Tactics of Delay, Pt. 36. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

It was an interesting moment. For the first time in the campaign, Dona was calling McMurdo. He was up onscreen in a moment.

“Colonel Graham. Dona. What an unexpected pleasure.”

He was positively purring, his forces having finally taken the road junction, and with a small but powerful armoured column presently on the short road to Roussef, This while the main force refreshed and regrouped.

“Hello, General McMurdo. And how are you this fine day?” And she meant it, too.

As long as he stayed healthy, the Unfriendlies wouldn’t replace him.

The family had too much klout for that.

He sat there, wondering. Surely he knew she wasn’t about to surrender, in which case curiosity would be building.

She nodded and a trooper put up the image. This was one Private First Class Phillip Dionne Jackson, Unfriendly trooper and only recently ransomed from the native Denebi. According to a published family tree in their databank, he seemed genuine enough.

“I would just like to reassure the General that his grand-nephew is safe and that he is being treated very well.”

“Oh, dear. That—that’s—” With a swallow and a nod, the General acknowledged the gesture.

“Well, that’s wonderful, Colonel Graham. Really rather decent of you.”

She smiled, having just disgorged the canary or maybe it was the Cheshire cat she was thinking of.

“I would like to return him to you. Honestly, we don’t have the facilities for large numbers of prisoners. I am also deeply saddened by the number of recent Unfriendly casualties. I would like the General to know that we are taking every step to minimize such casualties as much as possible under the present circumstances.” She meant it too.

The sooner they wrapped this up, the more Unfriendlies that would be going home. They might live to fight another day. Maybe they would just live.

They might even be a little smarter after this.

She wasn’t being paid to hate people.

“Ah—ah. Er.”

“At exactly ten-hundred hours this morning, a red civilian pickup truck, a Roussef Volunteer Fire Department truck to be exact, will approach the junction of Highways 17 and 2, just east of Roussef. He’ll be coming from the north. Phillip will be alone, in fact he assures us that he can drive it. That saves me from risking one of my troopers, whom, as I’m sure you are aware, are already quite busy enough. We will avoid detonating any mines, or any other ordinance while Phillip is in transit. That’s a window of about fifteen or twenty minutes. I will be giving up my own personal transport, General, so I do hope you appreciate it.”

“Ah—Colonel Graham.”

“Yes?”

"Thank you. Thank you very much.” The gentleman’s chest heaved with some kind of strong emotion.

Maybe he had finally figured it out, whatever. Maybe he remembered Phillip, opening presents on Christmas morning in front of some big old fireplace, at the family manor, or dandling him on his knee. The baptismal font—

He might really love that kid.

He swallowed, eyes shifting, but he was a brave man and they inevitably came back.

“Ah. I was wondering. If there was something, ah, something reasonable, that I could possibly do for you, my dear, ah…in exchange?” The face was definitely darker now.

“Yes, Ralph. There is. I would suggest that my earlier suggestion was actually a pretty reasonable one. Civilian emergency vehicles, police, fire and ambulance…with all the lights going, sirens going, should be considered as neutral in this present conflict?”

His mouth opened and then closed.

He smiled, the first genuine reaction she’d seen.

A paper transaction, almost meaningless except that honour had been served.

Honour, must always be served.

Some kind of bargain had been struck. This was now a relationship.

He nodded, he shrugged. He sighed.

He smiled again, the face a little colder this time. Perhaps he really was beginning to get it—

“Of course, Colonel Graham. I agree. That seems reasonable enough. And I thank you—on behalf of his mother, his family, and naturally, on my own behalf. Ah, also, on behalf of my dear sweet mother, as well as my wives, daughters and sisters. Thank you for, for giving us back our Phillip.”

It almost looked like he was going to get emotional. That one had hit home. She clenched down hard on an impulse to ask about the concubines—did they like Phillip too?

The life of one man had just been saved.

The old boy must have been pretty worried about Phillip.

“There was just one point that I wanted to mention, General.”

“Oh, please, Dona. Call me Ralph.” This smile was completely artificial and not very good.

“Sure. Ralph. If your people had come in peace. If they had landed on the other side of Denebola-Seven. There is virtually nothing the people of Denebola-Seven could have done about it. Simply put, it would have been too costly.” There weren’t the forces or even the transport available. “Some sort of accommodation would have been a lot more likely.”

“Ah, Dona. But surely you understand that there is a war on.”

So. This was part of their greater strategy.

Thanks, Ralph.

Play dumb.

Play the embattled commander.

“Yeah, but there wasn’t—not until you people came along. The problem is, you would have had to start in the middle of nowhere and to build from scratch. It is just so much easier to take what doesn’t belong to you. It’s a question of tolerance, and you people simply haven’t learned to get along with others.”

Not yet, maybe someday—

Hopefully, sooner rather than later.

“In which case, Dona, our people would have been extremely vulnerable.”

Scrambling to recover—

That one had hit home pretty good as well.

“How could they be vulnerable if there wasn’t a war on? And we weren’t likely to start one, either, Ralph. You outnumber us ten to one, after all. No, whatever happens here, it’s all on your own head—you and your superiors.”

“Dona, Dona—”

She cut him off, being rather sick of that patronizing tone by this point.

You and your sick little videos.

***

The Unfriendlies, having lost more people, more weapons and more vehicles on the short stretch leading to Roussef, were undeterred.

Having reassured themselves that the Confederation forces were mostly withdrawn, the bulk of them had turned around and come back to the road junction, and yet one more day had passed.

Also, another eighty or so casualties—the Confederation defenses having been heavy and well thought-out.

Roussef was essentially neutralized by one strong roadblock, and everybody knew it. No matter what actually happened there.

There were rumblings in the night, as they rested and reorganized for what could only be a dawn start. They had reset their artillery positions so as to dominate the road to Ryanville for the next twenty or more kilometres. By this time they must have had twelve or fifteen hundred troops involved in the operation, the count tallied by observation after observation. Yet another column forming up in Deneb City, there were helos patrolling the hills north of the city, hoping to locate the Mongoose if it was indeed used—and she was definitely considering it but the last reloads were precious.

Dawn was breaking in the southeastern sky. There might even be a little sun today.

“All right. They’re moving. Alert all positions.”

Harvey began tapping away on his board and the other staff members were riveted to their tasks.

You could have heard a pin drop—if it hadn’t been for the carpeting.

The first rounds were already falling on both sides, as the Unfriendly barrage opened up ahead of them and the Confederation troops blew the first of the charges. The charges were wired not along the road and the ditch, but by trunks and busses up in the hills, parallel to the road. As usual, the charges had been buried, camouflaged and obscured as well as possible. Every booby had its own camera, sometimes more than one. They were now wired into their network, which would only be temporarily useful. From now on, every defense point would be hard-linked by fibre so that people could talk to each other. Buried in their holes and bunkers, with the weather worsening, the satellite laser-link wasn’t nearly so reliable and they had to have communication.

Upon withdrawal, this part of the network would be cut up into little bits and abandoned, using remotely-triggered explosives.

Downstream fibre cables had been cut. The Unfriendlies had tripped over that a few times by now. They must understand the significance of it, but hadn’t tried to use it for anything so far. They were jamming known Confederation radio frequencies, but with simple trailered generators providing the power, the area they could swamp was limited to a bare few kilometres in radius and that would be on level ground—in this hill country, it was even less a lot of the time. At close ranges, the com units carried by individual troopers were burning right through it, what with the short signals, heavily-compressed bursts of data at max power. As for the enemy drones, the very latest in battlefield jamming capability should have been a priority, but apparently no one had thought much about that. As for the enemy radio traffic, the Confederation was glad enough to have it. They were sucking it up and analyzing it. They were recording every bit of it for eventual decryption by bigger machines.

Machines that were much more capable than anything available on Debebola-Seven. The larger strategic picture being what it was. The data might be worth her whole command—if they could get it off-planet.

The fibre links saved them from yelling back and forth, foxhole to foxhole.

“Here comes the infantry.” With a good one-point-two kilometres between one peak and the next, anticipating ambush and stiffening resistance the closer they got to Ryanville, the enemy assault force appeared to consist of light scouting vehicles, sacrificial goats leading the van, then some Samson armoured cars, a string of armoured personnel carriers, and then came the Joshuas, which were back up on the trailers. “They’re scattered about pretty good. Trying to avoid obvious ambush or mine-points.”

There were two companies on foot, one on each side of the road…

Further infantry was aboard a long line of trucks and other assorted vehicles, including more armour, on the far side of the hill.

“Activate Mongoose Two. Hit that leading column, please.”

“Roger that, Colonel.” The trooper looked over. “We’ll fire them one at a time, Colonel.”

Good.

A single triangular icon appeared on the big board.

“Tracking.”

“Thank you.”

Artillery rounds were landing on the forward assault group, and once again, the scene was becoming obscured by smoke. With a low, overcast sky, the satellite was next to useless. The fact that an enemy satellite would also be similarly affected wasn’t a whole lot of comfort.

What if it’s a hell of a lot better than ours?

With their two columns united now, and mindful of Noya’s recent success with the drone aircraft, the Unfriendlies had two drones in the air today, one of them purely for reconnaissance and the other now armed with an underslung, pod-type machine-gun mount. Considering the size of the aircraft, this might be anything up to a cannon in the 17 to 23-mm class. This drone was shadowing the recon machine, anything from one and a half to two kilometres back, and staying about a thousand metres higher in altitude. It was clearly meant to protect the other machine’s tail, and hoping to get a crack at one of the Confederation drones which tended to stay as high as possible where the ground-based systems couldn’t get at them. This was simple enough—keep the enemy drone between your own and the enemy column. If they tried to take you out, they stood just as much chance of hitting their own machine.

The Unfriendlies had been doing some thinking and were clearly prepared to slug it out.

“Mongoose hit on the column, Colonel. Assessing results, but we probably got somebody.”

“Thank you. Release the drones, please.” They’d been on standby, engines ticking over on the ground.

It was time for an air raid, and with the road to Ryanville wired for sound, colour and action in a proper and continuous feedback loop, all three were armed to the teeth. Their cameras would be used for targeting this morning.

“Colonel!” Two pictures came up in the middle of her big battle-board.

One was a POV, a point-of-view shot, moving quickly through brush and trees and then up a short but steep incline.

The other view was a panoramic, now zooming in to reveal the blur of one of their big-dog animals as it raced up to the side of one of the truckloads of infantry at an indicated eighty kilometres per hour. With probably fifteen or twenty people in there not counting the driver and relief up front, the resulting explosion would have been devastating.

Again, all along the line, the column halted while the burning wreck was cleared. A few stretchers were carried away.

Dona sighed.

“Thank you. Good work.”

The room was very quiet.

Another fifteen minutes had been used up.

***

Dona was with Harvey and the girl, proud of their work and their accomplishment.

“Okay, Colonel. Here’s the visible-spectrum shot from our bird. And down here, in the left corner, is a little black dot.” They’d timed the call to the colonel perfectly, and the white cloud-tops made it so much easier to see. “We zoomed out, and panned around, rather than zooming in. Makes a big difference in close-up focus, and therefore the acuity.”

This was live, all in real-time.

That’s how they’d spotted it in the first place, against cloud cover lit by the morning sun, that and one fortuitous radar-glint reflecting off of it shortly before dawn broke. With stealthy design it was otherwise invisible to their other instruments.

“Hmn. Very nice.” That was one way of putting it—

So the bastards had one up there after all.

“Ah. What do you want us to do now, Colonel?”

Having enjoyed the present assignment, they would be understandably concerned about being separated—clearly liking each other’s company in their cozy little lab, off and away from everyone else.

“Okay. Harvey. We need an estimate of its size. The Unfriendlies have some systems that are known to intelligence, although this one might be something new. Let’s see if we can identify it, first of all. Second. I would like a proper position, as accurate as you can make it…”

Coordinates, altitude, mass, all down to the nth degree. Its velocity was only slightly less than their own. Small as such birds were, it couldn’t be that far off, or they’d never have seen it with the lens or the human eye—they had a couple of starting points for the math. Harvey was looking at her oddly, mouth open, but she’d had all of their training, plus plenty more where that came from. Captains knew a lot of stuff that private troopers didn’t and might never.

“Our own bird has good maneuvering capability, Colonel. It’s in a geosynchronous orbit, the energy state is over ninety percent since initial boost was from LEO.” The girl took a breath. “What I was thinking, is what if we can get closer and maybe get a better look.”

Burn off some fuel in retro, and consequently some speed. The Mark Seventeen would descend. That part was simple enough. Milo might drop out of the picture, but it was a backwater anyways.

Dona nodded.

“What’s interesting is that they’re not too far off of our own satellite’s position. We’re lucky that theirs is in a lower orbit, and that is for sure.” Was the enemy satellite heavier by some substantial margin?

Would that necessarily imply that it was older, less sophisticated? Or did it mean it was more modern, and better-equipped than the Confederation’s bird. Perhaps it had extensive maneuvering capability of its own. Its fuel state might be one hundred percent.

The Mark Seventeen Satellite, deployed by the Confederation years before as part of their security mandate for Denebola-Seven, was using technology that was thirty or forty years out of date. It was a second-hand unit, adequate enough at the time.

“At least now we have some questions to work with.” That was the thing with the girl, Flaherty—that mind struck on things that others seemed to miss.

She turned things around. She looked at things from the other end—which was why Dona was sort of interested in her future with the Organization.

The Mark Seventeen had some very good optics and the sensors were the best that could be provided at that time.

The Unfriendly satellite might be brand-new tech, and at least comparable to the best anyone from more developed sectors of the galaxy could put up. It might be indigenous tech, but it might just as well have been acquired somewhere else. All it took was money and the Unfriendlies had been on a bit of a spending spree lately.

“You guys have something to work on.”

“Ah, yes, ma’am.” Harvey put his head down and began searching the database for known Unfriendly military reconnaissance satellites…

The girl nodded, tongue-tied now perhaps, when confronted with the CO’s approval.

“Good. I will leave you with that. Good luck to you guys and carry on.”

She would tell them the part about shooting it down when they had a little more information.

The door closed behind her.

(End of part thirty-six.)

Previous Episodes.

Part One.

Part Two.

Part Three.

Part Four.

Part Five.

Part Six.

Part Seven.

Part Eight.

Part Nine.

Part Ten.

Part Eleven.

Part Twelve.

Part Thirteen.

Part Fourteen.

Part Fifteen.

Part Sixteen.

Part Seventeen.

Part Eighteen.

Part Nineteen.

Part Twenty.

Part Twenty-One.

Part Twenty-Two.

Part Twenty-Three.

Part Twenty-Four.

Part Twenty-Five

Part Twenty-Six.

Part Twenty-Seven.

Part Twenty-Eight

Part Twenty-Nine

Part Thirty.

Part Thirty-One.

Part Thirty-Two.

Part Thirty-Three.

Part Thirty-Four.

Part Thirty-Five.

Images.

Image One. Collection of Louis Shalako.

Image Two. Confederation Public Communications Office.

Image Three. CPCO.

Image Four. Denebola-Seven Defense Force.

Image Five. Giuseppe De Chiarra.

Image Six. Fred.

Louis Shalako books and stories are available from iTunes. Please take a minute and have a look.

Thank you for reading.