The last time. But now his wife was half a world away, and the ghostly white snow fields unnerved him with their stillness. Translated through the monitor screen, the imagery of Assembly Area Silver had an unmistakable quiet about it that frightened him with its wrongness. It was eerie, unnatural. It occurred to him for the first time that silence could have a look about it, an intrusion across sensory boundaries that jarred the working order of his mind. The silent display of M-l00s, partially camouflaged and dispersed over a grove-dotted steppe, was somehow so insistently incorrect that he could feel his body responding even as his mind struggled to process the information into harmless answers.
First Squadron was supposed to be quiet, lying still in hide positions. The goal was to blend into the landscape, to avoid offering any signs of life to searching enemy sensors. To play dead. Even beyond that — to become invisible. The problem was that the M-l00s burrowed so neatly into the snow fields had achieved the desired effect too well.
No unit was ever completely silent. No unit was ever so disciplined that it could avoid twitching a human muscle or two for the practiced eye to spot. Perfection in camouflage and deception operations was, a matter of degree.
But the First Squadron site had a special, unbearable silence about it. It had begun with the refusal of every last oral communications channel to respond to Taylor's queries. They all had assumed that First Squadron had been hit and hit badly by an enemy strike. Then Meredith tried a computer-to-computer query.
Each computer in First Squadron responded promptly when contacted. Data passed through the heavens instantly and exactly. The machines continued their electronic march through the endless battlefields of integers. It was only their human masters that made no reply.
The first imagery Meredith called up had filled them with a sense of relief. Yes. There they were, all right. Carefully dispersed M-l00s. There was not a single indicator of battle damage. The snow drifted across the site with blinding purity, and when you looked carefully, the concealed contours of the M-l00s on the ground betrayed no trace of destruction. The squadron looked exactly as it was supposed to look, and it occurred to Meredith that the whole business just might be a bizarre communications anomaly.
It was only the feel that was all wrong.
"Run a systems check on our environmental seals," Taylor ordered.
"You figure chemicals, sir?" Meredith asked.
"Could be. I don't know. Christ," Taylor said quietly, "I've seen week-old corpses that didn't look that dead."
"Nerve agent strike?"
Taylor bent closer to the imagery, narrowing his eyes, obviously straining to achieve a greater intensity of vision. "That's what I'd have to bet, if I were betting. But it doesn't make any goddamned sense. Even if a strike had caught some of the birds with their hatches open, others would have been sealed. If only because of the cold. And the automatic seals and the overpressure systems would have kicked in." He backed away from the monitor, touching his eyes with thumb and forefinger, weary. The palm and back of his hand had been wrapped in gauze that already showed dirt. "It just doesn't make any sense, Merry. If it was nerve gas, or any kind of chemicals, somebody would have survived. The autosensors would have alerted, and we would have had more flash traffic calls coming in than the system could've handled." He shook his head very slowly, then touched the edge of the gauzed hand to his hairline. "It just doesn't make any sense."
"Looks like a ghost town," Hank Parker said. The clumsy, too-colorful image annoyed Meredith, and he almost made a dismissive comment. Then he realized, with a chill that ran along his arms, legs, and spine, that the assistant S-3's comment bothered him so much not because it was naive but because it was precisely correct. There was no town in the imagery, and Meredith did not believe in ghosts, but the feel that rose from the monitor like cold air was exactly the feel of a ghost town — of a no-nonsense, technologically affluent military kind.
"Rapper," Taylor called through the intercom, "get us down there as fast as you can. Get a fix on the S-3's bird and put down right on its ass."
"Roger."
"Sir?" Meredith said, suddenly forgetting his personal alarm and remembering his duty, "are you sure you want to put down? If there's something down there we don't know about… I mean, the regiment needs you. We could direct one of the other squadrons to send in a recon party, do it right…"
"I don't want to wait," Taylor said.
"Neither do I," Meredith said truthfully. "But we've got to think about the big picture. We've got to—"
"Be quiet, Merry. My mind's made up." There was a tautness in the voice that Meredith had never before suffered.
Something was terribly, inexplicably wrong. Each man in the cabin knew it, but none of them could bring it out in words.
"What's that?" Taylor demanded, stabbing a finger at the monitor. As the M-100 approached the heart of the site, the on-board sensors picked up greater and greater detail.
Meredith squinted and saw only a black speck. He touched the selector pencil to the screen and the lens telescoped down.
It was a body. A man's body. Where before there had been only the disguised outlines of machinery and the insistent silence.
"He's moving," Parker said.
They all bent down over the monitor, each man's stale breath sour in the nostrils of his comrades.
Yes. It was unmistakable. It was definitely a man, in uniform, and he was moving. He was lying on his back, making jerking, seemingly random gestures at the sky.
"What in the name of Christ?" Taylor whispered.
The unintelligent, wasted movement of the man's limbs came erratically. But he was unmistakably alive, although the snow was beginning to bury him. The man's movements reminded Meredith of something, but he could not quite place it.
"Get us down on the ground, goddamnit," Taylor roared.
It seemed to Meredith that Taylor had just realized what was going on. But the old man seemed to have no intention of sharing his knowledge.
"Yes, sir," Krebs's voice came back through the intercom, just a second late. The old warrant officer's voice seemed to tremble, astonishing Meredith, who had grown used to Krebs's theatrical toughness.
The sensors on the M-100 were very efficient, and although they were still several kilometers from the thrashing soldier's location, Meredith could already begin to make out the exact contours of the body, even the more pronounced facial features. He almost thought he recognized the man.
Suddenly, he realized what the man's unfocused pawings reminded him of: a newborn infant.
"Get a grip on yourself, Merry," Taylor said gently.
Meredith shook his head and wiped his eyes. He could not bring himself to look at Heifetz again. Or at any of the others.
"I'm going to be sick," he said.
"That's all right," Taylor told him. The old man's voice labored to steady him. "Just go outside. It's all right to be sick."
Meredith did not move. The smell of human waste hung thickly in the ops cell of Heifetz's M-100. Meredith closed his eyes. He did not want to see any more. But, behind his eyelids, the image of the last several minutes grew even grimmer.
"I'm going to be sick," Meredith said again. He could feel the" tears searching down over his cheeks for a streambed, seeking out the lowest hollows and contours of flesh.
Taylor took him firmly by the arm.