Intrepid (17 page)

Tires proved to be the limiting factor. None of the axles they recovered could take a tire from a Guard rig. Most of the local rigs had been shot up pretty well, even the spare tires. The final tally came in at eight single-axle carts.

The sun was edging below the horizon about the time both the tangle net started to crack and fall off its victims and the wagons were loaded with as much food, ammunition, and water as they would carry. A squad was delegated to protecting the rest.

Cortez got his command to the north end of the causeway and then set his troops to digging fighting holes to sleep in. Ten freed hostages started their way south. The remaining forty were cuffed sitting up to the wagons they would pull in the morning.

The night guards got a serious talking-to. “If anything moves in your line of fire, kill it.” Grim faced, they took in their orders.

The night was broken regularly by gunfire. Winged and four-legged critters that caught a guard’s attention died without firing a shot in retaliation. Sleep was not all that plentiful, but as dawn came up the next morning, the camp was secure.

27

Kris finally got a chance to talk to Jack around sunset. He risked rigging a tight-beam to the
Wasp
, which immediately passed it along to Kris.

“How’d Short Stop One go?” was Kris’s first question.

“Surprisingly close to plan,” Jack answered happily. “In one wild minute my fifty Marines pretty much took down every truck they had. They’re all afoot now.”

“They get anyone?”

“Winged a private who didn’t get his butt down low enough when Cortez rewarded us with one of the noisiest mad minutes I ever hope to encounter. I thought these broom trees were tough, but they shot several of them up so badly they kind of came sliding down into the mud low and slow. ’Twas sad to see such giants laid low.”

“Just so long as none of us got laid low.”

“As I said, one bun shot. How’s your recruiting job gone?” Jack asked back.

“I’ve got quite a procession spread out around me, say eight hundred locals along. My Marines are busy training them.”

“They any good?”

“We won’t know that until the shooting starts. Speaking of good, what’s your call of the invaders? They up to Marine standards?”

“Don’t let Gunny hear you even thinking that question. From what I saw of them, there’s about a company of heavily armed and armored. I figure them to be nearly as good as ours. Then there are three companies of guys running around in uniforms but no armor. And just a rifle and bayonet. They haven’t impressed me. One walked into the tangle web and let it make them into a bunch of fools. Those that missed the fun with tangle net didn’t duck all that fast when we shot up the trucks. Give Gunny two or three months with your local recruits, and I bet he’d have them in better shape than these white coats.”

“We don’t have two or three months. Gunny and his NCOs are doing everything they can with the locals, but a day or two isn’t two or three months.”

“You getting cold feet?”

“I’m worrying about Short Stop Two.”

The pause wasn’t all that long before Jack came back. “It’s bothering me, too. Looks kind of obvious on the map, and I don’t trust this Colonel Cortez with obvious. Not after what we did to him in the last
obvious
ambush ground.”

Short Stop Two was a neck on the road north where the ridgeline to the west reached almost down to the swamp on the east. Because of the high water table, the gophers and their droppings had been forced to the surface. Someone had dug up the area, leaving behind what looked like shallow trenches. Now overgrown with bushes and young trees, it had looked, from orbit, like a perfect place to set up a second ambush.

Now maybe it didn’t.

Kris gave Jack her present assessment. “He’s going to be looking for us there. If we take up positions in the dug-out area and he deploys to flank us, we’ll be stuck in place. They haven’t shown us any artillery, but even a couple of small mortars could pound that area, and we’d be stuck taking it. These green locals would break and be mowed down as they ran.”

Kris could almost hear Jack nodding along with her as she finished. “So, if we skip that, where do we hit him next?” he asked, as soon as she fell silent.

“Don’t laugh until I get this all out, okay?” Kris said, maybe a bit defensively. “I’ve been collecting goats. Goats and pigs, Jack. I’m thinking of staking them out in the diggings, covering them enough so that Thorpe can’t get a clear visual on them from orbit but can get a heat signature. I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that our Colonel Thorpe and his stalwart hands will look pretty silly after launching a full-scale flanking attack on our barnyard leavings.”

Jack chuckled. “Oh, that
would
be embarrassing. And if we did a little battlefield preparation here and there, he might have a casualty or two to show for his effort.”

“I’d rather not use explosives,” Kris said. She wasn’t ready for the affair to get deadly. Not yet.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got another tangle web. Oh, and some of the farmers I’ve recruited are out digging holes here and there in the sod. Not too wide and not too deep, but if someone isn’t looking and steps in one, they are going to have a sprained ankle or busted leg.

“When Cortez heads north in the morning, I expect he’ll end up with a couple of those to slow him down.

“I’m looking for Short Stop Three,” Kris said. “There are a couple of options. We can talk more when we join up tomorrow.”

“Sleep tight. See you tomorrow. Hard to believe that this time we’re following a plan that’s actually working.”

Kris signed off as well, with Jack’s words still fresh in her ears. A plan that works. Amazing! But further back in her head was an old commander’s warning from OCS. “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.”

This time hers had. So far.

Was that good? Or did it just mean that when everything fell apart, it would be all the bigger mess?

Now Kris had so many volunteers and Marines that she had to spread them out among three homesteads. For most of the day it had taken two or more farms to hide them in whenever Captain Thorpe came over.

Tonight, this dispersion meant that she couldn’t talk to most of her recruits. Their morale and skill set would be a great unknown for her tomorrow. She did not like that.

The good news was that tomorrow morning, Jack and Lieutenant Troy would rejoin her. She’d have her command together for the first time since they dropped.

The bad news was that she’d have them all together, and that would make hiding them all the harder. Well, at least she’d get a good look at them. Thorpe had been very quiet since he first fired his big lasers at the Fronour farmhouse. Now that she was concentrating her troops, would he risk another shot?

New battle, but the same old worries. Kris rolled over, tightened her bedroll around her, and went to sleep. There would be plenty of time for worrying in the morning.

28

Colonel Cortez mopped his brow; his handkerchief came away sopping wet. He glanced at the sky. It was still two or more hours until noon. Good Lord, but this place was hot.

“Man down. Medic!” came the shout from his right flank. For the fifth time this morning, Cortez signaled the column to a halt. Major Zhukov pointed at one of the pull carts and aimed them off the road and to where a clump of psalm singers gathered around one of their own who was baying like a stuck pig.

“Watch your step,” Zhukov ordered. “Bust your leg, and we’ll just leave you.” The hostage pullers went at a slow walk, eyes fixed on the ground. One did a hop and skip that caused the cart to slow. Maybe it was a snare, maybe not. No way to tell.

Major Zhukov turned to Colonel Cortez. “This is not working. We’re just reacting to
them
, sir,” he added.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Cortez snapped. He glanced at his deployment; it was standard. First Company was scattered widely in a van a klick ahead. Second was to his left, across half a klick of recently cut cropland. Third covered his right, spread out halfway to where the stinking swamp lay. . . but never more than a half klick out. The Guard was strung out behind him, with the hostages and handcarts mingled in. Half of the carts now carried a trooper moaning his splinted leg.

Casualties kept adding up for a battle not yet started. Cortez didn’t know much about the Longknife girl, but from what he saw, she was very good at driving good officers crazy.

Cortez squatted in the shadow of a handcart and projected a map of the road ahead of them. Major Zhukov, still standing, edged the toe of his boot in to highlight a section.

“Yeah,” Cortez grunted in agreement. “Yeah, I would probably set up an ambush there, too.”

The photo showed the road twisting around a ridge close to a heavily dug-up area between the road and the swamp. If that batch of ground was as hard as most of this planet’s worked-over ground was, those dugouts were ready-made fighting holes.

The place must have been dug up a while back. New trees, shrubs, and ferns covered the ground pretty well. It would be easy to hide people in those ditches. “I’ll have Thorpe give us thermal images of this area every pass.”

“His thermal images haven’t done us a lot of good so far,” Zhukov pointed out. “No hint as to where that Longknife girl is up north. No nothing about that swamp we got ambushed in. I swear, I could have done better with a blind man’s cane.”

“Maybe he’ll get lucky. Maybe we’ll get lucky,” Cortez said, staring off at the distant trees. And thinking.

Fact, we got ambushed but good. Fact, highly accurate fire. Rapid fire
. But come to think about it, not a lot of automatic fire. No, what had let the air out of his trucks’ tires had been single shots. Rock and roll would have shredded the rubber and put holes all around the trucks’ fenders. It also would have put holes in troops standing nearby.

No excess holes in the trucks. None in the troops.

Very good shooting.

And no thermal heat sources for Thorpe to spot from orbit.

Who could shoot that fast, that straight, and had battle suits that didn’t give off a heat signature?

“God. . .” Cortez started, then noticed the look the wounded psalm singer gave him. For peace in his command he swallowed what he’d intended to say and finished with, “bless.”

“Amen,” the member of the Lord’s Ever Victorious Host appended.

Major Zhukov pursed his lips. “U.S. Marines,” he whispered.

“With thermal battle suits,” Cortez finished.

“Damn,” said the wounded psalm singer.

29

Kris was glad to see Jack’s rig being waved in by her scout troop. They motored up and down the breaks that were the prelude to the hills ahead. At the bottom of many of the low, rolling hills were small streams, fed by the distant mountains. The sun had been up for only an hour, but it was already hot.

Jack reported with a salute and a smile. “Good to see you again, Princess. You’ve got quite a following,” the Marine captain said, taking in the lines of trucks behind her.

Kris returned the salute. “Where are your troops?”

Jack glanced over his shoulder at only three trucks. “I didn’t see much use in bringing them back and forth. They’re out ahead of you, digging holes in the croplands. It’s not going to be a lot of fun walking in their footsteps.”

Kris gave over to her captain any doubts she still had. He might be a short-timer in the Corps, but he’d been a long time looking after her hide.

“Oh, I passed that zoo you sent forward. Lot of unhappy campers. And not just the pigs and goats,” he chuckled.

Kris shook her head. “They’re all just looking for a fight. And not a second’s thought for the butcher bill.”

“The butcher’s bill is never in the vids,” Jack said.

“And if these young fools don’t pay it a bit of mind, they’re going to run when the first penny comes due,” Kris said. Just once she’d like to lead a real command with trained troops.

No, she had done that finally, and they’d all been just as eager for the first shot. But none had run at the first casualty. Marines wouldn’t think of doing that. The locals she had strung out behind her might be another matter entirely.

“The
Wasp
’s about due over the horizon. Let’s see what Drago has to show us,” Kris said, changing the topic.

Captain Drago greeted them cheerfully, as someone might who’d slept in his own bed and eaten in his own wardroom. Kris tried not to grumble; her quarters for the night had been a hayloft in a barn. Her breakfast, a canteen of water and a half loaf of the hard bread they made from the roughly ground grain of the perennial grass they were driving over.

There was a reason she had joined the Navy.

It took Chief Beni a moment to organize his sensor feeds into a coherent picture and download it to Kris. “Colonel Cortez appears to have spent the night at the end of that causeway and is just now moving north.”

Jack ran his fingers over the orbital image. “He’s deploying his light infantry for flankers and a van. His heavy infantry is holding his center with these carts. Looks like he’s using his hostages for mules. And has them in front.”

“You booby-trapping the road?” Kris asked.

“Nope, but plenty of holes around it. Should be rough on the van and the flankers.” An update of the image came through. The picture Nelly projected on the back wall of the truck they rode in wavered and settled down.

“Oh, look at that,” Jack chortled, pointing at the far right of the van troops. “Looks like someone’s down and drawing a crowd. I think we just broke a leg.”

They paused, waiting for the next refresh. It showed the same small clump. . . and a pull cart being rushed down the road to them. The rest of the formations were holding in place.

“Doesn’t look like Colonel Cortez is racing north,” Jack said, with a grin. “We may be slowed digging those holes, but he’ll be stopped every time one of his boys fills one.”

Kris nodded, satisfied that a certain colonel was having a very bad day, then moved her attention farther north.

It was easy to spot the dugouts. Jack’s teams were also easily found, even though they were spread off the road and across a greater depth than Kris had expected.

“I’ve got them in three lines. One’s digging holes. The second is farther down the road selecting where to dig more holes. The third is finishing up on their holes, and getting ready to fall back to another line. With lasers overhead every ninety minutes or so, I can’t make anyone too good a target.”

“You using local homesteads when Thorpe’s overhead?”

“Just spreading out. After that first shoot, Thorpe and Cortez know we’re here. Your volunteers are the unknown.”

Kris nodded. Jack looked like he wanted to say something, but it wasn’t coming out. “You got a problem, Captain?”

Jack gnawed at his lower lip for a second, then glanced at the scores of trucks moving along in rough lines. “You got quite a following here.” Kris nodded. “What have you paid for it?”

“Paid?”

“Hell has no fury like a noncombatant. I remember hearing that someplace. These kids are carrying rifles, but none ever fired a shot at another human being.” Kris wasn’t at all sure where this was going and was rapidly getting tired of waiting.

“Some of my locals are gleefully talking about the coming massacre. They want no surrenders. No quarter given.”

Gunny had reported similar talk among some of his locals. Kris hadn’t heard it. At least not from the clan elders she’d talked to while raising her volunteers. “You’ve explained to them that’s not the way we fight? Slaughtering prisoners is not only stupid, it’s against the laws of war.”

“Yeah, but I’m not sure anyone is listening. They don’t want to go through this again. They figure wiping out this bunch will send a message. Don’t mess with us.”

Kris shook her head. “Don’t they know most of these troops are rented? We set the home folks rioting, screaming about the ‘savages’ out on the Rim, and what started as a cheap little excursion by some get-rich-quick entrepreneurs will turn into a bloody vendetta to retrieve a planet’s lost honor.”

“I know that, and you know that, Kris, but how do we make them know that? I’m assuming you’re trying to maneuver this into a well-managed surrender, with the less blood the better.”

“I admit the thought is rather attractive,” Kris said, glancing over her shoulder. Her truck’s load was half Marines, half locals. The Marines looked grim. The locals’ faces ranged from puzzled to downright unhappy. So, she would have a problem on her hands even before she got to fighting a battle.

One thing at a time.

“I’ve ordered the zoo to take cover every time Thorpe is overhead. I figure they’ll be to the dugouts about noon. One of the locals mentioned that they’ve got a spider kind of thing that really raises a welt on a man when it bites him. It can lead to fever and all kinds of bad stuff. We’ve been collecting them to send along with the zoo.”

“Oh my,” Jack said, through a smile.

“We won’t actually rig explosives, though a settlement we stopped at last night makes fireworks for local use.”

“Fireworks!”

“Yep, firecrackers, rockets, those sorts of things. Battlefields are usually known for being noisy. What do you think the odds are that if we make a field noisy, someone might turn it into a battlefield.”

“Don’t you just hate blue-on-blue casualties,” Jack said, growing a grin. “Thorpe is really going to regret the day he didn’t load his ground pounders back aboard ship and run for a jump point when you wandered into this system.”

“What do you think the chances are that he will do just that?” Kris asked.

Jack took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “That’s not something I’d give you a bet on. Not at any odds.”

“Yeah, that’s what I kind of figured.”