Fleet of the Damned (34 page)

A piece of cake.

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

W
hen the ground stayed flat for seventy-five meters and the temperature went above 15°C, they unpeeled. Kilgour choked politely.

"Th' universe smell't mightily a' feet," he observed. "Th' Tahn'll track us by the reek."

He wasn't exaggerating—they collectively stank like a cesspit. But that lasted only until they ran across the first cattle tank. Kilgour shooed off the three scrawny bovines and charged into the water, tearing off his coveralls as he waded. The others were close behind him.

Sten gave them an hour to scrape off the worst before continuing the march. Now they needed rations and a secure place to plan just how they were going to return to friendly lines.

Navigation was easy—they marched toward the columns of smoke on the horizon that marked the battleground around Cavite City. The land was dry, poor grazing country, spotted here and there with ramshackle farms, most of which were deserted. Sten skirted the few that showed signs of occupation—they didn't look to have enough for their owners let alone be able to resupply Sten.

Then they hit prosperity: green fields and, in the distance, farm buildings. But 2,000 meters from the main building, prosperity showed itself as tragedy. The fields around the farm were deserted.

Sten spread his people out and advanced very cautiously. At 500 meters, he put his sailors into a defensive line in one of the many now-empty irrigation ditches that had made the land arable.

He and Alex went forward.

In the center of the farm was a small artesian pond. Scattered along its banks were fifteen or so bodies. Sten and Alex crouched behind a shed and waited.

A door banged from the main building. Sten thumbed his safety off. The door banged again. And again. It was the wind.

They leapfrogged forward to the first of the bodies. Kilgour sniffed.

"Three. P'raps four days now," he said. "Ah wonder if they had a trial first."

The people had not been killed in combat—each of the men and women had his hands wired behind him or her.

Sten rolled a body over. There was a glint of gold visible around the bloated neck of the corpse. Sten used his gun barrel to pry it free. The glint was a neck emblem.

"They were Tahn," Sten identified. "Settlers, by the way they're dressed."

"Wonder who butchered them?"

Sten shrugged. "Imperial vigilantes. Tahn troops. Does it matter?"

"M' morbid curiosity, Commander. Let's tumble the house."

They brought the others into the farmyard. A couple of sailors saw the bodies and threw up. Get used to it, people, Sten thought. From here on out, we won't be fighting a long-distance war.

He, Tapia, and Kilgour went through the main house. It looked as if the building had been picked up, turned upside down, shaken, and then replaced on its foundations. Everything that could be broken was. Anything that could be spoiled was befouled.

"Ah hae a theory. 'Twas no Imperials did this—four days ago, they'd be scuffin' toward Cavite. Tahn soldiers whidny hae taken th' time to be't ae thorough." As he spoke, he was stuffing unbroken rationpaks into a plas sack. "My theory," he went on, "says tha' these wee folk were tryin't't' walk the fence before th' war. Which dinnae set well wi' other Tahn. When th' Tahn landed, their bro' farmers settled accounts, an—"

Kilgour stopped and picked up a tiny bottle from where it had rolled next to a sideboard. He tossed the bottle to Sten.

Sten read the label: "Mahoney Cider & Fertilizer Works. Fine Fruit and Poop for 130 Years."

"We'll be walkin't in th' path ae th' master," Alex said mock solemnly.

Tapia couldn't understand why, in the middle of this death, her two superiors suddenly started laughing.

From then, they moved only by night.

And they moved very slowly, not only from caution but because of the sailors' inexperience. Sten had a permanent set of toothmarks in his tongue, trying to keep from exploding in anger.

These people were not Mantis. They weren't Guards. Clot, they weren't even infantry recruits. Shut up, Commander, and quit expecting supersoldiers. But at this rate, the war might be over before they reached Cavite City. So? Are you in some special hurry to get back under siege and get killed, Commander? Shut up and keep moving.

On the fourth night, Contreras stumbled onto Frehda's farm—literally, going sprawling across a concertinaed stretch of razor wire. Fortunately, her coveralls kept the wire from inflicting severe cuts. The others unwound her, pulled back to the shelter of a clump of brush, and considered.

Once again Sten and Alex went forward, going through the layers of wire and sensors without being discovered. They lay atop the hill looking down onto the rows of barracks and discussed the matter, using the sign language that Mantis had developed for situations like this. It was a very simple one. Spread hands, for instance, meant "What is this?"

Mime T—Tahn. Fingers on collar tabs—military? Shake the head. It was obvious—Tahn soldiers would have had far more elaborate security, and probably wouldn't be showing lights.

Sten pointed toward the floodlit barracks and signed a complete question: "Then what're all those clots with guns and gravsleds doing?" He realized he knew the answer—this was a Tahn revolutionary settlement.

Almost certainly there would be a few Tahn troops down there. He figured that the Tahn would be using those revolutionaries for behind-the-lines security, police duties, and so forth. The "so forth" probably included dealing with any of the settlers, either Imperial or Tahn, who weren't firmly committed to the cause.

Sten felt that he had a fairly good idea of who had murdered that Tahn family—and also how to get back to Cavite City.

Kilgour had the same plan. By the time Sten looked back at him, Alex had his two hands held, palms together, next to his cheek and his head slumped against them.

Right. Now they needed a sentry.

They found one about seventy-five meters farther along the wire. He was walking his post and staying out of the floodlight glare, his eyes sweeping the darkness behind. They modified their plan slightly.

Kilgour crept forward until he was within four meters of the sentry.

Sten, also snake flat, went around inside of the man, toward the barracks, then crept back. His fingers curled, and the knife slid into his hand.

Breathe… breathe… eyes down… Sten's legs curled under him, and he was up. Three steps, and one hand curled around the sentry's chin, snapping the man's head back and to one side. The knife, held ice pick fashion, went straight down into the subclavian artery. The man was unconscious in two seconds, dead in three and a half.

That gave them their prop for the sleeping sentry trap. It was based on the assumption that in all armies sleeping on guard duty is considered as grave a sin as committing an unnatural act on one's commanding officer.

They dragged the body against a post, pulled its cap over its eyes, and let it relax. Sten and Alex took flanking positions to either side of the body, ten meters away into the darkness, and waited.

Sooner or later, the commander of the guard should check his posts. And sooner or later, he did.

A combat car hummed up from the barracks and wove its way along the perimeter. Sten and Alex were prone, assuming that both occupants would be wearing light-enhancing goggles.

They were—but they were looking for their sentry, not for two thugs in the deep grass.

The guard commander saw his "sleeping" sentry. Evidently he decided the man needed a lesson, because the car grounded about ten meters away.

Sten slunk toward the combat car.

The Tahn guard officer—one of Frehda's "advisers"—padded toward his sinning sentry. Next he would bend over the man and bellow. Assuming the sentry survived the initial shock, major punishment would follow. The guard officer looked forward to it—he felt that these Tahn farmers were getting mostly slack, merely because the
real
fighting forces were winning.

He bent—and Alex's hand crashed out of the night in a
teisho-zuki
palm strike against his forehead. The blow, delivered by a normal man, would have stunned. With the full force of Kilgour's three-gee muscles behind it, the commander's skull crushed as if it had imploded under pressure.

Kilgour removed the weapons belts from the two men and ran toward the combat car.

Sten wiped the blade of his knife on the late driver's tunic and got behind the sled's controls. He pulled the driver's goggles over his eyes and lifted the car three meters into the air, turned it, and drove it at full power toward where his sailors waited.

They were mobile again.

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

T
he Tahn combat car gave Sten and his deck apes not only mobility but a cover as well. Sten assumed some logic from the Tahn: all civilian vehicles would be either grounded or impounded, and all Imperial gravsleds would be inside the Cavite City perimeter. Ergo, anything traveling openly must be Tahn.

Sten did cover himself slightly—after he loaded his people, he found the dustiest road around and made three passes down it within centimeters of the surface. Then he lifted for Cavite City, one more harassed combat car driver trying to get his dusty troops toward the lines.

The only potential problem might be police checkpoints just behind the lines—but they'd be checking the trip tickets and IDs of those headed away from combat, not toward the sound of guns.

Then they got even luckier. Sten was waved down by a Tahn road security man as a priority convoy of heavy lifters hurtled through. The convoy was keeping lousy interval, with hundreds of meters between its gravsleds. It was simple for Sten to tuck himself into line near the convoy's end and equally simple to bank down a side street once they hit the outskirts of the city.

The Imperial perimeter had gotten much smaller. The Tahn, vastly outnumbering the Empire's forces, were closing the ring. Sten managed to evade three Tahn street patrols before he decided he'd pushed their luck far enough.

Two kilometers from the lines, Sten tucked the combat car into the third story of a shattered building and thought tactically. From this point, the danger would be steadily greater—the Tahn units would be looking for penetration patrols in their own lines, and the no-man's-land between the lines would be even more hazardous.

Finally, there could well be the problem of being shot by their own troops—Sten had no idea what passwords or signals were in use.

The answer to their problem was a white-uniformed security patrolman.

White uniforms, Sten mused. In a combat zone?

"W hae rank an' idle ceremony," Kilgour observed, lowering his binocs. "Cannae we be usin't tha?"

"You're just looking for an excuse to gash another screw, Kilgour."

"True. But dinnae it be braw?"

It was.

Again, Sten and Alex reconned the situation, going from rooftop to rooftop until they had that security patrolman in plain sight. A second patrolman stood on the other side of what had been a city street and now was a less-rubbled section of ruins.

Behind the two military cops were two double chaingun positions. Further to the rear were tanks and missile launchers, positioned around a cluster of tracks. These were obviously command vehicles—they sprouted more antennae than a nest of young brine shrimp. It was the command post of the armored brigade supporting the Tahn landing forces. And it lay directly between Sten and the Imperial lines.

"Shall w' ring ae second goin' ae th' guard?"

They could—and did.

Less experienced—or less cynical—soldiers might have skirted the CP. But to Sten and Alex, this was opportunity.

Intelligence, either personally observed by the two men or taught them in Mantis training: headquarters units had massive security. The security elements may have been selected for their efficiency at first but inevitably would turn into spit-and-polish orderlies. They would be commanded, most likely, by ambitious or well-connected young officers. Their formations would slowly, and almost imperceptibly, transition from combat-based to parade-oriented.

The troopers in such a unit would be promoted and commended for the gloss on their boots and the shine on their buttons. After hours of such bianco drill, such a man had a certain reluctance to wade through the muck just because he had heard a possibly strange sound.

And finally there was the factor of arrogance—who would
dare
attack the powerful?

Sten and Alex proposed to exploit that arrogance.

Tourists goggle when the military changes guards. It's done in front of palaces, with dress uniforms, en masse, at predictable times, and with much clanging of weaponry—preferably chromed and antique. That isn't the way it should work when there may be bad guys around—but tradition is tradition, even if it's only a week or so old.

Sten and his sailors took full advantage of that.

The changing of the Tahn general's guard consisted of several platoons marching in close order up to each guard post, where, amid shouts and clatter, the old guard would be inspected and relieved by the guard commander. On relief, he would clang the butt of his weapons a couple of times and march to the rear of that platoon. The new guard would be positioned, and the platoons would stomp on to the next post.

Naturally, that guard changing was done on the clock, by the clock.

Sten knew that the lowest point in the human soul is four hours after midnight.

And that is when he moved.

Clangs… clatters… shouted orders… and Sten's thirteen people slipped silently past the newly posted and yawning guard, straight toward the heart of Atago's command post.

Marching in plain sight, in formation—Sten desperately hoped that his swabbies were keeping some kind of march step—they went in unchallenged.

Step one—complete. Step two—find a hidey-hole.

Kilgour picked an armoured supply gravsled, grounded about 150 meters from the command tracks. He slipped through the undogged entry hatch, kukri ready. Sten waited outside as backup.