Neen still wants my attention.
‘All right,’ I say. ‘What’s Haze worried about?’
My sergeant hesitates. That tells me I’m not going to like it. ‘Sir,’ he says, ‘Haze tapped into Hekati’s AI. Didn’t mean to. It just happened. And while he was tapped in . . .’
I’ll give Haze just happened.
Firing off a shot, I duck as a mercenary fires back. They’re harder to kill than fagan lizards. Of course, you need to know what a fagan lizard is for that to make sense. ‘And while Haze was locked in . . . ?’
‘He piggybacked the sky cams. There are Silver Fist coming this way.’
I grin.
‘That’s not good, sir.’
‘ Why not? ‘
‘Sir,’ he says. ‘With respect, sir. We left our supplies back at camp. On Colonel Vijay’s orders. So we could travel light.’
‘What did you leave, exactly?’
‘Tents, sir. Food, sir. Most of the ammunition.’
‘Neen,’ I say. ‘Fuck off, now . . .’
Punching a superior officer is a capital offence. Almost everything in this army is. It’s worse if he’s a staff officer. Then they shoot you, patch you up and shoot you all over again. Otherwise, everyone would do it.
But I’m still not going to take it out on Neen.
Seeing my anger, Colonel Vijay stays out of range. If he had any sense he would know just how close he is to being fragged by his own side. But he has all the sense of a blind kitten. Women probably find him sweet.
Me, I just want to pull the pin on a grenade.
‘Stay here, sir.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To tell the others to stop wasting ammo.’
A couple of seconds later, our rifles fall silent. A second or so after that, the mercenaries do the same. With luck, we destroyed their supplies when we hit those pods.
‘Haze,’ I say, ‘you jacked into Hekati’s system?’
‘Yes, sir,’ he says. ‘Sorry, sir.’
‘Why?’ I demand.
‘Can’t help it, sir . . .’ He must know how stupid that sounds.
‘What did you discover?’
‘Accessed the schematics, sir. She keeps track of all transport moving inside her torus. She always has done, there used to be seven and a half million-’
He sees my face and skips the lecture.
‘Transport?’
‘A Hex-Seven, sir.’
An X7i landing craft? On Hekati’s sea?
‘And a copter, sir. It’s shielded.’
The Hex-Seven is irrelevant. We are miles from the coast. Anything that happens here will be over before its crew arrive. But the copter . . .
‘You know where it is?’ I ask Haze.
He shakes his head.
‘Find out.’
‘Sir,’ he says, ‘that means . . .’
This boy isn’t a natural soldier. He isn’t a natural anything. Haze is a braid on the wrong side. Given half a chance, the Silver Fist will slice my throat, rip out my implant if only I had one, and poke their way through what is left of my brain. What they will do to Haze is far worse.
And yet he’s still sticking in there. That is courage of a kind.
‘Oh fuck,’ Haze says. He’s talking to himself. ‘They’re watching us . . .’ Scrabbling for his pad, he flips it open and flicks his fingers across its surface without glancing down.
‘Permission to request help, sir?’
Help? I’d ask Haze where he thinks we’re going to get help, but he’s gone back to his pad and is scrabbling frantically at its keys. So I nod, realize he can’t see, and say, ‘Permission granted.’
‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘Thank you. Thank you . . .’ Takes me a moment to realize he’s not talking to me.
In the distance, a tiny explosion lights the side of our mountain.
A few seconds later, there is another.
Then another.
‘What’s going on?’ asks Colonel Vijay.
We ignore him.
‘See them?’ I ask Neen, who hands me his field-glasses. I don’t need binoculars to know what is happening. Low-level lenz, the tiny comm-sat cameras that act as eyes for an advancing army, are dropping like hail into the valley below.
It is time we left.
Keeping our heads down, we make it to a stone hut before a copter skims overhead, heading for where the mercenaries still are.
An Uplift trooper hangs from the hatch, a machine gun resting on his knee. A heat sensor hangs under the copter’s body. Watching them go, I’m grateful the sun’s already made the slate roof hotter than we are.
A minute or so later a battle starts behind us.
Silver Fist, meet the Mercenaries. Mercenaries, meet the Silver Fist .
A belt-fed opens up and then falls silent. Grenades echo so loudly that pebbles trickle down the valley sides. I know how to read gunfire. Whoever the mercenaries are, they’re going down hard and taking a dozen Silver Fist with them.
It’s brutal, but the conclusion is foregone. As mortars drown out small-arms fire, a belt-fed opens up one final time. When it stops, it’s from choice.
A single shot brings silence.
Neen says the soldier’s prayer. All any of us can hope for.
Shouldering our weapons, we crest a ridge, switch tracks and begin the climb to a higher valley. Thorns drag at our legs and sweat dries before it has time to bead on our skin. The sun beats down and the wind is hot.
‘Our supplies,’ says Colonel Vijay.
‘Lost, sir.’
He opens his mouth to protest, then shuts it again.
‘We should stop soon,’ he says finally.
He is afraid to make it a direct order in case I disobey. He’s not sure what he will do if that happens. I am, he’ll do nothing. And his instinct is right. If he tells me to go back for the supplies or to stop this march, I’ll frag him where he stands.
‘Soon, sir,’ I say.
‘Good,’ he says, as if we’ve reached some agreement. A few hours later, he suggests stopping again. This time I don’t even bother to answer.
Chapter 19
‘So,’ says the SIG. ‘Who are we going to kill today?’
‘We’ve only just got here.’
‘And your point is?’ it says. A click of a switch closes it down.
The roof to our new base is missing, the front door has been stolen for firewood and the inside is strewn with goat droppings harder than buckshot. It’s ideal. There is even a spring outside, where black rock forces rainwater to the surface.
‘Obsidian,’ says Haze. Rachel thinks it’s coal.
I don’t care what it is so long as it keeps providing water.
‘Slowly,’ I tell them. ‘Sip it slowly.’
One entire circle of Hekati is behind us. It has taken five days in total, including today’s forced march, and I only know we’ve done it because this valley is where we came in. What we haven’t done is find our missing U/Free observer.
We’ve seen ejercito at a distance; they leave us alone. We see prospectors, and they don’t even know we are here. Is this what the ferox felt like? I wonder.
Invisible, out on the edge.
Boats skid across the distant sea like insects. Carts trundle from one city to another, pulled by donkeys or teams of men. Colonel Vijay is amazed. He never knew people lived like this. No one bothers to point out many live far worse.
‘Neen,’ I yell.
He comes running.
‘Hunt something,’ I say. ‘Kill it. Get Franc to cook it.’
My sergeant glances towards a figure sitting under a tree. He wants to say something about the colonel, but isn’t sure he should.
I’m damn certain he shouldn’t. ‘Wait,’ I say. ‘I’ll come with you.’
We find a track half a mile above our new camp. It runs straight uphill and a wisp of fur suggests wildcat. A large one, given the thorn’s at hip height.
My bet is the cat sleeps up here and hunts lower down, in which case we are heading in the wrong direction for food. Only I need a fresh look at the valley and the higher we go the better my chances of seeing the islands off Hekati’s coast. Because those are what we’ll need to search next.