There were, according to the fiche, several entryways to the fort. Sten picked the least obvious—a supposedly still-standing power line maintenance shed.
The monitor panel was hinged and counterweighted. It lifted away without complaint. Sten allowed himself to hope that this would be painless.
It wasn't.
He and Alex dropped into the underground passage with a splash. They were in thigh-deep muck. One of the filtering pumps must have stopped operation some years earlier. So had the vector killers.
There were vermin in the tunnel, vermin that thought this was their turf and resented the intruding two-legs. They bit. Sten wished that the livie standard, an area blaster, actually existed. Destroying the multiple-legged waste eaters one at a time with AM2 blasts from their willyguns would have taken an eon. Not to mention that the echoing explosions would have left them quite deaf.
Kilgour had the solution. He pitched bester grenades ahead of him as they waded toward the fort. Time loss wasn't ordinarily lethal, but it was when the air-breathing victims collapsed into water and drowned.
Eventually the tunnel climbed upward, and they waded out of mire. Sten found the master control room and, obeying the TF for the fort, turned the power on.
Lights flickered, and machinery hummed.
That was all Sten needed for the moment—the fort was mannable. The next step was to man it. They returned through the lines and slept through the day.
The second night was spent in a detailed recon of the least perilous route to Strongpoint Sh'aarl't. Sten and Alex broke that route down into 300-meter segments. That was more than enough.
On the third night, they positioned their guides. Sten knew that his befuddled sailors, regardless of their self-opinion, couldn't line-cross without discovery. His idea was to take the sailors he'd walked out of the hills with and use them as route guides. Each guide would be responsible for meters of travel. At the end of his or her route, he or she would pass people on to the next guide.
Almost anyone can learn to traverse—blind and quietly—300 meters of terrain in one night. Riiiight!
Sten had also loaded the odds on his side. For two nights now Imperial artillery had brought in crashing barrages exactly at midnight along the route to the fort. He figured the Tahn would be chortling at the Empire's predictability and, equally predictably, diving into their shellproofs at midnight.
On the fourth and fifth nights, he moved his sailors forward. The barrages were still mounted but, for those two nights, aimed to either side of the corridor that Sten and his people would move along.
Too elaborate, he'd told himself. Too true, he'd also thought. But you got a better option?
Neither he nor Alex could come up with anything cuter. And so, at midnight of night four, three-person teams moved out beyond the Empire's perimeter, to be met and hand-held onward by guides.
Sten was betting that forty percent of his people would reach the fort before the Tahn discovered them. If twenty percent made it from there and if most of the archaic weapons in the fort worked, he might be able to hold the position. Anything else was pure gravy.
Sten, by 0400 hours of the fifth night, was gloating.
Every single sailor had made it to Strongpoint Sh'aarl't'. Sten was starting to believe in them. By silent consent, he and Alex retired their private nickname for the swabbies.
"A'er tha'," as Kilgour pointed out. "Ee tha' want to christen th'selves th' Kilgour-Killin't Campbells, Ah'll dinnae fash."
The next task was to find out how much of a white elephant they were fighting from—and how big a fight it would be.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
The fort was more of a cement-gray elephant than white, and it wasn't even that much of an elephant. The beings who had mothballed the structure had done a fairly decent job.
Sten found the fort's command center on the second level and sent teams out to investigate the rest of his base.
Foss was staring at the fire and control computer. "Lord Harry," he marveled. "They actually expected people to shoot using this beast? Clottin' thing looks like it should have a kick starter."
He pulled an insulated glove on and touched power switches. According to the specs, the sensor antennae were grid-buried in the fort's armor, so no bedsprings should jump out of the park's grass and give things away.
The air stank of singed insulation—but the computer came to life. Foss unfolded a modern hand-held computer, slid the screen out, and started creating a glossary. The computer worked—but the symbols and readouts were those of a long-forgotten age.
Sten had the environment controls on standby. When they went into action, he would turn them on. But until then, he didn't want vent fans showing above the ground. He and his people would just have to live with the odor. The entire fort smelled musty, like a long-ignored clothes closet.
About half of the visual sensor screens were alive. Sten, once again, didn't use any of the controls that would swivel the pickups.
Okay, he told himself. I can aim at something—I think.
Let's see if there's anything working in the bang department.
He went up into the top-level ready rooms. His squad leaders were already assigning troops to them. Sten let them go about their business. He was busy studying the TO boards. Among the missing pieces of data on the fort had been the list of personnel required to man the base. As Sten had suspected, there were supposed to be far more soldiers than he had in his approximately 125-strong detachment.
Sten juggled bodies around. He wouldn't need to worry about the missile crewmen—that helped a lot. Cooks, bakers, and so forth—his people could rustle their own rations. Instead of three shifts, he would run watch on/watch off.
He was still about 400 people short.
Sten continued his inspection, going up the ladders into each of the turrets. Three of the four chaincannon looked as if they would work, and one of the quad projectile mounts would be online.
The maintenance machines had done their work—the cannon gleamed in dust-free, oily darkness. Tapia was studying the guns, trying to figure out exactly how each of them worked. Ideally, they would be automatically loaded, aimed, and fired. But if the command center was hit or the F-and-C computer went down, each turret would have to be capable of independent action.
Tapia was pretty sure that she could test the shell hoists that led from the fourth-level ammo dump up into the turrets without the turrets popping up. Sten told her to run them.
Machinery moaned and hissed. Monitor panels came semialive, informed Tapia they did not like the way the machinery was behaving, then shut up as lubricant hissed through long-disused channels and the hoist/loaders showed normal operating conditions.
Tapia glanced around. She and Sten were alone in the turret's command capsule.
"How do I get a clottin' transfer out of this clottin' henhouse outfit?" she asked.
"Problems?"
"Hell, yes. I don't like having to just sit here and wait to get hit. Clottin' better bein' a moving target. And it says real clear on my records that I got claustrophobia. And," she added, scratching thoughtfully at her neck, "I think I got fleas, too, off that clottin' bunker I was stuck in."
Having blown steam, she went back to her on-the-job training. Sten admired the turn of her buttocks under the combat suit, thought a couple of unmilitary thoughts, and continued on his rounds.
Sutton had found the kitchens and brought them to life. He was assisted by two others—the sons of Sr. Tige. The two Tahn explained that they saw no future in sitting around the ruins of the restaurant waiting to get shelled. Besides, none of Sten's troops could cook their way out of a rationpak. Sten should have figured out some way to send them back through the lines.