Colonel

by Rick Shelley

  “Once on the ground, our initial objective will be to engage the enemy around University City and break the siege. Once we break the cordon the New Spartans have thrown around the capital, we can start working to roll up their line and—hopefully—convince them that their contract is one they cannot fulfill.”

  “Do you plan to use all the Shrikes against the enemy ships?” Tefford Ives asked. “Or will you reserve some to cover the initial landing?”

  “That depends on how the New Spartans use their fighters. If they withdraw all of them to defend their ships or to attack our vessels, we’ll use all the Shrikes in space. If they leave some fighters low to oppose the landing and continue interdicting local air travel, then we may divert some of our Shrikes to keep them occupied.” Hayley cleared his throat again and let his gaze drift all the way around the table.

  “Just remember, gentlemen, this is still extremely speculative. The New Spartans have had four weeks to redeploy, reinforce, or even withdraw their forces. Until we see what assets they have in place and how they are deployed, we can’t make firm plans, and even those will be subject to change depending on how they react to our arrival. But this briefing will allow you to tell your men what our thinking is at present. Make sure everyone knows where we stand.” Keeping everyone as informed as possible was standard procedure in the Corps. Bob Hayley went perhaps a little farther than some commanders.

  “Right now,” he continued, “I just want you to recall one important provision of our contract. If we arrive insystem and find that the New Spartans have massively reinforced their presence beyond what we can expect to handle readily, our instructions are to report that fact to Dirigent immediately and await our own reinforcements, even withdrawing from the system, if necessary, to avoid useless losses before those reinforcements reach us. We don’t spend our men carelessly.”

  9

  Lon spent fifteen minutes with his battalion commanders before they all returned to their respective ships. He asked how things were going, repeated Hayley’s admonition to make certain the men were told everything, then wished them luck. “The next time we meet, we should be on the ground on Elysium.” Lon and his senior staff officers waited until all of the battalion commanders and executive officers had left before they boarded their shuttle to return to Golden Eagle.

  “I don’t know if it’s progress or not,” Lon said after his shuttle had been launched from one of Peregrine’s hangars, “but we’ve come a long way in how quickly a major operation can be planned and executed. Back on Earth, as late as the end of the twentieth century and into the early twenty-first, an operation this size would have taken weeks—more likely months—to plan and launch, and there would have been none of the improvisation we’ll have to do in less than three days to actually decide how to use our assets. The planners would have had virtually constant surveillance information available to them throughout the planning period. Half a century earlier, a major operation might have taken a year or more to plan and mount.”

  “I seem to recall that there were exceptions,” Ives said, “operations on the scale of what the Corps gets involved in that were planned and executed in short order. And operations where one of the major powers of the time couldn’t defeat an enemy whose total population was less than the size of the military force that could have been brought to bear against them.”

  Lon nodded. Torrey Berger, now a major and regimental operations officer, spoke. “There was a lot more to consider in the last half of the twentieth century. That was the era of massive nuclear weapons establishments. The two major powers had enough nuclear warheads to totally waste a hundred planets, and no way to get those warheads anywhere but their own world.”

  “That’s one concern we don’t have today, thankfully,” Lon said. “It’s been more than seven hundred years since a nuclear weapon was used, almost as long since the last stocks on Earth were destroyed.”

  “Assuming, of course, that no one has started making them again, Union or Buckingham, for example—or even Earth,” Ives said. “The information is available. The technology hasn’t disappeared. Constructing one would be much simpler today than it was then. You’d just have to program molecular assemblers and make certain they had the necessary raw materials.”

  “I can’t see anyone risking that,” Lon said. “The repercussions if the secret got out would be too overwhelming.”

  Twelve hours remained until the fleet would make its final Q-space transit, emerging in Elysium’s solar system. Lon had talked with nearly every man in his headquarters and service complement. It gave him a chance to judge the morale of his people firsthand, though surveying the H&S ranks was certainly not the same as talking with the frontline troops. One more remove from the heart, he thought as he ate supper with his staff, one more stage of isolation. There was the expected level of tension, but nothing so great as to give him cause for alarm. Some tension was needed; it wouldn’t do to have the men as relaxed as if they were going to a picnic in one of the parks around Dirigent City. The talk among his senior officers at supper was generally casual. There was curiosity about what they would find when the fleet emerged in Elysian space, speculation about what the New Spartans might have been doing the past month.

  Lon did more listening than talking, observing the faces of his officers. And he attempted to take stock of his own mental condition. I’m doing pretty well, maybe better than I’ve felt just before hitting hostile country since … before Junior was born. Lon’s worries had not evaporated, but they were no longer paralyzing him. Junior. Angie. The unborn baby not due until after Lon was scheduled to get back home, even if he spent six months on Elysium. Sara. Sometimes I wonder how she’s put up with me all these years, Lon thought with a smile. Between the brooding before a contract and the long absences, it’s a miracle.

  After supper, Lon spent a couple of minutes chatting with Tefford Ives, mostly about minor administrative details, then retired to his stateroom—actually a two-room suite—leaving instructions that he was not to be disturbed until three hours before the scheduled Q-space transit except in case of emergency.

  Lon sat on the edge of his bunk and took off his boots and socks. Only one of Doc Norman’s special eight-hour sleep patches remained, one more certain night of undisturbed sleep. Once we ground, sleep takes a backseat again, Lon thought. He glanced at his watch. He still had a half hour before he needed to put the patch on his neck and go to bed—to give him his eight hours of sleep and allow him to wake three hours before the fleet made its final Q-space transit.

  He spent five minutes recording a letter to Sara and Angie, adding on to portions he had recorded almost every day since leaving Dirigent. When he was away from home, his letters were almost a diary, added to when he had a chance, sent when a message rocket was being dispatched. Return mail from Sara and Angie was similar. They’ll see that I’m calm, not agitated or overly worried, he thought when he switched off the complink’s recorder. Give them less reason to worry.

  Then Lon finished undressing and did the things he needed to do before going to bed. After he turned out the cabin lights, he lay down and put the sleep patch on his neck. In less than two minutes, he was asleep.

  There was no foggy area of transition. Lon went from the oblivion of drug-enhanced sleep to total alertness in a heartbeat. The special patches Dan Norman had provided always brought Lon out of sleep quickly at the end of their allotted time, but this time it was abrupt, almost disconcerting. He blinked several times and sucked in a deep, convulsive breath. Briefly, his heart rate increased dramatically, then settled to a normal resting rhythm. He turned his head to look at the timeline on the complink near his bed.

  Right on schedule, he thought. This is the day we find out what we’re going to face. Any landing was three days away at a minimum, but that did not mean that there could be no danger for those three days. How fast will the New Spartans react? Lon wondered. If they responded promptly to the arrival of the fleet, combat might come in little more
than thirty-six hours—combat in space, between ships and aerospace fighters, combat that the soldiers in the transports could not affect. If they come after us, Lon thought as he sat up and swung his legs off the berth. There was even a slight chance that combat could come sooner, if the New Spartans had ships posted farther out from Elysium, waiting for the arrival of the Dirigenters.

  It would take one hell of a stroke of bad luck for them to be someplace where they could get to us quickly, Lon told himself as he stood and stretched. That was one situation he had never experienced in all his years in the Corps—having his ship come under attack. The odds must be longer than having two royal flushes honestly dealt in the same hand of poker. The enemy would have to be in the right place, at the right distance, on alert, ready to strike.

  “Not too damned likely,” Lon mumbled. He crossed to the complink and checked for messages, scrolling through the only two entries in his communications log before going to the bathroom to get ready for the day. After showering, he stood and looked at himself in the mirror. There were no scars to remind him of the many wounds he had suffered in the Corps. The body’s HMS was far too efficient to leave visible scar tissue. But Lon could recall each injury. He touched several of the spots, as if trying to evoke some memory of the pain he had felt. Nothing.

  “Like the dreams,” he whispered, focusing on his eyes in the mirror. “Nothing visible.”

  When he emerged from the bathroom, he looked at the complink again. It was three in the morning. Ship’s time had been adjusted to match local time in Elysium’s University City. The fleet would emerge while it was still night over the capital, and they would reach attack orbit in the night … in three days, if nothing happened to disrupt their schedule. If.

  Reveille sounded for the troops aboard Golden Eagle. “There shouldn’t be any sluggards today,” Lon said, almost managing a chuckle. Everyone knew the fleet would be jumping into Elysium’s system within hours and that shortly after that they should know the size of their opposition. Unless the government of Elysium had fallen, there would be direct updates as quickly as the ships could establish contact. The ships’ own sensing gear would quickly seek the enemy’s ships and start trying to determine the situation on the ground—though this gear would be only minimally helpful until the final day of the approach. Later, once the planners knew more, the troops would be put on a relaxed schedule, their main instructions to get as much rest and eating in as possible for the landings. Once they were on the ground, sleep and meals might be scarce.

  Lon took his time dressing, even taking a moment to buff his boots before going to the galley to eat breakfast. Look smart, project confidence: Those were important for an officer. Don’t give the rank and file any reason to suspect that their commander might be less than supremely confident about the outcome of the pending operation. Put on an act if you have to, but sell it, Matt Orlis had told him many years before. Recalling Matt took the smile from Lon’s face. Matt had retired from the Corps after his only son had been killed in action. It was a reminder Lon would rather have missed.

  Lon and Tefford Ives waited for the final Q-space transit in the small office attached to Lon’s cabin, drinking coffee and doing a poor job of trying to make small talk. This was a time for minor jitters, which made it an excellent time to be away from the rest of the men aboard the ship.

  “I wonder if the New Spartans even suspect that the Elysians might have help on the way,” Ives said when the waiting got to be too much for him.

  “If they notified Union by MR immediately when Berlino’s ship left, they could have word back that he didn’t get there,” Lon said. “They might have had a couple of days’ notice. That wouldn’t give them time to get additional forces here, unless they were already on the way. I think what we face will depend on just one thing. Were the New Spartans sent to conquer Elysium, or just to scare them into accepting the Confederation?”

  “A toss of the coin,” Ives said, “and I’ve been tossing it mentally since we first learned of the contract.” He glanced at the time. “We should have a pretty good idea soon.”

  He had scarcely finished saying that when the announcement was broadcast that one minute remained until Q-space insertion. Both men looked at the timeline on the complink then.

  “Don’t hold your breath,” Lon said, grinning.

  “I quit doing that years ago. I think.” Ives shook his head. “At least we’re not strapped down in our bunks for transits anymore. I always hated that. Made me feel like I was a prisoner and someone was going to do unspeakable things to me.”

  The final seconds of the countdown dragged past, concluding with the standard announcement “Q-space insertion.” Lon closed his eyes, feeling the vibration of the ship as the Nilssen generators ran at their maximums, stretching the bubble universe around Golden Eagle, stressing it according to some arcane mathematical formula containing more variables than a six-month weather forecast. Lon opened his eyes and stared at the elapsed-time indicator on the complink. This would be the longest transit of the journey, almost three minutes. It felt like a long three minutes, and the final ten seconds of the countdown to extraction seemed to occupy ten minutes. When the speaker announced “Q-space extraction,” Lon let his breath out, slightly embarrassed to realize that he had been holding it in.

  “I figure it will be an hour, minimum, before we get anything from Elysium,” Lon said, hoping that Ives had not noticed the breath-holding. “But we should have our first view of the New Spartans’ ships in minutes.” Out of date by the number of light-minutes away the planet was: If a ship were ten light-minutes away, the view would be of where that ship had been ten minutes earlier, not where it was now. Every ship would be scanning, and the information would be collated in CIC aboard Peregrine, then relayed to each ship in the Dirigenter flotilla.

  “What will it be, about twelve minutes before the New Spartans get their first view of us?” Ives asked.

  Lon shrugged. “Something like that. If they’re looking in the right direction.”

  “They will be,” Ives replied. “We would. Scanning the entire system even if we had no reason to suspect that trouble might be coming. They’re professionals, too.” He paused. “I have to keep reminding myself of that. This time we’re not going up against amateurs.”

  I know, Lon thought but did not say. He just nodded.

  The complink started to show an image of Elysium, still little more than a dot moving against the star field until the computers magnified and enhanced the raw feed. The system needed another five minutes before it could highlight the even smaller points that indicated ships in orbit around the world—seven blips, seven ships.

  “Enough to account for a single regiment,” Lon said. “They haven’t brought in reinforcements.”

  “Yet,” Tefford Ives said, but that was not enough to stem the relief Lon felt.

  The news that started to arrive from Elysium was not nearly as bad as it might have been. There had been no large-scale fighting in the past month, just skirmishes between small units of the defense force and the invaders. In the farming districts surrounding University City, the invaders had dispossessed people, sent them in toward the capital with no more than they could carry, but the New Spartans had been careful not to harm anyone who did not actively resist. Buildings and farm equipment had been destroyed methodically. Crops in the fields had been burned if they could not be easily harvested by the invaders. Livestock had been commandeered to feed the New Spartans.

  There was no orbital video of the deployment of the New Spartans on the ground. They had destroyed every Elysian satellite on the first day following their arrival, and had thwarted the few attempts the Elysians had made to replace those losses. That also meant that there was virtually no communications between population centers. Travel between cities was impossible. New Spartan aircraft kept local shuttles out of the air, and there were occasional raids against ground vehicles attempting to move from one city or town to another.

&nbs
p; Within four hours following the arrival in-system of the Dirigenter fleet, the New Spartans had recalled all of their aerospace fighters, bringing them back aboard their carriers. Shortly after that, the two fighting ships of the New Spartan task force started moving to a higher orbit, a thousand miles above their transports. But they did not attempt to intercept the Dirigenter fleet away from Elysium.

  The three separate elements of the Dirigenter force continued toward Elysium and rendezvous. Agamemnon and Odysseus slowly pulled ahead of the other ships. The plan was still for them to engage the New Spartan battlecruisers, the ships that carried their fighters and heavy armaments.

  “The idea is to tie up their firepower, especially their fighters, so they can’t oppose our landing,” Lon said on a linkup that included all of his battalion and company commanders. “If that works, it will make our landing much easier. All we’ll have to worry about is the enemy on the ground.”

  “Colonel, do you know yet if we’re going to have any Shrikes to cover our landing?” Captain Harley Stossberg, now commanding A Company, 2nd Battalion—Lon’s old company—asked.

  “No, and we probably won’t know until we’re in the boats ready to go in,” Lon said. “That depends on what the New Spartans do. If they hold all their fighters to defend their ships or to attack Agamemnon and Odysseus, then we’ll most likely have to use all our Shrikes in space. We’re going to try to ground far enough from any New Spartans to stay out of reach of any surface-to-air missiles. We haven’t decided on the details of deployment yet, but the preliminary plan calls for 15th Regiment to land outside the cordon around University City and for our first three battalions to land inside. We move at the New Spartans from both sides then, put them in a pincer, break the line, and do our best to roll them up in a hurry. Our initial operations will probably all be on the north bank of the Styx River, where the majority of the enemy troops are.”