Vertical furrows ran down the sides of the gully walls in places, and he initially found hope in the idea that they might represent the runoff he expected to see in the mountains. The sky overhead showed no signs of clouds, however, and the longer they walked the more Mortas began to doubt his earlier idea. The width of the chasm’s floor varied, with the walls sometimes pinching in so that the walkers had to press their hands against the sides to keep from tripping.
Cranther stopped them from time to time, usually near a spot where an outcrop allowed him a foothold to check over the rim. At first Mortas would move up from his place at the rear of the group to have a look too, but Cranther had finally admonished him that he was simply taking a bearing. Returning to the end of the tiny column, Mortas soon found himself fighting a malaise that threatened to rob him of any awareness at all. The sameness of the tight surroundings, the dull plodding of their movement, and the soundless, windless nature of the ravines might have caused him to lose his concentration entirely if he hadn’t been so hungry.
And he was hungry. The gentle swigs from the rapidly emptying water hoses did nothing to ease the pangs, and Mortas’s insides rumbled in rebellion at not being fed. He’d played tough, demanding sports all his young life and was no stranger to fatigue, but this was a level of debilitation with which he was completely unfamiliar. It seemed to sap his energy and consume his attention all at the same time, dulling his mind but heightening his awareness that he hadn’t eaten since before being loaded into his transit tube. Mortas tried not to speculate on how long that might have been.
To take his mind off the ugly sensations, he tried to focus on their current predicament. He had to admire Cranther’s choice of a route; anyone watching the plain would miss them entirely as they moved along below its surface. Mortas now remembered tales of the battles at the very start of the Sim War, where positional defenses interconnected with trenches very much like these gullies had been overwhelmed by the wave attacks of massed Sims even though they’d been cut down in the thousands. Looking about him, Mortas decided that he would have been able to move his entire platoon this way, and perhaps the entire company of which it was a part, had he only made it to his destination.
Thoughts of the platoon he would never see prodded his mind toward what he’d been taught in training, and Mortas wondered if he should be trying to exert more control over the situation. In a platoon-level movement he would have been close to the front of the formation while his platoon sergeant managed the other half. That would have put Mortas in a position to direct events if the point of the spearhead encountered the enemy, and leave his platoon sergeant free to direct the remainder of the platoon to flank the enemy or pin them down with fire.
What was the phrase they’d used for that? Ah, yes. Develop the situation. A platoon leader was supposed to be just far enough up front to see what was happening and direct the response, but not so far forward that he’d get nailed in the first volley from a hidden enemy. Develop the situation. Mortas smiled at the utter absurdity of the phrase in his current circumstances. Here he was, walking in the rear of the group for the simple reason that he was concerned that Gorman or Trent might not be able to keep up. Cranther was leading them, and for the life of him Mortas couldn’t say there was any real point to this movement at all. Except that it was movement. And that movement was better than standing still waiting to die.
Cranther halted them again, slithering up the gully to peek over the edge as he’d done so many times before. Gorman leaned back against the wall, adjusting the plastic box slung with his water and looking tired. For her part, Trent planted the metal pipe on the ground in front of her like a walking stick and stood motionless, scarcely breathing.
Guess she wasn’t lying about the treadmill.
Cranther slid back down from his perch and walked back toward Mortas. He stepped up on a large stone so that he was almost at ear level, and whispered. “We’re veering off course, so we’re going to have to crawl out and get into a different ravine. I think we should take a break here for a few. Okay?”
Mortas’s stomach growled with authority before he could speak, so he nodded instead. The scout’s hand left his shoulder and Cranther stepped off the rock to tell the others. Gorman gratefully slid to the gully floor, and when Cranther sat across from him the two officers joined them. They were close enough to converse quietly, and Mortas decided to ask a question that had formed in his mind as they’d walked.
“Corporal, I couldn’t help noticing how much your speech has improved since the first time we spoke.”
Mortas had hoped to get some kind of acknowledgment that he hadn’t let his mind go completely to sleep, but it wasn’t forthcoming. Cranther gave him a bland look before replying. “Oh, I can speak well when I need to, Lieutenant. Just one of the many little improvements they made on us in the Spartacans. You see, Command doesn’t trust anybody below a certain rank to accurately transmit what some smelly scout said about a hill or a spaceport or an enemy column. They like to hear it straight from the guy who was actually there. That’s why you’re supposed to pass us along to the next higher echelon as soon as possible.
“So while they were beating us into reconnaissance troops in Scout Basic, they were also pounding the right grammar and pronunciation into us so the bigs could hear our reports without an interpreter.”
Cranther let that sink in before continuing. “Didn’t know Command had such a low opinion of you, did you, sir?”
A flashback, brief as the flare on a match. His father warning him that there was no way Senator Olech Mortas’s son could go to combat without every major commander knowing who he was—for both good and ill. That the Twelfth Corps, The Senate’s Own, was the best place for him despite his objections because all of its senior officers owed their appointments to the Emergency Senate. Darkly suggesting that there were people out in the war zone who held deep, personal grudges against him and his supporters.
Be careful out there, son. Some of those people might hurt you to get revenge on me.
“I’m new. Why would they have an opinion of me at all?”
They’d moved into a different ravine after that, Cranther crawling across the open and the others following once he signaled that it was safe. The scout had hung his water tubes around his neck instead of across his chest, and they’d all done the same thing once they’d seen him inch across the open with the black hoses resting on his back. As last man Mortas had forced himself to move slowly, not from fear of being spotted but because he wanted to get a better feel for the terrain. It had been much too easy to become focused on the constricting walls of the passage they were following, and Mortas was surprised by the amount of vegetation he now found.
It wasn’t like moving across a field of grass, but the dirt was home to acres of small, spindly bushes that were the same color as the rest of the plain. That was why he hadn’t been able to make them out from up on the ridge. The brush was connected by surface roots that split as Mortas slid over them, and he took a moment to feel the broken ends for moisture. If it was there, he couldn’t detect it.
At the edge of the next gully Mortas lifted his head to gauge how far they’d come, and was encouraged by the distance they’d put between them and the ridge. The sun was already past its zenith, and when he turned his head to look at the mountains he was dismayed to see that they appeared no closer than before they’d set out. Mortas lifted his head still further, trying to see more, but a hand then reached up from the chasm and lightly swatted his arm. Cranther’s face appeared right next to his.
“Fallin’ asleep there, Lieutenant?”
His mouth formed to give a response, but the short man was already gone. Annoyed by the comment and not sure why, Mortas swung his leg into the ravine and found the ledge where Cranther had been waiting. Rearranging his water tubes so that they hung across him again, he noticed that the orange dirt of the plain had ground into the
fibers of his uniform. Its gray coloring had stood out against the gully walls all morning, but now his front was almost perfectly camouflaged.
Cranther had put Gorman in the lead by then and signaled him to move out, but Mortas gave out an insistent hiss that stopped the other three. He moved up to them and pointed at the now-orange fronts of Trent and Gorman’s flight suits. Removing his water tubes, Mortas dropped to a sitting position and then lay back before squirming away from them, grinding new dirt into the unstained fibers. Trent and Gorman understood immediately and began imitating him while Cranther watched.
“Who are you camouflaging us from, Lieutenant? I told you; there’s nobody here.”
Mortas draped the tubes across him again before standing. “You don’t know that for sure. Besides, you’re halfway there already. Your front’s camouflaged, so why not do the rest?”
“Maybe because I don’t want to have to walk with sand in the crack of my ass?”
Mortas took a step forward, towering over the other man. If it bothered him, Cranther didn’t show it. “Well don’t do it then. But from here on out, consider everything I suggest to be an order. As in, no matter who’s walking point, the last man in this column should be either you or me. We’re also going to start designating rally points as we go, so if we get separated we know where to link up. Now you take the rear, and I’ll take the lead.”
Mortas stepped out smartly after that, making sure he got around the next bend with enough time to shake the sand out of his trousers. It trickled down the sides of his legs, and much of it went into his boots.
They were only halfway to the mountain when the sun went down. Cranther was insistent that they push on through the night, but Mortas had been watching Gorman and Trent carefully and overruled him. Gorman was clearly limping, and Trent seemed to have withdrawn inside herself. Cranther’s hostility had shut her up early on, but Mortas could have sworn he’d watched the psychoanalyst actually shrink in size. A tense, worried expression was now permanently stamped on her face, and she kept looking skyward in the tunnel-like canyons as if hoping to see a rescue ship hovering overhead.
“Let me see your feet.” Mortas stood over Gorman, who had slid down the canyon wall to a sitting position when they’d halted. Cranther was on the surface looking for a hole large enough for them to spend the night in, and Trent was staring at the sky.
“I’m all right, sir.” Gorman whispered, his voice dry. They were down to one tube of water apiece, and hadn’t consumed any for several hours.
“I’ll tell you if you’re all right. Take ’em off.”
The mapmaker bent one leg over the other and pulled off the smooth-soled shipboard boot. His sock almost went with it, a sodden rag that had obviously slid down and bunched up around his heel. Mortas recoiled slightly at the sight of the raw flesh, surprised that the man’s foot could be that blistered after only a day’s march.
“Shit, Gorman. Didn’t you feel that happening?”
“With every step, sir.” The voice was peaceful and accepting, and Mortas wondered if the objector had viewed his suffering as some sort of holy purification.
Mortas pulled the damp sock all the way off, seeing wrinkled white flesh and more blisters on Gorman’s toes. His hands folded the sock and then wrung it out, a reflex action from the hard training he’d received as an infantry officer. Rusty blotches smudged the fabric, reminding Mortas that they had no medical supplies. In training he’d learned to cut and place bandages around blisters so that the aggravated flesh could heal without further friction, but here he had nothing.
Mortas handed the sock back. “When we’re in the hole where we’re going to spend the night, take your boots and your socks off. Let some air get at your feet, and let the socks and the insides of your boots dry.”
“Wrong.” Cranther slid over the edge of the ravine. “Only one boot off at a time, never two. And be ready to put that one on in a hurry. If we have to run suddenly, you’ll end up barefoot.”
The scout picked up Gorman’s boot and shook his head. “Shipboard piece of shit. Doesn’t breathe, doesn’t lace up; no matter how many times he pulls up his socks they’re gonna slide down.” A finger pointed at the bloodstained garment. “Better off throwing those away.”
Mortas felt his anger rising. “You find us a spot?”
“Yes. About fifty yards that way. It’s a hole big enough for the four of us, nobody’s gonna find it who isn’t actually looking for us.”
“You crawled fifty yards?”
“No. There’s more brush here than where we started. If you move in a crouch you should be all right.”
“More brush? You think that means we’re close to water?”
“Gotta be. But we won’t find it sitting in a hole.”
“I already told you we’re stopping for the night.”
“We should be moving at night. Less chance of being seen, sweat less.”
“Yeah, well, we’ve been going all day.” Mortas reconsidered, suspecting the scout was right but concerned about the other two. “We’ll lay up until the stars are out and then maybe move on.”
“I’m okay, Lieutenant.” Gorman stood up, hiding the pain.
“And don’t worry about me.” Trent had joined the group while they’d been talking.
“How are your feet?”
“They’re fine. I told you: I can run for miles.”
“Let me see.”
“Shouldn’t we be getting to this super-nice hole I’ve been hearing about?”
“It’ll be too dark to see then. Let me see your feet.”
Irritated, Trent jammed the pipe section against the wall and dropped to the ground. She yanked off the same kind of boot Gorman was wearing, but there was no sock underneath. The foot was suddenly thrust in Mortas’s face, and even in the failing light he could see it was unblemished. It didn’t even smell.
He took hold of her ankle before Trent could pull away, gently pressing a thumb against the flesh. It was soft and dry.
“That’s incredible. You’ve got some magic feet. No calluses, no blisters. They’re not even sweating.”
“It’s why I don’t wear socks.”
He was just about to hand her boot back when Cranther’s voice sounded in a rasp from the surface. “When you’re done with the foot massage, can we get going?”
Without the clouds from the previous evening, the stars came out almost immediately after nightfall. Cranther had timed the day’s length at twenty hours and reset the timer to measure the hours of darkness. The hole he’d found for them was just deep enough for Mortas to see out of if he stood up, and the scrub around it provided even more concealment. It wasn’t lush, but it was taller than anything they’d yet seen and actually had some kind of trunk area.
Water’s got to be around here somewhere.
His stomach had quieted down as they walked, like a sullen child sent to bed without supper, but now it started protesting again. Coupled with his thirst, it was a constant reminder of their situation and he was truly beginning to resent it. His feet were sore, the backs of his knees were strained, and Mortas was beginning to understand something his training hadn’t taught him: It’s easy to rise above one or two minor inconveniences or even injuries, but pile a few of them on top of one another and the obstacle can become very high indeed.
He was suddenly feeling very tired, and decided they would spend the rest of the night right where they were. “Assuming ten hours of darkness, that’s two and a half hours of guard apiece.”
“So we’re staying here after all?” Cranther spoke from a sitting position, his back against the dirt.
“Yeah.” Mortas let the fatigue enter his voice. “I don’t know about anybody else, but I could use the break.”
“The Sims don’t take many breaks on a march. Did you know that?” For once the scout’s words weren’t hostile
. “One time I was hunkered down in the brush, a place a lot like this, when a Sim column came trotting by. Close enough to smell, hundreds of ’em, all combat loaded. Not a sound other than their feet, none of that chirping that passes for words with them. Four abreast, really moving out, going somewhere in a hurry.
“I stopped counting at two hundred and just put my face in the dirt. Didn’t even try to send a report, too scared they’d hear me. I called it in after they were gone, got chewed out like you wouldn’t believe, but I did have a direction for them.
“An aerobot found the column hours later, so far away that they must have been moving the entire time. No breaks at all. Hustling along that whole distance, under those loads, knowing that if they got spotted we’d drop everything we had right on ’em. Which is what happened. Heard later the entire column was annihilated. That they were rushing up to reinforce an outfit that was under heavy attack. Only reason they tried to pull a stunt like that in daylight.”
The stars allowed Mortas to see the scout’s head shake. “They’re tougher than we are, you know. Command laughs at them for being so far behind us technology-wise, but from what I’ve seen they don’t need it. They understand how important it is to be able to do without. Even the stuff they have, they train for the times when they don’t have it. They practice hard on things like bayonet fighting, for the times when they run out of ammo. They have these amazing signals that they all understand, hand signals, smoke signals, lights, heck, even music. They can trot for hours under a full combat load. No breaks at all. And look what happens to us when we don’t have all our toys. We crap out and hide in a hole.”
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