Undercurrents (31 page)

Even an early 2000s Trueborn crawler could travel cross-country at nearly fifty miles per hour. But it took our crawler pair ten minutes just to rumble across the few hundred yards of open plain between the treeline and the railroad. That was because both the British Mark V and the Iridian Thunderer were designed to be too slow, and in fact were too slow, to outrun the walking infantry that sheltered behind them as they advanced toward enemy machine guns.

By the time our little convoy lumbered alongside the patrol train, our infantry had removed intact rails from the roadbed behind the train, carried them forward on their shoulders, and were spiking them into place in front of the train to replace the rails that Kit had blown.

We didn’t care about leaving a gap in the tracks behind us. In fact, we wanted a gap, to slow down any trainload of Tressens that might pursue us from the south. We were taking our borrowed train not back south, but north, into the heart of Tressen.

Kit’s soldiers had also cut the telegraph cables that ran in the roadbed, which was supposed to preserve for us the element of surprise as against our enemy in Tressen.

We also uprooted ties from the roadbed behind us. These we used to construct ramps, then drove the crawlers up onto the two flatcars. Then we chained our thirty-ton girls into place for the journey north. Finally we tied tarpaulins fashioned from sailcloth over the tanks, in hopes that they would attract less attention when the train rolled past strongpoints and, once we crossed the border into Tressen, villages and towns. Most of that travel would happen during the oncoming night, after moonset, but we needed all the surprise we could get.

The last thing we did was attend to the dead.

The lone Iridian casualty, who had been a widower corporal, we buried back within the wood line in an unmarked grave. Celline said a few words, and there were moist eyes, including hers and mine, though the moment was brief. We didn’t really have the time to spare, but nobody wanted the Tressens to get hold of the body.

The Tressen dead, who numbered ninety-seven, we could have pitched into the shallow fighting holes along the roadbed in which our infantry had hidden. But the Tressens entombed their dead above ground, covered with stones.

It took us two hours that we couldn’t spare, and we could barely scavenge enough rock to veneer each body. But Celline insisted.

When we had finished, Kit, Celline, and I stood on the open back platform of the troop car as the train inched forward. In the locomotive’s cab, an Iridian private who had once worked on the railroad opened the engineer’s throttle.

We looked back across the makeshift grave mounds. Here and there a bit of uniform or even a limb was exposed.

Celline sighed. “It’s unfortunate that we couldn’t have done a more thorough job.”

It seemed to me that a ninety-seven-to-one kill ratio was plenty thorough. But, of course, she was referring to the burial. As the train accelerated toward the Tressen border, I raised my eyebrows. “After what Tressen’s done to Iridia, ma’am? I wouldn’t have blamed you if you pissed on ’em.”

Maybe that was why she was a duchess and I was a soldier.

But twenty-four hours from that moment, Celline, myself, and everybody now aboard that train would be soldiers. Or worm food.

Eighty-five

The first skimmer of the convoy from the Arctic, with Polian in its right front seat, a command pennant flapping from its windscreen, slid to a halt. The hovercraft drifted in front of the first gate that marked a passage through the rows of concertina wire that now surrounded the spaceport.

The gate guard came to attention and saluted. Then he raised the gate bar and waved the convoy through. Two minutes later, the cavorite that would change the balance of power in the human universe came to temporary rest inside the shuttle strip’s hangar.

Gill was waiting for Polian, smiling alongside a small mountain of plasteel cargo containers waiting to be repacked, first with contraband cavorite and then with an assortment of unsuspicious goods.

Polian’s skimmer settled onto the floor of the great dome, and the echoes died as its engine shut down.

After thirty-six hours of being vibrated into jelly, Polian could barely stand. He tried, clinging to the windscreen with his left hand while saluting with his right.

Gill motioned him to remain seated. The older man walked to Polian’s side. “How was the trip?”

Polian shrugged. “Uneventful.”

Gill nodded. “Those are the best kind.” He leaned into the skimmer and looked down at Polian’s ankle. “We’ll see if this shuttle carries a flight surgeon. We need to get that looked at by somebody besides a local physician. And in the meantime, you should go and rest it. You must be shaken to pieces.”

“I thought I’d stay here while the stones are unloaded and repackaged, sir.”

Gill shook his head. “They’re surrounded by a battalion now. And nobody inspects what leaves Tressel, just what arrives. Ruberd, your job is ninety percent done. Take it easy. Do I have to make it an order?”

Polian said, “No, sir, you don’t. And thank you.” But what he thought of was what the interrogator had said before the abortive attempt to torture Born, the killer. A job ninety percent finished was only half done.

It occurred to Polian that the interrogator had probably interrogated dozens of imposters who had been unmasked as Illegals, then executed. No warrant was required to subject any Yavi to interrogation, just like the interrogation that had been conducted on the woman, so long as the crime under investigation was serious. No crime was more serious than unauthorized birth. Technically speaking, Polian was duty-bound to follow up his suspicions about Gill. He had the authority. He had the means. He certainly had reasonable suspicion. It was the right thing to do. After all, Polian’s father had spent his life tracking down suspect Illegals.

Yet the suspect had recently been more a father to Polian than his own had ever been.

As it had during Polian’s long journey back from the Arctic, the profane notion that a man should be judged by what he made of himself, rather than how he had been made, abraded the edge of Polian’s conscience.

Gill’s hand lay on Polian’s shoulder armor. “I’ll take care of things. The downshuttle’s on schedule to land tomorrow, take on cargo, and take off within an hour. I don’t think we’re going to have any trouble.”

Eighty-six

We thundered north in our peculiar Trojan horse of a train all night. Nobody came out and waved at us. But then nobody came out and shot at us, either. Maybe that was because nobody on Tressel had ever seen a horse.

More likely it was because a half hour after dark it began to rain buckets big enough to drown Troy. In these, the good old days of warfare, before Doppler radar and satellites, weather wasn’t a planning element, it was a blind date.

Kit and I stood, swaying, side by side on the troop car’s back platform, clutching the railing in front of us, as rain rumbled off the platform’s steel roof.

A lightning flash lit the rain-slicked sailcloth covering the two tanks on the flatcars behind us. The thunder rumble came two beats later, and another flash cracked down before the first rumble died.

It was eight a.m. Tressia time, though the storm made it look like midnight. The train was two hours away from our objective.

Kit snugged her oilskin jacket around her throat, leaned toward me, and shouted in my ear. “This is great, if it holds!”

I nodded.

Historians of warfare hold that awful weather favors the defender. They hold this even as they write about all the complacent defenders who got creamed when they were attacked under cover of awful weather.

Kit pounded my shoulder and pointed at the sky to our left. A wedge-shaped shadow tipped by winking red navigation lights slid down through the cloud ceiling and was immediately backlit by lightning. The shadow flashed across our path, showed two dots of orange engine exhaust for a blink, then vanished again, in the direction of the landing strip outside Tressia. It left behind a roar nearly as loud as the storm itself.

Kit said, “Shuttle.”

I shouted back, “So when Lockheed says all-weather, they mean all-weather? Maybe they won’t be able to take off with the stones and we can all go home.”

She shook her head. “Landing in this crap is the hard part, not taking off. I’ve gotten one of those old heaps off the ground in worse than this, and the Rand can fly circles around me. ’Course what a pilot can do if she has to and what she will do if she’s prudent are different. Like they say, old pilots, bold pilots. But no old, bold pilots.”

“Game on, then.”

One hour and fifty minutes later our engineer shut the train off. Ten minutes later the train coasted slowly, and as silently as two hundred tons of steel can roll, through the unabated storm and came to rest with just a pinch of brake squeal alongside a house row two hundred yards longer than the train, that blocked us from line of sight from the shuttle strip.

No curious faces appeared at the windows of the houses. No Tressen or Iridian outpost sentries marched the walks in front of the modest homes. The row was deserted.

The weather was good luck. The empty house row was good planning.

From the handle of every door on the row hung a drenched red quarantine ribbon. Our good friend the physician had, at the request of the rebellion and at great personal risk, quarantined and cleared the house row on the grounds that it was a deadly cesspool of influenza. It was even money that he wasn’t lying.

We stripped the tarps off the tanks within three minutes. Then my crew and I clambered aboard tank one while tank two’s crew did the same.

Compared to a modern tank, an old crawler interior’s a regular concert hall. Even a Trueborn-tall type like me can almost stand up in most of it, and the biggest usurper of open space is the engine. It’s bigger than an upright pipe organ and sits smack in the middle of the main compartment, as if the organist were about to take center stage and play a solo.

Starting a hovertank, or even a 2000s vintage crawler, is easier than starting a family four-place. Switch on, push a button, and the turbine sings.

Starting a Mark V or a Thunderer, however, was more like playing chamber music with sledgehammers. My staff sergeant began the process by priming each engine cylinder with local kerosene. Then he and three other crew members stood, grimacing like a row of galley slaves in a synchronized dead-lift contest, rotating a long crank like they were twisting the engine’s tail. As tank commander, I switched the magneto on and off while they cranked, and exhorted them to greater efforts. This division of labor normally continued until the engine finally fired. Sometimes command isn’t such a burden.

After two minutes of unrequited cranking, my staff sergeant shook his head and panted. “ ’S no good in the wet, sir.”

Plan B in case of high humidity involved wrapping a pinch of gun cotton, which was a low-grade explosive, in a kerosene-soaked rag, then lighting the rag with a match. The burning wad was then thrust inside one of the cylinders in the hope that the engine caught before the uniform and hair of the person who did the thrusting burst into flames.

This job fell to the tank commander. We were under way in no time, and I only lost an eyebrow.

I took up my position in an iron box top-center, while my staff sergeant drove from a position in another armored box that stuck up above the tank’s nose. Four of the crew operated the two side cannon and four machine guns while two more worked the gears and engine.

Outward visibility was through slits left at various spots around the tank. On clear days visibility was abysmal. In that day’s driving rain, it was worse.

Once we got both tanks started, off the flatcars, and idling nose to tail alongside the train, I waddled forward, then hand-signaled—they didn’t call it the Thunderer for nothing; interior conversation was impossible when the tank was running—my sergeant that I was going outside for a final meeting with the leader of the infantry platoon that our tank would lead into battle.

Kit and her platoon had formed up behind my idling tank. Celline’s platoon would follow behind tank two.

I pulled Kit by the elbow away from my tank’s bellowing exhaust, then pulled her close and yelled, while rain sheeted down, “Remember, keep it closed up behind us.”

She nodded. “No bad guys on your back, no machine-gun fire on our front.”

“Okay. Let’s do this.” I nodded and turned.

But she caught my arm and spun me back to face her. “After this, don’t look back for me, Parker.”

“I know. I have a job to do.”

“No. Because if you did look back, I might be afraid to do
my
job. Too afraid I’d lose you again.” She grabbed me by the webbing straps that ran from my shoulders to my belt, pulled me close. Then she kissed me as though it was the first and last time, while rain cascaded over us and peals of thunder shook the ground. It sounds erotic, but between the ammunition pouches, first-aid packs, trench knives, and pistols we were each wearing, I couldn’t even tell if she had boobs.

Then she was gone, back to her platoon.

Despite instructions, I watched her walk away. Then I ducked back through one of the tank’s side hatches, in the rear of the left sponson, weaseled past the engine on my right and the six-pounder cannon’s breechblock and its cannoneer on my left, and twisted myself into the commander’s seat.

I peered out through my forward peephole and jerked a cord that I had tied to my seat frame. It ran the ten feet forward that separated me from my driver and was tied around his bicep. He glanced back over his shoulder when he felt the tug. I signaled, and Thunderer One lurched forward into the storm.

Eighty-seven

Polian stood, wearing Tressen battle dress uniform and a belt-holstered needler, in the vast, rolled-back doorway of the shuttle hangar. He stood, one leg angled to accommodate his new walking cast, and stared out past the parked shuttle and into the rain beyond.

Water poured in pencil-thick cascades through a thousand leaks in the hangar’s vast dome roof and wound in ankle-deep rivers across the stone floor. A puddle had formed at the base of the cargo-loading ramp that angled down beneath the great shuttle craft’s upturned tail assembly. The storm was apparently so hard and so general along the continent’s eastern seaboard that it had knocked out the telegraph lines that the Tressens used to communicate with the occupation forces in Iridia, even though those lines ran underground, in the railroad’s roadbed.