Eric Flint: The Rats, the Bats and the Ugly

"Not without dying," said Bronstein, dryly. "Not with your waistline, Fal. We'll have to fly over and take what we can. And the place is busy, even though dawn is a few hours off yet."

Nym found himself studying the vehicles. The chocolate wasn't much, but it had sent his mind back onto its normal channels. Men were loading the trucks with small-wheeled things with a sort of fork in front. Nym eyed them with interest. They were a bit smaller than most vehicles. Nym had an eye for vehicles and for detail. "Methinks," he said slowly, "we can have our trip home and eat it too."

It was a good idea. The only thing he didn't like about it was that he wouldn't have an opportunity to steal one of those little vehicles with the fork.

"What do you mean, Nym?" asked Bronstein.

"That truck being loaded. 'Tis the one used to bring rations to our old camp. We can board it, and ride back. 'Tis full of food, too."

Eric Flint

The Rats, the Bats amp; the Ugly

Eric Flint

The Rats, the Bats amp; the Ugly

Amid the red Magh' adobe tunnels and galleries of the conquered scorpiary.

"I thought my life was complicated enough!" grumbled Major Van Klomp, looking at the two civilians that a patrol had brought to him. Van Klomp was de jure not in charge of the infantrymen. Officially, Colonel Nygen was in charge. Except that he had not yet made it past the old front lines, apparently.

Oddly enough, lines of communication back to there were terrible. Lieutenant Colonel Burkoff was supposed to be Nygen's second in command, and he had been sent forward by the colonel to assume control. It appeared he hadn't been seen for the last day or so. Van Klomp had very little doubt that the man was at the bottom of a Maggot pit somewhere, definitely not stabbed with a bangstick. There were several surviving majors from Brigadier Charlesworth's hijacked brigade. Fitz had sent them to the various edges of the scorpiary, to set up defenses. Such chaos was reigning that, while Military Headquarters had sent a number of messages that Major Fitzhugh was to be summarily arrested and tried… no one there had got around to giving orders as to the deployment of the troops, yet.

And no one had given Van Klomp orders to pull out yet, either. As the orders for him and his paratroopers to be here were fakes, made by Fitz's clerk, that was hardly surprising. So: by virtue of being smack bang in the middle of the scorpiary, and having a powerful personality and an overwhelming voice, Fitz's illegally assumed mantle of command had fallen on Van Klomp. He'd been quietly taking advantage of it to ship out as much of the captured materiel as possible.

He was a realist. The HAR army was going to lose this huge hunk of territory by sheer stupidity and inertia. But he was going to make sure that every untrashed piece of equipment from the brood-heart chamber, and as many of the Magh' artillery pieces as could be transported, went back to human-held territory. In the meanwhile, he had men making maps, taking photographs and generally scouring the territory to try to fill in the dreadfully thin human supply of knowledge about their enemy. So far he had established that most of the information the Korozhet advisors had provided for humanity was startlingly inaccurate.

Actually, the word "garbage" sprang to mind.

And now they'd brought him these. "Parachute Major Van Klomp?" asked the one without the camcorder.

"Ja." With a large hand, he redirected the camcorder to point at the floor. "And who are you gentlefolk, and what are you doing here? This is a combat zone. Not a good place for civilians."

The woman smiled, obviously a practiced-for-camera smile. "Sally Borodin, Independent News. Mind if we ask you a few questions, Major?"

Van Klomp's face, he hoped, revealed none of his real feelings. Or the fact that he had suddenly realized that these people could be very powerful weapons in what was bound to be an ugly fight. "Do you mind if I ask if you're officially accredited war journalists?" he asked in reply.

"The public is hungry for first-hand news about this campaign, Major," she said, avoiding a direct answer as smoothly as any politician. "Especially the role that the paratroopers have played in it."

Ah. Excellent. So she wasn't one of the sanitized journos the War Office normally gave permits to.

"No reason I can't tell you what happened," said Van Klomp. "Although the main man behind this campaign was an intelligence major by the name of Fitzhugh."

"We've been trying to track him down."

Van Klomp put on a suitably mournful expression, and tried to ignore the camera. "Major Fitzhugh was unfortunately caught in a Magh' deadfall, when he was bravely leading the troops in deadly chamber-to-chamber, hand-to-hand combat. He's been severely injured."

"Are his injuries life-threatening, Major?"

"Fortunately not. The medics assure me he has an absolute one hundred percent chance of recovery." That should stop General Cartup-Kreutzler attempting to have someone silence Fitz.

For the next hour and a half Van Klomp hammed it up, as large as life and twice as natural. He gave them a graphic-if fictitious-version of "the commandos' " heroic capture of the brood-heart, and their rescue of none other than the late chairman's daughter. He told of the race to rescue these heroes. He had some of his men reenact the final assault on the brood-heart. He let them photograph the dead alien. And he got them a few interviews with troops who had seen action with Fitz. They had had a number of those already. And just to make doubly sure it all got out, he had them escorted onto a captured hover-artillery piece and flown out of the combat zone. In the interests of their safety, of course.

He was just getting up to go and see Fitz when a patrol brought in another couple of reporters. This pair had sneaked in past the patrols by coming through the minefields, proving reporters to be entirely crazy.

"They must be as thick as flies around the old front lines," muttered Van Klomp. "You'll just have to wait," he said to the pair from Interweb. "I'm going to see someone in the field hospital."

He went down to see Fitz in the makeshift field hospital.

By Fitz's expression, it looked as if it was a good thing the major was immobilized. A terrified-looking MP lieutenant was standing against the far wall, doing his best to pretend that he wasn't there at all. "Ja boykie? Lazing in bed while the rest of us work, eh?"

"Bobby, tell this lot they're to stop terrorizing the kid," said Fitz, jerking a thumb at the MP, not bothering to rise to the bait Van Klomp trailed.

"Don't you think I have done enough?" asked the paratrooper cheerfully, making the makeshift bed groan as he sat on it. "I had to save the Lieutenant Colonel Jeebol from a lynch mob. Sent him sneaking home in a plain coat with his hair shaved off, and his tail between his legs."

Fitz was not to be distracted. "It's not fair on the boy. I was planning to go and hand myself over."

"I know," Van Klomp said cheerfully. "So, that was why, when you got injured, I sent some of my men back to fetch you an MP. Seeing as you couldn't go to them, they've come to you. My boys found several of them ornamenting the old front line. So: the record reads that you surrendered to them, to the best of your ability, and I assisted the MP." Van Klomp beamed broadly at the idea.

The young MP had finally had enough. "Your men brought us here by force, Major Van Klomp. They held a bangstick to my head!"

"My men forced you?" Butter would have frozen solid in Van Klomp's mouth. "But you had orders to arrest Major Fitzhugh, didn't you? What did they do but to bring you to him? He's in no fit state to come to you. The way it looks, you were being derelict in your duty."