There was quiet stirring all through the spread-out guerilla camp, men rolling out of their shelter-halves—many had just lain down under them, exhausted by the trek—water cooking on buried stoves covered in improvised log blinds. Slightly risky, even in this steady light snow, but worth it for the boost; she had specified that everyone got a hot drink and something to eat before the action. High energy stuff, candy and sweets, coffee, caffeine pills for a few of the most groggy. Grins, salutes, an occasional thumbs-up greeted her.
They good bunch, she caught herself thinking, slightly startled. Then: this isn’t just like running a gang. That was more like lion-taming, never knowing when they would turn on you. This trust stuff was infectious, like the clap. Skilly will have to watch herself or she’ll go soft.
The command staff were waiting under a tarp stretched out from a fallen tree; these were dense woods, down at the edge of the Rhydankos floodplain, huge cottonwoods and oaks and magnolias. Skida walked toward the officers, chewing on a strip of jerky. The sort that the CoDo Marines called monkey, that swelled up in your mouth like rubber bands. She swallowed, followed it with a piece of hard candy, and looked at the situation map.
“Report,” she said.
“We recovered a prisoner from the aircraft. She is resisting interrogation, but Yoshida reports the enemy have some warning of our location but no precise data.”
“Hmm.” That was an inconvenience; they would be watching, and there would be more losses from the base’s tubes before they closed. Although the prisoner might be valuable later.
“Stragglers?” she continued.
“Fewer than ten percent,” Sanjuki said; the Meijians were good at computerized lists. “I am surprised.”
She nodded. “You doan understand how powerful a force the need to prove yourself be, mon.” Or think only Meijians can feel it. “Can they fight?” she continued, to the unit commanders.
Nods, despite the brutal forced-march pace of the past week; they had all had a few hours rest by now, and there were the pills as a last resort. Amazing how it had not occurred to anybody that it was easier to move around the Dales in deep winter. Not to the Royals, although most of them came from the Valley where “winter” meant “mud.” Nor to her guerillas, well, most of them were cityfolk, or from hot climates . . . she was from a tropical slum herself, but she read history. Russian history in this case: if Batu Khan could do it, why not Skida Thibodeau? Snow made it much easier to carry heavy equipment along, helping with the perennial dilemma of infantry; move slow and you missed the chance, move light and fast and you didn’t have the stuff there when the shit came down.
She looked at the map, absorbing the latest changes. About as planned, except that the mercs seemed to have twigged faster than she hoped.
“OK,” she said. “Up to now, we has been biff-baffing them—” she made a gesture, miming striking for one side of the face and then another “—because we knew exactly where they were and they couldn’t find us. That about over after our next surprise. Then it just a matter of fighting, which they pretty good at when they know where to point the ends the bullets come out of. Ojinga, Raskolnikov.” The two who were to attack the first firebase north, present by link rather than personally.
“Field Prime.”
“You ready?”
“Green and go.”
“Niles.”
“Yes, Skilly?” he said, slightly breathless. She could hear firing in the background.
“0400,” Skida said. “Twenty minutes from . . . mark.”
* * *
“Fuck, am I glad to see you, sir,” the platoon leader said. He had a thin brown face, scarred by childhood malnutrition, desperate with worry now and bleeding from a light fragmentation wound on one cheek. There were slick-shiny scars across the nemourlon of his body armor and the battle-plastic of his helmet. “I got thirty percent casualties, more maybe, it hard to know, and these Cit cocksuckers can fight.”
“So can we, platoon leader, so can we,” Niles said. “Get your wounded out now.”
A mortar shell exploded in the treetops twenty meters upslope, a bright flash through the night and crack and the top half of the tree toppled into the forest. They both ducked reflexively and then grinned at each other.
There was a furious close-range firefight going on in the brush just ahead and upslope, continuous automatic weapons fire, thud of grenades, the louder whut-bang of rifle-launched bombs, and an occasional raaaaak-thud of shoulder-launched rockets. Mortar shells from the Royalist forward positions were landing, beating a pathway through the forest canopy, the follow-up rounds exploding contact-fused on the floor below.
“Alexandro,” he said, to one of the platoon leaders from Kolnikov’s E company. “Reinforce the engaged platoon, but have your sappers start stringing improvs”—boobytraps rigged from munitions they were carrying, rockets and grenades—”right behind your line. Careful, eh? When we fall back, your people delay the pursuit while the engaged platoon passes through you and moves south. Martins,” he went on to the other of Kolnikov’s subordinates. “You come in on their left.” From the south. “I’m going in on the other side. Hit hard, hit fast, then get the hell out when they reinforce.”
He turned to the headquarters platoon around him; two dozen, spread out in small clumps. “Sergeant,” he continued crisply, “deploy into skirmish line. We’re going south and upslope, and be careful you don’t get the end of the line visible from the top of the ridge. When I give the word, a volley of rifle grenades, then attack. Oh, and fix bayonets.” A rattle as the blades went on, then another as the finned bombs were attached to the launcher clips built into the muzzles. “Follow me, compadres!”
* * *
“Sir, sir!” the desperate voice in Lysander’s earphones said. He could hear the cause already, a fourfold increase in the firing to his left, down in the woods. “Sergeant Ruark here, Lieutenant Halder’s dead, we lost the recoilless, they’re coming in on both sides of us!”
“Steady, Brother,” Lysander said, feeling an almost physical effort as he tried to pour strength down the circuit link. “Help’s on the way. Call the positions. Weapons,” he continued, “switch the rest of the mortars and the recoilless to support 4th. All headquarters rifle squads, prepare to move downslope. Company Sergeant Hertzmeier, you’re in charge here.” He waited until the next stick of enemy mortars landed. “Let’s go!”
“They told us to stay in place.” Harv said.
“They told Captain Collins to stay in place,” Lysander said. “Those are our Brothers down there!”
Harv grinned wolfishly. “Welcome back, Prince.”
* * *
“Incoming!”
“For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful,” the driver of the command caravan muttered.
What the hell are they doing? Peter Owensford thought, clanging the hatch shut as another volley of rockets came howling in. Only two batteries on his position now, the l60mm’s had caught several, unmistakable seismic indications of secondary explosions.
“Andy, get me Jesus Alana.”
“Stand by one—go.”
“Jesus, what the hell are they doing?”
“I truly do not know, Colonel,” Alana said. “They are sending a major force through the valley between you and the Third Brotherhood.”
“Isn’t that suicide?”
“It is suicide if they do not win big. Which is to say, they must expect to defeat the entire First Royal Infantry, plus the Brotherhood forces holding the river camp.”
“And that’s not going to happen. All right, Jesus, they think they’ve got something decisive. What? Nukes?”
“No, they have moved far too many troops far too close for that.”
“Then what in the hell—” He was interrupted by two close explosions that rattled the caravan.
“Hah.”
“You have something, Jesus?”
“Yes, sir. As you ordered, I have been prodigal in expenditures of drones. One has sent back photographs that show enemy troops, several hundred. Colonel, every one of them is carrying a gas mask. A few are wearing them.”
“Gas mask. Wearing them?”
“Three men only. That we have seen.”
“Three scared men. Gas masks. Chemical weapons. Poison gas. Is that what they’re counting on?”
“Quien sabe? But it explains all the data we have.”
“OK. Go look again while I think.” An enemy willing to use poison gas. Prima facie violation of the Laws of War. You got hanged for using chemical weapons. Unless you won, of course.
The Helots expected to win. Expected to win big.
* * *
“Close in, close in, the bastid sumbitches can’t mortar us if we close in!” the sergeant of Niles’s headquarters squad was shouting.
Good advice, he thought sardonically, dashing forward to roll over a convenient log. Very convenient, and a Royalist machine gunner had thought so too; two of the crew sprawled around the weapon were dead or unconscious from the rifle grenade that had destroyed their position. The third was just rising; there was blood all down one leg, but his hands were steady on the machine pistol.