Colonel (UC)

by Rick Shelley

  Lon sat on the edge of his bunk and took off his boots and socks. Only one of Doc Norman's special eight-hour sleep patches remained, one more certain night of undisturbed sleep. Once we ground, sleep takes a backseat again, Lon thought. He glanced at his watch. He still had a half hour before he needed to put the patch on his neck and go to bed—to give him his eight hours of sleep and allow him to wake three hours before the fleet made its final Q-space transit.

  He spent five minutes recording a letter to Sara and Angie, adding on to portions he had recorded almost every day since leaving Diligent. When he was away from home, his letters were almost a diary, added to when he had a chance, sent when a message rocket was being dispatched. Return mail from Sara and Angie was similar. They'll see that I'm calm, not agitated or overly worried, he thought when he switched off the complink's recorder. Give them less reason to worry.

  Then Lon finished undressing and did the things he needed to do before going to bed. After he turned out the cabin lights, he lay down and put the sleep patch on his neck. In less than two minutes, he was asleep.

  There was no foggy area of transition. Lon went from the oblivion of drug-enhanced sleep to total alertness in a heartbeat. The special patches Dan Norman had provided always brought Lon out of sleep quickly at the end of their allotted time, but this time it was abrupt, almost disconcerting. He blinked several times and sucked in a deep, convulsive breath. Briefly, his heart rate increased dramatically, then settled to a normal resting rhythm. He turned his head to look at the timeline on the complink near his bed.

  Right on schedule, he thought. This is the day we find out what we're going to face. Any landing was three days away at a minimum, but that did not mean that there could be no danger for those three days. How fast will the New Spartans react? Lon wondered. If they responded promptly to the arrival of the fleet, combat might come in little more than thirty-six hours—combat in space, between ships and aerospace fighters, combat that the soldiers in the transports could not affect. If they come after us, Lon thought as he sat up and swung his legs off the berth. There was even a slight chance that combat could come sooner, if the. New Spartans had ships posted farther out from Elysium, waiting for the arrival of the Dirigenters.

  It would take one hell of a stroke of bad luck for them to be someplace where they could get to us quickly, Lon told himself as he stood and stretched. That was one situation he had never experienced in all his years in the Corps—having his ship come under attack. The odds must be longer than having two royal flushes honestly dealt in the same hand of poker. The enemy would have to be in the right place, at the right distance, on alert, ready to strike.

  "Not too damned likely," Lon mumbled. He crossed to the complink and checked for messages, scrolling through the only two entries in his communications log before going to the bathroom to get ready for the day. After showering, he stood and looked at himself in the mirror. There were no scars to remind him of the many wounds he had suffered in the Corps. The body's HMS was far too efficient to leave visible scar tissue. But Lon could recall each injury. He touched several of the spots, as if trying to evoke some memory of the pain he had felt. Nothing.

  "Like the dreams," he whispered, focusing on his eyes in the mirror. "Nothing visible."

  When he emerged from the bathroom, he looked at the complink again. It was three in the morning. Ship's time had been adjusted to match local time in Elysium's University City. The fleet would emerge while it was still night over the capital, and they would reach attack orbit in the night… in three days, if nothing happened to disrupt their schedule. If.

  Reveille sounded for the troops aboard Golden Eagle. "There shouldn't be any sluggards today," Lon said, almost managing a chuckle. Everyone knew the fleet would be jumping into Elysium's system within hours and that shortly after that they should know the size of their opposition. Unless the government of Elysium had fallen, there would be direct updates as quickly as the ships could establish contact. The ships' own sensing gear would quickly seek the enemy's ships and start trying to determine the situation on the ground—though this gear would be only minimally helpful until the final day of the approach. Later, once the planners knew more, the troops would be put on a relaxed schedule, their main instructions to get as much rest and eating in as possible for the, landings. Once they were on the ground, sleep and meals might be scarce.

  Lon took his time dressing, even taking a moment to buff his boots before going to the galley to eat breakfast.

  Look smart, project confidence: Those were important for an officer. Don't give the rank and file any reason to suspect that their commander might be less than supremely confident about the outcome of the pending operation. Put on an act if you have to, but sell it, Matt Orlis had told him many years before. Recalling Matt took the smile from Lon's face. Matt had retired from the Corps after his only son had been killed in action. It was a reminder Lon would rather have missed.

  Lon and Tefford Ives waited for the final Q-space transit in the small office attached to Lon's cabin, drinking coffee and doing a poor job of trying to make small talk. This was a time for minor jitters, which made it an excellent time to be away from the rest of the men aboard the ship.

  "I wonder if the New Spartans even suspect that the Elysians might have help on the way," Ives said when the waiting got to be too much for him.

  "If they notified Union by MR immediately when Berlino's ship left, they could have word back that he didn't get there," Lon said. "They might have had a couple of days' notice. That wouldn't give them time to get additional forces here, unless they were already on the way. I think what we face will depend on just one thing. Were the New Spartans sent to conquer Elysium, or just to scare them into accepting the Confederation?"

  "A toss of the coin," Ives said, "and I've been tossing it mentally since we first learned of the contract." He glanced at the time. "We should have a pretty good idea soon."

  He had scarcely finished saying that when the announcement was broadcast that one minute remained until Q-space insertion. Both men looked at the timeline on the complink then.

  "Don't hold your breath," Lon said, grinning.

  "I quit doing that years ago. I think." Ives shook his head. "At least we're not strapped down in our bunks for transits anymore. I always hated that. Made me feel like

  I was a prisoner and someone was going to do unspeakable things to me."

  The final seconds of the countdown dragged past, concluding with the standard announcement "Q-space insertion." Lon closed his eyes, feeling the vibration of the ship as the Nilssen generators ran at their maximums, stretching the bubble universe around Golden Eagle, stressing it according to some arcane mathematical formula containing more variables than a six-month weather forecast. Lon opened his eyes and stared at the elapsed-time indicator on the complink. This would be the longest transit of the journey, almost three minutes. It felt like a long three minutes, and the final ten seconds of the countdown to extraction seemed to occupy ten minutes. When the speaker announced "Q-space extraction," Lon let his breath out, slightly embarrassed to realize that he had been holding it in.

  "I figure it will be an hour, minimum, before we get anything from Elysium," Lon said, hoping that Ives had not noticed the breath-holding. "But we should have our first view of the New Spartans' ships in minutes." Out of date by the number of light-minutes away the planet was: If a ship were ten light-minutes away, the view would be of where that ship had been ten minutes earlier, not where it was now. Every ship would be scanning, and the information would be collated in CIC aboard Peregrine, then relayed to each ship in the Dirigenter flotilla.

  "What will it be, about twelve minutes before the New Spartans get their first view of us?" Ives asked.

  Lon shrugged. "Something like that. If they're looking in the right direction."

  "They will be," Ives replied. "We would. Scanning the entire system even if we had no reason to suspect that trouble might be coming. They're professional
s, too." He paused. "I have to keep reminding myself of that. This time we're not going up against amateurs."

  I know, Lon thought but did not say. He just nodded.

  The complink started to show an image of Elysium, still little more than a dot moving against the star field until the computers magnified and enhanced the raw feed. The system needed another five minutes before it could highlight the even smaller points that indicated ships in orbit around the world—seven blips, seven ships.

  "Enough to account for a single regiment," Lon said. "They haven't brought in reinforcements."

  "Yet," Tefford Ives said, but that was not enough to stem the relief Lon felt.

  The news that started to arrive from Elysium was not nearly as bad as it might have been. There had been no large-scale fighting in the past month, just skirmishes between small units of the defense force and the invaders. In the farming districts surrounding University City, the invaders had dispossessed people, sent them in toward the capital with no more than they could carry, but the New Spartans had been careful not to harm anyone who did not actively resist. Buildings and farm equipment had been destroyed methodically. Crops in the fields had been burned if they could not be easily harvested by the invaders. Livestock had been commandeered to feed the New Spartans.

  There was no orbital video of the deployment of the New Spartans on the ground. They had destroyed every Elysian satellite on the first day following their arrival, and had thwarted the few attempts the Elysians had made to replace those losses. That also meant that there was virtually no communications between population centers. Travel between cities was impossible. New Spartan aircraft kept local shuttles out of the air, and there were occasional raids against ground vehicles attempting to move from one city or town to another.

  Within four hours following the arrival in-system of the Dirigenter fleet, the New Spartans had recalled all of their aerospace fighters, bringing them back aboard their carriers. Shortly after that, the two fighting ships of the New Spartan task force started moving to a higher orbit, a thousand miles above their transports. But they did not attempt to intercept the Dirigenter fleet away from Elysium.

  The three separate elements of the Dirigenter force continued toward Elysium and rendezvous. Agamemnon and Odysseus slowly pulled ahead of the other ships. The plan was still for them to engage the New Spartan battlecruisers, the ships that carried their fighters and heavy armaments.

  "The idea is to tie up their firepower, especially their fighters, so they can't oppose our landing," Lon said on a linkup that included all of his battalion and company commanders. "If that works, it will make our landing much easier. All we'll have to worry about is the enemy on the ground."

  "Colonel, do you know yet if we're going to have any Shrikes to cover our landing?" Captain Harley Stossberg, now commanding A Company, 2nd Battalion—Lon's old company—asked.

  "No, and we probably won't know until we're in the boats ready to go in," Lon said. "That depends on what the New Spartans do. If they hold all their fighters to defend their ships or to attack Agamemnon and Odysseus, then we'll most likely have to use all our Shrikes in space. We're going to try to ground far enough from any New Spartans to stay out of reach of any surface-to-air missiles. We haven't decided on the details of deployment yet, but the preliminary plan calls for 15th Regiment to land outside the cordon around University City and for our first three battalions to land inside. We move at the New Spartans from both sides then, put them in a pincer, break the line, and do our best to roll them up in a hurry. Our initial operations will probably all be on the north bank of the Styx River, where the majority of the enemy troops are."

  "There isn't a lot of current data on the New Spartan mercenaries in our data banks, not specific data," Parker Watson of 4th Battalion said. "Do we have anything at all on how they're armed?"

  "We don't have much," Lon conceded. "They're as tight about security as we are. I couldn't find any reliable information on the armament and capabilities of their aerospace fighters. As for the men on the ground, we assume they'll be equipped about as we are, with one possible exception. One of the reports we have from the people on Elysium says that some of the New Spartans are armed with needle rifles, capable of firing huge quantities of tiny slivers of metal, possibly depleted uranium, at extremely high muzzle velocities. We don't have reliable confirmation, but it is possible. Our R&D people are working on similar weapons, though it will be a year or more before they're ready for issue, if the Council of Regiments decides to go into full production."

  More raw data flowed into CIC. Thousands of scenarios were created and critiqued, tweaked, and run through every conceivable variation. As the fleet continued to move toward Elysium, obsolete scenarios were discarded, the remainder graded, the rankings changed with each new influx of data. Lon and Colonel Hayley spent hours linked together with the staff of Peregrine's CIC. Thirty-six hours after the final Q-space transit, they had narrowed the possible assault scenarios to a manageable dozen, depending on what the New Spartans did in the last hours before the DMC soldiers entered their attack shuttles. Beyond the moment of landing, battle plans had to remain generalized, limited to primary objectives and very elastic timetables. The number of variables quickly became too extreme for precision.

  Aboard the troop transports, men recorded letters home. Those were merged on large message chips, ready to be dispatched via MR before the attack began. For some, it might be the last word their families ever would have from them.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The day before the landings, Lon spoke to his men. Company by company, he addressed the officers and sergeants through ship-to-ship links, and he recorded messages to the rank and file, individualized for each battalion. The sessions with officers and sergeants were two-way, allowing them to ask questions and receive answers. It also gave Lon a few seconds to speak with his son, though they could do little more than wish each other good luck. The conversation was not private. Aboard Golden Eagle, Lon spoke to officers and men face-to-face in small groups. Those sessions ran longer than the comp-link hookups. Altogether, Lon spent more than six hours giving his pep talks and laying out the latest version of the plan of attack.

  "This may be the hardest day's work I've ever put in," Lon told Phip Steesen after the last session. "I'd hate to be a politician and have to talk this much every day. Parker Watson is still upset at having his battalion held in reserve. Wouldn't matter who drew that, the commander would still bitch."

  Phip laughed. "Goes with the territory, I'd say." The two men were alone in Lon's office.

  "This contract is going to be different from any we've been on," Lon said after a short silence.

  Phip snorted. "Sure is. I bet the brass in the Contracts Division are already licking their chops. If we best the New Spartans head-to-head, it gives us a big boost in marketing. Proof we're the best. More contracts, higher rates."

  For a moment, Lon stared at his lead sergeant and best friend, almost stunned by the comment. Then he burst out laughing. "I knew you were cynical," he said, "but I never realized just how cynical."

  "Cynical, hell, just looking at it honestly. Tell the truth, Lon, didn't that get mentioned when you were talking about the contract?"

  Lon hesitated before he said, "Not in so many words, but, yes, I guess the implication was there… and the concern that if we were to lose it might cost us future business, send some potential customers to New Sparta. But every contract has that element of risk. Anytime we fail to fulfill a contract we risk losing business to competitors. Anytime we succeed, it gives us a better record to show customers."

  "This is orders of magnitude beyond that, Lon. Dirigent and New Sparta are the two major mercenary worlds, and we're going head-to-head, in strength. What happens here could affect the economies of both worlds for decades. We can't afford to let them win; they can't afford to let us win. Can you imagine what conditions would be like at home if the Corps had to lay off three or four regiments because there wa
sn't enough work? What that would do to the economy? Take jobs from fifteen or twenty thousand soldiers and it would mean a lot of lost civilian jobs as well, in Camo Town, in factories, everywhere. More people would be forced to live on basic maintenance in neighborhoods like the Drafts. More crime. On and on."

  "I guess I never thought it that far through," Lon said after considering what Phip had said. "I've just thought about it in terms of a hard job that has to be done… mostly because it is our job, and if we're not the best, then too many men don't make it home."

  "I might not have thought of it either," Phip admitted. "Jenny pointed it out to me, at some length, the night before we left." Jenny was his wife. She and her brother Kalko had grown up in the Drafts, the closest Dirigent City had to a slum district. "A discussion of the economic necessity of victory wasn't exactly what I was expecting the night before I shipped out on contract."

  "'Come home with your shield or on it'?" Lon quoted softly.

  "What's that?"

  Lon shook his head. "Ancient history. What the women of the original Sparta, on Earth, supposedly told their men before they went into battle. War was their business, too, in a way."

  "Sparta, a city-state in classical Greece, noted for its military prowess," Phip recited, showing that he had learned something along the way. "I looked it up once, wondering where the 'New' in New Sparta came from."

  "You get to where three hundred Spartans held off an army of a hundred thousand until they were outflanked and slaughtered?"

  "Thermo-something?"

  Lon laughed. "Thermopylae."

  "All in all, I've never been fond of last stands," Phip said. "No curtain calls, no rematches."

  A short while later, Lon was getting ready to head to the galley for supper when he received a call from Colonel Hayley on Peregrine. "Are you alone there?" was the first thing Hayley said when he saw Lon's face on his comp-link screen.