The Fleet Book 2: Counter Attack (28 page)

Nobody so much as breathed in the APC’s bay. Every one of English’s men was clamshelled and helmeted and locked and loaded. The dropmaster had his checklist in hand, but wasn’t checking anything. The first sergeant was ready to hand out plasma launchers and smart shoulder-borne missile tubes, but he wasn’t moving either.

Everybody watched his chronometer; the recon-helmeted dozen had their faceshields down, monitoring the transport’s progress in the same way English was doing.

If you lived with this gear long enough, you learned how to use it to its fullest advantage. English was seeing everything the pilot up front was seeing, and a split view of what the photo returns were picking up: close-in shots of the spaceport below.

No photo could tell you if the guns were real or cardboard or papier-mâché, though. Signature-seekers would have alerted countermeasures in the port area, the way tickling a weasel’s whiskers would wake him up.

So they didn’t do that. They snuck over the port in their glide pattern and acquired their hilltop DZ on scope.

English was about to warn his non-recon soldiers to hold tight when the dropmaster beat him to it, punching up the drop light. The guts of the sixty-place APC flared red, and the heads of fifty-two men turned toward the dropmaster, the single eyes of their helmets noncommittal.

There was a wrenching, silent moment of free-fall as the transport dropped the Ninety-Second’s APC, and the quiet was shattered.

The red light went off; the burners, then afterburners fired as attitude stabilizers kicked in, then out, then in again. Men could talk if they wished without worrying about blowing everything with some errant sound wave that got caught in a standard scan, because now the APC was alive and its own countermeasures powered up.

Veterans of countless drops sat still, making desultory webbing checks; newer marines unbuckled their harnesses and staggered over to the dropmaster to get their heavy weaponry and put their helmets together for private comments.

English stayed where he was, fiddling with his hand-held command scanner. In it were loaded the beacon codes to summon the o.t.s. support he’d been promised. He hadn’t integrated his gloves into his suit system yet, because he hadn’t automated the beacon yet. Because he wasn’t sure if he needed to do that.

But when the dropmaster signaled him that he had one minute to go, he ran up the sequence and enabled it. He couldn’t start worrying about somebody else’s soldiers. He had to take care of his own.

Landfall was harder than it ought to have been, and the jar of it nearly knocked the scanner from his hand. He didn’t need it swinging from its strap, enabled as hell, initiating any damn message it happened to bang out against his ceramic armor.

He safed it and swore into his open com channel, which brought his boys on line.

Insect-eyed heads turned again and he said, on his heavily shielded channel: “Don’t shoot the first thing that moves out there; we’ve got human agents coming through with milk and cookies.”

Somebody sighed like he was relieved; English’s display showed him it was Tamarack, the first sergeant. “Don’t fraternize with ’em, neither. And don’t trust your back to anybody who ain’t got a unit patch. Can’t tell what kind of pressure these agents are under.”

Then the dropmaster took over, readying the queue and slapping the bay door’s servo. Through the widening portal, English got his first sight of Bethesda, green in his nightscope.

Green as Eire and in full flower of summer. It was going to be a shame to cook-off the spaceport. All these pretty trees . . . He’d issued everybody with breathing equipment, and anti-radiation armor to boot. He said, “I know it smells good, and it’s pretty, but breathe through what you brought. Something goes wrong, you don’t have the two point one seconds it takes to engage that gear from a cold start.”

There were groans at that, but nobody flat refused. The only thing you got on the ground that you couldn’t get in space was fresh air and fast action. The Ninety-Second was going to have to settle for the action, this time out.

And out they went, past the drop master whose gloved hand was raised to English in an eloquent gesture, and whose com channel sputtered: “Get back on the mark, Lieutenant. I got strict orders.”

“So do I,” English answered, and neither of them wanted to explore the matter further.

The dropmaster closed the APC tight as a clam when everybody was out, and all the shoulder launchers and explosive ordnance off-loaded. Then English ordered the visual cammo-netting spread over the APC. When that was done, and the company moved away from the no-see-em APC, the dropmaster engaged its countermeasures. English could hear the hum right through his com helmet and his breathing gear, as if the vibration had come up through the soles of his feet.

He was about to give his sergeant an order to move the unit out along the preplot on his scanner, when he saw a movement in the bushes. And then another.

“We’ve got company,” he said on his open channel, and men brought up weapons as they scuttled for position or dived for cover, all as neat as a training exercise.

English had his scanner to deal with, and his helmet locked on to the targets he’d acquired, those in the bushes. He had three red blips and he was sending six of his recon specialists after those blips when one blip made a beeline for him.

Pitch-black night, so there was no use going to visual, but he dialed up his starlight intensifier and was able to ascertain the humanity of the blip approaching. Weasels weren’t that big, or that stupid.

“Unless you don’t wanta meet and treat, I’d like recon to give this fool an escort,” crackled Sawyer’s voice In his helmet.

“I’m in no hurry here, go ahead,” English told the recon sergeant. “And disarm all of them, if you please, Sawyer,” said English in his laconic command style.

Never hurt to let the boys know how they ought to be feeling.

Except English wasn’t sure how he was feeling about meeting three strange humans too close to his only ride off-planet, in the middle of the night in hostile territory.

In reality, he only met one.

As the moving blip slowed in the face of two marines, and the recon boys bore down on the other two blips in the bush, both the straggling targets bolted in opposite directions. English said, “Hold the one let the others go. Close ranks,” and left the rest to his sergeants.

When the prisoner was brought before him, both the additional blips were still hovering at the edges of his visorscope. He said into his com channel, “Proceed to Bush One,” to get his company moving and away from the APC
before he really looked at the body his recon helmet still insisted on treating as-a blip.

The human hadn’t said a word until now. It was dirty, ragged, and wild-eyed in the green tones of his helmet nightscope. And it was female.

He motioned to the periphery, while the men moved by with their machine guns and their RPGs and their plasma weapons, and said, “You’re coming with us. If your friends don’t come in or disappear, I’m going to take them out. You’ve got sixty seconds.”

He raised his gloved wrist and looked at the chronograph there steadily. His voice, coming through his helmet’s speaker grille, had been pretty much stripped of inflection.

The woman didn’t panic, or shout to her companions, or even argue. One of the recon group stepped forward and held out hardware: “Her weapons.”

A knife. A fifteen-round pistol, badly worn; two clips for it in a magnetic belt rig. A nasty little fragmentation grenade. Primitive stuff. He was beginning to wonder if perhaps she and her two companions weren’t simply a piece of walking bad luck, and not his contact at all, when she said, “Weasel tails are soft and so are these locals.”

That was the recognition phrase that Manning had come by to give him, with a sour look on her face, just before he’d de-shipped into the transport.

So he said, “Not as soft as a woman,” which was the rest of the call-and-answer. Then he added, “What about your friends?”

“They’ll tag along. They’re indig; they don’t need to know much about this.” So he told his boys not to shoot the outriders. Yet.

The woman was one of the materiel specialists who’d been dropped here six months ago, then. He had an impulse to take off his helmet, but he resisted. You wanted to give these people something to hold onto. She was brave, living down here waiting for someone like him. And foolish, because he wasn’t going to give her what she most wanted—a way out.

“I need your report. Fast.” He hauled out his scanner and punched up its transcribe mode. “Shoot.”

“Your Bush One route is too dangerous.” She spat coordinates like a tactical officer. “You go that way, and you can come into the spaceport from the big ship side. They moved their toys around last month. We’re a little bit hot, so I don’t want you doing much with the group.”

“A little bit hot?” English moved instinctively away from her, but the two big men just behind her elbows stayed close. The company was still moving toward Bush One. He didn’t change their orders. He wasn’t sure yet that he was going to. A code phrase didn’t make this woman trustworthy, or even prove she was the woman he was supposed to meet. There were human collaborators all over the occupied worlds, and the weasels were consummate interrogators.

“Hot—two cells have been destroyed, some of our people may have been captured. We’re using counterinsurgency rules, so no cell knew the whole picture, but I don’t know what may have leaked. Or who may have been compromised.”

“You don’t trust the people you brought? Why’d you bring them?”

“Look . . . you sound angry. That helmet’s making it hard for me to talk to you. I’ve been waiting a long time. I could use a bit of eye contact, maybe a little positive reinforcement. I’m Milius, and I really want to be glad to see you, Ninety-Second.”

“English. Sorry, I gave them orders for full kit—” He slapped his toggles and hit his shunt button, so that his helmet’s data would come up on his scanner. Then he shut down his recon camera and put his breathing gear on hold and took off his helmet altogether. Holding it under his arm, he said: “Satisfied? Human as the next guy. Now, what’s this about you not trusting your agents?”

“Field officer’s responsibility. Handler’s blues. They’re good enough, these. Committed. We can offer you better basing than Bush One, if you’re brave enough to take it.”

“This looks like a quilting bee to you?”

“I mean, in houses, with the locals. The weasels are sweeping for transients tonight. They do it every third night. Somehow your drop got scheduled for the wrong—”

“I get you. I’ve only got twenty-eight hours to do this job, lady. You think you can simplify it, I’ll bite. But if it looks funny to us, or it smells funny, all your in indigs are dead in the water.”

“Understood,” said Milius, and he thought she smiled in the dark.

He lifted his helmet, hesitated, and said apologetically, “You’ll have to bear with me. I need my com system. When we get where we’re going, you and I can go off for a quiet talk. Unless there’s something urgent?”

“Not beyond keeping from walking into a weasel patrol at Bush One, there isn’t.”

“Yeah, thanks,” he said absently, reinstating all his connectors as he settled his helmet once again over his head. If anyone had overheard them, beyond the electronic ears of the scanner, it would be only the two recon boys right behind Milius.

He began disseminating the coordinates she’d given, and finally said, “Tamarack, you can call your own shots once we get to this village. Anything funny, shoot ‘em all and set delayed det charges with electro overrides. If this is any kind of trap, I want it to cost them. And Sergeant Tamarack, get with Dropmaster and tell him what’s up. He might want to keep his finger on the burn button.”

“Affirmative. Recon’s flanking those two blips, still.”

“Agents, so the contact says. Whose, we’ll see—supposed to be ours. Tell Sawyer to stay on them, though. Now you know everything I do. Make your own calls, Tam, if it gets to it.”

“Yessir. I’ll tell APC it’s a no-say-again situation, if you concur.”

“Yeah, you better.” Because it was, even though putting the APC on its own recognizance was the last thing English wanted to do. From here on out, it went perfectly, or nobody went home. Which, he consoled himself, was the general nature of his business, o.t.s. agents or no o.t.s. agents.

When he got to the “village” that Milius and her outrider friends called home, he wished he hadn’t made contact.

The huts were poor, small, and stinking, with dirt floors and shuttered windows. Even through his starlight intensifier, the poverty was painfully sharp-edged. There were sick or wounded humans in every hut, and there wasn’t a single hut big enough for the whole company.

It kept feeling more and more like a trap to him, but if the woman called Milius was right—and there were going to be weasel sweeps and anybody found out during curfew shot on sight—he didn’t have much choice.

He put five men in a hut and tried to spread the group so that each hut had a plasma weapon, a shoulder launcher, a machine gun and a recon-ready specialist. That left him by his lonesome, in the woman’s own hut.

Sergeant Tamarack didn’t like that one bit, but everybody stayed com-ready, and they set motion detectors disguised as rocks with photo-return around the village’s perimeter. So it wasn’t that bad. It just felt bad.

The hut Milius called home had an old woman in it who was shot to shit and half-crazy. She kept talking to a spot on the wall she thought was some relative, and now and then she’d moan with pain or call Milius, who ignored her. Next to the woman, on another pile of ragged blankets, was a kid with a blown-off leg who was obviously dying of gangrene. The smell was enough to insure that English kept his helmet on, except when the woman insisted that he have a drink with her.

The drink was a watery tea, and he watched her prepare it, and then took her cup after she’d taken a swallow. No use in not being careful. He kept his back against the tied branches of the hut’s wall, but it didn’t make him feel any safer than he’d have felt in his clamshell alone.