* * *
Three hours before dawn the cargo containers silently opened, and Captain Ian Frazer led his scouts onto the darkened parade ground. Wordlessly they moved toward the revetted guns. One squad formed ranks and marched toward the gates, rifles at slope arms.
The sentries turned. “What the hell?” one said. “It’s not time for our relief, who’s there?”
“Can it,” the corporal of the squad said. “We got orders to go out on some goddam perimeter patrol. Didn’t you get the word?”
“Nobody tells me anythin’—uh.” The sentry grunted as the corporal struck him with a leather bag of shot. His companion turned quickly, but too late. The squad had already reached him.
Two men stood erect in the starlight at the posts abandoned by the sentries. Astoria was far over the horizon from Franklin, and only a faint red glow to the west indicated the companion planet.
The rest of the squad entered the guardhouse. They moved efficiently among the sleeping relief men, and when they finished the corporal took a communicator from his belt. “Laertes.”
On the other side of the parade ground, Captain Frazer led a group of picked men to the radar control center. There was a silent flurry of bayonets and rifle butts. When the brief struggle ended Ian spoke into his communicator. “Hamlet.”
There was no answer, but he hadn’t expected one.
Down in the city other cargo containers opened in darkened warehouses. Armed men formed into platoons and marched through the dockside streets. The few civilians who saw them scurried for cover; no one had much use for the Earthling mercenaries the Confederates employed.
A full company marched up the hill to the fort. On the other side, away from the city, the rest of the regiment crawled across plowed fields, heedless of radar alarms but careful of the sentries on the walls above. They passed the first line of capacitance wires and Major Savage held his breath. Ten seconds, twenty. He sighed in relief and motioned the troops to advance.
The marching company reached the gate. Sentries challenged them while others in guard towers watched in curiosity. When the gates swung open the tower guards relaxed. The officer of the watch must have had special orders . . .
The company moved into the armored car park. Across the parade ground a sentry peered into the night. Something out there? “Halt! Who’s there?” There was only silence.
“See something, Jack?” his companion asked.
“Dunno—look out there. By the bushes. Somethin’—My God, Harry! The field’s full of men! CORPORAL OF THE GUARD! Turn out the Guard!” He hesitated before taking the final step, but he was sure enough to risk his sergeant’s scathing displeasure. A stabbing finger hit the red alarm button, and lights blazed around the camp perimeter. The sirens hooted, and he had time to see a thousand men in the field near the camp; then a burst of fire caught him, and he fell.
The camp erupted into confusion. The Friedland gunners woke first. They wasted less than a minute before their officers realized the alarm was real. Then the gunners boiled out of the barracks to save their precious armor, but from each revetment, bursts of machine-gun fire cut into them. Gunners fell in heaps as the rest scurried for cover. Many had not brought personal weapons in their haste to serve the guns, and they lost time going back for them.
Major Savage’s men reached the walls and clambered over. Alternate sections kept the walls under a ripple of fire, and despite their heavy battle armor the men climbed easily in Washington’s lower gravity. Officers sent them to the parade ground where they added their fire to that of the men in the revetments. Hastily set machine guns isolated the artillery emplacements with a curtain of fire.
That artillery was the fort’s main defense. Once he was certain it was secure, Major Savage sent his invaders by waves into the camp barracks. They burst in with grenades and rifles ready, taking whole companies before their officers could arrive with the keys to their weapons racks. Savage took the Confederate Regulars that way, and only the Friedlanders had come out fighting; but their efforts were directed toward their guns, and there they had no chance.
Meanwhile the Earth mercenaries, never very steady troops at best, called for quarter; many had not fired a shot. The camp defenders fought as disorganized groups against a disciplined force whose communications worked perfectly.
At the fortress headquarters building the alarms woke Commandant Albert Morris. He listened in disbelief to the sounds of battle, and although he rushed out half-dressed, he was too late. His command was engulfed by nearly four thousand screaming men. Morris stood a moment in indecision, torn by the desire to run to the nearest barracks and rally what forces he could, but he decided his duty was in the communications room. The Capital must be told. Desperately he ran to the radio shack.
Everything seemed normal inside, and he shouted orders to the duty sergeant before he realized he had never seen the man before. He turned to face a squad of leveled rifles. A bright light stabbed from a darker corner of the room.
“Good morning, sir,” an even voice said.
Commandant Morris blinked, then carefully raised his hands in surrender. “I’ve no sidearms. Who the hell are you, anyway?”
“Colonel John Christian Falkenberg, at your service. Will you surrender this base and save your men?”
Morris nodded grimly. He’d seen enough outside to know the battle was hopeless. His career was finished too, no matter what he did, and there was no point in letting the Friedlanders be slaughtered. “Surrender to whom?”
The light flicked off and Morris saw Falkenberg. There was a grim smile on the Colonel’s lips. “Why, to the Great Jehovah and the Free States of Washington, Commandant. . . .”
Albert Morris, who was no historian, did not understand the reference. He took the public address mike the grim troopers handed him. Fortress Astoria had fallen.
* * *
Twenty-three hundred kilometers to the west at Allansport, Sergeant Sherman White slapped the keys to launch three small solid rockets. They weren’t very powerful birds, but they could be set up quickly, and they had the ability to loft a hundred kilos of tiny steel cubes to 140 kilometers. White had very good information on the Confederate satellite’s ephemeris; he’d observed it for its past twenty orbits.
The target was invisible over the horizon when Sergeant White launched his interceptors. As it came overhead the small rockets had climbed to meet it. Their radar fuses sought the precise moment, then they exploded in a cloud of shot that rose as it spread. It continued to climb, halted, and began to fall back toward the ground. The satellite detected the attack and beeped alarms to its masters. Then it passed through the cloud at fourteen hundred meters per second relative to the shot. Four of the steel cubes were in its path.
V
Falkenberg studied the manuals on the equipment in the Confederate command car as it raced northward along the Columbia Valley road toward Doak’s Ferry. Captain Frazer’s scouts were somewhere ahead with the captured cavalry equipment and behind Falkenberg the regiment was strung out piecemeal. There were men on motorcycles, in private trucks, horse-drawn wagons, and on foot.
There’d be more walking soon. The captured cavalry gear was a lucky break, but the Columbia Valley wasn’t technologically developed. Most local transport was by animal power, and the farmers relied on the river to ship produce to the deepwater port at Astoria. The river boats and motor fuel were the key to the operation. There wasn’t enough of either.
Glenda Ruth Horton had surprised Falkenberg by not arguing about the need for haste, and her ranchers were converging on all the river ports, taking heavy casualties in order to seize boats and fuel before the scattered Confederate occupation forces could destroy them. Meanwhile Falkenberg had recklessly flung the regiment northward.
“Firefight ahead,” his driver said. “Another of them one battery posts.”
“Right.” Falkenberg fiddled with the unfamiliar controls until the map came into sharper focus, then activated the comm circuit.
“Sir,” Captain Frazer answered. “They’ve got a battery of 105’s and an MG Company in there. More than I can handle.”
“Right, pass it by. Let Miss Horton’s ranchers keep it under siege. Found any more fuel?”
Frazer laughed unpleasantly. “Colonel, you can adjust the carburetors in these things to handle a lot, but Christ, they bloody well won’t run on paraffin. There’s not even farm machinery out here! We’re running on fumes now, and damned low-grade fumes at that.”
“Yeah.” The Confederates were getting smarter. For the first hundred kilometers they took fueling stations intact, but now, unless the patriots were already in control, the fuel was torched before Frazer’s fast-moving scouts arrived. “Keep going as best you can, Captain.”
“Sir. Out.”