His sons, Nikolai and Lavrenti, had killed their first men that day--as well as their second, their third, their fourth and their fifth; the boys had evidently inherited their father’s gift for marksmanship.
Sergei sighed. A lot of growing up for one afternoon in the life of two boys of eleven and ten. Natalya had been six years old then; her mother would have been thirty in another week. Sergei wiped his eyes and strapped his saddlebags to the harness.
The mare snorted as Natalya stepped up to stroke her nose, slipping something past the animal’s lips. “Shh, big girl,” Natalya spoke soothingly, though the animal only crunched at something contentedly.
“Hey.” Kamov began the litany. “Don’t waste sugar on the horses.” He had been saying the same thing in the same way since Natalya had been tall enough to tell rock candy from quartz; it had never done any good, and both of them knew the routine by heart.
“Sweets for the sweet,” Natalya grinned, popping a second rock-candy crystal into Sergei’s mouth and a third into her own. “Besides, Anya’s been mine for a long time, Papa,” Natalya resumed stroking the mare’s nose. “If I didn’t spoil her, she wouldn’t recognize me.”
Sergei Kamov grunted. “I’m sorry to steal your pet, Nat’ya.” He looked at his daughter’s face, seeing her mother’s there, reminding him once more how fiercely he loved his children. And his wife as well, still, though Valeria had been dead ten years last spring. “But a Cossack without a horse--”
“--is a man without legs, yes, Papa, I know.” Natalya smiled and hugged her father with a strength that had frequently surprised both her brothers and several over-eager boyfriends.
Sergei failed to suppress a grunt. “Oof! You want Anya back so badly, take her! I can’t ride with broken ribs!”
Natalya giggled, snuggling into the warmth of her father’s coat, and Sergei held her close and stroked her hair, then pulled the hood of her coat up onto her head. “Cover your ears, you’ll get frostbite.”
“Pah! You just don’t want the boys to see my hair.”
Sergei rolled his eyes. “Too true.” He kissed her forehead and held her away. “Everything is ready inside?”
She nodded firmly. “Our ship of the plains is ready for sailing, Kapitan Kamov. All cargo stowed and secured.” Back on the near-mythic homeworld of Earth, hundreds of years ago, Sergei’s ancestors had been wet-navy captains, and Natalya found the family legends passed down by her father endlessly fascinating. She read anything about the sea--any sea--that she could get her hands on.
“Good. Go on back in and watch over the fire coals.” Sergei swung up into the saddle and looked down at his daughter; the sun was behind him, and his shadow fell across her face as she made to go to the yurt. “Natalya--”
She turned back, her face out of shadow now and the sunlight blazing from her golden hair and blue eyes, and Sergei felt he could scarcely breathe. “Da, Papa?”
He found himself unable to speak. Just as Natalya’s smile was beginning to fade to a frown of concern, Sergei cleared his throat, frowned, and said: “Try not to let the place get burned down, won’t you?”
Natalya smiled again. “I love you too, Papa.” she said quietly.
Sergei smiled back and tapped his heels against Anya’s flanks to put the mare into a canter. He circled the yurt, inspecting it as he went. He was looking very hard for recent alterations he knew to be there, yet he could see nothing amiss. He knew the Saurons had better eyes than normal men, however, and he worried still. Leaning down from the saddle, he checked the suspension; the leaf-springs of the yurt’s low wheels and axles were carrying a bit more than usual, but seemed to be bearing up well nonetheless. Kamov finally came around to the complex harness at the structure’s front where the team of ten draft horses waited for the signal to move. As always, his sons had everything in perfect order.
Scattered about on the plain around them, several of their neighbors had already begun the exodus, and thin clouds of dust were being whipped away by the chill wind. Lavrenti was up in the driver’s seat, the reins of the harness loose in his hand and a cloth-wrapped automatic rifle in a scabbard beside him.
“Hey,” Sergei called. “What happened? Where’s your brother?”
Lavrenti waved and gave his father a rueful grin. “I flipped a coin with Nikolai and lost; so now I have to drive first shift while he gets to ride.”
Nikolai came riding around from the other side of the team with the grin that made Sergei despair for the virtue of his neighbor’s daughters. “And a good thing, too,” Nikolai called. “The best rider should always go first.”
Immune to his brother’s jibes, Lavrenti only rolled his eyes--a gesture picked up from his father--and grinned.
Sergei smiled. “Huh. Using that two-headed coin again, were you?” he asked Nikolai, whose brows shot up in mock protest even as Lavrenti’s jaw dropped in feigned outrage.
Nikolai was suddenly serious. “Father--what is it? What’s wrong?”
Sergei’s face had twisted into a frown of concentration so severe he looked stricken. He thrust his hand out, a gesture his sons well knew commanded silence. Sergei turned his gaze back over his shoulder, to the south. In the vast ranges of the Atlas Mountains was the pass into the Shangri-La, and atop that pass was the old fortress where the Saurons had taken up residence, re-naming it the Citadel. Staring hard at the mountains, straining to listen for he knew not what, Sergei waited.
Suddenly his eyes caught movement, and dropping his gaze from the heights of the ranges to their base, he saw them. They looked liked dragonflies, wings glimmering as they emerged from the shadows of the mountain range into the light of Byers’ Star and the Cat’s Eye gas giant. As Sergei watched, the dragonflies grew, gained detail, and became helicopters.
“Raid!” Sergei pulled the flare pistol from his belt and fired in one motion. The danger rocket was a blinding cobalt blue, sharply contrasting with Cat’s Eye’s orange haze that overwhelmed the feeble glow of Byers’ Star and made up the bulk of Haven’s normal light. “Lavrenti, get moving, you know what to do! Nikolai, with me!”
Lavrenti had the yurt rolling in an instant; he kicked open a vent flap at his feet and shouted down a warning to those within. As the mobile tent swung about toward the other yurts and those riders already responding to Sergei’s flare, Natalya clambered up through the flap, dragging a huge vehicle-mount machine gun behind her. Sergei and Nikolai cut across the yurt’s path and made for the group of riders approaching them.
“Commander Air Group, do you have visual?”
Fighter Rank Stahler put his craft into a tight bank as he circled the vast plains below. Three other supraorbital fighters, each still bearing the flaming eye insignia that had falsely proclaimed them to be pirates during the invasion, maintained their loose formation around him, scanning the surrounding skies.
There was virtually no chance of the Haveners mustering any aircraft which could threaten the Sauron fighters--or so Stahler’s squadron members had at first declared. He had corrected them by recounting his own experience with a squadron of Havener biplanes and a particularly determined pilot; an experience which had cost the life of his wingman, Fighter Rank Vil. That had sobered their attitudes considerably.
“Affirmative, Assault Group,” Stahler answered. Three thousand feet below, long streams of dust trailed out from behind the circular black lumps that were the nomad yurts, and still more from their herds and the outriders of their mounted warriors. “Continue present heading. Beginning first pass.”
Stahler’s group would provide pinpoint bombing of anything that looked like it might threaten the assault group’s aircraft. Not wishing--or needing--to risk the remaining shuttles, the incoming attackers under Assault Leader Bohren were all in the rotary-winged aircraft captured from Haven armories. Fast, heavily armored and well-armed even by modern Sauron standards, the “helicopter gunships” (as their manuals identified them) would land and put Soldiers on all sides of the horse nomads, then take of
f once more to prevent any of the herd or their mounted defenders from escaping.
The land was flat steppe all the way south to the foot of the Atlas Mountains, with only slight depressions to the north. A river flowed along the eastern border of the strike zone, with a small copse of trees bordering to the north. The weather here on the steppes was fickle, with the North Sea winds able to sweep unopposed across the miles of flatland, but the Meteorology Ranks had assured them that a storm currently out to sea would remain there for at least another day.
Blinking in a coded pattern, Stahler activated the optic-nerve link to his ground attack weaponry. Where his eyes went, the barrels of six gauss cannon swivel-mounted beneath his aircraft’s wings turned to follow. Hands free, Stahler manipulated the vertical thrusters which would stabilize his craft for sustained firing on any ground position which might warrant such attention.
Coming up beneath him, along the northern edge of the nomad mass of horses, a large domed tent filled his vision.
All things considered, Stahler thought as his fighter swept forward, it looks like an easy day’s work.
He would not have believed anything so apparently simple could go so horribly wrong.
Lavrenti watched the fighters bearing down on them with something like religious awe. He slapped the reins over the team, and stood up in the seat, shouting at them. Beside him, his sister Natalya was fumbling with the pedestal mount for the heavy machine gun she had brought up from the tent.
The yurts of Lavrenti’s people were a far technological cry from their Asiatic forebears; anything the Mongols had done, the Cossacks declared they could do better. Scavenged vehicle axles, huge pneumatic tires and advanced suspensions made the mobile tents as fast as their horse teams could run--eventually. They still comprised a great deal of mass, and even at their top speed, compared to the Sauron fighter, they were still as stones.
Lavrenti kept turning to watch as the fighter approached. Dark shapes moved beneath its wings, and two yurts in its path exploded like puffer spores, scattering carpets, pillows, household utensils and human bodies from their tops in great gouts of dust and flame and blood. There was no flash from the weapons on the Sauron craft, no roar to be heard above the surrounding din. Lavrenti knew the magnetic-accelerator weapons of the Saurons were virtually silent, and though there was nothing subtle in this attack, the next fighter could come upon them with no warning at all. If of course, we survive the attack by this fighter.
He heard a clanking beside him and his sister’s shout: “Get down, L’asha!”
The long barrel of the machine gun whipped about, clipping his shoulder as he ducked, then it was going off a foot behind his head with an ear-punishing roar. “You crazy girl! You can’t hurt that thing with a pop-gun!”
But he kept driving; if they were going to die, as he was now quite certain that they were, it would be good to die fighting.
Behind him and to each side, Stahler’s squadron members were completing their passes. So far, all their attacks had destroyed the rolling tents with no damage to the teams pulling them. Such was the expertise of Soldiers and the quality of their equipment. This first strike was intended to deprive the cattle of much cover against the ground forces now landing all around them. In a moment, the assault ships would disgorge their cargoes of Soldiers, then return to the air to take over the air-support role now being provided by Stahler’s squadron.
Before him, Stahler saw a flicker of light on one of the yurts, at the point where the team of horses met the dome of the tent. A faint tapping of shells against his canopy told him it was small-arms fire, and aborting his climb, he increased forward and vertical thrust, slowing his fighter to a virtual crawl. A machine gun on such a mount could provide a very unpleasant surprise for the ground troops now closing in on the position, and Stahler had no intention of leaving it intact.
His ground speed barely fifty miles an hour and his fighter effectively a floating tank, Stahler focused on the still-firing machine gun as he closed; there was a young man urging the team, and someone behind him firing the weapon. Matching speed with the yurt, Stahler focused on the youth; his ship’s weapons would take both the driver and gunner in a single burst. The sighting-implant painted twin hexagonal reticles over his field of vision, converging patterns which closed over one another and abruptly shifted to green; the weapons were locked on to the target, and as Stahler blinked again to fire them, the gunner became visible. “Shit!” Stahler roared in reflex.
In all species of humans, the instinct to preserve the opposite sex is nowhere stronger than in normal males; in all males, it is nowhere stronger than in Saurons. In all species of humans, the reflexes of Saurons are without equal, and among Saurons, the reflexes of pilots are something almost beyond the laws of physics. Stahler was completely unaware that he had jerked his control stick back, lurching the nose of the fighter up, sending his fire harmlessly over the heads of the boy and girl on the yurt. The tent rolled on, passing out of his forward field of fire, its riders in a crazy exultation over the antics of the bobbing spacecraft behind them.
Stahler recovered control in a red haze of fury. Had he not been under orders to preserve the livestock and females of these nomads, he would have emptied every weapon pod on his ship into that damnable tent, its team and its cattle, too. Stahler did not indulge in slaughter of opponents; it was inefficient and pointless. But dear God, he thought, startled by the pretty face of a female human norm at a machine gun? He almost groaned. He would never live this down.
“What is he doing?”
Cyborg Rank Sargun did not answer, remaining as motionless as only a Cyborg could be. Such stability was necessary to the function of the optical enhancer--mere binoculars would have done little to improve a Cyborg’s visual acuity--which was feeding data directly into Sargun’s optic nerve through the small receptor patches on his forehead. The effect was to place Sargun’s point of view in any scene within range of the OpEn unit. Right now he was watching Stahler’s fighter as it leveled off, recovering from the seemingly pointless gyrations to which he had subjected it in order to avoid firing on the cattle female.
Switching the OpEn unit to standby, Sargun drew a short breath and finally answered Cyborg Rank Stern: “Apparently he wished to spare the life of the gunner; a human norm female.”
Stern considered this for a moment. “Priority for captured females is this high?”
Sargun made the ghost of a shoulder movement that was the Cyborg equivalent of throwing one’s hands in the air. “Fighter Ranks tend toward romanticism. The violence of the maneuver suggests it was reflexive.”
Stern’s lips flickered in a suggestion that he didn’t think much of the pilot. Looking back over his shoulder, he gestured to the other Cyborgs in the salvage team: Remain in position; engagement occurring ahead. All twelve Cyborgs were motionless shapes spread out in the grass behind him, all twelve gave the subtle hand signal acknowledging his order: Understood; advise at discretion.
The sounds of the battle were carrying across the plains to them now. They were perhaps three miles distant; a two minute run for Cyborgs should they choose to intervene, but Stern was not yet sure of Sargun’s position on violating direct orders against committing Cyborgs to combat.
He decided to be patient.
Sergei and Nikolai had joined a dozen riders and made for the right flank of the herds. Helicopters were sweeping slowly over the fields beyond, dropping men from twenty feet above the ground, at speeds which would have killed human norms. The dark forms hit the ground running, leaving wakes in the steppes grasses as they came on toward the cossacks.
Sergei cross-drew a pistol and a long, curved sabre. On his right, Nikolai had drawn two revolvers of an indecent calibre. Having heard a rumor that the Saurons had two hearts, his son had acquired the pistols during the first weeks of the Sauron invasion, declaring his desire for weapons capable of removing both organs at once.
“At least the grasses are still high,” Sergei shouted
over the thunder of the charging horses. “They’ll have to get close for clear shots at us; we’ll be able to shoot down on them from horseback.”
Yarmoloff was on Sergei’s left side, carrying a shortened paratrooper’s carbine fitted with an absurdly huge snail-clip. He raised it to his shoulder and loosed a burst, the weapon barely moving as the body of the animal beneath it rocked in a gallop. “Horseback’s not much of an advantage against Saurons,” Yarmoloff shouted back.
Sergei leveled his pistol at a wake in the grass ahead, moving incredibly fast. Firing, he saw the wake first shift direction even as he squeezed the trigger, then cut back on course for him a split second later. Mother of God, he prayed; I’ll take any advantage I can get . . .
Assault Leader Bohren’s rotor-wing pulled up and back, giving him a clear view of the battlefield. Not much of a battle, he considered, but the match-up of infantry and archaic cavalry had always intrigued him in his studies. Too bad the equation will change once the helicopters begin providing fire support runs. The plan he had effected under Deathmaster Quilland’s approval was proceeding with an efficiency that might have seemed dull to anyone but the Sauron soldiers whose lives now depended upon it.
Bohren’s expertise lay in organizational control. As one of the Groundmasters for the initial invasion of Haven, he had been a paragon of efficiency. And, like all Saurons, he was a Soldier of the first magnitude; as a command Ranker, he was expected to be--and was-- competent for leading assault actions against human norms. His only weakness lay in the fallibility of pure organization as a technique for combat.
Bohren would have been amused to learn that the human norms used to say: “No battle plan ever survives contact with a Sauron.” Had Bohren been a bit more imaginative, he might have been less amused by appreciating that that phrase, within the context of the conditions under which the Saurons now lived, implied a potential for disaster beyond any powers of organization to withstand.
War World IV: Invasion Page 9
