The trumpet sounded outside. Last Post. It was the second time we’d heard it today. The first was when we’d buried our dead.
“Got my rounds to make,” Lieberman said. “By your leave, sir.”
“Carry on, Centurion.” A few minutes later Hartz came in to help me get my boots off. He wouldn’t hear of letting me turn in wearing them.
“We’ll hold ’em off long enough to get your boots on, zur. Nobody’s going to catch a Marine officer in the sack.”
He’d sleep with his boots on so that I could take mine off. It didn’t make a lot of sense, but I wasn’t going to win any arguments with him about it. I rolled into the sack and stared at the ceiling. My first day of command. I was still thinking about that when I went to sleep.
* * *
The attacks started the next day. At first it was just small parties trying to force the roadblock, and they never came close to doing that. We could put too much fire onto them from the fort.
That night they tried the fort itself. There were a dozen mortars out there. They weren’t very accurate, and our radar system worked fine. They would get off a couple of rounds, and then we’d have them backtracked to the origin point and our whole battery would drop in on them. We couldn’t silence them completely, but we could make it unhealthy for the crews servicing their mortars, and after a while the fire slackened. There were rifle attacks all through the night, but nothing in strength.
“Just testing you,” Falkenberg said in the morning when I reported to him. “We’re pressing hard from this end. They’ll make a serious try before long.”
“Yes, sir. How are things at your end?”
“We’re moving,” Falkenberg said. “There’s more resistance than the colonel expected, of course. With you stopping up their bolt hole, they’ve got no route to retreat through. Fight or give up—that’s all the choice we left them. You can look for their real effort to break past you in a couple of days. By then we’ll be close enough to really worry them.”
He was right. By the fourth day we were under continuous attack from more than a thousand hostiles.
* * *
It was a strange situation. No one was really worried. We were holding them off. Our ammunition stocks were running low, but Lieberman’s answer to that was to order the recruits to stop using their weapons. They were put to serving mortars and recoilless rifles, with an experienced NCO in charge to make sure there was a target worth the effort before they fired. The riflemen waited for good shots and made each one count.
As long as the ammunition held out, we were in no serious danger. The fort had a clear field of fire, and we weren’t faced by heavy artillery. The best the enemy had was mortars, and our counterbattery radar and computer system was more than a match for that.
“No discipline,” Lieberman said. “They got no discipline. Come in waves, run in waves, but they never press the attack. Damned glad there’s no Marine deserters in that outfit. They’d have broke through if they’d had good leadership.”
“I’m worried about our ammunition supplies,” I said.
“Hell, Lieutenant, Cap’n Falkenberg will get here. He’s never let anybody down yet.”
“You’ve served with him before?”
“Yes, sir, in that affair on Domingo. Christian Johnny, we called him. He’ll be here.”
Everyone acted that way. It made the situation unreal. We were under fire. You couldn’t put your head above the wall or outside the gate. Mortars dropped in at random intervals, sometimes catching men in the open and wounding them despite their body armor. We had four dead and nine more in the hospital bunker. We were running low on ammunition, and we faced better than ten-to-one odds, and nobody was worried.
“Your job is to look confident,” Falkenberg had told me. Sure.
On the fifth day things were getting serious for Sergeant Ardwain and his men at the roadblock. They were running out of ammunition and water.
“Abandon it, Ardwain,” I told him. “Bring your troops up here. We can keep the road closed with fire from the fort.”
“Sir. I have six casualties that can’t walk, sir.”
“How many total?”
“Nine, sir—two walking and one dead.”
Nine out of a total of twelve men. “Hold fast, Sergeant. We’ll come get you.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
I wondered who I could spare. There wasn’t much doubt as to who was the most useless man on the post. I sent for Lieberman.
“Centurion, I want a dozen volunteers to go with me to relieve Ardwain’s group. We’ll take full packs and extra ammunition and supplies.”
“Lieutenant—”
“Damn it, don’t tell me you don’t want me to go. You’re capable enough. You told me that you need officers to tell you what to do, not how to do it. Fine. Your orders are to hold this post until Falkenberg comes. One last thing—you will not send or take any relief forces down the hill. I won’t have this command further weakened. Is that understood?”
“Sir.”
“Fine. Now get me a dozen volunteers.”
* * *
I decided to go down the hill just after moonset. We got the packs loaded and waited at the gate. One of my volunteers was Corporal Brady. He stood at the gate, chatting with the sentry there.
“Quiet tonight,” Brady said.
“They’re still there, though,” the sentry said. “You’ll know soon enough. Bet you tomorrow’s wine ration you don’t make it down the hill.”
“Done. Remember, you said down the hill. I expect you to save that wine for me.”
“Yeah. Hey, this is a funny place, Brady.”
“How’s that?”
“A holy Joe planet, and no Marine chaplain.”
“You want a chaplain?”
The sentry shrugged. He had a huge black beard that he fingered, as if feeling for lice. “Good idea, isn’t it?”
“They’re all right, but we don’t need a chaplain. What we need is a good Satanist. No Satanist in this battalion.”
“What do you need one of them for?”
Brady laughed. “Stands to reason, don’t it? God’s good, right? He’ll treat you okay. It’s the other guy you have to watch out for.” He laughed again. “Got three days on bread and no wine for saying that once. Told it to Chaplain Major McCrory, back at Sector H.Q. He didn’t appreciate it.”
“Time to move out,” I said. I shouldered my heavy pack.
“Do we run or walk, zur?” Hartz asked.
“Walk until they know we’re there. And be quiet about it.”
“Zur.”
“Move out, Brady. Quietly.”
“Sir.” The sentry opened the gate, just a crack. Brady went through, then another trooper, and another. Nothing happened, and finally it was my turn. Hartz was last in the line.
The trail led steeply down the side of the cliff. It was about two meters wide, just a slanting ledge, really. We were halfway down when there was a burst of machine-gun fire. One of the troopers went down.
“Move like hell!” I said.
Two men grabbed the fallen trooper and hauled him along. We ran down the cliff face, jumping across shortcuts at the switchbacks. There was nothing we could see to shoot at, but more bullets sent chips flying from the granite cliff.
The walls above us spurted flame. It looked like the whole company was up there covering us. I hoped not. One of our recoilless men found a target and for a few moments we weren’t under fire. Then the rifles opened up. Something zinged past my ear. Then I felt a hard punch in the gut and went down.
I lay there sucking air. Hartz grabbed one arm and shouted to another private. “Jersey! Lieutenant’s down. Give me a hand.”
“I’m all right,” I said. I felt my stomach area. There wasn’t any blood. “Armor stopped it. Just knocked the wind out of me.” I was still gasping, and I couldn’t get my breath.
They dragged me along to Ardwain’s command post. “How would we explain to the Centurion if we didn’t get you down?” Hartz asked.
The CP was a trench roofed over with ironwood logs. There were three wounded men at one end. Brady took our wounded trooper there. He’d been hit in both legs. Brady put tourniquets on them.
Hartz had his own ideas about first aid. He had a brandy flask. It was supposed to be a universal cure. After he poured two shots down me, he went over to the other end of the bunker to pass the bottle among the other wounded.
“Only three of them, Ardwain?” I said. I was still gasping for air. “I thought you had six.”
“Six who cannot walk, sir. But three of them can still fight.”
XI
“We’re not going to get up that bluff. Not carrying wounded,” I said.
“No, sir.” Ardwain had runners carrying ammunition to his troopers. “We’re dug in good, sir. With the reinforcements you brought, we’ll hold out.”