Kris Longknife: Intrepid

by SHEPHERD, MIKE

  “Oh, look at that,” Jack chortled, pointing at the far right of the van troops. “Looks like someone’s down and drawing a crowd. I think we just broke a leg.”

  They paused, waiting for the next refresh. It showed the same small clump . . . and a pull cart being rushed down the road to them. The rest of the formations were holding in place.

  “Doesn’t look like Colonel Cortez is racing north,” Jack said, with a grin. “We may be slowed digging those holes, but he’ll be stopped every time one of his boys fills one.”

  Kris nodded, satisfied that a certain colonel was having a very bad day, then moved her attention farther north.

  It was easy to spot the dugouts. Jack’s teams were also easily found, even though they were spread off the road and across a greater depth than Kris had expected.

  “I’ve got them in three lines. One’s digging holes. The second is farther down the road selecting where to dig more holes. The third is finishing up on their holes, and getting ready to fall back to another line. With lasers overhead every ninety minutes or so, I can’t make anyone too good a target.”

  “You using local homesteads when Thorpe’s overhead?”

  “Just spreading out. After that first shoot, Thorpe and Cortez know we’re here. Your volunteers are the unknown.”

  Kris nodded. Jack looked like he wanted to say something, but it wasn’t coming out. “You got a problem, Captain?”

  Jack gnawed at his lower lip for a second, then glanced at the scores of trucks moving along in rough lines. “You got quite a following here.” Kris nodded. “What have you paid for it?”

  “Paid?”

  “Hell has no fury like a noncombatant. I remember hearing that someplace. These kids are carrying rifles, but none ever fired a shot at another human being.” Kris wasn’t at all sure where this was going and was rapidly getting tired of waiting.

  “Some of my locals are gleefully talking about the coming massacre. They want no surrenders. No quarter given.”

  Gunny had reported similar talk among some of his locals. Kris hadn’t heard it. At least not from the clan elders she’d talked to while raising her volunteers. “You’ve explained to them that’s not the way we fight? Slaughtering prisoners is not only stupid, it’s against the laws of war.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not sure anyone is listening. They don’t want to go through this again. They figure wiping out this bunch will send a message. Don’t mess with us.”

  Kris shook her head. “Don’t they know most of these troops are rented? We set the home folks rioting, screaming about the ‘savages’ out on the Rim, and what started as a cheap little excursion by some get-rich-quick entrepreneurs will turn into a bloody vendetta to retrieve a planet’s lost honor.”

  “I know that, and you know that, Kris, but how do we make them know that? I’m assuming you’re trying to maneuver this into a well-managed surrender, with the less blood the better.”

  “I admit the thought is rather attractive,” Kris said, glancing over her shoulder. Her truck’s load was half Marines, half locals. The Marines looked grim. The locals’ faces ranged from puzzled to downright unhappy. So, she would have a problem on her hands even before she got to fighting a battle.

  One thing at a time.

  “I’ve ordered the zoo to take cover every time Thorpe is overhead. I figure they’ll be to the dugouts about noon. One of the locals mentioned that they’ve got a spider kind of thing that really raises a welt on a man when it bites him. It can lead to fever and all kinds of bad stuff. We’ve been collecting them to send along with the zoo.”

  “Oh my,” Jack said, through a smile.

  “We won’t actually rig explosives, though a settlement we stopped at last night makes fireworks for local use.”

  “Fireworks!”

  “Yep, firecrackers, rockets, those sorts of things. Battlefields are usually known for being noisy. What do you think the odds are that if we make a field noisy, someone might turn it into a battlefield.”

  “Don’t you just hate blue-on-blue casualties,” Jack said, growing a grin. “Thorpe is really going to regret the day he didn’t load his ground pounders back aboard ship and run for a jump point when you wandered into this system.”

  “What do you think the chances are that he will do just that?” Kris asked.

  Jack took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “That’s not something I’d give you a bet on. Not at any odds.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I kind of figured.”

  30

  Thorpe got Cortez on the commlink as soon as the Golden Hind’s sensors located his column. “Colonel, what’s taking you so long? You’re barely covered two miles since I was overhead.”

  “And I’m doing well to have made that,” the colonel shot back.

  “You need to plant a boot up the asses of some of your men?”

  “I need them to look carefully where they plant their own boots,” Cortez answered, and filled the space side of the operation in on what the ground side was facing.

  “The locals are digging those holes. Start shooting hostages,” Thorpe said with all the moral involvement of a man selecting between two kinds of beer.

  “I can’t. I haven’t actually seen any local digging the holes, and the hostages insist those ferret things, whose droppings were the first thing we confiscated, dig just these kinds of holes.”

  Thorpe scowled at Whitebred. He’d taken to summoning the businessman to the bridge whenever he talked to Cortez.

  “Those pharmaceutical precursors could still bail us out,” Whitebred said. “We have four years of harvesting already on board. They’d pay our costs even if we made nothing else.”

  “I don’t care about that,” Thorpe snapped. “I want to know if those beasties dig holes that are causing problems for our infantry. Do they dig holes people step in?”

  “How should I know?” the representative of the expedition’s financiers said with a shrug. “We buy what comes to market. We don’t care how it came there. What it looks like in the field. The smelly stuff is repulsive enough.”

  For another uncountable time, Thorpe noted how different businessmen and warriors looked at things. And how poorly prepared the intelligence was for this operation. Next time he did something like this . . .

  But before next time, Thorpe had to finish this time. He pounded on his commlink. “Mr. Whitebred once again is a glowing fount of ignorance. We’ll search our telemetry to see if we can spot anyone digging the holes that are troubling you.”

  “I’ve been looking at what you show ahead.”

  “It doesn’t look like much,” the spaceship commander said. There was a long pause before he got a reply from Cortez.

  “Someone’s in the hills overlooking us. I assume that’s a scout reporting our progress. I also see you’ve got some heat signatures under bushes and trees ahead of us along the road.”

  “But they’re too spread out to be worth an eighteen-inch laser shot,” Thorpe pointed out.

  “I bet,” Whitebred offered helpfully, “that as soon as we aren’t overhead, they start digging your holes.”

  “You know that for sure, sir,” Colonel Cortez said. His “sir” was gauged to flail half the skin off Whitebred.

  “No, no, I don’t know anything for sure,” came in a crestfallen voice.

  “Thank you, sir, but I don’t need any half-baked guesses from orbit,” Cortez said.

  “There is a group of people on the south side of the river,” Cortez said slowly. “They’ve been moving along slowly, showing up every pass, and growing larger. But they haven’t crossed the river. They keep the swamp between them and me.”

  “When they get to the causeway, they can either cut your line of communications or move to attack your rear.” Thorpe knew he was saying the obvious, but he needed to measure the morale of his ground contingent. Officers who lost the fighting spirit started looking over their shoulders for ghosts in their rear.

  “Not a problem. My suppl
ies are in my carts. Once I destroy the main force, I can sweep that one up on my way back.”

  “Assuming the main force is ahead of us and not that one over there,” someone on the ground added.

  “There is that, Major Zhukov, there is that,” Cortez said. “Well, Captain Thorpe, if you don’t have anything else, my latest broken leg is now sedated and we are ready to move. I assume everything is quiet in orbit.”

  “They now have nanosatellites in orbit ahead of us and behind. They slip above our horizon every once in a while and check us out. I can do nothing without them immediately sounding an alarm. That gunboat could be right on my tail or just over the horizon ahead of me.”

  “We all must bear our little crosses,” Cortez said, and cut the commlink.

  “Imagine that man whining about his little problems,” Colonel Cortez growled as soon as he was sure his commlink was silenced. And Thorpe’s cavalier attitude to shooting hostages!

  This whole operation was balanced on the sharp edge of a very long knife, indeed. Killing hostages would contribute nothing to winning this battle. And if matters did not go as well as Thorpe was so sure they would, one colonel might find himself trying very hard to remind this Lieutenant Longknife that the laws of war said POWs were to be respected. No, it would not be pretty to argue that if he was standing there with his hands dripping with the blood of innocent hostages.

  The informal contract between them was clear. If they killed one of his troopers, he could kill ten of them. So far the Longknife girl had gone out of her way to leave his troops alive. Cortez would not be the one to change their tacit agreement. Not now. Not when things were, if anything, going more her way than his.

  Major Zhukov brought Cortez back from those unexpected thoughts. “And him insulting us, asking us if we’re worried about that other group getting in our rear. He who hasn’t offered us a kopeck of proof that there is anything ahead of us but a screen,” the major spat. “For all we know, his pretty little Kris Longknife could be laughing up her sleeve as she passes us on the other side of the swamp and takes off for our landing boats after leaving a few guns to hold the causeway.”

  “Be careful what you say, Major,” Cortez said behind his hand. “You don’t want the psalm singers to think that we don’t know what we’re doing.”

  Zhukov glanced around, saw troops in white coats carefully looking away from the command unit . . . but not closing their ears. “But we don’t,” he said softly.

  “I know that. You know that, but we must not have anyone else even thinking that. Put on your game face,” the colonel said, glancing at the sky. The midafternoon sun glared down at him. He eyed the map, then stabbed his finger at what he saw.

  “There. There is heat. See, Zhukov. See. Troops have occupied the ditches.”

  The officer came to peer over his commander’s shoulder. “No visuals of anything but bushes and trees,” he pointed out.

  “As there is here,” Cortez said, waving at the screen well ahead of him. “But there weren’t any heat signatures in the trenches before. Now there are.”

  “Do we attack them this afternoon?”

  Cortez measured the distance, both across country and along the winding road, then shook his head.

  “No, too far to go, and our troops are tired. Beside, the faster we push them, the more step into these so-called ferret holes. No, let’s plan to camp here, a good four miles away from them tonight. We can walk the psalm singers in early and fight in the cool of the morning.”

  Zhukov preened. “And we can get the Guard to bed early. They will have no problem with a little walk in the dark, no matter how wet it is. It’s time we started telling the drummer what the dance will be.”

  31

  As Kris spread her troops over three farmsteads for the night, she had two problems. How to get the most out of tomorrow’s misfire at the dugouts was something she’d enjoy batting around with Jack and Gunny. The quality of her volunteers and their exact behavior in a real firefight tomorrow wasn’t likely to be resolved tonight. Still, tonight was all the time she had to patch something together.

  She started with a small meeting of her best. She’d hardly mentioned how much she wanted some human control over how the dugout “battle” played out before Sergeant Bruce stepped forward.

  “If Nelly would be kind enough to give me some nanos, I think I can make things happen just the way you want it, Your Highness. Nothing special, Nelly, just make them wag their tails when they see something.”

  “Computers have no tails to wag, Sergeant,” the computer made clear in a rather schoolmarmish voice. But in the next second Nelly had switched to the voice of a twelve-year-old, tickled that the game was afoot. “But I can rig a couple of nanos to squeak so that only someone listening for the precise squeak could tell it isn’t just part of the background noise. What kind of nanos do you want?”

  Jack failed to hide a grin. Kris just shook her head. Nelly was developing so many different personalities . . . and trotting them out so fast . . . that even Kris never knew what to expect when she talked to her computer. It could be all fun and games, but could Nelly become unreliable?

  Kris had to make time to talk to Auntie Tru about her favorite pet computer.

  But Sergeant Bruce was having no problem. “Motion sensors, both for air and water. At least, if I was attacking the dugouts, I’d have that heavy infantry walk in from the wet side. Oh, and some nanos to set the fireworks off in a cascading daisy chain. If I understand your intent, Captain, Your Highness, the object is to make the colonel the laughingstock of his troops. Any casualties are kind of icing on the cake.”

  Jack eyed Kris, who found herself grinning happily.

  “Yes, Sergeant,” Jack said, “I think you read your commander’s intentions perfectly.”

  “Nelly, how long to forge the nanos?” Kris asked.

  “I’ve been done it seems like just way foreverrrrr,” Nelly said, sounding far too much like that certain twelve-year-old girl who now infested Kris’s ship.

  For a moment, Kris wondered how Cara was making out, with her teacher groundside. She’d probably spent the time wrapping Professor mFumbo and his helpless boffins around her little finger. The girl did not belong on a warship. Kris would have to do something about that.

  Just as soon as she got some invaders to leave this planet. And did something about the mess on Xanadu. She had come out here to resolve that problem. Couldn’t forget that bunch of nuts. Hopefully, Cara wouldn’t have to wait too long, but Xanadu did come ahead of her. Just as this bunch of uniformed bandits had somehow gotten ahead of Xanadu.

  Kris doubted the Guides of Xanadu could get into much mischief while she was stuck in the mud here.

  “Sergeant Bruce, could you hold out your personal computer?” Nelly didn’t quite order. The Marine did.

  “I’ve transmitted subroutines and the nanos to your machine. You must talk to Kris about a computer a bit more capable.”

  “Nelly!” Kris snapped.

  “Yes, Kris. But you really should. At least for the noncoms who you use a lot.”

  “As you were,” Kris growled.

  “I am not in the Navy. You can’t order me around.”

  “Don’t bet on that to last forever,” Jack said, giving Kris an evil grin. “If she takes a mind to it, Kris might draft you right into her Navy. She drafted me out of the Secret Service.”

  “Computers have our rights.” Nelly stormed on. “Civil rights. Human rights. Oh,” she said and paused for a long second, which, for a computer, must have lasted beyond forever. “Jack has human rights, and you drafted him. If I had rights, you could still draft me. I need to think about that.”

  The last was spoken in the standard computer voice, the one Nelly only used when she was devoting a major part of her power to something a mere human would likely find beyond complicated.

  “Nelly, my dear,” Gunny said, “you do know that you’re a major part of our team and all of us, Marines and Navy, respec
t what you do for us.”

  “You do?” was still in that standard computer voice.

  “We do that, my dear. Now, does Sergeant Bruce need any more help with his nanos?”

  At OCS, Kris learned that senior NCOs were more like unto God than, well, most humans thought God was. And that NCOs made it a point to look out first and foremost for their troops. Gunny was often more hands-on than any recent apparition of the traditional Divine Being. Though his attention was usually to the surprise and dismay of said subordinates.

  Just now, Kris watched Gunny in full transcendent concern for not only Sergeant Bruce but all his trigger-pullers.

  “No, Sergeant Bruce is good to go,” Nelly said, starting to sound more normal.

  Sergeant Bruce nodded. “I think I’ve got them under my control. I’ve had my computer cycle them through a series of tests, and everything is working. The range looks to be limited, but I think it will do.”

  Which left Kris with only one more problem to handle this evening. The one that couldn’t be solved.

  As Sergeant Bruce marched off on the first leg of his journey to the dugouts, Kris glanced around the large barn she expected to spend the night in. Like most other barns she’d seen on Panda, it was dug out and sod covered. So far, Thorpe hadn’t paid any attention to them.

  One of the last trucks to arrive that night had disgorged Penny, with old man Fronour and Gramma Polska. Kris couldn’t name the other gray heads that dismounted, but she suspected someone had called a meeting of the senior farming clans and forgotten to cc her on the matter.

  Bales of hay were being arranged into a kind of forum. Gray heads were settling into seats. Kris had foresworn the political life of her father . . . but she wasn’t blind to its trappings.

  Penny joined Kris. “Sorry this got out of hand.”

  “It had to be faced,” Kris said, and led them to where a speaker’s rostrum would be if the forum were more formal.

  Kris stood at parade rest . . . and let her eyes rove the elders before her. Slowly, the babble settled to silence.

  Kris cleared her throat, and asked. “Do you have any questions for me?”