“Ah, well, you know, don’t ever risk a spacer when you can risk a trooper,” Edgerton said, with a wise wink. “You and me is too valuable. Couldn’t run the ship without either one of us, huh?”
Watch me, thought Bruno. “But this wouldn’t be a risk. It’s a piece of cake. Besides, rewarding them with a three-day pass to Wingle World! You must have heard what those sick bastards did!”
“Everybody heard, lieutenant,” the clerk replied, leering at him. “Played you dirty.”
“It took me sixteen cycles to get the stink out of my armor. Giving them a walkover assignment like this is like telling the universe it’s all right to make fools of your fellow spacers.”
Edgerton shook his head. “It’s not like they get the whole experience, lieutenant. It’s the same as if they was on duty. No park hotel, with hot-and-cold running licensed characters. They still has to live in regulation quarters and eat regulation meals.”
Bruno grinned evilly. “Yes. That, in fact, is why I came down to have a little talk with you, personally. They have pissed me off, and nobody pisses me off. You’re in charge of dispensing those regulation meals.”
Edgerton eyed him. “I can’t short them, lieutenant. You know the rules: three weeks’ rations for three days’ assignment. Redundancy saves lives. They all get 21 days’ worth of food, or I’m in trouble, and the mission might be scrubbed. It’s not worth it.”
“That isn’t what I mean at all,” Bruno groaned. Edgerton was more obtuse than usual. “The mission must succeed. Don’t jeopardize the mission. I just want you to make their lives a little more … the same. Be selective.” He leaned to whisper to the clerk, holding his hand so the security cameras couldn’t read his lips. Edgerton listened, then guffawed out loud.
“Sure, lieutenant,” he cackled, pounding a hand on the counter in merriment. “That won’t hurt ’em a bit. Whatever you say. Always happy to help out a fellow spacer.”
“I know I can count on you, Edgerton.” Bruno swaggered out of the supply room with a big smile on his face. He was in such a good mood he didn’t even call his aides on the carpet for imagined screwups for the remainder of his duty shift.
***
Chapter 12
“Three days,” Commander Iry had said as the shuttle eased out of the Eastwood’s landing bay and fell in a gentle arc toward Dudley. Iry’s voice was still ringing in Daivid’s ears as sharp as the taste of Cockroach liquor on his tongue. Borden had explained the unit tradition of drinking half a glass of rotgut and leaving the glasses waiting on the table until they returned.
“That’s the first part of the tradition,” she had said. “It is superstition, I know, but it helps us come back.”
“Is there a second part to this tradition?” he had asked.
“We don’t do that until we get back on board,” Borden said shortly, and he knew he wasn’t going to get any more information out of her.
Like Treadmill, Dudley looked pretty from space, but more like a watercolor painting than a mosaic. True, the wide brush-strokes of green were various kinds of marshlands, and the purple-blues decorated liberally with the whipped-cream white of cumulonimbus clouds betokened high mountain escarpments that slashed the continental masses into individual ecospheres surmountable only by VTOLs or hardy all-terrain ground vehicles, but it was much more interesting to look at. Daivid strained his eyes to see if he could pick out the province that contained Wingle World. The last time he had been fending off a water-gun attack by his younger sister at the time the family ship made orbit, and missed seeing what he saw now. Presumably nothing had changed, though that wasn’t a sure thing any longer, not with current terraforming techniques and the amount of money that poured into Dudley’s economy during the vacation season.
Lt. Borden piloted the shuttle. That was to say, she sat at the controls ready to take over manually if the autopilot happened to fail. Like everything else aboard the Eastwood this craft, the Carferry, a smaller version of the one that had picked them up on Treadmill, was new and in perfect condition. Borden literally sat on her hands because there was nothing else she had to do with them. Beside her, Adri’Leta acted as navigator. Both of them were clad in full armor. Daivid sat behind them in the jump seat, normally occupied by weapons control. The shuttle was fully loaded with a plasma cannon, lasers and a couple of missiles that could achieve string-drive speeds, though none of these were likely to be needed on this mission. The laser emplacements, to either side of the passenger compartment, were unmanned.
The rest of the Cockroaches had taken their places in the cushy crash seats behind the bulkhead that separated the bridge from the passenger compartment. In their armor they blended in perfectly with the beige high-test upholstery, as the chameleon camouflage pixels on the surface identified the objects behind each trooper and changed to match. It was like being the only person alive on a ghost ship. Act inconspicuous, the commander had told them. Daivid’s combat armor was in the cargo hold, but he wore a uniform made of microinfinitesimal impact-resistant plates that would spread the impact of a bullet or a blow, with a matte dark blue surface that gave some protection against laser weapons. He wore a clear helmet over a field officer’s cap. One of them had to be able to do the talking without disappearing into the scenery and scaring the locals. He just hoped no one would ambush them and blow his head off. Some of the troopers had instantly gone to sleep, to nap away the three-hour orbit-and-drop. A few of the others were playing games with the palmsized controllers that a clever military contractor had back-engineered to work with the suits’ heads-up display, watching video, reading, or just shooting the breeze. Jones, Daivid felt certain, was making up a limerick he could deliver upon landing. If they were making use of the secondary function of their CBS,P webs, he didn’t want to know about it. Their personal gear was stowed in packs that hung from hooks all across the ceiling like overweight khaki-clad vampires. Carferry was made to hold twenty-five passengers, so there were five extra crash seats, occupied by duffels full of gear.
The capacious cargo hold also contained little but 21 days’ worth of MERDs (the mission was three days, but redundancy was the military’s middle name), 23 one-being tents, the inevitable portabiffy and a frame-mount sonic cleaner, plus a box containing a portable big-screen crystal threedeeo unit with full surround-sound earbands for all, and a download of the latest cinematic extravaganzas. Now that they knew they had three days to kill beside a closed amusement park, the Cockroaches had argued for and gotten an entertainment center. Better that, Daivid reasoned with his superior, than subjecting the people of Dudley to a band of bored, heavily armed, visiting troopers. Everyone had chosen at least one vid for the collection. Besides the usual hardcore pornography, horror movies, and action adventures, there were at least two unashamed classic sentimental weepers, half a dozen animated children’s videos, some ancient Terran documentaries on dinosaurs, and the opera Lucia di Lammermoor performed in itter. Daivid wouldn’t give extra points for guessing who had asked for that recording, but he would never have figured that the itterim liked opera. It just showed you couldn’t guess someone else’s tastes by talking to them. But it was clear that one trooper’s favorite would make another one heave. That, Daivid decided firmly, just made it simple as to who would be on guard duty during which shifts. The number of selections in hours far outnumbered the amount of time they would actually be spending on Dudley. Chick-flick fans could march during the documentaries, porn fans could skip the weepers, opera haters had the option of listening to the sounds of the night sky while the itterim enjoyed his favorite ‘mad scene.’ He might or might not take a walk during that one himself. His mother liked opera, but his father always said it sounded like a family argument set to music.
“Why did dey say we couldn’t land directly in de park, lieutenant?” Adri’Leta asked. He looked toward her, only certain of her location because of the signal sent by her implant to his heads-up display showing her ident number and the red heat signature of her body t
hrough the pilot’s seat. “Begging your pardon, sir, but I dink it’s a reasonable question.”
“Security,” Daivid shrugged. “No flyovers. It isn’t allowed even by their commercial atmospheric craft.”
“I think dey just don’t want people dropping into de park ond gettin’ in wit’out payin’. It cost too much. My friends came here wit’ eight kids, dey practically needed a second mortgage to buy admissions.”
“Eight!”
Adri’Leta shrugged. “Subsistence world. I tell ‘em it’s overpopulation, but dey tell me it’s survival.”
Dudley was anything but a subsistence world. In between the marshlands was higher ground. Daivid leaned over the external scopes and zoomed in tightly to the fields. The crops had evidently been reaped already. Only wisps of golden straw remained on the rich, black earth. You could grow anything in soil like that. Gravity was .97 Terran standard, the atmospheric mix was .1% greater in oxygen, and the two moons, one large and one a captured asteroid, rotated around at the rate of one Dudleian month, or 27 days of 27 hours each, providing slightly irregular tides. Daivid was grateful for Space Service timepieces, which displayed ambient ship’s time, calculated local planetary time for their landing zone, and Terran time, which was the dateline for all official activities. On the ship’s 30 hour day clock, it was 2800, the middle of the night; at Wingle World, it was three minutes past two in the afternoon; and on Earth zero meridian, it was five past four Tuesday morning.
“Automated landing instructions being received,” Borden said. Daivid tuned his implant to the control frequency.
“… Please follow global positioning coordinates 30o15´27˝ north by 45o02´16˝ west from magnetic north,” the mechanical female voice recited. Daivid glanced at the nav tank, which showed a rotating graphic of the globe passing underneath them with a grid overlaid. As they approached, the squares of the grid grew larger and larger. A blue dot flashed urgently from a spot in the curve of a mountain ridge as they crested the dayside of the planet. Daivid increased magnification of the light. It became a circle with the words, “LAND HERE,” inside.
“Duh,” Borden verbalized through the mastoid implant, the better not to be overheard by the mission recorder.
“Remember,” Daivid said, “they deal with tourists most of the year.”
“That’s right. I forgot, sir.”
The ports darkened protectively as the shuttle dipped into the atmosphere. Skin temperature rose to over 1,500o, and the little craft juddered and bucked as it descended. Daivid leaned back and the seat’s straps tightened around him.
“Dis is de only roller-coaster ride we get,” Adri’Leta observed.
O O O
Daivid waited until the vehicle had come to a rolling stop before lifting his head out of the protective padding.
“Nice job,” he said.
“Thanks, sir,” Borden’s voice said, from the seemingly empty pilot’s position. “I wish I could take credit for it.”
He peered through the forward port, clear once again. Daivid saw neatly manicured lawns, flower-filled gardens and rows of single-family dwellings. “It looks … suburban … out there.”
“This is where the computer told us to land, sir,” Borden replied.
“Not very rural, is it? I thought we were going to be out of town. Well, let’s get this done.”
“Aye, sir.” A pair of faint outlines rose from the seats, shifting in color as the chameleonics compensated to conceal the two women’s figures. Daivid opened the general headset channel.
“Open hatches. Troopers, rally at the bottom of the ramp,” he ordered.
“Aye, aye, sir!” twenty-two voices echoed all at once in his helmet speakers. He winced slightly and lowered the volume of his audio pickup. The floor of the lightweight vehicle shook as the heavily-laden company jogged to the hatch. He followed the shifting forms of Borden and Adri’Leta. Thanks to the chameleon armor, he could see all the way to the hatch ‘through’ his troopers’ bodies. The lights went green as the ramp unfolded itself and descended.
Bright sunshine and the song of a distant bird met them. The houses along the broad, shaded avenue had been painted or sided in bizarrely bright colors, jade green in between petunia pink and interstellar distress orange, across the street from cobalt blue, copper orange and grape purple. They were brighter than the gardens around them, which had been planted with autumn flowers of more somber cream, bronze, and gold in dark green foliage.
To the immediate right of the shuttle was a drinking fountain, its arcing spray sparkling merrily. About fifteen meters away stood a slide, swings, and a climbing frame in a sea of red-brown wood chips. They had landed in the local park. On the other side of the small ship a bronze statue of a man with a large moustache raised a benevolent hand in benediction from his stone plinth. A plaque at the base read, to Daivid’s magnified vision, “Oscar Wingle, Visionary and Humanitarian.” It was the only human figure around. The street and the park were deserted. It looked like an image in Ideal Home magazine.
“Nice,” Lin’s voice murmured over the main channel. “Reminds me of where I’ll retire someday, if I ever turn into an accountant with three children.”
Daivid took a deep breath and let it out slowly. This was it, his first mission with a company under his command. Now, to accomplish his objective and make his superiors and his platoon proud. “Fine. Squad leaders, squads into parade formation, weapons at low port. Audio frequency one, change to odds every ten minutes, up to nine and down. The number is fifteen.”
“Aye, sir.” The meager numbers formed into three rectangles of six or seven beings each, who blended in with the scenery as soon as they stopped moving. The one thing the suits couldn’t do was conceal the shadows the troopers cast, so Daivid found himself inspecting twenty-two black streaks coming in from one o’clock low.
He glanced back at the shuttle, squatting like a gigantic white pigeon in the middle of the park. “We can’t leave that here. Commander Iry was more than specific about us keeping a low profile.”
“What do you suggest, sir?”
Daivid racked his brain for any situation that he had ever heard of in officer training, in briefing sessions, or any time afterward about landing a shuttle in a suburban location in peacetime. There was none.
“We’ll have to take it with us.”
“Sir?” He couldn’t see Borden’s lifted eyebrow, but he could hear it. “What was that about low profile?”
“Well, er … we’re going to have to bivouac somewhere for three days. We’ll bring it to wherever we are assigned space to sleep.”
“But, sir, the ship is a little hard to conceal. We can’t take off and land it again. That will attract more attention, besides defying planetary government and Captain Harawe’s instructions.”
“We could just drive it where we’re going.”
“People are going to notice, sir.”
“True …”
“Sir, permission to speak, sir!” The slender outline snapping a limb to the faint bulge in the air that must be its forehead had to be Thielind. Yes, there was his keycode on Daivid’s display. “I can help, sir!”
“How, ensign?”
Thielind jogged over to the nearest tree. Daivid saw the flash of metal as the ensign drew his knife. With one resounding whack! Thielind chopped a dead branch and came back carrying it.
“Watch this, sir!” The branch began to twirl in the blurring hands. Almost of its own volition, it flew up into the air, turning end over end. Daivid saw out of the corner of his eye the shadowy figure before him turning a cartwheel and ending up on one knee just as the branch came down. Thielind grabbed for the stick, but missed. It hit the ground and bounced with a clatter. The hands picked it up and started twirling it again. The next throw the hands caught, and resumed spinning. A sheepish voice muttered in his ear. “Well, that’s kind of what it’s supposed to look like. This baton is heavier on one end than the other. I can lead us there, sir. This place is used to
all kinds of parades. We’ll just be another one, even the shuttle. Inconspicuous, see?”
“Very impressive, ensign,” Daivid said, sincerely. “Keep up the good thinking. Let’s do it.”
“Hey, yeah,” Boland’s deep voice came over the link. More noises of approbation followed.
“You can’t be serious, sir,” Borden interjected, aghast.
Daivid turned to the ghostly outline of his second-in-command. “Why not? He’s right. We couldn’t look any more ridiculous if we tried. Why not shame the devil and bull it out by looking as though we’re here on purpose? Where’s Wingle World?”
A faint hand, shifting in color all the way, rose in front of his nose and pointed a ghostly finger. “That way, sir.” At the same time, an indicator popped into place on the headset overlay inside Daivid’s helmet. “I hope we don’t need a permit to conduct a public display.”
“We’ll plead ignorance, lieutenant. If they fine us, we’ll charge it to the Space Service. Right. Light burners and follow us. Trooper Adri’Leta, assist Lt. Borden. Boland, get a few of your troopers and unload the vid box. We may as well have music. Company right face! Forward, march!”
“Sir, aye, sir!”
With Thielind capering before them to the deafening strains of a march played by the entertainment center, which Boland’s squad towed behind them on a hoverloader, Daivid led his platoon up the small street. The town wasn’t actually deserted. As they passed each house, he glimpsed figures behind the huge front windows staring out at them. He turned and flapped a gloved hand at them.
“We’ve got an audience,” he told the Cockroaches. “Wave to the nice people.” The troopers followed suit, some with more enthusiasm than others.
According to the map the town was called Welcome. It had been constructed in reclaimed swampland on a peninsula at the southmost edge of a major land mass. In the distant west was the expected massif of purple-blue with white glaciers frosting the top edge. A breeze was blowing from that direction, carrying a bit of the snow’s chill with it. His temperature indicators showed 15o. “Funny, I don’t recall it being this chilly.”
Strong Arm Tactics Page 22
