“Roger that. I’ll let you know,” the sergeant said, then a few moments later, “No, looks good. He’s climbing back up to join the others.”
“I think I should blow it now anyway,” JJ said, suddenly getting nervous.
“No, I’ll tell you when.”
JJ didn’t think that was the right move. He wanted the bridge gone, and gone now. He looked down to the control still grasped in his hand. A simple release, and the bridge would be no more. He could tell the sergeant that his hand slipped.
But he was a Marine, and the sergeant had made the decision. So he sat and waited.
“They’re coming onto the bridge now,” the sergeant said, satisfaction evident in his voice.
Duh! Of course that was what he was waiting for, JJ thought as excitement rose within him.
He could bring down the bridge and take out some of the bastards at the same time. He had both hands around the detonator, resting it on his chest. He’d just wait for the word, then release it. Only, he realized that wasn’t good enough; he had to see the bridge fall.
Carefully, he turned around onto his belly and pulled his knees in until he was crouching, his head just below the top of the buttress. When the time came, he could pop his head up and watch.
“Get ready,” Sergeant Go said.
JJ waited ten seconds, twenty, and still no order.
What the hell’s taking them?
Finally, the sergeant said, “Now!”
JJ released the control and popped his head up as a low rumble sounded from beneath the bridge. Two mercs were standing around Sergeant Thies’ body, and another ten were behind them. All startled at the explosions, then spread their legs as if trying to retain their balance—all except for two. One of the mercs by Sergeant Thiel started sprinting forward, and one of the others wheeled to sprint to back to the other side.
For a split second, JJ thought the bridge had held. It lurched, but didn’t go down. Then, almost in slow motion, the far side of the center, right where the transom was, gave way, and the span seemed to open like a reverse drawbridge with the two sides going down instead of up. Three mercs fell with the span. Several of the other mercs tried to get away, but the opening was only the first break. Like a zipper opening, the next two sections of the bridge fell, followed in turn by the rest of the bridge, one section after the other.
JJ thought that the merc running towards them might make it, and he brought up his M90 to take him under fire, but just before he could make the leap for safety, the final transom gave way, and the near end of the bridge fell, smashing onto the slope beneath it before sliding over the edge and into the gorge. The merc made a valiant effort to save himself, jumping to land on the rocks, but either he never had his balance, or the jolt of the bridge section knocked him off is feet, and he slid, hands flailing, until he went over the edge and disappeared from sight.
The weight of the bridge hitting the slope had another unintentional consequence. It knocked free a good chunk of rock, rock that was supporting the buttresses in back of which the two Marines were taking cover. The concrete buttresses shifted, tilting to the gorge.
Both Marines immediately scrambled up on their hands and knees up to and over the roadway, going flat behind the minimal cover it offered. A few rounds chased them.
“Holy shit!” JJ said, laughing out loud.
If Sergeant Go thought his reaction was weird, he never showed it.
“We’re not clear yet. Once they take it all in, they’ll know where we are. We’ve got to get some space between us.”
He started low-crawling, using the raised roadbed for cover. JJ immediately followed. He was so amped that he didn’t know how far they crawled—one minute he was on his belly, the next, Sergeant Go was helping him up where the road cut back to the left and out of a direct line-of-sight to what had been the bridgehead on the far side.
“On me, Portillo!” the sergeant said as he broke into a trot.
JJ looked back, but the curve in the road blocked his view to the bridge just as it blocked the mercs view to him. He wished he could see into the gorge and spot the twisted mass of junk that would be littered on the bottom.
JJ turned back and broke into a trot that matched his sergeant’s. They were alone, in the middle of bad-guy territory, and on this side of the gorge, without a firm plan to get out. Despite that, JJ was on Cloud Nine. He—they—had been given a mission, and they’d accomplished it.
That is what Marines do.
Chapter 4
Jasper
Jasper’s neck hurt. That was the first thing he was aware of as his mind started coming back. He didn’t know why it hurt, and he didn’t know why he seemed to be upside down. He kicked out with a leg, but something was in the way, and he couldn’t extend it. He knew there had been a battle, he knew the Tenner mercs had been about to shoot him. . .
Am I captured? he thought in panic as memories flooded back into him with an almost physical force.
He struggled to free himself, kicking out until his head slipped forward and he got a mouthful of dirt. It wasn’t until he pushed himself up that he realized his hands weren’t tied—he wasn’t a prisoner.
Carefully, he poked his head above his fighting hole where he’d been lodged at the bottom. The hilltop was barely recognizable. Trees were shattered into splinters, some sharp shards the only things still upright. The dirt was chewed up, and the mangled remains of bodies, both the Tenner mercs and what was left of Ito, seemed to have sunk into it, almost as if being consumed by the hungry earth.
Jasper remembered yelling, then a blast. The next thing was waking up, head down, in his fighting hole.
The explosion must have knocked me back into the hole, he thought, realizing that had probably saved his life.
From the looks of the tattered remains of the three mercs, nobody out in the open could have survived. He’d been lucky, very lucky.
“Christiaan!” he said before biting off his words and ducking back into his fighting hole.
He needed to find his son, but he didn’t know who had survived whatever had hit them. The mercs could still be out there—alive ones, he meant. The three mercs near him were no longer a threat to anyone. He slowly raised his head and looked around. Wisps of smoke rose from various spots on the hilltop, seemingly from random spots. There wasn’t any movement.
Turning to look down the hill to where they’d been taken under fire, he could see what was left of the combat robot: a smoldering and shattered hunk of synthetics. Beyond the bot, down on the highway, there was nothing. No movement, no figures, nothing.
How long have I been out?
He looked up at the sun, but his mind was still slightly muddled, and he couldn’t quite remember what time the battle had started. Early morning? It looked to be about noon now, so he might have been unconscious for a couple of hours.
Keela!
Was his wife safe? He reached for his granddaughter’s PA, but his pocket was empty. Panic started to set in, and he wheeled around in the fighting hole searching for it. The tiniest splash of pink caught his eye, and he dropped to dig the PA out of the dirt where it had fallen and been trampled. Brushing the soil off of the display, he felt a sweep of despair when he saw it was blank. He shook it as if that could somehow jolt the molecular state circuits inside.
PAs were almost foolproof. With no real working parts, they tended to work no matter what. As long as they were within the power sphere of a village or even a vehicle, they were connected to the net.
As long as there was a power sphere! Oh, my God!
The village’s sphere reached out for almost 20 klicks. If the PA wasn’t drawing power, then the power relay had to be knocked out. He automatically looked up as if he could see the Bright Horizon’s collector in orbit. That could have been knocked out, too, leaving the entire hemisphere without power, but the mercs needed that power, too, so he doubted they’d have taken it down. It was probably the village relay that was out of commission.
The PA had a short-term residual spark capacity, maybe close to an hour’s worth, so Jasper knew he’d been out at least that long. He pocketed the PA. As soon as he entered a power sphere, it should work, and he could call Keela.
His son, though, was up on the hill with him. He had to find Christiaan, and he couldn’t do that hiding in the foxhole. He scanned the crest carefully, then like an eel, squirmed over the back edge of the hole. He’d seen enough war flicks to know that was what soldiers did, but it was exhausting, pushing a knee up, then pulling himself forward. By the time he reached his sergeant’s hole, he just flopped in—only to immediately jump back out. Both Greg Brussie and Handel Portios laid in a tangle at the bottom of the hole, both very obviously very dead. Jasper scrambled back on his butt in horror, breathing heavily.
There was no way they were alive, but Jasper knew he had to check. He took a moment to steel his nerves, then he bent forward on his hands and knees and crept to the edge of the hole and peered in.
Handel was on top of Greg. His jeans were wet at the crotch, and Jasper didn’t need the acrid urine smell to know his body had let loose as he died. His face, pale and sallow, looked almost peaceful. His shoulders and head poking out from under Handel, Greg was face-first in the dirt, the top of his head pressed against the foxhole wall. The back of his head was a bloody mess, and flies were buzzing around, lighting for a few moments before taking off and buzzing again.
Jasper felt the gorge rise in his throat. Handel was bad enough. They’d been indentureds together, both gaining freeman status within a year of each other. But Jasper could almost pretend Handel was merely asleep. He couldn’t do that with Carrie’s boy. This was Christiaan’s friend, his partner in crime when they’d broken two of Tennison Corp’s algae tubes while playing holdball where they shouldn’t have been—something that had cost Jasper another eight months as an indentured. This was the boy who’d come to their house each Saturday for a year to do odd jobs in payment. This was the boy—no, man—who’d been given the position of sergeant when they’d formed to protect their homes from the Tenners. And now he was dead, the back of his head gone.
Jasper still didn’t know what caused the explosion that had killed the mercs, but he’d seen Greg killed before that. And judging from the devastated Tenner bodies behind his own fighting position as well as what had happened to Ito’s body, he was sure the two had been killed by the mercs before the entire hilltop had been hit.
Handel had an UKI as well, the twin to Jasper’s. He leaned into the hole, and trying not to touch the bodies, he pulled up the rifle. He dropped the magazine and checked the load. Three rounds. He slipped the magazine into his pocket and started to let the UKI fall before remembering the chamber. Normally, once fired, all that was left in the breach would be gasses, but there were occasional jams, so the weapon had a charging handle that could be used to extract a recalcitrant round. Pulling the rifle back up, he worked the handle, and the dull grey of one of the jacketless slugs flew up and over him to land in the dirt two meters away. He scrambled to get it, wiping it off before loading it into Handel’s mag.
With four rounds in that magazine and the five he had left from his own issue, he was back to nine rounds. They were comforting to have, but they were not nearly enough.
His knee was aching, and his back hurt, so he gave up crawling. He hadn’t seen anyone alive, so with a sense of foreboding, he walked to the next hole.
Saul Portios, Handel’s nephew, was dead in his position as well. The back of the position was trampled down, as if someone had crawled out, and it looked like there was blood at the spot. Jasper tried to remember who’d been in the hole with Saul. Lyon? Schuyler? He wasn’t sure. But the lack of a body and what he could read of the signs convinced him that someone else had survived the fight. His heart lifted for the first time since coming to. Maybe Christiaan had survived, too.
Jasper stepped over two-and-a-half more Tenners. The bodies were mangled, and one was just legs and hips, cut off at the waist. Exposed guts were attracting flies, and the smell of death was heavy in the still air. Jasper looked around, but he couldn’t see the top half of the merc. He couldn’t imagine where it was, but the numbness that had settled around him dampened any idle curiosity.
The platoon had been spread out over 14 fighting positions. Jasper didn’t find anyone alive as he made his way down the line. Most of his friends were dead. Hale, John R., John M., Oman, Dion, Masafumi, Lars. Dion was armed with a UKI as well, but when Jasper checked, he found the old man’s magazine empty. Maarten’s body was mangled, a good ten meters in front of his hole, his broken Olsen Hyper still clutched in his hand. Ito had bolted when the mercs showed up, but away from them. From the looks of it, Maarten had tried to charge the mercs at the bottom of the hill.
Jasper wasn’t a real soldier, and he didn’t know the protocol except from the flicks and holos, but he was positive that he was alive only because of Maarten and the fighting positions he’d forced them to dig. He came to attention and saluted the best he could.
The next hole had three bodies in it: Jan ter Horst, Mantei Caesar, and to Jasper’s surprise, a merc. Jan’s big Buck blade was buried in the merc’s neck. Jasper would never have thought the town drunk had it in him, and he suddenly felt guilty for his treatment of the man over the last several decades.
Not all the holes were occupied. One was completely empty, and only Ken Lee was in his foxhole; his twin brother Kev was missing. Including him, Jasper thought that at least five of the platoon might have survived. And that gave him hope.
Christiaan had been in the second-to-last hole. As he rounded the curve in the slope, he saw a body half out of the downhill side of the hole, face first in the dirt. But the body was too big. It was another of Christiaan’s friends, Asante. The young man had wandered into the village a few years back, saying nothing about his past. Rumors had run rampant, but he was a steady worker, and Maarten had hired him on. And now, like most of the others, he was dead.
With extreme hesitancy, Jasper crept forward. Even before he reached the hole, he knew what he would find. An arm inside the hole came into view, an arm he knew well, and arm that used to clasp him around his neck until he grew beyond wanting to be carried by his daddy. The arm of a freeman just starting out on his life’s journey, a journey that had been cut far too short.
Jasper ran the last few strides and looked down upon his son. He didn’t say a word but sunk to his knees, motionless for a moment until his stomach spasmed, and vomit burned its way up his throat and spewed on the ground. He heaved, over and over, even when his stomach was dry as tears cursed down his face.
“I’m sorry, Mr. van Ruiker,” a soft voice said, intruding into his grief.
Jasper jumped to his feet, his rifle ready. It took him a moment to realize that the bloody lump of flesh that was Asante was speaking to him. He dropped his rifle and rushed to the young man’s side.
“I’m sorry, I couldn’t protect him,” Asante said.
“I . . . I know you tried. It’s not your fault.”
Asante was missing part of his face; his right eye was gone. An arm was broken, bone shards visible poking through torn skin. But those were the minor wounds. Something had taken a huge chunk out of his left buttock and side. Jasper could see his spine, and he could see where his spine was missing.
“I can’t feel my legs, sir. Are they OK?”
“Don’t you worry about that. I’m going to get you to some help.”
Jasper was very aware of his son’s body just a meter away, but helping Asante was something he could do, something to take his mind away from what he’d lost. He stood up and straddled the big man’s head, putting his hands under Asante’s shoulders, and pulling to get him out of the hole.
Asante screamed in pure agony.
“Don’t, Mr. van Ruiker! It hurts,” he begged.
Jasper stopped. When he’d pulled, most of Asante’s lower body had remained in place, like it was coming apart. The young man sh
ouldn’t be alive with that kind of damage, but he was hanging on. Not for long, though, Jasper was certain.
“I need to get you to a doctor,” Jasper said, unsure of himself.
“No doctors up here,” Asante said, almost chuckling before that turned into a cough. “No, please, just sit with me, sir, if you would.”
“Of course. I’m here with you.”
Jasper sat, sliding his hips forward so that Asante’s head was in his lap. He stroked the young man’s hair, occasionally telling him he was there. He purposely didn’t look into the foxhole at his son’s body. He couldn’t.
He didn’t know when Asante passed. The body started to cool, but he didn’t move. He sat there, a dead man’s head in his lap, his eyes focused out over the forest as the sun went down and darkness hid his grief.
Chapter 5
Mountie
Mountie spun around again, pointing his Prokov in the direction from where he’d heard the noise. He was exhausted and his nerves frayed, and each rustle, each slight noise turned into a company of mercs ready to jump him. Whatever was scurrying around in the grass was too small to be much of a threat, so he turned back, peering through trees in the waning light, wondering if it was safe to proceed.
He fingered his beacon again, depressing the button, but the complete lack of resistance hadn’t changed. Somehow, probably during his plunge through the trees, he’d damaged the supposedly rugged device. He’d probably pressed the lever a couple of hundred times so far, but the green indicator light had never turned on. The beacon had no obvious signs of damage, but with the loose button, Mountie was betting that the unit itself was intact—it was just the button that was broken.
With few options, he’d decided to head to the hill he’d buzzed when he was shot down. The hill had friendlies on it, and if Skeets had managed to clear it of bad guys, then the town militia was his best bet. If he could reach them, he could try and contact someone for a pickup.
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