Intrepid

Kris sat down with a new problem to chew on. How do you train civilians into fighters in the short time she had? A very short time, Kris found, when she called up the map. Jack would spring the first trap in a bit more than one and a half orbits.

21

Colonel Cortez did not like the smell of what lay ahead. The ground was low and stank of marsh. Not the honest stench of the marshes humans had known forever … and drained on Earth. No, somehow this waterlogged mess had an acridly sweet smell to it. Nothing was right on this godforsaken planet.

If Cortez hadn't already issued orders to put a stop to the bitching about ''Why not let the damn locals have the damn place,'' he would have muttered something like that himself.

He searched what lay before him with his binoculars. As the photomap Thorpe had sent him showed, there was swamp as far as the broom trees let him see. And directly in front of him a grassy mound ran straight and narrow for about three klicks.

It wasn't exactly a road. Like everything on this planet the natives called Pandemonium, it was different. No solid gravel or asphalt road for these folks. No, they'd planted this causeway with one of the perennial grains that the locals harvested. From the stubble, someone had actually come along recently and cut a crop off it. Must not get much traffic.

One of the officers from the psalm singers had a couple of local hostages wading in the ditches on either side of the causeway. They were nearly up to their necks.

''I told you it's deep,'' one local hollered, loud enough that no one could avoid hearing. ''We had to get the dirt for the road from somewhere. We dug it out of the muck beside where we put the road. And we kept a lookout posted with a rifle handy. There's something in this water that likes to nibble on toes.''

That last claim Colonel Cortez didn't know how much to credit. But it got a lot of the white berets around him muttering prayers and eyeing the water darkly. You couldn't see six inches into the muddy stuff.

''What do you make of it, sir?'' Major Zhukov asked as he climbed aboard Cortez's command vehicle, one of the few army green battle rigs on the planet.

Cortez shook his head. ''Here is where I'd ambush me, if I had anything like a formal fighting force. Your Guard Fusilier could lurk out there in the water and only surface to shoot this bunch to a bloody pulp. Not so?''

''Just so, sir. Just so,'' Zhukov said, with an expressive sigh. Zhukov had been sent along on this joyride by the wise fathers of Torun to make sure that the lone company of Guard Fusiliers they rented out was returned in good shape. Some battle experience gained … with someone else paying the bills … but no real damage to the merchandise.

Cortez had wanted to rent the entire Fusilier battalion, but the penny-pinching fathers of Torun had learned something about defending their planet from that unidentified squadron of battleships that suddenly appeared over Wardhaven while their own fleet was elsewhere. Cortez got one company from them and had to settle for filling out the rest of the battalion from New Jerusalem.

Oh, and the financiers had been glad for the savings.

Colonel Cortez turned to the major. ''Do the engineers attached to your Guard company have sensors that would let me see warm bodies in that muddy water or pick up the electrical impulses of a sharpshooter's heart if he's standing half a klick away behind that ironwood tree?''

''Certainly, sir. We have a fully capable company of engineers on Torun,'' the major said with a bleak smile. '' ‘But engineers, we don't need no stinking engineers on this pissant planet.' Isn't that what your investors told you and Thorpe when you asked the Council of Torun Elders to rent some to you?''

''Your treasurer set a mighty high price for a platoon of engineers.''

Major Zhukov snorted bitterly. ''Their expensive engineer toys were bought while he was cashing the checks. He squealed at every penny as it fell through his tight fist. The gear my infantry is wearing is ten, twenty years old. A lot better than anything we've seen on this planet, mind you, but not something our glorious treasurer had to pay for. He let it go ‘cheap.' ''

''I'm just glad he let it go. I don't know what we're facing, but it's got to be better than these psalm singers.''

''Don't knock them. They didn't look too bad on the march up. You got any estimate of what this Longknife kid has?''

''Nope. Thorpe's not telling me a lot about her. Cusses her plenty, but not a lot of hard data behind all the noise.''

''I don't have anything on Thorpe and her, but one of the junior officers from the Lord's Ever Victorious Host did confiscate this from one of his soldiers.''

Zhukov pulled a plastic flimsy from his shirt pocket and unfolded a large picture of a busty redhead in a white dress that looked only thinly painted on over her many curves.

''That the Longknife girl?''