First to Fight (26 page)

“This isn’t controlled conditions, this is a live operation.”

“You’ve got your regular equipment to use as backup, and to confirm any data from the UPUD. That makes it controlled conditions.”

“Who made it?”

“It doesn’t matter who made it. It’s made to Confederation Marine Corps spec, that’s what matters.”

“It matters to me.”

Myer hesitated, giving Bass a hard look. “Terminal Dynamics. And they fixed the problem, Charlie. I checked that out myself, went out to where I didn’t have line-of-sight communications and used the damn radio. It bounced off the satellite.”

“I still don’t trust it.”

“You shouldn’t. Never trust anything the first time you see it. Never believe manufacturer’s claims. When they don’t lie outright about their equipment’s capabilities, they exaggerate them. All I’m saying is try it—with your existing equipment as backup.”

Bass’s internal struggle was evident on his face. Myer stood without saying anything to give the platoon sergeant a chance to work his way through it. Finally, Bass said, “All right, I’ll test it.” He took the UPUD Mark II from Myer’s hand. “But the first time this piece of shit doesn’t work, it’s gone.”

“Fair enough, Charlie.”

Bass looked into Myer’s eyes, hard. “I’m going to take it out on a foot patrol myself. I’m going to put it through its paces like it’s never been tested before.” He turned to Conorado. “Skipper, you said the Siad are on the move. Where?”

“All over their territory. But other than a few stragglers and small groups, none of them within seventy-five klicks of here.”

“How long would it take for them to mass here?”

“They’re on horseback. It would take two days for enough of them to gather and get here in strength to do any damage—but only if they were willing to kill their horses doing it.”

“Then tomorrow I’m taking a patrol out on the relief run and have it drop us off twenty klicks away. We’ll test this,” he hefted the UPUD, “on the walk back.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY-TWO

“You see where we are?” a glaring Staff Sergeant Bass snarled at Corporal Doyle. “That damn thing better work,” he couldn’t bring himself to call the UPUD Mark II by name, “and you better know how to use it, or just maybe none of us will live to see Tulak Yar again.”

Doyle swallowed. He could see perfectly well where they were—in the anteroom of some medieval hell. Populate it with a few dozen tormented souls, and it was a landscape that could have been painted by Hieronymus Bosch, had Bosch been a Copt instead of Flemish and known what a desert looked like. It was barren, colored light brown and light tan, and all the browns and tans in between, with occasional splotches of pink and rust-red and blue—and those were just the rocks erupting from the sand. Nowhere did Corporal Doyle see the greens and reds and yellows of life. The fantastically twisted and contorted land, with its spires of rock, tumbles of stone, and drifts of sand, made him shudder. High fliers drifted on the currents. Doyle wondered if they were carrion-eaters. They must be, he thought. There can’t possibly be anything here to hunt. But where did the carrion come from? Must be from animals that accidentally wandered into this area and died from it—or people who went into it on foot when there were better places to go or vehicles to ride in. He really didn’t need Bass’s glares and barely veiled threats to let him know they were in a deadly place where the Mark II and his expertise in using it could make the difference between life and death.

Bass’s question was rhetorical and he didn’t wait for an answer. Instead he simply added, “Don’t turn that damn thing on until I tell you to.” Then he snapped, “Move out,” at his patrol, and led them in a direction perpendicular to that of the Dragon, which had dropped them off in the middle of . . . “nowhere” seemed too inadequate a word to describe where they were, so Bass shook his head and didn’t try to assign a label to the place. The air cushion drone of the armored vehicle that was now out of sight beyond one of the nearby tablelands rapidly diminished into silence. Encumbered by little more than a large supply of water and a holstered side arm, Bass set a brisk pace for his twisting route through the badlands. The other men had to struggle to keep up—they were carrying larger weapons, more ammunition, and other gear as well as their water. An hour later, when he was sure none of his men knew where they were—he certainly wasn’t sure where he was—he stopped in the shade of a monolithic boulder that thrust out of the ground.

Bass had been in a bad mood from the minute he woke up that morning. He didn’t want to field-test the UPUD Mark II in the first place, but he had to regardless. So if there was a flaw or hidden problem in the UPUD Mark II, he was determined to find it.

“If by some miracle this thing works, I want men from each team in the platoon to be familiar with it,” he’d growled at his squad leaders after morning chow. “Hyakowa, Eagle’s Cry, I want one man from each of your fire teams. Kelly, I want a gunner and an assistant gunner from you.” The squad leaders exchanged glances; they’d never seen Bass in so vile a mood. “Softcovers, no helmets,” Bass said, giving instructions on what the men should bring. “Weapons, a spare battery, one day’s rations, one day’s water, basic medkits. Now do it.” He spun about and stomped off to get his own gear.

“Aye aye, Staff Sergeant,” Hyakowa murmured toward Bass’s back. He tipped his head at the other two and they followed him away.

“You pissed off enough at anybody to send him with Bass?” Eagle’s Cry asked before they went their separate ways to their squad areas.

Hyakowa shook his head.

“I’m never that mad at anybody in my squad,” Kelly said.

“So what are we going to do?” Eagle’s Cry asked.

“Ask for volunteers,” Hyakowa told them.

“Do we tell them what kind of mood the boss is in?”

Hyakowa sighed. “Use your own discretion.”

“Gotcha.”

So it was that Corporal Dornhofer, Eagle’s Cry’s second fire team leader, Lance Corporals Schultz and Neru, a gun squad gunner, and PFCs Claypoole, Dean, and Clarke, a new guy in the gun squad, volunteered for something that they began having second thoughts about as soon as they gathered around Staff Sergeant Bass.

Long before the Dragon dropped them off out in the middle of . . . of—“Does anyplace like this exist in the real universe?” Claypoole asked when he saw where they were—every one of them had revised his previously sterling opinion of Staff Sergeant Charlie Bass and resolved never again to volunteer for anything.

“I’m offering odds on none of us ever seeing civilization again,” Schultz muttered during the fast-paced trek into the badlands. Maybe nobody could mess with Marines and get away with it, but this land was bigger and meaner than anybody Schultz had ever run into.

“You can’t offer odds long enough to get any takers,” Dornhofer said sotto voce to Schultz when Bass finally halted in the shade of the boulder.

A long, high, riftlike cliff stood opposite the boulder a couple of hundred meters away. A jumble of mounds and hillocks cut off their vision less than a hundred meters to the rear. The farthest they could see other than up was less than five hundred meters ahead, where a high hill or low mountain began its climb to the sky. There was no way they were in line of sight of another UPUD Mark II.

“Turn that damn thing on now,” Bass snapped at Doyle when the panting corporal caught up with him and slumped against the boulder.

Doyle gasped once or twice, then pulled the UPUD Mark II from its carrying pouch, flipped on its power switch, and opened the lid.

“Ask it where we are.” Bass pulled a standard geo position locator out of a pocket and queried it. Doyle looked accusingly at the GPL. Bass wasn’t being fair about blaming him for anything that might happen if the UPUD Mark II didn’t work right. With that GPL, they wouldn’t get lost.

Bass grunted when Doyle read off coordinates that agreed with the ones his GPL gave. He wished he had a good map to compare the readings to, but there weren’t any reliable maps for that part of Elneal. He looked at the sketchy one he had and decided it might as well have a large X, labeled in a shaky hand, “Here Lie Treasure,” and a large blank area with the legend “Tygers Be Here.” Disgusted, he jammed the map into a pocket.

“Crank up the radio and raise the Six,” he ordered. As far as he was concerned, this was the most important test. If the radio didn’t work, he was going to borrow somebody’s blaster and slag the damn thing.

Doyle pressed a sensor, spoke into the mouthpiece, waited, spoke again, and handed the unit to Bass.

“Lima Three Six,” Bass said into it, “this is Five Actual. We are at,” he read the coordinates off his own GPL, “and proceeding as planned. Over.”

“Lima Three Five Actual, this is Lima Three Six Actual,” Baccacio’s voice came back. “Use correct radio procedure.”

Bass looked at the Mark II as if he wanted to strangle it; he couldn’t believe that Baccacio was chiding him about radio procedure.

“Roger yours, Six Actual. Out.” If Baccacio didn’t like his radio procedure, let him chew on that one—the senior position, in this case the platoon, Baccacio—was supposed to be the one to sign off first in radio communications.

He handed the Mark II back to Doyle. “Set a homing vector for us. And turn off the radio.” He punched the appropriate commands into his GPL and decided that part of the Mark II was working properly, for now anyway, when Doyle read off the same azimuth the GPL gave him. “Give it a tangential vector of 045 degrees. We’ll follow that for a while and see how that damn thing behaves. Deviation of five degrees.” He set his GPL the same way. This was a test to see how the homing vector changed as they moved away from the line of their original direction, and to see if the Mark II would alert them if they were shifting too far from their intended direction.

They went three kilometers in the tangential direction. The UPUD beeped within seconds of when Bass’s GPL did to warn of course deviation. The homing vector on the Mark II changed the same as on the GPL. So far, the UPUD was performing properly.

“Next test,” Bass snarled when he called another stop. This was a place where the land dipped and rose and twisted back and around on itself. It was pitted and pimpled so severely that half an army could be hidden in it so well that not even infras could pick up signs of anybody nearby.

So far the locator was working properly and so was the radio—Bass had Doyle make the half-hourly situation reports. “No change, proceeding with mission,” Bass said, and didn’t bother to speak into it himself, not even when Doyle tried to hand it to him. They couldn’t test the vector computer for calling in air strikes, but they were going to test the motion detector.

“You stand here looking in that direction,” Bass ordered Doyle, and went back to where the rest of the patrol waited for him.

Doyle stood where he was told and wished he had the courage to look in a direction other than the one Bass had indicated. He was shaken by a sudden fear that Bass was going to lead the others away and leave him there to find his own way out of the desolation. Not even the thought that he had the UPUD Mark II and that it was working properly could quell his trembling. But Bass didn’t have any ideas about abandoning Doyle or anyone else out there. What he really wanted was for the UPUD to flunk a test so he could slag it.

“Sit down and find a rock to lean against,” Bass suddenly said from right behind Doyle.

Doyle jumped at the unexpected words. He dropped into a sitting position and, with a whoosh, let out the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. He took a couple of deep, slow breaths, then scooted around until his back was against the shady side of a boulder that stood higher than he was tall.

Bass sat next to him. “I didn’t want you to look back because I didn’t want you to have any idea where I was sending people,” he explained. “I want any motion readings you get on that damn thing to be real readings, not affected by anything you know. Understand?”

Doyle nodded. “I understand. No problem.” Still, he couldn’t keep the relief at not being abandoned out of his voice.

“The rest of the patrol is out there somewhere, moving around. Maybe. Turn on the motion detector and see what it picks up. Use its lowest setting.” Bass wanted to test its sensitivity along its entire range.

Doyle managed to tap in the commands without fumbling. He studied the shifting colors on the viewscreen for a moment, then his eyes opened wide and he looked up. A puzzled expression took over his face, and he looked back at the screen, then back up again.

“It can’t be.”

“What?”

“It’s showing two men moving over there.” He pointed at a fiat area fifty meters away.

Bass nodded. “There’s a gully over there. Claypoole and Dean are following it.”

“But I’ve got the setting so low it shouldn’t pick up anybody at that distance, not unless he’s moving in the open.”

Bass raised his eyebrows, impressed. “Very good. See anything else?”

Doyle shook his head.

“Notch it up.”

Doyle did and studied the screen again. Abruptly, he dropped the UPUD and scrambled to the side of the boulder to look around it. Neru and Clarke were approaching the boulder from behind.

“No!” Doyle exclaimed. “It can’t be.” He looked back at Bass. “It’s not possible for a motion detector to pick up movement through stone at that setting.”

Bass considered what Doyle said. He thought the company clerk might be right. If he had the UPUD set right, that is. He looked suspiciously at the UPUD. “Check your setting.”

Doyle came back and examined his settings. “Second lowest.”

“Odd.”

Doyle nodded agreement.

“Everybody in,” Bass called out.

“My God,” Doyle murmured as the screen went crazy with all the motion that suddenly appeared on it.

“The motion detector’s more sensitive than we expected,” Bass said when his men were assembled. “On its lowest setting it picked up you two in that gully,” he said to Claypoole and Dean. “On the next setting up, it caught you two coming up behind us,” to Neru and Clarke. They gaped at him.

“I want to see what happens if you really wind it up.”

Everybody moved to where they could see the screen. Doyle obligingly shifted to make it more easily visible. His hand paused over the controls. The motion detector was so sensitive on its two lowest settings he was a bit apprehensive at what it might do at its highest. He entered the commands. The viewscreen suddenly filled with fluttering ghosts and tiny, swimming dots.

“What the . . . ?”

“Sweet Jesus Mohammad.”

“What’s it doing?’

Doyle studied the manic images and looked in the directions it indicated. “It’s showing us breathing,” he said in an awed voice. “Look at that.” He put a fingertip on one of the ghosts. “See how much more it’s moving? That’s me talking. Dorny, say something.”

“This can’t be,” Dornhofer said. “I’ve never heard of a motion detector doing that before.” A different ghost shimmered rapidly when he spoke.

“Schultz, you say something.”

“What are all those little dots in between?” A third ghost responded to Schultz speaking.

Doyle peered at the moving dots on the screen. “I don’t know, but they seem pretty close.” He made an adjustment to focus the image tightly on one of the moving dots, then, holding the UPUD in one hand, moved forward and began crawling, shifting his eyes between the viewscreen and the ground in front of him. After a few meters he stopped and lowered his face toward the ground.