by David Weber
"You are asking for an odd mix of resources. Not excessive, I think, but I would like you to explain the reason for each component."
Ryder looked at Chung. They exchanged smiles, for reasons that they could never tell these earnest Republicans. They had worked out the Table of Organization and Equipment, after consulting with their own people, on a portable computer. They'd propped the computer up at one end of the bed and themselves at the other. In between was a take-out fish and chips dinner. Their clothing lay on the floor, beside an insulated bucket with three liters of chilled ale.
It was quite the most comfortable planning session that Ryder had ever attended. A few more of them, and she might even be reconciled to combining briefings and pillow talk.
The four elements of the proposed force were two hundred fifty picked Sea Fencibles, a dozen fishing boats, two fish-factory ships, and enough air freighters, small enough to land on the decks of the factory ships, to carry the Sea Fencibles three hundred klicks to Buwayjon.
The air freighters would be borrowed from the fishing industry, which got priority in modern technology whenever possible. They were slow, clumsy, and low-ceilinged, with robust hulls of local aluminum alloy and fiberglass built around imported power plants and electronics. But like anything built to haul cargo bulky in proportion to its value, they also had payload capacity to spare.
"Unless somebody sees them all together, they won't connect them with the idea of a raiding force," Chung said. "So we are going to march—or in this case, sail—divided, and attack united."
"Won't a new fishing fleet look suspicious all by itself?" the PT Deputy asked. He was bullet-headed but not, as far as Ryder could tell, bull-headed—or at least no more so than his colleagues. And she'd seen a tape of him working out with claymore and shield; she anticipated bruises in her first few—or first few dozen—sessions with him.
"Not with the cover story we're going to circulate," she put in now. "The Erewhon consul is circulating stories of a new agreement with Broadman Imports for exploiting the icefish grounds off the Strathspey Islands. That means recommissioning a whole bunch of the old turtlebacks, which can hide just about anything below decks."
"The correct noun of association for ships is squadron or fleet," the PT Deputy said firmly. "And as one who hauled nets from one of those turtlebacks as a boy, I can assure you that soldiers riding aboard them will be practicing mortification of the flesh."
"I don't believe this is being organized as a pleasure cruise," the Supply Deputy said. "But I really must ask. Will two hundred and fifty people be enough?"
"If we have surprise, half that many could do the job," Ryder said. "If we lose surprise, or Euvinophan's infantry are in place, twice that many won't be enough."
That reduced everyone to silence. Including me, Ryder realized. I hope they don't have any more questions, because I'm damned if I could answer them.
Then three graying and one bald head nodded. "We will authorize in the name of the Republic all resources for this mission, as you have requested," Simpson said. "May the Lord Mighty in Battle watch over you, keep you in His hand, and give you the courage and skill you will need to bring victory in His cause."
Now, if I was just as sure as these people are, that we did have God on ourside. . . .
THREE
The big truck backed in under the camouflage net and squealed to a stop. Half a dozen Sea Fencibles ran up to lift off the crates of potatoes that hid the crates of ammunition. Then Director Simpson himself climbed out of the cab.
Shuna Ryder's first thought was to call SBA Bexo. Simpson didn't look fit to be out of bed, let alone this far north in the late summer, with so much water dripping off the trees that you couldn't tell if it was raining or not.
But he smiled as he came up and shook her hand. Most of the Sea Fencibles stopped, nodded, and went back to work. They were grasping the notion of when to salute and when not to, as well as a few other military skills. She only hoped the improvement in their marksmanship hadn't cost the Republic more of its ammunition reserve than it could afford.
Ryder pushed aside the blackout curtain and led Simpson to the observation platform, overlooking the covered hundred meters of creek that served as a workshop. Five of the wooden-hulled turtleback fishing boats were moored to the banks, with more Sea Fencibles and a few selected boatyard workers swarming over them. Saws, sanders, and paint sprayers buzzed, whined, and hissed, and through the hatch of one boat the glow of a welding torch suggested work on the engine or one of the steel tanks being converted for heads.
"I worked in a boatyard after I left school," Simpson said, his mouth nearly touching Ryder's ear so that she could hear him over the din. "I remember working on some of these boats, converting them from steam to diesel. It is good to see them doing more than rot in the rain, even if this were not God's work they will be about."
Ryder could have wished that God or somebody had made the boats larger or the Sea Fencibles smaller. Only two hundred twenty-seven people with their personal weapons and gear would be riding in the disguised boats. The other twenty-five would have to ride by air, along with most of the heavy weapons.
But the demolition charges were going in the turtlebacks. The Sea Fencibles were not going to be separated from their personal weapons or the explosives. Not if they had to swim in with them on their backs!
"I hope we bring back not only the people but the transport," Ryder said. "God will not feed families when the fishermen can't bring home their catch."
Apparently this was not heresy. Simpson nodded. "We can cut back on our catch for export, if necessary. Indeed, the war itself may make this necessary. If the godforsaken Havenites are really going to commission privateers, we may be living plain and short once again, until there is peace."
He took Ryder's hands in his, which somehow were not shaking and felt stronger than they had looked. "Even if nothing came back but yourselves, it would be worth the cost. Our people are hardy, but if Euvinophan held Port Malcolm and the passes, he would have four-fifths of our industry and two-thirds of our people hostage. Guerrilla warfare under those circumstances might cost us more than even Peep tyranny—if King Bira allowed the Peeps a free reign in the first place."
Ryder wanted to suggest that the Republicans consider ways of playing off a victorious Carl Euvinophan against the Peeps, so that King Bira would have to intervene all the sooner. But that would sound defeatist, and besides, the Republicans were surely canny enough to think of that for themselves.
"Now I had better take a cup of tea and be ready to ride the truck back," Simpson said. "I am supposed to be in a clinic for an examination. Better that I not turn the cover story into the truth."
A hovercraft armored personnel carrier nosed down into a shallow ditch, sprayed up water and weeds crossing the stream at the bottom, then lunged up the near slope. As the APC's nose appeared above the edge, two streaks of fire darted from a clump of bushes three hundred meters to Jean Testaniere's left. His first thought was Infiltrated saboteurs!
Then the two anti-tank rockets hit the hovercraft's bow plating. Smoke billowed and paint splattered from the dummy warheads. Citizen Sergeant Pescu rose from beside Testaniere and waved to the hovercraft, which stopped. He and the crews of the two rocket launchers walked over to the hovercraft. When Pescu returned, he was actually smiling.
"I estimate one penetrating hit and a probable mission kill on the second. Anybody riding that hover would be walking the rest of the way, if they weren't on a stretcher."
Testaniere tried to hide his surprise. "You've been working them hard, Citizen Sergeant. I didn't think they were up to hitting a hovercraft."
"Hitting anything's easy when there's no return fire. I hope to work out something with the tank people for simulating that in a few days. If not, I can at least run everybody through one firing with a live warhead on a stationary target."
"Excellent."
Under Pescu's firm hand, the Field Police were giving the armor
ed forces practice in facing missile-armed infantry, while learning to play that role themselves. Testaniere didn't expect many fighting vehicles on the other side of the water, but wrecked trucks made good road blocks, and anti-tank missiles had a long history as good "bunker-busters."
If one was going to fight a war with the technology of the past, one could at least take advantage of the lessons already taught by long-ago wars!
Fernando Chung looked at his watch. "Almost time," he whispered.
Shuna Ryder grabbed the wrist and lifted the hand to her lips, then moved the kiss up Chung's arm until she got a mouthful of wet battledress.
"Ptah!"
"I never said I was a man of excellent taste—"
He broke off to take her in his arms. Then they hugged hard, and Ryder knew so well that this was their last private moment, maybe forever, that heart and head fought a short battle.
What kept her from pulling Fernando behind the nearest bushes and then down on top of her was not discipline. It was the thought of the wet leaves and wetter ground, and the folly of leading a major operation with a howling cold. The mission's supply of antivirals was running low, and would have to be saved for something worse than the CO's sniffles!
They slowly stepped back to arm's length. Chung patted her cheek. "You are getting to be a habit with me, you know."
"Better a habit than a vice."
"Yes, but a habit is harder to give up."
"I will—I'll think about ways of not—of our not having to give up. Fair enough?"
"Completely."
They hadn't gone more than fifty meters down the slope toward the waiting boats, when several torches glowed, each held under a thermal umbrella to hide the heat signature. Then Sea Fencibles by the dozens and scores stepped out of the trees, applauding and cheering.
Ryder flushed. It was hard to see what Chung was doing, but he did glare, when Bexo joined the crowd. Ryder now saw among the audience some of the Sea Fencibles who'd come north to work on the boats in the hope of earning a slot in the raiding force, or even offered hefty bribes.
"Thank you," she said. "But let's not tempt fate. Hold the applause for when we come back. Then we can have a proper torchlight ceremony."
"By then it will be autumn," Bexo said, "then it rains even harder."
FOUR
If autumn meant rain, then it had already come to this stretch of the Central Sea two hundred klicks south of the Strathspey Archipelago. Fortunately the half-gale that had blown the past two days had died as the rain came to take its place. Ryder would not have cared to transfer twenty-odd Sea Fencibles from a sinking turtleback with the waves sending green water over the cockpit forward.
She braced herself against the cockpit coaming and gripped the back of the helmsman's seat with one aching wrist, the windscreen with the other. She thought that the windscreen might as well be blown away, considering that it was opaque with caked salt.
A thud and a clatter rose from below as somebody opened the port hatch. A familiar sound followed, fortunately not accompanied by a familiar smell. The rain drowned it, and the seasick Fencible's stomach was quickly empty anyway.
Not as many people were seasick as she'd feared, but enough, and enough of those badly, that Bexo had issued the antinausea pills wholesale. It would not do for fifty Fencibles to reach their target so weak that they couldn't even carry their loads, let alone run, climb, or shoot.
The rain wrapped Ryder's command boat and the other three visible ones in a gray murk, relieved only by the dim riding lights. In this weather, nobody would see them from above; the problem would be finding their way to the rendezvous.
The hatch had stayed open, to let in fresh air. Over the hiss of the rain and the rumble of the diesel, Ryder heard someone reading aloud from Chung's manual on Peep weaponry. He'd digested his files into a printed manual of enemy weapons, one copy for each squad, even though he'd acquired some of the knowledge on an exchange tour with the Technical Section of Solarian League Intelligence.
Ryder wondered if he'd done that for personal reasons, as well as professional. Did he want to be tossed out of the Erewhonese forces on his ear, for revealing confidential material, so that he could then freely emigrate to the Star Kingdom?
It would be pure Hell all around, if Chung did on his own something Ryder would never have dared ask him to do, then couldn't emigrate because the Sollies or the Erewhonese would put pressure on the Star Kingdom not to accept him! Then, when both adviser groups got shipped out from a (hopefully) neutral Silvestria, where could she and Fernando be—other than many light-years apart?
There was much wisdom in the old saying about not playing where you worked. It was just as true that she and Fernando were no longer playing.
The last tank whined and rattled into the sprawling warehouse complex that was now the vehicle park and supply dump for the armored battalion and infantry carriers. Four of Euvinophan's Field Police presented arms to Jean Testaniere and Citizen Sergeant Pescu, and the door closed behind the tank.
Thanks to the last few days' work on the tanks and rain on the door, the door made more noise than the tank. It hadn't been that way before the Peep advisers took in hand all the Euvinophan troops that they could talk to.
"One regrets the absence of the live firing practice," Testaniere said. "But I will not criticize you for being unable to control the weather."
"No, and this gives us a few days to screen the rounds. Corporal—Citizen Corporal Randall used to work for a chemical company. He's built a testing set and some tools for stripping the charges out of dud rounds. He thinks we can get maybe fifty to eighty extra satchel charges for house-to-house work, allowing for the usual percentage of duds."
"Citizen Corporal Randall can look for a commendation. And so can you, and everyone else you think deserves one."
"Thank you, Citizen Commissioner. But I'd be even more grateful for an easing up in this soggy weather. As long as it lasts, Euvinophan's pets aren't going to move out of their cozy barracks and start soldiering."
The two fish-factory ships would have looked innocent to anyone who didn't know their purpose. Their decks were maybe a little clearer than usual, but they were within fifty klicks of known fishing grounds, and their crews had manned both the side cranes and the stern ramp as if ready to start unloading the fishing boats' catch. Finally, it would be hard to believe that anything smelling like the two ships could be an instrument of anything remotely warlike . . . unless it was bacteriological warfare.
Ryder stood in the cockpit and waved across a hundred meters of heaving, oily sea to Chung, whom she hadn't seen or spoken to in a week. Radio silence had been complete, which hadn't kept the fishing boat skippers from navigating the Sea Fencibles to the rendezvous.
The only problem was that it was two hours after the planned arrival of the airlift, and the sky was still empty (except for thick gray clouds that promised more rain) and silent (except for an occasional distant muttering gust of wind).
Ryder put a hand on the wheelman's shoulder. He twitched it irritably, as if to say I know my job without Manties pawing me.
The wind to the west seemed to gust harder as Ryder's boat and Chung's approached one another. Looking over the side, Ryder expected to see a fluff of whitecaps sprouting from the waves, but the swell was as modest, even monotonous, as ever.
Then it came into sight—six dark-painted air freighters, all flying just above the wave tops.
Six, when there should have been seven.
The first one overflew the more distant factory ship, circled the second, then went to vertical lift and descended on the handling deck amidships. The crew lowered the booms out of the way just in time. Three more made equally smooth landings in quick succession. The pilots had all done this scores or hundreds of times; getting fresh fish to the markets or frozen fish to the container ports depended on their skill. But the fifth one faced trouble that went beyond the pilot's skill.
As it shifted to vertical flight, th
e counter-gravity failed. The pilot had enough altitude that even with a full load, he didn't plummet straight onto the factory ship. He even managed to claw the nose up before the tail smashed into the water.
Explosive bolts flung hatches away from both sides of the cockpit area, and the people aboard the freighter erupted into the open. Ryder managed to draw about three deep breaths before the water around the up-thrust nose of the freighter was dotted with bobbing black heads.
Then with a rumble and a hiss, the freighter sank.
Two down, including God knew how much equipment and how many people.
Ryder was glad that she hadn't endorsed the notion of this being a mission from God. If it was, He was definitely having an off day.
By now, Chung was in hailing distance.
"And here I thought we weren't going to have to wait around to recalculate any more loads!" he said.
It was just as well that he was out of reach. If he was as blithe as he sounded, Ryder would cheerfully have thrown him overboard.
FIVE
"This isn't an automatic abort," Chung said.
Ryder saw a few of the Republicans wince at the colonel's choice of words. The Conforming United Wee Free Kirk had its crotchets in the area of reproductive rights.
After that one slip, they looked relieved. Not that aborting the mission wouldn't have been simpler, but if simplicity had governed human affairs, a lot of institutions, including war and sex, would never have come into existence.
The airlift had come in two hours late because one freighter's navcomputer had gone out, then down. They'd had to find a handy piece of no more than damp ground to transfer ten Fencibles and several tons of weapons and stores. Then the cripple had flown off homeward, while the other six flew on.
