by Steve Perry
There was plenty of room for a couple of passengers to stretch out and sleep, and even with the loud noises, any soldier worth her salt could drop into a snooze; it was one of the first things you learned how to do when you put on a uniform.
Not that they would be sleeping since they were on duty.
And not that they were worried about any of the bozos down the hill trying to mount any kind of attack in this. Step crooked, and the wind would pick you off the side of the rise and drop you somewhere else. Made for interesting logistics: Whoa, there went Henri! Somebody see if you can find his machine gun . . .
Kay stopped growling, and when Jo looked, she was gone.
There was a moment of worry, then the rear hatch opened, and Kay climbed into the cart. She shook herself like a dog, slung water off.
“Havin’ fun out there?”
“It was invigorating, yes.”
Gunny shook her head. “Loony as a latrine lamprey.”
Kay grinned.
The cart shook, seemed to rise a couple of centimeters, then settled back.
Jo glanced at the sensor image. “That gust was 183 kph and the eye wall is not here yet.”
“We are on a hill and exposed to more of the storm,” Kay said. She had a towel, sponging the rest of the water from her fur.
Gunny looked at the sensors. “Nothing on the pradar or IR except detritus blowin’ in the wind out there.”
“It would not be an ideal time for an attack,” Kay allowed.
“Yeah, being worried about being blown twenty klicks away to land head down in the scrub will do that. Not something Ah would be keen to try.”
“It still might be done if the attackers moved with care.”
“Which is why we are here watching,” Jo said.
Another piece of building pinwheeled by, and Jo caught only a glimpse of it. Looked like part of a window shutter. More small bits rattled against the cart. She waved at the sensor controls, crooked a finger to bring up the weather sat. Their location appeared as a pulsing green dot. There was a lot of storm surrounding the dot.
“Something just took down those IR sensors you replaced,” Jo said.
“Shall I go and replace them again?”
“No, I think we’re good for now.
“The eye is approaching. Another few minutes. This should be interesting.”
“Why interesting?” Kay asked.
“Well, I’ve never experienced it, but the center of such whirling storms is the axis and mostly calm. Little or no wind and rain, low pressure. This storm’s center is relatively small, under thirty kilometers in diameter. Just before it gets here, the winds will be their strongest; when it arrives, in theory, it will be almost calm and cloudless, you could look up to see the stars. When it passes, the strongest winds will return, but from the opposite direction, so we need to orient our vehicles the other way for optimum wind resistance. According to the chart, the speed of the storm should give us about ten to fifteen minutes of calm. Plenty of time to turn the carts around.”
Jo had worked that out when she’d gotten the briefing on what to expect.
Kay said, “And while in the eye, there will be sufficient time for an opposing force that presumably has the same information, to mount a quick attack. If I were in their position, that’s when I would do it.”
Jo and Gunny both nodded. “We already kicked their asses pretty good once this evening,” Gunny said.
Jo said, “The wind and rain would play hell with grenades and mortars, even small-arms rounds get deflected or pushed off target. But in a dead calm . . . ?”
“Maybe they don’t want this hill that bad,” Gunny said.
“Do you believe that?”
Gunny shook her head at Kay. “No. The clock is tickin’, and the conditions are going to be nasty for the next couple of days. Probably won’t have a better chance.”
Jo toggled her com’s opchan on. “Listen up, people, it’s going to stop raining and blowing here in about . . . nine minutes. If company is planning on dropping by unannounced, there’s a small window when that is most likely to happen. Anything not IDed with our sig is a target. Shoot and report, in that order. Stets?”
Jo listened as the troops toggled message-received blips.
“Be a hard slog up that wet hillside,” Gunny said. “Ten minutes might not be enough.”
“But enough to get close enough to throw things at us. We’ll make it rain harder than water to give them something else to think about if they try it. Though the wind will blow our fire all over the place when it cranks back up.”
“I should go and scout.”
“Negative. I don’t want to see you flattened by a chunk of somebody’s greenhouse. You already had your conversation with the storm. Wait until the wind dies.”
Kay nodded. “Understood.”
The opchan alert blipped on the console.
“Hey,” Gramps said, “I don’t know if you have noticed, but there’s a little rain and wind happening.”
“Listen to the old man, Ah can’t believe he can still put his shoes on by himself.”
“Hey, Chocolatte, I miss you, too. But for those of you thinking that you are going to get a package from home or anything in the mail tonight, forget it. Air support is grounded.
“Nancy would fly if the colonel would let her, but we’ve got tornado alerts, and taking aircraft through those is generally considered unwise.”
“Tornados,” Jo said. “Yeah, I see ’em on the weather radar. Doesn’t look like they are a threat here, they are already past us.”
“Yep, but it’s early in the evening and those can pop up anywhere in a hurry. You know the eye is about to reach you?”
“Yep. We’re geared up in case somebody thinks that’s a good time to mount a charge.”
“Mount a knee-deep-in-the-mud wade, you mean.”
“They have some small treadware down there, might could move quickly enough to get up a ways before the wind comes back.”
“I trust you are prepared for such an eventuality.”
“We are. How are things on the other fronts?”
“Mostly shut down. Not a fit night out for man nor beast. I’m running the FCV on the edge of the woods about twenty klicks from where you are.”
“You should have been here a few minutes ago, seen Kay out there leaning against the wind; she was havin’ a fine ole time.”
“Mad dogs and Vastalimi,” he said.
Jo chuckled.
Kay said, “I don’t know the reference, but it sounds pejorative on the face of it.”
“It is. By our standards, your behavior sometimes can be classified as insane.”
“We feel the same way about your species.”
“Said the fem who tracked and killed a carnivorous monster the size of a troop carrier using only her claws,” Gramps said.
Kay smiled.
“She’s smiling, isn’t she?”
“Like a stoned baboon,” Jo said.
“Okay. If the opposition comes to call, drop a few rocks on their heads. Keep us in the loop.”
“Done.”
“I’m gonna go see if I can make a kite. Great weather for flying one; been a while since I did that.”
“Back when you made ’em from dinosaur hide and bones?”
“I told you about that?”
Gunny shook her head, but she smiled.
“Discom, fems. Have a nice night.”
Kay noticed it first, Jo and Gunny right behind her. “Listen,” Kay said.
“I don’t hear any—ah, yeah,” Gunny said.
The wind and rain had slackened. Even as they noticed, the sounds dropped again, almost as if somebody had waved a volume control to a lower setting.
“Heads up, people. Stay sharp.”
&n
bsp; – – – – – –
As soon as the wind died, Kay exited the vehicle and headed for her vantage point. The area was strewn with debris, tree branches, parts of buildings, bits of plastic, and uprooted bushes. There was a chunk of frame-igloo material the size of her head just there. Pieces of what looked like glass and other glittery shards of unidentified material shattered by the storm lay scattered about, visible in the starlight that shone down from a mostly clear sky.
Most interesting, this effect. From storm to nothing in only a few moments.
She felt pressure in her head and eardrums, and she equalized it, yawning, feeling a pop! as she did. She splashed through puddles of warm water, treading carefully to avoid stepping on something sharp. Her feet were leathery tough but not invulnerable.
The air smelled of torn and crushed vegetation.
She made her way to the edge of the hill. There was a smallish tree and some shrubbery there, and it seemed to have withstood the wind and rain. It would break up her outline, offer some concealment, as she peered over the edge. The enemy would have night-vision augmentation, but it would be no better than her own night sight.
It felt eerily quiet.
She saw movement almost immediately, no more than two hundred meters away. There were bushes down the slope blocking a clear view.
“We have enemy approaching,” she said.
On her com, Jo Captain said, “We have them on the scope. They must have started before the wind stopped.”
“What I see appears to be a small multiwheel crawler. Wait—there is a second, just behind it. Ah.”
“What ‘Ah’? What?”
“They are drones—no riders.”
Jo said, “Fuck! Crawling bombs. Somebody got a bead on these suckers?”
“I have them.” That was Singh.
“Spike them now.”
A minigun opened up to Kay’s left, eighty meters away. The tracer rounds revealed the trajectory, and a grenade launcher whumped! arcing down to follow the tracers. Of a moment, there came a bright flash, followed by the sound of the explosion—
“One down,” Singh said.
More tracers flew down the hill.
Kay looked away, to preserve her night sight. She smelled a feint. She moved from her concealment and edged away from Singh’s firing—
The second crawler exploded, much louder and brighter. Must have triggered the onboard bomb.
“Both targets hit,” Singh said.
Kay was fifty meters away now, staying low, searching . . .
Here came five, six . . . nine troopers in electronic camouflage, almost invisible in the darkness.”
“You see them?” Kay said.
“Stet that. Ten?”
Kay frowned. Ten? Had she missed one? Where—
“Sorry, I see nine. They are approaching the AP mines—”
As if to punctuate her comment, one of the antipersonnel mines went off, and somebody screamed.
The enemy advance stopped.
“Grenadiers, dial it in, let’s give them something else to chew on.”
A pair of grenade launchers behind Kay began firing.
Two . . . four . . . eight . . . ten rounds arced over her and fell, and their shooters had the range. The grenades began going off, and there were more screams from those being hit.
Not a good night to be a Dycon soldier in these parts.
Kay had her carbine, but she hadn’t unstrapped it.
The soldiers below began a retreat.
It was a high cost for no gain.
Kay frowned again. This seemed an unwise attack. Could they be that stupid?
She lifted a bit higher, to get a better view—
“Down!” Gunny yelled.
Kay dropped flat, face-first into the mud.
The bullet passed over her close enough to stir the fur on her left shoulder—
Gunny fired a triple tap from her carbine—
“Clear!” Gunny said.
Kay raised her face and looked down the hill to see the shooter still falling.
She came up. The tenth one. “Thank you. I made an error.”
Gunny moved closer, still looking for targets downrange. “Sniper. I bet he came up while the storm was still raging. He was set up when the others got here, looking for a target of opportunity.”
“They are determined.”
“Yep, and that and a noodle will get you a cup of bad coffee.”
The wind started coming back, but from the other direction.
“Time to go back inside,” Gunny said. “Ah’m guessing we are finally done for the night. They gonna need some new soldiers to replace the ones we tagged, and Ah’m guessin’ they won’t be coming anytime soon.”
FIFTEEN
Gramps was dry and tight in the FCV when his displays splashed warning icons, and an alarm chimed: He’d just lost the last satellite feed.
The brunt of the storm was past, and some of the trees ahead on the edge of the forest hadn’t survived it; they were splayed and downed, mostly leaning in the same direction. The big clearing where the FCV was parked was littered with debris the hurricane had brought and left behind. Branches, trash, odd things he couldn’t even identify in the darkness. Quite the meteorological drama. He’d been through other storms, but none quite as big as this.
He shut off the alarm.
Shit, he thought, there goes the last link unit.
It was the third of three modules he’d set out before the storm. Each was connected to the FCV by optical cable instead of a wireless pipe. Wireless transmission could get iffy during bad weather, and especially as far out as he’d set them. The links had been designed to stay close to the FCV’s transceivers because nobody thought they might need to be anywhere else.
When the military-hardware folks designed things, they usually had something particular in mind, and flexibility in function was somehow never high on their to-do list. And their responses when queried about such things?
No, that is not within our design parameters. Do not attempt to utilize it in such a manner.
The first had died an hour into the storm. The second lasted two more hours.
Now the third was kaput, and that’s all they had.
Which was fine for REMFs who didn’t have to use the stuff with expressed murder blowing past your head at hypersonic velocity, or huge fucking wind and rain, but in the field, you had to make do.
Cable was really old-school, but hardwired sigs were better. And, he could switch his signal among the three squatty boxes and down- and uplink his ELINT profile geographically, as well as spread-spectrum, which was also easier. Wireless sometimes got confused at multiple sigs and would start to cry and keep rebooting, which was a pain in the ass. Plus the proximity of the signal-blocking trees was just one more brick on the load. He had found some relatively clear spots to set the links, but the wind moved all kinds of crap back and forth . . .
The squad that usually walked shotgun on the FCV would normally attend needed repairs, but they had to stay inside. No way they could roam around in that blasting wind and shrapnel-like rain anyhow.
He ran a diagnostic on the cables. Two of them showed patent the full distance to their respective units. The cables weren’t the problem; the units themselves had malfunctioned. Probably trees fell on them.
If truth was the first casualty of war, communications hardware was usually right behind it, and triple redundancy was no guarantee.
The third cable showed a disconnect seven hundred meters out, in the clearing and well short of the trees, which likely meant it had been broken somehow by the storm.
All he needed to do was roll out to the broken cable and patch it. Or he could try the wireless link at a different spot. It was showing NO SIGNAL at the moment. One way or another, he was gonna have t
o move his ass fast, or he wasn’t going to get the data he needed.
The storm wasn’t done yet. According to the FCV’s sensors, winds were still gusting 70 to 80 kph. Maybe he could roll and set the FCV right over where he needed to splice—hell, stay inside if he could. That would be a story to tell later. Yeah, hurricane busted the cable, but I was able to fix it without even getting wet . . .
The troops could stay in their igloos. Everybody would be happy.
He put in a call to HQ, got the night-watch op. “I got a broken cable here. I’m moving the FCV seven hundred meters to the northeast for repair. Let the guys in the igloos sleep. I’ll call if I need help.”
The fem acknowledged that.
He cranked the engines, set the AP, and engaged the forward drive, heading toward the forest.
The treads would handle any of the small debris okay, and the AP would swing the big vehicle around anything large enough to cause problems. The treads crawled slowly along, slow as a walking man’s pace.
He lit the passive sensors and checked his position as he crept along the broken cable’s path.
It would take a few minutes to get there.
He did a systems check while he waited. Everything else seemed to be working as it should.
One FCV looked like another though this one had been rigged to carry a four-drone platform in a stick-on module on the starboard side. There were two small drones left, and they wouldn’t be going anywhere until the wind lessened. A meter-long drone wasn’t any match for even a 60 kph wind; it would toss the sucker this way and that. Which it had done with the first two drones. Those had vanished within an hour of deployment, and were probably halfway to Oklahoma City by now. Or buried a meter deep in the mud.
In theory, the storm would be mostly gone by daylight, and a couple more armed birds in the air come the dawn wouldn’t hurt, which was why he had brought them.
– – – – – –
He made it to the break in the cable. His connection reads changed from amber to red, flitted past green, and back to red again, depending on the signal that made it through. The wireless still wasn’t working worth shit though there were a couple of spots where reception was workable. If he couldn’t fix the cable, that was the other option.
