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  Cool Under Fire

  The gunfire was as much a surprise as a clap of thunder in a perfectly clear sky. Startled Marines dropped to the ground, looking for the source of the shots. Two men from the squad on point were hit in the first bursts. One was dead before he fell.

  “Where did that come from?” David asked on the channel that connected him with Lieutenant Hopewell and all of the noncoms.

  “Ahead and to the left,” Alfie Edwards said. “I don’t think it’s more than a single squad, Cap. They were waiting for us.”

  “Get to them quickly, Alfie. We can’t let them tie us down long enough for reinforcements to join them. Tony, you take half of the platoon one way and let Alfie go the other. Will, you keep your men watching the rest of the perimeter in case it’s a two-tiered ambush.”

  “They’re at extreme range,” Alfie reported when he finally spotted a muzzle flash. The other half of the platoon was slower to get close. “Well over two hundred yards.” The point squad had been a lot closer to the enemy. The Federation had found good positions for their ambush. They had excellent cover on three sides.

  “Don’t waste time playing with them, Alfie,” Spencer said. “Get in grenade range and drop the sky on them …”

  Books by Rick Shelley

  The Dirigent Mercenary Corps

  OFFICER-CADET

  LIEUTENANT

  CAPTAIN

  MAJOR

  LIEUTENANT COLONEL

  COLONEL

  The Spec Ops Squad

  HOLDING THE LINE

  DEEP STRIKE

  SUCKER PUNCH

  The Federation War

  THE BUCHANAN CAMPAIGN

  THE FIRES OF COVENTRY

  RETURN TO CAMEREIN

  The Varayan Memoir

  SON OF THE HERO

  THE HERO OF VARAY

  THE HERO KING

  The Wizard

  THE WIZARD AT HOME

  THE WIZARD AT MECQ

  Return to Camerein

  Book Three in the Federation War trilogy

  First published by Ace in January 1998. Published as an ebook by Jabberwocky Literary Agency in December 2011.

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1998 by Rick Shelley.

  Cover art by Dirk Berger.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business

  establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Dedicated to the memory of

  Diana, Princess of Wales

  and

  to her sons,

  Prince William &

  Prince Harry —

  The future of the Windsor family

  THE PARADISE OF THE FRINGE

  (X-DAY)

  The loud, high-pitched caterwauling of a flock of cachouri birds woke everyone at the Commonwealth Excelsior Hotel, as it did virtually every morning. Except for the three weeks between the end of the birds’ annual mating season and the subsequent birth of another generation of the green and orange screechers, the ritual was as inexorable as the rising of the sun. When the hotel was constructed, the colony had been quite small, its numbers kept in check by its natural predators. But the resort had thinned out those predators, and the cachouris had flourished. The last serious efforts at permanently dislodging the colony of birds from the jungle near the resort had been abandoned long before the start of the war between the Second Commonwealth and the Confederation of Human Worlds.

  Shadda Lorenqui cursed the birds in a whispered monotone. He made routine efforts to shut out the squawking—wrapping his pillow around his ears, pulling the sheet over his head—but it didn’t help. It never did. The noise was always there, and there was no way that he could sleep through the hellish racket.

  Finally conceding defeat, as he had every morning that the birds had rioted during his seven years of isolation at the hotel, Shadda hurled his pillow away and tore the sheet off his body. He got out of bed slowly, continuing to mouth obscenities that had lost all force through years of daily repetition. He stalked over to the window and pounded against the louvered shutters. Shadda’s frustrations were rarely far from the surface, but he only permitted them to show when he was alone in his room, even at the extremes of his mood swings—such as this morning. Around the others, he felt constrained to show a calm front. They expected it of him. He demanded it of himself.

  After a few minutes, Shadda stopped his futile pounding and took a deep breath. He held that as long as he could, then released it and sucked in another before he turned from the window to face the rest of his room. At one time it had seemed most spacious, homey and pleasant. Shadda had never deceived himself that it was truly elegant. He knew better. But his quarters in the hotel were far better than most he had known in his years of wandering. Still, it had become nothing more than a prison cell—a venue he had passing acquaintance with.

  But that had been before the war marooned him at the Commonwealth Excelsior on Camerein seven years before. It was not only the longest he had spent in one place since leaving his parents’ home more than twenty-five years before, it was the longest he had spent on one world in all that time.

  Shadda closed his eyes against a sudden throbbing in his temples. He massaged the aches with shaking fingers. When the pain eased enough to let him reopen his eyes, he shuffled to the bathroom. A short shower did little to help his mood, but it did give him time to start putting on his “public” face. As acting manager of the Commonwealth Excelsior, he had responsibilities.

  On the third floor of the hotel, Prince George Arthur Charles woke easily to the routine cacophony. He wastedneither time nor energy with curses or vain attempts to exclude the noise of the birds. That would have been unbecoming, even in private. But George had always been an habitually early riser, so the disruption was less of an annoyance to him than it was to most of the others. He got out of bed and went to the nearest window. After opening the shutters, he picked up the shotgun that had been leaning against the wall. The weapon had been readied the night before, as usual. George pointed the shotgun toward the nearest tree and calmly squeezed off all five rounds of birdshot in the magazine, moving his point of aim with each shot. Each blast brought a momentary halt to the cachouris’ screeching, but no more. The trees were too far off for the shots to do any harm, and the birds had gotten over any fear of the noise years before.

  When the magazine was empty, George set the shotgun back against the wall. Although there were a dozen boxes of shells on the dresser, he never considered reloading to continue his futile assault. There would be other mornings. He had no idea how long this exile might last. After seven years, he no longer tortured himself with the stock questions: Does the war continue? If not, who won? And, Will anyone ever come for us?

  “His Highness is up to it again,” Marie Caffre muttered. She didn’t bother to open her eyes. She had wakened before the cachouris had started their howling. That wasn’t unusual. Marie had always been a light sleeper, and four or five hours was enough to carry her through the day. Once she woke, she never managed to get back to sleep.

  Her husband mumbled something incomprehensible. Henri Caffre was one of the few people in the hotel who could sleep through the morning barrage of the birds, but he had never found a way to sleep through his wife’s complaints. He tried to snuggle deeper into the stack of pillows he surrounded his head with. If Marie would just let it go for once….

  “Shadda should take his guns away.” Marie opened hereyes and sat up. She looked at her husband, started to
peel pillows from his head, then poked at his shoulder until he looked at her.

  “He wouldn’t dream of it, even if His Highness started shooting at people instead of birds,” Henri said, suppressing a sigh as he gave up on sleep. “And if anyone suggested it to him….” He raised up enough to shake his head. “Leave The Windsor be, Marie. He does no harm. It’s certainly not your sleep he disturbs.” Marie had been the first to refer disparagingly to Prince George, behind his back, as “The Windsor.”

  “His High-and-Mightiness is no better than anyone else.”

  Henri sat up. “Count yourself lucky that we have him here. It is the one guarantee we have of escaping this place someday. Now, I have no intention of listening to one of your egalitarian lectures at this time of morning.” There was no longer any sleepiness in his voice. Annoyance had banished the last of it.

  Marie got up and walked naked to the bathroom. Now that she was in her early forties, that promenade was no longer as alluring to Henri as it had once been. The extra poundage she had put on over the years … among other things, it made it easier for him to remain cross with her. Marie refused to permit cosmetic maintenance. The molecular health system everyone had from birth could do that, but Marie maintained that it was artificial, and had refused to have the additional programming added at maturity. She slammed the bathroom door behind her. Henri got out of bed and started pulling on clothes. Only after he was completely dressed did he cross to the window and open the shutters.

  “Camerein, the Paradise of the Fringe.” That quote from the travel database had stuck in Henri’s mind through the years of exile. He made it sound like an expletive now. Camerein had seemed an exciting place to visit back when it was only to be a three-month vacation—a second honeymoon. Henri and Marie had spent two years planning thetrip to commemorate their tenth anniversary. Once they had settled on Camerein as their destination, it was de rigueur to book at the Commonwealth Excelsior, the most isolated resort on the planet, seven hundred miles from the nearest town.

  The Paradise of the Fringe. There had been no warning at all that war was imminent.

  By the time the residents of the Commonwealth Excelsior gathered for breakfast, the din of the cachouris was fading. No one in the hotel mentioned the birds any longer. Everyone had run out of original comments and curses.

  Only seventeen people remained at the hotel. Most of the guests and employees had returned to the more civilized districts of Camerein in the first days of the crisis, before transportation became impossible. At least, they had left the hotel and no one knew that they had not reached their destinations. But some three dozen people had chosen to ignore the crisis and remain. “The war will never affect us here, so far from the towns and cities,” they claimed. “It will blow over shortly. There’s no use wasting our holiday.” Those sentiments had carried most of them through the first month after the transcontinental shuttles stopped flying. After that, no one was ever quite so certain.

  Communications with the outside became intermittent in the first days, then ceased completely, as quickly as the shuttles had quit flying. Twice in the first year, groups of guests and employees had attempted the long overland trip to the only town on the continent. Neither group had been heard of or from since.

  Two people had died at the hotel over the years, one a suicide, the other mauled by an old bull keuvi, the largest local carnivore. The keuvi had struck and started to eat. None of the native wildlife would have dared challenge him or interrupt his feast. But that particular keuvi had no experience with humans. Prince George had killed it, but not before it had half consumed its victim. Five years later, noone could recall the dead man’s name without scanning the guest register.

  There was little talk first thing in the morning. Residents came into the dining room by ones and twos, guests and employees. They got tea or coffee from the beverage dispensers, then selected their food—those who bothered with food.

  Although everyone gathered in the dining salon at more or less the same time, breakfast remained almost as solitary as if everyone had chosen to eat in their rooms. The dining room was capable of seating two hundred and, before the war, it had often been crowded, with people queued up for their turn. But the seventeen people who remained had taken to sitting at “regular” tables scattered around the room, leaving as much space as possible between them. At lunch and dinner there was slightly less of that, but in the morning most seemed to prefer separation to community.

  The Caffres sat together this morning. That was one of the few variables. About one morning in three they were too angry at each other to share a table. The entire width of the dining room was not enough distance occasionally.

  The McDonoughs, Jeige and Mai, always sat together. Even when they were fighting—which was almost always—they shared a table so that they could continue their battle without interruption.

  Another morning variable was who would be the last to arrive. Prince George usually claimed that dubious honor without conscious effort, making a “regal” entrance after all of the others were in place. But occasionally Shadda did not arrive until after the prince. Shadda had duties before he could give himself over to the formalities of the dining room, and some mornings those duties took longer than others.

  Shadda came down the back stairs and went to the kitchen, as he did every morning. He checked the recycling bin to make certain that it was full. He could never count on his assistant to remember. Dacen Poriri will never bemore than a flunky, Shadda thought. He rarely considered that but for the war and this exile, his own position would likely be no better—had been no better. His years of drifting, and sometimes running, from world to world had made anything better unlikely.

  He gingerly lifted the lid of the first bin, and the usual noxious odors leaped out at him. But the bin was full. Dacen had actually remembered to dump all of the organic garbage in the night before. And it appeared that he had topped it off with a couple of bundles of local vegetation.

  “Thank God for the weeds,” Shadda muttered with due reverence. Without the extra organics to put into the food chain, the nanotech food service system would have collapsed more than six years back. It had never been designed to be a fully closed system.

  Before he left the kitchen, Shadda turned on the overhead fan and the wall vents. It would never do to let any hint of the odors from the raw materials for his guests’ food reach their delicate noses.

  “I do wish that someone would conceive of something novel to try,” Prince George, Earl of New Britain—the primary continent of Buckingham, the capital world of the Second Commonwealth—was saying when Shadda entered the dining room. “It has been so deucedly long since anyone has come up with a truly unique diversion.” George spoke loudly without putting any special effort into it.

  “Why don’t you come right out and say it?” Mai McDonough demanded from five tables away. “This place is a fucking bore.” She used the vulgarity for only one reason. It always made The Windsor flinch.

  Jeige McDonough patted his wife’s hand. “Now, dear,” he said softly.

  Mai turned to him just long enough to snap “Fuck off.”

  “What a disgusting woman,” Vepper Holford said under his breath. He glanced across the table at Prince George. Vepper was the prince’s aide, or traveling secretary—more than servant, less than friend.

  George cleared his throat discreetly, not deigning to answer either Vepper or the McDonough woman. Instead, he turned his attention to his food. The kidneys were, as always, perfect. The little cubes of cheese provided the perfect complement. There was orange marmalade for his crisp toast, tea with sugar and cream. The food service of the Commonwealth Excelsior had always been excellent, geared to please any guest, no matter which of mankind’s three hundred-odd worlds they came from. George couldn’t have eaten better in his brother’s palace on Buckingham. Of course, the ambiance would have been infinitely more civilized there. Still, one must make allowances for the exigencies of our isolation and the
war, he thought. Even the vulgar Madame McDonough would not disturb the royal digestion. George refused to permit that.

  The McDonoughs argued for several minutes, over nothing in particular; then Mai got up and strode out of the room. George didn’t bother to watch the flamboyant exit, but most of the other men did. Mai McDonough was worth watching, even though she had allowed minor slippage in her appearance over the past couple of years. She had been one of the highlights of the resort in the weeks before the start of the war. At the time, George had given serious consideration to seducing her—solo if possible, along with her husband if necessary. But now … In any case, the routine crudities of Mai McDonough were one of the few remaining sources of diversion. Occasionally, she managed to rise to novelty with her histrionics, but not this morning.

  After his wife’s departure, Jeige concentrated on his food, hiding his eternal embarrassment well. He waited until the prince finished eating before going to his table. “My apologies, sir,” Jeige said formally.

  The prince nodded, but said, “You owe me no apology.” The way he said it conveyed more than the words. The error was not yours. You were not responsible for the scene.

  “Thank you.” Jeige was careful to nod more deeply thanthe prince had. “A game of chess this morning?” he suggested.

  George leaned back and considered the idea before he said, “A capital suggestion.” Jeige was near the prince’s age but looked a decade older. Some men preferred to show their age, at least until they were quite old, and settled for the reality of life-extending molecular maintenance. “Shall we play on the veranda?” the prince asked. “In, say, an hour?”

  Jeige bowed. “In an hour, sir. I’ll meet you on the porch, er, veranda.” George nodded again, and Jeige left.

  “One of these days, he might actually beat me,” George said. “His game is improving, though at a frightfully slow pace.”