Dire Steps (14 page)

Mortas looked at the dirt, running over the ramifications of this blunder. Without the goggles, B Company could only view overhead imagery using its handhelds. The devices gave off a dull glow in darkness, and it was ludicrous to think of infantrymen patrolling in the jungle using them to navigate the terrain. Most importantly, without the goggles, the Orphans would be unable to see in the dark. The range-­finding and targeting capabilities the eyepieces shared with the Scorpion rifles, the chonks, and the machine guns would likewise be lost.

“How about the Marines? They must have a stockage for their goggles.”

“Different goggles, different batteries.”

“The security platoon at Cordvine?”

“They were issued the same goggles as the Marines—­so they could get resupplied with batteries by any cruiser that was nearby.”

“How about our friends at Almighty?”

“Their rigs are the next-­generation stuff. Different batteries.”

“So the tech-­savvy humans are getting beat by the guys who are fighting with tree sap.” Mortas laughed with genuine amusement, but then stopped. “Once our goggles are dead, we won't be able to see Sam's heat when he's nearby. If the aerial systems can't detect him from above, we're really in the shit, sir.”

“That sums it up nicely. But you did bring up the only piece of good news I have. Come with me.”

They rose, and walked across the clearing to a space in the shadow of two large trees. A morgue detail from the ship was photographing the remains of Broadleaf's complement that had not yet been evacuated. The bodies lay in a row on camouflaged tarpaulins, many of them missing limbs from the bombardment. Dassa walked past them, to a single corpse off to the side.

“Sam knew we'd bring in the rockets to run him off, so he chopped holes in the fence, set the main building on fire, did a little shooting, and then ran for it. But this one didn't get away.”

They stood over the body, human in every respect except for its uniform. Tattered Sim fatigue pants were visible under the worn covering of a Sim combat smock, and the dead soldier's head was still protected by the flanged helmet of the Sim infantry. Mortas had seen this outfit up close on two other planets and immediately knew it had been modified.

Squatting, he noted dozens of finger-­sized strips of metal that had been glued all over the shoulders, arms, back, and torso of the man's smock. His helmet was likewise adorned, and on one large piece Mortas made out what looked like part of a stenciled serial number in human numerals.

“Is that what I think it is?”

“It is.” Dassa spoke with admiration. “Sam is the most adaptable guy in the universe. They must have chopped up every downed drone, every crashed recon 'bot, and probably a few shuttle wrecks we didn't know about. Took the heat shielding and broke it up into little strips that they glued all over their helmets and their smocks. That's why we can't pick up their heat signatures from above. There's still plenty of it, but it's broken up, so it doesn't register.”

Mortas lifted the smock and rubbed a thumb against the coarse black rosin holding the strips in place. “Well now we know what they were using the tree sap for.”

M
ortas awoke with effort. Someone was shaking his arm, and yet he was so completely asleep that it seemed like minutes before his eyes opened. The sky overhead was losing its light, and it took a moment before he remembered where he was. Dassa had ordered him to take a nap after discovering he'd been on the go for the previous two days and nights, and he'd curled up in his field blanket after briefing Dak on what he'd learned.

“You with us, Jan?” Captain Pappas was sitting next to him, the lenses of his goggles raised up under his helmet.

“Yes, sir.” He moved his tongue around inside his mouth, surprised that the gummy paste was gone before remembering he'd drunk and eaten his fill before going to sleep. “What's going on?”

“Your platoon is going to take me out to that spot near Almighty where the Sim heat signatures showed up last night. They scaled the cliff here and wrecked this place without once showing up on the scanners, while at the same time half a platoon of them appeared bright as day at a different location.”

“I thought we'd decided that was a diversion.”

“It was. I bet there weren't more than three or four Sims over there, running some kind of torchlight show for us. But it sure looked real, especially the way they moved, and I need to see whatever might have survived the rockets.”

“Begging your pardon, sir, but what could you find out that we don't already know?”

“Look here.” Pappas took out his handheld and activated the screen. Mortas knew the entire company had moved into goggle-­battery conservation before he took his nap, so he assumed there was a plentiful supply of power sources for the handhelds.

The screen was dark, with markers indicating the steep changes in elevation around the glowing rectangle of Almighty. Tiny heat signatures abounded in the blackness, the birds and animals that inhabited the forest going about their nocturnal business. A group of lights appeared, and Mortas was about to assume he was seeing a replay of the previous evening's bombardment when he noted that the cluster was in a different location and much smaller. The fireflies rambled across several hundred yards of jungle, then vanished.

Another clip started right after that, and the time stamp in the screen's corner told him that this footage was from eight months earlier. A long column of fireflies flickered into existence against the blackness, but they didn't seem to move at first. After close to a minute, the entire dotted line started lurching forward toward Almighty.

“Look at the signatures in the center. See how they keep their exact intervals? Nobody getting closer, nobody getting farther behind. Incredible discipline, right?”

“Incredible is the word. Nobody can walk through this crap without weaving left and right and getting hung up on every other vine. I'm guessing that line of troops was just a bunch of stationary heaters of some kind, with probably two live bodies at either end.”

“Very good.”

“On a prearranged schedule, the guy in the back extinguishes one of the heat sources while the guy in the front activates a new one. Looks like a whole column of moving Sims.”

“I believe that half platoon we saw last night was a similar arrangement.”

“Wait a second. Those clips you just showed me—­nothing happened to them. No rockets, no gunships. How did the satellites miss that?”

“How indeed? I didn't, and all I did was filter the footage using the exact same protocols the scanners use. There was no way they could have missed this. Cordvine routinely bombards the jungle, just on a whim, and Broadleaf wasn't shy about dropping something on suspicious signatures like what we're seeing here. But not our friends at Almighty. They seem to have been exhibiting a very live-­and-­let-­live attitude these past few months.”

“They didn't the other night. They nailed that concentration, or diversion, as soon as it appeared.”

“As soon as we called them about it, you mean.”

Mortas remembered the snide comments from Almighty from the night before, and the station's hostility to Force units operating in the area. “You think something weird is going on over there?”

“That's not all.” Pappas activated the handheld, showing a calm nighttime scene to the west of Almighty. Mortas was waiting for a set of lights to appear, more Sim deceptions, when a series of explosions burst in the jungle. The spasms of fire flashed into life, probably a dozen of them, and an area of at least one hundred square yards began to glow. The heat wasn't a fire, and it slowly spread before starting to cool.

“Now I'm completely baffled. I didn't see any indication of the enemy.”

“Neither did I. And I have no idea what that glowing patch indicated.” Pappas turned off the handheld. “But I intend to find out what our friends at Almighty have been up to.”

“I
can't say how long the Step is going to be suspended, but it can't be too long.” Dassa's voice came though the earpieces in helmets all over B Company. Riding in the back of a shuttle headed for the jungle near Almighty, Mortas's platoon listened with occasional comments.

“One thing's sure, it'll come back online ten seconds after we don't need it anymore.”

“Aw, don't be like that. Thing needs a good cleaning. Think how long everybody's been using it.”

Dassa continued, broadcasting from what was left of Broadleaf. “We've got excellent communications, so every aerial support system is still available to us. By cutting back on goggle usage, we should be able to ride this out. But just in case we don't, the engineers on the
Dauntless
are working around the clock on a way to link the goggles into the batteries in our helmets.”

“See? There's a good answer. A ­couple of exposed wires running between your eyes and your ears, and everything will be fine. Especially when it rains.”

“Nah, they'll come up with some kind of waterproof adapter that weighs two hundred pounds.”

Leaning back against his rucksack, Mortas studied a moving schematic on his handheld. Normally he would have tracked the flight on his goggles, but the batteries needed to be saved. Three shuttles were ferrying his platoon's three squads to a spot near Almighty, close to the location where the Sims had diverted the humans' attention the previous night. Landing zones on that part of Verdur were hard to come by, so rocket fire had blasted an open space for them over a period of hours. Harassment fire had continued through the day, striking the jungle in numerous places, and every so often a rocket would impact in the steadily growing clearing where they would land. At least in theory, the technique lessened the chances that the enemy would recognize that a landing zone was being created.

The three shuttles were coming in from different directions, having lifted off from Broadleaf as part of the back-­and-­forth with the
Dauntless
. Instead of going into orbit, they'd flown many miles away before dropping down to treetop level and heading for the clearing. Mortas monitored the progress of all three birds, fearing one of them might get shot down, and was ready to divert to the crash site.

Dassa continued. “I'm in communication with Major Hatton, and he's working up a plan to move the rest of the battalion here using normal propulsion. It will take days, but they'll bring everything we need. In the meantime, Major Hatton noticed something that we missed. If Sam only wanted to kill one station, he probably wouldn't have hit the one in the middle; he would have hit either Almighty or Cordvine.

“By removing Broadleaf, he's isolated the remaining two sites. I think that means he plans to knock off at least one more of them before reinforcements get here. Sam thinks he's put us completely on the defensive, but he's wrong. We're going to be ready, no matter where he pops up next.

“Second Platoon will secure Cordvine, while Third and I finish up at Broadleaf. First Platoon will patrol the jungle near Almighty, to gain intelligence and to respond to any moves against the station. We can reassemble the whole company using the shuttles if necessary, but we cannot simply go over to the defensive. Sam has figured out a way to avoid detection by our scanners, so we can't let him operate out there with impunity.

“Remember what they did to Broadleaf, and remember what they did to us. Now it's time for us to kill 'em back.”

The handheld indicated that the three different craft were all approaching the landing zone, and Mortas switched it off. Stowing it in a pocket on his armor, his hand brushed against the sheath of a long, narrow commando knife tucked between two ammo pouches. It had belonged to Corporal Cranther, the Spartacan Scout who'd been marooned with him on Roanum, and it stirred a memory that was just out of reach. He reached for it mentally, sensing that it had some significance for the current mission, but it slipped away.

Something to do with shuttles, but there had been no shuttle flights on Roanum. Or water. Or food. Just lots and lots of walking. They'd escaped the planet by stealing a Wren shuttle from the Sims at their spacedrome, but that couldn't be it. The nagging memory seemed important, but he had to set it aside when the craft's rear ramp suddenly dropped, bringing him back to the present.

The twin rows of soldiers in camouflaged armor, wearing rucksacks that bulged with extra ammo, rations, and water, hustled down the ramp into the mangled greenery created by the rockets. Turning on his goggles in order to see the terrain around his location, Mortas grabbed his rifle and hurried after them.

“Y
ou seeing what I'm seeing?” Captain Pappas whispered from the center of a small clearing that had been blasted into the vegetation southwest of Almighty the night before.

Or it should have been a small clearing, cluttered with fallen branches and a few sagging trees held up by the profusion of growth around them. Instead, a hole ripped in the canopy above let in the last of the day's light to show an unexpected scene. A partially cleared area stood under the gap and extended for one hundred yards in every direction. Mortas's platoon was in a loose perimeter around that zone while Pappas tried to understand what it meant.

“They manicured the place. It's like they were trying to plant something and keep it hidden. Chopped out the trees and cleared the bushes in rows, leaving the rest in place.” In the dying light, Mortas saw the intelligence officer hop up and scurry forward several yards, mindful that the platoon had not yet secured the dense overgrowth around the bizarre site. “I'm where the rockets hit, right now. Big crater, minor damage to the trees, no sign of whatever Sam was doing out here.”

Dak spoke to Mortas from across the clearing. “Not a good place to spend the night. We gotta get going.”