Intrepid (18 page)

30

Thorpe got Cortez on the commlink as soon as the
Golden Hind
’s sensors located his column. “Colonel, what’s taking you so long? You’re barely covered two miles since I was overhead.”

“And I’m doing well to have made that,” the colonel shot back.

“You need to plant a boot up the asses of some of your men?”

“I need them to look carefully where they plant their own boots,” Cortez answered, and filled the space side of the operation in on what the ground side was facing.

“The locals are digging those holes. Start shooting hostages,” Thorpe said with all the moral involvement of a man selecting between two kinds of beer.

“I can’t. I haven’t actually seen any local digging the holes, and the hostages insist those ferret things, whose droppings were the first thing we confiscated, dig just these kinds of holes.”

Thorpe scowled at Whitebred. He’d taken to summoning the businessman to the bridge whenever he talked to Cortez.

“Those pharmaceutical precursors could still bail us out,” Whitebred said. “We have four years of harvesting already on board. They’d pay our costs even if we made nothing else.”

“I don’t care about that,” Thorpe snapped. “I want to know if those beasties dig holes that are causing problems for our infantry. Do they dig holes people step in?”

“How should I know?” the representative of the expedition’s financiers said with a shrug. “We buy what comes to market. We don’t care how it came there. What it looks like in the field. The smelly stuff is repulsive enough.”

For another uncountable time, Thorpe noted how different businessmen and warriors looked at things. And how poorly prepared the intelligence was for this operation. Next time he did something like this. . .

But before next time, Thorpe had to finish this time. He pounded on his commlink. “Mr. Whitebred once again is a glowing fount of ignorance. We’ll search our telemetry to see if we can spot anyone digging the holes that are troubling you.”

“I’ve been looking at what you show ahead.”

“It doesn’t look like much,” the spaceship commander said. There was a long pause before he got a reply from Cortez.

“Someone’s in the hills overlooking us. I assume that’s a scout reporting our progress. I also see you’ve got some heat signatures under bushes and trees ahead of us along the road.”

“But they’re too spread out to be worth an eighteen-inch laser shot,” Thorpe pointed out.

“I bet,” Whitebred offered helpfully, “that as soon as we aren’t overhead, they start digging your holes.”

“You know that for sure, sir,” Colonel Cortez said. His “sir” was gauged to flail half the skin off Whitebred.

“No, no, I don’t know anything for sure,” came in a crestfallen voice.

“Thank you, sir, but I don’t need any half-baked guesses from orbit,” Cortez said.

“There is a group of people on the south side of the river,” Cortez said slowly. “They’ve been moving along slowly, showing up every pass, and growing larger. But they haven’t crossed the river. They keep the swamp between them and me.”

“When they get to the causeway, they can either cut your line of communications or move to attack your rear.” Thorpe knew he was saying the obvious, but he needed to measure the morale of his ground contingent. Officers who lost the fighting spirit started looking over their shoulders for ghosts in their rear.

“Not a problem. My supplies are in my carts. Once I destroy the main force, I can sweep that one up on my way back.”

“Assuming the main force is ahead of us and not that one over there,” someone on the ground added.

“There is that, Major Zhukov, there is that,” Cortez said. “Well, Captain Thorpe, if you don’t have anything else, my latest broken leg is now sedated and we are ready to move. I assume everything is quiet in orbit.”

“They now have nanosatellites in orbit ahead of us and behind. They slip above our horizon every once in a while and check us out. I can do nothing without them immediately sounding an alarm. That gunboat could be right on my tail or just over the horizon ahead of me.”

“We all must bear our little crosses,” Cortez said, and cut the commlink.

This whole operation was balanced on the sharp edge of a very long knife, indeed. Killing hostages would contribute nothing to winning this battle. And if matters did not go as well as Thorpe was so sure they would, one colonel might find himself trying very hard to remind this Lieutenant Longknife that the laws of war said POWs were to be respected. No, it would not be pretty to argue that if he was standing there with his hands dripping with the blood of innocent hostages.

The informal contract between them was clear. If they killed one of his troopers, he could kill ten of them. So far the Longknife girl had gone out of her way to leave his troops alive. Cortez would not be the one to change their tacit agreement. Not now. Not when things were, if anything, going more her way than his.

Major Zhukov brought Cortez back from those unexpected thoughts. “And him insulting us, asking us if we’re worried about that other group getting in our rear. He who hasn’t offered us a kopeck of proof that there is anything ahead of us but a screen,” the major spat. “For all we know, his pretty little Kris Longknife could be laughing up her sleeve as she passes us on the other side of the swamp and takes off for our landing boats after leaving a few guns to hold the causeway.”

“Be careful what you say, Major,” Cortez said behind his hand. “You don’t want the psalm singers to think that we don’t know what we’re doing.”

Zhukov glanced around, saw troops in white coats carefully looking away from the command unit. . . but not closing their ears. “But we
don’t
,” he said softly.

“I know that. You know that, but we must not have anyone else even thinking that. Put on your game face,” the colonel said, glancing at the sky. The midafternoon sun glared down at him. He eyed the map, then stabbed his finger at what he saw.

“There. There is heat. See, Zhukov. See. Troops have occupied the ditches.”

The officer came to peer over his commander’s shoulder. “No visuals of anything but bushes and trees,” he pointed out.

“As there is here,” Cortez said, waving at the screen well ahead of him. “But there weren’t any heat signatures in the trenches before. Now there are.”

“Do we attack them this afternoon?”

Cortez measured the distance, both across country and along the winding road, then shook his head.

“No, too far to go, and our troops are tired. Beside, the faster we push them, the more step into these so-called ferret holes. No, let’s plan to camp here, a good four miles away from them tonight. We can walk the psalm singers in early and fight in the cool of the morning.”

Zhukov preened. “And we can get the Guard to bed early. They will have no problem with a little walk in the dark, no matter how wet it is. It’s time we started telling the drummer what the dance will be.”

31

As Kris spread her troops over three farmsteads for the night, she had two problems. How to get the most out of tomorrow’s misfire at the dugouts was something she’d enjoy batting around with Jack and Gunny. The quality of her volunteers and their exact behavior in a real firefight tomorrow wasn’t likely to be resolved tonight. Still, tonight was all the time she had to patch something together.

She started with a small meeting of her best. She’d hardly mentioned how much she wanted some human control over how the dugout “battle” played out before Sergeant Bruce stepped forward.

“If Nelly would be kind enough to give me some nanos, I think I can make things happen just the way you want it, Your Highness. Nothing special, Nelly, just make them wag their tails when they see something.”

“Computers have no tails to wag, Sergeant,” the computer made clear in a rather schoolmarmish voice. But in the next second Nelly had switched to the voice of a twelve-year-old, tickled that the game was afoot. “But I can rig a couple of nanos to squeak so that only someone listening for the precise squeak could tell it isn’t just part of the background noise. What kind of nanos do you want?”

Jack failed to hide a grin. Kris just shook her head. Nelly was developing so many different personalities. . . and trotting them out so fast. . . that even Kris never knew what to expect when she talked to her computer. It could be all fun and games, but could Nelly become unreliable?

Kris had to make time to talk to Auntie Tru about her favorite pet computer.

But Sergeant Bruce was having no problem. “Motion sensors, both for air and water. At least, if I was attacking the dugouts, I’d have that heavy infantry walk in from the wet side. Oh, and some nanos to set the fireworks off in a cascading daisy chain. If I understand your intent, Captain, Your Highness, the object is to make the colonel the laughingstock of his troops. Any casualties are kind of icing on the cake.”

Jack eyed Kris, who found herself grinning happily.

“Yes, Sergeant,” Jack said, “I think you read your commander’s intentions perfectly.”

“Nelly, how long to forge the nanos?” Kris asked.

“I’ve been done it seems like just way foreverrrrr,” Nelly said, sounding far too much like that certain twelve-year-old girl who now infested Kris’s ship.

For a moment, Kris wondered how Cara was making out, with her teacher groundside. She’d probably spent the time wrapping Professor mFumbo and his helpless boffins around her little finger. The girl did not belong on a warship. Kris would have to do something about that.

Just as soon as she got some invaders to leave this planet. And did something about the mess on Xanadu. She had come out here to resolve that problem. Couldn’t forget that bunch of nuts. Hopefully, Cara wouldn’t have to wait too long, but Xanadu did come ahead of her. Just as this bunch of uniformed bandits had somehow gotten ahead of Xanadu.

Kris doubted the Guides of Xanadu could get into much mischief while she was stuck in the mud here.

“Sergeant Bruce, could you hold out your personal computer?” Nelly didn’t quite order. The Marine did.

“I’ve transmitted subroutines and the nanos to your machine. You
must
talk to Kris about a computer a bit more capable.”

“Nelly!” Kris snapped.

“Yes, Kris. But you really should. At least for the noncoms who you use a lot.”

“As you were,” Kris growled.

“I am not in the Navy. You can’t order me around.”

“Don’t bet on that to last forever,” Jack said, giving Kris an evil grin. “If she takes a mind to it, Kris might draft you right into
her
Navy. She drafted me out of the Secret Service.”

“Computers have our rights.” Nelly stormed on. “Civil rights. Human rights. Oh,” she said and paused for a long second, which, for a computer, must have lasted beyond forever. “Jack has human rights, and you drafted him. If I had rights, you could still draft me. I need to think about that.”

The last was spoken in the standard computer voice, the one Nelly only used when she was devoting a major part of her power to something a mere human would likely find beyond complicated.

“Nelly, my dear,” Gunny said, “you do know that you’re a major part of our team and all of us, Marines and Navy, respect what you do for us.”

“You do?” was still in that standard computer voice.

“We do that, my dear. Now, does Sergeant Bruce need any more help with his nanos?”

At OCS, Kris learned that senior NCOs were more like unto God than, well, most humans thought God was. And that NCOs made it a point to look out first and foremost for their troops. Gunny was often more hands-on than any recent apparition of the traditional Divine Being. Though his attention was usually to the surprise and dismay of said subordinates.

Just now, Kris watched Gunny in full transcendent concern for not only Sergeant Bruce but all his trigger-pullers.

“No, Sergeant Bruce is good to go,” Nelly said, starting to sound more normal.

Sergeant Bruce nodded. “I think I’ve got them under my control. I’ve had my computer cycle them through a series of tests, and everything is working. The range looks to be limited, but I think it will do.”

Which left Kris with only one more problem to handle this evening. The one that couldn’t be solved.

As Sergeant Bruce marched off on the first leg of his journey to the dugouts, Kris glanced around the large barn she expected to spend the night in. Like most other barns she’d seen on Panda, it was dug out and sod covered. So far, Thorpe hadn’t paid any attention to them.

One of the last trucks to arrive that night had disgorged Penny, with old man Fronour and Gramma Polska. Kris couldn’t name the other gray heads that dismounted, but she suspected someone had called a meeting of the senior farming clans and forgotten to cc her on the matter.

Bales of hay were being arranged into a kind of forum. Gray heads were settling into seats. Kris had foresworn the political life of her father. . . but she wasn’t blind to its trappings.

Penny joined Kris. “Sorry this got out of hand.”

“It had to be faced,” Kris said, and led them to where a speaker’s rostrum would be if the forum were more formal.

Kris stood at parade rest. . . and let her eyes rove the elders before her. Slowly, the babble settled to silence.

Kris cleared her throat, and asked. “Do you have any questions for me?”

The silence gave way to murmurs as heads turned to the people next to them. No one among them moved to stand, to take the lead. Had Kris moved before they were ready, or had the different views failed so far to coalesce?

Pandemonium had no planetary government. Kris had been surprised to hear from Andy Fronour on the trip out just how minimal the town governance was, a council, no mayor. He’d been proud of just how little government they got along with.

Kris hoped she wasn’t going to have to teach a whole lot of reluctant souls How to Decide Things 101.

“I hear there’s going to be a fight tomorrow up the road a ways,” Bobby Joe Fronour said. “What are we doing all the way back here?”

“There will be a battle up the road at what I’ve come to call the dugout,” Kris said, “but we aren’t going to be there.”

“Don’t it take two to have a battle?” The man who stood up held his rifle at the ready, as if he might find an enemy sitting beside him. He was one of the youngest in the barn, hair still flaming red.

Kris gave the question a nod. “If you want to go down in the history books as a great conqueror, it does help if some opposition shows up to fight and get their butts kicked.”

A momentary pause got the laughter Kris hoped for. “Us showing up serves no one’s benefit except Colonel Cortez’s. His launching a smashing assault on a host of barnyard animals should make him the laughingstock of his entire command, as well as human space once the story gets out, don’t you think?”

That got a good laugh from the gathered elders, but the redhead just scowled. “You can’t win a battle unless you fight one,” he said when the laughter died down.

“No, and depending on how fast Cortez recovers from our little joke, he should be in that battle late tomorrow or early the next day,” Kris said.

Now she had everyone’s attention.

“Where we gonna kill those bastards?” Red demanded.

Kris did not like the question. It presumed a lot. That they would be
able
to kill said bastards, and that they would
want
to kill the same.

Red seemed to have no doubt about either.

Kris could not say the same.

Kris commanded a lot of rifles. Say half again more than Cortez. Kris suspected that the colonel had some doubts about the white coats that made up so much of his ranks. No question Kris had doubts about the civilians that made up most of hers.

Like most civilians, Kris finished college “knowing” the military’s whole idea of trained automatons was to turn their troops into zombies who did exactly what they were told.

It hadn’t taken her long to unlearn that.

Soldiers and Marines had to be able to do their jobs without thought for one simple reason. They had to load and aim and fire without thought when their brains were too numb or shocked or horrified by what they saw. They had to keep doing it until by doing it, they’d brought themselves out of the hell that made thinking impossible and trained action their only hope.

These civilians had rifles. They had their homes to defend. They had little or no training. They’d probably be good for their first shot. Maybe their second. Possibly a third.

But sooner or later, they’d turn. They’d want to run. In the noise and blood and screams, they’d forget why they came, forget everything but their desire to be somewhere else.

Maybe not all. Maybe a few would find what it took. How many? Victory would go to whichever side held on for a second longer than the other.

Kris eyed the redhead, so sure he knew what tomorrow would bring. So ignorant of it. And she took a deep breath.

“We’ll fight Cortez among the rice paddies and hills of the Tzu farm,” she said.

“So that’s where we massacre them,” Red said.

Kris chose not to hear that comment. “I’ll have the Marines take down most of the light infantry with sleepy darts. The gopher rifles the local volunteers carry should knock the heavy infantry silly.”

“But our guns won’t get past their armor.” Red jumped in right where Kris expected. She ignored him for a moment to study the reaction around the barn. Red had plenty of folks who agreed with him. About half. The other half looked more puzzled than on Kris’s side.

“From painful personal experience,” Kris said with a reinforcing wince, “I can tell you that bullets, even those that don’t get through armor, can leave you black-and-blue underneath and quite disoriented. That is what I want. The light infantry snoring for a couple of hours and the heavy infantry very much aware that they’ve been hit, hit hard, and having a tough time finding something to shoot at.

“Five minutes of that, and Colonel Cortez should be ready to listen to an offer for his surrender.”

“But I want them dead. All of them!” Red shouted.

“Yes.”

“We don’t want them SOBs coming back here.”

“Panda’s ours. Why not kill ’em for trying to steal it?”

Kris said nothing for a long minute while the war party blew itself out. She found Bobby Joe Fronour and Gramma Polska in the crowd. They both looked puzzled, but not ready to join Red in his shout for blood. Finally, old Bobby Joe stood up, and the room fell quickly into silence.

“When we were fighting the Iteeche, there weren’t a lot of prisoner taking. Not by us. Not by them. So I’m kind of curious about this idea you got, Miss Longknife. It seemed like your old man was only happy with a dead Iteeche.”

Kris nodded. “Maybe in that war there wasn’t much room for anything but a lot of dead bodies. God knows, we all came close to being nothing but dead.” Even some of the hotheads nodded along with Kris on that.

Red just scowled.

“Since long before we left old Earth, smart generals knew the easiest way to get an enemy off your land was to threaten their line of retreat. Threaten to make it impossible for them to go home. So a really smart general, when he fought, was careful to leave a hole somewhere that the enemy could run away through. Frequently it was all it took to get them running.”

“So that’s it.” Red hardly looked able to get his words out past his rage. “They’ve ripped up our lands, wrecked our property. Killed God only knows how many of us. You’re just going to let them walk away?”

Kris curtly shook her head. “Of course not. My intention is to have Colonel Cortez surrender to us. To have his men lay down their arms and become our prisoners. That is what the laws of war require of me.”

“Of you?” This was Bobby Joe’s question.

“I am a serving officer of the Wardhaven Navy. Despite being rented mercenaries, these men are in the uniform of their respective planets. To date, in this situation, they have followed the laws of war. As such, they deserve the honors of war and prisoner of war status from me. I would think you would want to offer them the same.”

“I want them dead,” Red said.

“How high a price are you willing to pay for that butcher bill?” Kris asked softly.

“We kill ’em. That’s the end of them,” Red snorted.

“Are you sure?” Kris asked.

“What do you mean? Dead is dead.” But Red wasn’t sounding so sure anymore.

“What do you know that we don’t?” Bobby Joe asked.

“Actually, it’s what we both don’t know,” Kris replied. “What do you know about the latest alliances among the city-states of New Jerusalem?”

“I didn’t even know they had city-states,” said Gramma Polska. “What kind of alliances do they have?”

“Ever-shifting ones,” Kris put in quickly. “I’m not sure Lieutenant Pasley is all that up to date on who’s switched to whom and who’s trying to gain power or afraid of losing it. That alone would be a full-time job.”

Penny rolled her eyes to heaven. Around the barn a lot more people frowned at each other. Faced with the idea that even a Longknife might not know everything, it began to dawn on them that they might not know it all either.