Lieutenant Colonel

by Rick Shelley

  “How’d you get all the blood on you?” Lon asked.

  “His blood. I was about the closest man not wounded or shocked senseless by the explosions. I got to him and did what I could to stop the bleeding.” Nace squeezed his eyes shut. “God, I didn’t know I was capable of what I did. I had to reach inside the chopped meat those grenades left to tie off the arteries in his left leg—hip. That was the only way I could keep him from bleeding to death right there, and I still don’t know if it was enough. There was nothing left to put a tourniquet on. The right stump at least had enough left for that.”

  Wil Nace turned to the side, away from Lon, and started puking, retching so violently that he had to drop to his knees to keep from falling.

  • • •

  Lon gave Colonel Crampton the news about his son while he was on the way back to his command post. “He’s alive but in very bad shape,” Lon told him. “He may have lost too much blood before they got him to the trauma tubes.”

  There was a long pause before Colonel Crampton said, “Thanks for telling me. I’ll get over there as soon as I can. I can’t let go right now.”

  “You’d better go now,” Lon advised. “I’ll keep you posted on anything going on you need to know about.”

  There were reports from company commanders. The raiders were moving uphill again on the southwestern front, where they had the bulk of their troops. Some of the fighting was already hand-to-hand.

  “We’ll leave one company of militia and two platoons of our people to guard the medical station,” Lon said. “I want everyone else pushing toward the main enemy force. Let’s finish the job here and now. If anyone hasn’t done it yet, fix bayonets.”

  Lon attached his bayonet to his rifle as he spoke. When he got to the squads that had moved back toward his command post, it was only long enough to collect those men and start them moving south, along the side of the hill.

  Toward the enemy.

  The raiders were concentrated in a wedge, 300 yards long, 150 yards wide at the base. The apex had reached and penetrated the defensive line through the middle of one of the militia companies but had bogged down there, unable to turn to roll up the line on either side of the breakthrough. While Lon was concentrating his forces, the raiders were attempting to broaden their attack, widening the wedge. The last members of the other raider forces were converging with the main body. All their eggs in one basket, just the way we wanted it, Lon thought.

  At the sides of the raider wedge, mercenaries and militiamen worked to turn the corners back, fighting to compress and contain the enemy. Lon led the men he had gathered near his command post—a mixed force of Dirigenters and Bancrofters—toward the center of the firefight, the point where the raiders had broken the defensive line. There were already six platoons—two mercenary and four militia—trying to push the raiders back out of the gap. Captain Magnusson had taken command of the joint effort, bringing two platoons in to plug the original penetration and then gathering the nearest militia platoons to try to repel the enemy. Lon added the men who had come with him.

  The raiders resisted with as much determination as any soldiers Lon had ever encountered, as if they knew they had nowhere to go, no escape. Even when some of the enemy ran out of ammunition, they continued fighting, moving closer to use bayonets or belt knives.

  Slowly the raiders were forced back toward the south and down the slope, fighting every step of the way, taking and giving heavy losses. Only after more than an hour of this deadly close-in fighting did some of the raiders—individuals, then small groups—start throwing down their weapons and surrendering. They were stripped of helmets and any remaining gear and moved away from the fighting. Those raiders who were too badly wounded to move on their own were left where they lay, with the dead.

  The fighting ended suddenly, after nearly ninety minutes of hand-to-hand combat. Two piercing blasts on a whistle were followed by a loudspeaker announcement from within the concentration of raiders—an order from the ranking officer for his men to lay down their weapons and surrender unconditionally.

  27

  It was nearly sunset before the rain finally stopped, leaving water dripping from trees and running down the slopes of the line of hills for hours afterward. Water was slow to seep into the saturated ground. There had been none of the magical cleansing of a poet’s springtime rain. This left only mud and dirty puddles, many of them tainted by blood.

  The fighting was over, but not the work. Shuttles had been operating in relays carrying the wounded back to Lincoln and Bancroft’s other towns—anyplace with medical facilities. Dirigenters and Bancrofters were given priority. Wounded prisoners went afterward, to be treated when possible. The location of the main raider base, two miles south of the area Lon’s people had searched, was discovered easily. Several wounded raiders were anxious to tell where it was after being reminded that they couldn’t be treated without the antidote to the nanotech self-destruct mechanisms they had been infected with. Several portable trauma tubes were found in the caves, as well as tons of metal and minerals plundered from Bancroft’s mining facilities.

  Manning reports were compiled for mercenaries and militiamen. Lon grimaced at each detailing of the dead and wounded from his battalion, though the numbers were not as high as he had feared they would be. Thirty-seven Dirigenters had been killed in the day’s fighting, 140 wounded or otherwise injured. The three companies of militia had suffered slightly more casualties, both dead and wounded. Lieutenant Wilson Crampton had survived, though Lon’s senior medtech said it was the most extraordinary survival he had ever seen. “It’s a bloody miracle he made it,” Sergeant Carvel told Lon. Colonel Wilson Crampton echoed that sentiment.

  “The miracle was one of your sergeants,” Colonel Crampton said when he and Lon met to go over the reports they had been receiving. “One of my son’s men said he saw one of your sergeants go to Wilson and stop the bleeding—said if he’d been five seconds slower he wouldn’t have made it.”

  “Company Lead Sergeant Wil Nace,” Lon said. “I saw them when they got to the medtechs.”

  “I want to thank him personally,” Colonel Crampton said. “I owe him more than I can ever repay.”

  “I’ll arrange it,” Lon said, looking away for an instant, remembering that it might be his son in similar circumstances…in not too many years.

  Raider casualties took longer to enumerate. Dead, wounded, captured. The raider force had suffered more than 50 percent casualties—dead or wounded—in the fight. Some of the wounded might have been saved had it not been for the toxins their leaders had infected them with to keep them from talking. Many of those who had been seriously wounded died before the antidote could be located and brought to the medical stations to allow treatment of the prisoners.

  The prisoners were kept together and guarded through the night. Stripped of their helmets, weapons, and most of their other gear, they posed little threat. By morning, many of them were willing to talk. The other raider bases, the locations of the remaining shuttles, even schedules for transport ships were learned in the first few hours of questioning.

  “There are a few officers among the prisoners,” Colonel Crampton told Lon after they had all returned to Lincoln. “It looks as if we’ll even get the names of most of the agents the Colonial Mining Cartel managed to plant here.” Colonel Crampton had been spending most of his time with his son. Wilson would need two months or more of trauma tube treatment to fully regenerate his legs.

  “That’s good. We won’t have any trouble clearing the rest up either,” Lon said.

  “What about that raider ship?” Colonel Crampton asked.

  “Shrikes from Taranto managed to disable that yesterday,” Lon said. That news had come as something of a surprise to him after the battle. Somehow he had completely missed the reports on that ship from Captain Roim of Long Snake. The Shrikes that had been assigned to intercept the raider ship had not been able to destroy it, but they had crippled its propulsion system. It was locked i
nto a very eccentric orbit around Bancroft. “We haven’t received a surrender from them yet, but we will. Either that or we’ll finish the job.”

  “I hope you can get them to surrender,” Colonel Crampton said. “We can use that ship, once it’s repaired. Get men trained to crew it. That ship could give us the protection we need out in space…some of it, anyway. We’ll be ready when the next raider transport comes to make a pickup, and we’ll make it harder for those bastards from Earth to try something like this again.”

  Lon smiled. “We’ll see what we can do for you, Colonel.”

  Phip Steesen was not so easy to appease. “You kept me out of the big fight on purpose,” he charged, the first time he managed to be alone with Lon after everyone had returned to Lincoln. “You stranded me back here so I wouldn’t end up like Dean.”

  “I didn’t know this was going to turn out to be the big fight when we left here, Phip,” Lon explained. “And no, I wasn’t trying to keep you out of anything.”

  “Like hell you weren’t.”

  “It didn’t even occur to me.”

  Still, for the next three days Phip spoke to Lon only when duty demanded it.

  Cleaning out the remnants of the raider force, recovering material they had looted and the munitions and supplies cached in their various strongholds, and taking the two remaining attack shuttles left to them took nearly two weeks. The crew of the ship needed twelve days to decide to surrender. The ship had been boarded and the crew taken off. Engineers from Taranto and Long Snake had already started repairing the ship’s propulsion system. Bancroft had contracted for an engineer and two officers from Taranto’s flight crew to stay over for six months to train Bancrofters to operate the ship. Those Dirigenters would return home when a supply ship came to bring new weapons and four Shrikes. Eight Bancrofters would be going to Dirigent for flight training. A dozen others would go for more extensive training in ship operations.

  “A most profitable addendum to a successful contract,” Lon noted in the last report he dispatched to Dirigent via message rocket. “It seems unlikely that Earth’s Colonial Mining Cartel will attempt to attack Bancroft again, but if they do, Bancroft will be better able to defend itself.”

  The prisoners, nearly seven hundred altogether, including twelve families of recent settlers identified as agents working for CMC, would be routed back to Earth—as transport became available—except for several dozen men who asked to be allowed to stay and settle on Bancroft. The government of Bancroft also began distributing detailed reports of the activities of the Colonial Mining Cartel to other worlds, and it sent an official diplomatic protest to Earth…for what little good that might do.

  There was a formal ceremony at Government House to mark the successful completion of the contract. Governor Sosa announced a large completion bonus for the men of 2nd Battalion, 7th Regiment, and one further honor. Lead Sergeant Wil Nace was awarded the Medal of Valor of the Bancroft Constabulary Militia.

  It was sixteen days after the climactic battle that an MR arrived from Dirigent, carrying—in addition to official mail—personal mail for the men of 2nd Battalion. There were two message chips for Lon among the personal mail, one from his wife and children, the other from his parents. In a rare gesture of self-indulgence, Lon postponed reading his official mail and turned to the family letters first. Lon was used to the segmented nature of the letter from his family. Sara had recorded a number of sections in private. Lon, Junior, and Angie had also recorded private messages. In addition, there were joint sessions, with all three sitting around talking more or less at once. They talked about the details of daily life, and about the things they had been doing with the elder Nolans. All in all, that letter ran for nearly an hour. Lon was tempted to replay the entire thing immediately, but took the chip from his complink and inserted the chip from his parents.

  “God, it’s good to have them on Dirigent,” Lon whispered while the second letter was playing. He hardly noticed the tear at the corner of his left eye, wiping it away absently.

  His parents were full of cheery news, their discoveries, their “exploration” of their new homeworld. Several times Lon found himself chuckling over their exuberance. But one passage—his father speaking without his mother present—almost brought Lon to tears.

  “I’ve spent quite a lot of time chatting with Junior. He’s been full of enthusiasm for your outfit and swearing that he’s going to enlist the day he’s old enough. I know how much that troubles you, but I think that maybe there’s hope he’ll change his mind. Junior has talked a lot, but he has also done a lot of listening—not your strongest suit when you were his age, if you remember. I’ve talked about my teaching, and about the options he has here. Given him a different perspective on a few things, I think. Maybe it sounds different coming from an old geezer like me rather than a certified hero-soldier. There’s no guarantee here, son, but the last few days Junior hasn’t been quite so absolutely adamant about becoming a soldier.”

  “I hope you’re right, Dad,” Lon whispered to the complink screen. “I pray you’re right.”

  The Dirigenter ships started for home three weeks before the end of the originally contracted three months, their job finished. Lon paid his first visit to the section of Long Snake where the Dirigenter dead were being stored for the trip home. There were too many dead—one was too many—but he consoled himself with the knowledge that it could have been much worse.

  He sat alone in the antechamber for more than an hour, staring at the hatch that led to the bodies. How many fathers and mothers have to mourn? he wondered.

  Maybe, subconsciously, I was trying to keep Phip away from the fighting, Lon thought—honest in proximity to the dead. Colonel Crampton nearly lost his son. Jerry was wounded. Lon shook his head. There was one problem he still had no answer for. “How can I convince Junior there are other things to do than be a soldier like his father?” Just the hope that maybe his father would make the difference.