The Mammoth Book of SF Wars

by Ian Whates

  From up here, maybe seventy metres above the strip, the scattered remains of the shuttle glittered in the sun. I could see the two craters, one about halfway along, and another maybe a third of the way from the far end. Across the little valley, less than a klick, the hills rose slightly higher than the one we lay on. The cliffs on one were just as impressive as I’d thought. The others rose more gently from the valley floor. All were covered with the same green scrub, thick enough to hide an army. Either army.

  I told the captain all this, and nodded when Skip held up the control box the Gerin had used with their detectors. We could use the stuff once we figured out the controls, and if they were dumb enough to give us an hour, we’d have no problems. No problems other than being a single drop team sitting beside a useless strip, with the Gerin perfectly aware of our location and identity.

  Brightness bloomed in the zenith, and I glanced up. Something big had taken a hit – another shuttle? We were supposed to have 200 shuttle flights on this mission, coming out of five cruisers – a full-scale assault landing, straight onto a defended planet. If that sounds impossibly stupid, you haven’t read much military history – there are some commanders that have this thing about butting heads with an enemy strength, and all too many of them have political connections. Thunder fell out of the sky, and I added up the seconds I’d been counting. Ten thousand metres when they’d been blown – no one was going to float down from that one.

  “What kind of an idiot …?” Lonnie began; I waved him to silence. Things were bad enough without starting that – we could place the blame later. With a knifeblade, if necessary.

  “Vargas …” The captain’s voice in my earplug drowned out the whisper of the breeze through stiff leaves. I pushed the subvoc microphone against my throat and barely murmured an answer. “Drop command says we lost thirty cents on the dollar. Beta-site took in four shuttles before it was shut out.” Double normal losses on a hostile landing, then, and it sounded like we didn’t have a secure strip. I tried to remember exactly where Beta-site was. “We’re supposed to clear this strip, get it ready for the next wave—”

  I must have made some sound, without meaning to, because there was a long pause before he went on. If the original idea had been stupid, this one was stupid plus. Even a lowly enlisted man knows it’s stupid to reinforce failure, why can’t the brass learn it? We weren’t engineers; we didn’t have the machinery to fill those craters, or the manpower to clear the surrounding hills of Gerin and keep the fighters off.

  “They’re gonna do a flyby drop of machinery,” he went on. I knew better than to say what I thought. No way I could stop them if they wanted to mash their machinery on these hills. “We’re going to put up the flyspy – you got a good view from there?”

  “Yessir.” I looked across the valley, around at all the green-clad slopes. The flyspy was another one of those things that you hated having to take care of until it saved your life. “By wire, or by remote?”

  “Wire first.” That was smart; that way they wouldn’t have a radio source to lock onto. “I’m sending up the flyspy team, and some rockers. Send Davies back down.” Rockers: rocket men, who could take out those Gerin fighters, always assuming they saw them in time, which they would if we got our detection set up.

  Soon I could hear them crashing through the scrub, enough noise to alert anyone within half a klick. The rockers made it up first, four of them. I had two of them drag the Gerin corpses over to the edge and bounce ’em over, then they took up positions around the summit. Now we could knock off the Gerin fighters, if they came back: whatever’s wrong with the rest of Supply, those little ground-air missiles we’ve got can do the job. Then the flyspy crew arrived, with the critter’s wing folded back along its body. When they got to the clearing, they snapped the wings back into place, checked that the control wire was coiled ready to release without snagging, and turned on the scanners.

  The flyspy is really nothing but a toy aeroplane, wings spanning about a metre, powered by a very quiet little motor. It can hold an amazing amount of spygear, and when it’s designed for stealth use it’s almost impossible to see in the air. On wire control, it’ll go up maybe 100 metres, circle around, and send us video and IR scans of anything it can see; on remote, we can fly it anywhere within line-of-sight, limited only by its fuel capacity.

  Soon it was circling above us, its soft drone hardly audible even on our hilltop, certainly too quiet to be heard even down on the strip. We didn’t know whether the Gerin did hear, the way we hear, but we had to think about that. (We know they hear big noises, explosions, but I’ve heard a theory that they can’t hear high-pitched noises in atmosphere.) The videos we were getting back looked surprisingly peaceful. Nothing seemed to be moving, and there was only one overgrown road leading away from the strip. Garrond punched a channel selector, and the normal-colour view turned into a mosaic of brilliant false colours: sulphur yellow, turquoise, magenta, orange. He pointed to the orange. “That’s vegetation, like this scrub. Yellow is rock outcrops—”

  The cliff across from us was a broad splash of yellow that even I could pick out. “Turquoise is disturbed soil: compacted or torn up, either one.” The strip was turquoise, speckled with orange where plants had encroached on it. So was the nearly invisible road winding away from the strip between the hills. So also the summit of the hill which ended in cliffs above the strip … and the summit of our own hill. Another outpost, certainly.

  But nothing moved in the broad daylight of Caedmon’s sun. According to briefing, we’d have another nine standard hours of light. None of our scanners showed motion, heat, anything that could be a Gerin force coming to take us out. And why not?

  It bothered the captain, I could see, when he came up to look for himself. Our butterbars was clearly relieved, far too trusting an attitude if you want to survive very long. Things aren’t supposed to go smoothly; any time an enemy isn’t shooting at you, he’s up to something even worse.

  “An hour to the equipment drop,” said the captain. “They’re sending a squad of engineers, too.” Great. Somebody else to look after, a bunch of dirtpushers. I didn’t say it aloud; I didn’t have to. Back before he saved Admiral Mac’s life and got that chance at OCS, the captain and me were close, real buddies. Fact is, it was my fault he joined up – back then they didn’t have the draft. Wasn’t till he started running with me, Tinker Vargas, what everyone called gypsy boy – gambler and horsethief and general hothead – that Carl Dietz the farmer’s son got into any trouble bigger than spilled milk. He was innocent as cornsilk back then, didn’t even know when I was setting him up – and then we both got caught, and had the choice between joining the offworld Marines or going to prison. Yet he’s never said a word of blame, and he’s still the straightest man I know after all these years. He’s one I would trust at poker, unlike Rolly who can’t seem to remember friendship when the cards come out.

  And no, I’m not jealous. It hasn’t been easy for him, a mustang brought up from the ranks, knowing he’ll never make promotions like the fast-track boys that went to the Academy or some fancy-pants university. He’s had enough trouble, some of it when I was around to carefully not hear what the other guy said. So never mind the pay, and the commission: I’m happy with my life, and I’m still his friend. We both know the rules, and we play a fair game with the hand dealt us – no politics, just friends.

  In that hour, we had things laid out more like they should be. Thanks to the flyspy, we knew that no Gerin triads lurked on the nearest two hilltops, and we got dug in well on all three hills that faced the strip on the near side. There was still that patch of turquoise to worry about on the facing hill, above the cliffs, but the flyspy showed no movement there, just the clear trace of disturbed soil. Our lieutenant had learned something in OCS after all; he’d picked a very good spot in a sort of ravine between the hills, out of sight beneath taller growth, for the headquarters dugout, meds and so on.

  Then the equipment carrier lumbered into view. I
know, it’s a shuttle same as the troop shuttle, but that’s a term for anything that goes from cruiser to ground. Equipment carriers are fatter, squatty, with huge cargo doors aft, and they have all the graceful ease of a grand piano dumped off a clifftop. This one had all engines howling loudly, and the flaps and stuffhanging down from the wings, trying to be slow and steady as it dropped its load. First ten little parachutes (little at that distance), then a dark blob – it had to be really big if I could see it from here – trailing two chutes, and then a couple more, and a final large lumpy mass with one parachute.

  “I don’t believe it!” said the captain, stung for once into commentary. But it was – a netful of spare tyres for the vehicles, wrapped around a huge flexible fuel pod. Relieved of all this load, the shuttle retracted its flaps, and soared away, its engines returning to their normal roar.

  Already the lieutenant had a squad moving, in cover, toward the landing parachutists. I watched the equipment itself come down, cushioned somewhat by airbags that inflated as it hit. Still nothing moved on the hilltop across from us. I felt the back of my neck prickle. It simply isn’t natural for an enemy to chase you down, shooting all the while, then ignore you once you’ve landed. We know Gerin use air attack on ground forces: that’s how they cleaned up those colonists on Duquesne.

  Yet ignore us they did, all the rest of that day as the engineers got themselves down to the strip from where they’d landed, and their equipment unstowed from its drop configuration and ready for use. One grader, what we called back on my homeworld a maintainer, and two earth-movers. The whole time the engineers were out there getting them ready, I was sure some Gerin fighter was going to do a low pass and blow us all away … but it didn’t happen. I’d thought it was crazy, dropping equipment that had to be prepped and then used in the open, but for once high command had guessed right.

  By late afternoon, the engineers had their machines ready to work. They started pushing stuff around at the far end of the strip, gouging long scars in the dirt and making mounds of gravelly dirt. The captain sent Kittrick and one platoon over to take a hill on the far side; they got up it with no trouble, and I began to think there weren’t any Gerin left there at all. Half that group climbed the hill with the cliff, and found evidence that someone had had an outpost there, but no recent occupation.

  We were spread out pretty thin by this time, maybe thirty on the far side of the strip, the rest on the near side, but stretched out. We’d rigged our own detection systems, and had both flyspys up, high up, where they could see over the hills behind us. What they saw was more of the same, just like on the topo maps: lots of hills covered with thick green scrub, some creeks winding among the hills, traces of the road that began at the landing strip. Some klicks east of us (east is whatever direction the sun rises, on any world), the tumbled hills subsided into a broad river basin. The higher flyspy showed the edge of the hills, but no real detail on the plain.

  Meanwhile the engineers went to work on that strip just as if they were being shot at. Dust went up in clouds, blown away from our side of the strip by a light breeze. Under that dust, the craters and humps and leftover chunks of our troop shuttle disappeared, and a smooth, level landing strip emerged. There’s nothing engineers like better than pushing dirt around, and these guys pushed it fast.

  By dark they had it roughed in pretty well, and showed us another surprise. Lights. Those tyres we’d laughed at each held a couple of lamps and reflectors, and the coiled wiring that connected them all into a set of proper landing lights controlled by a master-board and powered from the earthmover engine. By the time everyone had had chow, the first replacement shuttle was coming in, easing down to the lighted strip as if this were practice on a safe, peaceful planet far from the war.

  None of us veterans could relax and enjoy it, though. The new arrivals had heard the same thing I had – 30 per cent losses on the initial drop, sixty shuttles blown. No report from anyone on what we’d done to the Gerin, which meant that the Navy hadn’t done a damn thing … they tripled their figures when they did, but triple zilch is still zilch. So how come we weren’t being overrun by Gerin infantry? Or bombed by their fighters? What were the miserable slimes up to? They sure weren’t beat, and they don’t surrender.

  During the night, five more shuttles landed, unloaded and took off again. Besides the additional troops and supplies, we also had a new commanding officer, a mean-looking freckle-faced major named Sewell. I know it’s not fair to judge someone by his looks, but he had one of those narrow faces set in a permanent scowl, with tight-bunched muscles along his jaw. He probably looked angry sound asleep, and I’d bet his wife (he had a wide gold ring on the correct finger) had learned to hop on cue. His voice fitted the rest of him, edged and ready to bite deep at any resistance. The captain had a wary look; I’d never served with Sewell, or known anyone who had, but evidently the captain knew something.

  Major Sewell seemed to know what he was doing, though, and his first orders made sense, in a textbook sense. If you wanted to try something as impossible as defending a shuttle strip without enough troops or supplies, his way was better than most. Soon we had established a perimeter that was secure enough, dug into each of the main hills around the strip, each with its own supply of ammo, food and water. Besides the original headquarters and med dugout, he’d established another on the far side of the strip. All this looked pretty good, with no Gerin actually challenging it, but I wasn’t convinced. It takes more than a few hundred Marines to secure an airstrip if the enemy has a lot of troops.

  Shortly after sundown, one of the squads from the first replacement shuttle found ruins of a human settlement at the base of a hill near the end of the strip, and had to get their noses slapped on the comm for making so much noise about it. Not long after, the squad up on that clifftop put two and two together and made their own find. Having heard the first ruckus, they didn’t go on the comm with it, but sent a runner down to Major Sewell.

  There’s a certain art to getting information, another version of politics you might call it. It so happened that someone I knew had a buddy who knew someone, and so on, and I knew the details before the runner got to Major Sewell.

  We’d known the strip itself was human-made, from the beginning. What we hadn’t known was that it had been privately owned, adjacent to the owner’s private residence. It takes a fair bit of money to build a shuttle strip, though not as much as it takes to have a shuttle and need a shuttle strip. The same class of money can take a chunk of rock looking out over a little valley, and carve into it a luxurious residence and personal fortress. It can afford to install the best quality automated strip electronics to make landing its fancy little shuttle easier, and disguise all the installations as chunks of native stone or trees or whatever. The Gerin had missed it, being unfamiliar with both the world and the way that humans think of disguise. But to a bored squad sitting up on a hilltop with no enemy in sight, and the knowledge that someone might have hidden something … to them it was easy. Easy to find, that is, not easy to get into, at least not without blasting a way in … which, of course, they were immediately and firmly told not to do.

  Think for a little what it takes to do something like this. We’re not talking here about ordinary dress-up-in-silk-everyday rich, you understand, not the kind of rich that satisfies your every whim for enough booze and fancy food. I can’t even imagine the sort of sum that would own a whole world, hollow out a cliff for a home, operate a private shuttle, and still have enough clout left to bribe the Navy in the middle of a desperate war. This was the sort of wealth that people thought of the military-industrial complex having, the kind that the big commercial consortia do have (whether the military get any or not), the kind where one man’s whim, barely expressed, sends ten thousand other men into a death-filled sky.

  Or that’s the way I read it. We were here to protect – to get back – some rich man’s estate, his private playground, that the Gerin had taken away. Not because of colonists (did I see any
colonists? Did anyone see any evidence of colonists?) but because of a rich old fart who had kept this whole world to himself, and then couldn’t protect it. That’s why we couldn’t do the safe, reasonable thing and bomb the Gerin into dust, why we hadn’t had adequate site preparation, why we hadn’t brought down the tactical nukes. Politics.

  I did sort of wonder why the Gerin wanted it. Maybe they had their own politics. I also wondered if anyone was hiding out in there, safe behind the disguising rock, watching us fight … lounging at ease, maybe, with a drink in his hand, enjoying the show. We could take care of that later, too. If we were here.

  Sometime before dawn – still dark, but over half the night gone – the higher flyby reported distant activity. Lights and non-visible heat sources over at the edge of the hills, moving slowly but steadily towards us. They didn’t follow the old road trace, but kept to the low ground. According to the best guess of the instruments, the wettest low ground. I guess that makes sense, if you’re an amphib. It still didn’t make sense that they moved so slow, and that they hadn’t come to hit us while we were setting up.

  The next bad news came from above. Whatever the Navy had thought they’d done to get the Gerin ships out of the way, it hadn’t held, and the next thing we knew our guys boosted out of orbit and told us to hold the fort while they fought off the Gerin. Sure. The way things were going, they weren’t coming back, and we wouldn’t be here if they did. Nobody said that, which made it all the clearer that we were all thinking it.

  During that long day we made radio contact with the survivors at Beta-site. They were about eighty klicks away to our north, trying to move their way through the broken hills and thick scrub. Nobody’d bothered them yet, and they hadn’t found any sign of human habitation. Surprise. The major didn’t tell them what we’d found, seeing as it wouldn’t do them any good. Neither would linking up with us, probably.