Lotta was at the command tent and the sun newly risen when Romlar walked in, his hair still wet. He grinned at her. "How's my favorite intelligence specialist?"
She stuck her tongue out at him. "Big praise! I'm your only intelligence specialist. The rest of your information comes from scout flights and cadets, and the locals the cadets keep in touch with."
He laughed. "Don't knock praise. Especially from the regimental CO. What've you got for me today?"
"The general's worried about his diminished supply of gunships. Your guys wrecked another of them yesterday, beyond repair, which leaves him with only eight. And the nearest replacements are more parsecs away than he cares to think about."
"Mmm."
"That's right. You might want to think about reducing them further. With your replacements, that could give you a huge advantage."
Romlar nodded thoughtfully. "I wouldn't bring in more gunships; I don't want air superiority that way. I want to drive them off with inferior numbers and inferior weapons; that'll stamp us with the mystique we want them to remember the Confederation by. But it would save us a lot of trouble and lives if we could wreck their gunships; gunships have given us probably eighty percent of our casualties. They're hard to kill though. They're better armored than ours, and even when we shoot one of them down, they usually haul them away afterward. To repair, or cannibalize for parts." He paused, lips pursed. "Tell you what. You've made me relook at the situation. It's going to cost some guys, but I think I see a way to thin them out. I mean really thin them out!"
When Lotta left the tent, she hadn't fully recovered from Romlar's reaction to her report. She'd long known, intellectually, what warriors were all about, and hadn't questioned it. She understood the function of war and warriors in the real world of acquisitive rulers and merchant princes, of grudges and greed, threats and responses, rivalries and hatreds. And for the better part of a standard year now, she'd lived and worked among warriors, been around their activities, seen their mental images, even been inside their minds.
But when he'd said, "It's going to cost some guys, but I think I see a way . . ."—and with enthusiasm!—it had struck her as something totally foreign. Those "guys," after all, were his friends, even if they were warriors.
As she walked to the supply tent for her day's rations, she contemplated the matter. Then it struck her—the side of the matter she'd overlooked, obvious though it was: Every gunship destroyed now meant lives not lost later.
She regarded herself with wry amusement, this sixteen-year-old woman, seer, spy, and mental therapist. My wits, she thought, where were you hiding? In war, a commander, when he has a choice, invests his resources. Some perhaps in actions that promise modest payoffs at low risks, and maybe others in higher risks for bigger payoffs.
Maybe, she thought, I need to find my big brother and have him repeat what he told me. And this time listen for my own self.
It was the zone between afternoon and evening, still full daylight but with the sun lowering in the west. Standing back within the edge of a dense second-growth forest, Jerym looked out between trees and across nearly half a mile of open pasture and field to where the Spice River flowed. The weather had been dry, the river relatively low, the banks consequently high.
On the other side of the river was forest.
Four miles west, a Klestronu battalion was setting up bivouac in open ground between the river and a road, a bivouac designed to look assaultable. In fact, the Klestronu general intended it as bait in an enticing deathtrap.
It had taken several days of waiting to get a set of factors this favorable.
The Klestroni, Lotta had said, would have a scout overflying the area constantly, watching hopefully unnoticed from two miles up for indications of cadets or troopers. If it spotted any, the bivouacked battalion would be warned. If it spotted a large enough concentration of them sufficiently vulnerable, a flight of four gunships was standing by, six miles west, ready to fly immediately. They could be over the field in front of him within three or four minutes.
Jerym peered out again at the sun. The boats, he thought, should be putting in the water within minutes, a little way upstream—carrying the whole of H Company, sweating in camouflage ponchos. Not that they'd be trying to hide themselves; they wanted to be seen. The ponchos were to cover what they were carrying.
Getting the boats had been easily the most difficult and dangerous part of the mission so far. At the request of a cadet—the Terfreyans loved the pint-sized warriors—the boats had been gathered by locals twenty miles and more upstream the day before. And been transported by floater at night along the river—as much as possible under the sheltering eaves of the bordering forest. The risk of detection and destruction had been considerable.
The cadets had been in position since dawn, one platoon in the woods across the river, another under the dense brush that overhung the bank on this side. Each cadet had a stubby surface-to-air missile launcher and five small, wicked rockets. Under their ponchos, each of H Company's troopers had the same. As did several of the twenty-eight troopers in 2nd Platoon.
Timing was important but not absolutely critical. When the boats launched, they'd let him know. When they approached a point opposite him, they'd let him know that, too.
Lotta had learned of the Klestronu plan the day before, in the morning, but that had simply provided the details of where and exactly how. Romlar's general plan had been made six days before, and the request for additional rockets and launchers sent to Iryala. When Lotta's mind-spying had provided a specific situation, Romlar had had a hurried day and a half to set things up. The cadets had timed the current, clocking floating wood over a quarter-mile section of river. If everything went more or less as planned, Jerym thought, they'd have a real coup. Otherwise—That would depend on what went wrong.
So far the regiment had had only one disaster, a semi-disaster actually, when D Company had lost 62 troopers, two scout crewmen, the company commander—and Tain.
Jerym waited calmly, looked for the sun again, saw it squatting red and swollen on the horizon. A moment later he got the radio pulse that told him the boats were in the water. He called to his platoon directly, maintaining radio silence. Each man knew they had about six minutes: Romlar's best guess-timate of how long it would be before the boats were observed by Klestronu aerial surveillance, plus time for the gunships to arrive. If the gunships arrived later, things would be awkward; sooner, and things could go very badly. If the gunships didn't arrive at all, which was possible, the mission would be scrubbed.
So far, with that one exception, Romlar's judgement had been very good, and as far as Jerym was concerned, that had been more than chance.
They waited, Jerym at last feeling tension. The second radio pulse beeped with no sign of gunships, and he moved the platoon westward, out of sight within the forest's edge, moving at a rate intended to match the boats' speed. They hiked for several minutes before he heard a rocket explode, then quickly another, and 2nd Platoon moved closer to the forest's edge, to see.
There were four gunships over the river. Three were rising and presumably also firing, their silent gun beams invisible in the daylight. The fourth described tight, climbing circles, tail up. Two more rockets struck it, and it began to fall slowly, spiraling now, while rockets exploded against two other craft without apparent effect.
The crippled ship disappeared behind the high bank while the others continued to fire from higher up. For a moment there were no further hits, then another was struck three times within as many seconds. It staggered and began to settle slowly, moving toward the open bank. It was hit again, twice more, but its rate of fall remained the same till it was over land. Then it set down heavily in a kressera field.
During all this, 2nd Platoon crouched motionless, as if frozen by the sight.
Of the remaining two gunships, one was hit again and began to climb sharply as if damaged and trying to get away. That concentrated the rocketeers' fire, and quickly it was hit twice more. It slid down and to one side, then plummeted, the splash visible above the bank when it hit.
Jerym wouldn't have been surprised to see the other run then. Instead it seemed to intensify its attack, diving, swooping, its guns surely slashing at targets. Rockets struck it without apparent effect, and it doubled back as if determined to wipe out the boats and men below. Almost it disappeared behind the bank, then rose abruptly, seeming to labor, swerved, took another hit, and came down in the same kressera field, plowing dirt.
"Now!" Jerym bellowed, and 2nd Platoon ran out into the field. The rocketeers led off, and at closer range fired rockets into the motionless targets. Then the hosemen took over the lead, firing short bursts at the gunports, in case anyone aboard still lived and tried to man their guns.
They didn't. While everyone else stayed back a hundred yards, two troopers ran up to each of the two craft, planted satchel charges, then trotted back, and the charges were detonated. High explosives roared, gutting the armored gunships.
Jerym led the platoon to the riverbank. From there he saw no sign of the other two floaters, nor of any boats beached. What he did see was some floating boat wreckage not yet out of sight downstream. There were no floating bodies; they'd been too loaded with equipment. A few troopers stood or lay on the far bank, some being administered to by cadets and other troopers—perhaps twenty troopers in all—but it seemed to Jerym that H Company was no more.
Other cadets were trotting downriver on his side, from their bypassed ambush upstream, and Jerym went to meet them. They'd have seen where the two other gunships went down, and he'd have men dive to find them. They could plant charges and blow them under water, so there'd be no chance of salvage.
The Klestroni were down to four gunships now, apparently, but at the moment he didn't feel like rejoicing.