Redoubtable

5

The hike to the roadblock was hot and dusty. As Kris reflected back on her other advances to hostile contact, they all were either hot and dusty, or cold and wet. Why was a firefight never on a lovely, pleasant day?

Must be a rule somewhere.

“So, Your Highness,” Jack said, “what are we doing here?”

Kris heard a serious question . . . heavily salted with sarcasm. But she had to admit, she’d been seriously chewing on just that question . . . in the light of what she’d started off the day wanting to do.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if we don’t win a bloody battle today?” she finally said.

Jack didn’t seem surprised at her answer. “I assume that ‘Let’s not lose a battle today’ is at least one step higher on your priority list.”

“No question about that,” Kris agreed.

Jack mulled that over for a moment. “You know, if we did kind of accidentally wipe out this hostile force coming our way, it might leave us the only power on this planet.”

“I doubt it,” Penny put in.

Kris gave her a raised eyebrow.

“Face it,” Penny said. “Do you honestly think the big man is in the mob headed out here? You announced yourself, Princess, when you took down that pirate in orbit. They know they’ve got one of those damn Longknifes in the mix. If I were the big guy, I sure wouldn’t risk my fair skin anywhere near you.”

“I think Penny has a point,” Kris said. “Even if we killed or captured every thug we’re about to run into, there will be plenty left to cause us trouble tonight and next week. Jack, do you think you could control this planet with two hundred Marines?”

Jack scowled. “My company’s job is to protect you, Miss Highness, not get stuck running around a planet chasing every bad actor with a gun.” He paused, then added, “Still, I hate standing by while those pigs steal food from starving people.”

“There is that.” Kris sighed.

“There’s a second reason we really shouldn’t be wailing all over the badness on this planet,” Penny said.

Kris and Jack both eyed her.

“Let’s say that we set up our own police force here. That means we’ll have to run food in here to feed all the hungry. How are you going to explain to Vicky Peterwald next time you run into her that you aren’t really, actually, intentionally poaching on her old man’s territory?”

And Kris was under specific orders not to even give the appearance of United Sentients horning in on Greenfeld’s natural sphere of influence . . . much less actually doing the horning-in thing.

She hadn’t complained about those orders when she got them.

But then, when she accepted her orders, she wasn’t having her face rubbed in this mess. Had Grampa Ray, King Raymond I to most everyone else, seen this coming when he sent her here to do this job?

Had he, once again, chosen her because he knew she’d ditch her orders and do the job?

For the forty-eleventh-million time, Kris allowed nasty thoughts about being one of those damn Longknifes to chase themselves around the inside of her skull.

Enough of that, Kris thought, shaking her head. Policy reviews would have to wait for another day. Just now, she had a lot of heavily armed people who were eager to make her acquaintance. If she wasn’t careful, some people might not survive the experience.

Most definitely, Kris did not want to be on the list of those who didn’t see sunset tonight.

The dirt road they’d been hiking led them straight through what looked like dry rice paddies. Kris had never seen potatoes growing, but she guessed the low, leafy, green plants now spreading over the paddies were what potatoes pushed up above ground.

Sergeant Bruce’s computer had spun off a nano eye. It now drifted about two thousand meters above his location; Kris studied its feed. Lieutenant Stubben had deployed first platoon along a paddy dike on either side of the road. As elements of second platoon arrived, Stubben sideslipped his troops to the left of the road, concentrating second to the right.

“It looks good,” Kris told Jack, “but I would prefer us farther forward. Didn’t Mr. Annam say they were eating a lot of potatoes?”

Kris looked over her shoulder; the couple were keeping up with them. Of course, Jack had shortened his usual long strides to accommodate Kris’s slower, cane-assisted pace. Now, both of the locals nodded vigorously at Kris’s remark.

Jack must have been getting the same overhead feed as Kris. “There’s a newly mown field about a klick farther out. If we deploy carefully along the last paddy dike, all those other trampling feet ought to stay in the stubble.”

“We were going to replant those barley fields today,” Annam said. “I guess we can wait until tomorrow.”

Jack started issuing orders to his Marines.

Kris found herself negotiating with her computer . . . and Nelly’s kids. “Nelly, Chesty’s eye spy nano has done good. Could you spin off a couple more from Penny and Jack’s computers to cover the road all the way back to town?”

Penny and Jack didn’t raise any problems with that.

Nelly mulled it over for several nano moments. “Both Mimzy and Sal still have uncommitted matrix and Smart Metal™ they can spare. I’ll ask them to generate one remote each. Aren’t you glad now, Kris, that I ordered more material than just the minimum for nine new computers.”

Kris tried not to sigh. “I am now, Nelly, but as we have talked about before, I want to preapprove your spending such a large wad of my money in the future.”

“But you never would have approved money for my kids.” Nelly didn’t quite whine. Not quite. “Don’t you often say that it is easier to get forgiveness than get permission?”

“Nelly, you’ve picked up bad habits hanging around Kris,” Penny put in. “You’ve got to learn to do what she says, not what she does.”

“When pigs can fly,” Nelly suggested.

Kris decided her response could wait for a less busy day. “Longboat crew,” she said on net.

“Yes, ma’am, we’re still here. Still working. We need more time,” came in a rush.

“I expect you will,” Kris said dryly. “Could you have a couple of dozen bags of famine biscuits brought up here?”

“Yes, ma’am. Right away, ma’am.”

“That’s a seriously worried fellow,” Penny said.

“If they hadn’t been so eager to take on reaction mass, they wouldn’t be in this mess,” Kris said with a sigh. “Being too eager to please can be more trouble than . . .” Suddenly Kris thought better of finishing that sentence.

“Than getting a little lip, huh, Your Princessship?” Nelly finished.

“Doesn’t look like there are any more trucks coming out from town,” Jack said, changing the topic. “You have a problem with transportation, Mr. Annam?”

“When something breaks, there are no spare parts. And then there is the matter of food. You can either eat or make biofuel,” the farmer said. “We used to eat the barley and feed the chaff to the fuel vats. Now the potato crop is all going for food. There’s nothing to drink except the vat alcohol. Some people really need a drink.”

“So what we see is about what they got. No reserves,” Penny said.

“And we could end up owning most of the spare rolling stock on this planet,” Kris mused.

“No. No. I don’t want to own this planet. Vicky Peterwald is never happy to see my smiling face. Definitely she’ll be unhappy if I drag in with a couple of planets chained to my ankle that her father considers his.”

“You talk as if you knew the Peterwalds personally,” the plantation owner said. “Could that be so?”

“They’ve met on several occasions,” Penny said. “So far, everyone has survived the experience, but it’s been close a few times.”

The farmer and his wife exchanged astonished glances. “Next time you see them, could you ask them to please stop sending refugees to our poor planet?”

“I could ask them, but I don’t think they’d pay me any attention,” Kris said. “Also, I doubt many of these refugees bothered to ask permission to leave. They are just running. Running from something worse.”

“How could anything be worse?”

Kris glanced back at the shelters where the starving refugees were having their first meager meals in way too long. “I don’t know,” she said, “but running must have seemed like a good idea when they started moving.”

The last squad of second platoon trotted up and joined the others at the first paddy dike. They were followed by several less emaciated locals pulling wheeled carts piled high with food sacks. Kris told them to halt in the road where she intended to stand. Everyone was in position by the time the first truckload of gunmen came around a small hillock and headed toward them.

The Marines had taken cover, using what the dikes offered. Squad sergeants made the rounds of their teams, checking them out, correcting where necessary, and offering good examples of calm. Platoon skippers and their sergeants did the same.

Hopefully, this would keep buck fever on a tight leash. About half the platoons’ troopers were replacements, facing their first live-fire experience. The standing officers and NCOs also gave a clear signal to the opposition of how many they faced even if the individual trigger pullers stayed low.

Now it was time for Kris to find out what had come out to meet her.

The trucks were a mix of different three-to-five-ton rigs with flatbeds or strake side boards. They came up the road in single file, forty-five exactly. Four hundred meters out there was a cross trail. The lead truck drove past it, then stopped. A man standing on the bed of that truck used hand signals to send alternate trucks left or right. When he had twenty-two trucks on either side of him, he waved them all forward.

In a ragged turn, the other trucks moved off the trail and started to bounce across the field, trying, in a very imperfect way, to dress on each other.

“Not a bad effort,” Jack said as he watched the evolution. Then one truck fell out with a broken water line spewing steam. Another came to a halt for no apparent reason.

Kris eyed the central truck, the one she’d tagged as the command vehicle. The standing man waved his arms and shouted at the breakdowns. Clearly, he wasn’t the calm sort.

Just how professional was the guy across the way? What was he trained in? How good was he? How good were his troops? Kris had a long list of unanswered questions.

Her list of answers was very short. Too much was just one big question mark.

“When do you think he’ll stop?” Penny asked.

That was a question Kris hadn’t gotten down to. How close would she let this joker get to her Marines?

“Jack, pass The Word, if the trucks close to 150 meters, I want the tires shot out. But wait for my order.”

Jack passed along The Word. To Kris’s right and left, officers and NCOs glanced at them as they got it. A moment later, squad leaders went down their Marines, picking their best shooters for tire detail.

The chosen Marines showed clear intent as they dialed in their sight pictures. Others around them, under the watchful eyes of the NCOs, kept their rifles aimed high. Not too high, but high enough that a miss-shot would pass well above the heads of the approaching trucks.

Kris ordered Chesty’s spy eye to focus on the command rig. The man was still standing though now he leaned on the cab of the truck, binoculars roving over the Marine position. Then he came back to focus on Kris.

Kris couldn’t help it; she gave him a confident wave.

Two hundred meters away, the man with the binoculars put them down and scowled at Kris. Then he turned to the trucks on either side and raised his right hand.

The trucks came to a ragged halt. Up and down the line people shouted as they leapt, dropped, or helped others from the trucks. To shouts, the general mob flowed into a line, of sorts, facing Kris and her deployed Marines.

Kris studied them. Most looked hardly better off than the refugees Kris had just fed. Some leaned on long poles with blades on their tips. Someone must have gone into business converting available metal into machetes. There were many examples of them, similarly fashioned to the ones the Marines had confiscated from the pirates in orbit.

Many of the people had nothing but a club or bat.

Of course, there were also those with rifles and machine pistols.

The two trucks on the extreme wings each disgorged twenty or so men and women who held these weapons and looked like they knew how to use them. Dressed in parts of black uniforms, they went to ground. Once prone, they settled into a steady aim at Kris’s Marines.

They didn’t bother being nonthreatening. None of that aiming high stuff for them.

The Marines returned the favor as their rifles came level.

The two trucks closest to the command rig also had heavily armed types. On close observations, some even had body armor. A few shoulders showed NCO stripes from Greenfeld State Security. Once prone, they took the same aggressive aim at Marines.

The hairs on the back of Kris’s neck stood up. From the looks of it, she needed to start a new timer on how long it had been since someone tried to kill her.

Kris moved the overhead picture to examine the prone shooters across from her.

Beside her, Penny shook her head. “Look at all the unemployed Greenfeld security troops. Wonder how good they are?”

“Something tells me we’re going to find out,” Jack said.

Kris shrugged. “I don’t recall that many times Peterwald’s State Security went up against anyone with guns, do you?”

Penny took her own good time answering Kris’s question. “Officially, the boys in black never have used their guns,” she said slowly. “Abby says there are unofficial reports of several public protest gatherings that got sprayed with automatic weapons fire. There are no reports of anyone shooting back. The Peterwalds keep pretty tight control of guns in their backyard.”

“Keep, or kept control of guns?” Jack asked.

Penny just shrugged.

Kris completed her study of the opposition. It seemed to fall into two distinct groups. Those with guns were well fed and focused on threatening the Marines. Those without guns were emaciated, formed small groups to talk among themselves, and seemed a whole lot less interested in being close to all this firepower.

Given a bit of encouragement, Kris strongly suspected the gunless types would happily run.

All Kris had to do was figure out a way to let them. Something told her the gun toters were there as much to intimidate their hungry partners as to impact the Marines.

I THOUGHT WE DIDN’T WANT TO START A BLOODBATH TODAY, Nelly thought.

KEEP REMINDING ME OF THAT. IT’S VERY TEMPTING TO LET THE CHIPS START FLYING. YOU KNOW OF ANY WAY FOR ME TO GET A GOOD ESTIMATE ON HOW MANY REALLY BAD GUYS ARE OUT THERE?

I HAVE NOT THE FOGGIEST IDEA. I COULD GIVE YOU AN ACCURATE COUNT OF THE NUMBER WITH GUNS, BUT INTENT IS PURE GUESS.

THAT’S WHAT I THOUGHT, Kris said with an internal sigh.

Across the way, the boss man still stood with the truck cab between himself and Kris’s Marines. Did he really think something that thin would do him any good if it came to a fight? Now he was talking to a cluster of youth.

Kris was about to order a nano spy over to get a listen when one kid pulled his dirty white shirt over his head and started trotting toward Kris’s battle line. Every couple of steps, the shirt got waved.

“I think they want to talk,” Kris said.