by Chris Bunch
“Yessir,” the captain said, and the navigator’s fingers flew across his computer. A talker began speaking, in careful but urgent tones, to the other Larissan ships.
• • •
The cruisers had time to make the first jackleg, and then a formation of Cumbrian destroyers hit them from “above” and their “left.”
Countermissiles spat, and the Larissans seemed to forget the five watchdog escorts. Two of them launched against the flank of the cruisers. A Goddard got through the missile screen, holed a cruiser in its drive spaces. The cruiser lofted on in its orbit, into a swarm of other destroyers, was obliterated.
Another had its countermissile suite overwhelmed by the number of incoming missiles, since there were no destroyers screening, and was smashed out of action. Its crew was lucky — there was time, later, before the air ran out, for patrol ships to rescue them.
The four remaining, as Cumbrian ships flashed at them from nowhere, realized they stood no chance at all of reaching the transports. They were terrified of Redruth’s rage, but Redruth was a maybe, and a Cumbrian missile was for sure.
One was caught just in Larix Prime’s ionosphere, took four missiles, and burned, a twisting, smoking torch falling, falling to explode against the side of a mountain. Another suddenly blew up, although no one ever claimed credit for hitting it with a missile.
A third must have been hit, for it made a hard landing in a desolated mining area. Aksai went out to ensure it was destroyed, seeing Larissans run, panicked, in all directions from the wreck before they volleyed missiles in.
The last made it to a hard landing on Agur’s main field, and was hastily camouflaged. The crew was arrested, taken to prison, where all of the officers were shot for cowardice, and the crew was decimated.
Before the last man fell, writhing in his blood, aksai discovered the cruiser under its nets and bombed it into a fiery ruin.
Protector Alena Redruth watched the executions, one eye ticking uncontrollably.
• • •
Celidon paced back and forth in the main command center in his own bunker. His staff watched, was afraid to ask what had happened, what had gone wrong at the meeting with Protector Redruth.
Celidon was considering his options, finding them few, especially since he’d been intelligent enough not to board the commanding cruiser as he’d been ordered.
At this point, there appeared to be only one choice. He didn’t like it greatly. But at least it was logical, and almost certainly guaranteed his survival.
Survival and, he brightened, a decent possibility of advantage.
CHAPTER
27
Second Brigade, still not built up to full strength, was assigned the task of attacking Larix Prime’s minor cities. Jon Hedley didn’t like it, but had to recognize the logic, just as the other worlds in the Larix system were being bypassed and temporarily ignored. When Prime was taken, then there’d be time to worry about lesser problems — if they hadn’t taken care of themselves and surrendered.
First Brigade’s mission was to take Agur. Dant Angara hoped that if the capital fell, they could capture or kill enough of Redruth’s top leaders, hopefully including the Protector himself, to make whatever ranking Leiters Larix/Kura had sue for peace.
The transports went in. There were eight main traffic arteries into the capital, and landings were made around each of them.
A scattering of ships was hit coming in, but casualties were surprisingly low. Since the Force hadn’t picked the obvious landing grounds — sports arenas, open land, airfields, parks — but found others, flattening warehouses, setting down in wide avenues and office complexes that had enough open areas for two or three ships, the Legion was able to debark and assemble in combat formations without being hit hard.
More troops were convincing themselves this would be an easy campaign as the columns started into the city. None of them made it more than a kilometer before they learned otherwise.
Larissans came out of nowhere, hitting hard, recklessly. Cumbrians died, others found cover, fought back.
Sometimes the Larissans kept coming. Sometimes they surrendered. Sometimes they fell back into hasty positions, fought to the death. Sometimes they milled about and were killed or gave up.
The Force took only a few hundred meters that first night.
At dark, shots went back and forth. Sometimes there was someone shooting back, more often it was just a nervous new soldier killing shadows. Noncoms raged, even battered a head or two. But the near panic didn’t subside until almost dawn.
Rat paks were issued to all but the most forward elements, and the Force continued on, into the city.
• • •
A Larissan patrol was hit by an infantry company. They broke and ran. The company went after them, into a town square.
Fire roared at the Cumbrians from three sides, and when they tried to fall back, were pinned in the buildings on one side of the square.
They squealed for help, and seconds later, three Zhukovs smashed in at low level. Their 150mm autocannon churned buildings into rubble, and the chainguns shredded smaller, moving targets.
A rocket came out of the swirling dust, hit the lead Zhukov in the nose, and exploded in its cockpit. The ACV lifted, took another rocket in the belly, rolled, bounced, came back upright, flames licking from the hole in its nose.
The rear ramp dropped, and a Cumbrian staggered out, was cut down.
• • •
A dozen whooping Larissans dodged toward the ACV, grenades ready.
The commander’s cupola grated sideways, and its machine cannon chattered, ripping men and women’s bodies. Then the Cumbrians attacked through the haze, driving the Larissans out of the square.
One woman approached the smoking Zhukov, peered into the crew compartment.
“Hell’s nostrils,” she shouted. “There’s somebody alive in here!”
A dozen Larissans came out of a gun bunker, whitish flags tied to sticks. An Alt and the two men went forward to accept the surrender. The Larissans dropped, and blasters behind them opened up. The officer and her two men went down, hit hard.
The men of her platoon growled, swept forward, surrounding the bunker, firing. When the return fire sputtered out, there were real attempts to surrender.
The Cumbrians shot them down as they staggered out, and that particular platoon didn’t take prisoners for the rest of the battle.
• • •
Monique Lir, pushing a small recon team forward, saw an aksai, crashed into the side of a building. She had the team cover her, zigged forward. The canopy was open, and the corpse of a Musth dangled out.
He hadn’t died in the crash — his body was almost blown apart from close-range blaster fire and knife wounds.
Lir looked at the other I&R soldiers, but said nothing. There wasn’t any need.
• • •
Jil Mahim was bloody to the elbows, and her operating gown looked like she’d been swimming in gore.
“No go,” she said, pulling a sheet over a man’s face. “He’s gone.”
The gurney was hastily trundled away. Mahim had time to stretch, wish she could have a drink, wish she was a lowly enlisted swine back with I&R, when the casualties only came one or two at a time, and another gurney was pushed in front of her. Male, some kind of flier, flameproofs already cut open.
Bad, she thought. Chest wound … sucking, somebody put a compress over that, good Some intestinal damage. Heavy bleeding. Probably not going to make it.
She looked, impersonally, up at the casualty’s face, recognized him as the man’s eyes opened.
“Jill,” Alt Rad Dref, onetime I&R Grierson pilot, said. “Or am I dead?”
“You’re not dead,” Mahim said.
“Good. I saw those Larries coming … didn’t want them to get me … got to the cupola gun … guess somebody dragged me out … not a bad way to go, now, here, out of the dirt. Not much pain. Not much at all, unless I breathe.” Dref smiled beatifically.
“Letter in my pouch … see my people get it, ‘kay?”
Mahim was bending over him.
“Goddammit, you coward son of a bitch, you aren’t gonna die!”
Dref just smiled on.
“Breathe, you gutless bastard,” Mahim snarled. “Anybody can give up and die! Breathe, I’m telling you, or I’ll dig my thumb in your guts!”
Dref’s smile vanished. He sucked in air, grimaced.
“Hurts.”
“Damned right it hurts,” Mahim said. “It means you’re still frigging alive! Breathe again!”
Dref obeyed.
“Respirator,” Mahim called. “Now, goddammit! Over here! Breathe again, you sorry sack of shit!”
Again air came in painfully, went out.
The respirator was there, and Mahim’s fingers moved over Dref’s body quickly, connecting sensors, pumps, stabbing a hollow probe through his rib cage into a lung.
“Keep breathing,” she ordered. “This box is just gonna help a little. Breathe, or as the life spirit’s my goddamned witness I’ll tear up your pissyassed sniveling little letter home to Momma, and nobody’ll even know where you died!”
Again Dref’s chest moved, and once more.
“Come on, dickhead! You can do better than that! Breathe!”
Rad Dref lived, and was flying a Zhukov again within the year.
• • •
A soldier heard a sound, booted the door open, and flipped a grenade into the shanty. It went off, and the soldier heard the wail of a baby, then the tears of another child.
He forced himself to look inside, vomited, then started shouting for a medic.
• • •
“You know that goddamned Redruth’s palace is like a damned houm warren,” Maev Stiofan said.
Njangu didn’t know exactly what a houm was, figured it out by context.
“I only learned about half of it,” she went on. “Even Protector’s Own weren’t trusted a lot. But one thing I do know: Redruth’s last hidey-hole isn’t where you think it’d be, in the cellars. There’s this passageway that we guarded that went somewhere. Nobody without the highest clearance — his top aides, a few Leiters, some unit commanders, not me, went through those doors.”
“You remember where it is?”
“Surely,” Maev said.
“Don’t go and get killed on me ‘til we get closer to that palace,” Njangu said. “That might be interesting skinny, if things work out like they maybe are gonna.”
• • •
“I don’t like open land,” Monique Lir whispered to Darod Montagna, peering out of a bomb crater toward the large, ornate building across the sweeping grounds that’d once been lawns. “Gimme a nice, crooked alley, anytime.”
“ ‘Kay,” Darod said. “I’ll take the lead this time.”
“Hell you will,” Lir said. “I’ll take Second Troop in a big fat wave. You gimme fire support when they try to level our heinies.”
“ ‘Kay. Go.”
Monique came to a crouch.
“Second Troop! Off your dead asses and on your dying feet! Let’s go!”
The forty surviving Second Troop members came up in crouches and, waiting for the sky to fall, darted forward to the next cover.
Darod checked her sniper-modified blaster, took a deep breath.
“First Troop! In a rush!”
The rest of I&R zigged up, went on line with Second. Darod, panting hard, flopped behind a downed tree next to Lir.
“Why in hell,” she said, “have they got us fighting like line slime?”
“ ‘Cause,” Lir said, “they’re running low on people with death wishes. Happens to I&R in every war. We start as elite, then they decide we’re good enough to be line fillers, and then we get wiped out.”
“Thanks for the history lesson,” Montagna said. “But this is too easy,” she said. “I really think — ”
The artillery barrage came down, rounds crashing in a wave, on and on, endlessly. Montagna had her helmet buried in the dirt, trying to crawl up into it, when impossibly, she heard the incoming supersonic whine of the shell that was meant for her.
The shell hit on the other side of the tree, ten meters distant, and sent both officers tumbling.
Montagna realized with some surprise that she was still alive, lifted her head, opened an eye. Vision was blurred, and she wiped a hand across her face, and cleared blood away. She saw Monique Lir lying very still a few meters away.
“Sunnuvabitch,” she managed. She’d always thought Lir was immortal.
Darod realized she didn’t hurt that badly, and looked down at herself. Her camouflage uniform was dark-stained to her waist. Her hands came up, checked her breasts. They were still there. She cautiously ran fingers over her face. It hurt, but she didn’t find any new holes. Shrapnel wounds, that was all, assuming she didn’t have a big painless hole somewhere else.
First Tweg Huran was flat, next to her.
“You’ve got the company,” Montagna managed. “How bad’re we hit?”
“Not too. Three down, not moving, counting the boss. Maybe four wounded.”
“Go take the frigging objective for me,” Montagna said. “Anybody who can wiggle can give covering fire.”
“But you’re — ”
“The medics’ll be here when they’re here,” Montagna snapped. “You know the orders. Now move out!”
“Yes’m.”
Montagna, feeling shock finger her system, pushed it away. She found a syrette in a pouch, shot half of it in her thigh, rolled over on her stomach as Huran shouted orders.
Lying almost next to her was her blaster. She dragged it over by the sling, found it didn’t appear to be damaged. Montagna rolled into a shallow trench, winced in pain, and peered through the weapon’s scope at the monolith ahead of them.
Nothing … nothing … nobody moving over there … oh there we are, down on the ground. Nope, not good enough to be the eye in the sky … go high … goddamned stone statues, wonder what this frigging place used to be … hard to make out if those are stones, or real people … ho-ho, gotcha, you sneaky little bastard, she thought, seeing a glint of light from an upper tower window that moved. There’s my artillery spotter.
“Huran!” she shouted.
“Sir?”
“Get down! I got me the target that’s causing the grief, I think.”
Now, let’s us see … range, no more’n 270 meters, pull it in tight, good buttweld, finger on the trigger … ouch, didn’t know I got some shrapnel there, too, go away pain, come back later … hold on the glint, say it’s some sort of spotting scope, about, oh, half a meter long, move your aim on back, should be a nice chubby goblin’s head about there that I can’t see … finger on trigger, tighten, tighten …
The blaster cracked. Darod brought the scope back on target, twisted the selector switch to AUTO, and let six rounds chatter into the room. The glint of light was gone.
“You’re clear,” she managed to shout, and let herself collapse over the stock of her blaster, hearing the yelps as I&R charged.
I’ll just lie here and bleed a while, then rise on up and fight again came from somewhere. The hell I will, as pain washed over her.
She heard a moan, looked to the side, saw Monique Lir stir a little.
Blasters exploded ahead, and I&R swarmed into the building.
A turbine whined, and Montagna saw a Grierson land behind her. The ramps dropped, and men, women, medics by their paks, ran out. Neither ACV nor the medics wore distinctive insignia, since the Larissans found those an ideal target.
One medic slid down beside Darod.
“You’re a mess,” the woman said cheerfully.
“Thanks a lot. Where’s your goddamned bedside manner?”
“Back at bedside,” the medic said, opening her pak.
“I can wait a while. Everything’s superficial, and I gave myself half a shot of painkiller,” Montagna said. “Take care of my mother over there first, age preceding beauty and all tha
t.”
“Screw you and the stobor you rode in on,” Monique Lir said weakly, and Darod Montagna knew everything would be all right.
• • •
Angara looked at the screen grimly. The Force was barely out of Agur’s suburbs, and they’d taken almost 25 percent casualties.
“I don’t like this, I don’t like this at all,” he muttered.
“Pardon, sir?” Erik Penwyth asked politely.
“I want Caud Hedley on a shackle connect.”
“Sir.” Penwyth nodded to one of the omnipresent com operators, who spoke into a mike, waited for an instant, then passed headset and mike to Angara.
“Sir, Hancock Six Actual.”
Angara took the mike.
“Jon, I want you to send me your reserves. Then pull Second Brigade out of contact as quietly as you can. We’ll have to take care of your targets later.
“We’re going to need you over here to finish things off.”
CHAPTER
28
“Is this the one who called himself Ab Yohns?”
Njangu keyed the mike.
“It is.”
“A test,” and Njangu could hear the cold amusement in Celidon’s voice. “What do I prefer at my meals?”
“Barely cooked beef, and raw vegetables,” Njangu answered.
“And what do I drink?”
“Ice water.”
“You may be who you claim to be. What is your real name?”
“Uh-uh,” Njangu said. “Not over a com. And for you, come to think about it, probably not ever.”
A chill laugh came.
“You are definitely the double agent who fooled us. I shall continue, then, to use the name I knew you as.
“This must be brief, Yohns. I believe Protector Redruth has gone mad. He intends to destroy us all in his downfall. I am a mercenary, and have no particular desire to be devoured by his suttee.”
“So you want to surrender?”
“Yes,” Celidon said. “I’m arrogant enough to believe that, without me, your task will be far easier.”
Njangu nodded agreement. Celidon was the closest thing Larix and Kura had for a practical tactician, even if he obviously wasn’t as good as he thought at grand strategy.
