Hope Renewed (76 page)

“Sir, they report no more than six knots.”

“They’re to withdraw. Detach two destroyers to escort.” And to pick up survivors if they didn’t make it back to Dubuk.

Farr raised his glasses again. “I’d say it was about time we did something about this fort they were building, wouldn’t you, Gridley?” he said calmly.

“Christ yes, Admiral. If they’d got it fully operational . . .” The flagship captain’s voice faded off.

A biplane plunged past the bridge, trailing smoke. It smashed into the water and exploded not far from the bow of a destroyer; the whole thing happened too fast for him to see the national insignia. Dozens more were swarming through the air above the cloud of smoke and shellbursts that marked the surface of the fort, like flies around a piece of meat left in the sun.

Good thing we’re in range of ground-based air support here, Farr thought.

His sons were inland there, where the fighting was—steadily increasing fighting, as the Land forces battered their way through guerilla harassment and started to bring their weight to bear on the Santander blocking elements. His eldest grandson was in one of those wood-and-canvas powered kites . . . if he hadn’t been the one who plunged out of the sky and died just now. Pride came in many flavors; right now it tasted like fear. An old man might not fear for himself, but anyone living still had something hostage to fortune. His family, his country . . .

I think we’d be in a very bad way indeed if it weren’t for John and Jeffrey, he thought. If John hadn’t been born with a clubfoot, or if I hadn’t gotten that posting as naval attaché in Oathtaking . . .

“Carry on,” he said aloud. “Let’s keep them busy. And stand by to fire support missions for the ground forces.”

“I don’t give a living shit how many partisans there are out there, Colonel,” Heinrich Hosten said with quiet venom. His fingers were white on the field telephone. “Ignore them. Ignore your fucking flanks. Hit the Santies, and hit them hard, or by the Oath, you’ll be in the Western Islands dodging blowgun darts from the savages next month, if you’re unlucky enough to be still alive.”

He retuned the handset to its cradle with enormous care, fighting through the rage that clouded his vision. He looked at the pin-studded map and tried to force himself to be objective.
I’m not justified in going to the front. More information is getting through now. I’m in a better position to coordinate from here.

He could hear the Santy naval bombardment from here, though, a continuous rumble to the south. Guns were firing closer than that, medium field pieces; Land batteries, shooting obstacles out of the way in the narrow passages of the hills.

One of his staff handed him the field telephone again, “Sir, you’ll want to hear this yourself.”

He picked it up. “
Ja?
”

Gerta’s voice. He closed his eyes;
nothing
should surprise him today.

“You’ll never guess which old friend of yours I ran into today,” she said. “Ran into literally, but I didn’t quite manage to kill him.”

There were times when he was tempted to believe in malignant spirits.

Kurt Wallers jammed his palms over his ears and opened his mouth. The gun fired again, and the pressure wave battered at him. No point in going back to the command bunker deeper in the rock; the observation stations weren’t operational yet. With those and the calculating machine it would have been possible to direct accurate fire nearly to the southern shore of the Gut. As it was, each tube was firing under independent control—over open sights.

And not doing a bad job.
He hated to think what had happened to the construction people up above; he’d spent a long time training them.
All we have to do is hold out until the reinforcements drive off the landing parties.
Then—

“Sir! Movement on the beach below us!”

He blinked. “Get some extra propellant charges.” They came in fabric containers the size of small garbage cans. “Strap grenades to them. Pull the tabs and roll them over the edge of the casement.
Move.
”

Suddenly the background rumble of naval shellfire exploding on the plateau overhead ceased. Wallers looked up; that took his eyes away from the slit of light where the embrasure mouth pierced the cliff. Something flew in. His head whipped around, and trained reflex threw him down, not quite in time.

Durrison plastered himself to the lip of concrete above the gun embrasures. Every time the long cannon within fired, the concussion threatened to flip him off the ledge, despite the rope sling fastened to pitons driven firmly into the rock above. A couple of his men
had
been flipped, to dangle scrabbling on their ropes until the hands of their squadmates could haul them back. The enemy hadn’t noticed, thank God; the embrasures might be narrow firing slits in comparison to the size of the guns within or the scale of the three-hundred-foot height of the cliffs, but they were still fifteen feet from top to bottom.

The gun fired again. Durrison kept his mouth open to equalize the pressure, but his head still rang as if there were midgets inside with sledgehammers, trying to get out. The rock flexed against his belly; no telling how long the pitons would hold, with that sort of vibration. The wind was building out of the south, with dark clouds along the horizon south of him—perhaps one of the rare summer thunderstorms of the Gut.

Joy. Absolute fucking joy.
At last a man came around
the curve of the rock to his right, clinging like a spider as he made his cautious way.

“Everyone’s in place, sir!” he screamed into Durrison’s deafened ear.

The mountaineer officer nodded and pulled the flare gun out of his belt, pointed it up and out.

Fumpf.
The trail of smoke reached upward.
Pop.

Abruptly, the rolling bombardment from the fleet stopped. One last eight-inch shell ripped its way through the air overhead, and relative silence fell as the continuous thunder of explosions overhead ceased.

That was the signal. A half-dozen men swung their satchel charges out on cords for momentum and then inward, to fly through the openings of the gun embrasures. Durrison freed the submachine gun and clamped his right hand on the pistol grip. His left took the rope that held him by the slipknot and he let his weight fall on it, crouching and bending his knees to his chest with the composition soles of his high-laced mountain boots planted firmly against the rock.

Four.
Five.

Smoke and debris vomited out of the opening below his feet, bits trailing off down the cliff and whipping away in the rising wind. Durrison leaped outward and down with two dozen others—with over a hundred, counting the men at the other gunpits—and swung like a pendulum, straight through the embrasure and into the cave within. It felt exactly like a swing when you were a kid, momentum fighting gravity as you swung upward. His left hand released the rope and hit the quick-release snap of his harness, and now there was nothing holding him back.

He hit the ground rolling, amid chaos and screams. Wounded men were staggering or thrashing on the ground, caught by the blast or the thousands of double-ought buckshot packed into the satchel charges. Those luckier or farther away were turning towards the Santander assault troops.

Durrison shoulder-rolled to one knee. A blond Chosen officer with blood on his face and one arm hanging limp snarled as he brought an automatic around. Durrison’s burst walked across his body from right hip to left shoulder, punching him backward.

“Go! Go!” the Santander officer yelled, diving forward towards the armored doors at the rear of the cavern. Behind him his men advanced through the stunned gun crews. A shotgun loaded with rifled slugs went
thumpthumpthumpthump;
more muzzle flashes lit the gloomy cavern.

“Go! Go!”

Twelve-inch shells went by overhead. Jeffrey Farr huddled behind the stone wall and adjusted the focus screw of the field glasses with his thumb.
Crump. Crump.

This time the huge blossoms of dirt and smoke hid the Land field-gun battery. The ground shook, thudding into his chest and stomach. He grinned and spat saliva the color of the reddish gray dirt as secondary explosions showed in glints of orange fire through the dust cloud raised by the huge naval shells.

“That one was spot-on,” he said. To the men with the portable wireless set behind him: “Tell them to pour it on!”

The man on the bicycle generator pumped harder—batteries big enough to be useful were too heavy for a field set. The operator clicked the keys, and Jeffrey turned to the officer beside him.

“It’s going to be a while before they can advance through that.”

The first salvo whirred by overhead, four shells together, a battleship broadside. The shallow rocky valley ahead of them began to come apart under the hammer of the guns.

“Damned right, General,” the regimental commander said.

“So you’ll have time. Fall back to that ridge a half-mile south of us and do a hasty dig-in; when they advance, call in fire on this position. Next leap backward after that, you’ll be under observation from the water and the cruisers and destroyers can give you immediate support.”

“Will do, General.”

A fighting retreat was one of the most difficult maneuvers to execute, and the weather looked bad. On the other hand, if you had to retreat, it did help to have this much mobile artillery sitting behind you ready to offer aid and comfort.

The air stank of turned earth and the sharp acrid smell of TNT from the bursting charges of the shells. Jeffrey inhaled deeply. After Corona, the Union, the Sierra, it smelled quite pleasant.

“Sir. Message from the Fifth Mountain HQ. Enemy gun positions secured, and preparing to blow in pla—”

The noise that came from the south was loud even by the standards of a very noisy day, complete with battleship broadsides. The plateau above the Land fortress wasn’t visible from here, but the mushroom-shaped cloud that climbed up over the horizon was. He felt the blast twice, once through the soles of his feet, and the second time through the air.

Jeffrey whistled. “Must have had quite a bit of ammunition stored,” he said.

The rearguard commander nodded soberly. “Glad of that,” he said. “Now we can bug out with a clear conscience. We surprised them, but they’re starting to get their heads wired back to their arses. I wouldn’t care to do this withdrawal under air attack and with them pushing hard, particularly if they bring up armor.”

“They’re doing their best. They’d have it here in force if the partisans hadn’t cut the area off.”

There weren’t any bodies floating in the water on the beachhead anymore. They’d had time to police it, and put together the emergency floating jetties. Prisoners were going on board—all Protégés, of course, and not many of them; the fort had been pummeled all too well. You never took Chosen prisoners, not unless they were too badly wounded to suicide. The medics had a field hospital set up, and they were transferring wounded men lashed to stretchers and unconscious with morphine to a landing barge.

That
was the frightening thing. The swell was heavy enough to make the barge rise a good three feet, steel squealing against steel as it rubbed on the pontoons. Further out there were whitecaps, and the southern horizon had disappeared behind thunderheads where lightning flickered like artillery. The barges beached on the shingle were pitching and groaning as the beginning of a rolling surf caught at them.

Oh, shit.
That did not look good. Not good at all. He certainly didn’t envy men trying to climb boarding nets up a ship’s side in this, especially if it got worse. Particularly tired men, exhausted from a hard day’s marching and fighting. Tired men made mistakes.

probability of increased storm activity now approaches unity,
Center said.

How truly good. A pity you couldn’t have predicted it at more than a fifteen percent probability yesterday. He paused in the silent conversation. Plus or minus three percent, of course.

A commander has to take the weather as it comes,
Raj said.
Make it work for you.

and an artificial intelligence, however advanced, cannot predict weather patterns without a network of sensors,
Center said. There was an almost . . . tart overtone to the heavy, ponderous solidity of the mental communication.
there have been neither satellite sensors nor data updates on this planet for 1200 standard years.

Jeffrey snorted, obscurely comforted. Command was lonely, but he had an advantage over most men: two entirely objective and vastly knowledgeable advisors and friends. Three, although John wasn’t nearly as objective.

Thanks,
his foster-brother spoke. Jeffrey had a brief glimpse of a forest of larch and plane trees, and a rocky mountain path.
Meanwhile I’m running for my life. Be seeing you, bro.

“Make it work for you,” Jeffrey murmured, looking at the water. “Easier said than done.”

Among other things, the increasing choppiness was going to degrade the effectiveness of naval gunfire support. Particularly from the lighter vessels . . .

Decision crystallized. “Message to Admiral Farr,” he said. “I’m speeding up the evacuation schedule.”