by Tanya Huff
“If that’s the scenario,” Hisht said slowly, staring at the sketch as if he could see answers in the snow, “what happens differently in the real world?”
Torin grinned. “In the real world, we don’t give a crap about the power plant and we know that drones in scenarios don’t shoot to kill. And we’ve got Dr. Sloan.”
“So, if we’re injured, she can patch us up?” Bonninski asked a little wide-eyed as the rest of the platoon caught up to their position.
“Dr. Sloan,” Kichar said gleefully, before Torin could answer, “is wearing a noncombatant chip. The drones can’t shoot at her. The drones can’t even see her.”
TEN
“You want me to do what?”
“Walk through the settlement to the power station.” Crouched in the lee of the rock, bootheels tucked up under her butt, Torin traced over the route with the point of her stick, gouging it a little deeper into the snow. “Confirm that a majority of the enemy is inside, place the charges where marked on the schematic I’ll download into your slate, and get back here as quickly as possible so that they can be detonated before the Others have the opportunity to reprogram the scenario.”
Dr. Sloan shook her head, smiling tightly. “You misunderstood the question, Gunnery Sergeant. I wasn’t asking for clarification, I was asking if you were insane. I’m not walking into that.” She gestured toward Dunstan Mills, outlines of the buildings barely visible behind a gently falling curtain of snow. “I’m not a soldier, I’m a doctor!”
“If you don’t do this, Dr. Sloan, you’ll have plenty of chances to practice your trade.” Torin straightened, never taking her eyes off the doctor. “In the time it would take us to crack this scenario, the Others will have their chance to take control of the drones.”
“Major…”
“Sorry, Doc.” Major Svensson frowned down at Torin’s sketch. “There may be a better way to do this, but we don’t have the time to think of it. We need a position we can fortify—and we need it now. The last thing we want is to be caught in the open between the drones from the settlement and any long-distance drones that might be on their way. If we had any more of those chips…”
“Fine.” Yanking off her mitten, she shoved her thumbnail up under the lower edge of the plastic square on her forehead. “You can have this one.”
“You’re going to hurt yourself,” the major said quietly after a moment, grabbing her wrists and pulling her hands down to her sides. “Remember, I told you it wouldn’t come off without a special solvent. You’ll be saving lives, Kathleen,” he added, sliding his grip down to her hands and wrapping his fingers around hers.
“You also told me that the drones in an operative scenario don’t shoot to kill, and you…” She freed a hand to point at Torin. “You told me this is an operative scenario. So why can’t we wait until morning?”
“For now this is an operative scenario,” Torin agreed. “The Others know we’re here—they turned it on. You need to destroy the drones before they can be reprogrammed to shoot to kill.”
“And we wouldn’t ask you if there was any other way,” Major Svensson assured her.
She stood for a long moment, the snow beginning to pile up on the bright blue shoulders of her jacket, then she sighed. “Do you guarantee the drones won’t notice me?”
“Just to be on the safe side, you’ll maintain comm silence, but that chip renders you invisible until the Others reprogram,” Torin told her. “After that, we can’t guarantee anything but a fight we might not win.”
“I thought Marines didn’t know the meaning of defeat.”
Torin kept her hand from rising to touch the cylinder in her vest. “We don’t like it, ma’am, but we know what it means.”
Her gaze flicked down, as though she’d sensed the movement Torin hadn’t made, and she sighed again. “All right, let’s get it done, then. First, how do I confirm the enemy is inside? Send in a questionnaire?”
“No,” Torin told her as the major grinned, “we’ll load one of our scanning programs onto your slate.”
“You can just do that?”
She believed they could just do that, Torin realized, and she didn’t like it. The irrational fear that the military could mess with civilian lives became no more legitimate just because someone was messing with the military.
“Gunny?”
She’d paused just a little too long. Unclenching her jaw, she faked reassurance. “No, ma’am. We need your security codes first. You can just put them into my slate,” Torin added, holding it out, “and I’ll never see them.”
Lips pressed into a thin line, Dr. Sloan did as Torin suggested.
“You can change them later,” Major Svensson reminded her.
“Don’t think I won’t.” She frowned at her screen. “This is it? MAR-SCAN?”
“Yes, ma’am, and there’s a mapping program as well.”
“Which will?”
“It’s dark and it’s snowing, Doc. You might need a little help staying on course.”
“I might need a lot of things, but I doubt I’m going to get them,” she told the major tartly. “Let me have it, Gunnery Sergeant. And it had better not mess up any of my diagnostic programs.”
“We’re one hundred percent behind that as well, Doctor. If you’ll check your screen…”
Backlit, it was a small rectangle of light in the gathering dark.
“This is where you’re supposed to go,” Torin explained as the green line on the doctor’s screen flashed. “This is you.” At one end of the line, a red light blinked slowly. “You don’t need to see your surroundings; you only need to see this.”
The edge of a mittened hand brushed snow off the screen. “Oh, joy.”
“And this is where you place the charges.” The image changed to an outline of the power plant. “We don’t know how the drones will react to our communicating with you—they’ll pick up the signal even if they can’t crack the code, and we’d rather not draw any more attention to you than absolutely necessary.”
“Thank you.” Definitely more sarcasm than gratitude.
“Because you’ll be on your own, we’ve designed things to be as simple as possible. Just match up your red dot with the yellow dots showing on the outline of the building, unwrap the charge…” Torin held up the small cube of explosives and mimed stripping off the back of the paper cover. “…and press it to the nearest hard surface. You activate it by ripping off this tab.”
“Lovely.” Dr. Sloan turned a cube between her fingers, carefully not touching the tab. “These little things will be enough to drop the roof?”
Torin nodded. “Set in the right places, yes. Once they’re activated, they’ll link up, blow simultaneously, and the pressure wave will collapse the walls.”
“That seems almost too easy. Shouldn’t it be harder to blow things up?”
“That depends on what side you’re on, ma’am.” The pack of explosives dangled off Torin’s hand for a long moment before Dr. Sloan took it and hung it off one shoulder.
“Don’t worry about being seen or heard,” Major Svensson told her. “I know you’ve walked a long way today already, and I’m sorry, but speed is your only criteria.”
“It’s almost dark.”
Torin reached out and tugged the sleeve of the doctor’s borrowed combats out from under her jacket, thumbing the cuff light on.
Dr. Sloan snorted and turned on the much stronger light in the cuff of her jacket.
“We really need a look at that catalog, Gunny.”
“Yes, sir.”
* * *
“She’s past the sentry,” the major announced. As darkness fell, the EYE had switched to reading heat signals. “A noncombatant chip is a wonderful thing, Gunny, although, I have to admit, it feels a bit like cheating.”
Her back against the rock, sheltered from both the snow and the enemy’s scanners, Torin watched the red line spooling out beside the green across the screen of her slate. “It’s not cheating to use all available
resources, sir.” After a moment, the silence lifted her attention to the major’s face. His expression confused her. “Sir?”
“Whatever it takes to get the job done, Gunny?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fulfill the mission objectives; see that you kill as few Marines as possible?”
Because he’d phrased it as a question, she answered.
“No, sir, that’s your job. My job is to fulfill the mission objective in such a way that my people survive.”
“Semantics.”
“Perspective. Sir.”
To her relief, he smiled. It wasn’t a happy smile, but his mouth moved in roughly the right directions. “I stand corrected, Gu… Son of a bitch!”
“Sir?”
Eyes clamped nearly shut, both palms at his temples, he scowled up at the falling snow. “Damned low pressure system is playing hell with my head.”
And their doctor, his doctor, was trudging through a fake settlement carrying enough explosives to flatten the very real walls of the fake power station.
“Are the fireteams in position?”
“One/two and three/one are still on the move sir. Both teams have a ways to go yet…” She glanced down at the doctor’s position. “…but they’ll be there in plenty of time.”
“What about the staff sergeant’s drone ID?”
“Sorry sir, McGuinty hasn’t been able to tease it out yet. He’s still working on it though and with any luck we can upload it to the rest of the platoon before we move out.”
He watched Dr. Sloan’s progress a moment longer. “Which won’t be happening any time soon.”
“No, sir.”
“Hurry up and wait. Hurry up and wait.”
Torin waited in turn for some sort of punch line, but it never came. Collar up and scanner down, Major Svensson settled down in the snow like the rest of the platoon—pack on, weapon resting diagonally across his body. Combats and bodyliners would keep them warm and dry, and field rations required nothing more than a free hand. The only difference between the major and the platoon was that they watched the sky darken and the snow fall while he watched her, the shimmer of his scanner barely visible across his face.
Seemed like a good idea to ignore him. “Ayumi, put your Goddamned helmet on.”
* * *
Three/one moved around the south edge of Dunstan Mills, heading for the river and the third sentry Gunnery Sergeant Kerr had marked on her sketch of the settlement. It was a long way to hump based on the gunny’s assumption that there’d be a drone at that point needing removal, but then, Stone figured other Marines had humped farther based on other gunnery’s sergeants’ assumptions, so no harm, no foul. And, besides, the one thing he’d learned for certain after 120-odd days of training was that the gunny’s job was to know things and his job was to do what he was told.
Technically that applied to sergeants and above, but specifically it was all about the gunny.
Given the size of the trees around them, it was a good bet that the nearly knee-deep powder now covered more soil and less rock. The branches overhead, in spite of being bare, were interlaced thickly enough to keep out most of the falling snow which, unfortunately, also kept out a lot of the ambient light.
Scanner down, Stone felt like he was back in the quarry, dust forcing him to operate his loader by way of the readout on the screen. The scanners the Corps used were more complex but essentially the same, and it had surprised him a little that a number of recruits washed out because they couldn’t adapt to seeing their immediate surroundings through a tech filter.
Up ahead, Vega on point and Jonin right behind her showed on his scanner outlined in a nice friendly green, camouflage and light levels making them nearly invisible to the naked eye even though Jonin was almost close enough to touch. On the lower left corner of his screen, his scanner noted that another Marine followed three paces behind. He knew it was Alison Carson, the fourth member of the fireteam, even if the scanner didn’t.
Stone frowned as Jonin stumbled, boots catching on something under the snow. Not good. Picking up his pace, he closed his hand over the di’Taykan’s shoulder and shook him none too gently. “Hey. Get your mind back in the game.”
Jonin twisted out from under his grip and turned just enough to glare. “I’m not…”
“You are,” the big man told him calmly as Vega stopped and came back six paces to see what had stopped them. “You’re walking like you’re Human, covering ground with your head up your ass.”
“Up Staff Sergeant Beyhn’s ass,” muttered Carson from behind Stone’s shoulder. When Jonin switched his glare to her, she snorted, “Oh, come on, Jonin, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know.”
“We’ve got some distance to cover before we’re in position,” Stone continued, ignoring the interruption, “and I think we need to know now if you’re fit to go on or if it’d be safer for all concerned…”
“That being us,” Carson added.
“…if you head back.”
“To Staff Sergeant Beyhn.”
“Shut the fuk up, Carson. I know it’s some kind of biological imperative thing you guys have got going,” Stone continued, his scanner showing that Carson had taken half a step back, “but if you can’t get past it—well, I’m not dying for your biology.”
Jonin’s eyes were dark—hardly surprising given how many receptors he’d need open to see—and he was wearing the I’m a hot-shit aristocrat expression that training had pretty much slapped out of him by day seventeen. Being the focus of the other di’Taykan in the platoon had not been good for him.
“You’ve got to put the staff sergeant down,” Stone said levelly, wondering if the gunny had sent three/one on the long hump not because they were the only intact fireteam with a shooter but to get Jonin away from species issues. “Gunnery Sergeant Kerr seems to think you’re good to go or she wouldn’t have sent you. Now, if she hadn’t, I don’t know if she’d have sent us out one short or if she’d have sent another team, but me, I wouldn’t want to be the one to tell her she was wrong because I have a feeling the survival rate for…”
“Shut up, Stone.” His eyes were lightening, and the di’Taykan aristocrat had been replaced by someone who looked tired and pissed off about equally. “You made your point. Quit beating it to death. I can do this.”
Now he could.
Stone nodded and said, “Okay.”
* * *
“Well, McGuinty?”
McGuinty quickly swallowed the butt of his stim stick and shook his head. His helmet wobbled, sending clumps of accumulated snow falling down onto his shoulders. “Sorry, Gunny. It’d take me weeks to separate out the staff sergeant’s program for the drones. It’s wound in and around too much other crap.”
Torin tucked Beyhn’s helmet under her arm. It had been worth a shot, worth taking the time from the attempt to regain control of the CPNs. But now…
“I’m back on it, Gunny.” He held up the staff sergeant’s slate before she could speak.
“Good work, Marine.”
* * *
Temporarily attached to one/two, Duarte followed in Cho’s footsteps, the indentations of his boot prints in the snow showing briefly, palely green in her scanner. di’Lammin Oshyo was dead and she had replaced her in the fireteam and that was just a little creepy.
Oshyo is dead, and I am her.
No one was supposed to die on Crucible. Wish they were dead, yes. Actually die, no.
Her boots felt like they weighed ten kilos each and her nose was running again. She wiped it next to the frozen snot already on the back of her mitten and wondered if being chosen for the walk around to the north side of the fake settlement actually meant anything, or if she had just been standing closest to the three remaining members of one/two when the gunny’d had to make a choice.
* * *
Each of the three potential sentries—and two of them would remain potential until two/one and three/one had gained their positions and marked them—had been
assigned one of the recruits who’d shot Expert. Stone, Cho, and Lirit. Kichar was fine with that; it made sense that Major Svensson and Gunnery Sergeant Kerr were making use of the skills they had available. She, herself, had shot three points under Expert and that might have had some bearing on why her team had been chosen to back up Lirit who was on her own what with McGuinty still working the staff’s slate trying to crack the system and Piroj ordered to stick to McGuinty and Ayumi staying with the Staff Sergeant.
The only problem was that Lirit’s target was the sentry first spotted by Gunnery Sergeant Kerr, the sentry closest to the platoon’s position. The team would be going in well within range of the gunny’s scanner.
Gunnery Sergeant Kerr would be watching her… their every move.
They could have been sent to one of the farther positions if not for Hisht, but the Krai’s short legs had made the day’s march harder on him than anyone but Piroj and Sergeant Jiir. Kichar glanced over at Hisht, the pouch of rations he was eating giving away his position without her needing to use her scanner to determine which of the mounds of snow and camouflage was him. It probably hadn’t helped that Krai weren’t fond of the cold.
She was not going to turn and look at Gunnery Sergeant Kerr although she thought she could feel the gunnery sergeant looking at her.
Inside her mittens, her palms were sweating.
* * *
“Gunnery Sergeant Kerr, this is Private Stone. Three/one is in position and have targeted enemy eyes. Over.”
“You’ve got about a half an hour if Dr. Sloan maintains speed. I’ll ping you before the fireworks start.”
“Roger, Gunny. Out.”
Nice to know the other two sentries were exactly where she expected they’d be. It raised the odds they’d be right about the rest of the drones gathered in the power station.
It turned out to be closer to forty-five minutes, Dr. Sloan visibly tiring as she covered the final kilometer back to the platoon, the circle of light her sleeve cast on the snow skittering sideways at odd moments, the red line looping to both sides of the green. The moment she was far enough from the sentry, Major Svensson went out to meet her, nearly carrying her the last few meters.
