by David Mack
Abramowitz felt almost disembodied by the sedative side effects of the painkillers. She blinked slowly. A weak smile trembled across her lips. “Well, hurry up, then,” she said. “No offense, Commander, but I want to go home.”
Commander Zila hunched over the regional road-and-municipality map, his pale-blue hands planted flat and wide apart on the table on either side of the large, laminated document. It had been more than three days since the UAO had fallen from the sky, and he was still no closer to finding it.
On the opposite side of the table stood Legioner Goff, Zila’s divisional second-in-command. Neither officer had enjoyed a decent night’s sleep in three days. As they cross-referenced field reports here in Zila’s meticulously organized command office, it looked like tonight wouldn’t be any different.
“Where the hell can it be?” Zila said, slapping the table with his palm. “It’s got to be somewhere in the hills.”
Goff shook his head. “Can’t be. We’ve cordoned every road and stopped every vehicle within five hundred tiliks of the impact site. We emptied every X’Mari camp we could find. It isn’t there.”
Zila pushed himself away from the table and paced in front of it. He scratched his head and thought aloud. “Maybe the X’Maris buried it,” he said.
“Yes, maybe,” Goff said. Zila could tell the legioner was less than convinced. He forced himself to consider other scenarios, no matter how implausible they might seem.
“If the X’Maris don’t have it, and we don’t have it, is it possible that there are foreign agents in play?”
“Definitely,” Goff said. “But they’d still have to move the object. Sync-Com radar indicated it was about the size of a class-six warhead. Not exactly the kind of thing you can hide in a backpack.”
“So we’ve intercepted everything on the ground, and found nothing,” Zila said. “And we know the nofly zone hasn’t been breached.” He stopped in front of the table and loomed over the regional map once again. He pressed his pale-blue index finger onto an X, drawn in grease pencil onto the map’s clear plastic cover to mark the object’s impact point. He traced the route of the Scorla Pass away from the impact point and into the hills.
Then he retraced his finger’s path across the map, back to a notation on the map that was so tiny it almost escaped notice. “Hand me a magnifying glass,” he said. Goff grabbed one off the shelf behind him and handed it to Zila, who put it to his eye and leaned down to scrutinize the map close up. “That’s a bridge,” Zila muttered. “It’s a flezzing bridge. What does it cross?” Goff opened the cabinet beneath the shelves and grabbed a topographical map of the region. He unfurled the map, which was printed on clear plastic, and laid it over the road map.
A hairline-thin blue line snaked through the Scorla Hills and passed beneath the road map’s infinitesimal bridge icon.
“It’s on the water,” Zila said. He followed the blue line of the Scorla Ria across the topographical map toward progressively lower elevations until it intersected a much thicker blue line. “By now it’d be on the Ulom River.”
“But we’re watching the river,” Goff said.
“For smugglers and terrorists,” Zila said. “Not for one small watercraft just floating by. Whatever carried the object out of the hills had to be small enough to navigate a narrow, shallow stream for more than a hundred and twenty tiliks.”
“How many safe havens are there along that stretch of the river?” Goff said.
Zila scanned the names of the towns that lined the Ulom River downstream from its intersection with the Scorla Ria. “Tengma. Raozan. Kinzhol. Lersset. They’ve all been short-listed as X’Mari guerrilla bases.”
“Assuming that the X’Maris are the ones who have the object,” Goff said.
“They have it,” Zila said. “Pull all the regiments out of the hills and secure those four towns, now.”
“Yes, sir,” Goff said. He snapped a crisp salute and held it until Zila returned the gesture. Then he turned on his heel and strode quickly out of the commander’s office.
Zila picked up a red grease pencil and carefully drew an X through each of the four towns he’d just marked for death.
Gomez tied her pack shut and slung it over her shoulder. A few meters away, Stevens and Hawkins were already packed and waiting for her to lead them onward to the crash site. The sky overhead was peppered with stars; morning was still more than seven hours away, and the crisp, cold bite of winter was in the air.
Abramowitz was swaddled in thick blankets and propped up in a sitting position against a large rock formation next to the river. Within her reach on her left side was a neatly arranged assortment of water canisters and provisions, enough to last for up to two days. On her other side was a large pile of dry kindling and an ignition device, all arranged next to a stone-ringed concavity in which a small fire crackled.
Hidden beneath her serape was her tricorder and Gomez’s medical kit, complete with another day’s supply of painkiller patches. The whole comfy setup was concealed behind a makeshift screen of camouflage netting that Hawkins had tied together from spare hemp cord and local foliage.
Gomez crouched next to Abramowitz. “You feeling any better?”
“I’m okay,” she said with a nod. “Pain’s under control, and I should be fine here—assuming you guys don’t drag your heels.”
“I like you all drugged up,” Gomez said with a smile. “Makes you talk like an officer.”
Abramowitz chuckled and groggily shook her head. “Nah, just a mean cripple. Now go, you’re wasting time.”
Gomez gently squeezed Abramowitz’s shoulder. “Okay. Hang tight, we’ll be outta here in no time.”
Gomez stood up and stepped around the camouflage screen. She walked over to Hawkins and Stevens, took out her tricorder, and checked the readout. They did likewise.
“I’m tracking the probe’s energy signature,” she said. “Bearing one-eight-six. Range, four hundred fifty-four-point-three kilometers and opening at a rate of roughly three kilometers per hour.” Both men adjusted their own tricorders.
“Range and bearing confirmed,” Hawkins said.
“Roger that,” Stevens said. “That heading takes us right past the crash site, thirty-two-point-four kilometers from here. That’s about…what? Six hours’ walk?”
“More like seven,” Gomez said. “We’ll check it out on our way south. Let’s move out.” She adjusted the shoulder straps of her pack for a bit more comfort, then started walking forward into the night as a flurry of snowflakes fell like a white blanket across the uneven path ahead of her.
Chapter
4
Trooper Maleska led his squad down a dark, smoky stretch of Kinzhol’s main street. Broad scorches marred most of the buildings along this avenue. Not one had even a single window intact, and their façades were pitted with shrapnel scars and long trails of large-caliber bullet holes. Several had been reduced to broken-concrete foundations studded with shorn-off steel beams twisted in every direction.
He tuned out the slow-rushing roar of Venekan jumpjets cruising high overhead. Moments later, a loud explosion a few blocks away sent a glowing fireball mushrooming into the sky, followed by a plume of inky black smoke that melted into the night. The blast shook a cloud of dust off the ramshackle skeleton of a building on his left. He paid it no mind.
Debris was strewn in a chaotic jumble across the street. Maleska and his soldiers moved slowly, crouched low to the ground, their short-barreled rifles held level against their shoulders. The men on the sides of the formation crab-walked sideways while watching the flanks for any sign of enemy movement. All Maleska saw were civilians: some staggering aimlessly in shock; some cowering from him and his troops; some trying to preserve any semblance of their ordinary lives in the aftermath of a barrage of high-tech, pyrotechnic horrors.
A knot of twenty-odd X’Mari civilians drifted across the intersection ahead of the platoon. They were ragged and filthy, and they moved with a random, desperate curiosity as they sorted through th
e rubble and dirt, looking for who knew what. In the middle of the four-way intersection there was a crater where a bomb had exploded. As far as Maleska could see, the roads had been shredded, as if a fiery blade had shorn off the top layers of pavement. Twisted strips of the roads’ aluminum undergirders were scattered everywhere, wedged into vehicles and corpses, or jutting out of buildings they’d impaled.
A door banged open to his right. He turned and aimed his rifle. A X’Mari man backed carefully out of the doorway, helping another man carry a sofa. Behind them emerged a woman carrying an enormous duffel bag on her back and two large cases, one in either hand. Following her was a trio of children, the youngest barely old enough to walk, all clutching one or two favorite toys as they abandoned their home.
As Maleska and his squad neared the end of their patrol route, he thought he saw a discarded bouquet of white flowers on top of the overturned, blasted-out, carbonized frame of a car. As he passed the smashed vehicle, he realized that the bouquet was actually a dead, white bird.
The soldiers moved cautiously through a hazy wall of gray, fuel-smelling smoke and turned the corner to the checkpoint at the end of their assigned sector. As they broke through the veil of smoke, Maleska saw the street was littered with broken musical instruments. Standing in the midst of the shattered items was a lone X’Mari man who stared, silent and forlorn, into the hollow, charred shell of what had once been a music shop.
Maleska looked back at his squad. Yellik, who had been bringing up the rear, signaled all-clear. Maleska beckoned his radioman forward and accepted the radio handset from him. He punched in his security code. “Sync-Com, Five-Nine Jazim. We’ve finished our patrol. Sector masara all-clear. Over.”
“Five-Nine Jazim, Sync-Com,” came the staticky reply. “All-clear confirmed. Proceed due south on Genmeck Road and secure the river port with extreme prejudice. Over.”
“Sync-Com, Five-Nine Jazim. Secure the river port, acknowledged. Five-Nine Jazim out.” Maleska looked down Genmeck Road toward the river port a half-dozen tiliks away. There seemed to be nothing left intact between here and there.
He motioned his squad forward and began marching south toward the river. A light flurry of snow begin to fall. He watched the flakes melt before they reached the smoldering, scorched ground, and wondered if any part of this country would survive the Venekan Army’s dubious mission of liberation.
Ganag let his oar drag broadside in the water to the left of the skiff, turning the sliver-shaped watercraft neatly into the broad mouth of a corroded, half-submerged sewer drain. The stench of excrement and industrial waste assaulted his nostrils. He paddled the skiff slowly into the pipe. His paddle thunked against the sides of the pipe with a low, hollow metallic echo. The sound reverberated down the length of the pipe and back again, waking Lerec and Shikorn.
Shikorn swept his long, tangled bronze hair out of his eyes. “I dreamed I’d been buried in karg,” he said. He sniffed, looked around, and frowned. “I was right.”
“We needed to take cover,” Ganag said. “The sun’ll be up any minute.” He reached up and secured the anchor line to a protruding valve handle. Lerec failed to suppress a sick cough that sounded dangerously close to a retch. “Shut him up,” Ganag said, realizing only after he’d spoken that Shikorn was already placing a clean, folded cloth over Lerec’s nose and mouth, as a filter. Moments later, the young boy’s coughing ceased as he breathed through his covered mouth.
“Where are we?” Shikorn said, his near-whisper amplified by the close quarters of the pipe. Ganag pulled his own, threadbare blanket from his seat and unfolded it.
“On the outskirts of Lersset,” he said. “Maybe five tiliks from the edge of town.”
Lerec seemed calmer, but he was shivering now. “Why can’t we go and get some food?” he said.
Ganag wrapped his blanket around himself and huddled down into the stern of the boat. “Because you’ll be seen, we’ll get caught, and we’ll be killed,” Ganag said. He curled up for warmth and closed his eyes. “Now be quiet and go back to sleep. Save your strength.”
“I can’t sleep,” Lerec said. “I’m too hungry.”
“How hungry can you be?” Shikorn said as he crawled back under his own blanket. “You ate just yesterday.”
“No, the day before,” Lerec said. “And it smells here.”
Ganag sighed. He tried not to let his frustration with the boy prevent him from getting to sleep. He’d done most of the paddling since the bridge in the Scorla Pass, and his arms felt like knotty wood. He was hungry, too, but sleep was more precious to him than food right now.
“You’ll eat tonight, after we reach the Resistance,” Ganag said. “Now go back to sleep before we drown you.” Ganag didn’t enjoy making Lerec suffer, but right now it was necessary. Hungry, he reminded himself, is better than dead.
The pre-dawn sky was dark with clouds as Stevens, Gomez, and Hawkins crawled, side by side, up a snow-covered slope toward the crest of a hill. The gravity on Teneb was a bit more than Stevens was used to, and he felt as though he were dragging a large, dead weight behind him. He also could have sworn that the snow on this planet was colder than the brutal winters back home in the Rigel colonies, though that was probably only his imagination. As they inched over the top, they saw the brightly lit cluster of activity half a kilometer below.
A kilometer-long gouge in the soil, caused by the probe’s impact, had been cordoned off with what looked to Stevens like a lot of hastily erected, prefabricated metal fencing topped with razor wire. Dozens of technicians in bright orange, full-body protective gear paced back and forth inside the trench, stopping occasionally to take samples or examine small bits of debris.
Parked on either side of the impact scar was a fleet of vehicles ranging from several kinds of large trucks to assorted types of four-person utility vehicles to armored assault craft. Scores of uniformed Venekan soldiers milled about. Several of them patrolled the site’s perimeter.
Along the outer edges of the base camp, a large, fixed-wing aircraft with rotatable turbine engines split the air with a high-pitched roar as it made a slow, vertical landing. As its landing gear touched down onto the cross-marked landing area, its side hatches slid open, and another twenty-four Venekan soldiers bounded out and jogged in formation toward the camp’s central, tentlike command pavilion.
Stevens looked up as another pair of the same type of aircraft shrieked overhead. Gomez leaned toward Hawkins. “How many, do you figure?”
Hawkins narrowed his eyes as he studied the Venekan troops. “About two hundred on the ground,” he said. “Based on the number of landing platforms, I’d say there are three more of those aircraft in the area, counting the two that just flew over.”
Stevens checked his tricorder readout. “The probe’s stopped moving, four hundred eighty-two-point-seven kilometers from here, on bearing one-eight-four-point-two.” He looked down at the Venekan troops. “Think their buddies have it?” he said.
Gomez shook her head. “No, look at these guys,” she said. “If they had it, it’d be halfway around the world by now.”
Hawkins nodded in agreement. “Definitely,” he said. “They’d want it as far from here as possible. Same would go for any foreign powers trying to scoop it up. The fact that it’s as close as it is tells me the X’Maris have it.”
“Only one way to be sure,” Gomez said. “Let’s keep moving.”
Stevens followed Gomez as she turned to shimmy back down the hill. He stopped as he saw the barrel of a rifle pointed at his face from less than three meters away. “Halt!” an angry male voice said. “Hands in the air!”
Stevens waited until Gomez raised her hands over her head, then he did the same, followed by Hawkins.
Three Venekan soldiers, dressed in gray-and-white camouflage, kept their rifles aimed at Gomez, Stevens, and Hawkins while three more Venekan sentries, in the same winter gear, circled behind the trio.
Stevens’s pack was torn from his back and flung onto the ground,
its contents strewn across the snow. Beside him, Gomez’s and Hawkins’s packs were given the same treatment. He looked down the snowy hill and followed the soldiers’ footprints.
All six soldiers had been concealed beneath the snow and soil, buried into the hillside itself. They must have been in position even before it snowed, Stevens realized. We crawled right past them on the way up.
He heard Hawkins fall to the ground, followed by Gomez. He tried to brace himself, but the soldier’s boot slammed into the back of his knee and his leg buckled beneath him. He was pushed face-first into the snow-covered dirt and winced as the Venekan’s boot pressed sharply on his neck. Another soldier searched through his pockets. They found his tricorder and pulled it out to examine it.
“Let me see those,” the soldier in charge said.
A moment later, Stevens heard the whisper-soft poof of his tricorder self-destructing at the molecular level, right in the Venekan’s hand. Two more poofs were all that announced the loss of Hawkins’s and Gomez’s tricorders.
The soldier in charge sounded very unhappy about having just inexplicably lost three very important pieces of evidence. “First squad, take ’em down to camp,” he ordered. “Second squad, police up the rest of their gear and log it in with the quartermaster. I’ll notify Sync-Com.”
Stevens felt the boot lift from his neck. He was yanked back to his feet. The flurries of snow that had followed them south from the beam-in point grew heavier as he, Gomez, and Hawkins were pushed forward and down the far slope of the hill toward the floodlit base camp below.
Chapter
5
“Are you part of the X’Mari Resistance?” the Venekan military interrogator said. Stevens sat still and said nothing. After he, Gomez, and Hawkins had been escorted down to the camp next to the impact scar, he had immediately been separated from the others and brought to this tent for questioning.
The space inside the gray canvas tent was nothing if not Spartan. It stank of stale sweat. A naked tungsten-filament lightbulb dangled over his head, hanging from a frayed black electrical cord. It cast a weak orange glow in a tight circle around the dull-gray metal chair to which he was handcuffed in a sitting position. Other than that, the tent was empty.