The commo room of the permanent maintenance section at Camp Progress was installed in a three-meter metal transport container. It was unofficial—the result of scrounging over the years. Suilin hadn’t ever tried to use it before; but in the current chaos, it was his only hope.
“What do you mean, the satellites are down?” he demanded.
He was too logy with reaction to be sure that what he’d heard the non-com say was as absurd as he thought it was. The microwave links were out? Not all of them, surely. . . .
“Out,” the soldier repeated. “Gone. Blitzed. Out.”
“Blood and martyrs,” Suilin said.
The Consie guerrillas couldn’t have taken down all the comsats. The Terran enclaves had to have become directly involved. That was a stunning escalation of the political situation—
And an escalation which was only conceivable as part of a planned deathblow to the National Government of Prosperity.
“I’ve got to call Kohang,” said Dick Suilin, aloud but without reference to the other men nearby. All he could think of was his sister, in the hands of Consies determined to make an example of the governor’s wife. “Suzi . . .”
“You can forget bloody Kohang,” said one of the techs as he stripped off his headphones. He ran his fingers through his hair. The steel room was hot, despite the cool morning and the air conditioner throbbing on the roof. “It’s been bloody overrun.”
Suilin gripped the pistol in his belt. “What do you mean?” he snarled as he pushed past the soldier in the doorway.
“They said it was,” the technician insisted. He looked as though he intended to get out of his chair, but the reporter was already looming over him.
“Somebody said it was,” argued the other tech. “Look, we’re still getting signals from Kohang, it’s just the jamming chews the bugger outta it.”
“There’s fighting all the hell over the place,” said the senior non-com, putting a gently restraining hand on Suilin’s shoulder. ” ‘Cept maybe here. Look, buddy, nobody knows what the hell’s going on anywhere just now.”
“Maybe the mercs still got commo,” the first tech said. “Yeah, I bet they do.”
“Right,” said the reporter. “Good thought.”
He walked out of the transport container. He was thinking of what might be happening in Kohang.
He gripped his pistol very hard.
The chip recorder sitting on the cupola played a background of guitar music while a woman wailed in Tagalog, a language which Henk Ortnahme had never bothered to learn. The girls on Esperanza all spoke Spanish. And Dutch. And English. Enough of it.
The girls all spoke money, the same as everywhere in the universe he’d been since.
The warrant leader ran his multitool down the channel of the close-in defense system. The wire brush he’d fitted to the head whined in complaint, but it never quite stalled out.
It never quite got the channel clean, either. Pits in the steel were no particular problem—Herman’s Whore wasn’t being readied for a parade, after all. But crud in the holes for the bolts which both anchored the strips and passed the detonation signals . . . that was something else again.
Something blew up nearby with a hollow sound, like a grenade going off in a trash can. Ortnahme looked around quickly, but there didn’t seem to be an immediate problem. Since dawn there’d been occasional shooting from the Yokel end of the camp, but there was no sign of living Consies around here.
Dead ones, sure. A dozen of ’em were lined up outside the TOC, being checked for identification and anything else of intelligence value. When that was done—done in a pretty cursory fashion, the warrant leader expected, since Hammer didn’t have a proper intelligence officer here at Camp Progress—the bodies would be hauled beyond the berm, covered with diesel, and barbecued like the bloody pigs they were.
Last night had been a bloody near thing.
Ortnahme wasn’t going to send out a tank whose close-in defenses were doubtful. Not after he’d had personal experience of what that meant in action.
He bore down harder. The motor protested; bits of the brush tickled the faceshield of his helmet. He’d decided to wear his commo helmet this morning instead of his usual shop visor, because—