Guerrilla bands with powerguns, familiar with the terrain and dedicated to victory, could wreak holy havoc with an invader’s lines of communications. Boumedienne’s troops would have flailed blindly, destroying random villages but taking disastrous casualties whenever they tried to move in less than battalion strength.
The money cost to Boumedienne of a Frisian brigade was considerable, but it was the difference between victory and the sort of bloody stalemate that is perhaps the only thing worse than losing a war. Tagrifah was proof the money had been well spent.
Four more combat cars approached from the east. The armored vehicles spun on their axes to extend the line on which 3d Platoon crawled through the village. The cars closed up. Another platoon was in sight to Barbour’s left.
“Bunkers under every one of them?” Captain Currant asked/ observed as she scanned the wreckage.
“Yes, that’s right,” Barbour agreed. The part of his mind that spoke retained its professional detachment.
In every instance, the foundations of the houses they passed had collapsed into a crater instead of mounding above ground level. Delay-fuzed rounds—there was no need for true penetrators, designed to punch through the plating and reinforced concrete of fortresses—had sucked the fieldstone foundations into the bunkers the houses had concealed.
Barbour had pinpointed the individual bunkers by having patrols set off small explosions in the ground, never closer than a kilometer from the village. Analyzing the hash of echo returns was more a matter of magic than science, despite the help Barbour’s computers provided.
The results showed how perfectly he had succeeded. He wondered whether the villagers had built additional houses to conceal bunkers, or whether the Kairene military had limited their bunker locations to the existing buildings. Either way, there was a perfect equivalence.
The operation’s planners had laid firecracker rounds down to follow the HE in order to catch soldiers stumbling from their shattered bunkers. It didn’t appear that any Kairene regulars had made it that far.
Civilians lay individually and in groups near the doorways of their collapsed houses. An infant cried on the ground, between the bodies of its father and brother.
The car beside High Hat slowed. A gunner hopped from the fighting compartment, picked up the orphan, and remounted the vehicle.
Most of the dust had settled, but many of the house roofs burned sluggishly. Black smoke bubbled from the damp thatch. Occasionally the fans of a passing combat car would whip fires to bright flame, but mostly they remained glimmerings beneath an oily sludge.
The four-car platoon from the north of the village joined, bringing the company to full strength. Captain Currant spoke, switching her helmet from one sendee to another.
As a company commander, Mamie rated an enclosed command car with better communications gear and a specialist to run it. Like many other FDF officers, she preferred an ordinary combat vehicle.
Military doctrine for millennia had been that a commander’s job was to command, not to fight; Aggressive officers had never accepted that formulation; and when the dust settled, the victorious side was normally the one whose officers were aggressive.
High Hat rotated twenty degrees, then backed a few meters and settled onto its skirts. The remaining combat cars were shifting also, forming a tight defensive laager in what had been Tagrifah’s open marketplace. The vehicles’ bows faced outward, and their massed tribarrels were ready to claw.
They would have no target. Occasionally civilians blind with smoke and tears stumbled toward the laager. They ran as soon as the gleaming iridium shapes registered on their consciousness.
“There’s a battalion of Boumedienne’s boys coming on trucks,” Currant explained to Barbour. “We’ll wait for them, then head back to Desmond. There’s nothing here the locals can’t handle, now that we’ve done the real work.”
She clapped Barbour on the shoulder again. “Now that you’ve done the real work, Bob. This one was all yours.”
The dikes protecting Robert Barbour’s mind crumbled, letting unalloyed reality wash over him. The smoke and screams and the stench of fresh entrails …
It hadn’t been an atrocity. It was a necessary military operation.
And it was all his.
Cantilucca: Day One
The sailor at the Norbert IV’s boarding hatch pointed to a row of low prefab buildings 300 meters in from where the vessel had landed. The freighter’s leave party—the whole crew except for a two-man anchor watch—had already stumped most of the distance over the blasted ground. The crewmen carried only AWOL bags, while the disembarking passengers had much more substantial luggage.
“There’s the terminal,” the sailor said. “The left one’s Marvelan entry requirements. If there’s nobody home, go to passenger operations beside it. Pilar’ll be there, no fear.”
“Not,” said Mary Margulies, surveying the lighted buildings, “the fanciest-looking place I’ve ever been sent.”
“At the moment,” Matthew Coke said, “they aren’t shooting at us. That’s something.”
It was late evening. The sky was purple. Cantilucca was supposed to have two moons, but either they weren’t up or they were so small that Coke lost them in the unfamiliar stars.
The sailor snorted. “You want shooting?” he said. “Go on into Potosi. I guarantee you’ll find somebody there who’ll oblige you.”
Johann Vierziger looked at him. “A tough town?” he asked.
His voice was delicate, effeminate. Coke didn’t know what to make of Vierziger overall, but he’d watched the sergeant run the combat course at Camp Able. Whatever else Vierziger might be, he was surely a gunman.
“Tough enough, boyo,” the sailor replied, eyeing Vierziger speculatively. “But it’s a place a fellow can have a good time if he wants one, too.”
“It appears that we’re our own baggage handlers,” Sten Moden said. He lifted his twin-width suitcase in his only hand. “Shall we?”
The big logistics specialist started down the ramp, drawing the others after him. Vierziger moved immediately to the front. Each member of the survey team carried a concealed pistol, but they were under Coke’s strict orders not to draw their weapons unless he ordered them to.
Coke was uncomfortable. This wasn’t either a combat operation or a routine change of station. He didn’t know how he was supposed to feel.
Cantilucca’s starport was a square kilometer bulldozed from the forest and roughly leveled. The earth had been compressed and stabilized.
There hadn’t been a great deal of maintenance in the century or so since the port was cleared. Slabs of surface had tilted in a number of places, exposing untreated soil on which vegetation could sprout. The jets of starships landing and taking off limited the size of the shrubbery, at least in the portion nearer the terminal buildings.
There were twenty-three ships in port at the moment. Most of them were freighters of around 20 KT displacement, like the Norbert IV. Gage was big business, and Cantilucca grew the best gage in the universe.
Niko Daun chuckled. He was toward the rear of the straggling line—Lieutenant Margulies alone walked behind him, looking frequently over one shoulder, then the other.
“Here we all are in civilian clothes and everything,” the young sensor tech said. “We look like a bunch of businessmen.”
Coke glanced back at Daun. “That’s right,” he said wryly. “We are businessmen. Or ambulance-chasing lawyers, that might be closer.”
The survey team’s luggage, two pieces for every member except the one-armed Moden, had static suspension systems. When the systems were switched on, they generated opposing static charges in the bottom of each case and the surface beneath it. The cases floated just above the ground and could be pulled along without friction.