“Hello, Raul. We were wondering when you would make an appearance,” Vereshchagin said.
At that moment, the planetary director came on the broadcast system to call upon his employees to assist the Imperial forces in their peaceful occupation of the facility.
Sanmartin shook his head and sat down on top of the table to watch his men police up weapons. De Kantzow gingerly plucked the orator from somebody’s soup to dust for iron.
THE RUNWAY STRETCHED ALMOST TO THE HORIZON. SMALL ARMS fire issued faintly from the south where Kimura’s battalion was still in action. A little white dot appeared at the far end and grew in stature until it merged into the long black ribbon. As it continued to lose speed and increase in size, the delta wings showed themselves as thin white lines. Rolling thunder, the shuttle finally braked to a halt with a roar that shook the soil.
The clamshell door opened at the back as a ramp even before the nose cone stopped glowing. Even in the semitropical summer, the heat emanating from the shuttle struck the men who were running up. An armored car poised itself at the head of the ramp. Inexplicably, it did not move.
Malinov, a vine cane in his hand, stood at the foot of the ramp and waved the vehicle on. There was no response. Finally, he strode up to the top and rapped on its side.
“Move. What are you waiting for?”
The driver’s hatch opened, and the driver stuck his head out. “We can’t, Battalion Sergeant. She won’t start.” The, vehicle commander popped out of the turret and would have said something had he not seen the look in Malinov’s eyes.
“Move it!” Malinov barked. He looked to the other vehicles crammed into the shuttle. Slicks were hung from the roof and wired to the sides like flies in a spider’s web. Poised behind three other armored cars, the big mortar carrier trembled as its engine turned over in confined space, bare centimeters to spare on either side. A little utility vehicle burdened with a Hummingbird reconnaissance drone was almost hidden. Muravyov, the No. 15 platoon commander, stood in the turret of the second Cadillac trying to levitate his lead vehicle by sheer power of will.
The lead driver continued to shake his head. “She won’t go. She was fine on the transport, but she just won’t go!”
Malinov leaned very close. “I will say this in simple terms that your simple mind will understand. There is only one runway on this whole frosty planet. It has a frosty shuttle sitting on it that can’t unload half of the only ten frosting armored vehicles the battalion is going to get to invade this whole frosty planet because THAT FROSTY PIECE OF JUNK OF YOURS IS BLOCKING THE FROSTING DOOR.”
Malinov kicked the offending Cadillac as hard as he could.
The engine roared into life.
“Many thanks, Battalion Sergeant. Many thanks!” the driver yelled over staccato machine gun fire as he drove down the ramp.
Malinov continued to stand at the head of the ramp as the rest of the vehicles filed past. “Dumb, frosting Prigal,” he finally said, shaking his head.
ON A DIFFERENT ARMORED CAR TRAVELING THE PRETORIA ROAD, Sanmartin unglued his hands slightly from the handholds affixed to the back of the turret, choking on the dust. He found himself asking Vereshchagin, “Did you really drive up to the gate four armored cars abreast and every mother’s son whistling The Little Tin Soldier?”
“No, nothing quite like that, Raul. We have it on tape. As Matti says ...”
‘I know, ammunition is expensive. What did we do with the other two slicks?” Along the side of the road there was a tom-up area where a missile from Graf Spee had rooted up and shredded a telephone cable.
I sent them farther north with a few of your riflemen to screen the Johannesburg traffic.”
“Sir, are we really going to take over Pretoria with two platoons, less detachments?”
“Raul, sometimes you worry too much.”
“I worry too much?”
“Think of it in this way: Lieutenant-Colonel Kimura, who commands the Baluchi battalion, imagines that he is fighting a war. However confused the inhabitants are, when he shoots, they shoot back. Admiral Lee does not believe anyone is supposed to be shooting at us. If we tell the militiamen this, they may assume the admiral knows what he is talking about.” He snapped at the waist like a jackknife to avoid being decapitated by a hanging vine.
“In theory, all these fine folk are Imperial subjects. Their quarrels are not with us, but with USS and each other. They never expected to see Imperial infantry in a thousand years. We may, perhaps, even get away with this. Smile a lot, and wave.”
They came up to a bend in the road where the two scout vehicles were stopped.
“What is up there?” Vereshchagin shouted through cupped hands.
The gunner spat upon the ground. “Ambush. Light stuff and a machine gun.” He jerked his head upward, where Lieutenant Okladnikov’s Hummingbird flew overhead. "The bird took their picture.”
The gunner stuck his finger in a hole and wiggled it. “They were pretty nervous. We circled back for you.” He added significantly, “No armor-piercing stuff, or they’d have been firing that, too.”
"Did you fire back? ’ ’
“No, sir.”
“Good boys.” He rapped on the turret. “Sergei, leave the hatch open and stop the car when I start pounding. Please do not shoot unless I so request. Start up with The Little Tin Soldier and see if you can point the 90mm so that they will be looking down the barrel, that ought to help, do you think? Where is the flag?”
Okladnikov handed out a cased Imperial ensign on a collapsible staff. Vereshchagin began fitting it together. He paused briefly.
"Raul, you must keep an open mind on the advantages of the unexpected in warfare.”
Just past the turn, Vereshchagin rapped on the hatch. Okladnikov stopped his armored car dead and killed the engine. To the strains of The Little Tin Soldier, the other three Cadillacs whipped to a stop facing to either side. Behind them, for moral support, the 160mm mortar halted within the view of the Boer militiamen.
“Sergei, kill the music,” Vereshchagin hissed. He waved, leaning on the flag which was itself precariously planted. “Hello!
I need to see the burgemeester in Pretoria. May I offer you a lift in exchange for directions? ”
Badly out-gunned, a few nervous Boers stuck their heads out from the thick growth alongside the road.
Vereshchagin turned to Sanmartin. “Lev thinks they may have telephone service restored within the town limits. When we get to the outskirts, we will stop and give the mayor a ring.”
AFTER THEY ARRIVED AT THE STAATSAMP AND DROPPED THEIR escort off in front, His Excellency, the lord mayor of Pretoria— sleeves rolled up—was shredding every document from tax assessments to vital statistics. The squat, stolid building was marred by the gash of a strike from corvette Ajax that had tom the transmitter tower from its moorings and flung it to the street. The Boer provisional council, which functioned as a district government, had fled the city almost an hour before. Borrowing an interpreter of sorts, Vereshchagin managed to calm the burgemeester enough to function.
Vereshchagin pulled Sanmartin close with the hand that wasn’t wrapped around the burgemeester’s shoulder. “Raul, I am going to stay here and kiss babies. Paul Henke has borrowed a few trucks to send me one of Piotr’s platoons. 1 would like to keep Karaev and one of his sections. Please double back and head for Johannesburg.” He clapped Sanmartin on the shoulder. “There are only ten or fifteen thousand people in the whole town, so you should not have any trouble.”
Sanmartin stepped outside. “Sergei!”
Okladnikov stuck his head out.
“Scrounge some fuel. Save what’s in the trailer, the mayor says there’s a tank out back and I wrote out a promissory note. We leave in ten minutes.”
“For where?”
"Johannesburg. ’’ He noticed some riflemen standing around. “Go inside and scarf up all the shredded paper. We’re going to do this in style.”
HENDRIK PIENAAR HEARD SOMEONE POUND O
N HIS DOOR. “THE
door is open,” he said without looking up.
Olivier turned the handle. The Pretoria businessman headed up the informal committee Pienaar had come to see to discuss the situation with the cowboys. “Heer Pienaar, there is a matter of greatest urgency,” he said, red-faced and out of breath. Curiosity got the better of him. “What are you doing?”
“Cooking. The hotel restaurant is closed.” Pienaar had improvised a frypan out of metal foil and wire.
“The Imperials have landed!”
“Oh?”
“They have taken the burgemeester prisoner!”
“We should make them keep him,” Pienaar answered absently, trying to flip the eggs without breaking the yolks.
“We must fight them!”
“Why?”
“Why?” Olivier repeated. He sounded puzzled.
Pienaar had heard that Olivier was a straightforward, zealous man. He had also heard that Olivier drank too much and beat his wife, not that Pienaar believed everything he heard. “You and I and who else?” he asked instead.
“Be serious!”
“Oh. How many men do the Imperials have? What weapons? Space-bome fire support? What do they intend? ’ ’ Pienaar pulled the eggs off the flame gingerly. “What have they done to us?”
“I don’t know.”
For all the talk that the Afrikaner nation stood shoulder to shoulder, the fat city men had been less than eager when it was merely a matter of Chalker’s cowboys claiming Steyndorp lands. They all had bigger schemes to fry. Now someone else’s shoe pinched. “Would you care for an egg?” Pienaar said dryly as he glanced out the window at the armored cars in the street.
OKLADNIKOV HALTED HIS CADILLAC ON A CAUSEWAY BRIDGE
over the backed-up waters of a billabong. The two slicks were already on the other side waving them across.
“If this is the best road on the continent, I’d hate to see the others,” Sanmartin commented, spitting out some dust. “What’s up there, Sergei?”
Okladnikov replied by gunning the engine.
On the other side, his missing slicks were operating a parking lot. Twenty vehicles, from horse-drawn wagons to a huge road train with forty-four wheels, were sited off the road, hidden from the on-coming traffic. Okladnikov pulled up, and Sanmartin hopped off.
“So this is where you’ve been. Any problems?”
The lance-corporal pulled off his cap and scratched his head. “One truckload of militia. They’re over there playing cards. We dumped their weapons in the swamp.”
“Good enough. We’re going through to Johannesburg. Give us about an hour, then get these people on their way.”
The lance replied by flipping an ignition coil in the air and catching it smartly on the way down. “These things are a lot harder to put back. ’ ’
Sanmartin laughed. He turned to climb back and was almost run over by a bakkie truck—on some worlds they called them pickups—with a load of chickens on the flatbed. Speeding by, it veered around Okladnikov straight into the mire.
Listening to the chickens, Sanmartin watched the truck settle in Over the wheelwells. The lance looked at him expectantly.
“Try and clean up the area a bit before you go,” Sanmartin directed. “It’s untidy.”
On a knoll overlooking Johannesburg, he left a rifle section to commandeer a stone house and planted the mortar carrier to fire star shells and colored parachute flares. With the riflemen on top of the armored cars throwing confetti, they rode into the town to the strains of The Little Tin Soldier about the time Major Piotr Ilyich Kolomeitsev started up the road to Bloemfontein on a farm tractor.
Sanmartin pounded on Okladnikov’s back as they waved to the stupefied inhabitants. “Sergei, isn’t this the craziest war you ever saw?”
The casualties the battalion suffered were remarkably light. Heat exhaustion knocked down a double handful. Kolomeitsev had four men lightly wounded securing the militia armory in Bloemfontein, and in C Company, F. N. Nikitin managed to break his leg in two places walking off the back of a moving Cadillac.
In Pretoria, there was one task which Vereshchagin reserved for himself. In the courtyard hard by the town hall stood a flagpole. He slid the small bayonet from his belt and slashed the halyard through, to watch the Vierkleur flag come drifting down.
Monday(l)
KIRK HUNSLEY, SECRETARY PRO TEM FOR THE READING District Council, paced the floor of what was called the District Courts Building. Most of the wits in town—there were many— called it “the Arsenal,” which accurately described its appearance and function. Although the Reading Council was the closest thing to a government the big ranchers acknowledged, the significance of the fact that the council found it desirable to conduct its activities in a concrete blockhouse was not lost upon many,
For once, however, the petty bushwhacking endemic to the politics of inland ranchers was eclipsed. The arrival of Imperial forces had caught everyone off guard. Most of the council members were waiting to see what would transpire before committing themselves to anything that might diminish their wealth or be construed as treason. To Hunsley’s orderly mind came unbidden the thought that everything that the council had done could be construed as treason in strict legal terms, everything since the day that Big Jim McClausland and Janine Joh had extorted the transfer of governmental functions from the director at Complex—who had had no authority to grant anything of the sort.
It was a thought that the secretary pro tem of that unauthorized council did not relish. Even if someone as smooth as Kirk Hun-sley could explain to Imperial satisfaction the usurpation of governmental functions, some of the ranchers and their mercenaries were shooting at Imperial troops. In theory, those meres were council armed forces, and Imperials didn’t take kindly to colonial armed resistance. It was slight consolation that Kirk Hun-sley wasn’t the only one who could feel a noose around his throat.
It was ironic that the arrival of the Imperials put Kirk Hunsley on a level with the big cats inside. Occupation of a council seat differentiated the men who squeezed from the men who were squeezed, although the council’s lack of legal authority was matched only by its lack of actual authority over the big landowners it ostensibly governed.
A greater irony would be if the Imperials infused enough authority into the council to make it an acceptable puppet.
There lay a glimmering of hope. Hizzoner Jeff Newcombe was already running down that rainbow as fast as his short little legs would carry him. Newcombe’s witless assertion that he intended to force the Imperials to recognize the council was widely held to be proof positive that Jelf intended to sell himself and anything else if the Imperials were buying.
Hunsley grinned mirthlessly. After seven months as president of the council, pudgy Jeff Newcombe still didn’t realize that the day heavyweights like the Joh or McClausland could agree on the time of day was his last in office.
Of course, if Newcombe’s ploy succeeded, Hunsley was out of a job and maybe a lot more. Kirk Hunsley had played one rancher faction off against another so he owned none of them master. That was something Newcombe had never appreciated, and Jeff was enough of a fool to make his likes and dislikes apparent.
And being an ass, he planned a surprise for Vice-Admiral Robert E. Lee. The admiral had directed the council to await his pleasure for “discussions,” which was the first demand of many, and one the admiral hadn’t tried to phrase politely. For once, Hunsley didn’t know what Newcombe was up to, which was one reason why Hunsley was pacing around the back of the council chamber in a stiff collar with sweat pouring down the back of his neck.
Newcombe was fool enough to do anything. Hunsley had done what he could by warning the Joh. If she landed feet first, Hunsley hoped she’d remember.
He looked at his formal watch. Opening the stiff, metal door, he walked out onto the soft carpeting that covered the stark concrete reality of the council hall and looked from face to face: thirteen heads out of twenty-five, a bare quorum. McCl
ausland and Chalker were not present, nor was Tsai. Fat Joos was already seated, an angelic smile between his two red litde cheeks. Anyone who didn’t know what Joos had done to the jungle bunnies might think he was the chaplain’s choir boy.
Heaven alone knew where Newcombe was. Andrassy, the closest thing Newcombe had to a creature of his own, was standing at one end of the big table laying hands. Several men were smiling, which was hopeful. Andrassy never told the truth unnecessarily, and if they still saw fit to smile, there was light at the end of a tunnel and it wasn’t Andrassy holding a lamp.
The Joh was at the far end wearing a thin, black dress. Hunsley tried to catch her eye. Instead, she caught his and gave him a radiant smile that never touched her hard, washed-out eyes. Hunsley sighed deeply and waited, cursing Newcombe under his breath.
A full two minutes passed. The door flung open and Newcombe made his appearance. Hunsley almost rubbed his eyes. Newcombe was wearing antique dress, a gray, vaguely military outfit complete with a sword and topped off by a wide hat with :i leather in it. Watching people stare, Hunsley had to stifle an impulse to giggle before the computer between his ears reminded him that Newcombe was a historico-drama buff. And if play-acting in historical costume could persuade Admiral Lee that black was white, there was a sudden sickening feeling in Hunsley’s belly that sad, stupid Jeff had out-smarted them all.
As one thought followed another, four Imperial security policemen marched in wearing tailored battle dress with long black stripes extending down the sides. They cradled assault rifles and formed in pairs on either side.
Even fat Joos was standing. Mechanically, Hunsley took his place to Newcombe's left, eyeing eleven empty places. Newcombe’s white lace gloves irritated him beyond measure.
Newcombe lifted one of them in a theatrical gesture. Recorded music filled the room. Hunsley saw Newcombe looking at him malevolently out of the comer of his eye. “It’s called Dixie,” Newcombe whispered as two Imperial aides walked between the blacklegs, tall and blond in white dress.
Robert Frezza - [Colonial War 01] Page 4