Backshot (21 page)

From far down the road a tiny speck was approaching. Ollwelen’s heart leaped. He stepped into the center of the road and waved his arms. Gradually the speck resolved itself into a vehicle. As it neared he saw it was a passenger car, not a farm vehicle. Excellent! He’d get the driver to turn around and take him back to New Granum. He waved his arms furiously and the vehicle came slowly to a stop. A woman was driving. She appeared to be alone. Her hair was blond and cut very short in a masculine style.

“This is an emergency!” Ollwelen shouted, running to the driver’s side. The young woman looked out at him. He was disheveled, covered in dust and his face streaked with perspiration. “Sure looks like it,” she said. Her voice was sweetly melodious.

“I need to get back to the city as quickly as possible, er, Miss,” Ollwelen gasped. He did not see a wedding ring on the woman’s delicate fingers. “If you will turn around and take me back there I’ll make it worth your while, I really will.” He leaned against the frame of the vehicle. Perspiration poured off him.

“Get in,” she said. Gratefully, Ollwelen crossed to the passenger’s side and climbed in. “I can’t thank you enough,” he said, turning to face the driver. She reached across and deftly slit his throat with the tiny surgical blade concealed in the palm of her hand. He gasped and spasmed violently. The big woman leaned across Ollwelen’s spasming body, placed one muscled arm firmly around his head and pulled it back to further expose his throat while with her right hand she worked the blood-slick blade expertly across his throat, making sure both carotids were completely severed. Ollwelen gurgled and thrashed helplessly, his hot blood spurting over the woman’s clothing as air whistled eerily through his severed windpipe. In moments it was all over. The woman’s forearms and the front of her dress were covered in gore. She put one hand to her mouth and licked the blood, then she opened the passenger door and shoved the body out into a ditch. A few kilometers down the road she pulled off onto an access road. She cleaned herself up, with a double handful of moist towelettes, changed clothes, and transferred to her own car after setting the time fuse on an incendiary device she placed in the stolen vehicle. Driving back to New Granum, the windows down, the warm air rushing through the vehicle, elation washed over her. She loved hands-on work. She’d drawn the town-side security team and thought it’d be boring. She wondered how the action team had let that one slip through. Oh well, her gain! Whistling a happy tune, she drove on down the deserted highway.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Command Bunker, the Cabbage Patch, Near Spondu, Union of Margelan, Atlas

Major Principale, commander of the defense garrison, gripped the comm to headquarters in his hand though it had become useless once the tower went down. He gaped at the one-sided fight on his monitors.
Where are they?
he demanded of himself.
How did they get in without being detected?
But he had no answers. He couldn’t see anything on his monitors that hadn’t been visible to the slaughtered troops involved in the brief firefight—except for a few smudges in infrared. But he could tell where all those bits of star-stuff had come from, and they came from where the faint smudges were.

“Towers three, five, seven, nine, eleven,” he ordered into the local comm. “Saturate the ground between Lab Three and the power plant.
Now!
” Those were the only guard towers that had a view of the area between Lab Three and the power plant where the smudges were concentrated—the defensive layout had been designed to defeat a force attacking from outside, not from a force already inside the fence. Five assault guns began to send plunging projectile fire into the ground between the two buildings and immediately beyond them.

Major Principale looked at his layout again and snapped orders to the four bunkers that also had an unimpeded view of the target area. The crews in the bunkers manhandled their guns to the bunker entrances and began firing. One of the four put out grazing fire, no more than a meter above the ground, the others fired high enough that the Marines were easily able to stay low enough to avoid their projectiles.

Defenders, the Cabbage Patch

The Margelan officers and sergeants yelled confused orders to the confused troops of the reaction force from Barracks Two as they spread out to seek cover from the plasma bolts that were burning holes through their ragged ranks.

“First squad, fire toward the Lab One door!” a sergeant bellowed, then collapsed when an instantly cauterized hole appeared in his chest. Three of his six soldiers were hit, two fatally, before they could turn their weapons on the lab door.

A lieutenant stood, jerking his head about in near panic, straining to spot who was firing the bolts of blazing fire that were slaughtering his troops, but he couldn’t see anyone where the bolts seemed to come from! All he could see in the floodlit night-turned-day was the eye-searing afterimages of the plasma bolts—and his own men dropping with holes burned through their bodies or thighs, or with arms or lower legs burned off.

In a rage, the lieutenant screamed out for his men to follow him in a charge into the fire to find the enemy. He led the charge but only half a dozen of his men followed. They lasted long enough to see him fall with half his neck burned away by one blaster bolt, and two others punch bloodless holes through his torso—then they fell as well, killed by the withering fire from seventh and eighth squads. The initial ferocious firefight lasted less than two minutes. Only three of the soldiers from the reaction platoon remained alive and uninjured, and they weren’t killed only because they threw their weapons away and found cover from the Marines’ blasters. Most of their companions were dead; the rest were severely injured, even missing limbs.

“Section leaders report,” Lieutenant Tevedes ordered on the open platoon circuit. The section leaders called for squad leaders’ reports.

The only reports that meant anything were first, seventh, and eighth squads, the only squads that were involved in the firefight.

The lone casualty was Lance Corporal Thalia, who was bleeding where his nose hit the front of his helmet when he collided with the first soldier of the reaction force. The Marines didn’t have time to feel any relief, though; neither did they have time to begin planting the rest of their charges as every tower and bunker that could see it began firing into the area between and around the power plant and Lab Three. Marines

“Move!” Tevedes shouted into the platoon circuit. “Get out of the killing zone!” The section leaders echoed him, the squad leaders also snapped commands to move,
move-move-MOVE
!

“First squad, with me!” Tevedes ordered. He and first squad raced doubled-over due south, straight at a bunker that was firing directly between the power plant and lab. Tevedes wasn’t concerned with the fire coming from the bunker, it was one that was firing too high. First squad sprinted with him. When they reached the side of the barracks the reaction force had come from, Tevedes ordered, “Take that gun out.”

First squad opened fire on the assault gun visible in the bunker’s entrance. The gun let out a long burst as its barrel swiveled skyward, then it fell silent with its crew dead.

“We have to take out the towers that are shooting,” Tevedes gasped into first squad’s circuit.

“Which one do you want first?” Daly asked. He understood that the plunging fire from the towers was more dangerous than the grazing fire from the bunkers. He was already at the corner of the barracks, looking around it to see which was the nearest tower firing into the kill zone.

“Go to the right,” Tevedes ordered. Then he raised Gunny Lytle on the command circuit. Lytle had gone north. Tevedes told him to take a squad and knock out the firing tower farthest to the west, then work his way clockwise.

“Already on it,” Lytle replied.

The
crack-sizzle
of blaster fire broke out to Tevedes’s right as first squad opened up on a firing tower. The tower fell silent.

But Tevedes wasn’t satisfied, he wanted to be positive the tower was out of the fight.

“Let’s knock it down,” he ordered first squad. He fired his blaster at one of the tower’s legs a man’s height above the grounds. The four Marines of first squad concentrated their fire on the same spot. The five blasters fired bolt after bolt into the plasteel leg until it overheated and sagged.

“Next tower,” Tevedes said, and began sprinting toward the now-leaning tower. It crashed to the ground seconds after they passed it. The next tower firing was two hundred meters away when Tevedes stopped first squad. They quickly put it out of action, but didn’t bother toppling it. By then the fire pouring into the killing zone between the power plant and the lab was almost stilled; Gunny Lytle and fifth squad had also knocked out two of the towers firing into it.

But more fire plunged into the complex and arced above the ground as the rest of the towers and bunkers joined in, their crews firing at every shadow and imagined movement.

“Take out that gun,” Tevedes ordered when he and first squad took cover behind a bunker after taking out a third tower. The crew in the bunker had turned their assault gun around and was spraying grazing fire across the compound to the left of the power plant, in an area where some of the Marines were. Then, “Section leaders, report!”

Before Daly could give orders to his men, Lance Corporal Wazzen scooted around the front of the bunker to approach its entrance from the other side—which exposed him to fire from that direction. As soon as he got to the opposite side of the bunker, a randomly fired burst from an assault gun on the east side of the compound pounded into the side of the bunker, shredding him. Daly swore, then crawled around the corner of the bunker and jammed the muzzle of his blaster past the firing assault gun and began firing blindly. Screams followed his first three blasts; he fired a few more, moving the barrel each time, before withdrawing his blaster. Nobody tried shooting through the aperture in the bunker’s front, where it would normally fire from—they knew the bunker’s entrance had to be a staggered tunnel and they wouldn’t be able to hit anybody in it from the front.

Command Bunker

Major Principale compared the locations of the faint infrared smudges with the positions it appeared fire was coming from—they seemed to match one-for-one. He ordered his gun crews to use their infras to locate and fire on the faint smudges. He began directing fire from the guns that couldn’t see the smudges onto those he could see.

Marines

“First squad, one KIA,” Daly reported to Staff Sergeant Suptra, after taking out the bunker. But Suptra didn’t acknowledge.

Neither did Staff Sergeant Bos, the second section leader, respond to Tevedes’s call for the section leaders to report.

“Squad leaders, report!” Tevedes ordered on the squad leaders circuit when neither of the section leaders called in.

“First squad, one KIA,” Daly replied on the same circuit.

“Sergeant Bingh’s down!” a shaky voice said. “The rest of second squad’s pinned down.”

Sergeant Kare reported, “Third squad’s all right.”

Fourth squad didn’t reply.

Gunny Lytle reported for fifth squad, “Fifth squad’s got one KIA, one wounded. We can’t move.”

Sixth, seventh, and eighth squads also had casualties; only eighth squad was pinned down, the other two were able to move.

Tevedes resisted the urge to swear; he didn’t have the time to waste. He needed to turn the fight around.

“Third squad, have you placed your charges?” he asked.

“Not yet. We can’t get to the admin building, but we’re only a few meters from Lab Two,” Kare answered.

“Can you get into Lab Two?”

“I believe so.”

“Get in there and set your charges.”

“Aye aye.”

“Second squad, who’s in charge there?”

“Wehrli, sir. I think.” The squad’s most junior man. Tevedes forced himself to speak calmly. “Lance Corporal, can you see any of the towers without getting shot?”

“I-I think so.”

“Is anybody else in your squad able to fire?”

“I’m n-not sure.”

“Well, find out. If there are at least two of you, I want you to put enough fire on one of the towers to take out its gun crew. Can you do that?”

“Yessir, I can.” Wehrli sounded more confident now that somebody was giving him clear orders.

“Then do it, Marine.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Fourth squad, can anybody in fourth squad hear me?” Tevedes asked on the all-hands circuit. No response.

Back to the squad leaders’ circuit. “Fifth, sixth, and seventh squads. By squads, concentrated fire on towers, take those guns out.” Gunny Lytle and the squad leaders replied, “Will do.”

“Eighth squad, can you see a tower without exposing yourselves too much?”

“Negative,” Sergeant Pudharee said. “We can’t move, at least two guns are concentrating on us.”

“Stand fast, Eight.”

“One more down,” Daly said. While Tevedes was giving orders to the rest of the platoon, he and his remaining men had concentrated their fire on the next tower down the line and silenced it. Tevedes cautiously looked around the corner of the bunker and saw two bodies and the assault gun dangling from it.

“Got one!” Wehrli shouted into the all-hands circuit.

“Got ours,” Sergeant Bajing reported. “Moving to another.” Fifth squad had killed a tower and was moving into position to take out another.

“That makes five for fifth squad,” Gunny Lytle said. The near-deafening racket of assault guns firing into the compound continued, but seemed less than it had been.

“Where’s the gun that hit Wazzen?” Tevedes asked Daly.

“Right . . . there,” Daly said, sending a plasma bolt downrange. The bit of star-stuff plunged into a distant bunker’s entrance, and the gun momentarily stopped firing. When it resumed, its fire was wild. Daly rapid-fired several more bolts, joined by Kindy and Nomonon. Several bolts hit around the bunker entrance, but more went true, and in a moment the gun fell silent. Sergeant Kare suddenly broke in. “Third squad’s charges are set and the squad is clear of the building.”

“All squads, stand clear of Labs One and Two,” Tevedes ordered on the all-hands circuit. He made a silent ten-count, then said, “Fire in the hole!” and set off the charges. The roars of the explosions were muffled by the walls of the buildings, which had been constructed to contain explosions. Still, the walls were old enough that they’d weakened over the years; small clouds of dirt and pulverized plascrete puffed up from them, and cracks raced along the walls. A wall of Lab One bulged out and a corner of Lab Two’s roof collapsed. When the roar of the explosions passed, there was a brief silence in the compound as the shocked defenders stopped shooting. Tevedes snapped an order, and the Marines took advantage of the brief respite to move to new positions.

Command Bunker

“Resume fire!” Major Principale shrieked into his comm when he saw his soldiers had stopped shooting to watch the explosion of the labs. He could tell by the reduced amount of fire from the attackers that they were being hurt by the massive firepower put out by his troops, but whoever those invisible attackers were, they were very good—they were hurting his defenders even worse than they were being hurt, methodically knocking out the towers and bunkers.
Any
reduction in defensive fire could turn the battle in favor of the attackers.

“Watch for their fire!” he shouted. “That will tell you where they are. Kill them!
Kill them!
”

He examined the monitor images carefully; yes, those faint infrared smudges were definitely the attackers; the fire had slackened when he directed his men’s fire, and the dots moved during the lull in the fighting. The movement put a small group along the northern perimeter in a position where a squad from the reaction platoon could come up behind them. He began issuing orders. Later, he could wonder about who these invisible men were.