by Steve Perry
“You young people have no patience.
“One of the more interesting theories speculated that in the varnish were ground-up bits of a crawfish native to the rivers where the maker worked.
“The local crawfish went extinct, and so subsequent makers didn’t have it available, thus they didn’t have the same dulcet tones when played.”
“Why is it every time Ah ask a simple question, you babble like a stoned sociology professor giving a lecture? You could talk the leg off a cast-iron statue.”
And then, because she couldn’t help herself, she asked, “It is true? About the crawfish?”
“Great story, but, no. Scientists have done analyses on several of the Strads, and there’s no evidence of animal proteins in his finishes. The difference was that he was a better craftsman than his contemporaries. He picked better woods and put them together better. “
“So why are you tellin’ us all this crap?”
“I’m getting there. Stradavari’s instruments were good, they held up well, and people came to believe they were superior, so that’s what they heard when one was played. The Bax scientists’ concoction of god juice is probably chemically identical to the natural waters on their world, but they don’t really believe it, so . . .”
“Psychology,” Jo said. “Got to love it.”
“Says the woman who came from PsyOps,” Rags said.
“What about Junior?” Gramps said.
“Junior seems to be in bed with both sides.”
“Why?”
“That’s the part we don’t know.”
“So what good is knowing this stuff about the water?”
Kay said, “Both sides want it enough to sponsor an expensive war and to offer large bribes. General Allen has found a way to benefit. There must be a link.”
Rags said, “And if what Dhama said is so, if we are in possession of the wells, come the final whistle, it looks like Junior walks away rich. And somehow, I don’t think that’s the worst of it. This thing reeks of intrigue, there’s something else going on.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
“How are we going to find out?”
“I’m working on it,” Gramps said.
– – – – – –
It wasn’t more than an hour after that when Gramps showed up in Cutter’s office. This time, it was just the two of them.
“Something?”
“Oh, hell, yeah. The rest of the story about the Bax versus the Bax and the thrilling adventure of the Holy Water of Tejas.”
Cutter nodded.
“You aren’t going to like it.”
“I already don’t like it a whole bunch, I don’t see how it could be worse. Tell me.”
So Gramps did.
When he was done, Cutter said, “Well, shit. It is worse.”
“Yeah.”
“We are screwed either way.”
“Well, one side, they use lubricant, but, yeah, I’d call it a no-win situation. I don’t see a solution.”
Cutter thought about it for a few seconds. “I do.”
“Really?”
“Yep. But nobody is going to like it. Something I came up with a while back when I was lacking better ways to spend my time. Not how I would have used it, but the principle is the same.”
Gramps raised an eyebrow.
Cutter told him.
“Christus! You have a sick mind! You think you can get that by General Wood?”
“I don’t know. The fem I used to know, back in the day? Maybe. But she was a lieutenant on the way up, not a general running a small war. She might not see it the same now as she did then. Only one way to find out.”
– – – – – –
Wood was not at all happy to hear what Cutter had to say. After a string of choice curses, she stared at him.
“You’re sure about this?”
Cutter said, “Pretty much, yeah.”
Wood sighed. “Well, shit.”
“Yeah, that’s what I said, too.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment.
He knew what she was thinking, or at least what he’d be thinking in her boots. Balancing what she had and what she wanted against what she now knew.
“No other way?”
“I looked, I don’t see it. It’s all circumstantial. We couldn’t step in front of a judge and make the case, especially not a military tribunal, we’re not a parsec close to the standard of proof. He walks. At the least.”
“Shit.”
“It’s your call, Zoree.”
“My call, yeah, right!”
“I’m sorry—”
“Fuck you. You know I can’t pretend I didn’t hear this.”
“Yeah, I couldn’t, either.”
“Shit, shit, shit!”
“It’s not just about Junior—”
“I know, it’s the fucking Bax and their fucked-up business! Why is it people like us have to be the galaxy’s conscience?”
“If you can see a problem, and you have the ability to fix it, it becomes your responsibility. It’s always been that way.”
For a long time, she didn’t say anything. Then, “Nobody can know but us. If heads roll, they should be ours.”
“Yeah.”
“That will make it a bitch.”
“It’s a bitch no matter what.”
“You think you can pull it off?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. Lot can go wrong, but if we don’t, Junior walks away clean and almost certainly with his pockets full; the Bax could have a major sociological screwup, could work itself into a civil war. The cure will taste bad, but it probably won’t kill us.”
“Probably.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it sucks.”
“You didn’t create it, you just pointed it out. If I thought shooting the messenger would fix it, you’d already be bleeding out.”
“I’ll make it up to you.”
“How?”
“I dunno. Maybe my rich uncle will die, and you can have a chunk. Go buy that star-fruit orchard.”
“You have a rich uncle?”
He chuckled.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. All right. Let’s hear this plan of yours.” She shook her head. “You know, being a general isn’t as much fun as I hoped it would be.”
– – – – – –
Cutter called his people in and laid it out. When he was done, nobody said anything for a few seconds. They looked stunned.
“If anybody else has a better suggestion, I’m open to it.”
Nobody spoke to that, either.
Then Jo said, “It’s just this side of insane; maybe the other side, but if that’s how it has to be, then that’s how it has to be.
“If it were easy, anybody could do it.”
That got a quiet chorus of agreement from the others.
He wasn’t really surprised. They were smart, they were loyal, and they were, as much as anybody he knew, honorable, whatever that meant these days. It was a bad situation, he had looked at it from every angle he could, and while there wasn’t any path he liked, this one was the least harmful one he could see.
“We have four hours until the final horn blows,” he said, “and a shitload of stuff to get done. Let’s get moving.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
One hundred and ninety-six minutes . . .
If they were going to bag it, the time was now.
“I’m still not sure about this,” Gramps said.
“You and me both. It’s a terrible idea—except all the others I can come up with are worse. As I said before, I am open to better notions.”
Cutter looked at the others.
Jo shrugged.
Kay did her version of the same gesture.
>
Wink said, “I’ve been getting stale, I’m up for it.”
Gunny said, “Who wants to live forever?”
Formentara added hir shrug. “I’m good.”
Cutter nodded. “Okay. Understand, people are going to be pissed at us if we screw it up.”
“If we screw this up, we probably are all going to be dead,” Jo said. “I don’t expect that we’ll worry a lot about how pissed off they are.”
“Point taken. All right, here’s how I have the scenario running . . .”
He started talking, and they all listened intently.
This is really nuts, his inner editor said. Why don’t you just jump off a bridge or pull the tab on a grenade and drop it at your feet? Be faster . . .
– – – – – –
CFI’s advantage was that most troops in a war didn’t have the full picture, and in this case, the commanding general who did could alter and tweak things to make them fuzzier to her own people. Without that, they’d play hell getting it done.
The commander of this unit knew where his people and equipment were, but not necessarily where the command of that unit had all her resources; nor was there the need to know. When your responsibilities were narrow, that’s where you focused; unless you were given different orders, that was what you did.
The real trick here, at the end of it all, was to convince the Tejas commanders that they were doing the job they were supposed to do, so none of them would believe otherwise. Like a good close-up magician, if you could misdirect watchers at exactly the right moment, they wouldn’t know what you had done; they would think they had seen something else.
“You think Vim will go for this?”
“I would. So would you.”
Jo nodded. “Yeah, but . . .”
“What we have to hope is that Vim is as good a soldier as we think he is.”
– – – – – –
Every soldier and piece of rolling or flying hardware on the field of battle could theoretically be observed via overflights, except those under the tree canopies, so that’s where Gunny and Wink met to assemble the scooter. The parts had been trucked into the woods inside various transports, and the key element to the plan had been keeping it secret.
The scooter was small, computer-controlled, and had markings that would identify it as belonging to Dycon if anybody was able to examine it closely.
Which, Cutter hoped, wouldn’t happen. It wouldn’t be transmitting, but its receiver had Dycon bounce-back codes, and if some crackerjack communications op managed to get that far, The Line would certainly think it was the opposition’s vehicle.
Vim’s people had to do it; it couldn’t be handed to them. In a war, you trusted your allies, but only so far. You depended on the people who had been with you the longest, who had demonstrated the ability to cover your ass. That’s how Cutter did it.
He hoped that was how Vim thought, too.
– – – – – –
Gunny and Wink bolted and clicked the pieces together, and they wore thinskin gloves to do it. The thing wasn’t supposed to survive, and when it went nova, it wasn’t supposed to leave any big pieces, but you never knew, so no DNA left on it if they could help it.
It took about fifteen minutes, and when they were done, they had a heavily armored, squat, two-wheeled box just over a meter-and-a-half tall, not quite that wide, kept stable with rapidly twirling gyroscopes, and preprogrammed to approach-and-evade. It would resist small-arms fire, small rockets, and regular grenades; anything big enough to knock it out would theoretically need somebody calling it in.
Which, theoretically, wasn’t going to happen. If . . .
If, if, if . . .
The target was the main wellhead where Vim’s troops were ensconced.
They had to see it coming. They had to think they knew what it was, and the window of time and space where that needed to occur was small. If they didn’t, the operation failed.
There was a list of suppositions that needed to be made, and if those didn’t take place, the mission would fail.
Rags had told them if he were in Vim’s boots, he would make certain assumptions, and if Vim didn’t, it failed.
If somebody cranked off an antitank round they weren’t supposed to use, it would fail.
If the sucker got stuck in a rut, the motor crapped out, it was going to be a failure.
If, if, if, and failure-failure-failure . . .
Nothing about any of this was going out on any communications medium. If anybody thought to backtrack the recordings six months down the line and look for connections, nobody in CFI wanted there to be any. Not even a hint.
The base recorders had been shut down whenever they talked about it there, and that had been in fugue and code anyhow.
“Okay, we’re good,” Gunny said. “Let’s crank it up.”
She triggered the starter, and the wheeled robot whirred to life. It ran a self-check, then started rolling.
“Adiós, little din,” she said. “Okay, I need to go places and shoot people.”
“And I guess I need to go back to medical and fix the ones you hit with friendly fire,” Wink said.
“Piss on you.”
“I didn’t cheat, Gunny, you’re just a bad gambler.”
They grinned at each other.
Seventy-seven minutes . . .
TWENTY-NINE
Tracer rounds burned a path over her head as Kay flipped over the low adobe wall for cover. She landed, felt something give under her foot—
Jebati!
She froze.
“Jo, I have a problem here.”
“Go ahead.”
“I’m standing on an AP mine trigger.”
“On my way. Don’t, uh . . . move.”
Kay whickered.
She looked down. Rules for the engagement set the devices to go inert and biodegrade within specified time limits, so they wouldn’t be a danger to someone a few weeks down the line, but it didn’t help her now.
She crouched, working to hold still.
Too hard. Relax.
A bead of sweat rolled down her back. Even she wasn’t faster than this machine.
A large buzzing insect flew by and landed on her leg. She watched it crawling around, searching for something, doing whatever bugs did when they landed. In the moment, the colors of its body seemed vibrant and full of life. Would it be a surprise to the bug if the mine went off? Did it have enough brain to care?
Ahead, one of the enemy popped over the top of the wall.
She didn’t move, but she figured she could raise her weapon and, if he looked this way, shoot without blowing herself up. She brought her carbine up . . .
There was a crack from behind her and the trooper on the wall fell back, shot through the head. She didn’t need to look to know:
Jo Captain had arrived.
Jo moved to where Kay was, her own carbine held ready.
“You aren’t supposed to step on those, didn’t you get the memo?”
A fusillade of small-arms fire zipped overhead; more than a few of the bullets smacked harmlessly into the wall. Could have been worse; the mine could have been on the other side, where the guns were talking.
“I must have misplaced it. I’ll get to it as soon as I can.”
Jo bent down, removed a canister from her belt. Inside, under pressure, was liquid nitrogen, carried for just such occasions.
“Let’s see can we cool things off a little . . .”
– – – – – –
The grenade flew toward Gunny as if it were in slow motion, a high, lazy arc.
All the years of training told her where it was going to land: Too fucking close!
Without thought, her gun appeared in her hand, and she fired—
– – – – – –
As if to punctuate his words, there was an explosion outside, and the walls of the crawler rattled.
“Monitors! Where the fuck are you? Dammit!
“Get us rolling,” Wink said to the driver. “And I’m in the middle of surgery here, don’t hit any bumps—”
– – – – – –
“Go north!” came Gramps’s voice. “North!”
“Tell it to the driver, I’m busy—”
– – – – – –
Cutter stared at the readouts, watching red and green triangles, squares, and circles intersect and change colors as his side met the enemy.
He listened to various channels and snippets of conversation, key phrases tied to the different shapes on the screen:
“South side of Well Two, suppressing fire—”
“Inbound armor coming from the west—”
“I need air support! Got two drones pinning us in the creek bed south of Well Three—”
Cutter punched buttons, redirecting troops and machines. This part still had to be done even though time was running out—
Sixty-eight minutes . . .
– – – – – –
Gunny’s pistol slugs hammered the grenade, one-two-three-four, enough to deflect it. It fell short and to one side, exploded—
—bits of shrapnel blew her way, but not much, and none of it hurt her though something bounced off her shoulder armor.
Where is the shooter—?
There—a blurry outline—a shiftsuit. She toggled her magazine switch to AP, fired twice—
Gotcha!
– – – – – –
“I can slow it down, but the inbuilt heater will compensate pretty quick—we’ll have maybe three-quarters of a second.”
“Ready,” Kay said.
Jo sprayed the liquid nitrogen. Kay felt cold splash up to bathe her foot.
“Three . . . two . . . one—go!”
Kay sprang over the wall—
Jo landed beside her. The wall stopped the blast.
They exchanged glances.
Kay nodded.
Jo nodded back.
No time for more.
Both fems brought their carbines up and began firing—
