“They’re working in pairs. See?” Cranther pointed again. “Two of ’em just diverged from the others. They’re . . .”
“They’re filling in the ravines.”
The scout’s face twisted in thought, his mouth open. “I think you’re right. All that weight, rolling along so close on either side, would collapse the walls.”
“Why would they be doing that? Gotta be thousands of miles of these things.”
“Maybe they’re not worried about every mile, just the ones closest to where they live.” Cranther’s words came faster. “The colony’s gotta be on the other side of this ridge . . . and if they’re filling in the ravines, it means somebody’s been using them to cause trouble.”
“They after us? Because of what we did at the bridge?”
“Nah. Even if they figured out that wasn’t an accident, it’s just two guards. For them to put in this kind of effort means somebody’s been scooting down these ravines to hit them and then using them to run away.”
“Survivors from that fight.”
“Gotta be. And for them to be working this hard on a low-speed avenue of approach means something’s happened to their air.”
“Maybe it got taken out in the attack.”
“Maybe.” Cranther looked in the opposite direction and then up at the ridge that held the antenna. “But that colony has to have real troops with it, a battalion at least. All we’ve seen is that squad of militia.”
“The regulars are probably out looking for whoever’s been hurting them.”
“Could be. But they also might be waiting to see who runs away from these guys here.” He looked up at the ridge again. “We need to move.”
They found a crack in the base of the canyon wall and forced the dead man’s body into it, more to hide it than bury it. Not knowing if the oncoming machines were acting as beaters to drive any remaining humans toward a waiting Sim force, they’d briefly argued the merits of leaving the corpse where it might be found versus concealing it. Cranther felt it would be unwise to give the excavators an indication that enemy troops had even reached this area, and that decision gave Gorman a chance to say a few words.
Standing with his eyes shut, his head tilted skyward, and his palms up, the chartist intoned a prayer Mortas had never heard before.
“Father. Mother. Sister. Brother. Son. Daughter. All are one, from the beginning of time until its end.” He opened his eyes and looked at the hasty grave. “Thank you for helping us, dear brother. Find rest.”
And then they were moving. The gully walls were still tall enough to completely conceal them, so they moved at a fast trot behind Cranther. The scout stopped every so often, usually at a sharp bend, but he also periodically climbed the wall to scan the ridgeline that was now looming large. The ground was trembling slightly by then, an indication that the earth movers were closing the distance, and Mortas joined Cranther during one of his brief stops on the wall.
“Think somebody might be up there?”
“So far, I don’t think so. If there is, they’re well camouflaged and very patient.” He flashed the lieutenant a brief grin. “I don’t think anybody’s up there.”
Then they were moving again, sloshing water tubes bouncing on shoulders and the Sim weapon growing heavy in Mortas’s hands. Soon the ravine began to shrink, the walls growing shorter and shorter until they were all hustling along in a crouch. Low brush provided some cover at ground level, but if anyone was indeed waiting up on the ridge Mortas had to believe that they would have been spotted by then.
The machine noises had steadily grown from a dull rumble to a mechanical roar, and the ground around them was visibly shaking. Runnels of dirt cascaded down the sides of the gully, and they felt the full vibration when Cranther finally threw himself flat and the others followed suit. They were only a few yards from a wide finger of rock which sloped down from the ridgeline, and the scout popped his head up over the nearest bush to determine the excavators’ location.
“Okay, there’s nothing else we can do here. We gotta move in the open. We’ll go straight up this finger, on the side away from the Sims, and hope for the best. Don’t stop until we get to the top; even if there’s nobody up there, anybody on the other ridges is going to be able to see us as we move.
“We take fire, get back into the ravines. Run as fast as you can, and don’t wait for the others. We’ll meet up at . . .” He poked his head up again. “See that ridge over there? See that column of rock out just past it? That’s our rally point.”
Mortas tried to keep the skepticism off his face. If they were spotted by Sim troops going up the slope, there was no way they’d live to reach that distant spire. His mind was racing along with his pulse, but the thoughts flashed by in perfect clarity. The enemy earthmovers were busily crushing the ravine walls, and the only explanation was that human troops were using them as movement channels. The farther the chasms went out into the flat, the more chaotic their patterns became. It was highly unlikely that the Sims had enough troops to ambush all of those canyons if they didn’t even have enough to secure the approaches to the settlement. With no air support, even the tightest blocking cordon hidden in the ravines would leak like a sieve.
Something more: If they had enough troops for that human wall, they’d certainly have enough to provide flank security on the high ground as the excavators passed. Even without air support, it would be simple enough to get a patrol up there, and it would serve as an excellent set of eyes.
Air support. Where were their flying machines?
“Corporal!” He almost didn’t get the word out in time. Cranther was rising from the ground with the intent of rushing up the ridge, but he dropped back down instantly. Mortas quickly crawled to him on his elbows, both Trent and Gorman doing the same. The excavators were still distant, but their engines were so loud that for the first time in days they were able to speak in normal voices. In fact, they had to shout.
“Listen: They got no air and not enough soldiers to secure the ravines closest to the settlement! They might have enough bodies to put someone up on this ridge, but there’s no way they’ve got enough to cover all that!” He waved a hand at the flat. “That’s where we gotta go!”
Cranther’s face tensed as he turned it over in his head. He pushed himself up to get a look at the approaching enemy, and then came back down. A hand went up to the skull cap, swirled it around as if rubbing his scalp, and then stopped. Mortas saw the flesh whiten over the man’s knuckles, and noticed for the first time just how dirty and scuffed Cranther’s hands had become. He absently looked down and was shocked to see the same level of grime and the same number of tiny cuts and bruises on his own.
“Okay, Lieutenant!” Cranther turned to the others. His words vibrated with the ground, and he had to shout to be heard. “Stay right on my ass! We’re gonna follow this gully away from here! They’ll see us if we climb out, so we stay in this ravine unless it turns us all the way around! Remember the rally point if we get separated, and don’t stop for anything!”
He began crawling back down the ravine, and Mortas waited until the others were gone before popping his head up once more. The excavators were still several hundred yards away, but their enormous size made them seem closer. The much smaller movers were sticking close to them, and he could make out individual Sim soldiers on foot. Many of them were carrying Maulers, but he did see some of the longer, skeletal rifles more commonly found with Sim infantry. Militia or regulars, they didn’t seem eager to fan out.
They’ve taken a beating. They might have won the fight, but it cost them. They’ve learned to be careful.
More convinced than ever that his choice of the flat would now lead to their salvation, he began worming his way across the dirt after the others. This time, when the sand started working its way between his shirt and his belly, he didn’t mind at all.
They covered the ground quickly onc
e the ravine got deep enough for them to stand, but even so it wasn’t a pell-mell run. At first Cranther took the lead while the others hung back a distance, but once the ground stopped shaking Mortas called a halt. A covert glimpse over the rim gave them a good reason to slow down, as the enemy machines had actually turned and gone in the opposite direction.
“Filled in one set of gullies. Now they’re going back to start a new set.” Mortas was impressed by how easily he’d slipped back into whisper mode after all the shouting they’d just done, but Cranther merely nodded at him in answer. “I’ll take over on point. Just in case they are out here waiting, make sure the others don’t close up on me.”
The movement was fast, and the sun was only slightly past the midpoint when they approached a broad hump of dirt. Panting with exertion, Mortas stopped the movement so that they could rest a bit and take advantage of the comparatively high ground. Cranther passed him without being told to check it out. He wore an expression that Mortas normally would have associated with a bad smell, and so the lieutenant wasn’t terribly surprised when the short man crawled up onto the hump and sniffed the air. The three of them joined him, hunkered down on their stomachs amid the bushes, waiting for an explanation. The vista was what they’d expected: More brush and rolling plain with the next ridge rising ahead of them and the excavators receding behind them.
“What is it?” Mortas kept his eyes moving as he spoke.
“It’s faint, but it’s there.” Cranther tilted his head backward and sniffed again, dog-like. “Cofferdams. Had to be a lot of them, for that smell to still be here. A battalion at least.”
The term took Mortas back to the end of his pre-deployment training. The final war game had been a full-on dress rehearsal, launched from transports orbiting a conquered Hab planet. Each transport had created a transit tunnel hundreds of yards in diameter by generating energy beams that formed a cylinder running from the ship’s hull through the planet’s atmosphere all the way down to the surface. The tube was nearly invisible and reduced the effects of atmospheric friction, but it did have its drawbacks. The planet’s gravity was lessened but not negated, and the pressure inside the cofferdam was extremely high to keep it from being crushed by the forces it was holding at bay.
Mortas had ridden in the back of a pressurized personnel carrier that had been dropped right into the cofferdam through one of many hatches in the belly of the ship. They’d glided down the miles to the surface, stabilized and decelerated by thrusters attached to the carrier for the journey, but still landing with a surprising amount of force. The cofferdam’s walls had equalized with the planet’s pressure at ground level by then, and they’d simply driven out of it. The initial assault element was always composed of armored carriers like that one, and so he’d been able to watch from a nearby hill as the second wave, composed of individual foot soldiers, was delivered.
Those personnel coasted down the cofferdam in giant wheel-shaped carriers whose outermost rings hugged the transparent walls of the transit tube. It had been astounding to see these giant metallic snowflakes expand from mere dots in the sky to enormous rings of connected personnel compartments. Powerful deceleration rockets had fired when they approached the ground, kicking up a cloud of dust that had erupted from inside the cofferdam, but most of the snowflakes were so badly damaged on impact that Mortas had suspected they’d never be repaired. Hundreds of unsteady foot soldiers had emerged from the damaged rings and the war game had continued from there. Even with that experience, Mortas was still confused by Cranther’s comment about the odor.
“I didn’t know they had a smell.”
“The beam is always a little off when they hit a new planet. As they adjust—” He stopped suddenly, focusing on something in the distance. Cranther raised himself up on his elbows, shading his eyes with both hands as if holding a set of binoculars. “Oh no.”
“What is it?”
The scout lowered himself back to the dirt, his eyes on the ground. Without a word, he put an elbow on Mortas’s shoulder and pointed with his fingers in a knife edge.
Trent and Gorman saw it before he did, and Mortas heard them both uttering subdued words of alarm. He squinted in the sun, expecting to see the fractured snowflakes of an assault landing that had come to grief, but what they were viewing was farther out. Several hundred yards away, presumably in the direction of the enemy settlement, he could just make out the gun barrel of a heavy fighting vehicle. It was raised as if to fire at the sky, and a moment later he saw that the tank itself was stuck in the ground as if it had plummeted from a great height.
Once he recognized the wreckage, the rest came into focus. He knew he was probably looking at the near edge of an entire debris field, but even so the tank was surrounded by personnel carriers and scout cars that were likewise jammed into the dirt. It reminded Mortas of the queasy sensation he’d felt when the carrier he’d ridden in the war game had been released into the maw of the cofferdam. It had been a helpless, lurching fall that had gone on for several seconds before the quasi-gravity of the energy tube had slowed it down, and he’d feared the worst even though he’d been warned.
Had the cofferdams simply failed here? Had the occupants of the half-buried wrecks made the awful drop unaided, tumbling, screaming, accelerating? He shuddered at the very notion, and when he looked at the others he saw they were imagining the same thing. Gorman’s lips were moving in silent prayer, Trent’s eyes were fixed on something he couldn’t see, and Cranther’s face was still twisted in thought. The scout spoke first.
“Wait. Look there.” He pointed again, this time at a spot only a hundred yards away but not in the direction of the debris field. Following the hand, Mortas was taken aback that he hadn’t seen it earlier. An enormous circle of brush was flattened or missing, and the dirt inside it was furrowed as if recently plowed. A quick survey showed other sites like that one, on a rough line between the two ridges.
“That’s where the cofferdams touched down.”
“Right. So whatever happened to them, they landed safely and headed in to attack the settlement.”
“Could it have moved? The cofferdam, I mean.” Gorman’s voice was strained, but his point was a good one. Perhaps the vehicles had been dropped when their transport tube had shifted.
“It’s happened before, so maybe.” Cranther came to his knees and shaded his eyes again. “But I don’t think that’s it. If that tank dropped all the way, that turret should have popped right off. And those recon cars would have flattened, hitting from that height.”
“What are you saying?”
“That they didn’t slam into the ground.” The look of consternation was back. “I don’t know how, but I think they sank.”
The energy bars they’d consumed now proved to be a double-edged sword. Packed with the nutrients they so badly needed, the food gave them the strength to quickly move across the shorter expanse of flat ground and reach the next ridgeline. Mortas was amazed by the speed with which they traveled until he was able to consider that perhaps they’d been providing their own locomotion for so long, and without any nourishment at all, that of course it now seemed easier. But even as the food had given them what their bodies needed, it also served as a reminder that they hadn’t filled their bellies in days. The renewed growling of their insides and the sight of the ruined fighting vehicles now combined to drive them toward a very risky decision.
The sun was setting when they scrambled up the side of the escarpment, largely concealed by a species of tall, dry grass that covered it. A hurried group consultation had given voice to what they’d all been thinking, and so they’d agreed to take a serious chance and try to raid the broken war machines for real food.
It made sense, in a way. Before the sun set they’d drawn close enough to see that most of the vehicles hadn’t been hit by enemy fire. There’d been no need; whatever had caused them to sink into the now-hardened surface ha
d stopped the assault completely. The occupants of the tanks, scout cars, and personnel carriers had been transformed from armored aggressors to sitting ducks, and so they’d probably bailed out at the first opportunity. The dead man they’d found in the ravine, wearing the tanker suit and carrying no weapon, gave ample support to that theory. So if the crews and riders had run off in a frenzy, it was highly likely that they’d left food behind.
It was just as likely that the enemy knew this and might even have the area under surveillance, but intense hunger had helped the group to minimize that threat in their minds. The Sims had obviously sustained major damage in the attack; they had no air assets and could be expected to withdraw into a tight defensive perimeter once night came. The belching excavators seemed to verify this theory, as they hadn’t ventured beyond the ridge where they’d originally been seen and now even their roaring had gone silent.
Cranther had gone so far as to suggest that the killing of the hapless guards at the bridge might have helped by spooking their opponents even further. The battle had taken place far from that crossing point, and the two militia men had probably been posted as a precautionary measure only. The bulk of the fleeing humans from the trapped assault force had most likely gone in the opposite direction, toward the series of ridges from which the group now observed the debris field. For the surviving humans to have even found the bridge, they would have had to cross an enormous amount of open ground, and for no reason. It was clear that they were harassing the Sim settlement, and the enemy’s efforts to fill in the approaches suggested they were more concerned with those nightly attacks than with watching an enemy junkyard.
Having decided to take the risk of approaching the wrecks, they resolved not to easily accept any others. They moved along the ridgeline, just down from the crest on the side away from the battlefield, until they were close enough to get their final bearings. Darkness was coming fast, but the elevated position gave them a good view of the disaster. It was even worse when seen from above.
Glory Main Page 11
