by Terry Mixon
“I don’t have to tell you how important he is to Humanity Unlimited and me personally. I don’t want him dying in this fight. It’s up to us to make sure that he doesn’t find himself in a place where he’s going to plant his feet and roar his defiance at the enemy, knowing that he’s going to die.”
The other woman stared at her without speaking for twenty seconds and then slowly nodded. “It’s a crazy idea, and he’s going to be super pissed, so I suggest we just don’t tell him. If everything goes according to plan, he never needs to find out.
“But here’s the deal. I’m not going to put you in danger either. If it looks like the enemy has a means of dealing with these ultralights, then we’re pulling out. I’m not going to take any chances with your safety, Jess. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly,” Jess said as she headed toward the stacks of Asharim weapons. This time she wasn’t taking just her little pistol. She wanted a rifle and plenty of ammo. They were about to fight the fight of their lives, and she’d be damned if she’d be underarmed.
37
Harry wasn’t completely satisfied with the performance of his makeshift cavalry troops, but they were out of time. If they didn’t leave now, they’d never stop the Asharim and their slaves short of the Volunteer settlements. He gave the order to mount up.
The Volunteer forces had started marching hours ago, but his troops would quickly skirt their planned marching path and get in front. The locals were determined to save their people, but they’d arrive days after the battle was over, one way or the other. Their people’s fate was in his hands now.
The dirt bikes were capable of holding a driver and a passenger as long as they were willing to get comfortable with each other, so he’d be able to move a significant force into the area of conflict quickly.
A second group of dirt bikes was outfitted with makeshift harnesses capable of holding gasoline to refuel the bikes when they ran low. The little things didn’t use that much fuel, but they had a long way to go, and they didn’t want to run dry just short of their destination.
Everything about this mission was on a shoestring. He’d just have to pray that nothing serious went wrong.
He slid onto a bike behind the driver assigned to him and looked up into the air as a swarm of ultralights circled overhead. They were going to be the scouts that made certain nothing went wrong as they raced forward.
The bikes carried fuel for those as well, which cut into the number of combat troops he could bring along, but he’d rather have sufficient air cover to know what the enemy was doing. Drones would help, but they weren’t the same thing as having people in the sky watching what was going on.
Since the air cover seemed ready as well, Harry made a motion and sent the force forward. The enemy had a three-day lead now, and he didn’t want to be late to the party.
They didn’t dare drive after dark. There was just too great a chance for someone to find a deep rut and kill themselves. It was much better to be a little bit cautious and make certain that they all got where they needed to go as quickly as possible.
He quickly determined that this was a beautiful world but difficult to drive through. The underbrush beneath the trees made passage slow and troublesome, but the helmets helped, as they didn’t have to worry about limbs smashing them in the face as they drove.
If the Asharim were having to deal with the same problems, that was going to slow them down as well. This was going to end up being one of the weirdest battles in history.
“Lead elements, this is Liberty Six,” he said over the radio. “Keep an eye out for any lookouts that the Asharim might have left behind waiting for them. We don’t want to walk into an ambush. Report anything that seems out of place.
“We’ll take breaks every hour and let everyone stretch their legs. If you have any kind of mechanical issue, report it quickly. Let’s not screw this up. A lot of people are counting on us.”
With that, he settled back in his seat and did what he could to enjoy the ride. At this point, he was a passenger and just had to accept that this was a waiting game. When they reached an area suitable to bivouac, they’d land the ultralights and let the drones keep watch as they slept.
When they caught up with the Asharim forces, he’d do his very best to exterminate them. He wasn’t going to stand by and watch the aliens kill unarmed men, women, and children. He’d die first.
Brenda stepped out of the cave just as the motorcycles and ultralights were heading out. She looked around for Jess but couldn’t find her anywhere. Eventually, someone told her that they thought the woman had gone off on one of the ultralights with her bodyguard.
Harry was going to be really pissed about that.
She worried about the fight ahead. They didn’t know what kind of forces the Asharim were taking to attack the settlements. If they brought along some kind of superweapon, that could spell the end of Harry, Karl, and Jess. She really wished that she had something to add to the mix that would help them out, but until they got control of a gate that wasn’t obscured inside a hill, that wasn’t possible.
That didn’t mean that she felt useless. There were plenty of things that she could bring to the party here that might be useful if Harry and the rest ran into trouble. It would be a lot better to have them retreat here and find a lot of extra equipment waiting to help them defend the place.
Some of the assistance that she’d negotiated with the United States via Josh Queen was beginning to come into play. She wasn’t a military commander, but she now had one to assist her with the new troops that the United States had grudgingly loaned her.
They weren’t special operations soldiers by any measure, but to hold this hill against counterattack didn’t require those kinds of specialized skills. The light infantry brigade that Queen had managed to sequester for her would certainly make a difference in securing this place.
If they had to take the city, it would free up a lot of people to be in on the attack. That was outside her control, but she could go ahead and make certain that the people here on the hill were as safe as they could be.
She ordered Lieutenant Colonel Albert Montalvo to deploy his companies in defense of the hill. She left all of the details of that up to him and had him interface with the people that Harry had left behind. The new troops poured through the gate and began setting up machine-gun emplacements and extra mortar batteries. The Asharim weren’t going to take this place easily.
Considering how the enemy had used air cars in the past, she made certain that her troops had brought along anti-aircraft weapons. If the Asharim tried that kind of nonsense again, the forces here could deal with them firmly.
Humanity was going to claim this world. The Asharim could go screw themselves.
Jess had forgotten how liberating flying like this was. She could feel the wind on her face and smell the trees and forest below. It was nothing like traveling in a lander or an airplane. The experience was visceral. Personal.
“This is awesome,” she said over the short-range radio to Sandra. “It’s like I have wings.”
Sandra shook her head. “You don’t even know how to fly this thing. Not really. You’re kind of making this up as you go. That’s like the opposite of awesome.”
Jess laughed. “I’ve flown landers before, and a bunch of the Asharim knowledge included how to fly their ships, including inside an atmosphere. I’ve also flown as a passenger in ultralights before. It just didn’t make much sense until I had all this other experience. It doesn’t matter that the experience was implanted. Seriously, I’m good to go.”
“What could possibly go wrong?” Sandra asked grumpily.
“According to the briefing, we’re at three days behind them,” Jess said. “It’s possible that we’ll catch up to them before dark tomorrow, but that seems unlikely. We’ll probably run up into their business sometime day after tomorrow. Hopefully, still short of the settlements.”
The sniper looked around without speaking for a while. “I have to say that
this forest is going to make my job harder. Yours too. We can’t see anything under the canopy. There could be an entire army down there, and unless they were using fires that created smoke, we’d never know.
“You’ll find places like this on Earth, though not with this many big trees. Maybe the Amazon rainforest, but that got cut way back a couple of decades ago, so it’s not even the same there.”
Jess understood immediately what her friend was talking about. She’d seen the Earth from space and knew how much smaller the green space had been getting over the years. Demand was outstripping the protections that people had placed on their natural habitat. That was another thing that getting off the planet would help with, because eventually that kind of nonsense would kill off the majority of humans on Earth.
Of course, that brought in a whole new set of problems. How did they keep from exporting all of the terrible things that they had done on Earth to these new worlds? Volunteer World was pristine in so many ways.
Perhaps it hadn’t been back when the Asharim were more advanced, but she wasn’t willing to bet on that. With advanced technology came easy ways to protect the environment without disrupting what you were trying to build.
She swung the ultralight far off to the left of the formation and looked back toward where the motorbikes were running. There was a little bit of dust and smoke in the air. If someone was looking back from the Asharim forces, they might see that if they were observant.
Hopefully all those trees that were blocking the view forward would do exactly the same sort of thing looking backward. It wasn’t as if the Asharim had reason to expect that they were chasing them, at least not at this speed.
Or, with the communication systems that were probably on board the air cars, that might not be true at all. The aliens might know exactly how quickly they could go. It was possible they’d run into an ambush. Harry had said that he was prepared for that, but they still didn’t really know the capabilities of the enemy.
She’d just have to trust that her friend knew what he was doing. If anyone could protect them from ambush or counterattack, it was him.
“I think I see something,” Sandra said, peering forward with binoculars raised to her eyes. “It looks like smoke up ahead.”
Jess did as she’d been instructed and passed word back to the head of scouts. The man in charge of the ultralights immediately ordered her to move closer to determine what the source of the smoke was. He indicated that he’d be dispatching a couple more ultralights to back her up in case she needed it.
He didn’t know who she was. She’d concealed her identity from him easily enough because he’d been one of the new folks coming in from the United States. He hadn’t understood exactly who was supposed to be on Volunteer World and had expected that she was a civilian brought in to help with the scouting. He’d been happy to have her skills, and that had been the end of the matter.
Rather than approaching the smoke directly, Jess decided to come in on a big arc so that she could approach from the side of the travel path that the dirt bikes were using and get a longer look at what she was scouting without showing herself as a target.
It quickly became clear that the smoke was coming from what was left of a fairly large rural building. No, two buildings set somewhat close together. It was hard to tell what they’d been because both had burned to the ground.
The original fire was out, and all that was left was lazy smoke rising from the ruins. Based on the tilled fields off to one side and a number of what were probably some kind of domesticated animals native to Volunteer World wandering in the fields, this had been some kind of farm or ranch. She wasn’t sure if there was a name for something that incorporated both.
Whatever had happened here, it had happened at least a day ago. Maybe more.
“Look at the crops,” Sandra said. “A lot of people moved through here. They trampled everything. I think we found the direct path that our friends from the city took to get here.
“That was probably a human homestead. I don’t envy what Harry will find inside and around the buildings. These bastards seemed the kind that’ll execute men, women, and children without pause or self-recrimination.”
For once, Jess was glad that she wouldn’t have to do the exploration herself. It was hard enough forgetting some things. Seeing a dead child? She wasn’t sure she could ever get that out of her head.
She made a report of what they’d found and then, after circling the burn buildings several times, rose higher into the air and began moving forward along the path that the aliens had taken.
This probably wasn’t going to be the last set of burned buildings they found. If they wanted to keep the number to an absolute minimum, they needed to catch up to the Asharim and put an end to them once and for all.
38
Harry stopped long enough to allow his people to conduct a quick search of the burned farmstead. He didn’t send anyone inside the buildings, but he didn’t have to. They found three bodies between the buildings in the trees. Human bodies, two women and a man. They’d been shot multiple times with large caliber bullets.
That was all the proof he needed that the Asharim had passed through here. And it was all the motivation he needed to spur them on to catch the bastards. There was no way in hell he was going to allow this to occur to anyone else if he could help it.
“Mount up,” he said over the general channel. “We keep riding. I want the scouts to be extra careful about running into pickets. If they’ve left someone behind to keep an eye out for us, I want to make absolutely certain no one gets away to tell them about us. If we run into any Asharim or their slaves, I want that area swamped with riders to take down any outliers as fast as possible.”
“How far behind them do you think we are?” Krueger asked from where he stood next to Harry.
Harry shrugged. “Hard to say. If I was going to guess by the condition of the bodies, I’d say this took place a day ago. It’s getting dark now, so it’s questionable whether or not we’re going to catch them tomorrow.”
The Navy officer nodded. “What are we going to do when we do catch them? Hit them from the rear? Circle around and block them from their targets?”
“That’s really going to depend on how many troops they have and how they’ve arrayed themselves. With the mobility that the dirt bikes give us, I’d like to hit them from all sides and keep them from being able to effectively counterstrike.
“At least that’s what the cavalry officers in direct command of the units advised me to do. With the slow reload rate of those black powder rifles, we should be able to hurt them badly if we can keep them from shooting any of us.
“The wildcard is going to be the Asharim and their high-tech weapons. We’ve got a number of people that have flechette rifles to counterattack that kind of thing, but we need to identify them quickly and take them out as hard and fast as we can.”
Krueger nodded again and eyed the sun. “We’ve got maybe a couple of hours of ride time before we have to set up camp. The scouts are going to need to keep an eye out for a place that we can easily fortify before the sun sets and still have enough time for the ultralights to perform an overhead sweep to make sure that they don’t see signs of the enemy in our vicinity.”
Harry put his helmet back on. “Make that happen. I’d like for everybody to get as much sleep and food as they can. We might be fighting tomorrow.”
Shortly before dark, Jess brought her ultralight in for a landing. Troops with flags provided a visual cue for the best ground. In a pinch, they could do the same in the dark with glow sticks, though she didn’t relish the thought.
She’d done this several times over the course of the day to refuel and stretch her legs, but it still made her nervous because she couldn’t really be sure what was under the grass. A hole or big tree branch could tip the aircraft and send them tumbling.
Once she had the ultralight shut down and secured on the ground, she tossed her helmet into the seat and stretched her ba
ck. “I don’t mind flying rather than driving, but it sure does mean having to sit in the same spot for too long. My legs feel like jelly.”
“Pansy,” Sandra said as she did some squats. “In sniper school, we had to stay in one place and not move for a day or more. It didn’t matter whether ants were biting your leg or a snake slithered along over your back. If you twitched, they’d fail you.”
“I’m glad I’m an engineer not a sniper,” she said with a shudder. “I smell food. Those ration bars may have kept us from starving, but why can’t someone design one that tastes good? It was like chewing glue and sawdust.”
Sandra laughed. “That’s been a complaint since the beginning of time. Army rations made for the field will keep you alive but not satisfy you in any way whatsoever. It looks like the chow line is over to the right, so let’s get something inside our bellies and find a place to crash for the night.”
“I’d prefer a different word, if you please. I don’t even want to think about crashing.”
There was still just enough light to get into line and get their food. Jess had pulled a hat out of her pocket and pulled it down over her hair to keep from being so recognizable that people would know her at a distance.
Harry was eventually going to find out she was here, but she’d prefer to put that off until tomorrow when they were too far out to just send her back.
Dinner consisted of some kind of stew that they were reheating. It was delicious. Thankfully, they were encouraging folks to come back for second helpings, which she did.
Once they’d cleaned their plates and put them away, Sandra led her to a tent that she’d set up. It was small, so they were going to be cozy tonight. That might be just fine considering how chilly it was already getting.
“The smaller drones are going to keep an eye on everything while we sleep,” Sandra said. “They have infrared modes, so we should get some warning if we have visitors.”