by Rick Shelley
"I don't know. We lost men." Mort hesitated. "Pit's dead. Wiz is down, wounded. He's gonna need a few hours in a tube, I guess."
"Definitely," Al said, finishing his work on Baerclau. "But he'll be okay. And so will you, as long as you just lie there until Doc Eddies gets up here. We'll try to rig you a little shade."
Joe closed his eyes. There didn't seem to be much else he could do.
—|—
Dem and his men ran across one avenue and into the next building. He was certain that at least a few Heggies outside saw them, but the reccers weren't in the open long enough to draw fire. It didn't matter whether or not there were any Heggies inside the building that they ducked into. Even if there was an entire battalion of Heggies waiting, running into them was preferable to remaining too close to the building that had been rigged with explosives. That blast might not amount to much—but then again, it might be monstrous. A lot depended on luck, how many secondary explosions their preparations started. Dem didn't want to take chances.
There were only a handful of men in the building that the reccers ran into, and they appeared to be civilians. At any rate, they weren't in uniform and they weren't armed. As soon as they saw the reccers, the five men quickly raised their hands as high as they could. Dem used his rifle to motion them out into the open, away from any cover.
"Any more in here?" he demanded.
The response was almost unintelligible, but clearly a negative. Dem didn't recognize the dialect, but it was far from any of the language variants common in the Accord.
"Down." Dem gestured with his rifle to make sure that the men got his meaning. They went down rapidly, spreading arms and legs. All of them kept their eyes on their captors.
"Abe, you keep them covered while the rest of us move across to the far side. Don't get too far behind us. We've only got about ninety seconds left before..." He didn't finish that, in case the prisoners might understand him better than he understood them.
"We gonna leave these jokers here?" Coy asked. "Colonel might appreciate some prisoners."
"Can't take the chance," Dem said. "Let's go. Abe, give us twenty seconds, then follow as fast as you can. We'll cover you."
Twenty seconds and then another twenty seconds to cross to the far side of the warehouse. Near the far wall there was a line of tanker trailers, all labeled as water. Dem eyed the nearest trailer for a moment. The temptation was too much.
"This ought to be safe enough," he said. "We're close to the door. Hunker down under whatever cover you can find. We'll try to take time to fill our canteens before we leave, if this place doesn't go up with the other building." And if these cans are really full of water, he thought.
He glanced at the time line on his visor display. Less then ten seconds left. He got down in a hurry. So did the others, Abe skidding under one of the water tanks. As far as Dem could tell, none of the Heggie civilians had moved. He could see two of them, still spread-eagled on the floor.
The first sound that the reccers heard was a dull thump, an explosion baffled and damped by thick stone walls. Then the secondary blasts started. It was quite like an artillery barrage heard at a distance—for perhaps twenty seconds. One crump-thump followed another, the intervals decreasing.
Then there was one major blast. The warehouse in which the reccers were hiding shook violently. Two water trailers started to roll. Neither got far. Each bumped into a neighbor and stopped. Dust fell from the ceiling and from the girders that held it up. Somehow, clear against the immensity of the explosion, there were sharp, lighter sounds of glass breaking and small objects falling. The audible assault seemed to encompass the entire sound spectrum, from tones so low that they were felt rather than heard, to squeals that went right up to—and past—the upper limit of human hearing. The level crescendoed until some of the reccers clapped hands over the sides of their helmets, as close to their ears as they could get.
—|—
Fredo Gariston and the other half of the recon squad had one—questionable—advantage over the reccers who were hiding in the warehouse. They could see some of what happened. Two roofs to the north and one to the east of the explosions, they were much closer than they wanted to be.
Almost concurrent with the first sounds of the blast, the air itself seemed to compress around them. Dust rose from several rooftops. The stone roof over the explosion visibly bowed up, but before anyone could remark on that, the blast tore through the roof, scattering heavy chunks of stone and metal. With that barrier gone, the sound level doubled, trebled. Flame and debris shot skyward, seeking release through the line of least resistance. More of the roof gave way, collapsing. The secondary explosions continued for more than five minutes. Balls of flame jumped out of the breached roof, as if a succession of tiny new suns were being born.
The rooftop reccers lost interest in the show very quickly as debris started to rain down all around them: stone and metal—and more that couldn't readily be identified.
"Let's get out of here!" Fredo shouted at his companions. They were on the northeast corner of their roof, but debris was still falling around them—and far beyond.
"No juice for our jump belts," one of the others shouted back.
"We'll go down on ropes," Fredo said. Each reccer carried a twenty-five-meter rope. Half of them had grappling hooks. There were Heggies on the ground, hundreds of them in sight, but they had suddenly become the lesser evil. And the Heggies were equally intent on escaping the volcanic aftermath of the explosions.
As Fredo went over the side of the building, a last glance toward the warehouse that was exploding showed two walls collapsing, one inward, the other outward. He didn't wait to see if the rest of the building would fall as well.
—|—
Another shock wave shook the building that concealed Dem and his companions. A stack of crates near the west side of the building tipped over, starting a chain reaction that stopped only after three other stacks had fallen. Chunks of stone fell from the ceiling. One, perhaps several, of the civilians screamed in pain. Two got up and started running. They went right past Dem and his men without seeing them. The reccers moved farther under their cover.
Then the interior of the warehouse rang as if it were a gong. Dem looked up and saw the western wall sag inward. A long, vertical crack appeared and widened.
"Let's get out of here!" he shouted. He turned around on his belly and scrambled out from under the water trailer, heading for the nearest door. His companions were less than a second behind him.
Abe was the last man out, just before the building's west wall collapsed.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Schlinal prisoners were assembled into work gangs after the garrison surrendered. More than eleven hundred men had surrendered, about 20 percent of them civilians—prisoners or the descendants of prisoners. Even the female ten percent of the population were either prisoners or the descendants of men and women who had been sentenced to penal exile. Only in the rarest of circumstances did anyone descended from a penal exile make it off of a prison world. In the Hegemony, it was a crime to be born of criminals. And the sentence was life.
A half dozen of the highest ranking Schlinal officers, including the commandant of the penal colony and the commanding general of the army that had been staging on Tamkailo, were found together, their hands bound behind them, their throats slit. The commandant had been disemboweled and sexually maimed as well. More than thirty other officers and noncoms, mostly of the colony garrison, were also found dead in suspicious circumstances.
Not many Heggie officers of any rank survived. Two Accord Special Intelligence teams questioned those few officers, and a sampling of the enlisted men and civilians, through the remainder of the afternoon. Few of the prisoners were willing to say much, but the SI men learned enough—often by piecing together hints dropped by several different individuals—to know that in the last minutes of fighting there had been a mutiny coupled with a rebellion by the penal exiles. "Life's impossible here anyway,"
one private said sullenly. "We thought the whole place was going to blow up."
All of the munitions that remained in the depot were carried out into the open. The engineers burned what could be destroyed that way. Charges that had to be detonated were handled in small batches. Repeated explosions eventually gave the engineers a shallow pit to help contain later detonations. It was slow work. The depot had held tens of thousands of tons of tank shells, Boem and surface-to-air missiles, grenades, other explosives, and ammunition for rifles and machine guns, as well as thousands of those weapons.
—|—
Captain Hilo Keye limped into the field hospital that had been moved into one of the first buildings that had been emptied of its stores. Nearly three hundred Accord soldiers, and half that number of Heggies, were being treated. The warehouse did offer one very important advantage over the tents that had been used before. In addition to the insulation provided by its thick stone walls and ceiling, the warehouse had been air conditioned to help protect the munitions that had been stored in it, a luxury the Schlinal barracks did not enjoy. And the power supply had not been destroyed in the fighting.
For a couple of minutes, Keye stood just inside the door, off to the side, taking deep breaths of the interior air, luxuriating in the coolness of the interior. He leaned back against the wall to take his weight off of an aching left foot and ankle. Objectively, the temperature inside the building was still about 30 degrees Celsius, but the late afternoon temperature outside was closer to 40, without any shade except that available on the east and south sides of the buildings.
Echo Company, or as much of it as survived and wasn't in the hospital, was camped on the east side of one of those buildings. More than four hundred thousand liters of water had been liberated from the Heggies, and engineers were already making repairs to the water supply system. That had been seriously damaged in the battle. Accord troops were making liberal use of that water, not merely drinking it but standing under makeshift showers, just to cool off—a little. Sunset was still three hours away, and the air temperature had shown no indication of beginning to drop.
"Something I can do for you, Captain?"
Keye opened his eyes. He hadn't really been aware that he had shut them. He stared at the medic, a man he didn't recognize even though he had the 13th's patch on his collar. Keye blinked several times and dragged in one more deep breath before he spoke.
"Jammed foot, sprained ankle. Left foot."
The medic glanced down—the top of the boot was loose and a medical soaker had been wrapped around the ankle—then brought his gaze back up to the captain's eyes. "You can walk, sir?"
"I made it this far. If you'll give me a little help, I think I can make it the rest of the way. Doc Eddies busy?"
"Over in this corner, I think." The medic pointed, then pulled the captain's left arm around his neck and took a fair share of the weight. "We've gotten pretty well organized."
It seemed to Keye that the journey from door to corner took forever, but—logically—he knew that it could hardly have been more than two minutes, even shuffling along and detouring around stretchers, trauma tubes, and working medtechs and surgeons. Long before he injured his foot and ankle—that had been done after the fighting had ended, in a stupid accident (at least Keye considered it stupid)—his mind had been wandering. Although he had paced himself as best he could, the heat had started to get to him. If the fighting had continued for even fifteen minutes longer than it had, Keye thought that he would have been down, out of action, just from the heat. I'm too old for this crap was little comfort. Somewhere along the way between his men and the hospital, he had already decided that he really was too old to continue in a field unit. It was a job for younger men. If I can't transfer to some sort of staff position, I'll have to get out. It was a painful realization, more painful than his ankle. And he was certain that he would not change his mind later, when the ankle—and the heat of Tamkailo—were no more than bad memories.
Doc Eddies, Echo's medtech, saw the captain being helped toward him and broke away from what he was doing to go to the medic's aid.
"Captain?" Eddies said.
"Ankle and foot," Keye replied. "And the heat. I was starting to lose it"—he had to drag in a long breath before he could complete the sentence—"before I hurt myself."
The two men laid the captain on a stretcher. As soon as he was down, Hilo closed his eyes and again let out his breath. Being flat on his back came as a distinct relief. He could feel tension draining away. He heard Eddies thank the medic and then sensed that the medtech had knelt at his side. A medtech was more than a medic but less than a surgeon. Eighteen months of specialized training equipped him to perform anything less than major invasive surgery, but medical nanobots and trauma tubes meant that major invasive surgery was seldom necessary. And the military training would qualify Eddies for a civilian medtech's license when his contractual tour of duty was over.
"I'm going to set up a drip before I work on your ankle, Captain," Eddies said, his voice soft enough that it seemed to Keye to be almost part of a dream. "Got to get you rehydrated."
Keye didn't bother to answer. He felt as if he could slide into sleep, or something even deeper, but he felt no concern. Whatever happened...
—|—
Joe Baerclau felt sixty kilos lighter as he picked his way through the confusion in the hospital, heading back to his platoon. Since all of his combat gear had been taken off of him before he was carried to the hospital, he was significantly lighter. Rifle and gear added up to thirty kilograms, even allowing for the wire and grenades he had expended and two empty canteens. Dehydration would have accounted for perhaps another couple of kilos. Joe felt as if he were about to float off of the ground.
Other than feeling as if he were in low gravity, Joe felt exceptionally well. At the moment, he didn't even feel particularly hot. Fluids had been pumped back into his body. Even now, medical nanobots were coursing through his system, neutralizing toxins and completing their repair work. But the heat was just beyond the next door.
Although Joe didn't know it, the stretcher that he had vacated had been occupied less than three minutes later by Captain Keye, before Joe got across the room. Joe was eager to get back to his men, to show them that he was still in one piece and ready for duty, but he did hesitate before opening the door that would take him out of the hospital. The memory of the heat was almost as oppressive as the real thing. It wasn't until the door opened and two men carried in a stretcher with yet another heat casualty on it that Joe took one last breath of the air-conditioned air and went outside.
He had been given precise directions on where to find his men, and he had also been assured that the entire compound had been secured, that there were no more Heggies armed and on the loose. He wouldn't have let words alone reassure him, but the obvious presence of Accord soldiers along the side of the building did. If there were still Heggies around, there were more than enough friendlies to take care of them.
Looking along the avenue, Joe saw what remained of the warehouse that had been blown up from inside. Not much, that is. The buildings on the two nearer sides were both seriously damaged as well. Joe looked for a moment, then turned and walked the other way, north. He went to the corner, then crossed the open space to reach the shady southern side of the next building. Echo was supposed to be on the east side of that building.
Mort Jaiffer was the first man in Joe's platoon to spot him. Mort was the only man in the platoon on his feet, leaning against the building while everyone else was sitting, or lying, in the growing patch of afternoon shade.
"We expected you a half hour ago, Sarge," Mort said. His voice was flat, without the usual bantering tone.
"Couldn't tear myself away from the good life," Joe replied. "You got my gear stashed somewhere?"
"Better than new." Mort pointed to a rather disorganized-looking pile. "Right with mine. Even loaded your canteens for you."
Joe nodded. By that time Sauv Degtree had go
tten to his feet and moved to meet Baerclau.
"The platoon's yours again, Joe," Sauv said softly. "And welcome to it." None of the men had their visors down. This was as close to "off duty" as they were likely to get on an enemy-held world.
"Give me the report," Joe said. He looked around for a place where the two of them might speak privately, but the shady zone along the side of the building was crammed from one end to the other, and Joe didn't relish moving out into the sunshine any sooner than he absolutely had to.
"Twenty effectives now that you're back," Sauv said, lowering his voice. "Two men in hospital."
Joe couldn't help the narrowing of his eyes. Twenty plus two: that meant that the platoon had lost seven men killed.
Sauv waited until he saw Joe's eyes start to relax. "Captain's in the hospital. Twisted his ankle. Underwood's back for duty. You know that I'm the only one left from third squad," he said.
Joe nodded again. "We'll have to reorganize. You'll take over first squad, at least until we get off this cinder. I don't have any idea what will happen then. Mort will be happy to go back to being assistant squad leader. Hang on." He gestured for Mort to come over and told him what he was doing.
Mort's nod was almost gleeful. "You can give somebody my corporal's stripes too. Let me go back to being just a plain mudder."
"It doesn't work that way," Joe said. That was a continuation of a discussion that had been going on between the two men for more than a year.
"Jaiffer, I'm going to need your help getting to know what the others in the squad can do," Degtree said. "You I know about."
Mort almost blushed. "My reputation precedes me." He had been feeling as low as he ever got. The talk was starting to revive him.
"It does," Degtree agreed. He turned back toward Baerclau. "You need me for anything else right now?"
Joe shook his head.
