“JUST USE ENOUGH EXPLOSIVE TO MAKE A LOUD bang,” I warned Robbie. “We want to save as much as we can for later, when it might do some real good.” I had already given Claw the same order. He would be the other one planting a little package of sticky-boom—what we called the general-purpose explosive we had been given.
“I know what to do,” Robbie replied. “Doesn’t take much of a charge to bring down trees this size, if you know where to put it. And I do. Got in trouble once when I was a teenager, using homemade black powder to fell trees one Halloween.”
“I don’t need your life story,” I said over his subdued chuckle. He was already working the charge into shape, as casually as if it were dough for biscuits. “Just get the stuff planted and get back here out of the way.”
We really weren’t rushed for time, but I didn’t want to give Robbie the idea he could slack off. My squad had used only three of the allotted fifteen minutes to get where we were going and choose the trees we were going to blast. The larger of the two, the one I had given to Robbie, looked like it might fall into the nearest building—a structure with a lot of regularly spaced windows—if the charge was planted correctly. I thought the building might be residential. I had already pointed out the way the tree leaned to Robbie. He had taken the hint with a nod and a wink. We weren’t going to start shooting at civilians until somebody started shooting at us, and the explosive charges certainly weren’t heavy enough to do any direct structural damage to the buildings, but the lieutenant didn’t say anything about not giving enemy civilians a scare. A tree branch coming in the bedroom window in the middle of the night ought to at least startle anyone inside, especially right on the heels of a nearby explosion.
Robbie hurried off, rifle in one hand, explosive packet in the other. Claw was already at the other tree, thirty yards from Robbie’s. Placing the explosives and arming them with small command-control blasting caps didn’t take either man more than thirty seconds. They hurried back to their fire teams and we all moved farther back, around corners, out of the way of any loose wood that might fly away when we popped the charges. A sliver of wood propelled with the velocity of a bullet can do just as much damage as if it had come out of a rifle. I was at the corner. I had to be in line of sight to trigger the two little bombs when Lieutenant Taivana gave the command.
I kept glancing at the timeline displayed at the top of my helmet faceplate. We had nearly ten minutes left of the fifteen the lieutenant had set. What do we do if an enemy patrol wanders in on us before then? I wondered, surprised that I hadn’t thought of that before. Finding things to worry about is one of my strong suits. I glanced at Tonio. He was the platoon sergeant, the senior man on the scene, so it would be up to him. He was nearly a block away, with my second fire team, too far away for me to ask without breaking radio silence.
The men in my fire team were flat on their stomachs, close to the wall of the building, minimizing their exposure, stretching out in an arc behind me—watching for any enemy units that might sneak up on us. Across the way, the men in the other fire team were also down.
Five minutes left. I hadn’t heard any sounds of nearby fighting. I wondered where all the other spec ops squads that were supposed to be infiltrating the city were. There were supposed to be a lot of us working. We were still close enough to the edge of town that we might have seen some of the other teams, even if just as blurred movement hurrying across open spaces. We were keyed up enough that even the merest hint of motion would have drawn a glance.
I put the side of my helmet against the building next to me, the sound pickup over my left ear right against the bricks. If there’s any machinery running inside a building—heating, cooling, or just about anything else—you can sometimes feel, or hear, a low-pitched hum if you’re in contact with the structure. Even with the power off, there might be some sound, though certainly nothing as loud as it would be with electricity flowing to all the machinery. But I heard nothing at all. Maybe the building was deserted, as unlikely as that seemed.
I tried to swallow but found that difficult. My mouth and throat were dry. The tension of waiting was starting to get to me. My palms were sweating. I wiped them on my uniform, one hand at a time, always keeping the other hand on my rifle.
Three minutes left. I blinked and looked across the sixty-yard square park—or whatever the locals might call it—in front of us. Little squares of trees, bushes, and flowers spread all around the city. There are a few towns on Earth that try to maintain something like that, parks, green-ways, but never so … precisely, so completely as the tonatin had managed here. At least not in any town I had seen.
“Squad leaders, mark thirty seconds from now for action. Acknowledge.” Lieutenant Taivana’s voice over the radio—automatically interpreted by the translator button in my ear—startled me so badly that I jumped a little.
“Drak, Roger,” I said, my acknowledgment almost running over the words of Sergeant Chouvana, the porracci leader of our second squad. The other squad leaders got their acknowledgments in. I was staring at my timelineagain, waiting for those final thirty seconds to disappear. They seemed to evaporate in slow motion. When I noticed that I had started holding my breath I inhaled deeply, then let it out and took in another.
Silently, I counted down the last ten seconds, lips moving, my thumb on the detonator, hand stuck out around the corner. Twenty-nine. Thirty. I pushed the button and dropped flat, my face against the ground, as I pulled my hand back. By the time I remembered that I hadn’t cranked down the gain on my external audio pickups, it was too late to rectify the error.
Well, the explosions weren’t deafening. We hadn’t used enough sticky-boom for that. And only the two charges my squad had planted were really close—the nearest thirty-five yards from me. But the blast was loud enough to drag a wince out of my throat, and my ears rang for a minute or more after the trees fell and the last bits of wooden shrapnel stopped showering down. I can’t really say that I heard the explosions set off by the other squads. They were farther away, no larger than the two we had set, and near enough to simultaneous that they got caught up by the closer noises.
Blast of explosives, crack of wood breaking, glass cracking, limbs scraping against walls, trunks collapsing through their leaves. The smell of explosives and burned wood caught my nose, making it twitch reflexively. When I looked back around the corner, I saw that the tree Robbie had blown had indeed fallen against the structure I had thought it would hit, and there were a lot of broken windows. Apparently, the concussive force of the two explosions—small though those blasts were—had broken more windows than the tree itself had.
I also heard one high-pitched, continuing wail—sort of a drawn-out scream—coming from inside that building. At least we knew that the city hadn’t been completely deserted. After that first sound of pain or fear, I gradually became aware of other noises coming from the buildings around the park—enough to make it clear that there were people in those buildings, reacting to what we had done, or to what had happened to them.
“Let’s get out of here,” Tonio said, speaking over my squad channel. He got up and gestured. We had been given a rendezvous earlier. We had to cross the park block we had just bombed to get to the rendezvous on the direct route, and this was the time for directness.
As I got up, I spotted one shard of wood, two feet long and an inch or so thick, stuck into the brick wall just around the corner from where I had been lying. There had been that much force behind the blast. I whistled under my breath. Then I had other things to think of. I saw the ground in front of me suddenly erupt in a tiny explosion of dust—the sort you get when a bullet hits pavement at an angle. Then there was another, a couple of feet from the first. Someone was shooting at us, single shots, not automatic fire. I shouted a warning over my squad channel, then pointed off to the right, the direction the shot had apparently come from.
“On the roof, near the far corner!” It was Robbie who spotted the target. He didn’t bother pointing. His rifle did that as he sprayed a long burst in that direction. Three other rifles joined in. I don’t know if we killed the sniper, but his rifle fell, bouncing once when it hit the sidewalk.
Each fire team moved in a loose column, men moving at a jog, crouched over, zigzagging, more or less from tree to tree. Connecting the dots. Doing everything possible to make it more difficult for anyone else to target us.
I was about halfway across the park when I saw motion in the doorway to my right—in the building that had been struck by Robbie’s tree, the building that had had a sniper on the roof—not more than twenty feet away. I swiveled in that direction, bringing my rifle up to firing position, but I didn’t pull the trigger. Two civilians, both women, staggered out of the building, one half carrying the other. One woman was bleeding badly from the face and chest. I could see a splinter of wood, maybe a foot long and nearly an inch in diameter, sticking out below her left shoulder, in front and behind; it had penetrated completely. The other woman noticed us and screamed, a noise more piercing than the explosions had been.
“Leave ‘em be,” I said on my squad frequency. “They’re no danger to us. Let’s just get moving.”
THOSE TWO WOMEN POSED NO IMMEDIATE THREAT, and I figured it would take time before they would have the opportunity to tell anyone about us. They weren’t armed, and the one who wasn’t badly injured looked too hysterical to think of doing anything. The one sniper had reminded me—all of us—that we had to watch the rooftops and windows. That sniper might have been a civilian with a hunting rifle. And there might be others.
In the next minutes, I did start to hear small-arms fire in the area, nothing directed at my squad, but close enough that I could pick out the sounds of individual weapons as they stuttered on automatic or yipped on single fire. Some of the other spec ops squads had apparently run into tonatin military units, or other snipers. The gunfire was enough to make certain that we kept our eyes and ears open, and we were even more cautious crossing open spaces, where there might be stray rounds flying. We knew we were in hostile territory, and we had started the bloodletting inside the city. There might be enemy patrols around any corner, anxious to get in a few licks of their own.
Once we were on the move, we went back to electronic silence. Those two women might be able to tell what direction we had headed in, and there were likely other eyes that had seen us and the other squads, but we didn’t know how efficient the tonatin military would be in gathering intelligence from their civilians. By the time they found out where we went, we’d be somewhere else.
We were a quarter mile from the rendezvous when the enemy found us.
• • •
THEY DIDN’T SO MUCH FIND US. IT WAS MORE A matter of us stumbling on each other. We were going one way and they were coming in from our right. For an instant we were both exposed—the lead elements of my fire teams and the entire enemy patrol—both caught by surprise. The man on point, Jaibie, was looking the wrong way at the wrong time. That was the bottom line. He should have spotted the enemy and stopped us before anyone else got out in the open.
My initial estimate, made while I was diving toward the ground, was that there were about thirty tonatin coming at us, the nearest no more than forty feet from the point man from my second fire team, over on the right.
For a fraction of a second that seemed to last several hours shock kept fingers from triggers. I wasn’t the only one whose first impulse, once that instant of shock released mind and muscles, was to dive for whatever cover an inch or two of grass might provide. That hesitation wasn’t noticeably longer for one side or the other. It gave way to a fusillade of gunfire, sprayed rather than aimed. Most of the fire, in both directions, was high. That’s a common failing, especially at night.
We were too close to withdraw, or to move to better cover. We had met at an intersection, where there were no trees, and only a few men on either side had partial cover from the corner of the building that had concealed us from each other until it was too late. We hadn’t been cautious enough, but I didn’t have time right then to think about that. Iyi and Oyo had been just in front of me. At least the enemy patrol had made the same mistake. Small comfort.
Tonio lifted up just enough to toss a hand grenade. I saw his arm snap back unnaturally and made the easy guess that he had been hit by a bullet. Behind me, Nuyi got his grenade launcher around to where he could use it and popped three quick rocket-propelled grenades at an extreme angle to drop them in the middle of the enemy patrol. I heard a bullet hit metal but couldn’t turn my head to see what had been hit. I was too busy laying down as much gunfire as I could in the direction of the enemy.
It was the grenades that made the difference—the fact that a couple of our people thought of them before anyone on the other side did. In the instant after the blasts we were all moving toward whatever cover we could find quickly. All we could do was pull back and look for a different route, or try to come on the enemy patrol from a different angle, hope to get the drop on them next time.
One man did not pull back with the rest of the squad. Jaibie, our lone abarand, didn’t move at all. He was face down on the ground where he had gone down at the start of the ambush—farther out in the open than the rest of us. I clicked over to check his vital signs on my helmet’s display. No heartbeat. No respiration. The last brainwave activity fluttered out. Well, I guess you can fly now, I thought. Abarand believed that when they reached the afterlife they would regain the ability to fly freely that their primitive ancestors had lost.
“Jaibie’s dead,” I told Tonio, switching to the channel that connected me just to him. “How are you?”
“Hurting.” I could have told that from the tightness of his voice, the fact that the word obviously came through clenched teeth. “Arm’s broke below the elbow. We pull back to the next corner, then head south, try to get out of the way before that patrol pulls itself together enough to come after us.”
“You gonna be able to manage?” I asked.
“What choice do I have? Lead with your fire team.”
“On the way,” I said, gesturing for Iyi and Oyo to start. I switched channels to speak to the entire fire team. “To the corner, then left. We want speed, but let’s be more careful this time. I don’t want to lose anybody else.” I used the squad frequency to ask if anyone else had been wounded. I got back a string of negatives, one for every remaining man in the squad.
I hadn’t quite emptied my rifle’s magazine during the firefight, but I put a fresh clip in—saving the partial I took out, in case I ran short later. If we ran into more tonatin, or that same patrol hit us again, I wanted to have as much ammunition as possible in the rifle.
We paused before rounding that next corner. Iyi knelt at the edge of the building and peeked around, exposing just enough of his head to get one eyeball where it could see that there was no surprise waiting in the cross street. He signaled the all clear, then he and his brother started south and the rest of us hurried after them. Once around the corner, we moved out into the park area between buildings, where there were at least occasional trees to provide cover.
After I could see for myself that there were no enemy assets in front of us, I glanced back to see how Tonio was holding up. Tonio and my second fire team weren’t too far back, and both porracci were behind Tonio, acting as rear guard for the squad. Fang and Claw were flanking Tonio, and one of the ghuroh was close enough to give Tonio a hand, if necessary.
That was all the time I could spare—all the time I was willing to spare—on Tonio’s condition. I had to be ready to do the leading myself if he was in too much pain to think straight, so I had to start giving some thought to possible moves. The checkerboard arrangement of buildings and parks meant that after one block going south we would have to angle either left or right. Left would take us back toward that enemy patrol, which might well have headed south to intercept us. That meant we had to go to the right, around the building on the south side of the park we were in.
If Tonio couldn’t make the decision. He had told me to lead the way, so before we got to the end of that next block, I decided to go ahead and do the leading. I lifted my faceplate a little and whistled to get Oyo’s attention. He looked back toward me and I gestured to the right. Oyo nodded. That was almost a no-brainer. I glanced back to see if Tonio had noticed. He gave no indication, so I turned my attention to the front—and to what I assumed was the dangerous side, the left. As long as I eventually got us movingtoward the rendezvous again, I doubted that Tonio would complain.
We crossed the last stretch of park, and the street beyond it, as if we knew there were enemy soldiers waiting on the left. One man ran across the danger zone at a time while the rest of us had our rifles trained to the left. But no gunfire came. Once my first fire team was across, we took up positions to cover Tonio and my second fire team. Before we started moving again, I went to Tonio. He had dropped to one knee and set his rifle on the ground, the muzzle resting on his foot.
“I’ve got to get this arm supported before the hand falls off,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Here, let me.” I pulled a strap from the outside of his backpack to fashion a rough sling and got the arm in it. “You slap a pain patch on?”
“Two. It still hurts. You run the squad. I’m not thinking straight. Get us to the rendezvous.”
“Are we going to have to carry you?”
He hesitated for maybe five seconds before he answered. “I don’t think so. Not yet. I’m hurting, but my legs still work. Fang got the bleeding stopped, and I don’t think I lost so much blood that I’m likely to pass out. Come on. Don’t waste time. I’m sure we didn’t wipe out that enemy patrol. They’re gonna be lookin’ for us.”
I couldn’t argue with that. “Just the same, if you need help, don’t wait too long to ask. We’ve got enough big guys to handle you.”
I HAD COME UP WITH ONE POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVE to the cut-and-run we were doing. If Tonio lost consciousness, or got too weak to keep up, we could consider going into one of the buildings—hole up with enough civilians to give the tonatin military cause to hesitate before they blasted us—and hope that our people got to us before the enemy could dig us out.
Despite all the propaganda we had been fed about how utterly ruthless the enemy was, I was fairly confident that the tonatin military would not recklessly endanger their civilian population to get at us. I didn’t mention my alternative to Tonio, but … if it came to it, it was something to think about, even though I didn’t like the idea of backing us into a corner we might not be able to get ourselves out of unless there was no other way. The key to spec ops is to stay mobile.
AT THE END OF THE NEXT BLOCK WE ANGLED BACK to the left. Going any farther right would have put us too close to the edge of the city. That would make it more likely that we would run into other tonatin units, or get into crossfire between the enemy and some of our own people. We went to the ground again about a minute later when we saw movement to the south of us, but we had merely run into another spec ops squad. I got a recognition blip on my head-up display and an identifier showing it was someone from the second squad of fourth platoon. They waited in place for us.
I went to talk to the squad leader, a biraunta sergeant named Ikai. Tonio had merely sat down when we stopped, slumped over, his chin hanging down to his chest, concerned only with keeping himself going until he could get medical treatment. I told Ikai about our skirmish, and where it had been.
“We, too, have tasted the enemy,” Ikai said. We were whispering, faceplates lifted. “I lost two men, but we took fivefold payment from the tonatin. None of them escaped us.”
“Good for you. Look, my platoon sergeant is hurting pretty badly and we’ve got to get back to the rest of our platoon. Can you take a couple of minutes to cover us through the next block or two—until we know we’re away from what’s left of that patrol we fought with?”
Ikai clicked his teeth together twice and winked, the biraunta equivalent of “Can do.”
“Thanks.” I grinned and gestured for my men to start moving. Tonio almost couldn’t stand by himself. I didn’t ask him if he wanted help. I just told Kiervauna to pick the platoon sergeant up and carry him. Kiervauna nodded and handed off his extra weapons—the rocket launcher to Souvana and the grenade launcher to Fang—and scooped Tonio up as if he weighed no more than one of those weapons. I picked up Tonio’s rifle. There was no call to leave anything an enemy civilian could use against us.
I waved to Sergeant Ikai as we left. He waved back. Ikai had already started deploying his men. It felt good having someone watch my back for a few minutes.