With a start, Polk realized how dumb he must look. He turned to the latest in a long line of commanders in chief standing alongside him, his face drawn tight with shock.
"How, Admiral Belasz? How could this have happened?"
Belasz licked his lips; Polk could see a small tic working under the man's left eye. Given that his predecessor had been consigned to a DocSec lime pit for the last disaster, he had every right to be nervous.
"Well, sir," Belasz said, choosing his words with great care, "overwhelming force directed with great precision is how. If the Feds choose to drop hundreds of thousands of tons of armored heavy cruiser onto us, I'm afraid there's very little we can do to stop them. That much mass moving that fast…" Balasz shrugged his shoulders. "It's unstoppable."
Polk resisted the urge to have the man arrested on the spot. "They'd waste ships doing that?" he demanded. "Why? It makes no sense, especially given they are so short of frontline units."
"We don't know the answer to that, sir," Belasz said, "and I agree it doesn't make sense. Yes, they've caused us great damage, but it's all to the PGDF. They haven't reduced Fleet's capacity to wage war on them in any way. I'm sorry, sir. I wish we knew, but it's a mystery, and without the crews of the three ships to tell us, we may never work it out."
"Do we know the names of the ships?"
"Yes, sir. We do. They were three R-Class heavy cruisers: Redwood, Red River, and Redress."
Polk swung around. "Redwood!" he barked. "Did you say Redwood?"
The raw ferocity in Polk's voice made Belasz flinch. "Yes, sir," he stammered. "Redwood was one the ships destroyed in the attack. It hit Perkins."
Redwood, Kraa damn it! With a terrible, cold certainly it all made sense to Polk. "Admiral, get your people to confirm the status of J-5209."
"J-5209?" Belasz said with a frown. "The prisoner of war camp? I don't under-"
"Yes, you imbecile. J-5209, the Fed prisoner-of-war camp. Now!"
"Yes, sir."
Belasz returned a minute later. "J-5209 was attacked shortly after the three PGDF bases were hit. Fed landers took out the defenses before leaving with all the Fed prisoners. Kingfisher fighters from Ojan took them out off the coast southwest of McNair. We found no survivors."
Polk was silent. Redwood meant Helfort; it had to be him. Who else would have staged such an elaborate diversionary attack? Who else had enough of a motive? So why would he go to all that trouble only to die in the storm-wracked seas, victim of the Kingfishers' Alaric missiles and of a complete lack of fallback planning? It was not like Helfort at all; that meant…
"Admiral."
"Yes, sir?"
"Humor me," Polk said. "I'm not convinced. When the weather allows, I want the crash site checked again, including a seabed survey this time. I want concrete proof those landers were shot down, and I want it soon."
Belasz's eyes opened wide in surprise. "Yes, sir. Will be done."
"Good. Keep me informed." Polk waved his chief of staff over. "I've seen enough."
"Yes, sir."
As his flier climbed away, leaving behind a scene of utter desolation, Polk patched through a call to Viktor Solomatin.
"Anything from the Feds?" he asked when the unlovely face of his councillor for foreign relations appeared in his personal holovid.
"Yes, sir. In short, they are claiming that rogue elements acting outside the Federated Worlds' chain of command were responsible for the attack. Details to follow."
"I take it, Councillor, that you are not convinced?"
"Me?" Solomatin said with a scowl. "No, I'm not. I think it's the usual Fed bullshit. They planned it, they executed it, and in some way they intend to profit from it. How, we have no idea, but rogue elements? The Feds? Never!"
"Okay, Councillor. Let's wait for their full response before we do anything. That's all."
Polk cut the call, Solomatin's openmouthed surprise at Polk's evenhanded reaction fading away into nothingness. He stared out of the window as the flier approached McNair, the city's ugly sprawl reaching out to meet them.
"Chief Councillor?" his chief of staff said.
"Yes?"
"Councillor de Mel for you, sir."
"Okay. Yes, Councillor, what can I do for you?"
"Word of the attack on the PGDF bases is out, sir. The NRA is claiming responsibility, of course, so the mobs have hit the streets. Faith's particularly bad. DocSec's gone to red alert for all cities and towns across all three systems. I think it's going to be a bad forty-eight hours, Chief Councillor."
"Fine," Polk said with a dismissive wave of the hand. "Keep me informed."
"One more thing, sir," de Mel said with a small shake of his head, openly puzzled by Polk's lack of interest.
"What?"
"Like I said, sir, DocSec thinks we're in for a bad forty-eight hours, and I agree. They've asked for marine backup, but General Baxter is refusing to move even a single marine without an operational directive from the Defense Council."
Polk almost shrugged his shoulders-right now, he could not care less what Baxter might or might not be doing-but thought better of it. He had to act his part in the elaborate charade that was Hammer politics even if all that mattered to him right now was the undeniable fact that Helfort had rubbed his face in dog shit again. "I'll convene an emergency meeting of the Council," he said. "You'll get your marines."
"Thank you, sir," de Mel said, the relief obvious.
"Anything else?"
"No, sir. I'll keep you posted."
"You do that, Councillor. You do that."
Why do I bother? Polk asked himself. Not even twenty-four hours earlier, he had the Hammer Worlds and its tangled affairs as much under control as any one human being could. Now one man, one small, insignificant man, had thrown a huge monkey wrench into the works, leaving him thrashing around in a vain attempt to stay on top of things.
Was this his fate, he asked, doomed to reach out for the things that mattered to him, to the Worlds, only to have lowlife scum like Helfort rip them from his grasp? If it was, he said to himself, what in Kraa's name was the point of being chief councillor? Friday, September 21, 2401, UD Branxton Ranges, Commitment
It had been an hour since they broke camp, and Michael's left leg was letting him know it resented the punishing pace. Uphill or down, nothing seemed to bother Farsi and his patrol; the pace was the same: fast, relentless, a five-minute break every hour the only respite. Still Farsi refused to say how much farther they had to go: "You'll know when we get there" was all he ever said, every other question treated the same way, with a silent shrug of the shoulders. Michael had tried to get Farsi's second in command, T'chavliki, to talk, but she was just as uncommunicative. The rest of the patrol was no better; all day they marched in complete silence.
"So be it," Michael muttered while he followed Adrissa through trees filling the bottom of a narrow gully that climbed to a small crest before, presumably, it dropped away into yet another valley. Of the Hammers there had been no sign; judging by Farsi's relaxed attitude to patrol discipline-all he seemed to care about was maintaining the pace-there would not be. Kallewi had asked Farsi about the Hammers; true to form, Farsi's reply had been yet another shrug of the shoulders.
So the day wore on, the routine unfaltering, the pace unyielding, until only the fast-fading dregs of willpower kept Michael moving, hoping against hope that the day might finish and soon. His left leg had long since dissolved into a molten mass of white-hot pain, and it demanded every gram of willpower he possessed to keep up, his eyes locked on Adrissa's back. She marched ahead of him, troubled by neither the pace nor the hours. How did she do it? he wondered. The bloody woman had been locked up in a prison camp for months, for chrissakes.
Farsi's fist lifted ten long, hard hours after they had set off but only minutes before Michael knew he would have to fall out. Without a word, the man turned and waved everyone off the path they had been following through scrubby, stunted trees. What now? Michael wondered. He foll
owed T'chavliki down a gentle slope through trees thickening overhead until they came to a cluster of boulders tumbled together to form overhangs.
"We'll leave you here," Farsi said. "There's a stream thirty meters farther on, so water won't be a problem. You'll be safe if you keep those Kraa-damned neuronics of yours shut down, don't wander off, and don't light any fires."
"Yes," Adrissa said, "but when can we meet-"
"Kraa! You Feds are an impatient lot," Farsi said. "All in good time. Be ready to move out at first light tomorrow. Let me see… yes that'll be two days' time at 07:15 Universal. Understood?"
Adrissa nodded. "Understood. We'll be ready."
For a moment, Michael was confused before he remembered Commitment's forty-nine-hour days. He had not been dirtside a week, and already he hated them. The twenty-four-hour nights were bad enough, but what was worse was the locals' insistence on using Universal Time so that the arrival of daylight and the start of the working day coincided only once every forty-one days. It was a nightmare and confused the hell out of him.
"Right," said Kallewi as the NRA patrol disappeared into the scrub; like wraiths, they were there one minute, and then they weren't. The marine dumped his pack under an overhang. "I know we have to trust the NRA," he said, "but even so, we'll post a sentry. Four hours on, eight off. Happy with that, sir?"
"One person enough?" Adrissa said.
"Yes, sir, it is. Brought some remote movement sensors. They'll give us plenty of warning."
Adrissa nodded. "Okay."
"Just a few things to watch out for. Stay inside the movement sensors, keep your gun to hand all the time, keep quiet, and for chrissakes, do not take your chromaflage capes off unless you are under the trees. Hammer recon drones can pick up a human 10 klicks away, so be warned. Oh, yes, let the sentry know where you're headed and when you'll be back. I'll take the first watch. Michael and then you, sir. That okay with everyone?"
More nods. "Need a hand with the sensors, Janos?" Michael asked.
"That'd be good. Running fiber-optics is a pain. Come on, let's go."
Sighing with relief, Michael lowered his body into a small waterfall-splashed pool, the water tumbling down across granite rocks cool but not cold. The heat from his overworked legs leached away, and for the first time in hours, the pain in his bad leg started to fade to more manageable levels. He lay back and stared at the canopy of branches overhead. The last of the cloud from the tropical depression that had covered their attack on J-5209 was beginning to break, the sun now and again sneaking through to drive slivers of yellow-gold light down through tiny gaps in the canopy.
For a magical minute, tranquillity overwhelmed him, dragging him out of time and place to somewhere new, somewhere there were no Hammers, no Hartsprings, no death, no hurt, a place far from Commitment, a place where he and Anna might live out their days untroubled by all the stupidities that infected the rest of humankind.
The magic faded when a wandering recon drone passing to the south snapped him back to the present. "Urggh," he grunted, sitting up. Ignoring the protests from abused muscles, he started work on the muck accumulated over the days of hard marching. Job done, he lay back. Even though he missed Anna, he was surprised to find himself utterly content; for the moment at least, just knowing that she was safe was more than enough. Sunday, September 23, 2401, UD Branxton Ranges, Commitment
Michael had the watch, the minutes until Farsi's return dragging on and on. When one of the sensors reported movement, the shock jolted him upright.
"Stand to, folks. Company," he hissed, bringing his assault rifle to his shoulder, holding the sighting ring steady on the new arrival's head as he walked into view. "Stand down," he said. "It's Farsi. Welcome back, Sergeant Farsi."
"Thanks, but just so as you know, Lieutenant," Farsi said with a half smile, "we blew your head off long before your sensors picked us up."
"Eh?"
Farsi lifted his left hand; to Michael's horror, what looked for all the world like a bush slid out from behind a tree and stood up. It was T'chavliki, quite unable to conceal a huge grin as she stabbed her rifle in Michael's direction.
"I'll be damned," he said, chastened. "That is impressive."
"We need to be. Those Hammer bastards have all the technology. Problem is, they rely too much on it. Those movement sensors of yours are good, but we expected them. Took T'chavliki hours to infiltrate your position."
"Lesson learned, Sergeant Farsi, lesson learned."
"I hope so."
Kallewi appeared with Adrissa close behind. "What's happening?" he asked.
"Corporal T'chavliki made it past our sensors without being detected," Michael replied.
"No shit!" Kallewi exclaimed, the surprise obvious.
"Yes shit," Farsi said, deadpan.
Kallewi laughed. "Getting past those things takes some doing, Sergeant. I think I might have underestimated you guys."
"Maybe," Farsi said; a small smile appeared for the first time. "If you're ready to go, I have a general waiting."
"Let us grab our sensors, and we're right."
"Do it."
With everything recovered, the group set off. As before, Farsi and a trooper led the way, and the pace was no less cruel. Regaining the path, Michael resigned himself to a long day's pain. To his surprise, they walked for thirty minutes before Farsi called a halt.
"One klick ahead of us is a line of Hammer sensors," he whispered. "They're not up to Fed standards, but they work well enough. Microphones, holocams, and signal processors uplinked to PGDF headquarters by satellite. The stupid bastards think we don't know about them, and we'd like to keep things that way. So here's what we're going to do…"
An agonizing age later, they had wriggled their way through the line of Hammer sensors; Farsi assured Michael that they had gone undetected. If the Hammers turned up, he had said, they'd know he was wrong. Michael did not have the energy to worry about it. He rolled over onto his back, his knees and elbows protesting after crawling, in places centimeter by centimeter, the best part of a kilometer across broken ground, a twisting circuitous route out of sight of the holocams.
"That was hard," he muttered to Adrissa when she crawled up and rolled onto her back beside him.
"Tell me," she said, breathing hard.
"On your feet, folks," Farsi said, untroubled by the effort. "Now the good news. Only fifteen klicks to go."
"Another fifteen klicks?" Adrissa grunted. She climbed to her feet. "Terrific. I have had it with this hiking business."
Michael had, too. His left leg was threatening to refuse the weight he put on it. "I think this leg has, too," he muttered as he tried to massage it back to life.
"Problem?" Farsi asked.
"Yeah. Rail-gun splinter at Hell's Moons, then a gunshot wound on Serhati. Bloody Hammers. Oh, sorry," he said, lifting his head to look up at Farsi. "I didn't mean it that way."
"Don't be sorry," Farsi said with a shake of the head. "Nobody in the NRA thinks of themselves as a Hammer. So don't give me any of that Hammer of Kraa religious shit"-he spit on the ground-"I gave up believing a word of it the day I started to think for myself. When we've kicked the murderous, corrupt bastards out of McNair-and we will-the Resistance Council's first law will be to change the name of the Hammer of Kraa Worlds. Revival Worlds is the current favorite. Anyway, we're wasting time. We need to go. Let me know if you need any help."
"Thanks, Sergeant."
"Come on, Michael, lean on me," Adrissa said, and together they set off after Farsi.
Many hours into the march, Michael was still keeping up, but only with Adrissa's help.
His neuronics' knowledge base told him they were now in limestone karst country. There was plenty of it: half a million square kilometers running southeast away from the floodplain of the Oxus River and the city of McNair, a plateau riddled with thousands upon thousands of sinkholes, many leading down to labyrinthine networks of uncharted caves.
For the Hammers, the karst was m
ilitary horror writ large, a three-dimensional puzzle they could never solve: too big to isolate, too expansive to carpet bomb, too broken to cross on foot, too fractured to reconnoiter, every boulder an ambush site, every sinkhole an escape route.
But for the NRA, the karst was a sanctuary: big enough, tough enough, intricate enough to shelter tens of thousands of people far underground, secure enough to nurture an independent society safe from the Hammer's tacnukes, orbital kinetics, and fuel-air bombs, well watered and blessed with tunnels and thickly forested valley highways out of sight of drones and satellites.
For the first time, Michael began to understand why the Hammers had such trouble rooting out the NRA, how the tiny flame of resistance had managed to survive and flourish for more than fifty years, the full might and power of the Hammer state unable to snuff it out.
The topography had changed dramatically in the space of a few kilometers. Granite gave way to limestone, rounded hills surrendered to a flat-topped plain, water-worn valleys yielded to sheer-sided canyons, subtropical forest degenerated into a miserable tangle of scrubby bushes and trees fighting for survival in the thin soil. Michael's interest did not last long. He was overwhelmed by the need to keep going, to keep up with the rest of the group; the going was hard in the still, humid air.
Hour after hour, they plowed on. Farsi's people had an uncanny ability to find a way through the scrubby undergrowth; without them, their speed would have been measured in meters, not kilometers, per hour. "About time," Michael muttered when Farsi called a halt. Even with Adrissa's help, Michael knew he had only a few kilometers left in him.
"Okay. We're here. Welcome to Branxton Base. Follow me and stay close," Farsi said, and plunged into a small opening in the cliff.
Michael's heartbeat picked up at the prospect of meeting Vaas. He had last met the man in charge of the NRA in December '99 and wondered how much he had changed. Taking a deep breath, he followed Farsi.
"Michael. Welcome. Sure as Kraa didn't expect to see you again."
"I never planned to be back, sir," Michael said. "Shit! I never wanted to be back, much as I enjoyed your hospitality the first time around."
The battle for Commitment planet hw-4 Page 17
