“That is correct, Captain Connors.”
In about a minute, or perhaps a few seconds more, the AID had an answer. Saying, “This is the pattern,” it projected an image, superimposed over a map of the area, directly onto Connors’ eye.
“I’m guessing,” Connors said, after seeing the pattern of fire, “but it is a good guess. The Chileans are probably dug in a semicircle, give or take, at the base of that mountain to the north, Mount…”
“Mount Aconcagua,” the AID supplied.
“I’m making another guess. The Posleen, instead of pushing on down the pass towards Santiago” — Chile’s capital — “have decided instead to key on the mountain troops.”
This human tendency towards intuition was a source of both vast entertainment value and vast frustration to the AID. It never could quite understand…
“What makes you say that, Captain?”
“Two reasons, AID. The first is that if they hadn’t the Posleen would be down among us by now. The second is… well… what’s the temperature up there?”
“Cold, Captain,” the AID answered. “Minus twelve Celsius and with a wind chill that would kill an exposed man in minutes without superb winter clothing.”
“Right,” Connors said, struggling to keep from sliding on a patch of ice. “Now, we know the Posleen are pretty hardy. We know they’ve been designed for some pretty outrageous environments. I wouldn’t be surprised if they could raise their body temperature to beat off any practical cold pretty much on command. But what would they need to do that, AID?”
Damned humans. “They’d need food, wouldn’t they, Captain? That, and to suck in a great deal of very cold air to get enough oxygen to burn the food with.”
“Count on it, and that will make them colder still. The Posleen are going for the Chileans rather than pushing on because if they don’t get that additional thresh there’s going to be nothing but Posleen icicles all over this pass and on both sides.”
The AID went silent then, leaving Connors to think about other problems. How do we hit them? Surprise would be best. If we can get that it almost doesn’t matter from where we hit.
“AID, I need a recommendation on camouflage for this environment.”
“Snow, Captain.”
“That won’t work. They’ll see us as soon as we silhouette ourselves.”
“No, Captain Connors, I meant a snow storm. We can project a holographic storm high enough and thick enough that the Posleen are most unlikely to notice what’s inside it.”
Damned AIDs. “Do it. And get me control of those mountain guns.”
“Go over the mountains,” the Aarnadaha, or Big Pack Leader, had said. “Go over the mountains and carve out a fief for us. Nothing blocks your way but some lightly armed threshkreen. We have fought the heavily armed ones of this continent and butchered them with ease. What trouble can their merest foot troops give you?”
What trouble indeed, snarled Prithasinthas, a mid-ranking Kessentai leading about seven thousand of the People westward. Plenty of trouble, they’ve been. But not so much as this damned cold. How the hell do they stand it? How the hell do they stand and fight us in it? Ill was the day I left the world of my birth to come here.
The God King saw several of his people hacking steaks off of the human and Posleen dead, to try to gain some desperately needed thresh. The boma blades cut through the meat and bone effortlessly, but when the stupid normals tried to bite?
Even Posleen teeth have trouble munching large slabs of solid ice.
Prithasinthas and his group kept below what the threshkreen would have called the “military crest.” Here they were safe from the humans’ direct fire weapons. The God King wondered why the enemy were not using their indirect ballistic weapons on such a tempting target. His best guess was that the indirect weapons were too busy firing in support of the threshkreen encircled ahead to waste any shells and effort on a danger that only lurked at a distance.
The Kessentai looked up to see another approaching front of this miserable freezing snow. As if we don’t have enough troubles, he thought, shivering.
“B Company,” Connors began, “we’ll advance until either the Posleen see us or I give the order to begin the attack. Whichever happens first, I want First Platoon to go forward to the military crest and seal off the battlefield. Weapons Platoon, you go with them. Keep any reinforcements from entering the pass. Second and Third, you’re with me. We’re going to hit the horsies that I think have the Chileans pinned. We’re going to hit them right in the ass and roll them up. Watch out for friendlies.”
“Sir?” asked First Platoon leader, “the crest is our limit of advance, right?
“Right.”
“Well… what if we get to the crest before you’re ready to hit and they still haven’t spotted us?”
“Hold fire then until they do start coming up. Think hasty ambush.”
“Roger that, sir.”
“You can’t keep the host here much longer, lord,” Prithasinthas’ Artificial Sentience warned. “They’ll freeze to death.”
“Tell me about it, AS,” answered the God King who was slowly freezing to death himself.
“It would not be so bad, lord, if you could just get them out of the wind.”
“Do you see a ship nearby?” Prithasinthas asked sarcastically. “Perhaps a huge Temple of Remembrance? Is there a city of the thresh up here we somehow missed?”
“Errr… no, lord. There is, however a tunnel.”
“What? Where?”
Without another word, and unable to mark the tunnel quickly in any other way, the AS aimed the tenar’s plasma cannon and let fly one bolt at the featureless snow. It struck a few hundred meters in front of the lead edge of the host, causing the normals there to shudder and shy away. When the steam cleared there was an almost square tunnel carved into the rock.
“Well, I’ll be… Kessentai, this is the Aarnadaha. Get your people into that tunnel my AS has just found. Be orderly, now; no jostling.”
“Where does it lead?” the Aarnadaha asked his AS, for the moment attached to the tenar.
“I suspect it emerges on the other side of the pass, lord.”
“Interesting.”
One of the great things, one of the really great things, about the suits was that you couldn’t see out of them. That is to say, they had no view ports. No clear face screens: zero, zip, zilch… nada. Instead, sensors on the suit’s exterior took the images, analyzed them, adjusted them, and painted them directly on the eyes of the suits’ wearers, their “colloidal intelligence units.”
In the process, the suits eliminated the unreal. For example, while the Posleen were steeling themselves for the blast of snow and ice they saw coming towards them, Connors and his boys didn’t even see the holographic display. Rather, they saw a mass of staggering Posleen, or simply shivering ones if those happened to be riding a tenar, blasting blindly forward and often enough falling to the yellow stained snow under the fire of the white-clad human defenders.
The AID automatically analyzed that fire, too, matching it to what was known and suspected about the Posleen deployment.
“Pretty close to what we figured from the pattern of artillery fire,” Connors observed.
“Naturally, Captain,” the AID answered.
Connors took a last look at his own deployments, matched those to the Posleen, and decided, Close enough for government work.