Shadowline - Starfishers Triology - Book 1

Forty-Four: 3031 AD

"Father, Cassius needs you," Thurston boomed from ten meters away.

"What is it?"

Thurston shrugged. "Something's shaping up." Evidently, he did not want to talk in front of civilians.

"Mr. Blake. Mrs. Blake. If you'll excuse me?"

"Of course," Blake replied. "Wish I had an excuse to slip out myself."

"Creighton, Colonel Storm," Grace said, her tiny voice quavering, "could we go along?"

"Of course," Storm replied. "Your husband is the boss. I'd look silly keeping him away."

"Albin, make my apologies," Blake told Korando. "Then join us in Colonel Storm's war room."

The war room was lively when they arrived. The Legion had added a massive amount of specialized equipment to Blake Mining's Comm Center. The heartpiece was a gigantic display board on which was imposed a computer-mastered chart of the Shadowline. The long, dark river of the rift was alive with shoals of tiny moving lights. Each represented a particular unit. A susurrus of soft communications chatter filled the air as commtechs monitored Shadowline radio traffic. The theme of the moment was confusion on the firing line, questions racketing back and forth among "Foxbat," "Mirage I," and "Damocles." The chatter was clear, but couched in jargon that Storm's companions could not interpret.

Cassius' was on visual, and clearly impatient. "Command clear trunk, scrambled," the technician told Storm. Storm nodded.

"Gneaus," Cassius said the instant Storm moved in front of the pickup, "they're starting something. We don't know what yet, but it looks big."

"What have you got? I don't see anything on the big board."

"They started probing with infantry and armor two hours ago. Pushed our observers back. We've had to withdraw past the limit of reliable sonic discrimination, so nothing's sure. The computer enhancements make it look like there's a lot of heavy stuff moving."

Storm glanced at the pictures from the sky-eye orbitals. The damned satellites were next to useless. The demon sun burned them out in a few days' time, and what pictures they did send down were no good. Too much contrast between the sunlighted plains and the darkness of the Shadowline. "You get anything from Intelligence?"

"There hasn't been a crackle from an open carrier since this morning. Looks like they've shut down communications completely. Yesterday we did get confirmation of your notion that Richard went back to Twilight."

"Who'd he leave in charge?"

"Doskal Mennike. The younger."

"Richard wouldn't set up a push and then leave."

"That's why I called. He's been gone awhile, near as we can tell. He wasn't here for their spoiling raids last week, either. Something strange is happening."

"Where are they up top?" Storm's own forces had begun moving to break the laager that morning, after the engineers, a month behind schedule, had completed the incline to the upward side of the Shadowline cliffs. Any attack by Hawksblood would catch the Legion overextended.

"About ready. They were getting into position the last report I had."

"You have comm with Wulf?"

"A bad link. The sun is distorting the relay beam."

"Patch me in on Tac Two." While he waited, Storm asked, "Mr. Blake, is there any way we can find out what's going on in Twilight?"

"I have a man there, but I can't get in touch in a hurry. We have to wait till he finds some way to smuggle his microtapes out."

"That's no good. I need an idea of what's happening right now, today, not what was going on last month."

"Why?"

"I smell something rotten."

"Patched, Gneaus," Cassius said. "You won't get anything but snow on visual."

"I'll see if we can enhance. Switch it." He waited a few seconds. A 2 appeared momentarily. "Sky Writer, Sky Writer, this is Andiron, over." No response. "Sky Writer, Sky Writer, this is Andiron, do you read me, over."

"Andiron, Andiron, this is Blackwood. Sky Writer has lost lasecomm, over." The response was barely audible.

Storm whispered to a tech, "Who's Blackwood?"

The technician checked his charts. "Bill Allen, sir. In one of Colonel Darksword's crawlers."

"Blackwood, Blackwood, this is Andiron. Relay to Sky Writer. Query your position. Query can you relay visual of laager, over."

"Andiron, Andiron, this is Blackwood, relaying to Sky Writer. I read you loud. Am at point Romeo Tango X-Ray, engaged. Visual follows, over."

"Picture coming in," Storm said. "Enhance it."

A deep darkness, waxing and waning behind static snow, appeared before Storm. It wavered till the computer found how best to enhance it.

The darkness was broken occasionally by the fire-lances of lasecannon or the flash of explosives. The view was down from the rim of the Shadowline. Richard's laager was spread out like toys on a sand table. Here and there, jerkily in the flashes, movements suggested armor and mobile artillery scuttling for better cover. The visible crawlers began to glow.

"Why are they lighting up?" Storm asked. From behind him, Korando replied, "They're putting up their solar screens. That will stop the lighter lasecannon."

Storm leaned closer. "Those rigs look smaller than their military crawlers. Korando. What kind of units are they?"

"Pumpers and charters. Mostly old stuff. What I'd guess they'd be using for hauling supplies."

"Blackwood, Blackwood, this is Andiron. Query, Classes of defensive fire received, over."

"Andiron, Andiron, this is Blackwood. Receiving light projectile fire. Have silenced one lasecannon. Over."

"Wormdoom, Wormdoom, this is Andiron, do you read me? Over."

"Andiron, Andiron, this is Wormdoom," Cassius replied. "Switching to secure comm. Wormdoom out."

Shifting to the scrambled trunk, Storm said, "Cassius, they've replaced their heavy stuff with obsolete mining equipment. Watch for something coming out of sunlight. You might move up some artillery and armor. Go ahead with the blast. It's too late for Wulf to help you anyway. Try to get this lot to surrender. If you don't get hurt, and can push far enough past them, a sunlight sweep wouldn't be able to get back to friendly territory."

"I'm working along those lines already," Cassius replied. "Gneaus, if that's it, it's likely to be bloody. What's wrong over there? This isn't Richard's style. There's no need for an attack. And Mennike isn't any glory hound either."

Remembering what it had been like out there, penned in a suit most of the time and always surrounded by natural dangers as well as enemies, Storm posited, "Maybe he went around the bend."

"Maybe. But I can think of a more probable cause. There are enough Dees over there to wreck a galaxy. I've got to get back and stay on top of this. Keep watching. I'll check in later."

"Later." Storm rose, surveyed the room. He moved a chair to its center, seated himself. From there he could hear all the monitors and see the big board. He completely forgot his guests. Thurston received a curt nod when he brought a tankard of coffee.

The razor's edge of Now swept forward, turning future into past. Hours groaned away, creaking on rusty hinges. Wulf took the laager under heavy fire. One of his crawlers ran on out along the cliff top, planted charges that would drop a rockfall behind Hawksblood's men. Wulf's fire wrecked several Meacham crawlers. The laager broke. The big units, manned by flighty civilians, fled into sunlight, abandoning everyone not already aboard. Cassius immediately applied pressure with his armor. Hawksblood's people withdrew till Wulf's rockfall barred farther retreat.

The Twilight fighting crawlers swept in from sunlight on a well-organized front two hundred kilometers wide, far behind Cassius.

"No doubt about it," Storm muttered as he watched the situation develop.

"Father?" Thurston asked.

"There's a crazy man running things out there."

The thirty Meacham crawlers attacked everything man-made, including hospitals, refuge stations, and recreation domes, all of which had been clearly marked for what they were. The crawlers maintained a grim comm silence throughout the action.

Albin Korando observed, "It looks like they don't want each other to know what they're doing. It doesn't take any military genius to know that our comm nets would let us watch every one of them."

"Curious, isn't it?" Storm said.

The Legion bent. Forewarned, it broke nowhere. The attack was still on when Storm said, "We've got them. They're going to be sorry they tried this. This might mean the whole war."

Before long the others began to see what he meant. One by one, Hawksblood's military crawlers were being disabled or forced back into sunlight. The specially designed military units were Richard's most potent tool. He was losing them fast, and would lose more when the retreating units tried to get back into the Shadowline.

A Lt. Col. Gunter Havik commanded the forces opposite Cassius. He had been Walters's student in Academy and had served with Storm in Confederation's Marines. He was the archetypal mercenary officer. He surrendered the moment it became clear that his position was untenable.

The modern freecorps would fight no heroic, doomed Stalingrads. Not when there was no known tactical or strategic justification. Glory was an epitaph for fools.

Cassius immediately started ferrying troops round the rockfall and digging them in for the return of Hawksblood's fighting crawlers. He did not expect to have much difficulty forcing their surrender. Most would be running near their limits of solar endurance and would be short of munitions. They would be eager to get into shade, and unable to shoot their way in.

Wulf's force withdrew to the Shadowline to recuperate from its extended exposure to the demon sun.

Storm glanced at a clock and realized that he had been in the war room, awake and intensely attentive, for twenty-two hours. Even iron man Thurston had taken a few hours to nap. Thurston started to suggest that he do the same.

"I was just thinking that," Storm told his son. "I can't do anything here anyway. It's all on Cassius right now. Get me up if it begins to go sour."

In the Shadowline, of course, the only sleep for the men involved was the big one. No one would rest till the issue was decided.

Blake was on hand when Storm returned. He did not seem pleased.

"What's his problem?" Storm asked Thurston.

"Casualty figures been coming in."

"Bad?"

"Not good."

Battle's confusion had begun to resolve itself into a grim statistical portrait, Storm saw when he checked the unit reports.

The first big battle in the Shadowline, still under way, would be a resounding victory for Edgeward. The laager had been broken. All but a handful of the attacking battle crawlers had been taken out. Cassius, with every available man and machine, facing light resistance, was racing toward the point where Twilight's supply line intercepted the Shadowline. He would reach it in four days if Hawksblood could not stop him. The war could be over before the end of the week.

And a thousand Legionnaires had died the death-without-resurrection. More were missing. The survivors were sifting the rubble. There were as many more injured and resurrectable dead.

Storm was appalled. He was dazed. He could not accept the figures. He had not encountered this much killing since the Ulantonid War. "Richard didn't do this," he murmured several times. "This's the work of a madman." Michael's face seemed to laugh silently from nowhere and everywhere.

Only a Dee stratagem could have spilled so much blood.

He circulated around the war room, trying to find some positive spark amid all the negatives. He found no promise anywhere but in Cassius's headlong sprint.

Suddenly, he caught one strained thread from amid the constant babble being monitored. "... you read, Iron Legion? I've hit heat erosion fourteen kilometers off Point Nine Hundred. Main track in. Can't drop my slaves. I have thirty-two men aboard. Can you help? Mayday, Mayday, This is Twenty-ninth Brightside Main Battle Tractor, can you read, Iron Legion? I've hit heat erosion... "

"How's he sending?" Storm asked.

"Pulse-beam laser, sir. He's bouncing it off the cliff face."

Storm turned to the big display board. It portrayed incredible confusion. He wondered if even the computers were keeping track.

Point Nine Hundred would be nine hundred kilometers out the Shadowline, only about fifty kilometers east of the incline Wulf had used to scale the cliffs. "How long have we been getting this?"

The monitor checked the log for the previous watch. "Nearly four hours, Colonel. Colonel Darksword began rescue operations as soon as the message came in."

Storm turned to Blake. "What're the chances of bailing them out?"

Blake shook his head. "About zit. We haven't had a successful daylight rescue since Moira Jackson brought her father in. That was right after the Ulantonid War. And we get several chances a year. Finding them is the hard part. Point Nine Hundred and fourteen out don't mean that much. It's a dead-reckoning guess. DR gets pretty loose after a few hours in sunlight. If we ever develop the technology, we'll put out navigation beacons... Anyway, you have to be right on top of another crawler to spot it. The charters have the best instruments, and even they can't see far. But we always try, if only because we hope we'll learn something."

The drama unfolded with painful slowness. Wulf had committed all his units to a computer-mapped search spiral around the trapped crawler's estimated position.

The tractor's commander grew more and more desperate as his screens drew nearer overload.

Suddenly, "Hey! Got him! Hey, over here!"

Storm chuckled nervously.

Soberly, the same voice said, "Intrepid, Intrepid, this is White Wing One. We have a contact bearing three four seven at six one zero meters. Over."

"White Wing One, White Wing One, this is Intrepid. Hold your position, over." Intrepid was Wulf on his own tactical net. "Storm King, Storm King, this is Intrepid. Assemble on White Wing One, immediate execute, over." Wulf shifted to command net. "Wormdoom, Wormdoom, this is Sky Writer. We have a positive contact. Request instructions, over."

There was no response from Cassius. Walters had outrun his communications engineers.

Storm bent to a pickup. "Sky Writer, Sky Writer, this is Andiron. Proceed with caution. Let one of the miners direct the rescue. Andiron out."

Storm stared at the big board again. He had a sudden bad feeling about this. Something told him he should let it go. Yet he could not overcome his feeling of moral obligation to a brother soldier. He could not make himself call Wulf off.

"Andiron, Andiron, this is Sky Writer. Acknowledge proceed with discretion under native direction. Sky Writer out."

Storm told the tech, "Keep a close monitor. Let me know if you smell anything funny."

The communications technician frowned questioningly. Storm did not expand.

The rescue attempt followed procedures which were little more than paper theory. It went smoothly, according to Korando and Blake, one or the other of whom was always present.

Charters moved into position sunward of the stricken crawler. They set up portable shadow generators which were themselves protected by a series of disposable molybdenum-ceramic ablation sails. Pumpers, the leviathan crawlers which took liquid metals aboard and hauled them in for processing, ran their pump trunks to emergency locks designed to receive them. The inner diameter of the trunks was large enough to permit passage of a small man.

"Makes a hog more comfortable, knowing he has a theoretical chance," Korando observed. "Even if it's so slim it only pays off once a century. Knowing somebody will try means a lot when you're crawling Brightside."

"Andiron, Andiron, this is Sky Writer. We're getting no response from the crawler. We're sending a man from Main Battle One. Over."

Storm turned to Blake, frowning a question. "The battle crawlers are modified pumpers," Blake told him. "The first few have converted pump slaves."

That was not the question Storm wanted answered. But Wulf was waiting. "Sky Writer, Sky Writer, this is Andiron. I read you, over."

Wulf had the man carry a hand comm and patched him into the comm net. There was a lot of back and forth about how to open the escape hatch from outside. Wulf had a lot to say about hurrying it up because the shadow generators would not last forever.

"What I wanted to know," Storm told Blake, "was why you couldn't have used this method to rescue that man Frog."

"Because his tractor was built on the other side of the hill where Noah was building the Ark. His only escape hatch was under his cabin. The high-hatch modification came about because of the trouble we had getting to him. Meacham picked up the idea the same time we did."

"I see."

"I don't see anything but dead men, Colonel," Wulf's investigator reported once he had effected entry. "I'm starting forward to the control cabin."

There was a minute of silence. Storm waited tensely, something raising the hair at the back of his neck.

"Can't figure what happened here, Colonel. They're all bluish and puffy-faced. Their screens are still up and the oxy levels look good... "

"Wulf!" Storm thundered, ignoring the code rules. "Get the hell out of there! I mean now!" The bad feeling had bloomed into an intuition. "It's some kind of trap!"

His order came too late. It had been too late for an hour.

There was an instant of thunder on the net, then a silence punctuated only by static.

"Andiron, Andiron, this is Honeycomb," a tight voice said, breaking the silence. "We have a visual and lase-radar on a nuclear cloud at approximately Point Nine Twenty, fifteen kilometers out. Over."

And, "Andiron, Andiron, this is Charing Cross. I'm getting heavy richters epicentered at approximately point Nine Seventeen, fifteen kilometers out, accompanied by heavy gamma radiation. Over."

Similar and related reports came in from a dozen observers. Storm responded to none. The communications technician acknowledge in a dull voice.

Wulf. Dead. Along with hundreds of his men. Because of a humanitarian impulse. It had been a trap. Dee work for sure, predicated on a knowledge of mercenaries and miners.

Storm told Thurston, "That was Fearchild's doing."

Thurston nodded sadly. "It's his style. What are we going to do, Father?"

Storm paused a moment before answering. "You take over here." His stomach felt as though the great-grand-daddy of all ulcers were trying to gnaw its way out. "I've got to tell Helmut. Try to get through to Cassius. He has to know."

He was surprised at himself. He should have been in an insane rage. Instead, he was emotionally numb, still trying to convince himself that it really had happened. Part of him kept thinking Wulf would call in and say it was all a bad joke.

He scanned his people once before going to Helmut. Their faces were all reflections of his own, he suspected. Each portrayed shock and an inability to believe.

Nuclears had not been used on-planet, against people, even during the most critical days of the Ulantonid War. They had joined the list of banned-by-gentleman's-agreement weapons ages ago. One would expect chemical and biological weapons to see use first. Their effects were less long-lasting...

He had been right. The Shadowline war was the swan song of the freecorps. Confederation would move in and disarm them for sure, now. The public outcry would leave the government no choice.

He overlooked one small fact while thinking that. The media were completely indifferent to the Shadowline war. No one was covering it. Hardly anyone off Blackworld knew anything about it. He, the people in the war room, and perhaps a handful of men in Twilight, were the only folks Darkside who knew that proscribed weaponry had been employed.