Everything seemed normal inside and he shouted orders to the duty sergeant before he realized he had never seen the man before. He turned to face a squad of leveled rifles. A bright light stabbed from a darker corner of the room, nearly blinding him.
"Good morning, sir," an even voice said.
Commandant Morris blinked, then carefully raised his hands in surrender. "I've no sidearms. Who the hell are you, anyway?"
"Colonel John Christian Falkenberg, at your service. Will you surrender this base and save your men?"
Morris nodded grimly. He'd seen enough outside to know the battle was hopeless. His career was finished too, no matter what he did, and there was no point in letting the Friedlanders be slaughtered. "Surrender to whom?"
The light flicked off and Morris saw Falkenberg. There was a grim smile on the colonel's lips. "Why, to the Great Jehovah and the Free States of Washington, Commandant…"
Albert Morris, who was no historian, did not understand the reference. He took the public address mike the grim troopers handed him. Fortress Astoria had fallen.
Twenty-three hundred kilometers to the west at Allansport, Sergeant Sherman White slapped the keys to launch three small solid rockets. They weren't very powerful birds, but they could be set up quickly, and they had the ability to loft a hundred kilos of tiny steel cubes to a hundred and forty kilometers. White had very good information on the Confederate satellite's ephemeris; he'd observed it for its past twenty orbits.
The target was invisible over the horizon when Sergeant White launched his interceptors. As it came overhead the small rockets had climbed to meet it. Their radar fuses sought the precise moment, then they exploded in a cloud of shot that rose as it spread. It continued to climb, halted, and began to fall back toward the ground. The satellite detected the attack and beeped alarms to its masters. Then it passed through the cloud at fourteen hundred meters per second relative to the shot.
Four of the steel cubes were in its path.
V
Falkenberg studied the manuals on the equipment in the Confederate command car as it,raced northward along the Columbia Valley Road toward Doak's Ferry. Captain Frazer's scouts were somewhere ahead with the captured cavalry equipment, and behind Falkenberg the Regiment was strung out piecemeal. There were men on motorcycles, in private trucks, horse-drawn wagons, and on foot.
There'd be more walking soon. The captured cavalry gear was a lucky break, but the Columbia Valley wasn't technologically developed. Most local transport was by animal power, and the farmers relied on the river to ship produce to the deep-water port at Astoria. The riverboats and motor fuel were the key to the operation. There wasn't enough of either.
Glenda Ruth Horton had surprised Falkenberg by not arguing about the need for haste, and her ranchers were converging on all the river ports, taking heavy casualties in order to seize boats and fuel before the scattered Confederate occupation forces could destroy them. Meanwhile Falkenberg had recklessly flung the Forty-second northward.
"Fire fight ahead," his driver said. "Another of them one-battery posts."
"Right." Falkenberg fiddled with the unfamiliar controls until the map came into sharper focus, then activated the comm circuit.
"Sir," Captain Frazer answered. "They've got a battery of 105's and an MG company in there. More than I can handle."
"Right. Pass it by. Let Miss Horton's ranchers keep it under siege. Found any more fuel?"
Frazer laughed unpleasantly. "Colonel, you can adjust the carburetors in these things to handle a lot, but Christ, they bloody well won't run on parafin. There's not even farm machinery out here! We're running on fumes now, and damned low-grade fumes at that."
"Yeah." The Confederates were getting smarter. For the first hundred kilometers they took fueling stations intact, but now unless the Patriots were already in control the fuel was torched before Frazer's fast-moving scouts arrived, "Keep going as best you can, Captain."
"Sir. Out."
"We got some reserve fuel with the guns," Sergeant Major Calvin reminded him. The big RSM sat in the turret of the command caravan, and at frequent intervals fondled the thirty-millimeter cannon there. It wasn't much of a weapon, but it had been a long time since the RSM was gunner in an armored vehicle. He was hoping to get in some fighting.
"No. Those guns have to move east to the passes. They're sure to send a reaction force from the capital, Top Soldier."
But would they? Falkenberg wondered. Instead of moving northwest from the capital to reinforce the fortress at Doak's Ferry, they might send troops by sea to retake Astoria. It would be a stupid move, and Falkenberg counted on the Confederates acting intelligently. As far as anyone knew, the Astoria Fortress guns dominated the river mouth.
A detachment of Weapons Battalion remained there with antiaircraft rockets to keep reconnaissance at a distance, but otherwise Astoria was held only by a hastily-raised Patriot force stiffened with a handful of mercenaries. The Friedlander guns had been taken out at night.
If Falkenberg's plan worked, by the time the Confederates knew what they faced, Astoria would be strongly held by valley Patriot armies, and other Patriot forces would have crossed the water to hold Allansport. It was a risky battle plan, but it had one merit: it was the only one that could succeed.
Leading elements of the Regiment covered half the six hundred kilometers north to Doak's Ferry in ten hours. Behind Falkenberg's racing lead groups the main body of the Regiment moved more ponderously, pausing to blast out pockets of resistance where that could be quickly done, otherwise bypassing them for the Patriot irregulars to starve into submission. The whole valley was rising, and the further north Falkenberg went the greater the number of Patriots he encountered. When they reached the four-hundred-kilometer point, he sent Glenda Ruth Horton eastward toward the passes to join Major Savage and the Friedland artillery. Like the Regiment, the ranchers moved by a variety of means: helicopters, trucks, mules, and on foot.
"Real boot straps," Hiram Black said. Black was a short wind-browned rancher commissioned a colonel by the Free States Council and sent with Falkenberg to aid in controlling rebel forces. Falkenberg liked the man's dry humor and hard realism. "General Falkenberg, we got the damnedest collection in the history of warfare."
"Yes." There was nothing more to say. In addition to the confused transport situation, there was no standardization of weapons: they had hunting pieces, weapons taken from the enemy, the Regiment's own equipment, and stockpiles of arms smuggled in by the Free States before Falkenberg's arrival. "That's what computers are for," Falkenberg said.
"Crossroad coming up," the driver warned. "Hang on." The crossing was probably registered by the guns of an untaken post eight kilometers ahead. Frazer's cavalry had blinded its hilltop observation radars before passing it by, but the battery would have had brief sights of the command car.
The driver suddenly halted. There was a sharp whistle, and an explosion rocked the caravan. Shrapnel rattled off the armored sides. The car bounded into life and accelerated.
"Ten credits you owe me, Sergeant Major," the driver said. "Told you they'd expect me to speed up."
"Think I wanted to win the bet, Carpenter?" Calvin asked.
They drove through rolling hills covered with the golden tassels of corn-like plants. Genetic engineering had made New Washington's native grain one of the most valuable food crops in space. Superfically similar to Earth 'maize, the "corn" had a growing cycle of two local years. Toward the end of the cycle hydrostatic pressures built up until it exploded, but if harvested in the dry period it was high-protein dehydrated food energy, palatable when cooked in water, and good fodder for animals as well.