The Vastalimi Gambit

by Steve Perry

  Leeth whickered.

  They discommed. Wink said, “Your sister is tight-lipped.”

  Kay shrugged. “It goes with the job. I will prod, and she will parry, I expect nothing else. If she and her agents can find the answer, no one will be more pleased than I—it will reflect well upon the Sena, and my sister’s victories are mine.

  “But an answer must be found, and it might fall to us to be the ones to find it. We won’t ignore anything that crosses our trail if it might lead us to our prey.”

  “So we sit around and wait to be contacted?”

  “I think we won’t have to wait long. If they weren’t ready to talk, they wouldn’t have gotten in touch with me.”

  Wink nodded.

  Kay continued: “My sister will investigate the messenger who approached us. I expect that within short order, she will know who the messenger really is and where to find her. She will probably hold off on contacting her until we see if those who sent her have anything of substance to say.

  “Leeth’s first loyalty is to the Sena and to law and order. She might be tempted to come along and hide in the bushes, to keep an eye on things.”

  “Worried about her sister?”

  “Maybe. But if it turns out this plague is Vastalimi-made, despite Leeth’s belief otherwise, she would position herself to catch the perpetrators. And I don’t want them frightened off. They were specific, no Shadows. Harder to track a bird flown than one on the ground. She doesn’t want us bumbling into the path of her investigations; that gate swings both ways.”

  “Your show. But maybe I could leave a message that won’t be delivered until after the meeting is over? We come home in one piece, I cancel it. If not, it gives her a place to start looking.”

  Kay considered it. “Leave such a time message for Droc but not for Leeth. He will be more circumspect in his actions, and if the time comes he feels the need for Sena, he can contact Leeth.”

  “Got it.”

  FIFTEEN

  The trap was set, and the Cutters were about to spring it. It had been laid out using the basic idea Singh had offered: A barge was loaded with a secret cargo in such a way that any opposing military with half a brain and the barest intelligence unit could not have failed to notice it. As it left the dock headed downriver for a seaport five hundred klicks away, there was no air support, and only one boat with a few soldiers acting as escorts, an easy target.

  Too easy a target, and if the Masbülc mercs didn’t look at it askance, they’d have to be completely stupid. Cutter thought that they would upgrade their CO, and anybody worth his component elements wouldn’t be in a hurry to go for the bait. They’d look around.

  The convoy of wheeled vehicles, for which more efforts had been expended to load and get it rolling secretly, was on the move, using narrow, back roads. The convoy had a few more guards, but not enough to stop any real effort to take it. And the work to keep it secret was enough, maybe, to convince somebody that was the intent.

  They had sat down and worked it out to the nth detail, and their main force of ground troops, eighty strong, and just shy of the legal limit, was already in place. Cutter and his staff, with Singh, were taking a hopper to a hidden staging point. The attack, were it to be a surprise and successful, could only be launched through a narrow window, and that’s where CFI would be, waiting. If the Masbülc fly buzzed in, they would swat it.

  Nancy, the best pilot they had, flew their hopper, and they kept it low and slow as they headed for the stage.

  His field team wore shiftsuits, which gave them advantages, and the slow ride rocked them into a semidoze, at least it did Cutter. He wouldn’t be leaving the hopper, nor would Formentara; they’d be monitoring the action from there. He would rather be in the thick of it, but Jo was too good an XO to allow him to take the risk most of the time. Now and again, he could coax her into letting him into the action, but that happened less and less. He understood. Commanders were supposed to lead from the rear; getting killed was bad for the business.

  Singh was a newbie but not totally green. He had gone with them on sorties on Ananda, demonstrated his courage and a basic skill, but he need seasoning, so they kept him close. After his initial action and kill, the team had talked about their first hot actions, mostly to help him get past it.

  Eventually, most of the team had stepped up to tell their tales, then or later.

  They had been interesting stories. Wink, Jo, Gunny, Gramps, even Kay. Cutter hadn’t heard some of them directly, but public spaces in his camps were usually under electronic surveillance. Say something in the yard, chances were somebody could hear it if they wanted to bother. Word got around.

  Cutter hadn’t told his story. He hadn’t thought about it in a long time.

  Not that he could ever forget it . . .

  _ _ _ _ _ _

  It had been his first time in the field after basic, so long ago and far away, a little police action against a private militia that had gotten too feisty and had started stepping on civilian toes.

  Cutter’s light-infantry rifle platoon had been part of A company, with two other companies, B and C, set to surround a sixty-solider enemy unit and either capture or take them down.

  Cutter was in Second Squad, run by an old sergeant, Ali Muhammad Ali. The ten-person squad was a mix of a couple of old hands and mostly newbies, and the platoon leader had been a shavetail second loot straight out of some university ROTC school who thought he was Robert E. Lee, George S. Patton, and Lead Foot Franklin McGruder all rolled into one. A man who used the words “glory” and “honor” a lot in much of his conversation.

  Their assignment was to guard a narrow road leading from the main field of battle, and that would have been easy duty—the road bottlenecked between two old buildings just past a bridge over a narrow but deep river, there was plenty of cover, and all they had to do was line ’em up and knock ’em down if anybody tried to leave that way.

  It was a cool fall day, but the trees still had most of their leaves, and Sergeant Ali set Cutter and the rest of his squad behind bullet-stopping brick and permaplast walls. Cutter was a rifleman, but set to feed ammo for the light machine gun being run by Corporal Omar, who was on his second tour.

  The other two squads were placed, the com units seemed to be working just fine, and the main action was going to take place three klicks away, on the other side of a patch of woods, so probably, Ali said, they wouldn’t see anybody, and maybe not even hear much of the engagement. The militia was outnumbered, outgunned, and if their commanders had the sense Allah gave a jackboot, they’d surrender PDQ, Ali allowed.

  Cutter figured their captain gave them the job because it was the least likely to get anybody killed, and he’d have been right, except that Lieutenant Savoy Oslo Brinkley—and yeah, it didn’t take the unit thirty seconds to latch onto the man’s initials—wasn’t content to do what he’d been ordered to do.

  Thirty minutes after the push started, it seemed to be over. Ali had unauthorized access to the other two companies’ opchans, and he gave the squad a blow-by-blow.

  Apparently, however, a dozen or so of the enemy managed a retreat to escape being captured, and nobody seemed quite sure where they had gone. There weren’t any sats footprinting the area, and a wind blowing through the trees messed up the motion sensors or some shit.

  Lieutenant Brinkley, who shuffled about, but mostly stayed with the Third Squad, came to where Ali, Omar, and Cutter were.

  “Some of the enemy combatants have escaped the net,” he said.

  Ali, who already knew this, nodded as if it were news. “Sir.”

  “I think we need to go collect them.”

  Ali cast a quick glance heavenward—Brinkley didn’t catch it—and said, “Sir, if they come this way, we’ll have them. They can’t wade across that river, they’ll have to use the bridge, and come right up the road.”

  �
�No, they could spread out along the riverbank there, and it would be hard to capture them.”

  “Our field of fire covers that pretty well, Lieutenant. They won’t get far if they try that.”

  “We want to capture them alive if we can, Sergeant.”

  Ali didn’t say anything to that.

  “They could be valuable sources of intel. So I think it best if we move across the bridge and set up in the woods, there and there.” He pointed.

  “Sir? I don’t see what the tactical advantage would be—”

  Brinkley cut him off: “That’s why I’m the officer, and you are the sergeant.

  “First Squad will take the point, you will follow them, and Third Squad will bring up the rear.”

  “Begging the lieutenant’s pardon, sir—”

  “This isn’t a discussion, Sergeant Ali, it is an order. We move out in two minutes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  After Brinkley left to speak to the other squads, Ali offered a string of what sounded like Arabic curses. He shifted into Basic and ended with the phrase “shit-for-brains asshole photon-pusher who couldn’t find his dick with both hands!”

  Cutter said, “Is this a problem for us, Sarge?”

  “Nah, just a boneheaded move by a glory hound who wants to polish his brass. It won’t matter if we are on this side or that, thirty of us set against a dozen stragglers running to save their asses, we get them either way, but trying to capture them if they do show up might get some of us killed. Don’t matter what SOB says, if you see somebody and they point a weapon in your direction, you cancel their ticket, you understand?”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  “Good. All right, let’s get ready to move.”

  First Squad was three-quarters of the way across the bridge and Cutter’s unit ten meters onto the structure when the shooting started.

  Apparently, the remains of the militia were not interested in capturing anybody, and smart enough to know that an exposed bridge was a great place to kill your enemy.

  First Squad dropped prone and returned fire, but they were wide open, and the militia had a light machine gun and somebody who knew how to use it.

  Cutter saw half the men ahead of him catch rounds and go down, and the hosing kept on.

  Cutter’s squad shot back, too, but all they could see were muzzle flashes—the militia troops were in the trees.

  “Back it up, back it up! Move!” Ali yelled, as the deadly rain spewed past them.

  Omar took a round in the throat and fell. Ali bent and grabbed his arm, and Cutter moved over to help—

  There was a lot of noise, and time skewed crazily as men screamed and continued to fall.

  The fog of war, they called it, insanity loosed—

  They were all out in the open here, no concealment, much less cover, and they had to get off the bridge, or they’d get slaughtered—

  “Keep going! Across the bridge! Keep going!”

  Cutter looked to see Brinkley, waving them on with his sidearm.

  Was he out of his fucking mind?

  “Fuck me—!” Ali yelled.

  Cutter turned, and saw the sergeant go down. A splotch of spreading darkness appeared between the bottom edge of his dorsal armor and the hip plate, centered over his spine—

  Cutter had a moment of tachypsychia: Time slowed to a crawl. Sound went away.

  There was Brinkley, standing in front of him, waving his pistol. Men were going around him, like a stream around a rock, he was silently bellowing, trying to exhort the remaining members of the squads to go across the bridge, which was already blotched with the dead and dying, and each second more of them joined the fallen.

  Brinkley lashed out with his sidearm, hit somebody across the side of the head, knocking him down—

  Cutter looked at Omar and Ali. Omar looked dead, and Ali’s legs were paralyzed, he could tell. He let go of Omar’s arm and grabbed Ali’s armor handle and started dragging him—

  —Brinkley was suddenly there in front of him, pointing his gun at Cutter.

  Sound came back:

  “—let him go, get back across the bridge! Now! Goddammit, now!”

  Cutter had his left hand on Ali’s armor handle and his assault rifle in his right hand. He didn’t think about it. He reacted. He shoved the weapon forward and triggered it. The recoil rocked it in his single-handed hold, but he was so close he couldn’t have missed. The bullet ricocheted off the lieutenant’s armor just over his sternum and angled upward, hitting beneath the chin. The lieutenant’s helmet lifted from the impact as the round blew through his skull and pierced the helmet.

  The man collapsed, brain-dead before he hit the deck.

  He dragged Ali off the bridge, and one of the other sergeants got the rest of the platoon under cover.

  Of the thirty troops, six were killed and twelve more wounded, but the remaining soldiers were enough to keep the enemy from risking the bridge.

  Ten minutes later, Baker Company arrived and wiped out the militia.

  In the hospital later, Cutter went to visit Ali.

  “Hey, Sarge. Sorry about all this.”

  “Are you kidding? I’ll be here three months while they knit my spine back together, feeling up the nurses, plus another three for rehab, and then two weeks leave with six months back pay. Me, I’ll be getting tanked and laid in a posh jukery while you and the squad are getting your asses shot off in some hellhole. Advantage: Ali, all the way.”

  Cutter chuckled. “Right.”

  “I owe you, Cutter. Lot of guys would have left me there.”

  “Would you have been one of them?”

  “Hell, who knows? Maybe, maybe not.”

  “Listen, about the lieutenant.”

  “That craphead snake-sucker? What about him?”

  “Well, you know, how he . . . died.”

  Ali looked him square in the eyes. “How he died was, he took an enemy round during the engagement. Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving asshole, in my considered opinion.”

  “Sarge—”

  “No, Cutter, don’t say anything else. Maybe you didn’t see it, but I was looking right at him when it happened. It was an enemy round zipped across that bridge and took the man out, only thing it could have been. That is how it went down, you understand?”

  Cutter nodded. “Thanks, Sarge.”

  “For what? Send me a vid of them pinning the medal on you. You’re a hero, Cutter. You saved a lot of soldiers with your action. Not just me and the guys on the bridge, but anybody SOB would have commanded later.”

  He hadn’t felt like a hero. He’d been scared shitless. But the next few days had been unlike any other. The air had been sweeter, food tasted better, and everything seemed brighter and more imbued with . . . something. He understood the phenomenon, of how almost dying made you appreciate what life had to offer. And it was a potent drug, that feeling. Battle was not glorious. But surviving it? That was.

  _ _ _ _ _ _

  It must have been in the air, the memories of first encounters with death. Cutter, half-dozing, heard Singh say something to Jo he couldn’t quite make out.

  Formentara muttered something in return.

  Jo said, “Excuse me?”

  Formentara said, “Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet.”

  Cutter understood that one: Kill them all, God will know his own . . .

  Singh looked at Formentara. “You aren’t a combatant. You don’t kill people.”

  “Did I say that?”

  They looked at hir.

  “I’m not a soldier, that’s true. But that’s not to say I don’t have my own story.”

  “Want to share it?” Gunny asked.

  “Sure. Why the hell not?”

  They waited expectantly.

  _ _ _ _ _ _ />
  “I grew up on Oceanica, in the big spaceport city Lalau. We lived in the slum district called Papauaa—that translates to ‘sty.’

  “The summer I turned thirteen, I caught the attention of Limanui, the port’s largest flesh peddler.

  “The man had three hundred whores working the streets and docks for him, and many of them had not entered into the work voluntarily.

  “He was rich, and he was connected. He owned police, judges, politicians, port officials, even the local Army commander was in his pocket, and nobody in Lalau told him no.

  “He had a thing for mahu not yet of age, and when he saw me, or more likely an image of me somebody showed to him, he wanted me.

  “The man could have just had one of his thugs grab me and deliver me to his bed. But the flesh seller was a sadist. It was not enough to simply collect me and rape me; he wanted to season the experience with my terror.

  “He commed me. Told me who he was and what he was going to do to me, in great physical detail, and the day and hour it was to happen. And he made it clear that there was nothing I could do about it except to get used to the idea. In a ha’month, he said, I would be his and he would use me every which way, then put me to work at the docks as a whore.

  “I was thirteen, my parents were working poor, we had no clout and no recourse. If I told them and they tried to stop it, they would simply be removed, maybe killed. And I had a younger brother and sister, and I didn’t want them to suffer.

  “I thought of running, catching a ferry to one of the barrier islands, maybe even stowing away on an orbital lifter, but I realized the first time I went outside our plex that Limanui was having me followed.

  “Running wasn’t going to happen. Hiding wouldn’t work.

  “I could maybe get a weapon and try to resist, but against his hired thugs, I would have had little chance.

  “I could have killed myself, and I considered it. It was my fallback option.

  “What I had going for me was I was smart. I shoved my panic down deep and thought about all the ways I might save myself and my family.

  “A deadline looming for rape and slavery does wonders to spark the imagination.