The Far Stars War

by David Drake

  What bothered me, and I could see it bothered the captain, was that the fighters didn’t come back and blow us all to shreds while all this unloading went on. We weren’t slow about it; we were humping stuff into cover as fast as we could. But it wasn’t natural for those fighters to make that one pass over the strip and then leave a downed shuttle alone. They had to know they’d missed—that the shuttle was intact and might have live marines inside. All they’d done was blow a couple of holes in the strip, making it tough for anyone else to land there until it was fixed. They had to be either stupid or overconfident, and no one yet had accused the Gerin of being stupid. Or of going out of their way to save human lives. I had to wonder what else they had ready for us.

  Whatever it was, they let us alone for the next couple of standard hours, and we got everything moved away from the strip, into a little sort of cleft between two of the hills. I wasn’t there: I was working my way to the summit, as quietly as possible, with a five-man team.

  We’d been told the air was breathable, which probably meant the green stuff was photosynthetic, although it was hard to tell stems from leaves on the scrub. I remember wondering why anything a soldier has to squirm through is full of thorns, or stings on contact, or has sharp edges . . . a biological rule no one yet has published a book on, I’ll bet. Caedmon’s scrub ran to man-high rounded mounds, densely covered with prickly stiff leaves that rustled loudly if we brushed against them. Bigger stuff sprouted from some of the mounds, treelike shapes with a crown of dense foliage and smooth blackish bark. Between the mounds a fine, gray-green fuzz covered the rocky soil, not quite as lush as grass but more linear than lichens. It made my nose itch and my eyes run, and I’d had my shots. I popped a broad-spectrum anti-allergen pill and hoped I wouldn’t sneeze.

  Some people say hills are the same size all the time, but anyone who’s ever gone up a hill with hostiles at the top of it knows better. It’s twice as high going uphill into trouble. If I hadn’t had the time readout, I’d have sworn we crawled through that miserable prickly stuff for hours. Actually, it was less than half a standard when I heard something click, metal on stone, ahead of us. Above and ahead, invisible through the scrub, but definitely something metallic, and therefore—in this situation—hostile. Besides, after DuQuesne, we knew the Gerin would’ve wiped out any humans from the colony. I tongued the comcontrol and clicked a warning signal to my squad. They say a click sounds less human—maybe. We relied on it, anyhow, in that sort of situation. I heard answering clicks in my earplug. Lonnie had heard the noise, too (double-click, then one is his response), which figured. Lonnie had the longest ears in our company.

  This is where your average civilian would either panic and go dashing downhill through the brush to tell the captain there were nasties up there or get all video-hero and run screaming at the Gerin, right into a beam or a slug. What else is there to do? you ask. Well, for one thing you can lie there quietly and think for a moment. If they’ve seen you, they’ve shot you—the Gerin aren’t given to patience—and if they haven’t shot you they don’t know you’re there. Usually.

  It was already strange that the Gerin fighters hadn’t come back. And if Gerin held the top of this hill—which seemed reasonable even before we went up it, and downright likely at the moment—they’d have to know we got out, and how many, and roughly where we were. And since Gerin aren’t stupid, at least at war, they’d guess someone was coming up to check out the hilltop. So they’d have some way to detect us on the way up, and they’d have held off blowing us away because they didn’t think we were a threat. Neither of those thoughts made me feel comfortable.

  Detection systems, though ... detection systems are a bitch. Some things work anywhere: motion detectors, for instance, or optical beams that you can interrupt and it sets off a signal somewhere. But that stuff’s easy enough to counter. If you know what you’re doing, if you’ve got any sort of counterhunt tech yourself, you’ll spot it and disarm it. The really good detection systems are hard to spot, very specific, and also—being that good—very likely to misbehave in combat situations.

  The first thing was to let the captain know we’d spotted something. I did that with another set of tongue-flicks and clicks, switching to his channel and clicking my message. He didn’t reply; he didn’t need to. Then I had us all switch on our own counterhunt units. I hate the things, once a fight actually starts: they weigh an extra kilo, and unless you need them it’s a useless extra kilo. But watching the flicking needles on the dials, the blips of light on the readouts, I was glad enough then. Two meters uphill, for instance a fine wire carried an electrical current. Could have been any of several kinds of detectors, but my unit located its controls and identified them. And countered them: we could crawl right over that wire, and its readout boxes wouldn’t show a thing. That wasn’t all, naturally: the Gerin aren’t stupid. But none of it was new to our units, and all of it could fail—and would fail, with a little help from us.

  Which left the Gerin. I lay there a moment longer wondering how many Gerin triads we were facing. Vain as they are, it might be just one warrior and his helpers, or whatever you want to call them. Gerin think they’re the best fighters in the universe, and they can be snookered into a fight that way. Admiral Mac did it once, and probably will again. It would be just like their warrior pride to assign a single Gerin triad to each summit. Then again, the Gerin don’t think like humans, and they could have a regiment up there. One triad we might take out; two would be iffy, and any more than that we wouldn’t have a chance against.

  Whatever it was, though, we needed high ground, and we needed it damn fast. I clicked again, leaned into the nearest bush; and saw Lonnie’s hand beyond the next one. He flicked me a hand signal, caught mine, and inched forward.

  We were, in one sense, lucky. It was a single triad, and all they had was the Gerin equivalent of our infantry weapons: single-beam lasers and something a lot like a rifle. We got the boss, the warrior, with several rounds of rifle fire. I don’t care what they say, there’s a place for slugthrowers, and downside combat is that place. You can hit what you can’t see, which lasers can’t, and the power’s already in the ammo. No worry about a discharged powerpack, or those mirrored shields some of the Gerin have used. Some navy types keep wanting to switch all marine forces away from slug weapons, because they’re afraid we’ll go bonkers and put a hole in a cruiser hull, but the day they take my good old Belter special away from me, I’m gone. I’ve done my twenty already; there’s no way they can hold me.

  Davies took a burn from one of the warrior’s helpers, but they weren’t too aggressive with the big number one writhing on the ground, and we dropped them without any more trouble. Some noise, but no real trouble. Lonnie got a coldpak on Davies, which might limit the damage. It wasn’t that bad a burn, anyway. If he died down here, it wouldn’t be from that, though without some time in a good hospital, he might lose the use of those fingers. Davies being Davies, he’d probably skin-graft himself as soon as the painkiller cut in . . . he made a religion out of being tough. I called back to our command post to report, as I took a look around to see what we’d bought.

  From up here, maybe seventy meters 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 locatio
n and identity.

  Brightness bloomed in the zenith, and I glanced up.

  Something big had taken a hit—another shuttle? We were supposed to have two hundred 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 meters 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 knife blade, 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 on to. “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 heard 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 airplane, wings spanning about a meter, 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 a hundred meters, 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 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-color view turned into a mosaic of brilliant false colors: sulfur 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 stuff hanging 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 tires for the vehicles, wrapped around a huge flexible fuel pod. Relieved of all this load, the shuttle retrac
ted 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 got their equipment unstowed from its drop configuration and ready for use. One grader, what we called back on my homeworld a maintainer, and two earthmovers. 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.