Lieutenant Colonel

by Rick Shelley

“The intruder spotted us, altered course, and started accelerating,” Roim reported. “If they keep going, there’s no chance Taranto can intercept them before they can jump to Q-space again. Should I have Taranto abort the pursuit?”

  Lon scarcely hesitated. Having Taranto close enough to use its fighters would be welcome, especially with two raids in progress. “Yes, abort. But keep an eye on that intruder. If they start decelerating again, look like they might try to come in, tell Taranto to be ready to head after them. I want all of the attack shuttles here as fast as you can get them to us. I’ll send two companies to Long Glen and have a third ready to go to Damron’s Scar if the militia needs help there. That puts the last company on alert in case the raiders hit somewhere else.”

  Let’s put everything we can into this, Lon thought. If we’re going to have to take them piecemeal, best to get it started right now. He allowed himself only a few seconds to rest. Then he got up and started moving. There was a lot of work to do, even if he was still tired.

  Lon’s office was on the west side of the headquarters building, so he did not have sunlight streaming in a window to announce the coming of day. Jeremy Howell brought breakfast in, and made pointed hints about eating when Lon started to push the tray aside. Lon picked at the food—a few mouthfuls of scrambled eggs, a couple of bites of toast. Coffee was different. He drank two cups quickly—on top of several he had already consumed since getting up.

  Long Glen was only forty miles away. The alert company, Charlie, was on the ground there, engaging an enemy that appeared to be nearly its equal in strength. At the moment, Charlie was providing security for the landing strip to allow the two companies of militia to get down safely. It would be another twenty minutes before Taranto would be in position to launch additional Shrikes to help.

  Lon had his staff busy, and all of the men were up as well—some to move out as soon as they could board shuttles, the last company going on alert status, ready to respond if the raiders staged a third attack. The command shuttle was on alert also, and Lon had notified his staff to be ready to leave immediately—if he decided to head toward one of the raids.

  The raiders at Long Glen were not giving ground. A rocket hit one of the shuttles bringing in the militia, but the craft managed to land. There were a few minor casualties, but the men were able to disembark safely. The shuttle would need extensive repair work before it would be able to take off again, though, but in the meantime it would limit use of the landing strip.

  “Shuttles can get in and out,” Captain Kai reported, “but only one at a time, and there’s absolutely no margin for error.”

  “There are two other clearings within five miles of you,” Lon replied, scrolling his mapboard in for a closer view. “We’re watching those for enemy shuttles. As soon as Taranto gets back in position, we’ll have Shrikes covering both clearings.”

  “Why not put Delta on the ground, split between those two locations?” Kai asked. Delta was the other company moving toward Long Glen. Bravo was heading to Damron’s Scar, leaving Alpha on alert in Lincoln. “We really don’t need reinforcements here, and the way the landing strip is, putting them out like that might be a hell of a lot safer, and it gives us the option of closing in on the raiders from behind, no matter which way they go.”

  Lon spent a few seconds looking at his mapboard before he replied. “Good point, Sefer. I’ll divert Delta as you suggest.”

  When he passed those orders to Captain Magnusson and the pilots of the shuttles carrying Delta Company, Lon made a point of mentioning that enemy shuttles might intend to use one or the other of the clearings. “Keep your eyes open and be ready for attack from the air,” Lon warned.

  His next call was to CIC on Long Snake. “Are you picking up that static from enemy electronics?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” the duty officer in CIC said.

  “Any sign of enemy shuttle activity?”

  “Not yet, Colonel. We’re linking all our assets with new search frequencies and filters. Our hope here is that with the additions, and as many overlapping search vectors as possible, we’ll be able to spot them in fairly short order, shuttles or men on the ground using active electronics.”

  In other words, Lon thought, they still don’t have the faintest idea whether they’re going to be able to spot them at all. He shook his head slowly. I hope we get a chance to look over one of those shuttles before we get out of here, find out what makes their technology better than ours. A coup like that would make the contract far sweeter than the payment Dirigent was receiving from the government of Bancroft.

  “There’s a good chance they won’t be using the shuttles soon, though, Colonel,” the man in CIC said. “Any stealth they have is only going to be really effective at night, and it’s already light over both of the sites being raided. Daylight, they can be seen by the naked eye if they’re low enough to be of any use.”

  “We don’t assume that,” Lon said. “They timed this raid too close to dawn to have expected to get out by shuttle before first light. What’s the cloud cover over Long Glen and Damron’s Scar?”

  “Patchy over Damron’s Scar; almost nonexistent over Long Glen, Colonel. We can see the shuttles on the ground at Long Glen in visible light from here.”

  Lon closed his eyes, trying to concentrate. They’ve timed raids close to dawn before, he reminded himself. And it’s cost them. Why stage two more at the same time when their men will be trapped on the ground for more than twelve hours? What are they trying to prove? What are they trying to get us to do?

  “I want a close scan for unidentified electronics, that fuzzy static, for an eight-mile radius around the two sites,” he told CIC.

  “We’re already doing that, Colonel. You think they might be trying to draw us into a major battle?”

  “I don’t know what to think, but I want to be ready for any conceivable scenario. If they hope to sucker us into a trap, we need to be able to turn it back against them.”

  There was no fight at Damron’s Scar. Before the DMC and BCM forces arrived, the raiders had left—empty-handed, since there had been neither miners nor metal at the site. Bravo Company was trying to find their track, with one company of militia. The Dirigenter shuttles were back in the air, helping with the search, ready to provide air cover if the men on the ground ran into an ambush.

  “I don’t know what to think,” Lon said. He had Vel Osterman, Torry Berger, and Phip Steesen in the office. “Are they trying to draw us into a major battle, still feeling us out, or something else? They’ve shown they can be damned cunning, get in and out of a site if they have inside help. They didn’t give themselves the cover of night this time, though, and that puzzles me. Maybe they didn’t know Damron’s Scar had been evacuated, but what about Long Glen? They couldn’t have hoped to get in and out before we could respond, even if someone killed the snoops.”

  “As I recall, Colonel,” Phip said, “the raiders didn’t seem to act very logically the last time we were here.”

  “The operation is bigger now, and it’s shown signs of being better organized and more coherent, not so damned haphazard. We have to assume that the raiders have some logical plan in mind.”

  “Maybe they were hoping to provide enough distractions on the ground to let that ship come in for a pickup,” Vel suggested. “Or bring in reinforcements and supplies.” He shrugged. “They can’t count on getting munitions from the locals. Their rifles aren’t the same caliber as the Bancrofters use. Any ammunition has to come from off-world, and fuel for their shuttles. I assume they must get most of their food and other supplies the same way, other than what they can gather raw materials for to use in replicators. And they’re not doing their job if they can’t get their loot out.”

  “That ship that came in, it’s just sent an MR out,” Torry Berger said. Message rockets were the fastest way to get information across interstellar space, other than taking a ship. Radio transmissions were limited by the speed of light. An MR—basically just a propulsion system an
d Nilssen generator, with minimal space for cargo, less than a cubic foot—made the same jumps a ship would.

  “If they’ve sent an MR home, we can’t assume that they’re going to leave,” Osterman said. “There’d be little point, unless they were afraid that the ship might be destroyed before it could jump to Q-space.”

  “Which means that we might be up to our butts in raiders in a month,” Lon said. “If they choose to reinforce the assets they already have here. It would be nice if we could neutralize the raiders on the ground before any newcomers arrive.”

  “Colonel, I just thought of something else,” Phip said. “This stuff today, drawing so much of our force away. Maybe the raiders figure on hitting Lincoln again, just to stir up the fear factor. Like they did before. Try to erode the support base among the civilians.”

  “Every raid contributes to that,” Osterman said. “That’s one of the reasons the government brought us in. They lose money and support every time a mining site is successfully raided—not to mention the people they’ve killed.”

  “They do stockpile all their export stuff here in Lincoln,” Berger said. “If the raiders were strong enough to hit the city in force, they could make one hell of a haul, especially if they had a transport coming in to pick it all up right away.”

  “How much of a haul?” Lon asked.

  “The locals haven’t given us precise figures, but I would guess perhaps as much as a ton of refined gold and platinum, perhaps twice as much in other marketable elements and precious gems. Or more.”

  “There’s no evidence that the raiders have the assets to attempt a coup de main,” Major Osterman said. “If they did, they would have tried it before we arrived.”

  “Unless they were waiting for this new ship, and whatever other units might be waiting to pop in,” Berger said. “We don’t know where that MR was headed. They might have a fleet one jump out. If that’s the case, we could be in deep shit in a week.”

  “Vel, I want you to compile the data we have and get an MR of our own off to Dirigent,” Lon said. “Apprise them of the situation in as much detail as possible, including a transcript of this meeting. I’ll have my own report to add to the package. And make sure any outgoing mail gets out as well.”

  “How soon?” Osterman asked.

  “We’ll take a break now. Say an hour. That’ll give me time to finish my report,” Lon said. “Torry, you keep monitoring the action. Let me know if there’s any significant change.”

  Phip hung back as the others left. When he was alone with Lon, Phip said, “You’re really worried about this, aren’t you?”

  Lon nodded. “I have to be. I’ve got this nagging feeling that we’re missing something important, maybe something vital. The raiders are being too damned cute. They have to have an ace in the hole, something we haven’t figured out yet.”

  19

  One Shrike was brought down by a surface-to-air missile at Long Glen just as Lon’s staff reconvened. A barrage of SAMs were launched at the Dirigenter fighters and two shuttles that were in the air attacking the raider positions. None of the other craft were hit, but Lon decided to pull the shuttles out of action—they were less maneuverable and more vulnerable than the fighters. And Lon—pressed by his staff—decided to hold off on a personal visit to the scene.

  Reports from the men on the ground kept revising the estimate of the number of raiders upward. By midafternoon the best guess was that there had to be at least two hundred raiders committed to the fight. The battle had turned mobile, but that brought no clear advantage to the Dirigenters and Bancrofters. The raiders were showing themselves to be more professional than the militiamen…and very nearly the equal of the mercenaries. Maybe equal, Lon allowed reluctantly. The real test hasn’t come yet. It seemed clear that the raiders were better led, better organized, and better trained than the ones Lon’s company had dealt with on Bancroft nine years before. Those had shown no solid organization at all.

  “They learned. Have we?” Lon asked Phip Steesen. The two were alone in Lon’s office. It was nearly time for supper, though Lon was having difficulty finding any appetite.

  “Maybe that’s the wrong question,” Phip said. “Maybe we should be thinking more about how they learned from what happened here before. None of the prisoners taken in the last fight ever got back to Earth. There was at least one shuttle unaccounted for when we left, and who knows how many raiders we didn’t bag. I know what the Bancrofters say, that they cleaned out the last pockets and that anyone left over must have eventually died out in the wilds, but I wouldn’t make book on any of it.”

  “You don’t think the survivors managed to hold together any kind of coherent group through the eight years before the new raiders showed up, do you?”

  Phip shook his head vigorously. “Not for a minute. That wouldn’t have helped. I think that some of them got back to Earth, or Mars, or wherever they were based. I think they carried back pretty good reports of our activities and how we defeated them. That shuttle we didn’t find, and however many other shuttles we might not have known about—I think they took the survivors off the next time a ship came in to pick up booty.”

  “I can’t argue against the possibility,” Lon conceded. “That would tell them a lot about how we operate, and since we trained the first thousand members of the BCM, it would tell the raiders how the locals operate as well.”

  “It tells them how you operate, Lon,” Phip said, lowering his voice. “We got picked for this because the locals wanted the same man. Maybe it would have been better if someone else had come, someone who thinks differently, who commands differently.”

  “Too bad you didn’t come up with that argument before we left Dirigent. We might still be home with our families.”

  “Yeah, well, you know how it is. Give me enough time and I can fumble through and find the answer to anything. You got any idea who it was put the idea of getting the same troops here? I know it sounds kind of logical, but did the governor think it up on his own? Or Henks? Or somebody else, maybe one of the immigrants working in Government House?”

  “And I thought I was cynical. You look under your bed before you climb in at night?”

  “I’m a bit older, and I’ve been in this outfit longer.” Phip grinned. “Let’s go eat, and maybe have a beer. All this thinking is giving me one hell of a headache.”

  Four hundred Dirigenters and six hundred Bancrofters were involved in the engagement near Long Glen. Two hundred of each were pursuing the raiders who had hit the empty mining camp at Damron’s Scar. Before he could go to supper, Lon argued with Colonel Crampton over the second force. Crampton had showed up at Lon’s office as Lon and Phip were leaving. Lon wanted to bring the men at Damron’s Scar back to Lincoln, ready to deal with more serious threats. Crampton wanted to continue looking for the raiders who had triggered the snoops in the abandoned mining camp.

  “We need to get rid of all the enemy,” Crampton insisted. “Letting some get away doesn’t do it.”

  “We’re wasting resources there,” Lon repeated—for the third time. “The chances of finding those raiders is too small to be worth the effort. We’re better off having those companies here, where they can respond quickly to any new threats.”

  At the end, because Lon insisted, Crampton agreed to pull the men in the morning, if they hadn’t found the raiders yet.

  “He’s as stubborn as you,” Phip whispered after the militia commander left.

  “I can see his point. His worries aren’t quite identical to ours,” Lon said.

  “You just could have told him you were going to pull our company out of that place and let him worry about keeping his own people there without us,” Phip suggested.

  Lon started walking again. “For a second, I considered it,” he admitted. “But it’s better to do it this way. Consulting rather than commanding.”

  “Load of bull crap,” Phip said.

  Supper sat like lead in Lon’s stomach. After he ate, he spent an hour conferring
with CIC and with his company commanders at Long Glen and Damron’s Scar. The fighting was intermittent near Long Glen now, occasional skirmishes moving gradually farther from the village. North of Damron’s Scar, traces of the enemy’s path had been found, lost, then found again. And lost again after dark.

  “Don’t push your men too hard tonight, Brock,” Lon told Bravo Company’s commander. “We’ll guide you toward a suitable LZ in the morning, get the shuttles in to bring you back here…unless you run into something before then. And from what you’ve told me, I don’t expect that.”

  “I think they’re playing hide-and-seek with us,” Captain Carlin said. “Just showing enough trail to keep us interested, if you know what I mean. I’ve got my scouts looking for any hint of ambush.”

  “They’re capable of it,” Lon said. “Watch your back, Brock.”

  Sefer Kai and Ron Magnusson had similar impressions—that they were being drawn intentionally by the raiders. “They hit Long Glen hard, but they started withdrawing, fighting in good order, stepping lively enough to keep from being surrounded,” Captain Kai said. “Then, just when it seems that they’ve managed to break contact, something happens. They send a patrol to ambush our scouts, hit us on a flank…something.”

  “Colonel, if we didn’t have near a thousand men here, I’d swear they were trying to draw us into a fight-to-the-finish battle on their ground. They don’t want to lose us,” Captain Magnusson added. “Like kids, one daring the other to cross a line, over and over.”

  “You know to watch out for whatever tricks they’ve got up their sleeves. You having any trouble with the BCM commanders?”

  “They’re a little too eager, Colonel,” Magnusson said. “They want to press on full speed, all the time, force the engagement right this second, and damn the consequences.”

  “Hold them in as best you can,” Lon said.

  Lon went to his room, undressed, then took a long, hot shower. It eased some of his tension, left him feeling sleepy, ready for bed. He made one last call to the duty officer, to make sure that nothing new had come up in the past fifteen minutes, then turned out the light and climbed into bed. The timeline on the complink next to the head of the bed said 2127 when he closed his eyes.