The Fleet Book 2: Counter Attack (29 page)

He was hot and he was tired and he didn’t like this twenty-odd hours of hiding one bit.

But he knew he could take his boys out and blast his way into the spaceport in broad daylight, if he felt like it. There were lots of ways to die.

Milius was intent on telling him more than he wanted to know about the “resistance” here. After they had tea, she begged him to leave his helmet off, put on a long, loose robe to cover his armor, and come with her to meet the other villagers.

He did it because he had the time to kill, and because he wasn’t a good man for sitting and waiting, and because he could check on his company that way. So he told himself it was a surprise inspection he was about, and went with her from hut to hut, a hunchbacked, misshapen figure in a mouldy coat which was no more than holes cut in a blanket.

“This is Andy,” she said in the first hut, where one of the recon specialists had a medkit out and was trying to scrape abscessed tissue out of a teenaged boy’s flank. The boy was biting on a piece of wood, but he nodded. “Andy got that trying to get his mother out of slave coffle. He’s killed three weasels, trashed a supply truck of theirs, and sugared any number of gas tanks.” She ruffled the boy’s hair and English said to the spec, who’d stopped doctoring when his lieutenant came in, “Proceed, soldier.”

The other marines in the hut were protection enough from a wounded kid and three women of indeterminate age who weren’t anywhere near as good-looking as Milius.

They quit that hut, visited another, and left it before English asked, “How come so few men?”

“Dead. We use ’em; we lose ’em.” Milius reached up and tugged loose her hair. It had seemed dark brown in the huts; here, it was black and fell around her face like a wave. “I’m really glad to see you, English. I’ve done all I can here. These people can’t hold out much longer. It’s not any better further north, either. I’ve talked to the other handlers twice. How’re you going to do this?”

“Do this?”

“Get us out—the rest, I mean. I know I’ll go with your unit. I’m good enough with whatever weapon you’ve got to spare. But the rest of us—there’s a dozen in all. Are you picking them up too? The extraction procedure’s never been—”

“I don’t have those orders,” he said bluntly. Maybe he needed her, but he’d just been in those huts and he really hated to see weasel damage on people. Milius wanted out. He didn’t blame her. She had a right to expect it. But she’d obviously been planning the missions that put these folk down and the rest at risk.

Anyway, he couldn’t give her the answer she had a right to expect.

“Oh, so you’re just taking me and then, when the strike force comes in, the others will get out that way?”

“I’m not even sure we’ll get out ourselves before the strike force comes,” he said. “You know they need the o.t.s. agents. Look what might have happened tonight . . .”

It satisfied her. He was relieved it did. It didn’t satisfy him. Or it didn’t satisfy her, and she was too proud to rail at him when it wasn’t his decision.

He wished to hell it hadn’t been a woman, with all these casualties to tend, who’d risked her own life after curfew to get him and his to safety. Weasels were at their worst with human women.

He found himself reaching out to turn her face to him, so she’d look at him instead of the darkness. His clamshell grated on the bundled sticks of the hut against which he leaned. He said, ‘’I’ve got a floor-length coup-coat and a bedspread to boot, if it makes you feel any better. Done better than two hundred weasels, personally. My company’s got an aggregate kill record of better than three thousand. The Alliance may not be outright winnin’ this damned war, but the Ninety-Second’s holding its own.”

“I’m here to scrub that spaceport. That’s all I want,” she said in a voice so cold his hand fell away from her. “There are lots of planets, lots of people, who’ve had it worse than it is here. But that’s not my problem. I want those guns out of commission and I don’t care, English, if it kills every boy scout in your company to do it. Is that clear?”

“I thought you wanted to go home?”

“Home being an Alliance ship?” Her voice lightened then. “Sure, I want to know the job’s done. That’s when we go, right? If you guys can’t do the job, nobody’s going anywhere, so it’s fair to speculate about that day coming.”

An odd choice of words, her last. He heard them but he didn’t understand what they indicated until much later, when the night was done and she went to sleep curled around an old assault rifle.

He left her in her hut and found his first sergeant’s. “You know,” said Tamarack, “I was talking to the two outriders that o.t.s. officer had with her, and they said she’s bad news. A fanatic. Killing weasels is a religion with her. Seems one of the other cell leaders came down here and they had some kind of fight over turf and protocol, and she shot the guy for a traitor. Thought you ought to know.”

“Right,” said English, and made a sign meant to prompt Tamarack to wipe the last bit of digitized log that contained those comments. When they’d synchronized their edit, both men took off their helmets.

The other marines were quiescent, perhaps sleeping. You learned to sleep any way you could, anywhere you could. Tamarack said, “She’ll try something if she finds out things aren’t going her way.”

“I’m not sure I’d blame her,” said English, and pulled a ground ration bar from his belt. He wasn’t a bit hungry, but he was well trained.

He was counting on that training more than ever now, because there was something about the woman and her committed casualties that made him feel more and more rotten about the orders he’d gotten.

He was so cranky he kept wishing that the weasels would pull in here in their trucks so that he could shoot something—the sort of something that had shot an old lady and a kid, and kept these people in the kind of fearful poverty that was all around him.

In that instant, if anyone had asked him, he’d have said that Milius was the bravest single soul he’d ever met, fighting her heart out with these doomed bastards day after day, in this kind of grinding misery, and knowing it wasn’t going to do a damned bit of good to anybody alive here, even if her wildest dreams were realized and the Alliance took out the spaceport.

* * *

Sunset was fast on Bethesda, like the dropping of a smoke bomb. He had everybody in position, thanks to Milius, who’d found them a rickety bunch of wagons and jeered them into action when they balked at the audacity of her plan.

Or jeered him into action. English couldn’t quite fathom how he’d ended up taking orders from that crazy lady, but he had. She knew the weasel mindset on Bethesda better than he could ever hope to, and her little band of indigs supplied milk to the spaceport, as well as fresh eggs.

So in went the unit, behind the milk in the ox-drawn carts, under the eggs in a false-bottomed lorry, and every other way but shooting.

The trick was getting the equipment out and emplaced, and getting back in the wagons, before Milius’s indigs had to leave.

She’d said to him, when he worried over it, “Don’t sweat it. I have a . . . relationship—” She grinned without humor at him, and there in the port, under the arc lights, she was pretty in a tortured way. “—a relationship,” she repeated, “with the weasel port commander, and with some of the human trustees. I usually stay late.”

He didn’t understand. “You mean—”

“They all like whiskey, fool. And you know they like party games. This convoy’ll hold until twenty-three hundred hours, or I won’t be alive to wonder what went wrong. If you can’t set your charges by then, well . . . that’s what the auto-weapons are for, right? Fighting your way out’s got to be easier than fighting your way in
and
out.”

“No arguing with that,” he’d admitted. Off she’d gone, scrambling up through the false bottom of the truck he was hiding in. He’d heard her heels on the boards above, then switched on his electronics to amplify what he could of her conversations with the trustee guards.

Then he’d heard the damnedest thing. A weasel must have joined them; Milius greeted somebody with a name that had to be barked. Her bark wasn’t half-bad, considering the nature of the language she was trying to speak. Anyway, it was answered by a longer series of barks from somebody who’d been barking from birth.

And she responded. It had never occurred to him that she might speak Khalian. It had never occurred to him that any human did, although of course, among the intelligence services, somebody must, or you couldn’t do signals, or communications intercepts.

Then he was damned sure she walked away with the barking weasel—he could get enough isolation/amplification from his scanner to verify that.

It made him queasy, but he kept telling himself that if she’d been a collaborator, he and his men would already be prisoners—or dead. There’d be no reason for the weasels to wait.

The Ninety-Second waited until the mark was reached, dark was everywhere, and it was time for recon to do what its specialists did best.

Milius had given them coordinates and design specs for the power grid. Blowing it wasn’t going to be the hardest thing they did tonight; the auxiliary had to blow with it.

While the recon specialists did that, Tamarack and English eased out of their hidey-holes and headed for the big ships by the route Milius had suggested—back alley stuff, skittering from shadow to shadow, getting as close to the destroyers as they could before the power went down.

While he and Tamarack went for the destroyers, the rest of the unit, in groups of three, were detailed to the twenty fighters. Slap a charge under a fuselage, or in a thruster pod, and keep going.

English could see every one of his soldiers on his visor’s mapping display, and it was damned difficult on strange terrain, keeping track of them and his own mission, and counting weasel-parameter blips as they came up into critical mode.

Tamarack saw the first blip of real concern, while English was too busy worrying about Beta team and their exposed position to be covering his own ass.

He was telling Beta, “Six o’clock, and kill ’em quiet, please, if they scope you,” when Tamarack’s grunt on the dualcom made him realize that the sergeant wasn’t in front of him, but behind him.

English turned just in time to see the broken-necked weasel go down, and Tamarack already had his knife out, severing the tail for his coup-coat.

“Thanks,” English said into his helmet.

“Welcome,” Tam said, stuffing the bloody tail in his belt. “We gonna take the lights out, or what?”

“Only when I say so,” English told the sergeant very slowly, and waved Tamarack on ahead.

He was embarrassed about letting the weasel sneak up on him. Luckily, it hadn’t been a full-kit weasel; it had had no electronics on it that English could see; it had sounded no verbal alarm.

But the moment when he’d have to call the power-down was rapidly approaching. He really wanted to hold off until he’d buggered his destroyer. Those ships had their own lights and they could lift off at the first sign of trouble. It would be crazy to lose the targets after going through so much to get this close to them.

So English stalked among the hangars and the trucks and the repair gantries and the fuel wells, and watched the progress of their soldiers on his visor.

When half of the Khalian fighter craft were successfully mined, his Beta got into trouble. His helmet display threw up the typical confused blip patterns, and audio shunted him a clear call for help from one of the corporals.

English was, by then, scuttling toward his objective, a destroyer, magnetic-shaped-charge in hand. He did what he felt was right: he called the power-downs; he sprinted for the destroyer closest; he jumped for its main exhaust well. As his gloved hands hit the rim and he slapped his magnetic charge into place, he hung there, verbally empowering his shift video. For some few seconds he was blind to his own situation, seeing through the camera of one of his embattled corporals.

Then he shouted into his all-com channel for Sigma to help Beta. The lights went out, all over the base. He got his shift video disengaged and went back to real-time display as he let go of the exhaust well’s rim and dropped to the ground.

He couldn’t see Tamarack, not even with starlight intensification. He searched through his com bands, and his video bands. Tamarack’s camera was blacked out—either shattered, disabled some other way, or taking a good picture of nothing at all.

He yelled on all-com, “Tamarack’s out; Recon, find his charge and set it; Sawyer, you’ve got Tamarack’s files.”

Sawyer slipped smoothly into the first sergeant’s duty slot and English relaxed as he ran, rifle on, hot and ready, toward the second destroyer.

When English got there, he met weasels. Weasels came at him out of the dark, jumping down from fins overhead, illuminated by a sudden burst of automatic fire. He hoped to hell the fire wasn’t coming from his own men.

“Sawyer,” he shouted as he dropped to the ground, rolling, shaking off a weasel who had a slippery grip on his Clamshell, and shooting another as it hurtled toward him out of the air, “can you make sure you guys ain’t shootin’ at me? I’m at T-2 with Tamarack, who’s real dead. Where the fuck are you? I’m-covered with weasels!”

And he was. They were coming at him like attacking insects, out of the dark—weasels in coveralls, with wrenches and knives. He kept rolling and shooting and kicking and trying to dodge the occasional ricochet or burst that came too close.

“Right here,” said Sawyer, a figure looming suddenly. “Don’t move, okay?”

English was still saying, “What do you mean, don’t move? You’re not going to shoot—” when Sawyer, with a clip of low-penetration rounds slapped into his auto, shot the weasels gnawing on English.

It was the most terrifying moment of English’s life. He could feel the rounds slam into the weasel bodies, and
ping
against his armor. Point-blank range, yet.

But suddenly there were no moving weasels on him, and Sawyer was helping him push the weasel corpses away and get to his feet.

“No weapons,” Sawyer said, and English realized that the recon sergeant’s voice in his com referred to the weasels, who’d been mechanics or maintenance personnel of some sort. But there were other weasels, others with weapons. The darkened spaceport was flickering with auto fire and plasma blooms now, like myriad flashbulbs going off between the ships.