The Far Stars War

by David Drake

  * * *

  We used most of the afternoon reaching the caves we had chosen from the mapboards on the Cardigan. The survey team that first explored Grenadier did a first-rate mapping job. Liri, and Jacobs in Alpha Squad, had been on the survey team. That’s always been one of the regiment’s sidelines, finding and surveying new worlds. Sometimes that gets even hairier than combat.

  The cave entrance was nearly two meters wide, but barely high enough to crawl through without taking off our packs. Liri and I went in first.

  “Don’t switch on your visor until we’re inside,” I told him. The limestone and dirt would block any Gerin scanners, even if they were locked right on the cave formation.

  “I’m not happy about sticking my head in a hole without knowing what’s in there,” Liri said.

  “You think I am?” I asked.

  We slithered in for nearly three meters before the cave opened up enough to let us stand. That first chamber was only about six meters in diameter, but it would do. Two narrow passages led deeper, but exploration could wait. At least the cave didn’t seem to be inhabited by anything large enough to contest occupancy with us.

  “Stay here,” I told Liri. “Rig a baffle behind the entrance. A couple of field blankets. Then you can light a candle.” I crawled back out to let the captain know that the place would do. We started the others moving inside. After the captain was sliding in, I grabbed Ace Reynolds and Purl Jacobs and stayed out till the end.

  “You two set up in the entrance,” I told them. “You’ve got the first watch. Passive scans only.”

  The cave wasn’t all that homey, but it would do for the time we needed it, once we exterminated the little nippers that infested it. We had electric candles for light and didn’t even have to worry too much about keeping quiet. We settled in to wait. This time for three days.

  “Let’s take a look at the mapboard, Ian,” the captain said as soon as I got back inside after posting our sentries. He rarely calls me Ducks when there are others around. He knows I’m sensitive about it.

  “Right, Cap. Let me get people looking around first.”

  I grabbed two guys to check each of the passages leading out the back of the room—we couldn’t leave them forever, and one would have to be designated latrine before much longer—then I went back to the captain. He was sitting against a wall, mapboard on his knees. I dropped my pack and sat on it, close enough to see what we had to work with.

  “The new pictures look good,” he said.

  A mapboard is a dedicated computer with a flatscreen monitor that folds to make it convenient to carry. You can start with a view of the whole world as it appears from space, clear as looking out a ship’s port, showing rotation and everything, then zoom in to the most detailed scale available for that world. The original survey of Grenadier gave us 1.5-meter detail for all landmasses. Coming in this time, the mapboards were netted into the ranging and navigation systems of all the shuttles to give us updates and more detail. I watched while the captain scrolled around the area of the Gerin complex and out to where we were hiding.

  “Looks like seventy-five-centimeter resolution for almost the whole area,” I said after a few minutes. Only a few small strips still showed the lighter shading of 1.5 meter. “That should make it a little easier for us;”

  “If anything can,” the captain said softly.

  I got out my own mapboard and slaved it to his. I was getting a crick in my neck looking over the captain’s shoulder. The Gerin had one large concrete building, single-story, right on the water’s edge at the back of a tiny cove on the western coast. The cove was fed by a shallow small river and by a couple of even smaller creeks. There was one gun emplacement at the ocean end of the cove and another back by the building, both right down by the high-water marks.

  “You’d think they never heard of high ground,” I mumbled.

  “They must have it staked out somehow,” the captain said. “Observation posts, weapons, even if it’s just automatic systems.”

  We had plenty of time to examine the new shots on the mapboard, and we eventually spotted a couple of points on the slopes upstream, automated gun emplacements. And one strip of underbrush along the river and the south side of the cove had been cleared and leveled for use as a landing strip. We’d known about that coming in. The raiding party had been warned against damaging it.

  “They can’t have much of a force here, Captain,” I said after we spent several hours on the mapboards. “Maybe no more than a half-dozen triads on the ground now, after the raid.” About as many of them as us.

  “Don’t get any wild ideas, Ian. We’re not here to capture Grenadier all by our lonesome, and don’t forget, they’ve got a ship overhead.”

  “I know, Cap, but still ...”

  “But nothing. You know what we’re here for.”

  “Aye, sir.” I knew what we were there for, that is, what we were supposed to do, but I sure as hell didn’t know why. The captain didn’t either. Our briefings carefully skirted any mention of motive. I could see that. What we didn’t know we couldn’t be forced to tell if we were captured. Stripped of all the dotting-of-i’s and crossing-of-t’s that a fun briefing includes, we were to set up observation points and keep out of sight, monitor Gerin activities, learn whatever we could about how they did things, and try to discover what they were doing on Grenadier. Intelligence had several guesses and hoped we’d provide the raw data to remove the question marks. Was Grenadier merely a resort for some Gerin warlord? Was it being set up as an R&R facility? Was some important conference going to take place there? Or was it something else, maybe something so alien that our people couldn’t even guess at it?

  That was the what. The why had to be extremely important—at least to the staff-level geniuses who’d dreamed up the operation. To cut loose two cruisers from a fleet that never had enough ships as it was and risk them on a raid that was only cover to drop eighteen of us into the jungle behind the Gerin . . . well, I hoped it was for something more important than to settle a bet between a couple of intelligence analysts.

  One other topic was carefully avoided during our briefings, the question of when we would be picked up. We were carrying food for six weeks, if we stretched it, but nothing had been said about how close to that limit, or how far beyond it, we might have to go. Another safeguard, I guess, and not for us. If someone was captured and forced to talk, knowing when our pickup was due would give the Gerin a chance to ambush the ships that came in. I don’t think that Colonel Gregory would send us in without definite plans to retrieve us. A mercenary doesn’t waste men like that. I hoped the colonel was still thinking like a merc.

  * * *

  Seventy-two standard hours after we entered the cave, Bravo Squad was back outside ready to march again. Because of Grenadier’s shorter day, it was dawn rather than late afternoon.

  “See you at pickup, Cap,” I said before I crawled out to join the squad.

  “Don’t be late.” He hesitated a moment, then stuck out a hand and we shook. We had served together a lot of years. He had gone from cadet lieutenant to captain while I climbed from corporal to company lead sergeant. The handshake was an admission that this might be the last time we’d be together. I didn’t like the feeling it gave me.

  “We’ll be three hours behind you, Ducks,” the captain said. I just nodded. That was safer than talking. The time lag wasn’t anything major. Bravo Squad simply had farther to travel to get into position. We had the south side of the cove. The captain was taking Alpha Squad along the north side—where the Gerin building and our cave were. If we had to do any fighting when our ships came back, Alpha would tackle the barracks, or whatever it was, and Bravo would secure the landing strip for our shuttles.

  After I crawled out of the cave, I stood up and stretched as far as I could. It felt good to be outside after three days in the cave. My muscles were cramped from being in the damp
and unable to move around freely for so long. I started Ace on point and we went upstream for a klick, farther away from the Gerin, before we turned right, south. If we happened to be spotted—not that it was very likely while we were so far off and not moving toward the Gerin post—I didn’t want to give away the location of our cave. That wasn’t entirely because Alpha squad was still inside. We might need to use the cave again before we got off Grenadier.

  By the time we made our second turn, back west toward the ocean, I had decided that I didn’t much care for Grenadier, Gerin or no Gerin. All the native animals had too many legs. It looked like bugs were the evolutionary progenitors of everything that moved. Even the birds had six or eight legs. The original survey of Grenadier hadn’t gone into much detail about animals. The sightings the team made had been listed, but there was no systematic inventory. And we sure didn’t have time now. We couldn’t be sure which animals were dangerous and which weren’t. That meant that we had to use weapons several times.

  “Beamers only,” I warned. “And no skying a shot, nothing that shows above the trees.” There was still a chance of discovery, but unless the Gerin were still actively searching for people left behind after the raid, they wouldn’t be scanning close enough to get the backwash of our helmet electronics or the odd beamer flash. The garrison was too small. But we couldn’t risk slugthrowers. Those can echo for kilometers, and there’s no mistaking them for something else, not on an undeveloped planet like Grenadier.

  Liri was on point when we reached the river that led down to the cove. The river made me nervous, even though we were fifteen kilometers from the Gerin post. Water was one place where the Gerin had us hands, or tentacles, down. Amphibs. They were as much at home in water as on land, more so, according to some reports.

  “It’s not deep,” Liri said. I nodded. This far above the cove, the mapboard didn’t show anything deeper than a meter. It wasn’t much deeper than that at the mouth.

  “There’s nothing close bigger’n a mackerel,” Ace said after he dropped a monitor in the stream.

  Still, we crossed in two elements. I wanted some of us on dry ground all the time. Liri took his fire team across first. I followed with Ace and the other team. We got across and moved on.

  Hiking wet is miserable, but the next hour gave us time to dry out as much as we were likely to. We were almost on Grenadier’s equator. The day was hot and humid. We did a lot of sweating.

  “Must be a law against fighting a war where it’s comfortable,” Ace whispered when we took five beyond the next low ridgeline, after making our turn west. Ace’s mouth ran too much at the wrong times. That was why he was still a corporal instead of a platoon sergeant, though he was as qualified as any man in the regiment otherwise. He liked to brag about it when he was drinking. “I wise off enough to keep ‘em from promoting me, but not enough so’s they got to bust. I like it where I am just fine.” When I mentioned that to the captain, he laughed and said he had a mind to promote Ace just to prove him wrong.

  Liri tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to the pocket where I keep my mapboard. I pulled it out. Liri unfolded it and zoomed the controls down in a hurry, putting our position at one edge of the board and the Gerin base at the other. He drew his finger along the screen, tracing a route toward where we wanted to go. Then he raised his hand, flipping the palm to make it a question. I nodded. Liri didn’t talk when he didn’t have to on an operation. He was already on the list for platoon sergeant, next opening in the company. With a big war on, that probably wouldn’t be long.

  * * *

  Hiis took the point after our second break, a couple of hours later. We had a low ridge between us and the river. We were getting close to the cove. Not long after we started up with Hiis in front, he stopped and brought his fist up quickly. The rest of us froze in place, weapons at the ready, senses cranked up as we looked for telltales on our helmet visors. There was no sign of Gerin or anything else, but I waited for Hiis to work his way back to me. He pointed at the ground five meters past where he had stopped. I needed a minute to see what he had spotted—something like a small pipe sticking up about four centimeters. I looked around to make sure that everyone was paying attention, then brought a hand up to the side of my head, thumb over my ear, little finger over my eye, so they would know why we had stopped. I used hand signs to get everyone to look around to make sure that we hadn’t walked into the middle of a full spotter array.

  I didn’t know how sensitive Gerin equipment was. Our perimeter monitors can pick up the vibration of a single footstep ten meters off, and the cameras transmit visible and infrared pictures.

  Hiis tapped me on the shoulder, then put his hand to the sides of his eyes like blinders and looked down toward the creek. Then he put his hand over his ears, angled the same way, and mouthed, Directional pickup. I nodded even though it didn’t make much sense.

  When nobody found any other spotters, I pointed Hiis off at an angle, above the spotter he found. That took us off the animal track we had been following, but slow progress through the bush was better than announcing ourselves to the Gerin. Once we were far enough above the spotter to be safe, I passed the word to be extra careful looking for more of the little buggers. Even if Gerin didn’t use the same kind of array we would, I couldn’t believe that there would be only one.

  “They’re only interested in things moving down low, by the creek,” Liri whispered when we were a little farther off. “We’da had spotters aimed along the trail, where people would be.” I hesitated. One thing that gets drummed into you early is to always expect the enemy to do the smartest thing in any situation, to be at least as savvy as you.

  “They don’t have any idea that there might be people here?” I whispered. Liri nodded. That was what we had been hoping all along, that they wouldn’t even suspect that we were peeking over their shoulders—or whatever they have. I didn’t bother to voice the questions that remained. Why have sensors out at all then? Was it just routine? Or was it that the Gerin didn’t understand us any better than we understood them?

  We moved more slowly after our brush with the spotter, looking for more. But we didn’t see any and no Gerin came rushing out to intercept us. Maybe there only was the one, crazy as that seemed.

  An hour after noon, local time, we planted the first of our spotters on the ridge overlooking the cove and the Gerin installation and moved on to plant two more. Since we planned to stick around to monitor them, we used remote-control binoculars with attached microphones. Even less shows above ground than with the Gerin spotter. Two fiber-optic stalks with one-millimeter lenses and directional mikes are left just barely above ground. The rest of the apparatus is buried except for the knob of the transmitting antenna, and that is scarcely as big as one of the lenses. Then the observers can move back to safer ground, anywhere within line of sight of the transmitter—up to about five-hundred meters. The transmitters are very low-power to minimize the chance of detection. Our three snoops looked down at the cove, the landing strip, and the barracks. We spaced them three-hundred meters apart along the ridge, then moved into positions on the opposite slope, above the next creek.

  After putting normal perimeter bugs behind us and in each direction along our valley, we split up into two fire teams and dug in about fifty meters apart. Each team’s trench was covered with field blankets to shield us from IR detection. Then—again—we settled in to wait. We made our trenches as comfortable as we could. We had no idea how long they would be home.

  The active spotters on the ridge would run constantly, feeding everything they saw and heard into a computer pack for later analysis. We also monitored the feed to keep track of what the Gerin were doing. By slaving a spotter to our helmet electronics, we could scan as easily as holding a pair of binoculars to our eyes—left, right, up, down. The thin fiber-optic stalks were a lot less likely to be spotted than a head poking up in the same place.

  * * *

  Nig
ht came before I was ready for it. We had our essential work done, but I wasn’t acclimated to Grenadier’s shorter days yet. In the cave, we hadn’t worried about the local cycle. I didn’t sleep much at all, and I was awake to stay well before dawn. That’s rare for me. A soldier has to be able to sleep whenever and wherever possible. But not that night. I’d doze for a few minutes, then wake, take a look at what our spotters were seeing—nothing, mostly—and take forever to doze off again. I guess we all had trouble sleeping. Although we rotated sentry duty in each fire team, there was usually more than one person awake. I finally gave up and lifted a corner of the field blanket to stare at the sky, hoping to cool off a little. The insulated blankets keep us from showing up on IR scanners, but the insulation also makes them hotter than blazes to hide under in tropical heat.

  The brief flash I saw in the west might have been a meteor. Then a second flash, almost overlapping the first. Okay, maybe two meteors, close together and coming from the same swarm. It was possible, but somehow I doubted it. I used my helmet radio to whisper the others awake, then checked our spotters to make sure that nothing was going on at the landing strip or over by the Gerin barracks.

  “You think that’s our pickup?” Liri asked skeptically. “Can’t be,” I replied. We both whispered even though there didn’t seem to be any Gerin stirring. It didn’t make sense to pick us up so soon, not after everything that had been staged to put us into position. “It could be just about anything,” I added, still linked to the spotters. I switched from one remote to the next.

  Lights went on around the landing strip, diffuse panels that glowed more than shine. “Gerin traffic coming in,” I whispered. Three shuttles landed, one right behind the other, as close as if they were on a combat run. Five Gerin triads hurried out of each shuttle as soon as it braked to a stop near the end of the landing strip.