“We have an engineer,” Gamecock says. DJ looks apprehensive. “Do you have proper tools?”
“Possibly,” Kwak says. “But not many spare parts.”
The officers confer in Chinese and Russian. Then another officer enters the tent and looks around: an Indian with a swollen face, chapped and cracked lips and cheeks, his right arm badly broken and hanging in a crude cable sling. Lots of starboard breaks here. A command sled could have landed hard and injured everybody inside, all at once.
“We are in regard to repair and refit,” Kwak tells him.
“Most excellent.” The newcomer reaches out his left hand to Roost, thinks better of that gesture—no good for Muslims, and who knows?—withdraws the hand, looks around with sunken eyes. “I am Brigadier Jawahar Lal Bhagati. Who here is capable of our salvation, and making do for all?”
The old fountain seems to be our last hope.
Gamecock puts a hand on DJ’s shoulder. “Sir, this man is the best we have.”
God help us.
“Most excellent!” says Bhagati. “We have scrounged tools, and may have the right codes to activate. Let us begin.”
BRIEF HOPE
The next few hours, I’m designated quartermaster and scurry back and forth carrying tools and a few of the dwindling water packs. Still no food to speak of, but we can do without that for days longer.
DJ seems to be making progress with the fountain, but it’s getting dark and very cold, minus one hundred Celsius, and we’re not going to be able to stay outside much longer. Keeping warm drains batteries fast. During cold snaps or night, Skyrines are supposed to squeeze into a tent or at the very least huddle in a ditch and cover with dust. Last man pushes dust over the group and then burrows in as best he can. Back on Rainier, we trained extensively on how to huddle and cover. Like puppies, as I’ve said; puppies seem to know how to assume the most efficient piles.
Tak had corpsman training back at SBLM, and despite his own contusions and a couple of cracked ribs, he tends to the beat-up officers in the half-inflated tent with a steady, blue-eyed gaze that is equally good at calming horses.
Our squad, by the way, is code-named Trick and is made up, in full complement, of two fire teams. Tak and I are part of fire team one—weak-field disruptor, rapid-delivery bolt rifles, and multitrack launchers. If we arrive with all our weapons, of course. I don’t know why we still use code names. We don’t even know if Antags understand human languages. But we sure as hell don’t know their languages. No one, as far as we’ve been informed, has ever intercepted comm between Antag units or their ships or equipment. Nothing to help us make a Rosetta. Maybe they just don’t talk.
Which is one reason I don’t like calling our enemy Ants. Ants communicate all sorts of ways. Ant colonies are a single organism, a single mind, mostly, with the individual insects we call “ants” acting both as muscle and neurons. Each ant serves as scout, worker, and a little bit of the colony brain. The colony as a whole gathers intel around its field of action and then solves problems like a distributed network. They communicate by touching feelers and sensing chemicals they leave behind, trails of clues that also serve as a kind of GPS. I’d hate to fight ants, especially big ones. Gamecock, like Vee-Def—like Joe—persists in calling our enemies Ants. Sometime I’ll tell you about my nightmare of getting stung all over.
Christ, it’s getting cold. I’m starting to feel comfortable, ready to settle in and go to sleep, so to keep awake, I walk back and forth in the ditch between the half-inflated command tent, where the generals and colonels are hanging out—with the exception of Gamecock—and back up to the northern branch of the Y to the broken Chinese fountain. My ankles are knotting, so my gait is more of a controlled stumble. Worse, there’s a sickening smell in my helm. I hope it’s not my own gangrene. At the very least, our skintights are well beyond pickle juice; the scrub filters are failing and the residue must be turning rancid, which is absorbing oxygen… Everything needs recharging, replacing. Including me.
Finally, I post myself by the fountain, too tired to move. Sleep is a soft and lovely thought. Lovely easeful death. Through a darkening tunnel, I watch DJ’s feet. He’s shoveled out an angle of dust at the base of the fountain and unscrewed a hatch, into which he’s now shoved the upper half of his body. His feet twitch and every now and then he bends his knees. That’s how I know he’s still alive, still working.
Fountains are impressive pieces of equipment. They used to arrive by balloon bounce, but since they’ve gotten larger, more expensive, and more delicate, they’re more often delivered by stealth chutes or even chemical fuel descent. This Chinese model is smaller than some and may have bounced down hard when it arrived. Maybe it wasn’t packed right. At any rate, Colonel Orlov explains, on one of his own slow, painful passes up the trench, that some of its collection tanks have been crunched and its self-diagnostic unit has refused to activate, under the stubborn belief that it won’t do any good. Fountains can get neurotic.
DJ’s boots twitch, his knees flex, but other than that, he’s a cipher.
The fountain suddenly decides to pop its top and push out a collection vane. Orlov and I give out a weak cheer. Kazak, Michelin, and Efremov join us, hopeful. But the vane doesn’t unfold or spin, and it’s no good if it doesn’t spin.
DJ finally shoves out of the bay and shakes his helm. “All busted up inside,” he calls out. We can barely hear him. Kazak and Michelin and I touch helms with him like footballers in a huddle. “The parts that work are unhappy, and if I reroute the bus, the parts that don’t work will suck all the power. Drain it down to nothing. Don’t know what more I can do. If anybody finds a parts kit, let me know, okay?”
We amble in slow lurches for the command tent, loopy from the smell in our suits. None of us wants to spend a night puppied with a bunch of senior officers, but we don’t have any choice. Die outside or steal air and heat from the brass.
BLONDE ON A BUGGY
We’re in serious trouble, no doubt about it. We barely make it through the night. I lie in our pile, moving only when Kazak kicks in his sleep. He kicks like a mule.
General Bhagati is doing poorly. Blood poisoning, best guess. His own once-friendly germs have decided he’s a dead man. That happens a lot to warriors in battle. Germs seem to think we’re all walking corpses.
First light, we seal our helms and leave the tent to stand under the pink dawn. The sunrise is abrupt and not at all spectacular—not that we care. Point comes when beauty is lost on a fellow. My head swims. Helm stinks like a refrigerator whose power has been out for a couple of days, skin itches all over, and I assume the others, like me, will soon consider just popping a faceplate and getting it over with. A miserable end for Trick Squad.
Where did it go wrong? I’ll get into that later, I decide, when the freezing cold really sets in. You get warm, comfortable, and last thoughts come easier. At least the itching will go away. Maybe.
I sit on the edge of our ditch and catch occasional dim speech sounds from around the tent, but it doesn’t mean much, mostly in Korean or Mandarin. I took some Mandarin in high school and junior college, but not much sticks with me. I wanted to take an internship in Shanghai but got turned down because of an ultraslight criminal record—boosting an uncle’s truck when I was thirteen. Skyrines don’t mind criminals. They beat that juvenile crap out of you, then raise you from petty crook to stone killer. Skyrines start out as Marines, but then we get shipped to the desert and mountain centers for a lot of additional training. There’s also the entire Right Stuff gantlet, including a madhouse LSD psych evaluation that demands a Nuremberg trial. I remember that vividly, more than the routines of piss-poor torture, also known as VPP&T—Vacuum Physical Prep and Training. Hawthorne Depot, Rainier, Baker, Adams—Mauna Kea. Military medicine has been pushed to the ethical limits, and way beyond. Blood doping and juicing aren’t allowed until you’re a finalist, but then the docs really go to town. I added fifteen pounds of solid muscle, then was starved fifteen to make up for it. My body fat ratio…