The Desert of Stars (The Human Reach) (33 page)

South of Sycamore, Sequoia Continent, Kuan Yin

Ruth Harkins crashed into the cluster of rocks where Neil
and the others were holed up. Her fatigues were splashed with dark red.

“What happened? Are you hit?” Neil said.

“No, it ain’t mine,” she said. “PFC took a hit in the leg. I
was carrying him back here when a Han sniper put one in his fucking head. I
guess he was aiming for me.”

“How are we doing?”

She shook her head. “It’s bad. SEALs lost two, including
Costa, and I’ve lost three Marines. SEALs have the suit legs to run for it, but
they won’t unless they run out of people to protect. Start thinking what will
happen when we’re overrun. Anyway, I’ve got a spare rifle. Second Lieutenant
Salter, you’re welcome to it.”

Salter nodded and left with Harkins. Neil felt a little
ashamed at his uselessness, but he wasn’t trained or equipped to go into an
infantry battle. Salter was a pilot, but also a Marine, and they still held to
their “every Marine a rifleman” credo.

So this is what it feels like to be part of the herd
,
Neil thought.

He heard the combined roar of several aircraft overhead, and
he looked up.
Their air is here. Maybe we should run in separate directions,
or just …

One of the planes entered his field of vision. It was a
small tilt-turbofan ground attack craft.

But it wasn’t Chinese.

“MiG! That’s a MiG!” Neil shouted. A small rocket on one of
its wings lit and shot away, leaving a white contrail behind it, and Neil heard
a distant boom. The intensity of gunfire picked up for twenty minutes, and then
died down.

Harkins came back after that, but Salter wasn’t with her. As
soon as she saw Neil, she raised her hand and waved to someone behind her. Two
chameleon-suited troopers appeared. The older one, a gaunt, gray-haired senior
sergeant, examined Neil’s rank badge and nodded.

“Lieutenant, you are too far south,” he said in thickly
accented English. “You stay with us until we can find way to get you to
American zone.”

Near Combat Supply Cache Condor, Sequoia Continent, Kuan Yin

It’s a wonder they never found us here,
Rand
thought as he trudged around the periphery of the abandoned mine.
We kept
the teams out in the field, rarely let whole squads come back, but if any of
their guys had a tag on any one of us, we would have been as dead as everyone
back at Falcon.

He shook his head.
They have limits, too. And they
probably care a lot less about a few guerillas when there’s tens of thousands
of invaders in your low orbit.

“Hey, Captain,” said a voice behind him.

Rand jumped in spite of himself.

“Ruiz, you mother –”

“Sorry, sir. They do teach us a few tricks at Bragg.”

“What are you doing out here? Quite a long walk to take a
piss.”

Ruiz shook his head. “No, sir. Came to tell you someone’s
in your office. And he brought some friends.”

A lieutenant named Silva was waiting at the mine entrance
for Rand.

“The general will see you immediately, Captain Castillo,”
she said.

The lieutenant led him to his office. Unfamiliar faces – clean,
confident faces – lined the hall.

Inside, the general was sitting at the desk … Rand’s desk.
He rose. Rand remembered to salute, a touch slow. The man’s return salute was
crisp.

“Captain Castillo, I’m glad to meet you at last. I’m Rev
Grogan.”

“Sir.”

Lieutenant Silva said, “Brigadier General Grogan is deputy
commander for special operations on Kuan Yin and the acting commander of the
surviving forces from JTF Sequoia. He’s your commanding officer, Captain
Castillo.”

Grogan. Right, the guy on the
Vincennes
who never
talked to us. Our relief! Now we can get out of here.
“General, sorry we
didn’t tidy up, but you didn’t call ahead.”

The attempted joke made no impact.

“Captain, how many effectives do you have?”

“Sir, ninety-eight, plus four seriously wounded here at
Condor. Some of the squads are out on strikes, and we don’t have consistent
communications, so that number might be out of date.”

“Yes, the strikes against the enemy surface-to-orbit missile
units,” Grogan said. “I’m told you’re responsible for firing that solitary
missile into orbit last week. Good work alerting us to those. We know what they
look like now, and most of my units are out hunting them.”

“Glad we could help, sir.”

“Until we establish communications between your squads and
my troops, we’ll hold off on sending any more of your units out. In fact, I
want to you send runners out and recall all of them here.”

Rand was confused. “Recall them here? You want us to move to
an evac point as a unit?”

Grogan’s eyes narrowed. “Who said anything about moving to
an evac point? Our campaign on Kuan Yin has just begun.”

Oh, no,
Rand thought.

Grogan continued, “If you’ve told them they would be going
home the moment I showed up, you have misled them and foolishly hurt morale. I
can mitigate your error somewhat by upgrading your conditions here in the next
few weeks – better food, hot water, that sort of thing.”

“Sir, these people may be the last free soldiers of an
entire division that was stationed here two years ago,” Rand said. “Every
single one of them has lost more friends than they can count. About half have
been wounded at one time or another. They’ve held it together entirely on the
basis that relief would be coming someday, and now it’s here. I can talk to
them, ask them to volunteer to advise your people on the terrain around here.
Hell, I’ll even volunteer myself, but – ”

“That’s enough, Captain. You’ll need to make clear to them
that they are still fighting men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces, and their
duties have not changed just because we’ve arrived. Nor have yours. As soon as
we assemble enough of your personnel here, we’ll start planning a raid against
Sycamore.”

Rand said, “No, General, I don’t think I’ll be doing that.
My people are done, and you can’t have them. They’re going home.”

ALBUQUERQUE – Presidential allies in Congress are
increasingly referring to the third planet from Alpha Mensae by its former name
of “Jefferson,” instead of “Leviticus,” which rebels renamed the planet after
declaring independence from the United States two decades ago, according to an
analysis by researchers at the University of New Mexico. Micajah Scott, a
spokesman for the Levitican interests section in Washington, claimed the
statements were deliberate. “This is part of an orchestrated campaign by the
Delgado administration to delegitimize the legal authority over the free
republic of Leviticus,” he said. White House officials said they were unaware
of any such effort.

Sequoia Continent, Kuan Yin

The alpine city of Sycamore has three approaches. The
first is down a brutal cliffside road that leads to Sequoia’s western coast and
the Port of Sycamore, which sits next to volcano-fed seltzer-water seas that occasionally
emit deadly plumes of carbon dioxide, requiring humans to wear a rebreather to
survive extended exposure.

The second approach is to the east, over a high bridge,
through the town of Runneroak and along a narrow, winding pass; once the
mountains flatten out, you are on your way to Cypress, Sequoia’s second city,
some 650 kilometers away.

The third is through a wide, sloping valley to the city’s
south, which contains the road and rail link to distant Cottonwood. It is by
far the easiest approach, and it was here the Americans would focus their
attack.

The landing was delayed a week because
Admiral Cooper wanted to make sure General Grogan’s special operators had taken
out most of the Stoat units. Once she was satisfied, her warships and
transports descended to low orbit.

The Marines, of course, were the
first to land in any numbers. Drop pods of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Space
Assault Brigade fell south of Sycamore, in landing zones that had already been
scouted and cleared by the special operations forces. MESABs were built to hit hard
and fast; their armored drop pods were equipped to serve as firebases for the
landing forces. The Marines pushed outward in many directions; their job was to
create large enough spaces for the Army, which was much more capable of a mounting
a sustained fight, to land safely.

The Chinese sent much of their air power to attack the drop
zones; these were intercepted by fighters launched from the orbiting aircraft
carriers
Hornet
and
Wasp.
The furious air battle that followed
was something of a high-casualty draw, but, in some cases, Chinese attack
drones broke through and destroyed several Marine drop pods as they were
landing.

Two large screening forces landed next, placed to prevent
the Chinese from sending reinforcements north from Cottonwood and west from
Cypress. Elements of the 3rd MESAB landed on the eastern Sycamore-Cypress road;
they would also serve as a useful threat to keep the Chinese forces near
Sycamore looking over their shoulder for an attack from that flank. And to the
south, the 204th Guards Drop Assault Brigade, of the Russian army’s famed
Kosmos-Desantnye Voiska corps, landed not far from where Rand and the others
had once hopped a train to go north.

The sea west of Sycamore was still another battle site. A
third orbiting drone carrier, who cargo belong to the United States Navy,
seeded a fleet of hunter-killer submersible drones into the ocean. They battled
with Chinese drones of similar design, and the survivors sought the large drone
control ships and cruise missile submarines that could bombard the American
troops from under the sea, safe from any attacks from orbit.

It took four days, but ultimately the Marines, backed up by uninterrupted
bombardment from
Diaz, Texas, Maryland
and the rest, established a
sufficiently large lodgement that the Army could conduct its drop.

Harkins headed off to join one of the Marine units working
its way north, leaving Neil and the other survivors from the
Eagle
disaster
near the center of American-controlled territory, waiting for a launch to take them
back to orbit. But nearly all the traffic was headed in the other direction: He
watched some of the landings from a tent beside Lake Standish, a reservoir and
recreational spot before the war. Great blue parachutes dotted the sky to his
south, and the rumble of retrorockets filled his ears.

So much stuff.
Falling from space were robotic rocket
artillery pods for long-range bombardment, rapid power transfer vehicles to recharge
other vehicles, mobile fab units to build spare parts while on the move, trucks,
skytrucks and tilt-turbofan assault transports, LAVs, auto sentry drones, and even
a battalion of tanks, the last comprising a truly stunning amount of mass to
transport from Earth. And another Army brigade had yet to drop.

When they get here, maybe I can finally requisition a new
handheld
, Neil thought. His had been lost in the crash; the Marines had
given him an off-the-shelf commercial one from their stores, but he couldn’t
access his classified accounts or messages on it.

“You Mercer?”

Neil turned and saw a lean and muscular female first lieutenant
wearing a Special Forces tab, waiting for his response. Beside him was another
Special Forces operator, a staff sergeant.

“Lieutenant jaygee Neil Mercer, at your service.”

“I’m Lieutenant Silva, and this is Staff Sergeant Ruiz. You’re
to come with me.”

Her manner annoyed him. Special Forces or no, she was of
equal rank, so he could offer a challenge. “I’m waiting for a lift back to my
ship. On whose orders?”

“Brigadier General Grogan.”

“And what’s the mission?”

She sneered for a half-second, and then sighed. “General
Grogan is having some problems with an old colleague of yours, name of Captain
Castillo, who is in command of the largest body of – ”

“Rand? What’s happened to Rand?”

Silva looked uncomfortable. “He’s refused an order from
General Grogan, and his people are backing him up. The general is aware you two
went to school together and staged a successful rescue operation on this planet
last year. He hopes you can talk some sense into him. We need his help on a mission.”

“What’s the mission?”

“We’re going into Sycamore to free high-value prisoners
before the Hans can move them off the continent.”

Neil nodded.
Either something’s wrong with Rand, or
something’s wrong with the mission. I need to help the guy.

They flew north on a skytruck, staying beneath the ridgelines
of the wide valley. Ahead of them were the front lines. Neil was kitted up: an
M7 carbine, chameleon armor, and a dragoon suit. While Silva rode forward in
the cab, Neil sat in the back with Ruiz, who said he had been fighting alongside
Rand for a while.

“Captain Castillo’s a good CO, on the whole, a little lax on
discipline, maybe. But he’s lost too many people – almost his entire artillery
platoon, then most of his team of guerrillas near Cottonwood, and then he
watched a couple hundred more die when the Hans hit our main base in the
mountains. He figured out what the Hans were up to before they hit our base,
but the commander didn’t listen, and a lot of good warriors didn’t make it out.
He takes every death personally, and he thinks his people have suffered enough,
and he’s trying to prevent more casualties.”

Neil remembered Rand’s near-breakdown over the death of one
of his guerrillas during the prison raid in Cottonwood. “He’s gun-shy?”

“Up until Grogan arrived I’d say he was just extremely careful.”

“And now?”

“Look, I’m only talking to you because the captain spoke
highly of you, and said you’d fought together,” Ruiz said. “He’s right in that
the unit has already been pushed way beyond any reasonable limits, and it’s remained
a coherent fighting force. He gets a lot of credit for that. But I also know
General Grogan. He’s an asshole, but he gets the job done. Captain Castillo and
the rest of the survivors know the ways into Sycamore better than anyone, and
he wants them to show Silva and the rest the way in.”

The pilot’s Tennessee drawl cut off Neil’s reply. “End of
the line,” he transmitted. “This isn’t an assault bird, and beyond here Mister
Han could be lurking about.”

The skytruck set down near a burning farmhouse. Silva, Ruiz
and Neil gathered their gear and exited, and the skytruck rose and raced away
south.

In front of them was the blackened wreckage of a Grizzly
main battle tank.
We’ve never lost one of those to enemy fire before now,
Neil
thought, noting it had died with its main gun pointing north. He couldn’t tell
if the crew had been able to escape.

They donned their walker gear and moved north along the main
road, passing a busy mobile hospital, a battery of empty rocket artillery pods,
and several lines of Chinese prisoners trudging south. Around them, great
swaths of foliage had been blackened by laser strikes.

“Are we going to have to pass through the front lines?” Neil
asked, trying not to sound concerned.

“No,” Ruiz said. “Not sure we could if we had to. This
terrain is brutal for our guys, with the Chinese putting snipers and missile
teams up on the ridges every klick or so. But we’ve pushed far enough north
that our little turnoff to get to Condor should be safe.”

“Advance is slowing down, though,” Silva commented. “We
can’t get any air or space directly over Sycamore, in part because of those damn
Stoats, and in part because we need constant coverage from orbit over the front
line. Pretty soon, the ships in orbit will be in range of Sycamore’s defenses,
Space Force, and we’ll have to change our tactics because your admiral isn’t
going to risk any more of them.”

They jogged along in silence. Neil marveled at the craggy
peaks towering above the valley, a product of Kuan Yin’s .88 gravities. Twice
they were stopped at checkpoints. American attack drones shot overhead, and
they heard the distant rumble of lasers slicing down from orbit. They passed
several Chinese bodies, crumpled in a ditch beside the road. Then they passed
some dead Marines. Neil recognized their dragon-and-knife patch.
First
Battalion, Fourth Marines,
he thought sadly.
We’re close enough to the
front that the cleanup teams haven’t been here yet.
All the bodies looked
small, somehow.

“All right, here’s our exit, boys,” Silva said, pointing to
a deep saddle in the mountains to their east. “It’s offroad from here.”

They reached the saddle three hours later; from there, they
could see the front, still well off to their north. The main road was empty
save for some blackened and motionless Chinese LAVs. Palls of smoke rose in a
dozen places from the trees, and the staccato pops of various small arms were
audible, even at this distance. Somewhere below them, the main gun of a Grizzly
barked fire, and Neil saw an orange flare signaling the destruction of an enemy
infantry carrier. The sound of the explosion arrived a moment later.

A pair of ground-attack drones roared in low from the south,
and Neil waited with some anticipation for the great eruptions of smoke and
fire beneath them, but something caused them to abort the run without dropping
their ordnance. A Chinese air defense laser sliced through them both, and they
crashed into a hillside.

“Stupid waste of hardware,” Silva commented. “Someone
fucked up down there.”

They arrived at Condor after a two-day hike in their
walker gear. Neil saw neither Grogan nor Rand immediately – both were asleep,
he was told. Instead, Ruiz took him to meet with Sergeant Hal Aguirre, Rand’s
right hand, according to Ruiz.

“We met, you know,” Aguirre said.

Neil snapped his fingers. “You and … and … a woman private,
you were part of Rand’s old platoon, and you went with the Aussies during the
raid on the jail, right?”

“That’s right. The private’s named Lopez.”

“Is she here?”

Aguirre grimaced briefly, and Neil could tell he struck a
nerve. “Hans took her prisoner a while back.”

“I’m sorry, Sergeant.”

“It’s all right, sir. If she’s alive, we’ll get her out,”
Aguirre said, his wounded expression betraying the bravado in his voice.

Neil nodded, unable to think of a reply that wouldn’t sound
forced. “So they brought me here to talk Rand into bringing you guys out on a
mission to Sycamore.”

“I heard. You’re not going to be popular among a lot of Rand’s
people,” Aguirre said.

“I figured,” Neil said. “Hope you know I’m not in the
general’s camp just because he ordered me to come here.”

Aguirre grunted and looked past Neil’s shoulder.

“General Grogan will see you,” Silva said.

Neil mused that the general wouldn’t be all that
impressive out of his battledress uniform, maybe a little leaner and more
muscular than the average guy in line behind you at the store.

His eyes aren’t so average, though. They’re made of ice.

“I’m not accustomed to junior officers doing anything but
following my orders,” Grogan said. “But for this mission to be successful, I
need full cooperation from Captain Castillo and his people. Your job is to bring
him on board. You fail, I’m arresting him.”

“Yes, sir.”
This guy would have arrested him already
under normal circumstances. Why hasn’t he?

Because you don’t arrest the leader of the resistance, a
guy who didn’t surrender, a guy who has been fighting on his own for two years.
You give him a medal.

Rand had not lost his easy grin, but
his lankiness had given way to something slighter: He was nearly
skin-and-bones.
Ruiz and Aguirre and the others were definitely thinner than
the average trooper, but they were getting enough calories. Rand’s doing this
to himself.

He embraced Neil and lifted him off the ground.

“Buddy,” he said. “Thanks for coming.”