This is where your average civilian would either panic and go dashing downhill through the brush to tell the captain there were nasties up there, or get all video-hero and run screaming at the Gerin, right into a beam or a slug. What else is there to do? you ask. Well, for one thing you can lie there quietly and think for a moment. If they’ve seen you, they’ve shot you—the Gerin aren’t given to patience—and if they haven’t shot you they don’t know you’re there. Usually.
It was already strange, that the Gerin fighters hadn’t come back. And if Gerin held the top of this hill—which seemed reasonable even before we went up it, and downright likely at the moment—they’d have to know we got out, and how many, and roughly where we were. And since Gerin aren’t stupid, at least at war, they’d guess someone was coming up to check out the hilltop. So they’d have some way to detect us on the way up, and they’d have held off blowing us away because they didn’t think we were a threat. Neither of those thoughts made me feel comfortable.
Detection systems, though… detection systems are a bitch. Some things work anywhere: motion detectors, for instance, or optical beams that you can interrupt and it sets off a signal somewhere. But that stuff’s easy enough to counter. If you know what you’re doing, if you’ve got any sort of counterhunt tech yourself, you’ll spot it and disarm it. The really good detection systems are hard to spot, very specific, and also—being that good—very likely to misbehave in combat situations.
The first thing was to let the captain know we’d spotted something. I did that with another set of tongue-flicks and clicks, switching to his channel and clicking my message. He didn’t reply; he didn’t need to. Then I had us all switch on our own counterhunt units. I hate the things, once a fight actually starts: they weigh an extra kilo, and unless you need them it’s a useless extra kilo. But watching the flicking needles on the dials, the blips of light on the readouts, I was glad enough then. Two meters uphill, for instance, a fine wire carried an electrical current. Could have been any of several kinds of detectors, but my unit located its controls and identified them. And countered them: we could crawl right over that wire, and its readout boxes wouldn’t show a thing. That wasn’t all, naturally: the Gerin aren’t stupid. But none of it was new to our units, and all of it could fail—and would fail, with a little help from us.
Which left the Gerin. I lay there a moment longer wondering how many Gerin triads we were facing. Vain as they are, it might be just one warrior and his helpers, or whatever you want to call them. Gerin think they’re the best fighters in the universe, and they can be snookered into a fight that way. Admiral Mac did it once, and probably will again. It would be just like their warrior pride to assign a single Gerin triad to each summit. Then again, the Gerin don’t think like humans, and they could have a regiment up there. One triad we might take out; two would be iffy, and any more than that we wouldn’t have a chance against.
Whatever it was, though, we needed high ground, and we needed it damn fast. I clicked again, leaned into the nearest bush, and saw Lonnie’s hand beyond the next one. He flicked me a hand signal, caught mine, and inched forward.
We were, in one sense, lucky. It was a single triad, and all they had was the Gerin equivalent of our infantry weapons: single-beam lasers and something a lot like a rifle. We got the boss, the warrior, with several rounds of rifle fire. I don’t care what they say, there’s a place for slug-throwers, and downside combat is that place. You can hit what you can’t see, which lasers can’t, and the power’s already in the ammo. No worry about a discharged power-pack, or those mirrored shields some of the Gerin have used. Some Navy types keep wanting to switch all Marine forces away from slug weapons, because they’re afraid we’ll go bonkers and put a hole in a cruiser hull, but the day they take my good old Belter special away from me, I’m gone. I’ve done my twenty already; there’s no way they can hold me.
Davies took a burn from one of the warrior’s helpers, but they weren’t too aggressive with the big number one writhing on the ground, and we dropped them without any more trouble. Some noise, but no real trouble. Lonnie got a coldpak on Davies, which might limit the damage. It wasn’t that bad a burn, anyway. If he died down here, it wouldn’t be from that, though without some time in a good hospital, he might lose the use of those fingers. Davies being Davies, he’d probably skin-graft himself as soon as the painkiller cut in… he made a religion out of being tough. I called back to our command post to report, as I took a look around to see what we’d bought.
From up here, maybe seventy meters above the strip, the scattered remains of the shuttle glittered in the sun. I could see the two craters, one about halfway along, and another maybe a third of the way from the far end. Across the little valley, less than a klick, the hills rose slightly higher than the one we lay on. The cliffs on one were just as impressive as I’d thought. The others rose more gently from the valley floor. All were covered with the same green scrub, thick enough to hide an army. Either army.
I told the captain all this, and nodded when Skip held up the control box the Gerin had used with their detectors. We could use the stuff once we figured out the controls, and if they were dumb enough to give us an hour, we’d have no problems. No problems other than being a single drop team sitting beside a useless strip, with the Gerin perfectly aware of our location and identity.
Brightness bloomed in the zenith, and I glanced up. Something big had taken a hit—another shuttle? We were supposed to have 200 shuttle flights on this mission, coming out of five cruisers—a fullscale assault landing, straight onto a defended planet. If that sounds impossibly stupid, you haven’t read much military history—there are some commanders that have this thing about butting heads with an enemy strength, and all too many of them have political connections. Thunder fell out of the sky, and I added up the seconds I’d been counting. Ten thousand meters when they’d been blown—no one was going to float down from that one. ”
“What kind of an idiot… ?” Lonnie began; I waved him to silence. Things were bad enough without starting that—we could place the blame later. With a knifeblade, if necessary.
“Vargas…” The captain’s voice in my earplug drowned out the whisper of the breeze through stiff leaves. I pushed the subvoc microphone against my throat and barely murmured an answer. “Drop command says we lost thirty cents on the dollar. Beta Site took in four shuttles before it was shut out.” Double normal losses on a hostile landing, then, and it sounded like we didn’t have a secure strip. I tried to remember exactly where Beta Site was. “We’re supposed to clear this strip, get it ready for the next wave—”
I must have made some sound, without meaning to, because there was a long pause before he went on. If the original idea had been stupid, this one was stupid plus. Even a lowly enlisted man knows it’s stupid to reinforce failure, why can’t the brass learn it? We weren’t engineers; we didn’t have the machinery to fill those craters, or the manpower to clear the surrounding hills of Gerin and keep the fighters off.
“They’re gonna do a flyby drop of machinery,” he went on. I knew better than to say what I thought. No way I could stop them, if they wanted to mash their machinery on these hills. “We’re going to put up the flyspy—you got a good view from there?”
“Yessir.” I looked across the valley, around at all the green-clad slopes. The flyspy was another one of those things that you hated having to take care of until it saved your life. “By wire, or by remote?”
“Wire first.” That was smart; that way they wouldn’t have a radio source to lock onto. “I’m sending up the flyspy team, and some rockers. Send Davies back down.” Rockers: rocket men, who could take out those Gerin fighters, always assuming they saw them in time, which they would if we got our detection set up.