The fat of beasts in Pontefract’s ancient seas had fossilized into translucent masses which fluoresced in a thousand beautiful pastels. Ruthven didn’t know why it was called amber.
“Twenty years?” Drayer sneered. “The Royalists won’t last twenty days after we ship out!”
“It’ll still be worth some banker’s gamble at enough of a discount,” Ruthven said. “And the Five Worlds may run out of money to supply the Lord’s Army, after all.”
He lifted his legs onto the mattress, waiting for the pain; it didn’t come. It wouldn’t come, he supposed, until he stopped thinking about it every time he moved …and then it’d grin at him as it sank its fangs in.
“Well, I don’t know squat about bankers, that’s the truth,” Drayer said with a chuckle. “I just know I won’t be sorry to leave this pit. Though …”
He bent to remove the recorder.
“ …I guess they’re all pits, right, sir? If they was paradise, they wouldn’t need the Slammers, would they?”
“I suppose some contract worlds are better than others,” Ruthven said, looking at the repair yard. Base Hammer here in the lowlands seemed to get more snow than Platoon E/1 had in the hills. He’d been in the hospital for three weeks, though; the weather might’ve changed in that length of time. “I’ve only been with the Regiment two years, so I’m not the one to say.”
Drayer’s brow furrowed as he concentrated on the bed’s holographic readout. He looked up beaming and said, “Say, Lieutenant, you’re so close to a hundred percent it don’t signify. You oughta be up and dancing, not just looking out the window!”
“I’ll put learning to dance on my list,” Ruthven said, managing a smile with effort. “Right now I think I’ll get some more sleep, though.”
“Sure, you do that, sir,” said Drayer, never quick at taking a hint. “Doc Parvati’ll be in this afternoon to certify you, I’ll bet. Tonight or tomorrow, just as sure as Pontefract’s a pit.”
He slid his recorder into its belt sheath and looked around the room once more. “Well, I got three more to check, Lieutenant, so I’ll be pushing on. None of them doing as well as you, I’ll tell you. Anything more I can …”
The medic’s eyes lighted on the gold-bordered file folder leaning against the water pitcher on Ruthven’s side-table. The recruiter’d been by this morning, before Drayer came on duty.
“Blood and Martyrs, sir!” he said. “I saw Mahone in the lobby but I didn’t know she’d come to see you. So you’re transferring back to the Frisian Defense Forces, is that it?”
“Not exactly ‘back,’” Ruthven said. He gave up the pretense of closing his eyes. “I joined the Slammers straight out of the Academy.”
Sometimes he thought about ordering Drayer to get his butt out of the room, but Ruthven’d had enough conflict when he was in the field. Right now he just wanted to sleep, and he wouldn’t do that if he let himself get worked up.
“Well, I be curst!” the medic said. “You’re one lucky dog, sir. Here I’m going on about wanting to leave this place and you’re on your way back to good booze and women you don’t got to pay! Congratulations!”
“Thank you, Technician,” Ruthven said. “But now I need sleep more than liquor or women or anything else. All right?”
“You bet, sir!” Drayer said as he hustled out the door at last. “Say, wait till I tell Nichols in Supply about this!”
Ruthven closed his eyes again. Instead of going to sleep, though, his mind drifted back to the hills last month when E/1 arrived at Fire Support Base Courage.
“El-Tee?” said Sergeant Hassel, E/1’s platoon sergeant but doubling as leader of First Squad from lack of non-coms. “We got something up here you maybe want to take a look at before we go belting on int’ the firebase, over.”
“Platoon, hold in place,” Ruthven ordered from the command car, shrinking the map layout on his display to expand the visual feed from Hassel some 500 meters ahead. The platoon went to ground, troopers rolling off their skimmers and scanning the windblown scrub through their weapons’ sights.
Melisant, driving the high-sided command car today, nosed them against the bank to the right of the road and unlocked the tribarrel on the roof of the rear compartment. She used the gunnery screen at her station instead of climbing out of her hatch and taking the gun’s spade grips in her hands. The screen provided better all-round visibility as well as being safer for the gunner, but many of the ex-farmers in the Regiment felt acutely uncomfortable if they had to hunch down in a box when somebody might start shooting at them.
Ruthven expanded the image by four, then thirty-two times, letting the computer boost brightness and contrast. The command car’s electronics gave him clearer vision than Hassel’s own, though the sergeant can’t have been in any doubt about what he was seeing. It was a pretty standard offering by the Lord’s Army, after all.
“Right,” Ruthven said aloud. “Unit, there’s three Royalists crucified upside down by the road. We’ll go uphill of them. Nobody comes within a hundred meters of the bodies in case they’re booby-trapped, got it? Six out.”
As he spoke, his finger traced a virtual course on the display; the electronics transmitted the image to the visors of his troopers. They were veterans and didn’t need their hands held …but it was the platoon leader’s job, and Ruthven took his job seriously.
The Lord knew there were enough ways to get handed your head even if you stayed as careful as a diamond cutter. The Lord knew.
Instead of answering verbally, the squad leaders’ icons on Ruthven’s display flashed green. Seven troopers of Sergeant Rennie’s Third Squad—the other two escorted the gun jeep covering the rear—were already on the high ground, guiding their skimmers through trees which’d wrapped their limbs about their boles at the onset of winter. The thin soil kept the trees apart, and the undergrowth was already gray and brittle; Heavy Weapons’ jeeps, two with tribarrels and the third with a mortar, wouldn’t have a problem either. The command car, though …
Well, it didn’t matter that a command car’s high center of gravity and poor power-to-weight ratio made it a bad choice for breaking trail in wooded hills. This wasn’t a choice, it was a military necessity unless Ruthven wanted to take the chance that the bodies weren’t bait. His two years’ experience in the field wasn’t much for the Slammers, but it’d been plenty to teach him to avoid unnecessary risks.
The victims had been tied to the crosses with their own intestines, but that was just the usual fun and games for the Lord’s Army. Ruthven grinned. If he’d had a better opinion of the Royalists, he might’ve been able to convince himself the Regiment was Doing Good on Pontefract. Fortunately, Colonel Hammer didn’t require his platoon leaders to maintain feelings of moral superiority over their enemies.
His eyes on the dots of his troopers slanting across the terrain display, Ruthven keyed his microphone and said, “Courage Command, this is Echo One-six. Come in Courage Command, over.”
The combat car’s display showed that the transmitter in Lieutenant-Colonel Carrera’s headquarters was one of half a dozen in Firebase Courage which were live, but nobody replied. Ruthven grimaced. He wasn’t comfortable communicating with the Royalists to begin with, since any message which the Royalists could hear, the Lord’s Army could overhear. It added insult to injury that the fools weren’t responding.
The car bucked as the forward skirts dug into an outcrop with a skreel! of steel on stone. Ruthven expected they’d have to back and fill, but Melisant kicked her nacelles out and lifted them over the obstacle. She was driving primarily because her skimmer …now strapped to the side of the car in hopes of being able to repair it at the Royalist base …was wonky, but she was probably as good at the job as anybody in the platoon.