by Leo Champion
Nomads were chasing them. The trucks, which on any good road could outpace zak-mounted nomads any day of the week, were having a much rougher time loaded up and weighed down on the rough ground.
He fired another burst off from where he was braced on the tailgate.
Jezzails bloomed back at him, from the nomads who weren’t too far behind. But one of them had fallen, shot down by the superior firepower of his team.
And now heavy weapons opened up from the fort blockhouse they were approaching. Machine-guns slashed at the nomads, cutting some of them down and making the rest turn back.
“Open the gates! Open the damn gates!” shouted a driver as the two trucks pulled to a halt.
There was a grinding sound, and the first truck drove in. Pantaleo could see nomads in the distance, half a mile away. Backed off, out of range of the fort’s heavy weapons that had taken a bunch of them down.
But there were going to be a fuckton more on the way, they’d likely have their own heavy weapons, thought Pantaleo.
And if they didn’t, they were going to have numbers anyway.
* * *
“Lieutenant-Colonel Newbauer,” Croft said to the gathered officers in his phonebooth-tiny office inside the walls of Hubris, “is away and unaccounted for.”
Dunwell and Nakamura nodded. So did Master Sergeant Ortega, leader of Weapons. Henry was away with his men, inspecting his crews around Diamond South.
“So is Senior Lieutenant Gardner. That puts me in command.” He looked at Second Lieutenant Dunwell. Normally Army took automatic seniority over Legion, but Croft as a West Pointer qualified as Army for that purpose. Except Dunwell had graduated the same day as Croft.
“Jesus,” said Dunwell, “you graduated third in our class. I graduated two hundred and ninety-first. We have the same date of rank but you have seniority, I acknowledge.”
He’d expected that; Marsha Dunwell had never been stupid. And fact was fact.
Fact left Junior Lieutenant James Croft, by class standing and date of rank, in charge at Fort Hubris.
Well shit.
Chapter Twelve
Across the wastelands, millions of the overpopulated nomad hordes surged east, armed with European-supplied stinger missiles and satchel charges, American jezzails and pistols and their own blades and bows.
They came in waves, days apart at times, in zak-riding hordes ranging in size from a few thousand to ten times that. Descending on the Chongdin Empire. Miles-high clouds of dust were thrown up as twenty million zak-hooves pounded east.
Arlene Lavasseur’s original plan for them, agreed-upon and approved by higher-level councils in Paris, had been for the nomads to mass at the east of the Chongdin Empire and overwhelm the passes, hit Chongdin simultaneously.
That hadn’t happened; a hotheaded nomad firing at an ultra-communications-connected prospecting plane had warned Vazhao and the plan had been executed immediately on pain of giving the Americans further warning than they’d already now received.
So the signal had been given to move anyway, wherever you were. They headed east, for the mountains and their passes in the north and the borderland walls in the south.
Millions of them.
* * *
Major Andre Lavasseur halted his zak with the main horde a solid mile from the fort the nomads called Kandin-dak, built from the ruins of a city that had been named that hundreds of years ago. With him, the nomads, Tenzhen especially, were coming to a halt. They knew the power of the weapons there.
“von Kallweit! Over here!” he gestured at his second in command. Normally you rode with the officers spaced apart, in case one unlucky shot or missile might decapitate everyone.
But with radio down, the broad-spectrum jamming, sometimes you needed to talk. von Kallweit recognized the hand-signs and kicked his zak over.
“They’re holed up.”
“We sweep past them,” said von Kallweit flatly. “Let them, what is the mongrel expression, ‘die on the vine’?”
“They are an insult to our lands,” said Tenzhen. “We will destroy them.”
“Fifteen thousand of us,” said von Kallweit. “Can’t be more than a few hundred of them. I understand these ones are a construction crew. Leave a detachment here to invest the bastards and let them starve.”
“They are on my land! They are on the Anzing Hills!” protested Tenzhen lord of Anzing.
The Anzing Hills are half a day east of here, thought Andre Lavasseur. Stupid eatie. But he had to humor the filthy beast for now, so he said,
“And they represent the Chongdin oppressors, who have dared to deny you your rights. To rule rich lands, fertile lands, to make the Chongdins your slaves!”
“They do,” said Tenzhen. “So we will destroy them!”
“No. You will let them starve and you will destroy the Chongdins. My under-khan is correct, you will leave a detachment behind. A thousand. And let them starve.”
But a plan was forming in Andre’s mind. These were a construction unit, bent on building some road out into the wastelands. That meant not just an isolated garrison, but working units spread out.
“But before we do that,” Major Andre Lavasseur of the Department said proudly, “I have an easier plan.”
He laid it out. Tenzhen was thrilled.
But was it just his imagination, or was von Kallweit looking at him with distaste?
Deluded poor German. No wonder they’d lost three wars.
Not ruthless enough.
* * *
Senior Lieutenant Gardner, Corporal Arwen and Lance Borchardt had finally managed to, through a simple process of trying everything they knew until something went right, fix the damn Mutt’s engine. It had taken almost two hours, but at least the engine was running again. It mightn’t have been.
Now, with Arwen riding shotgun and Borchardt in back with the radio, Gardner gunned the car forwards. Back to Hubris, finally!
The little shaven-headed black company XO was nervous about what was going on. They’d seen parties of nomads going past in the distance to one side or another of the line between Diamond South and Hubris.
A couple of hundred miles. At the speed this thing could do, a several hour drive.
Well, better floor it!
The Mutt bumped across the rocky ground, Gardner steering it – the thing didn’t have power steering, it was all manual – at thirty miles per hour across the rough ground, the unpadded seat kicking his ass. Behind him, Borchardt was trying repeatedly to make contact over an apparently-jammed radio network, and Arwen was simply hanging on for dear life with his rifle slung in front of him.
The ground around here, about halfway between Diamond South and Fort Hubris, was low rolling hills with the occasional dry streambed. Rocks everywhere; he could steer around the bigger ones but there were too many of the little ones to do anything but bounce over them.
The Mutt was an ancient design, an upgraded and modified direct descendant of the 1940s-era Jeep, but it was a tough four-wheel-drive vehicle with all the essentials twenty-third century technology could add to the ancient but still-functional body design. Too bad those didn’t include power steering, but Gardner would live.
At least, that’s what he was thinking right up until jezzails bloomed from a gully two hundred yards in front of them.
Their balls went way wild, but Gardner slammed on the brakes as Arwen, in the rear seat, opened up with a burst in the general direction of the nomads.
The Mutt came to a skidding, ninety-degree turn as Borchardt put the radio down and raised his own weapon, returning fire.
They’d turned left. Good enough, thought Senior Lieutenant Gardner and began to apply gas.
A whitesmoke jezzail explosion bloomed from there, too. Sun gleamed off a few unfired weapons – and as he watched, one did explode, a ball kicking up dust within feet of his Mutt’s hood.
“American!” came a megaphoned voice. “Surrender!”
“Go fuck yourself!” Gardner shot back, yanking
the Mutt into reverse and beginning a three-point turn. If he couldn’t go left he’d go right. Fuck these eaties, they couldn’t be everywhere.
A volley of jezzail fire erupted from two hundred yards away to his right.
“We will treat you well and exchange you in due time! Don’t you want to return to your families? Surrender!”
Well fuck.
Gardner wanted to scream “Eat shit!” and slam the vehicle into reverse but he’d read the Intelligence summary of how accurate the nomads could be with their jezzails. They’d been aiming to miss, to warn him of their presence. If they truly wanted to kill him, Arwen and Borchardt, they’d die. Fast.
“You’ll exchange us, huh?” he shouted back.
“When this is over.” The voice had a low, soft Scandinavian cast to it, not that Gardner had encountered too many Europeans. He’d fought their proxies in the past before, though.
Gardner had no guarantee that this man was keeping his word, that he had the authority to keep his word. But he’d heard of many exchanges. People pretended to follow the functions of international law. Plenty of unauthorized ‘terrorist groups’ had detained Americans in the past, only to release them once a major action was over and before heavy retaliation could be organized.
There was a good chance that if he surrendered, he and his men would be free within a few weeks, and wouldn’t be too roughly treated in that time.
Damnit, to surrender… He was Legion.
“We’ll exchange you fairly once this is over!” the Scandinavian on the megaphone shouted back.
“I say we give up,” Borchardt said. “They got us.”
Surrender. Legion men didn’t surrender.
They were surrounded on three sides, possibly four now, by nomads who could kill all three men in a heartbeat if they wanted to.
There was no honor in a pointless death. There was no purpose in a needless death.
Gardner killed the engine and raised his hands.
“We surrender!” he shouted to the Scandinavian with the microphone. “We give up!”
* * *
Dieter von Kallweit didn’t like the plan.
Oh sure, it would work. But it was dishonorable, and the hundreds-of-years-old strain of battlefield honor – at least if you believed the teachings of Marcand, which he like every civilized European did – in von Kallweit’s Prussian blood said that honor was a good thing.
You killed your enemies. You didn’t do… this.
They were encamped, to von Kallweit’s distaste when the main force should have been pushing east to the Vasimir Pass to hit the Chongdins. On his tablet he, like Major Lavasseur, had a list of the important objectives to hit; dams, bridges, power lines. The infrastructure of American Chongdin.
The horde was wasting its time here, squandering hours or days on an insignificant fortress that a handful of nomads could simply starve out. They should be attacking, not dithering.
But Lavasseur didn’t want to leave anything behind him. It was logical enough at the rookie level, which despite his staff duties and broadening assignments he didn’t seem to have grown much beyond. But von Kallweit understood that; you needed field experience to grow.
“Dig,” he told Tenzhen son of Venzhen. “Have your men dig.”
The khan shook his head, a gesture von Kallweit knew had been learned and was not natural to the nomads.
Good, they were learning civilized ways.
“My men will not dig. They will attack!”
Not fast enough, apparently.
von Kallweit raised his voice, then decided example was the best way to lead. They were spread out about a mile from Fort Kandin-dak, out of the range of effective enemy heavy weapons fire. If there were mortars there they could get them, but if the Yanks had mortars – an unknown variable – they wouldn’t know to pick out the command groups.
“They will camp, then,” said Major Andre Lavasseur. “While our bands round up the invaders outside. But first we will try the easy way.”
* * *
“They’re coming toward us,” Atkinson shouted. “Lieutenant Dunwell, Lieutenant Croft, they’re sending a party.”
Croft had been expecting this. He’d been pacing along the parapets, wondering whether to arm the two hundred and some Black Gangers in the center of Hubris and how to do so if he were to. Right now he had about a hundred actual troops – sixty-five or so Legion men and the thirty-five men of the combat engineers platoon – and a dozen grumbling Goldnecks, who’d bitched quietly about being under his authority but done what he’d told them.
The combat engineers, with respect to the two Third Platoon squads he had handy, who’d made it back alive although Team Pantaleo only barely, had been the most useful. The specialist engineers knew how to defend a place like this and Marsha Dunwell’s people had done a fine job.
He wondered how they’d perform in action. He’d fought alongside Third Platoon, led them effectively in combat. With full respect to his friend Dunwell, she’d never heard shots fired in anger.
That might be about to change.
“To arms!” Croft shouted, then backed off a second later; melodramatic a little, huh? “Get ready!”
There was a general hustle along the parapets as men – and the women in the combat engineers, about a quarter of that platoon – readied their weapons.
“No, Lieutenant!” came the voice of Sergeant Atkinson. “They’re carrying a white flag!”
Croft hustled over along the parapets, past anxious blue-shirted Legion troops and yellow-camouflaged combat engineers, past the machine-gun team set up on the corner blockhouse, toward the gatehouse. A small tower was set up on each side of the gate, a wooden footbridge crossing from one side to the other.
Atkinson stood there already, Dunwell joining them a moment later.
Someone was definitely coming toward them, moving at a brisk pace – on zaks – across the ground. Waving high from a pole was a white flag.
Croft raised the small binoculars that had been around his neck. Darkness. Slightly sheepishly he thumbed the caps off the ends and focused in.
It was a delegation of about half a dozen Qings and a human, a dark-haired man in plain but neat military fatigues. He gave the vibe of a ranking officer, but he looked like a young man – older than Croft’s twenty-three, but far from thirty.
Croft focused in, looking for rank insignia on the man’s shoulders. Of course there was none; this was a thoroughly illegal operation, beyond illegal for any European – Croft would have bet this guy was a Frenchman or at least a German – to be this side of the Hundred and Twenty-Second Meridian.
He held a megaphone, slung around his neck. The Qing nomad nearest to him carried the white flag, hoisted on a long pole and fluttering a bit on the wind.
“We got a megaphone of our own?” Croft asked Dunwell, Williams and Atkinson.
Williams shook his head.
“Maybe in the crates. Not at hand,” the platoon sergeant said.
“Very well. Let them come closer. Hold your fire, people. Hold your fire!”
Croft watched as the delegation came to about a hundred yards of the fort’s iron front gates, then stopped.
The Frenchman raised the megaphone to his own lips and spoke:
“Surrender, American. You are surrounded and you have no chance.”
Where the hell is Gardner? thought Croft.
A situation didn’t have to be at his pay-grade for him to take charge of it.
He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted back:
“You are illegally trespassing!”
“This is a spontaneous nomad uprising. We are only along as academic observers!”
Bull. The Frenchman was in charge.
The nomads didn’t realize they were being played for fools by the Euros, who’d eventually enslave them or worse. But that didn’t affect the current situation.
“Surrender and you will be well treated!”
Croft remembered his father. Had t
he insurgents at Godfrey’s Landing, where James Croft III had fought as a lieutenant under the legendary General Edwards during the Insurrection, been asked to betray their nation and surrender their positions?
Probably, and there was only one response to that kind of a ‘request’.
“Godfrey holds!”
Croft felt Williams looking at him with respect. Dunwell and Atkinson, perhaps, were looking at him with a bit of confusion. But they weren’t Legion, as he’d become. And they hadn’t been raised in the shadow of Godfrey’s Landing and the legend that had happened there.
“No we will not surrender!”
“We’ll make you,” came coldly across the megaphone.
“Bring it,” Croft shot back.
* * *
“I’d like to ask you guys your advice,” Croft said to a council of the platoon leaders and sergeants in his office a little while later. “Spontaneous thoughts first.”
“Good job telling them to fuck off, sir,” said Master Sergeant Ortega. “You realize we’re all going to die regardless?”
“But we’re going to die well,” said Lieutenant Nakamura.
“We’re going to die, sir,” said Atkinson flatly. “With respect.”
“Enough of that,” Croft said. “Spontaneous thoughts were a bad idea.”
He didn’t want to acknowledge to himself just how bad this was; they were fucked. Surrounded by thousands of nomads, radio jammed and help unreachable even if it could be talked to.
He doubted that even if the jamming stopped they’d get any help. If the nomads were uprising here, communications were out and they had European advisers, it had to be part of some wider plan. They were probably uprising everywhere, and the Chongdin Empire would have its own problems.
“Point of order,” Croft declared. “First, arming the Black Gangers. Thoughts?”
“No,” said Nakamura’s platoon sergeant, a shaven-headed pale-skinned man named Korval. “They’re scum of the earth and incipient traitors besides.”
“Yes,” said Williams. “We’re going to need every man we have.”
