by David Drake
The field first nodded.
"Well, stands to reason that if it can follow us anyways at all, it could just as easy follow me back to Quan Loi. At least here I got a chance." His left hand reached out and patted the heavy barrel of the cal fifty, sticking more than three feet out from the cupola gunshield. "Oh, I know," the redhead went on, "the captain had a gun, and Jody was right here when it got him—but Christ, back at Quan Loi or Di An there wouldn't be a goddamn thing between me and it."
The sergeant chuckled without much humor. Casely thought he could see the outline of a machete, buckled onto the pistol belt under the massive bulge of the black's stomach. The only other time the TC could remember Peacock actually wearing the big knife was the evening they got word that the firebase was being hit by everything from one-oh-sevens on down and that the NDPs could expect their share any moment. "Hey, you want a beer?" he questioned. "It's warm, but—oh Christ!"
The younger man leaped back into his cupola. "What's the matter?" the sergeant demanded. Then his nostrils wrinkled.
"Flares!" the noncom shouted at the top of his lungs. "Everybody shoot up flares!"
"What the hell?" Jones blurted in confusion as he and Bailey stuck their heads up out of the cargo hatch. The bolt of the cal fifty in the cupola clanged loudly as Casely snatched back the charging handle. Across the laager somebody had heard the sergeant's bellow and obeyed enthusiastically with a pair of white star clusters. They shot up like Roman candles, drawing weird shadows with their short multiple glare and silhouetting Sergeant Peacock himself as he pounded across the dirt toward the command track. A horrible stench lay over everything.
The flares burned out. The sergeant disappeared, black into the deeper blackness. Lt. Worthington lurched into sight at the flap of the command tent, his rifle in his hand. Then the sergeant bellowed, a terrible mixture of hatred and surprise that almost drowned out the hiss of another flare going up. In the cupola of three-six, Casely cursed with effort as he swung the squealing armor around and pointed the big machine gun in across the NDP.
"Red, what in God's name are you doing?" Jones shrieked. The flare popped and began floating down on its parachute. Sergeant Peacock was between three-six and the command track. His bloated shadow writhed across the soil; neither of his feet were touching the ground. Casely pressed down the butterfly trigger with both thumbs. The shattering muzzle blast pocked the sides of the command tent as the red tracers snicked out past it. The stream of fire was whipping almost straight across the laager, a long raking burst endangering everybody in the troop as it lashed the air just over Sergeant Peacock's head. The field first was struggling titanically with nothing at all; his right hand slashed the glinting machete blade again and again across the air in front of him while his left seemed clamped on the invisible something that held and supported him.
The southern sky brightened, flickered. Not another flare, Jones realized, not thunder either as the sound shuddered toward him. Arclight, a strike on the area they had started to laager in two nights back.
All around the NDP men were shouting in confusion. The lieutenant had started running toward the field first, then collapsed gagging as he took a deep breath. Diesels rumbled, but no one else had started shooting. The barrel of Casely's machine gun was cherry red. You could watch tracers start to tumble in screaming arcs as soon as they left the burnt-out barrel, but the TC continued hosing the air. Sergeant Peacock gave a choked cry; his machete snapped, then dropped from his hand. At the same instant, the cal fifty came to the end of its belt of ammunition and stuttered into silence. The TC's despairing curses were barely audible over the rising thunder of bomb blasts raking the jungle south of them.
There was an incongruous pop from the air beside Sergeant Peacock. The field first dropped to the ground, unconscious but alive. With a smile of incredulous hope etched on his face by the last glow of the flare, Casely staggered out of his cupola. His eyes were fixed on the rippling glare in the south, and he didn't seem to notice when Jones plucked his sleeve.
"God bless the Air Force," the TC was whispering. "God bless the Air Force."
Band Of Brothers
Sanger was the commando's point man this morning. Twenty meters beyond the abandoned farmhouse he walked into a Gerin killzone.
"Freeze!" ordered Rudisill, the artillery specialist; second in the six-man column and shocked out of the lethargy of a long march by the pulsing alert on his helmet display. "Sanger, your helmet's fucked. You're already in a killzone."
Coils in each helmet cooled the trooper's head and approximately half his blood supply, the next best thing to total environmental control. The refrigerant didn't prevent Duquesne's atmosphere from being a steam bath, though; nor did it do anything to lighten the commando's load of gear.
For concealment purposes, they'd been inserted by sea with ten kilometers to hike before they reached their objective. Sweat had been rolling off Rudisill's body with the effort of humping his helmet, weapons, rations—and the heavy spotting table—up and down forested ridges.
Now the sweat was cold.
"Everybody halt in place," said Captain Lermontov over the unit net. "I'm coming forward."
Lermontov's voice was more than calm; it was calming. "Sanger, you know the drill. You're safe unless you try to back up, so just stay where you are. Might be a good time to take a leak."
"I done that, sir," whispered the point man. Then, "Sir, you gonna be able to get me out?"
Commando 441 had carried out twenty-seven missions on this Christ-bitten hellhole without a fatality. The troopers of other units carried lucky charms. Four-four-one had Ivan Lermontov.
But it was going to take more than luck to pull Sanger from the trap into which his faulty equipment had dropped him.
"I don't see why not," said Captain Lermontov.
Rudisill heard the soft rustle of vegetation. The commando's leader was approaching with easy caution from his number three slot in the column, a hundred meters behind the artillery specialist.
The heads-up display on Rudisill's visor showed pulsing blips as the computer-directed elements of the Gerin killzone maneuvered for optimal position. Pretty soon they'd encircle the whole commando, not just the point man . . . .
This killzone consisted of twenty separate elements, strung in a two-kilometer line almost parallel to the commando's axis of advance. If the commando'd crossed to the left rather than the right side of the knob on the last ridge, they'd've been out of the zone's sensor range. The troopers wouldn't've known—or cared—that the killzone was in place. Now—
Each element of the killzone was a 20-centimeter sphere with sensors, magnetic lift engines, and a rudimentary control/communications computer. When a target entered the sensor range of any element, that computer alerted the other elements and the whole chain drifted closer to do maximum damage to possible following targets. Nothing would happen until the target started to move out of the zone's lethal area.
The magnetic motors had an electronic signature even in standby mode. Commando helmets could detect a killzone at twice the killzone's own fifty-meter sensor range.
Except that Sanger's helmet had malfunctioned.
The shell of each sphere was pre-fragmented ceramic, backed with high explosive. Sanger was within ten meters of one. At that range, the blast would shatter the trunk of 30-centimeter hardwoods—much less a man.
"Good work, Guns," Lermontov murmured, using straight voice instead of frequency-hopping radio as he came up behind Rudisill. "If you hadn't been looking sharp, we'd be in problems now."
That was oil, not reality. The helmet, not the artillery spotter personally, had done the work; but the words made Rudisill feel better nonetheless. "They're coming down on us, sir," he said tightly.
"Sure, that's what they do," agreed Lermontov as he paused beside Rudisill.
The captain was a man of middle height, with a gymnast's shoulders and slim hips. He'd slung his assault rifle and was punching keys on the miniature handset
flexed to his helmet.
The face beneath Lermontov's raised visor looked unconcerned; a boyish lock of dark blond hair peeked out from beneath his helmet.
Lermontov smiled. "Got another job for you, Guns," he said. "Need you to tell me when I look like I'm a zone element myself."
Rudisill's rifle was aimed at the stretch of forest which concealed another of the mines drifting toward the target area. He brushed sweat from his chin with the back of his left hand and said, "Sir, you can't. These helmets won't—"
Lermontov flashed a smile that brooked no more argument than a shark's did. "Don't you worry, troop," he said flatly. "These helmets'll sit up and beg for cookies if you know how to massage 'em. Your job's just to tell me—" Lermontov concentrated on the keyboard in his left palm "—when I've got it right."
Rudisill swallowed and nodded. His visor displayed the slowly moving elements of the killzone as blue dots on the ghostly relief map overlaying the reality of the forest. As Captain Lermontov touched his keyboard, another dot sprang to life beside the artillery spotter. The new arrival was fuzzy at first, but its outline quickly sharpened to a near identity with the other twenty.
"You got it, sir," Rudisill said. "But I wish you wouldn't . . . ."
"Okay, Sanger," Lermontov said over the unit push as he stepped forward. "We're golden. Help's on the way."
The undergrowth folded behind the captain, hiding him from Rudisill after a few long, gliding strides. On Rudisill's visor, the twenty-first dot moved smoothly toward the original one at a pace swifter than that of the other drifting deathtraps.
Lermontov's helmet was matching its own output to the commo and motor signatures of a killzone element. If the emanations were close enough, the Gerin sensors would ignore Lermontov until he switched the killzone off.
If the match wasn't close enough, the blast would be lethal within a fifty-meter circle.
Rudisill knelt carefully so that the ground took part of the weight of his pack. He pretended to ignore the drop of sweat that trembled on the end of his nose.
The dot that was Lermontov paused briefly as it reached the point man's position. Nothing came over the commo net, but Rudisill could imagine the captain patting Sanger on the shoulder, saying a few cheerful words, and moving on toward the waiting explosive.
Rudisill could imagine it because that's more or less what had happened to him when a laser toppled a tree across his thighs. The spotting table was smashed, so he couldn't call in artillery fire. He didn't have a prayer unless somebody crawled suicidally close to the Gerin bunker and dropped a grenade through its firing slit.
Which Captain Lermontov did.
The dot that was the commando's leader merged with the almost-identical killzone element.
"Okay," said the captain's voice. "Now, everybody hug the ground for just a . . . ."
Rudisill knew he should flatten from his crouch. He couldn't bring himself to move.
The line of oncoming beads faded to blurs or vanished as their motors cut back to stand-by power. The first element of a killzone to make contact became the master link; and Captain Lermontov had just shut it down.
"There, we're golden," Lermontov said. "Let's get moving, shall we? Heatherton, come forward and take point."
Rudisill finally let his breath out as he rose to his feet. "Negative," he said. "I'll take it, sir."
He moved forward, letting his eyes scan either side and the trees above him, as though he were already the column's point man.
"Guns," Lermontov replied cautiously, "we need you to spot when we reach the hostage pen."
"We need everybody," Rudisill said. "I'm here, and we know my hardware works."
He'd reached the clearing around the farmhouse. The inhabitants hadn't been gone for long. Chickens squabbled noisily beyond the palings of the kitchen garden, and the hog which snorted off among the trees was domestic rather than feral.
The pig's masters were probably hidden nearby. Rudisill didn't bother to try calling them out. The Dukes weren't going to come forward, weren't going to help even by dipping a gourdful of drinking water for the troops risking their lives to free Duquesne from the Gerin.
The Dukes weren't shit.
Sanger was washing down a tablet of electrolyte replacement with tasteless water from the condenser in his helmet. He was nineteen years standard and could pass for twice that age at the moment.
Sanger stood, shouldering his pack. He didn't have the spotting table, but the Multi-Application Rocket System he and the other three troopers carried was equally heavy. "Thanks, buddy," he muttered to Rudisill.
"Hell, I didn't get you assigned to Lermontov's commando," Rudisill answered, speaking in a low voice because the captain was waiting only a few meters beyond.
Lermontov had clipped the keyboard back onto his helmet. His right hand gripped his rifle again. His left index finger was tracing designs on the mottled shell of the Gerin mine. The access plate in the top of the sphere was still open.
"Good job, Cap'n," Rudisill murmured.
Lermontov shrugged. "You watch yourself on point, Guns," he said.
"Always," Rudisill said without emotion. He stepped forward into the trees, following the azimuth projected onto his visor.
There were no more Gerin minefields, but the commando found repeated evidence of human occupation. Another farm; the prints of bare feet on trails the commando crossed but never followed; once the sound of a baby crying, tantalizingly near.
"I can feel 'em watching," said Minh, the last man in line.
"I better not see one," Heatherton responded. "I know damn well those shit-scared bastards're reporting to the Slime."
"None of that," Lermontov said sharply. "There's no evidence that the locals cooperate with the Gerin. They're just scared. Same as you'd be if your planet'd been run by the Slime for three generations."
"Cap'n," said Sanger, "they don't have the balls t' live nor die neither. Any of my kin gets that scared, I'll cut their throat and put 'em outa their mis'ry."
Rudisill panted in time with the rhythm of his boots. His pack cut him over the collarbone and the jut of his hips. He'd glued sponge from fuze containers over the points of wear, but it didn't matter. In the long run, the weight and friction were the same, and the ulcers in his flesh reopened.
"I still say," Heatherton muttered, "that if they ain't interested 'n saving 'emselfs from the Slime, then I'm not interested neither."
"Look," said the captain, "when we release the hostages the Gerin are holding, then maybe we'll see some changes in the local attitude. That's what Headquarters figures, anyway."
"Headquarters ain't sweatin' like pigs in the boonies," Sanger retorted.
They were climbing what Rudisill's projected map said was the last rise before they reached the target; but it was a kilometer of outcrops and heavy undergrowth, and the map was a best-estimate production anyway. Rudisill figured the Headquarters analysts must've been wrong, again, because if the commando were really that close to a Gerin base there'd be—
"Freeze," Rudisill ordered as his own body locked in place. But they were all right . . . .
"Sir," he whispered, "we've found it. I'm just about in the defensive ring, but they got half of it shut down so my sensors didn't pick it up till now."
"What're we talking about, Guns?" Lermontov whispered back. His voice was a phantom in the artillery spotter's earphones.
Rudisill began unfolding his spotting table. "Sir," he said, "there's a plasma battery to right and left. I can't see them, but they're live. And—"
He swallowed. "And what I thought was a boulder right here in front of me, it's concrete. It's the cap of a missile site. They're loaded for bear, but I don't think they were expecting anybody to walk in the back way."
As Rudisill spoke, he clipped the leads from his helmet onto the spotting table. He could mark targets with a lightpen, but direct input was more accurate by an order of magnitude.
The meter-square table couldn't lie flat, b
ut it better be close enough.
"Okay," said Lermontov. "I'm coming forward—"
"Wait sir," Rudisill said.
He focused on the "boulder," which was literally close enough to spit on, and pressed the ENTER key of his helmet's pad. Then he slid a meter to the side, focused on the same point, and clicked the key again. His helmet fed the triangulated data to the spotting table.
There was a muted zeep from the table. The relief map projected on Rudisill's visor echoed the processed data: three red beads, the Gerin sites identified either by sight or electronic signatures; and nine yellow beads spaced equidistantly around the remainder of the calculated circle.
