Onward, Drake!

by Mark L. Van Name

  Thank you, David, for writing such great stories and inspiring the rest of us.

  Save What You Can

  David Drake

  Raney didn’t think she’d been able to sleep more than fifteen minutes or so on the run from the spaceport, but when the truck rocked to a halt she heard someone outside shout, “End of the line, troopers! Out! Out!”

  “This is Mormont?” she said to the trooper beside her. If it was, she’d slept most of six hours.

  “I guess,” he said. “Unless they changed their bloody minds again on the road. Which is likely enough.”

  Raney slung her sub-machine gun, then put on her commo helmet. She wasn’t netted in to the First Platoon channel; that was the first order of business after she reported.

  “Say?” she said to the trooper shuffling to the open tailgate ahead of her. They’d loaded at night, and she only knew a few people in First Platoon. “Who’s the CO?”

  They’d been crammed in so tight that you had to negotiate to get room to curl up to sleep, but that was all the talking Raney had done during the ride. They were all slugged out from Transit; they’d offloaded from the ship and packed straight onto the trucks without the usual couple days’ stand-down to acclimate.

  “That’s Sergeant Krotcha,” the trooper said, “but they said we’re with a section of combat cars and the El-Tee of them’s in command of the team. Say, are you a recruit?”

  “Not exactly,” said Raney, feeling her lips grin a little. She was thirty standard years old, twelve years a veteran of the Slammers. “I’m a sergeant/gunner from Third, but my jeep’s deadlined. My driver’s with the vehicle, waiting for the rest of Support Section to land. Major Pritchard stuck me in First because Third had already pulled out and they need all the bodies they have up on the border.”

  “You watch,” said the other trooper, holding the tailgate latch with one hand as he stepped from the truck’s bumper to the ground. His 2cm weapon banged between the tailgate and his body armor. “We’ll be here freezing our butts for a month without our hold baggage, and nothing will happen.”

  “That’s okay with me,” Raney said, swinging down in turn. She thought of asking the fellow’s name, but there’d be time later so it didn’t matter.

  Or there wouldn’t be time, that could happen too. Then it mattered even less.

  Their convoy was four civilian trucks—the one Raney had been aboard had Glover Shirtwaists painted on the side—with a combat car ahead and another behind. They’d halted in an irregular plaza surrounded by one- and two-story fieldstone houses with slate roofs. It had stopped snowing, but at least a decimeter lay on the roofs and pavement.

  Sky, land and buildings were different dirty shades of gray, and it was as cold as a witch’s tit. Raney saw no sign of civilians.

  The last truck was a stakebed carrying the infantry skimmers snugged down with cargo ties. They were being offloaded now, but Raney figured she’d better report before she picked up the skimmer they’d assigned her at the spaceport.

  She’d only had time to glance at her skimmer, but that was long enough to see that it was a clapped-out junker. If she had to do any serious travel on it, she was well and truly screwed.

  Krotcha was a heavy-set man, not old—forty, maybe—but bald except for a black fringe circling above his ears. Raney knew him slightly. He was talking to somebody on his commo helmet when Raney walked over to him.

  “Top, Major Pritchard attached me to you just as you were pulling out,” Raney said. “I’m—”

  “You’re Raney,” Krotcha said. His gaze was disturbingly sharp. “You got a tribarrel in Third, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, but the jeep’s deadlined for parts until the Sundquist lands,” Raney said. “Maybe tomorrow—”

  “And maybe next month,” Krotcha said, shrugging. “Well, I’m glad to have you, Raney. I’d be a long sight gladder to have your gun too, but in a ratfuck like this I guess you take what you can get.”

  A younger man in clean khakis and new body armor joined them. He’d gotten down from the lead combat car, Camptown. Krotcha looked toward him and said, “El-Tee, this is Sergeant Raney from Third. I’m putting her in Wetsam’s squad. Raney, this is Lieutenant Taggert from Charlie Troop, he’s in charge.”

  “Sir,” said Raney. “I’m still on the Third Platoon net. There wasn’t time—”

  Krotcha leaned forward to read the serial number from her helmet, then spoke it into the AI of his own unit. A machine voice in her ear said, “Accepted.” A moment later the same voice said, “Command net, accepted.”

  Raney nodded thanks. Top was treating her as a sergeant rather than just an extra trooper, though she wouldn’t have any command responsibilities unless something went badly wrong. She didn’t know the people in the platoon well enough to be giving orders, but she’d do what she could if it all hit the fan.

  “There isn’t time to breathe,” Taggert muttered. He suddenly looked very young; Raney wondered if this was his first command. “The Bessies mobilized as soon as they learned the Commonwealth had hired us. It looks like they hope to take the spaceport before the Slammers have landed, all but us on the Garrett.”

  “We’ll have backup soonest, sir,” Sergeant Krotcha said. “The other ships can’t be more than a day out, and then it’s just a couple hours before there’s a company of panzers barreling down the road to us.”

  He sounded reassuring, upbeat even, when he spoke to the green lieutenant. You’d scarcely imagine that he was the same man who’d muttered to Raney, another veteran, that the rest of Hammer’s Regiment might not land for a month.

  “I’ll get my ride and find Wetsam,” Raney said, turning away. The combat cars were in air-defense mode, their tribarrels slanted up toward the north. They would sweep incoming shells from the sky before the combat team—and the nearby portion of Mormont—was in any danger.

  Three locals in gray uniforms had come out of a building facing the plaza and were walking toward the command group. Two of them carried long-barreled coil guns; the middle-aged man in the middle had only a pistol.

  Raney used the locator of her helmet as she walked toward the stakebed. It was taking time to unload the skimmers; the catches of the tie-downs had frozen. She wasn’t surprised to find Sergeant Wetsam in the crowd at the back of the truck.

  “Sarge, Top assigned me to you,” Raney said to the trooper highlighted by her face-shield. “I’m Raney.”

  Wetsam—short, sturdy and thirty; a male equivalent of Raney herself—gave her a wry smile. “Lucky you,” he said. “Did he tell you were he’d put us?”

  “I don’t know squat,” said Raney. “Pretty much like usual.”

  The skimmer being driven off the truck now was hers. It looked even worse in morning sun than it had when she first got it under the spaceport floods.

  “Well, there’s a farm north of town proper and half a klick off the main road,” Wetsam said. “We’re there to snipe at the Bessies if they barrel straight up the road to Mormont. If they decide to use the farm for their own outpost, though, I’ll be bloody glad to have you and anybody else you can scrape up besides.”

  The snow on the road was unmarked, so Wetsam took the squad well to the right through the straggling woods. If the wind kept up, the snow swirled from the pavement by the skimmers’ air cushions would be wiped out in a few hours anyway. Wetsam was right not to give the Bessies a chance that they didn’t need to have, though.

  Wetsam was number two in the line and Raney brought up the rear. She had her skimmer punched out to hold the moderate pace. Winter had frozen the undergrowth down to bare canes.

  The clean-up slot was proper for Raney’s rank—she might even be senior to Wetsam, though she had no intention of pushing the point—but she hoped that her skimmer didn’t crap out while the others drove on without her. She would call on the helmet if necessary, but they wanted to hold electronic silence. The Bessies couldn’t listen in on the frequency-hopping communications, but helmet commo might
alert them to the Slammers’ presence.

  The farm that was to be the squad outpost was a one-and-a-half-story fieldstone building in a large yard. There was a shed, a chicken coop, and a shoulder-high woodpile ten meters long.

  The fence was probably more a more of a way to dispose of stones plowed up from the field than a barrier. It was waist-high on three sides, but on the back toward the woods it was low enough for a healthy skimmer to hop. Raney and another member of the squad stopped just short of it. Each in turn then lifted the front of the other’s machine while its rider gunned the fans. They parked against the rear of the building with the other skimmers.

  Wetsam had opened the slanting door in the ground against the rear wall. Beneath was a root cellar which reached some distance back under the house proper.

  “Okay, here’s our hide,” Wetsam said. “Blessing, you take Sparky and Carl to tear apart them sheds. The rest of us’ll use the timbers to brace the cellar roof in case the house gets shelled. Raney, there’s a window in the roof peak. Central hasn’t warned us yet, so I’m not expecting anybody down the road till we’re set up here. Just in case, though, you keep an eye out. All right?”

  “Roger,” Raney said. Her sub-machine gun didn’t have the punch to be effective on targets five hundred meters away, but the other squad members were used to working together. Besides, shooting at scouts would just warn the Bessies that the farm was a target worth dealing with.

  The only door to the house was in the front. It was ajar; a trickle of snow had blown over the board floor. The fireplace—Raney checked it with thermal imaging on her face-shield—was cold.

  The stairs to the loft were almost steep enough to be called a ladder. When Raney started up, a dog began yapping above her. She paused, then lunged up two steps and raised her head above floor level behind the holographic sights of her sub-machine gun.

  A little girl stared big-eyed from the side of a bed. She held a puppy in one arm and was trying to clamp its muzzle shut with the other hand. She shrieked and dropped the dog when Raney appeared. The yapping continued, punctuated by slobbering as the puppy tried to lick tears from the girl’s face.

  Raney stepped onto the loft floor. She could stand upright if she stayed under the ridgepole. There weren’t supposed to be any civilians left in the district, but besides the kid—she looked about eight—there was an old man lying in bed. The quilt over his chest rose and fell slightly, but his face was as still as wax.

  “What are you doing here, kid?” Raney said. “You’ll get blown to Hell! You were supposed to evacuate.”

  “Grampa can’t go!” the girl said. “The Da Costas said they wouldn’t carry him, he’d just die anyway, but I won’t leave him!”

  “Look, sometimes you gotta cut your losses, kid,” Raney said. She squatted to bring her head more on a level with that of the kneeling girl. “You know, save what you can. I’m sorry, but your grandfather isn’t going to make it much longer even without a shell landing on top of him.”

  Which was what was going to happen a couple minutes after the squad started shooting.

  “I won’t!”

  Raney sighed. “What’s your name, kid?” she said, trying to sound calm and friendly. This was just one more screw-up. That’s what a war was: one bloody screw-up after another.

  “Celie,” said the girl. She hugged the dog close again. “And this is Bubbles.”

  Instead of keying her helmet, Raney bent over the ladder and shouted, “Sarge! Wetsam! I need you soonest!”

  Glass splintered. Instead of coming around to the door, Wetsam had knocked out a back window. Through it he called, “What the hell is it, Raney?”

  “We got civilians! Get up here!”

  “Bloody hell,” the squad leader snarled. More glass broke, but it was some moments before Wetsam appeared through the doorway from the back room. He’d have used the butt of his weapon to clear glass from the casement, but that left sharp edges. Nicking an artery by accident could let your life out as sure as a powergun would.

  “Celie, come stick your head over,” Raney said. Obediently the girl came and looked down the stairs beside Raney. Bubbles waddled over also, whining.

  “Bloody hell,” Wetsam said.

  “There’s an old guy in the bed, too,” Raney said. “He’s on his last legs, but she won’t leave him.”

  “The bloody National Guard swore they’d cleared all the bloody civilians from the bloody area!” Wetsam said as he started up the stairs.

  “Hey, you don’t suppose the locals might be bloody useless, do you?” Raney said. She stood and eased Celie back from the stairhead with her. “We’ve never run into that on other deployments, have we?”

  “Joke,” Wetsam said as he joined them in the loft. He stared at Grampa and made a sour expression with his lips. “But we’re still stuck with them.”

  “Do we get the Guard in Mormont to pick ’em up?” Raney asked. “We can’t carry the old guy on our skimmers.”

  “They didn’t take him before, so why’re they going to now?” Wetsam said. The puppy was sniffing his boots. “Besides, I don’t want a bunch of Guards tramping around here. If the Bessies ignore us till we decide to get noticed, we got a lot better chance of retiring.”

  “Well, then we got to bring them down into the cellar with us,” Raney said. She thought about retirement, but it was just a gray blur. She knew she wasn’t going back to Hagel’s World—ever; but there wasn’t any other planet that she wanted to be. The Slammers were the only place she’d been that seemed like home.

  “Hell, it’s cramped already,” Wetsam said, but he wasn’t really arguing. “Bloody hell.”

  “You know what’s going to happen to the upper floors,” said Raney. “Want me to go down and you reach him down to me on the floor?”

  “Yeah, I don’t have a better idea,” Wetsam said. He bent over the bed and gripped the old man around the shoulders.

  “What are you doing?” Celie said, and her puppy started to yap again.

  “We’re going to get your grampa some place safer,” Raney said, going down the stairs backward. It wasn’t going to be very safe, but it was the best they could do for now. It was all they had themselves, but the Slammers got paid for it.

  The dog suddenly squatted and peed on Wetsam’s boots. Wetsam didn’t react, maybe didn’t even notice. Raney wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d kicked Bubbles downstairs, but then the kid would make even more noise than the dog had.

  Wetsam bent, lowering the old man. Raney stood with one boot on the floor and the other on the first step. She surged up, then eased back when she had a hand on each side of grampa’s ribs.

  He weighed next to nothing, but she felt his breath on her cheek as she stepped back. It smelled sour.

  Bubbles bounced down the stairs front-first, circling and yapping as Raney walked to the door. She wasn’t going to try fitting Grampa through the jagged casement.

  The girl scooted down ahead of Wetsam. Just as well that Raney didn’t need help carrying the old man.

  Celie walked beside her, holding one of Grampa’s dangling hands. “Are you going to save us from the Filth?” she asked.

  “Huh?” said Raney, then realized that “Filth” must be the local name for citizens of the Republic of Bessarabia. “We’ll, we’re going to try to give the Bessies a bloody nose if they come this way, but maybe they won’t.”

  “You’ll save us,” the little girl said firmly. “I know you will.”

  “If Central was right about what’s coming down the road tonight . . . ,” Wetsam said from behind them. He was carrying the bedding and even the thin mattress. “I figure we’ll be lucky to save our own asses.”

  Raney didn’t respond, but she sure didn’t disagree.

  Grampa was still alive, though the only evidence of that was the occasional wheeze of breath through his open mouth. The girl huddled against him; the puppy varied between sniffing at the crouching Slammers and trying to wriggle between the two civilians.r />
  The heaters in Raney’s helmet, boots and gloves kept her functional, but the bare skin of her face prickled beneath the face-shield. They’d created the hide by slanting the beams of the outbuildings from the back wall of the cellar to the floor. The kitchen table, the front door and the cellar door lay on the supports to catch debris and slide it away if the building above them collapsed.

  It would have been reasonably warm with nine people and a dog crammed in, if they hadn’t had to remove the cellar door. It wasn’t a real bunker, but as a hide where they could keep out of the sight of Bessies heading for Mormont, it’d do. It had to.

  The sun was low beyond the woods behind them, and the blurred gray of the sky was shading deeper. It wasn’t the sort of night that ever became pitch black, though; the bare branches would still be faintly silhouetted against the overcast at midnight. A mist was rising.

  Celie hadn’t spoken for half an hour, and her eyes were closed. Wetsam was letting the squad sleep three at a time, but Raney had stayed awake. Dozing on the truck, followed by the surprise of finding the civilians, seemed to have cured the normal loginess of Transit.

  They were watching the road through tiny sensors placed on the stone fence. “Visitors!” Raney said in a harsh whisper when her face-shield careted movement. All the troopers had probably seen the vehicle, but it was a lot easier to call the alert than learn that you were the only one after all.

  Troopers shifted, ready to rush up the stairs. “Stay where you are!” Wetsam snapped.

  Raney checked the indicator lights on her sub-machine gun, green/green/red: loaded, sights on, safety on. The other troopers were going over their weapons also.

  A pair of four-wheeled vehicles with sloping bodies came down the road from the direction of the Bessarabian frontier. One head stuck over the top of each compartment.