by Rick Shelley
Reggie did the talking for himself and his companions. After the introductions, he said, “We lived in Hawthorne. Eric and I lived on Sherwood Pike. That would have been the last road you crossed.”
“A few of us came from Hawthorne,” Noel said after he had introduced himself. “But most of us are from South York.”
“You’ve come that far?”
Noel nodded. “We had hoped that maybe Hawthorne was small enough that the Feddies wouldn’t have bothered it. We know now that we were wrong.”
“They burned South York too?” Reggie asked.
“They were still burning when we left.”
“You come across any good news?”
“Possibly. Five days back, some of us thought we heard shuttles that sounded different than the Feddie landers. Nobody actually saw anything, but … it gives us some hope.”
“You think there are Commonwealth soldiers here?”
“That’s the hope. But even if they aren’t here now, they’ll come sooner or later. I think they’ll come just as fast as they can find the men and ships.” He looked both ways along the track his people had been following. “We’ve been listening for any hint that there are Commonwealth forces around. We have a few battle helmets from the HDF. But we haven’t heard anything yet.”
“So they’re not here after all?”
“We don’t know. They’d probably use different channels than we’ve got. Unless we had the latest codes, which I’m sure we don’t, we wouldn’t hear anything but noise, if that.”
“If there are Commonwealth troops on Coventry, you might have been better off staying around South York. It might be ages before they work their way out to small towns like Hawthorne.”
“It’s too late for that. Anyhow, we didn’t have much choice. All we can do now is keep moving, follow the game and try to keep everyone fed. What about you three?” Itwas time, and past, he felt, to ask a few pointed questions himself.
“We have our families camped not too far from here,” Reggie said. “We didn’t go out as far as most of the others from our part of town.” He gestured toward the east. “I imagine you’ll run into the rest, hundreds of them, before much longer.”
That’s all we need, Noel thought. “You have any idea where they might be?”
“Not the foggiest. We haven’t seen anybody in a week. It’s been two weeks since we got pushed out of our homes. The others could be just about anywhere. They might be having the same problems you are, finding enough meat to keep everybody fed.”
Michael Polyard came walking back along the line of refugees. He had been out ahead, scouting, and had returned to find that everyone had stopped. In as few words as possible, Noel told him what had passed, and introduced the strangers.
“Some of those people probably aren’t too far ahead of us now,” Polyard said. “I came across the signs of a large camp, abandoned; about two miles east of here. It looks like they moved off to the northeast then.”
“I suppose we’ll have to move in the opposite direction then.” Noel barely suppressed a sigh. “Southeast, toward the ridges. We might even have to cross the mountains before long.”
Reggie almost instinctively said, “It’ll be colder south of the mountains than on this side soon,” but stopped himself. If these people didn’t know that quirk of the climate, it was better for his family and the others with them that these hundreds of people didn’t learn about it and stay north of the slopes.
“You might want to head due south,” Reggie said instead. “I think that most of the people from around here went east. A few miles south you should find untouched land.”
Noel nodded slowly. “What about you and your families?”
Reggie glanced at his companions before he replied. “As long as we don’t have to compete with you lot for our food, I think we’ll stay where we are for now. We’ve got a woman with a baby born after we were chased out of our homes. We’d like to avoid any traveling if we can.”
Noel turned toward Michael. “What do you think? Head south? Try to avoid the crowds?”
“It’s worth a try. We might find enough to keep us going for a few days before we have to worry about another major move.” He looked to the sky. “We can still make another few miles before we stop to hunt, anyway.”
Reggie closed his eyes for an instant while the two were looking at each other. They’re going to move on! Short of certain word on the arrival of a Commonwealth liberation force, it was the best possible news he could think of.
“How far out are the scouts?” Noel asked.
“I was the only one out,” Michael said. “I didn’t send anyone else when I came back. I wanted to see what was going on back here first.”
That simplifies matters, Noel thought. “Mr. Bailey, do you know of anyplace we’d have trouble getting our floaters across south from here?”
“I don’t have any idea. Sorry. I’m already as far from home, from where my home used to be, as I’ve ever been.” As far into the wild, in any case. He had visited some of the other towns over the years, and made it to The Dales or Coventry City at least once each year, but that wasn’t the same. “I doubt that there’s anything you can’t at least find a way around between here and the first ridge of the mountains.” If you’re willing to go far enough, anyway.
“We’ll manage, I guess. Michael, let’s get everybody turned.” Noel turned away from the strangers. “Everyone’s had a chance to rest. We’ll want a bit of good daylight left to put our hunters out when we find a place to camp.”
Reggie and his companions watched for a few moments. There were no words of farewell, no parting pleasantries. Once the column had started moving south, Reggie, Eric, and Ted moved away from the track. They backed off a few steps into the forest first, then turned to walk away.
By the time he got back to camp, Reggie’s hands were trembling almost out of control. He held them out and stared at them, frowning. It seemed to be some sort of fear reaction, but had he really been as frightened as that? It didn’t seem possible. He needed time to get the trembling under control. He drank a cup of tea—the weak brew they had been making to help their tiny stock last longer—while he told the women and children about the meeting. Occasionally, Eric added some detail. Ted merely listened, as if he had not even been present.
“If they have HDF helmets, some of them must have been in the HDF,” Al observed. “Why are they running away and not fighting the Feddies?” No one had a good answer for that. Neither Reggie nor Eric bothered to try.
“Do you really think that they’ll go off and leave us alone?” Ida asked. “Go far enough away that we won’t have to move to find food?”
“I think so,” Reggie said. “They started south straightaway. They’re no more eager to be around other folks than we are. As many people as they have, they have to keep moving to eat. They’ll probably keep going until they have some overriding reason to either come back this way or head home toward South York.”
“What the man said about Commonwealth troops—you think that’s right?” Al asked. “You think maybe they’ve already come to save us?”
“Your guess is precisely as good as mine, son. We don’t have any way to know. They heard something that sounded like a shuttle, but not like the Federation shuttles they had already heard. But no one saw anything. That’s terribly vague.”
“It is something, though,” Anna said. “It’s more than we had even a couple of hours ago.” Her voice sounded strained. She wanted so much to believe that the ordeal might be nearing its end, but she feared disappointment.
They talked it to death and through resurrection, returning to the topic throughout the day, and into the evening. Just to get away from it for a time, Reggie took another walk.
He followed the new track south for a few hundred yards. There was no sign of the “horde” from South York. They had really gone.
There was mist before dawn, just enough to thoroughly dampen everything. Reggie stayed out on watch unti
l it started to get light. The weather gave him something to think about other than what had happened the day before. Ida woke then, and several of the children started to stir. When the Knowles baby woke and cried loudly, everyone else woke. Lorna Brix helped Ida with breakfast. It wasn’t much, of course, but breakfast always seemed to taste better than the other meals. There was meat and the broth it had been stewing in, tea, and a few crackers served in place of bread. The little of that they had brought along had only lasted three days. Crackers stayed fresh longer and took up much less space for the weight.
Morning rituals were attended to, a little more hurriedly because of the mist that was just ending and the extra chill it had brought. Everyone ate sitting inside the shelters, hunched over their bowls and mugs as if to protect them from … whatever.
Afterward, no one was in any hurry to go outside, even when the sky started to clear. The morning was chilly. What finally started to move the adults outside was a general reluctance to start talking. No one felt much like conversation. Reggie’s impulse was to go hunting. That would take him away from camp and give him time alone. But he and Eric had each brought down large deer the morning before. There would be no need to hunt for at least one more day.
Reggie walked around the camp, trying to loosen stiff muscles. Al came out of the shelter and climbed to the top of the rock outcropping to look back toward Hawthorne. The others came and went. The younger children played, running and laughing. After two weeks, this life seemed almost normal to them—most of the time.
A sudden screeching noise some two hours after breakfast, loud and insistent, stopped Reggie’s pacing. The sound came from the northwest, back toward home. Then the noisewas gone. He hadn’t seen a thing. He looked to the top of the mound. Al was still up there, staring off in the direction of the noises.
“Some shuttles came in, back toward town, maybe in the center!” Al shouted. “Two or three of them. They didn’t look like the Feddie shuttles.”
The other adults were all outside and looking northwest by then. Even the smaller children looked that way. Reggie felt a catch in his throat. Can it really be? He didn’t want to hope, afraid that his hopes would be crushed all too quickly, but …
“I’m coming up there,” he told Al. “Give me a little room.”
Ten minutes, twenty, maybe even thirty, passed. Reggie had no idea how long he had stared, hoping to see or hear something that would confirm his hope that Commonwealth forces had arrived. It wasn’t until he heard shooting, and the flat thrump-crump sound of grenades (although he wasn’t certain what those noises were) that he decided that help really had come to Hawthorne, to Coventry. There was a battle under way, and even though the fighting had to be three or more miles away, there was enough of it going on that he could hear the sounds.
“It all sounds so tinny,” Al said, almost a complaint. “Are those really gunshots?”
“I’m sure of it,” Reggie said. “A lot of guns by the sound of it.” Eric was also on top of the rock outcropping. Even Ted had come part of the way up. But there was nothing that any of them could see, except for the smoke of more fires.
“Shouldn’t we go see what’s happening?” Al asked. “Maybe we can help.”
“There’s nothing we could do but get ourselves killed,” Reggie said. “It’s after the shooting stops that we’ll need to go see what happened.”
“You mean who won?”
Reggie looked his son straight in the eyes. “Yes, that’s what I mean.”
• • •
There were ebbs and flows to the sounds of battle. For a considerable time, the noises seemed to remain stationary. Then, abruptly, they started to move.
“That’s coming toward us,” Reggie said, looking around—suddenly concerned at being so exposed. “It’s time we get back down on the ground.”
“We won’t be able to see anything down there,” Al protested.
“You can’t see anything from here,” Reggie said. “And there could be stray shots coming this way if they get much closer. Down.”
AI was the first down, all but shoved by his father. The men followed. Below, the sounds of the fighting were muted a little. The younger children were herded inside the center shelter. The entrance was guarded by Ida and Lorna. Anna was inside with her baby. The three men and Al stayed outside, but even they took some care about where they stood, and after a time they moved close to the stone shelter.
“That’s getting terribly close,” Ted said.
Reggie and Eric exchanged glances. The sounds had quit moving again. “They’re probably not more than a mile off, if that,” Reggie said.
“Back by the gully where the first caches were?” Eric said.
“That’s the right direction. Could be the right distance.” Reggie nodded. “The gully would be a good place to put up a fight from.”
The sounds seemed to remain stationary for a time, and then the volume of shooting died off to no more than a quarter of what it had been before.
“They’re settling in for a long fight,” Al guessed. He had seen a lot of video adventures, and there was nothing deficient about his imagination.
“That means neither side has won outright,” Reggie said, a more practical consideration.
For the next quarter hour they heard only isolated shots, then there was another intense exchange that lasted for several minutes before another period of almost quiet came.
“What the hell’s going on?” Eric said, almost shouting in frustration. “Who’s winning?”
No one tried to answer his questions. Almost before the second was out of his mouth, they heard shuttle noises again, louder than before, shattering the air. Two landers came in from the southeast, almost directly overhead, and no more than two hundred feet off of the ground. The sound of the passage was almost physically painful.
“Commonwealth markings!” Al shouted. “I saw the emblem!”
Reggie got so light-headed that he feared he would faint. He leaned against the wall of the shelter and sank to a sitting position. They’ve come! They’ve come at last!
Part 5
17
The battalion’s quartermaster sergeant was also H&S Company’s service platoon sergeant. Malcolm Macdowel had held the position more than four years, the company’s most senior platoon sergeant by eighteen months. Even in peacetime he might have been able to start thinking of promotion to company lead sergeant or an equivalent staff position. With wartime attrition, his promotion was long overdue, as Macdowel was quick to point out when David Spencer gave him the new assignment.
“Tell it to the chaplain, Mac,” David said. “For now, you’re still our QM sergeant, and that means your lads get to hustle everything out of the shuttles when they arrive.”
“If they arrive,” Macdowel said. “In any case, we’ll need help. My supply squad can’t get everything out fast enough.”
“Use the whole platoon. The mechanics don’t have any vehicles to repair at the moment. Anyway, your lads won’t have to tote anything very far. There’ll be men from every platoon in three companies waiting to grab the ammunition as quickly as you can toss it to them.”
Macdowel let the habitual scowl on his face ease a little. “I just hope both shuttles make it. We’re going to need everything they can carry.”
“You can set that in bronze.”
“Just get them in, David. We’ll get them unloaded.”
Spencer nodded. “It should just be a couple of minutes now, if all goes well. The last word we had was that the shuttles had all separated from the ships and were on their way in before the fleet jumped back to Q-space.”
Malcolm’s scowl returned, deeper than ever. “That’s another thing I don’t like, them kipping off to Q-space and leaving us behind all the time.”
David laughed. “Save it for after you retire. You can spend twenty years writing out everything you don’t like about the CSF, then ship it off to the Admiralty for immediate action.”
Macdowel tu
rned and walked away. H&S Company was still on the far side of the Commonwealth position from the Federation troops, with dense forest and a slight rise to the ground between them. So far, there had been no shooting near enough to make anyone duck on the eastern section of the perimeter. Out in front of the H&S positions there was a clearing—almost impossibly small for an LZ. The landers would come in hot, vertically, with only a few yards between them. If Federation soldiers got around to the east side first, they could make it very hot for the shuttle pilots, and for the Marines who would be rushing to unload the landers.
Tory Kepner and his men were waiting again, outside the Commonwealth lines. They were one last line of defense for the shuttles, in case the Feddies did try to come around and interfere with the landings. Carrying captured weapons, the I&R platoon was covering the most likely approaches, waiting to ambush any Feddies who came along. Two squads were concealed to the north, the other two to the south of the main Commonwealth force.
First and second squads had the southern approach, arranged in a shallow V. Any Feddies coming in would funnel straight into the notch of that V. The squads had planted a half dozen mines along the trail leading into their position and off to either side, most on the side, also to help funnel any enemy right into the center of the ambush.
Tory took his place at the apex. He was concealed under a tangle of vines with only the last two inches of the Federation rifle’s barrel protruding. Using an enemy rifle held no particular challenges for I&R men. They had used captured rifles in training, enough for familiarization. Tory’sonly concern was the amount of ammunition available. He had a full magazine, twenty-seven rounds, in the rifle, and another full magazine stuck into his belt. His own rifle, and those of his men, were back inside the perimeter, out of ammunition. The few rounds the platoon had been able to scrape together had been parceled out to men in other platoons.