by David Drake
“It wasn’t a mistake!” Barbour said. “Tagrifah was a regimental headquarters!”
“Curst right it was!” Mamie Currant agreed. “Look at there.”
She gestured this time by waggling the muzzles of her tribarrel. A hand and arm clutching a 2-cm powergun extended from beneath a collapsed house.
The weapon wasn’t of Frisian pattern, though it might well take the same ammunition. The Kairenes had been well equipped with small arms. They lacked artillery and armor, but they would have put up at least a good fight if the Boumedienne government had attempted to reduce them with its own forces.
Guerrilla bands with powerguns, familiar with the terrain and dedicated to victory, could wreak holy havoc with an invader’s lines of communications. Boumedienne’s troops would have flailed blindly, destroying random villages but taking disastrous casualties whenever they tried to move in less than battalion strength.
The money cost to Boumedienne of a Frisian brigade was considerable, but it was the difference between victory and the sort of bloody stalemate that is perhaps the only thing worse than losing a war. Tagrifah was proof the money had been well spent.
Four more combat cars approached from the east. The armored vehicles spun on their axes to extend the line on which 3d Platoon crawled through the village. The cars closed up. Another platoon was in sight to Barbour’s left.
“Bunkers under every one of them?” Captain Currant asked/ observed as she scanned the wreckage.
“Yes, that’s right,” Barbour agreed. The part of his mind that spoke retained its professional detachment.
In every instance, the foundations of the houses they passed had collapsed into a crater instead of mounding above ground level. Delay-fuzed rounds—there was no need for true penetrators, designed to punch through the plating and reinforced concrete of fortresses—had sucked the fieldstone foundations into the bunkers the houses had concealed.
Barbour had pinpointed the individual bunkers by having patrols set off small explosions in the ground, never closer than a kilometer from the village. Analyzing the hash of echo returns was more a matter of magic than science, despite the help Barbour’s computers provided.
The results showed how perfectly he had succeeded. He wondered whether the villagers had built additional houses to conceal bunkers, or whether the Kairene military had limited their bunker locations to the existing buildings. Either way, there was a perfect equivalence.
The operation’s planners had laid firecracker rounds down to follow the HE in order to catch soldiers stumbling from their shattered bunkers. It didn’t appear that any Kairene regulars had made it that far.
Civilians lay individually and in groups near the doorways of their collapsed houses. An infant cried on the ground, between the bodies of its father and brother.
The car beside High Hat slowed. A gunner hopped from the fighting compartment, picked up the orphan, and remounted the vehicle.
Most of the dust had settled, but many of the house roofs burned sluggishly. Black smoke bubbled from the damp thatch. Occasionally the fans of a passing combat car would whip fires to bright flame, but mostly they remained glimmerings beneath an oily sludge.
The four-car platoon from the north of the village joined, bringing the company to full strength. Captain Currant spoke, switching her helmet from one sendee to another.
As a company commander, Mamie rated an enclosed command car with better communications gear and a specialist to run it. Like many other FDF officers, she preferred an ordinary combat vehicle.
Military doctrine for millennia had been that a commander’s job was to command, not to fight; Aggressive officers had never accepted that formulation; and when the dust settled, the victorious side was normally the one whose officers were aggressive.
High Hat rotated twenty degrees, then backed a few meters and settled onto its skirts. The remaining combat cars were shifting also, forming a tight defensive laager in what had been Tagrifah’s open marketplace. The vehicles’ bows faced outward, and their massed tribarrels were ready to claw.
They would have no target. Occasionally civilians blind with smoke and tears stumbled toward the laager. They ran as soon as the gleaming iridium shapes registered on their consciousness.
“There’s a battalion of Boumedienne’s boys coming on trucks,” Currant explained to Barbour. “We’ll wait for them, then head back to Desmond. There’s nothing here the locals can’t handle, now that we’ve done the real work.”
She clapped Barbour on the shoulder again. “Now that you’ve done the real work, Bob. This one was all yours.”
The dikes protecting Robert Barbour’s mind crumbled, letting unalloyed reality wash over him. The smoke and screams and the stench of fresh entrails …
It hadn’t been an atrocity. It was a necessary military operation.
And it was all his.
Cantilucca: Day One
The sailor at the Norbert IV’s boarding hatch pointed to a row of low prefab buildings 300 meters in from where the vessel had landed. The freighter’s leave party—the whole crew except for a two-man anchor watch—had already stumped most of the distance over the blasted ground. The crewmen carried only AWOL bags, while the disembarking passengers had much more substantial luggage.
“There’s the terminal,” the sailor said. “The left one’s Marvelan entry requirements. If there’s nobody home, go to passenger operations beside it. Pilar’ll be there, no fear.”
“Not,” said Mary Margulies, surveying the lighted buildings, “the fanciest-looking place I’ve ever been sent.”
“At the moment,” Matthew Coke said, “they aren’t shooting at us. That’s something.”
It was late evening. The sky was purple. Cantilucca was supposed to have two moons, but either they weren’t up or they were so small that Coke lost them in the unfamiliar stars.
The sailor snorted. “You want shooting?” he said. “Go on into Potosi. I guarantee you’ll find somebody there who’ll oblige you.”
Johann Vierziger looked at him. “A tough town?” he asked.
His voice was delicate, effeminate. Coke didn’t know what to make of Vierziger overall, but he’d watched the sergeant run the combat course at Camp Able. Whatever else Vierziger might be, he was surely a gunman.
“Tough enough, boyo,” the sailor replied, eyeing Vierziger speculatively. “But it’s a place a fellow can have a good time if he wants one, too.”
“It appears that we’re our own baggage handlers,” Sten Moden said. He lifted his twin-width suitcase in his only hand. “Shall we?”
The big logistics specialist started down the ramp, drawing the others after him. Vierziger moved immediately to the front. Each member of the survey team carried a concealed pistol, but they were under Coke’s strict orders not to draw their weapons unless he ordered them to.
Coke was uncomfortable. This wasn’t either a combat operation or a routine change of station. He didn’t know how he was supposed to feel.
Cantilucca’s starport was a square kilometer bulldozed from the forest and roughly leveled. The earth had been compressed and stabilized.
There hadn’t been a great deal of maintenance in the century or so since the port was cleared. Slabs of surface had tilted in a number of places, exposing untreated soil on which vegetation could sprout. The jets of starships landing and taking off limited the size of the shrubbery, at least in the portion nearer the terminal buildings.
There were twenty-three ships in port at the moment. Most of them were freighters of around 20 KT displacement, like the Norbert IV. Gage was big business, and Cantilucca grew the best gage in the universe.
Niko Daun chuckled. He was toward the rear of the straggling line—Lieutenant Margulies alone walked behind him, looking frequently over one shoulder, then the other.
“Here we all are in civilian clothes and everything,” the young sensor tech said. “We look like a bunch of businessmen.”
Coke glanced back at Daun. “That’s
right,” he said wryly. “We are businessmen. Or ambulance-chasing lawyers, that might be closer.”
The survey team’s luggage, two pieces for every member except the one-armed Moden, had static suspension systems. When the systems were switched on, they generated opposing static charges in the bottom of each case and the surface beneath it. The cases floated just above the ground and could be pulled along without friction.
On terrain as broken as that of the untended starport, that was only half the problem. Because of their contents and their armored sidewalls, the cases were extremely heavy. They wobbled on their narrow bases of support, threatening to fall over unless the person guiding them was relentlessly vigilant. The poor illumination didn’t help either.
“Not bad training for life,” Coke muttered.
“Sir?” Sten Moden said, turning his head back.
“Just talking to myself,” Coke explained. “Sorry.”
A bus pulled away from the terminal area. Its wheels were driven by four separate electric motors. One of the drives shrieked jaggedly as the bus headed toward the gate of the port compound.
“It’s a lot easier,” Sten Moden said without emphasis as he watched the bus go, “to replace a bearing than it is to replace a driveshaft and a bearing.”
The bus didn’t have headlights. A spotlight jury-rigged to the driver’s side window swept the road and a stretch of the fence surrounding the compound. The forest beyond was a black mass. The sky had some color still in the west, but it no longer illuminated the land beneath it.
“Let’s hope the soldiers aren’t any better than the mechanics,” said Robert Barbour.
Coke didn’t have any more of a handle on the intelligence specialist than he did on Vierziger. Based on Barbour’s personnel file, he was an easy-going man who was brilliant in his field. He had a bright career ahead of him, despite a lack of ambition outside his professional specialty.
There was no question about Barbour’s qualifications. Coke had thought he himself knew his way around a sensor console, until he saw what Barbour could do casually with one.
In the flesh, though, the young lieutenant was withdrawn and apparently miserable. The file would have indicated if Barbour had survived a close one, as had happened to Daun. Maybe he’d had trouble with a woman. The Lord knew, there was plenty of that going around.
“They don’t have soldiers here, Lieutenant,” Johann Vierziger said. “On Cantilucca they have thugs, gangsters.”
“We’re not going to prejudge the situation,” Coke said sharply. “Our report on the quality of potential allies and opposition is just as important as whether we recommend Nieuw Friesland accept an offer of employment here in the first place.”
“Sorry, sir,” Vierziger said. He didn’t sound ironic, but neither was he making any effort to appear contrite.
The sergeant had made a statement which he knew, and which Coke knew, was correct on the basis of the score or more similar planets they’d both seen. Coke didn’t know what Vierziger’s background was—his file began at the point he enlisted in the FDF; but he knew the little gunman had a background. Nobody got as good as Vierziger was by spending his time at the target range.
Coke laughed. “Hold up,” he called to Moden and Vierziger. He stopped where he was, set down the cases he was pulling, and motioned his team closer.
Lights from the terminal brightened that side of the faces watching Coke, but even there the flesh was colorless. Opposite the terminal, the team’s features lacked detail.
“Look,” Coke said, “we’re here now, we’re on our own. From this point on, we’re on first-name basis.”
Nobody reacted openly. Shutters clicked across the eyes of the more experienced trio, Moden, Margulies, and Vierziger.
“I don’t mean,” Coke explained hastily, “that we’ve suddenly become a democracy. Fuck that notion. You will take my orders, or I’ll have you court-martialed on return to Camp Able.”
A starship across the compound tested its landing motors. Plasma flared in an iridescent shimmer above the vessels, lighting the team members and the shattered ground about them. Vierziger grinned in broad approval.
“We’re all good at our jobs,” Coke resumed as the jet’s rumble faded away. “And we’ll be living in each other’s pockets while the operation goes on. I trust that we can maintain real discipline without pretending we’re back in base somewhere. Okay?”
The other members of the team nodded—Margulies with obvious relief. The last thing any sensible officer wanted was to serve under a commander whose first priority was that his troops like him.
Coke smiled and nodded. “Saddle up, troopers,” he said. He switched on the repulsion units of his cases and resumed the last stage of his trudge to the terminal buildings.
Vierziger fell in beside him. “I’m not used to thinking of myself as ‘Johann,’” the little man said with an unreadable substrate to the comment.
“Better get used to it, Johann,” Coke said.
Vierziger’s eyes were always on the far distance, the shadows which might be hiding an ambush. His cases tracked as nearly straight as the ground permitted, never tilting far enough to be in danger of toppling over. The little man’s peripheral vision chose the best line possible across the field.
“People generally don’t trust me,” Vierziger said, as if he were commenting on the magenta glow of the western horizon. “That’s understandable, of course. But I want you to know that you could trust me, can if you want to.”
A speck of light now at zenith had been fifteen degrees further east when Coke left the freighter. A moon, then, rather than a star; but merely a speck.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said aloud.
Vierziger laughed without malice. “The only difference between me and the pistol in your holster,” he said, “is that you’re more likely to hit the target if you aim me than if you aim it.”
Coke looked at the little man. Neither of them spoke for a moment.
“Watch out for this,” Vierziger said, gesturing toward a raw pit with the index finger of the hand gripping one of his cases.
The pit separated the two men by its width as they avoided it. “Why?” Coke asked.
“Because I think that’s what I’m here to do, Matthew,” Vierziger said.
He took two longer strides, then released his cases. They stood as sentinels to either side of the door as the gunman entered the terminal with his delicate hands free.
Coke walked through the doors a step behind Vierziger. Coke had been a combat soldier all his career, so he was irritated to be treated as an object for protection. Another part of him, though—
It was the job of the security element, Margulies and Vierziger, to protect the survey team’s staff personnel. Coke, as team commander, couldn’t object with even a frown at his people doing their jobs.
A hissing static broom shut off as the door opened. A woman, hidden until then behind the counter, stood up. Her lustrous auburn hair was caught in a braid and coiled on top of her head.
As Coke judged the mass, the hair would dangle to the floor if she removed the ornate silver combs pinning it up. Unlikely that she let it down often, though; the arrangement would take an hour to rebuild.
The woman wore black, relieved only by the massive silver crucifix hanging across her breast on a chain of the same metal. She was full-featured rather than fat and could have modeled for Rubens.
“Yes, gentlemen?” she said. Her voice held a touch of sharpness, a sign of uncertainty otherwise hidden. She appeared to be alone in the office. Two men had entered, well dressed but men and strangers, and there were further shapes looming outside the door.
“We’re passengers from the Norbert, ma’am,” Coke explained. “We’re looking for the entry control office.”
He hadn’t forgotten the sailor had said that would be in the left-hand structure. The center building was the only one that was lighted, however.
“Oh, they should have told me!” the
woman said with a stricken look.
Her eyes focused on the door. The panels had once been clear, but years of grit blown by nearby landings had blasted them to a pebbled surface. “How many of you are there?”
“Six,” said Coke. “Is there a problem?”
“Not for six,” the woman said. “I was going to take the operations van home anyway. My husband has our—”
She caught herself, flushed, and continued. “You see, the port bus just left with your ship’s crew. They didn’t say anything about passengers. I suppose they wanted to get into Potosi before dark.”
Her skin was white, though from her dark lips Coke suspected she would tan to an umber color. She wore neither make-up nor, apart from the combs and crucifix, any jewelry.
“I’m Pilar Ortega,” she said. “I’m the, well, I’m the passenger services officer, but for the past few months I’ve been sort of running Terminal Operations—to the extent they’re being run.”
“What sort of entry formalities are there?” Coke asked. “Cantilucca is part of the Marvelan Confederacy, isn’t it?”
The building was none too clean. From the sound of the static broom which the team’s entry had interrupted, Pilar was doing not only the terminal director’s work but also that of the janitor.
“Here, I’ll log you in as well,” Pilar said with a grimace. She turned to a console and brought it live. “Call your friends inside, will you please?”
Coke nodded to Vierziger, who moved to the door.
“The clerks in the Commission office next door have all gone home,” the woman explained as she sorted through electronic files. Her fingers were tapering. They moved a light pen with short, positive strokes to control the holographic data. “High Commissioner Merian is …isn’t as diligent as he might be. To tell the truth, so long as the port duties are paid, the Confederacy doesn’t bother much about Cantilucca.”
