War in Heaven (43 page)

‘Okay, everyone pack up the E-suits and shove your camo on.’

By camo I meant reactive camouflage. They were like gillie suits made of a rugged liquid-crystal thinscreen that adapted to and blended with the surroundings. One of the benefits of a near-bottomless expense account. Well that and the amount that each of us had embezzled. We took it in turns to get out of the E-suits, breaking them down and packing them away. More weight to carry but we didn’t know when we’d need them again. Then we shrugged on the reactive camouflage over whatever armour we were wearing.

Each of us was carrying five hundred metres of photoreceptive smart rope. Merle was taking the end of each of the pieces of rope and chemically bonding them together. He was then checking them, then Cat was rechecking them and then I did the same.

‘Is this enough?’ I asked.

Merle shrugged in a not very comforting manner. He took the winch frame and mechanism from the drop container and started fitting it together. I headed around to the other side of the hole in the cavern floor to aid him. The rest were watching our backs. We wrapped the container in a reactive camouflage suit and swung it out over the hole. The engine whined quietly as the winch mechanism slowly started feeding in the rope we’d coiled on the floor. Merle guided it through to make sure it didn’t snarl up. Now Cat and myself were covering the hole in case anything happened. In theory it was moving so slowly that the camouflage sheet and the properties of the rope should render it almost invisible.

It took a long time. We’d fed over a thousand metres of rope through when we heard it. An engine. The so-familiar sound of a gunship had once been a comforting sound to me. Not now.

Merle slowed the winch, bringing it to as gentle a stop as he could manage. I could still see the rope swinging from the winch. Cat and I backed a little further away from the edge of the hole. Merle took something from his webbing and unfolded it. Super-spy had brought a hand-held periscope. He lay down on the rock floor and peered through it into the cavern.

Nobody said anything. The acoustics of the cavern were doing odd things. The engine noise seemed to get very loud and then recede. The echoing didn’t help. I was sweating again. Not so much from the exertion this time; I was suddenly overwhelmed with fear that the gunship would fly into the rope or the container. This was ridiculous. It was a huge cavern and a very thin rope. Eventually we heard the sound of the gunship’s engines definitely receding and Merle folded away his periscope.

‘Patrol,’ he said. ‘Would have been here longer if they were changing shift at the atmosphere processor.’ I nodded. He started the winch again. Some minutes later I saw the rope develop a bit of slack. ‘Well it’s long enough,’ Merle said.

We quickly disassembled the winch and packed it into Merle’s gear. He was first over. He just slithered over the edge head first. We watched the rope quiver as he slowly rappelled down it. After an age we saw it twitch. You had to be paying attention because the rope was now the same colour as the background rock.

Morag was next. That seemed to take longer. I had a brief thrill of terror as I watched her creep out over the precipice, but already the camouflage was obscuring her, turning her into fractal ghost movements in the violet light.

Then I went. The awful feeling of vertigo as I slipped over the edge head first, the sudden change in perspective, the shifting of the cavern floor and the sudden appearance of the cavern roof above me. I quickly suppressed the terror as I concentrated on rappelling down the rope slow enough for the reactive camouflage to work, using my legs to keep my inverted body straight. Down through the massive rigs that supported the UV strip lights. It was disconcerting because the rope seemed to disappear just below my grip and I was struggling to see my own hands. I had to rely on my sense of touch, dulled by gloves and inertial armour. The sound of my rasping breath was loud in my ears. Very quickly I was exhausted. I was so heavy and all the weight just wanted to pull me towards the distant ground.

All this rock. I wondered if Cat had gone to the Grand Canyon to remind herself of this place. Why would she want to be reminded? The mind does strange things to veterans. You don’t think you’ll miss these places but, like Mudge had pointed out, few experiences in your life ever live up to being that intense.

Looking back up I could see what looked like an enormous fan with an equally enormous filter beneath it. Around the edge of this giant piece of engineering I could see a system of catwalks with automated weapons at regular intervals. Fortified buildings hung from the cavern roof plus a landing pad that looked like it could take anything up to a transport shuttle. This was one of the atmosphere processors that helped make the air in the cavern system manageable. I didn’t want to call the air breathable. I continued pulling myself down. In terms of mega-scale engineering I guess the only things comparable were orbital stations and the Spokes. There were bigger ships, but we never saw the outside of them up close.

I was less than halfway down when I heard it. The ground still looked distant but seemed to be pulling me towards it. My enhanced hearing picked up the distant noise echoing from a connecting tunnel. The noise was deeper, signifying a much bigger vectored-thrust vehicle. I froze on the rope. I felt like a spider.

It was a heavy-lift military transport. It looked like a flying chunk of armour, a weapons platform with cargo space. It circled close enough to me that I was buffeted, bouncing up and down on the rope, making the reactive camouflage work harder. Close enough that I could look down gun barrels, count missiles and see the jacked-in pilot’s helmeted head. I didn’t have much of a contingency plan for compromise here other than to drop down as quickly as I could.

The buffeting from the transport lifted me high up on the rope and then dropped me hard. I tried not to cry out as the rope bounced. I lost grip with my legs and spun, the rope sliding through my hands. I felt utterly helpless, praying the camouflage was still concealing me. I heard the whine of more power added to engines as the ugly military vehicle rose, heading towards the landing pad next to the processor.

My back was screaming at me. Despite the supporting clamp and my own enhancements the impact in the high G had really hurt. Slowly I managed to recover and begin pulling myself down again as I responded to warnings in my IVD by dampening the pain with a small dose of painkiller from my internal reservoir. I wanted to use it sparingly. This planet was starting to seem like pain. What was worse, my skin was beginning to burn in the UV. None of us had thought to bring sunblock.

It was either a supply delivery or a guard change. I was still on the rope when the transport left and had to remain still again, but it didn’t come so close this time and the buffeting wasn’t so bad.

The canopy of giant ferns felt so cool when I got under it. Rolling over to land gently on my feet, Merle and Morag were nowhere in sight. I unclipped myself and brought the SAW up ready. There was a quiet whistle. I responded and part of the surrounding flora came to life. Merle gestured to me, images of the surrounding jungle seemed to slide off him as he did so, showing me where Morag was. I indicated where I was going and moved into position after shaking the rope, signalling for Mudge to follow.

Waiting beneath the fern canopy in violet light was the closest to a pleasurable experience I’d had since we’d got here. Perhaps it was the presence of the plants, but the air didn’t seemed quite so bad.

There had been another moment when an airborne combat remote had flown by as Cat had been coming down. She had remained still and the reactive camouflage had done its work. As had the heat-masking properties of our inertial armour suits. They were designed to dampen our IR signatures and make us more difficult to spot using thermographics.

When Cat was down Merle had touched the rope with the control wand. Normally we would have used our internal comms to transmit the command codes but we intended to remain comms dark our entire stay. No transmissions. In the cave in the roof of the cavern nearly two miles above us, the rope untied itself. We then kept well back as three thousand metres of it fell towards us. This made more noise than I was happy with, but we needed the rope and there was only so much we could carry.

Then it was time for another long tab carrying that fucking container. We went deeper into the stone guts of the planet. It got colder and the air stank more, burning the backs of our throats as we headed towards one of Merle’s Cemetery Wind caches. We travelled in the dark. Our lowlight optics powered by an internal light source let us see where we were going. It also made everything look green. Most of the time we walked, taking it in turns to carry the container while someone took point and the rear. Other times we were forced to climb. All the while a tremendous weight bore down on us. We stopped periodically to rest and eat. Nobody said much. Everyone was too tired.

Merle and Pagan, who I think was trying to prove something to us, scouted the cache position before coming back for us. We left the container and moved forward stealthily, ready for trouble and grateful that we found none.

It was just another small cave. The entrance had been camouflaged by the simple expedient of painting a sheet of material to look like the rest of the rock. The place was full of supplies and something even better.

‘I’m not in the military so forgive me if I don’t get the strategic reason we humped that fucking container about when there’s all these supplies here,’ Mudge said, sounding genuinely pissed off.

‘We didn’t know if it would still be here or if it had been compromised,’ Merle told him.

‘Mudge, Morag, I want one of you on the entrance and the other a little further out. Okay?’ I said. ‘The rest of us are going to do a sweep in here then sort out what we need.’ There was some muttering from Mudge but he nodded.

‘But the shiny cars?’ Morag protested. She was referring to the four Fast Attack Vehicles.

‘You can look at them later,’ I told her.

Grudgingly she joined Mudge, making for the entrance. I could understand her interest. They were a welcome sight and had long been the envy of most third-world soldiers like myself. They looked like a bizarre hybrid of performance sports car, old-style dune buggy and tank. With an independently driven four-wheel-drive combat chassis powered by a well-protected hydrogen power plant in the rear of the vehicle, the FAVs were heavily armoured, hermetically sealed and designed for stealth operations. This put them out of reach of all but equatorial special forces units – and apparently Cemetery Wind. The power plant’s cracker could remove hydrogen from water to power it. This meant if you had a ready supply of water the vehicle’s range was only limited by wear and tear. They made the Land Rovers we’d used on Dog 4 look like go-karts.

These ones had been modified for Lalande 2. The independent suspension had been reinforced and the tyres were made from intelligent smartfoam. This, along with twin front and back winches linked to grapples, gave them a limited climbing capability. They would cling to rock, and what they couldn’t cling to they could use the winches to get over.

We swept the cave thoroughly and then Pagan and I ran diagnostics on the FAVs. Cat and Merle cherry-picked what we wanted from the supplies. Merle assured us that it would be fine to take the quiet-running FAVs as long as we stuck to the deeper tunnels away from habitation.

We were still moving in the darkness using lowlight. There was a generator and lights here but we’d decided against them. It was like living in a permanent green twilight. I gathered Pagan, Cat and Merle around me.

‘You find any surveillance?’ I asked Pagan.

‘If it’s here then I can’t see it.’

His answer did not fill me with confidence.

‘There’s nothing active here,’ Merle said.

I wasn’t sure I liked that either.

‘When’s our next scheduled RV with Rannu?’ I asked Pagan.

‘Twenty-three hours,’ he said.

Day or night was meaningless under all this rock. Our bodies were going to find their own clocks. Pagan was hard-wired into a monitor and he showed us the rendezvous point on it.

‘Okay, that’s about twenty miles south and maybe three below Moa City. Good choice – there’s nothing there,’ Merle told us. ‘There’s so much tunnel down here, they would tie up all their manpower just trying to patrol a small part of it. They’ll keep their people close to strategic locations.’

‘I agree,’ Pagan said. ‘Our biggest risk is going to be remotes.’

‘Risk the FAVs?’ I asked. I tried not to sound hopeful. Cat and Merle nodded. I think everyone was relieved, I knew I was. ‘Okay, we take what we need and we do it quickly. We find a place to camp and stay there for fifteen hours. That’ll give us more than enough time to get to the RV point and hopefully we can find out what’s going on.’

Merle raised his eyebrows. Fifteen hours was a long time, but if the others felt anything like me then they needed the rest.

‘We camp up and get our heads down. Two on, four off – four-hour shifts. Cat and Merle, you get the middle shift, and yes, I am picking on you,’ I said.

Merle nodded; Cat gave me the finger. It meant a broken night’s sleep but it made sense. Cat and Merle were most used to the environment.

This was how it was going to be from here on in: always on guard, always on edge. Sleeping when we could. No respite for as far into the future as I could see.