The Far Stars War Read online

  “All right. . .” Lermontov murmured as he watched the same beads on his own display. “And you’ve got them?”

  “Yessir,” the artillery spotter said. “The data’s sent to Support as soon as it’s calculated. They’re waiting offshore to launch as soon as they get the order.”

  Rudisill raised himself slightly to check the terrain of the estimated—and now confirmed—Gerin camp on the spotting table. The table’s data came from the same satellite radar picture as the map on Rudisill’s visor, but at least the display was better.

  The ridge up which the commando was climbing fell away sharply at the crest. On the other side was a valley carved by the meanderings of a considerable watercourse. The plain’s vegetation was kept to a height of ten meters or less by flooding, but giant trees from the crest spread their branches over the scallop a spring had carved from the cliff face.

  Water pooled beneath the cliff before gurgling on toward the river half a kilometer away. The pool was the exact center of the Gerin’s defensive ring.

  “Bingo,” said Rudisill.

  “All the sites are vertical defense, right?” Lermontov said.

  “Well, the plasma guns would be dual purpose,” said the artillery spotter. “But yeah, there’s likely antipersonnel stuff closer in that’s shut down too.”

  Rudisill kept his voice steady, but he knew what the words meant. The normal way to eliminate a concealed defensive array was to take cover, spoof the system into life, and then blast the unmasked batteries with precisely aimed artillery. The other way of discovering the system was…

  “Okay,” said Captain Lermontov, “that means we gotta get real close. No point in our being here if we give the Slime enough warning they grease their hostages before we nail ‘em, right?”

  “No bloody point our bein’ here,” Heatherton muttered, a complaint but not an argument.

  “Heatherton, Minh, Moschelitz,” the captain continued. “You take positions on the clifftop. Guns, Sanger, and me’ll circle to the low side and penetrate as close as we need to spot the Slime inner ring.

  “Remember,” Lermontov added, “take it easy.”

  His voice honed itself to just a hint of an edge, reminding them all that he knew they were hard men, but Ivan Lermontov was the hardest of them all, and he would be obeyed. “The first the Slime knows we’re here is when Guns’s salvo takes out all their defenses. If anybody shoots before then, he’s responsible for the failure of the mission and the death of a hundred fifty civilian hostages.”

  Softly again: “Understood?”

  “Roger, “ whispered five voices simultaneously across the com net.

  “Then let’s move.”

  The other method of discovering a shut-down defensive array was damned dangerous. Maybe a little safer than jumping on a live grenade, but real bloody similar.

  Not that Rudisill was going to argue with the captain.

  Even shut down, the elements of an antipersonnel defense system could be detected if you got within a couple of meters. The danger was that if the Gerin had the inner defenses under observation, they could bring their weapons live while the human troops were right in front of them.

  But then, if you figured to die in bed, you didn’t volunteer for a commando.

  It took Lermontov’s three-man section over an hour to slink around to the opposite side of the Gerin base.

  Their circuit confirmed the locations of four more batteries, but the outer ring defenses weren’t really a threat. Even though the heavy plasma weapons could be put under manual control to fire on ground targets, there’d be a lock-out to prevent them from shooting toward the base itself. The whole commando was by now within the outer defended area.

  The trees on the valley floor had soft, pulpy boles. They grew close together. Rudisill knew that every time he brushed one, the fan of leaves ten meters above him waved like a flag toward any of the Slime who happened to be watching.

  Air didn’t move among the dense trunks. Rudisill prayed there was enough breeze above the low canopy to conceal the foliage he moved in the broader patterns of nature.

  His right hand was cramping. He deliberately took it off the grip of his rifle and flexed it, working fatigue poisons out of the muscles.

  “Sir?” said Heatherton. “We’re in position. I want to scope a look.”

  “Okay,” said Lermontov. “Optics only.”

  Nonemissive viewing through the long fiber-optics lens each trooper carried was safe enough. Laser-ranging or using long-wave radar to pierce a curtain of vegetation might give useful information, but would be almost certain to arouse the Slime defenses.

  Rudisill settled in place and spread his spotting table again. He switched his visor to play the take from Heatherton’s periscope at full intensity. He could’ve crawled through the vegetation with Heatherton’s data displayed as ghost images, the way the relief map had been, but the commando wasn’t in a real hurry, and Rudisill wanted a good look at the lion before he stuck his head in its mouth.

  The picture wasn’t razor-sharp, but it was damned good for an image picked up by a one-millimeter lens, piped down several meters of glass cable, digitized, and finally transmitted to Rudisill’s helmet over a spread of frequencies.

  It was good enough to kill by.

  There were two Gerin in the spring-fed pool below the cliff. From Heatherton’s near-vertical angle, they looked like short-limbed octopuses—or blots of slime that somebody’d stepped on.

  That would happen real soon.

  There was an armored transporter under camouflage netting, forty meters down the stream which gurgled over the lip of the pool. It was only a six-place vehicle, but its forward cupola held a plasma cannon.

  A third Slime sat on the transporter’s entrance ramp. Its tentacles waved idly in the water flowing to either side of the vehicle’s plenum-chamber skirts.

  Rudisill keyed in the vehicle as an artillery target. The spotting table whined happily.

  “All right, “ whispered Sanger.

  The analysts had been right for a change.

  There was a cave in the cliff directly beneath Heatherton.

  The gate at its mouth was invisible from this angle until another Gerin opened it. Shadows displayed the pattern of bars.

  The guard was letting a pair of naked humans out of the cave. Commando 441 had the first sight of the hostages it was supposed to rescue.

  Rudisill couldn’t figure the byplay at the gate. The Slime had seemed to fondle the prisoners’ necks before letting them run clumsily toward the plain, carrying tools and baskets.

  Then Captain Lermontov said, “Okay, they’re wearing collars. Explosives with radio detonators and antitamper locks, sure as hell. The Slime let ‘em supplement their rations, but they make sure they come back.”

  “They give ‘em knives, too,” Sanger noted.

  “Those may be trowels,” the captain said.

  “I’d open up a Slime with a trowel,” Sanger retorted. “So ‘d they, if they had balls.”

  The hostages trotted into the forest. Heatherton’s periscope gave only brief further flashes of them. They were operating at some distance from one another. They seemed to be digging and putting the results into their baskets.

  The gate shut. The Slime guarding it remained in the alcove, barely visible in the strip of shade beneath the cliff face.

  “Okay,” said Lermontov. “We’ve got the right place. Let’s move up and find the inner defenses.”

  “Sir, I don’t think we’d better do that,” Rudisill said. “We’re already inside three hundred meters. The paradigms on my spotting table, they don’t include one for antipersonnel arrays on less than a three-hundred-meter radius. “

  Nobody said anything for a moment. On Rudisill’s visor, a Gerin rose from the pool with a splash. For a moment, there were three of the ugly b
easts within spitting distance of one another. Then one of the initial pair slipped deeper into the water and disappeared.

  “Look, maybe they don’t have an inner ring here,” Sanger suggested.

  “Unlikely,” Lermontov said flatly, though he’d have liked to believe that as much as the others would. “The heavy weapons are too extensive for them not to have light stuff as well. They’ve just hidden it too well for us.”

  “Sir,” said Rudisill, “we don’t have a choice. Let’s move back and I’ll send in a drone. If we try anything without nailing the antipersonnel shit, we cut our throats and the hostages’ too.”

  “Okay …” Lermontov said, but the word was a placeholder while he thought, not agreement. “This is what we’ll do. The hostages themselves will have a notion where the defensive ring is hidden. We…”

  “Maybe not,” the artillery spotter interjected. “They maybe were brought here after the…”

  “Chances are,” Lermontov went on, “they’ll know.”

  He didn’t raise his voice, but his tone shut Rudisill up instantly. “All we need is one element to figure the whole array, right?”

  “Ah,” said Rudisill. “Two’d be better. But yeah, one’ll give us a point and the radius. Chances are there’ll be only one paradigm to match. If it’s regular.”

  The Slime at the back of the transporter squirmed inside. A moment later, he or another Gerin reappeared with a food bar wrapped in one tentacle.

  Slime worked in groups of three. That meant the vehicle’s turret was probably manned.

  “The outer defenses were regular?”

  “Yessir,” Rudisill admitted. “Like they’d asked a computer to lay it out.”

  Which they probably had. The Gerin had an accountant’s taste for precision.

  “Okay,” Lermontov repeated. “We’ll ask a hostage where the inner defenses are—or how they’re camouflaged. Whatever it takes for us to locate an element. Then we’re golden.”

  “Aw, shit, Cap’n,” Sanger whispered. “Aw, shit. I don’t like this shit.”

  “It’s the only way we’re going to get the hostages out alive,” said Captain Lermontov. “So that’s the way we’ll do it. All right?”

  “Yessir,” said Sanger. Rudisill’s mouth was too dry for him to comment, even if he’d wanted to do so.

  “Guns,” the captain continued, “one of the Dukes seems to be coming your way. Stay where you are while Sanger and me move in from behind her. Let me do the talking if possible. “

  “Roger,” Sanger said. Rudisill either spoke the word or thought it while his mouth poised to scream.

  He had too much imagination. It was all right when shit started to happen and there was nothing to do but react to the terror that stalked in with blast and fury. But for times when he had to wait and know how much could go wrong with a plan ... for times like this, Rudisill had too much imagination.

  The soft dirt wasn’t perfectly regular. He edged sideways into a low patch and flattened, wishing he were back in the base camp, or up on top of the cliff, or any damn place else in the world.

  The hostage’s tool echoed against a root with a hollow chock! chock! chock! Bare feet shuffled closer to Rudisill’s hiding place.

  He caught a glimpse of leg among the narrow trunks. The skin was the pasty white of a cave creature.

  The hostage stepped into plain sight, five meters away. She didn’t see Rudisill. His helmet and uniform took on the mottling of his surroundings with the perfection of a chameleon’s hide; and anyway, the hostage was looking for fruiting bodies like the dozen or so she already carried in her basket.

  She was about fifteen years old and stark naked except for the metal collar. He body was as filthy and scrawny as that of an alley cat.

  Sanger and Captain Lermontov slipped out of the trees just behind her and moved in from either side.

  The girl was humming something beneath her breath.

  She knelt by a tree two meters from Rudisill. Her eyes caught the regular outline of the spotting table.

  Before the artillery spotter had time to react, the girl spun erect, kicking gritty loam back toward him.

  “It’s all right,” said Captain Lermontov with his arms spread. “We’re here to free…”

  The hostage screamed. She flung her blunt-bladed machete into Lermontov’s visored face, then sprinted between him and Sanger.

  For a moment, Rudisill had a flash of what the girl was seeing: a trio of grim figures like monsters sprung from rotting vegetation. Camouflage made the men faceless blurs; only the arsenal of weapons they wore had firm outlines.

  “Geddown! Geddown!” Rudisill shouted as he uncaged the red firing key on his table. The girl would warn…

  “I got ‘er!” Sanger cried as his hand rose. Not with a gun, because the shot would be worse than the screams....

  Sanger’s hand was vertical. A long-bladed knife rose from it like a torch, hilt-down for a short throw. At this range, Sanger’s arm would send the point pricking out above the girl’s breastbone while the crossguard rapped her shoulder.

  “No!” said Captain Lermontov, but words didn’t matter now, not even his words, so he tackled the trooper.

  Rudisill pressed the red key. He forced himself into the dirt, exhaling so that he’d be that much flatter when…

  The first sound was the snarling roar of a backpack rocket, fired from the clifftop on Rudisill’s warning. The next sound was a whine, through the damp soil and then above it, as the Gerin antipersonnel array deployed.

  Gerin lasers were firing even before the MARS warhead’s blast and the rippling secondary explosions of fuel and ammunition aboard the Slime transporter.

  The commando hadn’t been able to locate the inner ring defenses because the elements had been buried deep in the ground. Three meters behind where Rudisill cowered, a thick post thrust from the soil like a cylindrical toadstool. Its high-energy laser scythed through tree trunks in bursts of fire and live steam.

  Rudisill’s helmet went black, saving his vision from the blue-white dazzle a centimeter above his head. He poked his rifle backward like a huge pistol and fired blindly while hell roared and ravened above him. The bare skin of his hands and throat crinkled.

  Far around the circuit, a plasma weapon started to pulse skyward. Then the artillery support Rudisill had summoned burst overhead.

  Rudisill’s rifle had antipersonnel ammunition up, but a lucky round snapped through the laser aperture. His visor cleared when the glare paused, and he had a chance to throw the switch on his magazine to armor-piercing.

  Rudisill’s aimed shots punched the laser unit into a colander before it could rotate a replacement lens into place.

  The air bursts spewed a rain of self-forging fragments. Each one struck within satellite-computed centimeters of the targets the spotting table had sent them. The circle of Gerin plasma and missile batteries, gutted by molten penetrators, blew skyward in alternate bubbles of ionized light and flattened mushrooms of flame-streaked smoke.

  The spotting table was zeeping again as it transmitted the coordinates of the inner defensive ring.

  Rudisill twisted, loading another magazine to replace the one he’d emptied on the automatic defense unit. He had a good view of the Slime positions now, because the laser had sawed the trees in a jumble of steam and thrashing feathery branches.

  Sanger was okay. He’d been saved—like Rudisill—by irregularities in the ground they’d scarcely have noticed while marching. Sanger was shooting toward the guard at the cave mouth. Purple blood spurted from the back of the Slime as it tried to unlock the gate and squirm for shelter.

  The laser’s beam of coherent light had sliced off the feet of the running hostage, then cycled back as she fell and touched her again. Her hair smoldered, and the top of her skull lay a little distance from the rest of her body.

 
Captain Lermontov had been on top of Sanger when the laser began to cut. Now he lay very still.

  His torso was separated from his hips.

  The remains of the Gerin transporter were still burning fiercely. Rudisill had targeted it for the artillery, but the fragment’s impact only fanned flames which the commando’s own rocket had ignited.

  The men of Heatherton’s section must have destroyed the automatic defenses nearest to them, because they were able to shoot instead of cowering beneath the ravening lasers. Bullets blew forth from the pool and combed Sanger’s shots in a sparkling crossfire.

  Rudisill heard a familiar howl in the sky. “Watch yourselves!” he warned over the unit net. “Incoming!”

  He spread himself flat again. These were shells he’d summoned, but no fire was friendly if you happened to be at the point of impact.

  Instead of ducking, one of Heatherton’s men fired his MARS down into the pool. A geyser of water lifted, carrying with it the bodies of two Gerin. Steam puffed out around the bars of the cave and the Slime corpse which lay there shivering as bullets continued to rake it.

  The world paused for the triple low-altitude blasts of incoming shells and the hypervelocity shock waves of the glowing spearpoints they spewed. The ground rippled like a trampoline, flinging Rudisill into the air as mud gouted thirty meters high at the point where the laser unit had been.

  The inner ring of the defensive array vanished. Bits of metal and plastic dribbled down with the columns of gritty mud the penetrators had lifted.

  “Have we got ‘em?” Rudisill called. “Have we got ‘em all?”

  Sanger was reloading his rifle. He paused in midmotion as he noticed Lermontov for the first time. Sanger was a veteran. When the shooting started, he must have rolled into position and fired by reflex, ignoring every part of the equation except what was in his sight picture....

  The head of a Gerin wearing an armored battle suit rose just above the surface of the pool. It fired up at the cliff. The Slime was using what by human standards was a light cannon. Rock crumbled around the bright orange shellbursts.