Dire Steps (15 page)

Mortas nodded without speaking. The platoon had moved to the site quickly after being dropped off by the shuttles, but the ground had fought them. Overloaded with what they needed to survive and bulling through vegetation that seemed to have been in place for millennia, they'd been astounded to find this oasis of order.

“Just need a few more minutes.” Pappas rose again, running forward. His rucksack bounced against his armor, and it seemed to be an optical illusion that he was able to jog through the ground vegetation. Mortas glanced down at the handheld, having already selected a defensive position for the platoon. It wasn't too far away, but he'd picked it using only the elevation lines suggested by the overhead imagers. No human had ever set foot on that location, and so there was a chance it wouldn't be any good at all.

“Listen to your platoon sergeant, el-­tee,” a familiar voice purred in his ear. “We're locking down for the night, and you want to make sure we know where you are.”

It was the same mocking fool from the previous evening, the radioman at Almighty.

“You know exactly where we are,” he responded darkly. “We're right there on the screen, plain as day.”

“Oh, I see you. Poor perimeter, three disjointed squads, and no idea where Sam is. You better get your shit together, if the boogeyman comes calling.”

“We got plenty for the boogeyman—­and anybody else who pisses us off.” Dak spoke dismissively. “Now why don't you go get another cup of coffee and let the men work?”

“Sure, sure. Good idea. I wouldn't want to get drowsy and call something in on the wrong target tonight.”

“No you wouldn't.” Dak's answer was lost, as the disembodied voice had already terminated the link.

“We need to get moving,” Mortas announced. Tapping the handheld, he emplaced a marker on the side of the cleared area closest to their destination. “First Squad, Second Squad, slide around to Third and form a temporary perimeter. Move out to our night position in five minutes.”

Putting the device away, he touched Vossel's prone form with his boot. The medic was facing the other way, rifle ready, and simply came to a knee. Long weeks of field training had transformed the two of them into a pair of near-­telepaths in the way they had come to understand each other's intentions. Mortas tilted his helmet toward the clearing, and the two men zigzagged through the undergrowth in a crouch.

They knelt when they reached Pappas, hidden by the shrubbery left in place by the Sims. The intelligence officer knelt as well, three rifles pointed outward. “See what they did here? They chopped out these lanes, five yards across and two hundred yards long. Look how they leveled the stumps with the ground, how they took it down to bare dirt most of the way.”

Mortas remembered the images from the night before, the three columns of men headed for Almighty. “Sleds. Instead of firepots set in the ground, they mounted them on sleds or runners or Sim two-­wheelers. Three guys dragging them forward at a nice slow pace, and it looks like half a platoon.”

“Yep. Sam's tricks take time to set up, but they really work.”

“Saw one of those Sammies running away after the first rocket,” Vossel whispered. “Guess they took his Smock of Invisibility away from him.”

“Or it got blown off,” Mortas offered, haunted by the image of the desperately running figure, tripping, falling, and ultimately unable to outrun the rockets.

“I doubt they were wearing them at all. Defeats the purpose if you're trying to create a diversion,” Pappas offered. His sigh came through the helmet speakers. “Let's get gone, Jan. We had direct hits on this spot the other night, and there's almost no sign they were even here. Somebody picked this place clean.”

T
he new position was nothing to brag about. A modest finger of raised ground in the heavy forest, it wasn't large enough for the entire platoon. Mortas played with the idea of ringing it evenly, but that lost the advantage of the higher elevation, and so he put Katinka's squad on the berm facing north and ran the other two squads down the incline so that the platoon was arranged in a rough triangle.

“Getting sentimental on us, Lieutenant?” Dak whispered, once he'd checked the positioning of the three machine guns and the grenade launchers. Mortas had been coordinating defensive fires with the ASSL on Broadleaf, his back against a fallen tree trunk, and was caught off guard.

“What's that?”

“You got us formed in the shape of a heart. Thought you were going to break out some marking powder and write ‘Jan plus Betty' in the middle.”

The absurd suggestion made him laugh, and Mortas cut his mike until it subsided. B Company's ASSL finished marking his last target, and when it popped up on the handheld, Mortas acknowledged it and signed off. Dak sat down next to him.

“One of my platoon leaders in Third Corps, he did that once. Then he took a snapshot of the imagery and sent it to his girl back on . . . somewhere, I forget where he was from.”

“Bet the censors ripped him for that.”

“Actually, not. You see, unless you been out here, things like that picture don't look like what they are. Buncha headquarters pussies, riding out the war giving everybody shit, what would they know about an overhead image of an infantry perimeter at night?”

“Where you from, Sergeant Dak?”

“So you finally got around to me. Been pestering every new man, and didn't bother asking your right arm.” Dak gave a short laugh. “Tratia, sir.”

“I heard Tratians join the Force to get a break from all the discipline.”

“They do have a lot of rules there, don't they? But yeah, in a way that is why I joined. I never liked school, there was always so much better stuff going on right outside the window, and after a while I just stopped going. My father didn't understand, but he was a guy who bought into all the laws and the rules. To be honest, I think it worked for him.

“I got into fighting for a while, but then I started stealing anything that moved—­not for the money, I'm not a thief—­and boy did I get into some great chases with the enforcement types. The police, some of them liked the way I drove, and they kept warning me, ‘You're gonna end up in the Force. Magistrate's gonna send your ass to the war.' And stuff like that.

“One night, I came home and my dad was waiting. Time for the showdown, I guess. Told me I was gonna straighten up, go back to school, all that garbage. And then he says, ‘You live under my roof, you obey my rules' which he really shouldn't have done.”

“Why's that?”

“I took him up on it. I remembered what the police had been saying, and I enlisted the next day. Don't ever use that ‘My roof, my rules' line on your kids, Lieutenant, if you and Betty ever have any. Of such moments, recruits are made.” They both chuckled quietly. “Listen, sir. I checked the water situation, and we need to purify some of the local stuff.”

“We topped off just a few hours ago.”

“The move was tougher than we expected. By this time tomorrow we'll be empty, and if we call in for resupply Sam's gonna know where we are. I've put a small patrol together, all experienced jungle men, and I'll lead them. We'll slip back to that one stream we crossed getting here and strain out some gallons real quiet.”

“How long's that going to take?”

“All night. It's just as well that we stay put there; always dangerous to come back into the lines and besides, we'd be humping full collapsibles. Better you bring the platoon to us at first light.”

“We're going to burn up some goggle batteries doing it that way.”

“Oh yeah, that reminds me.” Mortas felt Dak's hand on his arm, and two goggle batteries were pressed into his palm. “We're in better shape than it seemed. The veterans always carry extra batteries. If we exercise a little discipline, these should last a ­couple of days.”

Mortas looked down at the tiny cylinders, unable to see them. “Captain Dassa asked for an exact report of how many of these we had.”

“Oh, you know better than to expect the boys to answer a question like that truthfully. They would have confiscated the extras and given 'em to the knuckleheads who didn't plan ahead—­no offense, sir, I'm not calling you a knucklehead. But in the future, always bring a ­couple spares of your own.”

Dak stood and moved off through the gloom without making a sound.

T
he shortcomings of the platoon's position became obvious when it was Mortas's turn to sleep. He'd sat radio watch for the first few hours, periodically getting up to quietly check the perimeter, then rolled up in his field blanket. The slope was steeper than he'd thought, and no matter how he arranged himself he kept sliding downhill. Every few minutes, a new rock or bur or root would find some exposed bone to press against, and gravity increased the pressure until he had to move.

Finally giving up, he groggily pushed his way out of the thin quilt. A ghostly fog had seeped in while he was asleep, and it made the prone figures of the platoon look like primordial beasts with armored exoskeletons. The jungle was quiet, though, and he turned on his goggles long enough to check the overhead imagery. Now that they knew how the Sims had been avoiding detection, every flicker of heat on the screen could mean enemy movement. Apart from a few jungle creatures walking, crawling, or flying off in the distance, everything seemed all right.

He turned off the goggles and slid the lenses up inside his helmet. Looking around, he spotted the boots and legs of Captain Pappas sticking out from under a camouflaged tarpaulin usually used for expedient shelters. Vossel, on radio watch, was sitting cross-­legged next to Pappas and appeared to be watching him closely. Having used the same technique on many field problems, Mortas knew that Pappas was viewing something on his handheld and needed to keep the screen's light from being observed.

“I'm coming in, sir,” Mortas whispered above the form, and a muffled voice told him to wait a moment. He heard a switch being turned off, and then crawled under. Pappas's body odor was trapped inside the tarp, and Mortas made a weak waving gesture in front of his nose.

“Hey, I wouldn't go pointing any fingers if I were you, Jan.” Pappas switched the handheld back on once Vossel indicated that they were covered again. “You're the one taking the stink pills.”

The screen brightened, and Mortas pushed a wet blade of grass out of his way. Pappas was reviewing the footage of the attack on Broadleaf, with the resolution taken as far down as it would go. He was focused on the northern edge of the ridge, where the Sim attack had originated.

“Dassa sent patrols out to examine the northern slope, and you wouldn't believe what they found. The Sims had chopped at least three sets of steps out of the side of that hill, and reinforced them with cut branches. Sam must have been crawling right up to Broadleaf's wire night after night, and they never knew it.”

“Can't hunker down inside a base like that. You gotta run defensive patrols all the time, just to keep the bad guys from setting up shop on your doorstep.”

“There's more. At the bottom of the hill, they found two sections of fencing attached to a stack of heavy logs all tied together. The Sims had the logs secured just a little bit downhill, and they attached them to the fence using these ropes made from woven vines. When they released the trunks, it pulled the fence down.”

“Is that what you're looking at now?”

“No. I've got the intelligence section on the
Dauntless
helping me. Sims wearing that heat shielding are hidden inside this footage, so if we can recalibrate the sensors to pick that up, we'll be back in business. We've already got new readings for the unshielded Sims dragging those firepots, just because we got out here and examined the ground where they pulled that diversion. They shouldn't be able to get away with that again.”

Mortas stared at the screen, watching the fire start at Broadleaf and remembering the altered combat smock on the dead Sim. “Hey sir, how come they wore the special smocks onto Broadleaf? They had to figure they'd take casualties, and Sam's been showing good discipline hiding things from us. Why didn't they have the assault force take off their smocks?”

Pappas reached up with a grimy hand and wiped perspiration from his upper lip. “Keep this to yourself. The consensus is that Broadleaf was in real trouble, but that they might have made it if they hadn't called in rockets on themselves. The fire probably didn't collapse the building; the skipper of the
Dauntless
thinks our ordnance did that.

“Sam knows that our own weapons are sometimes our biggest enemy. He wanted to panic the guys inside Broadleaf—­so the assault team wore the smocks to muddy the situation as much as possible.”

“How many of them do you think we're up against?”

“Impossible to say, but based on all the work they've done out here, just in the parts of the jungle we've seen, it's at least a hundred. Which bears out the earlier suspicion that Sam somehow got reinforced. We haven't seen any new equipment yet, which makes me think it's another group of holdouts who somehow linked up with the gang that's been messing with the stations for years.”

“Big planet, no doubt there were more of them elsewhere.”

“Sure. But what brought them here? How do you find the only piece of civilization in the middle of a giant wilderness?”

The answer fell into place for Mortas with a mental thud, and he realized it was the solution to the puzzle that had been plaguing him all day. The sensation of an important piece of information, something familiar to him, flitting around just beyond his recognition.

“Sir, is there any way to check the flight patterns around the stations, going back a long time?”

“Of course. The satellites send out a continuous feed of everything they detect, and it's all archived. What are you getting at?”