Fleet of the Damned (36 page)

And then he reported.

Sten had expected decimation among the motley crew of technicians and chairborne troopers, most of whom were probably slightly unsure of which end of a willygun was hostile and were surely unaware of certain infantry subtleties, like keeping one's head out of the line of fire.

Instead: six dead, fourteen wounded.

"The Tahn mounted—I believe that is the correct phrase—a most determined attack on our second day," Sutton said. "Their tactics were most foolish. They sent three waves of soldiers at us. We did not find it necessary to aim carefully. Their casualties were appalling, Commander. Just appalling.

"A day or so later, they attempted us again. Most halfheartedly. Since then, we have seen very little action. They appear to be terrified of us."

Sten raised an eyebrow—the Tahn were afraid of
nothing
. But there had to be some explanation.

A Guards sergeant commanding an attached support rocket battery provided it. "Our prog's that the Tahn figured your kiddies'd be a walkover, no offense, sir. They come in dumb, and got dead. Next time, they was just pro-bin'. Then—zipburp. We got curious, so I took out a couple of my people and lifted a prisoner. That's a terrible thing to happen to a Tahn, you maybe know. He says the reason your people didn't get wiped is 'cause everybody figures they're elite. Or decoys."

"Say what?"

"Put it to you like this, Commander. Your people go out on patrol. Nobody told 'em you're supposed to blackface. Or you ain't supposed to be showin' lights or smoking herb. Th' Tahn thought they were gettin' set up. Progged that your swabs had big backup. Plus, this Tahn told us, they couldn't believe any line animals'd build such clottin' poor positions. Hadda be some kind of trap. Guess they got somebody over there guilty of thinkin', huh?"

Sten laughed. And made a note to give the real skinny to whoever took over his section of the line; he wondered how the man would take the basic instruction—remember, tell your people to act real stupid. But in the meantime, he had to figure out how he was going to move his merry marauders back through the enemy lines to this probably non-existent fort.

Whatever he did, he figured it would get pretty interesting.

CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

A
s far as Strongpoint Sh'aarl't went, getting there was not half the fun.

It took five full nights for Sten's troopies to reach the long-abandoned fort. It started with the small problem that his sailors thought they were minor heroes instead of lucky sods. They had a group name—Sutton's Sinister Swabbies—which had been created by a livie journalist who had reported on the Battling Bastards of the Bridgehead. That, of course, had made the Empirewide 'casts—there was very little in the way of good news those days.

Alex and Sten privately dubbed their cocky swabs the Clotting Klutzes of Cavite.

Actually, either label would have fit. Through good fortune, they hadn't gotten instantly wiped out. And so they had survived long enough to learn combat tactics instinctually. Proof—they were still mostly alive.

Sten hoped to keep them that way.

He moved his detachment to the friendly point closest to this possibly mythical fort. They were ordered to delouse, drakh, and degrease.

Once again, Sten and Alex went point.

Sten was very tired of being the first man into danger, but he saw no other option. Fortunately, Kilgour felt the same and didn't bother complaining. But both of them would have traded their chances on salvation for eight uninterrupted hours on a feather mattress.

They slid through the Tahn front lines without problems, two floating ghosts. Finding that hilltop of the hidden fort was equally easy. Mahoney had sent an op-aimed missile onto its crest, a missile whose warhead area carried a nav-beacon.

There were, according to the fiche, several entryways to the fort. Sten picked the least obvious—a supposedly still-standing power line maintenance shed.

The monitor panel was hinged and counterweighted. It lifted away without complaint. Sten allowed himself to hope that this would be painless.

It wasn't.

He and Alex dropped into the underground passage with a splash. They were in thigh-deep muck. One of the filtering pumps must have stopped operation some years earlier. So had the vector killers.

There were vermin in the tunnel, vermin that thought this was their turf and resented the intruding two-legs. They bit. Sten wished that the livie standard, an area blaster, actually existed. Destroying the multiple-legged waste eaters one at a time with AM2 blasts from their willyguns would have taken an eon. Not to mention that the echoing explosions would have left them quite deaf.

Kilgour had the solution. He pitched bester grenades ahead of him as they waded toward the fort. Time loss wasn't ordinarily lethal, but it was when the air-breathing victims collapsed into water and drowned.

Eventually the tunnel climbed upward, and they waded out of mire. Sten found the master control room and, obeying the TF for the fort, turned the power on.

Lights flickered, and machinery hummed.

That was all Sten needed for the moment—the fort was mannable. The next step was to man it. They returned through the lines and slept through the day.

The second night was spent in a detailed recon of the least perilous route to Strongpoint Sh'aarl't. Sten and Alex broke that route down into 300-meter segments. That was more than enough.

On the third night, they positioned their guides. Sten knew that his befuddled sailors, regardless of their self-opinion, couldn't line-cross without discovery. His idea was to take the sailors he'd walked out of the hills with and use them as route guides. Each guide would be responsible for meters of travel. At the end of his or her route, he or she would pass people on to the next guide.

Almost anyone can learn to traverse—blind and quietly—300 meters of terrain in one night. Riiiight!

Sten had also loaded the odds on his side. For two nights now Imperial artillery had brought in crashing barrages exactly at midnight along the route to the fort. He figured the Tahn would be chortling at the Empire's predictability and, equally predictably, diving into their shellproofs at midnight.

On the fourth and fifth nights, he moved his sailors forward. The barrages were still mounted but, for those two nights, aimed to either side of the corridor that Sten and his people would move along.

Too elaborate, he'd told himself. Too true, he'd also thought. But you got a better option?

Neither he nor Alex could come up with anything cuter. And so, at midnight of night four, three-person teams moved out beyond the Empire's perimeter, to be met and hand-held onward by guides.

Sten was betting that forty percent of his people would reach the fort before the Tahn discovered them. If twenty percent made it from there and if most of the archaic weapons in the fort worked, he might be able to hold the position. Anything else was pure gravy.

Sten, by 0400 hours of the fifth night, was gloating.

Every single sailor had made it to Strongpoint Sh'aarl't'. Sten was starting to believe in them. By silent consent, he and Alex retired their private nickname for the swabbies.

"A'er tha'," as Kilgour pointed out. "Ee tha' want to christen th'selves th' Kilgour-Killin't Campbells, Ah'll dinnae fash."

The next task was to find out how much of a white elephant they were fighting from—and how big a fight it would be.

CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

T
he fort was more of a cement-gray elephant than white, and it wasn't even that much of an elephant. The beings who had mothballed the structure had done a fairly decent job.

Sten found the fort's command center on the second level and sent teams out to investigate the rest of his base.

Foss was staring at the fire and control computer. "Lord Harry," he marveled. "They actually expected people to
shoot
using this beast? Clottin' thing looks like it should have a kick starter."

He pulled an insulated glove on and touched power switches. According to the specs, the sensor antennae were grid-buried in the fort's armor, so no bedsprings should jump out of the park's grass and give things away.

The air stank of singed insulation—but the computer came to life. Foss unfolded a modern hand-held computer, slid the screen out, and started creating a glossary. The computer worked—but the symbols and readouts were those of a long-forgotten age.

Sten had the environment controls on standby. When they went into action, he would turn them on. But until then, he didn't want vent fans showing above the ground. He and his people would just have to live with the odor. The entire fort smelled musty, like a long-ignored clothes closet.

About half of the visual sensor screens were alive. Sten, once again, didn't use any of the controls that would swivel the pickups.

Okay, he told himself. I can aim at something—I think.

Let's see if there's anything working in the bang department.

He went up into the top-level ready rooms. His squad leaders were already assigning troops to them. Sten let them go about their business. He was busy studying the TO boards. Among the missing pieces of data on the fort had been the list of personnel required to man the base. As Sten had suspected, there were supposed to be far more soldiers than he had in his approximately 125-strong detachment.

Sten juggled bodies around. He wouldn't need to worry about the missile crewmen—that helped a lot. Cooks, bakers, and so forth—his people could rustle their own rations. Instead of three shifts, he would run watch on/watch off.

He was still about 400 people short.

Sten continued his inspection, going up the ladders into each of the turrets. Three of the four chaincannon looked as if they would work, and one of the quad projectile mounts would be online.

The maintenance machines had done their work—the cannon gleamed in dust-free, oily darkness. Tapia was studying the guns, trying to figure out exactly how each of them worked. Ideally, they would be automatically loaded, aimed, and fired. But if the command center was hit or the F-and-C computer went down, each turret would have to be capable of independent action.

Tapia was pretty sure that she could test the shell hoists that led from the fourth-level ammo dump up into the turrets without the turrets popping up. Sten told her to run them.

Machinery moaned and hissed. Monitor panels came semialive, informed Tapia they did not like the way the machinery was behaving, then shut up as lubricant hissed through long-disused channels and the hoist/loaders showed normal operating conditions.

Tapia glanced around. She and Sten were alone in the turret's command capsule.

"How do I get a clottin' transfer out of this clottin' henhouse outfit?" she asked.

"Problems?"

"Hell, yes. I don't like having to just sit here and wait to get hit. Clottin' better bein' a moving target. And it says real clear on my records that I got claustrophobia. And," she added, scratching thoughtfully at her neck, "I think I got fleas, too, off that clottin' bunker I was stuck in."

Having blown steam, she went back to her on-the-job training. Sten admired the turn of her buttocks under the combat suit, thought a couple of unmilitary thoughts, and continued on his rounds.

Sutton had found the kitchens and brought them to life. He was assisted by two others—the sons of Sr. Tige. The two Tahn explained that they saw no future in sitting around the ruins of the restaurant waiting to get shelled. Besides, none of Sten's troops could cook their way out of a rationpak. Sten should have figured out some way to send them back through the lines.

They were civilians and if captured by the Tahn would be quite legally executed. But then, on the other hand, if Cavite City fell, they would be executed as collaborators, even though everyone on Cavite was supposedly an Imperial citizen.
If
Cavite City fell? Sten wondered if he was getting sick—there was no reason for any sort of optimism.
When
Cavite City fell.

What the clot—the Tiges were probably in no worse shape with him than anywhere else.

Besides, there was business. Sutton ran down the supply station.

The spindar had personally lumbered down the rows of ammunition on the bottom level. The pumps had kept the dump from flooding, and the rack sprays had lubricated the stored rounds at intervals.

Bedding? Mr. Sutton lifted a rear leg and scratched the back of his neck. Forget bedding—the dehumidifiers on the third level were wonky. The living spaces themselves were almost uninhabitable.

That wasn't a problem. The troops could doss down in the ready rooms.

Water? Again, no problem. The rain collectors were in perfect condition, as were the purifiers.

Rations?

Sutton was outraged. "I am preparing a full report, Commander. Cha-chuff. Whoever was the quartermaster was on the dropsy! An out-and-out crook!"

Sten smiled. Sutton was getting moralistic on him.

"Examine this," Sutton growled, and pointed to a computer screen. "Imperial regulations specify that each serving trooper is to be afforded a balanced, interesting diet. Am I correct?"

"Imperial regulations specify a lot of things that get conveniently lost in the shuffle."

Sutton ignored Sten's reference to his past. "Balanced, interesting, with full provision for nonhumanoid or special diets."

"GA."

"Look at what this unspeakable person did! All that we have warehoused here are paked legumes and freeze-dried herbivore flesh! How can I feed my people on things like this? How can the Tiges manage to keep the rations interesting? We might as well hook ourselves up to a mass converter and be done with it!"

"We live on nothing but beans and beef for a few days," Sten comforted, "we'll all be our own mass converters."

"Not humorous."

"Besides," Sten continued, "The Tahn are going to wipe us out before we get bored."

"Commander, I'm appalled. You have been associating with that Kilgour for entirely too long."