Captain

by Rick Shelley

  "A thousand men could hide in a field like that," Tebba Girana said over his radio link to Lon. "Long as they were still and didn't make the grain move against the wind, we'd be hard put to find them before they were ready to be found."

  "I don't think so, Tebba," Lon replied. "We've got too many lenses looking down at this whole area. We might miss them, but the sky-eyes would see them, anything bigger than a possum."

  There was a moment of silence before Girana asked, "What the hell's a possum?"

  Lon laughed. "Small marsupial from Earth. Short legs, hairless tail. Maybe a bit bigger than an overfed house-cat."

  "That where the saying 'playing possum' comes from?"

  "Yeah. Story was that they'd play dead to escape threats. More likely, they get scared and just freeze up, even in the road with a car coming. Most I saw were roadkill." Tebba must be unusually nervous, Lon thought. He doesn 't normally talk more than he has to, going into action. Lon glanced to his left. Tebba was more than fifty yards away, behind third platoon.

  Lon could pick him out only by where he was. With helmet and battledress, he could have been nearly anyone in the battalion.

  "Just like a drill, Tebba," Lon said softly. "Don't go working yourself up to an itch you can't scratch."

  Girana grunted. "I wouldn't have an itch if the fly-guys were spreading around a little metal first," he said. "Or maybe if those big shots from West's government were walking with us instead of sitting back there with their shuttle, all ready to get the hell out of here if things go bad in a hurry."

  ' "They're not soldiers, Tebba. They'd just be in the way if they were with us," Lon said.

  "Maybe so, but I'm starting to feel a little like one of those little yellow ducks in a carnival shooting gallery.

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  Knock down three and get a stuffed bear for your girl."

  "Maybe so, but remember, the sights on those shooting gallery guns are usually rigged so you're more likely to shoot yourself in the ass than hit three targets."

  Tebba didn't respond. Lon had to switch channels for a call from Captain Ortis. "Another few minutes," the captain said. "We're waiting for Bravo and Delta on the other side. When we start up we keep going until we're in town or hit enemy fire."

  "Yes, sir. We're ready." Lon switched to his all-hands channel. "We're got a couple of extra minutes waiting for the rest of the battalion. Let's keep this nice and loose. No need to tighten up. If trouble comes, you all know how to react. That means wait for an order to return fire. We still want to make nice if they'll let us. And they might. If they wanted to be nasty, we'd have had company last night, noisy company." Sounds good to me, he thought. He felt surprised that he was as calm as he was, not forced to put on an act for the men, the way he sometimes had to in the past. Even earlier this morning he had felt a little apprehensive about this mission, but no longer. His sweat was a product of heat, not nerves. Even Girana'

  s unexpected jitters had not disturbed Lon. Maybe it should have, he conceded. He's been in the business a hell of a lot longer than I have.

  The order to start moving again came. The platoons rose from the grass and started forward, rifles at port arms. Lon spent a few seconds nagging squad leaders to make

  .certain their men watched their intervals. "No bunching up," he said. It was routine "officer noise," the kind that had often annoyed him when he was on the receiving end as cadet or trainee.

  Looking ahead, even with his faceplate switched to magnify the view, Lon could see no people in the town. The place might as well have been deserted. No, they're there, someplace, Lon assured himself, waiting. He wondered if the settlers would indeed turn this into a fight, or just stall as long as possible then capitulate to save lives and avoid the destruction of their homes. A lot of the men

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  might have weapons, but they 've also got wives and children. Asking, What would I do? was unproductive. He had no wife or children. Yet. Even thoughts of Sara and marriage were not enough to let him trust his instincts on this. Fight for something I believe in, or accept the inevitable and make sure the people I love remain safe ?

  He followed his men through the grainfield. The stalks that were tramped down did not spring back afterward, but lay nearly flat, a clear sign of the passage of his soldiers, arrows showing their course and numbers. We would know if any of the enemy was lying in wait, Lon realized. We d know exactly where they were. The native grasses had shown more resilience, slowly springing back after being walked over, but not the cultivated grain. The grainheads are too heavy for the support, Lon thought. If it's not harvested on time, it would collapse under its own weight. Lon had never farmed, or kept a garden, but his mother had always grown a few tomatoes and onions. / guess I picked up some knowledge somewhere along the line, he decided.

  "Keep the pace down, Well," Lon told the fourth platoon sergeant, noticing that his part of the skirmish line was starting to get ahead of its neighbors. "This isn't a race. We want to give the locals plenty of time to think about us coming, time to decide they don't want to fight us."

  Jorgen was already dressing the line, passing the order to his squad leaders, undoubtedly more emphatically than Lon had given it to him. The line straightened quickly.

  Lon noticed a lone bird circling high overhead. It made him think of the buzzards he had often seen on Earth, circling like that in the mountains, looking for dead meat. The buzzards got to much of the roadkill. As a child, Lon had asked his father, "How come we never see dead buzzards? Don't they die?" He could not recall, at the moment, how his father had answered that.

  The skirmish line reached a point a thousand yards from the nearest buildings. Lon scanned the town again, still without seeing any human beings. "They're sure not UPIAIN

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  going to welcome us with a parade," he muttered.

  "The locals still aren't answering the radio," Matt Or-lis said a moment later. "I just had that from battalion."

  "I wish they'd say something, even if it was just, 'Go to hell,' " Lon said. "No change in the plan, is there?"

  "No change," Orlis confirmed. "One way or the other, we make them commit themselves. At seven hundred yards, the colonel wants to slow the pace even more. One step at a time, as if we knew we were moving through a minefield."

  "It's getting hot, so I guess that's better than running our tails off," Lon said, as much to himself as to the captain.

  "That's one way of looking at it."

  Lon told his platoon sergeants about the upcoming change. The line was still eight hundred yards from the first buildings.

  A good sniper would have afield day now, Lon thought. Like those ducks Tebba was worried about. He could feel his muscles start to tighten, anticipating the possible need for quick action. It still was not fear. Maybe I should be afraid. He shook his head. This wasn't the time for self-analysis.

  Seven hundred yards. Second Battalion slowed its pace. Lon scanned the near side of the town almost constantly, letting his sergeants and corporals worry about keeping the platoons in line. He caught a glint of sunlight off glass—someone peering out from the shadows behind an open window in one of the buildings. Lon mentioned the sighting to Captain Orlis.

  "It's the first hint I've seen of anyone in there," he added.

  Lon flexed his shoulders. Walking hunched over for so long had started a cramp in his back.

  His shoulders ached as well. The web straps of his pack harness felt as if they were digging into flesh, though they were too well padded far that. His platoons marched out of one field of grain aid through another plowed buffer strip (after it was Checked for mines), then into more grain. The fields did

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  not have wide separation between neat rows left for large harvesters to maneuver along—the way it was still done on Earth. The farmers would have smaller harvesters, robots that would separate grain from chaff and harvest both. No organ
ics would be wasted. The inedible portions would be fed into replicators—raw materials for foods not being grown in the area. Wild vegetation would serve that purpose just as well, but humans still liked to grow some of their own food, even food animals, no matter the arguments that it was impractical, wasteful, that replicators could do the job far more efficiently, and produce meals indistinguishable from the "real" thing.

  Five hundred yards. Lon saw more indications of human presence in the town, occasional movement, low to the ground or at the edges of windows and doorways. The settlers were there. Lon tried to figure the probabilities. How long would they wait to open fire? How disciplined were the soldiers, professionals and militiamen? When would one of the amateurs get nervous and let off the first shot? At five hundred yards, with little wind and a good firing stance, Lon could hit a ten-inch target nineteen times out of twenty. A nervous civilian would be lucky to come anywhere near a moving human at that range, even from a benchrest.

  Four hundred yards. "Quack, quack," Lon whispered after silencing his radio, beginning to feel what Tebba had felt earlier. Nerves. His palms were sweaty. One at a time, he wiped them on his clothes. / guess you're still human. They might not be sitting, but they were nearly close enough to the settlers and soldiers from Aldrin East to be standing ducks. Damn it! Do something! he thought almost angrily, a sudden surge of emotion breaking through his studied reserve. Either put up a fight or surrender.

  Two hundred yards. As the leading skirmish line hit that distance, a dozen rifles opened fire from inside the town.

  "Take cover!" Lon's order was an echo of the one that Captain Orlis gave the entire

  company. Lon went down

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  with his men, but kept his head up enough to look forward. The first shots had been farther to the right, near the junction between his fourth platoon and Charlie Company.

  Thirty seconds passed before Captain Orlis came back on the line, this time on the channel that connected him with his lieutenants and platoon sergeants. "Hold your fire. Charlie's going to reply to the group that fired on it. No one else is to get involved."

  Lon passed that order to his men as Charlie opened up. For nearly a minute, the men of Charlie poured rifle fire into a short section of the town's perimeter. Lon could not tell if the defenders were still firing, or if anyone else in the town had started. When Charlie Company stopped firing, there seemed to be silence around the settlement, but after a few seconds Lon noted that there was some scattered fire coming out, not coordinated, and not close.

  "We're going in," Captain Orlis told his lieutenants. "Fire and maneuver. Two squads move while the other two provide the covering fire. I don't want wild shooting. We don't want a lot of civilian casualties. Tell your men to be careful and look for targets when possible, and to keep their aim narrowed to the areas where the enemy shooters are."

  Lon passed on the orders and his platoons waited for the command to advance. The entire battalion would resume the constricting movement, tightening the ring around the settlers and the soldiers who were supposed to protect them.

  That defense remained sporadic. Occasionally defenders along one section would provide a concerted effort, but never for long, and the fighting never became general. The Eastmen who had settled on territory claimed by their rivals hunkered down under the fire of the approaching mercenaries.

  The leading squads of 2nd Battalion were still 150 yards out when the order was passed to fix bayonets. t's it, for certain, Lon thought as he attached his bay-124

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  onet to the muzzle of his rifle. We're going all the way in.

  "Halt the advance!" Captain Orlis ordered. Lon's men stopped in their tracks. They had scarcely had time to get their bayonets fixed. "Cease firing. Dress the line and keep the men down, alert. There's something going on. The settlers finally want to talk."

  ft's about time, Lon thought. / hope they're ready to call it quits and this isn 't just a stalling tactic.

  He did not worry as the wait extended past the first minutes. He was wilting to let the Eastmen take all the time they wanted as long as the result was peaceful. "Get a drink and keep your eyes open,'' he told his men. ' 'Hard telling how long we're going to be here." He took water himself, first a sip, then a longer drink. It wasn't noon yet and the temperature was already near a hundred degrees. Water was vital. Dehydration could drop a man in his tracks.

  Ten minutes passed. Twenty. From habit, Lon had noted the time of the order. And when his radio came to life again, he glanced at his helmet timeline again.

  "This is Colonel Black," the familiar voice said. "Stay alert, just in case, but it looks as if the fighting is over. We're wailing for the representatives of Aldrin West to join us, and then we're going to get up and walk right in."

  / hope, Lon thought, closing his eyes for just an instant. / hope it's not just a trick.

  Alpha Company was chosen to escort Colonel Black and the Wester government team. The rest of the battalion remained outside the town that the residents called Hope. Lon got his first close look at the supposedly civilian representatives of Aldrin West on the march into the settlement. There were twelve men. Six were described as police officers. They appeared military to Lon, even though they wore civilian clothing. Of the other six, the men chosen to begin West's administration of the captured settlement, Lon was certain that at least two were also military, officers of long service. They had the look, the bearing, of

  professional soldiers.

  "Keep your eyes open," Lon told his men as they started moving into Hope. "If this is some kind of trick, we need to be ready. No doping off."

  The town of Hope consisted of two dozen public buildings—commercial, industrial, and so forth—surrounded by more than two hundred residences, most with extensive yards and gardens. Lon looked closely at the buildings. The "new" had certainly worn off. Most had been constructed with plascrete and resin-based composites that could be nanofactured onsite to specification, but a large minority were built of wood, and all of those showed signs of weathering. Orchards planted in some yards had trees that were old enough to bear fruit.

  The center of the community was a large plaza. It was unpaved, and the &ass was brown and sparse.

  "This town has definitely been here more than a year Or two," Lon commented on the radio channel that con-125

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  nected him with his platoon sergeants. "Look at it. I wouldn't be surprised if it's been here ten years."

  "Half that, at least, Lieutenant," Weil Jorgen said. ' 'Those apple trees on the left have to be that old or older. Nobody transplants or replicates them more than a year old."

  It was no surprise to see trees and plants that naturally flourished in temperate climates doing well in tropical heat. Most terran flora that had been taken to new worlds had been modified for conditions wherever they were introduced. That had been going on since the start of the human diaspora. Genetic engineering, and the nanotech-nology that allowed people to replicate goods from patterns—atom by atom—had been as vital to mankind's expansion as the mastery of Q-space.

  The company of regular soldiers was drawn up in formation in the plaza, wearing soft caps instead of battle helmets. Their weapons had been carefully stacked twenty yards from the front rank of soldiers, flanking a flagpole that carried what Lon took to be the standard of Aldrin East—a white field with blue and red diagonals, surmounted by a golden sun. The officers stood in front of their men. Off to the left there was another series of pyramidal stacks of rifles. Those, Lon assumed, belonged to the militia, the "civilian" volunteers. But there was no formation of that unit. We won't find any records saying who belonged either, Lon guessed. I'd bet anything those were destroyed to make sure there were no reprisals.

  That would leave a cadre of trained men in the community, even if the regular army unit was taken out. / bet they've got more weapons and ammunition cached somewhere the Westers
will never find. It was the obvious ploy. And Hope appeared to have been too carefully planned to miss that preparation.

  A few civilians stood near the commander of the army unit, apparently the leaders of the municipal government. A few other civilians were visible on the fringes of the plaza, and in windows and doorways overlooking it. Most of the civilians were too far away for Lon to read facial

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  expressions, but the nearest looked sullen and angry.

  "They may have surrendered, but they don't look beaten," Lon commented. Tebba grunted.

  Weil did not reply at all.

  Colonel Black had the company form up facing the defenders, just like regimental parade back on Diligent.

  "Nolan, come with me," Captain Orlis said. "Leave your rifle with one of your men. Hoper, you've got the company until I return." As Orlis and Lon moved forward, to stand behind Colonel Black and his headquarters staff, Orlis told Lon what was going on via private link.

  "We're here to make show. The colonel wants all of the company commanders and their

  junior lieutenants up close for the ceremony. The others are hurrying in from their posts around the town, so we've got a minute or two. We don't have to break our necks."

  "What about West's people?" Lon asked.

  Orlis gestured to the left with his head. "According to the deal that Colonel Black struck with the locals, their soldiers are going to surrender to us rather than to West. I don't know the details. The civilians will remain to the side for now. The idea is, Hope and its defenders surrender to us and we turn control over to West."

  "A way for the locals to save face?"

  ' 'Maybe they just hate West too much to do it any other way."

  The soldiers of East remained at attention while the mercenary officers assembled. Alpha Company was also at attention, and Colonel Black brought his gathered officers to that position as well once all of them had gathered.

  "We'll move forward, halfway," Black informed the officers. "Their commander and senior officers will meet us there. Let's give them a proper show."