The Elan strategic assault display flashed up across his virtual vision. He saw batches of wormholes opening a hundred kilometers above the planetary surface. They would remain in place for several seconds, disgorging a phenomenal quantity of munitions: missiles, ground-attack warheads, electronic warfare pods, decoy vehicles, beam-weapons platforms. It was all covering fire, a diversion while other, smaller wormholes opened just above the surface, deploying squads all around the fringes of Prime installations and bases. The Primes were fighting back, sending up flyers and big ships, their beam weapons punching through the scuzzy continent-wide clouds to intercept the rain of lethal machines as they sank down through the ionosphere. There were also flyers scouring the ground as the troop wormholes flipped in and out of existence. But electronic warfare aerobots were causing havoc with the Prime communications and sensors, hampering the flyers. Initial reports indicated that the landings were succeeding, by which the navy meant beachhead casualties were under thirty percent.
Morton hit the ground. The impact wasn’t as bad as any of the bone-buster hits they’d given him in training. His bubble bounced twice, the plyplastic flexing and bending to dissipate as much of the shock as it could; pressure waves moved sluggishly through the gel to squish lightly up against him. On the third landing, it sagged like a punctured balloon and stayed on the ground. “Down,” he told the rest of Cat’s Claws.
According to the inertial navigation readout, he was within half a kilometer of his predicted landing coordinate. The land immediately around him was flat, a field that had been seeded in springtime and had run rampant before starting to decay. Some kind of bean crop, judging by the yellow-green mush pressing against the lower section of his bubble. Abrupt climate change hadn’t helped this land’s recent delicate conversion to cultivation. It was raining in the Highmarsh; a thick blanket of dark turbulent cloud was stretched across the roof of the valley, flowing slowly from east to west. It produced a constant downpour of gray water that had overwhelmed the drainage dikes and beaten the surviving crops into a straggly mat of insipid green stalks lying flat against the sodden soil. Tall liipoplar trees that had been planted in long lines up and down the valley had been battered by the nuclear blast and subsequent storms, few of them were still intact; the majority had snapped to crash over the roads they once marked.
Morton checked around, and found the mountain he was supposed to be heading for, three kilometers away. The bubble started to stiffen up again, reverting to its standard spherical configuration. His virtual hands zipped over a sequence of control icons, and the single broad caterpillar track running around the compact machine’s vertical equator began to spin up. The bubble began its stabilized counterspin, keeping him perfectly level. Dips and lumps in the ground jounced him from side to side, but in the main it was a smooth ride, the gel acting as the ultimate suspension system.
External sensors showed Morton water spraying out from either side of the track. A rigid trail of squashed muddy plants lay behind him. “Goddamn!”
The bubble’s chromometic skin was doing a wonderful job defusing the moldy green color of the crop around the entire exterior. Any eye or visual sensor looking down would just see a hazy patch just the same color as the rest of the field; but that crushed track and little wake of water was a dead giveaway.
“We need to get on the farm roads,” he told the others. “This wet ground is painting us as big fat targets.” Pre-invasion map images flipped up in his virtual vision, and he steered the bubble to the right, his body tilting over as if he were riding a bike. The bubble changed direction, heading for the top corner of the field.
“Incoming,” Doc Roberts warned. “Four flyers.”
Morton saw the symbols creep into his virtual vision. They’d come into the valley at the western end, following the old highway route around Blackwater Crag.
Aerobots curved around to meet them head-on. Maser beams slashed between the two opposing formations, etching themselves in lines of steam through the downpour. Force fields flared brightly as they deflected the energy strikes. The aerobots fired salvos of missiles, their fiery contrails spluttering in the rain. Powerful ion bolts ripped through the air like slow-motion lightning, casting stark shadows for kilometers across the ground below.
Morton reached the rough farm track bordering the field. It was awash with muddy water that was spilling over the banks of the dike, but only a few centimeters thick. He throttled up the bubble’s track. A limp fantail of water squirted up behind him as his speed reached an easy eighty kph.
Tactical decision: that the aliens in their flyers would be a little preoccupied to spot a ripple in the mud right now.
The aerobots were always going to lose. They were outnumbered from the start. The flyers were heavier and slower, but their beam weapons had a much higher power level. Maneuverability and superior tactical ability gave the first two kills to the aerobots and their host of submunitions, but eventually brute force won out.
After seven minutes of furious combat the remaining two flyers thundered over the area where the wormhole had opened. One of the stubby cylinders was trailing a thin brown vapor trail from a gash on its side, but its straining engines managed to keep it airborne. They began to spiral out, sensors sweeping the ground.
Ten kilometers away, and already three hundred meters above the valley floor in the rugged folds of the foothills, Morton watched the aliens circling around and around. His bubble was stationary, resting at the bottom of a narrow gully cut out of the soil by an earlier spring storm. Mud and stones were pressed against the base, their mottled shading replicated all around him. A web of thermal shunt fibers completed the disguise, giving the bubble’s chromometic skin the same temperature as the land it rested on.
“Bugger,” Rob Tanne said. “Eight more of the bastards.”
The new flyers raced up the Highmarsh Valley to join the first two in the search for any surviving human trespasser. Their flight paths brought them closer and closer to the foothills.
“Don’t they have anything else to do?” Parker complained.
“Guess not,” Morton said.
Cat’s Claws waited as the flyers swooped low overhead, their bubbles inert, operating on low power mode, hidden among the abundant secluded folds and hollows provided by the rugged landscape. Morton could hear the bass thrumming of the engines through the bubble’s gel. They must be very loud out in the open.
One passed about fifty meters away. His bubble’s passive sensors scanned the layout. There wasn’t much to add to the database already in his array. The Primes didn’t seem to vary their machines.
After thirty minutes, six of the flyers peeled off and left, leaving the remaining two patrolling the Highmarsh. “Let’s go, boys,” Cat said as the flyers loitered at the far end of the valley.
Morton was slightly surprised she was still with them, not to mention sticking to the deployment plan. He’d half expected her to take off on her own as soon as they were down. Under his guidance, the bubble’s plyplastic skin rippled, squeezing itself up out of the gully with a fast lurch. The caterpillar track held it steady on the soaking sulphur-yellow boltgrass that covered the slope. There was only a kilometer or so of desolate ground to cover before the unruly cloud base. They’d be a lot safer inside the thick, cool vapor.
The strategic assault display was empty now. Elan’s deployment was complete. The wormholes above the planet had all closed, shutting down the temporary communications feeds. Morton switched to a local display, checking the position of the other bubbles against his own. Unsurprisingly, Cat was already above cloud level, waiting for the rest of them. He fed power to the tread, and began his ascent.
The navy had been concerned that the snow that lay on the Dau’sing peaks all year round would leave tracks that the Primes could follow. For that reason the path preloaded into the bubble’s navigation array skirted the very high ground, taking Morton on a long winding route through tough passes and clinging to contour lines along alarmin
gly steep slopes. They need not have worried. The gray clouds were several degrees warmer and a lot muckier than the usual weather fronts besieging the mountains at the onset of the southern continent’s winter. The snowline had undergone a long retreat upward, exposing vast tracts of slatey shingle that hadn’t seen daylight for millennia.
Morton drove through the dark, murky fog for a couple of hours. He had to move slowly; visibility was down to thirty meters at best, and that was using the passive sensors on full resolution. All he saw was kilometer after kilometer of the same slippery, muddy shingle crunching below the translucent track. No other features emerged out of the fog. The angle of the slope changed, but that was it for variety.
They were traveling in a very loose convoy, with Cat out in front. At least he assumed she was still in front; he hadn’t spotted her beacon for over an hour and a half. She’d gone off at a speed he wasn’t going to try to match. Behind him, Doc Roberts was keeping a sensible kilometer separation distance. His beacon moved in and out of acquisition depending on the shape of the terrain.
Morton rounded a sharp vertical ridge of rock, and the Cat’s beacon was shining three hundred meters ahead.
“Where’ve you been, boys?”
“Taking care,” Morton said. “We’re not proving anything to each other here.”
“Touchy!”
He accelerated down the shallow incline to her bubble. She had stopped at the low point of a shallow saddle between a couple of peaks on the edge of the Regents range, about fifteen kilometers from where the navy detector station had been built. It was walled in on both sides by cliffs of sheer rock rising to vanish into the turbid clouds that occluded the peaks. The ground between them was a stratum of crumbling stones, scattered with fresh unsteady piles that had fallen from on high when the mountains were shaken by the nuclear blast.
Morton drove his bubble on a slow circuit of the area, matching up what they’d reviewed on the satellite imagery from CST’s original survey. It was a good location to adopt as a base camp. The cliffs were riddled with slim zigzag fissures and deeper crevices. He identified at least three where they could store the bubbles and equipment.
“This should do,” he announced as the Doc’s bubble came slithering down the incline.
“Well, as long as you think so, Morty darling,” Cat said.
Once everyone had arrived, they got out of the bubbles and started unpacking their equipment. Morton and Rob took a fast walk over to the edge of the saddle. Past the cliffs, the ground curved down sharply, though visibility was still only a few tens of meters. The clouds were moving faster here, scurrying along the southern edge of the Regents. Without them, Morton and the Doc would have had a clear view straight down to the Trine’ba two kilometers below. Randtown itself was away to the west.
“There’s a lot of activity down there,” the Doc said. He was using his suit’s electromagnetic spectrum sensors to scan the shoreline of the vast lake.
Morton switched on his own sensors. The clouds filled with a bright gold radiance, as if a small, intense star was rising from the Trine’ba. When he added analysis programs, the coronal hue changed to a serpentine mass of entwined emissions, bundled sinewaves thrashing in discord. As well as the strange Prime communications, there was the bolder background turquoise of powerful magnetic fields flexing in a slow cadence. Lavender sparks swarmed around the empire of light, flyers trailing their own wake of cadmium signals, their membranous force fields flickering like wasp wings. “What kind of important installation would you build in Randtown?” he asked out loud. “I don’t get it. There’s nothing here. Send your invasion force halfway across the galaxy so they can build a five-star ski resort? That’s crazy.”
“This whole invasion makes no sense,” the Doc said. “There must be something down there more valuable than we realized. They are alien, remember. Different values.”
“We understand their technology,” Morton countered. “They base everything on the same fundamental principles we do, they ain’t that different.”
“When you apply technology to a requirement it nearly always shakes down to a one-solution machine in the end: cars to travel over land, rockets to fly into space. But motivation, that’s a species variable, always has been.”
“Whatever,” Morton said. As well as his dodgy medical qualifications, the Doc had some obscure English degree dating back over a century; all that education made him want to overanalyze everything. “We’re not here to admire their psychology, we’re here to blow the shit out of them.”
“Eloquently put,” the Doc said.
Morton took out a type three sensor, a transparent disk five centimeters across, and stuck it on the side of a boulder where it could scan across the Trine’ba. “That’ll spot anything approaching us.”
“Unless they come from the other side.”
“We’ll place sensors all the way around our base camp. Obviously. It’s not like we’ve got a shortage of them.” Part of their mission procedure had them building up a comprehensive network of the optronic devices, allowing them to monitor all the alien activity in and around Randtown.
“Roger that,” the Doc said; he sounded amused.
They spent the next forty minutes scrambling over rocks and unstable shingle falls, planting the little sensors to provide early warning of any approaching flyers. Not once did they see sunlight; the cloud swirled and eddied as they clambered about, but it remained unbroken.
“Well done, boys,” Cat said as they arrived back at the base of the saddle.
“Great views you’ve given us; lots of rock and a big wet sky.”
“Let’s just hope it stays that interesting,” Rob said.
“That kind of depends on us,” Morton said. “We’re here to cause as much disruption as we can. I guess we’d better start by scouting out the neighborhood. We need two teams, and someone to stay up here to safeguard the equipment.”
“I’m sorry, sweetie, I must have missed that,” Cat said. “When did they pin a general’s star on you?”
“You don’t need to be a general to point out the bleeding obvious,” Parker said. “We know what’s on the mission plan. Establish a knowledge of the enemy and use it to hit them hard.”
“And the person staying behind ain’t going to be you, Cat,” Rob said.
“Darling! Why is that?”
“Don’t you know? I don’t trust you. None of us do. You’re a fucking psycho.”
“Ow, Bob, are you scared of little me? You’ve got your armor suit and a very big gun.”
“I’m not scared of you, I simply regard you as unprofessional. We can’t depend on you for backup and support, we don’t know if you’d provide it or not. You enjoyed playing the badass in training, screwing with our instructors. We all got a laugh out of that. Out here, nobody’s smiling, nobody thinks you’re clever. So you either take the front row all the time, or fuck off right now.”
“I’m disappointed, Bob, did the Doc fill your head with that speech?”
“Let’s just concentrate on what we’re here to achieve, shall we,” Morton said. “Cat, he’s right. You’re not dependable enough to be our cover.”
“General, and peacemaker. I like you, Morty.”
“And don’t call me that.”
“Mellanie does,” Parker said, laughing. “We all know that.”
“Morty, oh Morty, yes, yes please,” Rob warbled. “Oh, Morty, you’re the best.”
Morton knew his cheeks were red inside the helmet, despite it maintaining a perfect body-temperature environment.
The communications band was full of chuckles. Parker gave a long wolf’s moonhowl.
“Rob, you and I are one team,” Morton said, ignoring the gibes.
“That’s good for me, Morty. Real good.”
“Cat, you and the Doc can have a ball together. Parker, you keep everything secure up here.”
“Hey, fuck that,” Parker said. “I want to see some action here.”
“Then you
partner Cat,” the Doc told him.
“He couldn’t handle that kind of action,” she said.
There was amusement in the voice, but it left Morton cold. Even over the communications link something in her personality that was fundamentally wrong made itself felt.
“We don’t really need to leave anyone back here,” the Doc said. “If the Primes can hack our sensors and secure links, we’re fucked anyway. Forget the navy way. We’re the ones on the ground. We’re the best judges how to fulfill our duty.”
“Duty!” Parker grunted. “Jesus Christ, Doc, you just love all this military crap, dontcha?”
“Roger that. So you want to stay here?”
“I fucking told you, I’m staying with you guys.”
“That’s cool,” The Cat said. “You come with me and the Doc.”
“Fine,” Morton said. “Rob, come on, we’ll take the east side of town. You guys, see what they’re doing farther over around Blackwater Crag. And remember, everybody, we’re not looking to engage the enemy yet. This foray is just to build up our sensor network, okay. We don’t want to alert them to our presence before we know how to make their lives truly miserable.”
“Do you think she’s going to be trouble?” Rob asked when they were halfway down the mountain. He’d switched to a short-range secure link between the two armor suits.
“Rob, I don’t know what the hell to make of her. All I know is, she’s never going to be my backup. I don’t trust her.”
“Amen to that.”
They’d left the cloud base behind an hour earlier. Even though nightfall wasn’t due for another three hours, the light was reduced to a somber gloaming underneath the cloud. The rain was threaded with sleet and surprisingly hard pellets of hail, all of which turned to slush as they began a slow melt. It made the slope very hard going, even with the boosted limbs of the armor suits. Unrelenting rain was steadily beating away the boltgrass tufts, which never had a deep hold at this altitude anyway. The disappearing vegetation left long tracts of mud and shingle striping the slope, which threatened to slide them down hundreds of meters if they lost their footing.
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