by Rick Shelley
The rest of the platoon arrived and moved into position between the wounded men and the enemy. A medic was almost as quick to get there. He moved Alfie away from Wegener.
“Take care of those cuts you’ve got, Corp,” the medic said, pointing to the wounds on Alfie’s right arm and side. “I’ll look after this one.”
Wee Willie was already tugging at Alfie from the other side. “Let me get those,” he said. He already had med-patches out, ready to apply. Alfie sat back and let the private do the work. He only needed a few seconds.
“Nothing too bad there,” Hathaway said when he had finished. “Looks like we came off lucky.”
Alfie glanced at Wegener before he mumbled, “Yeah, lucky. Let’s get organized.”
Tory slid in next to them, going flat. “What’s the story?”
Alfie told him, gesturing around, as if Kepner ought to be able to see for himself. “We’ll be a man short for a while, but the rest of us are fit for duty. It was a mine that did for us.”
“We’re going to slide around the far side of that building you were in, try to end this quick-like.”
“The quicker the better,” Alfie said.
“Gather up your lads and stay with the rest of the squad.”
The building where Alfie and his men had been before was rubble now, a jumble of large chunks of plascrete, with windows, trim, and furniture scattered through the mess. The pile was less than ten feet high, from a building that had stood more than thirty feet above the surrounding land.
“Up the hill,” Tory said. That was one thing about such destruction; the remnants provided excellent cover.
The I&R platoon scrambled up the rubble. Alfie and the two men remaining to him moved with the van of the platoon and found places at the very peak of the mound.
“Settle in and get your innings,” Alfie told Willie and
John. “A little payback while you can still feel what you’re paying them back for.”
Some of the civilians had managed to edge farther away from the Feddies, but others were being held by force as human shields. That did the Feddies no good though.
Alfie went back to firing single shots, as did virtually all of the I&R platoon, picking their targets carefully, scoring more hits than misses. With the advantage of elevation, they had the better of the fight. The Federation troops held their ground for a few minutes more, then started trying to retreat south, along the one line that was—apparently—still free of Commonwealth forces. The civilians still within reach of Feddies were forced to move with them.
A few civilians fell in the continuing firefight, but more of their captors went down. A shorthanded company of Federation troops could not hope to stand against the eight hundred Commonwealth Marines ringing them in. But the Federation soldiers never offered to surrender, and no one asked them to.
No more than a dozen Feddies were taken prisoner uninjured. Another forty wounded soldiers were captured. There were seventeen dead civilians and thirty-two wounded. Some forty others had either escaped the fight or survived without injury. Marine casualties were light, two dead, a dozen men wounded seriously enough to need treatment beyond battlefield first aid.
Many of the civilians were interviewed. For the first time, the Commonwealth Marines learned some details of the Federation invasion and occupation. Feddie prisoners were interviewed as well, but little was learned from them immediately.
“It’s as bad as we feared,” Lieutenant Colonel Zacharia said over a link that included Admiral Greene, Colonel Laplace, and a number of staff officers. “The policy seems to have been one of total destruction. Turn the locals out and destroy every building and any possessions that the residents had to leave behind. Well, not everything. They’ve been gathering what they could from the public buildings for theirown use, ferrying some of it up to their transports. But it doesn’t appear as if they’ve done any stealing from private residences.”
Aboard Sheffield, Admiral Greene listened with a growing feeling of despair. Coventry had fifty million residents. So far, it looked as if half of the buildings on the planet had been destroyed, and Federation forces were still burning, still blowing buildings up, wherever they were not directly confronted by the second Regiment. The conference ended, and Greene shifted to a private channel to speak with Colonel Laplace.
“We’ve got to do more, faster,” the admiral said. “We’re not equipped to deal with the number of refugees that must be looking for help. We’ve got to keep the Feddies from burning out many more. We’ve got to go after every group we can, get between the Feddies and areas that haven’t been burned yet.”
“I’ve already got my ops people working with CIC, Admiral,” Laplace said. “We’ll do what we can, but there are limits, and we’re going to hit them in a hurry. We can break into smaller units, use shuttles with fighter cover to move them from place to place, but we can’t run everyone around the clock, not for long.”
Greene hesitated. “Let me know what you come up with. I’ll try to figure out what we can do for the people who have already been left homeless. They’ll be needing food, shelter, probably medical aid, whatever we can get to them. We’ll run all of the replicators in the fleet full out, but we can’t supply millions of people for even a single day without getting something working on the ground, and getting raw materials for our replicators as well. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can, Arkady. I just hope we get that other regiment in as soon as possible.”
“You send an update back to Buckingham yet?”
“It’ll be going out within the next ten minutes, telling them just what we’re up against, Feddies and refugees.”
The cost, Greene thought when he switched off. It’s like they’re trying a stunt like this just to bankrupt the Commonwealth.
11
Reggie Bailey tried to tell himself that it was only his imagination, that the Knowles baby, named Winston, did not really cry all that much more than most babies. But the youngest member of the group did complain a lot, in the only way he could. He’s got reason enough, I guess, Reggie thought as he paced around the perimeter of the camp. It’s cold and drafty. If the lad knew what was going on, he ‘d really have something to squall about.
The baby was a week old. It had been two weeks since the first Federation landings. The Bailey and Knowles families remained where they had been since before the baby was born. Winston appeared to be healthy, despite the crying. The problem was with his mother.
Anna Knowles could not be suffering any of the complications of childbirth that had plagued women through most of recorded history. The medical nanobots in her system would respond instantly to infection, hemorrhaging, or any other identifiable medical condition. Nor had she been particularly “delicate” before the pregnancy, or through most of that term. She had only felt significant strain during the last few weeks, beginning before the invasion. But even seven days after Winston’s birth, Anna found it difficult to stay on her feet for more than a few minutes at a time. She was perpetually tired, no matter how much sleep she got, or how little she exerted herself while she was awake. She nursed the baby—an inescapable necessity with no food replicators handy to provide a suitable substitute—and held him while she was awake, trying to ensure the normal bonding of mother and infant. But the effort drained her energy far too quickly.
Two more shelters had been raised in the rocky clearing, flanking the first, sharing connecting walls. The new shelters were lower and narrower, just high enough for adults to sit under cover and wide enough to let everyone sleep almost dry. The roofs of the new shelters were not completely waterproof, but they kept off most of the rain. There had been rain, almost every day since Winston’s birth. Generally, the showers were brief, light, but there had been one long stretch of moderate to heavy rain, close to eighteen hours without a break.
A whistle from Al, who had taken over as sentry, brought his father out of his shelter, no more than an hour after sunrise. Someone was coming.
Reggi
e carried his shotgun at his side. People had come past with some regularity in the last few days. The last holdouts were finally moving farther away from their homes. The Watersons and the others who had cached goods with the Baileys and Knowleses had gone past two days earlier, looking for … anything. But some of the people coming through had been from nearer the center of Hawthorne, or even from along the other roads that radiated from it. Some were simply wandering, not knowing what to do or where to go, often with a glazed look to their eyes.
Eric came out from the shelter where his wife and baby were. He had a rifle with him. Neither man had had any occasion to use their weapons on anything except food, but—without really discussing it—they had decided that it was better to be prepared for the worst. Some of the people they had seen had already been far along in hunger.
Ida went into the center shelter to sit with Anna. The children, except for the infant, were out, doing what passed for chores in camp. Al’s chore was to serve as lookout. That job seemed to please him.
The strangers did not approach the camp directly, though they must have been guiding themselves by the thin trail of smoke rising from the campfire that was kept burning constantly.
Walking directly toward the camp might have appeared too threatening. It had not taken most people long to stumble into new forms of etiquette to suit the new conditions.
“I say there,” a voice called from thirty feet away. The newcomers had halted that far out. “Do you mind if we stop by for a moment?”
“Not at all,” Reggie called back. “Come on in.”
AI was nowhere to be seen. Once he was sure that his father had heard his signal, he had moved away from camp, away from the strangers. “They might be playing tricks,” he had explained to his father and Eric after the first time he had done that. “A couple of folks come into camp to keep our attention while more of them sneak around behind to get us while we’re not looking. If I’m out there sneaking around first, they won’t be able to do that.” It was something that neither of the men had thought of.
Reggie did not recognize these people, a man and woman with one child, a girl who appeared to be five or six years old. The adults were both carrying backpacks, but those bags hung as if they were less than half full. All three of the strangers showed the effects of being out in the weather. Their hair was wet and bedraggled-looking, their clothing only partially dry. And they had a hungry look, sniffing at the air as if seeking food. The little girl’s clothes hung on her as if they were hand-me-downs, or as if she had lost considerable weight already.
“My name’s Ted Brix,” the man said, stopping at the edge of the camp. He might have been thirty, or less, though he looked a lot older. His cheeks were hollow. There were dark circles around his eyes. His clothes also hung as if he had lost considerable weight. “My wife Lorna, our daughter Helene.” He gestured as he introduced each of the others, as if he thought that Reggie and Eric would not be able to decide who was who.
Reggie introduced himself and Eric, and made a sweeping gesture to include the visible children. The name Brix meant nothing to Reggie.
“I thought just about everyone had gotten farther out than this,” Eric said. “How far did you come?”
“I’m not quite sure, actually,” Ted said, looking over his shoulder. “I’m afraid we’ve done some wandering, lost our course more than once, don’t you know. We live—lived—a mile east of the Downs.” The Downs was a park, a gathering place for local residents since the founding of Hawthorne.
“I guess you have done some wandering,” Eric said. “That’s got to be nine, ten miles from here.”
“You must have crossed, what, three roads?” Reggie asked.
The look that came over Ted’s face might have suggested that he was about to get extremely ill. “Maybe three different roads, three matching lines of burned out houses and other buildings, but as I said, we’ve been wandering about quite a bit. We’ve crossed roads at least a half dozen times. We thought that we would run into other people closer in to town, thought maybe the government would have set up places for us to go to.”
“You didn’t find any?” Reggie knew that it was an unnecessary question—the Brixes wouldn’t be there if they had found organized refugee centers—but it had to be asked.
“Not a glimmer of anything,” Ted said. His wife and daughter remained silent, showing no interest in the talk. The girl stayed at her mother’s side, hanging on to her as if she were a lifeline, sniffling occasionally. Her face was dirty and tear-streaked. “Just ashes, rubble, and bodies.”
“Bodies? You mean the Feddies have started killing people?” Eric asked.
Brix shrugged. “Some had gunshot wounds, but I can’t say who fired the shots. We never actually saw anyone get shot. But more of the blokes looked as if they had been beaten to death, or stabbed. Ghastly.”
It’s too soon for people to starve to death, Reggie thought, blinking once. Their health maintenance systems would carry them through until their bodies had absolutely no reserves left. But medical nanobugs would not stop hunger, or the quest for nourishment. Fighting over food, most
likely. I guess it had to come, sooner or later.
“I imagine there’ll be a lot more deaths before things start to get better,” he said, speaking slowly, watching Ted Brix’s eyes carefully. Two weeks and killings. I thought it would take longer than that.
Brix showed no reaction at all. “I daresay.” There was no inflection to his voice, as if he were too exhausted, or too hungry, to waste energy beyond what was absolutely needed to get the words out.
“Do you mind if we sit for a spell before we move on?” he asked. It was clear that he wanted to ask for something to eat, but would not. That was another of the new rules of etiquette. Food could be accepted if offered, but it would not do to beg for a handout from other refugees.
“Not at all.” Reggie glanced at Eric and raised an eyebrow as a question. He hadn’t decided whether or not to offer. They had plenty of food, for the moment. The evening before, each man had managed to bring down game. So far, they had always been able to find meat, and that helped stretch the supplies they had carried out from their homes. Eric’s nod, given while the Brixes were moving in closer, was almost invisible, but Reggie saw it.
“If you’d like something to eat, we’ve got meat and broth,” Reggie said. Stewing the meat in water with a scant helping of their dehydrated vegetables seemed the best way to make everything last longer.
“Much obliged. Rations have been rather slim for us the past few days,” Ted said. His wife blinked. Their daughter looked up at her mother but didn’t speak. Her stare seemed to ask, Are we really going to eat?
Ida came out of the center shelter after she heard the invitation and acceptance. Reggie made the introductions, and Ida helped serve food to the strangers, making certain that there was plenty of meat in the bowls. The Brixes had hardly started to eat when Al came in, signaling an all clear.
Helene, the child, ate greedily, slurping down half of the broth at once, then picking chunks of meat out with her fingers. She did not look up from the bowl until it was empty. Then she turned to look at her mother, and it was impossible to miss the question in her expression.
“Have some more,” Ida offered. Helene extended the bowl, her face suddenly beaming with a mix of emotions—relief, happiness, and gratitude. Ida had to look away, as soon as she had refilled the bowl. It was either look away or cry.
A few moments later, when the girl’s parents were almost finished with their servings—they had eaten more slowly, to make it last—Reggie offered them seconds. Watching the child had hurt him as well. He turned to Eric then, and lifted an eyebrow again. Eric shrugged.
“You’re going to find it a rough go if you haven’t a gun to hunt with, or some way to set traps,” Reggie said.
“I’ve never fired a gun, nor even held one,” Ted admitted. “I don’t know much about this living in the wild at all but what I’ve seen on vi
ds. That’s not much help, I fear. Those blokes always seem to come up with just what they need—in the nick, as it were.”
Reggie tried to look at Ted, but Brix kept looking at his daughter, drawing Reggie’s eyes to her as well. The logical side of Reggie’s mind, normally dominant, told him not to do what he was thinking of doing. Dozens of couples had come by the camp, most with children. He had not made the offer before, had never really considered it. But he knew that, for whatever reason, this time was going to be different.
“Things are like to get rough for everyone before there’s any chance of them getting better,” he said, still temporizing even though he realized that it was unlikely to change his mind.
Brix nodded, moving his gaze to his wife. She was staring at him now, though their daughter continued to eat, more slowly now that she had her second helping.
“Winter’s coming on,” Reggie continued. “Nobody knows what’s going to happen, how long it might be before Commonwealth forces come to rescue us, or how long the Feddies will stay.”
“We figure, the way the Feddies are burning everything in sight, they can’t plan to stay long,” Eric said. “If they planned to occupy Coventry, they’d be leaving places forthemselves to live in. But if, when, they leave, it may be up to us to get ourselves back together. If we can.”
“The government had to get word off to Buckingham about the invasion,” Reggie said, hoping more than believing, even though two of the news readers that first night had said that message rockets had been dispatched. “The Commonwealth will send an army to kick the Feddies off and help us. Once our blokes come in, things will get better.”
“But there’s no way to know how long that might be, now, is there?” Ted said, his head drooping. He was talking more to himself than to his hosts.
“Exactly,” Reggie said. He glanced at Ida, then at Eric—both of whom gave him minuscule nods—before he looked at the Brixes again. “For now, at least, we’re going to have to do for ourselves.” He gave himself one last pause, took in a deep breath, and held it for a moment.