by Henry Zou
FAR BACK IN the lines, Corporal Schilt was fuming. He had almost been killed in the Lauzon Offensive. He had come precariously close to dying in some backwater hamlet on some feral planet he could barely pronounce the name of.
He had only escaped death by running back into camp and hiding in a drainage culvert while the battle had raged around him. Drunk beyond all senses, Schilt had shuddered to think what would have happened had he been forced to fight. He had simply followed the main line of retreat, making sure to keep as many Riverine between himself and the insurgent waves as possible. In his hurry to flee, Schilt had climbed aboard an assault lander rather than his assigned swift boat and was now stuck aboard its cramped crowded conditions.
It was all a rather unfortunate series of events. He was sure to never let that happen again.
'I'm going to shoot him,' Schilt declared to nobody in particular.
The men huddled around, tired though they were, began to chuckle.
'Schilt. You're drunk. Settle down,' said Sergeant Emel gently.
'I'm not drunk. Just wait and see, I'll fragging shoot him.'
In reality, Schilt's temples were still viced by the aftereffects of intoxication and his breath was sour with ethanol. But in his mind, the colonel would be as good as dead. 'The colonel's all right. He's got some balls considering his staff background. At least with him, we'll never spoil for a fight,' said Emel.
Schilt shook his head sluggishly. 'If you want to die then go ahead. Me, I'm not dying here, not on this planet. Baeder is nothing but trouble.'
Emel shrugged wordlessly. The others looked away in undecided silence. But although Schilt had not gathered support here he knew his boys would share his view. It was better that his comrades did not regard his threats as anything more than the aggravated rants of a drunken soldier. It would make it easier to do away with Baeder, once he and his creepers had the timing right.
CHAPTER TEN
DUPONTI WALKED OUT of the hangar bay with the stiff, blood-tingling limbs of extended flight. The ship was quiet. Most of the personnel were sleeping soundly except for the maintenance crew working on Duponti's strike fighter.
He crossed the long grey strip of the flight deck, small and insignificant under the shadow of towering vox-mast antennas. On board the Argo-Nautical, two thousand Persepians were at rest, oblivious to the turbulent fighting many kilometres away on the mainland. The Iron Ishmael carried two battalions of Nautical Infantry, a squadron of Marauder bombers reinforced by four Lightning strike-fighters, as well as a crew of seven hundred sailors, crewmen and logistics units. But for now, the only man who could make a difference to the distant fighting was Lieutenant Duponti.
As Duponti made his way towards the ''iron-box'' - a four-storey superstructure on the deck that housed the ship's officers - it occurred to his flight-addled mind that the operation was at a crucial point now. It was a climax. They were at war for real.
At the sentry point, two Nautical infantrymen in their neat, sky-blue waistcoats opened the enormous clamshell entrance into the superstructure. The soldiers in their pressed uniforms, still chalky with starch, saluted Duponti as he passed. Compared to them, Duponti must have looked a dishevelled mess. He had not changed out of his flight suit for three days and thick stubble scraped his neck. For a moment, he wanted to clutch the nearest man by the shoulders and shake him, yelling as to whether he realised there was a war on. It was a momentary urge and Duponti put it down to the high spike of nerve stimms he had ingested to keep himself awake.
Duponti made his way towards the wardroom: a large officers' mess that doubled as a cafeteria. He had approximately twenty minutes to down some caffeine and load up on carbohydrates before his warplane would be ready for take-off again.
In the rectangular, steel container of the wardroom Duponti finally slumped down. He could not remember the last time he had straightened out his back against a real backrest. A handful of ship officers nursed cups of steaming caff at the big, otherwise empty metal tables. They shot him short, curious glances. Duponti was too weary to acknowledge them. He kept his head down between drooping shoulders and dug away at a bowl of gritty grain cereal.
He had not been eating long when he heard the loud scrape of chairs. The officers in the wardroom had all risen to their feet, sword-straight and in salute. Duponti turned around in his chair and saw Admiral de Ruger stride into the hall. The admiral levelled his gaze on Duponti and headed towards him.
Duponti groaned inwardly. He had never liked de Ruger. He found the man insufferably smug, far too smug for a soldier who had never gained his rank by earning his combat pins. Like most rear-echelon Persepians, de Ruger had put far too much thought into his outward appearance as a way of distracting outsiders from the fact that he had no real front-line experience. Even now in the middle hours of the night, the admiral was upholstered in a doublet of silky cyan and a cape of translucent fur.
'Sir,' said Duponti, rising to his feet. He sat back down before de Ruger returned his salute.
'How is the fighting, lieutenant? Thrilling, I'd wager,' declared the admiral in his tone that suggested he already knew the answer.
'It's getting thicker the further out I fly. These last few days have been one continuous combat zone, so thick that it's hard to call this an insurgency any more.'
'Oh, I know. How I miss the stink of fyceline,' de Ruger said, mimicking an exaggerated shiver of delight.
He didn't, of course. Duponti knew for a fact that the admiral kept himself as far away from combat as he could and had done so ever since he had been a pampered junior officer. Being the nephew of a Persepian consul had afforded him special status amongst the peers of his day.
Duponti slopped a spoonful of grits into his mouth. 'Sir, is there anything I can do for you?'
'I've come to let you know that your services to the Riverine operation are no longer required. You may stand down and get some rest. Clean yourself up,' smiled de Ruger. He said it as if he believed it was a good thing.
'Why?' said Duponti glumly. 'It's a full-scale engagement out there. If anything, sir, I was going to request four other pilots to help fly rotations. I can't do this alone.'
De Ruger seemed slightly taken aback by Duponti's response. 'No. No, I'm not risking any more pilots for this operation. I'm letting you know that you may stand down now.'
'Sir, the battalion are going to take much heavier casualties, especially in that kind of terrain. If I'm not flying overwatch, it could get worse.'
De Ruger shook his head. 'The 88th Battalion are expecting at least sixty per cent attrition. You don't need to work yourself to death, lieutenant. Have some dignity.'
Duponti was slouched over his bowl of cold grits, his head hanging from exhaustion. But the admiral's attitude riled him. Duponti put down his metal spoon with a clink. 'Sir, they are so close to the objective now. I've seen what it's like out there in the heartland. The inland is crawling with rallying insurgents, it's like a nest of mites out there. The insurgency grows in strength everyday, sir, I've seen it with my own eyes. For the sake of my own conscience, I need to help the Riverine neutralise that siege-battery before this war becomes unwinnable.'
The admiral was unmoved. 'When they fail,' he said imperiously, 'then Cardinal Avanti will simply return to our original strategy of carpet-bombing the inland until the heavy guns are silenced. Won't that be something? The full might of the Persepian fleet taking the mainland.'
The fact that the admiral said ''when'' not ''if'' was not lost on Duponti. The aviator hid his face behind a cup of tea, scowling. The admiral was a true political strategist, constantly seeking to manoeuvre himself into the cardinal's favour. Maybe he truly wanted a seat by the Emperor's golden throne when he died. Whatever the case, it did not seem likely that de Ruger had the success of the Riverine objective at heart.
'Yes, sir.'
De Ruger patted his back. It was awkward, as if the admiral were not used to contact with lower ranking men. 'Good, good, lieuten
ant. Now you can clean up and start looking like a real man again. I hear they are serving smoked sausages and fresh local eggs for breakfast in a few hours. Make sure you're here for those. The sausages are the smoke-cured variety from the Fragment Isles, brought all the way here from home.'
Duponti stopped paying attention. The less he acknowledged the admiral, the less likely he would be to linger around. De Ruger continued to bombast, debating with himself about the merits of fine breakfast wines and whether ham in the officers' mess was better grilled or raw cured. Finally, after several agonising minutes, he left Duponti alone.
The aviator waited until he was sure de Ruger was well and truly gone. Opening a zip pocket in his jumpsuit, Duponti took out a handful of stimms. He swallowed the pills dry. Immediately, he felt his heart begin to thump hard in his chest.
He cried out involuntarily, slapping his palms hard on the table.
The other officers sitting around quietly put down their cups to stare at him. One of them shook his head.
Duponti laughed at them, tossed his chair aside, and stumbled out to find his Lightning interceptor. Admiral de Ruger be damned, the war was just beginning.
FROM LAUZON PROVINCE, the delta widened into a basin of saline water half a kilometre broad at its widest point. But unlike the low-lying marshlands of Ouisivia, where sheets of mangroves clung to the muddy bottoms, here the rainforest continued to grow even in the water itself. According to Baeder's map, the terrain should have made for easy travel, indicating a wide expanse of water. But that was not to be.
Aquatic trees resembling stands of green coral rose out of the water and knitted a mesh of canopy thirty metres overhead. Hardy lentireeds and stringy rhi-zophora floated in clumps on the surface, their broad leaves speckled with salt crystals. Gas from the decomposing mud pits secreted the sinus-heavy stench of wet, rotting fruit. The foliage here had a colossal, alien quality to it, as if growth in the rough, saline waters had nurtured a strain of enormous plants that survived the conditions through sheer size alone.
The flotilla ground slowly through the aquatic forest, covering less than eight kilometres in three hours of travel. The canopy formed a greenhouse of humid air, so heavy that it could be reached out and touched like steam. Visibility was low. Sunlight that filtered through the canopy was a shade of foggy green and entire sections of boats often lost sight of each other. Fog sirens brayed constantly. After repeated slowdowns as boats sought to find each other, Baeder ordered them to maintain positional awareness through vox contact alone.
At times, Baeder felt that the entire rainforest was just an extension of the marine habitat below. Silvery shoals of fish skipped along the surface of the water, dancing on gossamer wings. Serpents slipped in and out of the water without eliciting so much as a splash. Crustaceans clung to tree bark, flies hovered in clouds and bug-eyed primates watched them from the tallest branches. The wildlife sought to claim them too; schools of tiny insects suddenly appeared on the surface of their boats, dotting the surface in hundreds, if not thousands. On closer inspection, Baeder was astounded to see that these were actually miniature frogs no bigger than his pinky nail, flitting and clustering together like condensation. Baeder brushed them away, scooping up dozens in his palm, but after a while he gave up. They simply materialised as if out of thin air.
DURING THE HEIGHT of the afternoon, at the hottest part of the day, Baeder called his men to rest. As temperatures increased, dehydration became a very real threat. Although it had not rained all day, the troopers were plastered with moisture. It was as if they had been travelling through the water itself.
Baeder himself did not rest. He ordered Corporal Velder to nurse their swift boat ahead of the battalion to meet with the scouts. The terrain was far worse than the maps had led them to believe and Baeder thought it prudent to scout ahead of the main force. Clustered and hemmed in as they were, ambush was a constant possibility.
The three scouting swifts, along with Baeder's vessel, continued sailing for a rough half hour. The going was extremely difficult and in some parts spurs of underwater roots worried their passing hulls. The boats had to navigate around miniature atolls of aquatic plants, bumping and scraping the tight confines. The water-borne jungle was like a sieve, thought Baeder, forcing the boats out of formation in order to weave around its tangled growth. The insurgents could hide thousands of men here. With this weighing on their minds, the four swifts never strayed far from each other, maintaining constant line of sight. Baeder and his coxswain stayed within the pilothouse while the boat's three other crew stayed on deck, one manning the stern stub gun and two manning the heavy bolter on the bow.
As they crept around an ox-horn bend of root systems, a village came into their view, sudden and looming. So well hidden in the jungle, the houses caught them off guard.
'Sir, was this on the map?' one of the scout boats voxed to Baeder.
'No. But this entire forest wasn't on the map either,' Baeder replied.
'Should we observe local customs and unlink ammunition from our main guns?'
'No,' Baeder decided. 'Not after last time. Keep your weapons lined up on every doorway and window.'
The village was built entirely on stilts. Support poles, some four or five metres high, kept the several dozen shack huts above the water. A system of rope bridges connected each of the various structures to each other in a web of hemp ropes and plank boards. Some of the shacks were even nestled on platforms, high in the trees, suggesting that this village was a permanent one, not just some seasonal nomadic settlement. The few villagers who squatted outside their homes fled and shut their doors as the swift boats sailed into view.
'This place looks harmless enough,' voxed the swift boat that sailed lead.
Sure enough, the town was a miserable-looking settlement in disrepair. Moss and rivers of tiny green frogs covered the walls and sloping roofs of every building. No one came out to greet them or at least regard the off-worlders with curiosity. The swifts passed in single file with Baeder at the rear, one after another until at last Baeder's boat sailed through the centre of the settlement.
That was when the enemy fired a shot.
One lonely shot that rattled from an autogun. The round danced off Baeder's starboard rear with an aggressive shriek.
Immediately, the vox-channels came alive. 'Shots heard! Location needed!'
Baeder had spotted the muzzle flash from a second storey window of a nearby shack. It had obviously been fired in anger, but it would be too premature to start igniting the entire village with heavy support fire. 'Hold your fire! My boat is going in, so cover us,' Baeder voxed to the scouts.
They drew their boat parallel with a swinging rope ladder that led up to the rope walkways. Snatching las-rifles from the stowage racks, Baeder and his crew surged up onto the platforms. The five-man team stormed up onto a lopsided house and Corporal Velder caved the flimsy plyboard door in with a fen-hammer from the boat's armoury.
The Riverine burst into a large room full of screaming occupants. 'Down! Down on the floor!' Velder yelled as he brandished the fen-hammer overhead.
Baeder took a moment to assess his surroundings. There were both men and women huddled there, along with many children. At first glance there appeared to be three or four families sharing one single room. The Riverine began to search the house while Baeder covered them with his lasgun. The women started to sob hysterically and the children followed suit.
'Sir. I found it!' shouted Trooper Keidel. The Riverine was peering into a man-sized water urn. From inside, he drew out two crude autorifles and a missile tube. 'Still warm,' Keidel said, slapping the barrel of a rifle against his open palm.
Baeder looked at the four men. The Baston men smiled at him broadly and confidently. 'No proof,' said one of them.
Another raised his hands above his head in mock surrender. 'We are not soldiers. You cannot harm us,' he said. 'Not with our children as the Emperor's witness.'
'Emperor my arse!' Baeder spat, and was su
rprised by his own vehemence. 'Frag it! Cuff them all!'
Corporal Velder looked at Baeder with uncertainty. 'And then what, sir? We can't take them with us.'
'We can and we will. Let these crotch-beaters know that we won't suffer their insolence any more,' said Baeder. 'Tie them up. We're going to search this whole village. Cuff these ones and leave them here for the battalion to collect on the way through.'
In Baeder's eyes, the men in the house did not seem to appreciate the severity of the situation. They were smiling smugly and claiming to be fishermen, even as the Riverine led them outside and lashed their wrists to the house stilts with plastek cuff ties. They left the four men in chest-deep water as Baeder and his four crewmen set about searching the other homes.
They had not even crossed the rope bridge to a second house when a shot rang out from across the other side of the village. Trooper Nye yelped and fell backwards. A round had entered his neck, just above the collar of his flak vest. The others crouched or dropped flat against the rope bridge.
Suddenly, Baeder was angry. He had been a career soldier for as long as he had been an adult and fighting was his duty. He had been shot at considerably in his lifetime. But the civilians taking potshots at his men stirred something within him. The Lauzon Offensive had ignited a spark and now this remote village was stirring the embers. He had lost too many men to care. Morality was now a grey area.
Baeder got up and signalled for the three waiting swift boats providing overwatch. 'Frag this place! Kill them all!' he shouted, flashing the field signals for fire at will.
The boats opened up immediately. They fired in all directions. The force of their combined arms shook the village apart, splitting roofs and tearing down walls.
Baeder watched the men they had bound struggle loose from their cuffs. One of them began to swim away from the village. He covered no more than ten metres before bolter rounds sent a bearded cecropia crashing down on him.