by Steve Perry
Somebody had known that they were coming; it had been a setup.
The question was, who?
There was no question what they were gonna do about it when they found out, least not in her mind. Assuming, of course, they lived to tell anybody.
Speaking of which, she hoped Jo was calling Gramps and getting his ass lifted. They were gonna need a ride pretty damn quick, or they were gonna get spiked.
~ * ~
“I’m here,” Gramps said. “How’s tricks?”
“Got a situation,” Jo said. “The lodge was a trap. No Indira. We shot our way out, but there’s a shitload of real infantry fanning out after us. We are going to rendezvous at Alpha. Be nice if you could get into the air and stand by for our go-to after that.”
“Copy, Jo. Anybody hurt?”
“Wink says he got a minor wound; nobody else reporting any injuries.”
Gramps felt a flush of relief. He waved at Nancy, gave her the hand-swoop up-jive for get-it-in-the-air.
The engines had been on standby, they came online and whined up to full power.
“Pick a spot,” Gramps said. “We’ll meet you there.”
“Acknowledged. Tell Nancy to keep her eyes open—they got a transport with a platoon, and they are carrying J&S Rails, they can probably afford ground-to-air or a warbird. If you get shot down, we have to walk all the way home.”
“Well, we wouldn’t want that, would we? Stay edgy, Jo.”
“You bet your ass I will. Might want to pass it along to Rags, JIC. Off-line.”
Gramps sighed. A trap? How was that possible? They hadn’t told anybody but the colonel where they were going, and he wouldn’t have said anything to anybody. Which meant somebody knew where they were going before they ever lifted.
There was an ugly can of worms.
Well. Worry about that later.
He opened a secure pipe and hailed the colonel.
“What’s the situation?” Cool, but alert.
“Lodge was a trap, no girl. Team got out okay and are running through the woods, but there’s a platoon of what Jo calls ‘real infantry’ chasing them. They’ll decide on an extraction site once they see what’s what, and I’ll collect them.”
There was a short silence. “How did they know we were coming?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? Nobody but you and us knew that, we didn’t tell anybody and I’m guessing you didn’t, either, so ...”
“... so they threw out a lure, and we bit on it.”
“Looks like, yeah.”
“And they knew we were there to go for it.”
“You need help?”
“Nah, Nancy and I got it.”
Another short silence. “Collect them and come back to base. We’ll work the rest out when you get here. Offline.”
“Off-line,” Gramps said.
To Nancy, he said, “Keep it low and keep the scopes on high. Might be some smoke and fire coming our way. Shall we rise?”
The hopper lifted.
~ * ~
FOURTEEN
Kay was there when Jo got to the site. Singh and Gunny were the last to arrive, a minute after Wink. It was dark, the tree canopy particularly thick. No smell of other humans in the air.
“Everybody okay?” Jo asked.
Everybody nodded.
Gunny looked at Wink. “Doc, you let somebody put a hole in that suit? Rags will have your ass, much as these things cost.”
“Yeah, well, these suckers aren’t as great as they are supposed to be, are they? They are supposed to stop bullets! I might sue ‘em for the puncture in my lat.”
They all laughed, save for Singh. He was still running on adrenaline, Jo realized; you could see he had a tremor. Best give him something to occupy his mind.
“Okay, Singh, what’s our best way to a place where the hopper can land for our evac? Be nice it was close, the bad guys are on their way to find us.”
Singh took a deep breath and blew most of it out. “There is a gold placer site two kilometers from here, to the southwest. Abandoned and mostly overgrown, but a clearing next to the stream is flat, bare rock. I don’t think it shows on a map. You could land a small VTOL craft there.”
“Kay, take point with Singh. Gunny and I will cover our asses. Doc, you ride in the pocket. Anybody see anybody not us, spike them, but keep moving. We don’t have time to stop and play around. Go.”
As they dropped back, Gunny said it aloud: “They knew we were coming, Jo. And they knew enough to carry J&S’s.”
“That thought crossed my mind. We’ll suss it out once we get back to base.”
“You have Gramps call it in?”
“Yep. But Rags won’t send help unless we ask for it.”
“We’d never hear the end of how much that costs if we do that.”
Jo grinned. “Don’t I know it. We just need to outrun ‘em, and we have a head start. You want left or right?”
“Right. Mah good side.”
They both smiled.
~ * ~
They were most of a klick along when Kay smelled the enemy. She stopped, held up one hand for Singh to do the same. “We have humans ahead,” she said.
“How many?” Jo.
Kay sniffed, inhaling deeply, swiveling her head from left to right, then back again. “A dozen. A picket line.”
“They must know about the placer site,” Singh said. “I don’t have them on my suit’s sensor.”
“Bollixed,” Jo said. “Can we go around them?”
Doc Wink arrived.
Kay looked at Singh.
“Maybe to the north,” Singh said. “There’s a ravine to the south that’s deep enough to be a problem. It can be traversed, but the going will be very slow.”
Jo and Gunny got there. Gunny said, “Our pursuers are five minutes behind us. They know about the pickets, got to figure they know about the ravine. Bet your bonus they’ll be angling to the north to cut us off.”
“So you are saying we are fucked?” Singh said.
“Nah, Ah’m saying we don’t have a lot of time to break through and hope Gramps and Nancy don’t get lost coming to pick us up. How far away are we from the site?”
“A little over a kilometer.”
Jo said, “I got it.” She switched to the tactical channel. “Gramps?”
“Here.”
“You got our PPS sig?”
“Of course.”
“We are heading for a clearing approximately one kilometer southwest of our location. Next to a stream, an old gold mine. We have an obstacle, so it might be a few minutes before we get there. Be nice if you were on the ground with the door open when we show up. We’ll need to be leaving in a hurry. And come in quick and quiet, somebody might be looking for you.”
“I’ll see what I can manage.”
“Off-line.”
Jo looked at Kay. “How far apart are they?”
“Twenty-five meters.”
“Okay. Right up the middle.”
Singh said, “What are we doing?”
Jo looked at him. “We are in a closing pincer, between the pickets and the pursuers. If we are going to get to where the hopper can land, we have to get out of it. Terrain says we can’t go south, and if we try going around, to the north, it will take too long. So we punch right through the line and move as fast as we can. Speed is of the essence, we are run-and-gun. Lose the suits.”
Singh stared at her as if she had just turned into a giant lizard. “What?”
Jo continued. “The pickets have gear that messes with our sensors, so we will have to use visual. The suits won’t stop what they are throwing, and they’ll hose, spray-and-pray, so the camo won’t help. And they will slow us down.
“They are using capacitor-driven railguns, so our spook-eyes will work, there won’t be any muzzle flash. But if somebody chain-fires photonics, the strobes will screw the ‘eyes.”
“Will they do that?”
“Maybe, but we will for sure. So their n
ightsight won’t work, either. Kay and I will know where they are, and we will be firing at them. Fire only if you are certain you have a valid target. It’s going to be just like a strobe scenario, only they’ll be using live ammo instead of taggers.
He nodded. “A-All r-r-ight.”
“Everybody ready? Wink?”
“What? I’m trying to take a nap over here.”
“Get a pressure patch ready and get out the FAS, we are going jogging.”
“Man,” Wink said. “You know Rags is going to shit a square brick when we show up without these suits. They aren’t covered by insurance.”
They stripped to their skivvies, black polyprop sheaths that covered them from neck to ankles. “Put your boots back on,” Jo ordered.
She looked at Wink. “How is your wound?”
“Nothing I can’t plug with some dermastat.”
“Plug it. And Wink? Stay behind Gunny.”
Jo glanced at Gunny, then at Kay, then pointed her nose at Singh. He was putting his boots back on, he didn’t catch it.
Gunny and Kay nodded at Jo in return. They would let Singh get a step or two ahead of them when they moved. It wouldn’t matter to anybody shooting in their direction from the picket line if he was a meter ahead or behind, but that way, he wouldn’t accidentally shoot one of them in the back. Even a combat veteran could get excited in the middle of a firefight, and Singh wasn’t that.
“Ready?”
They all nodded.
“Let’s do it.”
~ * ~
“Well, looky here,” Nancy said. “It must be a celebration— somebody is shooting off fireworks.”
She had already zigged to port by the time Gramps spotted the ground-to-air missile heading their way. Not that the evasive move was necessary: the hopper’s tactical computer had tagged the missile, painted it with a laser, and launched a counterrocket that hit it five hundred meters away from the vessel. It made a bright splash against the polarized portholes.
The viewscreen was a full-sheet starlight sandwich, and the night was as a somewhat-faded day looking through it. It cut the glare as the missile blew up.
They had gained some altitude to look for the clearing, which was why the GTA.
“There it is,” he said.
“You sure? Doesn’t look big enough.”
“I get that a lot. Trust me, it’ll look bigger in a minute.”
The hopper dropped, and his belly roiled at the sudden lack of gravity.
~ * ~
Kay set the photonic grenade bar for a three-second delay and a sequential quarter-second strobe. She threw the PGB into the air ahead of her in a high arc, mentally timing it. She heard the pop! as the globes separated from each other, six of them, each the size of a walnut. No matter which way they landed, some portion of the globe would flash, unless it was completely buried, only they’d mostly go off in the air—
“Eyes!” she said. She shut her own as the first of the globes ignited, and it was bright even against her lids. To somebody looking right at it, it would be blinding. Spookeyes would cut out and protect the circuits and a user’s vision, but a quarter second later, and for a total of a second-and-a-half, the night-vision gear would be cutting in and out as the grenades lit.
Strobe. Strobe. Strobe—
Kay had marked her path, and she opened her other senses, listening, smelling, feeling the ground under her feet, and ran. The nearest enemy was fifty meters away—
She heard the railguns go off—they were shooting blind—and pointed her own weapon at the source of the sound. She could smell the human’s fear-sweat.
Kay fired. Was rewarded with a scream.
—Strobe. Strobe—
Kay opened her eyes, picked up the second target to her left.
Fired—
~ * ~
Jo saw the man angling in from her right, his weapon on full auto. Stupid—the J&S fired a heavy projectile at high velocity, and the recoil was stout. Even as she watched with her augmented sight amped to full, she saw the muzzle of his weapon rising, so by the eighth or ninth shot, the guy was shooting at the stars. She gave him a pair of three-round bursts, pointing high. The first burst hit him in the neck armor, the second blew through his helmet’s face bubble—
Two more angled in from her left, but Gunny had them, that was four? no, five down, and they had a big hole in the line.
Just ahead of her a step, Singh waved his carbine back and forth, also on full auto, and chipped bark from several trees. There wasn’t anybody in his line of sight.
So much for don’t shoot unless you are sure of your target—
—Wait, there was an enemy!
She swung her weapon over to cover him, but Singh’s rapid hose found the solider and stitched across his belly. The man went down—
~ * ~
Gunny didn’t follow the two she’d spiked as they fell, that was a beginner’s mistake she hadn’t made in a long time. She looked for more targets, could hear railguns, but their shooters weren’t visible. There were at least seven more troops out there, but they didn’t seem in a hurry to get here.
They’d punched through the line and were past it. She moved her finger off the weapon’s trigger and kept running—
~ * ~
Wink didn’t see anybody ahead of him except Gunny. To his left, Kay ran, with Singh a couple of meters ahead of her.
Now he was up! His heart raced, his blood sang with ancient songs of life and death, his breath was too loud in the night. The pain in his lat was gone, the glue would either hold or it wouldn’t, but that wasn’t important.
There was a body on the ground just ahead. Gunny leaped over it.
“Watch your step!” she called out.
“Got it!” Wink yelled back.
He leaped over the downed body. Was he dead? That didn’t matter, either. Wink wasn’t dead. That’s what mattered-:—
~ * ~
Three hundred meters past the line, Jo stopped, turned, and using every one of her sensory augs, scanned the woods behind them.
Nothing.
“Kay?”
Eight meters away, Kay said, “We are clear.”
“But we won’t be for long.” Click. “Gramps?”
“Nancy and I are having a picnic by the water here,” he said. “Why don’t you all come on by and join us? I’ll save you a sandwich.”
“Three minutes,” Jo said.
“Don’t put any mustard on mine,” Gunny said.
“Chocolatte, I’ve got some special sauce I’ve been saving for you.”
“Ah bet,” Gunny said. “You just keep right on savin’ it.”
~ * ~
FIFTEEN
Once the hopper was airborne and fifteen klicks away, they all felt better.
Gramps shook his head. “Children, children, what have you done with your dress clothes? Your father is going to be sooo unhappy with you.”
“It was such a nice night,” Gunny said. “And those suits were so hot.”
“Yeah, he can take it out of our allowances,” Wink said. He was regluing the hole in his muscle shut; it had leaked a little.
Singh stared at them. He was still shaking. “How—how can you make jokes?”
The kid was rattled. All the crap he’d been told about combat, whatever simulacra he had run, none of it applied the way the real deal did. He was one step away from losing it, shaky, his skin pale, sweat beaded on his face. In shock.
Wink said, “Not like you expected, was it?”
Singh shook his head. “No.”
Wink looked around at the others. “We’ve all been where you are.”
Singh looked at him.
“If you are a soldier, you train for battle. It’s them or you, and that’s the choice. If you can’t wrap your mind around that, you can’t stay in this line of work.
“Oh, you can get a posting behind the lines, run a desk, repair rollers, shuffle supplies, stay out of the field, but when you put on the uniform, you ar
e on call to pull the trigger if it comes to that.
“Enemy kicks in the door of the air-conditioned office you are in, even if you are a photon-pushing clerk, it’s kill or die. That’s what soldiers do.”
