The Desert of Stars (The Human Reach) (13 page)

But his trained eyes detected something, a certain unnatural
ordering among the chaotic stars … there. A dim line of lights, twinkling.

“Sir, about three fingers to the right of Rigel, and down.
Could you point the scope there?”

Rand complied. “I see it,” he said after a bit. “God damn. More
than a dozen … twenty … make it thirty-five ships in a line that points back to
Long Nu. Those ships just came through the Han keyhole from Golf-Juliet
Eleven-Thirty-Four.”

“So more Hans.”

Rand fiddled with the telescope’s settings to try to make
out the ships, but it just didn’t have the resolution. He stared at the lights
for a while on the scope’s screen.

“The flicker’s off,” he muttered.

“What’s that, sir?”

“We aren’t really trained on long-range observations like
this, but those aren’t military drives we’re seeing up there. That’s a huge
civilian convoy.”

“Must be the circus come to town,” Aguirre said, his eyes
never leaving the firmament. “Just what we need.”

OSAKA – Fujitsu researchers here say they have
developed neural overlays that are able to handle as many as two dozen thought
commands from a user to a computer, a significant increase over current
commercially available models. These overlays, however, require a six-week
induced coma and a year of training for the user, a significant barrier to wide
adoption by the technological public. Nevertheless, Fujitsu officials praised
the development: “Like polymath artificial intelligences, full-service neural
overlays able to process the entire range of human thoughts and interface with
computers have lagged far behind predicted capabilities and remained a ’technology
of tomorrow’ for generations now. With this advance, we’re a step closer to
realizing that dream.”

North of Puerto San Carlos, Republic of Tecolote, Entente

Neil couldn’t stop grinning, even as the six-wheeled,
two-and-a-half-ton truck bounced over yet another pothole, bruising his
backside. Across from him, his red-headed Marine protector grinned back.

“You still glad you volunteered for this mission, Gunny?”
Neil half-shouted.

“Wouldn’t miss it, sir,” Gunnery Sergeant Ruth Harkins
replied. “Be good to be near some action, even if we’re just observers. Way
more fun than babysitting a bunch of Navy pukes. Life’s been pretty dull since
they broke up the
San Jacinto
crew. How is the old girl, anyway?”

Neil shook his head. “She’s finally getting fixed. Yard was
spending most of its time on ships with less damage to get them out to the
blockades sooner. But last I heard she should be ready to fly in another four
months.”

Harkins nodded. “That’s good to hear, sir. “

Her arrival in Tecolote the day before had been a welcome
surprise, a renewed connection to his prior ship and crew. He had lost touch
with most of them – he still got an occasional note from Doc Avery, now serving
on the
George Washington
, and Tom Mondragon on Kennedy Station, but Tom’s
communications were mostly forwarded diatribes from commentators about the
injustices of the war or screw-ups by the Delgado administration.

The vibrations from the road surface changed abruptly, and
Neil looked out the open back of the truck. The pavement had ended, and they
were now on a dirt road.

“Why did the road stop?” Neil asked the driver.

“The rebels blew up a couple of robopavers out here and
burned some farms,” he said, looking at them over his shoulder. “A lot of crews
who get assigned to come out this far refuse to go, and if we force them to,
they desert. It ain’t worth the trouble.”

“Are we going to get attacked?” Harkins asked. She put a
hand on her rifle.

“Probably not. Colonel Aziz has them pretty contained in
this area, and activity has been down the last couple of months. But it will
take a while before civilians are going to be willing to come back.”

They were on a flat coastal plain, but out of sight of the
ocean, which was some fifty klicks to the east. Ahead of the truck, great gray peaks
loomed above a line of clouds. The lower elevations of the mountainsides were
covered by the thin beginnings of a jungle of tall, narrow trees.

They encountered no one on the road until they hit a
checkpoint where the plain became hills, and they reached the military
encampment half an hour after that. They were met by a corporal, who took them
to a lieutenant, who took them to a major, who took them to a tent containing Colonel
Samir Lorenzo Garcia y Abdulaziz and three of his aides.

The colonel was a short, thin, black-haired man in olive
fatigues and an olive che-style ballcap. He wore a sidearm in a brown leather
holster.

“Please, just call me Aziz, or Colonel Aziz if you insist on
formality,” he said. “Sorry we don’t have better accommodations for you. We may
have to pack up on short notice. We’ve got some units up in the mountains
trying to flush out the enemy, drive them into a smaller box where we can
direct our main force.” He pointed to a map.

Neil’s expertise was in space combat, not terrestrial
warfare, so it took him a few minutes to figure out the symbology on the
projection from the colonel’s handheld. Harkins, bulky in her battle armor,
watched over his shoulder.

“How many bad guys?” she said.

The colonel looked briefly surprised that an enlisted person
would speak up. Neil recalled that the Tecolote military didn’t train its NCOs
to the level the American services did.

“In this sector, we think about three hundred or so
effectives, operating in platoon groups or smaller. They’re just starting to
get organized – ”

Harkins suddenly and clearly stopped paying attention to
him. Neil’s own handheld alerted him to unusual electromagnetic activity in the
room. He looked at Harkins, who nodded.

“All of you, don’t say anything else,” Neil said.

Now Aziz appeared genuinely annoyed. He looked questioningly
at Neil.

“You’ve got bugs in here, the artificial kind,” Neil said.

Harkins walked over to her pack and pulled out a beer-can-sized
black cylinder with a small clear bulb on top. She set it on the table in the
center of the tent.

“They’re expensive and so easy to kill that no big army
bothers with them anymore, but any Marine company always keeps one of these
rayguns around just in case,” she said. She touched her handheld. “Nobody look
directly at this.”

Harkins’ little laser – first developed to kill mosquitos,
back on Earth – worked its way around the room. Its beam was invisible, but
every few seconds Neil saw a tiny purple spark as an airborne artificial
transmitter died.

One of Aziz’s aides sighed. “We didn’t know the enemy had
that capability.”

“Can we examine those to prove who made them?” Aziz asked.

“Not without some gear I don’t have and a lab. They’re the
size of dust motes; the laser burns them up pretty good.”

“Presumably, they’re Chinese or Korean,” Neil said.

“Good guess,” Aziz replied, but something in his words
implied skepticism.
He is worried Naima or someone from the administration is
spying here, too,
Neil realized.
I thought getting out in the field
would get us away from all the paranoia in the capital, but it’s everywhere on
this island.

Harkins looked at her handheld and said, “Room’s clear, but
I’ll leave this on in case any have been lying dormant in here and decide to
light up. Once we’re done, I’ll pass the laser around the camp in case there
are any others lurking about, but they like to hang out around expensive
command and control gear, ‘cause that’s where a lot of interesting secrets
happen.” She pointed at a console in the tent. “I’m guessing that’s your local
network and comms rig?”

Aziz nodded. “We have a backup set, but we haven’t turned it
on since we left our base six months ago.”

“Then we should be in the clear. These things don’t have the
power to both fly and transmit very far, so you’ve either got a turncoat in
your camp who released them since you set up here, or you hit some kind of
tripwire when you arrived. There should be some kind of repeater nearby, but
good luck finding it.”

Aziz tried anyway, leaving to assemble a technical crew to
hunt for a transmitter. His aides described the situation in the area to Neil.

When Aziz returned, Neil pointed to a high valley on the
map. “Are you leaving them an escape route through here?”

“Up to a point,” Aziz said. “There’s an old U.N. terraforming
station up there. It’s an obvious place for the rebels to congregate, but they never
have. If we drive them in that direction, we may force them to. Then we will be
able to pound them.”

“Makes sense.”

Aziz was quiet for a moment. “Lieutenant Mercer, I
understand you attempted to procure us some artillery rockets. As you can
imagine, that’s something we could have employed with great effectiveness,
particularly if we are able to force the rebels into the terraforming station.
Can you tell me why they weren’t delivered?”

“You haven’t been told?”

“I can’t seem to get a straight answer. General Naima blamed
President Conrad, in so many words. General Vargas blamed you.”

Neil stiffened. Vargas’ lie angered him so quickly that he
didn’t think through the politics of his response. “Vargas is full of shit.
General Naima told the truth. We had the shipments arranged and Conrad said no,
that accepting such direct aid from us would bring too much attention from the
Chinese.”

Aziz regarded him coolly. “That sounded like an honest
response, but it’s one that’s also in your best interests if you are trying to
build trust with me.”

“I would think clearing your room of spies would have built
that trust,” Neil said evenly.

“If only we knew for sure who sent them.”

“Look, Colonel, if we’re not welcome here – ”

Shouts, outside, punctuated by handheld alarms going off.

“Sir! Inbound aircraft, coming from the northwest!” one of
the colonel’s aides shouted. “Count is eighteen, coming in low. It’s a raid.”

“We didn’t know they had that capability, either,” the
colonel said grimly. “They’re coming from where we don’t have any radar
coverage.”

Neil said, “I’ll wager they’ve got a base out there, and somebody
panicked when they lost the intel feed from this room.”

“How long do we have?” Aziz asked a lieutenant sitting at a
console.

“Ten minutes. And they just picked off one of our airborne
scouts.”

“Call San José and tell them to scramble some interceptors.
They’ll get here late.”

“When?” Neil asked.

“Half an hour, if we’re lucky. You got any triple-A on that
getup of yours?” he asked Harkins.

“No, sir. I’m a rifleman, and this isn’t a heavy weapons
suit.”

“We have exactly four manpads in the camp and one anti-aircraft
laser,” Aziz said, shaking his head. He turned to a captain. “Get outside, tell
everyone who fires something smaller than a fifty to disperse and get under
cover. Tell them they can go outside the perimeter to get under the trees.”

The captain blinked. “Sir, some of them will run off.”

“Then remind the sergeants to keep an eye on them. But if we
lose some to the woods, it won’t be any different if we lose them to the attack,
except less to clean up.”

The captain smirked. “Yes, sir.”

Outside, Neil heard the officers shouting to the sergeants
in Spanish.
The officers use English with each other and Spanish with the
enlisted. That can’t help.

Aziz turned to Neil. “We don’t have any hardened shelters
here. You both should get out to the woods, too.”

The mission.
“Colonel, have you identified those
incoming aircraft yet?”

Aziz nodded to his lieutenant, who said, “No ID on the
little ones, but our scout said the big ones looked like JZ-11s.”

“Chinese heavy gunships,” Aziz said. “We’ve got a couple of
Brazilian knockoffs of the same model, but they’ve been down for missing parts
for months. They’re great at rooting out insurgents when you have control of
the air. The little ones are probably spotter craft.”

“But China hasn’t flown the elevens in thirty years,”
Harkins said.

She’s right.
That gave him an idea. Neil grabbed his
handheld and dialed
Apache
. “Foxtrot Alpha
,
this is Sneaker.” The
tradition on the ship was that ground parties were named after footwear.
“Emergency Priority.”

Apache
’s orbit had carried it to the far side of
Entente, so his transmission bounced between several British communications
satellites orbited after the allies took Entente’s skies from the Chinese.

There was a slight delay. Then, a female voice: “Uh,
Sneaker, this is Foxtrot Alpha. Go ahead.”

Neil cut in the video, saw the astronaut
– Callahan,
that’s her name –
serving as the comms watchstander. He explained to her
what he wanted.

“I hope that’s in shipboard memory,” she said. “Otherwise it
will be several hours to ask Space Command and get a response.”

“I’ll be calling back for an orbital strike before that,”
Neil said. Astronaut Callahan looked perplexed before cutting the video so she
could research his request.

Maybe I should have told her I wasn’t kidding. No idea if
Howell would approve one, or if he even has the authority to order a
bombardment.

“Five minutes!” the lieutenant called.

“All right, shut everything off and get under cover,” Aziz
told his team. “The radar will just be a big target. We’re going to have to
ride this out. Mercer, you and your Marine are with me.”

“
Your
Marine?” Harkins said under her breath.

They trotted outside. Neil observed that Aziz’s battalion
was reasonably well-run: A number of squads were calmly moving toward the
treeline, but a few laggards were sprinting, in a couple of cases while getting
dressed, toward the nearest cover they could find. Aziz stopped a couple of
times to give instruction to junior officers and sergeants before taking cover
in the trees around the camp.

They heard the planes before they saw them: a grinding
rumble, echoing off the hillsides. Harkins pointed, and a small, speedy drone
raced overhead. A half-dozen .50-caliber machine guns opened up, their orange
tracers trailing behind it. Off to Neil’s right, a trooper kneeled and fired a
surface-to-air missile from a shoulder launcher. It roared and left a curling
trail of smoke as it arced toward the drone, impacting it on the right wing.
The plane spun onto its side and crashed in the trees several hundred meters
away. The trooper dropped the launcher and ran for cover.

“Idiot,” Aziz grumbled. “We need to save the missiles for
the gunships.”

The lieutenant from the command tent ran over, crouched low.
“Sir, we’re having trouble firing up the laser.”