First Casualty Read online

  The light assault teams of Companies B and C bounced buggies off their transports and went about preparing for as fast a start as Ray would have done when he commanded a company. Good people.

  “Santiago.” Ray called up his exec. “Use A company for site security and to help the engineers. I'll move out with the vanguard. Get the heavies in D and E company moving as quickly as possible. I'll need artillery as soon as possible.”

  “Right, sir” was all the answer Ray needed.

  Ten minutes later, the light companies were mounted up and impatient to lead the charge. “Santiago, how soon can you give me artillery?”

  “How about two rocket launchers right now?”

  “You're a miracle man. Good luck.”

  “Good luck yourself, and Godspeed. Give 'em hell. See you for supper tonight in one of the Earthies' luxury chow halls.”

  “With real steaks and fresh potatoes.”

  Longknife swung aboard C company's command rig as it passed and plugged himself into the brigade network. Security was guaranteed by the communication filament trailing out from the carrier to the command post back here. His orders would not be intercepted or garbled. Second Guard was experienced and ready. He couldn't help pitying the poor bastards up ahead.

  * * * *

  Mary followed the descending ships, handing them off to battalion, who in turn bucked them to brigade. As Mary lurked in the background, they ended up talking to a very angry Navy type, a Commander Umboto, who was pissed as hell that nobody had any long-range rockets ready to go.

  “Miller, you store those coordinates and I'll go kick butt. If we can't get some rockets off the ground, my boot will damn sure get some lieutenants flying in that direction.”

  The comm link went dead with a loud click, as if the commander had bitten off her mike. Damn, there were some real hard cases here. Mary wondered if they were tough enough to win. She checked her digger. . . almost to the escarpment. What would happen to Umboto if their platoon cut its own peace? She'd probably live through it. They all would. Come on, digger.

  Mary called up her squad leaders: Lek, Cassie, Thu, Dumont , and Berra. “What's it look like?”

  Cassie and Dumont were Mary's backup, neither willing to say who was primary. After a long pause, Dumont spoke first. The kid was subdued. “We're dug in. I guess we're ready.”

  There was a beep. Mary focused on her heads-up. “Lieutenant, we got rolligons headed our way.”

  “Thanks, Sergeant, I make out a dozen.”

  Lek coughed gently to make himself known on net. If the LT was surprised to find a lurker, he said nothing. “Computer makes out ten wheeled vehicles spread out in the lead. Two columns with another ten coming up behind them. A tracked vehicle is pulling up the rear of both columns. Looks like another pair of columns about five klicks behind the first.”

  “Corporal, put that through to my and the sergeant's heads-ups immediately.”

  “Yes sir,” Lek answered.

  “Sergeant, looks like we got two companies coming our way. The tracks are probably artillery of some sort. Damn, I wish we had rockets with longer reach than ten klicks.”

  The regular issue was short-ranged. The LT knew nothing of what Dumont 's girls had gotten them. Just now, Mary wasn't ready to let him know what she had up her sleeve. He'd just want to start whopping the enemy sooner. Mary wanted to keep her hole cards back for a bit. Maybe, if nobody was hurt, nobody would have to be hurt. She checked the mole she'd sent across. It was at the escarpment, but making slow headway.

  Mary adjusted a few of her sensors. When next she looked up, the enemy was at the escarpment, eight klicks away, rolligons scattered loosely. One man had dismounted and stared her way, taking in the gap and the rim around it. A gleam came off the fiber-optic cable streaming from his suit.

  “Whatcha gonna do, man?” she whispered, hoping he wouldn't do anything until her mole could find his comm wire.

  * * * *

  Major Longknife studied the ground before him. Unlike the flat plain they'd just crossed, this was rolling and broken by boulders from the time of the creation of the huge crater, and small craters since. He'd walked similar terrain with grandfather, examining his defense of Goundo Pass Three on Yama-8. Grandpa had earned his colonelcy there. He'd also stopped just the kind of attack Ray was about to make.

  Eyeing the ground with twenty years of training and experience, he liked what he saw. The plain, rim, and pass looked untouched since creation. He maxed the zoom on his suit binoculars. At the crown of the pass were footsteps. One set.

  “So you had to see for yourself.” The man facing him was curious, or just needed to get personal with his battlefield, get past the vid and heads-up.

  Good man. Longknife would use that against him.

  The major called up his deployment on his heads-up. Two companies here. One coming up, heavier with artillery. Santiago was holding the last company back. He'd send them forward with the last of the heavy stuff. For a moment, Longknife cursed not having his command van with its full sensor suite. The XO had taken him at his order, artillery first. Still, it would have been better to have slipped the van in somewhere in the middle. Weight of salvo was good, but intelligence would be nice directing that salvo.

  “Should have thought of that when I was giving the order.” Usually Santiago used his head better in reinterpreting his orders. Not today. Well, C company had recon assets.

  “Tran, talk to me about that rim.”

  “Sensors show standard-issue snoops and not much else. Well, we got something that might be a whiff of nitrogen, but it only showed for a second and we can't get it back. No hot spots. No dust. It's clean. We are picking up something underfoot. We've turned loose a counter-miner to hunt it down.”

  “You got anything to send over there?” Longknife asked.

  “One Dervish Mod Three is up, other two are busted. We couldn't fix them on the way out here ...”

  “Not much a tech can do in three gees,” the major said to absolve the support staff. “If you will, Captain, launch what you can.”

  “Yes, sir. Tech Sergeant Callahan, boot that mother.”

  The Dervish was away in a blink.

  * * * *

  “What the hell?” Mary yelped. Coming at her in a crazy dance, now up, now down, now right, now left-way too fast to track was something.

  “It's a scout,” the LT observed. “A Dervish, I think. Laser, up and ready,” he ordered. “Sergeant, feed us a track.”

  One of Dumont's kids had tested fastest on the one laser rifle the platoon rated. Despite Lek's best scrounging efforts, one was all they had. Nobody would trade anything for what few antimissile weapons they had. Dumont had his fire team sleeping with theirs. Only 12 millimeters, it was small compared to the big Navy guns. Still, it was their laser.

  Mary passed numbers and hoped the team was as good at the real thing as they'd been with the vid-game they trained on. The scout reached the base of the rim, dodged right, rose, then jinked left. At the top of the rim, it went right, then left, and slipped over the crest. If Mary hadn't had her sensors covering every square inch of the place, she'd have lost it.

  “Dumont, it's yours,” she Said.

  Even as she did the handover, the laser rifle spat a bolt.

  First shot missed clean as the scout went right. Next shot was closer, but the damn thing jumped five meters. It jinked to the left—directly into a bolt.

  Whether the kid guessed right, or just missed in the right direction, he'd done it. Chunks of wreckage shot out in a dozen directions and began to fall slowly.

  “We did it, we did it!” the youngsters screamed as one.

  But had we done it soon enough? Mary turned her attention back to the wheels on the plain. Some were already negotiating their way through low places in the escarpment.

  “Here they come,” she announced on wide net, then gave full attention to her far digger. It had to find that cable.

  * * * *

  Lon
gknife zoomed the picture on his heads-up display and scowled. None were completed before the Dervish was popped. Infrared showed hot spots everywhere but a dust down around the rill. Had the idiot deployed his people in there? That was either stupid or a desperate move by an unprepared force. The electromagnetic scan that would show him the location of every racing heartbeat was . . . jammed!

  In theory that was possible, but he'd never had it done to him before. The major blinked hard. What was he up against here? Someone had downed his Dervish fast. Good shooter or dumb luck? He wasn't supposed to be facing good troops, just hasty conscripts who'd break at the first tap. “Was the dust down for real,” Longknife mused, “or just to confuse me?”

  “Major, we're ready to move out.”

  Longknife smiled. It was time to commit, and there was nowhere near enough to go on. For twenty years he'd faced this, just like Dad and Grandpa before him. Let's kick over this anthill and see what happens. Which was all there was to do.

  “Companies advance, C on the right, B on the left. Keep your intervals loose. Your objective is the rim wall. Keep your heads up, use what cover you can. Until things develop, hang loose and keep ready for anything. Good luck and Godspeed. Now let's show 'em Second Guard's the best there is.”

  The fire teams answered with a shout as the carriers moved out. Ten rifles to a carrier and two carriers to a platoon. The Earthies still used the fifty-man platoon. In a few minutes, they'd learn what the twenty troopers in a Unity platoon could do. One hundred to a company, two hundred rode by his command. D company was four klicks out with three more launchers and a pair of tube artillery. If he used his two launchers now, they'd be reloaded before the troops reached the crater.

  “Rockets, pop their sensors on the rim. Use the rest of your load to lay down a salvo on the other side. Standard long box pattern. Use the rill as your center line.”

  “Roger. Salvo on the way.” The tracks had leveled themselves on jacks as soon as they halted. Rockets began budding from their launchers as the words echoed in his ears.

  Three meters from Ray, the ground erupted. He smiled; the counter-miner had bagged its bug, too. The Earthies were losing all their sensors. Hot damn!

  * * * *

  “Damn,” Mary groaned as the digger across the plain went dead. Mining diggers weren't rigged with sensors; still, Mary had picked up readings through the rock. With something digging ahead of her, she'd pushed her digger to the max, hoping to get a fast patch into the Collies' comm net. The digger was gone, and with it their one chance to settle this nice and easy.

  Her heads-up went wild.

  “Rockets, incoming,” Mary shouted. Pair after pair of missiles appeared on her display.

  “Expect sixteen if they're the large ones, sixty-four if they're pelting us with the little stuff.” The lieutenant again provided the military analysis. “Those dinky things can't touch us in our holes, so stay low men and hug your boots.”

  * * * *

  Dumont didn’t need the LT to tell him to stay low. He and Tina crouched as deep in their hole as they could, holding each other tighter than when they made love.

  “We got 'em.” Blacky's voice rang in Dumont's ears.

  “Got what?” he asked, like they were back on the Pitt, cruising for rags.

  “The rockets. Watch me pop 'em.”

  Dumont blinked his heads-up to life. It overwrote his eyeball, mottling Tina's pale complexion with the tracks of fast-moving missiles. Mary had promised that what she could see, she'd show them all. And what Blacky saw, he shot at.

  “Damn it, Blacky, those things'11 home on you.” Around Tina's nose a second and third dot winked out.

  “Not while I got 'em in my sights,” Blacky crowed.

  A fourth disappeared.

  “Private, get that rifle in your hole,” the lieutenant shouted, his voice cracking. “Your ammo won't hold out. You're only making yourself a target.” Two more dots just below Tina's eyes vanished. But her forehead looked like a bad case of acne. And they were changing direction, arrowing straight for Blacky.

  “Can't you do something?” Tina whispered.

  “Run over to Blacky's hole just in time to get blown to jelly with him.” Dumont wasn't about to do that, even if a corporal was supposed to. And nobody had told him a corporal was. Two more dots disappeared.

  “Damn, it's not shooting anymore,” Blacky screamed. “Amy, switch me to another juice bag.”

  “Not enough time,” Mary yelled. “Pull it in and get down!”

  “I'm going. I'm going,” Blacky hollered.

  Dumont wanted to look, see if Blacky had finally done what someone told him to. He kept his head down. Don’t make yourself a target . He could check on Blacky when the barrage was over. Check on what was left of him. On Dumont's display, the dots were flocking to Tina's lips. He wanted to kiss her. Damn suit. Some of the dots farther back, around her eyes, were still spread out. Dumont held his breath and Tina tight. The explosions began. He pissed in his suit and his bowels let go. Tina screamed as he was thrown against her. He gripped the walls of their hole, trying to hold himself, not smash against her again.

  The explosions went on—forever.

  * * * *

  “Report casualties,” the lieutenant ordered on net as soon as the last rocket was down. On her screen, Mary could see him out of his hole, bounding for third squad.

  No one else was moving.

  The lieutenant came to a halt at the edge of a torn and pocked area. Here, the rill was gone, broadened into a ten-meter hole made up of a lot of little ones. “Third squad, you've lost two men and the laser rifle.” Mary knew it was a man and a woman, two kids who'd played one too many vid-games.

  “Lieutenant,” Mary said, her voice even, “I've got traffic moving in front of us.”

  “How much?”

  “Twenty wheeled vehicles.”

  “Pick two, wide apart, and give 'em each a rocket.” The LT's words were bitter cold. She'd never heard anyone talk quite that way. But then, Mary'd never been around when murder was decided upon.

  She selected two rigs, a bit out in front of the rest. By triangulating her vid, she got a good range and position on them without using a laser to range-find. She felt nothing. “Fire in hole twelve,” she called ... just another day at the mine.

  “Clear,” the lieutenant shot back.

  Cold as death, Mary watched the two missiles process as dots across her display. She didn't switch on the laser designator until the missiles were over the rim. She only highlighted the vehicles when they were halfway there. For a moment the missiles did not respond; then they changed direction. Mary grinned as the projected courses intersected the rigs.

  Alarms must have gone off in the vehicles when the designators hit them. Plums of dust shot out as they accelerated and turned. They popped chaff—too late. Several battle-suited figures tumbled out of the rigs. A laser bolt shot up— missed.

  The missiles hit. Parts of rig and bodies cartwheeled in slow arcs. Mary zoomed a video in on both scenes, passed them along. Let everybody see the payback. There were cheers on net. Mary studied the picture, imprinting it solid. How many times in the mines had she swallowed whatever the owners handed out? She'd stood, clinch jawed, and taken it. Well, I'm not taking it anymore. You got two of us. We got a lot more of you. Keep coming and there's more where that came from.

  “Lieutenant, can I have a couple more missiles?”

  “Yeah.” Her request was seconded by others on net.

  “We've made our point, Sergeant. We'll need what we got in an hour or so.” As the lieutenant headed back to his hole, Mary turned to the enemy. They'd gone to ground, rigs hiding in the cover of rocks, infantry scattered.

  “Okay, you bastards. Let's see how you take to getting your own nose bloodied.”

  * * * *

  “Where the hell did that come from?” The newly arrived commander of D company joined his brigade commander at the escarpment's edge, surveying the wreckage.
r />   “I'd like to know.” Longknife could feel the blood lust rising. They'd played him for a sucker—and he'd taken the bait. He wanted them dead. The question was how to do it without throwing troopers away. “Company commanders, report.”

  “Tran here.”

  “Lieutenant Cohen, B company commander.”

  “Where's ...” Right, there'd been a laser cannon on one of the carriers—a company commander's rig. B company had a new commander. Longknife took a deep breath. “Slight change of plan. Send me back your carriers. Keep the infantry heading for the rim, but advance on foot, leapfrog, use fire and movement.”

  “Who do we fire at?” the lieutenant squeaked.

  “Nobody, unless you see something. Just don't put too many people out in the open until we know what we're up against.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “No stupid questions, only stupid answers.” And how stupid am I being? I'm not ready to put my tail between my legs and run, that's for sure. Of course, it would be nice if those bastards in the pass just disappeared. “Move out, fellows, and keep your heads down. You got an hour to reach the rim.”

  “Roger” came back to him. He went to the next item on his agenda. “Senior Pilot Nuu, when's the Revenge due back for a second shooting pass?”

  “Don't know, Major. Whatever they ran into fried every sensor and antenna on the boats. Even lost a nine-inch gun. Some eager turret commander ran his laser out early. Got something in its eye. Revenge and company will be low when they go past here. You running into trouble?”

  “Nothing we can't handle, but I wouldn't mind the Navy slagging this pass from orbit.”

  “Sorry, hon.”

  “I'm having a busy day at the office. Call you later, friend.” Ray clicked off. There might have been a whispered kiss just before the line went dead. He stowed it away somewhere behind his heart for later. Right now, he had a battle to win.