by Rick Shelley
Taiters stopped rubbing at his face and lowered his head so he could look at Lon with the night-vision enhancements of his visor. “I used to think that, too, but it isn’t. Look at it this way. We’re on the peak of a pyramid built of all of those battles, weapons, and tactics.” He shook his head. “No, not the peak of a pyramid—we’re part of a continuum, built on the past, with the future to be built as much on what we do as on what those other soldiers have done before. The more links of the chain you know, the easier it is to extrapolate, to improvise, when you come up against something new, or something not covered by orders.”
“Like now?” Lon asked, and Arlan nodded.
“Exactly. We’ve got the best surveillance gear in the galaxy. We can pick up a helmet’s electronics from two hundred miles out in space and take photographs from that distance with enough resolution to identify an object no larger than your hand—day or night. We have computers that can track the positions of twenty thousand individual moving traces in real time, as well as monitor and record their conversations and helmet telemetry. We can fire an MR halfway across the galaxy and know it will arrive within two hundred yards of its target. But here, up against an enemy without electronics to trace, and with a forest to hide in, we’re right back to where the Greeks and Persians were four thousand years ago, stumbling around trying to find the other guy before he finds us first and clobbers us.”
“I’d have thought that we’d be able to at least get thermal images of that many warm bodies,” Lon said. “We’ve got the advantage of infrared cameras and our own night-vision gear.”
“You know the limits of that, especially here. The basic material the Norbankers use for clothing has just enough thermal insulation to make spotting them difficult at any distance. It’s not as efficient as the stuff they make our battledress out of, but enough with the temperature conditions here.”
The men of A Company were still in their defensive positions, half of them on watch while the other half slept—or tried to. Lieutenant Taiters was “up” while his two platoon sergeants rested. Other companies were doing the scouting now, a squad here and a squad there, while one or two shuttles kept up the search from the air. It had been nearly three hours since the discovery that the rebels had moved.
Occasionally there were short bursts of gunfire, never particularly close. Each time it triggered a quick alertness in the waiting men, but turned out to be the discovery of rebels in yet another small cave. It was not clear whether those men had been sent in to snipe at the mercenaries and government forces or if they had simply been cut off from escape.
Midnight passed, then one o’clock. There was still no word from battalion headquarters. Lieutenant Taiters checked to make sure that his platoon sergeants were awake, and told them that he was going to try to get a little rest.
“You too,” he told Lon after his radio conversation with the sergeants. “Get it while you can.”
Lon lay down. He had scooped out a shallow depression under a thick tangle of brambles. (A fine nest for a paranoid, he had thought at the time.) As long as he did not try to sit up, he would be fine. He made himself as comfortable as he could under the circumstances. He left his helmet on. The webbing inside did not make a perfect pillow, but it was better than bare ground. Lon turned down the volume on his earphones and dimmed the head-up display on his visor. If an alarm came, he would be ready to respond instantly. In the meantime, sleep would ease the waiting.
But sleep would not come.
He was exhausted. His mind had slowed, his thinking dulled, the way it always was when sleep had been too long delayed. But he could not slide below something close to a trancelike state. He was aware … but not fully, neither truly awake nor asleep—almost like the way he had been aboard ship after coming out of the trauma tube. His ears continued to strain for any hint of danger. Questions continued to plague him.
Will we ever finish here? Images floated by, at the periphery of his mind, at the edge of perception. At one point he started, shivering, feeling as if he were falling, but lying on the ground in full gravity left nowhere to fall. All the episode did was drag him farther from the void of sleep.
Sleep! For a time he thought he was back at The Springs, studying for final examinations his first semester. He had stayed up all night, two nights in a row—afraid not just of not making high marks, but actually worried that he might totally bomb one or more of the tests, fail a course … and perhaps find himself washed out of the academy. The memory was so vivid that he could see the bright light of his desk lamp, feel the eyestrain caused by his complink monitor, smell the coffee he had consumed in a vain effort to maintain alertness.
“Huh?” he said, half aloud. He had thought he had heard his roommate asking a question about one of the courses. This isn’t The Springs. He looked around quickly, disoriented by the dark and the greenish cast to everything through his helmet faceplate. He needed a moment to recall where he was, and to realize that it had been Lieutenant Taiters’ voice he had heard.
“I’m awake,” Lon mumbled, trying to force himself to live up to the claim. He felt groggy, almost drugged. “What is it?”
Arlan gave him a few seconds before he said, “We’ve got orders. We’re going to move out in twenty minutes.”
“Yes, sir.” Lon started trying to sit up, only to run his helmet into the thorny vines he had camped under. He dropped back to the ground and took a deep breath. Then he slid to the side, out through the only exit his position offered. Lon took off his helmet and rubbed vigorously at his face with both hands, still trying to shake off the effects of the almost-sleep he had … suffered through. “They found the rebels?” he asked.
“Some of them, anyway,” Arlan said. “About four miles northeast of where they were before.”
Lon blinked several times as he put his helmet back on. “The terrain gets even rougher off that way, doesn’t it?”
“A little,” the lieutenant said. “It doesn’t get really bad until farther out, though. This is all just foothills stuff.”
“Were they still moving, or had they set up camp?” was Lon’s next question.
“We’ll know if they’re still there when we get there,” Arlan said. “We can’t get in position before dawn, though.”
“You mean we’re going to run a daylight attack?” The idea before had been to get into position early enough to take advantage of the dark, to hit the rebels while they would still have difficulty seeing them.
Arlan shrugged. “If the colonel’s made up his mind, he neglected to tell me. Once you get yourself pulled together, trot over to Corporal Nace. This isn’t what I had planned, but I need you to help fill the gaps in fourth platoon.”
Lon nodded.
“I’ll try to keep you filled in about what’s going on. I probably don’t need to say this, but I will anyhow. You’re still just a cadet, out of the line of command—no matter how well you’ve proved yourself.”
“Yes, sir. That’s not something I’m likely to lose sight of,” Lon said.
“I know. It’s just that we’re all tired, and tired men make mistakes. Go on, get over to Nace and see where he wants you.”
Even with the addition of Lon, Nace’s squad was still four men short. Every squad in fourth platoon was shorthanded, but first squad had suffered the worst casualties. Wil Nace put Nolan between Tarn Hedley and Owl Whitley, and—most of the time—kept the three of them in the middle of the squad.
“It’s not that I don’t trust your abilities,” Nace told Lon on a private channel. “I’ve seen you in action. I know that you know your stuff. It’s just … well, I don’t want to lose an officer cadet who’s ready to get his pips, not if there’s any way to avoid it without putting the rest of the squad in extra jeopardy. That’s laying it on the line.”
“I appreciate the honesty, Wil, and you’ll have my fullest cooperation. I don’t want to lose me either.” Between them, they managed about half a chuckle.
Captain Orlis held a sho
rt conference with his officers and noncoms. Lon shared Corporal Nace’s mapboard while the captain outlined the plan. Second Battalion would move in two elements, a mile apart, following parallel tracks toward the northeast in an effort to outflank the rebels. Somewhat behind the mercenaries, the local militia would come up in the center, with just enough of the Dirigenters to maintain communications.
“Are we going to put people in behind the rebels to keep them boxed in?” Lieutenant Hoper asked.
There was a pause before Orlis said, “No. If they want to keep retreating, we let them. Colonel Flowers insisted on that, even though the government wants us to do to this batch what we did to the others. If we drive them off, too far away to be an immediate threat to the capital, that gives us time to give the militia some real training, get them to the point where they’re not as dangerous to us as they are to the rebels.”
I don’t think that’s the only thing the colonel has on his mind, Lon thought. With the militia in the center the way they are, they’ll be coming straight up the valley at the rebels. If we attack after daylight, they’ll take heavy casualties. He was hesitant to ascribe motives to the colonel, but it looked like one more way to prevent wholesale slaughter of the surviving rebels after the battalion left Norbank.
Alpha and Bravo companies were on the left flank, Alpha in front. Its first platoon provided advance scouts. Second and third platoons took turns on point. Fourth was not purposely excluded. Its turn would have come next. There just was not time for them to rotate to the front. After third had been on point for fifty minutes, the advance was halted. One of the patrols had come upon a rebel outpost. The three men in the outpost were killed—silently, two by a beamer and the third by a knife across the throat.
We’ve got to be close, Lon told himself when he received the news from Lieutenant Taiters. Amateurs wouldn’t put sentries out farther than easy shouting distance. He cranked the volume up on his helmet’s external microphones. Someone will hear something. Lon knew how good the Corps’ sound detection gear was. On Dirigent, during a field exercise, he had picked up the local equivalent of a squirrel biting open a nut at ninety yards, gnawing his way in and then chewing the nut meat. It had taken him some time to figure out what the noise had been, using his helmet’s pickups like direction finders, then scanning the vector until he spotted the only possible target.
Alpha Company was ordered to hold its position, to switch into a skirmish line facing up the slope to its right. “Look for caves,” Captain Orlis ordered, “but be quiet about it, and try to handle any enemy you find the same way.”
Two openings were found along the company’s new front, but both were vacant of anything larger than a scaly creature the size of a house cat. The men who found that unknown animal decided to leave it alone. Its teeth appeared fearsome.
Dawn was near. Even with his visor up, Lon could pick out shapes on the forested slope above him. We’ll never get close enough to the main body of the rebels in secret, he thought. Although there might be rebel patrols on the ridge atop this slope, the main body was—or was believed to be—another ridge over. Even when Alpha got to the top of this hill the enemy would be more than two hundred yards away, within range of rifles and beamers, but beyond the range of the grenade launchers that one man in each squad carried.
As long as they keep their heads down and don’t do anything stupid, we’ll still have to go in after them, Lon thought. In daylight, that could be suicidal, depending on how much—or how little—cover there was between this ridge and the next. And the Corps doesn’t believe in suicide missions. So the colonel must have something else in mind, he reasoned. He shook his head then, recalling the Norbanker militia advancing along the valley, moving directly toward the rebels. It can’t be that; Flowers can’t intend to use three companies of militia as sacrificial lambs to let us get in. Colonel Flowers might not be too heartbroken over some militia casualties, but he could not be callous enough to offer up more than four hundred loyalist troops for certain slaughter.
What’s the alternative? What am I missing? Lon asked himself. It was part of the education of any aspiring military leader to look at situations and seek the optimal solution. Wargaming had been an integral part of the curriculum at The Springs, as well as a major extracurricular activity ranked equally with physical sports.
Thinking about the tactical problem did not keep Lon from paying attention to his more immediate responsibilities, guarding his section of the squad’s front. He tried to recall the details he had seen on the mapboard earlier, the terrain, the supposed positions of the enemy force. At the same time, his eyes continued to scan the hillside in front of him, and his ears strained for any untoward sound.
The valley that the rebels were thought to be defending was a little more than a mile long between lower passes between hills. The nearer crest was eighty feet above the interior valley, not quite that high above the valley between Alpha Company and the rebels. The far ridge was higher on both sides. The distance across the valley that the rebels held, crest to crest, averaged twelve hundred yards.
Room for an army and a half Lon thought. CIC’s estimate of the number of rebels was extremely vague. There might be as few as six hundred—or more than two thousand. Hell of a way to run a war. It could be two-to-one odds in either direction, and we might not know which until we’re in the middle of the battle.
Company Lead Sergeant Jim Ziegler ran a radio check of platoon sergeants and squad leaders. Lon was hooked into the noncoms’ channel. Nothing seemed to be stirring along A Company’s front. No one was picking up any identifiable sounds from the supposed rebel positions.
“I want one squad from each platoon to move up to just behind the ridgeline,” Ziegler said. “We need observation posts. If you run into opposition, try to handle it quietly, and try not to show yourselves to the rebels across the way.”
Before fourth platoon’s sergeant could assign one of the other squads, Wil Nace volunteered his men. “We need this, Jim,” he said.
Jorgen scarcely hesitated. “Okay, Wil, you’ve got it. But be damned careful. Watch your heads, and your butts.”
Lon was waiting for Nace’s call on the squad channel when it came. He had already started to choose his route up the hill.
21
Lon Nolan was just a few paces to the right of Corporal Nace as the squad started up the slope. The pitch was not steep enough to cause any difficulties, but it was enough to put a strain on the muscles of calf and thigh, even though the line stopped after almost every step forward to search for the enemy, and for any mines or booby traps he might have planted. In some ways, the slope was a help. Eyes were closer to ground level, nearer to where any booby traps were likely to be set, nearer to any sign of men who had traveled the route recently. And if the Dirigenters had to dive for cover, the ground was that little much closer.
The crest was silhouetted by the brightening glow of dawn, a sharp line above the mantle of shadow that the mercenaries climbed through. The upper reaches of the trees on the hillside were already in sunlight.
Climbing toward morning, Lon thought. As the skirmish line got closer to the light, he crouched forward a little farther, subconsciously delaying the time when he would lose the cover of the shade and failing night. Many of the other soldiers reacted similarly, and well before the line reached the summit, the men were virtually crawling toward it.
“Down!” Nace ordered his squad when they were still six feet below the crest. “That next hill is higher than this one. Slide up into position carefully.”
The soil near the top of the hill was thin, fighting to hold scrub growth in among the rocky mass of the extrusion. The ridge itself was nearly devoid of vegetation, a naked spine of rotting limestone. As Lon slid up against it and took his first careful peek over, he found himself looking through the upper branches of trees growing along the opposite slope of the ridge. Farther off, across the next valley, another ridge—forested rather than bare—ran parallel to this one.
From a distance, it looked to be more than the twenty to thirty feet higher that the charts said it was. Lon pulled back from the edge, feeling too exposed for comfort.
Within seconds, things began to go wrong. Lon heard gunfire far off to his right. With the hills creating echoes, he could not be positive, but he suspected that the gunfire came from where the Norbanker militia was—or was supposed to be. At first there were only a few scattered shots, but the volume built up. It took no more than a minute or two before it had crescendoed into a major firefight.
“What is that?” he asked Lieutenant Taiters.
“I don’t know. Keep your mind on your own area.”
Lon edged up to the crest again to look at the next hill. There was no trace of activity there, even when he switched his faceplate to maximum magnification and scanned the opposite ridge slowly. He saw no sign of any rebel positions, not even a sentry. We wouldn’t be visible, he thought, or not very. But that’s with good equipment and better training. If these rebels are amateurs …
“Lieutenant, I don’t think the rebels are over there, at least not many of them. I think they’ve moved again.”
This time Taiters did not answer immediately. He left Nolan hanging while he made a number of calls that he did not include the cadet in. When he finally returned to his channel with Lon he said, “You may be right. No one’s spotted any activity there since we got in position. Keep your eyes open. The colonel is checking with CIC before he decides what we do next.” The lieutenant paused, then said, “That shooting you hear is at the rear of the militia. A company or more of rebels hit them from behind. Delta Company is moving to relieve them.”