But he was across. He forced himself upright and turned.
All three of his companions were standing on the throwing rock, anxiously looking across.
“Are you OK?” Sergeant Go yelled, his voice muted by the power of the river.
He raised a tentative hand, thumbs up. Carefully, he climbed up around the boulder and onto the bank. He wanted to do nothing more than to lie down on his back for a few moments, but he knew that would freak out the others. Instead, he started walking back to where he’d intended to reach this bank. He’d been swept at least 150 meters downstream during his little swim. It took almost three minutes to clamber over the rocks and reach the spot opposite them. Once he arrived, he swung his left arm in circles. They’d just have to throw the hook over again.
The three had been watching him the entire time, and after he signaled them, they hurriedly recovered the hook. He leaned back against a large boulder, watching as they got the line ready. Within a minute or two, Sergeant Go was making his loops, and on his first throw, the hook sailed across to land right at his feet. Trying to isolate the pain in his side as well as the bumps and bruises that were beginning to make themselves felt, he reached down and picked it up. It was still in pretty good shape, but Jasper’s blade had taken a beating. The edge had several nicks, and there was a dent in the cheek.
Jasper’s knife was a working man’s blade, nothing fancy, but practical. It was nothing like his Hwa Win, which had cost Mountie almost a month’s pay. He glanced down to his calf, and it was only then that he noticed that the holster was gone, along with this Prokov and Hwa Win.
“Son-of-a-one-eyed-bitch!” he said, looking down the river, but the river taketh and the river keepeth.
Both were long gone.
He straightened up and dragged the rope to a tree ten meters back from the bank where he secured it. The safety line was in place. Back on the other side, the three had attached the pull line to a clip in the middle of the safety and gave him the signal. He pulled on the safety line, drawing over the pull line, all the time his side making itself known with jolts of pain. He unclipped the pull line and secured it to the same tree while the other three pulled back on the safety line, bringing it taut once again. It was a messy way to deal with ropes, having each line more than twice the length of the width of the river, but that was the only way to move something back and forth with each end of both lines secured on opposite banks.
Finally, it was time for the others. Jasper was hooked into the middle of the pull line first. He stepped into the water, and after a safety loop secured him to the safety line, Mountie pulled him across. Jasper helped a little, but the bulk of the horsepower came from Mountie’s aching arms. It took three minutes before a sputtering Jasper stepped up on the bank.
Jasper gave a pointed look at Mountie’s torn and bloody skinsuit, but Mountie waved him off. He wanted to get everyone over as quick as possible.
Next came the two packs with all their gear, one after the other. Mountie felt a lot more comfortable when he had his Gescard slung around his shoulders.
Lance Corporal Portillo followed, coming across without incident. The Marine was able to assist his crossing more than Jasper had, and he had a huge smile as he came out of the water, much to Mountie’s disgust. He’d evidently thought it was fun!
Sergeant Go was a little more difficult. With no one needed to retrieve the pull line, he detached the far end of it and attached himself to the running end. The three on the near bank pulled in all the slack before the sergeant entered the water and half-swam, half-clutched at the safety line as the other three hauled his big body across. Unlike with Portillo, the sergeant had a hint of panic in his eyes when he finally made it.
There wasn’t a way to detach the safety line on the far side, so Sergeant Go reached out and cut it, letting the near end sink into the water. The current caught it and started sweeping it downstream. Someone walking on the other side could see the end still attached to a tree, and they’d know someone had crossed there, but Mountie hoped that would happen long after they gone and been re-united with their units.
With that done, Mountie breathed a sigh of relief as he sunk down on the ground. He took his SERE kit, pulling out the NueSkin spray, which he liberally applied to his side. The cool, soothing properties of the spray immediately deadened the ache as it cleaned and stabilized the wound as Jasper and Portillo hovered over him, worry on their faces.
“No big deal. Just give me ten, and we’ll be on our way.”
Mountie knew he’d been correct in taking the crossing himself. If it had been Lance Corporal Portillo doing it, he was sure the Marine would have been lost. He’d made the right decision, and in doing so, maybe he’d shown the others what he was made of.
All told, though, he thought, I think I’d much rather be in my Lizard.
Chapter 16
Jasper
Jasper dug the last bits of the date-crumble out of the wrapper, then wadded that up and threw it into his mouth as well. JJ and the sergeant sure complained about their field rats, but he didn’t think they were bad. The date-bar was rich, and the wrapper had that sweet crunchiness that had become popular over the last few years. Jasper loved his wife dearly, but neither of them could cook worth a darn, so they relied on fab food. Given that much of his crop probably made its way to food fabricators across the galaxy, that was probably appropriate.
The travel rats, as JJ called them, were small, but packed with calories. They might not bulk much, but they kept a Marine alive, and that worked for militiamen as well. JJ was almost out, but he was making sure he shared with Jasper as well.
The four of them had stopped for the evening, crawling deep within heavy brush in a marsh. No one would be able to sneak up on them unnoticed. Sergeant Go’s PFG-cloth coated body armor was laden with all sorts of suppressors, but JJ’s armor was in taters, and neither he nor Mountie had any type of suppressor capability in their clothing. The three of them could still be spotted with surveillance gear, but with the Navy and Marine air superiority, the Tenner air was limited.
Jasper would have rather put a few more klicks behind them, but by unspoken agreement, they knew Mountie needed to rest. He’d been beaten up pretty good at the river crossing, and he could use a bit more down-time to let his meds work.
When the grappling hook had come free, sweeping Mountie downstream, Jasper had been sure he was lost. But the guy had somehow beat the current to crawl out on the other side. It had been pretty amazing, something that hit home when he had crossed next. They didn’t have pools in Donkerbroek, and the Rustig Stroom was just about big enough for wading. Jasper had flailed his way across, almost entirely pulled by Mountie. He’d been shocked and badly frightened by the pure power of the river.
He licked his fingers and looked up to see Mountie staring at him. Not knowing what else to do, he nodded.
“I haven’t mentioned it yet, but that was pretty smart what you did with your knife and the grappling hook. What gave you that idea?” Mountie asked him.
“It was pretty obvious that the hook was too light to get over, so what else to do except add some weight?”
Jasper knew the Navy pilot meant well, but the inference was that Mountie was surprised that he, some hick farmer, was just as intelligent as the others. He may not have attended a university like Mountie, and he may not have been to engineer school like the two Marines, but during his life as an algae wrangler, both as an indentured and now as a freeman, he’d had to learn a lot of seat-of-the-pants engineering just to survive. The hook needed weight, he added it. Simple as that.
“Sorry about your blade,” JJ said. “It took a beating there.”
“No worries. I’ll just hammer it out when I get home.”
Not that I have a shop anymore.
He pushed that thought out of his mind. He didn’t need to be dwelling on things like that now.
“You can do that?” JJ asked. “I fucked up my Spyderco last year, and I just had to get a
new one.”
“That’s because it was aligned cero-steel, most likely. Once the molecule chains are disrupted, there’s no fixing that. Not like mine,” Jasper said, pulling out his knife and holding it up. “I made this out of a chunk of an old holding tank.”
“You mean, like you made the whole thing? Why not just order a real one?”
“A real one? This doesn’t look real?” Jasper asked, shaking the blade a few times, then rapping the cheek against the barrel of his rifle.
“No, I didn’t mean that. But it’s easy to just order one.”
“Why? Margins are tight farming algae, and this took me maybe 40 minutes to make. Didn’t cost me a credit, either.”
“Hell, Mr. van Ruiker. Margins are tight?” Sergeant Go said. “I seen how you farmers grow algae and that stuff on ‘How Things Work.’ Every three days, you can harvest a new crop.”
Jasper couldn’t stop himself from rolling his eyes.
“Sure, we can. If we get decent sun. If the temperature remains steady and we don’t have to expend energy raising or lowering the bath temp. If we manage the flow of fertilizers and additives to match ambients. If the nitros don’t explode and take out half of your tubes.”
“That can happen?” JJ asked.
“Well, not to me. But our fertilizers are nitrogen-based, and yes, if you don’t upkeep your equipment, you can get a huge explosion. Happened last year to Kale Hastig. Let the nitros flow too freely, and boom, his tubes and Maarten’s were destroyed. A freeman for all his life, he had to sell his contract to cover the expenses, but who wants to keep an indentured on the farms if he makes that kind of mistake.”
He didn’t mention that Kale had been drunk on his butt when he blew up his farm and a quarter of Maarten’s.
“And even if we do everything right, what do we get for our efforts? Not much. We get paid the DR. The government decides on the Dedicated Rate without our input, but you can bet the big corporations give theirs.
“So, to answer your question, I made my own blade because I can, and I didn’t have to pay anything for it other than 40 minutes of my time. As an algae wrangler, we learn to make do whenever possible.”
“Hell, I can’t make shit, Jasper,” JJ said. “I can blow it up, for sure, but not make anything. You’re a real gyver.
“Hey, Sergeant Go, maybe we should call him ‘Gyver.’”
“What’s a ‘gyver?’” Jasper asked.
“You know, like you. Someone who can make things out of something else, like a blade out of a holding tank, or, what, a rocket out of a stylus.”
“You can make a rocket out of a stylus?”
“I don’t know. I was just pulling something out of my ass. Just anything out of nothing.”
Jasper had been fascinated by the dynamics of his companion’s nicknames. Lance Corporal Portillo was “JJ,” Sergeant Go was “Go-man,” and the lieutenant was “Mountie.” Mountie called the two Marines by rank and last name. The sergeant used rank and name for Mountie, but JJ was usually just “Portillo.” He called JJ and Mountie by their nicknames, but not Sergeant Go. Mountie had made mention of another pilot, “Skeets.” Jasper didn’t know what to make of all this, but he found it all fascinating.
And, surprisingly, he felt a bit of excitement when JJ said he should be called “Gyver.” It was almost as if getting a nickname was some sort of rite of passage. He still didn’t quite know what “Gyver” meant despite the explanation, and he wasn’t sure if it was complimentary or not, but that wasn’t as important as the fact that JJ thought he deserved a nickname.
JJ seemed to be pleased with his suggestion, but Sergeant Go merely harrumphed while Mountie never looked up from where he was cleaning his fingernails. The slight bit of excitement Jasper had felt quickly faded. He should have known better. He was a militiaman, not a professional soldier, and the other three didn’t hold him in the same class as themselves.
Jasper didn’t know what to say to that, but he was saved from having to make a response when a flicker of bright white light reflected off the top of the trees.
Lightening? Jasper wondered.
Something seemed unnatural about the light, and the low boom that reached them a few seconds later was nothing like thunder.
“Someone’s getting into it,” JJ said somberly.
More light flickered, followed by more rumblings and booms. A battle was going on off in the distance, a big one by the sounds of it. Men were fighting and dying over there, as they fought over his home-planet while the four of them sat huddled in a marsh.
Jasper forgot about nicknames, the perils of farming, and making knives as he sat with the others simply listening to the sounds of war.
Chapter 17
Mountie
The explosion knocked Mountie to the ground, his wounded side erupting in pain. He tried to scramble to his feet when he felt Sergeant Go’s strong arms grab and lift him.
“Move it, sir,” the sergeant said as he bolted at right angles to their previous direction of march.
Mountie took off, dodging through the trees. Another explosion sounded behind him, the pressure wave pressing against his back. Bits of wood and leaves rained down from the trees.
“They’re using air bursts!” Sergeant Go shouted. “Stay under the trees as much as possible.”
Bad choice on their part, the professional side of Mountie noted. They need to be using something to penetrate the canopy to detonate around us.
The four dodged around tree trunks as three more explosions sounded behind them, each one successively farther away as they ran. Mountie wasn’t about to stop, though, not until they’d put far more distance between where the rounds had landed and them.
But what if they’re waiting for us ahead?
The firing had stopped, but the worry about fleeing pell-mell through the forest was eating at him. After less than a minute, he called for a halt. He looked back, figuring they’d probably covered 200 meters.
“Was that intended for us?” Jasper asked.
“No, they just decided to fire randomly into the forest, and out of all these square kilometers of trees, we just happened to be there,” Sergeant Go said, barely breathing hard.
Mountie ignored the sarcasm and asked, “How do you think they picked us up? Were we spotted?”
If the sergeant thought his question was foolish, his military discipline didn’t let it show.
“I don’t think so, sir. The forest is pretty dense here. We’ve still got secondary and tertiary growth going.”
Mountie usually didn’t care about vegetation while he was up in the air in his Lizard, but he knew enough about terraforming to know that old growth, even when genetically sped up, still took close to 100 years to create a mature forest. As Nieuwe Utrecht was only 50 or 60 years old, the undergrowth was dense, making visibility limited.
“I’m guessing we got too close to a sensor. They already know by now we’re out here, and you can bet they’re searching for us. They can’t afford to let a platoon run loose in their rear.”
“But we’re not a platoon,” Portillo said.
“Doesn’t matter. They think we’re a platoon, thanks to your runner.
“They tried to reach out with their arty, and they would have wanted to zero us, but they also wanted to let us know they are on to us. If we were a platoon on a mission, that might disrupt the mission and send us packing back to our lines.”
“But they have a location on us, and probably the direction we were heading, right?” Mountie asked.
“Yes, sir. They were pretty close on target. Hell, if the round had penetrated the canopy . . .” he said, leaving that thought unfinished. “So yeah, they had a few scanner hits to give them our direction. And that means they probably have a welcoming party for us up ahead.”
“And we are about seven or eight clicks to the Grangers,” Mountie said, not really asking a question.
“I was hoping to be up in the mountains today and rendezvous sometime tomorrow. But w
e’ve got to change up. Let’s keep going to the east like this for now before turning back north. It’ll add a day to our march, but I think we have to do it.”
“Aye-aye, sir,” Sergeant Go said. “Portillo, keep heading east.”
Mountie stole a glance at Jasper. He didn’t know if this would put them farther from the route up to Spirit Lake or not, but if they ran into a Tenner ambush, they’d never make it to the Lake—or to Federation forces.
He was acutely aware of the fact that they were about out of food. Adding another day to their march meant that much longer without eating, but that couldn’t be helped. His mission was to get Jasper to his family and the Marines and him back to their units, and if that took an extra day, so be it.
Chapter 17
Jasper
“What do you think are in them?” Mountie asked as the four lay on their bellies, trying to see through the trees.
“Look at the fourth one,” Sergeant Go said. “See how low it’s on the rear tracks? I’m guessing ammo or something. But we don’t know for sure.”
“You couldn’t see?”
“No, sir. The tarps are drawn closed. But the trucks aren’t empty; I’m positive of that.”
“So, getting back to my earlier question, what do we do now? We’ve got mercs on our asses, we’ve got another five klicks until we reach the Grangers, and possibly some vital Tenner war equipment just sitting there, ripe for the taking.”
“It’s your call, sir, but you know my opinion. Clause 4, sir.”
“Did you get a solid count of the men?”
“I saw four walking around or in the cabs. Probably just the drivers.”
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