"It's a good thing you handed out the material on Peep weapons," Ryder said, as she and Chung stood beside a freighter. A four-Fencible security patrol walked past, feeling their way cautiously forward on the fog-slick rock. "We may be using them!"
"That would solve the heavy weapons problem nicely," Chung said. "And if we can bag the pinnace and their airlift as well, only the Peeps will complain."
It would need more than captured heavy weapons to be sure of striking the local air base before anything could get off. It would need a force large enough to carry out the original plan of simultaneously striking both the ground-forces depot and the air base. They no longer had that.
But if Chung said that he would try it, he would—and do as well as anyone could. Ryder leaned back into her lover's arms.
"I am losing my enthusiasm for yachting," he said, into her ear. "When I knew I was going to try for Manticore, I thought of a vacation on a rented sailboat. You and me, a well-stocked galley, days of wearing nothing but sun screen—"
"You, Sir, assume a good deal."
"It would be better than a good deal, good lady. Furthermore, I am only assuming that if the idea repelled you, you would have pushed me off a cliff into the sea or otherwise discouraged me some time ago."
Unfortunately, Ryder had no reply to that. Of course, that was because there was none.
SIX
The four surviving freighters ran in at such low altitude and high speed that the sea was a gray glaze rushing toward Ryder as she stood in the cockpit of Claymore One. The other freighters were leaving visible wakes, and an agile treecat could probably have jumped from sea level into an open hatch of any of the freighters—if they'd dared open a hatch at this speed.
They still hadn't heard from Claymore Three, which suggested either disaster or complete radio discipline. Ryder was betting on the second, and not only to keep up morale. They'd heard a good deal of radio traffic, much of it commercial, some of it in low-grade Peep codes easily broken on the freighter's computer. None of it suggested that anyone ashore knew about Claymore Three, Nautilus, or the four grim gray darts now flinging themselves across the sea toward Buwayjon.
Ryder turned away from the cockpit to start applying her camouflage cream. It was one of Chung's ideas; he'd pointed out that warpaint was as old as war, and did things for your morale and to the enemy's. Even in Old Earth's post-industrial wars, one warrior band had been known as "the devils with green faces."
Except that Ryder had never been able to put on makeup without at least three tries, and had always thanked God for regulations that strictly limited it for female officers on duty. She had succeeded in making her face into something that scared her when she glimpsed it in the mirror, and was trying to sort it out when she felt gentle fingers touching her cheeks from behind.
This was almost too public a touch even from Chung, but she was still not going to slam her elbow back into his stomach. Instead she sighed, not caring if he thought that meant pleasure, and a moment later she realized that it did. Chung was not only spreading the camouflage cream more evenly, his touch was taking a few of the knots out of her stomach.
"Just practicing for the sun lotion," he whispered, when he was finished.
Before she could turn to thank him, he was gone, and the pilot was waving for her attention.
"We've picked up a clear signal, with a Peep Navy call sign. Reports they're heading south to investigate a suspected raid south of Point Luchuin."
The map display was late Neolithic digital but it made at least the distance evident. "That could be Claymore Three," she said. "Keep a passive watch for the pinnace. "If it's airborne, we may have to take evasive action suddenly."
Peep piloting might still let them evade at low level, but the pinnace would be more likely to be carrying air-to-air than air-to-ground weapons, let alone anti-ship ones. This raid could still end in a futile disaster: the Canmore Republic striking the first blow without gaining anything by it.
Then the white cliffs north of Buwayjon thrust above the horizon. Fishing boats of all sizes and colors whipped past to either side. Ryder motioned the pilot to climb a little to avoid being impaled on a mast.
A black hull with a dirty yellow superstructure and a white funnel, off to the right—Nautilus! The pilot jumped as Ryder blasted the word triumphantly into his ear.
"Just keep cool, Ma'am, and we'll have you on the ground in a minute."
The minute seemed to last a millennium, and it didn't help that the pinnace switched to scrambled communications but kept talking, obviously on the track of something that had the people aboard excited. Ryder managed thirty seconds to check her gear and lock and load her assault rifle, then they were over the breakwater, below the top of the lighthouse, from which a woman in a nightgown stared as if she couldn't believe what her eyes showed her.
They raced over treetops, turned at the foot of the cliffs, saw the air base briefly as they banked—no pinnace in sight—and then slowed to come down on the Subinaro Esplanade next to the warehouse district.
As the noses came up and the counter-gravity on, the pilot swore. "I forgot to drop the damned leaflets!"
That was a planned propaganda move—dropping thousands of leaflets telling the port's citizens to stay under cover, for the Republic had a quarrel only with the traitorous Carl Euvinophan and the imperialistic Peeps.
"I don't imagine that will do any harm," came Chung's voice, "unless Buwayjon is short of toilet paper."
Then the landing gear groaned and squealed, hatches and ramps slammed open even before power died, and everybody was yelling "Go, go, go!" so loudly that Ryder knew she was shouting too only because she could feel her throat vibrating.
"He did what?" Jean Testaniere said. If it would have relieved his feelings, he would have shouted, even screamed. Since that would only have added to what already seemed a first-class panic, he replied in as normal a tone as he could manage, with the erupting din of battle in his ear.
"The pinnace has gone south, to investigate and if necessary attack a Republican raiding force south of Point Luchuin. Citizen Captain Weldon went with it, in personal command."
Citizen Sergeant Pescu looked as if he wouldn't mind being killed, as primitive tradition allowed with the bearers of bad news, if only to get him out of this embarrassing situation. However, it was so far only embarrassing. It was not yet fatal. Five minutes ago, the first three truckloads of Carl Euvinophan's troops had pulled into the Training Barracks Compound. In another five minutes, they could be out of their trucks and on the way to the tank depot and supply dump.
The whole five hundred would have been better, but convoy discipline, at night, on the kingdom's mountain roads, would have taxed anyone's ability. Fifty could fight at least a delaying action against any number of Manty puppets who could have ridden in four air freighters. And the Manties would be fighting in two directions at once, because forty Field Police and ten SS people were already on watch to defend their target.
"I'm going out to the air base," Testaniere said. "It has the best command facilities, and it's where Weldon will come if he has the sense to return in time. Deploy all StateSec personnel to guard the depot at all costs, and—"
"What about a message to Euvinophan's men?"
Testaniere slammed his fist down on the table. A calculator and an electronic notepad fell to the floor. The SS and Field Police knew Pescu; they would obey him if they obeyed anyone. But Euvinophan's infantry wouldn't recognize any local People's authority other than Testaniere himself, and if they wasted time arguing—