorite and then with an assortment of unsuspicious goods.
Polian’s skimmer settled onto the floor of the great dome, and the echoes died as its engine shut down.
After thirty-six hours of being vibrated into jelly, Polian could barely stand. He tried, clinging to the windscreen with his left hand while saluting with his right.
Gill motioned him to remain seated. The older man walked to Polian’s side. “How was the trip?”
Polian shrugged. “Uneventful.”
Gill nodded. “Those are the best kind.” He leaned into the skimmer and looked down at Polian’s ankle. “We’ll see if this shuttle carries a flight surgeon. We need to get that looked at by somebody besides a local physician. And in the meantime, you should go and rest it. You must be shaken to pieces.”
“I thought I’d stay here while the stones are unloaded and repackaged, sir.”
Gill shook his head. “They’re surrounded by a battalion now. And nobody inspects what leaves Tressel, just what arrives. Ruberd, your job is ninety percent done. Take it easy. Do I have to make it an order?”
Undercurrents Page 24