The Fleet Book 2: Counter Attack

by David Drake (ed)

  “But,” Hesik said in a voice bright with emotion, “my men have located the traitors, where they’re hiding.”

  “Up for some real action, Captain?” Sitterson asked. “You said you were a reaction company. Let’s see how fast you can react.”

  “Download the coordinates,” Kowacs said, too focused to care that he was giving a brusque order to his superior. He’d taken off his helmet when he entered the building. Now he slipped it on again and added, “How about transport?”

  Sitterson was muttering directions to his AI. “You have truck assigned already, don’t you?” he said, looking up in surprise.

  “You bet,” Kowacs agreed flatly. “Priority One,” he said to his helmet. “This is a scramble, Headhunters.”

  His helmet projected onto the air in front of him the target’s location, then the route their computer had chosen for them. That decision was based on topographical data, ground cover, and traffic flows along the paved portion of the route.

  “How many bandits?” Kowacs demanded, pointing a blunt finger at Hesik to make his subject clear.

  “Sir,” said Daniello’s voice in the helmet, “we still don’t have the hard suits back from decontamination.”

  “Twenty perhaps,” said Hesik with a shrug. “Perhaps not so many.”

  “Fuck the hard suits,” Kowacs said to his First Platoon leader. “We got twenty human holdouts only. Pick me and Sienkiewicz up in front of the security building when you come through the parade ground.”

  “On the way,” said Daniello.

  “We’re going too,” said Commander Sitterson, jumping up from behind his desk as he saw to his amazement that the Marine was already headed for the door.

  “Please yourself,” Kowacs said in genuine disinterest.

  It occurred to him that the weasel commando in the area might have human support. And a group of turncoats like these could tell him something about that—if they were asked in the right way.

  * * *

  Satellite imagery reported seventeen huts in the target zone, which made Kowacs think Hesik had underestimated the opposition. By the time the four trucks were in position, each in the woods half a kilometer out from the village and at the cardinal points around it, Kowacs had better data from long-term scanning for ion emissions and in the infrared band.

  The Bethesdan was right. There couldn’t be as many humans at the site as there were dwellings.

  For the last five kilometers to their individual drop sites, the trucks overflew the woods at treetop level on vectored thrust. It was fast; and it was risky only if the target unit had more outposts than seemed probable, given their low numbers.

  “Probable” could get you dead if one guy happened to be waiting in a tree with an air-defense cluster, but that was the chance you took.

  “Hang on,” warned the driver—Bickleman from Third Platoon. Kowacs didn’t trust somebody assigned from the motor pool to know what he was doing—or be willing to do it in the face of enemy fire, when people’s lives depended on their transport bulling in anyway.

  The truck bellied down through the canopy with a hell of a racket, branches springing back to slap the men facing outward on the benches paralleling both sides. A limb with a mace of cones at its tip walloped Kowacs, but his face shield was down and the scrape across his chest was nothing new. He held the seat rail with one hand and his rifle with the other, jumping with the rest of his unit as soon as they felt the spongy sensation of the vehicle’s underside settling into loam.

  The bustle of Third Platoon taking cover briefly, then fanning out in the direction of the village, was only background to Kowacs for the moment. He had the whole company to control.

  Bradley and Sienkiewicz covered their commander while he focused on the reports from the other three platoons—“Position Green,” the drop completed without incident—and the hologram display a meter in front of him which was more important than the trees he could see beyond the patterns of light.

  “Advance to Amber,” Kowacs said. A blue bead glowed briefly in the hologrammic heads-up display projected by his helmet and all the others in the unit, indicating that the order had been on the command channel.

  They moved fast through the forest. The Headhunters were used to woods—as well as jungles, deserts, or any other goddam terrain weasels might pick to stage a raid—and here speed was more important than the threat of running into an ambush.

  Kowacs couldn’t see much more of Third Platoon than he could of the rest of the company. The undergrowth wasn’t exceptionally heavy, but there were at least two meters between each marine and those to either side in the line abreast.

  “Gamma, Amber,” reported the Third Platoon leader, somewhere off to the left. Kowacs knelt with the rest of the unit around him, rifle advanced, waiting for the remaining platoons to reach the jump-off point.

  “Beta Amber”/“Alpha Amber,” reported Second and First Platoons in near simultaneity. There was a further wait before Delta called in, but they were the Heavy Weapons Platoon and had to manhandle tripod-mounted plasma guns through the undergrowth.

  Anyway, Delta had reported within a minute of the others, not half a lifetime later the, way it seemed to Kowacs, as his fingers squeezed the stock of his rifle and his eyes watched green beads crawl across the ghostly hologram of a relief map.

  The only difference between Position Amber and any other block of woodland was that it put each platoon within a hundred meters of the village. The huts were still out of sight, though Second and Heavy Weapons would have clear fields of fire when they wriggled a few meters closer.

  “Alpha, charge set,” reported Daniello whose platoon had the job of driving a small bursting charge a meter down into the soil.

  “Beta, sensors ready,” answered his Second Platoon counterpart who had set the echo-sounding probes on the other side of the village.

  “Fire the charge,” Kowacs said.

  As he spoke, there was a barely audible thump off to the right and somebody shook his arm to get attention.

  “What’s going—” demanded Commander Sitterson, whose helmet received all the unit calls, but who didn’t have the background to understand them.

  He didn’t have sense enough to keep out of the way, either. Kowacs was very glad that because of the angle, he hadn’t swung quickly enough to blow Sitterson away before understanding took over from reflex.

  “Not now, sir!” he snapped, turning slightly so that Sitterson’s head didn’t block the pattern of lines dancing across his display as the unit’s computer mapped the bunkers and tunnels beneath the village in the echoing shock waves.

  There weren’t any bunkers or tunnels. The target was as open as a whore’s mouth.

  “Was that a shot?” the security chief insisted. Hesik lay just back of Sitterson, his face upturned and the big pistol lifted in his right hand.

  “Assault elements, go!” Kowacs ordered as he rose to his feet himself, so pumped that he wondered but didn’t worry whether the wild-eyed Bethesdan colonel was going to shoot him in the back by accident.

  First and Third platoons swept into the village clearing from two adjacent sides, forming an ‘L’ that paced forward with the sudden lethality of a shark closing its jaws.

  “Everyone stay where you are!” Kowacs boomed through the loudspeaker built into the top of his helmet. The speaker was damped and had a strong directional focus, but it still rattled his teeth to use the damned thing. Still, he was in charge, and the holdouts in the village had to know that.

  Even if it meant that he’d catch the first round if the fools tried to resist.

  The civilians in plain sight seemed scarcely able to stand up.

  Two women—neither of them young, though one was twenty years younger than Kowacs thought at first glance were scraping coarse roots on a table in the center of the straggle of huts. Beside them on a straw
pallet lay a figure who might have been of either sex; might have been a bundle of rags, save, for the flicker of lids across the glittering eyes, the only motion visible as the line of rifles approached.

  “Don’t move, dammit!” Kowacs bawled as a man directly across from him ducked into the hut.

  There was a pop and a minute arc of smoke from Bradley’s left hand—the hand that didn’t hold the leveled shotgun. The smoke trail whickered through the doorway as suddenly as the civilian had—then burst in white radiance, a flare and not a grenade as Kowacs had half-expected.

  Bawling in terror, the man flung himself back outside and danced madly as he stripped away the flaming rags of his clothing while the hut burned behind him. A marine knocked him down with his rifle butt, then kicked dirt over the man’s blazing hair.

  Both platoons were among the huts in seconds. “Empty!” a voice called, and, “Empty!”—then, “Out! Out! Out!”

  Three of them tried to get out the back way as somebody was bound to do. That was fine, always let ’em think they had a way to run. The dazzling whip crack of a plasma bolt streaking skyward, all the way to the orbit of the nearer moon, caught the trio in plain sight.

  They didn’t flatten on the ground or raise their hands, just froze in place and awaited the cross fire which would vaporize them if it came. Marines from Second Platoon threw them down and trussed them scornfully.

  “He can’t move, he’s wounded!” a woman was screaming desperately from the hut beside Kowacs. That didn’t sound like an immediate problem, so he glanced around for an eyeball assessment of the situation.

  Everything had gone perfectly. The one hut was afire. Several Marines held an extra weapon while their buddies grasped the civilian who’d been carrying it. The woman didn’t have to tell anybody that the fellow two of his men were dragging was wounded. Kowacs could smell the gangrene devouring the prisoner’s leg.

  The only shot fired was the warning round from the plasma weapons placed in ambush. Very slick. So slick that it probably looked easy to Sitterson and Hesik, pounding up from the treeline where they’d been left flat-footed by the Marines’ advance.

  The elder of the women who’d been preparing food cried shrilly at Kowacs, “Why are you here with guns? We need help not—”

  Then she saw Hesik. Kowacs caught her by one arm and Sienkiewicz grabbed the other when they saw what was about to happen, but it didn’t keep the old woman from spitting in Hesik’s face.

  The Bethesdan colonel slapped her across the forehead with the barrel of his pistol.

  The younger of the pair of women broke away from a marine who was more interested in the drama than in the prisoner he was holding. She jumped into the dark entrance of a hut. The three marines nearest lighted the opening with the muzzle flashes of their automatic rifles.

  The prisoner flopped down with only her torso inside the hut. Her legs thrashed while one of the Marines, more nervous or less experienced than the others, wasted the rest of his magazine by hosing down her death throes.

  The air stank with the oiliness of propellant residues. Hesik looked dazed. He was making dabbing motions with his right hand, apparently trying to put his weapon back in its holster. He wasn’t even close.

  “Right,” said Kowacs, angry that his ears rang and that a screwup had marred a textbook operation. “Get the trucks up here and load the prisoners on while we search—”

  “Not yet,” ordered Sitterson. Everybody paused.

  “Hold him,” Sitterson added to the marine gripping the man-boy, he was about seventeen—with his hair singed off. “You too—” pointing at Sienkiewicz. “Make sure he doesn’t get loose.”

  The big corporal obeyed with an expression as flat as those of Kowacs and Bradley while they watched the proceedings. She gripped the boy’s left elbow with her own left hand and angled her rifle across her chest. Its muzzle was socketed in the prisoner’s ear.

  Sitterson took something from his pocket—a miniature shock rod—and said to the boy in a caressing voice, “Now, which of this lot is Milius?”

  “Go to—” the boy began.

  Sitterson flicked him across the navel with his shock rod. It gave a viper’s hiss and painted the midline hairs with blue sparks. The boy screamed and kicked. Sienkiewicz interposed her booted leg, and the security chief punched the prisoner in the groin with the rod.

  “Sir!” Kowacs shouted as he grabbed Sitterson by the shoulder and jerked him back. “Sir! People are watching!” He tapped his rifle on the side of his helmet where a chip recorder filed every aspect of the operation for rear echelon review.

  Sitterson was panting more heavily than his physical exertion justified. For a moment, Kowacs thought the commander was going to punch him—which wasn’t going to hurt nearly as much as would the effort of not blowing the bastard away for doing it.

  Instead, the security chief relaxed with a shudder. “Nothing to worry about,” he muttered. “Not a problem at all. What’s your unit designator?”

  “Huh?” Kowacs replied.

  Sienkiewicz was spraying analgesic on the prisoner while the other marine stood between the boy and any possible resumption of Sitterson’s attack. Maybe they were worried about what their recorders would be saying at a court-martial.

  Maybe they didn’t like Sitterson any better than their CO did.

  Sitterson stepped behind Kowacs holding the marine officer steady when he started to turn to keep the security chief in sight. Kowacs froze, waiting for whatever was going to come, but there was no contact beyond Sitterson’s finger tracing the serial number imprinted in the back of the helmet rim.

  “There,” he said as he let Kowacs face around again. “I’ll take care of it when we get back. I’ll have the file numbers of all the recorders in this company transferred to units in storage on Earth.”

  Kowacs looked blank.

  “That’s the way to do it,” Sitterson explained with an exasperated grimace. “Don’t try to wipe the data, just misfile it so nobody will ever be able to call it up.”

  “Where’re those trucks?” Bradley demanded to break the sequence of words and events. The vehicles were arriving with their intakes unshrouded for efficiency, howling like demons and easy to hear even for ears deadened by rifle blasts.

  Two Marines came out of the hut where the woman sprawled. One of them carried a sub-machinegun he’d found inside. The other held, of all things, an infant whose wails had been lost in the noise and confusion of the raid.

  “Check it for bullet splinters,” Kowacs ordered with a black scowl, knowing that if the baby had taken a round squarely it would, have bled out by now.

  “It just needs changing, sir,” said Sienkiewicz unexpectedly.

  “Then change it!” Kowacs snapped.

  “All right,” said Sitterson. “I think you’re right. We’ll take them back to headquarters for interrogation.”

  Marines faced outward toward the treeline with their weapons ready—just in case. The trucks bellowed in, brushing the upper limbs with thrust and their belly plates.

  Switching to the general unit push because he couldn’t trust his unaided voice to be heard as a truck settled in the clearing before him, Kowacs asked, “Bradley, how many we got all told?”

  “Thirteen with the kid,” the sergeant replied, flashing Kowacs a double hand plus three fingers to reiterate his radio message. “That fits, right?”

  Bradley frowned, then added, “Fourteen with the mother.”

  “Yeah, they’ll need that too for identification,” Kowacs said with no more emotion than the static hiss of his radio. “But we’ll sling it to a cargo rail, all right?”

  The draft from the truck exhausts stirred the burning hut into a mushroom of flame, then collapsed it in a gush of sparks spiraling into several of the huts downwind.

  “Beta, Delta,” Kowacs ordered on the command channel. �
�Pack up and let’s split before it turns out there’s an explosives cache here the sensors missed but the fire doesn’t.”

  “Come on, come on!” Bradley was demanding on the general frequency. “Three prisoners to a truck. And secure them to tie-downs, will you? They’re going to tell us things.”

  Commander Sitterson had begun to sneeze. The vehicle exhausts were kicking up dust, smoke, and the smell of the corpse being dragged past him.

  Kowacs really wanted to be away from this place, though he didn’t have any objective reason for the way it made him feel. The only problem was when they got back to Base Forberry, the interrogations were going to resume.

  And if the “Milius” the security chief was looking for was the same woman Toby English had been talking about, Kowacs didn’t think he was going to like that much either.

  * * *

  As the trucks hovered at -the base perimeter, waiting to be keyed through the automatic defenses by the officer of the guard, Commander Sitterson said, “Well, Kowacs. Now that you’re under my command, I want you to be comfortable. What can I do for you? Are your barracks satisfactory?”

  “Huh?” said Kowacs. He’d been watching the prisoners lashed to the forward bulkhead, the burned kid in the center with an old woman on either side of him. “Barracks? Nothing wrong with them. They leak a bit.”

  So does the governor’s office.

  “But you know, there is something you could maybe do . . .”

  “Name it,” Sitterson said, beaming.

  The column got its go-ahead and vectored out of hover mode with a lurch. One of the women called the boy “Andy” when she asked if he were all right.

  Andy told her to shut her mouth and keep it shut.

  “Well, these trucks,” Kowacs explained. ‘’We couldn’t decontaminate them properly after we searched the spaceport this morning, just hosed ’em off. If you’ve got any pull with the yard facilities, maybe you could get us time in a dry dock to—”