by Rick Shelley
It was Tim Connors who hit the jackpot, where the upper surface of the left wing met the fuselage. He whistled softly, and gestured when Doug looked his way. Carefully, Connors twisted a latch and opened the access panel. Albert looked along the side of the shuttle, holding off on his work, while Doug went to see what Tim had found.
In the recess, Doug saw the shuttle’s fuel intakes, two pressure couplings. One intake pipe was labelled for liquid hydrogen, the other for liquid oxygen. Doug quickly waved for Albert.
“Could give us a real pretty show,” Albert whispered.
“We have enough explosives to take out all three?” Doug asked.
“Don’t want to spread it too thin,” Albert said, which was easier than admitting that he didn’t know. “Why not be satisfied with two of ‘em? Maybe the blasts will take out the third.”
“Okay. Get started on this one. I’ll have Gil pack the one farthest from the camp.”
“Yeah, you do that,” Albert said. “Then I’ll check to make sure he did it right.”
Gil Howard’s group had just reached the end shuttle. Doug ran across and scooted under the fuselage.
Gil started to work with the explosives as soon as Doug opened the access panel.
“We’ll let Albert set both timers,” Doug said. “We want to be certain they go off together.”
Doug moved everyone else away from the shuttles, giving them a headstart on their escape. Six men took up prone positions in a line fifty yards from the nearest shuttle, ready to give Doug, Gil, and Albert covering fire if necessary. Doug could feel sweat pouring freely down his face. There seemed to be a lump in his stomach a foot in diameter.
“Give us as much lead time as you can with those timers,” Doug told Albert, who was priming both detonators at the same time.
“Five minutes from right now,” Albert said, positioning one timer in the middle shuttle. He closed the access panel and twisted the recessed latch. Then the two of them ran to the other shuttle and Albert attached the second timer and secured that panel.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Albert said.
They ran hard. The rest of the men got up as the last three approached, and they all took off in the same direction. Doug looked at his watch every few seconds. The group started to slow down after a couple of minutes of racing at full speed. Albert was the first to lag behind. Doug held his speed down to stay with him. Soon Gil and Ash had slowed as well.
“Keep moving as fast as you can,” Doug urged the others, feeling the extra effort that talking required.
By the last minute of the five, everyone had slowed down to the pace of the older men. None of these men were accustomed to this level of physical exercise. They might work regularly, but they had not trained as athletes.
“Keep going,” Doug said when they were all fairly close together again. “We’ve only got thirty seconds.”
When the count got down to fifteen seconds, Doug stopped everyone. “Down on the ground.” He took up a position looking back toward the shuttles. “We don’t know what kind of blast effects there’ll be.”
And I want to see this, he told himself. It might be the only victory we have.
Ten seconds. Five.
The night lit up with an orangeandred fireball. Just as the sound of the blast reached the watching Buchananers, two more explosions sent even brighter light flashing out through the first cloud of flames.
The hangar was blown to shreds, hurtling large panels of siding into the dark. The third shuttle exploded next, and the terminal building started to burn. Beyond that, tents were burning and blowing, and the fire spread into the prairie grass around the edges of the port. Glowing debris arced through the night and fell on all sides, starting more secondary fires.
“Okay, let’s get out of here before they get their act together,” Doug said. He got to his feet and started jogging toward the southwest. This time, it wasn’t a fullout run, but a more moderate pace. It still hurt.
Doug’s lungs felt as if they might burst.
But, for a few minutes at least, the Federation troops would be too busy to give chase.
Part 3
8
“White, stick around. The rest of you, hit the showers.” David Spencer mopped at his face with a towel while the I&R platoon filed out of the gymnasium. Jacky White just stood where he was, not even looking at Spencer. Since leaving Buckingham, the Second Regiment had been training ten to twelve hours a day. Physical conditioning was the first item on the daily schedule for the platoon, even before breakfast.
“You’re still carrying a chip,” Spencer said when he and Jacky were alone.
“What d’you expect? I’ve been shanghaied. You think I should jump for joy?”
“I think you’re a Marine and should act that way,” his sergeant said. “You go into combat sulking like this, you’ll be worm meat in five minutes, and maybe your mates as well. Is that what you want?”
Jacky didn’t say anything.
“They’re the ones you’re going to hurt,” Spencer said. “So you think you got a raw deal. You’re not the only man in the regiment who thought he was going back to civie street and didn’t. There are at least a hundred others who’ve had their hitches continued. You can bet the story’s the same among the Navy crew, and in every other regiment in the RM. What makes you so damn much better than all of them?”
When Jacky didn’t reply, David shouted, “Say something, damn you.”
“What? That it’s okay I’m being screwed because a lot of other sods are in the same boat? That doesn’t make it right, not by a sight. Don’t worry, I won’t let my friends down, but don’t expect a damn thing more from me.”
Spencer advanced on Jacky until they were toe to toe. “Look at me,” Spencer ordered. When Jacky finally raised his eyes, Spencer said, “You’ve got until we make our last Qspace transit. You get your act in order or you’ll spend the rest of this cruise in the brig. I won’t risk my platoon on the moods of a crybaby.”
‘ ‘Is that all, Sergeant?’ Jacky asked.
“Get out of my sight.” After Jacky left, David relaxed the tight control he had been holding himself under.
His hands trembled with suppressed rage.
The standard table of organization for a Royal Marine line company was simple. The basic tactical unit was the squad, eight men. If each slot in the squad was filled at its highest rating (a rare event) there would be one sergeant, one corporal, two lance corporals, and four privates. A squad could operate as a single entity, or split into two fourman fire teams. Four squads made a platoon. The highest ranking squad leader doubled as platoon sergeant. There would be a lieutenant as platoon leader for each platoon— again, ideally; more often there was one lieutenant for two platoons. A company consisted of three line platoons, a special weapons platoon, and a headquarters and service platoon (H&S), the last a catchall for all of the necessary ancillary personnel—clerks, cooks, communicators, and mechanics. A battalion had four line companies and an H&S company. The intelligence and reconnaissance platoon was part of Battalion H&S. The next rung in the organization chart was the regiment, four line battalions, weapons battalion, and engineering battalion… and the inevitable H&S detachment, theoretically an
“augmented” company at regimental level, though it could approach battalion size in practice.
There were a lot of new men aboard Victoria for this voyage. Manning levels in the RM had been low as long as David Spencer had been a member. Now, the Second Regiment was almost at full strength. New men meant dropping to a more basic level for training drills. Although some of these men had been in the regiment almost since the start of the Devereaux mission—replacements had been husbanded on Buckingham since the start of the war, attached to the battalions that had stayed behind—most still seemed to be raw recruits.
There were three new men in the first squad. Sean Seidman was a small, quiet man, except when he lost his temper. That had already happened once in the week since
he had joined the squad. Like the other recruits, he was hardly more than a boy just out of school. Seidman’s complexion was dark—and so was his temper. Even in the best of moods, he seemed to be perpetually one match short of an explosion, but he was one very proficient Marine, the best marksman in his training class on every light infantry weapon.
Carlo Montez was a large, fairskinned man, his hair a light blond. He was slowmoving, but a whiz with electronics and savage in unarmed combat. The third man was Henry, more commonly “Henny,” Prinz, from the Germanspeaking world of Hanau. His English was fluent, but heavily accented. When he got excited, he was incomprehensible in either language.
Spencer had assigned each of the new men to one of his veterans, and told the oldtimers to shepherd them along. Only Jacky White had been spared that duty. While Jacky had quit bitching constantly, he remained surly and uncooperative. If he hadn’t been with the squad for nearly five years, David would have given up on him days before. I may have to brig him yet, he reminded himself, and the possibility hurt.
Once a Marine was sealed into the helmet, his senses were amplified and extended, turning the brutal reality of combat’s horrors into a virtual reality that was marginally less terrifying. A headup display on the visor showed him things he could never see with his naked eyes, picking up infrared as well as visible light. It offered magnification when necessary, and plotted charts and data on targets or threats. Besides amplifying nearby sounds, the helmet’s “ears” also provided abundant communications links. Medical sensors funnelled through the helmet’s complinks kept commanders apprised on the physical condition of every trooper.
“We’ll run full diagnostics on every helmet,” David said when his men were settled at the benches in the electronics shop. “Replace anything that doesn’t show one hundred percent. We don’t want marginal equipment now.” The diagnostics were mostly automatic, and repair rarely needed anything more than unplugging a wafer module and replacing it. In theory, any Marine ought to be able to maintain the helmets equally well. In practice, some men seemed to have a more delicate touch, better results. In David’s squad, the men with the touch were Tory Kepner and Roger Zimmerman. One of them would be the last to go over every helmet.
David watched his men work for a quarter hour, then said, “Alfie, let go of that for a minute, will you?”
Alfie nodded and got up from the bench. He followed David out of the shop.
“What is it, Sarge?” Alfie asked. David just gestured for him to follow him and headed to one of the break rooms.
‘ ‘Get yourself a cup,” David said, getting coffee for himself. Alfie did as he was told, then followed the sergeant to a table.
“It’s about Jacky, isn’t it?” Alfie asked.
David nodded, then took a long sip of his coffee.
“I knew it was going to be rough for him,” Alfie said. “Didn’t figure he’d hold the grudge this long.”
“You know what my problem is, don’t you?” David asked.
“I’m not sure I do,” Alfie hedged.
“If he doesn’t shape up, I don’t dare take him into combat. He’d bugger the works for everyone. And if I don’t dare take him down with us, there’s only one thing I can do, and I don’t want to do that.”
“Unfit for duty in a combat zone?” Alfie spoke the words reluctantly. He had been in the Royal Marines long enough to know King’s Regs backward and sideways. It was a courtmartial offense, no chance of running it soft under company punishment.
“I need help from you and the rest of the lads,” David said. “I told Jacky he had until we make our last Qspace jump to shape up or I’d have to brig him. I had to give him the deadline, but I don’t want it to come to that.”
“We’ve all had a go at him, Sarge. We’ll keep at him, you know that, but I don’t know as he cares what happens to him any more.”
“In all my years in the RM, I’ve never had to courtmartial one of my men, Alfie. I don’t want to start now, not with Jacky.”
“We’ll do what we can. We don’t want anything to happen to him either. He’s a good mate.”
“But if you can’t get him back on course, he’ll be too much a danger to himself and everyone else,” David said. “Do what you can, but don’t try to cover for him. You could be cutting everyone’s throat.”
“I know,” Alfie said, very soberly. He drank down the last of his coffee, his hand shaking. “I’d best get back to work, Sarge.”
“When do we find out what the job is?” David asked Lead Sergeant Landsford. They were alone at a table in the sergeants’ mess. The fleet had made its second Qspace transit a few minutes earlier. “Don’t they know what they want us to do yet?’
Landsford shrugged. “I’m not sure we’ve even got a map of the bloody planet. No one seems to know a thing about this Buchanan. Bloody world of farmers that nobody goes to. That’s why we’re on our way to rendezvous with the ship that’s been in to do a recce.”
“Hell of a way to run a war,” David said. “They’ll probably give us five minutes to study an ops briefing—on our way down.”
“We get that much, count yourself lucky,” Landsford said. “It wouldn’t surprise me a whit if they sent your lads down to take a looksee so the rest of us know where to go”
“Don’t even think that,” David said, groaning.
‘ ‘Just in case, your lads ready for action?”
“We’re ready,” David said. “We’ll do whatever we have to do.”
“Likely to be a right ballsup, no matter what,” Landsford said. “I’ve got a proper itch about this.”
“Should have the medicos give you an ointment,” David said, laughing. “They say they’ve got a cure for anything.”
“Don’t you start. Sergeant major’s been riding me for days.”
Rendezvous was still hours away, but there were already rumors floating through the regiment about what news the scout ship had. The rumors had started almost the instant that the ship had been sighted. David had dismissed the platoon. There was still an hour before supper, but he knew he wouldn’t get much work out of them until they got some news. Besides, it gave him a chance to kick off his boots and grab a little rest before mess call. But he had scarcely closed his eyes before there was a knock at the door.
“Come in,” David said, suppressing a sigh. He swung his legs off of the bunk and sat up. / hope it’s not an officer, he thought, looking down at his stocking feet. I’m out of uniform.
“Sergeant?” Jacky White opened the door, but didn’t enter.
“Come on in,” David said, more softly. “Have a seat.” He gestured to the bunk across from his. “What’s on your mind?”
Jacky sat just on the edge of the bunk, and held himself stiffly, as if he were at attention.
“I wanted to let you know that you don’t have to worry about me,” Jacky said. “I’ll do my bit. I still say I got a raw deal, but I won’t let the lads down. I know my duty.” There was tension in the voice, but not the open hostility of a few days before.
“I know you do, lad,” David said. “I just had to make sure you’d remember. I owe that to you and the rest. The best thing we can do is get through this patch as fast as we can. Sooner it’s over, the sooner we can go home.” He paused, then added, “And the sooner you and everyone else in your position can get on with their lives.”
Jacky stood. “I just wanted to make sure you knew.”
David stood as well. “Thanks, Jacky. We’re all counting on you.”
9
“Captain of Khyber on link, Admiral,” Gabby Bierce said.
Khyber had been moving toward the fleet for three hours since appearing out of Qspace. Captain Dever Miles had reported in at once. Truscott had put him off, simply ordering him to collate all of the intelligence he had gathered, and to transmit the hard data as soon as possible. This followup was right on schedule.
“I’ll take the call in my day cabin, Gabby,” Truscott said, getting out of his chair. “Ian
, you’d best come along. I may need you to tickle my memory later.”
“Aye, sir,” Ian replied.
The admiral’s day cabin was actually two rooms and bath. The smaller room held a bunk, small table, and one chair. The larger room focused on a large tabletop complink monitor that could be used as a chart plot or to model battles. There were also projectors to let the admiral conduct fullscale holographic conferences in the room, with projections of as many as nine remote participants.
The admiral sat at the table in the chart room. “On the wall, Ian,” he said. Ian turned on a wall monitor.
Captain Miles’s face appeared in closeup, larger than life on the fiftyinch screen.
“Afternoon, sir,” Miles said.
“Dever.” Truscott nodded. “You have everything I asked for?”
“Everything we could find, sir.”
“I’m afraid I’m going to impose on you, Dever,” Truscott said. “Feed everything through to this station on the blitz, if you haven’t already. But I want you to shuttle over and give me a personal briefing in the flesh.”
“Whatever you say, sir,” Miles said. “There wasn’t even a flicker of annoyance at the command to leave his ship for an unnecessary trip to Sheffield.
“I do apologize, Dever.” The admiral put on a threesecond grin. “But I’m getting old and I think better if I’ve got somebody to bounce things off of in person… and my aide is getting rather bruised.”
“I’ll be over straightaway, sir.” Dever Miles matched the admiral’s grin almost perfectly.
Truscott severed the connection and looked up at Ian. ‘ ‘Get on to Captain Hardesty. Let him know the shuttle is coming, and keep me posted. I’ll ask you to go to the landing bay to escort Dever up here as well.”
