by Rick Shelley
Ewing fiddled with the controls on his mapboard to get a better view of the topography. “Looks rather obvious,” he said.
“Ambush?” Spencer suggested. He pointed at the nearest approaches to the forest on the left of the gully. “It would have to be along here, if anywhere.”
“Still, we’d have good cover to return fire, if we had to,” Ewing said. “The only major danger would be if they got above us, in the gully. They could funnel fire right down into us.”
“How high are the weeds in there?” David asked Doug.
“No more’n ten or twelve inches, I’d say, and thin. Our rainy season wasn’t particularly wet this year.”
“Sir?” David turned to Ewing again. “Any Feddies we scare out makes that many less for later. We could send the main body up the pipe. I’d take a squad here, along the edge of the wooded area, back a ways.
Anything starts, we’d be in position to set up a quick crossfire. They’d lose interest right fast.”
“The undergrowth at the edge is as thick as it gets anywhere in the Park, brambles so tight a mouse can get stuck,” Doug said. “Man sure can’t move silently through that, and he can’t see far, no matter how fancy his helmet is.”
“Let’s do it,” Ewing said. “Put a squad on the right too, say thirty yards out, to cover that flank.”
David did everything but hold his breath as he took first squad along the edge of the woods. Thinking about what Doug had said about the difficulty of silent movement in the thick underbrush, David had told his men to stay absolutely quiet and use their directional microphones to search for any threat inside the woods. There were animal sounds, but nothing even vaguely human. But they were approaching the stretch where the forest came closest to the dry gully.
Any action will come soon, if at all, David told himself. Delta’s leading platoons, and David’s third and fourth squads, were already level with the patch they had decided was most dangerous. David’s sensors showed no infrared images of lurking men, no enemy electronics, no human sounds at all in the trees and underbrush.
He let a long breath out, then took a quick glance at the columns of men in the gully. They were moving as low as they could, but the ditch wasn’t deep enough to cover them completely. If there was an ambush, they would find sufficient cover by going flat, but that initial exposure could do a lot of damage.
It was up to David’s squad to prevent that.
Second squad, on the far side of the gully, was holding back, staying even with David’s squad. The plants in the field they were trudging through weren’t tall enough to obscure their boots.
David whispered a command over his squad frequency. Alfie dropped to one knee, bring his needle rifle up to cover the danger point. David ordered the rest of his squad down. They held their positions until all of the men in the gully had passed the bulge. David expected the shooting to start at any second. Under tension, an ambush seemed more a certainty than a possibility. In daylight, they might not even have the instant of warning that would come from helmet electronics being switched on.
The seconds passed with an impossible slowness. David felt a growing urge to spray the woods, but he wouldn’t give in to it. If no answering fire came, his action would be clearly seen—all the way up to Sheffield—as a panic reaction. The thought of certain embarrassment was enough to hold back his twitching finger. For now.
The last platoon moved beyond the bulge. David passed another command and Alfie led the way past the choke point. The men kept their weapons pointed into the underbrush. The shadows beneath the trees were thick. Vines climbed from tree to tree in a chaotic webbing. Even a bird would have to exercise care getting through that tangle.
David walked to the edge of the trees, out of the line of march. He moved slowly, and stared as deeply into the tangle as he could, squinting against the confusion of light and shadow. His sound equipment was still probing for any identifiably human sounds—and getting none. The last of his men moved past him.
Jacky stopped and gave him a questioning look. David shook his head and gestured for Jacky to move on with the rest. Jacky nodded and went on, following Sean Seidman. The rookie was performing well.
Both of the remaining new men in the squad were. Henny Prinz’s death had taken a lot of the newness out of them.
The gully got shallower and wider as the Marines neared its head. After a quick conference on the command frequency, Ewing brought everyone to a stop. The two outlying squads came down into the gully.
“Now we make contact,” Doug said when the lieutenant and several sergeants had gathered in the middle of the defensive formation.
“You have any ideas?” Lieutenant Ewing asked.
Doug nodded. “I pull off my helmet, walk up toward that house, and call out to the folks who live there.”
He pointed at the house, sixty yards from the end of the gully, and off to the right. “If they answer, we’ve made our contact. If not”—he shrugged—“they’re either hiding in the cellar or not home.”
“And if your people aren’t in there, there might be Feddies in the house,” Ewing said.
“Might be,” Doug conceded. “If there are, they might take a quick shot at me. That’d give you an answer in a hurry. If they don’t, then I guess we’d have to go inside and see what’s what.”
“You make it sound like a stroll through the garden,” David said.
Doug shrugged again. “It all comes down to something like that, doesn’t it.” There was no question in his voice.
“It does,” David agreed.
“Take it one step at a time,” Ewing told Doug. “We don’t want to lose you.”
“If anyone has to go inside to flush the place, leave it to us,” David said. “We know the drill back to front.”
Doug took off his helmet and met David’s look before he nodded. “I’ll do that.” Then he turned to Ewing.
“Any reason why we shouldn’t get busy with this right now?”
“Whenever you’re ready,” Ewing said. He glanced around to make sure that all of the Marines were in position. “We’ll give you all the cover we can, if it comes to that. Anything starts, drop flat and let us do the work.”
Doug managed a smile. “I appreciate that.” He looked at David again for an instant, then stepped up out of the gully.
Doug stood there for a moment. He looked at the house, then looked around him. After taking a deep breath, he walked slowly toward the house, whispering a prayer under his breath. He held his helmet in his left hand, his rifle in his right, both low, at his sides.
He walked to within fifty feet of the back door before he stopped again. There were no lights on inside the house, but that didn’t surprise him, not in the middle of the afternoon. Marie wouldn’t have a light in the kitchen until she started fixing supper, if life were continuing anything like normal.
They’d be keeping low, even if they’re not down in the cellar, Doug told himself. No reason for them to see me coming in. They might not be looking out.
He wasn’t certain that he believed all of that.
“Elena? Marie? Tom? Jamie?” He called out each name loudly, leaving a short pause between them.
Then he started to take a deep breath. He hadn’t even rilled his lungs before the back door opened, just a little.
“It’s Doug,” he said, not as loudly as before. The door opened the rest of the way and Tom Genner, Marie’s husband, showed himself in the shadows.
“Doug? Is it really you?”
“It’s me.” Doug took several steps closer to the house. “You have any unwanted guests in there, uniformed guests?”
Tom shook his head. “Haven’t seen any of them since yesterday morning, before dawn. They’ve cleared off, somewhere.”
“That’s good. I’ve brought a few friends.” He gestured toward the gully. Tom looked that way and grew a worried look. “Commonwealth Marines,” Doug said quickly. “They’re the reason the Federation bastards took off.”
&n
bsp; Tom came down off of the porch. He grabbed Doug’s shoulders. “The others are down in the cellar. I’ve been keeping watch. We didn’t know if you were ever going to make it back.”
“It’s not over yet, Tom,” Doug said. “Okay if I bring a couple of these chaps up for a powwow? We need information.”
“Sure, bring them up. We can go inside, out of sight.”
Doug brought his helmet up and spoke into it. ‘ ‘Lieutenant? Sergeant Spencer? Come on up. It’s okay here.” Then he looked at Tom again. “I hope you’ve got something to drink, Tom. I’ve been all this time without a taste.”
Tom laughed. “I think we can find a dram or two.”
• • •
Neither Marine refused the offer of a drink. Doug went down to the cellar to see his wife and son, and his wife’s sister. Tom stayed with the Marines until Doug came back up, ten minutes later, looking much less steady than he had before.
“You okay?” David asked.
Doug’s answering smile was painfully weak. “I’ll get by. I know my family’s safe. That’ll do, for now.”
“We’ve been talking,” Ewing said. “Your brother in law says that as far as he’s been able to tell, all of the Feddies moved out of town.”
“Southeast, into the forest,” Tom said, pointing vaguely in that direction.
“The ones that ambushed us must have been part of that,” David said. “Though that was just last night; this morning.” He was losing track of time. “They may have moved out of your towns, but at least some of them didn’t go very far.”
“How certain are you that they all left Sam and Max?” Doug asked.
Tom shrugged. “Not one hundred percent. I’ve been trying to work up the courage to get on the complink to call around and get more information.”
“I’ve got a lot of men outside to make it safe,” Ewing said.
“We can both get busy,” Doug suggested. “You’ve got two terminals here, don’t you?”
“Sure, you know we do.”
“You take Max. I’ll take Sam. Start with the rest of the commission, then whoever you can think of,”
Doug said. “Let’s take back our world.”
22
Josef Langenkamp sat in the dark of his cabin, alone. The only light was the pale green glow of the time line at the top of his complink. He had slept for six hours, and counted himself lucky that those hours had passed without nightmares. He hadn’t known Seb Inowi all that well, despite the year and odd months they had served together. They had talked in ready room and mess, in the recreation rooms and so forth, the way all of the pilots did, but they hadn’t been close. Their associations had run in different circles. Seb had been the squadron commander’s wingman. Josef spent his time with Kate, and together they tended to spend their time with other “couples” within the wing.
Now Josef found himself remembering Seb, such chance associations as they had had within the squadron. There wasn’t much to build a memory on. That was what bothered Josef most.
What will anyone have to remember me by? he wondered. Would anyone in the squadron, other than Kate, have any deeper recollections of him than he had of Seb Inowi? Josef leaned back against the bulkhead that ran along his bed. The wall was cool. It always was.
We’re loners, mostly by choice. That’s part of what makes us fighter pilots. If we were herd animals, we’d have chosen different careers. In the cockpit of a Spacehawk, a pilot was in a universe of his own, almost as completely as if he were alone in Qspace. All of the radio links and telemetry didn’t change that in the least. Those links were no more real than vidgames or comedies. Or tragedies.
The time line clicked over to 1600 hours. Josef stared at it until the next minute ticked over, and the next.
“This gets me nowhere at all,” he mumbled. “I might as well do something. Anything.” Just getting out of the cabin would be a start. He went into the head for a quick shower. He shaved, cleaned his teeth, and dressed. When he finally left the cabin, he stood in front of his door for more than a minute. He still didn’t know what to do, which way to go.
A twinge from his stomach finally headed Josef toward the squadron mess. Combat operations meant that the mess halls were providing meals around the clock. Flyers were going on and coming off duty at all hours. Nearly half the squadron’s pilots were in the mess hall when Josef entered. Kate was just going through the serving line. When she spotted Josef, she waved and pointed toward their usual table in the corner.
“It looks like a lot of people needed less sleep than they thought,” Kate said when Josef set his tray on the table a few minutes later. “I think most of the others are in the rec room or gym.”
“We’ll need time for our systems to get used to the new schedule,” Josef said.
“Well, we’ll certainly have time for that,” Kate said.
“You heard something?” Josef asked quickly.
She shook her head. “No, just a feeling. We’re going to have more fighting ahead, and one of these days, it’s going to be real fighting.”
“You think the Federation will return.” Josef didn’t bother to make it a question.
“Next week or next month. They won’t write off Buchanan and all the soldiers they left behind. Not so simply.”
No more than the Commonwealth would write off hundreds of us.
“Then it makes all the more sense to let us get as much rest as possible while we can,” Josef said.
“Maybe cut back even more on the number of fighters out at one time. Just put out one flight for ground support. With the escort ships higher in orbit, we’d have plenty of time to scramble to meet any attack on our ships.”
“If the admiral cuts back that far on regular sorties, Commander Bentley will have us out on training missions so we don’t get rusty.”
Josef laughed softly, and Kate managed a warmer smile than before. But then he spoiled the mood. “All the training in the galaxy can’t prevent the kind of fluke that got Seb.”
“No,” Kate agreed. They were both quiet for several minutes.
“I was thinking before, when I woke up.” Josef set down his fork and stared directly at Kate. “I really didn’t know Seb all that well.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Kate said. “All that time working together and he was still almost a stranger. I couldn’t even remember if he had close family.”
“I never even thought of that,” Josef said.
“I had the urge to ask Olive, but I didn’t want to make it more difficult for her. Seb was her wingman after all. That’s close.”
“Don’t even think that,” Josef said, chilled by the implication. “I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to you.”
“That last flight, back on Buckingham, when you had to eject.” Kate had to stop for a moment. “I froze up completely until you were down. I doubt that I could have overridden my automatics if I’d had to. I was terrified for you.”
“We’re flyers,” Josef said after a long hesitation of his own. “This is what we always wanted to do. I know I never seriously considered doing anything else from the time I was ten years old.”
“Me either.” Kate stared at her tray. “And civilian flying just wouldn’t be the same.”
“It’s the danger, not just the flying, that draws us.” That’s what puts us in the middle of a war.
Somehow, war had always been an abstraction before, even when they spent virtually every working day preparing for the eventuality.
“And what happened to Seb, that’s part of the price.” Kate didn’t see Josef’s nod of agreement.
23
Doug got up from the dining room table and walked out to the front porch. Sunset was near, and he wanted nothing more at the moment than to stand in the open and watch it, without fear of being caught by Federation hunters. He was still at Marie’s house, but it was almost like being home. Supper had been something of a celebration, despite Doug’s protests that it was premature. Asa Ewing an
d David Spencer had shared the meal with the Weintraubs and the Genners. The others were still at table, but Doug had felt a need to get away from the festivities.
The sun was a dull red ball, slightly obscured by wispy, distant clouds. Doug felt uncommonly safe, safer than he had felt since the invasion. Commonwealth Marines were stationed around each of the towns.
Patrols were searching Sam and Max, guided by local residents who knew all of the places where a few enemy soldiers might possibly hide. And the Marines who had accompanied Doug were stationed around the house, all but Spencer and the lieutenant. But there had been no gunfire, supporting Tom Genner’s assumption that all of the Federation troops had left the settlements.
The only nearby place that might conceal any significant number of the enemy was the Park, and that would be secured during the night.
“That’s the easiest way to do something like this,” David had explained. “We’ll be using full helmet electronics. To meet us on anything approaching even terms, the Feddies will have to switch on their helmets before they start shooting, and the second they turn on their electronics, we’ll know precisely where they are.”
“But won’t they know the same thing about you?” Doug had asked.
David had shook his head. “They’ll be able to tell direction, but without additional sensors to triangulate positions, they’ll only have a line, not a point. If that. We really don’t know if their helmets are equipped for anything that precise. We just assume that they must have the same fundamental capabilities we do.”
“Then if they still had ships here, they’d be able to pinpoint your men just as easily?”
“Most likely,” David agreed. “But not necessarily. There are countermeasures we can take to make that more difficult.”
“And you assume they have the same sort of defenses?”
David had hesitated a long time before he answered that question. “By the book, the answer would be,
‘Until we know differently,’ but if they did have that sort of defenses, I can’t see why they were so quick to shut off their helmets so completely.”
