In the Valley (19 page)

When the sun came up, Second Company could feel free to chase squirters and rummage through the dead for souvenirs.

That was the theory, anyhow.

In the few hours left of daylight, Paul and the colonel obsessed over what they should and shouldn’t bring. They were both mindful of the three-hundred-kilogram normal operating limit of their suits, but they both reasoned they only had one and a half klicks to cover and a mild, four-hundred-meter hill to climb. They were both experienced suit operators and infantrymen, and they both figured they could lay on some extra equipment. The reason they were going crazy about equipment was just in case they had a real fight up on the hill.

Paul wanted to bring extra ammo for the colonel’s grenade launcher. The colonel, in turn, wanted to bring a bulky laser range finder, on the off chance that they had to call in shuttle fire. The list grew. But hey, they figured, it was only a klick and a half.

Only a klick and a half
: Paul would later regret those words.

The sun started to go down. Paul reached into his cams and produced a Fortunate, lit it, and inhaled. The smoke tasted wonderful. Seeing as how he and the colonel would be suiting up soon, he was making up for tonight’s lost time.

His hand shook only slightly. In a suit, yeah, you could get messed up, but you didn’t feel nearly as naked as being in a metal storm with just your cams.

Paul was eager to get it on. This waiting business was the worst. The sun dropped below the horizon. Paul and the colonel stepped into their heavily weighted-down suits.

When he was engulfed by his suit and did his diagnostic checks, he noted that he was carrying 440 kilos, a tad bit over the recommended patrol weight. Paul knew that the max a suit could lift was 750, but a suit would require special bracing to do that. At 440, he was definitely going to be a little top-heavy. But hey, it was only a klick and a half, with a little climb up a hill. All his other readouts were green. The colonel pinged him for his readiness state. Paul said he was good to go.

When it was full dark, the two men moved out to go hunting.

Paul noticed that his suit was giving him strain feedback—what exerted the suit would also exert the operator. It was one reason that force infantry made sure they weren’t physical slouches. Yeah, a complete weakling could operate a suit just fine, but a heavily laden suit required strength to operate. Tonight looked as if it was going to be a workout, and the colonel and he had only moved about two hundred meters.

The colonel launched a micro, and within thirty seconds the feed came online into their halos. Everything looked clear, except there appeared to be a few small wadis crossing the plain en route to the hill. They kept moving north: the colonel in the lead, Paul in trail, in a sort of echelon left formation.

Wow, Paul thought. He had to hit the gym; his suit was really giving him some feedback about the weight. Paul could already feel his arms start to tingle with the exertion. He thought maybe they should have left some of this extra shit back at the camp with the ground-cars. But, checking his readout, they only had 750 meters to go.

He could make it—easy. Then he and the colonel started to hit the “negligible wadis” their remote sensors had detailed for them.

One minute Paul saw the colonel clearly through his visor; the next, the colonel had disappeared. Paul hastened ahead and looked down—the colonel was lying on his back at the bottom of a very sharp-edged wadi, about five meters down.

“Hey, are you all right, sir?”

“Yeah, watch your step, though; these wadis aren’t as minor as we were led to believe.”

No kidding, thought Paul. From the aerial view via micro drone, the wadis looked like dinky rivulets. They weren’t on any map. And from the camp, looking toward the hill, you couldn’t see the wadis at all. No wonder the dissidents had been hauling supplies through there.

The colonel fumed his way out of his predicament and provided Paul with security while he crossed.

On the next wadi, it was Paul’s turn to fall. He rolled about six meters down the side of the hateful ditch and came to a clanging halt at the bottom. So much for stealthy movement, he thought. This was shaping out to be the worst movement he had ever done in a suit, bar none. He cursed the extra weight he was carrying. There was nothing for the two to do but press on. They had to get up to the top of the hill to their ambush position soon, or the whole op would be blown.

Finally, they reached the bottom of the hill. It sure looked bigger and steeper at the foot than what they had seen from a distance in the daylight. Gasping for air, the two started making their way to the top via goat trails that wound their way to the summit.

As was usual, Paul had his suit filters set so that he could smell the air outside. About halfway up the hill from hell, he noticed a strong smell of goat
urine. Of course, he was clinging to the side of the hill and praying for an end to the pain when he smelled it. There was nothing like putting one’s face in the dirt to smell the evidence of the thousands of goats that had passed by.

By the time they finally crested the hill, both men were ready to die. And both of them were cursing their stupidity in carrying such a heavy load. It wasn’t a mistake they would ever make again.

“Hey, Paul,” panted the colonel.

“Yes…sir.” Paul was gasping for air.

“If the shitheads come right now, we’re dead.”

“Yeah, roger, sir.”

They lay there, unable to move, for another couple of minutes. Finally, they got themselves shaken out, unassed their extra gear, and set up the ambush.

And then they waited. A point one never gets from war movies, books, and other silly publications is how much of combat is just plain waiting. And even after the waiting, when the action happens, the results are frequently ambiguous.

But Paul and the colonel were in luck tonight. Paul was scanning the northern sector, and the colonel was scanning the south, back toward the camp. The colonel pinged Paul and then pinged Bashir and Z back at camp. The bad guys were coming out of the mountains to the west—the colonel’s plan had worked.

Paul sat, scanned his sector, and kept looking at the micro feed. If the bad guys continued on their track, they would come right down the wadi at the base of their mountain.

The colonel pinged Paul with a text message: “I see five personnel, all armed, with six donkeys. Unknown supplies on donkeys. My plan: engage when hostiles within 150 meters. Acknowledge.”

Paul pinged back: “Roger.”

It was 0233 hours. The next seventeen minutes, the length of time it took for the dissidents to reach the kill zone, seemed to take forever.

The waiting ended when the colonel pinged Paul: “Engaging in thirty seconds with 40 mm HE. Will follow up with my rifle.”

Paul scanned his sector and watched the micro feed on the lower left of his view.

Thump, thump, thump
. The automatic grenade launcher spoke.
Thump. Thump. Thump
. Then,
crump, crump, crump
as the rounds detonated.
Crump, crump, crump.

Paul saw the men and donkeys disappear in black-and-white thermal blooms on his feed. The colonel had systematically destroyed the mule train.

The colonel went to audio. “Good effect—six rounds fired. We have some survivors still showing hostile intent. Engaging with M-74.”

Paul continued to watch the black-and-white thermal micro-drone feed. Some guys down there were squirming around with weapons in their hands. Paul could easily hear the screaming of the wounded donkeys from atop his hilltop perch.

Crack
. One of the squirmers quit squirming.
CRACK
. And so it went. Within thirty seconds, the ambush was over.

“All stations this net, be advised: at 0255 hours ambush terminated. Result: five enemy personnel killed. Second Company, sweep at first light. Five and Two-Three will remain on station until sweep complete.”

“Five out.”

At dawn, Bashir and his merry men swept toward the hill that Paul and the colonel had sprung the ambush from. With daylight working for them and
being lightly equipped, it only took Second Company about half an hour to get to the scene of carnage at the base of the hill. As they picked over the dead, the two suited soldiers on the ridge provided security for the Juneau Army. Z looked over the dissidents to see if any needed help. None did.

Paul sure was glad to come down off of Goat Piss Hill. He and the colonel never packed that heavy again. Lady Luck had been with them, but she was a fickle bitch.

L
ady Luck had definitely spurned Paul on his rotation here on Samarra 4. So far, all his “combat tour” had consisted of was guarding a lousy hotel in the diplomatic sector of the capital city, New Marseilles.

Samarra 4 was a dry world, with little native life. The nearby Great Ocean was a shallow, saline thing with vast reefs of stromatolites, a sort of algal life form. Life hadn’t made it to shore yet on this world, so the earliest human settlers had brought life with them, in the form of palm trees and other terrestrial Mediterranean life.

Slowly but surely, they had cultivated the soil and irrigated it liberally. With time, the colony had developed food independence, a major step on a developing world.

Even in the capital, however, there was still much more sand than soil. It blew everywhere. The world was given to awe-inspiring sandstorms; Paul had lived through one just last week.

For a born-and-raised product of the Eastern Hardwoods Forest on Old Earth, Samarra wasn’t much to look at. Worse yet, it was home to a particularly vicious breed of neofascist dissidents who just loved to set bombs in marketplaces and hotels—like the hotel it had been Paul’s duty to guard these last seven months.

After signing back up in the force, Paul had been sent to Rio 4, a typical garrison world. There had been a whole brigade stationed there to guard the frontier against any Sino intrusions. Of course, if the Chinese bloc was really intent on taking a world, all they had to do was drop rocks on the planet from orbit, and the game would be over. However, the force made the assumption that if a hostile human force wanted a planet, they would want it reasonably intact.

That had been the case on Szeged 7 fifty years prior, when the Sino bloc had landed forces to dispute the ownership of the world with the federation. The fighting back then had gone on for years; finally, a peace agreement had been reached that effectively split the world in two, right along its equator.

After the Szeged War, both sides—the Pan-American Federation and the Sino (or Eurasian) bloc—had just looked at each other across their various spheres of influence in the galaxy. The Euros, of course, played both sides off against each other while maintaining trade ties with both.

And among the one hundred or so planets that had been settled, no one yet had discovered a whiff of sentient life.

Sentient life
. Paul whistled in derision. As far as he was concerned, the people on Samarra didn’t count either. He couldn’t see why settlers would want to come to a place like this—fifty degrees on a typical day in the summer, muddy and cold (about five degrees) in the winter, which felt especially cold after one had acclimated to the other season.

Paul shrugged; he was comfortable and buttoned up in his suit. He could smell the spicy air of the desert, but his suit kept him comfy at twenty-five degrees. Outside, his suit told him, it was forty-seven degrees.

He scanned his sector in front of the hotel. At 40 meters there was a row of date palms, at 75 meters there was the pull off for ground-cars, and at 225 meters there was the neighboring building, the local Ministry of Something-or-Other. Paul had heard what they did there once, but had since forgotten.

It was another boring day, as far as he was concerned. Using suited troopers to guard a hotel—get out of here, he thought. But still, it was his duty, and he intended to do it as best he could.

He looked at his suit’s status display; he had the full load-out of ammunition, and his power levels were green. He had his motion detector set for 270 degrees and one hundred meters. The hotel had its own security feeds, and his halo was slaved to their systems. In other words, there wasn’t much of a chance of someone sneaking up on him.

Paul had control of a shift of guards at the hotel; there were three other entrances, and each entrance had one of his troopers by it. He guarded the main entrance. One trooper had the day off as a “reserve”; his junior soldiers rotated the day off.

At 1800 local, plus or minus an hour to keep any hostiles from nailing down their rotation, the guard shift would change. Paul and his crew would head indoors, pull suit maintenance, and relax. Seeing as how it was 1435, Paul still had a while to maintain his vigil.

As he checked the halo feeds of the troopers in his section, he reflected that he had enjoyed Rio 4. The population was primarily Hispanic, and the women were beautiful and liked a good party. Looking out at the orange sky and dusty streets of New Marseilles, Paul remembered Rio with a wistful sigh.

Rio had been a green world with lots of swamps, which made for interesting maneuvers when he was out in the field with his battalion. More than once he had sunk in bogs up to his suit visor, and more than once he had helped out other suited troopers in that same predicament. Rio had been a world of heavy rainfall and dense forests of ferns. Many of the ferns were so big they could almost be called trees. Their suits automatic camouflaging system would change to a mottle of bright and dark greens, and they would move stealthily through the bush, practicing their deadly trade.