2
Since this was not a paying contract, there was no parade of buses through Dirigent City to the civilian spaceport. Lon’s platoons were bused to the landing strip on base and loaded on two transport shuttles. Lon rode the first shuttle, with third platoon. Fourth platoon was on the second shuttle. Neither group was crowded, even with barracks bags and a number of crates of cargo that had already been aboard when the troops arrived.
“Not the item we’re to evaluate,” Lon told Sergeant Tebba Girana in response to a direct question. Perhaps the control units, he thought, but he did not share his guess, since he was uncertain. There were numbers stenciled on each case, but those offered no clue to the uninitiated.
“Why all the secrecy?” Girana asked. The men were all in combat kit, complete with battle helmets. Girana talked to his lieutenant over their private circuit.
“I don’t know, Tebba,” Lon said. “I guess a lot of people think they have a lot riding on what we’re going to do.”
“I hope it works. I’ve been too many places where counting bullets was more than an exercise for the quartermaster.”
“You and me both, Tebba.”
The flight to the Nassau Proving Range, three hundred miles east of Dirigent City, was almost casual. The training transports were not as powerful, or nimble, as attack shuttles, and there was no reason for the pilots to, attempt records along the way. The flight remained solidly suborbital.
Ten minutes before the shuttles’ ETA, Lon stood and moved to where all of the men in third platoon would be able to see him. He clicked his radio over to a channel that would also connect him to fourth platoon in the other shuttle—flying formation a hundred yards to the right.
“There’s no drill on landing, men,” Lon started. “We disembark in an orderly fashion, unload our gear, and move toward our temporary quarters. We’ve got the rest of the afternoon to get squared away. The job doesn’t start until tomorrow morning. I’ll give you the schedule as soon as I get it. We’re going to be up to our necks in outsiders, people from Corps R&D, techies and so forth, and no doubt a few civilians as well. Mind your manners. They’ve come up with a gadget they think will make it possible for us to get essential resupply in the field when a shuttle can’t get in. For those of you who have been in combat, you know what that can mean. Let’s do the job right.”
Lon no longer felt self-conscious making speeches like that, and he no longer looked for reactions from his men—boredom or suppressed laughter.
The barracks, mess hall, and other troop facilities at Nassau Proving Range were almost primitive. They had been built by troops of available material—logs and rough-hewn beams and planking, the chinks filled with clay. Over many years the buildings had been improved now and again, to add the comforts of base, but they retained their rustic look. Like a fort out on the western frontier in North America a thousand years ago, Lon thought as the caravan of trucks approached the stockaded compound where his men would be living for the next ten days.
Laboratories and inside testing facilities were different. Those buildings had been constructed of plascrete, composites, and metal, offering ideal conditions for the techs and others who would use them … and any visiting VIPs who might come to observe tests. Set well apart from the cruder-looking troop facilities, the “permanent” buildings lined several hillside terraces, with plascrete bunkers on the top of the hill offering a safe vantage for observing tests that might be dangerous—an explosives range was in the next valley to the southeast.
The only civilian staff onsite when Lon’s platoons arrived consisted of only six people, two maintenance men, and four who worked in the kitchen. A platoon of military police served to guard the facility. None of the military or civilian technical staff who would be in charge of the tests had arrived yet.
“They’ll be coming in first thing tomorrow morning,” Lieutenant Shaesel Ourf, the commander of the MP platoon, told Lon when they met in the troop compound.
“Just as well,” Lon said, looking around. “Give us a chance to settle in first without them tripping over us.”
Ourf grinned. “I can bounce that all day,” he said. “I like it best here when it’s just us and empty space.”
“This a permanent post for your lads?”
“We rotate the duty, draw three months here every two years. A platoon that’s lucky sees nothing but nature.”
Lon grinned. “Sorry to spoil your luck.”
The MP lieutenant shrugged. “Fall of the cards. We’ve had six weeks of the good life. Life’s a bit casual here, most of the time. A lot of us look forward to it.”
“Food all replicated, or do you get fresh in?”
“When it’s just us, it all comes out of the machines, but I’ve been alerted that there’s a supply transport coming in this evening with vegetables, fruit, and meat. They like to treat the brain-boys and techies right, and when the nobs eat fresh, so do the rest of us. Evening chow is at seventeen hundred hours. You’ll join me?”
“Honored,” Lon said. They were, for the time being, the only officers on base. “What about the town, Bascombe East?”
Ourf chuckled. “Calling it a town is a bit much. Two hundred or so permanent residents. They provide civilian workers here and for a small armory and replicating factory.” The Corps had dozens of scattered sites, insurance against any attack against the world that might disrupt production in and around Dirigent City. “One pub, one restaurant, hotel, general store. Fifteen miles west of here. The only transport is what we have.”
“Sounds cramped. They equipped to deal with soldiers on pass?”
“Maybe two squads at a time. You find out when your men will have free time, we’ll do what we can to arrange transport. In any case, we’ve got beer in the dayroom.”
Lon made an informal inspection of the troop bays to see that the men were settled in, and to answer the inevitable questions—mostly about the chance to get out and have a drink.
“You just got here, lad,” Lon told one of the newer privates in fourth platoon. “We’re here to work, in case you’ve forgotten.” But he said it mildly, not as a rebuke.
“I don’t know the schedule yet,” he told each group of men. “Looks as if we won’t know until the R&D folks get in tomorrow morning. Supper will be coming up shortly. After that, get comfortable. There’s a dayroom across the way. Get plenty of sleep while you can.”
On the inside, the barracks looked as modern as anything at the Corps’ main base back in Dirigent City. Lon found his room rather larger than his usual accommodations. His gear had been set next to the bed. Junior officers did not rate aides to pack and unpack for them. They had to do for themselves.
Lon took his own advice and got a good night’s sleep—a rare seven hours undisturbed. His room was between the troop bays where his platoons were billeted, and he was flanked by the platoon sergeants. In the morning, after a brief and informal reveille formation, they all went to breakfast, to find that the civilian cooks had already started using some of the fresh foods that had arrived the evening before—eggs and ham.
The shuttles bringing the research and development team started to arrive while breakfast was in progress.
“I guess that’s my call,” Lon said after hearing two shuttles come in for their landings. “My orders are to report to the team leader upon his arrival.”
Lieutenant Ourf smiled. “Finish your breakfast, Lon. You’ve got plenty of time.” He touched his left ear. There was a radio receiver plugged into it. “It’ll be a while yet before they’re ready for anything.”
An hour later the two lieutenants walked to the lab offices on the lowest terrace on the hillside. Altogether, some three dozen people had arrived, along with two small ground-effect trucks and several pallets of crates. A lead sergeant with a Technical Corps emblem in the center of his chevrons directed them to the team leader.
“I’m Major Joseph Pitt,” the man said after returning the salutes of the lieutenants. “Nolan, you brought the men who are going to do the testing?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’ll have a lengthy briefing on the testing protocol after lunch, followed by instructions on the equipment and operating procedures. Field testing won’t begin until tomorrow. My people will need the rest of today to get ready. The only delay might be if the weather turns sour. We want perfect conditions for at least the first round of testing.”
“The XRS-one-seventeen will make it possible for a platoon on the ground to receive resupply of ammunition and food directly from an orbiting transport or a shuttle standing off out of the way of hostile fire,” Pitt told the men of third and fourth platoons. Lon stood off to the side to be able to watch both the presentation and his men.
“Each platoon will be issued two ground-control units once the system becomes fully operational. It will add no more than twelve ounces to a soldier’s load, and link through his helmet communications system. The supply capsule, a small rocket, will be launched by ship or shuttle on a trajectory to bring it within visual range of the target unit, which will guide the capsule into a soft—and extremely precise—landing, just where it’s needed.”
There was video, and a series of animated charts. Pitt turned over the podium to a gray-haired man in a white lab coat, who went through the procedure step by step as he narrated another animation.
Then the civilian went through the extensive safety protocols. “This is still experimental, you understand,” he said, looking slowly around the room, as if waiting for nods of understanding from each of the soldiers. “We are dealing with explosive rocket fuels, and—in field operations—these capsules will also customarily be carrying ammunition. In our first tests, the target landing sites will be no closer than one hundred yards to any personnel on the ground. Later, if early results warrant the step, we will bring that distance down to more … practical limits.”
“They want us to guide freakin’ bombs right down on our own heads,” Phip said to the men of his squad during the break following the orientation lecture. It would be fifteen minutes before the platoons were given separate close instruction on the operation of the units—hands-on instruction.
“Even your skull doesn’t have a radius of a hundred yards,” Lon said. Phip had not seen him coming. “Look at it the other way around. You’ve been places where ammo was just a memory. If this works, it boosts everyone’s odds of coming home from even the worst contract.”
Phip turned, not at all embarrassed. “I know that, Lieutenant,” he said—they were on duty. “I just don’t fancy being a guinea pig.”
“They’re not going to risk necks. The rockets will be coming in with inert cargo and just enough fuel for the range. Until they know it works and is safe.” Lon looked around at the other men of third platoon’s second squad. “They’ve got to have field troops to test gear, because we might see problems that the brain-boys would miss. But they’re not going to risk anything they don’t have to. Besides, we’re going to have civilians hanging around. Even if they might not worry too much about us, they’re going to be mighty careful of their own necks.”
Lon remained with the civilian briefing officer for an hour after he had dismissed his men. “I want to know exactly how it’s supposed to go,” Lon told the researcher. “I need to be at least as proficient with any equipment as any of my men.”
The civilian blinked once, then nodded. “I suppose you do at that,” he conceded. “Let’s get comfortable. I’ll take you through the whole procedure in the simulator, then explain exactly what’s supposed to happen every step of the way.”
By the time he had—literally—sweated his way through the guidance and retrieval of three simulated supply capsules, Lon’s hands were trembling. He felt as if he had completed a strenuous physical workout. “Thanks,” he told the civilian, Alec Deradier. “I hope it works that well in practice. This gizmo could make a big difference to us. I expect you know that.”
Deradier smiled. “Not as well as you seem to, but I’ve heard the same from other line officers.”
“I don’t want to step on any toes, but I understand that R&D has been working at this for … well, a long time. Some special problem?” Lon spoke tentatively, not at all certain how Deradier might respond to what he might take as criticism.
For a protracted moment, the older man did not speak. He pursed his lips and appeared to be intently studying the tip of his nose. Then he cleared his throat. “Yes, a long time,” he said then, very slowly. “We’ve had the theory well in hand for more than a decade. And, far longer than that, we could have produced a system that would allow a ship or shuttle to place a resupply capsule on the ground within, shall we say, a five-meter radius of its target. The problem arises because of the need for control of the incoming capsule from the ground. Combat situations can change quite quickly—I am told,” he added with a self-conscious glance at Lon’s face. “We would not want to land supply capsules where the enemy might get to them first, or where retrieving them might be too dangerous for our own people. That limits the speed of the capsule to what human perception and reactions can handle, which makes enemy intercept easier, and so forth. To balance all of this has proven difficult.”
“Have the capsule reach the vicinity of its target at the fastest speed possible, still allowing for the man on the ground to direct it to a precise landing,” Lon said.
Deradier nodded. “Exactly. An enemy surface-to-air missile does not have to limit its speed. There have been times when I have almost despaired of finding a workable solution.”
“But now you think you have?”
“We hope.”
Lon nodded. “I wonder if, perhaps, there is one consideration you might not have taken note of. I apologize if this seems presumptuous, but the reactions of a man in a real life-or-death combat situation can’t be adequately approximated in safe field tests. The only way to know for sure, even if everything works perfectly here, is to try them with troops on contract, in a situation where they are faced with an immediate enemy and need ammunition to survive.”
Deradier shrugged. “That is most difficult to test under any other circumstances,” he agreed. “We have likely not given it the fullest of consideration for that very reason. But I might venture to suggest that the parallel is closer than you seem ready to concede. True, your troops will not have the fear and uncertainty of combat to heighten reflexes, but neither will they have any long regimen of too little sleep and constant worry and work to slow those reflexes. In any case, before we could proceed to that sort of testing, we must be satisfied with the controlled experiments.”
Lon woke early the next morning, after a restless night. The simulations had played themselves back, with variations—mostly unpleasant—in his dreams. He had seen himself directing a life-saving capsule of ammunition and food in … only to have it explode in a terrific fireball, consuming all of his men. There was a background of maniacal laughter to the explosion.
It can’t happen like that, he assured himself when he woke trembling from the fears of sleep. It’s not possible, even in combat, and certainly not here and now. They won’t let it happen. But his hands needed a moment to stop trembling, and he could not wait to get into the shower to wash away the sweat that had come with his nightmares.
Breakfast was a hurried affair. Trucks were waiting to carry Lon’s platoons to the testing area. The R&D people would go separately, carrying the control units and their monitoring equipment. Another team was aboard the shuttle that would be used to fire the capsules into the testing area.
“I want my squad leaders to be the first to try steering in the capsules,” Lon told Deradier and Major Pitt. “That gives you experience and steady hands, and they’ve all been in situations where a barrel of bullets from heaven would have been welcome.”
“Probably an excellent idea, Lieutenant,” Major Pitt said, nodding. “It’s something we didn’t cover in our test protocols, and likely we should have. We’ve got a bit of leisure here. We’re only going to fire one rocket at a time, and before a second is launched—if it is—we’ll analyze the results of the first. So let’s get your first man equipped, and Dr. Deradier will go through the procedure with him once more before the shuttle takes off.”
Lon chose Dav Grott to make the first attempt, and hovered nearby while Deradier coached the corporal through the steps again, then attached the controller to Grott’s helmet. “A simple joystick, nothing special at all,” the civilian said. “Two buttons to control the maneuvering jets.” He spent several minutes issuing maneuvering instructions then and watched Dav as he operated the controls. “Good. Good.” Deradier nodded several times. “I think you’ll do fine.” He turned to Pitt. “Major, I think we’re ready.”
Lon’s platoons were deployed in a permanent trench paved and lined with plascrete. Deradier and Pitt remained with them, close to the radio equipment that connected them to the shuttle that would launch the capsules. The rest of the R&D team was dispersed around the area, some in a bunker behind the trench, others in redoubts at the edges of the test area.
“The target is that red X in the center of the white circle out there,” Deradier reminded Dav Grott. A large tarpaulin had been staked to the ground. “One hundred yards out. We’re not looking for great precision, Corporal. You’re not firing for a sharpshooter’s qualification. Somewhere close to the target would be nice, but today we’re more interested in the total maneuvering time once the capsule comes within control range.”
Lon noted that he was sweating again. His hands were balled up into fists at his sides. Almost like my first combat landing, he thought, trying to force himself to relax. He was not too close to Dav. Grott was flanked by Pitt and Deradier. But he was close enough to hear Major Pitt talking to the shuttle pilot.
“Twelve minutes until the shuttle reaches the test area,” Pitt reported after he finished that conversation. “Then we’ll set up specific timing for the first capsule launch. Relax, Corporal. I’ll let you know when it’s time to tighten up.”
Dav, wearing his battle helmet with the faceplate up, managed a weak grin. “I’ll try to remember that, sir,” he said.
The shuttle would make its run from south to north, releasing the capsule at fifteen thousand feet, six miles south of the target. The capsule’s main rocket would accelerate the projectile until it was within a thousand yards—vertically and horizontally; then retrorockets would fire to start slowing the capsule. As soon as Dav spotted the capsule—with a lot of other eyes to assist him during the test—he would take over manual control to bring it into the target. Fast enough to make it hard for an enemy to destroy it, slow enough so the primers on the ammunition aren’t set off, Lon thought. But the only pay-load this capsule would carry would be testing equipment to judge the impact and record the detailed course and second-by-second speed of the landing.
There was a twenty-second countdown before the launch. Eyes and cameras watched the sky, looking for the first sight of the capsule—the test units had been painted a bright red to make that as easy as possible.
“There it is!” A dozen men might have yelled that simultaneously. Once the rocket had been spotted, the rest went too quickly for anyone to do much more than watch. Except for Dav. He juggled his joystick and pushed buttons, biting his lower lip as he concentrated—so fiercely that blood was trickling onto his chin before the job was finished.
The performance was not polished. At the end, the watchers could see the capsule jiggling around, almost going into an end-for-end spin, but it did come to rest—with the force of an object falling from fifty feet—within thirty feet of the center of the cross on the tarp.
A cheer went up from most of Lon’s men. Dav Grott nearly collapsed in exhaustion.
“It’s too soon for cheering,” Alec Deradier said, almost under his breath. Lon scarcely heard him. “Was it within the necessary parameters?” He turned to look at the blockhouse, where the main bank of instruments were housed. Several of his men were already hurrying toward the capsule, flanking the small wheeled cart that would bring it in for further examination.