by David Drake
Voices came out of the radio pickup. He recognized the squeals, hisses, and growls of the Khalian tongue.
“I hope like hell this is a military comlink,” Pat said, nudging his jaw control. “Breaker. Mayday. I am a Fleet single fighter, Charlie Two, at the following location,” he read off the coordinates of his position from his heads-up display. “You have five, repeat five Syndicate transports attempting to make planetfall up here, and one more orbiting disabled. Can anybody hear me? I say there are troop transports entering your space one hundred eighty degrees out from the battle zone. I need help. Mayday. Over.”
He let go of the control and listened. The voices, still speaking Khalian, became agitated. Otlind repeated his message distinctly and signed off, because he saw some old friends approaching. The three Syndic fighters he had left behind on the other side of the planet had finally caught up with him. They had taken a safer descent angle into atmosphere than he had needed, and were firing laser cannons in his direction.
The shields’ alarm went off as Charlie Two’s shield was unable to completely protect the former Khalian fighter from two long-range laser hits. The little craft juddered and shook under him. The power indicator swan-dived. If the shields sustained more damage, he was in danger of losing power to his drives. He fired quickly at the three fighters, and then moved to evade their lasers.
That it had taken them so long to follow him into atmosphere made him think that perhaps the Syndic fighters were less resistant to friction than his craft, which Meier had made sure were coated with a newly developed Fleet-technology ceramic paint. It made them slightly less mobile and slower in atmosphere. With his long experience at dodging and weaving, their firepower, triple his, could serve a useful purpose.
He flung a barrage in their direction, and then turned tail and ran toward the troop transports. It took next to no time to vanish between two of the leviathan ships and into the clouds below. The large ships were so startled at his return, he met no incoming fire at all.
As soon as Otlind angled around the first massive hull, he shut off power to the shields. They were already hemorrhaging and would soon drain the drives that powered them, leaving him a sitting, or falling, duck. At the speed he was flying, he doubted the fighters could hit him anyhow. Losing the screens made him a smaller shadow and eliminated the danger of interacting explosively with the larger ship’s more powerful screens, enabling him to slip in and out of places where another fighter could not pass.
The three fighters, seeing him drop shields on their heads-up displays, added more thrust. They closed in, following him between the transports with lasers firing. The transports scattered as the laser bolts impacted with sparks on their shields.
Making two quick left turns in midair, Otlind angled back upward through the clouds and into the midst of the transports. His tiny craft buzzed in front of the command blister of one mighty ship. He had time to blast the bubble into melted slag before the three small fighters rounded the fleet and were on his tail again.
The Death Knell went off this time with a double clang. He had been targeted by more than one craft, probably the fighters and perhaps one of the transports. There was no way to outrun the bolts. He slapped the shields back up just as explosions began to ring in the thin air outside his hull. He put everything he had into a repulse from the planet’s gravity and his rear shields, and blasted toward the black canopy of space.
A split second passed. Otlind realized that he was still alive. His ship was more or less intact, and the transports were ignoring him. Two military corvettes, on a vector from the planet’s surface, had appeared through the clouds and were pounding laser blasts into the transports’ hulls. They appeared to be typically overgunned Khalian raiders, highly illegal after the surrender, but a most welcome sight to the lone pilot. The three fighters were nowhere to be seen. Otlind guessed that they had fled into space. No, his tank showed only two blips heading for outer space. One of them must have been destroyed.
The radio clamored for attention. ”Charlie Two?” it inquired in a lisping voice.
“Who wants to know?” Otlind demanded, skimming safely in the blue-blackness above the planet’s glow. Systems said that he was about ten minutes from drive shutdown. He turned off his shields and was rewarded with ten minutes grace more.
“I am the high priest of communications aboard the Loyalty. Khalia extends honor to its defender. We thank you for the warning. You bought us precious moments to stop our foe. If not for you, our ships would not have lifted. Your name will go down in our rolls of honor as a hero.”
“So long as you spell it right, honorable Weasels,” Otlind said, settling back in his seat with a sigh of satisfaction. The muscles of his lower back were unaccountably tight. He wiggled to ease them. “It’s Otlind. O-T-L-I-N-D.”
* * *
“Charlie Two, where the hell have you been?” Marsden’s fury came over loud and clear through his headset. “We thought you were dead when you went down.”
“Lieutenant, you’re going to be really sore. I got lost, and then I had to break radio silence. I’m sorry,” Otlind said, trying to sound contrite, but unable to wipe a justifiable grin off his face.
“Your power levels are too low. Damage report?”
“I’m missing a piece of wing, I’ve got burns in my tail and belly, and my shields are shot.”
“If you don’t take care of your toys, you can’t have them,” Marsden said, but her voice displayed no real irritation. “Get back to the Blackwell. You’re in no shape to stay out here.”
“Too bad I couldn’t do more,” Otlind said, hoping he didn’t sound facetious.
* * *
“So that’s how I saved Khalia,” Otlind told Mack Dane later that day when the brass had finished with him. “At least for that ten minutes I was a hero. But you know what really twists my tail? I blew up a transport and disabled two more, but the guys say they don’t count. There was no confirmation and all the Fleet scanners were watching the big battle on the far side of the planet and the Khalians won’t admit they had corvettes secreted on the planet. I still don’t have any fighter kills on my record.”
Articles of War
Article XXX
The Officers of all Ships Appointed for the Convoy and Protection of any Ships or Vessels shall diligently perform their Duty without Delay according to their Instructions on that Behalf ... shall be Punished criminally according to the Nature of the Offence, by Death or such other Punishment as is herein-after mentioned.
Article XI
Where a mutiny is not accompanied by Violence, the Ringleader or Ringleaders of such mutiny shall suffer Death, or such other Punishment as is herein-after mentioned; and all other persons who shall join in such Mutiny, or shall not use their utmost Exertions to suppress the same, shall suffer Imprisonment or other such Punishment as is herein-after mentioned.
As the fighters’ dogfight intensified overhead, contingencies that had been prepared long in advance were also put into motion. Many failed because they depended upon no-longer-willing Khalian warriors. Others were smashed by the efforts of the three hundred thousand militia and infantry left behind on Khalia. A few contingencies succeeded, including one that disrupted the entire orbital observation system protecting the planet itself. None of this affected the space battle immediately, a fact that confirmed the Syndicate’s fear that they had lost control of the Khalia.
Like all good engineers, the Syndicate had in place one more backup system. Normally such a system is designed to ensure something happens. In this case the backup system was intended to ensure nothing ever happened on Khalia again. Originally meant to be activated from space, this particular backup was almost complete at the time of the unexpectedly rapid fall of the Khalia. As a result it was only partially successful. Which for many of those on the planet was quite enough.
NICK KOWACS laughed to imagine it, him sitting at a booth in the Red Shift Lounge and saying to Toby English, “That last mission, the
one that was supposed to be a milk run? Let me tell you what really went down!”
“Come on, come on, come on,” begged the logistics officer, a naval lieutenant. “Your lot was supposed to be in the air thirty minutes ago, and I got three more convoys behind it!”
“Keep your shirt on, sailor,” said Sergeant Bradley. “We’ll be ready to move out as soon as Major Kowacs gets this last set of voice orders–”
Bradley nodded toward the blacked-out limousine that looked like a pearl in a muck heap as it idled in a yard of giant excavating machinery. The limousine was waiting for the Headhunters when they pulled into the depot. Bradley didn’t know what the major was hearing inside the vehicle, but he doubted it was anything as straightforward as verbal orders.
“That’s faster than you’ll have your equipment airborne even if you get on with your job,” he concluded.
Bradley was acting first sergeant for the field element of the 121st Marine Reaction Company, Headhunters, while the real first sergeant was back with the base unit on Port Tau Ceti. Bradley knew that before the lieutenant could punish him for insubordination, the complaint would have to go up the naval chain of command and come back down the Marine side of the Fleet bureaucracy ... which it might manage to do a couple of lifetimes later.
As if in answer to Bradley’s gibe, drivers started the engines of the paired air-cushion transporters that cradled a self-contained excavator on the lowboy between them. The yard had been scoured by earlier movements of heavy equipment, but the soil of Khalia was stony. As the transporters’ drive fans wound up, they shot pebbles beneath the skirts to whang against the sides of other vehicles.
One stone hit a Khalian wearing maroon coveralls. He was one of thousands of Weasels hired to do scut work in the wake of the Fleet’s huge logistics buildup on what had been the enemy home planet–when the Khalia were the enemy. The victim yelped and dropped to the ground.
Sergeant Bradley spat into the dust. If the Weasel was dead, then the universe was a better place by that much.
Drivers fired up the engines of the remainder of the vehicles the 121st was to escort. Four lowboys carried three-meter outside-diameter casing sections. The final piece of digging equipment was a heavy-lift crane to position the excavator initially, then feed casing down the shaft behind the excavator as it burned and burrowed toward the heart of the planet.
All of the transporters were ground effect. The noise of their intakes and the pressurized air wailing out beneath their skirts was deafening. The lieutenant shouted, but Bradley could barely hear him. “You won’t be laughing if the planet-wrecker you’re sitting on top of goes off because you were late to the site!”
Corporal Sienkiewicz, Kowacs’s clerk/bodyguard, was female and almost two meters tall. This yard full of outsized equipment was the first place Bradley remembered Sie looking as though she was in scale with her surroundings. Now she bent close to the logistics officer and said, “We won’t be doing anything, LT. It’s you guys a hundred klicks away who’ll have time to watch the crust crack open and the core spill out.”
The Syndicate had mined Khalia. If the planet exploded at the crucial moment when Syndicate warships swept in to attack, the defenders would lose the communications and logistics base they needed to win.
But most of the Weasels in the universe would be gone as well. . . .
The door of the limousine opened. Bradley keyed the general-frequency override in his com helmet and ordered, “Five-six to all Headhunter elements. Mount up, troops, it’s time to go play Marine.” His voice was hoarse.
As Bradley spoke, his fingers checked combat gear with feather-light touches. His shotgun was slung muzzle-up for boarding the vehicle. The weapon’s chamber was empty, but he would charge it from the box magazine as soon as the trucks were airborne.
Bandoliers of shotgun ammo crossed his back-and-breast armor. From each bandolier hung a container of ring-airfoil grenades, which Bradley could launch from around the shotgun’s barrel for long range and a high-explosive wallop.
Hand-flung grenade clusters were stuffed into the cargo pockets of either pant leg. Some gas grenades, some explosive, some incendiary, some to generate fluorescent smoke for marking. You never knew what you were going to need. You only knew that you were going to need more of something than you carried. . . .
A portable medicomp to diagnose, dispense drugs, and patch the screaming wounded. If you could reach them. If they weren’t out there in the darkness being tortured by one Khalian while the rest of a Weasel platoon waited in ambush; and you still had to go, because she was your Marine and it didn’t matter, you had to bring back whatever the Weasels had left of her.
Sergeant Bradley lifted the rim of his com helmet with one hand and knuckled the pink scar tissue that covered his scalp. He didn’t carry a fighting knife, but a powered metal-cutter dangled from his left hip where it balanced his canteen. He’d killed seven Weasels with the cutting bar one night.
Bradley was twenty-eight standard years old. His eyes were the age of the planet’s molten core.
“Come on, Top,” Sienkiewicz said, putting her big hand over the tension-mottled fingers with which the field first gripped his helmet. Major Kowacs sprinted toward them as the limousine accelerated out of the equipment yard. “We got a taxi to catch.”
“Right,” said Bradley in a husky voice. “Right, we gotta do that.”
He prayed that the Headhunters would be redeployed fast to some planet where there weren’t thousands of Weasels running around in Fleet uniforms. ...
* * *
Sergeant Custis, a squad leader with three years service in the Headhunters, pulled Kowacs aboard the truck while Sie and Bradley hooked themselves onto seats on the opposite side of the vehicle’s center spine.
“Cap’n?” said Custis as his head swung close to his commanding officer’s helmet. “Is it true the Weasels are going to blow up their whole planet if we don’t deactivate the mines first? Ah, I mean, Major?”
Kowacs grimaced. One of the problems with latrine rumors was that they were only half-right.
He checked to see that the flat box was secured firmly to his equipment belt. He’d clipped it there as soon as he received the device in the limousine.
Another problem with latrine rumors was that they were half-right.
“Don’t sweat it Buck,” Corporal Sienkiewicz offered from the bench seat on which she sat with her back against Custis’s back. It’s gonna be a milk run this time.”
The lead truck was out of the gate with 1st Platoon aboard. A lowboy followed the Marines: the truck with Weapons Platoon and Kowacs’s command team lifted into the number three slot.
There was enough crosswind to make the vehicles skittish. At least that prevented the gritty yellow dust that the fans lifted from coating everybody behind the leaders.
The Marine transporters had enough direct lift capacity to fly rather than skimming over a cushion of air the way the mining equipment had to do, but for this mission Kowacs had told the drivers to stay on the deck. After all, the Headhunters were supposed to be escorting the excavating machinery ... or something.
“Six to all Headhunter elements,” Kowacs said, letting the artificial intelligence in his helmet cut through the conversations buzzing through the company. Everybody was nervous. “Here’s all the poop I know.”
But not quite everything he was afraid of. He instinctively touched the special communicator attached to his belt. . . .
“A presumably hostile fleet is approaching Khalia,” Kowacs resumed aloud.
“Weasels!” a nearby Marine snarled. The AI blocked radio chatter, but it couldn’t prevent people from interrupting with unaided voice.
“The enemy is human,” Kowacs said firmly. “Any of you replacements doubt that, just talk to a veteran. This outfit has met them before.”
That ought to shut up the troops who were convinced the Khalia had broken their surrender terms. Kowacs’s words told the Headhunter veterans they knew better, so
they’d hold to the CO’s line as a matter of status. And no replacement, even a Marine with years of service, would dare doubt the word of a full-fledged Headhunter.
It was only Nick Kowacs who still had to fear that the incoming warships were crewed by Khalians like the hundreds of millions of other bloodthirsty Weasels all around him on this planet. He looked out at the landscape.
The fast-moving convoy was three klicks out of the Fleet Logistics Base Ladybird–one of hundreds of depots that had sprung up within hours of the successful invasion of Khalia. The countryside was a wasteland.
The local foliage was brown and dun and maroon, never green. Even granting the difference in color, the vegetation was sparse and signs of habitation were limited to an occasional hut shaped like an oversize beehive.
How could the Alliance ever have believed a race as primitive as the Khalia was capable of sustaining an interstellar war–without someone else behind them, arming the Weasels and pointing them like a sword at the heart of the Alliance?
“FleetComSeventeen believes that the human enemy, the Syndicate . . .” Kowacs said as his eyes searched terrain that was already being scanned to the millimeter from orbit, “. . . has used its past association with the Weasels to plant a chain of thermonuclear devices at the planet’s crustal discontinuity. If the weapons go off together, they’ll crack Khalia like an egg and destroy everything and everyone the Fleet has landed here.”
Corporal Sienkiewicz chuckled and said to Bradley in a barely audible rumble, “Including us.”