Valiant Dust

12

Harthawi Basin, Gadira II

Otto Bleindel counted forty-one operational grav tanks camped around the water station—the better part of an armored battalion. A third or so were the new Léopards. The rest were older Tatous, slower and less heavily armored than the recent additions, although still quite immune to anything short of a small K-cannon or antitank rocket. Mounted infantry in heavy-duty scout cars accompanied the Royal Guard armor, although in the heat of the afternoon none of them moved about the laager. City-dwelling Gadirans cultivated the midday qaylulah as a matter of comfort and ease; here, in the depths of the planet’s unforgiving desert, resting during the hottest part of the day was a matter of life and death.

Good enough, Bleindel decided. He’d been following the reports from Tanjeer on his news feed all morning long. The capital was almost halfway around the planet; it was a few hours before dawn there now. Alonzo Khouri and his revolutionaries had kept the Royal Guard busy all night with riots and attacks in their backyard, but now it was up to the desert tribes to strike the next blow. Toppling a government was like chopping down a tree; no one was strong enough to bring it down with one clean stroke, but the cumulative effect of many small ax bites would serve just as well … and if you knew what you were doing, the weight of the tree itself would finish the job for you.

The Dremish agent swept his binoculars over the force below him one more time, looking for anything he might have missed. Not many trees here, that was for certain. More important, he didn’t see any combat flyers, either. The desert Caidists had made a point of targeting the sultan’s airpower at every opportunity, expending surface-to-air missiles at a prodigious rate to whittle down the Royal Guard’s most important advantage.

Bleindel finished his observation and scooted back carefully behind the brush, moving slowly to avoid raising a telltale puff of dust on the long, low hillside. He turned to Caid Harsaf el-Tayib, who likewise was lying on his belly studying the sultan’s tanks. “It looks like they’ve settled exactly where we thought they would, Caid Harsaf,” he said. “I can’t see any reason to wait.”

Caid Harsaf snorted. “By which you mean you are ready for me to poke this nest of scorpions whenever it suits me.” He was a wiry, gray-bearded tribal chieftain, his skin burned to dark brown leather by a hard life in the Harthawi Basin, a vast region of scrub plains and broken hills between two dry mountain ranges. The water station currently occupied by the sultan’s soldiers belonged to Harsaf el-Tayib’s tribe, providing a rare source of clean, pure water in the middle of what was otherwise one of the more inhospitable places Bleindel had ever visited. “The el-Manjouri had better be ready.”

Bleindel checked his dataslate. “They’re in place,” he told the desert chieftain. Convincing the hardheaded desert fighters to let him track their tactical movements hadn’t been easy, but results were what counted. The green icons representing the el-Tayib tribe and their neighbors (and occasional rivals), the el-Manjour tribe, were arranged more or less as he intended. They wouldn’t stay there for long, of course—sooner or later one of the fighters would get bored or anxious, and begin firing without regard for what should be a clear and simple tactical plan. However, that suggested just the right way to handle the proud Harsaf. “Best to get started, before Caid Ahmed and his men find a way to ruin the surprise.”

Caid Harsaf spat and nodded. “Maybe you’re right.” He rolled over and looked back down the slope to where his fighters were gathered. He gave one shrill whistle and waved his hand; below them, five teams of el-Tayib fighters quickly dropped their mortar bombs down the short barrels of their weapons and fired off a volley in the direction of the encampment two kilometers distant.

The mortars were simple and ancient weapons indeed; even Gadira’s backward industrial complex could have produced the tubes without trouble. Importing any kind of heavy artillery from offworld was not very practical, but modern mortar bombs weighed only a few kilos each and made locally produced tubes into very effective weapons for their size and portability. These rounds included a mix of guided armor-penetrating antivehicle rounds that could identify grav tanks and transports, steering themselves toward likely targets as they came down, and air-burst fragmentation weapons that showered troops in the open with lethal shrapnel. Even before the first rounds hit, the crews dropped more bombs into the tubes; the steady whump! whump! of the mortars firing battered Bleindel like big, soft punches.

“Hah!” Caid Harsaf shouted as the first volley hit. Airbursts exploded above the encamped battalion; one mortar bomb found a scout transport and blew it up in spectacular fashion, creating an orange fireball and a cloud of black smoke that rose slowly into the hot desert air. Bleindel felt the explosions through the ground beneath his belly, and grinned. One of the old Tatou grav tanks brewed up a moment later, killed by the shaped charge of an armor-penetrating bomb, but he saw a small black burst of smoke on the turret of a Léopard where another such weapon failed to destroy the newer tank.

“Damn it!” the caid snarled, pointing at the grav tank Otto was watching. It now began to move, its turret slewing from side to side. “Your bombs are too light for the newer tanks!”

“I thought that might be the case.” Bleindel shrugged. “It doesn’t change the plan. Keep firing, you’re doing plenty of damage to the other vehicles.” And any Royal Guards unfortunate enough to be outside of armor plating, as well as the station’s pump mechanisms, he thought. Well, the el-Tayibs could always fix their pump later.

He took a moment to scan the horizon in a full 360 degrees, looking for any other threats. It was all too easy to get caught up in the spectacle of a barrage and forget that sometimes your enemies weren’t where they were supposed to be. The Harthawi Basin was not as flat as its name implied. Long, rolling slopes covered in clumps of thorny desert vegetation two or three meters high provided surprisingly good cover to those who knew the terrain—and whatever one might think of the desert tribes’ lack of discipline or antiquated beliefs, they certainly did. Caid Harsaf had easily brought two hundred fighters within mortar range of an alert enemy equipped with modern fighting vehicles. In fact, if Bleindel had asked, Harsaf might have been able to get his men within rifle range without being spotted. Fortunately, that was not required today.

“They are moving out,” Caid Harsaf growled.

Bleindel looked back toward the encampment. Sure enough, dozens of the grav tanks pushed out of their laager, heading in his direction. They left at least six or seven armored vehicles burning behind them in the wreckage of the water station. That’s what will really hurt them, he decided. It was fifty kilometers to the next source of water.

“Time to let them see us run,” he told Harsaf. “Leave the tubes, but take the mortar bombs.”

The caid nodded and shouted orders at his tribesmen in Jadeed-Arabi. Bleindel had been studying diligently for weeks now, but he still found the language hard to make out. Fortunately most of Harsaf’s exhortations consisted of swearing at his followers. The Dremish agent got up and hurried down the reverse slope of the low hill to where half a dozen light transports waited. Getting them into position without raising suspicious clouds of dust had required hours of driving along at a walking pace and choosing a circuitous route that kept the rise and fall of the land between the tribe’s vehicles and the water station, but now that painstaking effort would pay off—or so he hoped.

“This would be a good time to pray, infidel,” Caid Harsaf told him as they climbed into one of the flatbed vehicles. He grinned, a flash of bright teeth. “The allameh Hadji Tumar says that God in his mercy heeds the prayers of unbelievers and believers alike, although I have my doubts.”

“Then I will hope for both our sakes that your allameh”—some sort of teacher or scholar, if Bleindel remembered correctly—“is correct in this regard.” He held on as Caid Harsaf gunned the transport’s motor and surged up out of the shallow valley behind the hill, with half a dozen more fighters clinging to the jolting transport’s back and sides. There was no hiding their movements now; speed was their only hope, although the thick dust kicked up by the bouncing transports certainly helped to obscure them from the pursuing soldiers.

Bleindel anchored himself in place by bracing one arm against the dashboard. They raced off across the desert, flattening small clumps of brush and dodging around the thicker ones. To either side, the rest of the el-Tayib transports bounced and sped alongside them, forming a great uneven semicircle as they fled toward the north. Behind them came the Royal Guard grav tanks and scout cars, relentless in their pursuit. The military vehicles were a little slower than the tribesmen’s own civilian transports, but they were built to handle tougher terrain—and they were armed with K-cannons that could reach out and kill from a very long way on open ground. The flatbed racing alongside Bleindel’s own vehicle suddenly erupted in burst of mangled metal and flying bodies, wrecked by a hypersonic round whose report came two heartbeats after it hit. Then another one of the el-Tayib transports slewed aside and buried its nose in the sandy ground, knocked out by a second shot.

“Damn good shooting!” Caid Harsaf shouted. He was right—there was so much dust behind the fleeing tribesmen that the grav tanks behind them couldn’t have been shooting by sight. Belatedly Bleindel recalled that the Léopards had both advanced radar and thermal targeting capabilities. He wondered how long it would take for one of the sultan’s grav tanks to get around to blowing his own light transport to bits, and did his best to ignore the crawling, itching sensation between his shoulder blades as he heard the earsplitting whine of additional K-rounds streaking past the fleeing tribesmen. He was not ashamed to heave a sigh of relief when the shrinking convoy finally reached the cover of a broad wadi a couple of kilometers behind their original position, and momentarily broke line of sight.

“That was entirely too close,” he admitted. “To your left, Caid Harsaf.”

“I have not forgotten,” the desert chieftain replied. He slewed the transport into a broad curve and streaked off down the dry riverbed, the remainder of his tribe’s vehicles following him. They rounded a large outcropping of worn boulders, and the caid quickly turned their light transport behind the rocks while the rest of his men continued on.

Bleindel hopped out of the cab and scrambled up to peer over a boulder at the pursuing force. They came speeding over the desert, firing wildly as they followed the fleeing tribesmen. Nest of scorpions is not quite the right metaphor, he decided. More like a herd of blood-maddened bulls goaded into a killing rage. The leading vehicles broke out from the thorny brush and into the relatively open wadi, turning to chase the el-Tayibs.

At that moment, Caid Ahmed and his el-Manjouri struck. From the heavy brush on the opposite bank of the wadi, a score of antiarmor rockets streaked out to hammer the Royal Guard grav tanks, while insurgents armed with new mag rifles opened up on the lighter scout cars. Explosion after explosion rocked the desert, as Tatous brewed up and Léopards staggered under the warheads. Maybe half the rockets missed—after all, the Caidist fighters hadn’t had much practice with antiarmor weaponry before—but the ones that hit did plenty of damage, and even the misses contributed to the chaos of the moment by rocking the ground with stray blasts that showered vehicles nearby with fountains of dirt.

“Ha!” shouted Caid Harsaf, joining Bleindel behind the boulder. “Kill those city-dwelling dogs, you Manjouri bastards!” He waved a fist in the air as shrapnel hissed and pelted off the boulders around them. A piece of barrel from a grav tank’s main armament actually sailed completely over the boulder jumble sheltering the two men, and thudded into the sand twenty meters behind them. It must have weighed at least five hundred kilos.

“My men stand and fight, while yours run for their lives!” Another gray-bearded tribesmen, this one a short, round-bodied fellow in a dusty keffiyeh, scrambled into the sheltered vantage where Bleindel and Caid Harsaf watched the battle.

“That is unfair, Ahmed,” Caid Harsaf said, glaring at the other chieftain. “We diced for which tribe would stand and which would pretend to run. This is as God willed it, and my men played their part well.”

Caid Ahmed of the el-Manjour answered Harsaf’s angry look with a wide grin. “As you say, Harsaf. Your men run very well indeed.”

Bleindel ignored the two chieftains, keeping his eyes on the battle. He’d spent only a few hours with them—after all, he was doing his best to be in a hundred places at once as he coordinated arms deliveries, stirred up riots and protests in the major cities, and urged the pugnacious desert tribes into useful action—but he’d already come to the conclusion that despite all their protestations, Harsaf and Ahmed were firm friends. Better yet, they seemed eager to find out what they could do with the modern weapons he was able to deliver through el-Fasi’s shipping network. This deadly skirmish seemed to be a matter of sport to them.

More rockets fired off, now shooting in ragged volleys as different teams struggled to reload their weapons and fire at their best speed. The Royal Guards opened up on the brush and boulders of the wadi’s dry bank, autorifles whining and chirping as they scythed back and forth. The grav tanks still had plenty of teeth, and the concentrated firepower was terrible to behold. They simply sterilized whole patches of desert with storms of mag darts, but most were firing blindly; the ambushers were well hidden. The furious barrage silenced some of the el-Manjour tribesmen, but others kept up their fire. Three of the rocket teams happened to target the same Léopard at once, and this time the Montréalais tank’s armor didn’t hold—it blew apart, its main turret spinning through the air. Abruptly the remaining Royal Guard combat vehicles spurred into motion again, wheeling about to flee back the way they had come and escape the killing ground. The autorifle fire slackened as the targets disappeared into the ever-present dust.

Bleindel scrambled up on top of a low boulder for a better vantage. Yes, there was no doubt of it. The badly mauled battalion was in full retreat, heading back toward the water station, most likely inoperable now. Nine more Royal Guard combat vehicles burned in the wadi, adding their thick black smoke to the billowing dust. He smiled in satisfaction. “Well done, Caid Harsaf. And you, too, Caid Ahmed. The sultan is going to miss those grav tanks sorely, I think.”

“We should hit them again tonight,” Caid Ahmed said. “One or two more shocks like this and we will chase them completely out of the Harthawi.”

“I think you might be correct, but that’s not what we need from your fighters. The best place for the Royal Guard is right here in the middle of your desert. Let’s see if we can keep them here for a few more weeks.” Bleindel lowered himself back to the ground again. “Draw them in deeper after you. Encourage them to chase you, and when they give up, sting them again to goad them on, or feign weakness and lure them in.”

Caid Ahmed and Caid Harsaf exchanged glances. “It is the height of folly to allow an enemy to learn your strength,” Harsaf said. “If blows are to be struck, strike hard and finish your foe.”

“True,” Bleindel admitted. “But the goal is not just to defeat the sultan’s army. You also need to break Montréal’s grip on your planet, and right now, the best way to do that is to help the Royal Guard waste the better part of its strength here in your desert. Speaking of which, it is time for me to move on. I think I can count on a pair of sly old desert foxes to look after things here for now.”

“Where are you going?” Ahmed demanded.

“To and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it,” Bleindel said with a cryptic smile.

Caid Harsaf gave him a sharp look. “That is from the story of Job,” he said. “I thought you were not a Believer.”

“I have been reading up.” Of course, that was what Satan had told God when God asked what he’d been up to lately. He salaamed to both men. “I should have another shipment of weapons for you in a week or so. Contact me if anything unexpected comes up.” Then Otto Bleindel jogged off into the desert, headed for the spot where his flyer was hidden. He had a lot to do, and not enough time.