IronStar (60 page)

Marcus asked, “Go
where
,
Corporal? Its transport is fried, right?”

“Yessir. I don’t know where it
plans to go, but wherever it is, it’s going to be walking there.”

“
Which two! Which two people has
it got?
” Kirrah almost climbed Marcus’ suit front to speak into his suit
microphone.

Corporal Sengli heard her. “Who’s…
oh, Lieutenant Roehl! Just a minute, I’ll ask someone. What do you want me to
do, sir?”

“You got a shot at it?”

“Well, yessir. But it’s wearing
something, can’t tell if it’s combat armor or survival suit, but whatever it
is, chances are good the hostages will be injured from the back-splash. It’s
standing right between them, got them chained to it somehow. Wait one, here’s
that teacher, Slaetra… who’s - yes, thank you ma’am. Uh, she says to tell you
the names of the hostages are Tashta and Akaray. One’s a girl, other’s just a
little kid.

“Need a decision
now
, sir,
it’s already killed one of the indig guards, and fired on me, and it’s
demanding immediate exit from the building or it will kill one of the
hostages.”

"Never forget that no
military leader has ever become great without audacity. If the leader is filled
with high ambition and if he pursues his aims with audacity and strength of
will, he will reach them in spite of all obstacles." -
General Carl Von Clausewitz,
op. cit.

“
Noooo!
” Kirrah railed,
shaking the Marine Lieutenant by his shoulders. “
Let it go!
It can’t go
far! We’ll find another way to stop it!
Let it go!
” Marcus actually
shrank back slightly in his seat, then seized her wrists and said:

“Sengli, Warden. Let it go. But
keep it in contact, Corporal, max pri. Call the duty watch at
Attila’s
shuttle, deploy every Tango we’ve got, and get some spyflys up. If it kills
both hostages, or separates from them, nail it, no delay. Don’t be subtle about
following it, Ali. Let it see that live hostages are essential to its health.”
His eyes were connected with Kirrah’s, whose anguished face was suspended in
front of his. His voice became gentle.

“We’ll get him, Kirrah. We’ll save
your friends. That’s what Marines
do
.” She sprang up and pounded on the
seatback in front of him to punctuate her words.

“God
dammit
, that’s what
mothers
are supposed to do! That sonova
bitch
! How did it
know!
How
did it know where to look, who to go after? What’s it gonna do now?
Gods!
How
did I let this happen?”

“Ma’am? Ma’am!” It took Kirrah a
moment to register that someone else was talking to her, and to focus on
Adrianne Gilman. When she was sure she had Kirrah’s attention, the Corporal
said: “Remember that small transmitter relay I found on the lake bottom, near
the Oh-die camp? Before someone threw it in the lake, it was probably picking
up burst transmissions from the smartshots, both sound and vid, and relaying it
on a tightbeam to the Kruss base. It did have a directional array.”

Kirrah stood stunned as she
remembered the first smartshot Peetha had brought to her at Stone-in-a-River
school: how her wristcomp had detected a microwave burst transmission even as
she held the cursed thing in her own hands, even as Akaray stood behind her,
clearly visible to its pickup in the background behind her own face. It
wouldn’t have taken a genius at the other end of a vid link to figure out who
was the best hostage to influence Talam’s Warmaster. She had provided that
information herself.

“Thank you, Adrianne,” Kirrah’s
voice said.
So calm, how did I get so calm?
“People, is there anything
we can think of,
anything at all
, to kill that Kruss safely?”

“Do I understand it will be armored
against all our weapons, that only
Reg’num
weapons can touch it?” asked
Irshe.

“That is so, Irshe
’jasa
. I
value your knowledge and your skill and your heart, but no one born on this
world has the experience to deal with its weapons and defenses, and a single
mistake will kill… will kill a hostage.”

“If we are to defeat this thing’s
intentions, it may be best done as
firado’kae
, a braid-of-three.”
Despite her reeling sense of desperation, Kirrah was surprised to hear Issthe,
who usually took no part in tactical planning, speaking up:

“You warriors from the
Reg’num
know your own weapons best, and your enemy’s. Our warriors know the city, and
the land. Kirrah knows her own
ath’la
, and holds these captives’ lives
in
shee’thomm
. We, all Talamae, will help any way we can.”

“I believe I’ll go check the
shuttle’s arms locker, see if I can’t find some inspiration,” said Adrianne.
“And I suggest you have a good look at the sensor log, ma’am. It’d be nice to
know what that Kruss can expect for help.”

“Ensign Piersall,” said Marcus into
his comm, all business now: “Put us on the ground at Roehl Two, fastest, go!”
The young pilot’s crisp acknowledgement was followed immediately by a deepening
rumble from aft, which built into a roar, then a muted scream. Everything
seemed dragged aft by the acceleration, which kept building and building. In a
few seconds the engine noise suddenly dropped to a low whirr of pumps and
occasional servos as they left their own outside sounds behind. The
acceleration eased back as they reached cruising speed, and they continued
hurtling at three times the speed of sound through the still-calm and beautiful
morning sky. The Marine Lieutenant turned back to Kirrah and said:

“Nothing beats being there, Kirrah.
We cannot plan a response until we know what the Kruss is up to. And we won’t
know
that
until we get there. All we can do now is look at options.”

“Options! What ‘options’?” Kirrah
sank down on the seat opposite Marcus. She wanted desperately to wail, to break
something, to crawl into Irshe’s kind, capable arms and wait until someone else
made it all better. None of that was going to happen.
Two lives balanced,
she thought.
Who would have guessed it could
hurt
so much?

“Here’s
one
option, ma’am,”
said Adrianne. Kirrah turned around in her seat at the unexpected remark from
behind her left shoulder. “I found a couple of these P-6R sniper rifles back
there in the small-arms locker. If the li’l bugger’ll stand still for me, I can
put one of
these
rounds through its braincase from a thousand meters, no
problem at all.” Her left arm cradled a heavy, thick-barreled rifle with a
bipod mount and large optical sights over a bulky optronics sensor package, and
in her extended right palm lay a smooth, brightly metallic, finned slug. When
Kirrah just stared at it, Corporal Gilman continued:

“It’s a portable railgun, ma’am.
Fires a sixteen gram copper-clad tungsten slug at about twenty five hundred
meps. This one’s a Mark Six, it still uses the old fifty-fives, but it will
actually let us use double cartridges. That means one ten kay joules, something
like thirty-five thirty meters per second. You’d just better be in combat armor
if you double up, though, or the recoil will take your arm off. But in this g,
that’s going to be a drop of just point four meters over a kilometer, isn’t
that right, Lieutenant Warden?”

“Sounds good, I’m sure the
compsight will get it right,” replied Marcus. “Tell Kirrah about your range
scores, why don’t you?”

“Ahh, well, I’ve done pretty well…”

“Corporal Gilman has taken the cup
at two of the last three all-service meets at Trailway, Kirrah,” explained
Marcus. “I watched her put five of those slugs into an eight-centimeter group
at fifteen hundred meters, and
that
was one of her
bad
days.
She’s a sniping
witch
! At their three hundred meter target, she just
made the one hole, all five rounds overlapping. If our lizard stands still,
he’s hers. Your call.”

Kirrah could feel her spirits
rising slightly, despite her sense of harsh emotions racing uncontrollably
around the rim of a deep well of despair.

Adrianne put the sniper rifle down
and sat behind Marcus. She said, “I noticed we’re also carrying RO-7 spyflys,
they can be fitted with light AP. I assume the
Attila’s
shuttle has the
same inventory, Lieutenant Warden?”

“Yes, I think they do. Go ahead and
make sure Corporal Sengli has them deployed,
with
the antipersonnel
mini-beamers. I’ll go over the sensor log with Kirrah.” Outside the shuttle a
boom sounded and the engine noise returned, indicating their transition back
down to subsonic flight. Petty Officer Thornlea called back on the intercom:

“Ramp down in two minutes, sirs.
Corporal Sengli reported the lizard’s moving south through the city with the
hostages, they’re staying close but not interfering.”

“Good, Thornlea,” replied
Lieutenant Warden into the air. He gestured to his wristcomp screen. “Now look
here, Kirrah, the sensor log shows these traces of Kruss material in just two
areas in the whole city, both directly under that palace we just dented. I
think Mac was right, one’s a storeroom and one’s living quarters.
Hmm
…”
Kirrah almost held her breath as he put one fist in front of his chin and
pondered.

“Y’know what I
haven’t
seen
yet?” he mused aloud. “I haven’t seen a single piece of serious Kruss military
hardware. They’ve got light beamers built into their suits, they’ve given
weapons to the Oh-die, yes, but something’s
missing
. The nanowire
could’ve been borrowed out of general stores, the smartshot launcher looked
like it was custom-made in a hurry in a fabricator… hell, even the smartshots
were fabbed using mostly the same specs as a Kruss med probe… Everything has a
sort of, of
improvised
feel to it. Just like someone was scrambling to
make weapons out of bits of ordinary tech lying around, and doing a
civilian
job of it.” He managed to make the word ‘civilian’ sound like a
professional slur, in this context. Under their feet, the belly thrusters were
coming on-line in preparation for landing. Marcus continued:

“Looks to me more like, say, a few
clerks and techs left behind in a contact outpost when their Navy escort got
clobbered upstairs.
Both
escorts. I think your ship’s action may have
left them caught with their pants down around their furry lizard ankles,
Lieutenant.” He stopped and looked back at Adrianne, who nodded reluctantly,
then back to Kirrah.

“Marcus, you’re
right
! I
didn’t see it that starkly before, because I was fighting with bows and arrows,
and even a spool of nanowire looks like overwhelming tech when you don’t have
any yourself. But if they have a real military presence, where the hell
are
they?
Saving themselves for when we get our naval bases built?”

He replied, “Corporal Gilman here
is about to tell me that we can’t afford to assume we’re down to our very last
Kruss, and she’s right. It’s just something you might want to think about, if
we can get it to talk.”

The shuttle rocked slightly as its
landing gear settled onto the uneven surface, and the door folded down into a
ramp, touching the earth within a third of a meter of the place it had rested
at the start of their day. The passengers debarked swiftly to a pair of waiting
Tangos. Irshe, Kirrah and Peetha piled into one of the small vehicles around
Adrianne Gilman and her sniper rifle, and four of the other Marines joined
Marcus Warden in the other machine.

They set off immediately, and
Marcus chose the Unit General channel to contact his other corporal. “Sengli,
Warden. We’re groundside, en route. Talk to me, Ali.”

The Corporal’s voice responded
almost instantly, “Sengli here, Sir. We’re a few blocks north of the
waterfront, maintaining visual contact, still letting it keep moving south.
It’s carrying the little kid now slung across its back. I don’t think it’s hurt
either of them yet. It’s shot down three of my spyflys so far,
Gods
it’s
fast, sir. The only images we’ve been getting are from units I’ve left parked
on a rooftop or someplace it doesn’t notice. No shot yet, sir, sorry.”

“Good work, Sengli. We’re rolling,
should be there in five or six minutes.”
If we don’t kill someone on the way
,
Kirrah said to herself as they swerved expertly around another market cart and
barely dodged a man trying to cross the street behind the cart.
Gonna need
sirens and traffic signals, any day now
…

“Lieutenant Warden, Sengli,” her
suit comm said.

“Warden, go.”

“The Kruss just stopped, sir. It
keeps looking at its comm screen. I believe it may still be getting telemetry
from smartshots we haven’t swept yet. Ok, it’s… it seems to be putting
something around the boy’s neck… looks like some kind of collar - same for the
girl. Sir, it’s just two blocks from the water now, wherever it’s going, it has
to be almost there. If you want me to stop it, I’d have to…”

“Negative, Corporal. We’ll be there
soon.” Listening helplessly to the narrative, Kirrah thought her rigidly
clutching hands would break the seatback in front of her, or vice versa. On her
wristcomp two images relayed from spyflys showed the Kruss hoisting Akaray
across its back again, and dragging on the chain around Tash’ta’s neck to lead
the girl farther south.
What the hell is it up to
, she wondered.

Unbidden, a memory of Captain
Leitch came to her mind, of one of her frequent defeats at his hands while they
played chess.
‘The reason you didn’t see that coming, Kirrah, is that you
were too busy working on your own offensive. We call that ‘target-fixation’, a
sometimes fatal condition. If you want to
defeat
me, first you have to
be
me. How about another game?’
Kirrah’s eyes stung, whether at the memory or
her present distress, she could not say.

What would I do, if I were the
last human on a planet full of Kruss, and I wanted my friend back?
she
thought.
I’d kidnap the enemy commander’s son. Then I get my aircraft shot
up, so I’d need some kind of…
Hah
!

“Captain Crath’pae!” she called
into her wristcomp. “Opeth shu’Teeklae, anyone!” After an eternity of five or
six seconds, the Talamae Armsmaster replied, obviously still having a little trouble
with the unfamiliar comm equipment. To say nothing of the unfamiliar
concept
of comm equipment:

“..aster! Kirrah Warmaster! I hear
you!”

“Opeth! Listen, there’s a Kruss
headed south down Tailors’ Road towards the waterfront, I think it’s going to
try stealing one of our ships, I need you to get everything we’ve got that
floats, out on the water immediately!”