by Steve Perry
“Stet that,” Cutter said.
Well. Never a dull moment.
– – – – – –
The sweep came up empty. If there had been anybody else, he or she was gone, and there was no sign of another trike, so it would seem to be just the one shooter.
Wink told them there was no record on Earth of the shooter’s DNA, at least not one they could access, and he wasn’t carrying anything that would ID him. Interesting, and moderately impossible. You couldn’t move around on Earth without leaving a trail, and if you were from offworld, there should be an entry tag somewhere.
No match to the dead guy existed. Which meant he was protected by somebody.
Gramps said, “Could be some kind of sub-rosa op, shielded identity.”
Cutter nodded.
“I wouldn’t think Junior would have any trouble importing a killer without leaving a trail.”
“Probably not.”
“You’d think he’d offer you a little more respect by hiring a better one,” Gramps said.
“Given how things went back on Morandan, maybe not. He caught me flat-footed.”
“We don’t know it’s Junior. Could be the opposition. Or an old enemy.”
“Could be.”
“You don’t sound too worried.”
“He missed, I didn’t.”
“They might send somebody better next time.”
Cutter shrugged. “Or not. See if it happens.”
– – – – – –
“Captain?”
Jo came awake at once. Her internal clock told her it was 0320. The sodden night smelled of mold and moths, which, until she’d had olfactory augmentation, she’d never known, that moths had a kind of . . . powdery-rot odor.
It was Singh. “Yeah?”
“Pradar op says we have aircraft incoming.”
Jo stood, stretched, moved to the craft’s computer board. She called the pradar op even as she toggled the image onto her control screen.
“Hey, Prop, what do we have?”
He said, “Two craft, masked sig and stealthed, but from the size and speed, I’m guessing troop copters, probably Howard 120s.”
Jo nodded to herself. H-120s would carry eighteen troopers with chutes or twelve with flysuits. If they could drop two dozen on top of them, that would make things interesting.
“They have to know we know they are there,” Jo said. “Reach out, Prop, see if there’s anybody else flying our way.”
“That’s a negative out to one hundred klicks, Cap.”
“Stay alert. Let me know if anything shows up.”
Jo opened the command opchan. “Heads up, people. If you haven’t already noticed, we have enemy aircraft approaching. The G2A spikes are ready to go, and we’ll hold off until they are close enough so they can’t duck ’em; but meanwhile, everybody scans everything else, this might be a decoy.”
H-120s were slow; unless the enemy had some way of stopping tight-beam-guided ground-to-air missiles, they would be easy targets once they were within range, and they almost were there. They couldn’t get close enough to drop parachutists that could reach ’em unless they were a lot higher, and the missiles could stretch to an H-120’s ceiling.
If, however, they were carrying troops in flysuits, they’d drop them before they got within missile reach. The suits—essentially stubby wings with small turbojet engines—were slow, had a short range, and were harder targets. The fliers could drop into the ground clutter and be hard to spot on pradar or Doppler. This was risky, since the controls weren’t all that precise on issue flysuits, and if you leaned crooked at two meters up, you’d auger into the ground at speed or bounce along the dirt like a stone skips on water; still, trained troops might get to a target without being shot down. It was something to worry about.
“Cap, they are holding just outside maximum range, and I’m getting e-chaff.”
Jo noticed on her own scope. “So they are using flysuits.”
“That’s my guess.”
Be a waste of missiles trying to spike those, Jo knew. They might snag a few, but their standard G2A systems weren’t rigged for cold, human-sized targets.
“All stations, expect troops in flysuits incoming.”
“Oh, boy, wingshooting!” That was Gunny.
Jo shook her head. Time to go outside and have a look.
“Inbound,” somebody said. “The leader is eleven hundred meters out, speed . . . 180.”
The machine guns had enough onboard brain to calculate the lead. An ape could hit them if he pushed the right button.
“Targets of opportunity,” Jo said. She scanned the skies. Her optics were first-class, but she didn’t see anybody yet.
“Soon as you can hit them.”
“I got four more, I think,” another voice said. “Oops. One of them disappeared. Bad flying.”
“That just means the more dangerous ones are still coming,” Jo said.
The first machine gun opened up.
Jo saw the tracers zipping up from the emplacement into the night.
“Leader is down,” the gunner said. “The next three have separated—”
“—and the one farthest north is mine,” Gunny said. “Come on . . . come to Mama . . . Gotcha!”
The second machine gun chattered; more red streaks arced through the darkness.
That shooter must have put a round into one of the flysuit’s engine intakes; there was a small flash of orange light as the engine blew, followed a few seconds later by a screech of metal tearing.
Time that sound got to Jo, that flier would already be dining on dirt.
More carbines fired. Even if the suits had been pradar-shielded, which they weren’t, troops on the ground wearing spookeyes could see them well enough.
And if Jo were one of the fliers, right about now, she’d be tossing some kind of photonic to make shooters on the ground blink—
The thought was the deed: Photon flares on glide foils erupted, lighting up the sky. That made the nightscope shutters automatically shield, but it also gave plenty of illumination for naked eyes to see the fliers, a couple of which were no more than five hundred meters out.
Jo raised her carbine. She didn’t use the sights, but let her training tell her where to point. Human brains were exceedingly accurate when it came to tracking motion. When it felt right, the position of her weapon’s muzzle and that of the target, she pulled the trigger and let go a full-auto blast, fifteen rounds, continuing to track the target without conscious thought.
Years back, she’d taken a seminar given by a professional trick shooter. Don’t think, the woman had said, just feel. There will be a connection between you and the target, and once you feel it, fire. Have that, you won’t miss.
That woman could borrow a ring from somebody in the audience, put a paper sticker over the opening, toss it into the air, and thread it with a pistol round without scratching the ring. As far as Jo could tell, the trick shooter didn’t have a single aug running, which made it even more amazing.
Her target didn’t slow, but it changed direction and flew into the ground.
“Where you goin’, birdboy?” Gunny’s voice came over the com. “Nobody excused you! Eat this!”
Somebody said, “Cap, I think we got a couple made it to the ground, south side, on the hill.”
Kay seemed to materialize from nowhere. “I will check,” she said.
Jo nodded. “Go.” If there were a couple of enemy soldiers there, they’d be shedding their suits and looking for cover or a way up. Kay was on it, and Jo wasn’t worried about a threat from there . . .
“Captain, the H-120s are making a run.”
“What? That’s idiotic!” Jo said, half to herself.
Might be remotely controlled and full of explosives. That would be spendy, but it could mak
e a big enough bang to draw attention away from the incoming flysuiters.
“Spike ’em as soon as you can,” Jo said.
The first copter blew ten seconds later, and it was indeed a big boom. The light turned the night into noon for a brief moment, and the sound, when it got there, was a lot more than a G2A missile and a fuel tank would make.
“We have the big birds,” Jo said. “Don’t let the little ones get past!”
A second later, the second Howard exploded, with equally bright and loud results.
Seemed like a lot of sound and fury for what they had to know wouldn’t amount to much. Why?
Assuming stupidity on the part of an enemy was seldom the safest way to bet. It might be the case—she had seen a lot of foolish enemies—but you were much wiser to go with the notion that the enemy wouldn’t make any bonehead moves. If they did, that was good, it was a gift, but if they didn’t, and you were ready, you were much better off.
There were a lot of people run through the military crematoriums who had underestimated their enemies.
The copters and the fliers were low-percentage attacks, and anybody with any experience had to know that. And if they did, what were they really up to?
“We have incoming rockets,” the prop said. “G2G from down the hill.”
“AR spikes auto-launched,” the prop continued. “They are wasting a lot of ammo. They ain’t gonna get shit that way.”
“That’s what I want to hear,” Jo said.
As dawn approached, the theater was quiet. Whatever the enemy had intended from the three-prong attack, they had indeed been wasting their ammo. No casualties on CFI’s side, and at least a few of the enemy were pushing up daisies, and probably more decorating a surgical suite in the flatlands.
Jo called base. Gramps was up, and he took the com. She filled him in.
“Why are you awake, aren’t you off duty until 0700?”
“Had a little ruckus here. Somebody sneaked onbase to take a shot at Rags.”
She felt a sudden stab of alarm, but before she could ask, he said, “Rags shot first, no problem. Well, except that the guy is dead, and we can’t question him.”
“Junior,” she said.
“That thought had crossed our minds. And since the shooter was not particularly adept, that makes it an even better guess—Junior is not the sharpest blade in the drawer, and cheap, too.”
“Crap. We don’t need Rags getting tagged.”
“We will take better care of him in the future. You might want to get some sleep. The weather guys are a half step slow—you are gonna get rained on pretty soon. If you aren’t battened down yet, better get that way. Noon on, you are going to get wet, and come dark, really wet. By midnight, you are apt to be blown off the hill, you aren’t tied to something.”
“Great.”
“A soldier’s lot is not always a happy one. Want a couple verses of ‘Field Rat Blues’?”
I got the field rat blues, baby, got diarrhea runnin’ into my shoes
Yeah I got the field rat blues, baby—
“Seal it,” she said. “It’s too close to the truth. I’m the poster girl for Immodium now.”
“Sorry.”
“Right. You’re thinking, ‘Better her than me,’ aren’t you?”
“Not I.”
“Liar.”
“I’m gonna see if I can get Formentara to install one of them mind-reading augs in me, too.”
“Careful, it has a bad side effect; you can read minds, but you also have to tell the truth.”
He laughed. “I’m workin’ the FCV starting tomorrow night,” he said, “so I’ll be a little closer to the action. Stay dry, Jo.”
“Stet that.”
TWELVE
Bright and early, Gramps cranked up the shielded lines and made some calls.
“Ah, the infamous Junior Allen,” the speaker on the other end of the shielded com said. “‘The Butcher of Morandan,’ though if you say that aloud in public, his lawyers will be on you like stink on a spooked skunk.”
Gramps smiled. He hadn’t heard that simile in a while.
The speaker, Max Tigre, had retired from the GU Army and moved into private military intelligence twenty-some years past. They went way back; Max had been a sergeant when Gramps had started basic training, and he had to be at least seventy-five by now. The heuristic was, anybody who had fifteen years on you? They were old . . .
“How’s the Chapman Stick going?” Max asked.
“I do my daily diligence. You still paying squeezebox in that bar band?”
“Now and again.”
Max was an accordion player in a Norteña Espacio band that had a chart hit a few years back, a little ditty about narcotic traffickers working the lanes around Jupiter’s moons.
“So, tell me what else you know about Junior.”
“Not much. He’s idling a peacetime command here until they can force him to retire,” Max said. “Anybody with two neurons to spark at each other knew it was Junior’s fuck-up, and that Rags took the hit for it. Knowing and proof aren’t the same, but the uplevels put a black mark next to Junior’s name, and those don’t ever go away. He’s had a completely undistinguished career since, a series of do-nothing stations, shuffling equipment and guarding empty bases, like that. Along the way, there were some questionable activities out in the boonies where nobody was looking over his shoulder. A little nest-padding, some troops complained of poor treatment. I think the current post is probably the best he’s had in ten years, and it’s only because they can keep a better eye on him here.”
“If it was that well-known, I’m surprised nobody from Morandan has made a run at him.”
“Oh, they have. Couple–three times we know for sure, somebody took a shot or threw a bomb his way. He doesn’t go outside much, and when he does, he’s armored up the ass, with bodyguards left, right, and center. Closest anybody got was a piece of shrapnel in his back, but it was minor. He was running pretty good when the grenade went off; took out a couple of his guards, and that because he was well ahead of them, and gaining. Got a Purple Heart for that, go figure.
“He doesn’t travel anywhere that isn’t cleared these days, and you need an engraved invitation to get in to see him if he doesn’t know you personally. Must be kind of funny to see a full-security sweep of a locked-tight warehouse full of tents and sleeping bags before Junior will set foot in it. Man has to look over his shoulder taking a piss in the base latrine.”
Gramps said, “Not much chance a sniper will plug him out taking a stroll?”
“Not much chance, no. You thinking about it?”
“Me? Why, no, that would be illegal.”
Max laughed. “The GU Army is letting him fade away, Roy. You know how they are; better to let all that stuff stay swept under the rug than risk big sneezes trying to clean it up. Another few years, Junior will find himself in command of a barren moon somewhere where the sun don’t shine, and he’ll get tired of it and put in his papers. They’ll let him go with an HD, he’ll collect his pension, end of story.
“Eventually, everybody directly connected to the slaughter on Morandan will die off, and it’ll be another bit of ugly military history that’ll get spun in the texts as an unfortunate event laid to the fog of war.”
“Yeah, but in the meantime, Junior can be a pain in somebody’s ass.”
“He make any threats at Rags?”
“Nothing actionable. He’s watching, looking for a reason to stomp us. If we are careful not to give him one, he’ll invent one. We’d rather not worry about him backstabbing us while we are in a shooting war on the ground down here in Tejas.”
“In your boots, I’d feel the same way. But I don’t see a lot you can do. He’d have to make an illegal move in your direction, and it would have to be documented out the wazoo. They won’t want to act on
it no matter what you have because that means opening an old can of worms nobody wants to look into. Unless he murders the GU Military Commander on the front steps of HQ in front of a hundred witnesses and the evening news cams, they ain’t gonna do shit.”
“I hear you.”
“I wish I could help.”
“You did, Max. Never hurts to have a little more intel.”
After they discommed, Gramps thought about it. About what he expected, given the flow of history. They were going to have to come up with a way to deal with Junior, and that might be difficult. Difficult wasn’t impossible, though.
He stood, stretched, and walked outside into the already-warm and sunny morning.
The sun wasn’t going to last, though.
Scudding clouds raced across the sky, and it was darker to the south and east. Looked as if that hurricane was arriving.
Well, a good soldier could stand a little rain and breezes.
– – – – – –
The Base Medical Trauma Suite was fully functional, everything humming along as it should. It had eighteen beds, room for another dozen gurneys, and six D&T full-ride units. That wasn’t the same as having six live doctors, but with the diagnose-and-treat systems running, the supervising medic could monitor and deal with problems the med-dins couldn’t manage, which, truth be known, weren’t apt to be many for combat injuries. There were only so many ways soldiers got hurt during a battle in a gravity well. People got shot, electrocuted, cut, burned, sometimes gassed, hit with shrapnel, injured by explosives. There were vehicle accidents. Troops might get otic or ocular damage, induction-neuritis, sonic CNS shock. Now and again, somebody would OD, drown, fall off a building, or step in a hole and break a leg. The dins could deal medically and surgically with most such patients, and certainly triage them so he could attend the worst first.
Hell, most of the time, the place could be run by a couple of orderlies who were smart enough to load patients into the D&Ts. The units were automatic, self-regulating, and if they couldn’t handle something, would flash and beep until somebody came to help.
