Backshot (22 page)

Marines

Lieutenant Tevedes analyzed the situation. The initial fire had been totally wild, until the tower guns began firing into the area between the labs. They had to be firing at the source of the blaster bolts; he doubted the defenders had any ultraviolet capability that would allow them to see the Marines’ locator lights. There had to be a command bunker someplace, from which the defense was being directed. He needed to find and destroy that command bunker. The building tentatively identified as the military headquarters building was to his left—that was the most likely place to have the command bunker. First, though:

“Turn off your here-I-am’s,” he ordered on the all-hands circuit. Just in case the enemy could see them. He holstered his hand-blaster and picked up Wazzen’s blaster and switched to first squad’s circuit.

“First squad, we’re going to the headquarters building and find the command bunker.”

“Wait one,” Daly said. He sighted his blaster and put a bolt through the entrance of the bunker to the left of the one that had killed Wazzen. Kindy and Nomonon saw where he fired and added their bolts to his. That bunker went silent. “That one could have taken us out before we got there,” Daly explained.

“Good thinking,” Tevedes said. “Anyone else shooting at us?”

Daly snorted.
Every
body was shooting at them. But no fire was coming close to them now. When Daly didn’t say anything, Tevedes said, “Let’s do it!” He sprinted to the next bunker. The others went with him.

They pounded the forty meters to the suspected headquarters and lined up left and right of the door.

“We go in hot,” Tevedes ordered. “Right, left, right, left. Ready?
Go!
”

Daly was next to the door on the right. He reached for the handle and twisted, the door swung open. He crashed his shoulder into it, slamming it against the wall as he charged through and wheeled to his right, pointing his blaster where his eyes pointed. Tevedes came next and wheeled to his left, followed by Nomonon and Kindy.

They were in what was obviously a military office. No one was in it, but three doors led out of the room.

“Daly, right door, Kindy, left door, Nomonon, center door,” Tevedes ordered. Daly was at the door on the right before Tevedes finished giving the orders, kicked it open, and dove through it. There was a single room beyond the door, living quarters with a hastily vacated bed. Another door off it was open, showing a lavatory.

“Clear,” Daly reported, followed almost immediately by Kindy’s “clear.” The door on the left was a multiunit lavatory.

“Guard quarters,” Nomonon reported from beyond the center door. “There’s a blast-hatch on the far wall.”

Tevedes briskly strode through the middle door into a long room. Double-deck bunks, most showing signs of recent use, lined the walls; evidently the duty watch rested there rather than returning to their barracks. To the right, against the far wall, was the solid-looking metal door that Nomonon had identified as a blast-hatch. The lieutenant reached the door in a few long steps and examined it both visually and manually. His cheeks pulled his mouth wide in a feral grin, the door had been designed to withstand explosions from outside without being knocked in. The door had a handle, but there was no visible locking mechanism. So if it wasn’t barred on the inside, it should simply swing open into the guard quarters. He turned about and signaled first squad to gather close. They touched helmets for secure communications.

“Turn your here-I-am’s back on,” Tevedes ordered. “That hatch looks like it can just swing open. I’m going to give it a try. If it opens, we go in fast and take out everybody who doesn’t surrender immediately. I go left, Daly right, Nomonon left, Kindy right. Any questions?” No questions. “Let’s do it.”

Tevedes reached the door in a long step and grasped the handle. The door didn’t budge when he pulled, but there was lateral give in the handle. He twisted it right and left, but it didn’t move far in either direction, neither did the hatch move when he pulled while twisting. He pushed on the handle, and smiled when it moved forward. With the handle in as far as it would go, he gave it a clockwise turn and the thirty-centimeter-thick door swung toward him. He pulled on it hard and squeezed through as soon as it was open far enough. Sergeant Daly followed so closely he almost tripped over Tevedes’s heels, and Corporal Nomonon and Sergeant Kindy briefly got jammed together going through the narrow opening. The blast-hatch didn’t open into the command bunker, but onto a landing at the head of a steep, narrow stairwell. Tevedes didn’t hesitate when he got through the door, but went down the stairs three at a time. A landing at the foot of the stairs connected to another, shorter flight of stairs that went left to another landing. More stairs went down left from that landing. There was another blast-hatch at the bottom of those stairs.

Tevedes bounded down. The lower hatch had the same handle mechanism. He bent low, gripped the handle, pushed, turned, and pulled. This lower hatch was neither as thick nor as heavy as the one at the top of the stairs and swung open faster. Tevedes dove through to his left, pointing his blaster where he looked.

Command Bunker

Private Second Class Handquok turned his attention to a blinking alarm light and his blood ran cold.

“Sir!” he croaked. He gasped and tried again. “Major Principale, someone’s in the stairwell!”

Major Principale swore, and scanned the bank of controls in front of him, searching for the switches that would toggle the cameras in the guard quarters and stairwell. Sergeant Oble reached over and unerringly hit the right switches. Three of the monitors in front of Principale flickered as their displays changed from the battle raging outside to the interior of the headquarters. The one showing the guard quarters showed the room was empty—and the blast-hatch at its end open. The view of the upper flight of stairs was likewise empty, but the view of the bottom flight showed a faint smudge of infrared midway down and another at the hatch. On the monitor, the blast-hatch began to open. In one motion, Principale stood, turned to face the blast-hatch, and drew his sidearm. At his side, Oble did the same. They fired through the opening blast-hatch.

Sergeant Daly almost pushed Lieutenant Tevedes out of his way rushing through the hatch into the command center. At the
zing-zing
of fléchettes flying over his back, he dove for the floor and pointed his blaster at the source of the fire. He squeezed off three quick bolts before his eyes focused on the shooters. Both of them fell with holes in their chests.

“Don’t shoot, I surrender!” someone called out from behind a console.

“Show your hands!” Tevedes ordered through his helmet speaker. A pair of hands timidly poked up from behind the console where the voice was. A second pair came up from behind another console.

“I see two pair of hands,” Tevedes said. “Is anybody else in here?”

“J-Just M-Major Principale and S-Sergeant Oble,” the first voice said. “I-I think you killed them.”

While the platoon commander checked the two bodies, Daly checked his men over the squad circuit. Corporal Nomonon was all right, but not Kindy.

“I got hit in the leg,” Sergeant Kindy reported. “The bleeding’s under control, but the leg won’t hold weight.”

“Are the painkillers working?” Daly asked.

“I’m not using them, except for a local. I want to keep my mind clear.” Kindy paused, then added, “My leg’s numb from mid-thigh down.”

“Daly,” Tevedes broke into the squad circuit, “you and Nomonon check for hidden people, just in case our prisoners are lying about how many people are here.” He looked around the command center; it had eight stations. Where were the other four soldiers who should be on duty here? He switched to his external speaker and asked the prisoners, who were now standing with their hands clasped on top of their heads.

“It’s night,” Handquok said, “only Sergeant Oble and I were on duty. Major Principale and Private Braser were upstairs. Nobody else was able to get here from the barracks.”

“Looks like he’s telling the truth, sir,” Daly reported on the squad circuit. The stations were close to each other, there wasn’t much to the room and it had taken little more than a minute for him and Nomonon to search it.

“Secure the prisoner on the right,” Tevedes ordered through his speaker. “You,” he said, stepping up to Handquok and grabbing his shoulder, “show me how to communicate with the towers and bunkers.”

Handquok flinched from Tevedes’s grip, but stammered, “Y-Yessir. O-Over here, s-sir. H-Here, sir,”

he said, holding out a comm he lifted from Major Principale’s console. “P-Press the button on the side to talk. L-Listen here.” He pointed out the earpiece. “It’s hard wired.”

The other soldier yelped in fear when invisible hands grabbed him and pulled him from the console he’d hidden behind and dragged him to the small open area in front of the open blast-hatch, where he was flung to the floor and his hands secured behind his back.

“Just lie there and keep quiet, and you’ll be all right,” the invisible man told him. Private Third Class Braser nodded numbly. Tevedes studied the monitors and displays. “Which ones show the towers and bunkers?” he asked.

“Th-These, sir.” Handquok pointed to a pair of schematics studded with dots. Many of the dots were blinking, about a third of them were dark.

“What do the lights mean?”

“Th-Those are stations we h-have c-communications with, sir. W-We’ve lost the dark ones.”

“Why are the lights blinking?”

“Those stations are f-firing, sir.”

“If they’re steady, then they aren’t firing?”

“Y-Yessir.”

Tevedes nodded. He raised the comm to his helmet speaker, and pressed the button on its side without bothering with the earpiece.

“Attention all stations,” he said. “This is the command bunker. Your commander is dead and the command bunker has been taken. About a third of you have been killed or severely wounded—” he glanced at the time “—in the past ten minutes. Surrender now, or you will all be killed. To show good faith on our part, we will cease fire in one minute.

“Live or die, the decision is yours.” He put the comm down and switched to the squad circuit. “Daly, you heard how to read the boards?”

“Yessir.”

“Good. Take charge here, I’m going topside to call a cease-fire for us.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Then through his external speaker, “You, come here.”

“M-Me?” Handquok squeaked.

“Yes, you. What’s your name?”

“Handquok, sir,” he said as he stumbled toward the commanding voice of the invisible man. “P-Private Second Class Handquok.”

“Turn around and put your hands behind your back,” Daly ordered when the soldier reached him. He quickly secured the soldier’s hands with ties and told him to sit on the floor. “You too,” he told Braser, and lifted him by the collar of his shirt. “Just be calm and you’ll be all right,” he told them, then walked to where he could more easily see the schematics. Upstairs, in the front office, Tevedes toggled on the all-hands circuit. “Now hear this. We have taken the command bunker. I have communicated with the defenders and told them to surrender. Let’s see if they’re going to cooperate. Cease fire. Acknowledge by squads.”

The Marines stopped firing and the squads acknowledged the order, beginning with Daly’s terse,

“One-one, acknowledged.” This time, fourth squad reported as well. Outside, the rattle of the defenders’

guns diminished sharply.

“One-one,” Tevedes said, “what do the boards say?”

“The light for one bunker is still blinking,” Daly reported. “Wait one.” Daly told Nomonon to bring Handquok over. “Where is that bunker?” Daly asked on his external speaker.

“Th-That’s the f-first one north of the main gate.”

“Thanks,” Daly said, then over the radio, “Six, the first bunker north of the main gate is the only one still firing.”

Tevedes tried to imagine where his squads were. “Two-five and two-six, are you in positions to engage the bunker just north of the main gate?” When they reported they could quickly maneuver into position, he said, “Kill it.”

In a moment he heard the multiple
crack-sizzle
of half a dozen blasters, then silence.

“I’m going to order the defenders to leave their weapons and posts and assemble on the drill field,”

Tevedes said into the all-hands, then hurried back to the command bunker to give the order. The Battle of the Cabbage Patch was over.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

On the New Granum Road, Union of Margelan, Atlas

Toward dusk two small, bedraggled figures, obviously a young woman accompanied by a large dog, stepped out of the corn onto the shoulder of the road in front of the three men. Lanners challenged her sharply. “Halt! Identify yourself!”

Lavager laid a restraining hand on Lanners’s arm. “We won’t hurt you,” he told the figure. “We’re glad to see you. We’ve been in a bad fight. We need help. My friend is hurt. Can you help us? What’s your dog’s name?”

“Roland,” the girl answered in a tiny voice. She came close enough to see them clearly and her eyes searched Lavager’s face. “I know who you are!” she said, “You’re—”

“Yes, the same,” Lavager sighed. “We must get to Spondu. Will this road take us there?”

“Yes,” she answered as she sat heavily on the ground and began to cry. “They killed everyone!” She wept.

The three men sat wearily beside the girl. “What’s your name?” Lanners asked.

“Gina—Regina Medina. My father owns . . .” she gestured at the fields on either side of the road, “owned this farm,” she corrected herself, “but they killed him.” Briefly she told them what had happened.

“Bastards!” Lanners cursed. “They murdered the farmer and his help so nobody would spot the ambush or interfere once it was sprung. Sir, this really is beginning to look like a well-planned setup. Gina, was it you who turned on the water?”

“Yes.”

“Is there a farm nearby where we can go for help?” Lavager asked. He felt a sharp hurt in his chest, looking at the orphaned girl who was about the same age as his own daughter. Gina shook her head. “You’re closer to Spondu than to the Yatzaina place. Sir,” she looked up at Lavager, “may I come with you? I-I don’t want to go back to . . . I can be your guide and Roland will warn us if—if they come back.”

Lavager scratched Roland between his ears. He was a big dog, at least fifty kilos, a mixed breed of retriever and something else. “Those men are never going to hurt anyone again, Gina. We’d love to have you come with us, and we can use your help. Once I’ve taken care of some business at Spondu, we’ll send people back to your farm to—” He left the rest of the thought unfinished. It was dark when an overloaded vehicle passed them. It came out of the night without lights of any kind, traveling at very high speed. It was upon them and past before they could react and, had they been in the middle of the road where they’d been just moments before, all four would have been hit. But carrying al-Rashid forced them to take frequent breaks and they were sprawled on the shoulder when it roared by.

“Did you see those fools?” Lavager shouted. “Goddamned idiots! Probably going back to the cornfield to assess the damage. They took their own sweet time! Did you see all those men hanging on?”

“They weren’t from the Yatzaina farm,” Gina volunteered. It was well after dark before they reached the Cabbage Patch. The last kilometer of their way was illuminated by the burning buildings.

The Cabbage Patch, Union of Margelan, Atlas

Second platoon had five Marines killed and eight too badly wounded to walk; thirteen casualties out of thirty-six Marines who entered the Cabbage Patch. That was a horrendous rate—and it didn’t even count minor wounds.

Lieutenant Tevedes put the remnants of second and fourth squads to work setting their charges and second section to gathering their casualties in a collection point for Doc Natron to tend to, while first and third squads oversaw the assembling of the surviving defenders on the drill field. Tevedes checked on the dead and wounded Marines as they were brought in. Most of them were hit during the first minute or two, when the towers and bunkers began firing into the area between the power plant and Lab Three. They were twenty kilometers from their puddle jumpers, there was no way twenty-three of them could carry the severely wounded and the dead that far, not with any speed, and they weren’t going to leave anybody behind. They’d need transportation. He toggled on first squad’s circuit.

“How are the prisoners doing?” he asked when Sergeant Daly answered.

“They’re thoroughly cowed,” Daly answered. “They see the destruction of towers and bunkers, and hear commands from people they can’t see. They’re scared.”

“Are they frightened enough to try anything?”

Daly looked at the gathered prisoners before replying. “I don’t think so. They don’t look like they think we’re about to start killing them. If they did, I’d be concerned. Anyway, we’re securing them as they arrive.”

“Good. Take Nomonon and go to that vehicle building, see if there’s anything we can use to ferry our dead and wounded.”

“On the way,” Daly said.

He and Nomonon trotted to the barnlike vehicle building. He used his HUD to review the maps of the area that he’d stored en route to Atlas, checking on the roads between the Cabbage Patch and where they’d left their puddle jumpers. There weren’t many, they’d need an off-road vehicle to cover the distance. He hoped they wouldn’t need a driver as well. There were five vehicles in the building. One was a standard landcar, probably the facility administrator’s personal vehicle—
Speaking of which
, Daly wondered,
Where are the administrator and the rest of
the civilian staff? Probably hiding out of the line of fire, which is the best place for them to be

—and one was a passenger bus that didn’t look capable of driving cross-country. Of the three lorries, only one looked fit for all-terrain movement. Daly wished it rode on an air cushion instead of wheels, but it looked like it would do. Corporal Nomonon climbed into the driver’s compartment and tried the motor. When it whined to life he checked the dashboard instruments and declared it ready to go. He also determined that he could drive it easily enough. Daly climbed into the cargo compartment to see what it held. Benches lined the sides of the compartment, and there were shelves above. The benches and the shelves together were big enough to hold the casualties and most of the able-bodied. There was enough floor space for the dead and the able who couldn’t fit on the benches. Daly climbed out of the lorry and went to the door of the vehicle barn to report in.

“There’s a lorry in here that will carry all of us,” Daly said when he raised Tevedes. “We also got a present—there are two assault guns mounted in the cargo compartment, one fore and one aft.”

“Let’s hope we don’t need them,” Tevedes replied.

“Me too. But I’m glad to have them.”

“Bring the lorry to the casualty collection point and let’s get them aboard.”

“Roger that.” Daly went back in and climbed into the lorry’s cab. “Find rough spots to drive on,” he told Nomonon, who simply said, “Aye aye,” and started the vehicle. Doc Natron looked up as the lorry trundled to a stop a few meters away. He had the three most seriously wounded in stasis bags.

“We found an ambulance for you, Doc,” Daly said through his speaker, swinging down from the cab. Natron had his chameleon gloves off to work on the wounded, he turned a palm up in a skeptical gesture. “How are that thing’s cushions?” he asked. “Some of these Marines can’t take being bounced around.”

“I figured, that’s why we didn’t come here on the road. It’s a smooth ride.”

Natron looked across the compound toward the vehicle building and shook his head. “That ground’s a lot smoother than anything we’re liable to be on after we leave here,” he said.

“Sorry, Doc, but it’s the only vehicle we found that
can
go cross-country.”

“Then it’ll have to do.” He stood. “Let me take a look at what you’ve got, then give me a hand loading. And take off your gloves so I can see what you’re doing.”

While the corpsman inspected the interior of the lorry, Daly reported to the platoon commander.

“Will it hold our goodies?” Tevedes asked. He’d had a couple Marines collect artifacts from the labs, his hard evidence that the Cabbage Patch was a weapons research center.

“That’s affirmative.”

“How soon will we be ready to go?”

“You’ll have to ask Doc, he’s checking the lorry now.”

“I heard that,” Natron broke in. “Give me two more Marines and I can have the casualties aboard the lorry in ten minutes.”

“You’ve got them,” Tevedes said. He checked with Sergeant Kare, who believed they could leave the prisoners alone without the soldiers realizing they weren’t being guarded and trying to break loose to cause trouble. The lieutenant ordered second squad to help load the casualties. Doc Natron was good to his word and the casualties, including the dead, were loaded within the promised ten minutes.

“Listen up,” Tevedes said on the all-hands circuit, “Mount up on the lorry at the casualty collection point, we’re riding out of here.”

While the platoon was gathering and Sergeant Daly, as the senior uninjured NCO remaining, supervised their boarding the lorry, Tevedes went to the prisoners.

“Listen up,” he said when he reached the assembled prisoners. “Some of us are leaving on that lorry over there in a few minutes. The rest of us will walk out when the lorry’s far enough away. Don’t bother talking to us, we don’t want to hear anything you have to say.

“Sooner or later, some of your people will show up and free you. When that happens, send someone up the hillside to the east, one of your civilians is up there alone. He’s trussed up more securely than you are, he’ll need help getting free.

“I’m sorry for your casualties, we would have preferred to get in, do what we had to do, and get out without a fight, but it didn’t work out that way.

“Don’t worry about the explosions you’ll hear in a minute or so, that’ll be the last of what we came here to do, there won’t be any more.” With that, he turned and walked away.

“Report,” Tevedes said on the command circuit as he headed for the lorry.

“All hands present and ready to go,” Daly replied immediately.

“Stand by for the final boom.” Tevedes waited until he was at the lorry before transmitting the signal that set off the explosions laid by second and fourth squads. Mission accomplished, but at a high price. Tevedes pulled himself into the cab and settled next to Daly, who moved to the center of the bench seat.

“Take the road a few klicks southwest, then turn east,” he told Nomonon, who was still driving.

“Aye aye, sir,” Nomonon replied with a question in his inflection.

“The prisoners will hear the direction we’re going,” Tevedes explained. “This is misdirection, I don’t want anybody to start searching for us to the east right away. Besides, I told the prisoners only some of us were leaving now, and the rest would guard them for a while longer before heading out on foot.”

Daly snorted a laugh. “The funny part is, they probably believed you.”

“I hope they did.” The lieutenant then twisted around to look into the cargo compartment. “Doc, how’re they doing?”

“As well as can be expected under the circumstances,” Natron answered. “They’ll all live until we get them back to the
Admiral Nelson
.”

The five dead lay under the benches, only two of them were in bodybags, he could see the other three by the bloodstains that wandered across their chameleons. The three stasis bags were on the shelves above the benches; the corpsman thought it would be too morbid to lay the most severely wounded next to the dead. Tevedes saw the other wounded the same way he saw the unbagged dead, by the blood on their chameleons. Two of them, one laying on a bench and the other on a shelf, showed enough blood that Tevedes suspected they should be in stasis bags. But they’d been too optimistic and had only brought three. He remembered ruefully that he had thought the two bodybags they’d brought was a pessimistic number.

He turned back to watch where they were going. They barely noticed the four people sitting on the side of the road as they sped past in the dark before dawn.

Cross-country, a Few Kilometers East-Northeast of the Cabbage Patch

Lieutenant Tevedes kept an eye on the time as the lorry trundled cross-country after leaving the highway. He hoped the rain that had started a short time earlier would wash away the lorry’s tracks. He wanted to stop and send his reports to the
Admiral Nelson
as soon as they were a safe distance from traffic and the navy starship was visible above the horizon. Ten kilometers east of the highway and a few north of the Cabbage Patch, he saw a modestly tall tree on top of a moderately high hill and directed Nomonon to draw close to it and stop. The lorry would be exposed to any possible overflights for a few minutes, but no aircraft were visible in the sky in visual or infrared, so the danger was slight. He got out and recorded two messages.

One message reported mission success, casualties, and how they were returning to where they’d left their puddle jumpers.

The other was the go code to be forwarded to the sniper team in New Granum. When the messages were ready, he coded them to a burst transmission and climbed the tree. He saw Kraken Interstellar as a bright dot halfway up the western sky. He aimed his point-transceiver at the proper distance behind the station and activated it to zero in and lock on to the
Admiral Nelson
. When it beeped to say it had a lock, he pressed the transmit button.