A World of Hurt

by David Sherman

  "Sir, there were fires all around, but there was a clear path through them that the company was following." He coughed and spat to the side. "The fire jumped into the path and cut us off."

  Van Winkle nodded. "I was watching the download and saw that. What I really want to know is, you had fires all around you--how did you think of the tactic you used to get out of it?"

  Bass snorted, the snort turned into a wracking cough. Van Winkle slapped him on the back and he spat out a large globule of blackened mucous. "Sorry 'bout that, sir," he said when he was able to speak again.

  "Don't apologize. Tell me briefly--and let me know if talking becomes too difficult."

  "We heard something to our flank, thought it was an ambush and reacted. It wasn't an ambush, it was a tree going up. Its trunk split and popped, threw out embers. Our return fire put so much more heat in the fire over there it burned out in a hurry. I saw"--he looked at Conorado--"the Skipper and I saw a burned-out area with a screen of fire between us and it. I remembered watching the tree go up, and had the platoon volley fire into the fire until the vegetation got hot enough, flared up, and burned out. We went through and waited." He shrugged; it was simple.

  "That was good thinking, Charlie. I knew we had a reason for making you an officer."

  Bass snorted again. The coughing it brought on this time wasn't as violent as before and he recovered faster, without having his back pounded. "Nothing any old gunnery sergeant couldn't come up with."

  "But an ensign couldn't figure it out for himself?" van Winkle said with a wry smile.

  "A lot of ensigns used to be gunnery sergeants." Bass stopped before adding, "Not everyone takes a dumb pill when he gets commissioned."

  "Regardless, it was good thinking. Congratulations, Charlie." Van Winkle stood. "Now," he said, looking around for a corpsman, "I want you on the next Dragon out of here--you belong in the hospital. That's an order, Ensign."

  "But, sir--" Bass looked to Conorado for help, but the company commander just looked back at him, and he saw no help there.

  "I'll have Gunny Thatcher make sure he's on it, sir," Conorado said.

  The Kilo Company corpsman who had been trying to work on Bass returned.

  "Ensign, let this good corpsman stick that tube down your throat," van Winkle ordered. He nodded to the corpsman and walked away.

  "He's one of the best small-unit leaders I've ever seen," van Winkle said to Conorado when they were far enough away that Bass wouldn't overhear.

  "Yessir, he is," Conorado agreed.

  "But he's sometimes stubborn almost to the point of being suicidal."

  Conorado barked out a short laugh. "Yessir, he's that too."

  It was the next day before the forest fire finally burned itself out. Brigadier Sturgeon agreed with Commander van Winkle about sending vegetation samples up to the Grandar Bay for analysis. He contacted Commodore Boreland, who sent down a three-member science team. The string-of-pearls showed a single stand of trees and brush untouched by the flames, on a small island in the middle of a large pond near the middle of the valley. Kilo Company hadn't been involved in the fighting or the fires in the valley, so Commander van Winkle sent one of its platoons to escort the scientists to the island. They went on foot; the forest leading up to the saddles was too dense for Dragons to get through, and neither he nor Sturgeon was willing to send people in the flimsy civilian vehicles that were small enough to fit between the trees. They didn't know whether Skinks or other enemy were left alive in the valley, or if they had rail guns or other antiaircraft weapons, but Sturgeon wasn't going to risk losing a hopper and everybody in it if there were.

  The string-of-pearls' ground-penetrating sensors didn't pick up anything that indicated caves or tunnels under the surface inside the valley, but that didn't mean there weren't any underground formations.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Corporal Juliete lay between Lance Corporal Rising Star and PFC Bhophar, his point man. They were on top of a different saddle from those Company L and Mike Company had used to enter the valley; its sides weren't as steep and they wouldn't have to rappel to reach the valley floor. They peered into the valley. It was burned for almost its entire breadth and width. Only a few green trees still stood, outside of the sparkling emerald oasis several kilometers away on the island in a small lake near its center.

  Juliete heard Staff Sergeant Oconor, his squad leader, slither into position between him and Rising Star to look for himself. Oconor whistled softly at the devastation. A moment later Ensign Zantith, commander of Kilo Company's first platoon, joined them. Unlike Mike Company and Company L when they went into the valley, this platoon could see the lay of the denuded land. It rippled slightly, and rose and fell in longer swells.

  The four Marines studied the valley for a few minutes. The floor was mostly shades of gray, with blackened spikes sticking up here and there, the remains of trees. A few thin waterways were discernible as glistening gray ribbons. Nothing moved over the ground that wasn't propelled by breezes. Nothing flew above the dead valley.

  Zantith used his magnifier to scan the sides of the valley. "Where does the water go?" he asked softly.

  "Sir?" Oconor said.

  "All those waterways. They don't flow to any outlet from the valley that I can see. So where does it go?"

  Nobody answered, which was all right with Zantith. They knew as well as he did that if the water didn't flow out of the valley on the surface, that meant it went underground. That, in turn, meant there were probably caves under the valley floor, even if the string-of-pearls hadn't found any yet. Skinks liked caves--they must really like caves with water running through them. And those caves would extend well beyond the limits of the valley, which meant Skinks could be anywhere.

  When he realized he wasn't going to gain any more advantage from looking at the valley, Zantith projected his map onto his HUD and adjusted the route already drawn on it. He transmitted the revised map to his platoon sergeant, squad leaders, and Corporal Juliete. He also forwarded a copy to his company commander. "Let's do it," he said.

  Juliete nudged Bhophar and said, "First fire team, move out," into his fire team circuit.

  Bhophar led off, followed by Juliete and Rising Star. Oconor trailed them with a gun team, the rest of first squad behind him, then Zantith and his comm man. The platoon sergeant followed second squad with the three scientists off the Grandar Bay and the cargo scoot that carried their equipment, and third squad pulled drag. The cargo scoot was the reason they had to use an easier way into the valley.

  Lieutenant Brightly, the Grandar Bay's botanist, looked around in dismay. He'd studied the maps and knew that much of the botany of this isolated valley had to be unique to it. Such a loss! he thought. Why did the Marines think it was necessary to burn it down? He mourned the life-forms that might have been exterminated in the fire.

  Well, maybe not completely. As he looked about, he saw individual trees and bushes that seemed almost untouched by the fire, even the occasional clumps of bushes in their brilliant colors. And the island they were headed for didn't appear to have suffered from the flames and heat--at least, no damage showed up in the images from the string-of-pearls. And it was unknown flora, so no one knew what kind of damage it could sustain before suffering irrecoverable stress. Of course, being burned to char was considerably more stress than he thought the plant had evolved to deal with.

  Lieutenant Brightly had lived up to his name: no matter how morose he felt at any time, a negative mood was unlikely to be sustained. He was soon looking forward to examining the flora on the island. Maybe he'd be able to find out what had made the fire spread so rapidly. He began walking more jauntily.

  Unlike Lieutenant Brightly, there was nothing jaunty in PFC Bhophar's gait on the platoon point. He neither knew nor cared about the uniqueness of the flora of this valley. What he did know and care about was that Company L and Mike Company had been attacked with acid shooters in this valley. Acid shooters meant Skinks. Skinks liked water an
d caves, and there was both of them in the valley. He moved cautiously, placing his feet carefully to stir the ash as little as possible. His head moved constantly, checking his front from one side to the other, and halfway to his rear. The muzzle of his blaster pointed everywhere his eyes looked; if he saw a threat, he wouldn't have to waste even a split instant to bring his blaster to bear on it. He paid particular attention to narrow waterways the platoon crossed, looking for signs of anything moving--or waiting--under the surface. As softly as Bhophar stepped, he still raised some ash, and by the time they'd gone a quarter of a kilometer his boots and ankles were coated with ash--in visual, he was a pair of ghostly feet stalking across the valley floor.

  Behind and to the right of Bhophar, Corporal Juliete watched almost as broad a front, from his right rear to his left front. He also looked down and, after a while, grimaced. He realized that, like him, everyone in the platoon was gradually becoming visible from the feet up from the ash. He looked closer at the space between himself and Bhophar. Fine ash was suspended in the air. He looked down and saw that his legs were visible higher up than Bhophar's. Even staggered as the platoon column was, each man walked through a low cloud of ash raised by the men ahead of him, and each increased the density of that cloud. The scoot raised even more ash. Juliete looked back along the column. The last men in the gun squad were faintly visible almost to their knees, and the last men in second squad were visible to their waists.

  He swore silently. The Marines' chameleons weren't going to provide them with much concealment if they ran into an enemy.

  In some places, ash covered the ground to a depth of several centimeters; in others, the surface could be seen through a thin coating of the fiery residue. Ensign Zantith suspected those nearly clear spots must be where small clearings had been. He could have called data down from the string-of-pearls to compare the map of the valley before the fire with the positions of the thinly covered spots, but couldn't think of a possible threat related to them that would justify taking his attention from his men and their surroundings to make the check. He wondered about the squiggly lines of darker, more granular ash that snaked for meters across the valley floor. They looked like they were made by someone pouring streams of water on the burning ground.

  He did stop briefly to look at the first streamlet the platoon crossed. The water, clotted with suspended ash, was so viscous it barely flowed. He looked along the streamlet in its direction of flow and lost it to sight before he could see where it went underground. He would have liked to divert his platoon to follow the waterway, but his orders were strict, and he had a timeline to follow that didn't allow for a side trip. He wanted to know if ash buildup had blocked the flow where the water went underground. If it had, nobody traveling between the surface and the caves via those routes would be able to resurface until the ash plugs were broken.

  Each waterway the platoon crossed was the same as the first--thick and sluggish with suspended ash. No matter where he looked, he was never able to see where one went. He saw no standing pools that would indicate a blocked entry to an underground stream.

  Kilo Company's first platoon didn't encounter Skinks or anybody else in their trek across the undulating valley floor. It reached the small lake in good time.

  Like the waterways, the lake was gray with ash, but noticeably less viscous. Other than some scorching, the growth on the island appeared untouched by the fire that had raged around the small lake. It seemed the lake itself was fed by an upwelling from underground, or at least no streams flowed into it in the stretch of bank that the Marines and the scientists could see from where they stood. Neither did water flow out anyplace they could see.

  Lieutenant Brightly studied the island from the lakeshore. It sat a hundred meters away across the water. "Ensign," he said after he'd given the bank a quick scan, "I want to take a look at the other side before we go to the island."

  Zantith had intended to send a squad on a circuit anyway, to check for enemy threat; if the xenobotanist wanted to go with them, that was fine.

  "I'm sending a squad around the lake on a recon in force," Zantith replied. "You can accompany them. Just remember, until we get on the island and have it secured, we're in a tactical situation. That means when you go around the island, the squad leader is in command. If he says you can't stop someplace, you can't stop. If he says move, you move. Understand?"

  Brightly made a face. A navy lieutenant outranked a Marine sergeant, but he had to concede that Zantith was right--they were still tactical, even though the xenobotanist was certain there was no danger other than what nature provided, and he believed he was better qualified to deal with that than the Marines were. All he said, though, was, "I understand. I'll be a good boy and do what your sergeant says until you declare the island secured."

  "Thank you," Zantith said, and meant it--if Brightly had objected, he would have refused to allow him to go with the squad when it went to scout the island's far side, and he didn't know the botanist well enough to know whether he'd try to make trouble over it later on. He checked the UPUD and saw that his platoon sergeant had already set one blaster squad and the gun squad in a defensive perimeter and left the other blaster squad aside for the recon. "Sergeant Kraeno up," he said into his command circuit.

  In seconds the second squad leader joined him. Zantith shook his head; Kraeno was visible. His feet were solid gray, the color slowly fading as it climbed his legs and body until only the upper part of his helmet still had the full chameleon effect.

  "I want you to take your squad and scout around the lake," Zantith told the squad leader. "Take Lieutenant Brightly with you. The lieutenant understands you have command."

  "Aye aye, sir," Kraeno replied. He looked at the width of the small lake and judged its circumference. "How long should I take?"

  Zantith also looked at the lake. It was about four hundred meters across, and the map showed it to be almost circular. With the vegetation burned away his Marines could easily circumnavigate it in less than half an hour. But he wanted more caution than a slow amble would allow. "Give yourself an hour," he said.

  That satisfied Kraeno; he thought an hour sounded about right. "Second squad, on me," he ordered into his squad circuit, and slid a sleeve up before he raised his arm for his men to home on.

  Lieutenant Brightly was annoyed by the slow pace of second squad when they started off; after all, with all the ash clinging to their uniforms, the chameleon effect was pretty well negated, and they didn't need to move so slowly to avoid being seen. He didn't realize that the slow pace allowed them to thoroughly investigate their surroundings. But he was a navy officer, not an infantryman--he wasn't used to long walks, and the brief stop at the edge of the lake had been enough to let him notice how tired he was. It wasn't long before he was glad they were walking little faster than a crawl. Not even the brilliant greens, scarlets, pinks, ambers, and blues of the foliage on the island distracted him enough to ignore the aches in his muscles and soreness of his feet. By the time they reached the far side of the lake, what he mainly wanted to do was sit under a shady tree and rest for a while. But, other than those on the island, there weren't any trees, shady or otherwise, nearby. Brightly was so tired he barely remembered to watch the sides of the lake for streams.

  There weren't any. Curious. He was no geologist, but knew enough about geology to know that running water had to come from someplace and go somewhere. Not only running water, but water in standing bodies.

  "Can we stop here for a few minutes, Sergeant?" he asked.

  Sergeant Kraeno looked around at the eerily gray landscape on which nothing moved except occasional breeze-driven ash devils. "Will five minutes be long enough?"

  Brightly nodded, then remembered that, despite the thin coating of ash that covered his uniform, his head might not be visible, and said, "I think so, for what I want to do right now."

  "Take five," Kraeno said into the squad circuit. "First fire team, twelve to three o'clock, second fire team, three to six o'cl
ock. Third fire team, watch the island." Security taken care of, he asked, "What do you want to do, Lieutenant?"

  "I want to look for currents." He waved a hand at the lake, his hand and arm coated with enough ash to be fully visible.

  "Enjoy yourself, sir," Kraeno said.

  The xenobotanist knelt at the side of the lake and leaned forward to study its surface. The water moved in gentle ripples, as in any other undisturbed lake he'd ever looked at. The ash was settling out of it, and the upper several millimeters looked clear, giving the lake a mother-of-pearl shimmer. He tilted his head this way and that, trying to detect the water's direction of movement, but it didn't seem to favor one direction more than any other. He looked at the ground he knelt on, saw a fragile flake that hadn't been turned to fine ash by the fire, and carefully slid his fingers under it and picked it up. He stretched his hand out a centimeter above the water and tipped it to let the flake slide off his fingers. The flake broke when it hit, but two of its pieces were large enough for him to easily watch. He knelt unmoving, his eyes on the two small flakes, until Sergeant Kraeno called for the squad to mount up and resume moving.

  Except for slowly sinking as they became waterlogged, the two small flakes didn't move at all--he wasn't able to discern a current in the lake.

  "Same-same," Sergeant Kraeno reported when the squad returned to the rest of the platoon--everything looked the same all the way around the island.

  Lieutenant Brightly conferred with the other two members of the science team and told them of his experiment with the flake that failed to show a current.

  Ensign Szelt, a hydrologist, had also tested the water for a current and hadn't found one. She'd also tested water quality, and found it clear for the top six millimeters. "The only elevated salinity is in the polluted water," she concluded. "It appears that the water is clean enough to drink without purification--once you filter the ash out, that is."