Ayliss walked through the silent complex later that night. Kletterman and his people didn’t get many visitors, so they’d thrown a dinner in her honor. It had been a raucous affair, largely because the isolated station had been generously supplied with alcohol and its occupants were not shy about imbibing. Python had apparently formed a romantic relationship with more than one member of the female staff, and Ayliss had last seen him reeling down the dormitory corridor with his arms around two of the prettier scientists.
Her handheld could neither send nor receive, and so she’d decided to wait until everyone was asleep before inspecting the devices in the main control room. Python was convinced that the site had no means of communicating with anyone, but she wanted to check anyway.
Ayliss had to be circumspect about this, as she soon learned that not everyone had called it a night. She had already passed one laboratory where a researcher was poring over data on a screen. The display glowed in the reduced lighting, and for a giddy moment she imagined the pale scientist was trying to get a tan. The unfamiliar hallway was dim, but the complex was not terribly large and Ayliss soon found herself in the main room where she’d been briefed by Kletterman earlier.
Most of the consoles were dormant, but the large overhead display cast a gray wave of dull light across the workspace. Walking over, Ayliss recognized the projection as the Sim village on the distant island. The surveillance robots had switched to infrared with the setting of the sun, and she could make out the whitened outlines of slumbering Sims through the thatch of some of the roofs.
“It’s early to bed and early to rise out there.” The voice made her jump, but she recognized that it belonged to Python. Her eyes penetrated the gloom just outside the screen’s luminescence, and she saw him leaning back in a padded chair. Python’s hair hung loose over his shoulders, and he wore a dark robe that was open to expose large muscles and curly hair. When he sat up, the faint light caught the silver scar tissue of an old wound high on the left side of his chest. The whitened line reminded her of the Sim images overhead.
“Why do you still have that scar?”
“Oh, I could have had it erased. And believe me the Force pushes that pretty hard—don’t want to upset the civilians when we send the brave troops home.” He reached into the shadows, and his hand came back with a tumbler of dark liquid. “But this scar here, and another I can show you when we’re better acquainted, they remind me of the buddies I lost.”
As her vision improved, Ayliss began to suspect that Python wore nothing under the robe. She tried not to smile at the notion of getting “acquainted” with a double-dealing criminal who, to her knowledge, had just bedded two other women.
“That must have been a very difficult experience.” Ayliss didn’t give him a chance to reply. “Is there a place we can talk? Safely?”
“Sure. The landing platform. It’ll be nice out there, too.”
They went up the stairs, and Python led her through a small hatch near the blast doors. The night was clear and warm, and the light from the stars cast the landing space in a blue glow. They walked out to the far edge, where a waist-high railing was the only thing separating them from a long drop to the forest floor below.
“You should have seen this place when they were setting it up. Shuttles constantly coming and going from right where we’re standing. Takes a lot to put something like this into action, even a small site like this one.”
“Why isn’t there a security force?”
“No need. The prisoners can’t leave the island, and even if they did, there are some huge catlike things around that would get them long before they got here—assuming they found the place at all. Besides, I think your father wanted to keep the number of people involved to a minimum.”
He let that hang in the warm air, and Ayliss walked closer to the edge to regard the fluffy green outlines of tall trees not far away. The forest was thick, and the birds that had been singing in it that afternoon had all gone silent. She rested her hands on the thick bar that topped the railing, enjoying the sensation of vertigo.
“Just imagine what’s going on out there.” Python came up next to her, bending to reach the low barrier. “The forest primeval. The true state of nature, unspoiled by man. All sorts of things creeping and climbing and jumping and slithering around. Foraging. Feeding. Fighting.”
His hand brushed her arm. “Fucking.”
“Sorry, Python. Spoken for.” Ayliss stopped herself from taking a step away, the nearness of the wild telling her it would be mistaken for retreat—and followed up.
“He’d never know.”
“You’d be a dead man if he ever found out. And he’s probably trying to find me already.” Ayliss let herself take one step back, gaining a little space, reminding herself that she still needed Python. And that she owed him a lot. “When can we get out of here?”
“Not for a couple of days. When I visit, it’s for at least three days, usually longer.”
“How many times have you visited with Olech Mortas’s daughter?”
“Even more reason to stick to routine. The Doc likes me, but he knows better than to completely trust a guy who does the things I do. Lucky for us he’s so grateful to your father that he hasn’t stopped to wonder why you turned up with no prior warning. Let’s not make him suspicious.”
“So what if we do? You said there’s no communication from here. Who’s he going to call?”
“There’s a Force cruiser that patrols this sector and prevents unauthorized landings. The Doc’s got a kind of panic button direct to that ship, a burst transmission he can send if he needs help.”
“He’d call up a cruiser if he got a little antsy about my visit?”
“The cruiser would send an armed party down here to see what was going on. If we left suddenly, and the Doc hit the panic button, in no time at all your father would know you’d been here. And before you could spring the news to anybody, this whole place would evaporate.”
“You seem to know a lot about how my father does things.”
“Not really. I just remember what happened to those Sims I was marooned with—especially the wounded ones—when Command found out we’d made ourselves a separate peace. I’m pretty sure that’s another reason they’ve kept the staff here as small as possible: less to clean up if necessary.”
“So two more days?”
“That’s my recommendation. Nice and easy, cool and calm. And then we whistle for the pod, get out of here, head back to Broda, and let Harlec spread the word.”
“No. Not Harlec. Me. It has to come from me.”
Somewhere out and below, a stricken creature uttered a frantic cry that was suddenly cut short.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“—as you can see, this is going to be a fluid situation.” The Orphan Brigade’s commander stood at the front of a briefing room packed with officers and NCOs, many of them from First Battalion’s B Company. They were on the flagship of a fleet headed to Fractus, and B Company had come aboard only a few hours earlier. There was an electric sense of haste to the whole thing, and accommodations reflected the rush to reach the fighting. The rest of the brigade was scattered across several other transports, and Watt’s image was being projected to them.
“The enemy’s use of the new ‘mud munition’ has ruptured a defensive zone that has been in place for almost a year. Our fellow soldiers on Fractus have taken heavy casualties, and been forced to give a great deal of ground.”
Behind the stocky colonel, an enormous satellite photograph was projected on the wall. It was covered in military graphics, but in such a fashion that the terrain was still distinguishable. Having been trained in this kind of symbology, Mortas could tell that a front line stretching for many miles had been broken by the revolutionary munition. Fired directly behind the zone defended by a human armored division, it had robbed the tanks and other fighting ve
hicles of their ability to maneuver. A massive Sim armored force had pinned them against the newly impassable acreage, and crushed them.
In his mind, Mortas saw the mired mastodons on Roanum again, the tanks with their guns pointed at crazy angles and the personnel carriers tilted like ships on a heavy sea, all trapped in the solid ground that had temporarily become mud. In the darkness of the room’s tiered seating, Mortas shivered.
“There is reason for optimism, however. On Fractus, the enemy has employed this new weapon with dramatically mixed results. The first time we saw this munition on Roanum, it transformed solid ground into mud that bogged down an entire assault battalion, and then the ground hardened again. Clearly this ordnance is designed for temporary area denial, but on Fractus this has not turned out to be the case. Far from it.”
The photograph display enlarged rapidly, as if the assembled soldiers were dropping out of the sky toward the ground. The big picture of the entire elongated front shrunk down to just the region where the enemy had broken through. Much of the battle area appeared to be open ground, rough terrain largely without cover, and its predominant shade was gray. Now that the picture’s resolution had increased, a blob of dark brown appeared.
“The enemy was unable to exploit the hole it created in our lines because the ground hasn’t firmed up as expected. In fact, aerial reconnaissance has not only confirmed that the ground remains impassable, but also that the morass is spreading. Two entire enemy armored divisions, presumably meant to cross this area once it hardened, have been held up by this enormous mud field of their own creation.”
Colonel Watt cracked a brief smile. “Yes, even the Sims can get too clever for their own good.”
Shaking off the memories of Roanum, Mortas exchanged a glance with Berland. The B Company soldiers could be easily identified in the audience by the tiger-striped fatigues from their aborted jungle mission while the rest of the assemblage, various higher-echelon attachments whose jobs Mortas did not yet know, wore a mottled gray camouflage.
“This giant obstacle has given our forces an opportunity.” Watt turned to face the photograph. “To the north of the mud field, there is the beginning of a long mountain chain that was the anchor of our left flank in this defensive zone. The fighting is shifting far south of that high ground, now that the Sim advance is blocked by the mud field. The enemy’s attention is focused on getting around the impassable territory they created, which may give our forces the chance for a major counterattack in the north.
“Beginning just a few miles inside those northern mountains, there are three passes that were so heavily mined by both sides in earlier fighting that they might just as well not even exist.” Humans and Sims had been fighting over Fractus for years, and at one point it had been considered sufficiently secured for the Force to give the planet an actual name. The Sims had landed a new army soon after that, and the conflict had been stalemated for many months.
More military symbols popped up on the photo, thin lines that indicated movement lanes that twisted through the rugged terrain from west to east. For the first time, Mortas was able to make out the passes about which Watt was speaking. The southernmost lane was the shortest because it ran through a thumb-shaped ridge pointing south that tapered down to the plain. The two passes farther north twisted this way and that as the elevation increased, and as far as Mortas could tell, the indicated corridors were widely separated.
“As you all know, an obstacle that is not observed at all times and covered by fire is no obstacle at all. Anybody can come up and remove it or chop their way through it. Even now our engineers are preparing to clear these three gaps, and the Orphan Brigade is going to protect them while they work. Once cleared, these three passes will be used as counterattack lanes by our armored and mechanized forces to swing wide around the enemy’s northern flank while his strongest effort is many miles to the south.
“Three passes, three battalions. We will secure the high ground on both sides of each of these lanes, preventing enemy scouts from discovering what our engineers are doing. It is vital that we not attract attention, so our use of air assets will be limited at first. Rest assured those assets will come into play the moment we need them, but if we do this right, the enemy won’t know what we’re up to until it’s too late.
“When the passes are open, we will have set the stage for one of the greatest counterattacks in the history of the entire war.”
When the briefing ended, most of the assembled officers and NCOs immediately began circulating about the room, coordinating the tasks that the mission required. Mortas almost rose as well, but Berland remained seated and so he followed his platoon sergeant’s example. The older man was staring at the enlarged photo of their intended area of operations, and for the first time Mortas believed his platoon sergeant was worried about something.
“What is it?” The room was full of voices and the sound of movement, so he was able to speak normally.
“This isn’t making any sense, sir.” Berland caught himself and forced a smile. “Not that it ever does. Sitting here, I’d guess those lanes are between fifteen and twenty miles long, jam-packed with old mines and booby traps. It will take the sappers forever to clear them if they’re trying to do it by stealth.
“All it’s gonna take is one Sim aerobot to fly over and notice all this activity, and that’ll be the end of this whole counterattack. They’ll rain artillery and rockets down on us, and they may even be able to reseed those minefields the same way.” Area denial was a mainstay of the war for the Habs, largely to preserve the planets for later colonization, and so both sides had evolved sophisticated methods for shooting minefields into place from great distances. “They’ll plug those lanes back up, and while they’re doing it they’ll be shelling the shit out of us up on the high ground.”
Memories of a different piece of elevation on Roanum, Sim munitions falling out the back end of high-altitude rockets, madly fleeing the explosions and the lethal rocks they sent hurtling through the air. Mortas stared at the photo, surprised to have not seen the plan’s many flaws, while Berland continued.
“Colonel Watt’s no dummy, and I can’t be the only one who sees this. There’s got to be a reason why they think this will work.”
“He did say those passes haven’t figured in either side’s calculations for a long time. And the Sims are doing a mad scramble to shift their forces south of that mud field . . . You think maybe that has something to do with it? The mud still spreading like it is?”
“Maybe.” Berland rubbed his thumb across the screen of his handheld, switching the aerial view. The overall situation had been loaded onto the handhelds when the briefing began, and he took a long look at the vast acreage of muck. It was surrounded by a set of military graphics, unit designations and boundary lines that shifted frequently. “Even if they think this swamp is going to get big enough to keep the Sims outta range, that wouldn’t keep their air assets from finding us. If they come looking.”
“Lieutenant Mortas!” He recognized Captain Noonan’s voice, and peered through the throng of uniforms to see the company commander standing in front of the first row of seats. Lieutenant Kitrick was with him, but they were surrounded by faces Mortas didn’t recognize in smudged gray fatigues.
“I’ll ask the CO if anybody’s mentioned this,” he said to Berland, not sure the brooding NCO had heard his words. Mortas slid along the row of now-empty seats and went down the aisle quickly. A clutch of logistical officers held him up for a moment, but when he slid around them he came up short.
Emile Dassa, wearing the pin-on rank of a captain, stood in front of him with a look of blank appraisal. It had been five years since he’d seen the other man, who’d only been fifteen at the time. Dassa’s dark hair was cut short Orphan-style, and he’d filled out a little, but he was still a lean individual just a little shorter than Mortas. An inch-long whitened scar ran parallel to his right e
yebrow, and his dark eyes were unreadable.
“Hello, Jan. Last time I saw you, you were sitting on my chest, hitting me.”
Dassa was a captain now, Mortas’s superior though two years younger. Insubordination was a serious crime in the Force, but Mortas decided to take up the gauntlet anyway.
“The last time I saw you, you were bouncing down a flight of stairs, out cold. Sir.”
The face relaxed, and Dassa extended his hand. “Broke my fuckin’ arm, asshole. I’d make you buy me a beer or something, but it turns out that was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Mortas shook the hand, searching for a response and finally choosing the truth. “Well I still shouldn’t have done that, not after you were unconscious. Sir.”
“It’s Emile. I was a lieutenant until yesterday.”
Mortas saw Noonan’s impatient face from only yards away, but he needed to know. “So how was getting your arm broken a good thing?”
“The school officials figured out who my father was, so they shipped me off to the zone. I was in this crazy-ass colonial outfit for a while—you think Force discipline is rough, the colonials are completely out of control—but I survived. Got into a Force unit and met up with some guys who fought for my dad. I learned more about him from those vets than I’d ever found out from my mother.”
“Mortas! Get over here!” Noonan bellowed. Dassa gave the agitated company commander an amused look, but didn’t get out of the way.
“I heard you did good on Roanum. Let’s talk when we get the chance.”
“You’re over in Second Battalion?” Mortas was already sliding past him, not fully comprehending the brief discussion or why Dassa was on board the flagship.
“Until yesterday. I’m your new battalion supply guy, replacing Captain Follett.” Dassa grinned fiendishly. “I haven’t got the slightest idea how to do this, so don’t eat your last ration.”
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