John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

A shutter broke inward through a window, tipping onto the floor inside with a crash; a moment later, an arrow quivered on the floor. The snipers in the attic were firing so fast it sounded like continuous volleys.

Everyone dropped to hands and knees and crawled into the central hallways. Good, they remembered something else from their drills, and this time without being told. At another window, the steel shutters rang, but held; this trebuchet crew must be more competent, closer, maybe both.

As Trish and Arnie took quick roll of the scientific staff in the hallway, Quentin rolled in a rack of rifles. “These are pre-loaded—Newberry Standards, same thing the troops are using. Who’s qualified on them?”

“Everyone,” Arnie said. “I insisted. Some of us don’t like it, though.”

“Some of us do,” Trish said, picking up a Newberry and five four-shot magazines. Arnie stepped forward, and then everyone else was forming a line, the more reluctant taking the rear.

“I’ll have other jobs than shooting for some of you,” Quentin said, “but it’s bad; I think you should all have a gun with you, all right?”

Ruth Odawa sighed. “I hate the things but I hate being clubbed or burned to death even more. I’ll carry it but I’ll be happy to do almost anything else.”

The front door opened and slammed shut in an instant; the sergeant outside said, “In the center hallway.”

Carton, a Ranger from Olympia, came in. “Lieutenant Quentin, the colonel says we’re going to be surrounded, and he’s ordering everyone who can to fall back here. Captain Piersall and Lieutenant Ayache were killed in the first attack. Colonel Streen has direct command of Charlie Company and he’s bringing them in here. He’s also got both platoons of Rangers. If any of the engineering and scientific party can shoot—”

“We just went over that,” Quentin said. “They’re armed and ready.”

“Armed anyway,” Odawa said; Trish shut her up with a glare.

“Where’re the TexICs?” Quentin asked.

“Trying to chase the tribals away from the windmills,” Carton said. “The tribals swarmed up onto the mota, hundreds of them, with grapnels on big pieces of piano wire that tangle around and wreck the hubs, and rocks on poles to smash up the rotors, and God knows what else. I was on a watchtower up there when it started. We’ve lost at least four windmills that I know of. A few guys with black-powder repeaters couldn’t even slow the bastards down; I don’t know how the Texans’ll do with lances, pistols, and sabers, but at least they’re on horseback.” He might have grimaced or laughed; his expression was strange. “Guess we’ll all have to stop making fun of our pony soldiers and their cowboy outfits.”

“Guess we will,” Quentin said. “All right, we don’t want to be—”

Bangs, pops, and roars stuttered above. One of the men above shouted something down the stairs; then the front door opened. “Everyone stay down!” Colonel Streen shouted. “Troops coming in!”

Suddenly the house was full of soldiers—over a hundred Temper infantry, in their “Rorschach jammies,” the gray wool camo-blotched with India ink that had replaced the rotted-away ACUs; around fifty of the President’s Own Rangers, in their black flannel shirts and jeans; a few TexICs, Texas Irregular Cavalry, who looked to Arnie like they’d escaped from a Nashville revue.

Colonel Streen, a tall black man who had never spoken much to Arnie before, came in. “Doctor Yang, if we can all meet in your office, I need to talk quickly with my officers and you.”

Arnie’s “office” was a walk-in closet, with barely room for the five of them to stand around Arnie’s tiny, battered old desk.

“It’s the worst.” Streen looked a thousand years old. “We’re out of touch with at least half the force; the tribal attack overran three blockhouses out on our main line right during rotation, they were inside before the blockhouse crews knew what was happening, and the reliefs coming up were hit out in the open—Captain, thank God your TexICs were on top of that or we’d have lost all those men too—”

“Glad to help,” Captain Tranh said, his Texas twang broad and harsh; something about him reminded Arnie of a silly movie he’d seen long ago, John Wayne playing Genghis Khan. “Wish we could’ve been more use on the windmills, though. I think you have to figure they’re all lost; we can run’em off any one windmill but they’re right back on it, or after a different one, as soon as we turn our backs. I’m real sorry about that, Doctor Yang.”

“It’s gear,” Arnie said, though his heart was sinking. “People are what matter.”

Streen nodded. “Right. All right, now when I was with General Grayson in the Yough, we found out there’s no real leadership on the battlefield, even if their plan is sophisticated. Each little tribe has a structured, conditional list of tasks, every single tribal has that list memorized, and they run down their decision tree till they’re killed, dispersed, or victorious. So right now out in the dark they’re all finding each other, getting the right people on their left and right, and then when they’re all in place, there’s gonna be one big human wave, like a banzai charge, focused here, coming from all sides.”

“That’s what the tribals did at Pend Oreille,” Goncalves, the Ranger major, agreed; with his chest-length graying beard and all-black uniform, he looked like the wrath of Jehovah. “Fighting them around Grant’s Pass we could screw them up with three-man teams intercepting their runners and picking off the guys carrying spirit sticks, because they guide off those. I have six three-man teams out doing that right now; that should buy us a few minutes to prepare.”

“Cavalry can probably disrupt even better,” Tranh said. “Anyone running between groups of tribals, and anyone carrying a spirit stick—”

“And anyone that either of those are talking to,” the major said. “Leave no surviving witnesses—you have to kill the wounded. The tribal is just the medium, you’ve got to stop the message. If you get a spare second, break the spirit stick or scrape all that holy bric-a-brac off it, so nobody else can use it.”

“Do it, Captain,” the colonel said. “Cavalry won’t be any use pinned against this house, and we don’t know how much longer they’ll take before they launch their wave.”

The Texan saluted and went out, bellowing, “TexICs with me, now!”

“Other than that,” Colonel Streen said, “we’ll have to open windows—we can’t get enough guns on the enemy with those shutters closed. I want the second floor to open all at once, and then the ground floor, each on my command. Any thoughts?”

“Just glad to be here,” Goncalves said. “And my sympathies on your losses.”

Streen nodded. “Thank you. All right, let’s go. If anyone asks, the plan is to fight till we’re all dead, they’re all dead, or they run away, and the goal is complete victory. Everything else is details. This wave might have three or even four thousand tribals in it, but if all our people are careful about cover, and we don’t let the enemy close enough to set fire to the house, we should be all right, because in tribal attacks, the worst is always the first. Can we can stand a siege?”

“There’s a month of food for fifty in the pantry,” Arnie said, “and we’ve got an inside pump, so there’s water. We rigged up a bucket and pulley in the old dumbwaiter shaft to carry water upstairs; should we wet down the roof and walls?”

“Couldn’t hurt,” Streen said. “All right, let’s go.”

On his way out, Arnie grabbed his six least enthusiastic shooters and put them on wetting-down duty, reminding them to keep their rifles with them and ready.