Intrepid (11 page)

16

Kris’s job was a bit more complicated than the Marines riding behind her. She had to put the LAC into a small lake about fifteen klicks north of the Fronours’ latest homestead.

And do it well before Thorpe’s ship came over the horizon.

Also, it would be nice to do it without heating up the LAC so much that it just screamed their location to anyone who might want to laser them from space.

Oh, and there might be radars in at least two of the big river towns. Might be. The radars had, like everything on this planet, not shown themselves. But if Kris was running the show, she’d have put at least a platoon in each of those towns and given them radar and antilander rockets.

Some might consider that nasty of her, but she hadn’t found herself all that much worse than others who’d chosen her profession.

And definitely no worse than Captain William Tacoma Thorpe.

Kris made her initial approach steep, then went into soft S curves to bleed off excess energy. She did all this while keeping the inland mountain range between her LAC and the potentially deadly towns. Their radars stayed silent until the last moment. Just as Kris was finally able to duck into the shadow of the mountains, she got a beep out of the dime-store radar detector that had been taped to the instrument panel.

So, her sonic boom had gotten someone’s attention, at least enough to have them risk their radar. Kris passed the radar information along to Jack. His LAC was farther back and still high. He was also headed for a river closer to those radars.

And his LAC had been modified to carry two antiradiation missiles. The plan called for him to loft them at anything Kris found. It didn’t call for him to say anything to her.

She would just have to bite her nails and wait to find out if this bit of their plan worked, failed, or headed for points unknown.

Battles were just so much fun.

Kris skimmed the mountains, balancing height with speed and hoping she was bleeding off the heat buildup that came with reentry. Her butt told her that her seat was cooler than usual; that was the full extent of her instrumentation.

As she caught a thermal crossing the last mountain range, she spotted her lake and put the LAC into a gentle curve for its inviting blue waters. She set the craft down in a shower of spray, then held it nose high as it skimmed over the water, sending cooling waves off the wings and hull and dissipating the heat over a big chunk of the lake. It had been frustrating to be on the losing end of this game of hide-and-seek. Now, she was a player, and her life depended on giving as little away about her whereabouts as the others had given her.

Kris’s LAC slowed, so she headed it for the beach. This lake had a sandy edge leading to a wide grass-covered vale. A couple of meters from the shoreline, the LAC ground to a halt.

Kris popped the canopy and sat while the senior tech got out, tested the water and the air, then did a heat scan on the LAC. She shook her head. “Even the top side is a full five degrees warmer than the ambient, Lieutenant.”

The LAC was a one-way ride; still Kris would have liked to keep it around. She stepped out, and Sergeant Bruce and a tall woman Marine towed the craft out to chest-high water. Then Bruce slit open one side panel and tipped the craft until it sank.

The tech did a second scan. “This water is a bit warmer than the rest of the lake, but the river it empties into is only a few klicks thataway. With luck, anyone who notices the difference will put it down to sun warming the shallows here.”

By now, the second LAC was drifting up to the beach twenty meters from them. The sergeant in charge of that one took in the situation and immediately began sinking his. The lighter with its large cargo container was a bigger problem.

That one was still hot as it approached the beach. Sergeant Bruce shot a line to it when it went dead in the water a couple of hundred meters short. Some Marines came hand over hand along the line, while others attached their own lines to the main one while collecting on the tail of the lighter.

With that weight aft, the nose rose, the tail sank, water poured into the container, and the whole shebang sank. Five minutes later, all the Marines were ashore and accounted for. . . though some looked muddy and waterlogged.

Gunny pulled up the rear with a small team vanishing all evidence of their passing. Kris put the Marines in single file, posted a pair of mine hunters ahead of her, and led off at a jog for the latest burn north of the Fronour place. The speed heated them up, but their battle suits were intended to make that go away. Heat, whether from the machinery or the human inside, collected in a central reservoir, where it powered up dissipation units called “hoppers” by the troops and something else, which no one recalled, by the suits’ manufacturers.

The idea was for the hoppers to spread the heat over a wide area when they were jettisoned. However, with her Marines in single file to avoid leaving a lot of footsteps, dropping hoppers would more than likely leave a heat arrow pointing right at Kris.

“Hold your hoppers for when we walk through the fire area,” Kris ordered. “Pass it down the line.”

What a battle she was headed into. Orders passed by voice. A map with nothing on it. Did these folks have horses? Was she going to end up riding one into battle?

No. Goats were what they used for terraforming. No way was she or a Marine under her command going to ride a goat.

Assuming she could find Andy’s people. They had to be around here somewhere. Probably close to their farmstead. Not too close. Not too far either. But how to spot them?

Behind Kris, Sergeant Bruce ordered his tech to check the air, then suggested that Kris might want to put them on local consumables. “Don’t know when we’ll need the air we brought.”

Kris passed the order down the line.

And kept right on gnawing at her main problem. How to make contact with people who didn’t much care to say, “Howdy.”

They had gone to ground. But even moles needed air. Air was the one weakness of any subterranean existence.

But before Kris could say, “Hi,” to anyone, she had to survive the next pass from Thorpe’s ship.

This battle was being played out like an old chess game. Kris had made her move. Now she’d better find a place to shelter up and wait out Thorpe’s move.

The line of march took them along the side of the still-burning field. “Fire hoppers to the left,” Kris ordered, reducing her heat signature. Ahead was a field dotted with goats. A couple of evil-looking rams wandered over to inspect these invaders of their domain.

“Are they dangerous?” Sergeant Bruce asked Kris. The wrong person. She called for Andy.

“They can be pests,” he assured them, kicking one that got too close. That one retreated, joining the others a comfortable distance out to crop grass and eye the Marines.

“I think I’ve found the only thing that smells worse than a Marine after a week in the field,” Bruce concluded.

“They spend all year in the field,” Andy said, in defense of his farm stock. If only a very minimal defense.

“This place looks good,” Kris called out to her platoon. “Let’s spread out the netting. It’s nap time, crew.”

She could see lips but did not actually hear anyone say, “Yes, Your Highness.” They were a good team.

Hopefully, they’d be alive five minutes from now.

“They also took out our radar at Bluebird Landing,” Sensors reported.

“Did they pick up anything first?”

“Something coming in from the northwest, but it was masked by mountains for all but a second. Colonel Cortez reports they spotted an incoming pair of missiles and went silent. However it must have been fire-and-forget as well as antiradiation. It went right through the radar emitter.”

“Our investors should have provided something better than that old crap,” Thorpe said with a scowl he was sure to turn toward Mr. Whitebred. The man was back on the bridge though otherwise well behaved.

He was, however, one of those blind optimists among the investors who had been sure they’d be facing nothing but farmers with squirrel rifles. He had the good sense to blush and keep his mouth shut now.

“Well, they wouldn’t be throwing missiles at our radars if they weren’t bringing in troop transports behind them. Sensors, find their landing sites. I’m sure Colonel Cortez and his gravel crunchers would be most happy if we blasted this nosy princess from orbit. Let’s make it happen.”

Two minutes later, with only moments before the
Golden Hind
lost any line of fire at a target in the settlement area, Thorpe was ready to pull his hair out.

“They’ve got to be down there somewhere,” he said, glaring at both his sensors and weapons leads.

“Yes, sir. The problem, as it has been with the farmers, is where?”

“We seem not to have surprised them,” Thorpe said.

“The ones we have captured don’t claim to have been warned. They haven’t seen a ship in nearly a year.”

“Save this for later. I want Longknife now. Her ships just landed. Where?”

“We’ve searched every inch of the settlement. They didn’t land on any of what they call roads. No landing runs on any fields. They could not have landed in the trees. We’d see wrecks all over the place. Could they have jumped and their landers recovered back aboard their ship?” the young man on sensors said helpfully.

“Colonel Cortez reported no such sonic booms,” Weapons interjected. “Booms when they came in. Nothing going out.”

“Let’s stick to the likely, shall we,” Thorpe said. “Longknife likes water landing for her LAC, at least she did when I knew her. What have you got along rivers and lakes?”

“Nothing, sir,” reported Sensors. “Those landers should be hotter than two-dollar pistols. We’ve got nothing on infrared either pulled up on the beach, or floating. Even if they did cool them, we show nothing on visuals. If she landed, the earth has swallowed them up.”

“Like it has the rest of these people,” Thorpe muttered. He was tired of hearing that line.

“There is one thing, sir,” Weapons said.

“What?” Thorpe demanded.

“Well, sir, we know that they have to be carrying a lot of heat from reentry. Nobody, not even a Longknife, can do a reentry and stay calm and cool.” She risked a smile at her own joke.

Thorpe allowed a thin one to encourage her. She, at least, was using her head.

“There are two heat anomalies,” Weapons began.

“Anomalies is right,” Sensors cut in. “Easily explained by natural causes.”

“Two,” Thorpe said.

“As if she had split her forces, sir, one out on the fringe in a lake, the other closer to the center but spread all over. Maybe a strike force and a reserve?”

“You’re setting up a straw enemy to fit nothing but a bit of sun-warmed lake.”

“Where?” Thorpe demanded.

The forward screen was replaced with a map of the settled areas. Weapons highlighted a section of the screen. “This river suddenly warms here, but is cool again five klicks downriver. This lake is snowmelt cool, but down here near the river that empties it, it’s warmer.”

“Less than a tenth of a degree. It could just be sun warming shallow water,” Sensors pointed out.

“Radar says that lake is deep, a hundred meters or more. And it rises quickly at the shore,” Weapons said softly.

“Who owns this homestead?” Thorpe asked.

“Ah, just a moment, sir,” Sensors stuttered. “A Robert Fronour, sir.”

“Isn’t he the original settler of this planet?” Weapons said, her voice rising. “Didn’t that Longknife girl claim to have someone of his family and cargo for him?”

“Yes she did,” Thorpe said, making a snap decision with no doubt that it was the one to make. “Weapons, two targets. The Fronour farmhouse. Target with one eighteen-inch laser. Use the other eighteen-incher to hit the warmest part of that lake. Let’s see if anyone is trying to hide in the bottom mud.”

“I have the target coordinates loaded, sir,” Weapons said. Pushing off from his chair, she flew arrow-straight for her station. She snagged her station chair with one hand and made final adjustments to her firing solution with the other. “We will lose our line of fire in five seconds.”

“Fire on the count of three,” Thorpe ordered. His “One, two, three” was short, but it got the job done.

The lights dimmed as the pulse lasers drew all the power they could into two coherent beams of light and death. Thorpe’s only regret was that he’d have to wait over an hour to find out if he’d finally gotten that spoiled brat.

17

Lasers from orbit are not supposed to be effective weapons against ground troops. Crowbars, rocks, all of those, according to The Book, are an effective way that an orbital force can contribute to issues that are in doubt on the surface below. Assuming, of course, that you can get rocks and crowbars to hit what you want when they’re coming in at twenty-five thousand klicks per hour.

Kris doubted the smart staff weenie who so casually dismissed lasers from orbit had ever taken a good lasing.

Without warning, the main farmhouse, say ten klicks ahead of them, exploded. It just blew up in a hurricane of wind, light, and destruction, throwing flaming pieces of itself in all directions. Most of the outbuildings crumbled in the maelstrom.

The very air around Kris exploded as well. One of the supposed drawbacks of lasers from orbit was their tendency to heat up the air they passed through. This was supposed to cause the lasing beam to lose its tightly wound coherence.

Maybe it wasn’t quite as coherent as when it left Thorpe’s ship, but the house sure didn’t notice the difference. And the air, oh the air around Kris. Some of it roared out from the beam’s path. Other gusts were fighting their way in to fill the hole in the sky. And Kris’s ears got battered by gusts both coming and going. Kris got off easy, she had her visor fully up. The woman beside her had only opened hers a crack. The visor crumbled and left her face streaming blood.

Kris thought the farmhouse was the only target until it began to rain: water, dead fish, mud, and really ugly-looking things with no fins.

“I think they put one shot into the lake. Didn’t you say that they had two eighteen-inch pulse lasers?” Sergeant Bruce asked.

“That’s how the chief called it,” Kris agreed.

“Well then, we know where both of them went. I hope the captain is real grateful to us for absorbing all the attention.”

“Kris,” Nelly said, “Thorpe’s ship is below the horizon. We’ll have eighty-five minutes before he comes back.”

“Let’s put it to good use. On your feet, crew.”

“Can we shoot back next time, Your Highness?” some wag asked.

“You show me a target in range, and it’s all yours,” Kris assured anyone still able to hear.

Kris spent her nap time designing a set of drifter nanos. Folks can hide but they
have
to breathe. Somewhere around here air was being sucked underground and blown back up again. Gently, so as not to leave anything visible from orbit. Kris figured she was closer and should have an easier time of it.

That was before someone zapped one farmhouse, its roaring fire now grabbing all the free oxygen available. Gentle drifting nanos would be sucked right into the flames.

This whole show was turning into a bloody lash-up.

Not for the first time since she’d jumped into Panda space, Kris schooled her face to command neutral, let a breath out in a soft sigh. . . and went looking for Plan B. Or G. Or maybe she was already down to Z.

There was one item on the map Nelly displayed on Kris’s eyeball that intrigued the Navy lieutenant. The controlled burn had been started in three layers, each of them about twenty meters thick. Most of what was still burning was in the far line.

But one broom tree in the first line still showed up brightly on infrared. Why? Kris trotted for it, Sergeant Bruce and his squad not far behind.

The most noticeable thing about a broom tree was its trunk. Solid and round at the bottom, it looked like it would take three or four people holding hands to circle it. The trunk rose thirty to fifty meters straight up. At the top it was about as big around as it was at the bottom. Only there, a wild concoction of branches sprang out. It looked like someone had planted a bush on top of a stone column.

But it was the bottom of the tree that Kris now stared at.

There, a good half meter from the ground, the tree again branched out into a wild tangle of holes, dirt. . . and surprisingly thin roots.

There the fire was still hot. “I guess that’s how you kill a tree that’s as hard as iron,” Kris muttered.

“I have nothing like this in my database,” Nelly said.

Kris edged around the tree, so she was upwind of it from the still-burning settlement. “Nelly, modify some of those nano drifters. Up their power and turn them loose on this tree’s roots. Something is keeping it burning. Is air being blown out from underneath it, or is it being sucked down past it?”

“Doing it, Kris. I have launched two. Damn, I lost one of them to the homestead fire.”

“Nelly, I will not have my computer cussing. Clean up your language. You work for a princess.”

“Yes, ma’am. I am sorry.” And she really sounded it. About as much as a computer could.

“You are picking up bad habits, Nelly. Habits I suspect you are getting from the company you keep. If you want me to let you keep hanging around with Cara, you need to watch yourself. And you might let Cara know that she needs to clean up her act. She is, after all, living next door to a princess these days.”

With luck, Kris might solve one of her problems. If the computer and the twelve-year-old really wanted to stay together, maybe Kris could at least get some leverage in this kid-adult relationship. Little things like pirates and filibusterers aside, Kris had the odd feeling that all the adults on the
Wasp
were outnumbered by one little girl. Oh, and a computer that was forgetting who wore it around her neck.

“Kris, I will be more decorous. And I will teach Cara to be more proper as well. And one of my nanos has found a vent and is diving into it. The airflow is from belowground. Should I send more nanos in? The vent is just a single path, but it may branch at any time.”

Kris was once more back to juggling that which could merely kill her rather than that which really bothered her.

Question for later consideration. Might Nelly be taking lessons from Abby on how to avoid getting talked to?

Kris got down to business.

“Lieutenant Troy, Gunny, I’ve found evidence that folks are underground.” Kris yelled. It felt weird to be shouting her commands for anyone and everyone to hear. Still, it had been good enough for Alexander and Caesar. Why shouldn’t it be good enough for one Princess Kris?

“You want us to form on you?” the LT asked.

“No, stay scattered. I’m just following an air vent right now. Don’t know where it will lead, but I’m betting it will be closer to the house.”

The LT and Gunny began moving the troops, still in scattered formation, but oriented toward the still-burning home.

Now Kris took a good, hard look at the lay of the land before her. It had seemed level. And it certainly was from orbit. But during the walk up from the lake, the land had taken on a rolling character. It wasn’t really hilly, but the bottom of one roll might leave you looking up at the feet of a trooper fifty meters away. And the low points were usually cut deeper a half meter or more by some creek or meandering brook.

Good ambush territory.

It had been a while since Kris lugged a gun over such ground. She gritted her teeth and called up a rarely used part of her tactical training. She should have been more on the ball. She couldn’t afford to be slow at this business.

“Kris, the nanos are branching off,” Nelly reported. “I’ve set up a communication line so they can use a tight, low-power communication beam. I think one of them is doubling back.”

“Where?” Kris snapped.

“It is under that low hillock,” Nelly said, sending a small laser pointer at the rise ahead of Kris. “I think it is coming out the other end.”

“Andy,” Kris shouted. “We may be making contact soon. You might want to be with me when we do.”

With a shout, the young man took off running for Kris. In full battle armor, he kind of lumbered along. But there was no question about his enthusiasm to see someone from home.

From the top of the rise, Kris had a good view of the homestead, now pretty much burned-out but still smoking. Nelly’s light led her down the hill, halfway to the wash below. . . and right to a low rock that might have offered a couple of proud owners a good view of their holdings if they wanted to sit there on a cooling summer evening. Kris suspected she knew why it had not been dug up and lugged away.

“The nano just slipped out a view slot under the rock.” Nelly reported. “There is someone down there on watch.”

Kris considered having the tech folks come over and rip the rock out. She nixed that idea. There’d be the devil’s own time covering that up before Thorpe was back in the sky.

So Kris plopped herself belly down on the ground and stared at the situation from that viewpoint.

Clearly, you don’t dig up the ground directly under a heavy rock. Not unless you have a very hard head. Kris spotted a clump of weeds to the right of the rock and reached over with both hands. In a second, she had worked them aside.

To find herself facing a very freckled, redheaded young man about her own age.

He was clearly startled to find himself face-to-face with her, but not slow to react. He jammed a long-barreled, slug-throwing rifle in her face.

“Slow down, fellow. I’m one of the good guys,” Kris said, less worried about gender issues at the moment. “I’ve got a friend of yours here with me. Andy! Andy, could you come have a word with a very angry redhead who’s got a rifle jammed up my left nostril.”

Andy slid to a stop beside Kris. There wasn’t much space in front of the view, what with Kris kind of unable to make more room for fear of getting another hole in her nose.

“Jamie, that you. Jamie, it’s me, Andy. Are you down there, Jamie?”

“Andy? Are you in cahoots with these bushwhackers? They done captured you?”

“No, Jamie, these aren’t bushwhackers. This is Princess Kris Longknife of Wardhaven, and they’ve come to help us.”

Jamie frowned, nothing even close to conviction on his face. “A Longknife, huh. You know what Grampa says about Longknifes.”

“But this one is on our side.”

“As I heard the stories, they usually were,” Jamie said, but the rifle came out of Kris’s face, so apparently Grampa Ray had not come off all that bad in this family’s stories.”

“Jamie, we need to talk to Pa, and Grampa, too. They okay?”

“Yep, and so are Glenda Sue and Gracie Ann.”

“Gracie Ann?”

“Yep, the cutest little thing on two pudgy legs. You get over to the cool house, and I’ll see that they let you in. Now close this thing back up and quit messing with my lookout.”

The man was gone, crawling backward into the dark. Kris had shivers just thinking about wiggling around in such close quarters. Still, she did her best to put the weeds back and smooth the earth as she got to her feet. The ground cover here was the perennial that seemed to pass for both cover and crop. The grain had recently been harvested, and there was nothing but stubble.

Standing, Kris took a moment to reevaluate her situation. Andy pointed, eager to get on his way, to a low hill about fifty meters from the burned-down house. Cool room. Or cool warehouse. Kris was hardly less eager to be off and find out what wonders lurked in its cool insides.

But there was this matter of a war between her and Thorpe.

“Lieutenant, I’d like two squads to take everyone’s store of hoppers and beat a slightly visible track to the south, say in two groups. Try to make it look like more than just eight troops,” Kris said.

“Distract the orbital sensors from here,” the young lieutenant said.

Kris projected a map of what lay to the south. “But don’t give them any real targets. Five minutes before Thorpe pokes his nose above the horizon, go to ground and get hard to find.”

“I understand, Your Highness. If you don’t mind, I’d like to take this team, ma’am. Once we’re down there, we can set up our watch on the road. Let you know if anything comes up it and do something about anything bite-size and chewy.”

Kris glanced at Gunny. He had a fatherly smile on his face for the young officer, and a quick nod for Kris.

“Set up some tight-beam repeaters along your path so we can keep in touch,” Kris said, and left the youngster to organize his first command. No, second. He’d had half the company dropped in his lap when the last CO nearly bought the farm on a lovely and violent evening back on Eden.

The LT was whistling softly as he went off to do his duty.

Kris turned to Gunny. “It seems there is a magic door to all the glorious treasures under the hill if we but go there,” she said, pointing at the hillock.

“I had a good friend who swore by the little people. Or at them, depending on which way he thought they were leaning,” Gunny said.

“I had a good friend like that, too, once upon a time,” Kris said. “Word is, these people under the hill are our friends. Let’s hope they stay that way. See what you can do about getting our troops in there without leaving anything pointing too blatantly at where we went.” And with that in mind, Kris signaled Andy to lead the way.

Behind her, Gunny went noisily about the business of getting the platoon in single file and having the engineers sweep down their tracks. Kris would have to tell Grampa Ray about this next time she saw him and they were on speaking terms. The Marine engineers were using brush to sweep away the tracks just like Apache warriors of old Earth. It had worked for them in their desperate battle against the odds. What ain’t broke, hardheaded Marines didn’t fix but stole from with pride.

As Kris approached the cool room, she had to smile. At least the door into the hill was a solid, respectable rectangle. That lowered Kris’s expectations for meeting halflings or elves. On the way, she had removed her helmet and gauntlets. It didn’t seem quite friendly to make her first acquaintance with an ally encased in armor.

The first man she saw caused her to double-check that the door wasn’t round. The short, round fellow, with bald pate and white whiskers looked like he’d be right at home in some fantasy epic. If the tall, thin woman beside him had offered Kris an apple, she would not have taken a bite out of it. Instead, the woman eyed Kris as if sizing her up for some cauldron and let her pass.

Kris’s move on down the rabbit hole was brought to a quick halt as, in a flash of gingham skirts, a young woman raced out the door Kris was obviously being directed toward. With wonderfully golden hair and an improbably pale complexion, the young woman easily met the local role of Snow White.