Empire of Man 01 - March Upcountry (20 page)

Roger smiled in pleasure at the rare compliment.

"You know I like languages."

"So the scummy thinks we should move out?" Pahner asked, just to keep things straight.

"Yes," Roger said, somewhat coldly. He was beginning to develop a distaste for the epithet. "He has a problem with something that apparently comes out only at night. He wants to hurry to make it to his village before whatever it is comes out."

"That's going to be tough," Pahner said consideringly. "We've got a pass to cross, then quite a bit of jungle. We'll barely make it up to the top of the ridge before dark."

"He seems to think we ought to be able to make it before dark without
too
much trouble," Eleanora put in.

"He may be right," Pahner responded. "But if he is, then his village has to be a lot closer than I think he's suggesting."

"Then
I
suggest that we'd better get moving," Roger said.

"No question there," Pahner agreed. "First we've got to get this tent taken down, though."

"Hang on." Roger pulled his drinking tube down. "Here," he said, gesturing with it to the Mardukan. "Water."

They didn't have that word yet, so he used Standard. To demonstrate, he took a drink out of it and dribbled a few drops onto his hand to show the Mardukan what it was. Cord leaned forward and took a swig off of the tube. He nodded at Roger in thanks, then gestured to leave the tent.

"Yeah," Roger said with a laugh. "I guess we're all on the same sheet of music."

But playing in different keys.

It quickly became apparent to Roger where the disconnect between Cord's and Pahner's estimated travel times lay. Cord's giant legs drove him forward at a far quicker pace than humans were able to maintain. The Marines, had they been less heavily encumbered, could have jogged and kept up with the Mardukan, but Matsugae, O'Casey, and the Navy pilots were unable to make anything like the same rate of movement. As the sun set behind the mountains and the alluvial outflow narrowed into a mountain gorge, the Mardukan became more and more voluble in his worries, and translations became clearer and clearer.

"Prince Roger," Cord said, "we must hurry. The
yaden
will suck us dry if they find us. I'm the only one with a cover cloth." He gestured to his leather cape. "Unless you have those 'tents' for everyone?"

"No," Roger said. He grasped a boulder and pulled himself up onto it. The vantage point gave him a clear view of the company scattered up and down the narrow defile. The tail of the unit was just starting up the narrow, steep canyon while the head was nearing the top. As mountain canyons went, it wasn't much, but it was slowing them as the heavily laden troopers struggled up the ravine, pulling themselves from boulder to boulder. They blended into the background well, but for the flash of solar panels on the rucksacks and the occasional reflection off a weapon's barrel. The parties with the stretchers were in particularly bad straits, wrestling their heavy and cumbersome loads over rocks and around corners. All in all, the company was moving very slowly.

"No, we don't have enough large tents for everyone. But we have other covers, and everyone has a personal bivy tent. How large and fierce are these
yaden
?"

Cord mulled over a few of the words that obviously weren't quite right.

"They are neither large nor fierce. They are stealthy. They will slip into a camp full of warriors and select one or two. Then they overcome them and suck them dry."

Roger shuddered slightly. He supposed that it could be superstition, but the description was too precise.

"In that case, we're just going to have to post a good guard."

"This valley is thick with them," Cord said, gesturing around. "It is a well-known fact," he finished simply.

"Oh, great." Roger jumped nimbly down off the boulder. "We're in the Valley of the Vampires."

The wind was constant and enervating. It blew through the pass incessantly, funneling from the high-pressure upland desert to the lower pressure jungles. It dried the surroundings here at the head of the pass, creating one last patch of arid ground before the all-enveloping triple-canopy rain forest barely a hundred meters below.

Captain Pahner looked down at that canopy and, for the sixth time, reconsidered his decision to stop in the pass itself. Cord hadn't cared one way or the other; he insisted that anything short of returning to his village was a veritable death sentence, and now he sat by a fire as the cold settled in. Pahner didn't blame him a bit; the cold-blooded scummy would be virtually somnolent once the full cold hit.

The Marine scratched his chin for a moment, pondering what they'd so far learned from the native. He was forced to admit, albeit grudgingly, that Roger had had a point about the need to acquire the ability to communicate with the locals as quickly as they could. And the delay for the initial conversation probably hadn't mattered all that much in the end. Not that Pahner intended to say anything of the sort to Roger . . . or even to O'Casey. There could be only one commander, especially in a situation as extreme as this, and whatever the official table of organization might have said, "Colonel" His Royal Highness Prince Roger wasn't fit to be trusted with the organization of a bottle party in a brewery.

Now that the moment of pure, incandescent rage which had possessed him when the young jackass went right ahead and killed the
flar
beast had passed, the captain rather regretted his language. Not because he hadn't meant it, and not because it hadn't needed saying—not even, or perhaps especially, because of the potential impact their little
tête-à-tête
might have upon the future career of one Captain Armand Pahner (assuming the captain in question survived to worry about career moves). No, he regretted it because it had been unprofessional.

On the other hand, it seemed to have finally started making an impression on the sheer arrogance and carelessness which seemed to be two of the prince's more pronounced characteristics. Which was the reason Pahner had no intention of admitting that
this
time the kid might have had a point. The last thing they needed was for the prince to feel justified in continuing to butt heads with the professional who was his only chance of getting home alive.

Setting that consideration aside, however, it was beginning to look as if Cord might prove very valuable indeed, at least in the short run, and the debt he felt he owed to Roger might actually work out in the company's favor. It appeared that the Mardukan was a chief or shaman of the tribe whose territory they were about to enter, and that suggested that Roger might just have secured the best introduction and intermediary they could hope for.

Exactly why he'd been headed towards the lakebed remained less clear. He insisted that he'd been on some sort of vision quest, and it seemed evident that whatever problem he'd been seeking answers to must be pressing to drive him into such a hostile environment, but just what that problem was remained elusive despite his efforts to explain it. On the other hand, his conversations with Roger and Eleanora during the hike to this first camp had nearly completed the task of gathering a workable kernel for the language program. By tomorrow, translations should be as clear as the software could make them.

Pahner allowed himself a few more seconds to hope that would be the case—it would be really nice to have
something
break their way—and then put that particular problem away in favor of more immediate concerns. He turned and walked back through the camp perimeter, running one last personal visual check. Everything was in place: directional mines set, laser detectors on sweep, thermal detectors up and watching. If anything tried to get through those defenses, it had better be invisible or smaller than a goat. He completed his check and crossed to where Sergeant Major Kosutic waited with the portable master panel slung over her shoulder.

"Turn it on," he said, and she nodded and hit the trip switch. Icons flashed on the panel as the sensors came online and the weapons went live, and he watched her eyes move as she ran the visual checklist. Then she looked up at him and nodded again.

"Okay, everybody," Pahner announced, using both his external suit speakers and the all-hands frequency. "We're live. If you have to take a dump or a piss, do it in the latrine."

The latrines, like everything else about the camp, met the guidelines for a temporary camp in hostile territory. The latrines had been set up on the jungle side of the camp, and were dug to regulation depth and width. Inside the sensor parameter, each two-man team had dug in its own foxhole, and most of the party would sleep in them. The two-meter trenches were uncomfortable, but they were also safe. Those who weren't assigned to a fire team, like the Navy personnel (or Roger), had erected temporary shelters with their one-man "bivy" tents within the perimeter enclosed by the foxholes, and the company would maintain fifty percent watch all night long, with one trooper covering the other as he or she slept. It was a technique which had kept armies relatively safe on multiple worlds and through thousands of wars.

Relatively safe.

"How are the troops, Sergeant Major?" he asked quietly. He didn't like having to ask, but the constant wrestling with Roger was dragging him away from the troop time he preferred.

"Worried," Kosutic admitted. "The marrieds, especially. Their spouses and kids will have gotten the word by now that they're dead. Even if they make it back after all, it's going to be hard. Who's going to provide for their families in the meantime? A death bonus isn't much to live on."

Pahner had considered that.

"Point out to them that they're going to be up for plenty of back pay when they get home. Speaking of which, we're going to have to get some sort of a pay cycle in place when we get to whatever passes for civilization on this ball."

"Long way off to think about," Kosutic pointed out. "Let's make it through this night, and I'll be happy. I don't like this
yaden
thing. That big scummy bastard doesn't look like the type to scare easy."

Pahner nodded but didn't comment. He had to admit that the Mardukan shaman had him spooked, too.

"Wake up, Wilbur." Lance Corporal D'Estrees nudged the grenadier's boot with her plasma rifle. "Come on, you stupid slug. Time to take over."

It was just past local midnight, and she was more than ready to rack out for a couple of hours. They'd been trading off, turn and turn about, since sunset, while it got colder and colder. There'd been a few little things moving in the jungle below, and the sort of strange, unfamiliar noises any new world offered. But nothing dangerous, nothing to write home about. Even with both of the planet's double moons below the horizon, there was enough light for their helmets to enhance it to a barely dusky twilight, and there'd been nothing doing. Just hours to wait and watch and think about the straits the company was in. Now it was Wilbur's turn and the bivy tent was calling to her. If she could just get the stupid bastard to wake up, that was.

The grenadier was sleeping in his bivy, a combination of one-man tube-tent and sleeping bag less than a meter behind the foxhole. If it dropped in the pot he could be in the hole in a second;
would
be in the foxhole before he was fully awake. It also kept him in reach to be awakened for guard duty, but it had been a long day and it looked like he was sleeping pretty hard.

Finally, she got annoyed and flipped on her red-lens flashlight. It had the option of infrared, but prying open an eyelid and shining infrared in was an exercise in frustration.

She pulled back the head of the tent to flash the light in the sleeping grenadier's eyes.

Roger rolled to his feet at the first yell, but he could have spared himself some bruises if he'd just stayed put. The instant he came upright, two Marines tackled him and slammed him straight back down on the ground. Before he could sort out what was happening, there were three more troopers on his chest, and more around him with weapons trained outward.

"Get off me, goddamn it!" he yelled, but to no avail. The limits of his command authority were clear; the Marines would let him make minor choices, like whether they lived or died, but not large ones, like whether
he
lived or died. They ignored his furious demands so completely that in the end he had no choice but to settle for chuckling in bemusement.

Several minutes passed, and then the pile began to erupt as arms and legs disentangled. There were a few good-natured wisecracks that he pointedly did not hear, and then a hand pulled him to his feet. He noticed in passing that it was as dark as the inside of a mine, and he was wondering what had changed their minds and convinced them to let him up when his helmet was placed on his head and the light amplifiers on the visor engaged. Pahner was standing in the doorway of the tent.

"Well," the captain said wearily, "we've had a visit from your friend's vampires."

The grenadier was twenty-two, stood a shade over a hundred seventy centimeters, and, according to his file, weighed ninety kilos. He'd been born on New Orkney, and he had light reddish hair that ran thick on the backs of his freckled hands.

He no longer weighed ninety kilos, and the freckled hands were skeletal and yellow in the beam from the flashlight.

"Whatever it was," Kosutic said, "it sucked out just about every drop of blood in his body." She pulled up the chameleon cloth and pointed to the marks on his stomach. "These are at all the arteries," she said, turning the head to show the marks at the neck. "Two punctures, side-by-side, just about the width of human canines. Maybe a little closer."

Pahner turned to the lance corporal who'd been the grenadier's buddy. The Marine was stonefaced in the light from the lamp as she faced the company and platoon leadership with a dead buddy at her feet.

"Tell me again," Pahner said with iron patience.

"I didn't hear a thing, Sir. I didn't see a thing. I was not asleep. Private Wilbur did not make a sound, nor were there any significant sounds from the direction of his hooch."