by Chris Bunch
• • •
“Now,” Jord’n Brooks told Jo Poynton quietly, as the Group assembled for another meeting, this time in a burnt-out village, “you see my idea of moving against the oppressors in the city might have merit.”
“Our people were defeated,” she said.
Brooks shrugged. “They were rioting, not fighting a war. And they weren’t beaten in their souls, their hearts, their minds. Can there be any of our people who don’t realize their enemy, and that only one can survive?”
“I can’t argue that,” Poynton said carefully. “But Brien’s view of the Task has been more successful than yours, at least as far as external results, and success will rule this Group’s thinking.”
“True,” Brooks grudged. “But how long will his success continue? The Force is still fighting us with only one hand, and that one bare. Sooner or later, unless they are total fools, they will learn to fight our way. And then what?”
Jo Poynton nodded once, turned away from Brooks as Comstock Brien began speaking.
CHAPTER
27
“You’re free,” Jasith squealed.
“Or anyway reasonable,” Garvin said. “Since we’re such hee-roes, I wangled a pass.” Jasith didn’t notice the sarcasm. “Any possibilities of getting together?”
Jasith’s voice went husky. “You tell me where.” Garvin thought of the Shelburne’s bar, remembered Marya, discarded the notion. “I’m from out of town, remember?” he said. “You pick the spot.”
“Are you still at the base?”
“Yeh. Next shuttle to Leggett’s in … ten minutes.”
“You just wait there,” Jasith ordered. “Concentrate on looking cute. I’ll get you.”
• • •
Garvin peered through the gaggle of shuttles, cabs, and private lifters, spotted a familiar, long black lim nosing toward him. “Aw shit,” he moaned. “Now I’m gonna have to listen to more batshit about how the frigging Force is saving frigging civilization. God damn it, Jasith! Are we failing to communicate?”
The lifter grounded, and the pilot’s door lifted and Jasith stuck her head out. “Surprised?”
“Oh Lordy lord, am I ever,” Garvin said fervently.
“Then get in,” she ordered. “Up front, with me.”
Garvin checked the backseat. No father. Jasith had her hair tied back, and wore a red halter top and baggy black crepe pants. She was barefoot. Wordlessly, the two leaned together, and kissed. After some time, a horn blasted, and they broke away.
“Take me,” Garvin said. “I’m yours.”
Jasith touched controls, and the lim took off and floated along the ramp toward the ocean. “Daddy’s got two bodyguards keeping me safe,” she said.
“Where’d you hide them? In the baggage compartment?”
“I managed to convince him that I was perfectly safe, if I came out here to see you. He said we couldn’t get in any trouble with soldiers all around us.”
“There aren’t any soldiers all around us,” Garvin said.
“You noticed.”
“So where are we going?”
“Nowhere.” Jasith touched sensors, and the lim turned until its nose was pointing toward blackness. “On this heading,” she said, “we’ll reach” — she hit another sensor and the SatPos screen lit — “Lanbay Island. About dawn, at this speed.”
“What’s there?”
“Nothing. Rocks. Trees. Waves. But I wasn’t thinking about going there.”
“What were you thinking?”
“First, about putting this lifter on auto … like this,” Jasith said. “Then about putting an anticollision alarm on. Then about toggling this sensor here” — the dark canopy of the lim cleared, and they were looking up at storm clouds racing overhead — “and getting in the back, like this.” The seat swiveled, and Jasith moved past Garvin. “Join me?”
Garvin found seat controls to the side, pressed one. The seat back collapsed.
“Not that button, silly,” Jasith said. “The one in front of it. But put the seat back up first.”
Garvin obeyed. “Now what?”
“I had the head cook flash-defrost one of our picnic baskets,” she said. “I put it in the storage compartment in the back of this seat. It’s got all kinds of good things in it — roe, pâté, chilled filet of beef with sour cream dressing, endive salad, and a fruit ice, plus a couple of bottles of that Earth Taittinger champagne you sucked up so fast when Daddy and I took you to dinner. So we could eat. Or …”
“Or what?”
“Or you could always press that button over there, under the window.”
Garvin obeyed, and the lim’s rear seat gently collapsed, and pillows inflated on either side. Jasith swung her legs up, until she was lying on the seat.
“I wondered why Daddy ordered this feature on the lim, which came all the way from Centrum,” she said. “He said there’d been a mistake. I don’t believe him. Do you think he might be unfaithful to my stepmother every now and again?”
Garvin didn’t answer. He was staring, hypnotized, at Jasith. She sat up, unfastened her hair, let it fall free, then her fingers touched the button of the halter top between her breasts.
“Let me do that,” Garvin said.
“All right.” Jasith lay back. Garvin’s fingers were suddenly thumbs, but the top came away. He bent his head, nibbled at her nipples. She sighed, stroked his close-cropped hair. He put both hands in the waistband of her pants, slid them off. She wore nothing under them.
“Undress for me,” she whispered.
He obeyed, Jasith’s eyes on him. “You’re very pretty,” she murmured.
“So are you.”
“Now,” she said, lifting one leg and resting it on the doorsill, and putting her hands together, over her head, “come here. Hold my wrists to keep me from moving. Now, my Garvin. Oh, please, now!”
• • •
Half an eternity later, the lim bumped softly against something. Jasith murmured, sat up, peered out. “Oh dear,” she said.
“What’s the matter?” Garvin said.
“We appear to be lost. Oceans don’t have shacks.”
The lim had gently bumped into a low shed, turned, and was drifting away from it. Garvin saw a sign: FIRING RANGE SEVEN.
TARGET STORAGE SHED.
“We sure as hell are lost,” he said. “Lost and in trouble. We’re back on Chance Island, out on one of the target ranges, on the east end. We will get our heinies slapped if they catch us.”
“How’d we get here?” Jasith wondered.
Garvin looked over the now-lowered front seat, noted flashing lights on the control panel. “I think we must’ve kicked something,” he said. “Or everything, starting with the collision sensor. And I think we better rectify the matter. I see headlights coming toward us.”
Jasith slid past him, into the driver’s seat, and her fingers rippled over sensors. The lim lifted to two meters, accelerated, and sped over the range, then down a rocky beach and back out to sea.
“Do you think they’ll shoot at us?”
“I don’t know,” Garvin said. “Whyn’t you drop it down some, and I’ll say a prayer.”
She obeyed, and small waves crested barely a meter below the lim’s bottom. “Now what?”
“Now we wait until we make sure we’re out of range and beyond challenge,” Garvin said. “Are we going back toward Lanbay Island?”
“More or less,” Jasith said.
“I don’t see any missile flashes,” Garvin reported, looking back. “So I guess we showed ‘em clean skirts … well, not that. Bottoms, maybe. Whyn’t you drop the speed down?”
“And then?”
“And then come back here where you belong.”
“All right,” Jasith said. “And then?”
“Is there some way to open this roof?”
“Surely.” The canopy opened, and a light, warm, tropical rain misted down.
“Now what?” Jasith said.
“Y
ou just stay on your knees like that,” Garvin said, getting carefully to his feet, “and let me surprise you.”
A moment later Jasith squealed. “Oh God, God, God,” she moaned. “Oh yes. All the way in me now. Oh, Garvin, Garvin …”
• • •
At dawn, the men and women of the Force were stumbling out of their barracks for reveille as a black luxury lifter floated down the enormous parade field. It grounded, a door lifted, and a disheveled Garvin Jaansma got out, went to the driver’s side.
“Wasn’t Daddy right?” Jasith said softly. “Wasn’t I perfectly safe?”
He kissed her.
“Give me a call, soldier, when you’re of a mind to.” The lim window slid closed, and the craft lifted, spun on its own length and accelerated away, toward Leggett across the bay.
Garvin Jaansma took a deep breath, started across the parade ground as the whistles and catcalls built from the Force.
CHAPTER
28
“Again … you know nothing about the murder of Mister Scryfa and his family?” the interrogator asked, slipping, letting a bit of incredulity into her voice.
“Nothing,” the ’Raum said calmly.
“But you were their housemaster,” Technician Warbeck insisted.
“I was.”
“You were in the house when the murderers came in.”
“Evidently I was.”
“But you heard nothing? Nothing woke you?”
“I am a very sound sleeper,” the man insisted.
“Warder!”
The door opened, and the guard entered.
“He’s cleared for release,” Warbeck said. “But you’re to stay in close touch with us, in case we need to question you again.”
The man stood, a trace of a smile on his lips, and walked out. The warder lingered. “Why didn’t you nail him? The bastard was there … we know that … we even found a blood trail from the Scryfas’ bedroom to his quarters.”
“Look at this trace,” the woman said, and lifted the hood away from the machine she sat behind. “Zero flickers on the readouts, zero wiggles, zero anything, which means the frigging scan insists he’s innocent, innocent, innocent, and that’s all a judge will listen to.”
“That’s not possible,” the guard said.
“Sure it is,” Warbeck said tiredly. “If somebody doesn’t believe lying to us is really lying … they’ll fly every time.”
“That’s what it’s come down to?” the warder asked. “Somebody can slaughter a Rentier … and his whole family … and hike?”
“That’s what it’s come down to.”
• • •
A Cooke hovered up the jungle trail, hovering at intervals, and a small white spike spat into the ground from a cylinder bolted to its hill. Within an hour, three women and two men went the length of the trail. The leader carried a small homemade case. Every now and again, the case buzzed, and the five looked carefully through the undergrowth, dug in the ground until they found one of the spikes. Every time they did, a woman covered it with a dark metallic cone. They did this to all of the people-sniffers except one. That one they put a very filthy pair of pants next to, and one man urinated in a circle around it. Then they ran, back toward their camp.
Three hours after that, three Zhukovs dived toward the spike. Three salvos of the semiguided Fury rockets shot toward the ground, and the jungle rocked under explosions. A single Grierson sailed through the whirling smoke, and an I&R team dropped off its ramp. “Kursk Leader, this is Sibyl Beta,” the team reported. “Negative contact.”
The alt commanding the Zhukov flight forgot his communications discipline. “Whaat? We had positive indicators!”
“This is Sibyl Beta,” the com told him. “I say again … negative contact. No casualties found, no traces found. Your trickshit machinery’s wonky. Out.”
• • •
Two Cookes swirled about the village. “No sign of life,” one reported.
“Keep checking,” the battalion commander, overhead in his Grierson, ordered. “We have positive intelligence about this village.”
One Cooke dived low, the second close behind.
“Maybe there’ll be something up that draw?” the commander of the first Cooke suggested on the between-ship channel.
“On your tail,” the other responded.
The first entered the ravine, hovered around a bend and thick, hand-woven nets rose up before, behind. The gunner on the first ship pulled the triggers on his autocannon, and shells slammed uselessly through the holes in the net. Another net came up, trapping the second Cooke. The commander of the ACV shouted a warning, just as six ’Raum, each with a captured Squad Support Weapon, rose from spider holes and bullets yammered into the scout vehicles.
• • •
“Relax,” Comstock Brien said quietly. “Does it not always come this route?”
“It does,” the young man said. “But it’d just be my luck — ”
“Don’t talk of luck,” Brien ordered. “The greater your decision, the harder you work, the better your luck shall always be.”
The young man sniffed in skepticism. The third man leaning against a crude frame said nothing. A few minutes later, the first man stiffened. “I hear it.”
Moments later, the drive-whine was audible to Brien’s older ears, and, a hundred meters below, a Zhukov nosed into view, following the overgrown road as it curved below the cliffs. The young man and his partner tore away the concealing foliage, pushed the wooden frame with a Shrike lashed to it to the edge of the bluff. The missile had misfired during an air-support operation two weeks ago, been recovered by the ’Raum, fuel only half-expended. Its firing mechanism was replaced with a simple contact detonator, and the missile carried far down island.
The second man moved away from the launcher and watched the Zhukov close on a peculiarly shaped bush the three men atop the hill had designated as a firing marker, while the third ran back a few meters and picked up a small switch that was wired to the missile’s rear.
“Wait … wait … wait … wait … NOW!” the second man ordered, and the third closed the switch. The Shrike hissed, then heat waves flared from its exhaust. The rack bucked, and the missile launched, almost straight down toward the Zhukov. It struck the attack ship just behind the main turret. The Shrike’s primary charge exploded, and a jet of incandescent gas seared through the armor. The main charge, a gaseous explosive, sprayed into the Zhukov’s crew space and detonated. The Zhukov exploded, pin wheeling into the jungle, thrashing like a dying beast.
The three men allowed themselves a moment of exultation, then trotted away.
• • •
“How the hell did those bastards manage to kill a Zhukov!” Caud Williams raved.
“As I said, sir, from above,” Mil Rao said. “Armor’s a few centimeters thinner there. And nobody expects to be hit from topside unless they’re in space.”
“What was that goddamned vehicle commander doing that low, anyway?”
“Doing as he’d been ordered, sir. Closely patrolling the old highway toward the Highlands, looking for enemy sign.”
“Very well,” Williams said. “Very well. We’ll have to …” His voice trailed off.
Rao waited. “Yes, sir?” he said after a time.
“Give me a moment,” Williams said. “I’m trying to figure what we’ll do next.”
• • •
There were five Cookes, flying west, fast, about a hundred meters above the jungle. The bluffs leading to the Highlands were to their left. Three times one or another of the combat lifters dipped into a clearing, hovered for an instant, then climbed back to the formation. The fourth time was almost like the others, except that the diving Cooke hovered long enough for eleven men to drop off the sides, and double into the thick brush around the clearing, crouching in a perimeter.
The eleven were Gamma Team, First Troop, I&R Company plus Alt Jon Hedley. They wore dark green-and-black camouflage matching the jungle, their faces
and hands were blackened, and they carried heavy packs. They waited, weapons ready, for five minutes. The jungle was silent, except for the drip of rain. A wind stirred. A howler called from a distance. Then a gunshot blasted from somewhere, dull, dead, muffled by the undergrowth. A moment later, another shot came, from some distance, then a third and a fourth, each blast fainter than the last.
“Shit!” Petr said, standing. “They made us.”
The team stayed in a crouch, except for Hedley, who slid to the team leader. “Now what happens?”
“We evac,” Petr said, “or else there’ll be thirty or more of ‘em coming in on us. A man could get hurt sticking around an insertion zone these days.”
“Every time?”
“Just about,” Petr said. “They seem to be able to tell whether it’s a phony insert or for real. Looks like the bastards have every clearing either bugged … although we can’t find any telltales … or under visual. This is my fourth patrol this week that’s been blown.” He motioned to the team’s com man, took the microphone: “Sibyl One Control, this is Sibyl One Gamma. Outski. Eyeballed. Clear.”
“This is Sibyl Control,” the voice came. “Nice short visit. Stand by. Pickup inbound.”
“See what I mean, boss?” Petr said.
“I do,” Hedley said. “I know you’re good, and I know the other insert teams are good. The flipping problem seems to be flipping simple. The flipping villains are flipping winning.”
CHAPTER
29
Caud Williams was glooming over a glass of sherry — his last case from Centrum, which made his mood worse — in his quarters when someone tapped. “Enter.”
Jon Hedley opened the door. “A word, sir?”
“Come in, Alt”
Hedley obeyed.
“A drink?” Williams asked. “There’s almost anything you could want behind the false bookshelves.”
“Nossir,” Hedley said. “I’d like to ask a favor.”
