The Buchanan Campaign Page 2

  “What will you do with your leave when we get home, Sergeant?” Lance Corporal Tory Kepner asked.

  Tory was still on his feet. Spencer turned to him, liking what he saw. Kepner looked as if he had stepped out of a recruiting poster, tall and obviously strong, cleancut, the exception to the “small men go to I&R” rule. He would make full corporal soon, replacing Norwood Petty, who had transferred to the Second Battalion when he made sergeant.

  “I know what you’ll do,” David said, avoiding the question. “You’ll be off to see that new son of yours.”

  “Not so new. He’s eighteen months old, and I haven’t seen him yet.” Tory had bored his mates to tears through most of those eighteen months, and through the last five months of his wife’s pregnancy, talking about his wife and child.

  “Not to worry,” Alfie Edwards called from across a half dozen bunks. He was the only man in the squad shorter than Jacky, but outweighed him by fifteen pounds. He had grown up in a rough, lowerclass neighborhood and looked it. Even though his hair was worn short, there was no mistaking the “almost red” color or the fact that it was uncontrollable. Alfie had been dangerous in a fight before enlisting.

  Training camp had merely refined his skills. He had never been bothered by any yearning for a “fair” fight, wanting every possible advantage. ‘ ‘You were there for the important bit.”

  “He thinks,” Jacky said, sotto voce.

  “I didn’t hear an announcement that we’ve left Qspace,” Roger Zimmerman said. He leaned against the end of a tier of bunks. “Hasn’t it been long enough?” He was less worried about the transit than he was about the discussion he was interrupting. Roger fancied himself the glue that kept the I&R platoon’s first squad from disintegrating into a constant brawl. He claimed to be older and wiser than the others, but had stopped mentioning that when the others said it was a matter less of years and wisdom than of the fact that he was simply going bald.

  “Maybe the navigator’s got the shakes and can’t line us up,” Alfie said, and there were laughs from most of the others.

  Then the transit announcement came. After another thirtysecond countdown, Victoria was back in normalspace, and in its home system.

  “I’ll be in my room,” Spencer said. “Lunch will be called soon. Leave a bit for the rest of the battalion, will you?” He used that as an exit line, heading for the hatch on the inboard side of the compartment while the squad groaned and called out retorts. Sergeants were quartered separately, normally four to a room—except for company lead sergeants and above, who were two to a room, and the regimental sergeant major, who had a cabin to himself. On this voyage, with only half the regiment aboard, David shared a stateroom with only one other sergeant, Malcolm Macdowell, HQ Company’s quartermaster.

  And Macdowell used the room only to sleep in.

  There was a message flashing on the complink screen when David got to the stateroom. “SERGEANTS’

  CALL AT 1215 HOURS IN THE SERGEANTS’ MESS.”

  “Right after lunch,” David mumbled. “I wonder what’s cooking now.” He smiled at his pun. Finally alone in his sanctuary, David let his body relax. After fifteen years, it was an automatic reflex, the putting on and taking off of proper military posture. Barely thirtytwo years old, David had enlisted while he was still underage. He had planned from the start to make a career out of the Royal Marines, and he had worked with almost maniacal determination to make himself the best Marine he could possibly be. Almost textbook average in height and weight, David looked deceptively mild, with pale blue eyes and thin blond hair. The look was simply another advantage to make use of.

  He glanced at his watch. Mess call wouldn’t sound for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes to kip out, David decided. He lay on his bunk and stared at the overhead. It would be good to get home to Buckingham and civilization. Two years was an unusually long posting to a frontier world like Devereaux, and David was no different than his men—he was anxious to enjoy some of the pleasures of a civilized world again. The twenty minutes of daydreams were only a start.

  David put on a fresh uniform before he went to the mess, undress blues with standing collar. Captain McAuliffe could sometimes get sticky about appearance. Heading back to garrison after a twoyear absence, he was almost certain to start.

  Lunch was served from 1100 to 1200 hours, ship’s time. Most days, David made it a point to get to the mess late enough that he didn’t have to stand in line. But today there would certainly be rumors about the meeting. There might even be hard information.

  “It’s all three battalions,” H&S Company Lead Sergeant Landsford told David just inside the entrance to the mess. “Colonel Laplace himself will be conducting the meeting.”

  “What’s on the cooker?” David asked.

  Landsford shook his head. “Something about the war is all I’ve been able to find out. No idea what.”

  “The war’s still on then?” David asked. “The war” had been something of a joke on Devereaux. The Confederation of Planets had formally declared war on the Second Commonwealth—rather, on the worlds that belonged to the Commonwealth, since the Federation didn’t recognize the existence of the Commonwealth itself. The Federation had reasserted its claims to sovereignty over all of the worlds settled by humans. But they had always claimed that. No word of any actual fighting had ever come to the troops on Devereaux.

  “Colonel had officers’ call ten minutes after the last jump,” Landsford said. “Must have been a priority signal waiting.” There wouldn’t have been time for Victoria to report its return to Buckingham and get a message back.

  “You know what I think?” David said sadly. “I think we’ve wasted our time making plans for furlough.”

  “I dare say,” Landsford said.

  “You know, Peter, if this war has turned real, it won’t be like any of the campaigns we’ve known before.

  This won’t be a mopup of a tiny colonial civil war.”

  “We’ll earn our pay,” Landsford agreed. “But it’s no good speculating. The colonel will have his say and then we’ll know, won’t we?”

  The speculation didn’t stop, of course. David got his meal and took a seat. He ate slowly, listening to the talk— questions and speculations, no solid answers.

  The regimental sergeant major and the three battalion sergeant majors came in together, just after 1130

  hours. RSM Dockery brushed aside the first questions directed at the group, quite brusquely, and the questions ceased.

  “They know what’s up,” David mumbled.

  “But they’ll not let the cat out of the bag,” Sergeant Eric Dealy of Engineering Battalion said. “Dockery could keep mum about his pants being on fire if he was ordered to.”

  The laugh that earned was subdued, but prolonged.

  “They’ll sit there in their corner and pretend there’s not a thing different about this meal,” Macdowell said from the next table.

  “You don’t think they’ll send us out again straightaway without even a stopover on Buckingham, do you?”

  Norwood Petty asked.

  “We’ll have to reprovision, if nothing else,” Macdowell said. ” Victoria’s been out for two years, after all.

  The old girl needs her bit of maintenance, and she needs to fill her larders and storerooms.”

  “Doesn’t mean they have to let us ground out,” David said, just to puncture Macdowell’s confidence. ‘

  ‘They could load the rest of the regiment, do a rush job on the tuneup, and have us heading outsystem in fortyeight hours.”

  “That’d sure have the lads feeling mean enough to fight,” Macdowell said.

  “It would have me feeling mean enough to fight,” Dealy said. “And I’m a pacifist at heart.” That earned a generous laugh. In his younger days, Dealy had been one of the most frequent barroom brawlers in the regiment. It had taken him extra years to earn his stripes because of that.

  Precisely at noon, Sergeant Major Dockery got up and spoke with the chief mess s
teward. A moment later the stewards started setting pitchers of coffee and tea on the tables. Then they cleared away dishes and closed down the serving line. By 1212, the last of the mess stewards had left the room. Two minutes later, the colonel arrived. A sergeant by the door called attention and everyone sprang to their feet.

  “As you were,” Colonel Arkady Laplace said without breaking stride. He had his operations chief and all three battalion commanders in tow. The regiment’s executive officer had remained on Buckingham with the other three battalions. The senior officers marched to the head of the room. Colonel Laplace took up a position looking out at his sergeants, who had already returned to their seats. The other officers sat with the sergeant majors.

  “I know how quickly rumors spread aboard ship, so I want to get the facts out even more rapidly,”

  Laplace started. “I’ve already briefed the officers. Now it’s your turn. If it were practical, I’d address all the men myself, but I could only do that over the speakers, and that’s little better than hearing it in a letterchip from home.”

  That earned a few laughs. After forty years in the Royal Marines, Laplace had his timing perfected. He was at ease with his authority, and felt no need to artificially protect his “dignity.” His men tended to award him their highest praise for an officer: “He’s better than most.”

  “There was a dispatch waiting for us on the buoy when we bounced out of Qspace,” the colonel said. “I expect a few of you have already guessed this, but we won’t get to take all of the furlough we’ve accumulated over the past two years. We’ll be lucky to manage seventytwo hours in port before we’re off out again.” He held up a hand to forestall questions.

  ‘ ‘I know. We should have at least six months insystem, plenty of time for everyone to take furlough and get in a score of pub crawls besides, but the war appears to have taken a turn. Fighting has actually started.”

  That brought a low buzz of comment. Colonel Laplace waited for it to fade before he continued.

  “The news isn’t particularly good. The first engagements apparently occurred in the system of Camerein.

  The only losses we know of were Commonwealth, three frigates. More recently, there’s word that Federation troops have invaded an independent world on the marches between our respective core regions. I don’t have full details, just the barest outline. But the Federation has taken a world known as Buchanan, and we’re to chase them back off.

  “The reason we’re going straight out again is that there isn’t another full regiment to be spared on Buckingham just now. Two regiments are being retained as home defense, in case it should come to that.

  The other three regiments based on Buckingham have already been dispatched on other missions, and Buchanan apparently can’t wait.”

  2

  Flight Lieutenant Josef Langenkamp was dozing in the fourth squadron ready room aboard HMS Sheffield when the alert klaxon sounded. Before the horn went silent, Josef and his comrades were moving toward the hangar and their fighters. They helped each other don and seal their helmets before stepping through to the ramp leading out to the airlock and hangar. They had been in their flight suits since coming on shift. The fourth was the alert squadron, on twominute response. All of the pilots were young. A few were still teenagers, but most, like Josef, were in their twenties. Even the squadron commander was only twentysix. Flying a Spacehawk required young reflexes.

  This alert was almost certainly only one more training exercise in a seemingly endless series. After all, Sheffield was still in orbit around Buckingham and there had been no warning of any enemy fleet entering the system. But until they had confirmation that this was only a drill, they would treat it as real.

  Crew chiefs waited for their pilots on the hangar deck. The multipurpose Spacehawk Zed3 fighters were in thenslots in the launch/recovery cylinders. Josefs fighter was in the third slot in the rotating cylinder.

  “Going for a gang launch, sir,” his chief, Andrew Mynott, told him as they connected Josefs air and power hoses in the cockpit.

  “Thanks, Andy,” Josef said. “You heard anything about our mission?”

  “No, sir, not this time.” The crew chief was a large, hulking man, in his early forties, but he could still manage the most delicate touch when he was working on “his” machine. He had spent more than twenty years maintaining Spacehawks, all of the way back to the Zed1, the first of the series. Mynott finished checking connections, then tapped Josef on the helmet. “Clear now, sir,” he said as he stepped back.

  Josef nodded and closed the canopy while he worked through his preflight checklist. At the same time, he had a voice from Combat Control Center to listen to.

  “Ground support mission,” the C3 voice announced. “Gang launch. Your computers have been programmed with the launch sequence and initial vector.” The numbers were repeated for the pilots.

  Josef compared the numbers recited over the complink with the numbers showing on his screen. They matched. That was always a relief.

  The preflight routine was controlled pandemonium, too hectic to allow Josef to worry. Launching a full fighter squadron needed three launch/recovery cylinders. Each LRC would be extended from the hull of Sheffield. Six fighters were launched simultaneously from pods that were barely seven feet apart in each LRC. The cylinders were emptied one after the other, with no more than tensecond intervals.

  Fortunately, not all launches were made in that hairraising fashion. The fighters could be launched one at a time, with each pod rotating around the LRC to reach the solo launch slot—“The biggest revolver in the Galaxy,” a sign on the hanger deck read.

  Combat pilots wore neural implants to make their jobs more nearly reasonable than they would be for unaugmented human minds. A needlethin jack connected the computing power of their helmets and fighters to their own brains. It was a threeway system. Combat command was on one channel with mission parameters. The Spacehawk needed attention from its pilot—through the neural implant, the pilot was instantly on line to his bird’s systems. And finally, the pilot needed to pay attention to his environment, both inside and outside his cockpit. At first, the confusion had seemed absolute, but training and drills reduced the incomprehensible to routine, honed skills and reflexes, brought confidence. After four years, it was just another day at the office for Josef.

  As soon as the service crews were through the airlocks, the LRCs were extended from the hull of Sheffield. A final tensecond countdown was both audio and visual. Sheffield kicked the fighters out of the LRC. The ship was in assault orbit, 160 miles above Buckingham. The Spacehawks’ rockets fired five seconds later. While the fighters slid down toward the atmosphere, the squadron commander, Lieutenant Commander Olive Bosworth, briefed her pilots.

  “First run is missiles only. Our target is a cluster of six buildings in the desert, rigged with everything but people.”

  ‘ ‘What, no live targets?” one of the pilots asked.

  “Clamp down on that, now,” Bosworth said sharply.

  As Josefs fighter punched through a few high wisps of cirrus clouds, he got visual identification of the target. The squadron was over ocean at present, but the coast was less than forty seconds away, with the target another eight seconds beyond.

  Red lights started flashing inside Josefs cockpit. Status codes jumped straight from green to red. A warbling alarm siren sounded.

  “This is Red Three,” Josef said, struggling to remain calm. “I show full hydraulic failure.”

  “Eject, Red Three,” Commander Bosworth said. “We’ll have the rescue team on the way before your chutes open.”

  There was no choice unless Josef wanted to accompany his Spacehawk into the ground at thirtyfive hundred miles per hour. He pulled up the safety cover to his left, armed the ejector, then lifted the trigger housing on his right and punched the button.

  His Spacehawk was crossing the coastline as the cockpit pod was blasted clear of the rest of the fighter.

  The ejector explosives cance
lled much of the escape pod’s forward momentum. A first series of drag chutes righted the cockpit capsule in the seconds they were deployed. Three small rockets provided additional braking as the first series of chutes broke free. When the rockets fell silent, the main chutes deployed. Josef clenched the armrests of his seat and flinched with each shock.

  ‘I hope Andy got all the straps tight, Josef thought just before the crash bags inflated around him and the capsule hit the ground. The impact was still enough to knock him out. It’s almost inevitable, the briefing went. We do everything we can to reduce the force of impact, and the cockpit of a Zed3 has a thousand years of safety engineering behind it, but the human body still tends to get indignant when subjected to certain levels of abuse. And when it gets too indignant, it goes on strike.

  When Josef regained consciousness, he heard a voice in his ear, but he didn’t pay attention at first. He ached all over but was—apparently—not critically injured. He moved his arms and legs, tentatively at first, then with more vigor—as much as the cramped confines of the cockpit would permit. Nothing broken, he thought, and he repeated that after two deep breaths convinced him that no ribs had been fractured either. He touched a stud on the side of his helmet and the visor displayed his vital signs: heart rate elevated; blood pressure slightly depressed; respiration normal.

  “Red Three, do you copy?”

  Josef finally became aware of Commander Bosworth’s voice. He keyed his microphone, uncertain that he would be able to transmit. The cockpit capsule was on its side, rocking. At least one of the braking parachutes had to be attached yet, pulling at the pod.

  “I appear to be in one piece, Commander,” Josef said. “I guess I took a little nap.”

  “Affirmative, Three. I showed you out for ninetythree seconds. Can you free yourself from the capsule?”

  “I think so. My vitals are sound and nothing seems to be broken.”

  “Take it slow and easy, Josef. You’re in a sandfield. Your chutes are dragging you but there’s nothing ahead to make that dangerous.”