March Upcountry

CHAPTER FORTY

Roger looked out from the citadel wall as the first overcast light of dawn stole across the dead, jungle-devoured cityscape.

The company had been up for nearly an hour, getting breakfast and preparing for these first moments of early morning light. This time, Before Morning Nautical Twilight, had been considered the most dangerous time of all for millennia. It was the time preferred for a "dawn attack," when sleepy-eyed sentries were at their lowest ebb and attackers could slip up under cover of darkness but attack with the gathering light.

The Marines' answer was the same one armies had used for centuries: get up well before time and be awake and alert when the moment of "stand to" came. Naturally, as had also been the case for centuries, there were some complainers.

Roger wasn't one of them. He'd been up for hours the previous night, reviewing his actions of the day before and worrying about what was to come. For all that he'd been fighting monsters and the occasional skirmish or ambush all the way across the continent, this would be his first true battle. Today the Kranolta would come to kill the company, and someone would lose, and someone would win. Some of them would die, and some would live. While it seemed likely that casualties would be light, there was still a risk. There was even a risk that the humans would lose, and then word of the treachery aboard the DeGlopper would never reach Earth. Roger had smiled at himself when he reached that point in his ruminations. It was amusing to realize that the main thing he thought about was that the word wouldn't get back to his mother, not that he himself would be dead.

Sergeant Major Kosutic padded up silently behind him and leaned on the lip of the adjoining embrasure.

"Still quiet," she said, and glanced over at Cord who stood silently at Roger's back. Since the events of the day before, the old shaman had attached himself firmly to his "master," and was rarely to be found more than five meters away.

The sergeant major had been up from time to time the night before. Not worried, just running through the practiced actions of an experienced warrior checking on changes. Still, she'd become slightly perturbed as every sentry throughout the night had reported more and more fires. The tactical computers were having a hard time pinning down numbers, but each fire sent the estimates up and up. The current balance of forces didn't look good.

"I wish we had some razor wire," she said.

"Do you think it will come to that?" Roger asked in surprise. "They've only got spears; we have plasma cannon."

"Your Highness—I mean, Lieutenant," Kosutic said with a smile, "there's an old story, probably a space story, about a general and a captain. They were fighting some indigs and an air car came in with a spear sticking out of the side. The captain laughed and asked how they could lose against people armed only with spears. But the general looked at the captain and asked how she thought they could win against people willing to fight an air car with only a spear."

"And the moral is?" Roger asked politely.

"The moral, Lieutenant, is that there is no such thing as a deadly weapon. There are only deadly people, and the Kranolta—" her hand waved over the battlements at the broken city "—are fairly deadly."

Roger nodded and looked around, then back into the sergeant major's eyes.

"Are we?" he asked quietly.

"Oh, yeah," Kosutic said. "Nobody who gets through RIP is a slacker in a firefight. But... there's gonna be a lot of those scummies, and there ain't many of us." She shivered slightly at the smell of woodsmoke from the thousands of fires in the jungle. "It's gonna get interesting. Satan damn me if it ain't."

"We'll get the job done, Sergeant Major," the prince said confidently.

"Yeah." Kosutic looked at the sword hilt jutting up over his shoulder. "I suppose we will."

Captain Pahner strolled up, checking the positions, and looked out at the mists curling around the ruined city.

"Beautiful morning, fellas," he remarked, and Roger chuckled.

"It'd be even more beautiful if half 'my' platoon were in armor, Captain. What's the status?"

"Well," Pahner said with a grimace, "it isn't pretty, 'Lieutenant.' Poertena found the fault, which is a mold eating the contacts coating of the joint power conduits. You can't remove the coating; it's a dissimilar metallic contact. The problem seems to be in a new 'improved' version."

"Oh shit," Kosutic chuckled grimly.

"Yeah." Pahner nodded with a grim smile. "Another improvement. The suits that hadn't been 'upgraded' are okay. But that's just the four."

"What are we going to do?" Roger's eyes were wide, for Pahner had stressed repeatedly that they had to have the suits to take the starport.

"Fortunately, the contacts tend to wear out, so each suit has a spare in its onboard spares compartment. The ones sealed up in the storage packets are okay, but..."

"But there's only a couple of spares per suit, normally." Kosutic shook her head. "So we're down to four sets of armor for everything except taking the spaceport."

"Right." The captain nodded. "We can cannibalize from suits that we lose the users for, or that go down with other problems we can't fix. So we can put His Highness in a suit if things look particularly bad. But until then, it's just 'The Four Horseman.' "

"I guess that will have to do," Roger said with a shrug, then changed the subject. "So what's the plan for today, Captain?"

"Well," Pahner replied with his own shrug, "we wait until they have the majority of their forces in close, then engage with all the firepower we have. I won't say that I agree or disagree about whether they should be wiped out as a tribe, but we can't afford to have a large force following us to the next city-state. So they have to be eliminated as an operational threat at least."

"Can we do that?" Over the night, Roger's ardor had cooled, and he looked at the scattered weapons positions worriedly.

"Against what I'd estimate the maximum threat to be, yes," Pahner said. "There's a big difference between barbarian warriors and soldiers, and today these Kranolta are going to discover that."

"What's your estimate?" There were hundreds of fires in the jungle according to the taccomp in Roger's helmet—just under a thousand, in fact.

"I'm estimating a maximum of five thousand warriors with some camp followers. More than that is really hard to maintain logistically."

"Five thousand?" Roger choked. "There are only seventy of us!"

"Don't sweat it, Your Highness." Kosutic gave him a cold smile. "A defensive position like this gives us a ten-to-one advantage all by its lonesome. Add in the firepower, and five thousand isn't an impossible number." She paused and looked thoughtful. "Tough? Yeah. But not impossible. We're gonna get hurt, though."

"We'll make it through," Pahner said grimly. "That's the only thing that matters."

"What did Cord think of those numbers?" the prince asked, looking over his shoulder at the shaman. Despite the Marines' confidence, it still seemed like a lot of scummies to him.

"The Kranolta are said to be as numerous as the stars in the sky," the shaman said quietly. "They cover the ground like the trees."

"Maybe they do," Pahner said, "but that's not what you could call a hard and fast number. And it's really difficult to support more than five thousand in these sorts of conditions. I don't see any sign of a baggage train, for example."

"And if it is more?" Roger asked dubiously.

"More than the stars in the sky?" Pahner smiled wryly. "If it's more than five thousand, well... we'll just handle it. The important part is to survive and damage them badly enough that they decide that fucking with Imperial Marines is a short road to Hell."

"Oh hell," Corporal Kane whispered.

The humans had been working in shifts throughout the night to prepare their defenses, and she stood on one of the recently constructed platforms within the burned-out bastion, monitoring the sensor remotes planted along the approaches to the citadel. That gave her the dubious pleasure of an advanced look at the approaching horde, and a horde it was. She took one more look at the numbers estimate, blanched, and keyed her radio.

"Sergeant Despreaux, could you step over to the west bastion?"

The company command group had gathered atop the curtain wall gatehouse, watching the gathering horde on their visor HUDs. Captain Pahner's maximum estimate had unquestionably been exceeded.

"How the hell could they have gathered fifteen thousand warriors?" Pahner demanded irately. He couldn't seem to decide whether he was more incredulous or more offended that the Kranolta had not abided by his professional estimate.

"Between fifteen and eighteen, actually, Sir," Lieutenant Gulyas corrected, looking at the readout on his own helmet heads-up display.

"Should I have Poertena start warming up the other suits?" "Lieutenant" MacClintock asked.

"No," Pahner said, thinking furiously.

"We could engage them at longer ranges," Lieutenant Jasco suggested. "The plasma cannon would range from here, and they've got the punch to burn through the undergrowth. Hell, for that matter, they could blow through most of those walls without much sweat."

"No," Pahner said again, shaking his head. He pulled out a stick of gum and popped it into his mouth without any sort of ritual.

"This is gonna get real interesting, boss," Kosutic said, taking another look between the battlements.

"Pull the plasma cannon off the walls," Pahner said abruptly. "Put them in the bastions ready to move up. Put one on each of the bottom floors, and the rest at wall level. When we come to grips, it's bead rifles only. No grenades, no plasma."

"But—" Lieutenant Jasco said. "Sir, we'll lose the walls!"

"Yep," Pahner agreed with a grim smile. "Better make sure the door to the keep is heavily reinforced. And tell Julian his people stay put in there until I tell him different. And make sure those damned pack beasts are tied down!" If the elephant-sized flar-ta got loose in those close confines, it would doom anyone who wasn't in armor.

"I'll take care of that," Jasco said, heading out the door.

"Get those plasma cannon moved back," Pahner continued to Gulyas. "Remember, at least one downstairs in each of the bastions. We have five, so two upstairs in Third Platoon's bastion, and one downstairs. One up, one down in the east bastion."

"I'm on it," the lieutenant replied, already leaving, and Pahner turned back to the oncoming Kranolta.

"I still don't believe this." He shook his head. "Where do they get the food?"

"They've had word of our coming for some time now," Cord pointed out. "Undoubtedly they heard through rumors from Q'Nkok, and with that warning, the warriors would have gorged and gorged for days, then set off with packs of food for Voitan. We were lucky to arrive before the main host."

"They were probably waiting for us wherever the crossing of that Satan-damned swamp was," Kosutic agreed, nodding her head. "Good thing we didn't know where it was, or we'd be dead in the jungle."

"They can't stay together long," Cord admitted. "Only a few days, at most. But they don't intend to stay long; only long enough to kill us."

"And if we just hold them off," Roger continued, "they'll be waiting for us every few kilometers in the jungle."

"Which is why we have to do more than drive them off," Pahner confirmed. "And we will."

"Let's hope so," Roger said. "Let's hope so."