Storm Force: Book Three of the Last Legion Series

by Chris Bunch

  “With any luck, we put a nice wave down the main valley, maybe fifty meters high, through the middle of that city and wash everybody out to sea.”

  The medic, Jil Mahim, bit her lip, but didn’t say anything. Garvin saw her expression.

  “If it bothers you to probably be drowning women and kids,” he began.

  “No, boss,” Mahim said. “It just took me a minute.”

  “ ‘Kay,” Jaansma said, pretending he didn’t notice her embarrassment. “That’s the tentative first target. As the op order said, we’ll take out the first target, extract, and depending on how battered we are, reinsert on another part of the world and mess with them there.

  “That’ll give Protector Redruth something to worry about protecting, I hope.

  “Now we’ll have the tech chance another sweep with the drone over those mountains, see if we can’t see where the local soldiery hangs its hat, the size of the dam’s garrison, where the local villages are, and like that.”

  “Second target,” Lir said, “if the first dam doesn’t take down the big one, we’ll get it ourselves.”

  “That’ll make the countryside nice and hostile,” Tweg Nectan said.

  Lir shrugged. “You wanted an easy life, you didn’t have to do something dickheaded like volunteer, now did you?”

  There was laughter.

  “Actually,” Froude said, “if we were serious about pursuing war to the hilt with these people, we’d be better advised to abort this commando business, pull back to Cumbre, and then return with the best defoliants science can build. Assuming, as is likely, this and Kura’s other three planets are Redruth’s rice bowl, as the intelligence indicated.”

  “Or,” Mahim said, “a little radioactive dust here and there.”

  “That would work as well,” Froude said, undisturbed. “If we have no postwar plans for occupying the planet.”

  “Back to the operation at hand,” Garvin said. “For extraction we’ll pull back into the mountains, and holler for help. I’d guesstimate operation time at, oh, five to seven E-days. But it could run double that, so don’t pack yourselves on the thin side.”

  Garvin saw Alikhan looking at him, raised a questioning eyebrow.

  “A private word, Garvin?”

  Garvin started to say there weren’t any secrets on something like this, stopped himself, and went out of the compartment with the Musth.

  “I am still not that familiar with your fighting rules,” Alikhan said. “Was there a reason you did not mention those … I do not have a word for it … presences we saw in the display from time to time?”

  “Presences?”

  “They appeared to me like thin, small clouds, but moved in several directions, so they could not be clouds, unless the winds over those mountains are stranger than any I’ve known.”

  “I think,” Garvin said, “we better go back inside and tell the troops what you think you saw.”

  Alikhan followed him back. The soldiers were studying the projection, muttering about “steep bastard to be humping,” “figure max travel no more’n three klicks a day,” “wonder if there’s villagers in the jungle we’ll have to worry about,” and such.

  “Crew, listen up,” Garvin said. “We might have problems. Would you rerun the sweep over the rivers?”

  The tech obeyed.

  Alikhan pointed, his head moving back and forth rapidly. “There is one. Another. Two there. That one.”

  The humans looked perplexed.

  “Did anyone see any of what Alikhan was pointing at?”

  There was a chorus of “no,” nossir,” “nah,” and such.

  “Very interesting,” Dr. Froude said. “One of the many things we appear to have overlooked was whether the Musth sense beyond human ranges.”

  “None of you saw what I did?” Alikhan said, wonderingly.

  There was a long silence.

  “Technician,” Garvin asked, “does your record show anything above/below human perception?”

  The technician touched keys on the holo box, read the screen, frowned, hit more keys.

  “No, sir. Nothing like he says he’s seeing … and there isn’t any way somebody could sight something that the instruments say isn’t there.”

  Alikhan surveyed the woman, ears cocking, eyes reddening in anger. But he said nothing.

  “I don’t like things to get strange,” Deb Irthing said.

  “Who does?” Garvin said. “When we send the drone in again, we’ll see if Alikhan picks up anything. Maybe,” he said hopefully, but not very convincingly, “we’ve just got some flaws on the recorder.”

  • • •

  Another, closer pass over the area gave more details. There were small villages here and there. Just below the first, smaller dam, was a military-looking camp, and there were buildings on either side of the dam’s parapet.

  Alikhan also saw half a dozen more of the “clouds.”

  “I do not like this, Garvin,” he said. “This time, as they are seen by the drone, they move quickly to one side or another, as if they do not wish to be pictured.”

  “So now, in addition to everything else,” Garvin said, “we’ve got invisible thingieboppers that can sense drones. Whyinhell doesn’t that frigging Yoshitaro report in with some good skinny to explain all?”

  “What’s the prog, boss?” Lir said.

  “Screw it,” Garvin said. “We’re going in.”

  “Bless Ahriman and his putty dildo,” Lir said fervently. “I was sure this’d end up another goddamned dry run.”

  • • •

  The Parnell made a fast swoop, dropping off a relay satellite in a geosynchronous orbit over the target area that would bounce any transmissions from I&R to the pickup ships hovering at the system’s edge.

  • • •

  The velv came down in a near-vertical dive, Alikhan at the controls. Dill considered the somewhat greenish I&R troops strapped to hastily fitted acceleration pads at the rear of the control room, and chortled.

  “Nice to see the guys and gals with the steel assholes aren’t perfect at everything. Be glad a gentle lout like Alikhan’s at the controls instead of me, or you’d really be heaving your guts out. Speaking of which, would any of you care for a nice, refreshing vomit before we enter the jungle?”

  Lir was the only one healthy enough to manage an obscenity.

  Dill laughed even harder. “Hey, Alikhan?” he bellowed. “You need any help up there doing this controlled crash?”

  “Negative,” Alikhan said. “I could fly this pattern with my tail.”

  “It feels like you are.”

  The velv flared once about five hundred meters above the tree-covered slope, then lifted into a near stall over the clearing Garvin had picked. Alikhan caught it on antigravs, settled it down.

  “Ramp down,” he ordered, and two human crew members obeyed. The velv hovered two meters above brush.

  “Go, go, go!” Lir was shouting, and the team unstrapped and went out the door, dropped into the brush, got a nasty surprise that they were still three meters above the ground, found a more pleasant surprise as they squished down into muddy soil. The soldiers recovered, staggered forward under the mass of their packs for a dozen steps, hit the prone position, weapons ready.

  The last solider was down. Garvin looked up at a helmeted face peering out the velv’s ramp, gave a thumbs-up, and pointed to the sky. The velv’s drive snorted, and the ship lifted for space, very fast.

  Nobody moved in the jungle hush, waiting. No shots, no cries of alarm.

  Garvin came to his knees, stood, then motioned the team forward, after him. He walked point, with Tweg Wy Nectan on slack just behind him. Third was Dec Val Heckmyer, then Dec Darod Montagna, the team sniper. Behind her was Ben Dill, the biggest and most heavily laden. Garvin, maliciously, had chosen him for prime commo, with Finf Baku al Sharif behind him with a backup com. Jil Mahim, the medic followed, then Dr. Danfin Froude. The last two in the initial march order were Tweg Deb Irthing, and tail g
unner was First Tweg Monique Lir.

  They were very heavily armed. The basic weapon was the blaster, configured, as common with I&R, as an arm-length carbine. Montagna’s blaster was fitted with a variable optic sight and a heavy barrel. Basic load was ten hundred-round drums of caseless ammunition. Garvin, Heckmyer, Dill, and Lir carried cut-down Squad Support Weapons, and fifteen drums of ammo. Each of them had a pistol and the standard-issue double-edged dagger of the Force. Dill also carried a Shrike launcher and four tubed rockets.

  From that moment until they were extracted, they’d communicate with the whisper mikes and bone speakers each member of the team carried. But they’d use those as little as possible, even though they were set on what appeared, from a superficial check, to be unused frequencies. Hand signals were still preferred.

  Each soldier carried almost one hundred kilos in his pack, fighting/survival essentials on his fighting vest, plus individual weapons. The staggering load was only possible because the pack bases held modified droppers, antigravity parachutes that cut the load to no more than four kilos, although the mass remained an unwieldy bulk. The problem with the droppers was they emitted a certain amount of detectable energy. Garvin was operating on the hopeful assumption nobody would be scanning that much jungle that carefully.

  Most of the load was explosives, one-kilo slabs of Telex, plus detonating cord, fuses, and timers of various types and nastiness. Their load would lighten as they found targets, got shot at, and ate.

  Garvin had gone about one hundred meters when Lir’s voice whispered in his ear.

  “Boss. Lir. Look back. At the clearing.”

  Garvin obeyed.

  “The ship should’ve gone higher before it put the drive on,” she said. “See the burn?”

  Garvin did, a rapidly browning streak in the jungle.

  “Maybe we better honk hard out of here,” he said, “and hope nobody wonders what made that happen.”

  Monique double-clicked her mike in agreement. Garvin started moving faster, thinking, Naturally, we go to full speed just when it’s starting to get steep.

  • • •

  Garvin picked something that wasn’t quite a trail, knowing how suicidal that could be, but an animal track that appeared to lead to the top of the knife-edge ridge.

  It did, but in its own fashion, winding here and there, stopping at what Garvin thought might be tasty herbs or merely a quiet place in which to defecate.

  He remembered the two hardest parts of I&R. The first was obvious — never to fall out, to keep marching until you were chewing on what tasted like dry heart — your own — and trying to remember your body was a damned liar when it wheezed about how there weren’t any reserves left to call on. Listening to that voice was what washed out volunteers for I&R.

  The second was the worst — not only to keep moving, but to stay alert, in spite of your exhaustion. Never let yourself fall into the agonizing one step then another way of moving, eyes fixed on the trail ahead, not looking up, not seeing what was around you.

  The first lesson, unlearned, kept you from getting into Intelligence and Recon. The second killed you as you staggered into a booby trap or ambush.

  Garvin pushed on, relearning the hard lessons about ignoring the body’s sniveling, eyes always moving, weapon ready, alert for anything touching off an inner alarm.

  Or for a sudden silence that could signify danger.

  Here, on this strange world, his ears and brain began memorizing what appeared to be the normal sounds of this jungle, and what could be new and lethal surprises. All he, and the others, could do, was file noises, try to keep their gasping as quiet as possible, and not lose their footing as they inched up the near-vertical slope.

  They stopped below the crest, let their lungs agonize back toward normal and looked around for anything threatening.

  There was nothing, there was everything. They moved on, topping the knife edge, saw higher ridges around them, jungle all around, no sign of the lake.

  Shit, Garvin thought. I thought we were just one slope this side of the dam. Guess again.

  He motioned Heckmyer to take point, Montagna to move up to slack, let them continue the march. Nobody could walk point for very long without losing the edge. Garvin fell into the column in front of Dill, who, though sweating like a saline factory, appeared unbothered by the climb.

  They went down the ridge, slipping every now and then, catching themselves on saplings or each other, and reached the bottom, which was a rocky ravine with a creek splashing down it.

  It would’ve been easy to lose discipline and dive into one of the pools and suck down all that wonderful cool water. Instead, Mahim tested the water, nodded approval. Two troops went across, maintained far-side security up and downstream. Two remained on the near side, and six got to dunk their heads and bodies as they went across, trying to submerge into the meter-deep pools. Then it was the turn of the other four.

  They were wet, but cool now, their backpack-mounted canteens refilled before moving on.

  Suddenly the sun was gone, and it was late afternoon. Garvin realized they’d most likely not make the next crest before night, and they’d have to camp wherever they found themselves.

  Wonderful, he thought. All we need now is a good serious rain.

  A few minutes later, Kura Four quite cooperatively drenched them.

  An hour later, they found the best of several bad lots for a campsite — where the hill leveled for about ten meters to only forty degrees. They moved past the designated site for another hundred meters, stopped in ambush formation. Nothing was moving around them.

  They went back downhill into the chosen bivouac site. Paired up, they ate from their ration paks, then put the debris into heat pouches also used for body waste. Just before dark, the pouches were gathered, and tabs pressed. The pouches seared into self-consuming life, without smoke or odor. None, at least, that humans could detect.

  Garvin sent a four-symbol burst to the satellite: Bivvied. All right. Moving toward target.

  Then they lay in a starburst formation, each soldier’s heel touching the next. Less-skilled soldiers would’ve kept full alert, lazy ones would’ve gone to one-in-four. That would be the procedure once they were farther away from the Landing Zone, but not tonight. Half of the I&R soldiers stayed alert.

  But nothing happened, other than al Sharif emitted, in his sleep, an enormous fart that not only woke three soldiers on either side of him, but forced them to move away until the odor dissipated. Revenge was silently vowed.

  Their wrist chronometers had already been set for Kura Four’s twenty-seven-E-hour day. An hour before dawn should appear, Garvin, who always took first and last watch, woke his troops. Again they ate, splashed water on their faces, a great luxury permitted by the creek crossing, defecated, and went on, up and up.

  This time was lucky: The land opened into a wide valley, with V’d walls. In its center was a lake, and, across its end, the damn that had created it.

  Nectan grinned at Garvin, signaled with his fingers: man walking downhill; man putting heavy charge in place; twisted a demolition box; and then signed waves roaring over everything. Then he clasped hands in victory.

  Garvin crossed fingers, held them out to him.

  Then the team started downhill toward their target.

  • • •

  The watch officer woke Liskeard in his tiny cabin aboard the Parnell.

  “Blurt transmission from Cumbre, sir. Marked EYES ONLY, in the R-Code. The com officer decoded it.”

  The R-Code was the most carefully kept code, except for diplomatic ciphers, of the Force, with personalized access limited to involved unit commanders and their communications officers.

  Liskeard grunted, took the sheaf of paper, dismissed the officer, then sat up and unsealed the folder with his thumbprint.

  “Quite a package,” he muttered, then, reading the first lines, came fully awake. He’d been told, on initial briefing, that there was a “source” somewhere within the Lari
x/Kura system, who so far hadn’t been able to report.

  Now, Njangu’s first com had come through. Liskeard scanned it, looking for any reference to Kura, but found nothing.

  Still, he felt heartened. The Force was no longer operating in complete darkness.

  • • •

  Garvin’s team had been moving no more than an hour when Lir, on point, stopped, held out one hand, palm to the rear.

  Stop.

  Her hand pushed down.

  Down and freeze.

  The signal went down the line and the ten men and women crouched, weapons sweeping their assigned sectors, looking for movement.

  Nothing.

  Lir used binocs to scan the area immediately below, the valley and lake, the skies.

  Garvin was in mid-column, waiting. Lir turned, touched her shoulder with two fingers.

  Commander up.

  Garvin wondered why she didn’t use her com, what she’d seen. He slid carefully forward, inscribed a question mark in the air.

  Lir leaned close, whispered:

  “I feel like we’re watched. No indicators.”

  Garvin thought for a moment. He didn’t believe in mumbo jumbo at all, but a scout’s honed senses might come up with something she couldn’t readily identify — a momentary silence in the jungle, a flash of equipment, anything.

  He used his own binocs to sweep their front.

  Nothing.

  He moved his finger in an arc, up, down, around, then a question mark.

  Where do you feel it?

  Lir looked disgusted, pointed up and out, to somewhere over the lake.

  Garvin saw nothing in the air, but he remembered Alikhan’s invisibles. He put his lips next to Monique.

  “Remember what our hairy alien couldn’t see, either. Signal when it’s gone.”

  Lir nodded. A few moments later, she stood, swept her hand forward at the waist.

  Continue the march.

  The team moved on. Garvin slid back into his position, and they went down toward the lake.