Son of Justice (20 page)

The carrier had been moving slowly on a westerly track as the team exited. This allowed them to each step from the vehicle safely, without fear of landing on their fellow soldiers. Eli took care to observe the others’ landings and noted that their spacing was correct and as predicted. When the last member of the squad, Private Turner, kicked up his own snow cloud without any visible issues, Eli asked for a situation report. All members of the team responded positively before performing the preplanned check of their systems.

Within moments of landing, Eli received the notification he had been expecting. It was an electronic message detailing the coordinates of their first objective. The mission was still a mystery, and he assumed he would find out what it entailed when they arrived. He waited until his systems check was completed, then quickly read the message that appeared on the upper right of his visor. Once he had the coordinates plugged into his system, he forwarded the message to the rest of the team and directed his suit to load the coordinates into the other suits.

Two minutes later, the team was headed west toward their first checkpoint.

* * *

The going was much slower for the team than Eli had anticipated. After more than an hour of movement, they had covered only two kilometers, which was only halfway to the first check point. His initial concern regarding limited visibility in the cold, dark terrain had been unnecessary. The optics package engineered into the armor was more than adequate—excellent even. The issue was the terrain. Though solid underfoot, the landscape was a series of tall, craggy mounds and towers of frozen ice. Interspersed between the mounds and towers were narrow, pathlike breaks that could be easily navigated, but didn’t allow a direct line of march, and this exercise was basically a timed event. The team leaders were awarded Sift points in direct correlation to the time it took for their teams to complete the mission.

Because of the broken terrain, Eli had been presented with a choice: speed or caution. Speed was an enticing option. With their armored suits, they could jump over the obstacles that they encountered easily enough. The problem was in the landings. What if a canyon or some other unseen danger waited on the other side of their jump? Despite the lure of speed, Eli opted for caution. This was only an exercise after all, and he refused to put any of the soldiers assigned to his team in unnecessary danger. As a result, they wound back and forth among the plateaulike towers, weaving a pattern that took them in the general direction they needed to go. He silently hoped that Crimsa was having similar problems on the sun side of the planet, and was also using caution over speed. Not that it mattered. All Eli could do, he reminded himself, was the best that he could do.

Control what you can control. Focus on the mission.

The speaker in his helmet pinged softly to let him know the auto check he had programmed into his suit had been completed and everything was okay.

“Team, check in. Status?” He could see each person’s position on the map that displayed on the bottom left of his visor. Everyone was exactly where they were supposed to be, but thirty minutes had passed since their last verbal exchange. Having them relay their status was a good way to keep them alert.

“Ming,” the soldier in line behind him immediately replied. “All systems green.”

“Aquino, all systems are green.”

“Samna. All systems . . . are, uh . . . green?”

Eli stopped moving forward and listened as Wagner, the soldier in line behind Samna reported all systems green. He did not wait for Turner, who was the last in their line, to respond.

“Samna. Are you asking me or telling me? Confirm all systems are green.”

“Um,” the soldier replied. Eli thought he detected a waver in her voice. “They show green. But . . .”

“But what, Samna? Speak up. What’s the issue?”

“Is anyone else c-c-cold? The bio-temp systems are reading green, but my suit f-f-feels . . . colder than it should.”

Eli opened a hinge on his left forearm and tapped in the code that would allow him to access Samna’s systems. While all of his personal systems were accessed by voice-, eye-, or body-control, he could only access another’s systems by using a manual interface built into the keypad on his suit’s left arm.

He pulled up her suit’s readings and scanned them quickly. They all seemed normal, but if they were, why was she feeling cold? The quavering of her words indicated a very real, physical issue. It wasn’t until he bypassed the automated systems and commanded the sensors in Samna’s suit to take and report the current outside and inside temps that he saw the problem. The outside temperature reading matched the one his suit was reporting: negative ten degrees. The inside temp, though, while not immediately life-threatening, was barely above freezing. As he was considering what was happening in Samna’s suit, and debating on what actions they should take, the temperature in the suit dropped another degree. He immediately initiated a diagnostic run of the suit’s bio-systems. It was a deeper scan than the cursory checks they had been performing and would hopefully pinpoint the problem so they could fix it. A moment later, the suit lost another degree of warmth.

“Everyone. Initiate a full diagnostic run of your suit’s bio-systems right away. Report in when they are complete.”

Eli initiated his own diagnostic and then pulled up a map of the Telgoran landscape. As he was plotting a new course for the team, the results of Samna’s diagnostic run popped up on his visor. As unlikely as it seemed, she had a hole somewhere in the agsel casing of her suit. Despite the suit’s efforts to maintain a comfortable environment for its owner, it was only a matter of time before the temperate inside the PEACE armor mirrored the temperature on the outside. Which meant they only had one option. Get Samna to safety, as quickly as possible. He considered calling the carrier they had jumped from back to assist, but he doubted that would be allowed. There was also no good place for the carrier to land, which meant this problem had to be solved by the group.

“Samna’s suit has been compromised. I’m sending new coordinates to each of you. We’re changing direction and will be moving out to the south right away.”

“Jayson, this is Turner. What about the mission?”

“We’ve got a new mission now, Turner. We’re heading south toward the equator.”

“But that’s over ten kilometers away.”

“Noted,” Eli stated, struggling to keep his voice calm. “We’re going to be picking up the pace, everyone. We can’t continue weaving through these paths. It’s time we went up and over these rock formations.”

“Now we’re talking,” Aquino quipped. “Let’s see what these suits can really do!”

“I’m pleased you’re excited, Aquino,” Eli replied. “I want you in the lead. We need to be quick, but safe. Think you can do that?”

“You know it, Jayson.”

“Samna, you’re behind Aquino. I’ll be behind you. Then Ming, Wagner, and Turner.” Eli didn’t like the idea of putting someone else at the front of their line, but he needed to keep an eye on Samna. If she faltered or stumbled, he wanted to know it right way. She would probably be fine, but he had to make sure, and the best place to do that was from directly behind her. “Questions or comments, anyone?”

Again, no one had anything. “Okay then, let’s move.”

Aquino took a running start, then leaped to the top of a rock formation to their south. Eli watched Samna complete her own jump, then followed suit. He kept an eye on the three bringing up the rear to make sure they followed, then turned his attention to the recruit to his front. Samna seemed fine, for now. He checked her suit for the current temp and noted that it still remained a few degrees above freezing. Her shivering indicated she was already experiencing mild hypothermia and the sensors from her suit showed her core temp to be slightly lower than it should be. The movement from the faster pace should help her body retain its heat, but he knew she was in danger. Where caution had been required before, they now needed speed and movement. The potential danger to Samna’s health justified the increased risk of a bad jump.

They covered the first kilometer slowly, with Aquino jumping onto each successive rock formation, then down into the arroyolike pathway on the far side, then up onto the next formation, then back down again. It wasn’t until Aquino tried jumping across a particularly narrow arroyo to the next elevated plateau that they picked up the pace. Before long, they were completing jumps across all but the longest rifts and that’s when they really began making good time.

An hour later, they reached a point near the equator where they turned off their night optics and began navigating in the twilightlike light of the sun. Five minutes later, they reached the point where the sun was just peeking above the horizon, and Eli called a halt. The external temperature was now reading a relatively balmy sixty-six degrees Fahrenheit, eighteen degrees Celsius.

“How you doing, Samna?” He read her internal body temperature and saw it had lost another degree in their journey, but was still above the danger point of severe hypothermia. They had dodged a bullet.

“Still c-c-cold. But it feels warmer already.”

“You should get out of your suit. You’ll get warmer quicker without the contact against your body.” She didn’t disagree and began the process of dismounting the armor. Soon, she stood before them in the uni-body fighting suit they all wore underneath. “Now, let’s take a look and see if we can find the problem.”

A quick search turned up a perfectly round hole, roughly the same diameter of a pea—
or a drill
, Eli thought—in the right underarm area of her suit. It looked too perfect to have been the result of an accident, and Eli’s first thought involved big, green aliens with overlarge ears. He fumed silently. It was one thing to sabotage his performance, another to put his fellow recruit’s life at risk.

“Will you be okay on your own, Samna?” He got a nod in return. “Good. Get warmer, then re-suit. I’ll alert the unit to pick you up here as soon as they can. It shouldn’t take long.”

“You going back to complete the mission?”

“Oh yeah,” he acknowledged. The longer he thought about this situation, the more difficult it became to keep the anger from his voice. He took a deep breath and tried to steady his thoughts.

Control what you can control. Focus on the mission.

“I’m leading from here on,” he informed the rest of the team, then turned to the north. Fortunately, Aquino had showed them a better way to navigate the frozen terrain. Now they just had to make up for lost time. “I’m gonna be moving fast, so keep up.”

* * *

They made good time over the now-familiar terrain. The over-the-top method that Aquino had discovered on their trek to the south was a much better method for traveling than the safe, but slow winding through the valleys below. Despite the improvement in speed, the detour they had been forced to take had put them behind schedule, and he wondered for just a moment how Crimsa was doing on the other side of the Telgoran habitable zone. The brief thought urged him into a faster pace, and he scanned his visor for the positions of his team. A quick glance told him they were keeping up just fine, so he kept pushing ahead at the new pace.

Finally, after what seemed like hours, Eli spotted a marker flag in the distance. He verified that the marker matched their course and destination and made his way toward it. Upon arriving, he noted the large black box at the base of the flag.

Eli wasted no time. He had the box emptied by the time Turner, bringing up the rear, arrived at the checkpoint.

Six defense force weapons were now carefully arranged around the marker flag: a Ninny sniper rifle, two standard issue plasma pulse rifles, two Ginny shotgunlike weapons, and a single, large Boomer antitank weapon.

A message announced its arrival with a ping and a flashing, red icon on Eli’s visor. He keyed it open and read it quickly:

Mission
: One shot, one kill

Objective
: Eliminate each target using one of the weapons provided.

Rules of engagement
: Each weapon has one round, so can only be fired once. Each team member will be assigned a weapon by the Team Leader and is responsible for destroying their designated target. Team members cannot be assigned multiple weapons/targets.

Scoring Parameters
: Points will be awarded for successfully destroying an assigned target, using the following schema:

Target 1: 25-centimeter circle. Ninny Sniper Rifle. Distance 300 meters. 10 points.

Target 2: Tank silhouette. Boomer Antitank Weapon. Distance 300 meters. 5 points.

Target 3: Human silhouette. Pulse Rifle. Distance 100 meters. 3 points.

Target 4: Human silhouette. Pulse Rifle. Distance 100 meters. 3 points.

Target 5: Human silhouette. Ginny Shotgun. Distance 15 meters. 3 points.

Target 6: Human silhouette. Ginny Shotgun. Distance 15 meters. 3 points.

Success Criteria
: Successfully hitting a target, with the assigned weapon receives the points described. Failure to hit a target, or hitting a target with the incorrect weapon receives zero points.

Time Constraints
: None

“Orders received. Forwarding now,” he announced, then keyed a command that sent the message to the rest of the team.

While they read the message, he pulled up the performance reports for each of his charges that had been downloaded into his system files at the start of this exercise. He scanned them quickly, focusing on the weapons scores each had received over the course of their training. It didn’t take long to see the problem. Samna was the only one of the team who had scored better than “average” during Ninny training. She was ranked “expert” with the weapon, which Eli respected. The long-range, cartridge-fire rifle—what his dad called a “sniper” rifle—was difficult to master and required a high degree of patience and precision. Although skilled with most weapons, Eli hadn’t fared well on the Ninny course four weeks earlier. As someone who was used to mastering any type of weapon, his inability to account for all of the environmental factors that went into being a good long range marksman had frustrated him.