They each took a ration pouch at random, unable to see its markings, and set the remaining four on the side of the dirt wall so that the next flare might reveal its contents. It was then that any pretense of control vanished, as all four of them greedily tore into the rubberized bags and began devouring the contents. Mortas would be hard pressed later on to identify the meal he’d been given, knowing only that it was covered in gravy, that it was deliciously greasy, and that it contained some kind of chunked meat. It was gone in moments, no matter how hard he tried to slow down, and he ripped the small bag apart so that he could lick its insides clean. When he was done with that he rubbed his hands hard against the stubble around his mouth and then licked them clean too.
He looked at the others then, and was intrigued to see that they’d also devoured their food but that he hadn’t heard them doing it. Reflecting on this, Mortas realized that he’d suppressed more than one moan of pleasure as the nutrients had gone down his throat. The others must have done the same, and he considered it a testament to how long they’d been in a survival situation and how much they’d come to imitate Cranther.
For his part, the short man was half reclined against the hole’s sloping wall across from Mortas. His knees were drawn up slightly, and the wrappings from his meal were resting on his thighs. Mortas watched as the scout began stuffing the trash back into the original pouch, and he began to do the same. The revelry of the hurried meal vanished with the memory of an enemy who was hunting humans nearby, close enough for their flares to help the tiny band find their way. It would not do to leave evidence that they had been there, and the picked-clean wrappers from one of their rations would be a dead giveaway.
“I want another.” Gorman’s voice was quiet and passive. He was seated across from the line of four meals awaiting the next flare, but the hostilities seemed to have ended for the night. “I don’t care which one it is. I don’t want to wait for a flare, or anything involving this war. I just want to eat my next meal.”
“You eat it now, you can’t eat it tomorrow.” Mortas kept his voice level, more the tone of a parent giving advice to a child, but even he didn’t find value in the words.
“Probably a good idea to wait just a bit.” Trent offered. “Let our bodies adjust to what we just had. We haven’t eaten in days, except for those energy bars . . . and didn’t you say our stomachs would shrink, Corporal?”
“Yeah I did, but that was a lie. I just wanted to give you something to help handle the hunger pangs.”
There was a long silence, but it finally ended when Gorman began to giggle. As hard as he tried not to laugh, Mortas soon joined in and ended up clamping a hand over his mouth to muffle the sound. Next to him, Trent was actually shaking with mirth and barely got the words out. “You son of a bitch.”
“I know, I know.” Cranther raised his hands palm upward. “But it worked, didn’t it?”
They kept up the stifled laughter for some time, and Cranther took the opportunity to crawl to the top of the ridge and look over at the inky vastness below. When he came back he settled against the wall and pronounced that portion of the night’s activities to be over.
“Any idea what happened to those vehicles?” Mortas asked, still mightily puzzled.
“I’ve seen some weird things in this war, and both sides are always developing new stuff, but that one’s a cut above. No idea how they did it, but they turned dry dirt into mud so deep it bogged down treaded vehicles and swallowed men alive. And then it went back the way it was.”
Mortas searched his brain for the term the instructors had used. “Temporary area denial.”
“That’s the name of the game out here.” Trent broke in. “No point in fighting over a Hab planet if you make it an Unhab in the process.”
His father’s secret briefings came back to Mortas with that observation. One of the techs had used almost those exact words describing the seemingly contradictory nature of the war. Although it was a fight for survival of an entire species, it was very much a limited conflict. Both sides possessed weapons that could blow a planet’s atmosphere right off or radiate the place so badly that no one could live there, but the goal of gaining a habitable planet took those weapons off the table. Instead it set the engineers from both sides working on devices that delivered their terrible effect but didn’t permanently alter the ground where they were used.
The tech had become visibly disturbed when he reached the logical conclusion that the limited war calculus would no doubt be dropped the day either side found the enemy’s home planets.
Cranther murmured, “Very practical boys, the Sims. It figures they’d come up with a way to turn the dirt against us.”
“I heard a rumor that they found a way to defeat the Step,” Gorman suggested. “Either it makes the Threshold collapse as the ship enters it, or they’ve got a rocket fired on the other side so it makes contact as the ship exits.”
Mortas shifted uneasily. Ships had been lost in the Step since its creation, but another of his secret classes had mentioned a concern that the enemy had learned enough about the technology to turn it against the humans. There had been only a slight increase in unexplained ship losses, but Command was still greatly concerned that the enemy had indeed countered mankind’s greatest advantage. It would be typical of the Sims to distill a technological achievement down to a simple question of inertia and have something waiting for the irreversible arrival of the ship making the transgression.
“I heard that one too,” Trent whispered. “A pilot I know said the enemy had captured enough of our ships to figure out how it all works. Said they can’t reproduce it yet, but they don’t need to if they just want to stop it.”
“Well, Command’s gonna have their hands full countering this new thing right here,” Cranther said. “Forget what the Sims might come up with later.”
“Think anyone reported it? I mean, anyone got off a message or maybe even got back to the ships before they bugged out?” Trent’s eyes were on Cranther.
“That’s almost certain. There were no personnel rings where the cofferdams came down, so they canceled the second wave almost as soon as the first one hit the ground. First the bombers and the rockets come in, then the armor, then the individual infantry right behind them. The troops in those vehicles got written off really fast, so either somebody was watching or they sent a message.” The scout made a quiet sound in his throat and then spit outside the hole. “Sometimes you’re better off not letting Command know what’s happening.”
“You don’t really believe that, right?” Mortas asked in a voice that was slowly drifting toward sleep.
“Oh you bet I do. And the troops left stranded down here believe it too. At least they do now.” The short man leaned forward, his hands on his knees. “Did you know that at the beginning of the war Command used to drop huge numbers of Spartacans on Hab planets in Sim space just to get the enemy to attack? The Sims had to figure we were going to follow up those scouts with troops and colonists, so they’d send a force to wipe out the recon parties. Took ’em a while to figure out what Command was doing, buying time with Spartacan lives and getting them to waste a lot of assets on planets we couldn’t hope to actually keep.”
“At the start of the war? That was forty years ago. Sounds like a story to me.”
“Maybe. Maybe.” Cranther’s voice had taken on a cautious, almost tentative tone. “But here’s one that actually happened, might change your opinion of how much Command values your ass.
“I’d been operational for a year or so, finally figuring things out, when they dropped me and two others on this one planet. Had Spartacans running all over the place checking it out. We always knew when a planet was hot because it was the only time they’d send us down in groups. And that one was a special kind of hot.
“You see, there weren’t any colonies there and it wasn’t a standard enemy base. It was like the Sims were trying out
something different. They’d hidden an entire corps on that rock, dug ’em right into the ground and inside the mountains as if it wasn’t a Hab planet at all. Their camouflage was almost perfect, and man did they have discipline. They must have spotted my team and all the others, but they just sat tight and waited for the real party to arrive.
“We’d crossed this one big hill a week before the troops came down, and of course nobody thought the enemy was there then. But some of the other scout teams started finding the signs of digging, and then the entrances to a few of the emplacements, and of course then they got taken under fire so the game was on. Our people came down in regiments and there was a lot of confusion about where the Sims were because they kept moving around underground.
“So this one platoon got told to occupy that hill I mentioned, the one I crossed with my team before we knew any enemy was on the planet. Some idiot in orbit, turned out to be a Golden Boy captain with a dad who was a general, told them to go up and dig in on this unsecured hill. When they asked if it had been scouted he said, ‘Sure, the Spartacans were all over the thing,’ and so they went up.
“They ended up getting torn to pieces. I was told they weren’t even in tactical formation, just went for a little hike because some yo-yo who wasn’t even on the planet told them everything was cool.”
He stopped, and didn’t seem like he was going to continue, so Gorman quietly asked the question the others were thinking. “How’d you find out about it?”
“What’s that?” Cranther’s voice was far away.
“I mean, how do you know the specifics if you walked over the hill a week before all that happened?”
“Oh, they tried to court-martial me for getting those guys killed. I was in the brig for an entire month. That was a bad scene; the two other guys who’d been with me had both gotten killed, so I was a sitting duck for this general and his Golden Child. You see, Command normally doesn’t care about what happens to one platoon, except this one had somebody else’s Golden Child in it and whoever that was, he wanted his pound of flesh.”
“How’d you get off the hook?”
“Pure luck. That captain had told the dead platoon leader that he’d personally sent a recon drone over the hill just that morning and that there wasn’t anything there. Lucky for me, there was a recording of that message. He was required to send that drone because my team’s intel was so outdated, but he just decided not to for some reason. Wanted to get to the galley while they were still serving chow, maybe. Or maybe he was just tired. Anyway, that tape ended the whole thing. When they let me out of the brig, one of the lawyers said that captain had been executed.
“Not real sure about that, though. The Golden Children have a habit of surviving. But what happened to somebody else really isn’t important; you couldn’t beat the hot chow in that brig, and while I was cooling my heels there I wasn’t getting shot at.”
“But you could have been executed.”
“Not much I could do about that, was there? And it’s a lot cleaner when Command kills you on purpose . . . than when they do it by accident.”
“I guess we should have waited, huh?” Gorman’s voice came out of the gloom, disembodied and dull.
“What do you mean?” Mortas answered as if in a dream. His consciousness was drifting away now that they’d consumed the second ration, refusing to concentrate on even the elementary need to post a guard. The darkness was so total that it hardly seemed necessary, and even Cranther was in no hurry to broach the topic. They’d been going nonstop since the end of the day the day before, and even though their current position wasn’t perfect—too easily trapped up there—it seemed impossible to think of moving.
Gorman explained his comment. “Didn’t you hear that? That hissing sound? I think they’re putting up more flares.”
Cranther moved with great suddenness, his boots kicking Mortas’s as he got his feet under him. The scout came to his full height, facing in the direction of the settlement.
Mortas stood too, a grinding sense of alarm slowly working through his lethargy. Cranther’s hand gripped his arm to silence him, and that was when he heard the remotest whooshing sound, like someone brooming off a rough surface. Cranther’s hand started squeezing the fabric of his sleeve, and he forced his eyes as wide as they would go in the pointless hope that it would help him see in the dark.
“No, no, no—” The scout was fairly wringing his sleeve now, and then suddenly the intense pressure relented. The voice was choked and staccato. “Back in the hole. Get back in the hole. Everybody down.”
Mortas obeyed instantly, throwing himself forward and banging his chin against the dirt. He’d landed on top of Gorman’s torso and Trent’s legs, and they all began squirming around to make room and get lower. The hissing sound grew louder, far up in the night sky, like the malevolent warning of some giant winged predator. Mortas looked up just in time to see a faint trail of light and fire passing over the valley, sparks trailing behind whatever Cranther feared so much.
Then it burst over them. Lightning and thunder at the same time. A convulsive wind-slap on their backs blowing away the gloom like the birth of a new sun. A multitude of guttural growls, followed by a rain of spherical projectiles streaking toward the ground below, through the volcanic light. Mortas cringed in the seconds it took for the bomblets to reach the wrecked vehicles, and then the fading glow from the delivery rockets abruptly erupted into flashing fire as their deadly produce detonated.
In the instant of those explosions, Mortas was almost sure that the spheres hadn’t struck the ground. Only a few yards off the deck they flashed a blinding light, which was quickly followed by a sharp cracking boom that was in turn answered by dozens of sparks and popping sounds that joined together into a rolling roar. It reminded him of strings of firecrackers he’d set off in his not-distant youth, but these were different: They were followed up by purple sparks and the pinging noise of metallic ricochets, and he recognized the weapon as a deadly Sim rocket that passed over its target area dropping dozens of anti-personnel bomblets.
He was just beginning to wonder why they hadn’t heard this kind of device fired before now when a series of deeper explosions sounded from the enemy colony. His eyes were still half blinded by the light show below, but he looked up anyway, trying to see the new threat coming their way. The explosions continued, and Cranther pushed off of him to come to a kneeling position in the hole. The three others joined him slowly, uncertain, when the first artillery round landed far down the ridgeline. It struck the escarpment near the valley floor, closer to the settlement, but it was soon followed by another and another, working randomly up and down the far end of the slope.
“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” Cranther shouted above the din as the impacting rounds began to move toward them. In the momentary flash of light of each detonation Mortas saw huge plumes of dirt thrown up in the air, and imagined the particles being ripped by hundreds of chunks of jagged metal.
An insistent hand grabbed his sleeve, and then they were up and running, straight over the knife edge and down the other side, momentarily thrown back into darkness. The dirt slid under his boots as Mortas fought to stay on his feet, one hand gripping the Mauler while the other clasped hands with someone he couldn’t identify. They both skidded on the loose scree, and then another set of hands was on his blouse from behind. It was impossible to take a step, but it was also unnecessary, as they were sliding down the opposite slope as if on skis.
They might have covered quite a bit of ground that way had the enemy artillery not begun to overshoot. The explosions from the other side of the ridge now reached across for them, much closer now, and in one crack of lightning Mortas saw that all four of them had come back together, holding on to one another in an effort to stay upright. Another flash and he saw that they were already halfway down the incline, but then he saw something that almost sent him scrambling back up th
e slope.
The explosions reflected off a ribbon of dark fluid at the base of the ridge. Water. A stream. Serpents.
He’d just opened his mouth to shout a warning when a single round landed at the top of the ridge behind them, knocking them all over as if a giant hand had just swatted the little group. Grips lost, thrown down, rolling faster and faster, slamming into rock outcroppings and gnarled bushes, they quickly separated and crashed toward the bottom completely out of control.
Mortas hugged the Mauler to his chest, terrified that it would knock out his teeth if he tried to discard it, his eyes squeezed shut even as his mouth opened in a primal cry of terror at the very thought that they would end up in the river. His face scraped over something thorny in the darkness, he was rolling so fast that he couldn’t keep his legs together, and the explosions walked closer and closer even as he started screaming, “Stop!” over and over again until he took a mouthful of sand and turned to choking instead.
His descent ended abruptly when he crashed, chest-first, into a boulder right at the water’s edge. A hard protrusion on the Sim weapon smashed into his ribs, and the sudden stop knocked the wind out of him. His face was buried in a stand of grass, and he lay there simultaneously spitting out dirt and sucking for air until another body hurtled down the slope and slammed into him.
He heard a loud splash and a frantic cry, but before he could raise his head a set of hands was under his armpits, yanking him to his feet. He turned, still choking and expecting to see Gorman, but Trent’s dirty face was right in front of his own. Another round landed behind them, the blast slapping their backs with an air concussion and an echoing boom that drowned out Trent’s shouted words.
Cranther appeared, soaking wet, also shouting. “Come on! We gotta cross it!”
Gorman came up next, his eyes wide in the light of the latest blast. Dirt and rock rained down on them, the slap making Mortas see that Cranther was right. The enemy guns were working both sides of the ridge now, anticipating flight, and would be on them in moments. The black water of the stream appeared in the flash of a round that hit the top of the ridge, and Mortas shivered in fear at what the dark surface might be hiding.
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