In the Valley (34 page)

Later that fateful morning, he heard the colonel’s voice over the halo net, talking with Thompson about all the women and children leaving the villages up ahead.

The fleeing civilians were expecting something—something that meant bad trouble for him, personally. The portents were ominous. He sifted them much as earlier generations of humans had begged their gods for signs. His stomach churned. He looked into a cart packed with people, trundling away noncombatants. An old man looked into his eyes; the bastard was smiling at him!

Birthday was wild with hate in that moment—the old fuck wanted him dead! If Birthday could have, he would have sprung out of the vehicle and worked the old fuck over with his rifle—the nerve of the bastard, laughing about his death!

His spirits sank lower and lower as he reached Hesar. When the convoy pulled over in the clearing, Birthday didn’t get out. He didn’t say a word as they sat there, either, even though Al-Asad tried to talk with him some.

He just kept thinking over and over again, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.” But he did fear evil. He feared evil to excess, and he knew that today he would come face-to-face with that greatest evil of all—a threat to his mortal being. He could read the tension on people’s faces at the halt as well as anyone; it scared him even more.

He dreaded the moment when everyone climbed back into the ground-cars; it meant that this brief pause, this respite, was coming to an end.

What he feared would happen did, of course. He watched the brief meeting break up, and the soldiers climbed back into the waiting ground-cars. When
the colonel gave the order to go, Birthday threw the vehicle into gear and rolled out; he had no choice.

The drive to Qalat was as bad as any he had ever made—no, it was worse. He couldn’t believe the road was so bad, but it was. The one good thing about the terrible road was that it did take his mind off the battle to come, but that was about it. The bad thing was that it raised his stress level even higher, something that he would not have thought possible one short hour before.

When the ground-cars laagered up in the rocky clearing in Qalat, Birthday was not so secretly relieved that he was not going forward with the assault force; he thought that would have been too much. He thought he would have broken like a glass dropped on Plascrete if he had to go up on foot with the infantry.

Birthday wasn’t a coward. He was just an ordinary man reacting to extraordinary circumstances that his career so far had done a poor job of training him for. He started to drift off in thought when Crest’s gun fired—the sharp noise surprised him half out of his skin.

He jerked so hard when he heard the
bum bum bum
of the automatic grenade launcher that he thought for a second he had dislocated his shoulders. His heart rate shot through the roof; his skin was clammy and cold.

“What the hell was that, Al-Asad?” He almost screamed out the words. Al-Asad, on the gun, told him that Crest had fired at some bad guys on the western ridge. Now that Birthday knew what was going on, it was small consolation. If bad guys were on the ridge, then bad guys were in sight of him.

He hung his head in misery and recited psalms with even more fervor.

When Third Battalion dismounted and men began to disappear into the grove on the road to Kanaghat, Birthday felt abandoned. When, fifteen minutes later, the first gunshots rang out from the valley ahead, Birthday felt fear’s greasy hand upon him again. An hour and a half later, when the garbled halo
messages came crackling from his headset, he prayed that his vehicle would not be called forward into battle.

His hopes were dashed when Crusty said, “Right on, brother! Let’s move!” He felt betrayed. He had no choice but to throttle up and follow the assholes, lest they leave him and his vehicle crew behind to fend for themselves.

The road from Qalat to Kanaghat was twice as bad as the road from Hesar. Birthday wouldn’t have believed it was possible, but it was so. His lack of confidence caused him to lose control of his vehicle. The ground-car rested at a precarious angle half on the river’s bank and half in the river itself.

He felt terrible that he had wrecked and caused everyone to have to delay and help fish him out of the creek. When Crusty forced him out of the driver’s position and took over his ground-car, he was humiliated.

Birthday thought it was the worst day he had ever had. He
knew
it was his worst day when the three ground-cars rode up onto the hot battlefield, with lots of lead going back and forth between the combatants. This was exactly the scenario he had feared. When the antiarmor rocket landed in the field next to his vehicle, he felt like peeing his pants. Whether he wanted to or not, Birthday was engaged in battle.

Later, when their part in the shooting was over and they had parked the ground-cars, he had gotten out of the accursed metal-and-Plastlar thing with shaking knees. There was still some sporadic firing going on, but it was up on the hill, away from where the vehicles had made a parking lot.

Just parking the ground-cars had been a bad experience; they created a laager via the field-expedient method of driving through a couple of rock walls. Their parking job was accompanied by the sound of tumbling boulders and grinding metal.

He took a deep breath and tried to relax. Crusty was nearby, his arms on the twisted fender of a ground-car. He was smoking a near-cig.

Birthday had never in his life even considered smoking, not even the genetically engineered, noncarcinogenic variety of tobacco that made up near-cigs (let alone the practically illegal “straight” cigs that were bound to kill the user). But damn, for some reason he wanted one now, in the worst of ways.

“Hey, Crusty,” Birthday called out to the leather-faced sergeant.

Crusty looked over. “Whatdya want, Birthday?” Crusty looked back toward the hill, where the cheery pops were still sounding off and on.

“Hey, Crusty, let me bum one of those off of you.”

Crusty looked back over at him like he was a two-headed calf. “You want a smoke? Get the fuck outta here.” He reached into his sleeve pocket, pulled out a smoke, and passed it to Birthday. “I suppose you want a light, too, asshole.”

Birthday looked at him and squinted. “As a matter of fact, you prick, I do.”

Crusty laughed and held out his lighter to Birthday. Birthday leaned over, drew in, and coughed something fierce.

He knew it was a cliché, guys having their first real smoke on the battlefield. Birthday was a well-read fellow, and he had read lots of war fiction. Lots of those cheesy books talked about just such a scene as he was in. He thought, with sudden insight, that just because something was a cliché, that didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

That held especially true for Birthday. He had stumbled through a series of clichés that day. He had been the sensitive, novice warrior riding to battle, praying for his life. And now this—he was having his first smoke on the field of battle. All true and all clichés.

Finally the battle, like all battles, ran its course. The team members who had taken place in the assault trudged back to the trucks, looking weary as hell. Everyone mounted up and got ready to leave. Birthday was glad as hell to be leaving that place. So was everyone else.

Birthday had lived through the battle. Many of his fears were realized, but not the ultimate one, the loss of his life. He had survived.

The Baradna Valley was never the same for him again. The next night, as the sun sneaked behind the mountains, the place took on a menace it hadn’t had before. That night, he dreamed terrible, restless dreams. Because of the cold, he had pulled out a sleeping bag and had zipped himself up in it.

Birthday liked to sleep on his belly. That night, the night Lyek died, was no different.

Birthday awoke to the sound of gunfire. He jumped up immediately, but he was tangled in his sleeping bag! He dug for bag’s the zipper; he couldn’t find it. It was a nightmare he had woken from, and it was a nightmare he was still in. Everything seemed to go in slow motion.

There was the chatter of rifle and machine-gun fire, the double boom of an antiarmor rocket. All the while, he struggled with his sleeping bag, looking for a way out. He crashed over something, heard a man curse. Still he couldn’t locate his zipper.

He cried out, “Help me out of here, guys!” Instead of a helping hand, however, he heard laughter. Lots of it. He was furious. He had finally found the zipper. He tore it downward violently and searched for his battle rifle. All the while, guys were cracking up.

“You motherfuckers are assholes!” he screamed. He was in a towering rage. “I could’a fuckin’ got killed, and all you assholes can do is laugh!” Red, the mechanic, was laughing so hard he looked like he was going to die. Birthday stormed out of the tent, lest he do someone violence.

Fuck all those smartasses, he thought. He thought about looking for his fighting position when he saw the colonel and Thompson talking and having a smoke. He listened to the gunfire and willed himself to calm. What a hell of a way to wake up, he thought.

He looked up and cursed the stars above, cursed the day he had come to Juneau 3.

P
aul cursed as he went over his wounded ground-car, 3-4. A strange calm had descended upon Firebase Atarab, and Paul had used the opportunity to pull maintenance upon his suit and vehicle.

His suit had some new gashes and dents on it from the beating it had taken when Paul had had to manually gun, coming out of the fight at Kanaghat. Running the diagnostics on the suit, however, had revealed there were no serious flaws in the machine.

The same, however, could not be said of 3-4. The vehicle had taken a serious beating. There was lots of cosmetic damage. Both front fenders were smashed. A headlight was shattered. The running boards were bent beyond any usefulness, and two of the door handles had been sheared off. The list seemed endless.

Most seriously, however, was the fact that the weapons turret on top was completely inoperative. If a vehicle couldn’t defend its riders from attacks, it was worthless. Despite his best efforts, this truck was broke.

Paul wiped his hands on his uniform and went to tell the colonel the bad news. The colonel was sitting on the ground and drinking coffee by the
mechanics’ tent. He looked to be basking in the morning sun, trying to recharge his energy much as a suit would.

Paul walked up to him. “Hey, sir, three-four can’t be fixed out here.” Paul reached for a smoke and lit up.

The colonel, who had been looking at New Sol with his eyes closed, turned his head back to ground level, opened his eyes, and looked at Paul. “Yeah, I thought as much. Can’t be helped.”

Paul puffed out a lazy cloud of smoke, which the breeze quickly carried away. “What do ya want to do?”

“I haloed with Colonel Fasi about your broke truck this morning. He says the only thing the battalion is doing today is that First Company is out hunting for Shithead.”
Shithead
was the guy who killed Lyek, of course.

The colonel continued, “I think we can get the truck up to Kill-a-Guy and swap it out for another. As it stands right now, 3-4 is useless, and it’s hard to tell how much longer we’re going to stay here. Colonel Fasi says we stay and fight until the dissidents ain’t a threat anymore.”

Paul nodded. “When do ya want to leave?”

“Oh, around 1300 local or so. We can drive from here to Kill-a-Guy in a couple of hours. We’ll drop off your ground-car in the motor pool and grab a quick shower and some hot chow. Then we’ll come back here tomorrow.”

It sounded like a plan to Paul. The thought of a hot shower and a fresh uniform set him all a shiver. Everyone out here at the firebase was just plain filthy; they had been there for weeks, with few creature comforts.

The two men worked out what vehicles would be going back and who would be on what ground-car. Usually, Mighty Mike worked out the logistics of
the trips, but he was off with First Company looking for Shithead. Of course, everyone on the team and the attached mechanics wanted to go back in for obvious reasons, so there were some long faces when some of the guys had to stay.

But the list was made, and the vehicles were staged. At 1300 promptly, the three-vehicle convoy rolled out. Paul, riding with the colonel in his wounded ground-car, had to stand suited up in the hatch again with his M-74. It was an improvised defense, but it was better than nothing, Paul supposed.

As the vast marijuana fields of the Baradna Valley disappeared behind him, Paul could feel some of the tension drain away from his body. The feeling was entirely subconscious, but it was real. As the convoy turned right, or north, onto the provincial highway, Paul felt positively happy. The feeling was tempered, however, with the thought that they would be returning the next day. Still, Paul figured he’d take what he could get, standing with his shoulders projecting above the top of the ground-car.

Riding like that, sticking out of the top of the ground-car in his suit, gave him a feeling like what he imagined the Old Earth panzer drivers must have felt, riding astride a hulking war machine. He had a heck of a view as he scanned his sector for threats.