by Leo Champion
Whose fate Mullins had no idea about; they hadn’t been following the line of probably-poisoned wells and they’d seen no sign of anyone past Diamond North. It was possible there might be other groups out there, who they could make radio contact with. It wasn’t likely Newbauer would have relevant orders to give them though, if so.
“We’ll blow it, then,” the lieutenant-colonel had agreed. That had been two days ago. “Of course we have to blow it.”
Now, a rising dawn starting to appear behind them, they approached the place, two dozen exhausted and hungry soldiers of the United States Foreign Legion, Black Gangers, Air Force and Army. They’d packed enough food from Diamond North to last until now – but it wasn’t going to last forever and, except for Newbauer who’d ignored them, Hill and Lennon had decided to be sparing with the MREs.
“They might have to last us after we get there,” Lennon had said darkly to silent nods. Nobody wanted to talk about what Mullins, at least, thought was most the likely thing they’d find at Hubris: ruins and corpses.
Now they were about to find out.
“Sir?” Lennon came to the front of the line. “Mondragon and I are going to scout the place. Just to make sure.”
Newbauer kept walking for long enough Mullins thought he was ignoring Lennon, then stopped.
“Go ahead,” he told the corporal. He raised his voice and shouted: “March halt!”
“Clear it out,” Mullins said to Lennon and Mondragon as, rifles raised, they headed up to the crest of the hill.
Others stopped marching, sat down, drank some of what remained of their water, checked their weapons. Ears strained for shouts or gunshots from the rocky crest of the hill where Lennon and Mondragon had gone, hoping they wouldn’t come.
They didn’t. About ten terse minutes later, the two men returned.
“All clear,” said Lennon.
* * *
Static filled Mullins’ right ear through the radio handset as, crouched with the radio unslung on the ground in front of him, he waited tensely for Mandvi’s grenade to go off. Huddled around him on the far side of some rocks to the transmitter shed and the cables snaking up from them into the aerials, were the others except for Mandvi.
Boom, and it did.
Mullins’ ears were still ringing when he realized the boom had silenced the noisy static in his ears. Not silenced completely – other jammers elsewhere were still going, their signals faint background noise at this distance – but hushed, like it had been after they’d blown the first jammer. Only now it was possible they might have someone they could talk to!
He switched the frequency to company command, and said:
“Bravo Six, this is Bravo Three. Come in please.”
Several long moments passed, every pair of eyes in the group looking at him. Newbauer was front and center, his hand already half-outstretched for the handset.
“Bravo Three,” came a crackling voice, “this is Bravo Six. Let me get Bravo Three Actual.”
“I raised them,” Mullins said. “He’s getting Croft now.”
A couple of hands clapped and there were more than a few grins.
“Tell Gardner to send out a relief party,” Newbauer barked. “Get him to send food, water and some good MPs to keep the scum under control!”
“Bravo Three Actual,” came Lieutenant Croft’s voice. “Was it you who blew the jamming just now?”
“Yes sir,” Mullins said.
Newbauer gestured for the handset.
“Here’s the colonel, sir,” Mullins said. As he gave over the handset he discreetly thumbed the switch that connected his earpiece to the conversation.
“Lieutenant Croft,” Newbauer demanded. “I want you to organize a relief party. We’ve had to walk – three hundred miles to get here.”
That was actually pretty close to the truth, so far as Mullins had figured. It might have been two hundred and twenty miles as the bird flew, but terrain and the need to travel between wells, and only at night to avoid trouble, had made it above two hundred fifty miles, easily.
There was a long pause from Croft’s end.
“Sir,” the lieutenant carefully cleared his throat, “are you aware of our present situation?”
“I’m aware,” Newbauer replied, “that I and my men are on our last legs.”
“Sir,” Croft changed tack, “permission to make a situation report, sir?”
Newbauer hesitated for a moment and then made an affirmative grunt.
Yes, what’s been happening with you guys? Mullins very much wanted to know himself.
“Sir, we have been under continuous siege for the last fifteen days. We have repulsed three major attacks and inflicted significant casualties, but we are down to less than half the effectives we started the siege with. Sir, rations have been reduced to one-third and we’re almost out of ammunition. I’m glad to hear from you, sir – but no, a relief party would not be possible for us to send.”
Newbauer was silent for a moment, clearly stunned by the news. Mullins’ own reaction was a not-too-surprised shit; he’d figured from the start that if Kandin-dak still stood, it would have drawn unsafe amounts of nomad attention.
“Get me Senior Lieutenant Gardner, Junior Lieutenant!” he barked. “I want to verify that.”
“Sir, Senior Lieutenant Gardner is dead, sir.”
“So who’s in command?”
“I am, sir.”
“Junior Lieutenant, I am hereby taking command of all elements at Fort Kandin-dak, and I am ordering you to send a breakout party to get me and my party into the for,” Newbauer growled. “Is that clear, Junior Lieutenant?”
“Sir, I repeat that it is not possible,” Croft said.
“It is an order!” Newbauer snapped. “Do you understand what an order is, Junior Lieutenant?”
“Sir, we are surrounded at Kandin-dak. It is physically impossible, sir, for me to exfiltrate a group to recover you.”
“I have taken command of all elements at Fort Kandin-dak. I am ordering,” said Newbauer with forced patience, “you to make a breakout effort so that my party and I can be taken to Kandin-dak.”
“Sir, I repeat that that is not possible.”
“You are relieved of your authority!” Newbauer snarled. “Get me the next-ranking man!”
“I believe that would be Lieutenant Dunwell, sir.”
“An Army engineer! One who understands authority! Yes, get her.”
* * *
Dunwell shook her head.
“I’m not available,” she said. “Besides, James, you’re still in command.”
“I know,” Croft said. Of all the people he hadn’t wanted to talk to! “He can’t relieve me or take command without being here in person.”
“And he’ll get killed trying to get here,” said Lieutenant Henry. “Problem solved, bluntly.”
“He didn’t get that far on his own,” Croft said. He’d recognized Mullins’ voice; who else of the people he’d written off for dead, were alive? Lennon and his fire-team possibly. Jorgenson? The doctor and her assistant? Others?
He couldn’t keep the lieutenant-colonel hanging forever.
“Sir, Bravo Three Actual here,” he said. “Second Lieutenant Dunwell is unavailable. Sir, you will have to come to the fortress to relieve me and I recommend sir, that because we are besieged by more than ten thousand nomads, that you avoid the area of Fort Kandin-dak.”
“Your career has ended, Junior Lieutenant! The first thing I’m going to do when I arrive is clap you in the brig for mutiny! Your career is over!”
Croft stood stiffly at attention until Dunwell’s rant was done and the lieutenant-colonel ended the connection.
“Bravo Three Actual out,” he said to the dead air. Then looked up at the gathered officers and platoon sergeants. Lieutenant Nakamura was dead along with his platoon sergeant Korval; Second Platoon’s jefe Sanchez was in charge of First Platoon now, and on the walls at the moment. But everyone else in Hubris ranked E-6 or higher was in
the small radio room right now.
“Well,” Croft told them, “that could have gone better.”
“You warned him, sir,” said Ortega. “That’s all you could do.”
Croft nodded.
“James,” Dunwell pointed out, “we can do more than just talk with Bravo Three now. We can get communications from outside!”
“No jefe,” MacGallagher said; he was at his station in the crowded room, a fliptop computer wired to the radio in front of him. “We can’t. When the jamming started, the Euros apparently blew most or all of our relay stations out here, too.”
“Satellite?” Croft asked.
“That’s what I’ve been looking at, sir,” said MacGallagher. “Looks like whoever did the jamming also pulled something that knocked a lot of the satellite network offline. We’ve got GPS and not a lot else that I can see.”
“Some, though? That we can reach?”
“They have to be right overhead to be within range,” the chief signalman said, “and not so much had orbits going over these wastelands to begin with – who is there to communicate with, other than us? And a lot of the ones we would have relied on for backup, they’re now down.”
“So when’s the next satellite that can communicate with us?” Croft demanded.
MacGallagher turned to his computer and typed for a couple of moments.
“Five days from now, sir. We can next get a message to the outside world, now they’ve quit jamming us, in five days.”
“And the nomads are going to get their trenches close enough to overrun us,” Master Sergeant Koppel said flatly, “in three days.”
“Then,” Croft said flatly, trying to get himself to believe the sentiment. He was too exhausted, too worn-out physically and emotionally, to be sure he cared one way or the other, “we figure something out. Or we die well.”
* * *
“Sir,” Mullins urged as Newbauer headed for the jamming station’s open and empty shed, which the colonel had declared for himself to sleep in. It was getting to be very much early morning, the time when they’d have normally on the march and been making camp. “I urge us to make some distance between here before we set up.”
“No,” Newbauer said, still clearly furious from his conversation with Croft, “we won’t be able to get past the nomads surrounding the fort if we move by day. We’ll have to walk at night so they don’t see us.”
Dinqing had three moons and the skies of the wastelands were mostly cloudless. True darkness that Mullins had seen, was rare.
“I don’t mean toward the fort,” Mullins said, “I just mean away from here. Away from the transmitter the horde’s advisers are going to know that we shut down, sir.”
“They didn’t do anthing when we shut down the other one,” said Newbauer.
“We weren’t within twenty miles of the main horde and their advisers when we shut down the other one, sir,” said Senechal.
“No and no,” Newbauer said. “We make camp here because it is time to. If you want to be careful, double the guard or something.”
“Yessir.” It was the only possible response.
* * *
“Captain,” said Technician Second-Class Monier, “a second of your time please?”
The communications tech, a blond Swiss, rode his zak uneasily.
“Of course, Technician,” von Kallweit said. Since the siege had developed into a game of digging and waiting, there’d been very little for him to do.
“We just lost Jamming Station Nineteen, sir. Went off the air about five minutes ago.”
That was – interesting. For one, it gave him radio communications himself, with satellites. He could make reports of his own. And get updates.
“Permanently?” von Kallweit asked the technician. “Has it – come back up?”
“No sir. We’ve got background noise from the other jamming stations, but Nineteen seems to have gone completely offline.”
Which meant something had to have taken the station offline. The aerials came from prefabricated kits that a team could assemble in a night, but the setups were surprisingly strong and nasty surprises awaited the first nomad to try messing with the power/transmitter sheds. And of course a lethal electrical shock would await anyone who cut open the wires.
That would have short-circuited one aerial, not all of them, anyway.
“You’ve checked that this is across all the frequencies?” he asked Monier.
“Yessir. Nineteen is down across the entire spectrum.”
Something had taken the station offline, or someone had, five minutes ago.
“Lieutenant Hecht,” von Kallweit ordered that man, “take a band to Station Nineteen to see what’s happened. It’s only a couple of hours’ ride.”
* * *
“Stay ready,” Mullins said to Jorgenson as they uneasily set up their tent. “Sleep with one eye open, gun in your hand and a round in the chamber.”
He didn’t want to sleep at all. The Euros would know this jammer had been silenced. A main force was barely ten miles away. How hard would it be for them to send someone to check it out? What was the likelihood that methodical German officers wouldn’t bother to?
Of course, if the group did take the scouting force, a bigger force would be sent to see what had happened to them. It was an utterly no-win situation.
“Muls, Jorg,” said Hill. “Got a sec?”
“Sure,” said Mullins, following First Squad’s leader to where others were gathering. Senechal had been put on watch – looking east, of course, toward where the horde outside the fort was – while Alvarez and Cramer had already pitched their own tents.
With the First Squad men were Leon Smith and Dao Kwan, the two Black Gangers who’d proven themselves in the fight at Diamond North. They’d been trusted to carry ammunition and grenades ever since, and since the first of the two oasis fights they’d been discreetly given sidearms and trusted on watch duty.
Mullins didn’t like the idea of Smith around any kind of loaded weapon, but he had to admit the former platoon fuckup had pulled his own weight and not screwed up, dangerously or otherwise, yet.
“Mullins, explain to us what you were telling the lieutenant-colonel,” Hill said.
Eyes turned to him.
“If Lieutenant Croft is right and they’re surrounded by nomads, it must be a main horde. The sort of group that is definitely going to have Euro advisers along with them. One of those guys is going to notice, sooner or later if they haven’t already, that the radio jamming in this area is down. If only because they can now communicate around here, too.
“You’re the Euro commander,” Mullins finished. “You learn a jamming station ten miles away has gone offline. Is there any universe, for any of you, in which he does not send a detachment to take a look? And a bigger one if those guys don’t report?”
“Decamp,” Mandvi said. “Decamp now and leave him there.”
“Desertion in the face of the enemy,” Janja noted. “With the doctor, the pilot, and the rest of the Gang as witnesses. We’re not going without them.”
“Not to mention,” said Lennon, “if they only find one guy there, they might interrogate him. You think a guy like the colonel is going to stand up five seconds to a knife?”
Slow nods all around. Mullins realized the others had to be thinking the same as him. He found himself looking in Janja’s direction more than anyone else’s. If anyone would object it would be the rules-focused, respectable former Rajput lieutenant.
“He’s going to get us all killed,” Hill said flatly. “I don’t care that he’s an asshole; the Army is full of assholes. But this asshole is going to get us all killed.”
“We’re lucky he hasn’t already,” Janja said. “I agree with you. This man is a danger to us all. But you’re not seriously proposing…”
“We all know what we’re talking about,” said Hill.
Mullins looked around at other people looking at each other. Nobody said anything for a few moments
; “Make it look like an accident in a fight,” said Reuter. He’d recovered, in the last two weeks, to where he could steadily walk with a crutch. He still had to be carried on the stretcher, but he could get around camp on his own. There hadn’t been much in the way of pain treatments, though, and Mullins could tell that he was hiding a lot of pain just to stand.
“This close to a main horde,” Hill said, “we do not want contact in the first place. And bullets can be traced to weapons, if they ever recover the corpse. I say we do it the traditional way.”
There were silent nods all around as men looked at each other.
Then Leon Smith stepped forward slightly.
“I’ll do it,” he said.
All eyes turned to the Black Ganger. Mullins found himself wanting to speak up—no you did not trust Smith around grenades.
“I want to make up for screwing my buddies,” Smith said. His eyes looked around the group, touched Mullins for a second. Pleading. “I first really fucked up with a grenade; doesn’t it fit that I can make it right with a grenade, too?”
You’ll fuck it up, Mullins thought. And get the wrong person killed.
Janja was the first to speak.
“Good luck, Smith.”
And that settled it.
Hill gave Smith a fragmentation grenade.
“Let us all get to bed first,” the former sergeant said. “Nobody is going to see a damn thing and we never talk about it, clear? And Smith?”
“Yes, Corporal Hill?”
“Don’t fuck this one up.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Shooting came from the bridge, the long bursts that Major Ramos’ trained ears could tell meant another attack was under way. As the battalion commander had predicted, the attacks were getting fiercer and more frequent as more of the hordes found themselves this far west, a bridge and an hour’s ride from fabled Vazhao. Sooner or later they’d start making rafts or something.
An early-morning sun shone through the command tent while Ramos re-read the email on his laptop. Marked Urgent/Priority, he’d first assumed it would relate to Charlie Company with its riot-control duties in Vazhao proper. Were they – hopefully, with what they had they couldn’t hold for much longer – being sent to reinforce the bridge?