“Negative.”
“Wait one.”
Bernie kept a wary eye on the countryside as the Packhorse idled in the middle of the road. Eventually Mathieson came back on the radio.
“P-Twelve, Rossi’s unit is ten klicks north of Byrne’s position,” he said. “He’s moving in. Control out.”
Sergeant Rossi was an old hand; he’d expect a lot from Anya as the senior officer, and it looked like she was all too aware of that. She slapped her palm on the dashboard.
“Let’s do it.”
Bernie refolded the map with the six-echo grid uppermost and handed it to Anya. “Okay, we’ll go off-road at the stream and come around the back of that incline. It’s on foot from there. Where are you going to put Rossi?”
Anya pored over the map. “Here …”
“How about a little further over here?” Bernie pointed. “Then he can cut them off to the north or the east.”
“Good call, Sergeant.” Anya nodded. “Thanks.”
It was a sergeant’s job to nursemaid the junior officers until they were safe to be let loose on their own. Bernie was all too aware that this would be Anya’s first real firefight. She wouldn’t have the armored protection of a ’Dill and a bloody big gun this time. Mac could probably smell the sudden tension, because he started making little whining noises in the back of his throat and squeezed his head past Bernie’s shoulder to poke his nose out of the open window.
“Good boy,” Bernie said. “Quiet, now. Okay?”
Mac was only thirty kilos of vulnerable, unarmed meat, but somehow having a dog alongside made Bernie feel a lot safer. It was primal. A dog said weapon to any human.
“Byrne, Rossi—Stroud here,” Anya said. “Anything moving?”
“Byrne here. Nothing, ma’am.”
“Rossi here. Where do you want us?”
“Five-eight-zero by three-eight-zero, close to the stream.”
“Roger that.”
He didn’t sound worried. Bernie glanced at Anya as she released the switch on the mike. She’d definitely honed that reassuring voice to perfection over the years, but she kept licking her lips in a way that said she was scared shitless. Bernie was, too—sensibly afraid, the way any sane soldier should have been—and almost hoping the Stranded would make a run for it before they showed. But they were scumbags, and they had to be put down. She felt ashamed of herself.
I really am getting too old for this shit. Baird’s right.
“Where’s Sam from?” Anya asked. “I can’t place her accent.”
“Tyran father, Kashkuri mother. She’s from Anvegad—Anvil Gate.”
Anya seemed genuinely distracted for a moment. “I didn’t realize.”
“I like to know what I’m taking on. It’s a habit to cultivate.” Bernie watched Anya doing the mental calculations. Everyone did, wondering if Sam was old enough to remember the siege. “No, ma’am, she was born a few months after it all ended.”
“Sergeant’s telepathy.” Anya looked embarrassed, too diplomatic to ask the obvious questions. Any mention of Anvegad and its COG garrison—its romantic Kashkuri name reduced to the prosaic Anvil Gate—inevitably led to Hoffman’s involvement there. “Handy.”
“Sam’s had a lot to live up to.” Bernie hesitated, because she’d never said aloud to Anya what everyone thought—that her war-hero mother was a tough act to follow. “Like you.”
But Anya didn’t say anything. She kept her eyes on the road. They were ten klicks from Sam’s position now, and Bernie started looking out for a break in the fields where she could drive across uncultivated land rather than churn up crops.
But she still had her personal radar tuned to anything that didn’t look right.
Gears didn’t see roads the same way civilians did. Civvies looked for oncoming traffic and hazards from side roads. Gears looked for choke points, kill zones, and ambushes. They were always on the alert for combat indicators. Bernie found herself checking for blind spots and cover to either side.
“Five hundred meters is a damn long wire,” Anya said. “Must have taken them some time to bury it.”
“They’re not in any hurry.” As she drove, Bernie was starting to get that feeling. The instinct was born of years moving through hostile places, rational clues that could be analyzed later—a weird stillness, things that should have been there and weren’t, a thousand subliminal details—but now it simply told her to get ready to fight. “It’s a war of attrition. We’re not used to that.”
“Why are you slowing down?”
“That bend ahead.” The angle was so tight that the road seemed to vanish into an isolated stand of trees. For once, she couldn’t see any birds around. “If I was going to jump someone—look, humor me, there’s something not quite right.”
Anya picked up the mike again. “P-Twelve to Byrne, P-Twelve to Rossi, stand by. Possible contact, grid six-delta … zero-one-three, two-five-four.”
But there was bugger all that the others could do for them if the worst happened. Anya checked her Lancer. Bernie prepared to pull off the road down a shallow slope fifty meters ahead. The road was in poor repair here, a mass of potholes and cracked concrete patches, and suddenly that surface became the only thing she could focus on.
Yeah, something’s wrong.
The Packhorse bounced as the nearside front tire hit a hole. The next thing she knew—something smashed down hard on her head, the Packhorse was going up and not along, and the road vanished. The dog fell on her, yelping. She had no idea how, but she was sure she was falling too. And then she hit bottom.
For a few moments, she couldn’t work out where the hell she was. Then she realized she was lying with her head under the steering column and the Packhorse was upside down, maps and water bottles and windshield fragments everywhere. The driver’s door was gone. She could taste smoke, cordite, and blood.
“Shit.” That was all she could manage. She fumbled for her Lancer—it had to be close by—but caught a handful of fur instead. Mac whimpered. At least he was still alive. “Anya? Hey, Anya!”
“Get clear. Come on.” There was a metallic sound and a loud grunt. Anya’s voice seemed to be coming from a distance. “Can you hear me, Bernie? Can you move?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I can. I can.” Bernie grabbed her Lancer automatically, struggling out of the crushed gap where the door had been, expecting to come under attack. It’s an ambush. What happened? Grenade round, bomb, or what? She went into the drill without thinking. Assess, cover, evacuate. Just because you were still alive, it didn’t mean the incident was over. “You hurt?”
Anya crouched beside her against the underside of the stricken Packhorse, Lancer raised. The vehicle had come to rest in a shallow roadside gully, stopped from settling completely on its roof by the slope. “Can’t tell,” she said, scanning 180 degrees. “You sure you’re okay?”
“I’ll wet my pants and cry later.” Bernie suspected she might well do at least one of those, but the operative word was later. Right now she took a strange comfort from the fact that she could still handle it. She was scared shitless and in shock, but the hardwiring created by years of drill pushed that aside and went straight into a defensive routine. “Let’s call a cab. If we start walking, we’ll get picked off or hit another mine.”
She had to assume that. The words were out of her mouth before she remembered that she had to leave more decisions to Anya. Never mind. Either way, she learns. Anya pressed her finger to her earpiece, her voice just a little shaky.
“Control, this is P-Twelve. Control, come in. This is P-Twelve. We’ve been hit, position grid six-delta, main road—”
“P-Twelve, we’ve got you,” Mathieson said. “We’re scrambling a bird.”
“No hostiles spotted, but we might be bait.”
“Understood. Injuries?”
“We’re both T-three.” Not in immediate danger—and if either of them was bleeding internally, they were too pumped on adrenaline and shock to feel it. “The Packhorse is wrecked.??
?
“P-Twelve, I’m diverting another squad to Byrne’s position. Wait one.”
Bernie edged around the rear of the vehicle, head level with the burst nearside tire. There was a ragged crater about thirty meters behind them. One side of the road had been ripped up, and lumps of concrete were scattered around. It was a smaller hole than she expected.
Shit, we drove over it. Or we hit it and it threw us forward. A few seconds—that’s all that saved us.
That reality would sink in later. The tailgate of the Packhorse looked like someone had hosed it with random caliber rounds. The front end was just mangled by the hard landing, still hissing hot, rusty water from the broken radiator. The vehicle’s tail had taken the blast. Whatever the device had been, it had detonated late. And it had been planted since yesterday’s patrol. It was hard to spot disturbed soil out here because of the thick vegetation that flanked the roads.
Astonishingly, Mac was wandering about, sniffing the churned soil around the vehicle and looking none the worse for his experience.
A fresh trail for the dog. Shit, now would be the best time to track these bastards.
“You don’t look too good, Bernie,” Anya said. “You sure nothing’s broken?”
“I hit my head. I can use that as an excuse for being cranky for days.” Bernie had had more than a few close calls with ordnance over the years. Doc Hayman said an explosion didn’t have to kill you or even knock you out to do brain damage. “I really should get the dog on the trail. It’s less than a day old.”
“You’re going straight to triage,” Anya said firmly. “And that’s an order.”
Bernie suddenly felt that tracking these bastards was more important than anything. Mac seemed okay. And if she had any brain damage, there wasn’t much Doc Hayman could do about it. They had no state-of-the-art neurology unit. The COG had just lost a century in technology terms.
She could hear the clicking of cooling metal, so at least the blast hadn’t deafened her. Eventually it gave way to a distant droning sound overlaid with the chatter of rotor blades. The Raven was coming.
“Two explosive devices today,” Anya said, still scanning trees a couple of hundred meters away. “You think they’ve got a new strategy?”
“If they have,” Bernie said, “I’d love to know how they’re being resupplied.”
“P-Twelve, this is Byrne.” Sam’s voice buzzed in Bernie’s earpiece. “Rossi’s in position. You’re going to miss the party.”
Bernie supposed that was Sam’s way of checking they were still okay. “Sorry for the no-show. I’m sure we’ll get another chance to have a girls’ day out with extreme violence.”
Mac paused in his investigation of the soil and stared out across the grassland into the trees, trauma apparently forgotten. It might have been rabbits that got his attention.
Bernie found herself hoping it was bigger quarry.
KING RAVEN KR-239, TWENTY KILOMETERS NORTH OF VECTES NAVAL BASE.
The Packhorse lay belly-up like a dead animal. The dog was sniffing around in the grass at the side of the road, but Baird couldn’t see Bernie or Anya yet.
They were here, though. They were still in radio contact, but that didn’t seem to make Marcus any less agitated. The warning signs were no more than a fixed stare and a twitch of jaw muscles, but Baird knew him well enough by now to see when the guy was wound up. He really didn’t like Anya doing any hairy-assed stuff. Baird wondered if they argued about it in private.
They occasionally disappeared at the same time. Baird noted things like that.
“Well, at least I know where to set down safely,” Sorotki said. “Seeing as Mataki’s been kind enough to do the route-proving and trigger the device … I’ll land on the road.” The Raven banked in a loop, coming up on the other side of the overturned vehicle. Bernie and Anya were crouched in its cover with their rifles ready. Bernie shielded her eyes from the grit whipped up by the chopper’s downdraft. “Stick to the paved surface, boys and girls. No telling what those bastards have planted either side.”
Bernie’s voice came on the radio. “You can set off mines with downdraft, you know.”
“Stand by, kitten-killer …”
Baird leaned back into the crew bay to talk to the crew chief. Mitchell was huddled over the Raven’s door gun like he was trying to hatch it. “Hey, the Pack’s in one piece,” Baird said. “We can lift it underslung.”
Mitchell didn’t take his eyes off the ground below. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re just too caring?”
“I never leave a wounded machine behind.”
“Dizzy can swing by with the salvage rig later and haul it back. Casevac first.”
“It’ll be picked clean the minute we leave. You think these assholes don’t stake out their devices or know when they catch something?”
“Too bad.” Marcus did his slow head turn, the one that said he was seriously pissed off, and fixed Baird with a cold blue stare. “We’ll just have to reclaim the shit when we catch up with them.”
Baird wasn’t scared of Marcus, but he knew when to back off. The man wasn’t knowable. Although Baird knew what Marcus would do in a given situation, he didn’t know how his mind worked, and that bothered him. Any mechanism—human, animal, machine—could be analyzed, its component parts evaluated, and its workings and functions understood. Not understanding Marcus was the most unsettling thing about him.
Yeah, but you’re not immune to all this shit, are you, Marcus? Look at you sweating over Anya. Caring screws you up, man. Just switch it off. Life gets a lot easier then.
Sorotki set the Raven down on the road. Bernie and Anya emerged from behind the Packhorse, tottering under the weight of an ammo box and two fuel cans.
“Can’t leave it here,” Bernie said. She had maps stuffed under one arm. “Got to clear the vehicle.”
Baird blocked Bernie’s path and tried to take the crate from her. “Women drivers. You must have inherited extra lives from all those cats you ate, Granny.”
She hung on to the crate, but he could see she was struggling. “Thanks, I can manage this.”
“Sure you can.” He wrestled the box from her arms. He wasn’t sure if he was embarrassed for her, or just trying to avoid looking as if he gave a shit. “And then you’ll have a stroke, and I’ll have Hoffman on my back for letting you.”
Marcus relieved Anya of the fuel cans and steered her toward the Raven. Bernie shrugged wearily. “We’re going to need some mine-clearance kit, Blondie. Invent something.”
“Already got a plan for putting a mine flail on a grindlift rig. Now get your ass in that bird before you break anything else.”
“Arse.” She ignored him and snapped her fingers at the dog. Mac trotted to her side and sat to attention like he was waiting for orders. “Mac? Want to find bad guys? Seek.”
“You got perforated eardrums, or just going senile? Time to go.”
“It wasn’t much of a bomb. I’m fine.” Mac was already rooting around and making a line for the trees. “The trail’s less than a day old, though. Best time to follow it.”
“Head injuries. Subdural hematomas.” Baird wondered if he was going to have to haul her on board. He found himself worrying inexplicably about how to grab her. “Delayed onset of cerebral swelling. Coma.”
“Thanks. You’re such a cheery little bastard.”
But she gave him a motherly pat on the back, just like she did with Cole, and went after the dog. Marcus was still examining the crater. He looked up.
“Where the hell’s she going?” he asked.
“Asshole hunting. It’s an Islander thing.”
“And you let her.”
“Hey, I’m not a geriatrics nurse.”
Marcus sighed and pressed his earpiece. “Mataki? Get back here.”
There was a pause before she came back on the radio. She must have been in a dip, because Baird could only see gray hair and the top of her backpack bobbing above the grass as she walked.
“M
ac’s picked up a trail,” she said. “You want to pass this up?”
“How hard did you hit your head, Mataki?”
“Not hard enough to forget I owe these tossers a really bad time.”
Marcus didn’t bother to argue. He gestured at Baird to follow her and pressed his earpiece again. “Sorotki? We’re going after them. Get Lieutenant Stroud back to base.”
“Roger that,” Sorotki said. “Call us when you need us.”
Anya’s voice interrupted. “Look, I’m fine. I should be out there with—”
But she was cut short by the whine of the engines as the Raven lifted clear. Baird didn’t approve of women in combat roles, but it was asking for trouble to override her like that—and not just because she outranked Marcus. She wouldn’t take that dismissal lightly, whatever the motive.
“Wow, harsh,” Baird said. “You won’t be getting any for a long time.”
“Shut it, Baird,” Marcus muttered.
Baird never had much control over his mouth, and he knew it. Something smart-ass always emerged unbidden; he couldn’t even blame it on stupidity. Sometimes it was fear, sometimes frustration, but mostly it was habit, and he wished he could just keep it zipped. He realized that all the people closest to him—this squad—were those who seemed to understand that and knew when to ignore him.
It was kind of comforting. For once in his life, he felt easy with a group of people.
His earpiece radio clicked. “They’ll hang around, won’t they?” Bernie said. “They’ll be somewhere relatively close.”
“They’ll want to know if they hit their target,” Baird said. “They’d have to be deaf not to hear the explosion.”
“Are we checking the farms for missing chemicals? They make their own sodium chlorate and nitrate fertilizer here.”
“Oh, great.”
“You can kill someone with most anything if you want to. Farms need agricultural chemicals, Blondie.”
“Spoken like a farmer, Granny.”
She had a point, though. The Stranded would use whatever they could find to make explosives, whether that was weed-killer, fertilizer, or even old and unstable TNT. And when they ran out of the chemical stuff, and then ran out of bullets, it would be pit traps with shit-smeared wooden stakes at the bottom. Whatever they used, however low-tech the guerilla war became, people would still end up dead or injured.