The Prince by Jerry Pournelle and S.M. Stirling

“Probably scared we’d find their base.”

“Could be. I still think there’s some kind of plan at work here. Something complicated. Main thing is, keep them using up their heavy stuff until they notice they’re running short.”

Behind him the 160mm mortars flashed as Sastri sent in anti-radar and counterbattery fire. Crump. Crump. Crump. Twelve times repeated, and then the brief winking of rocket-assist at the high points of the shell’s trajectories, thousands of meters overhead. The muzzles disappeared behind their raw-earth revetments, as the hydraulics in the recoil-system automatically lowered them to loading position; the bitter smell of burnt propellant settled across the hilltop. Inside the gunpits the two loaders would be dropping the forty-kilo bombs down the barrels . . . the tubes showed again, ten seconds to load and alter the aiming point both. Crump. Crump. Crump.

A rumble through the ground, and an edge of satisfaction in Sastri’s voice:

“Secondary explosions. Scratch one rocket battery.”

Rockets hissed skyward, arcing northward.

“Jamming antennae down. One. Two . . . Active jamming off. Chaff continuing.”

* * *

“Sir, Second Platoon, we’re under fire.” A bit superfluous, Lysander thought, since they could all hear the crackling two thousand meters to their left.

“Where’s Lieutenant Doorn, sergeant?”

“Dead, sir. Three dead, five wounded. Heavy automatic-weapons fire. Maybe a whole company come after us, we’d have been dead if we hadn’t dug in.”

Lysander could hear the relief, and more, in the sergeant’s voice.

“Incoming!”

Lysander ducked lower into the hole. At least everyone is dug in. Explosions all along the line, but a lot fell into the minefield, setting off more mines. They thought we’d be in there. . . .

“Alexi’s hit, medic, medic!” somebody shouted.

Then the sky screamed, globes of violet light raking through the cloud towards them. The Collins prince dropped to the bottom of his spider pit and tucked his limbs in, standard drill to let the thicker torso armor protect you. A flicker of silence, and then the world came apart in a surf-roar of white noise. The rocket warheads burst apart thirty meters up, showering their rain of hundreds of grenade-sized bomblets to bounce and explode and fill the air with a rain of notched steel wire. The sound was distant as the helmet clamped down on audio input that would have damaged his ears, like a movie on Tri-V in another room of the house, and it seemed to go on forever. Something struck him below the right shoulderblade with sledgehammer force, driving a grunt out between clenched teeth.

Fragment, but the armor had stopped it. If a bomblet fell into the hole with him, well, Sparta would just need another heir to the Collins throne. He felt sick, a little lightheaded; part of him not believing this was real, a deeper part knowing it was and wanting to run away. Had it been this bad, swimming underwater to hijack the shuttle on Tanith? No, he decided. Then he had had one definite task to do, and Falkenberg waiting, and that had been very comforting. Peter’s a good man, he told himself. Good soldier. And now there are people looking for you to be their rock.

A lot of the incoming barrage had fallen into the minefield. The enemy had expected to catch troops out in the open, not down in holes.

The rocket fire lifted, to be replaced almost instantly by the whistle of mortar shells; continuous bombardments were luxuries for rich worlds with abundant mechanical transport. Lysander raised his head, automatically sorting through the messages passing through the audio circuits of his helmet. Casualties, more than he liked, but nothing like what there could have been if they’d been out there in the open.

“Shift the wounded to perimeter defense,” he said on the company push. Schoop. A mortar firing, it might be up to a klick away. Whunk. A fountain of snow and vegetation and wet old earth bloomed ahead of him, in among the minefield. Well that’s one way to clear a field. Let the enemy pound it. Bloody good thing we stopped the advance.

Schoop. Schoop. Whunk. Whunk. The three eighty-two mm’s of his own weapons platoon were back in action, firing to the direction of the Second’s observers over to the left.

“Fire central,” he said, switching to the interunit frequency. “I’m taking medium mortar fire. Counterfire needed.”

Far above, points of light winked briefly; heavy mortar shells getting an extra kick at the top arch of their trajectory. Seconds later a heavy crump . . . crump echoed from the hills, mingling with the noise of explosions eight or ten thousand meters to the north, wherever the computers thought the rockets had come from.

“Sastri here.” The battalion heavy-weapons company CO. “Can you observe the fall of shot?”

“That’s negative, Fire Central.”

“Not much point, then,” the artillery officer said. “With passive sensors, there just isn’t enough backtrack on mediums. If you can get drones over the target, let me know.” A hint of impatience; the battalion heavy weapons were working hard to supress the enemy’s area-bombardment weapons.

Schoop. Schoop. Schoop.

Lysander looked again to his left. “Patch to Colonel Owensford.”

“Owensford here.”

“Sir. Code JOSHUA, repeat Joshua.” Owensford did not have to look up the meaning: “Permission to continue attack.”

“Negative. DOVE HILL continues.”

“Then give me some fire support! Some of those Thoth missiles—”

“Who’s asking?”

“Kicker Six, sir, this is—”

“So long as it’s not the Prince Royal, shut up and soldier. We’ll know more in a few minutes.”

“Aye aye, sir. Out.”

Dig in. Dig in and wait, while they drop stuff on our heads. They’re out there, Lysander thought. They’re out there, those terrorist bastards, they’re out there killing my brothers, and we could go kill them. Let me go get them, dammit. Next time, by God, you just might be talking to the Prince Royal. . . .

* * *

Lieutenant Deborah Lefkowitz frowned at the satellite photo as the engines of the tiltrotor transport built to their humming whirr. There was plenty of room inside, even with the sidescan radar and IR sensors and analysis computers the Legion had installed; this class of craft was originally designed as troop-transports for the CoDominium Marines, capable of carrying a full platoon a thousand kilometers in two hours. Room enough for the six equipment operators and her, and even a cot and coffee machine so that they could take turns on a long trip. The smell of burnt kerosene from the ceramic turbines gave an underlying tang to the warm ozone-tinted air.

That is an odd snow formation, she thought, calling up a close-range 3-D screen of the picture. Down a ridgeline bare of trees, through a shallow valley where it vanished under forest cover, then starting up again three hundred meters south. Multiple sharp depressions the width of a man’s hand and many meters long, running in pairs. It could be a trick of lighting, shadow played odd games when you were taking optical data through an atmosphere under high magnification. . . . She began to play with gain, then froze the image and rotated it.

Her round heavy-featured face frowned in puzzlement. Mark it and send it back to the interpreters. But—

Deborah Lefkowitz had been born on Dayan, a gentle world of many islands in warm seas. She had trained in photointerpretation as part of her National Service, and followed her husband into the Legion when he grew bored with peacetime soldiering on a planet too shrewd and too feared to have many enemies; he was on New Washington now, commanding an infantry company. Massaging computers was a good second-income job for her, perfectly compatible with looking after two young children. But these odd shapes in the snow tugged at some childhood memory. . . .

The aircraft was rolling forward, no reason for a fuel-expensive vertical lift here. As the wheels left the ground, Lefkowitz touched the communicator. There was a slight pause as the seeker locked on to the relay station in Dodona, and then the status light turned green.

“Commander Task Force Erwin, please.”

“Owensford here.”

“Major, I will be on target in thirty minutes. In the meantime, I have an anomally in the last series of satellite photos. What look like . . . well, like ski tracks, sir.”

“Ski tracks?”

“Cross-country skis.” That had been the memory. Jerry and she had spent their honeymoon at Dayan’s only winter resort, on one of the subpolar islands. “Moving—” she paused to reference. “From a position three-fifty kilometers north northwest of your present location almost like an arrow towards you, stretching for ten kilometers or so, then vanishing.”

Silence for a long moment. “How many? And how long ago?”

“Impossible to say how many, sir. Could be anything from one hundred up, or more if some sort of vehicle on ski-shaped runners was used. How long depends on snow conditions, wet snow freezing and then being covered by fresh falls . . . that could mean anytime since the first firm snowfall.”