Meanwhile the engineers went to work on that strip just as if they were being shot at. Dust went up in clouds, blown away from our side of the strip by a light breeze. Under that dust, the craters and humps and leftover chunks of our troop shuttle disappeared, and a smooth, level landing strip emerged. There’s nothing engineers like better than pushing dirt around, and these guys pushed it fast.
By dark they had it roughed in pretty well, and showed us another surprise. Lights. Those tires we’d laughed at each held a couple of lamps and reflectors, and the coiled wiring that connected them all into a set of proper landing lights controlled by a masterboard and powered from the earthmover engine. By the time everyone had had chow, the first replacement shuttle was coming in, easing down to the lighted strip as if this were practice on a safe, peaceful planet far from the war.
None of us veterans could relax and enjoy it, though. The new arrivals had heard the same thing I had—thirty percent losses on the initial drop, sixty shuttles blown. No report from anyone on what we’d done to the Gerin, which meant that the Navy hadn’t done a damn thing… they tripled their figures when they did, but triple zilch is still zilch. So how come we weren’t being overrun by Gerin infantry? Or bombed by their fighters? What were the miserable slimes up to? They sure weren’t beat, and they don’t surrender.
During the night, five more shuttles landed, unloaded, and took off again. Besides the additional troops and supplies, we also had a new commanding officer, a mean-looking freckle-faced major named Sewell. I know it’s not fair to judge someone by his looks, but he had one of those narrow faces set in a permanent scowl, with tight-bunched muscles along his jaw. He probably looked angry sound asleep, and I’d bet his wife (he had a wide gold ring on the correct finger) had learned to hop on cue. His voice fit the rest of him, edged and ready to bite deep at any resistance. The captain had a wary look; I’d never served with Sewell, or known anyone who had, but evidently the captain knew something.
Major Sewell seemed to know what he was doing, though, and his first orders made sense, in a textbook sense. If you wanted to try something as impossible as defending a shuttle strip without enough troops or supplies, his way was better than most. Soon we had established a perimeter that was secure enough, dug into each of the main hills around the strip, each with its own supply of ammo, food, and water. Besides the original headquarters and med dugout, he’d established another on the far side of the strip. All this looked pretty good, with no Gerin actually challenging it, but I wasn’t convinced. It takes more than a few hundred Marines to secure an airstrip if the enemy has a lot of troops.
Shortly after sundown, one of the squads from the first replacement shuttle found ruins of a human settlement at the base of a hill near the end of the strip, and had to get their noses slapped on the comm for making so much noise about it. Not long after, the squad up on that clifftop put two and two together and made their own find. Having heard the first ruckus, they didn’t go on the comm with it, but sent a runner down to Major Sewell.
There’s a certain art to getting information, another version of politics you might call it. It so happened that someone I knew had a buddy who knew someone, and so on, and I knew the details before the runner got to Major Sewell.
We’d known the strip itself was human-made, from the beginning. What we hadn’t known was that it had been privately owned, adjacent to the owner’s private residence. It takes a fair bit of money to build a shuttle-strip, though not as much as it takes to have a shuttle and need a shuttle strip. The same class of money can take a chunk of rock looking out over a little valley, and carve into it a luxurious residence and personal fortress. It can afford to install the best quality automated strip electronics to make landing its fancy little shuttle easier, and disguise all the installations as chunks of native stone or trees or whatever. The Gerin had missed it, being unfamiliar with both the world and the way that humans think of disguise. But to a bored squad sitting up on a hilltop with no enemy in sight, and the knowledge that someone might have hidden something… to them it was easy. Easy to find, that is, not easy to get into, at least not without blasting a way in… which, of course, they were immediately and firmly told not to do.
Think for a little what it takes to do something like this. We’re not talking here about ordinary dress-up-in-silk-everyday rich, you understand, not the kind of rich that satisfies your every whim for enough booze and fancy food. I can’t even imagine the sort of sum that would own a whole world, hollow out a cliff for a home, operate a private shuttle, and still have enough clout left to bribe the Navy in the middle of a desperate war. This was the sort of wealth that people thought of the military-industrial complex having, the kind that the big commercial consortia do have (whether the military get any or not), the kind where one man’s whim, barely expressed, sends ten thousand other men into a death-filled sky.
Or that’s the way I read it. We were here to protect—to get back—some rich man’s estate, his private playground, that the Gerin had taken away. Not because of colonists (Did I see any colonists? Did anyone see any evidence of colonists?) but because of a rich old fart who had kept this whole world to himself, and then couldn’t protect it. That’s why we couldn’t do the safe, reasonable thing and bomb the Gerin into dust, why we hadn’t had adequate site preparation, why we hadn’t brought down the tactical nukes. Politics.
I did sort of wonder why the Gerin wanted it. Maybe they had their own politics? I also wondered if anyone was hiding out in there, safe behind the disguising rock, watching us fight… lounging at ease, maybe, with a drink in his hand, enjoying the show. We could take care of that later, too. If we were here.
Sometime before dawn—still dark, but over half the night gone—the higher flyby reported distant activity. Lights and nonvisible heat sources over at the edge of the hills, moving slowly but steadily towards us. They didn’t follow the old road trace, but kept to the low ground. According to the best guess of the instruments, the wettest low ground. I guess that makes sense, if you’re an amphib. It still didn’t make sense that they moved so slow, and that they hadn’t come to hit us while we were setting up.
The next bad news came from above. Whatever the Navy had thought they’d done, to get the Gerin ships out of the way, it hadn’t held, and the next thing we knew our guys boosted out of orbit and told us to hold the fort while they fought off the Gerin. Sure. The way things were going, they weren’t coming back, and we wouldn’t be here if they did. Nobody said that, which made it all the clearer that we were all thinking it. During that long day we made radio contact with the survivors at Beta Site. They were about eighty klicks away to our north, trying to move our way through the broken hills and thick scrub. Nobody’d bothered them yet, and they hadn’t found any sign of human habitation. Surprise. The major didn’t tell them what we’d found, seeing as it wouldn’t do them any good. Neither would linking up with us, probably.
The smart thing to do, if anyone had asked me, was for us to boogie on out of there and link with the Beta Site survivors, and see what we could do as a mobile strike force. Nobody asked me, at least nobody up top, where the orders came from. We were supposed to hold the strip, so there we stuck, berries on a branch ready for picking. I know a lot of the guys thought the same way I did, but hardly anyone mentioned it, seeing it would do no good and we’d have a lot more to bitch about later.