The Heart of Valour (22 page)

“No-fire zone?

“None of the scenarios I downloaded ever included making camp right on top of a node. Every camp has been a minimum of one kilometer away. It looks like the drones have safety protocols that keep them from firing near their controllers and by camping tight and forcing the Others to work through that on top of everything else, we’ll delay them gaining control of this specific CPN.”

“Unless they’ve already got control and we’re walking into an ambush.”

“We’ll watch for that, sir.”

He scratched his throat under the collar of the bodyliner. “Or during the night they could gain control of everything but the safety protocols and ambush us in the morning.”

“That’s possible, sir. We’ll take that into account when we move out.”

“Business as usual, then, Gunny? Stay sharp and out of the bag?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the three drones behind us?” He jerked his head.

Torin turned, looking past the Marines, past the thick tufts of rushes stuck up through the ice, drifts of snow fingering out from their leeward side. She smiled. “We’ve got three Marines who shot Expert, sir.”

* * *

Silver-gray sky, silver-gray snow; Stone checked his sights again and thanked any gods who were listening that the drones were not silver gray. At least the drones they’d seen so far hadn’t been. These could be, of course.

A rustle to his right.

“Calm down, Cho,” he murmured, eyes on the sky. No point in shutting down all energy systems if the drones sensed movement.

“They should be here by now. What if they changed heading?”

“Gunny said to give them an hour. Said if they haven’t passed by then, they won’t.”

“Well, how long’s it been?”

“Twenty-seven minutes.”

“Seems longer.”

He wasn’t arguing. It had been the longest twenty-seven minutes he’d ever spent lying camouflaged in a snowbank.

“What if we can’t see them,” Cho muttered. “Snow and sky’s the same color.”

“Not to me,” Lirit snorted from Stone’s left. “I can see…”

“Incoming.” He shifted slightly to better track the center drone. “Twelve o’clock.”

“Got them.”

“They’re moving fast.”

“Yeah, but right toward us.”

“On my word.” Gunnery Sergeant Kerr had put Stone in charge.
Because someone has to be,
she’d said.
And you’re marginally the best shooter. You have to hit them simultaneously; if they start evasive action, you’ll be SOL.
It wasn’t exactly shooting at a moving target; it was more like shooting at a target that kept getting bigger. The question became: how much bigger should they be allowed to get?

“Stone…”

“Wait for it.”

The center drone filled his gunsight: triangular wings clearly visible, folded extremities a shadow against the main casing. He refused to look up and see how close it actually was.

“Acquire your target.”

“One acquired.”

“Three acquired.”

“Two acquired.” Maybe he didn’t need to say it. He wasn’t sure. “Fire on silent three count.”

Deep breath on one. Hold it on two. Squeeze the trigger on three.

Three shots so close together they sounded like one. An instant after that, the echo bounced back off the ridge.

Two drones flared red and dropped out of the sky.

The third drone hit the ice and didn’t bounce.

The crack as it broke through sounded like a fourth shot.

The sounds as the ice continued to crack brought up memories of a sinking tank and Stone threw himself back out of the drift, tripped over the rushes and landed in a tangled pile with both Cho and Lirit who had, evidently, done the same damned fool thing. The di’Taykan got to her feet first. Head cocked, she held up a hand for silence.

The other two Marines complied. The ice continued to crack.

“Son of a fukking…”

And then it stopped.

It was suddenly so quiet, Stone thought he could hear his nose hair freeze.

“Didn’t come this far. We’re okay.”

Crack.

“Not that humping our butts out of here isn’t a damned good idea!”

* * *

As the only Marine besides the major with recon experience, Major Svensson had put Torin on point with one/three—moving one/one, too jumpy to be sharp, into the body of the moving platoon.

“From here on in, we teach these Marines how to stay alive and that means we utilize all that government training we’ve benefited from over the years.” He swept a pale gaze across his NCOs. “Since we’ve got a whole platoon of greenies under attack, we’ll all be getting our hands dirtier than we might be used to.”

Dirty wasn’t a problem—cold, though, that was making things a bit dangerous as Torin, on her stomach, cheek pressed against the snow, both arms buried almost shoulder-deep, had begun to lose feeling in her fingers. On the other hand, the cold—or more specifically an eddy in the vapor plume her breath made in the cold air—had given away the position of the upper filament just before her shin would have hit the lower, so she had no plans of complaining too loudly.

“All right, Ashlan…” She worked her right hand free. “… give me back the scarab.”

“I still can’t believe you saw that line,” he muttered as he set the tool back in her hand, waiting until her fingers had closed around it before he let go.

“I didn’t see it.” She carefully worked the blades back into the spool’s access hole, right hand pressed against her left arm as it moved lest she cut anything better left in one piece. “I saw a pattern I couldn’t identify.”

“But you knew what it was,” he insisted.

“Experience is the best teacher, Ashlan; everything on Crucible has been faced by Marines in combat more than once. Next time,
you’ll
know what it is.” It had been almost seven years since she’d run into this particular bit of nasty business—although
run into
was a bad choice of words since not running into it was the preferred choice. Once seen and the spool found, it was still a tricky bastard to disarm. Unfortunately, it had been longer than seven years for the major, Annatahwee had only worked on simulators, and Jiir’s arms were too short. “Nobody move.”

Working in micro movements that made the muscles in her forearms ache, she touched the blunt edge of the blade to the first line of tension, then the second, and cut the third, careful not to even touch the fourth. She was close enough to be safely under the filament’s rewind path, and if the other four stayed where she put them…

Someone cried out.

No point in asking who’d moved when turning to look would answer the question. Snapping the scarab closed as it cleared the hole, she slid it into her combats as she rolled up onto her feet.

The handful of snow Lumenz held against his chin turned rapidly red. His expression as much embarrassment as pain, he fumbled in his vest with his other hand for a tube of sealant. Even Marines able to wade ankle-deep through battlefield gore could freeze at the sight of their own blood and Torin was pleased to see Lumenz hadn’t.

As he tossed the snow aside and sprayed the slice closed, she stepped closer. He stiffened, waiting for a reaming out, but she only nodded as he spat out a mouthful of foul-tasting chemical, and said, “You’re lucky you didn’t lose your nose.”

On either side of an impressive protuberance, his cheeks flushed.

“Bury the bloody snow.” Swinging her weapon around into her hands, she double-tongued her implant to let the major know the path had been cleared. “All right, one/three, let’s move.”

“Gunny?”

“Lumenz.”

“Why couldn’t we have marked the trap for the platoon and walked around it?”

“Because the filaments don’t always kill.” She allowed the rage, present since she’d identified the trap, to rise. “They…
wound
indiscriminately.” She hated the damned things; not only because of the damage they could inflict on their actual targets but because of the wild animal lying legless and still thrashing beside the first one she’d ever seen. Swearing in all three of the Corps languages, her sergeant had slit its throat and then disarmed the trap. No one in the squad mentioned that they were losing time and every one of them saluted the animal as they passed, its torment having saved the Marine on point a similar fate.

“But, Gunny, the time…”

“Fuk the time.” They were racing the Others’ ability to hack the security on the drones, and any time spent not moving toward Dunstan Mills might come back to kick their collective asses later. To his credit, the major had left the decision of disarming the filament up to her. Even knowing that the Others were activating lessons in the shittier parts of war all along the trail, and that they couldn’t safely make up the time, she still couldn’t,
wouldn’t
leave that fukking thing up.

Considering what they’d already run into, she circled around an old piece of deadfall rather than stepping over it, one/three following carefully behind like heavily armed ducklings.
Tentative
heavily armed ducklings.

“Caution, not fear,” she snapped.

“Yes, Gunnery Sergeant!”

In unison. While they might be afraid of what they’d face on the trail, they were definitely afraid of her. Not good. She dialed the rage back, packed it down until she could stuff the memory back into the compartment marked
do not open
it had been dragged out of. A deep breath of cold, damp air. These Marines were here on Crucible to be taught, so she’d teach them.

“Ashlan…”

The di’Taykan lengthened his stride until he was beside her. “Yes, Gunnery Sergeant.”

“How do we know this trap was rigged recently?”

“Um… because we just got here? The enemy’s either watching us on a satellite feed or they’re extrapolating our path from the topography,” he added hurriedly when she raised a
what the hell are you talking about
brow. “They couldn’t have figured out we were going to choose this particular gully until two or three kilometers after we came off the swamp, so they had to have rigged the trap recently.”

“Granted. But not the answer I was looking for. Thing is…” Another deep breath. “…specifics change, so you want to keep things as simple as possible. Filament is always rigged right in front of pursuit because it’s indiscriminate; dead or injured wildlife will give its position away.”

The silence had a different feel now. The Corps had little use for Marines unable to connect the dots and she could almost hear these three making connections.

“Gunny…”

No, she was not filling in details. “If you run into filament—and trust me when I say I mean that euphemistically—it means that you’re climbing up the enemies’ butt. It could mean they want to slow you down while they set up an ambush in better terrain or that they’re heading for somewhere they think they can defend, and they’re slowing you down to make sure they can get there.”

“But today…”

Torin shrugged, cutting off the question. “Today it’s probably nothing more than a simple ‘if, then’ statement. If Platoon 71 goes this way, then we’ll activate this. If it goes that way, then we’ll activate that. And as soon as we’ve reprogrammed enough drones, we’ll drop everything we’ve got on them and wipe them off the planet.”

“They may not.”

“Yeah, they will.” A triangular crack in the rock ahead and to the left was large enough for a drone. She brought the team to a stop, sent Lumenz to check it out, and kept a light on it as they passed. “Because it’s what I’d do.”

“If they know we’re here, then they know where we’re going. On this heading, there’s only one logical place to make a stand.” Ashlan seemed to be thinking aloud.

Torin appreciated that—both for the thinking and the aloud. “And?”

“And they’ll have baked a
crif
,” muttered a dry voice from the rear.

Kaimi, the second di’Taykan in the squad, had a cynicism unusual in her species. It made her seem remarkably Human in spite of the lavender hair and eyes, but Torin had long since learned not to fall into the “sounds like must be like” trap. Ducking under a low hanging branch, she snorted. “Even so, knowing when and where the battle’s going to be beats planning on the fly.”

The di’Taykan’s mittened hand came into her peripheral vision as he reached out to move the next branch along. “You make it sound so simple.”

“Well, it’s war; it’s not rocket science.” Then the memory of what had once been accomplished by three Marines with a surface-to-air missile launcher, a game chip, and the guts from a field kitchen twisted her mouth into a grin. “Usually,” she repeated.

* * *

“It’s good to be more than just an observer, isn’t it, Gunny?”

Torin, watching Sakur and Jonin carefully moving Staff Sergeant Beyhn from the stretcher into his shelter, wondered how the hell Major Svensson expected her to respond to that. As far as she was concerned, she’d never been an observer. Her job was to fulfill mission objectives while keeping those Marines she was responsible for alive. She had been responsible for the major and Dr. Sloan; she was now responsible for the major, Dr. Sloan, and Platoon 71. Her hand rose to touch the small metal cylinder holding the remains of Private di’Lammin Oshyo—it was nothing more than a matter of degree.

Was it good to be back in actual combat instead of playing silly buggers against a system that guaranteed only the extraordinarily stupid or inordinately unlucky could get hurt? Actually, yes. Everyone liked their work to have meaning.

And no.

Given the present circumstances, only a fool or an optimist would assume they’d seen their final KIA, and Torin was neither.

Fortunately, the major kept talking. “I hated being sent to Crucible while Marines were fighting a war. If I was combat ready, I wanted to be back in combat. You know?”

She did. “Yes, sir.”

Which did not mean that he wanted the war to come here just so he could be back in the thick of it. Too many officers liked to make it all about them, but Major Svensson knew there was war enough to go around.

They’d kept moving through dusk and into early dark in order to make it to the theoretical safety of the next CPN. Torin had half expected the drones to attack at their closest perimeter, and when that attack never happened thanked any gods listening that they’d beaten the Others’ reprogramming. She only hoped that the other three platoons of recruits spread out over the planet were doing as well.