The Prince by Jerry Pournelle and S.M. Stirling

“Situation?” Niles said.

“Hell of a fight for this district, sir,” the Helot officer replied; Steve Derex, Niles remembered. He was a tall lanky man, heavy-featured, with the fashionable guerrilla braid down his back and a nasal Welfare accent; one arm had a stained bandage around it. “We rushed them out, but they kept comin’ back through the sewers and snipin’, thicker’n crabs inna hoor’s cunt. Got the cure for thet, right enough.”

As if on cue, there was a massive thump under their feet, a sound that shuddered up through the soles of their boots into the breastbone rather than to the ears. Manhole covers all along the broad concrete roadway sprang into the air with a belch of sooty fire.

“Took a fuelin’ station and jist ran the hoses down, sir,” the guerrilla said with vindictive satisfaction. “Wit’ youz troops, maybe we kin clear an’ hold this sector.”

Niles looked across the street. Two and four story buildings, offices mostly. Perhaps a laboratory or assay office. Nothing of any great importance, certainly nothing worth losing a whole battalion for. From beyond that came a steady booming sound, rolling and echoing off the cliff-line of the open pit mine just to their south. The armory, and the gun-batteries around it.

Clear and hold for what? But that’s the Plan— “Let’s do it, then,” he said, looking at his watch. 1130 hours, he thought. The timetable was shot all to hell, and there wasn’t anything to accomplish. What did Skilly expect to do?

* * *

“We rendezvous at Objective A-7, eh?” Skilly said, listening to the ripping canvas sound across the sky.

“Roger wilco.” Niles’ voice sounded hard and flat, tightly confident.

“Incoming!”

Skida went flat along with everyone else in the headquarters unit. The shot fell a thousand meters behind them, crackling echoes through the jagged hills. Then there was a flash visible even in bright noonlight, and another explosion that shuddered the ground beneath her. Secondary explosion, as piled ammunition went up.

“Goddam, that counterbattery too good!” she said. That was the fifth heavy mortar they had lost in the last fifteen minutes. There weren’t many left.

“The Legionnaires are feeding the plotting data to the Royalist gunnery computers,” consultant Tetsuko said, not glancing up from his consol. “Falkenberg’s troops use Xanadu milspec multiband radars, difficult to jam, and their passive sensors are also very good. And the artillery is dug-in and has armored overhead protection. Not very vulnerable even to precision-guided munitions.”

“Field Prime don’t need explanations, Field Prime need results,” Skilly said.

Crump. Crump. That heavy-mortar battery was down to two tubes, but they were maintaining fire. Skilly felt a stab of warmth; they might have been gutter-scum once, but she had shaped something different, as proud and deadly as a King Cobra.

“Report from Olynthos?”

“The Royalist airborne is not scrambling.”

Sheee-it. The little Fang missiles were in perfect position, and the Royals couldn’t know about them. The air cavalry was a serious problem in her Upper and Middle Valley operations already, and the Spartans were training more. Half the purpose of this raid had been to lure the helicopters out where they could be killed. “Maybe we outsmart us, cut communications too good so they don’t know we here yet,” she said. “We hurt them enough here, they come.” And maybe the Prince, too, there was a report that he’d been seen in Olynthos. If he there, he will come running, not like him to send his troops out and not go. We get him and this war is half over. If we stay here, punish the Cits, maybe they send that air cav, maybe they send the Prince, we win it all. Getting rid of the airborne would be worth taking heavy losses, getting the Prince worth even more. We could still win, win big.

But suppose he didn’t come? If the air cav didn’t come? Then she grinned. They will come next time. Next time they send everything they have, even the old king.

“OK, the Mjollnir ready?”

“As instructed, Field Prime. We have it set up on the bunker line in the center of your penetration through the enemy defenses.”

She touched her helmet. “Von Reuter?”

“Fallback complete and standing by,” he said stolidly.

Von Reuter was a comfort; the man didn’t give a damn for the Movement, but cared a great deal about doing his professional best. When it came to making a pursuit as costly as possible, he had a certain sadistic imaginativeness as well; anyone who came after them—assuming we gets away at all—would get a very bloody nose, while the Helot forces broke up into dozens of small parties and made their way to prepositioned hiding-places and supply caches. And when it was over, the Kupros Mountains would be a second place the Royal forces would be extremely cautious about entering, would have to guard continuously. It was still a good plan.

“Right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

This time they would ride in style; the first people back out had dropped off transport. Someone had even taken time and a spray-paint can to sketch a red = on the sides of each. Skilly led the slide down the hill to the vans and trucks. As they boarded and drove bumping and crashing down the rock-strewn streambed they passed other captured vehicles heading north into the wadi-and-gully country. They were loaded with sedated wounded, or with boxes and crates of refined silver and platinum and thorium, from the looted warehouses, or medical supplies, food, clothing. . . . Money to slip off-planet through Bronson’s outlets to pay for weapons, to pay troops and bribe and buy and intimidate here on Sparta. Supplies to help sustain the expanding Helot forces. They would drive the vehicles to destruction, then transfer the loot to muleback and scatter it.

“‘Make War support War,'” Skilly quoted to herself, as they drove onto the ringroad of the base. That chink Sun Tzu knew he business. The background chatter hummed in her helmetphones, and the sound of combat was a continuous diffuse stutter all around, louder than the roar of engines. Behind a fragment of wall the Meijians had erected the Mjollnir, a squat two-stage rocket shaped like a huge artillery shell twice the height of a man.

“Faster,” she said.

There must be at least a thousand, maybe as many as two or four thousand armed Citizens within the perimeter, besides the formed units in the bunkers and the Legion soliders. Speed and the air-sown mines and disrupted communications had kept them from concentrating, but that would not last long. The trucks and vans careered down the streets, veering between wrecked and burning vehicles. The lead car went over a body with a sodden thump; a howling dog dashed by, its coat ablaze. Not only houses and cars were on fire, the wooded tongues of ridgeland between the built-up areas had caught as well, and smoke was drifting in billowing clouds.

Helot soldiers with MP brassards and light-wands were directing traffic, most of it people on foot moving at a run. More vans and trucks with wounded and loot passed them; parties of Movement undergrounders clung to their sides or ran back toward the perimeter, those too compromised to stay even with this degree of confusion, and the scores of transportee recruits they had picked up.

Most of those not on pickup or guard duty were laying boobytraps, everything from grenades taped to doors to huge time-detonated mines in the sewers; a lot of them were wired into the settlement power systems, and there was going to be a very unpleasant surprise when they got the turbines running again.

Skilly grinned like a wolf at the thought, opening the door of the van and dropping out at a run as it slowed down beside the block of buildings she wanted. The guides waved them in through doors that had been blasted off their hinges with a recoilless-rifle shell, up steel-framed stairs that sagged and creaked, into a corridor slashed and pocked with the remains of close-quarter fighting with grenade and bayonet.

“Down,” the man at the head of the stairs warned. “Under observation.” The building was flbrocrete, but the tall rectangle of window at the south end looked out onto enemy-held open ground and the armory-fortress. “Peltast snipers.”

They squatted and duckwalked down the transverse corridor; the floor was wet and sticky, and the blanket-wrapped form of a Helot trooper lay in one doorway, the hole blasted through his helmet showing why. The corridor turned, and they were in a long room looking out over the open space. More Helots sprawled on the floor, forming heads-in starfish circles amid maps and plotting tables and a tangle of communications lines.

“Yo, Niles,” Skilly said; it was safe to come to a crouch here, and she scuttled quickly over to his side. “Crack this nut yet?”

“No, Field Prime,” he said. “Here, take a look.” They moved to one side beyond the last of the tall narrow windows, and he offered her the thread-thin jack of a pickup camera one of his troopers was holding over a window on an extension grip. “Careful with that, Yip.”