Into the Maelstrom Read online

  The small speaker in his mask made his voice squeaky, like someone who inhaled helium as a party trick. Allenson nodded to save his breath for sledge pulling. There was enough ambient light cast across the swamp from the port and the city for Allenson to see the officer as a dark outline. Theoretically anyone training a scope on the swamp from Oxford could spot Allenson’s small expedition, but why would they bother? There was little they could do about it anyway.

  The expedition pulled five sledges in all, three carrying equipment and the other two supplies. It took another hour to cross the last one hundred and fifty meters as everyone was close to exhaustion. One man fell face down in the slime. Unfortunately he panicked and pulled off his mask when sediment blocked its valves. One breath was all it took. His companions got the mask back on him but by then he was still. They piled him on a sledge but Allenson suspected that the trooper was already dead.

  The soldiers were so knackered when they reached their destination that Allenson told them to climb up on the low jumble of rocks and wait for dawn before unloading. He sent back a coded message signaling the party’s safe arrival before wedging himself uncomfortably between two boulders. Rather to his surprise, he dozed off almost immediately.

  Trina and Ling watched the operation from Allenson’s office via a secure line to a nightscope positioned in the siege lines. Trina’s hands clenched when the trooper slipped into the ooze but she showed no other sign of the stress she was under.

  “That’s not the general,” Ling said confidently. “I can see him quite clearly at the front.”

  “I believe you are right,” Trina replied.

  They both lied. All the scope showed were struggling silhouettes barely distinguishable from the background. Her knuckles stayed white until the signal arrived, the precise form of the message indicating that all essential personnel were in place which must of necessity include Allenson. In her relief she talked more than she would normally have considered necessary.

  “I don’t understand why Allen had to personally undertake this operation,” she said. “It’s not like he knows anything about engineering.”

  “Strictly speaking that is true,” Ling said carefully. “But the strike is critical so I expect he wanted to be on hand in case unexpected developments required an immediate response from him personally.”

  “Like what?” Trina asked.

  “Well, anything I suppose,” Ling replied, evasively.

  Trina glared at the chief of staff.

  “Give me an example?” she asked, remorselessly pressing the point.

  “The Brasilians might, well . . . suppose . . .”

  His voice trailed off.

  “That’s what I thought,” Trina said crushingly. “There is no good reason for my husband to hazard himself.”

  “It’s the first offensive move by the army so I expect he wanted to set an example by leading from the front,” Ling said loyally.

  “Ridiculous, and you know it,” Trina snapped. “Generals make plans but their combat officers carry them out. He’s just being irresponsible because he can’t bear to stay away from the sharp end. It never seems to occur to him that he is as mortal as anyone else. What will happen to his precious army if he gets himself killed? Answer me that? People die in wars. They die stupidly, pointlessly by sheer chance.”

  Ling stayed silent.

  “Sorry, Colonel Ling, I’m just worried about him. I shouldn’t embarrass a gentleman by inviting him to criticize his superior officer’s ludicrous behavior even if it is just privately to the man’s wife.”

  Ling muttered something

  “What?”

  “I said it will soon be light.”

  “Really? I thought you said: especially to his wife.”

  “The difficult part is over. There’s nothing now the Brasilians can do,” Ling said reassuringly.

  Trina would have none of it.

  “I don’t pretend to know anything about war, Colonel, but I do understand business. It’s exactly when you know your competitor can’t counter your move that he does so anyway.”

  “Colonel Hawthorn is in charge of the operation and I’m sure he will take good care of the general. From what I’ve seen I would say the colonel is a most effective officer.”

  “Oh, he has many competencies,” Trina said tonelessly.

  Ling glanced at her sharply but her mouth was set in a hard line as she watched the scope. She clearly didn’t intend to expand upon the point.

  A figure danced in the flames, his head thrown back, his mouth open, soundlessly screaming. His hair blazed like molten lava. Allenson reached out to try to pull him from the flames but the figure shook him off. The shaking went on and on.

  “Rise and shine, General,” Hawthorn said, and shook him again.

  Allenson licked his lips inside the mask. He put his head close to Hawthorn’s so he could speak quietly.

  “I wasn’t, you know, saying anything odd, was I?”

  Hawthorn looked at him sharply.

  “Have the nightmares started again?”

  Allenson shook his head. The mask disguised his features. It was easier to lie just by body language although he doubted if Hawthorn was fooled. He levered himself awkwardly to his feet. One of his knees had frozen and his back felt as if a regiment had marched up and down it.

  “Too many nights sleeping in a soft bed,” Hawthorn said with a grin.

  Allenson told him to commit an act that a double jointed teenage acrobat would have found demanding and surveyed their surroundings. Rosy light filtered over the horizon, flooding the green tinge of the marsh with a pastel pink. The first flicker of the sun gleamed where the sea met the sky.

  Breakfast consisted of a tube of nutrient fluid with added stimulants squirted through a valve in the mask. It tasted like salted baby food. Kiesche was already up with his engineering crew to supervise the assembly of his apparatus. He hopped from installation to installation like an overworked midwife dealing with three simultaneous births.

  The heavy duty pipes that linked the machinery had to be bolted on manually as the use of power tools constituted too great a hazard. Each of the three engines consisted of three separate modules: a power supply, a hydraulic pump, and a catapult with twisted steel torsion bars. Connecting the modules involved a great deal of sweat and general cursing. Kiesche constructed the gear in situ on any available bit of flat surface so each installation was laid out differently. Heavy steel cables attached to pylons driven into crevices in the rocks by sledge hammers locked down the catapult sections.

  Allenson and Hawthorn had little to do but stay out of Kiesche and Pynchon’s way. Allenson amused himself by observing the port and city. The port was already awake. A trans-Bight civilian freighter had landed during the night on the waters of the bay. Tugs pushed and pulled the vessel up against the dockside where laborers waited by the unloading chutes and cranes. A couple of smaller tramps sat on the concrete aprons.

  Over in the town it was still quiet. One or two early birds hurried through the streets but the majority of the citizenry snored on. He examined the lasercannon towers carefully. From his vantage point in the swamp he could see they were made from preassembled modules like giant scaffolding, which explained how the Brasilians had erected them quickly. He had wondered whether they could be toppled, but the lattice arrangement of supports would be difficult to hit. Knocking out just one or two struts would have little impact on the integrity of the structures.

  A flash of reflected sunlight from one of the towers caught his eye. He jacked up the magnification on the scope as high as he could go without losing all detail in hand-shake. The scope’s stabilization function helped enormously. A figure hunched over an observation device that was pointed in the direction of the expedition.

  He nudged Hawthorn.

  “We’ve been spotted.”

  “They were bound to clock us sooner or later,” Hawthorn replied.

  “I suppose so.” Allenson chuckled. “They mus
t wonder what the hell we’re up to.”

  After another hour Kiesche approached Allenson, rubbing his hands together in satisfaction like an excited schoolboy.

  “They’re done and I’ve dry tested the systems. The power supplies discharged a little overnight but I’ve got men replacing the lost energy.”

  “So I see,” Allenson replied.

  A man stood over each of the three power supplies pumping backwards and forwards on a lever. Manual recharging was the only sure way to replenish power into the sealed batteries without risking an explosion.

  “We’ll have to set up a rota with a frequent changeover. The men won’t be able to stand that level of work for long in these damn masks.”

  Allenson walked gingerly across the rocks, which were slippery with some disgusting slime-mold like growth. He was naturally clumsy at the best of times. On this surface a fall could damage more than just his dignity. Pynchon bent over one of the pumping modules, intently watching a pressure gauge crudely welded onto the case. He looked up when Allenson approached and switched off the pump.

  “Morning, sir, just powering up one of the engines. I intend to try a few shots to calibrate tension against range before we open up with the full battery. Do you have any particular mark you’d like me to try to hit?”

  Oddly enough, Allenson’s attention had been so fixed on getting their homemade artillery into position that he hadn’t given the matter much thought. He looked across the bay allowing himself the luxury of choosing a target.

  “You see that big bugger tied up against the dock?” Allenson said, pointing to the newly arrived freighter.

  “Yes, sir,” Pynchon replied with a grin.

  “That’s your mark.”

  Pynchon measured the range with his datapad. He carried out a quick calculation before running the pump for another five minutes or so. The torsion bars on the third module imperceptibly tightened, causing the engine to make sharp clicking noises as various components took up the load.

  Pynchon adjusted the rake of the carbon fiber and steel tube that served as a barrel, before signaling to the loaders. Two men carried a heavy iron ball to the muzzle and rolled it down the barrel where it lay on a striker connected to the torsion bars.

  “Stand clear,” Pynchon said, testing the various cables anchoring the module to the rock one last time.

  The artilleryman fired the piece by flipping a lever, because they didn’t want to risk a remote. A mechanical delay gave Pynchon a valuable half second to put a couple of meters between himself and the device before it released. The catapult emitted a great clang and thumped against the ground. It bounced a few millimeters into the air before being caught on the cables. Allenson winced, thinking of the strain on the pressurized pipes connecting the pump.

  “Would you look at that,” Hawthorn said in wonder.

  The ball soared majestically into the air, clearly visible to the naked eye. It described a high parabolic curve before dropping into the bay with a visible splash. Unfortunately it fell well short of the ship.

  “I was concerned that we wouldn’t be able to see the fall of shot,” Pynchon said, half to himself, “but that isn’t going to be a problem. The equipment is less efficient than our initial tests suggested. No matter, we’ll try another round with ten percent more pressure.”

  The last was directed at a technician on the pump who pressed a large red button to reset the safety and switch on the apparatus. It took ten minutes to re-tension the catapult. Not a devastatingly fast rate of fire, Allenson reflected, but the targets weren’t going anywhere. No one in the port appeared to have noticed the attack.

  Pynchon fired again. This time the ball sailed clean over the ship and kicked a chip from the tough material of the syncrete. They certainly noticed that in the port but didn’t connect it with Allenson’s little band. Dockers stood curiously around the crater, alternating between peering down at the damage and gazing up at the sky.

  Pynchon’s third shot hit the water just in front of the floating ship and bounced into the hull with a crack that could be heard across the bay.

  “Skipping stones,” Allenson said delightedly, imitating throwing a stone across the water with a flick of his wrist.

  “I remember your brother Todd was a demon at that,” Hawthorn said with a grin.

  “Happier times,” Allenson replied, regretfully.

  He turned to the engineering officer.

  “That completes your part in our enterprise, Major Kiesche. You and your technicians may as well walk back and get a decent meal and rest. I expect you’ll be glad to get these damned masks off and enjoy a hot shower.”

  “I’ll send my men back, sir, but with your permission I think I should stay just in case a problem arises with the equipment.”

  Allenson grinned within his mask. Kiesche didn’t fool him for a moment. The man wouldn’t miss seeing his inventions in action for anything.

  The artillery proved to be horribly inaccurate. Only one in three shots managed to hit even such a large target as the freighter but they had plenty of time and plenty of iron. The solid shot inflicted limited damage but you can erode granite if you flick enough water drops at it.

  It didn’t take the Brasilians long to join up the dots and work out the source of the bombardment. They reacted by raking the area with lasercannon fire. Fingers of green punched into the air in front, generating opaque clouds. Acid rain fell into the swamp in heavy drips. When they realized that they weren’t getting results, the enemy’s next tried focusing a group of lasercannon on a single spot.

  Boiling enemy reached deep into the vapor but the extra power was counterproductive. All it did was spawn a massive chemical reaction that completely shielded the rocky outcrop. None of this affected Pynchon’s bombardment. Not being able to see the target was little disadvantage as the catapults didn’t exactly have sights anyway.

  The green fog slowly dissipated over half an hour, finally allowing Allenson to see the fruits of their efforts. A dockside crane jib hung over at a crazy angle, swaying from side to side. The container being unloaded had half slipped out of the lifting cables so that one corner was smashed on the ground. Dockers swarmed around the wreckage trying to make it safe before the whole thing collapsed.

  The Port defenses were on automatic, firing at each iron ball as it left the protective screen of marsh vapors. The Brasilian lasercannon were quality kit and the artillery rate of fire glacial so the energy pulses repeatedly hit and lit up the shot. Defenses like these easily destroyed artillery shells and missiles. Lasers wrecked their delicate fuses and thrusters and set off the various unstable chemicals in the warheads. On the other hand, heating a lump of iron white hot before it smashed into you was not an advantage. The Brasilians eventually worked this out and shut down their lasercannons. The civilian laborers, not unreasonably, took this as a sign to abandon work.

  The captain of the freighter inevitably lost patience with the situation. The freighter was valuable private property and he was responsible to the owners for its safety. Tugs maneuvered the ship away from the dockside. As soon as it was clear, the ship extended pylons and lifted off. The artillerymen raised a cheer, which sounded like more of a squawk because of the masks. Nevertheless, the sentiment was clear.

  All through the afternoon they intermittently bombarded the port, mostly achieving little more than chipping tiny fragments of syncrete out of the aprons. One of the tramps lifted off but the other stayed, perhaps rendered inoperable. Pynchon didn’t manage to hit it but he did smash holes in a number of the port buildings and facilities.

  Allenson buttonholed the man in a short break in the bombardment while his men recharged the batteries.

  “Major Pynchon, I believe we will rotate the artillery crews this afternoon before it gets dark. I don’t want to lose any more men in that damn mud. With the benefit of hindsight, moving the equipment at night was overly cautious. There’s not a damn thing the Brasilians can do to stop us short of attacking through o
ur siege lines and sealing off our supplies from the land. Colonel Buller would love them to try that.”

  “Very good, General.”

  “You may as well take your people back as well, Hawthorn. There’s no need for a security detail here.”

  “Oh, I think we’ll hang around for a mite longer, Allenson,” Hawthorn replied with a cheery disregard for military lines of command.

  “As you wish,” Allenson replied, avoiding giving a direct order that would not be obeyed.

  Allenson slept badly again that night. Hawthorn silently observed him in the morning drumming his fingers in an irritating manner on a power supply casing.

  “Okay,” Allenson said, conceding the unspoken point. “I’ll go back with this afternoon’s shift.”

  A civilian freighter phased in over the sea and started its descent into the bay. Pynchon opened the bombardment as soon as he had the ship in range. By chance he scored a lucky hit on the hull not long after it settled into the water to wait for the tugs. This captain didn’t attempt to unload but simply relifted and reversed course.

  A few tramp ships made fast blockade-runs into the port, dumping boxed and barrels on the syncrete before scuttling out. Pynchon failed to hit any of the relatively small targets but it was not for want of trying.

  “You know something, I think we’ve done it,” Allenson said to Hawthorn, resisting the urge to destroy his credibility by dancing a jig. It was damn difficult keeping the gravitas of a general when matters went well, easier somehow in the midst of catastrophe.

  “The Brasilians can’t survive on anything like that level of supply. There’s not enough there to support the civilian population let alone the army. We’ve damn well cut their logistic line. Now they’ll have to break the stalemate by attacking our siege lines and we’ll have all the advantages of a dug-in position. Their only other choice is to ask for terms.”

  “If I was the Brasilian general I would think about driving unnecessary mouths out of the city,” Hawthorn said thoughtfully. “We should of course refuse to let them pass our siege lines. It’s not in our interests to lessen the pressure.”