The bridge was a simple, flat, concrete structure that just spanned the rushing waters. Checking both ways as if for traffic, Mosovich hopped over the near guardrail and started across the span with the rest of the team not far behind. On the far side, to the left, was another small field, the intersection of the main road and a washed-out side road that paralleled the river on the west side. The field was covered in brambles and small white pines, none of them more than knee-high, but it looked like some concealment to Brer Mosovich and he jumped the far guardrail and went to ground again.
As soon as the rest of the team was in place, and making sure again that there was no sign of Posleen, he trotted through the brambles to the side road. The nearest woodline was up a chest-high embankment and across another small, sloping, weed-covered field. Once they crossed that, no more than another seventy meters, they would be in the woods and out of sight; the woods on this side were much more “bushy” than on the far slope.
Jake jumped up the embankment and waited for Mueller and Nichols. After helping the sweating sniper haul the rifle up the embankment the team leader headed for the woodline.
Daffodils, some roses run wild and a shallow crater showed that this had once been a homestead. There was also a low, stone terrace to be negotiated. As Jake scrambled up that — reaching the deeper shadows under an enormous pinetree — he looked to the east and went flat on his stomach; a Posleen patrol had just come around the bend on the far side of the river.
The rest of the patrol saw him go down and followed suit, hoping for the darkness and their camouflage to conceal them. Sister Mary took a calculated risk and reached back to flip down her own ghillie net, which was kept in a bag at the top of the rucksack. It only took a few twitches to cover herself and a human could have walked within a few feet and never realized she was there.
The Land Warrior suits they all wore had a nice suite of “sensors,” one of which was a fiber-optic periscope. Mosovich, and everyone else, used theirs now as they slowly extended them above grass height and looked back towards the bridge. The small diameter of the optics, even with the best processing in the world, did not give much detail in the extreme darkness, but some gross outlines were possible to make out. The Posleen patrol had come from the northeast, from the general direction of Tiger, and now they broke rhythm and ranks to cross the small structure.
As the patrol watched, the Posleen force, about two hundred in number, formed up on the near side of the bridge, no more than fifty meters away, turned up the far hill and trotted away.
Mosovich waited a moment for them to get out of sight then stood up carefully. “Now why the hell didn’t they see our trail?” he wondered.
“I dunno,” Mueller responded, picking up the barrel of the sniper rifle. The four trails were clear in the vision systems, with bent down grass and weeds pointing directly to their position. “I dunno,” he repeated. “But let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”
“Concur,” Mosovich said, heading towards the trees again at a moderate but steady pace. “No reason to look a gift horse in the mouth.”
The Posleen normal had very few desires in life. Eat. Sleep. Reproduce. Satisfy the desires of its God. Kill anything that threatened it or its God.
Currently it was satisfying its God that had it bugged. The orders it had been given were right at the edge of its competence. Most of its limited intelligence was bent on keeping to the complicated patrol path that had been laid out for it. The rest was burdened with determining what “signs of the threshkreen” meant. It knew threshkreen; it had survived all three of the fights its God had been involved in. They mostly wore green and brown. They carried weapons not dissimilar to the People. They were generally tough and stringy.
But, by all reason, threshkreen either should be or should not be. This… being in potential, having been, but are not now, but might be again, this was rocket science to the poor normal.
However, as it passed over the bridge, ready to make its programmed turn, it paused. Around it the part oolt formed, looking for the threat that had prevented their temporary master from continuing on. No threat. No thresh, no threshkreen. Just the dark silence of the moonless night.
For the superior normal, however, there was a problem. The last time the God had spoken to him — he recalled it with a thrill of pleasure — the God had asked if he had seen anything not-normal. This, then, these… trails through the high grass and thorn bushes, this was not normal. By extension, it was possible that he should call for help if something was not normal. However, those were not his orders. His orders were to fire off one magazine if he saw “sign of threshkreen.”
But… this could be the mysterious “sign.” Running thresh made such trails; it was a good way to find the thresh for gathering. Threshkreen, though, tended to leave things on the trails themselves, so walking on them when gathering threshkreen was contraindicated.
But even the four-legged thresh of these hills made trails like that from time to time. Another patrol could have scattered them, driving them away from the road by their presence. It could even have been wild oolt’os; there were some of those in these death haunted hills.
Rocket science indeed. Finally, cautiously, the normal moved towards the trails, searching and scenting for any clue. The trails came off of the road, crossed the field with some evidence of scattering or bedding, then went up into the hill beyond. He cautiously paralleled one of the trails. There was a scent of oil, a bite of gun-smell, that combination of propellants, metal and cleaners. But that could have come from anything. It could be in his nose from their own weapons. Finally he paused.
The field was covered in thorn and grass, a simple triangle between the trees along the river, a road that paralleled it and the main road they were patrolling. The parallel road, a washed-out track now after the first onslaught cleared these hills, was also torn in the passage of whatever had made the trails. And in the mud on the far side, under the short cliff that terminated the field beyond, was a clear and unmistakable boot print.
The normal didn’t know it was a bootprint. But he now knew what his God had meant by “sign of threshkreen” for he had seen this before as well. And when he saw it, he lifted his railgun in the air and fired.
“Oh, bloody hell,” Nichols said quietly.
“Somebody spotted the path,” Mueller added unnecessarily. “Jake?”
“Sister, call for fire on that field, call for scatterable mines on our trail, too. Let’s didee-mao, people.”
Cholosta’an scratched up behind the head of the superior normal as he drew his blade. It bothered him to gather this one. The normal was, without a doubt, the best of his oolt’os, but he was wounded sore and the path of duty was obvious. Cholosta’an scratched the chosslain and told him how good he had been to find the trail of the threshkreen as he laid the monomolecular blade against the normal’s throat.
“Wait,” Orostan said quietly. “Is that the one that found the trail?”