The Tejano Conflict (14 page)

The wind started coming back, but from the other direction.

“Time to go back inside,” Gunny said. “Ah'm guessing we are finally done for the night. They gonna need some new soldiers to replace the ones we tagged, and Ah'm guessin' they won't be coming anytime soon.”

Gramps was dry and tight in the FCV when his displays splashed warning icons, and an alarm chimed: He'd just lost the last satellite feed.

The brunt of the storm was past, and some of the trees ahead on the edge of the forest hadn't survived it; they were splayed and downed, mostly leaning in the same direction. The big clearing where the FCV was parked was littered with debris the hurricane had brought and left behind. Branches, trash, odd things he couldn't even identify in the darkness. Quite the meteorological drama. He'd been through other storms, but none quite as big as this.

He shut off the alarm.

Shit,
he thought,
there goes the last link unit.

It was the third of three modules he'd set out before the storm. Each was connected to the FCV by optical cable instead of a wireless pipe. Wireless transmission could get iffy during bad weather, and especially as far out as he'd set them. The links had been designed to stay close to the FCV's transceivers because nobody thought they might need to be anywhere else.

When the military-hardware folks designed things, they usually had something particular in mind, and flexibility in function was somehow never high on their to-do list. And their responses when queried about such things?

No, that is not within our design parameters. Do not attempt to utilize it in such a manner.

The first had died an hour into the storm. The second lasted two more hours.

Now the third was kaput, and that's all they had.

Which was fine for REMFs who didn't have to use the stuff with expressed murder blowing past your head at hypersonic velocity, or huge fucking wind and rain, but in the field, you had to make do.

Cable was really old-school, but hardwired sigs were better. And, he could switch his signal among the three squatty boxes and down- and uplink his ELINT profile geographically, as well as spread-spectrum, which was also easier. Wireless sometimes got confused at multiple sigs and would start to cry and keep rebooting, which was a pain in the ass. Plus the proximity of the signal-blocking trees was just one more brick on the load. He had found some relatively clear spots to set the links, but the wind moved all kinds of crap back and forth . . .

The squad that usually walked shotgun on the FCV would normally attend needed repairs, but they had to stay inside. No way they could roam around in that blasting wind and shrapnel-like rain anyhow.

He ran a diagnostic on the cables. Two of them showed patent the full distance to their respective units. The cables weren't the problem; the units themselves had malfunctioned. Probably trees fell on them.

If truth was the first casualty of war, communications hardware was usually right behind it, and triple redundancy was no guarantee.

The third cable showed a disconnect seven hundred meters out, in the clearing and well short of the trees, which likely meant it had been broken somehow by the storm.

All he needed to do was roll out to the broken cable and patch it. Or he could try the wireless link at a different spot. It was showing
NO SIGNAL
at the moment. One way or another, he was gonna have to move his ass fast, or he wasn't going to get the data he needed.

The storm wasn't done yet. According to the FCV's sensors, winds were still gusting 70 to 80 kph. Maybe he could roll and set the FCV right over where he needed to splice—hell, stay inside if he could. That would be a story to tell later.
Yeah, hurricane busted the cable, but I was able to fix it without even getting wet . . .

The troops could stay in their igloos. Everybody would be happy.

He put in a call to HQ, got the night-watch op. “I got a broken cable here. I'm moving the FCV seven hundred meters to the northeast for repair. Let the guys in the igloos sleep. I'll call if I need help.”

The fem acknowledged that.

He cranked the engines, set the AP, and engaged the forward drive, heading toward the forest.

The treads would handle any of the small debris okay, and the AP would swing the big vehicle around anything large enough to cause problems. The treads crawled slowly along, slow as a walking man's pace.

He lit the passive sensors and checked his position as he crept along the broken cable's path.

It would take a few minutes to get there.

He did a systems check while he waited. Everything else seemed to be working as it should.

One FCV looked like another though this one had been rigged to carry a four-drone platform in a stick-on module on the starboard side. There were two small drones left, and they wouldn't be going anywhere until the wind lessened. A meter-long drone wasn't any match for even a 60 kph wind; it would toss the sucker this way and that. Which it had done with the first two drones. Those had vanished within an hour of deployment, and were probably halfway to Oklahoma City by now. Or buried a meter deep in the mud.

In theory, the storm would be mostly gone by daylight, and a couple more armed birds in the air come the dawn wouldn't hurt, which was why he had brought them.

– – – – – –

He made it to the break in the cable. His connection reads changed from amber to red, flitted past green, and back to red again, depending on the signal that made it through. The wireless still wasn't working worth shit though there were a couple of spots where reception was workable. If he couldn't fix the cable, that was the other option.

Winds were down to the sixties now; he checked the passives and did a quick scan of the trees at the edge of the clearing. Nothing to see.

He couldn't pull up directly over the break; there was a section of tree as big around as he was lying on the cable, which was probably what had broken it.

Looked as if the tree had been hit by lightning, the way the wood was shredded and split.

He parked the vehicle. Ran another sensor scan. No signs of anything out there but windblown crap.

He pulled on his jacket and slapped the door release. He stepped down to the ground.

He lit the helmet lamp and started looking for the break.

It wasn't under the toppled tree, it was a meter away, and the cable had been cut, the edges sheared clean and smooth.

Shit!

He dropped flat, landing in the mud on top of the cable. He heard the shot right after he smacked down.

And guess what? The fuckers are still
here
!

Bullets slapped and skipped from the earth around him.

He rolled, staying prone. Time to call for help:

“This is Demonde, I have some enemy action here.”

No reply.

He tried again: “Anybody awake out there? I could use a little backup.”

Zip.

Great! Fucking com—!

Something on the ground dug into his right hip—

The fallen tree absorbed some of the rounds; those made heavier
chonks!
as they hit—

He scooted backward under the FCV. Not going to be safe here for long, and with no backup and no way to get into the cabin without exposing himself to fire, things were going to go to shit fast.

He pulled his sidearm, pointed it in the general direction of the incoming fire, and triggered half a magazine, just to let them know he could shoot back.

Even if he could call for help, it wouldn't get here in time. Any second now, one of the shooters would throw a grenade or decide one man with a pistol wasn't that big a problem. A captured FCV would be a nice prize.

Time to activate the gun.

The FCV had a roof-mounted extrusion machine gun with 360-degree coverage. All he had to do was telescope it up enough to depress the elevation enough and shoot the fuck out of the guys blasting at him.

He sent the command sig, ordering the gun to backtrack incoming small-arms fire and to hose those sources.

That, at least, was working: The gun rose; he could hear the hydraulics over the rain as it lifted the weapon high enough to get the right angle.

The roof gun spoke, chattering caseless 10mm into the night.

Adiós, motherfuckers!

Then somebody fired a G2G missile and blew the machine gun right off the fucking roof—

Not more than twenty or thirty meters away, he guessed. Where the fuck were they?

Shit, shit, shit!

More rounds splatted or chonked around him.

Screwed.

Wait a second, wait
. The angle on the FCV, they were on his starboard side . . .

He spoke a command sequence to the FCV's tactical comp.

He fired off the rest of the magazine in his pistol to draw their attention.

The stick-on pod's doors slid open.

The drones' wings had to be manually unloaded, and the folded wings locked into place by hand or they couldn't be launched, but he didn't need them to fly . . .

The incoming fire stopped. Somebody yelled at him through the soggy night:

“Surrender, and you get to stay alive! Otherwise, we roll over you! You have ten seconds to decide!”

He lit the drones, sent the command code for the little crafts' miniguns' radar, and gave them leave to fire when they detected moving, human-sized targets.

“Hey, asshole, did your mother get those new kneepads I sent her?”

The enemy soldiers hiding in the night came up and charged—

The little drones couldn't fly, but their guns worked just fine.

He heard yelling as the drone's guns fired.

He shut them down and came up_

Don't shoot Roy, little drones—

He scrambled up into the FCV and closed the door. He plopped his wet and muddy self into the command center seat and put the FCV into reverse.

The drones had done the trick, and they still had a little ammo left, enough to keep any of the enemy still out there from any kind of run at him. He relit the drones. They'd stopped shooting, so nobody was moving around they could see.

As soon as he found a spot where the wireless connection was strong, he'd park. And he'd have to wake up the squad in their igloos and let them know they'd had company. Well. He'd tried to cut them a break and learned once again that no good deed goes unpunished.

He felt a twinge, looked down at his muddy self and noticed a darker blotch on his hip.

Blood.

He stood, noticed he had a pain just under his right iliac crest, and peeled his shirt up and pants down.

Well, shit.
There were two holes there, maybe five centimeters apart. He hadn't rolled over something sharp on the ground, he'd been
shot
.

It wasn't bleeding much, and it hadn't hit anything serious, just punched a little channel through the meat below the bone. Son of a
bitch
 . . .

He went to find a first-aid kit. He cleaned the wounds, dusted them with Antibiotic Clot Factor, and sprayed a bandage over it. One the patch set, he took a quick shower, and put on some clean clothes. Okay, a little harm, a small foul . . .

As he slipped the com bleed-through earpiece back in, he heard “—there, old man? Anybody home, FCV?”

He grinned. “Hello, Chocolatte, I'm here. Feeling lonely?”

“No, just figured it was past your bedtime, and I'd better call and be sure you were still awake. You didn't answer.”

“Doing a little chore,” he said. “How's the rain treating you?”

“Been busy. Bangs, booms, this, and that. Must be nice to be in a big ole vehicle with all the comforts of home and nothing exciting going on.”

“Yep, that's me. Dull as dishwater here.”

He didn't want to worry her in the middle of things; he could tell her later.

Maybe.

– – – – – –

Gunny logged off. She lay there and listened to the rain, not falling so hard now, and thought about Gramps out there in the FCV. It had become their pattern, to rag on each other, but he was not really that old, not even sixty yet.

He was decades older than she was, but technically, not even middle-aged. He probably had a few moves left.

She hadn't really thought much about herself aging until recently.

She knew it was the nature of the beast; that she was slowing down. Yeah, she was like that old gunfighter in the ancient vid; she could still catch a fly on the bar with a swipe of her hand, but once, she could have caught two of them.

There was a quick fix: A trip to Formentara's table, and the best aug available would kick her regular military-grade speed up a few notches.

Thing was, in her mind, that would be cheating.

Sure, everybody in most armies had the military issue. That was part of the requirement, and it brought you up to par; you couldn't compete without them unless you were some kind of genetic sport. But the high-end augmentation, the stuff like Jo ran, that put you into another whole class of quick and strong and all kinds of other shit.

Without that kind of work, Gunny would never be as fast as Jo. And even with it, she'd still be slower than Kay. There were limits as to how much a human body could be amped, and even staying inside them, the more augs you ran, the sooner you died. They took their toll.

Well, except if you had Formentara tuning you up now and then.

It wasn't as if she wanted to live forever, but it had always been a point of something, pride, maybe, that Megan Sayeed had gotten to where she was mostly on her own. It was practiced skill, training, and that meant something to her. Like the climbers who scaled the big peaks without supplemental oxygen, there was a different sense of accomplishment.

She was still a young fem, but normal humans peaked in their teens or early twenties when it came to reaction time and nerve-conduction speeds, and she was past that. She wasn't going to get any faster on her own, only slower. Practice made it smooth, and smooth led to fast, but there was only so much you could do to compensate for the organic slowing.

A year from now, five? Some hotshot on the other side who was younger and faster would beat her to the draw and cook off a more accurate round before she could.