by Rick Shelley
“On my way, Wil,” Lon whispered.
Turning his back to the unseen and uncounted enemy was difficult. It made Lon feel too exposed, too juicy a target. But he did not want to take any longer than absolutely necessary getting back among comrades. He scuttled along as quickly as he could manage without getting his butt too high for safety, ignoring the growing ache in his knees and elbows as he scrabbled along the ground. I’d need less than ten seconds to get up and sprint the distance, he thought. Maybe three minutes to crawl it like this. But Lon was not frightened enough to let himself be panicked into such a foolish attempt.
After he had covered half of the distance, Lon stopped to catch his breath and look both ways. He had not even realized that he had started to hold his breath until he had to gasp to fill his lungs. He did not see anyone from first squad, but he did not raise up more than a few inches to look. They would be there, right where they were supposed to be. Lon never doubted that. He took another deep breath, then resumed his crawl.
“I see you, Nolan,” Nace said ten seconds later. “Just keep coming, nice and easy. There’s no one in sight behind you.”
Despite the admonition and reassurance, Lon tried to crawl faster. He started panting for air but did not stop moving. He finally spotted a little of a DMC battle helmet’s camouflage pattern, no more than five feet away. I made it! Lon thought, resisting the urge to get up and lunge forward to join first squad. It was just then that the gunfire started behind him.
There was no question of it being a lone sniper this time. Dozens of rifles opened fire almost simultaneously in a ragged volley. Lon got up to his hands and knees and plunged forward, scurrying on until hands caught him from one side and pulled him down. For perhaps ten seconds then, Lon lay motionless, dragging air into aching lungs, before he could turn to face the new threat. First squad had already started to return fire.
Lon got his rifle up, but took a few seconds to scan the front before he bent to the sights and started shooting. The enemy gunfire was coming from along a fairly broad front, at least fifty yards across, and no more than 150 yards away. That might mean thirty men or sixty, and there could be many more nearby.
“We’re moving up to you,” Lieutenant Taiters said over the squad leaders’ channel. “The shuttles are on their landing run now. We’ve got to keep these bastards busy for ten minutes.”
At first, Lon had trouble holding his rifle steady, even in what should have been a rock-solid prone firing position. His hands and arms were still trembling from all of the crawling. But gradually his muscles steadied, and he moved quickly from target to target—from from one muzzle flash to the next, firing his short bursts. The routine helped to steady him, helped Lon forget the aches.
The number of enemy rifles taking part in the firefight rose. The increase was more audible than visible, but unmistakable. He heard one bullet smack into a tree trunk no more than six inches above his head and just off to the side. The bullet ripped loose bark and dropped it on his helmet. Lon shook his head and continued shooting. After seeing Dean’s creased and cracked helmet earlier, this did not even count as a near miss.
At a distance, even over the sounds of gunfire, Lon heard the two shuttles coming in for their landing—very close together. Load the wounded up fast, Lon projected. Get them up and out of the way.
Ten minutes seemed like a very long time, even though the rebels showed no hint of trying to close in on the squad, or run over them. We’re facing at least company strength opposition, Lon thought, guessed. Maybe quite a bit more. Most of the rebels were firing single shots, but not all of them. The military rifles that had been found earlier were capable of fully automatic fire. But none of the rebels seemed to have mastered the short burst. They always seemed to rattle off ten or twelve shots each time they pulled the trigger—a waste of ammunition to any professional.
“I had a man spending ammo that way without good reason, I’d make him pay for his own bullets,” Corporal Nace mumbled over a channel to Lieutenant Taiters.
“Maybe there’s a reason they’re not afraid of running out,” Taiters replied. “The loyalists have learned not to waste. They haven’t had anything to waste.”
“Sir, those weapons we captured, the military ones, do we know where they came from?” Lon asked.
“They were made on Hanau, but that’s not necessarily where the rebels got them. Don’t worry about that, Nolan. It can’t make any difference to us.”
The volume of enemy fire increased again. There appeared to be at least a doubling of the number of weapons engaged. “They know about the shuttles,” Nace said. “Looks like they want to get close enough to get a piece of them.”
He had scarcely stopped talking when the rebels started moving in against the lone Dirigenter platoon. The Norbankers did show some basic knowledge of fire-and-maneuver tactics—using half of their men to cover the other half as they got up and moved a few steps closer before dropping to cover, one group leapfrogging the other—but their local manpower advantage was so large that it was scarcely important.
The mercenary platoon kept the enemy advance slow—and costly. Four dozen men with automatic rifles, beamers, and grenade launchers took a fierce toll on the frontal attack. Each time a group of Norbanker rebels got up to advance, there were fewer than the time before. But the rebels had started out with a lot more men than one platoon could pit against them, and despite heavy losses, they kept coming. Lon Nolan had no way to be certain, but after the shuttles landed and the rebels appeared to put all of their resources into the attack, he guessed that the platoon was facing at least six hundred men—the equivalent of three DMC companies. That meant twelve-to-one odds.
We can’t stop them all Some of them are going to reach us unless they quit trying, Lon thought—and he could think of nothing that was liable to make them quit soon enough. He emptied one forty-round magazine, then a second. The leading elements of the rebel attack were within sixty yards of the platoon, and the Dirigenters had started taking casualties.
Lon was only vaguely aware of the talk going on among the noncoms. He did not keep track of the numbers—seven dead and twelve wounded so far, more than a third of the platoon. There was no time for bookkeeping. He had little time for anything but shooting, and one tortured thought: How much longer are those shuttles going to be on the ground?
“Fix bayonets!” Taiters ordered. The shouted command startled Lon enough to throw off his aim. He reached for the bayonet on his belt with his left hand, attempting to line up his next target and shoot one-handed at the same time. The rebels were close enough that they were hard to miss, even like that. The Dirigenters who were still able to got their bayonets—eight-inch-long, double-edged blades—mounted on their rifles, and got ready for the face-to-face fight.
Lon heard the roar of attack shuttles taking off, accelerating quickly into a steep climb. But the Norbanker rebels did not suddenly give up their advance. They might not get a chance to shoot down the landers, but they still had one small group of outlanders they could overrun and destroy.
I guess we’ve had it, Lon thought. There was no emotion to the realization. Death might be imminent, but until it came, he still had work to do. Right next to him, Wil Nace’s head was thrown back, and then the corporal collapsed over onto his right side, hit. Lon spared him only the briefest glance, uncertain whether the squad leader was dead or wounded. Very soon, it would probably make no difference.
Another forty-round magazine was empty. Lon scarcely had time to get another magazine loaded, the first round slammed into the chamber. But he did not resume firing the rifle. Instead, he pulled his pistol and used that. The rebels were within forty yards, close enough for the pistol. Lon squeezed off the fourteen rounds the semiautomatic pistol held, coolly aiming each shot, then dropped that weapon to take up the rifle again.
There was no longer any great advantage to firing the rifle on full automatic. Lon moved the selector to single shots. The enemy was close enough that he cou
ld have thrown the bullets and been sure of hitting an enemy with each one. The faces of the rebels were clearly visible, most distorted by intense emotion—anger, fear, or some fey humor. Lon was up off of his stomach, kneeling behind a skinny tree trunk. He heard bullets smack into the wood more than once, felt heated air as one round whizzed past him with less than an inch to spare.
But those barely impinged on Lon’s awareness. He was caught up in what he had already subconsciously accepted as his own Götterdämmerung. The universe had closed in like a Q-Space bubble to encompass only the area enclosing Lon and the men who would likely kill him. And time had ceased to maintain its orderly progression from present to future.
Like a machine programmed to kill and unaware of its own mortality, Lon went about his work with cold precision. He noted a searing flash through his left shoulder but not the ensuing pain. He did not realize that he had been struck by a bullet, or that he was bleeding. His concentration was too intense, his focus too narrow. He continued to fire his rifle, hardly noticing that his left hand could no longer grip the weapon, that the arm had dropped to his side, useless.
No more than twenty men of the fourth platoon were still able to fire. The enemy—less numerous than earlier—was moving in slowly. At close range, it would not take them long to finish the job.
Then a new sound entered Lon Nolan’s universe—the metallic, grating noise of shuttle Gatlings being fired. He was not certain whether he dove for cover or was knocked to the ground by a bullet. There was no pain, but by the time he hit the dirt, there was no awareness either.
16
Death smelled like a hospital, with cloying, antiseptic odors permeating everything. Distant noises were swamped by their own echoes, indistinguishable, unimportant, beyond full awareness. There were no sights, nothing but a dark limbo populated only by ghostly retinal images, or imaginings, flickering amorphous shapes in dark purples or greens, morphing from one fantastic appearance to the next, teasing the mind to find familiar silhouettes in the shapeless blobs.
This must be hell, trying to drive me crazy. That was the first coherent thought in Lon’s return from the abyss. Death was assumed, unquestioned. There was Self without non-Self There was only the thought, without accompanying images, abstractions beyond representation—a universe without matter, and with little energy.
Through subjective eons there was nothing more, not even cognition of passing time or wonder at the lack of substance to existence. Lon’s mind took no special notice of its own—apparent—survival. He gave no thought to future or past, for those concepts did not currently exist for him. Nor was he aware of the lacunae in his tightly circumscribed experience, the recurrent voids, each shorter than those that came before.
Slowly, there was one almost subconscious image. Lon was nearly aware of floating in liquid, secured in some sort of womb. After another passage of nontime, light entered his universe—harsh, bright light—and he felt the circulation of cool air against his cheeks. One layer of muffling was removed from the faraway sounds that he was finally, almost, aware of. Then he felt his chest move as he sucked in air. Awareness was not a flood but a growing trickle of sensory input.
There was an era of discovery as Lon’s body gradually made its presence known, encapsulating his awareness, his consciousness. Only slowly did outside referents intrude. Memory was the last constituent to arrive and find its place.
Memory … .
Lon found his mind catapulted back to the climax of the battle, to the last rush of Norbanker rebels. They were so close that he could almost have spit on them. And the rattle of Gatling gunfire, the roar of an attack shuttle passing overhead, low, fast, emptying thousands of rounds of ammunition in the few seconds that it could have been in range before roaring skyward on a burn-to-orbit and rendezvous with Long Snake.
Recalling the name of the ship triggered associations in Lon’s still-expanding mind-universe. He opened his eyes, intuitively certain that he had to be aboard the ship, in its dispensary, its hospital ward.
I’m alive. He experienced a feeling of wonder, surprise, at that revelation. It was impossible but undeniable. His view was restricted to what he could see directly in front of his eyes, above him. He could not move his head—or anything else—and his field of vision was bordered by a rectangular opening not far from his face. Ceiling lights surrounded by a light gray field—the color of walls and ceilings aboard Long Snake.
He blinked.
“Take it easy, son,” a voice said from behind, above Lon’s head. “You’re going to be fine. It’ll just take a few more seconds to flush the last of the repair units from your system. Just relax, and wait.”
Waiting was easy for Lon … since he had no choice. He could move only his eyelids and eyes, and the eyes did not seem inclined to obey directions. His mind was beginning to function at something near normal, though, and he had enough to think about. He was obviously in a trauma tube in the ship’s dispensary. He was also at the end of his treatment, which meant that he had likely been in the tube for at least two hours, more likely four. The molecular repair units had finished repairing whatever damage had been done to him in the firefight.
I was shot, he realized, and then, more than once. He recalled the first wound, in his arm, or shoulder. He had no memory at all of the second wound, the one that had robbed him of consciousness. It took a moment to reassemble his final memories of the battle, the nearness of the enemy, men falling on both sides of him—and the roar of an attack shuttle giving them belated support. At first Lon did not notice when the lid of the trauma tube was lifted and one side lowered. There were two men standing next to him, watching him. One wore the insignia of a surgeon. The other was an enlisted rating, a medical orderly.
“You can get up now,” the doctor said. “Good as new. There was no serious neurological damage.”
The orderly helped Lon to sit and then stand, and remained close, ready to catch the patient if he started to fall. There was often a brief period of disorientation and dizziness for a patient coming out of a tube. Lon felt the vertigo, but he had planted his feet well apart, and leaned back against the edge of the tube until it passed. He looked down at himself and saw that he was wearing nothing but a disposable hospital gown.
“Just how bad was it, doctor?” he asked, turning his head toward the surgeon—slowly. “How close did I come?”
The doctor blinked once—quite deliberately, it appeared to Lon. “You want the full details?”
“As much as I can understand.”
“Very well. There were three separate bullets. The first creased your right arm here.” He traced a line across Lon’s arm.
I didn’t even know about that, Lon thought.
“That wound was … relatively insignificant. The other two were serious. One entered here.” The doctor tapped the left side of Lon’s chest, just below the collarbone. “It fractured the clavicle, then was deflected downward, causing the left lung to collapse, and exited below the fourth rib, about three centimeters to the left of your spine. The other bullet caught you in the side, slightly below the ribs.” He poked Lon again, in the left side. “That one damaged the liver, stomach, and small intestine. There was no exit wound. The bullet was lodged against the ilium on the right side—the upper part of the hipbone. We needed a surgical probe to extract that. And between the three wounds, you lost considerable blood. If help had been a little longer getting to you … ” He shook his head.
“The others with me. How many made it?” Lon asked.
“I don’t know,” the doctor said softly. “We treated nine men. How many were uninjured, treated dirtside, or killed, I don’t know. Sorry.”
“I’ll show you where your clothes are,” the orderly said, finally stepping away from Lon. “Then you get yourself to the mess hall for a meal. After that you can worry about getting back to your unit on the ground.”
Lon nodded, and let the orderly lead him away. Once they were leaving the ward, Lon asked, “Have you h
eard anything about how things are going on the ground?”
“Just rumors. All I know for certain is that we haven’t received any additional casualties since the group you came in with. I guess that counts as good news.”
They had entered a small locker room. The orderly pointed to one of the lockers. “You’ll find your stuff in there. Most of it’s new, except for the shoes and helmet. Your weapons are in the armory.”
Lon nodded, mumbled his thanks, and opened the locker.
“You know how to find your way to your mess hall from here?” the orderly asked.
Lon hesitated before he nodded. “I think I remember.” He shrugged. “If not, I know how to use the locators.”
“Good enough. Good luck.”
Thanks, Lon thought as the orderly left. Lon stared into the locker. The battledress, underwear, and socks were new, but that would not have surprised him even without the damage his clothes had to have taken. It was simpler to recycle uniform clothing than to clean it. The boots had been cleaned, somewhat.
Lon stripped off the hospital gown and dropped it on the floor. Methodically, he pulled on clothing, first donning everything he could while standing, then sitting to pull on socks and boots. When he was finished, he picked up the hospital gown and put it in a chute designated for that purpose. The last item that Lon took out of the locker was his helmet. He carried that under his left arm as he left the locker room.
In the passageway, he looked both ways, trying to make sure that he did know exactly where he was and how to get to the A Company mess hall. He had labored over plans of Long Snake, trying to memorize everything that he might need to know about it. The ship’s dispensary was a new point of departure for him, but novelty was not an insurmountable complication. At worst, he would only have to look at the wall, down by the hatch through the nearest gastight bulkhead, to see where he was—section, level, and corridor. But after a few seconds he turned left and started walking, striding along at a solid clip, knowing that he had more than a quarter mile to go to reach the mess hall.