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been set up for all groups on the far side of the river.
He drifted forward just under treetop level, some forty to sixty meters above
the ground, at a speed of not more than six kilometers per hour. Below him,
the upland jungle flora showed less of the yellow veining than there had been
in the greenery near the shuttle-boat landing pad; but the threads of scarlet
ran everywhere, even through the outsize leaves of the variform Earth
trees oak, maple and ash with which Kultis had been seeded twenty years back.
The Earth flora had taken more strongly in these higher altitudes. But there
was still a majority of the native plants and trees, from fern-like clumps
reaching ten meters into the air, to a sprawling tree-type with purple fruits
that were perfectly edible but exhaled a faint but sickening scent through
their furry skins as they ripened. Cletus was about eight hundred meters away
from the river crossing before he spotted his first sign of movement, a waving
of fern tops below him. He checked his forward movement and drifted downward.
A second later the foreshortened figure of a man in a brown-and green-splashed
jungle suit moved into sight from under the fern.
The infiltrator was unequipped except for the pack on his back, a soft
camouflage-cloth cap on his head and the pellet-gun sporting firearm he
carried by its strap over his right shoulder. This was to be expected where
the guerrillas were concerned. The convention that had grown up on the newer
worlds in
fifty years of intercolony disputes was that, unless a man carried military
weaponry or equipment, he was subject only to civil law and civil law had to
prove damage to property, life or limb before any action could be taken
against an armed man, even from another colony. A guerrilla caught with
nothing but a sporting gun was usually only deported or interned. One with any
kind of military equipment, however even as little as a military-issue nail
file could be taken by the military courts, which usually adjudged him a
saboteur and condemned him to prison or death. If this man below him was
typical of the infiltrators in his group, then Jarnki and his men with their
cone rifles would have a massive advantage in weapons to make up for their
scarcity of numbers, which was a relief.
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Cletus continued to watch the man for several minutes. He was making his way
through the jungle with no real regard for silence or cover. As soon as Cletus
had a line of march estimated for this individual, he turned off to one side
to locate the other members of the same guerrilla force.
The rapidly rising sun, burning through the sparse leaves at tree-top level,
heated the back of Cletus'
neck. He was sweating from his armpits, all across his chest and back under
his jungle suit, and his knee was threatening to revive its ache once more. He
took a moment out to force his muscles to relax and push the knee discomfort
from him. There was not time for that not yet. He went back to searching the
jungle for more guerrillas. Almost immediately he found the second man, moving
along parallel to and perhaps thirty meters from the infiltrator Cletus had
spotted first. Cletus continued looking, and within the next twenty minutes he
ranged out to both ends of the skirmish line that was pushing through the
jungle below him and counted twenty men moving abreast over a front perhaps
three hundred meters in width.
If the Neulanders had split their forces equally between the three crossings,
which would be only elementary military precaution, that would mean an
infiltration force of sixty men. Sixty men, assuming they lost something like
20 per cent of their group's strength in getting through the jungle from here
to the coast, would leave about forty-eight men available for whatever assault
the Neulanders planned to celebrate deCastries' visit.
Forty-eight men could do a lot in the way of taking over and holding the small
coastal fishing village.
But a good deal more could be done with double that number. Perhaps there was
a second skirmish line behind the first.
Cletus turned the electric horse in midair and drifted it back under the
treetops behind the man he had just spotted advancing. Sure enough, about
eighty meters back, he discovered a second skirmish line this time with
fifteen men in it, including at least a couple who looked like officers, in
that they carried more in the way of communication and other equipment and
wore sidearms rather than rifles.
Cletus turned the electric horse about, slid quietly through the air just
below the treetops and back toward the outside lower end of the approaching
skirmish line. He located it, and saw that as he had expected the guerrillas
were already beginning to close up so as to come into the crossing point
together. Having estimated the line along which their lower edge would be
drawing in, he went ahead on the electric horse, stopping to plant singleton
personnel mines against the trunks of trees not more than four inches thick at
intervals of about twenty meters. He planted the last of these right at the
water's edge, about twenty meters below the crossing. Then he swooped back to
make contact with the end of the second skirmish line.
He found the end of the line just coming level with the first mine he had
planted, the end man some ten meters away from it in the jungle. Cletus
swooped out and around to come up behind the center of the line. Careful not
to approach any closer than twenty meters, he halted the electric horse,
unlimbered his rifle and sprayed a long burst up and down the line through
about a sixty-degree angle.
The sound of a cone rifle firing was not the sort of noise that went [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]