The Desert of Stars (The Human Reach) (25 page)

Hal’s face took a hard set. “That’s
part
of your job,
sir. If it was your whole job we could sit here playing Spades until we’re
relieved. The rest of your job is to harass the enemy, make him change his
operations, and keep laying the groundwork until the cavalry gets here. And
that’s dangerous work, and Kowalski and Pasker knew it. That’s a thinking,
adapting enemy out there, and sometimes they’ll outfox us, Cap. We have to learn
from it, and move on. Taking it out on Patterson or yourself won’t do a damn
bit of good.”

Rand bit his lip. “I should go talk to Patterson.”

“Nah, let me handle it, sir,” Hal said. “You go heavy and
light with her like that and she’ll crack up. I’ll cover for you with a healthy
NCO-to-NCO conversation.”

“Thanks, Hal,” Rand said. “How are you doing?”

The question apparently caught him off-guard, and his eyes
momentarily betrayed a deep, abiding pain. “Been better, sir. I keep dreaming
she’s being tortured, or worse.” He shook his head. “I know there’s not much
reason for the Hans to do anything to her other than throw her in with the rest
of the POWs, but I keep remembering them executing all those prisoners in the Cottonwood
jail during the rescue.”

“Do you want me to send a team to recon the camp, see if
they can see her?”

Aguirre shook his head. “No, sir, they could get caught and
give up our location. I appreciate it, but helping me get a good night’s sleep
isn’t work the risk.”

CSS Xinglong, above Entente

Admiral Pan Gaoli looked over the cost tally as his
flagship transited the wormhole from DG Canum Venaticorum into Beta Comae
Berenices. It was roughly what the simulations predicted for overcoming a
blockaded wormhole: a truly massive expenditure of missiles, with four
breaching cruisers, a light cruiser, a destroyer, two frigates and a support
ship lost.

At least the breaching ships
were heavily automated.
Pan’s fleet could sustain such losses and still
fight; the smaller enemy flotilla guarding the gate could not. The defenders
had suffered eight ships destroyed, including the British flagship
Formidable,
and three more disabled and surrendered. The five survivors, led by the battered
cruiser
Repulse,
were fleeing from the plane of the system, their
ultimate destination uncertain, and, for now, irrelevant
.

War of the mass,
Pan thought. At his order, the fleet
descended toward Entente. A few more Chinese ships – survivors from the earlier
battle, hiding out in orbit of one of Beta Comae Berenices’ outer planets – lit
their candles to join Pan’s flotilla.

It took a day to drop to a bombardment orbit. His ships
bunched up to concentrate their fire for each pass, which would focus first on
New Albion’s surface-to-orbit laser sites. Most of the troop transports would
wait in a higher orbit until the enemy was softened up, although he ordered
three specialized battalions to drop on a minor island state that had thrown in
with the enemy and became an advance base for their sea and air forces. He
tasked a cruiser to provide fire support.

Republic of Tecolote, Entente

General Antonio Vargas died among his beloved artillery
rockets. He was out in the field, in the northern highlands, directing the hunt
for bands of rebels. The concentration of troops he was with was large enough
to attract attention from orbit, and the cruiser
Taizhou
lasered his
position relentlessly. One beam struck an ammunition truck at the center of
Vargas’ encampment, igniting the rocket fuel inside. The fireball, which
consumed General Vargas and many of his troops, was visible for kilometers in
every direction.

Within a week, rebel forces, backed
up by Chinese commandos, approached San José’s outer suburbs. Colonel Samir
Lorenzo Garcia y Abdulaziz was summoned to the capital yet again, this time to
be put in charge of the defenses there. He knew all the dirty tricks of urban
fighting against a technologically superior foe: Sniper teams on the rooftops
and in doorways, proximity bombs, bombs on timers, antipersonnel mines in the
streets. Get indoors when the enemy’s warships were overhead. Kill a few assaulters
here and there, sap their morale, slow them down. He stopped short of ordering
his troops into civilian clothes – that would be unprofessional – but he didn’t
flinch when he saw some of Naima’s personal militia walking the streets in
their blacks.

But while the rebels were still a bit of a disorganized
rabble, the Chinese special forces with them were seasoned veterans of this
sort of fight; their unit had been instrumental in ensuring more than one
African government continued to supply raw materials on terms favorable to the
Chinese. They moved slowly and efficiently, sending drones to scout each street
and suspect building, and bringing armored troopers forward to root out Aziz’s
forces. When something looked too threatening, they stopped their advance, and
waited for the
Taizhou
to pass overhead and burn it.

Aziz had his victories, though. His troops lured an enemy
platoon into a warehouse and then collapsed it on them. One of his RPG teams
managed to kill four Chinese heavy infantrymen before being taken out by a
drone. Of course, the civilians in the middle of this suffered the most, at
least the ones who hadn’t the sense to flee as soon as they saw troops moving
through their neighborhood. As Aziz retreated from one command post to another,
he was surprised to see curled-up bodies in the streets
behind
his
position. Shortly after that, his unit was ambushed in what he thought was a
safe area. He took a bullet to his forearm and was captured.

General Katherine Naima holed up at the interrogation
center as enemy troops moved through the city. She had a faint hope the rebels
didn’t know its location, but Kao Tai, advising the senior colonel in charge of
the Chinese forces, ensured it was assaulted as soon as his troops were in
range. She also insisted it not be bombarded, because it would be a useful
facility in establishing the new regime. When the attack came, her police
fought poorly, and they were quickly overrun.

Naima herself, however, eluded capture. After Kao Tai’s raid
on the center, Naima had a safe room installed, its access disguised as a small
steel service duct plate in the lowest underground level. The room itself was
shielded from cursory scans by various sensors.

When the firing subsided, Naima waited three hours before
emerging and made her way toward the surface. She killed two rebels with her
pistol and fled on foot toward the docks.

Paul Layton and the other State personnel left on a
suborbital flight for New Albion just before the Chinese troops reached the
city. Commander Marc Raleigh and Lindsay Trujillo volunteered to be the last
ones out of the American consulate. They secured seats on a chartered
suborbital and destroyed as much computer data as they could in the meantime.

They split up when Lindsay left for her apartment at the foreigner’s
compound to pick up a few things, and Raleigh made his way directly to the
spaceport. He was swept up in a riot, though, and could not find a way past the
barricades.

Lindsay’s roundabout route, however, allowed her to make it
in time. The security forces had already fled, and the charter was surrounded
by rough men and women with big rifles. She boarded and was surprised to find
Raleigh’s seat empty. She argued with the pilot to wait a little longer, but
when a rebel artillery shell burst within the airport grounds, he took off.

One of Kao Tai’s informants in San José called her and
said General Naima was on that particular suborbital. He was lying; one of his
ex-business partners was on the flight, and he was seeking payback for some
perceived theft.

Kao Tai had her doubts about the contact, but she had no
time to confirm the information, so she contacted
Taizhou.

In orbit,
Taizhou
’s sensor operator noted the launch;
standing orders were not to interfere with evacuating vehicles. But he heard
the communications officer asking for confirmation, and then nodding before
relaying coordinates to the laser officer.

Shortly, the fiery remains of the suborbital crashed into
the ocean.

Commander Raleigh, wearing civilian
clothes, saw the suborbital launch from a few kilometers away and cursed. He
heard faint thunder when it was shot down, but it was too far distant for him
to know what happened. The flow of people was toward the harbor, so he joined
them.
Maybe I can catch a ride with the Brits. I’m not going to spend
another second in a Han prison.

The scene at the docks was chaos. Thousands of people had
crowded here, looking for escape
. HMS Caledonia
had been bombarded at
anchor and sunk in shallow water, the top of its sail still poking above the
surface along the quay. A large freighter had also been sunk further out in the
harbor. Dozens of boats of various sizes – cabin cruisers, fishing trawlers,
yachts – were heading for open sea. As Raleigh watched, a group of people on a
small panga motored up to a large sport fishing boat and shot the people on
board.

And things fall apart,
he thought.

Two jet-powered drones roared low overhead, and something that
sounded like firecrackers burst in a line along the quay. Raleigh heard
screaming, and he was thrown in the water.

His head came up. The quay was aflame, burning so hot that
he had to swim further out into the harbor. He wondered what he would do.

“Damn it, gringo, get over here!” Tippy Griego shouted
from the boat’s wheel. By chance Tippy had recognized Neil’s replacement from
the going-away party among the human flotsam in the water. His wife grabbed the
boat ladder and attached it to the side, and he climbed board.

Tippy wheeled his cabin cruiser around and headed for the
mouth of the harbor. The guy –
Marc, that was his name
– seemed in a
daze, so Tippy talked to him to see if he would engage.

“We’re going to ride out the worst of it at sea,” he said.
“Kind of like a hurricane, I guess. This dinky boat doesn’t have the legs to
reach anywhere else.” He gestured at several large yachts making for the open
ocean. “Not like those aristocrats there, headed to Ardoyne or New Albion.
Anyway, we’ve got enough food to last us a week, and then we’ll head back. New
rulers will need catering, just like the old ones. I just hope I’ll have a
house.”

Another man came topside, with some children. Tippy’s next
door-neighbors.

Raleigh, wrapped in a towel, collected himself. “Thanks,
Mister Griego. Mind if I use your handheld? Mine fell in the drink.”

Four days later, he departed on a submersible sent by the
British submarine
Hibernia,
which met them well away from the coast,
farther, Tippy said, than he had ever taken his boat out.

Irene Sato heard that some ships were picking up refugees
at an undeveloped natural harbor near Tecolote’s extreme southern tip, so she
carjacked a fleeing family from its sedan and headed in that direction.

But the rebels had already set up checkpoints at San José’s
southern exits, and she soon found herself stuck in a traffic jam. She inched
along, hour after hour, until she reached the checkpoint itself. A bored rebel
looked her over and then at his brand-new Chinese handheld. Then he looked back
at her, and back at the handheld, concern growing on his face.

She shot him.

He reeled backward, and she gunned the sedan’s engine and
crashed into the pickup truck that was serving as the roadblock. The truck spun
to one side, and she accelerated her now-damaged car down the highway. She
heard a loud thunk as a bullet penetrated into the sedan’s trunk.

Ten minutes later, two Chinese tilt-turbofan drones caught
up with her. One pulled in front of her, turned, and neatly fired a single .50-caliber
bullet into the engine block. As the car coasted to a halt – even now she
didn’t hit the brakes – she grabbed her handheld, connected to a satellite, and
started entering a message. She knew the Hans probably had an information
blockade in effect, but commerce would require that it eventually end, and her
message would sit in a queue until it was released to reach its recipients.

Entering the encryption password took far longer than
composing the message itself. She hit send just as a Han troop carrier landed
nearby. She entertained the idea of shooting herself in the head, or going out
in a blaze of glory, but, for some reason, she hesitated when she saw Kao Tai
herself get out of the transport.

She was typing in the command to wipe the handheld’s memory
when a Chinese soldier smashed the butt of his rifle through her window and
into her head.

President Lawson Conrad felt a faint
twinge of emotion when Park told him his daughter had been found dead, not far
from the nightclub he had given her on her twenty-first birthday. She had been
shot once, in the back of the head, and dumped into a ditch. Her bodyguards had
vanished.

He also appreciated the efficiency of it. She was a
potential claimant for the presidency if he died, a figurehead for any rebel
movement that wanted to challenge whatever new order that would take his place.
He wondered briefly how her mother, back on Reunion, would take the news.

He quickly dropped that line of thought after the
communications officer with him in the command bunker told him the British were
withdrawing their small group of advisers from the island, and they would not
be sending air support from across the ocean. He was, once again and as always,
on his own. He transmitted the order to his forces to evacuate and head to the
highlands.

But the transmission was the final clue the Chinese
electronic warfare techs needed to locate his bunker’s position, not far from the
government house. A high-altitude bomber drone launched a series of penetrator
warheads at those coordinates, which drilled through metal, stone and earth to
incinerate him and everyone around him.