Dire Steps

by Henry V. O'Neil

  Mortas remembered the snide comments from Almighty from the night before, and the station’s hostility to Force units operating in the area. “You think something weird is going on over there?”

  “That’s not all.” Pappas activated the handheld, showing a calm nighttime scene to the west of Almighty. Mortas was waiting for a set of lights to appear, more Sim deceptions, when a series of explosions burst in the jungle. The spasms of fire flashed into life, probably a dozen of them, and an area of at least one hundred square yards began to glow. The heat wasn’t a fire, and it slowly spread before starting to cool.

  “Now I’m completely baffled. I didn’t see any indication of the enemy.”

  “Neither did I. And I have no idea what that glowing patch indicated.” Pappas turned off the handheld. “But I intend to find out what our friends at Almighty have been up to.”

  “I can’t say how long the Step is going to be suspended, but it can’t be too long.” Dassa’s voice came though the earpieces in helmets all over B Company. Riding in the back of a shuttle headed for the jungle near Almighty, Mortas’s platoon listened with occasional comments.

  “One thing’s sure, it’ll come back online ten seconds after we don’t need it anymore.”

  “Aw, don’t be like that. Thing needs a good cleaning. Think how long everybody’s been using it.”

  Dassa continued, broadcasting from what was left of Broadleaf. “We’ve got excellent communications, so every aerial support system is still available to us. By cutting back on goggle usage, we should be able to ride this out. But just in case we don’t, the engineers on the Dauntless are working around the clock on a way to link the goggles into the batteries in our helmets.”

  “See? There’s a good answer. A ­couple of exposed wires running between your eyes and your ears, and everything will be fine. Especially when it rains.”

  “Nah, they’ll come up with some kind of waterproof adapter that weighs two hundred pounds.”

  Leaning back against his rucksack, Mortas studied a moving schematic on his handheld. Normally he would have tracked the flight on his goggles, but the batteries needed to be saved. Three shuttles were ferrying his platoon’s three squads to a spot near Almighty, close to the location where the Sims had diverted the humans’ attention the previous night. Landing zones on that part of Verdur were hard to come by, so rocket fire had blasted an open space for them over a period of hours. Harassment fire had continued through the day, striking the jungle in numerous places, and every so often a rocket would impact in the steadily growing clearing where they would land. At least in theory, the technique lessened the chances that the enemy would recognize that a landing zone was being created.

  The three shuttles were coming in from different directions, having lifted off from Broadleaf as part of the back-­and-­forth with the Dauntless. Instead of going into orbit, they’d flown many miles away before dropping down to treetop level and heading for the clearing. Mortas monitored the progress of all three birds, fearing one of them might get shot down, and was ready to divert to the crash site.

  Dassa continued. “I’m in communication with Major Hatton, and he’s working up a plan to move the rest of the battalion here using normal propulsion. It will take days, but they’ll bring everything we need. In the meantime, Major Hatton noticed something that we missed. If Sam only wanted to kill one station, he probably wouldn’t have hit the one in the middle; he would have hit either Almighty or Cordvine.

  “By removing Broadleaf, he’s isolated the remaining two sites. I think that means he plans to knock off at least one more of them before reinforcements get here. Sam thinks he’s put us completely on the defensive, but he’s wrong. We’re going to be ready, no matter where he pops up next.

  “Second Platoon will secure Cordvine, while Third and I finish up at Broadleaf. First Platoon will patrol the jungle near Almighty, to gain intelligence and to respond to any moves against the station. We can reassemble the whole company using the shuttles if necessary, but we cannot simply go over to the defensive. Sam has figured out a way to avoid detection by our scanners, so we can’t let him operate out there with impunity.

  “Remember what they did to Broadleaf, and remember what they did to us. Now it’s time for us to kill ’em back.”

  The handheld indicated that the three different craft were all approaching the landing zone, and Mortas switched it off. Stowing it in a pocket on his armor, his hand brushed against the sheath of a long, narrow commando knife tucked between two ammo pouches. It had belonged to Corporal Cranther, the Spartacan Scout who’d been marooned with him on Roanum, and it stirred a memory that was just out of reach. He reached for it mentally, sensing that it had some significance for the current mission, but it slipped away.

  Something to do with shuttles, but there had been no shuttle flights on Roanum. Or water. Or food. Just lots and lots of walking. They’d escaped the planet by stealing a Wren shuttle from the Sims at their spacedrome, but that couldn’t be it. The nagging memory seemed important, but he had to set it aside when the craft’s rear ramp suddenly dropped, bringing him back to the present.

  The twin rows of soldiers in camouflaged armor, wearing rucksacks that bulged with extra ammo, rations, and water, hustled down the ramp into the mangled greenery created by the rockets. Turning on his goggles in order to see the terrain around his location, Mortas grabbed his rifle and hurried after them.

  “You seeing what I’m seeing?” Captain Pappas whispered from the center of a small clearing that had been blasted into the vegetation southwest of Almighty the night before.

  Or it should have been a small clearing, cluttered with fallen branches and a few sagging trees held up by the profusion of growth around them. Instead, a hole ripped in the canopy above let in the last of the day’s light to show an unexpected scene. A partially cleared area stood under the gap and extended for one hundred yards in every direction. Mortas’s platoon was in a loose perimeter around that zone while Pappas tried to understand what it meant.

  “They manicured the place. It’s like they were trying to plant something and keep it hidden. Chopped out the trees and cleared the bushes in rows, leaving the rest in place.” In the dying light, Mortas saw the intelligence officer hop up and scurry forward several yards, mindful that the platoon had not yet secured the dense overgrowth around the bizarre site. “I’m where the rockets hit, right now. Big crater, minor damage to the trees, no sign of whatever Sam was doing out here.”

  Dak spoke to Mortas from across the clearing. “Not a good place to spend the night. We gotta get going.”

  Mortas nodded without speaking. The platoon had moved to the site quickly after being dropped off by the shuttles, but the ground had fought them. Overloaded with what they needed to survive and bulling through vegetation that seemed to have been in place for millennia, they’d been astounded to find this oasis of order.

  “Just need a few more minutes.” Pappas rose again, running forward. His rucksack bounced against his armor, and it seemed to be an optical illusion that he was able to jog through the ground vegetation. Mortas glanced down at the handheld, having already selected a defensive position for the platoon. It wasn’t too far away, but he’d picked it using only the elevation lines suggested by the overhead imagers. No human had ever set foot on that location, and so there was a chance it wouldn’t be any good at all.

  “Listen to your platoon sergeant, el-­tee,” a familiar voice purred in his ear. “We’re locking down for the night, and you want to make sure we know where you are.”

  It was the same mocking fool from the previous evening, the radioman at Almighty.

  “You know exactly where we are,” he responded darkly. “We’re right there on the screen, plain as day.”

  “Oh, I see you. Poor perimeter, three disjointed squads, and no idea where Sam is. You better get your shit together, if the boogeyman comes calling.” />
  “We got plenty for the boogeyman—­and anybody else who pisses us off.” Dak spoke dismissively. “Now why don’t you go get another cup of coffee and let the men work?”

  “Sure, sure. Good idea. I wouldn’t want to get drowsy and call something in on the wrong target tonight.”

  “No you wouldn’t.” Dak’s answer was lost, as the disembodied voice had already terminated the link.

  “We need to get moving,” Mortas announced. Tapping the handheld, he emplaced a marker on the side of the cleared area closest to their destination. “First Squad, Second Squad, slide around to Third and form a temporary perimeter. Move out to our night position in five minutes.”

  Putting the device away, he touched Vossel’s prone form with his boot. The medic was facing the other way, rifle ready, and simply came to a knee. Long weeks of field training had transformed the two of them into a pair of near-­telepaths in the way they had come to understand each other’s intentions. Mortas tilted his helmet toward the clearing, and the two men zigzagged through the undergrowth in a crouch.

  They knelt when they reached Pappas, hidden by the shrubbery left in place by the Sims. The intelligence officer knelt as well, three rifles pointed outward. “See what they did here? They chopped out these lanes, five yards across and two hundred yards long. Look how they leveled the stumps with the ground, how they took it down to bare dirt most of the way.”

  Mortas remembered the images from the night before, the three columns of men headed for Almighty. “Sleds. Instead of firepots set in the ground, they mounted them on sleds or runners or Sim two-­wheelers. Three guys dragging them forward at a nice slow pace, and it looks like half a platoon.”

  “Yep. Sam’s tricks take time to set up, but they really work.”

  “Saw one of those Sammies running away after the first rocket,” Vossel whispered. “Guess they took his Smock of Invisibility away from him.”

  “Or it got blown off,” Mortas offered, haunted by the image of the desperately running figure, tripping, falling, and ultimately unable to outrun the rockets.

  “I doubt they were wearing them at all. Defeats the purpose if you’re trying to create a diversion,” Pappas offered. His sigh came through the helmet speakers. “Let’s get gone, Jan. We had direct hits on this spot the other night, and there’s almost no sign they were even here. Somebody picked this place clean.”

  The new position was nothing to brag about. A modest finger of raised ground in the heavy forest, it wasn’t large enough for the entire platoon. Mortas played with the idea of ringing it evenly, but that lost the advantage of the higher elevation, and so he put Katinka’s squad on the berm facing north and ran the other two squads down the incline so that the platoon was arranged in a rough triangle.

  “Getting sentimental on us, Lieutenant?” Dak whispered, once he’d checked the positioning of the three machine guns and the grenade launchers. Mortas had been coordinating defensive fires with the ASSL on Broadleaf, his back against a fallen tree trunk, and was caught off guard.

  “What’s that?”

  “You got us formed in the shape of a heart. Thought you were going to break out some marking powder and write ‘Jan plus Betty’ in the middle.”

  The absurd suggestion made him laugh, and Mortas cut his mike until it subsided. B Company’s ASSL finished marking his last target, and when it popped up on the handheld, Mortas acknowledged it and signed off. Dak sat down next to him.

  “One of my platoon leaders in Third Corps, he did that once. Then he took a snapshot of the imagery and sent it to his girl back on . . . somewhere, I forget where he was from.”

  “Bet the censors ripped him for that.”

  “Actually, not. You see, unless you been out here, things like that picture don’t look like what they are. Buncha headquarters pussies, riding out the war giving everybody shit, what would they know about an overhead image of an infantry perimeter at night?”

  “Where you from, Sergeant Dak?”

  “So you finally got around to me. Been pestering every new man, and didn’t bother asking your right arm.” Dak gave a short laugh. “Tratia, sir.”

  “I heard Tratians join the Force to get a break from all the discipline.”

  “They do have a lot of rules there, don’t they? But yeah, in a way that is why I joined. I never liked school, there was always so much better stuff going on right outside the window, and after a while I just stopped going. My father didn’t understand, but he was a guy who bought into all the laws and the rules. To be honest, I think it worked for him.

  “I got into fighting for a while, but then I started stealing anything that moved—­not for the money, I’m not a thief—­and boy did I get into some great chases with the enforcement types. The police, some of them liked the way I drove, and they kept warning me, ‘You’re gonna end up in the Force. Magistrate’s gonna send your ass to the war.’ And stuff like that.

  “One night, I came home and my dad was waiting. Time for the showdown, I guess. Told me I was gonna straighten up, go back to school, all that garbage. And then he says, ‘You live under my roof, you obey my rules’ which he really shouldn’t have done.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I took him up on it. I remembered what the police had been saying, and I enlisted the next day. Don’t ever use that ‘My roof, my rules’ line on your kids, Lieutenant, if you and Betty ever have any. Of such moments, recruits are made.” They both chuckled quietly. “Listen, sir. I checked the water situation, and we need to purify some of the local stuff.”

  “We topped off just a few hours ago.”

  “The move was tougher than we expected. By this time tomorrow we’ll be empty, and if we call in for resupply Sam’s gonna know where we are. I’ve put a small patrol together, all experienced jungle men, and I’ll lead them. We’ll slip back to that one stream we crossed getting here and strain out some gallons real quiet.”

  “How long’s that going to take?”

  “All night. It’s just as well that we stay put there; always dangerous to come back into the lines and besides, we’d be humping full collapsibles. Better you bring the platoon to us at first light.”

  “We’re going to burn up some goggle batteries doing it that way.”

  “Oh yeah, that reminds me.” Mortas felt Dak’s hand on his arm, and two goggle batteries were pressed into his palm. “We’re in better shape than it seemed. The veterans always carry extra batteries. If we exercise a little discipline, these should last a ­couple of days.”

  Mortas looked down at the tiny cylinders, unable to see them. “Captain Dassa asked for an exact report of how many of these we had.”

  “Oh, you know better than to expect the boys to answer a question like that truthfully. They would have confiscated the extras and given ’em to the knuckleheads who didn’t plan ahead—­no offense, sir, I’m not calling you a knucklehead. But in the future, always bring a ­couple spares of your own.”

  Dak stood and moved off through the gloom without making a sound.

  The shortcomings of the platoon’s position became obvious when it was Mortas’s turn to sleep. He’d sat radio watch for the first few hours, periodically getting up to quietly check the perimeter, then rolled up in his field blanket. The slope was steeper than he’d thought, and no matter how he arranged himself he kept sliding downhill. Every few minutes, a new rock or bur or root would find some exposed bone to press against, and gravity increased the pressure until he had to move.

  Finally giving up, he groggily pushed his way out of the thin quilt. A ghostly fog had seeped in while he was asleep, and it made the prone figures of the platoon look like primordial beasts with armored exoskeletons. The jungle was quiet, though, and he turned on his goggles long enough to check the overhead imagery. Now that they knew how the Sims had been avoiding detection, every flicker of heat on the screen could mean enemy move
ment. Apart from a few jungle creatures walking, crawling, or flying off in the distance, everything seemed all right.

  He turned off the goggles and slid the lenses up inside his helmet. Looking around, he spotted the boots and legs of Captain Pappas sticking out from under a camouflaged tarpaulin usually used for expedient shelters. Vossel, on radio watch, was sitting cross-­legged next to Pappas and appeared to be watching him closely. Having used the same technique on many field problems, Mortas knew that Pappas was viewing something on his handheld and needed to keep the screen’s light from being observed.

  “I’m coming in, sir,” Mortas whispered above the form, and a muffled voice told him to wait a moment. He heard a switch being turned off, and then crawled under. Pappas’s body odor was trapped inside the tarp, and Mortas made a weak waving gesture in front of his nose.

  “Hey, I wouldn’t go pointing any fingers if I were you, Jan.” Pappas switched the handheld back on once Vossel indicated that they were covered again. “You’re the one taking the stink pills.”

  The screen brightened, and Mortas pushed a wet blade of grass out of his way. Pappas was reviewing the footage of the attack on Broadleaf, with the resolution taken as far down as it would go. He was focused on the northern edge of the ridge, where the Sim attack had originated.

  “Dassa sent patrols out to examine the northern slope, and you wouldn’t believe what they found. The Sims had chopped at least three sets of steps out of the side of that hill, and reinforced them with cut branches. Sam must have been crawling right up to Broadleaf’s wire night after night, and they never knew it.”

  “Can’t hunker down inside a base like that. You gotta run defensive patrols all the time, just to keep the bad guys from setting up shop on your doorstep.”

  “There’s more. At the bottom of the hill, they found two sections of fencing attached to a stack of heavy logs all tied together. The Sims had the logs secured just a little bit downhill, and they attached them to the fence using these ropes made from woven vines. When they released the trunks, it pulled the fence down.”