Part One.
Part Two.
Part Three.
Gully Foy did not appear surprised by the announcement that Elbers had ruled out fire support. He blew fluid and dirt noisily out of both tubes in the endearing spasm known as the “snot-fart,” a Xinq reaction to bad news they could not do anything about. Ignoring the occasional mortar round (most of which missed Hill 49 by at least 100 meters), the squat Xinq walked Arras along Recon’s perimeter.
“Gonks be dumb ‘nough walk straight up hill, hold ‘em here,” he said. “Trained some those tubeheads back when. Never got the idea ‘bout flank attacks.”
Gully Foy had placed nine of Recon’s fourteen warm bodies into line. Two snipers were using the casualties’ power packs to harass Gonk officers and mortar teams; the rest were improving their fire-points. Mazir and Ully Nood had hauled up the Luitingh, which they were setting up to cover the most obvious avenue of approach up the hill’s gentle southwestern slope. Reyd had loaded down himself and Hoella with three frag-mine packs apiece, and was preparing to low-crawl in front of the perimeter to set up a final defensive line.
“Give us time,” remarked her Platoon Sergeant, “you Boss, Gully Foy, Ree-yedd, and Hoo-ella get one shuttle railer up here. But maybe we get no time.”
Arras gazed out toward the Gonks. The same low scrub broken only by nearly invisible ravines spread out for what her mon-oc told her was not quite ten klicks to the woodline of a Zekainian moss forest. To the unaided eye her enemies were almost completely hidden in the wavy brush; her mon-oc combined infrared, sonic, and visual scans to superimpose a false image of over 150 Gonks in squad-size clumps as visible as if advancing across naked dirt.
She bit her lip, considering, then began shedding her combat harness and leg-packs.
“How good do you figure their optics are, Sergeant?” Arras asked as she discarded her blouse and bent to unfasten her boots so that she could drop her trousers.
Ignoring the strip-tease, the Xinq replied, “Some eye-red maybe. Ka-shit else.”
“That’s what I thought.”
She was down to the flex-weave armored under-garment that had saved her life a few minutes ago. All of the troops wore them, but her career in the Bureau had left Arras with a set of undies containing mods that XRAF regulars had never imagined. She made a flipping motion with both hands and smart gloves covered her fingers; touched a subcutaneous implant adjacent to her carotid and the collar flowed up around her mon-oc to leave her face a featureless mask. Another touch to the implant activated full stealth mode, causing Arras to dissolve into a wavy blur as photo-fluidics bent light around her form, roughly mimicking whatever was immediately behind her. Except for the mon-oc and the Baarlow FSP (Flechette Sniper Pistol) in her left hand, she effectively disappeared.
Gully Foy staggered back with a shocked hoot, then recovered his composure and trained his own mon-oc on the shimmering figure. She waited while the Xinq cycled through all the detection capabilities his ocular possessed, knowing what the result would be.
“You a wraith, Boss? Shit-damn, Gully Foy maybe live through this some way, then.”
That the Xinq had heard of a wraith suit both impressed and concerned her. The Colonel had said there were only six in existence; her Sergeant should not even have heard rumors.
Mark that down for later.
“I can’t promise that, Sergeant, although there will be a big mound of dead Gonks before they take this hill. Get Reyd.”
When the Xinq and the former floatie stood in front of her, she said, “Here’s the deal, Sergeants. You’re in charge, and the mission is simple: hold the hill or die. The Gonks won’t take mercenary prisoners, and if they get the crest there won’t be any point in trying to exfiltrate, because they’ll will be able to spot you from here. I’m dead weight as a Platoon Commander, don’t know half enough to do anything except get in your way. So I’m going out to do what I am trained to do.”
Arras paused for questions. There weren’t any.
“Right, then. Sergeant Gully Foy, I’ll feed you the code that our people will need to light me up on their scans, so we don’t get any friendly fire incidents. Then I want the feed from your snipers slaved back to my mon-oc. They’ll probably have a better view than I do.”
With that, Arras turned her back on them and strode down the hill.
* * *
The Gonk directing the point of the advance carried a knife in one tinker, a comm in the other, and a XRAF-issue Precis in one grappler, while the free grappler found employment in cuffing reluctant subordinates up the slope. The Xinq wore no harness: scars covering its back highlighted both spinal columns in macabre relief. Aside from a faint, rhythmical panting, more gasp than hoot, the team leader moved gracefully in nearly complete silence.
Arras killed the Gonk from behind with two flechettes: one severing each nerve-cord. Before the four-armed body sagged to the ground, she brought the Baarlow smoothly around, taking out the other seven team members, each with two noiseless molybendium darts.
Checking the feed from the hill, she determined that the next nearest Gonk element was forty meters back, allowing time for a quick examination of the corpses. None appeared well fed, and most lacked harnesses. On the other hands, the motley assortment of weapons, including a K7 Metal Hurlant frag launcher and an antique Wessell Model 24 slug-thrower, showed evidence of careful maintenance. No one but the team leader had carried a comm, nor was there any indication of ocular enhancement.
Arras slithered back into the brush. As she closed with the main skirmish line, her feed from the hill deteriorated, indicating that she had reached the extreme range of her mastoid implant. She halted, taking a few seconds to commit known enemy locations to memory. From here on out, she’d be dependent on her mon-oc and her instincts.
She let the skirmish line pass her by, the nearest Gonk stomping up the incline about four meters to her left. That was easy. The main assault force would be more problematic, but Arras felt confident she could elude the flank guards and pass back toward the command and support echelons unnoticed.
About 100 meters to her left a Gonk soldier shrieked and went down as one of Recon’s snipers burned a hole through its chest. Her sergeants were actively diverting enemy attention away from her. Yet the Gonk advance continued, observing strict noise discipline. Nilly Nilly had clearly committed his best; along with the virtually deserted Oyos complex the whole operation began to smell worse and worse.
Think about that later.
It required ten minutes to work her way back toward the command element, six Gonks hustling forward a portable comm-center on a travois. Two were obviously nothing more than haulers; one appeared to be a tech; that left three officers. Obviously this was the brain trust, and as she slunk into a convenient fold of ground, Arras contemplated the correct moment to eliminate it.
Not before the lead elements made contact, that was apparent even to a tactical innocent such as she. No, do it just when the attack went in, depriving the Gonks of any ability to modify their plans. Yet how would she know for sure? It struck her that Reyd and Hoella would have completed sewing the slope with frag-mines; the detonation would provide the clearest possible indication that the fight for the hill had begun.
Arras stood—now safely behind the last Gonks—and surveyed the field from the vantage point of the enemy commander. Her mon-oc painted friendlies in blue, hostiles in red. Abruptly, her mouth went dry and she suppressed a curse. Despite what Gully Foy believed, this Gonk commander fully understood the concept of a flank attack. While she had concentrated on reaching the Gonk rear echelon, two platoons had broken off and begun a wide swing around the left of Recon’s position. The maneuver had been timed to be obscured by a rock outcropping, but even if her sergeants had seen it, there was little to do about it.
She was in the wrong place—again.
Angrily, Arras slapped a fresh clip of flechettes into the Baarlow and sprinted toward the Gonk officers. She executed them and the tech without breaking stride. The unskilled labor hauling the travois she ignored: neither carried a weapon, and neither would locate one before she was dozens of meters away.
Bright flashes preceded the boom of the frag-mines, but a quick scan confirmed that skirmishers, not the main element, had triggered them. Four platoons surged forward toward Recon’s perimeter as all of Gully Foy’s pulse rifles and the Luitingh rail gun now opened up. Their combined fire tore holes in the Xinq ranks, yet it would not be sufficient.
Only twenty meters separated the wildly hooting Gonks from Recon’s line. Arras herself was five times that far away.
She thought, I will not be left out here while my people die.
Still running, the virtually invisible woman smacked the inside of her left bicep with her right palm—hard. She fought the urge to panic at the sudden tightness in her chest as the neural stimulators kicked in and the world started to slow down around her. Subjectively speaking, her foot speed did not seem to increase, but both the Gonks and Recon essentially froze. She could actually see the cyan lines of fire from the pulse rifles dart across the battlefield, and she tongue-clicked her mon-oc to standby since the unit could not process data fast enough to project it into her field of vision.
Throwing herself bodily across ravines at a run, Arras covered the distance in fifteen seconds, by which time Reyd’s second line of frags had blown, staggering the Gonks, as Recon used the time to pull back into a concave line with the Lutingh at its center.
Not evolved for the kind of over-drive that her stimulators induced, Arras found herself witnessing the next few seconds in discrete, static images. She saw—
—Gully Foy at the left end of the line firing two pulse rifles simultaneously, one with each pair of grappler and tinker—
—the brown wispy trail of the mortar round as it arced down—
—Ully Nood and Mazir catapulted up into the air, along with the Lutingh as the round hit two meters in front of them—
—Sergeant Reyd howling as he stepped forward to engage the lead Gonk hand-to-grappler—
Then she was in range and firing, firing, firing—flechettes spitting from her weapon as rapidly as it would cycle. Arras swept toward the right of the Gonk line, some hazy instinct driving her for the rear of the two flanking platoons even as she decimated the attackers at high speed.
Razor-like pain stabbed her heart and lungs. Arras had never run on stim for more than four or five seconds before, but she knew the limitations: beyond thirty seconds her nervous, respiratory, and circulatory systems would red-line. She staggered, felt her vision flicker to black, forced herself to keep going.
The last image she saw—again engraving itself directly onto her visual cortex without movement or sound—was one of the assault shuttle’s rail guns, miraculously transferred into a firing position on Recon’s threatened flank. Cradling the over-sized weapon between her legs (one ended in a bloody stump at the ankle, tied off and jammed against the receiver assembly) was Private Vanessla Hoella, her face contorted into a rictus of pain and fear . . . .
* * *
Waking at all surprised Arras; waking in a hospital bed did not.
She had IVs running in both arms, a cardiac support rig on her chest, and a neural stabilizer around her neck. Consciousness fled before she could determine whether there was anyone else in the room. Over the next three days she woke several times: once to darkness, and at least once to find several medicos clustered around her, faces grave.
Khom visited briefly on the fourth day, when she showed signs of maintaining alertness for more than a few minutes. Arras knew him—a good sign!—yet could not formulate the questions that somewhere inside she knew needed answered. There were flashes back to Oyos, but her mind refused to weld them together into a meaningful story.
That return of minimal intellectual clarity may or may not have coincided with the removal of the neural collar a week later.
Khom had to recount the fight for Hill 49 several times before the memory stuck.
“Reyd was the one who realized that the Gonks were flanking you,” he said. Then, in perhaps another conversation, added, “I have no idea how he managed to drag the damn rail gun around in time, but it saved the position.”
Later: “Hoella lost her foot to a frag blowing back the wrong way. She insisted on manning the RG because she couldn’t handle anything else. Yeah, she made it, but with all the pounding on her leg the surgeons had to finish it off above the knee….”
Khom in different clothes—must have been another day, when he said, “Elbers lied to you, didn’t want you to depend on help from the complex. We sallied two squads out toward Hill 49 almost as soon as he got off the comm. They arrived as the Gonks were finally overrunning the crest. Besides you, there were four others still alive, including Hoella and Gully Foy, Hoella. But Recon gutted the Gonks and we threw them back off the hill.”
Only a week later did a conversation with Gully Foy (one tinker mangled and his torso still covered with dressings) confirm that Khom’s “we” was a slip. He’d personally led the relief force over Elbers’ objections and stayed there for three days, holding Hill 49.
Progressing to peeing into a bedpan rather than through a catheter, Arras got the outlines of the rest of the operation straight, albeit from Verk, not Khom. The logistics specialist intuited her difficulty with short-term memory, arriving with a summary on a pad that she could refer back to.
Oyos had been a set-up. Some Frec on Nilly Nilly’s payroll had fed Deng Altairs seriously compromised intelligence. The Gonk rebels knew that eventually the government would attempt to recover the complex. Instead of defending it, they left it essentially unoccupied but surrounded by three regiments of the best-armed troops Nilly Nilly could field. The insurgents reasoned that only one serious attempt would be made to retake the lattice fields before men like Altairs took their money elsewhere.
“Elbers broke the first two attacks with orbital shrap,” Verk said. “The third time he evacuated the north end of the complex just prior to contact and blew apart four Gonk companies with more frag than I’ve ever seen laid down in such a small place. That bought time for the Ardooleys to reinforce him, but it was still looking pretty ka-damn grim with only one partial load of shrap left.”
When had the person she was talking to become Semplen Derst-Jesten? Altairs’ bodyguard said, “Verk convinced Deng that he would feel pretty stupid if he lost Oyos because he was too cheap to provide enough artillery support. We used his yacht to drop in two more loads of shrap right before the last big attack.”
She wondered idly who paid for that.
Khom—again?—holding up a chit for Cert thirty million with a thin smile.
“Couldn’t have done it, probably, without Recon kept Hill 49 long enough for us to reinforce.” He paused, looked down, and then said slowly, “We couldn’t have done it without Elbers, either. I know you don’t want to hear it, but he led the reaction teams into hand-to-grapple himself.”
That conversation occurred two days after the doctors told her they’d had to rip out her neural stimulators to save her life. They couldn’t rule out future seizure disorders, although they felt relatively confident that within a few weeks her memory would improve.
Slowly putting together the pieces, Arras was not sure she wanted to remember everything. Near as she could tell, North Regent Consulting had turned a profit because Elbers had managed—barely—to overcome Khom’s planning error in not investing in enough shrap and her own incompetence as a Platoon Commander, albeit only at the cost of thirty percent casualties.
Such a great start for the organizers of a mercenary outfit.
* * *
“I will not do this again with you in a command position,” Elbers said, standingd at the end of her bed, arms folded, face implacable although not hostile. “You and Khom have the contacts and the organizational skill to make a go of this business, but you, Sub-Major Winsen, don’t have the first idea about tactics. Putting soldiers under your command is tantamount to killing them.” He broke off, then said, “I’ll bloody let that ka-damn Klatta Lor call in fire on my head all day, but I won’t give you a platoon again.”
Arras had been dreading this conversation. Now, surprisingly, she found that the reality lacked the pain and embarrassment she had expected. She had already admitted to herself everything Elbers was saying. Even though her final rush up the slope had killed enough Gonks to assist in holding Hill 49, she couldn’t think of a single correct decision she’d made throughout the operation.
The Colonel did not select people for the Bureau who could not face their own weaknesses.
She met his gaze directly, then said, “I agree with you, Colonel. It was a bad idea. However, I’m not about to sit back in the office while we’ve soldiers in the bush. You’ll just have to figure out some way I can be of use.”
Arras reached across to the tray table over the bed, picked up a globe of juice (she could do that now) and sipped it, watching Elbers’ face as he worked it through.
Finally, he said, “You surprise me. Very few officers could admit that. Perhaps when….”
“When we go back to Gonkaina? Yes, Khom and I discussed it. NRC is taking the contract.”
This time the Frec government had approached them directly. Besides the Ardooleys, the Gonkaina Republic Army had few units capable of standing toes-to-toes with XRAF-trained Nilly Nilly’s rebels. So Yoohoo Tankey had personally advanced the idea that the mercenaries who’d held Oyos might be better employed as training advisors for the entire army.
With lattice already flowing out of Oyos, a three-year contract at 100 million Cert per standard year looked like small change well spent, particularly when Deng Altairs had agreed to underwrite twenty percent of that in exchange for Tegnarian Lattice’s new exclusive lease.
“Colonel Elbers, neither of us likes the other. Both of us respect Khom, and both of us know that if we’re not off-world doing something, eventually the Momentum will start examining our dossiers very carefully. That official line of forgiveness will evaporate rapidly for the likes of us if we haven’t made ourselves useful, at least in a non-official way.”
Elbers nodded, said, “It’s obviously in the best interest of the Momentum—which is now officially the best interest of the Reach—that Nilly Nilly’s insurgency fail in Gonkaina. So as along we’re contributing to that, they’ll let us alone.”
“That’s it. Although there’s one more wrinkle we have to take into consideration.”
“What’s that?”
Arras rubbed her nose, gathering her thoughts. If ideas still took longer to coalesce than she’d like, at least they appeared willing to be herded if she approached them slowly. “You’re absolutely correct that I don’t know tactics and you do, Colonel. Even so, I think I’ve figured out something that you and Khom are yet to realize. This mercenary thing, if it’s going to be an ongoing business, will be a different kind of war than any of us is used to, even though individual battles may seem superficially the same.”
Elbers had a perplexed look on his face, but he was paying attention.
“Verk called it ‘war on the cheap,’ but he’s wrong. Not having those last two loads of shrap available when we needed them is proof enough that cheap can’t be what we’re about. I think it’s got to be something like ‘war for net profit.’ When the Colonel conned Khom and me into this whole enterprise, we looked at it the same way you looked at Oyos: another assignment. Except that I never spent a lot of time thinking about where the Cert came from to buy my wraith suit, and Khom didn’t fret over meeting the a payroll. Those things just happened because we were XRAF.”
“I understand,” Elbers offered, his voice more tentative than usual. “You’re saying that now we not only have to worry about making those things happen, we have to think about how to pay for them.”
“Yes. No. Not quite. Damn it, I can’t concentrate. I mean that we’re going to have to question everything we do, not just do it. Take shrap, for example. If you’re the government, shrap is cheap. You know how much of it we threw around in Fringe and Gonkaina, even when we didn’t really need to. Now, when we can’t afford all that much of it, we’re going to have to think about different ways to keep the other guy’s head down. If we can’t always do hot inserts, we’re going to have to take up hiking. We have to think about the effect we need to achieve, and then the most economical—but not cheap!—method of achieving it.”
She sat the juice down.
“We can’t do that without you, and you don’t have much of a future without us. So the question is, can we be a team?”
Elbers actually smiled. “No, the question is apparently whether we can be business partners. We’re both going to have to think that through rather carefully, yah? Let’s get you up and kicking, we’ll talk again.”
“That will be the second thing I do, Colonel Elbers, when I get free of this lash-up. Depend on it.”
* * *
The first thing that Arras did when the wires and tubes had been removed was to float a grav-chute three floors up to Rehab, where Vanessla Hoella was learning to use her prosthetic leg. Recruit Hoella had been a name, a uniform, and a perceived weakness in Recon’s roster. Watching the young woman through the observation panel, Arras noticed that she had a small but muscular frame, wide hips, red-brown hair, a strong jaw, and scars all over her left arm where tattoos had been erased.
The younger woman had her hands braced on parallel rails as the Xinq therapist coached her in balancing on her new leg.
A floor supervisor noticed Arras observing the session.
“If this were Freehold or Bastion,” the man said, “we’d be able to regenerate her leg. We know how to do it; we just can’t afford the tech.”
Arras thought about the Colonel and the thin white scar circumscribing his upper arm she’d seen one day when he had his blouse off. “Got to be done somewhere,” she said. “There are people in the Reach get that kind of treatment.”
“Those people can afford to leave the Reach and pay for it. Not folks like her. You know her?”
“I was around when she had her accident.”
Deciding not to pursue the kinds of accidents one might have around weapons-grade molybendium, he said, “Want to speak with her? The session’s almost over.”
Arras hesitated, touched the side of her nose, then shook her head.
“Nah, doubt she’d recall me. Besides, I’ve other things need doing today.”
Part Two.
Part Three.
War on the Cheap
An Original Science Fiction Story by
Steven H. Newton
(c)2008; all rights reserved
Gully Foy did not appear surprised by the announcement that Elbers had ruled out fire support. He blew fluid and dirt noisily out of both tubes in the endearing spasm known as the “snot-fart,” a Xinq reaction to bad news they could not do anything about. Ignoring the occasional mortar round (most of which missed Hill 49 by at least 100 meters), the squat Xinq walked Arras along Recon’s perimeter.
“Gonks be dumb ‘nough walk straight up hill, hold ‘em here,” he said. “Trained some those tubeheads back when. Never got the idea ‘bout flank attacks.”
Gully Foy had placed nine of Recon’s fourteen warm bodies into line. Two snipers were using the casualties’ power packs to harass Gonk officers and mortar teams; the rest were improving their fire-points. Mazir and Ully Nood had hauled up the Luitingh, which they were setting up to cover the most obvious avenue of approach up the hill’s gentle southwestern slope. Reyd had loaded down himself and Hoella with three frag-mine packs apiece, and was preparing to low-crawl in front of the perimeter to set up a final defensive line.
“Give us time,” remarked her Platoon Sergeant, “you Boss, Gully Foy, Ree-yedd, and Hoo-ella get one shuttle railer up here. But maybe we get no time.”
Arras gazed out toward the Gonks. The same low scrub broken only by nearly invisible ravines spread out for what her mon-oc told her was not quite ten klicks to the woodline of a Zekainian moss forest. To the unaided eye her enemies were almost completely hidden in the wavy brush; her mon-oc combined infrared, sonic, and visual scans to superimpose a false image of over 150 Gonks in squad-size clumps as visible as if advancing across naked dirt.
She bit her lip, considering, then began shedding her combat harness and leg-packs.
“How good do you figure their optics are, Sergeant?” Arras asked as she discarded her blouse and bent to unfasten her boots so that she could drop her trousers.
Ignoring the strip-tease, the Xinq replied, “Some eye-red maybe. Ka-shit else.”
“That’s what I thought.”
She was down to the flex-weave armored under-garment that had saved her life a few minutes ago. All of the troops wore them, but her career in the Bureau had left Arras with a set of undies containing mods that XRAF regulars had never imagined. She made a flipping motion with both hands and smart gloves covered her fingers; touched a subcutaneous implant adjacent to her carotid and the collar flowed up around her mon-oc to leave her face a featureless mask. Another touch to the implant activated full stealth mode, causing Arras to dissolve into a wavy blur as photo-fluidics bent light around her form, roughly mimicking whatever was immediately behind her. Except for the mon-oc and the Baarlow FSP (Flechette Sniper Pistol) in her left hand, she effectively disappeared.
Gully Foy staggered back with a shocked hoot, then recovered his composure and trained his own mon-oc on the shimmering figure. She waited while the Xinq cycled through all the detection capabilities his ocular possessed, knowing what the result would be.
“You a wraith, Boss? Shit-damn, Gully Foy maybe live through this some way, then.”
That the Xinq had heard of a wraith suit both impressed and concerned her. The Colonel had said there were only six in existence; her Sergeant should not even have heard rumors.
Mark that down for later.
“I can’t promise that, Sergeant, although there will be a big mound of dead Gonks before they take this hill. Get Reyd.”
When the Xinq and the former floatie stood in front of her, she said, “Here’s the deal, Sergeants. You’re in charge, and the mission is simple: hold the hill or die. The Gonks won’t take mercenary prisoners, and if they get the crest there won’t be any point in trying to exfiltrate, because they’ll will be able to spot you from here. I’m dead weight as a Platoon Commander, don’t know half enough to do anything except get in your way. So I’m going out to do what I am trained to do.”
Arras paused for questions. There weren’t any.
“Right, then. Sergeant Gully Foy, I’ll feed you the code that our people will need to light me up on their scans, so we don’t get any friendly fire incidents. Then I want the feed from your snipers slaved back to my mon-oc. They’ll probably have a better view than I do.”
With that, Arras turned her back on them and strode down the hill.
* * *
The Gonk directing the point of the advance carried a knife in one tinker, a comm in the other, and a XRAF-issue Precis in one grappler, while the free grappler found employment in cuffing reluctant subordinates up the slope. The Xinq wore no harness: scars covering its back highlighted both spinal columns in macabre relief. Aside from a faint, rhythmical panting, more gasp than hoot, the team leader moved gracefully in nearly complete silence.
Arras killed the Gonk from behind with two flechettes: one severing each nerve-cord. Before the four-armed body sagged to the ground, she brought the Baarlow smoothly around, taking out the other seven team members, each with two noiseless molybendium darts.
Checking the feed from the hill, she determined that the next nearest Gonk element was forty meters back, allowing time for a quick examination of the corpses. None appeared well fed, and most lacked harnesses. On the other hands, the motley assortment of weapons, including a K7 Metal Hurlant frag launcher and an antique Wessell Model 24 slug-thrower, showed evidence of careful maintenance. No one but the team leader had carried a comm, nor was there any indication of ocular enhancement.
Arras slithered back into the brush. As she closed with the main skirmish line, her feed from the hill deteriorated, indicating that she had reached the extreme range of her mastoid implant. She halted, taking a few seconds to commit known enemy locations to memory. From here on out, she’d be dependent on her mon-oc and her instincts.
She let the skirmish line pass her by, the nearest Gonk stomping up the incline about four meters to her left. That was easy. The main assault force would be more problematic, but Arras felt confident she could elude the flank guards and pass back toward the command and support echelons unnoticed.
About 100 meters to her left a Gonk soldier shrieked and went down as one of Recon’s snipers burned a hole through its chest. Her sergeants were actively diverting enemy attention away from her. Yet the Gonk advance continued, observing strict noise discipline. Nilly Nilly had clearly committed his best; along with the virtually deserted Oyos complex the whole operation began to smell worse and worse.
Think about that later.
It required ten minutes to work her way back toward the command element, six Gonks hustling forward a portable comm-center on a travois. Two were obviously nothing more than haulers; one appeared to be a tech; that left three officers. Obviously this was the brain trust, and as she slunk into a convenient fold of ground, Arras contemplated the correct moment to eliminate it.
Not before the lead elements made contact, that was apparent even to a tactical innocent such as she. No, do it just when the attack went in, depriving the Gonks of any ability to modify their plans. Yet how would she know for sure? It struck her that Reyd and Hoella would have completed sewing the slope with frag-mines; the detonation would provide the clearest possible indication that the fight for the hill had begun.
Arras stood—now safely behind the last Gonks—and surveyed the field from the vantage point of the enemy commander. Her mon-oc painted friendlies in blue, hostiles in red. Abruptly, her mouth went dry and she suppressed a curse. Despite what Gully Foy believed, this Gonk commander fully understood the concept of a flank attack. While she had concentrated on reaching the Gonk rear echelon, two platoons had broken off and begun a wide swing around the left of Recon’s position. The maneuver had been timed to be obscured by a rock outcropping, but even if her sergeants had seen it, there was little to do about it.
She was in the wrong place—again.
Angrily, Arras slapped a fresh clip of flechettes into the Baarlow and sprinted toward the Gonk officers. She executed them and the tech without breaking stride. The unskilled labor hauling the travois she ignored: neither carried a weapon, and neither would locate one before she was dozens of meters away.
Bright flashes preceded the boom of the frag-mines, but a quick scan confirmed that skirmishers, not the main element, had triggered them. Four platoons surged forward toward Recon’s perimeter as all of Gully Foy’s pulse rifles and the Luitingh rail gun now opened up. Their combined fire tore holes in the Xinq ranks, yet it would not be sufficient.
Only twenty meters separated the wildly hooting Gonks from Recon’s line. Arras herself was five times that far away.
She thought, I will not be left out here while my people die.
Still running, the virtually invisible woman smacked the inside of her left bicep with her right palm—hard. She fought the urge to panic at the sudden tightness in her chest as the neural stimulators kicked in and the world started to slow down around her. Subjectively speaking, her foot speed did not seem to increase, but both the Gonks and Recon essentially froze. She could actually see the cyan lines of fire from the pulse rifles dart across the battlefield, and she tongue-clicked her mon-oc to standby since the unit could not process data fast enough to project it into her field of vision.
Throwing herself bodily across ravines at a run, Arras covered the distance in fifteen seconds, by which time Reyd’s second line of frags had blown, staggering the Gonks, as Recon used the time to pull back into a concave line with the Lutingh at its center.
Not evolved for the kind of over-drive that her stimulators induced, Arras found herself witnessing the next few seconds in discrete, static images. She saw—
—Gully Foy at the left end of the line firing two pulse rifles simultaneously, one with each pair of grappler and tinker—
—the brown wispy trail of the mortar round as it arced down—
—Ully Nood and Mazir catapulted up into the air, along with the Lutingh as the round hit two meters in front of them—
—Sergeant Reyd howling as he stepped forward to engage the lead Gonk hand-to-grappler—
Then she was in range and firing, firing, firing—flechettes spitting from her weapon as rapidly as it would cycle. Arras swept toward the right of the Gonk line, some hazy instinct driving her for the rear of the two flanking platoons even as she decimated the attackers at high speed.
Razor-like pain stabbed her heart and lungs. Arras had never run on stim for more than four or five seconds before, but she knew the limitations: beyond thirty seconds her nervous, respiratory, and circulatory systems would red-line. She staggered, felt her vision flicker to black, forced herself to keep going.
The last image she saw—again engraving itself directly onto her visual cortex without movement or sound—was one of the assault shuttle’s rail guns, miraculously transferred into a firing position on Recon’s threatened flank. Cradling the over-sized weapon between her legs (one ended in a bloody stump at the ankle, tied off and jammed against the receiver assembly) was Private Vanessla Hoella, her face contorted into a rictus of pain and fear . . . .
* * *
Waking at all surprised Arras; waking in a hospital bed did not.
She had IVs running in both arms, a cardiac support rig on her chest, and a neural stabilizer around her neck. Consciousness fled before she could determine whether there was anyone else in the room. Over the next three days she woke several times: once to darkness, and at least once to find several medicos clustered around her, faces grave.
Khom visited briefly on the fourth day, when she showed signs of maintaining alertness for more than a few minutes. Arras knew him—a good sign!—yet could not formulate the questions that somewhere inside she knew needed answered. There were flashes back to Oyos, but her mind refused to weld them together into a meaningful story.
That return of minimal intellectual clarity may or may not have coincided with the removal of the neural collar a week later.
Khom had to recount the fight for Hill 49 several times before the memory stuck.
“Reyd was the one who realized that the Gonks were flanking you,” he said. Then, in perhaps another conversation, added, “I have no idea how he managed to drag the damn rail gun around in time, but it saved the position.”
Later: “Hoella lost her foot to a frag blowing back the wrong way. She insisted on manning the RG because she couldn’t handle anything else. Yeah, she made it, but with all the pounding on her leg the surgeons had to finish it off above the knee….”
Khom in different clothes—must have been another day, when he said, “Elbers lied to you, didn’t want you to depend on help from the complex. We sallied two squads out toward Hill 49 almost as soon as he got off the comm. They arrived as the Gonks were finally overrunning the crest. Besides you, there were four others still alive, including Hoella and Gully Foy, Hoella. But Recon gutted the Gonks and we threw them back off the hill.”
Only a week later did a conversation with Gully Foy (one tinker mangled and his torso still covered with dressings) confirm that Khom’s “we” was a slip. He’d personally led the relief force over Elbers’ objections and stayed there for three days, holding Hill 49.
Progressing to peeing into a bedpan rather than through a catheter, Arras got the outlines of the rest of the operation straight, albeit from Verk, not Khom. The logistics specialist intuited her difficulty with short-term memory, arriving with a summary on a pad that she could refer back to.
Oyos had been a set-up. Some Frec on Nilly Nilly’s payroll had fed Deng Altairs seriously compromised intelligence. The Gonk rebels knew that eventually the government would attempt to recover the complex. Instead of defending it, they left it essentially unoccupied but surrounded by three regiments of the best-armed troops Nilly Nilly could field. The insurgents reasoned that only one serious attempt would be made to retake the lattice fields before men like Altairs took their money elsewhere.
“Elbers broke the first two attacks with orbital shrap,” Verk said. “The third time he evacuated the north end of the complex just prior to contact and blew apart four Gonk companies with more frag than I’ve ever seen laid down in such a small place. That bought time for the Ardooleys to reinforce him, but it was still looking pretty ka-damn grim with only one partial load of shrap left.”
When had the person she was talking to become Semplen Derst-Jesten? Altairs’ bodyguard said, “Verk convinced Deng that he would feel pretty stupid if he lost Oyos because he was too cheap to provide enough artillery support. We used his yacht to drop in two more loads of shrap right before the last big attack.”
She wondered idly who paid for that.
Khom—again?—holding up a chit for Cert thirty million with a thin smile.
“Couldn’t have done it, probably, without Recon kept Hill 49 long enough for us to reinforce.” He paused, looked down, and then said slowly, “We couldn’t have done it without Elbers, either. I know you don’t want to hear it, but he led the reaction teams into hand-to-grapple himself.”
That conversation occurred two days after the doctors told her they’d had to rip out her neural stimulators to save her life. They couldn’t rule out future seizure disorders, although they felt relatively confident that within a few weeks her memory would improve.
Slowly putting together the pieces, Arras was not sure she wanted to remember everything. Near as she could tell, North Regent Consulting had turned a profit because Elbers had managed—barely—to overcome Khom’s planning error in not investing in enough shrap and her own incompetence as a Platoon Commander, albeit only at the cost of thirty percent casualties.
Such a great start for the organizers of a mercenary outfit.
* * *
“I will not do this again with you in a command position,” Elbers said, standingd at the end of her bed, arms folded, face implacable although not hostile. “You and Khom have the contacts and the organizational skill to make a go of this business, but you, Sub-Major Winsen, don’t have the first idea about tactics. Putting soldiers under your command is tantamount to killing them.” He broke off, then said, “I’ll bloody let that ka-damn Klatta Lor call in fire on my head all day, but I won’t give you a platoon again.”
Arras had been dreading this conversation. Now, surprisingly, she found that the reality lacked the pain and embarrassment she had expected. She had already admitted to herself everything Elbers was saying. Even though her final rush up the slope had killed enough Gonks to assist in holding Hill 49, she couldn’t think of a single correct decision she’d made throughout the operation.
The Colonel did not select people for the Bureau who could not face their own weaknesses.
She met his gaze directly, then said, “I agree with you, Colonel. It was a bad idea. However, I’m not about to sit back in the office while we’ve soldiers in the bush. You’ll just have to figure out some way I can be of use.”
Arras reached across to the tray table over the bed, picked up a globe of juice (she could do that now) and sipped it, watching Elbers’ face as he worked it through.
Finally, he said, “You surprise me. Very few officers could admit that. Perhaps when….”
“When we go back to Gonkaina? Yes, Khom and I discussed it. NRC is taking the contract.”
This time the Frec government had approached them directly. Besides the Ardooleys, the Gonkaina Republic Army had few units capable of standing toes-to-toes with XRAF-trained Nilly Nilly’s rebels. So Yoohoo Tankey had personally advanced the idea that the mercenaries who’d held Oyos might be better employed as training advisors for the entire army.
With lattice already flowing out of Oyos, a three-year contract at 100 million Cert per standard year looked like small change well spent, particularly when Deng Altairs had agreed to underwrite twenty percent of that in exchange for Tegnarian Lattice’s new exclusive lease.
“Colonel Elbers, neither of us likes the other. Both of us respect Khom, and both of us know that if we’re not off-world doing something, eventually the Momentum will start examining our dossiers very carefully. That official line of forgiveness will evaporate rapidly for the likes of us if we haven’t made ourselves useful, at least in a non-official way.”
Elbers nodded, said, “It’s obviously in the best interest of the Momentum—which is now officially the best interest of the Reach—that Nilly Nilly’s insurgency fail in Gonkaina. So as along we’re contributing to that, they’ll let us alone.”
“That’s it. Although there’s one more wrinkle we have to take into consideration.”
“What’s that?”
Arras rubbed her nose, gathering her thoughts. If ideas still took longer to coalesce than she’d like, at least they appeared willing to be herded if she approached them slowly. “You’re absolutely correct that I don’t know tactics and you do, Colonel. Even so, I think I’ve figured out something that you and Khom are yet to realize. This mercenary thing, if it’s going to be an ongoing business, will be a different kind of war than any of us is used to, even though individual battles may seem superficially the same.”
Elbers had a perplexed look on his face, but he was paying attention.
“Verk called it ‘war on the cheap,’ but he’s wrong. Not having those last two loads of shrap available when we needed them is proof enough that cheap can’t be what we’re about. I think it’s got to be something like ‘war for net profit.’ When the Colonel conned Khom and me into this whole enterprise, we looked at it the same way you looked at Oyos: another assignment. Except that I never spent a lot of time thinking about where the Cert came from to buy my wraith suit, and Khom didn’t fret over meeting the a payroll. Those things just happened because we were XRAF.”
“I understand,” Elbers offered, his voice more tentative than usual. “You’re saying that now we not only have to worry about making those things happen, we have to think about how to pay for them.”
“Yes. No. Not quite. Damn it, I can’t concentrate. I mean that we’re going to have to question everything we do, not just do it. Take shrap, for example. If you’re the government, shrap is cheap. You know how much of it we threw around in Fringe and Gonkaina, even when we didn’t really need to. Now, when we can’t afford all that much of it, we’re going to have to think about different ways to keep the other guy’s head down. If we can’t always do hot inserts, we’re going to have to take up hiking. We have to think about the effect we need to achieve, and then the most economical—but not cheap!—method of achieving it.”
She sat the juice down.
“We can’t do that without you, and you don’t have much of a future without us. So the question is, can we be a team?”
Elbers actually smiled. “No, the question is apparently whether we can be business partners. We’re both going to have to think that through rather carefully, yah? Let’s get you up and kicking, we’ll talk again.”
“That will be the second thing I do, Colonel Elbers, when I get free of this lash-up. Depend on it.”
* * *
The first thing that Arras did when the wires and tubes had been removed was to float a grav-chute three floors up to Rehab, where Vanessla Hoella was learning to use her prosthetic leg. Recruit Hoella had been a name, a uniform, and a perceived weakness in Recon’s roster. Watching the young woman through the observation panel, Arras noticed that she had a small but muscular frame, wide hips, red-brown hair, a strong jaw, and scars all over her left arm where tattoos had been erased.
The younger woman had her hands braced on parallel rails as the Xinq therapist coached her in balancing on her new leg.
A floor supervisor noticed Arras observing the session.
“If this were Freehold or Bastion,” the man said, “we’d be able to regenerate her leg. We know how to do it; we just can’t afford the tech.”
Arras thought about the Colonel and the thin white scar circumscribing his upper arm she’d seen one day when he had his blouse off. “Got to be done somewhere,” she said. “There are people in the Reach get that kind of treatment.”
“Those people can afford to leave the Reach and pay for it. Not folks like her. You know her?”
“I was around when she had her accident.”
Deciding not to pursue the kinds of accidents one might have around weapons-grade molybendium, he said, “Want to speak with her? The session’s almost over.”
Arras hesitated, touched the side of her nose, then shook her head.
“Nah, doubt she’d recall me. Besides, I’ve other things need doing today.”
Comments