Dire Steps (10 page)

More flashing lights. The engines coming to life, taking him forward into space, into darkness. Going now, ready or not.

Fighting a rising spur of panic, he tried to remember that first Step, when he'd been fifteen and a green volunteer, sealed in a tiny cylinder with all of the other teenagers, headed for what they knew was a losing battle. Recalling his iron resolve, his utter rejection of his own safety in the name of protecting humanity, his near certainty that he would not return. God, he'd been strong back then, or ignorant, or just a better man than the phony he was now.

A man who'd found himself surrounded by political hacks and climbers, slowly giving in more and more in the name of winning the war, turning a blind eye on the profiteering and the outright theft and the human misery on Celestia. Every day another compromise, another rationalization, until years of it had piled up, and he'd finally been forced to admit that it was no longer an act, that we become what we pretend to be, and that the brave young boy who'd shipped out to the war would have spit in his face if they'd ever met.

No.
His eyes fluttered, the drugs finally taking effect, tears rolling down his face.
No, that's wrong. So many mistakes, so much lost, but my heart was always pure. Defend our ­people.
Win the war. Look at me now, shit-­scared again, but here by my own choice again, I do this willingly, for total strangers and the ones I love, because in the end that is all that is left, my love, I love you Reena, I love you Lydia, I love you Ayliss, I love you Jan. I love

 

CHAPTER EIGHT

O
n his stomach in a patch of sickly weeds, Mortas was thinking about water. Night had fallen hours earlier, and the darkness magnified the gurgling of a small stream just on the other side of the trail he was watching. Although drinking the water straight from its source would have made him too sick to stand, Mortas still wanted it. He'd consumed most of the water in his canteens during the afternoon's long, hot movement, and he ran his tongue around the gummy paste that covered the inside of his mouth.

When the sun came up they would push patrols out, across the trail and the stream, and begin the process of rendering the water drinkable. All three platoons carried sophisticated equipment that would siphon the liquid straight from its source and, at the end of a long tube with several intermediate stages, pour the filtered results into waiting canteens. Purification pills would then be added to complete the job, and the local water would be safe to drink.

Unfortunately, the water source was on the other side of a trail running east to west that was even larger and more developed than the north–south path they'd been following. Moving through the bush while keeping the cart track in sight, they'd encountered more and more signs of Sim presence. The pipes hammered into the trees had become so common that they'd stopped calling them in, but a few hundred yards later they'd detected footprints in the jungle muck that couldn't have been more than a day old.

All three platoons, moving north at a slow, steady rate, had reported boot prints and oddly shaped impressions that were probably made by crude sandals. The surveillance satellites watching over the three sites to their north still showed none of the heat signatures associated with the Sims, and the
Dauntless
had confirmed there was no sign of the enemy anywhere. The heat and the vegetation had closed in on them, sending sweat running down their arms and fatigued paranoia into their minds. Every now and then, a covey of birds would explode into the air not far in front of the troops, further jangling their nerves.

First Platoon had just reached the east–west trail when Second Platoon discovered the bunker complex. Excited radio calls had passed back and forth, and Dassa had halted both First and Third Platoons in place, so they would be in position to help Second if their unseen foes materialized.

They hadn't. The bunkers were expertly camouflaged, but the complex was small and so it took no time at all to determine that it was empty. Second had swept on through, right up to the edge of the east–west trail where the bunkers ended, then formed a defensive perimeter using the Sims' own positions. Markers had begun popping up on goggle maps across the company, indicating that the abandoned positions had formed a circular strongpoint just east of the junction of the two paths.

The water table in that region was high, so the bunkers had only been dug down a few feet before walls and ceilings had been constructed over them using logs and dirt. In classic Sim fashion, the jungle around the complex had been left undisturbed—­which meant that the rotting logs used to build the positions had been brought from a considerable distance away.

Darkness had approached, and so Dassa called a halt right there. The evidence of an organized enemy presence, utterly undetected by the humans' battle-­tested overhead surveillance, had made most of the company highly uneasy. Many of the veterans of the debacle on Fractus darkly commented that this was not the first time the orbital eyes had failed them, and so Dassa had arranged the company in three defensive positions covering the two trails.

Mortas moved most of his platoon several hundred yards back, assigning Sergeant Frankel's squad to ambush the trail. Mortas had stayed with them while Dak had supervised the arrangement of the other two squads in a perimeter to which Frankel could fall back if pressed. Second Platoon remained in the enemy fighting positions, covering their part of the same trail, while Wyn Kitrick's Third Platoon had swung behind them to the south, covering the northbound path they'd followed most of the day.

Captain Pappas was quietly broadcasting a description of the enemy emplacement now occupied by Second Platoon. “Standard Sim fighting positions, well camouflaged with overhead cover capable of defeating our scanners. Defensive orientation concentrated to the north, with only a few positions covering the other cardinal directions. Indications that several standing structures were present, but have been dismantled and removed. These structures may have been fabricated from the fuselages of downed resupply drones and other materials left over from earlier fighting, all of which could have concealed the enemy from orbital and aerial surveillance.”

Wiping a dirty hand across his face and feeling the stubble of his beard, Mortas flipped his goggle view to the surveillance feed. He saw the three glowing rings again, the platoons of B Company formed into defensive postures, and only the solitary flickerings of individual birds and animals moving around them. The heat signatures of the jungle creatures were too small to be Sims, leaving him to wonder just where the enemy had gone—­and what they'd been doing there.

Pappas offered a clue. “A series of short trenches within the enemy perimeter have also been discovered. The soil inside these ditches shows signs of having been badly scorched, which is surprising given the water content of the ground. It is likely that this was caused by a flammable material generating extreme heat, but there is no other indication of what that might have been or what the enemy was doing. It is extremely unlikely that such a heat signature would have gone unnoticed by surveillance satellites, suggesting that the enemy erected some kind of shielding over the trenches while the burning was in progress.

“Possible reasons for this activity could involve rendering the sap collected by the enemy into a different substance, use unknown at this time. The danger represented by creating such a large heat signature suggests that the Sims considered this activity to be highly important.”

Mortas's attention began to lapse, and he recognized that he was in danger of falling asleep. Returning to the imagery in his goggles, he toggled the view until it included the three monitoring stations to the north, their heat signatures standing out like roaring green furnaces against the blackness of the jungle.

He narrowed the view again, enjoying the sensation of plummeting straight toward the ground, until he could make out the individual dots around him. One of the platoon's machine-­gun teams covered the trail to the west, and a scattered line of men formed the ambush. He identified himself and Vossel, set back from the trail, and then a pair of two-­man teams several yards to his east and west. Despite the absence of the enemy and the fallback position occupied by the remainder of the platoon, the ambushing squad was still responsible for its own local security and had to make sure Sim infiltrators didn't sneak up on them from behind.

A slight breeze drifted through the dense foliage, making Mortas aware of his own stench. A mix of body odor and the sharp scent of that day's stink pill, it would have been revolting if it hadn't been helping in a small way to keep him awake.

The sound dampeners in his helmet snugged down hard without warning, and Mortas flattened against the dirt in a reflex born on Fractus. The dampeners detected large sound waves a fraction of a second before their arrival, protecting the wearer's hearing and providing a moment's warning that something big had just detonated nearby. A brief spasm of movement from several of the veterans waiting in ambush proved his reaction was not unique, but no blast followed.

Instead, a warning message came through. This one was straight from the
Dauntless
.

“Warning. Enemy movement detected.” A robot voice chattered a preset message activated when the scanners got a hit. “One mile southwest of civilian monitoring station Almighty, moving northeast. Estimated size: platoon strength.”

All around him, bodies switched the view on their goggles to see where almost forty enemy soldiers had appeared as if they'd materialized out of the ground. Sergeant Frankel spoke to his men. “Don't get distracted. Sam's a tricky bastard, and whatever he's showing the satellites is far away from here. Keep your eyes open and watch your assigned sectors.”

Dassa echoed a similar command to the rest of B Company, and Mortas shifted the overhead view all the way around his platoon's split locations. The jungle showed no signs of the Sims, but that was hardly reassuring, given what was happening to their northwest.

The green-­white dots of the Sims' heat signatures were in three parallel columns, with roughly one hundred yards between them. Eerily reminiscent of his platoon's movement formation that day but moving at a steady pace. Mortas focused on the three soldiers in the lead, marveling at the ease with which they were moving forward through the bush.

“Almighty, are you seeing this?” Dassa called the civilian security force defending the Victory Provisions station.

“Hard to miss 'em, isn't it?” a bored voice responded. “Don't get worked up, Army. We got somethin' for these assholes.”

The dots shifted again, hustling northeast toward the Victory Provisions site. All across their silent jungle positions, the troops of B Company exchanged quizzical looks that conveyed their confusion about what the enemy was doing. Despite their rapid progress through the jungle, the Sims would soon encounter the steep slopes surrounding the civilian station. At the top of that elevation was an electrified antipersonnel fence and a trained security force. Almighty had its own armed satellite that could rain rockets down on any opposition and, in the unlikely event that those systems failed, the
Dauntless
was overhead with even more firepower.

“Rockets on the way. Rockets on the way,” the bored voice announced. “Lemme show ya how it's done, Infantry.”

The dampeners snugged down again, but the enemy target was so far away that Mortas didn't react. The night was dark enough where he might have glimpsed the incoming ordnance, but the trees and foliage made that impossible. A target designator popped up on the enemy concentration in his goggles, and a moment later the image flashed in a spasm of light. The first rocket was dead-­on, and several more impacted right after that. The burst of white blotted out the dots that were the enemy, and chunks of burning material arched away into the jungle.

When the image returned to normal, several small fires marked the spot where the enemy platoon had been. To the west, a single white dot was zigzagging across the blackness, looking like a crazed firefly chasing a much smaller and more nimble insect. It sped up suddenly, charging forward at a fantastic speed before coming to a sudden halt. Mortas decided it was a lone Sim survivor, fleeing the strike, terror-­stricken, and that he'd fallen down some kind of an embankment in the darkness.

One last rocket raced down, slamming into the spot where the single Sim lay, the sound of the blast a mere whisper when it reached them.

“Evenin', Sam. So glad you could drop by,” the Victory Provisions man said in farewell. “Go back to sleep, Army. Didn't need ya—­don't need ya.”

Before anyone could respond, dampeners all over the jungle clamped down and the robot voice spoke again. “Urgent warning. Urgent warning. Major fire detected at Retransmission Station Broadleaf.”

Mortas swung the goggle image from the rocket strike to the Force station that sat between Almighty and the planetary monitoring base Cordvine. Normally the building's rectangular silhouette glowed with heat, but now it pulsated on two sides as if the northern and eastern walls were a set of bellows.

A tiny speck of light, an ember thrown from a fireplace, burst into life on the northern slope, then disappeared. Mortas was just wondering what that might have been when a half dozen more of them blinked from the same area and the radio burst into chatter.

“This is Broadleaf! This is Broadleaf! We are under close attack! They're inside the wire!”

Adrenaline surged through Mortas as he increased the resolution. Dots began to emerge from the burning structure, men running into the lighted compound and abruptly stopping, dropping, and lying still. More flickers from the jungle, and now he was just able to make out the impacts against the wall of fire, a giant blacksmith's hammer pounding a red-­hot piece of steel. Boomers. Enemy rocket launchers. The sounds of the blasts finally reached them, along with the muttered chatter of enemy machine guns, and yet there were no Sim heat signatures from the firing positions.

Orphan voices came over the radio.

“How did they get in there?”

“Why can't we see them?”

“We have to get there,
now
!” Mortas recognized the voice of Lieutenant Wyn Kitrick, from Third Platoon. Kitrick had signed himself out of the hospital when the Orphans had gone to Fractus, but his unhealed wound had forced his evacuation before the bruising battle. Mortas knew the man carried a fair amount of guilt over that.

“Get up there?” Lieutenant Stout, leading Second Platoon, exclaimed. “Miles of bush, in darkness, then up a cliff face with Sam waiting on top? Not a chance.”

“What, we gonna leave them to fight by themselves?” Kitrick again. “No. We gotta go help them.”

“Everyone stop talking. You know better than that.” Dassa's iron command stilled the panic. “Broadleaf, can you direct orbital fire onto the enemy?”

“Negative, Orphan! You gotta do it for me!” Terror jumped on the other end of the transmission, and the booming sound of the rockets came with it. “They're in the compound! Dozens of 'em! Hit everything outside the building! Bring it in as close as you can!”

“Understood. Hang tough, Broadleaf! Rockets on the way!”

Right next to Dassa somewhere in Second Platoon's perimeter, an expert in the application of support fires took over. His technical description was Aerial Support Systems Liaison, but across the infantry these men were warmly addressed by their acronym, ASSL.