She looked up at him angrily, but all she said was, “I’ll come, Colonel. I’m only here because they thought I could help. Just give me some space.”
“I don’t have time for negotiations,” N’Gana responded coldly, then turned and looked straight into the eyes of the priest. “And, Father, this is the absolute last time I will explain a course of action. We don’t have the luxury of that now.”
Harker looked over at Socolov and could not read what she was thinking. He sighed and hoped that she could work it out before things got even stickier. Even though he’d been as harsh as N’Gana in getting her out of the boat, he knew he couldn’t be as cold under conditions like these as the colonel had been. Even so, as a former company commander in hostile territory, he couldn’t find fault with anything the colonel had said, either.
It’s this damned heat and humidity, he thought. And how damned naked we are in just fatigues and boots toting anachronistic old blunderbusses through unknown territory. He missed the combat suit more than he’d thought he would. He would have bet most anything that, underneath, N’Gana and Mogutu wished they had theirs, too.
Maybe slithering along like the Pooka would suit them all better than this incessant walking in the tall and masking grasses.
In point of fact, the imposing creature could move along very rapidly, often outpacing everyone, and this was not lost on N’Gana. Although the Quadulan couldn’t yell and didn’t make a sufficient dent in the grasses to be the forward scout, it was very useful, when strange sounds were heard or when things just didn’t feel right, to be able to send it forward and wait for it to return with information on just what was there. It was unlikely to have any real enemies here save the Titans, and it could lay a trail of its own scent to guide it precisely back to the group.
It was getting very late in the day when the creature returned from one such mission. “Follow to the grove,” it said. “Make camp. Good ground, food, water.”
It was a welcome suggestion, and it turned out to be not ten minutes from where they were.
The grove was clearly an old farm gone wild, with lush fruit trees all lined up for as far as the eye could see right next to bushes bearing large, juicy red and purple fruit. The insects were there, of course; in this climate it was inevitable. Still, they didn’t seem nearly as dense, and it looked fairly comfortable as this world went. There were even several small streams, all with swift-flowing if warm water nearby, possibly a remnant of some early irrigation system.
“Nick of time,” Harker commented to everyone and nobody in particular. “The sun’s about past the mountains. It’s going to be very dark very soon, I think.”
The camp was quickly laid out. Each backpack, once unloaded, became a kind of sleeping bag and the contents were in a series of plastic containers that fit together for maximum compression and easy organization and unpacking. The shortage of sleeping bags was not the disadvantage it seemed. There would have to be someone on guard, and maybe having two up at once wasn’t such a bad idea in this totally alien landscape. Night would be about eleven hours at this time of year and in this latitude; everyone would try to sleep at least six of those hours, maybe even eight, if they weren’t continuous. They ate and drank and washed and relieved themselves mostly in silence; there wasn’t anything more to say. A fire was forbidden, at least for now—at least until they knew why no small fires had ever been picked up by orbital spy satellites tracking the remnants of humanity on conquered worlds.
“Sergeant, you and the good Father here will take the first watch,” N’Gana told them. “Three hours, then you wake up Harker and the doctor and when they get out of their bags, you two get in. Harker, three hours and then you awaken me. I’ll get Hamille up—he tends to be rather nasty when awakened suddenly, but I know how to do it—and we’ll take the final shift. We’ll get you all up a little after sunup and we’ll start breaking camp and get on the march. There is still a very long way to go.”
About an hour after sundown, though, when it was so dark at ground level they could barely see their hands in front of their faces, they could all first hear and then feel the coming of the storms. And when they hit with furious thunder and lightning and great gusts of wind, there was little any of them could do but get wet in the almost impossibly dense downpour or huddle inside the bags. The clothing, boots, and sleeping bags were waterproof, of course, but where there was an opening or something was exposed, it got soaked.
It lasted a good twenty to thirty minutes and seemed like forever. It wasn’t the steady tropical dumping all that time, but it only let up briefly, never stopping, then roared back again. And when it ended, it ended. Five minutes after the last drop fell, the wind was down to next to nothing and the clouds were breaking up and revealing an exceptional, spectacular sky.
Mogutu and Father Chicanis walked around, to be sure that everyone was all right. Everyone was waterlogged, but they were okay.
Neither Harker nor Kat Socolov had been asleep; it was difficult to get comfortable, and the situation was still tense, with more unknowns than knowns about this strange new place. Neither had managed to keep water out of the head end of the sleeping bags, although it took only a couple of minutes to open them up, drain them, and let the inside liner dry out. Everything about and on them would have to air-dry, though you didn’t pack towels on this kind of trip.
Once things settled down, the sounds of the night bugs rose to a crescendo, creating a background that was impossible to ignore. Note to outfitters on future expeditions, Harker thought, feeling a bit miserable. Pack earplugs.
True to the colonel’s schedule, and in spite of the thunderstorm, Mogutu awakened Harker from a less than perfect sleep after what was, by their watches, precisely a three-hour shift, but which seemed to Harker to have lasted, at most, ten minutes. He felt worse than he had riding the keel, and much more vulnerable. Still, he heard Father Chicanis gently waking a probably more miserable Katarina Socolov, and he whispered to Mogutu, “Couldn’t you at least let her sleep?”
“No exceptions,” the sergeant responded. “We have to get into this. It’s not going to get easier, you know. The priest volunteered to take an extra shift for her and I nixed that, too.” He reached down for something that turned out to be a low-gray sealed cup and handed it to Harker. You could suck on it, like a baby bottle, but otherwise it was tight. Harker took a pull and was surprised. “Coffee? Hot coffee?”
“Self heating canister,” Mogutu responded. “No heat signature. We don’t have too many, but I think you and the doc will both need it now.”
In truth, he did, and the taste of the coffee, as military strong and black as it was, energized him a bit. It was still extremely hot and humid, but there were times when caffeine in a hot solution was the only thing that worked and this was one of them. He also checked his pocket, took out a small tablet, popped it into his mouth, and swallowed it. It made the aches and pains go away, at least for a little while.
They didn’t have a lot of those, either.
He felt human enough to be worried about standing a watch with a still truculent Socolov, and wondered what the hell they might do to pass the time.
He made his way over to her, his eyes finally clearing and adjusting to the darkness. At least the moon Achilles, half-full, was up; not a lot of help, but it was better than before. He could see that she, too, had been given a stimulant to drink, as well as Father Chicanis’s rifle. He was a bit better armed; he had Mogutu’s submachine gun. He didn’t like either crude and noisy weapon, but at least with his you only had to aim in the general direction of something to hit it.