The Prince by Jerry Pournelle and S.M. Stirling

Her fingers danced over the console. “Say any time in the last three weeks. But, sir, even if they all went to ground every time the satellite came over the horizon . . . very difficult to conceal, sir. The IR scanners and the imaging radar are much less affected by vegetation, and anyway, the leaves are off the trees.”

“If the satellites are giving us the real data, lieutenant.” Owensford’s voice was harsh, and she felt a similar roughness in her own. On Tanith the Legion had fought rebel planters supported by the Bronson interests, and Bronson had suborned personnel in the governor’s office, filtering the satellite data.

“But sir, we’ve had our own people in there from the day we landed! Senior lieutenant Swenson went over it all with a fine-toothed comb; nobody’s been allowed past those computers and we take the datadump right into our own equipment.”

“Still, it’s interesting, isn’t it, Lieutenant? And those computers aren’t ROM-programmed like ours. It’ll be even more interesting when you get some direct confirmation. Meanwhile, I’m not real confident about those satellite pictures. Owensford out.”

Lefkowitz looked up. The other’s faces were bent over their equipment, underlit by the soft blue light of the display screens, but she could see the sheen of sweat on one face, the lips of another moving in prayer. They had been nibbling at the outskirts of the Dales for a month, even landing and planting sensors; so far, not a hint of enemy activity. Suddenly that seemed a good deal less comforting.

“Relay link,” she said.

“Green,” the radio technician replied; the tiltrotors had a feedback-aimed link with a blimp circling at five thousand meters over Dodona, ample to keep them in line of sight even when doing nape-of-the-earth flying.

“Set for continuous download, all scanners.” Everything the instruments took in would be blipped back to headquarters in Dodona in real time. “Pilot,” she said, “I really think we should stay low, perhaps?” Even though they were staying well short of the action, south below the horizon from Task Force Wingate, along the path it had marched.

“Ma’am,” the flyer said. “Everyone strap in.”

There was a flurry of activity as the technicians secured themselves and anything loose. Silence for long minutes; Lefkowitz caught herself stealing glances out the nearest port. Moonlight traced lighter streaks across dark ploughland and pasture, where the long windbreaks of cypress and eucalyptus caught and shaded snow. The last lights of the widely scattered farmhouses dropped away as they left the settled lands around the confluence of the Eurotas and Rhyndakos. The pilot brought the plane lower still, until the tallest trees blurred by underneath so closely that they would have hit the undercarriage if it had not been retracted. There were trees in plenty, then open grassland where sleeping beasts—she thought they were cattle but could not be sure—fled in bawling panic as the dark quiet shape flashed by. Swamp, where puddles of water cast wind-riffled reflections from stars and moon.

“Relay from Major Owensford. Column’s under attack, rocket and mortar fire.”

Then they were over hills, the ground rising steadily. More snow appeared, first in patches and then as continuous cover; the reflected light made the night seem brighter. Forest showed black against the open ground, as if the hills were lumpy white pillows rising out of dark water. The lights of the base on the Rhyndakos showed; the tiltrotor circled, then swung north toward the chain of firebases.

“Passive sensors only,” Lefkowitz said. “Warm up the IR scanner.” A bit of a misnomer, since it was a liquid-nitrogen cooled superconductor in large part. “Prepare for pop-up manouver. Location, pilot.”

“Coming up parallel with Task Force Erwin’s column of march, one-ten klicks south.”

“Major Owensford, I’m making my first run. Stand by.”

“Standing by, Lieutenant,” the cool voice replied.

“Pilot, now.”

Debbie Lefkowitz keyed her own screen into the IR sensor. It had fairly sophisticated electronics, enough to throw a realistic 3-D map and pre-separate anything not the natural temperature of rock or vegetation. Data was pouring into the craft from the sensors with the column and in the firebases along the route, free of the suspect satellite link that lay between the Dales and the Legion’s analysis computers back in Fort Plataia.

“Major, you’ve got about . . . two thousand hostiles in your immediate vicinity,” she said, as the machines correlated the fragmentary input. “Grid references follow.” And relay this back to Swenson, now!

A machine beeped at her. She looked at it and her stomach clenched.

“Major, I’ve got multiple readings south of your position. South of my position. Readings all around,” she said. Calm, she told herself sternly. This was certainly more hands-on than headquarters duty, but needs must. If the Royalist line of march was a bent I, the troops—they must be troops—were two parallel lines flanking it on either side, with another bar in the north closing the C. This safe rear zone just became bandit country. The enemy below might not have stinger missiles and detection gear, but they probably did. “Permission to conduct direct scan.”

“South—” Owensford began, then snapped: “Denied. Get low and get out of there, and do it now.”

“Sir.” Gravity sagged her into the seat as the pilot turned for home and rammed the throttles to full.

“We’re getting out of here soonest,” she said on the cockpit link. “Might as well take a look while we’re leaving. Prepare for pop-up. Stand by for sidescan.”

The rotors screamed as the engine-pods at the ends of the wings tilted, changing the propellors’ angle of attack. The aircraft jerked upward as if pulled by a rubber band stretching down from orbit “Scanning . . . down!”

Another freight-elevator drop. “Major, troops, at least two thousand down here heavy weapons probable category follows—”

Alarms squealed. “Detection, detection, multiples, frequency-hoppers—”

“Jesus Christ missile signatures multiple launch—”

The pilot’s voice overrode it, shouting to his copilot. “Flares and chaff, flares and chaff! Those are Skyhawks!”

The putputput of the decoys coughing out of the slots was lost in the scream of the airframe as the pilot looped, twisted and dove almost in the same instant. The cabin whirled around her. For a moment they were upside down and flying in the opposite direction to their course two seconds ealier, and she could see two livid streaks of fire pass through the space she had been occupying. One struck trees and exploded in a globe of magenta fire as they began to turn, but the other did not. “Shit, shit, shit, shit,” the pilot cursed.

The Lord our God, the Lord is One— Lefkowitz found herself praying, for the first time since girlhood. Get the data stream out. Send everything we know. Nobody dies for nothing. Let them know what we saw. Lights flashed as the computers dumped their data.

The tiltrotor was below the nape of the earth now, threading its way through narrow passages between trees and rocks, flipping from one wingtip to the other with insane daring as the pilot stretched the machine to its limits. Inspired flying, and very nearly enough; the missile was barely within effective radius when the idiot-savant brain that guided it sensed its fuel was nearly exhausted and detonated.

“Portside engine out, cutting fuel.” The copilot’s voice, metronome-steady. The aircraft lurched and turned sluggish, barely missed a hilltop.

“Starboard’s losing power!” Both pilots’ hands moved feverishly on the controls. “Something nicked the turbine casing, she’s going to split. Shut it off, Mike, shut her down.”

“I can’t, we’re too low—”

The plane surged upward, painfully, clawing for enough altitude to pick its landing-spot. The starboard engine’s hum turned to a whining shriek that ended in an intolerable squeal of tortured synthetic and an explosion that sent the tiltrotor cartwheeling through the sky. Fragments of fiber-bound ceramic turbine blade sleeted through the walls of the aircraft, and lights and equipment shorted out in a flash of sparks and popping sounds and human screams, of fear or pain it was impossible to say. Lefkowitz felt something like a needle of cold fire rip down the length of one forearm.

They struck.

* * *

“The observation plane’s down,” Andy Lahr said. “Lefky bought us a lot of data. Still sending when she augured in.”

“Dead?”

“Dunno. Went in from low altitude. Maybe not.”

“What can we send to rescue her?” Owensford demanded.

“Not one damn thing. That area’s crawling with hostiles. Which we know about only because of her, but they’ll get to her long before we do.”

“I see. Tell Mace. All right, let’s see what she found out.”

“It’s a lot. One thing’s certain, Major. The satellite data is thoroughly corrupted. We didn’t get clue one of that force to the south, and it’s far too damn big that we wouldn’t have seen something.”

“Right. Get me Jesus Alana.”

“Alana here.”

“Jesus, we’ve been snookered.”

“Yes, sir, I’m following it.”

“Got anything for me?”