Another soldier, Green, showed up. He was an armored infantry line officer with a strong aside as an intel guy. The colonel tapped him to be the team “fox” (the colonel’s lingo for “the intelligence specialist”) and put him in the command cell. Green was tall and pale and had a head like a bullet; he was a solid soldier, usually soft-spoken, and came off as an intellectual. If pushed, however, he would metamorphose into what he had been previously—a hardboiled infantry company commander.
No one would mistake the supply guy, Sergeant Dirty, as either a solid soldier or an intellectual. Dirty had more angles than an amusement park and more bad habits than a whorehouse. He had a potbelly, a shifty smile, and a girlfriend at every force port of call throughout this arm of the galaxy. He was also a crackerjack supply guru—when the colonel made him play by the rules. Otherwise, you might have a swimming pool show up at a firebase that no one could seem to account for. Most importantly, when the chips were down, you could count on him, even though you couldn’t quite get a hold on him—he was too slick.
There were two other guys on the command cell: Birthday, the badass admin guy, and Freak, the communications dude. Birthday had been drafted by force to be on the team. It seemed that force had to drag an admin guy onto a FMAT team, and Birthday was the guy they selected. He was a good soldier and scared to death that the colonel and present company was going to get him maimed or killed. He had ponderous looks and a serious air, even when he was kidding around. When it came to halo admin and all-around administrative headaches, Birthday was a godsend to the team.
Freak was just that, a freak. He was covered in bad tattoos and always had some line of shit handy. But the team needed a commo guy, and force said he was qualified. So he showed up and did his job when required.
The other three cells were parceled out to the Juneau Army line outfits, imaginatively named First, Second, and Third Companies.
The First Company’s cell was headed up by Mighty Mike. Mike wore two hats, in that he was the team NCOIC (noncommissioned officer in charge) and lead advisor for First Company. He had two guys with him.
One was his medic, a guy called Stork. He was a good medic and a confirmed connoisseur of the opposite sex. Stork, as his team name implied, was ungodly tall. He barely fit the morphology parameters for donning suits. Paul, being of average size and build, always had to crane his neck to talk to the guy. Stork had a farm boy’s face and gawky looks that girls went wild for. He was also a pretty good shot in and out of his suit. It was kind of hard to miss a target in a suit, what with the halo-controlled inertial targeting system and all. Add Stork to the suit’s systems, however, and he made the suit’s inherent accuracy seem like magic.
One just couldn’t let him go near a bar, that’s all. He’d disappear with some lady and come back the next day, enervated and hung over, with some crazy tale. The hell of it was that his tales were honest, unlike some other characters on the team.
Stork’s sidekick was Crest, a crusty NCO with long experience. He was a tempering influence on Stork, except when he drank. Then you were likely to find him in his barracks room in his underwear, screaming something incoherent and playing with his bayonet. Crest was a good man, but heaven help the fella who came between him and his next meal. He would almost rather clear villages by himself than miss his breakfast.
Crest was the anti-Stork in appearance. Where Stork was tall and thin, with a wholesome complexion, Crest was built like a fireplug, with a ruddy complexion. Stork was clean-shaven (Paul didn’t think he could even grow a beard), while Crest had a cheesy pencil moustache. Paul frequently thought the two looked like an ancient prehalo comedy team he had seen once, Loren and Harding…or something like that.
Second Company’s advisor cell consisted of a certain Paul Thompson, previously described, and his medic, Z-man.
Z was of average height and build, with a mahogany complexion. He had joined the force to escape his life in Detroit and had done a few tours before coming to the team. At first, Paul thought he would choke the life out of Z-man, who always seemed to move in slow motion even when he was running. After a while (and a few f’d up missions), Paul gained an understanding of the man, and they formed a decent team. There was one caveat, though, that Paul was unaware of at first. The caveat was that Z had a pathological fear of dogs—this would come out later on the mission.
Finally, there was Third Company’s advisor cell. The advisor team was led by Sergeant Crusty. Ol’ Crusty was another long-service NCO. He had refused to take the traditional twenty-year retirement and had accepted yet another deployment when Force HQ asked him to come on the FMAT.
Crusty, Paul speculated, had taken too many mood-altering drugs as a minor. Sometimes he had insanely bad judgment, and he had nearly as many angles as Dirty, the supply guy. If Dirty was the one behind the swimming pool coming to a remote firebase, then you could bet your bottom federation credit that Crusty had gotten the water and chlorine pump. Crusty, while at times an amazing annoyance to the team’s leadership, had some strong redeeming factors. The most important was that he was there when you needed him. He had a line of crap ten kilometers long, but every now and then he would back it up, and one could see that the ancient, leather-faced NCO had once been a hard-charging, sky-falling armored trooper. His moments of brilliance, alas, were few and far between. But when they were there, the moments shone like diamonds.
His medic was Al-Asad, a wiry kid who tried harder than anyone on the team to make things happen. Skinny, small-framed Al-Asad was a badass who happened to be a medic. He was as tough as gutta-percha, and he excelled at hand-to-hand combat. His prominent eyebrows and nose always made people think of a punch line, though. An excellent, above-board soldier, he was frequently horrified at the antics of Sergeant Crusty and suffered under his rule. Al-Asad was a guy destined to be disappointed in people because he set himself to an impossible-to-reach standard. Teamed up with Crusty, all he could do was shake his head.
These were the guys Paul was going back to war with. At first, they had been a team. After the Baradna Valley, they would be a family, albeit a dysfunctional one.
The Baradna Valley hadn’t happened yet, however. First came Paul’s run-in with the magical fish of Buree.
Z was in the ground-car with Paul; they were speeding toward the village. Bashir’s vehicle was in the lead, and he was covering them with dust. They were travelling to Buree because complaints had reached Third Battalion about “wild men in the hills” coming down to the village to steal their daughters and sheep. The colonel suspected that these so-called wild men might be dissidents, and Second Company had to go and see if they could get intel. That was the reason for this crazy trek out into a broad desert plain. The plain was ringed by majestic blue mountains.
Paul’s halo told him the nearest mountain was 12.71 kilometers away. It looked closer. What this place felt like, though, was the end of Juneau 3. The thought wouldn’t leave Paul’s mind. God, he thought, uncountable kilometers from Earth. This wasteland was what he’d had in mind when he first got his orders shipping him out of Sill. The plain shrieked “alien,” “lost,” and “abandoned” to Paul. Why, oh why, would anyone fight over this barren hell? There wasn’t even a dinosaur tree to break up the monotony. But people did fight over barren hells just like what he was seeing. Light-years from Earth, and they never failed to recreate the old dissatisfactions of home.
Paul had seen this type of landscape many times before, most notably on Roodeschool 5, where he’d known the landscape would deceive you. It was no different on Juneau 3. Even though all Paul was seeing was wasteland, he knew the village of Buree would be waiting for him on the other side of a fold in the ground 3.56 kilometers away.
These desert regions were frequently like that—the observer on the ground would see nothing but rolling wasteland, but the natives knew where every village was located in a fold or wadi (a small, steep ravine). This type of terrain was why Paul blessed the person who had come up with the micro dron
e.
His halo told him that he was within micro range of Buree. He had three micros in launchers on the side of his ground-car. Paul hit the launcher push on his halo visual and waited. Today, because the colonel and he had decided that they were on a “hearts and minds” mission, Paul and Z were unsuited. It was the dreaded basic dismounted patrol once they reached the village and got out of their ground-cars. But Paul had a few tricks up his sleeve to even out the playing field, and the micro he had just kicked out was one of them.
The micro icon popped on in his visual field. Without a lot of effort, Paul opened it and started to study the drone feed. As Green had briefed, it was a simple village built at the intersection of two roads, with compound houses branching out on all sides. There was a brilliant green mosque (presumably) with a courtyard, what looked like a rectangular pool, and some trees.
There was also a clearing next to the mosque that would assuredly be the local gathering place and market. There were no obvious signs of a threat and no squirters running for the hills.
Paul called Bashir. “Bashir, this is Two-Three.” No one had thought of a call sign for Bashir, so his call sign was just “Bashir.” The Juneau Army was simple like that.
“Yes, my friend,” he answered. The Juneaus were using just plain civvy halos, and Szeged 7 knockoffs at that. They were transmitting in the clear, unencrypted, so Paul had to be circumspect. Bashir, of course, knew this.
“Bashir, looks like there’s no welcoming committee for us at the objective. Your guys ready for the party?” The party, of course, was the sudden establishment of four checkpoints on the roads going into and out of Buree. After the village was secure, Bashir and Paul would meet with the elders in the village.
“Of course, my friend. Do not worry; God is with us today.” Paul had his doubts, but after working with Bashir this past month, he was gaining more confidence in Second Company. Hopefully, this knock and greet wouldn’t end with a bomb going off or other potentially fatal unpleasantness.
Paul had an OK feel from this village, though. Funny how over the years he had developed a knack for telling what was safe and what was fishy. On the micro feed, he was seeing kids playing and women at the well. As the ground-cars reached Buree, however, the women disappeared. That was pretty standard on Juneau 3; the locals on this part of the planet really didn’t like to put their women on display. Who knew—if they were exposed to foreigners, they might start to get uppity ideas. Paul thought the practice strange, but he was used to it.
Every house here was a walled compound that showed nothing to the street. Every compound had its gates, and the tops of the walls were usually filled with mortared-in broken bottles or barbed wire. This was typical of the building style he had seen on Juneau 3 to date. It wasn’t exactly friendly architecture. The buildings were, however, eminently practical in the eyes of these extraterrestrial Pashtuns. They were a people imbued to internecine conflict since the days of Alexander the Great, back on Old Earth.
Paul took a deep breath and savored the aroma of donkey shit and goats as they rolled into the central market.
Bashir had brought seven vehicles on this patrol. One vehicle with six soldiers each went to the ends of the village streets and set up checkpoints. Three vehicles, one with the advisors, remained in the center of the village in the marketplace. They were pulled into a wagon-wheel shape for mutual defense.
Trust was a curse on Juneau three, and like the verbal variety of curses, it was a social nonstarter to display trust in public. So, linked via their halos, the entire party leaped out of their vehicles once everyone was in position and the vehicles had stopped rolling. It was a fairly smooth op, so far.
On cue, the village elders came out of the mosque courtyard. Paul looked them over along the top of his rifle. He had known for years that it was better to cover someone with your rifle and ask for forgiveness later than to lose the split second it took to aim and pull the trigger. The elders were clothed in the curious man-dresses and muffin hats of the region. They had long beards dyed various shades, and each of them had deeply squinted, hard-set eyes.
The elder in the center, with a potbelly and faded blue robe, spoke. “The peace of God upon you, friend. I am called Hassan.” His tone seemed mild, accepting.
Paul’s hackles went down a bit; but his eyes and halo scanned the rooftops and alleyways, while keeping the elders in his peripheral vision.
Bashir answered, “Peace upon you as well. I am Commander Bashir, of the Juneau Army.”
They continued to exchange pleasantries. Paul was watching the scene and keeping his micro feed in view as well. All checkpoints were established, and one checkpoint had just picked up a squirter armed with a Kalashnikov. He was being questioned, none too gently, by the Second Company soldiers at the western roadblock. It was the one in the direction of the mountains. Hmm, Paul thought, we have a contestant in the game.
Bashir surely knew that his men had picked up a shithead as he talked with Hassan, the headman. The headman probably knew it too—after all, he was wearing a halo as well. Bashir finally got down to brass tacks.
“This man who we are questioning—is he one of your people?” Bashir’s eyes bored into Hassan.
“He is one of the wild men. He has a wife in this village.” “Wife” meaning he had probably kidnapped and raped a local girl. To preclude her being killed, her family had decided she was a wife and had it declared so by the imam, the man to the right of Hassan. It was one of the time-honored ways jihadi dissidents infiltrated the local population.
“We will take this man with us,” said Bashir flatly. “Is this a problem? Will it help you with the men from the hills?”
“I have no objection,” said Hassan, his eyes unreadable. Paul’s halo said there was a 75 percent chance the man was telling the truth, and he decided Bashir’s play was a smart one.
Mike pinged in on Paul’s halo. As usual, when he wasn’t out on a mission himself, Mighty Mike liked to “sit in” on missions. Text appeared in Paul’s vision. “Maybe we can roll these fuckers after this birdie sings.” Paul sent back a shrug icon. We’ll see, he thought. Mike had no further comments for the nonce.
In the meantime, Hassan and Bashir had shifted back to pleasantries, the main business concluded. Did we want to eat? he asked. Could his son sing for us? Bashir declined, citing a lack of time. Then Hassan came out with an offer that Bashir could not refuse.
“This village—it is famous,” he said. “We have the most beautiful of mosques in the Zudnok River delta.” Bashir raised an eyebrow. “Also, God has blessed us in a most fortunate manner. We have magical fish in a special pool; they are blessed by God.”
“Fish?” said Bashir. “Are they the fish we have brought from Old Earth, seat of the Kaaba, peace be upon God, and his Prophet, Muhammad?” Paul could tell Bashir was interested. One didn’t see fish every day on Juneau 3.
“No no no!” said the elder. “These are magical fish, blessed by God! If you eat them, you will die.” He made a negating gesture, as if to banish the thought of eating their holy fish.
“Well, show us these fish!” demanded Bashir. “Where are they?” The elder gestured and led Bashir into the walled courtyard by the mosque. Z-man and Paul followed. This was an unexpected deviation from the mission and not an unwelcome one. It was hot as hell-not-on-Earth beneath the white sky and blazing sun. The local sun was imaginatively called “New Sun.”
Paul looked at his clock icon; it was getting to be local noon. He checked his micro feed; the courtyard was clear of any threats. Paul also noticed in the feed that there was the large rectangular pool he had seen earlier on the other side of the wall. Bashir and his party entered the courtyard. Paul and Z followed. Two Juneau Army soldiers stayed outside the simple stone archway and maintained security.
Upon entering the compound, Paul was struck by four things immediately. One, there was a huge cedar growing within, casting inviting shade upon the enclosure. Paul had noticed the tree before but ha
dn’t noticed its type because he’d had better things to do at the time.
Two, the wall of the mosque facing the pool was a very pleasing green that complemented the large, rectangular basin below it. The courtyard just felt peaceful.
Three, a row of villagers were squatting upon a wall that was close by a trough. The trough was filled with crystal-clear water that ran from the pool. The villagers looked at Bashir and Paul curiously; there didn’t seem to be a lot of hostility. Paul figured that after Second Company left, this visit would be the talk of the town for years.
Finally, there was the pool itself. It was a ten-by-fifteen-meter rectangle and about a meter deep. Paul could see rocks in the bottom and white sand. The water was crystal clear.
And sure enough, there were about a hundred fish swimming in the water. They were about fifty centimeters in length and had a strange, almost boxy appearance. Looking closer, Paul was treated to an odd sight—they appeared to have armor plates! They were what had been known on Old Earth as placoderms, a primitive type of armored fish.
Paul guessed he had just discovered a new species on Juneau 3. Word about these fish had obviously never reached the capital city of Jade, so they were never registered as a new species on Juneau. Or, maybe Paul had missed the fish part of the briefing on the flora and fauna of Juneau 3. But he didn’t think so.
A text from Mike appeared in his visual: “Throw a grenade into the pool, and see how many fish you can get.” Paul decided to ignore his advice. That was Mike for you—coming up with a plan of action that was guaranteed to provoke violence.
Fucker, thought Paul. He shot back a laugh icon via their halo link.
This courtyard was an unexpected, pleasant surprise for Paul. It really was a green jewel in the middle of hell-not-on-Earth. Paul continued to scan around, looking at the villagers arrayed by the stone trough and then looking again at the pool and its magical fish.
In the Valley Page 7