With the Lightnings

by David Drake

  It probably didn’t matter. The Alliance commandoes weren’t coming to stage a fashion show. The blood that stiffened the shoulders and right sleeve of Daniel’s shirt wouldn’t surprise anybody either.

  Barnes and Dasi were across the strait, tending the original camp on the other island. It was a dangerous job, but that description would cover most of what was going on tonight.

  The eight other ratings guarded the prisoners. They were all neck deep in the water of an inlet eighty yards from the Kostroman camp. Overhanging foliage ought to block the remainder of the human heat signature, at least from a quick-reaction force that was trying to locate known groupings rather than searching for people who weren’t where they were supposed to be.

  “Zojira civilians,” a voice rasped from the radio. The person speaking was male, but the single-sideband emergency signal and a degree of professional disdain almost concealed even his sex. “Give us a vector from your camp to the bandit position. Over.”

  The burned Kostroman had died, so Daniel hadn’t been required to decide whether to put her in the water with the others. Both her hands had been charred off, and her heat-shriveled intestines writhed where there was no longer a ribcage to cover them.

  Her death had been the best option for all concerned. Daniel supposed it was a failing of his as a man as well as an officer that he’d been unwilling to speed the result himself.

  Daniel bent over the microphone. The emergency unit’s poor sound quality was a blessing under the circumstances: it’d take a better linguist than most commandoes to notice a problem with his accent.

  “Master, the pirates’re east of us,” he said in tones of breathy nervousness. “Maybe a little south, too, a little southeast. They’re not half a mile away!”

  Daniel could hear the deep bass note of an APC at speed now. The commandoes were coming in fast, despite the risk that the sound of their ducted fans would alert their quarry.

  The power it took to lift and propel twenty-odd tons by thrust alone came at the price of a sonic signature, no matter how much you tried to minimize it. Quick and dirty was probably the better choice, as well as the option that would appeal to members of a strike force.

  “On my signal,” the radio voice said, “fire a flare straight up. I repeat, straight up. And stay off the radio! Out.”

  Woetjans smiled lazily and stood, holding the flare gun from the Ahura’s emergency kit. She was obviously glad to have a task to occupy her while the others could only wait.

  Adele sat on an upturned metal bucket. Her attention was seemingly a million miles away. Daniel grinned at her. She raised an eyebrow in question, realized Daniel was just being sociable, and returned to her reverie. Her hands slowly rotated the head-sized object she held between spread fingertips.

  Lamsoe and Sun held submachine guns; the Kostromans had salvaged guns, so the Cinnabars taking their place had guns too. Lamsoe held his as if it were a bomb. Daniel wouldn’t let him disconnect the battery because the APC’s sensors might be able to tell the difference, but the safeties of both weapons were on.

  The APC’s thrum was louder now. A few minutes earlier the pulsing note could have been concealed in the night sounds except to ears that were searching for it.

  “Zojira civilians,” the radio ordered, “fire one flare now! Over!”

  Woetjans walked two steps closer to the bank of the inlet, aimed the gun skyward, and sent up a flare as close to vertical as you could tell without a plumb line. Daniel hoped the process hadn’t been too expert, but the commandoes would probably figure the wogs had just gotten lucky.

  “Good, I’m already stiff from sitting here,” said Hogg. He still looked like he’d been exhumed on maybe the third day. Daniel’d planned to leave his servant with the prisoners, but at the last instant he’d lacked the courage to say that.

  Hogg would’ve ignored the order anyway. The fellow who’d changed your diapers wasn’t going to kiss your boots just because you had “Lieutenant” before your name now.

  The flare’s tracer burst a hundred feet up in a brilliant blue dazzle. There was enough wind from the sea to push the sparks away from the campfire; not that the commandoes would’ve cared.

  The APC came fast over the trees, heading east toward the first island. The downdraft drove the flare’s falling particles into the lagoon as a hundred scattered steam vents. The hiss of quenching sparks was lost in the roar of the fans.

  The big vehicle banked left. The plasma cannon in its cupola raked the original Cinnabar camp with a hell of stripped ions.

  Steam and fire blew from the jungle. The vegetation was wet, but even stone burned when bathed in radiance as hot as a sun’s corona.

  A mushroom of soot and vapor erupted from the target area. Daniel heard the chatter of submachine guns as well, a sign of ruthlessness and bad fire discipline. Personal weapons had nothing useful to add to the plasma cannon’s swath of destruction.

  “Those bastards,” Hogg said as he stropped his knife on his palm. “Kill us all while we slept, they would.”

  He spat, and smiled, and looked much more his old self.

  The APC went into a reverse bank and swept back. The cannon fired again, its dense saffron beam ripping apart the pillar of smoke from the first pass. A glowing rock flew out of the impact area, dimming as it tumbled. It landed in the lagoon and exploded from thermal shock.

  Daniel was white with cold rage. This was war: if it claimed Barnes and Dasi, well, that was a hazard they understood when they took their oaths. This Alliance commander wasn’t alone in his willingness to shoot sleeping enemies without giving them a chance to surrender.

  And it wouldn’t change anything about what happened next; nothing except that Daniel Leary would take more pleasure in viewing the Alliance casualties he very much expected to see.

  Apparently satisfied with what it had achieved on the neighboring island, the APC idled toward what it believed was the Kostroman camp. The muzzle of the plasma cannon pointed toward them as a white-hot oval, cooling slowly.

  Daniel stood and raised his hands to shoulder height. A part of his mind was already composing the letters he’d write to the families of Barnes and Dasi, if that were required and if God preserved him to carry out that duty.

  * * *

  Adele watched the armored vehicle come toward her at a slow pace, thunderously loud and bigger than she’d expected even though she’d seen APCs before. She supposed it was because of the circumstances in which she was watching this one that it seemed to loom so large.

  The APC was closed up; its driver and gunner used electronic imaging to view their surroundings. Daniel said that vehicles of this sort had sensor suites that could tell if a gnat farted.

  The saving grace of the situation was that this jungle had many, many gnats. As in Adele’s own proper job, the difficulty was to sort vast quantities of data for the single item you needed. No ordinary weapon was going to pass the electronic frisking, though.

  The APC hesitated in the air, then dropped to the surface of the lagoon. Spray erupted in a screen that would have been rainbowed if there’d been any lights to refract within it. The vehicle resumed its leisurely progress, waddling up the inlet toward the camp. It didn’t even show the minimal running lights Adele had seen on APCs in Kostroma City during the coup.

  The sailors were all standing. They looked nervous, the attitude the commandoes would expect as well as the way Adele supposed they really felt. She didn’t want to stand, but at last she got up awkwardly from the bucket so as not to look out of place.

  Daniel spoke; sailors moved forward slightly. Adele, though not concealed, was now in the background.

  She wasn’t afraid. She was too detached to be afraid. She understood precisely what was required of her; if circumstances permitted, she would execute her task. There was very little uncertainty except about the outcome.

  The APC’s bluff bow slid out of the water, bulldozing a wedge of root-bound mud ahead of it. Spray doused the campfire and d
rove the sailors back, cursing and covering their eyes.

  Adele turned away. She could scarcely be wetter than she was already, but the deliberate insult set her face coldly. Scorn a Mundy of Chatsworth, would they?

  She turned again, smiling internally at her own reaction. She’d have laughed, but that would have been out of keeping with her pose as a small-time crook and smuggler. Instead she let her face muscles relax into a neutral expression. She’d never cringed, so she was afraid of an unsatisfactory result if she tried to fake it now.

  The APC swung broadside to the eleven Cinnabars. Its stern shoved aside undergrowth and nestled there. The cupola rotated so that the plasma cannon stayed trained on the presumed Kostromans. Five submachine guns projected from miniature gunports in the armored side.

  Realistically, the weapons weren’t much danger because those threatened were close enough to the vehicle to duck under the cannon and flatten themselves against the APC’s flank between the gunports. The muzzles would have a psychological effect, though, especially on the stupid thugs the commandoes thought they were facing.

  The driver shut his fans down. The roar of air through the eight intake ducts stilled, but a high-pitched whine indicated various parts continued to spin in readiness for any need.

  The plasma cannon twitched, aiming at Lamsoe’s head. “You two with guns!” the Alliance voice shouted, this time through a conformal speaker somewhere on the vehicle’s hull. “Throw them in the water now! And the six of you who have knives, you too! Now! We can see you!”

  Daniel stood a half step in front of his sailors, waggling his raised hands and smirking in apparent terror. At the command he clawed into his pocket and came out with the little knife he’d used to peel nuts.

  Lamsoe and Sun spun their submachine guns toward the inlet. Sun’s splattered mud on the bank, but Lamsoe got rid of his with the enthusiasm owed a live grenade. It took longer for sailors to fumble folding knives out of their pockets, but they flew toward the water too.

  Though Hogg threw his knife, Adele heard it thunk into a tree bole in the near distance. If the Alliance officer noticed the slight disobedience, he passed over it for now.

  A hatch opened in the vehicle’s side, just back of the cupola. The man who got out was barely taller than Adele but strongly built. He held the central grip of a submachine gun, a weapon both more compact and more deadly than the Kostroman equivalents the sailors had just thrown away.

  “Now listen up!” the officer said. He spoke in an upper-class Pleasaunce accent.

  The officer waved the submachine gun as though it were a conductor’s baton. The hatch behind him was a pale rectangle; the vehicle’s interior lights were faint, but they were brighter than the jungle now that the fire was dead.

  “You wogs will go back under restraint,” he continued, “or you’ll stay here till you rot. And you can count yourselves lucky that my colonel has a softer heart than I do, or there’d be another burned patch of jungle and we’d be heading home without the trouble of tying you, do you understand?”

  “But master—” Daniel whined. He sounded so much like a crying child that Adele felt her jaw clench.

  The officer thrust his gun an inch from Daniel’s face. “Shut up or I’ll do it my way!” he said.

  Daniel whimpered and bent away. Adele tossed her ripe soap-bubble fungus through the open hatch. The officer’s eyes flicked sideways at the movement and Daniel caught his gun-wrist in his left hand.

  Sailors dived for cover as they’d been warned to do. Screaming chaos broke out within the APC. A submachine gun raked the night.

  Adele ignored the shots—they weren’t aimed at her or, most likely, aimed at anything at all. She bent to tip over the bucket she’d used as a seat. Her pistol was beneath, concealed from sensors by the galvanized iron bucket.

  She straightened with the gun in her hand. There wasn’t anything she needed to shoot.

  The plasma cannon pointed at a crazy angle as the howling gunner tried to free himself from his harness. A commando emptied a submachine gun through a port on the opposite side of the APC; pellets lit the jungle like a stream of fireflies, clipping foliage and sending up puffs of splintered wood. Other troops hammered the sides of their vehicle, but even a crash-bar hatch release required a little more coordination than these retained in their present puling agony.

  Daniel held the Alliance officer between him and the APC. He had both his wrists, now. The Alliance officer twisted with a grace suggesting he was expert in unarmed combat, but the Cinnabar lieutenant was stronger and very angry.

  “The men you squirted over on the other island, master?” Daniel said in a hard, precise voice.

  The Alliance officer tried to bite him; Daniel had the leverage and kept the teeth away from his shoulder as his hand continued to grind together the bones of the officer’s gun-wrist. “They were really warm stones wrapped in blankets to give the right heat signatures. I had two of my ratings tending the fire there, though, and I hope—”

  The commando’s wrist failed with a sound like that of stones rubbing. His eyes rolled up and he fainted in Daniel’s arms.

  “I really hope they heard you coming in time to cover up in their dugouts,” Daniel concluded, his voice softer. He straightened—he’d spread his legs to brace himself during the struggle—and surveyed the situation, still using the Alliance officer’s body as a shield.

  “It seems to have worked,” Adele said. She stood with her pistol at her left side. Two submachine guns still protruded from gunports, but their muzzles were tilted up. Their owners had dropped the weapons as they tried to fight off an enemy more insidious than poison gas.

  A gun fired inside the vehicle. Sparks, pellets or metal spalled from the inner face of the armor, spun through the hatch.

  A commando finally managed to release the latch that dropped the whole side of the troop compartment. Soldiers tumbled out, twisting and moaning. One commando shambled blindly into the undergrowth, clawing the air with her hands. The sailors let her go.

  The soap bubble fungus had ruptured into fluffy tendrils on the compartment’s deck. A single insect the size of Adele’s thumb glittered in the lights, then settled on the neck of a commando.

  Daniel took the submachine gun from the officer he held, then laid him on the ground and stepped back. There’d been sixteen troops aboard the APC. None of them were upright now. Some thrashed, but Adele could see at least half a dozen others were as still as death.

  “I think we’d better get back a little farther,” Daniel said in a voice wheezy with recent exertion. “They’re not supposed to fly farther than a couple meters from the nest, but I don’t want to be the one to prove that was as wrong as the data on how big sweeps get.”

  Adele put her pistol in her pocket. Together they walked slowly toward the sailors now appearing from the jungle. Hogg joined them.

  “The beetles aren’t supposed to live longer than ten minutes from when they leave the fungus, either,” Daniel added. “But we’re going to stay on the safe side there, too.”

  Behind them, tough Alliance soldiers moaned in mindless pain.

  * * *

  “Couldn’t we come by boat?” Adele complained. She was acting for the benefit of the prisoner the two sailors were dragging through the jungle behind her and Daniel, but the peevish tone wasn’t entirely put on. Feet had worn the trail to a narrow creek with muddy banks.

  “Our Alliance friend might try to escape,” Daniel explained. His voice was breathy with exertion. “Or drown himself, anyway, especially if he figures out what’s waiting for him. Besides, it was your idea to get the information this way.”

  It actually had been Adele’s idea, offered diffidently when Daniel wondered aloud how best to interrogate the prisoners about the Aglaia and her crew. Daniel and Hogg were enthusiastically sure that the plan would work, at least after they’d refined it. Adele found that hard to imagine; but her knowledge of what went on in other people’s minds was not, she knew, to be tr
usted.

  “I don’t know anything,” the commando said muzzily. “And if I did, I wouldn’t tell you fuckers.”

  The Alliance prisoners had been stripped—Daniel wanted their uniforms, but Adele knew the psychological effect would be useful as well—tied, and held separately in nooks in the jungle. Any of them who tried to speak had been gagged as well. The interrogation had to wait till daybreak.

  Their prisoner was a sergeant whose skin was startlingly white beneath a mat of black chest hair. His wrists were tied in front of him and a pole was thrust between his elbows and his back. Barnes and Dasi held opposite ends of the pole, forcing the sergeant to walk sideways, crab fashion, along the trail.

  “Well, I hope you’re wrong,” Adele said in her usual coolly astringent tone. “The two soldiers we tried this on first didn’t talk, and I’m getting tired of tramping through the mud.”

  “I got nothing to say,” the prisoner repeated. His foot caught in a trailing vine, tripping him so that his weight fell on the pole. He gasped at a pain so severe that he staggered again.

  Barnes and Dasi paused; they’d have to carry him if he blacked out completely. “Daniel,” Adele murmured, halting the lieutenant. Sailors had improved the trail from the first time she and Daniel scouted it, but whoever was in the lead still had to force fresh growth aside.

  A fungus beetle had bitten the prisoner on the right shoulder. His arm and the whole side of his chest were still lividly swollen. Pus oozing from the wound trailed a yellow crust as far as his elbow.

  “Well, I tell you, Sarge,” Dasi said with bantering menace, “I’d just as soon you didn’t talk. I’d just as soon none of you talked. I was back at the other camp, you see, when you bastards had your fun shooting it up. I got blisters on my butt from that, and I guess I was still luckier than you planned me to be.”

  Barnes leaned over and pinched the sergeant’s cheek. “You be just as tough as you want, boy,” he said. “I really like to hear you fellows scream.”