The War for Profit Series Omnibus (72 page)

Task Force Exterminator moved East following the Southern edge of the beefalo herd. The Marines skimmered around to push small groups of straggling animals back into their main body. It took a week but the herd was pushed well inside the safe zone and the Indigs in the safe zone assured us the herd would not be allowed to leave. Our mission shifted to going back to the first battle site to recover the buried bodies of our fallen troops. Eight cargo trucks, each capable of holding two pallets of sixteen zinc coffins each, were enough. Then the Task Force moved back to the air strip and sent the remains up to the troop transport ship.

Major D called for a key leader meeting in the TOC dome. I was invited along with Emily. We took seats in the back near the entrance, being the two lowest ranking leaders there. Major D stood and said, “Listen up, here’s the deal.”

The group quieted down. The screen showed a big patch of green, some white at the top and some tan at the bottom. Little gray and blue scraggly lines…a map of the area of interest. There was a smudge in the every center, a streak of slightly darker green trailing North from it.

Major D pointed at the smudge. “Here we have imagery taken from our ship in orbit. It shows the location of the last of the hostile Indigs as of an hour ago. This is the Goran Clan, the main component of the final Indig push that wiped out Alpha Company of the Stallion Battalion. I want them. I want them dead. We’ll break camp starting now and roll out of here at first light. Any questions?”

Silence.

“Good. There are fourteen hundred of them, so be careful out there. Dismissed.”

The leaders stood and moved out of the dome. I started folding up chairs and stacking them in their travel rack. Emily helped take down the Vid gear. I went outside and helped pull stakes, then provided muscle for the rest of the tear-down. When the TOC troops began taking up the rubber floor matting, I excused myself and went to sit in my skimmer. Emily was already there, asleep in full war gear, stretched out across the back seat. I put on my war gear and climbed up top and stretched out on the roof. The stars were bright and I could make out the
Acadia, as big as my thumb when held at arm’s length. The transport was harder to spot; I couldn’t find it in the sky and assumed it was on the sunny side of Tumbler at that moment. Anyway, it was less than one percent the size of the Acadia. I closed my eyes and didn’t realize I’d been asleep when Emily beat the roof of the skimmer from inside, the force transferring through the armor to my back.

“Hey, we’re moving in five!”

I stood and stretched and opened my turret hatch and lowered myself inside. I powered up my rail gun and did a function check. Then I connected the commo cord to my helmet. “Emily, you got me?”

“Yeah.” The vehicle lifted to a hover. The TOC track took its place right behind the HQ tank platoon and Emily took her spot to the right rear of the TOC track. A minute later the Task Force was formed up and began moving. The four new flak panzers were attached to Captain Blythe’s platoon as part of his rear-guard command. I imagined Corporal Parks having a great time standing up in my old cupola. I also wondered if having a new female gunner would cause friction between Parks and Caldwell and secretly hoped it would. But he was a tank commander now. He’d learn leadership pretty damned quick.

The sun rose to the right and warmed the side of my face so I put my visor down. Emily engaged the climate control and cool, dry air rose past me in the turret, past the hatch. I dropped down and closed the hatch and checked the function of the weapon’s remote control, opened the hatch and stood back up. I just liked standing up, looking around as much as I could. Looking through the weapon’s open sights, watching the targets fall. The Marines skimmed out ahead, left and right. An occasional engagement report came over comms, the Marines calling up that they engaged Indig scouts and pickets riding on their trikes. We kept our speed at thirty kilometers per hour. This was an orderly, deliberate march. A movement to contact with a known enemy at a known location. They’d better know we’re coming. They’d better take the time they have left to make peace with their maker. No use running, Indigs. You’ll just die tired.

We reached the enemy and halted just outside their line of sight. The front wedge of tanks spread its interval to two hundred meters and the IFVs got on line in the gaps between them. Blythe’s team of three tanks and four flak panzers took off to the West about three klicks and then stabbed North. The Indigs were in a wide, shallow bowl of lower ground with a dried-up creek to the West draining out of the bowl. Blythe stopped in the dried-up stream and came East just far enough to get on-line, masked by the first turn of the creek from the Indig’s line of sight. To cut off the retreat of the Indigs. The mortar team set up. The Marines skimmered up to and from the edge of the bowl, sent data. Targets were assigned. The IFVs crept forward to where they almost had line of sight into the bowl, to the Indigs in the bowl. The dismounts formed a skirmish line, their Eliminator shotguns at the ready. The tanks checked the function of their suspension brakes, rising to full height and then back down to have their bellies on the ground. Then they crept forward, their hulls rubbing the grass.

Major D’s command track dropped its assault ramp and he stepped out of it and climbed into the Vehicle Commander seat of my skimmer. We moved forward slowly, then stopped next to the HQ-3 tank, hull-down. Major D raised the observation mast of the Skimmer to its full height and the image on its monitor showed the Indigs dug in, waiting for what they were about to receive.

Major D spoke into his command terminal. “Mortars: Fire.”

Mortar rounds whooshed overhead and impacted on the softest targets, the Indig support vehicles and trikes and campers and a fuel tank on a trailer. Flames rose above the edge of the bowl, visible to all the members of the Task Force.

Major D spoke again, “Tanks: Targets to the front. Advance.”

The tanks rose to their full height and engaged their assigned targets. The eight Indig light tanks, the half-section of towed guns. The targets burned, seared by charge eight laser bolts. Return fire came from Indigs in fighting positions, some anti-armor rockets. Some Indigs in battle armor fired their twenty millimeter heavy rifles. The tanks dropped down and crept forward a little more. They popped up again, engaged targets of opportunity. The coax and cupola rail guns were using the new rail gun rounds; they punched through the Indig powered battle armor as though it were cheesecloth.

Major D told Emily, “Get me in a little closer.”

I popped my hatch and stood up behind my gun. Emily raised the skimmer and pulled up to where I could almost see into the base of the bowl. I could see Indigs running up the opposite side of the bowl. Far away, like ants. I fired at them through the open sights of my gun. The tank commanders also fired their cupola rail guns at them. No Indigs made it to the top. I dropped back down inside and used the remote control sighting optics on full zoom. Indigs lay strewn all over the far side of the bowl.

Major D spoke again, “Mortars: Fire.”

They fired, their rounds spaced to saturate the area, one mortar round landing every twenty meters square. The Mortar Chief called back, “Rounds Complete.”

The last of the Indigs came out of their holes and ran toward the dry creek, desperate to escape. The flak guns waited for them to close to fifty meters and then blasted them. Cut them to pieces. No body left whole. Arms and legs and heads and guts torn away and blasted off. The ground in front of Blythe’s detachment, ankle-deep in bits and pieces of what had been strong, healthy human beings just a moment before.

Major D said, “Infantry: Mission, Police Call.”

The skirmish line of dismounts moved forward at a slow walk, their IFVs right behind them. They moved through the objective area. An occasional burst from an IFV’s turret or dismount’s Eliminator shotgun. They reached the opposite side of the bowl. The objective was closed out.

Major D said, “Move forward, Sergeant Dickinson. I want to look for something.”

The skimmer picked its way around the carnage and wreckage, toward the center. Major D said, “Stop.”

Emily set the skimmer down and Major D dismounted and walked around a tangle of metal, the chassis of a camper twisted and smoldering. He walked beyond, found a sandbagged bunker behind it, a wisp of smoke rising from its air vent. He pulled away some sand bags and dug with his hands at the dirt of its entrance and muscled the door open and then went inside. He emerged a minute later holding a wad of blue and red cloth held to his chest, hugging it with both arms. He waved for me to get atop the skimmer and looked at me and said, “Pull the tip of sensor mast down to me.”

The spring mount at the base of the fully extended sensor mast allowed me to bend it down to where he could reach the end. He tied the two square corners of the cloth to it, the red corner on top. I let loose the mast and it whipped upward and unfurled the Stallion Battalion Guidon. I took a step back and saluted. I glanced side to side without moving my head. Several troops in the immediate area, Major D included, held proper hand salutes.

Major D dropped his salute and said, “Okay, now we can get out of here.”

We drove East for three days, my skimmer in the lead with Task Force Exterminator Commander, Major Delagiacoma, aboard. The tattered, holed, frayed, blood-stained Guidon of the Stallion Battalion flapped in the breeze of our thirty kilometer per hour pace. We stopped every four hours for a ten minute break and switched out drivers. During the times I drove, Major D didn’t speak, didn’t sleep, just read from his noteputer, occasionally writing something but mostly just reading. He also ate, a little every hour, like he was snacking. I slept like a log stretched out on the back seat when I wasn’t driving. I guess Major D nodded off then. Had too. Nobody goes three days without sleep.

I awoke when the vehicle stopped and set down. The sun had just set. I looked out the window to the right and saw the landing strip built by the Frogs, a solid surface with a control tower and a terminal. In a couple of months it would be buried under at least ten meters of snow and then destroyed by shifting ice flows half a year later. But it was there now, and pretty nice. Drop boats from our troop transport ship were arriving at five minute intervals, loading up and taking off. A tap came at the opposite back door window. I looked. It was Coyote, wearing his Scout outfit. Leather jacket and pants, heavy boots.

I stepped out. “What do you want now?”

“Council meeting. Stand beside me.”

I shrugged. “What do I do?”

“Nothing. Please, just stand there on my left side. If they say something I don’t like, try to frown. If they something I like, try to smile. And if anyone threatens me, draw your side arm.”

I reached back into the skimmer and dug around and found my ground troop helmet, put it on. Opened the driver’s door and shook Emily’s shoulder.

She lifted her head, eyes still closed. “Whu?”

I said, “I’m going with Coyote, be back in a few.”

“Uh huh.” She went back to sleep.

I turned to Coyote and shrugged. “Okay. Why not?”

I followed him over to a group of ten Indigs. Two of them set up a single work lamp on a pole, hung at an angle five meters above the group. The younger one flipped a switch and the light shone down like a street lamp. The older one stood directly under the light and announced, “I call this council to order. Chiefs and deputies, assemble.”

They stood in a circle facing him, an older man with a younger man at his side, all the way around to me and Coyote. I was about the same age as Coyote, the youngest Chief there. And I was older than any of the deputies. But our combined ages probably matched any other pair.

Our host said, “We have much to discuss. Some of you want to stay here; some of you want to move to Acadia. Some believe it is a choice for each individual, some feel it is a choice for each Clan to make as a group, and some feel it is all or none, we all stay or we all go. I call Chief Gilani of the Gilani clan.”

Chief Gilani said, “We have history and tradition here. We have made our home on this world and no one has the right to take it from us. The Acadians, they are few in number and come to us from an ancient past. They should have all died of natural causes by now, thousands of years ago. It is a fluke, a freak of nature, that they are here at all. I say we bid our own contracts with mercenaries and get rid of them once and for all. Hire a battle cruiser to swat their habitat from our night skies.”

The host said, “Fatima?”

Fatima said, “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I see the
Acadia as a real opportunity. It gives a space platform from which to link more efficiently to the interstellar community. Right now we’re outcasts, forgotten by humanity. Left out. I will take my Clan up top and live, really live, in prosperity.”

The host pointed. “Musa?”

Musa said, “I have thought about this. I have been up to the Acadia. They have much to offer. And as Gilani pointed out, they are few in number. Even if we bring life to their embryos, we will still raise them as our own according to our traditions. And in the far distant future, when this planet is remade in the image of Terra itself, our descendants will have a much better life here. And since our numbers are great and the Acadians few, I’m sure the generation that comes to re-settle Tumbler will be more Kurd than Acadian.”

“Novin?”

Novin said, “Hell no, we shouldn’t go. Tumbler is hard, demanding. But that makes us stronger as a people. When people own and enjoy early in life, it does something to them. It destroys the very essence of what makes us human, that delicate balance between reason and appetite is set askew. The animal within takes over to rule the mind and then goes soft and withers away. We live here on Tumbler, and it is a hard life. It demands of us our use of cunning and intelligence, skill and knowledge. It makes us truly human, more human than the pampered people who spend all their time seeking a higher pleasure, and unattainable degrees of satisfaction. And it’s all for naught. People from such places, even if sent to live our hard life, still can’t reconnect with their animal spirit. They are ruined, their spirit a mere ghost.”

“Kolah?”

Coyote, known here as Chief Kolah, said, “I speak the truth. I long for the day when we Kurds are respected. We came from Terra seeking a home, autonomy for our people, and this pile of crap was the best planet we could get. On Terra, our people never had a country or homeland, caught between empires and political instability for longer than humanity had knowledge of the wheel. We lost our language and religion many times, and have absorbed new blood into our veins more times than I can count on fingers and toes. Then Terra came under a single government. That certainly ended any chance of sovereignty for our people. So we came here and look at what’s happened to us. We’re wandering nomads, chasing beefalos around for a living. And education, few make it past eighth grade. Few have the time to learn academics. Or religion has also changed. We practically worship cows! There, I said it. We’re slowly turning into cow-licking uneducated nomads pushed around by ice and fire, with no permanent structures on our planet and no chance of advancing as a society. Chiefs, we’re slowly withering on the vine, dropping out of the human race. We need Acadia. We all need to move up top.”

The host said, “Goran could not be here, but his actions make it obvious his vote would be to stay. That makes the vote tied at three each. The council has not reached a decision and that means each Clan will do as it sees fit.”

Gilani pointed at Coyote, “I make a challenge. Kolah, to the death. I will kill him and we will all stay on Tumbler, the Acadians be damned.”

I drew my side arm. Gilani’s deputy pointed his hunting rifle at me, at my chest. My body armor would protect me from the first shot, anyway. But I’d be on my back with the wind knocked out of me after that first shot. But I had my pistol pointed at his face. I squeezed the trigger a bit and the green pointing laser showed where my bullet would go: right into his neck. My five point seven millimeter hyper-velocity caseless wad cutter round would rip his whole neck away and separate his head from his body. And I had thirty two rounds in my magazine, enough to put down this whole council if need be.

Coyote stepped forward. “My entire Clan is up there already and they aren’t coming back. Gilani, I care more about your people than you do. I’m willing to die for them, to improve their lives.”

Gilani stepped forward. “You would turn your back on a way of life that has sustained our people for nearly fifteen hundred years. You are a fool.”

“And you’re an asshole! Sure, life is great for you; you’re the big bad Chief! You get to tell people what to do all day and a different Clan gives you a new teen bride about every five years. You like things just the way they are but you don’t give a damn about the privation, the neglect and suffering of your people.”

Gilani said, “Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

Coyote drew his knife, his beefalo-skinning knife. A real toothpick, thirty centimeters long. He threw it at the ground and the blade stuck in the sod up to the hilt. “I accept your challenge!”

Gilani threw down his knife to stick in the ground, but not as deep. His deputy lowered his weapon and I lowered mine, put it back in its holster. I raised my left hand. The Host stepped between Coyote and Gilani, pointed at me and said, “You. Speak.”

I took a deep breath and puffed my chest. That’s what they all did before they spoke and I was just trying to fit in. “Clan Goran was wiped out, every man, woman and child, three days ago. This I know to be true, I was one of the killers.”

The assembled Chiefs and Deputies looked at me. What was I supposed to do? Let Coyote fight to the death? If he won, fine. If he lost, the Task Force would have a rebellion of over seventy thousand Indigs blow up right in its face, and I’d be the first mercenary killed. Dead before I had a chance to warn my unit.

The Host said, “We will wait.” He turned to his deputy. “Go find Andrede, his mother is from the Goran Clan.” He addressed the Chiefs again. “Andrede is the oldest surviving male heir of the Goran Clan. He will cast their vote.”

The circle broke apart, the Chiefs stepping out of the circle of light cast by the work lamp. The sun was far down; it was dark. Coyote retrieved his knife and said to me, “I was going to kick his old ass up between his shoulders. He can’t fight.”

I said, “My thoughts exactly. But he challenged you, knowing you would thump his melon in a fair fight. He’s got a trick up his sleeve; otherwise he’d never challenge you.”

“You are wise. But this is none of your business. You have no right to interfere.”

“Coyote, the moment you tapped me to be your Deputy it became my business.”

He folded his arms across his chest and stared at me. Ungrateful bastard. I shoved my hands in my pants pockets and stared back. Then I stepped about five meters away and used my personal communicator to call Major D. He was unavailable so Major Deskavich answered.

“What is it, Sergeant Slaughter?”

“There’s an Indig council meeting in progress. Could be a problem.”

“What?”

“Sir, they’re tied on a vote and Coyote is about to fight to the death to decide the matter.”

A long pause. “What matter?”

“Whether or not they’ll move up to the
Acadia. All or none decision.”

“We’re ninety percent loaded on the drop boats. We’re in no position to fight. Get the hell out of there. We’re leaving as soon as possible.”

“Sir, it’s Coyote.”

I heard a deep sigh and then Major Deskavich said, “I’ll be right there. But in about five minutes it’s just you and me and one last drop boat. The rest of the unit is out of here.”

“Yessir. I understand.”

“Where the hell is this council meeting?”

“Under the work light. Hundred meters from the tarmac.”

“I see it. Three out.”

I walked toward the tarmac and made out the silhouette of the Major approaching. I met him. “Sir, they’re finding some kid to cast a vote that will either uphold the tie and allow the challenge…”

“Just tell me what I can do to help.”

I pointed out Chief Gilani, standing in the light by his Deputy. “Sir, the old Chief who challenged Coyote can’t fight, so he’s obviously got a trick up his sleeve. We need to find a way to take that advantage away from him before he can use it.”

He held up his night vision goggles. “I’ll make my way around the perimeter, see what I can detect. Damn magnetic field here makes these hard to use, but I’ll get close enough. What kind of fight?”

“Unarmed, hand to hand. To the death.”

“I’ll look for a boot knife or something on the old Chief.”

“Thank you, Sir.”

The Major put on his goggles and adjusted the settings. “Don’t thank me, thank your agent.” He strode off into the darkness.

I made my way back to the council light and located Coyote. He said nothing, just faced the light and stared across it at Gilani.

The Host stepped in below the light with a twelve year old boy by his side and said, “This is Andrede. He will cast the vote for the Goran Clan.”

The Chiefs and Deputies reformed the circle. The Host said, “Coyote, you will speak your piece to the boy, followed by Gilani. Then he will cast his vote.”

Coyote said, “This is no way to live. The future is up there.” He pointed to the sky, stepped back into the circle.

Great speech, hero. Should have told the boy about vids and games and swimming pools and cake and ice cream. And girls, Acadian girls.

Gilani stepped forward. “Young man, Chief of the Goran Clan, you know the heart of your people and their spirit runs through your veins. Move to the
Acadia and you’ll never know the thrill of the hunt, never wear powered armor, never chase down a bull and break its neck with your own hands, something you must do to become a man according to our traditions. You could go to the Acadia, attend school every day, amuse yourself with luxuries, eat candy and never know what it means to cross the wasteland. If you fear these things you might as well dress up like a girl right now, because that is what you’ll become when you leave your home to live in space. Choose the harder right, not the easier wrong.”

Gilani stepped back.

Typical. Half the young men get killed trying to prove their manhood, that leaves more young women for the older men to enjoy. Pretty good scam.