“I didn’t lie. It is the easiest passage. Watch how I tie myself in, then you do the same.”
Twenty-five
Alone at a polished wood table in the cutter’s officer’s mess, Polian sat hunched over a mug of tepid local tea and ground his teeth. He tugged back the sleeve of his Tressen jacket and eyed his ’puter.
If he were back home, with a lousy brigade recon platoon, he could have simply put up a drone and tracked this boat forever. Polian sighed. It was a rule of covert operations that the equipment they let you bring was always one item short of the equipment you needed.
So, with a permanent change in the human balance of power at stake, here he sat. Reduced to awaiting progress reports about a rowboat race, relayed in the clear on glorified portable telephones with awful reception. He should have taken command of the skimmer himself. But this expedition into which he had thrown his troops was already Polian’s first real foray from staff officer to commander. The experience would grow Polian as a commander, just as it would grow Sandr, and Polian had seen too many grandstanding commanders who led from the front unnecessarily.
A Tressen seaman rapped on the mess hatchway’s steel surround as he turtled his head in through the opening. “Sir? Your man on deck says a call is coming in on your wireless.”
The sailor jumped aside, wide-eyed, as Polian sprinted past him to the passage ladder.
Polian took the ladder two steps at a time, barked a shin as he emerged from below decks into twilight, and limped, swearing under his breath, to Frei, the budding line lieutenant, whom Polian had assigned to monitor the handtalk.
Polian snatched the handtalk from Frei, and a voice, not Sandr’s, crackled in Polian’s ear. “—at first light. Or we can give it up.”
Polian panted. “Rover, this is Base. What’s your situation?”
“Base, we’ve taken a casualty.”
Polian closed his eyes and gripped the handtalk. Polian recognized the voice now. Mazzen, the brevet corporal. That meant the casualty—
“Sir, the lieutenant’s dead.”
Polian stepped back, off balance, though the ship wasn’t rolling. His shoulders slumped. He should have gone himself. “How?”
“The passage we took. It wasn’t the one the Iridian boat took, sir.”
Polian wrinkled his forehead in the fading light. “Then how—?”
“They spoofed us, sir. Tied some big, half-live fish to a barrel and let the current carry it. The sensors aren’t close-calibrated, so we got mass and residual motion and organic indicators from it. Took a while to catch up with it and recognize the decoy.”
“But Sandr?”
“Sir, the decoy suckered us into a gorge that led to a waterfall. Dropped straight down two hundred feet to solid rock. The passage was too narrow for us to turn the skink around. We barely stopped in time. Then we had to reverse out with everybody fending off the walls with their weapon stocks. We lost a man overboard.” There was a pause. “Me. I was a goner. Except Lieutenant Sandr dove in after me and got a line on me. But nobody had a line on him.”
Another pause.
“He didn’t hesitate a heartbeat, sir. If he had, I wouldn’t be here.”
Polian leaned against the deck gun and wiped his eyes. “I understand.” Polian stared across the calm sea at the last red glow of daylight above the cliffs. Somewhere beyond those cliffs was Mazzen and the skimmer, the Iridian boat, and what remained of Sandr. Sandr, who had died because he, Polian, who had no experience of command at all, had some addled aversion to leading from the front. And he, Polian, had filled the kid with stupid notions of responsibility and decisiveness, as if he himself understood them.
“Sir, he hit the rocks headfirst. Armor or not… We haven’t been able to reduce the remains, sir. Honestly, we’d probably lose somebody else trying. I’m sorry, sir. I know you and the elltee…”
Polian straightened and drew a breath. “So, where are you now?”
“Back in the intersection. Now we’re calibrated. And we’ve got reliable residuals to track. With snoopers we can make better time than the rebels can. The Tressen guide says we can still overtake them within an hour, now that we’re both navigating in darkness.”
Polian rubbed his forehead with numb fingers. “Yes. Of course.”
Alongside Polian, Lieutenant Frei cleared his throat. “Sir? I overheard. If Mazzen waits, there’s time for the Tressens to ferry me out to the skink in their launch. I could take Sandr’s place and direct the pursuit.”
Polian blinked as he felt swelling around his eyes. Then he clapped the boy on the shoulder. “I appreciate that, Frei.” Polian shook his head. “But it’s my place to go.”
Frei opened his mouth, then closed it.
Polian thumbed the handtalk. “Mazzen? Hold your position.”
“Hold? Sir, I—yes, sir.”
“I’m on my way to join you.”
“Oh. But if I may, sir? A question?”
“Shoot.”
“How did fishermen a hundred years behind the times learn to spoof a sensor array?”
Polian felt blood rise in his cheeks. The guilt for Sandr’s death didn’t rest entirely on Polian. “They didn’t, Mazzen. But once I get out there, we will find the bastard who did this. And he’ll pay for it.”
Twenty-six
I clung to the ropes around my waist that lashed me to the quaking boat and stared at the girl. Alia sat across from me, roped the same way and staring back. We teetered on the lip of the first, twenty-foot stair-step drop of Dead Man’s Falls. The roar of the falls drowned the hull’s creaks. And probably the grinding of my teeth.
The girl sat serene, staring ahead as the bow dipped. As Pyt had told me, they had done this before. The distances between Yavet and Tressel, and the differences between life on each of them, could scarcely have been greater. Yet the girl and I were alike. For practical purposes she was growing up orphaned by parents she never knew, as I had. Like every Iridian, and every child born Illegal on Yavet, she was subject to summary execution for the crime of living.
The boat passed its tipping point, and I must have yipped. She looked at me with the Iridian green eyes that marked her and shrugged. “Don’t worry. The next steps aren’t any worse.”
Boom.
The keel struck a boulder, and the boat rolled right.
Boom. Back left.
Spray drenched my armor. Inside it, my underlayer was already sweat soaked.
Pyt, back on the tiller, straightened us, and we careened between glistening black boulders and over the second twenty-foot step.
All three of the channels among which we had chosen plunged down the same two-hundred-foot-high escarpment. Name notwithstanding, Dead Man’s Falls made the plunge in survivable twenty-foot drops. The other channels’ falls, Pyt had told me, dropped sheer.
My improvised sensor decoy must have worked, or the skimmer would have caught us well before we reached these falls. So were the Yavi all dead? And if they were, had I killed them?
I swallowed. As an officer in Earth’s army, I had taken an oath to defend my parents’ homeworld against enemies and oppressors, and Yavet was certainly both. I had spent my growing years on Yavet hiding from a government that wanted Illegals like me dead. But still I had been raised a Yavi.
When you’re young, committing to anything is hard. But, as the girl and I knew, being alone was harder.
The channel beyond the falls was narrow, flat, and slow. Daylight was now gone from the canyon floor.
I panted.
I turned to Pyt. “Can we stop here?”
He nodded, glancing back over his shoulder at the now-distant falls. Then he grounded the boat, its prow grinding up onto a half-moon–shaped beach pocketed in a bend and walled by cliffs. While Alia made the boat fast, Pyt grabbed my elbow and took me aside. “What are you thinking, Jazen?”
I pointed back along the channel in the direction of Dead Man’s Falls. “The Yavi must have bought our spoof, or they’d have bee
n on us an hour ago. If they went over your falls, fine. But if they didn’t, they’ll backtrack. Then come after us down this channel.”
He nodded. “We have to assume the worst, then plan to deal with it. I agree.”
I nodded back as I rummaged through my gear. “If they make it over the falls, running won’t save us. The skimmer’s faster than we are, and they won’t fall for a decoy again.”
He crossed his arms. “Then we fight.”
I shook my head. “Force against force? A dozen Yavi commandos would annihilate the three of us in a fair fight.”
Pyt narrowed his eyes. “You’re suggesting we run away?”
I shook my head again. “I’m suggesting we make it an unfair fight.” I knelt and popped seals on a plasteel. “We call the equipment I have in this container force multipliers. If the skimmer makes it over the falls, the Yavi will be channeled down that gorge for a hundred yards. And they’ll be as shell-shocked as I was for a couple minutes.”
Pyt smiled. “We lay an ambush?”
I shook my head one more time. “I lay an ambush. You two continue downstream.”
Pyt frowned. “You? That’s—”
“See this?” I held up a curved slab of olive plastic, as rectangular and thick as a Gideon Bible.
Pyt ran a finger across words molded into the slab’s convex plastic face like a book title, in Standard. He read aloud, “This Side Toward Enemy.” Then he sniffed. “We already have mines. We use Tressen artillery shells when we can steal them, and nails in gunpowder when we can’t.”
I sighed. Trueborns, for all their self-proclaimed goodness, had invented more ways to slaughter people on the cheap than any three outworld societies combined. Pyt probably didn’t realize that improvised explosive devices, the poor man’s force multiplier, had been invented on Earth a century before.
Even the IED’s regular-forces cousin, the command-detonated directional antipersonnel mine, hadn’t evolved much. Why mess with a bad thing?
I rotated the mine as I pointed out its features to Pyt. “This beats a bucket of nails. Convex slab of plastic explosive, here. Harmless as cookie dough without a detonating cap. Seven hundred rifle balls stuck into the explosive’s front. The cookie’s sealed in weatherproof plastic. Blasting cap in the back, here. Detonation wires out the back, here. There’s even a peep sight, here on top. Emplace, back off, send a spark to the cap, and…boom!”
Pyt jerked his hand back off the mine’s face.
I set the mine down and unboxed another. “Any man-sized target within a sixty-degree arc fifty yards downrange will take a bullet.”
While he hefted the mine, I laid out a half-dozen more. “I’ll set these along the gorge, just beneath the waterline, angled up, and detonate them when the skimmer’s inside the kill box. Skimmer armor’s like kitchen foil. One mine should disable everyone in the skimmer, armored or not, but a little overkill won’t hurt. Two mines I’ll hardwire back to me, to be detonated on command by me, from cover, fifty yards downstream. I’ll set four more to detonate automatically, as fail-safes. Two on photoelectric trips, two on temperature sensors.”
I peeled Cosplas off a heavy machine gun, stripped and reassembled it. “When the first mine blows, I’ll fire straight down the gorge. Enfilade fire. Like knocking down dominoes.” I palmed back the gun’s charging handle, released it, then tapped the handle to seat it. “Yavi body armor may protect them from some of the mine shrapnel, but it won’t stop a heavy machine-gun round.”
“We know ambush technique. You could use some help.”
I swept a hand above the equipment containers. “Sure. If I had a day to teach you new techniques to ambush armored troops in a skink. These will be Yavi, equipped like nothing you’ve ever seen.”
I twisted a buzz bug to activate it, then said, “Pick a number between one and five.”
Pyt wrinkled his forehead. “Three.”
“Now pick another.”
“One. Why?”
I coded the bug, then handed it to him. “Keep this in your pocket. It’s a wireless receiver. If the Yavi don’t show up, or the ambush succeeds, I’ll transmit a burst signal from my helmet comm. The receiver’s silent, but if you’re within twenty miles of me, my signal will make it vibrate. If you receive three vibes, one minute apart each, wait for me at the next fork. If you receive nothing, keep running. If you receive any other pattern, keep running. Any other pattern could be a spoof transmitted by the Yavi. Clear?”
“Clear.” Pyt nodded slowly. “But I would have expected a Trueborn to make those he had paid for take the risk. Not himself.”
I watched the girl, who had rolled up her pant legs and was wading in the stream, chasing shellfish, then cocked my head inside my helmet. “Me, too.”
Twenty minutes later, I was alone in the gorge. I had set passive listeners to warn me if the skimmer closed in while I was prepping the ambush. Then I had waded back upstream and emplaced mines to envelop the ambush kill zone.
By the time I had run det wires, set aiming and ranging marks for the gun, and scooped out a firing position on the little beach, I was wheezing. The warning sensors remained quiet. I lay on my back alongside the gun on its bipod, popped my visor, and stared up at the night-sky sliver that showed between the gorge walls. As I watched, a streak flashed across the sky, as fleeting as the meteor “shooting stars” that lit Earth’s night skies.
I smiled. I had seen enough old-style orbitals cross above enough battlefields to recognize the difference between spacecraft and meteors. The streak was a downshuttle. Soon that shuttle’s human cargo would be standing in immigration and baggage-claim lines, bitching about the discomfort and inconvenience of shuttling in this day and age. I smiled. I would gladly have traded my planetfall experience for theirs.
In the cool darkness, listening to the distant falls purr, I yawned. If this plan did come to a firefight, I needed to be fresh. I maxed my sensor alarms and checked the gun and the mine det clackers one more time. Then I popped two dozers from my helmet dispenser. The nice thing about dozers was that when you woke, you woke one hundred percent alert. I chased them with fortified water from my helmet nipple.
While I waited for the dozers to kick in, I visualized myself lying on a starlit beach less hostile than this one, with Kit alongside me. Pyt was right. Why was I lone-wolfing this ambush when the book dictated that I enlist expendable locals to do it? I was in this to save the damsel and run, not to stick my neck out for some child I hardly knew. Wasn’t I?
Before I could answer my own question, I slept.
Twenty-seven
The skimmer crept down the pitch-dark gorge, floating a foot above the current roaring beneath it. Polian fended the skimmer off the rock wall, green in the amplified light of his snoopers, with a gauntlet.
“All stop!” The Tressen seaman seated alongside Polian touched the skimmer driver’s arm, and the skimmer stopped and hovered. The seaman turned to Polian. “This one’s more rapids than a sheer fall, Cap’n.” He cupped a hand around his ear. “The pitch of the sound tells you.”
Polian ground his teeth. The pitch hadn’t told this man enough last time. And so a promising officer, who was a good kid, was dead. But this Tressen was the best guide Polian had.
“Sir, I got organics a thousand yards dead ahead! We’re catching them!” the specialist monitoring the sensors whispered into his helmet mike.
Polian frowned. “Movers or stationary?”
“Uh. Actually, they are stationary, sir.”
Mazzen, the brevet corporal, frowned, too. “Maybe they wrecked on the falls.”
Polian shook his head. “They know this place. They didn’t wreck themselves.”
“But if they think we wrecked, they may have put in for the night.”
Polian stared around them at the narrow gorge. It would become even narrower, and more demanding of their attention, when they reached the falls or rapids or whatever rumbled up ahead. He shook his head again. “He’s too smart to assume t
hat. They’ve set an ambush at the base of the falls.”
Polian turned to Mazzen and pointed at the gorge walls. “Can you get six men up to the top of this canyon?” Polian pointed at the sensor image and the map onscreen. “Move down past the falls on foot? Flank them?”
Mazzen’s boots clanged as he popped his climbing crampons. “Hour up the wall, sir. Another hour hump downstream. Thirty minutes to down rappel.” He smiled. “Actually, we wouldn’t need to down rappel. We could take ’em under fire from above. Hell, chuck grenades down on them.” Then Mazzen frowned. “But I suppose you want them alive, sir?”
“I do. As soon as you’re in position above and behind them, we’ll bring the skimmer forward and distract them.”
Ten minutes later, Mazzen’s team clung to the gorge wall thirty feet above the skimmer, already looking as small as a half-dozen green monkeys climbing a green curtain.
Polian tapped the specialist’s shoulder and took the sensor-display tablet from the man. The target indicator hadn’t moved. It was, of course, possible that they really had misjudged the success of their little decoy game and stopped to rest. That would make capture even easier.
Polian opened his visor and let the night air and the roar of the undercurrent wash over him. Actually, it didn’t matter what their mind-set was, or whether they were asleep or awake. He whispered to the shapeless blob on the tablet screen, “You’re mine now.”
Twenty-eight
I woke, belly down in my slit trench, because a hand grabbed my shoulder as my sensors screeched.
I spun onto my back, drew my bush knife, and pressed it to my attacker’s throat.
“Jazen! It’s me!” The girl’s eyes bulged.
I recoiled, whispering, “Alia? What the hell?”
Pyt, speaking from over my shoulder, said, “Iridians don’t cut and run. Alia had to remind me of that.”
I thrust my knife back into its scabbard then pounded the boulder. “Crap!”
Alia’s face fell.
My army, a half-handed, middle-aged stepfather and a prepubescent girl, stood there jut-jawed. They clutched their hunting rifles like they thought they were three hundred Trueborn Spartans at Thermopylae. Pyt, I guessed, also came back to see whether Trueborns were, to use an expression that made no sense on a world without mammals, all hat and no cattle.
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