"Sergeant, if we all stay here, we all die here," she said flatly. "It's always possible some of the decoy force might survive." She held up a hand before he could protest. "I know how heavy the odds against that are," she told him. "I'm not saying I think any of them will. I'm only saying that it's at least theoretically possible . . . whereas if we stay here, there's no possibility at all, unless Gauntlet somehow miraculously gets back in the nick of time. Or would you disagree with that assessment?"
"No, Ma'am," he said finally. "No, I wouldn't."
"Well, in that case, let's—" she looked up at the sergeant with a bittersweet smile he didn't quite understand "—be about it."
It wasn't quite that simple, of course. Especially not when Gutierrez found out who she intended to command the decoys.
"Ma'am, this is a job for Marines!" he said sharply.
"Sergeant," she shot back just as sharply, "it was my idea, I'm in command of this party, and I say that makes it my job."
"You're not trained for it!" he protested.
"No, I'm not," she agreed. "But let's be honest here, Sergeant. Just how important is training going to be, under the circumstances?"
"But—"
"And another thing," she said, deliberately dropping her voice so that only Gutierrez could hear her. "If—when—they finally catch up with the decoys," she said unflinchingly, "they're going to realize they've been fooled if all they find are Marines. That was a Navy pinnace. They may assume some of the crew stayed aboard to draw their fire and cover the rest, but do you think they're not going to be suspicious if they don't find any naval personnel dirtside?"
Gutierrez stared at her, his expression unreadable, as he realized what she meant. That despite anything else she might have said, she knew the decoys were going to die . . . and that she was deliberately planning to use her own corpse in an effort to protect the other personnel under her command.
"You could have a point," he acknowledged, manifestly against his will, "but you really aren't trained for this. You'll slow us down."
"I'm the youngest, fittest Navy person present," she said bluntly. "I may slow you down some, but I'll slow you down the least."
"But—"
"We don't have time to debate this, Sergeant. We need every minute we've got. I'll let you choose the rest of the party, but I'm coming. Is that clearly understood?"
Gutierrez stared at her for perhaps another three heartbeats. And then, slowly, obviously against his will, he nodded.
"It's taking too long," Ringstorff said.
"It's a big planet," Lithgow replied. The depot ship was far enough from Refuge that Lamar's light-speed message reporting the loss of his assault shuttle had yet to reach it.
"I'm not talking about that," Ringstorff said. "I'm talking about Morakis and Maurersberger. They should have been back here by now."
"It's only been fourteen hours," Lithgow protested. "It could easily have taken them that long just to run the Manty down!"
"Not if this report from Lamar about her impeller damage was accurate, it couldn't," Ringstorff shot back.
"Unless she got it fixed before they caught her," Lithgow said. "Or maybe they got just enough of it back to stay ahead for a few extra hours." He shrugged. "Either way, they'll catch her, or after a few more hours, they'll turn around and come home to announce they've lost her."
"Maybe," Ringstorff said moodily. He moved morosely around the depot ship's bridge for a few minutes. He didn't care to admit, even to himself, how shocked he'd been by Fortune Hunter's destruction. Despite all of his inbred respect for the Royal Manticoran Navy, he hadn't really believed that a single RMN cruiser stood the proverbial chance of a snowball in hell against no less than four Solarian-built cruisers, even with Silesian crews. But he'd viewed Lamar's report carefully, and he was privately certain that if Mörder hadn't hit her with that single totally unexpected broadside, Gauntlet could have taken all three of the ships she'd known about.
Which, he finally admitted to himself, was the real reason he was so antsy. If an undamaged Gauntlet could have taken three of the Four Yahoos, then it was distinctly possible that, even damaged, she could deal with two of them. And that assumed she'd really been damaged as severely as Lamar thought she had.
"Bring up the wedge," he said abruptly. Lithgow looked at him in something very like disbelief, but Ringstorff ignored it. "Take us out of here very slowly," he told his astrogator. "I want a minimum power wedge, and I want us under maximum stealth. Put us outside the outermost planetary orbital shell."
"Yes, Sir," the astrogator acknowledged, and Ringstorff walked back across to his command chair and settled into it.
Let Lithgow feel as much disbelief as he liked, he thought. If that Manticoran cruiser did manage to come back, there was no way in hell Haicheng Ringstorff intended to confront it with an unarmed depot ship. The chances of anyone spotting them that far out from the primary were infinitesimal, and they could slip undetectably away into hyper anytime they chose.
"What about Lamar?" Lithgow asked in a painfully neutral voice, and Ringstorff looked up to find his second-in-command standing beside his command chair.
"Lamar can look after himself," Ringstorff replied. "He's got an undamaged ship, and he's way the hell inside the system hyper limit. He certainly ought to be able to spot a heavy cruiser's footprint in plenty of time to run before it comes in on him. Especially if his damned report about its impellers was right in the first place!"
"I'm picking something up," Sergeant Howard Cates announced.
"What?" Major George Franklin demanded nervously. Franklin wasn't really a "major," any more than Cates was a "sergeant," of course. But it had amused Ringstorff to organize his cutthroat crews' ground combat and boarding elements into something resembling a proper military table of organization.
"I'm not positive . . ." Cates said slowly. "I think it's a power pack. Over that way—"
He looked up from the display of his sensor pack and pointed . . . just as the supersonic whip crack of a pulser dart blew the back of his head into a finely divided spray of blood, bone, and brain tissue.
Franklin cursed in falsetto shock as the scalding tide of crimson, gray, and white flecks of bone exploded over him. Then the second dart arrived, and the major would never be surprised by anything again.
Mateo Gutierrez had his vision equipment in telescopic mode, and he smiled with savage satisfaction as Private Wilson and Staff Sergeant Harris took down their targets.
"Well, they know we're here now," he said, and Abigail nodded beside him in the dark. She'd seen the sudden, efficient executions as clearly as he had, and she marveled, in a corner of her mind, that it hadn't shocked her more. But perhaps that wasn't really so surprising after the last four or five hours. And even if it was, there wasn't time to worry about it now.
"They're starting to circle around to the west," she said instead, and it was Gutierrez's turn to nod. He'd managed, for reasons Abigail hadn't been prepared to argue against, to assign her as his sensor tech. They'd had less than a dozen of the sensor remotes, but they'd planted them strategically along their trail as they scrambled across the mountainside under the cover of their thermal blankets. Abigail was astounded at the degree of coverage that small number of sensors could provide, but very little of the information coming in to her was good.
There were well over two hundred pirate ground troops moving steadily in their direction. It was obvious to her that they weren't even remotely in the same league as Gutierrez and his people. They were slow, clumsy, and obvious in their movements, and what had just happened to the pair that had strayed into Sergeant Harris' kill zone was ample evidence of the difference in their comparative lethality. But there were still over two hundred of them, and they were closing in at last.
She leaned her forehead against the rock behind which she and Gutierrez had taken cover and felt herself sag around her bones. The sergeant had been right about how untrained for this she was. Even with the advantag
e of her low-light gear, she'd fallen more than once trying to match the Marines' pace, and her right knee was a bloody mess, glued to her shredded trouser leg. But she was better off than Private Tillotson or Private Chantal, she thought grimly. Or Corporal Seago.
At least she was still alive. For now.
She'd never imagined she could feel so tired, so exhausted. A part of her was actually almost glad that it was nearly over.
Mateo Gutierrez interrupted his focused, intense study of their back trail long enough to glance down at the exhausted midshipwoman briefly, and the hard set of his mouth relaxed ever so slightly for just a moment. Approval mingled with bitter regret in his dark eyes, and then he returned his attention to the night-covered valley behind them.
He'd never thought the girl would be able to keep up the pace he'd set, he admitted. But she had. And for all her youth, she had nerves of steel. She'd been the first to reach Tillotson when the pulser dart came screaming out of the dark and killed him. She'd dragged him into cover, checked his pulse, and then—with a cool composure Gutierrez had never expected—she'd taken the private's pulse rifle and appropriated his ammo pouches. And then, when the three pirates who'd shot Tillotson emerged into the open to confirm their kill, she'd opened fire from a range of less than twenty meters. She'd ripped off one neat, economical burst that dropped all three of them in their tracks, and then crawled backward through the rocks to rejoin Gutierrez under heavy fire while the rest of Sergeant Harris' first squad put down covering fire in reply.
He'd ripped a strip off of her for exposing herself that way, but his heart hadn't been in it, and she'd known it. She'd listened to his short, savage description of the intelligence involved in that sort of stupid, boneheaded, holovision hero, recruit trick, and then, to his disbelief, she'd smiled at him.
It hadn't been a happy smile. In fact, it had been almost heartbreaking to see. It was the smile of someone who knew exactly why Gutierrez was reading her the riot act. Why he had to chew her out in order maintain the threadbare pretense that they might somehow survive long enough for her to profit from the lesson.
She'd killed at least two more of the enemy since then, and her aim had been as rock steady for the last of them as for the first.
"I make that thirty-three confirmed," he said after a moment.
"Thirty-four," she corrected, never lifting her forehead from the rock.
"You sure?" he asked.
"I'm sure. Templeton got another one on the east flank while you were checking on Chantal."
"Oh." He paused in his rhythmic search and raised his pulse rifle. Her head came up at his movement, and she brought her own appropriated rifle into firing position.
"Two of them, on the right," Gutierrez said quietly from the corner of his mouth.
"Another one on the left side," she replied. "Up the slope—by that fallen tree."
"You take him; I'm on the right," he said.
"Call it," she said softly, her youthful contralto calm, almost detached.
"Now," he said, and the two of them fired as one. Gutierrez dropped his first target with a single shot; the second, alerted by the fate of his companion, scrambled for cover, and it took three to nail him. Beside him, Abigail fired only once, then rocked back to cover their flanks while the sergeant dealt with his second target.
"Time to move," he told her.
"Right," she agreed, and started further up the valley. They'd picked their next two firing points before they settled into this one, and she knew exactly where to go. She kept low, ignoring the pain in her wounded knee as she crawled across the rocky ground, and she heard the sergeant's pulse rifle whine again behind her before she reached their destination. It wasn't quite as good a position as it had seemed from below, but the rough boulder offered at least some cover, as well as a rest for her weapon, and she rolled up into position, thanking the Marine instructors who had insisted on drilling even midshipwomen in the rudiments of marksmanship.
The pulse rifle's built-in telescopic, light-gathering sight made the valley midday bright, and she quickly found the trio of pirates who were engaging the sergeant. She took a moment to be certain of their exact locations, then swept the lower valley behind them from her higher vantage point, and her blood ran cold. There were at least thirty more of them, pressing up behind their point men, with still more behind them.
Gutierrez had the lead trio pinned down, but they had him pinned down, as well, and he couldn't get the angle he needed on them.
But Abigail could. She tucked the pulse rifle into her shoulder, gathered up the sight picture, and squeezed off the first shot.
The rifle surged against her shoulder, and the left shoulder and upper torso of her target blew apart. One of his companions darted a look in her direction and started to swing his own rifle towards her, but in the process, he rose just high enough to expose his own head and shoulders to Gutierrez.
The platoon sergeant took the shot, and then Abigail had her sights on the third pirate. Another steady squeeze, and she keyed the com they hadn't dared to use until they were certain the pirates were already closing in on them.
"Clear, Sergeant," she said. "But you'd better hurry. They brought along friends."
"Piss on this!" Lamar snarled as the latest reports came up from groundside. His ground troops had run the damned Manties to ground, but in the process they'd run into an old-fashioned buzz saw. He didn't believe the kill numbers they were sending up to him for a moment. Hell, according to them, they'd already killed at least forty of the bastards . . . and even at that, they'd lost forty-three of their own. Not that there was any damned way the Manties had sent forty people down to a dirt ball like Refuge in the first place!
"Piss on what?" St. Claire asked wearily.
"All of this—every damned bit of it! Those frigging idiots down there couldn't find their asses with both hands!"
"At least they're in contact with them," St. Clare pointed out.
"Sure they are! Such close contact that we can't get in there to use the shuttles for air support without killing our own troops! Dammit, they're playing the Manty bastards' game!"
"But if we call them back far enough to get air support in there, the Manties will break contact again," St. Claire argued. "They've done it three times already."
"Well, in that case, maybe it's time for a few 'friendly fire casualties,' " Lamar growled.
"Or time to give it up," St. Claire suggested very, very quietly, and Lamar looked at him sharply.
"I don't like how quiet Ringstorff's been being for the last several hours," his exec said. "And I don't like hanging around this damned planet chasing frigging ghosts through the mountains any more than you do. I say bring our people up, and if Ringstorff wants these Manties, he can go down there and get them himself!"
"God, I'd love to tell him that," Lamar admitted. "But he's still calling the shots. If he wants them dead, then that's what we have to give him."
"Well, in that case, let's go ahead and get it done, one way or the other," St. Claire urged. "Either pull them back far enough to get in there with cluster munitions and blow the Manties to hell, or else tell our ground people to get their thumbs out and finish the damned job!"
"We've lost Harris," Abigail told Gutierrez wearily, and the sergeant winced at the pain and guilt in her voice. The dead staff sergeant's thirteen-person squad was down to four Marines . . . and one midshipwoman.
"At least we did what you planned on," he said. "They're way the hell and gone this side of the others. No way they're going to backtrack and search for survivors that close to the original contact site."
"I know." She turned an exhausted face towards him, and he realized that it wasn't as dark as it had been. The eastern sky was beginning to pale, and he felt a vague sense of wonder that they'd survived the night.
Only they hadn't, of course. Not quite yet.
He looked back down their present hillside. All four of First Squad's survivors were on the same hill, and there wa
s no place left for them to go. The ground broke down in front of them for just under a kilometer, but the hill on which they were dug in was squarely in the mouth of a box canyon. They were finally trapped with no avenue of retreat.
He could see movement, and he realized the idiots were going to come right up the slope at them instead of standing back and calling in air strikes. It wasn't going to make much difference in the end, of course . . . except that it would give them the opportunity to take an even bigger escort to hell with them.
Well, that and one other thing, he told himself sadly as he looked with something curiously like love at the exhausted young woman beside him and touched the butt of the pulser holstered at his hip. Mateo Gutierrez had cleaned up behind pirates before. And because he had, there was no way Abigail Hearns would be alive when the murderous scum at the foot of that hill finally overran them.
"It's been a good run, Abigail," he said softly. "Sorry we didn't get you out, after all."
"Not your fault, Mateo," she said, turning to smile up at him somehow. "I was the one who thought it up. That's why I had to be here."
"I know," he said, and rested one hand on her shoulder for a moment. Then he inhaled sharply. "I'll take the right," he said briskly. "Anything on the left is yours."
"About fucking time!" Samson Lamar swore, and gestured for the com officer to hand him the microphone. "Now, listen to me," he snarled at the ground troops' commander—the third one they'd had, so far, "I am sick and tired of this shit! You get in there, and you kill these bastards, or I will by God shoot every last one of you myself! Is that clear?!"
"Yes, Sir. I—"
"Incoming!"
Lamar spun to face Predator's tactical section, and his jaw dropped in disbelief as he saw the blood-red icons of incoming missiles. It was impossible! How could—?
Michael Oversteegen's eyes were bloodshot in a drawn and weary face, but they blazed with triumph as Gauntlet's fire streaked towards the single surviving pirate cruiser. The idiots were sitting there with their wedge at standby, and it was obvious that they hadn't even bothered to man point defense stations!