Soon I could hear them crashing through the scrub, enough noise to alert anyone within half a klick. The rockers made it up first, four of them. I had two of them drag the Gerin corpses over to the edge and bounce ’em over, then they took up positions around the summit. Now we could knock off the Gerin fighters, if they came back: whatever’s wrong with the rest of Supply, those little ground-air missiles we’ve got can do the job. Then the flyspy crew arrived, with the critter’s wing folded back along its body. When they got to the clearing, they snapped the wings back into place, checked that the control wire was coiled ready to release without snagging, and turned on the scanners.
The flyspy is really nothing but a toy airplane, wings spanning about a meter, powered by a very quiet little motor. It can hold an amazing amount of spygear, and when it’s designed for stealth use it’s almost impossible to see in the air. On wire control, it’ll go up maybe 100 meters, circle around, and send us video and IR scans of anything it can see; on remote, we can fly it anywhere within line-of-sight, limited only by its fuel capacity.
Soon it was circling above us, its soft drone hardly audible even on our hilltop, certainly too quiet to be heard even down on the strip. We didn’t know whether the Gerin did hear, the way we hear, but we had to think about that. (We know they hear big noises, explosions, but I’ve heard a theory that they can’t hear high-pitched noises in atmosphere.) The videos we were getting back looked surprisingly peaceful. Nothing seemed to be moving, and there was only one overgrown road leading away from the strip. Garrond punched a channel selector, and the normal-color view turned into a mosaic of brilliant false colors: sulfur yellow, turquoise, magenta, orange. He pointed to the orange. “That’s vegetation, like this scrub. Yellow is rock outcrops—” The cliff across from us was a broad splash of yellow that even I could pick out. “Turquoise is disturbed soiclass="underline" compacted or torn up, either one.” The strip was turquoise, speckled with orange where plants had encroached on it. So was the nearly invisible road winding away from the strip between the hills. So also the summit of the hill which ended in cliffs above the strip… and the summit of our own hill. Another outpost, certainly.
But nothing moved, in the broad daylight of Caedmon’s sun. According to briefing, we’d have another nine standard hours of light. None of our scanners showed motion, heat, anything that could be a Gerin force coming to take us out. And why not?
It bothered the captain, I could see, when he came up to look for himself. Our butterbar was clearly relieved, far too trusting an attitude if you want to survive very long. Things aren’t supposed to go smoothly; any time an enemy isn’t shooting at you, he’s up to something even worse.
“An hour to the equipment drop,” said the captain. “They’re sending a squad of engineers, too.” Great. Somebody else to look after, a bunch of dirtpushers. I didn’t say it aloud; I didn’t have to. Back before he saved Admiral Mac’s life and got that chance at OCS, the captain and me were close, real buddies. Fact is, it was my fault he joined up—back then they didn’t have the draft. Wasn’t till he started running with me, Tinker Vargas, what everyone called gypsy boy—gambler and horsethief and general hothead—that Carl Dietz the farmer’s son got into any trouble bigger than spilled milk. He was innocent as cornsilk back then, didn’t even know when I was setting him up—and then we both got caught, and had the choice between joining the offworld Marines or going to prison. Yet he’s never said a word of blame, and he’s still the straightest man I know, after all these years. He’s one I would trust at poker, unlike Rolly who can’t seem to remember friendship when the cards come out.
And no, I’m not jealous. It hasn’t been easy for him, a mustang brought up from the ranks, knowing he’ll never make promotions like the fast-track boys that went to the Academy or some fancy-pants university. He’s had enough trouble, some of it when I was around to carefully not hear what the other guy said. So never mind the pay, and the commission: I’m happy with my life, and I’m still his friend. We both know the rules, and we play a fair game with the hand dealt us—no politics, just friends.
In that hour, we had things laid out more like they should be. Thanks to the flyspy, we knew that no Gerin triads lurked on the nearest two hilltops, and we got dug in well on all three hills that faced the strip on the near side. There was still that patch of turquoise to worry about on the facing hill, above the cliffs, but the flyspy showed no movement there, just the clear trace of disturbed soil. Our lieutenant had learned something in OCS after all; he’d picked a very good spot in a sort of ravine between the hills, out of sight beneath taller growth, for the headquarters dugout, meds, and so on.
Then the equipment carrier lumbered into view. I know, it’s a shuttle same as the troop shuttle, but that’s a term for anything that goes from cruiser to ground. Equipment carriers are fatter, squatty, with huge cargo doors aft, and they have all the graceful ease of a grand piano dumped off a clifftop. This one had all engines howling loudly, and the flaps and stuff hanging down from the wings, trying to be slow and steady as it dropped its load. First ten little parachutes (little at that distance), then a dark blob—it had to be really big if I could see it from here—trailing two chutes, and then a couple more, and a final large lumpy mass with one parachute.
“I don’t believe it!” said the captain, stung for once into commentary. But it was—a netful of spare tires for the vehicles, wrapped around a huge flexible fuel pod. Relieved of all this load, the shuttle retracted its flaps, and soared away, its engines returning to their normal roar.
Already the lieutenant had a squad moving, in cover, toward the landing parachutists. I watched the equipment itself come down, cushioned somewhat by airbags that inflated as it hit. Still nothing moved on the hilltop across from us. I felt the back of my neck prickle. It simply isn’t natural for an enemy to chase you down, shooting all the while, then ignore you once you’ve landed. We know Gerin use air attack on ground forces: that’s how they cleaned up those colonists on Duquesne.
Yet ignore us they did, all the rest of that day as the engineers got themselves down to the strip from where they’d landed, and their equipment unstowed from its drop configuration and ready for use. One grader, what we called back on my homeworld a maintainer, and two earth-movers. The whole time the engineers were out there getting them ready, I was sure some Gerin fighter was going to do a low pass and blow us all away… but it didn’t happen. I’d thought it was crazy, dropping equipment that had to be prepped and then used in the open, but for once high command had guessed right.
By late afternoon, the engineers had their machines ready to work. They started pushing stuff around at the far end of the strip, gouging long scars in the dirt and making mounds of gravelly dirt. The captain sent Kittrick and one platoon over to take a hill on the far side; they got up it with no trouble, and I began to think there weren’t any Gerin left there at all. Half that group climbed the hill with the cliff, and found evidence that someone had had an outpost there, but no recent occupation.
We were spread out pretty thin by this time, maybe thirty on the far side of the strip, the rest on the near side, but stretched out. We’d rigged our own detection systems, and had both flyspys up, high up, where they could see over the hills behind us. What they saw was more of the same, just like on the topo maps: lots of hills covered with thick green scrub, some creeks winding among the hills, traces of the road that began at the landing strip. Some klicks east of us (east is whatever direction the sun rises, on any world), the tumbled hills subsided into a broad river basin. The higher flyspy showed the edge of the hills, but no real detail on the plain.