by Rick Shelley
The six men fanned out quickly. Dem used his belt knife to pry open the nearest crate. It contained rocket-propelled grenades. He helped himself to a half dozen. Dropping his visor for a moment, he said, “Somebody find launchers for these grenades. We can use them later.”
There were several crates of launchers in the next stack. Each of the reccers took one launcher and as many of the RPGs as he could carry.
Five minutes of searching gave the team a good idea of what the warehouse contained. Five minutes of more delicate work let them arm a dozen of the Boem missiles and aim them at other stacks, mostly at the tank shells. Strategically placed shaped charges would, if everything worked properly, ignite the rockets. The men pulled safety pins from the heads of as many missiles and shells as they could, arming the explosives.
“Give us enough time to get the hell away from here,” Coy said when Dem started sorting through his selection of fuses.
“Remember, we’re going to be on foot,” Abe Junger added. “No rocket man stuff.”
“The only caps we’ve got enough of are five-minute,” Dem said. “That’s going to have to be time enough. Coy, you check that door on the east. Make sure we’re going to be able to get out of here before we clip these caps.” He didn’t want to get caught in a firefight at the door of the warehouse once the timers were activated. “Abe, you check the door on the north, just in case we need a different way out.” Those were the only two exits that Dem had spotted.
Dem and two of the remaining men put the timed caps in place on the charges, but they waited for reports from the doors. Both were clear–clear enough for reccers.
“Abe, move around to the east door,” Dem said. “We’ll take that.” He watched until Abe was as close to the other exit as Dem was. Then he nodded at the men with him. Very quickly, they clipped the fuses to arm the charges they had placed.
No one needed an order to run for the door.
* * *
Mort Jaiffer pulled the dead Heggie off of Joe Baerclau. At first, Mort thought that the Bear was also dead. He knelt next to the platoon sergeant and felt his neck for a pulse. The relief Mort felt when his fingers detected a steady beat made him light-headed for a moment.
“Al, get over here!” he shouted into his radio. “The Bear needs help.”
For the moment, most of Echo Company was out of the fighting. The heaviest action had moved into the avenues between the warehouses and other buildings and, in some cases, inside the buildings. It was a brutal kind of combat, but only so many men at a time would fit in the lanes between the buildings. Mostly, the 13th–and the units coming in from the north and south–were waiting for the Wasps to return and clear out the areas between the buildings. They were fighting a containing action, content to hold their own and keep the enemy from escaping or regrouping.
Al Bergon ran past a pile of Heggie bodies to Joe BaercIau. Mort had the sergeant’s visor up and had already poured water over the Bear’s face.
“I think the heat got him,” Mort said. “I don’t think the blood is his. At least I can’t find any trace of a wound.”
“He skewered the Heggie right enough,” Al said, giving the dead man only a glance. Mort retrieved Joe’s knife, which was still sticking in the man.
“You’re right,” Al said after he had checked Baerclau’s vital signs. “Just the heat. Heat and exertion. He’s starting to come around now.”
Joe’s eyes opened, but they were not focusing. They seemed to track separately at first, only slowly coming to some sort of accommodation with each other. Joe blinked once, then again.
“Sarge?” Al spoke loudly, even though his mouth was only a few centimeters from Baerclau’s face. “You hear me?”
Joe blinked twice more, slowly. His head moved a little to one side, then back. He blinked again, trying to force his mind back to alertness.
“Sarge?” Louder.
“No need to shout,” Joe said, his voice cracking. “I hear you.”
“You took a nap,” Al told him. That seemed to go right past the sergeant. “Heat exhaustion and then some. You’re dehydrated.” Like the rest of us, he thought. He gave Baerclau a drink of water, then swabbed down his face with an alcohol-soaked patch. “Best I can do for now. I’m all out of IV bags. Doc Eddles is on his way up with what he needs to take care of all of the heat casualties.”
Joe took in a long breath that was almost yawn. “How long was I out?”
“Don’t know,” Al said. “Mort found you under the Heggie you knifed. Just lie still,” he added when Joe tried to sit up. “Don’t complicate this.”
“What’s going on?” Joe asked as he went limp again. Obeying was much simpler than insisting on having his way.
Mort gave him the news, as briefly as he could. “Sergeant Degtree’s taking care of the platoon for now,” he added. “He’s the only one left from his squad.”
“What about the others?” Once more, Joe started to try to sit up, forgetting that he had just decided to obey AI and stay down. Al just put his hands on Baerclau’ s shoulders and held him down until Joe quit trying.
“I don’t know. We lost men.” Mort hesitated. “Pit’s dead. Wiz is down, wounded. He’s gonna need a few hours in a tube, I guess.”
“Definitely,” Al said, finishing his work on Baerclau. “But he’ll be okay. And so will you, as long as you just lie there until Doc Eddles gets up here. We’ll try to rig you a little shade.”
Joe closed his eyes. There didn’t seem to be much else he could do.
* * *
Dem and his men ran across one avenue and into the next building. He was certain that at least a few Heggies outside saw them, but the reccers weren’t in the open long enough to draw fire. It didn’t matter whether or not there were any Heggies inside the building that they ducked into. Even if there was an entire battalion of Heggies waiting, running into them was preferable to remaining too close to the building that had been rigged with explosives. That blast might not amount to much–but then again, it might be monstrous. A lot depended on Iuck, how many secondary explosions their preparations started. Dem didn’t want to take chances.
There were only a handful of men in the building that the reccers ran into, and they appeared to be civilians. At any rate, they weren’t in uniform and they weren’t armed. As soon as they saw the reccers, the five men quickly raised their hands as high as they could. Dem used his rifle to motion them out into the open, away from any cover.
“Any more in here?” he demanded.
The response was almost unintelligible, but clearly a negative. Dem didn’t recognize the dialect but it was far from any of the language variants common in the Accord.
“Down.” Dem gestured with his rifle to make sure that the men got his meaning. They went down rapidly, spreading arms and legs. All of them kept their eyes on their captors.
“Abe, you keep them covered, while the rest of us move across to the far side. Don’t get too far behind us. We’ve only got about ninety seconds left before . . .” He didn’t finish that in case the prisoners might understand him better than he understood them.
“We gonna leave these jokers here?” Coy asked. “Colonel might appreciate some prisoners.”
“Can’t take the chance,” Dem said. “Let’s go. Abe, give us twenty seconds, then follow as fast as you can. We’ll cover you.”
Twenty seconds and then another twenty seconds to cross to the far side of the warehouse. Near the far wall there was a line of tanker trailers, all labeled as water. Dem eyed the nearest trailer for a moment. The temptation was too much.
“This ought to be safe enough,” he said. “We’re close to the door. Hunker down, under whatever cover you can find. We’ll try to take time to fill our canteens before we leave, if this place doesn’t go up with the other building.” And if these cans are really full of water, he thought.
He gla
nced at the time line on his visor display. Less then ten seconds left. He got down in a hurry. So did the others, Abe skidding under one of the water tanks. As far as Dem could tell, none of the Heggie civilians had moved. He could see two of them, still spread-eagled on the floor.
The first sound that the reccers heard was a dull thump, an explosion baffled and damped by thick stone walls. Then the secondary blasts started. It was quite like an artillery barrage heard at a distance–for perhaps twenty seconds. One crump-thump followed another, the intervals decreasing.
Then there was one major blast. The warehouse in which the reccers were hiding shook violently. Two water trailers started to roll. Neither got far. Each bumped into a neighbor and stopped. Dust fell from the ceiling and from the girders that held it up. Somehow, clear against the immensity of the explosion, there were sharp, lighter sounds of glass breaking and small objects falling. The audible assault seemed to encompass the entire sound spectrum, from tones so low that they were felt rather than heard, to squeals that went right up to–and past–the upper limit of human hearing. The level crescendoed until some of the reccers clapped hands over the sides of their helmets, as close to their ears as they could get.
* * *
Fredo Gariston and the other half of the recon squad had one–questionable–advantage over the reccers who were hiding in the warehouse. They could see some of what happened. Two roofs to the north and one to the east of the explosions, they were much closer than they wanted to be.
Almost concurrent with the first sounds of the blast, the air itself seemed to compress around them. Dust rose from several rooftops. The stone roof over the explosion visibly bowed up, but before anyone could remark on that, the blast tore through the roof, scattering heavy chunks of stone and metal. With that barrier gone, the sound level doubled, trebled. Flame and debris shot skyward, seeking release through the line of least resistance. More of the roof gave way, collapsing. The secondary explosions continued for more than five minutes. Balls of flame jumped out of the breached roof, as if a succession of tiny new suns were being born.
The rooftop reccers lost interest in the show very quickly as debris started to rain down all around them: stone and metal–and more that couldn’t readily be identified.
“Let’s get out of here!” Fredo shouted at his companions. They were on the northeast corner of their roof, but debris was still falling around them–and far beyond.
“No juice for our jump belts,” one of the others shouted back.
“We’Il go down on ropes,” Fredo said. Each reccer carried a twenty-five-meter rope. Half of them had grappling hooks. There were Heggies on the ground, hundreds of them in sight, but they had suddenly become the lesser evil. And the Heggies were equally intent on escaping the volcanic aftermath of the explosions.
As Fredo went over the side of the building, a last glance toward the warehouse that was exploding showed two walls collapsing, one inward, the other outward. He didn’t wait to see if the rest of the building would fall as well.
* * *
Another shock wave shook the building that concealed Dem and his companions. A stack of crates near the west side of the building tipped over, starting a chain reaction that stopped only after three other stacks had fallen. Chunks of stone fell from the ceiling: One, perhaps several, of the civilians screamed in pain. Two got up and started running. They went right past Dem and his men without seeing them. The reccers moved farther under their cover.
Then the interior of the warehouse rang as if it were a gong. Dem looked up and saw the western wall sag inward. A long, vertical crack appeared and widened.
“Let’s get out of here!” he shouted. He turned around on his belly and scrambled out from under the water trailer, heading for the nearest door. His companions were less than a second behind him.
Abe was the last man out, just before the building’s west wall collapsed.
THE SCHLINAL prisoners were assembled into work gangs after the garrison surrendered. More than eleven hundred men had surrendered, about 20 percent of them civilians–prisoners or the descendants of prisoners. Even the female ten percent of the population were either prisoners or the descendants of men and women who had been sentenced to penal exile. Only in the rarest of circumstances did anyone descended from a penal exile make it off of a prison world. In the Hegemony, it was a crime to be born of criminals. And the sentence was life.
A half dozen of the highest ranking Schlinal officers, including the commandant of the penal colony and the commanding general of the army that had been staging on Tamkailo, were found together, their hands bound behind them, their throats slit. The commandant had been disemboweled and sexually maimed as well. More than thirty other officers and noncoms, mostly of the colony garrison, were also found dead in suspicious circumstances.
Not many Heggie officers of any rank survived. Two Accord Special Intelligence teams questioned those few officers, and a sampling of the enlisted men and civilians, through the remainder of the afternoon. Few of the prisoners were willing to say much, but the SI men Iearned enough–often by piecing together hints dropped by several different individuals–to know that in the last minutes of fighting there had been a mutiny coupled with a rebellion by the penal exiles. “Life’s impossible here anyway,” one private said sullenly. “We thought the whole place was going to blow up.”
All of the munitions that remained in the depot were carried out into the open. The engineers burned what could be destroyed that way. Charges that had to be detonated were handled in small batches. Repeated explosions eventually gave the engineers a shallow pit to help contain later detonations. It was slow work. The depot had held tens of thousands of tons of tank shells, Boem and surface-to-air missiles, grenades, other explosives, and ammunition for rifles and machine guns, as well as thousands of those weapons.
* * *
Captain Hilo Keye limped into the field hospital that had been moved into one of the first buildings that had been emptied of its stores. Nearly three hundred Accord soldiers, and half that number of Heggies, were being treated. The warehouse did offer one very important advantage over the tents that had been used before. In addition to the insulation provided by its thick stone walls and ceiling, the warehouse had been air conditioned to help protect the munitions that had been stored in it, a luxury the Schlinal barracks did not enjoy. And the power supply had not been destroyed in the fighting.
For a couple of minutes, Keye stood just inside the door, off to the side, taking deep breaths of the interior air, luxuriating in the coolness of the interior. He leaned back against the wall to take his weight off of an aching left foot and ankle. Objectively, the temperature inside the building was still about 30 degrees Celsius, but the late afternoon temperature outside was closer to 40, without any shade except that available on the east and south sides of the buildings.
Echo Company, or as much of it as survived and wasn’t in the hospital, was camped on the east side of one of those buildings. More than four hundred thousand liters of water had been liberated from the Heggies, and engineers were already making repairs to the water supply system. That had been seriously damaged in the battle. Accord troops were making liberal use of that water, not merely drinking it but standing under makeshift showers, just to cool off a little. Sunset was still three hours away, and the air temperature had shown no indication of beginning to drop.
“Something I can do for you, Captain?”
Keye opened his eyes. He hadn’t really been aware that he had shut them. He stared at the medic, a man he didn’t recognize even though he had the 13th’s patch on his collar. Keye blinked several times and dragged in one more deep breath before he spoke.
“Jammed foot, sprained ankle. Left foot.”
The medic glanced down–the top of the boot was loose and a medical soaker had been wrapped around the ankle–then brought his gaze back up to the captain’s eyes. “You can walk, si
r?”
“I made it this far. If you’ll give me a little help, I think I can make it the rest of the way. Doc Eddles busy?”
“Over in this corner, I think.” The medic pointed, then pulled the captain’s left arm around his neck and took a fair share of the weight “We’ve gotten pretty well organized.”
It seemed to Keye that the journey from door to corner took forever, but–logically–he knew that it could hardly have been more than two minutes, even shuffling along and detouring around stretchers, trauma tubes, and working medtechs and surgeons. Long before he injured his foot and ankle–that had been done after the fighting had ended, in a stupid accident (at least Keye considered it stupid)–his mind had been wandering. Although he had paced himself as best he could, the heat had started to get to him. If the fighting had continued for even fifteen minutes longer than it had, Keye thought that he would have been down, out of action, just from the heat. I’m too old for this crap was little comfort. Somewhere along the way between his men and the hospital, he had already decided that he really was too old to continue in a field unit. It was a job for younger men. If I can’t transfer to some sort of staff position, I’ll have to get out. It was a painful realization, more painful than his ankle. And he was certain that he would not change his mind later, when the ankle–and the heat of Tamkailo–were no more than bad memories.
Doc Eddles, Echo’s medtech, saw the captain being helped toward him, and broke away from what he was doing to go to the medic’s aid.