Страница 82 из 129
According to all reports, those scummies had been sitting more or less motionless for at least three or four months since taking Sindi, and that many mouths would have eaten the countryside around a city Sindi's size clean in far less time than that. Not to mention the fact that a city of seventy thousand could never provide even minimal housing for six or seven times that many invaders.
All of which suggested to the veteran noncom that—as always seemed to be the case—he and the rest of the company were about to find out that the backroom intelligence pukes had screwed up again. Fortunately, the captain had been a Marine long enough to be very cautious about how much trust he put in intelligence his own people hadn't confirmed. Un fortunately, there was only one way to confirm this intelligence.
Jin tapped the pad off and stepped ashore as D'Estrees reappeared and gave a thumbs-up. Normally, as Bravo Team leader, D'Estrees would have been teamed with Dalton, the team's plasma gu
Damned if you do, and damned if you don't. But nobody was going to accuse Mamma Jin's boy of favoritism. Stupidity, though, okay, maybe.
But somewhere out there was the target, and right now he didn't care if that target was Saints or pirates or Boman. Because sooner or later, he was going to get a chance to kill something, and the closer he was to the action, the more likely that was to happen. And if he didn't kill something else soon, he just might start on one too-good-looking plasma gu
Two klicks to the track that ran from D'Sley to Sindi. It paralleled the river, so it never saw much traffic, since barges made so much more sense than land transport. But it was there, and if the Boman came to play, it would be along that track.
And if they didn't come out to play on their own, then they were just going to have to be called.
* * *
"I don't care if you do think it's a waste of time," Bistem Kar told the skeptical underofficer in a deceptively calm tone. General Bogess stood beside the K'Vaernian CO, but the Diaspran was being very careful not to involve himself in the conversation. "I don't even care if your men think it's a waste of time. I don't think it is, and this—" he tapped the ruby-set hilt of the sword at his side, the one only the commanding officer of the Guard Company was permitted to wear "—means that what I think is all that matters, now doesn't it?"
The underofficer closed his mouth and straightened both sets of shoulders. The thought of being ordered around by Diaspran "soldiers" so new they still had canal mud on their feet was enough to infuriate anyone, and he sympathized perfectly with his men. And even if the idea of being instructed by jumped-up common laborers hadn't been hard to swallow, the sheer stupidity of what they were supposed to be learning was almost intolerable. Damn it, they knew how to do their jobs, and they'd done them well enough for decades to make K'Vaern's Cove the most powerful city-state on the entire K'Vaernian Sea! And they hadn't done it by hiding behind any silly shields and refusing to come out and fight like men!
Even granting the incontestable truth of all of that, however, Kar's tone of voice had just forcibly reminded him that there were other considerations, as well. "The Kren" was a guardsman's guardsman, always willing to listen—to a point at least—to the opinions and concerns of his men, but anyone who'd ever been stupid enough to think that that mild tone was an invitation to further discussion never made the same mistake twice.
Kar gazed at him for a moment, clearly waiting to see if he'd finally found someone stupid enough to keep pushing. He hadn't, and after waiting a bit longer to be sure the point had been adequately made, he allowed his own ma
"I admit it seems a bit . . . bizarre," he conceded then, "but I've watched the Diasprans drilling. I've never seen anything like it, either—not for infantry. But much as I hate to admit it, now that I've seen the humans' notions of how infantry should drill and maneuver, I can't understand why the same ideas never occurred to us."
"Sir, it just seems . . . wrong," the underofficer said in a carefully dispassionate tone, and Kar grunted a chuckle.
"It isn't the way our sires did it, or our grandsires, or their sires," the Guard commander agreed, "and I suppose it's inevitable for us to feel some sort of, um, emotional attachment for the way things have always been. But it's worth thinking about that the League, which spent the most time fighting the Boman instead of other civilized sorts of armies, already used tactics a lot closer to these new ones of the humans than ours. Now that we're the ones up against the barbs, maybe it's time we considered the fact that we can't take them on one by one. Even if they were willing to play by the old rules, there are so many of the bastards that we'd run out of bodies before they did, no matter how good we are. But these new tactics—all this teamwork with these 'rifles' and 'pikes' and 'assegais,' and those big shields the humans have invented—are going to change all that if we can figure out what in Krin's name we're doing with them. The problem is, we don't have a whole lot of time, and we're going to have to un learn almost as much as we have to learn.
"So I don't have a lot of time to spend arguing with my underofficers," Kar went on in a slightly harder tone. "We're all going to be much too busy listening to General Bogess here. And we're also going to be busy making sure that our noncoms understand that they're going to be listening to the Diaspran training cadre. I don't care if most of the Diasprans were dam builders and canal diggers four months ago. What they are now are soldiers. More than that, they're combat veterans who've done something none of us ever have: met the Boman bastards in the field and kicked their miserable asses all the way into whatever Krin-forsaken afterlife they believe in.
"So you will go back to your unit, and you will tell them that they really, really don't want me to come explain all of this to them in person. Is that clear?"
"Yes, Sir!" the underofficer said quickly. "Perfectly clear, Sir!"
"Good." The Guard commander gazed at him once more, then nodded dismissal. "I'm glad we had time for this little conversation," he told the underofficer. "Now go back and get that mess straightened out."
"Yes, Sir! At once, Sir!"
* * *
"We're going to train them how?"
St. John (J.) would much rather have been out in the field probing for the Boman camps. Anything but trying to explain the captain's brainstorm to this evil-looking scummy.
"The weapons are going to be something like an arquebus, Sir," the Marine answered. "But they're going to need to be aimed, not just volley-fired in the target's general direction, and Marines know all about teaching aiming. The most important part is breath and trigger control."
He picked up the contraption which had been leaning against the wall, brought it to his shoulder, and pointed it.
"We teach them about sight picture, then we put a K'Vaernian copper piece on this carved sight mockup and have them practice squeezing the trigger. When they can do it time after time without the copper falling off, they'll be halfway there."
The company commander picked up the wooden carving of the rifle and tried to point it while balancing the copper piece on the narrow width of the sight. The coin chimed musically as it promptly hit the stone floor, and the Mardukan snarled in frustration.