been weeks now, and the Feds had to know that the only thing stopping them from walking in was the
Fifteen minutes later and with the routine slow drive-by of the base finished, Digby’s driver stopped the half- track at the foot of Humpback Hill.
“Back in thirty, Corporal.”
“Sir,” said Erdem as he and his partner, Lance Corporal Korda, settled down to wait for Digby’s return.
Digby made short work of the shallow slope of Humpback Hill, settling himself down on his favorite rock, looking across the western end of the lander runway; the rock’s wind-sculpted surface provided a perfect support for his back. For once his mind was not on work but on Jana, unimaginably far away and gone now for almost three months. Well, at least she’d seemed happy in her last vidmail. Thankfully, he had three months before she would even think of coming back, so all being well, that would give him enough time to secure his own position and work out how he was going to get out of the mess he was in.
His breather squeaked in protest as Digby sighed deeply in frustration.
The comm jolted Kerri upright in her chair, her heart beginning to pound as adrenaline flooded her system.
“Commodore Helfort, Lieutenant Kerouac.”
Oh, thank God, Kerri Helfort said to herself. It’s time. The awful dragging wait was almost over.
“Yes, Lieutenant?”
Kerri’s voice gave no hint of the terrible churning in her stomach as every fiber of her body cried out for this to be over and for her to be at home with Andrew. Her fingers were tightly interwoven with Sam’s as they sat waiting in Hut 1 for the word to move.
“Everything is in position, sir. The landers are on their way in and will be here on schedule. So start moving people out now. What about the red list?”
“We have the red list nominees under control.”
“Roger that. Start autojecting them now. Good luck.” With that, Kerouac was gone.
Kerri stood up, pulling Sam to her feet with her.
“Come on, Sam, let’s go,” she said, her attention focused on getting the guides moving and, most important, getting the red list nominees autojected so they could be herded out of the camp like the sheep they’d be until the binary mind-control drug wore off.
A quick check to confirm that the coldlamp groups were where they should be, blinding the holocams, and she was able to wave the first groups through, out from under the low eaves of the wall-less hut that had been home for so long and on into the darkness and the welcoming arms of the waiting marines.
Every so often, a group was diverted to the end of the hut and given a coldlamp to make things look normal, but soon the trickle of people became a flood to the point where Kerri and the guides had to hold them back physically, so strong had the urge to flee become.
Twenty minutes later, everyone except Kerri, Sam, and half of the escape committee had vanished into the night. For a moment, Kerri marveled at how easily and quickly almost a thousand people could disappear. Even the four occupants of the makeshift camp hospital had been extracted without incident, carefully maneuvered clear of the camp, out of sight of the Hammer’s holocams.
“Okay, everybody. Our turn. Sam, grab a lamp. Let’s go.”
And so with no further fuss and no regrets, the last non-Hammer occupants of Eternity Camp moved into the night, the ground ahead speckled with pools of light cast by almost a hundred lamps scattered through the darkness. No more than 50 meters out, the chromaflaged shape of a marine reared up so suddenly that Sam and Kerri flinched in surprise.
It was the familiar face of Corporal Gupta, his face crinkled by a wide grin.
“Sorry about that, Commodore. Just to confirm, you are the last ones out, so keep going and please make sure that everyone stays put at the rendezvous point until we come to get them.”
“Will do, Corporal, and thanks. I can’t tell you how much this means.”
“You don’t have to, sir. I think we know.”
Kerri nodded, and the pair hurried on. Once they were across the stream, which was a lot deeper than usual because of the rain earlier in the day but still fordable without too much difficulty, she picked a dark spot to put down the lamp. Then, their hands still tightly locked together, she walked with Sam up the banks of Base Creek as fast as a dangerous blend of gloom and broken ground would allow.
Seven hundred meters farther on they were at the rendezvous point, joining the huge throng of
Kerri hoped they wouldn’t have to wait long.
High on Humpback Hill, Digby had stayed alone with his thoughts for much longer than usual. His driver would be wondering what in Kraa he’d been up to. Screw it, he thought, that’s enough for tonight. As he levered himself up off his rock, his comms unit chirped, announcing a priority call. Odd, he thought. The camp was quiet, so why the priority call? Everything looked okay.
And then it hit him and hit him hard.
The Feds were coming, and they were coming now. Nobody needed to tell him. He just knew.
As he took the call, Digby turned and started to half walk, half run down the hill.
Even as the alarm came through on his earpiece, Corporal Erdem sat bolt upright in his seat, boredom gone and heart pounding as he brought the half-track’s gyro-stabilized low-light holocam to bear.
It took seconds for him to identify the black shapes coming in from the west on final approach as military assault landers. They definitely weren’t commercial. The holocam was zooming in to pick up every detail of the lead vehicle, its wings flexing alarmingly as it bounced and shook and drove its way down through the rough air rolling off the hills. They’d been caught, he thought as he locked the holocam to autotrack the incoming lander, and now there would be hell to pay.
Erdem didn’t hesitate as years of military training kicked in. The only time to hit a lander was before it landed, and even if he had only a single 30-mm hypersonic light cannon, he was going to have a go. Shouting to Korda to get set up, he gunned the half-track sharply forward, swinging it south toward the runway to get clear of the long ridge that ran down from Humpback Hill.
As Erdem hammered the half-track down the slope toward the runway, Korda’s microvid told him the system had a firing solution on the lead lander. It was closing rapidly, wheels coming down as it approached the threshold, nose pitching up as belly-mounted mass drivers fired to slow the massive ship for landing. Without waiting, Korda opened up, the laser-guided fire control system putting him precisely on target, the high-explosive cannon shells smashing into the lander’s belly armor, splashes of red-gold stitching their way across the hull. For a moment, Korda would have sworn that the lander flinched before it settled again. Erdem actually cheered as Korda hammered away, the cannon shells spalling thin shards of ceramsteel armor off the lander, the pieces whipped away by the airflow howling turbulently past the lander’s less-than-aerodynamic hull.
But Erdem and Korda had forgotten that landers were built to survive much worse than 30-mm cannon and not simply by absorbing whatever was thrown at them.
Within seconds, an escorting ground attack lander had tracked the shells back to their point of origin and had passed the data to its fire control system. Microseconds after that, it had a valid firing solution, and then, happy that there was no more pressing threat that needed looking after first, it directed the full fury of its forward laser batteries onto the hapless half-track and its crew, pausing only to switch targets to hack the last few shells out of the sky as they raced in toward the lander Korda was trying so hard to bring down.
Moments later, all that was left of the half-track was a charred wreck. Even the wreckage didn’t last long as the half-track’s microfusion bottle gave up the unequal struggle to hold on to plasma hotter than any sun before exploding in a shattering, searing blast that picked Digby up and threw him brutally onto his back as he ran in.
Seconds later the first lander thumped down on the runway. The liberation of Eternity Base and its unwilling guests was just a matter of time.
For more than an hour, almost a thousand
