As Technician Niko Daun dealt the last cards, Bondo, one of the two Central States soldiers in the game, grumbled, "If I get a decent hand this time, it'll be the first tonight."
A dripping soldier entered the 20-man tent that served as living quarters for the battalion's technical detachment. His boots slipped in purple mud as he tried to seal the tent flap. He thumped the ground, cursing in a monotonous voice.
"You're only a rubber down," objected Sergeant Anya Wisloski, Daun's Frisian Defense Forces superior, partner, and—for the three months they'd been on outpost duty—lover.
"Yeah, but that's on Hendries' cards, not me," Bondo said. "I want some cards of my own."
Daun picked up his own bridge hand. Based on what the dealer had, everybody else in the game was looking at great cards.
"What I want," said Anya, "is some decent weather. I haven't seen the sun since we've been up here."
Anya was short, dark-haired and white-skinned. Her waist nipped in and her chest was broad, but the breasts themselves were flat. She was several years older than Daun's 21 standard—how much older she'd avoided saying—and had gone straight into the Frisian Defense Forces while Daun had four years of technical school.
Daun trusted his own judgment inside a piece of electronics farther than he did Anya's (or most anybody else's, if it came to that). There was never any question about who was in charge of a group when Anya decided to take charge, however.
Another gust pelted the tent as a colophon to Anya's statement. For the most part, today's rain had been a drizzle, but occasionally big drops splattered to remind the battalion outpost that there were various forms of misery.
Support Base Bulwark was almost as isolated as a space station would have been. Weekly convoys brought food, replacements, and very occasionally a team of journalists from one of the major cities.
The journalists never stayed long. Sometimes the replacements didn't either. Troops who shot themselves in the foot or, less frequently, in the head, during their first week at Bulwark were a significant cause of attrition.
The base was sited on a low plateau, chosen for its accessibility by road rather than for purposes of defense. Higher peaks surrounded it within a five-klick radius.
The sensors themselves were expected to alert friendly forces if the Democrats massed in numbers sufficient to threaten the outpost. Daun had his doubts, but he realized the Democrats might be just as sloppy as their Central States opponents.
Heavy construction equipment had encircled the perimeter of the base with an earthen wall. The same construction crews then dug bunkers into the sides of that berm. During the months of constant rain, the bunkers filled as much as a meter deep with water.
The infantry protecting the base lived in tents on the bunker roofs. They had no protection except—for the ambitious ones—a wall of sandbags. The tents weren't dry either, but at least the troops didn't have to swim to their bunks.
Conditions for support personnel within the base weren't a great deal better. Walkways constructed from wooden shell crates led between locations, but for the most part the makeshift duckboards had sunk into the greasy, purplish mire. The Tactical Operations Center was an assemblage of the high officers' four living trailers placed around a large tent.
The whole complex was encircled by a triple row of sandbags and dirt-filled shell boxes. The construction engineers had trenched around the protective wall to draw off water. Because of the lack of slope the would-be channel was a moat, but at least it prevented the TOC from flooding.
The 150-mm howitzers of the four-tube battery were on steel planking to keep them from sinking to the trunnions. The guns slid during firing, so it was impossible to place accurate concentrations when the sensors located movement. Because rain and the slick ground made it so difficult to manhandle the 45-kg shells, most firing was done at random when battalion command decided it needed more ammo crates for construction.
The remainder of the support personnel lived in tents and slept on cots. Most of the tents were sandbagged to knee-height, three layers. Higher than that, the single-row walls fell down when the slippery filling bled through the fabric.
The two Frisians' assignment was for six standard months. The indigs were here for a local year—twenty-one months standard, and at least three times longer than Daun could imagine lasting under such conditions.
"Oh, sure, it'll dry out in spring," Bondo said as he scowled at his cards. "Dry out, bake to dust, and blow into every curst thing from your food to the sealed electronics. You think equipment life's bad in this rain, wait until spring."
The purpose of this Central States Army outpost in Maedchen's western tablelands was to service a belt of sensors brought at great expense from Nieuw Friesland. In theory, the sensors and the reaction forces they triggered would prevent infiltration from the Democrat-controlled vestries on the other side of the divide.
Bondo was quite right about the sensor failure rate. The Belt no doubt looked impressive during briefings in the capital, but the reality was as porous as cheesecloth. Infiltrators had an excellent chance of penetrating the eastern vestries unnoticed, and an even better chance of evading the Central States Army's half-hearted reaction patrols.
"One club," Bondo offered.
Daun didn't blame the rain or the quality of the hardware for the rate of sensor failure. Quite simply, personnel assigned by the Central States government weren't up to the job of servicing electronics this sophisticated.
Central States field teams wouldn't follow procedures. For example, they regularly used knives or bayonets to split the sensor frames to exchange data cartridges. The special tools that would perform the task without damage were lost or ignored. They didn't understand their duties. At least a third of the cartridges were inserted upside down, despite the neon arrows on both casing and cartridge, and despite anything Daun could say to the troops he was trying to train.
And they didn't care. As often as not, a field team huddled in a sheltered spot within a klick of the base instead of humping through the rain to service the sensors for which they were responsible. In the morning, they returned with the circuit marked complete—and there wasn't a curst thing Daun or Anya could do about it.
"Three no trump," Anya bid. She grinned coldly around the table.
Daun had already drafted an assessment for the Frisian Defense Forces Maedchen Command, back in the capital Jungfrau. In it he stated flatly that the system wasn't working and could never work as presently constituted.
Nieuw Friesland should either withdraw support from the Central States, or the FDF should insist that the Central States hire a detachment of Frisians sufficient to perform all field as well as base servicing tasks. Otherwise, the inevitable failure would be blamed on Frisian technology rather than the ineptness of the Central States Army at using that technology.
Anya wouldn't let Daun transmit the assessment. It wasn't that she disagreed with him—quite the contrary. But she didn't believe anything a Tech II said could change the policy of bureaucrats on Nieuw Friesland . . . and there was a good chance Daun's opinions, once released, were going to become known to the Central States personnel she and Daun shared a tent with.
There are a lot of ways to get hurt in a war zone. Pissing off the heavily-armed people closest to you wasn't a good way to survive to a pension.
But the situation grated on Daun's sense of rightness, as well as making him feel he was a bubble in a very hostile ocean.
"Too rich for my blood," Hendries said. "I pass."
Daun stared at his cards again. They hadn't changed for the better. He had four clubs, three of each other suit, and his high card was the jack of hearts.
He knew his partner was asking where his support was greatest; and he knew also that the proper answer was: nowhere.
"I pass," he said aloud.
Anya grimaced.
"Pass," said Bondo.
Daun laid out his wretched hand. His partner's expression softened as she saw just what Daun had dealt himself. Hendries glared at his cards to determine a lead, a nearly hopeless task under the circumstances.
The tent flap tore open. "Hey!" called the Central States soldier who stuck his head in. "Smart guys! Your fucking pickups gone down again. The screen in the TOC's nothing but hash!"
"Bloody hell," Anya muttered.
She laid her cards down. "My turn, I guess," she said to Daun. "You were out all morning with the satellite dish."
Daun stood up, waving his partner back. "Look, you were up the mast last night. Besides, I'm dummy. I'll catch this one."
"Hey!" the messenger from the Tactical Operations Center repeated. "Colonel Jeffords isn't real thrilled about this, you know."
That was probably true. The amount paid to Nieuw Friesland by the Central States government for Anya's services was comparable to what the colonel himself earned. Daun's pay was at the scale of a senior captain. The money didn't go into the two technicians' pockets, much of it, and if it had there was still no place to spend money out here on the tableland. It still provided a reason for some of the locals—Jeffords certainly, and apparently this messenger—to get shirty about off-planet smart-asses whose equipment didn't work.
"I'm on the way," Daun said. "Just let me get my gear."
He buckled his equipment belt around his narrow waist, pulled on his poncho, and tried to punch the larger working canopy down into its carrying sheath. He could only get it partway into the container, but that would hold it while he climbed the mast.
The slick fabric still shone with water from when Daun had to use it that morning. It didn't matter—to the job—if he got soaked, but rain dripping into an open box could only make a bad situation worse.
The messenger disappeared. Daun sighed and followed him. "I'll catch the next one, Niko," Anya called as Daun stepped out into the rain.
The flashlight strapped for the moment to Daun's left wrist threw a fan of white light ahead of him. He could switch the beam to deep yellow which wouldn't affect his night vision, but it didn't matter if he became night-blind. He'd need normal light to do his work anyway: many of the components were color-coded. The markings would change hue or vanish if viewed under colored light.
Rain sparkled in the beam. Reflections made it difficult to tell what was mud and what was wet duckboard. The crates were likely to shift queasily underfoot anyway.
Three months more. How the locals stood it was beyond him.
Daun couldn't blame the soldiers he tried to train for being apathetic. It was all very well to tell the troops that their safety depended on them servicing the sensors properly, but a threat to lives so wretched had little incentive value.
Daun and Anya complained, but professionalism and a sense of duty would carry the pair of them through no matter how bad things got. The vast majority of the Central States personnel were conscripts, and the conscripts with the least political influence in Jungfrau besides. Daun was sure that at least eighty percent of the outpost would have deserted by now, if there was any place to which they could desert.
Light through the walls of the tent turned the TOC into a vast russet mushroom, though the fabric looked dull brown by daylight. Daun could hear voices, some of them compressed by radio transmission.
It was conceivable that the problem was inside the TOC, either in the console or the connecting cables. Daun was tempted to check out those possibilities first, but he decided not to waste his time. The console was of Frisian manufacture and sealed against meddling by the locals.
The cables had been laid by the previous pair of FDF advisers. They'd done a first-class job; Daun had checked and approved every millimeter of the route the day he and Anya arrived. Unless somebody'd driven a piece of tracked construction equipment through the TOC, the conduits should be fine. The indigs were capable of doing something that bone-headed, but Daun would have heard it happening.
The thirty-meter mast was a triangular construct set in concrete and anchored to the trailer housing the battery commander. The unit telescoped in three sections. Daun could lower the mast to save most of the climb, but re-erecting it would require help to keep the guy wires from fouling. He didn't trust the indigs to do that properly even during daylight.
He squelched to the base of the mast, hooked his safety belts, and began to climb the rung-like braces which bound the three verticals together. The mast was formed from plastic extrusions, not metal, but the rungs still felt icy to Daun's bare hands. They were also slick as glass.
The sensor wands' removable recording cartridges provided extremely precise information on all movements within the coverage area. If a human passed within two or three meters of the wand, the retrieved cartridge could determine the state of health based on body temperature and pulse rate. Such data were remarkable but useful only as the raw material for a historical overview.
Base Bulwark collected coarse sensor readings in real-time, via coded frequency-hopping radio signals. As the messenger had implied, this was the second miserable night in a row that the ultra-high gain antenna atop the mast had failed.
Last night a match-head-sized integrated circuit had blown: the sort of thing that happened only occasionally with Frisian hardware, but always at a bad time. Anya had unplugged the blown chip and replaced it with a good one.
Anya, simply glad to have the antenna working again, had pitched the bad chip out into mud and darkness. If she'd instead saved the fried unit, Daun would have examined it to determine the cause of failure. Long odds the problem was due to manufacturing error, but there was always a possibility that a short within the box was causing a hot spot.
The chance to diagnose the underlying problem instead of merely fixing the symptom was much of the reason Daun had volunteered to climb the mast. Besides, he liked the hardware part of his work well enough that he preferred to be doing it instead of playing cards with strangers he couldn't respect and didn't much like.
There were guy wires on each of the three sections of the telescoping mast. When he reached each set of guys, Daun unhooked one of his two safety loops, rehooked it above the wires, and repeated the process with the second loop. At no time did he trust merely his boots and grip to keep him on the mast. Daun wasn't so much cautious as perfectly methodical. The notion of cutting corners to lessen his exposure to the chill drizzle didn't cross his mind.
Viewed from the top of the thirty-meter mast, the lights of Bulwark Base had a surreal innocence, like the gleam of will-o'-the-wisps in a nighted meadow. Rain softened the patterns and dusted glare into sparkle. The scene wasn't beautiful but it had a dignified tranquility, far removed from the muddy truth. The glowing canvas of the TOG could be the entrance to the Venusberg, and Daun could imagine that flashlights in the tents on the perimeter were cupids twinkling around the goddess of love.
The receiving antenna at the mast peak was enclosed in a weatherproof capsule about the size of a soccer ball. The covering was dull gray plastic which was reasonably sturdy but remained transparent over most of the electromagnetic spectrum. Wherever possible, the sensor wands transmitted over microwave frequencies, but those without a line of sight to the receiver used VHF or UHF as circumstances required.
Daun arranged the working canopy over the capsule. When he had it stiffened into position, the monomolecular sheeting blocked the rain completely. Before then, however, he managed to pour what felt like a liter of cold water down the back of his neck from the canopy's folds.
He sighed, clipped his light to a strut so that it shone down on the work, and opened the antenna capsule. Two of the micro-miniaturized circuits were black instead of the healthy gold color. That was neither surprising nor a problem. When one chip blew, it could easily have overloaded its neighbor. Daun's repair kit contained at least three replacements for every chip on the chassis.
He opened the cover wider as he prepared to pull the failed chips. An irregularity on the inner face of the cover caught his eye. The plastic had blistered and turned silvery on the side facing the chips that had failed.
The antenna didn't draw enough juice to heat the cover even slightly. A short circuit which blistered the plastic that way would have vaporized the circuitry, chassis and all, instead of popping a chip or two.
The energy that had caused the antenna to fail had come from outside. The most likely outside source was a precisely aimed X-ray laser on one of the enemy-held hilltops overlooking Bulwark Base.
Feeling colder than rain could make him, Daun reached up to key his commo helmet and alert the camp. The shock wave proved he was too late.
The warhead went off with a hollow Klock! that blew one of the TOC trailers inside out in a sleet of aluminum. The weapon, a laser-guided anti-tank missile, was configured to defeat heavy armor with a shaped charge. A straight fragmentation or HE warhead would have been better suited for the present task. This was along the lines of killing mosquitoes with an elephant gun.
On the other hand, an elephant gun will kill a mosquito. Little survived of the trailer, and nothing of anyone who happened to be in it.
The canopy flapped skyward in the blast. The antennas whipped violently and a guy wire parted, either overstressed or cut by flying shrapnel. Daun hugged the mast with both arms as his feet slipped from the rungs.
Buzz-bombs and crew-served automatic weapons raked the bunkers on the north and west perimeter of the base. Tents collapsed or exploded, flinging out the corpses of troops huddled beneath canvas for shelter.
While the antenna was dead-lined the previous night, the Democrats had moved an assault force into position in the gullies close to Bulwark Base. Tonight they had taken the antenna out of commission again in order to make their final approach through the rain. The Democrats knew they had nothing to fear from the garrison's patrols or the watchfulness of the troops on duty on the perimeter of the base.
Another terminally guided missile impacted, this time on furniture near the center of the TOC. The tent shredded in a reddish appliqué over the white flash at the core. Bits of missile casing, and fragments of equipment converted into secondary projectiles, riddled the three remaining trailers.
The mast swayed even more violently. Daun lost his grip. He was hanging by his safety belts. The broken guy wire whacked across his helmet and bound his out-flung arm to the antenna mast.
Half a second later, a third missile detonated in the Technical Detachment's tent.
For an instant, the flash threw the silhouettes of the dozen startled occupants against the canvas. Then the tent was gone, the flash was a blinding purple afterimage on Daun's retinas, and Sergeant Anya Wisloski shrieked into her commo helmet like a hog being gelded.
Daun's legs flailed as he tried to find the rungs again with his feet. The mast had torqued and bent over so that he hung out in the air. Most of his weight was on his left forearm, bound to the mast. He thought the bones might have broken. The pain was inconceivable.
He didn't scream. His ears still rang with the sound of Anya's cry.
Figures, some of them waving weapons, lurched from tents. The TOC's instrumentation ran off a portable fusion power plant adapted from the drive unit of a Frisian armored vehicle. There was plenty of excess capacity. Most of the living quarters within the berm had electric lights run through a variety of jury-rigged conductors, with telephone line predominating.
The Central States personnel were backlit by their own illumination. Democrat troops had quickly crossed the skimpy wire entanglements by throwing quilted padding over the barbs. They opened fire from the berm, knocking startled defenders down like bowling pins.
Daun managed to grip a rung with his right hand and take some of the weight off his tangled arm. The mast swayed, dipping slightly with each movement. Sooner or later one of the twisted poles would snap and collapse the whole tower. Daun had to get free before then.
A ricochet moaned past his face. The bullet sounded lonely, like a dog unjustly kicked. Daun thrashed his lower body and finally hooked his right leg around the tilting mast.
In one of the gun pits nearby, the crew were trying to depress their 150-mm howitzer to fire directly on the attackers. A buzz-bomb described a flat arc that climaxed on the gun's recoil compensator. The projectile burst with a white flash and a blast of shrapnel that was invisible except for its effect on the crew.
The gunners spun away and fell. Open powder charges sprayed across the gun pit and ignited in a fierce red flare. The gun captain crawled back toward her position through the flame, dragging loops of intestine. She pulled herself onto the trail and died, reaching vainly for the firing lanyard.
Trip flares attached to the wire on the south side of Bulwark Base began to go off. The sappers leading the Democrat assault had disconnected the flares on their approach routes. Members of the garrison stumbled over their own mines while fleeing into the night.
A truck, one of the few vehicles assigned to the base, drove south out of the engineer compound. Scores of troops clung to the cab and body. Some of them shot wildly.
Democrat riflemen and machine gunners opened fire. Bullets sparked on the frame and slapped troops from the vehicle. The truck continued to accelerate, skidding on the slick surface. Its eight driven wheels cast up a rooster-tail of mud, water, and duckboards.
Two buzz-bombs sputtered toward the moving target. One missed high, sailing over the berm to vanish. The other went off close alongside. Would-be escapees tumbled from the bed, but the run-while-flat tires permitted the truck to keep going.
The gate to the road south from Bulwark Base was three X-frames connected by a horizontal pole and strung with barbed wire. A flange-like extension of the berm was intended to force vehicles to slow for a right-angle turn when entering or leaving the base.
The truck hit the gate, crushed it down, and roared over the berm's sloped extension in low gear. A Central States soldier ran along behind the vehicle, trying to climb aboard. He lost his footing on the berm and sprawled.
As the truck disappeared, the soldier rose to one knee and tried to shoot at the vehicle. Mud clogged his rifle. He flung the useless weapon after the truck. A moment later, a Democrat machine gun nailed him into the berm with a burst of golden tracers.
The leg Daun had flung around the mast cramped because of the awkward angle. That pain was lost in the red throb of blood returning to his left arm now that he didn't dangle by it.
With no tools and one good hand, Daun couldn't unwrap the guy wire that held him. It was spliced into his safety belts and apparently pinched by a fold of the slowly collapsing mast. He'd lost the wrist light when the first missile went off.
He supposed that was a good thing, because otherwise he'd have been a lighted target. He giggled hysterically.
Daun heard a thump over the shooting. He looked down. A dark parcel lay on an expanse of softly reflectant aluminum. Someone had tossed a satchel charge onto the roof of the battery commander's trailer.
Daun clutched the mast with his free arm and tried to find footing for his other leg. He closed his eyes instinctively. Blood vessels in his eyelids reddened the yellow flash that streamed through them.
The blast flattened the trailer and flung Daun upward like a yo-yo shooting the moon. The guy wire broke again, but the safety belts held.
The mast toppled with the grace of a falling tree, slowly at first but accelerating as it neared the ground. Daun was underneath. Remaining guy wires zinged as they parted.
A Democrat parachute flare drifted down through the overcast to illuminate the encampment. The mast rotated as light bloomed. Daun stared down through the latticework at the ruin of Bulwark Base instead of up into the clouds that would otherwise have been the last thing he saw.
A pole in the base section had broken, causing the mast to twist on the remaining verticals before it hit the ground. Daun slammed into the mud, beside rather than beneath the structure to which he was bound.
The impact knocked all the breath out of his body. The antenna capsule snapped off and bounced twice before coming to rest beside the technician. He didn't quite lose consciousness, but the shots and screams around him faded into a thirty-cycle hum for a few seconds.
The rain had almost ceased. The flare sank lower. Vertical objects cast jagged shadows that cut like saw-teeth across the surface of Bulwark Base.
Daun lay with the mast on one side of him and on the other the low sandbag wall that had once protected the Technical Detachments tent. The missile had destroyed the wall it hit and the structure beyond, but it spared the sandbags on the opposite side.
Someone just across the wall was moaning.
Daun tried to free himself from the tangle in which he lay. His left leg was pinned and his left arm was still tethered to the mast. He could move his head as far as his neck flexed, but he couldn't crane it high enough to see what was holding his limbs.
The bunched jacket held his right arm almost as tightly as his left. There was no possibility of tearing the tough, weatherproof fabric.
Daun heard voices nearby. He opened his mouth to call for help. One of the voices said, "Watch it! This one's alive!"
A machine pistol within the area the Tech Detachment tent had covered fired a short burst downward. The muzzle flashes were red and bright.
Daun wore a pistol as part of his required equipment. It was in a cross-draw holster on his left side, where it was least in the way when he was working. He could no more reach the weapon now than he could fly back to Nieuw Friesland under his own power.
"They were playing cards," said one of the Democrats.
"Hey!" said his partner. "We're just supposed to be taking guns and ammunition."
"So I'm searching their wallets for items of intelligence value," the first Democrat snarled. "If you're smart, you'll keep your fucking mouth shut about it, too."
The sky blazed orange as the light of an explosion reflected from the low clouds. The ground shock lifted Daun, the mast, and the sandbag wall an instant before the airborne shock wave punched across them. The ammo dump had exploded.
Daun hit the ground again. He was still tied to the roast. Sandbags collapsed over him.
Individual shells detonated during the next fifteen seconds, some of them at a considerable distance where the initial explosion hurled them. The first Democrat was cursing. The blast had knocked him skidding in the mud.
"There's one!" cried his partner. Two machine pistols fired together. Daun felt the whack of little bullets against the sandbags over him, but he wasn't the target. The moans of the soldier on the other side of the wall ended in a liquid gurgle.
"Hey, look it!" shouted the second member of the Democrat clean-up team. He was standing beside Daun, but the Frisian could see only a triangle of cloud through the jumble of collapsed wall. "Look at this!"
"Bloody hell!" said the first man. "That's a bloody powergun. The Cents don't have bloody powerguns!"
"I do," said his jubilant partner. A bolt of cyan plasma lanced skyward.
"You cursed fool!" the first Democrat said. "Don't do that! Somebody'll shoot us! Besides"—His voice changed slightly into that of a hustler calculating his chances—"it's not worth anything much 'cause we can't get ammo for it. Look, though—just for the hell of it, I'll give you two hundred lira for it. For the curiosity."
"Fuck you," said his partner. "This is mine."
The two Democrats stepped onto the bags covering Daun. They hopped from him over the fallen antenna mast.
"Look," the first man was saying, "half of it is mine anyway . . . ."
Daun's lungs burned, but he was afraid to breathe. The detached part of his mind noted that the second Democrat should be very careful about standing with his back to his partner this night. Otherwise he might die for the trophy, as surely as Sergeant Anya Wisloski had died.