of a cave, her visor up as she took a drink. She, too, showed the effects of rock splinters, a massive gash across her helmet marking the path of a near miss.
Willems did not seem too bothered; she raised her canteen in mock salute and grinned at Michael. “Wondered if you made it.”
“Me, too,” Michael said, ducking instinctively when a storm of rifle fire howled overhead, followed by the characteristic fizzing of the lander’s lasers and the shivering crack of cannon fire walking its way across the slope above them.
“Firing blind,” Kallewi said laconically, untroubled by the racket, “hoping to keep us pinned down until the marines can get to us. Well, good luck to them, ’cause luck is all they have going for them. Let’s go before they work out where we actually are.”
They set off again, slipping through the boulder field, climbing all the time. Michael concentrated on keeping his head down while Kallewi led the way through the nightmarish falls of tumbled rock that climbed steeply ahead of them. They stopped, but only long enough to dispatch a few more Hammers-Kallewi picked off a surveillance drone that strayed too close while he was at it-before moving off again. And so it went, on and on, until Michael could think of nothing else but keeping up with the relentless pace set by Kallewi, the only breaks forced on them by the Hammer landers returning to waste yet more ordnance on the rock slope. As each attack died away, Michael said another quiet prayer of thanks to the genius responsible for marine-grade chromaflage capes. He doubted whether the Hammers had ever known precisely where they were; they would be dead otherwise.
It took a while before he noticed, but it suddenly struck Michael that the Hammers were becoming increasingly reluctant to show themselves, their skirmish line disintegrating moments after it formed, victim to the appalling terrain. Soon the marines’ rate of fire dropped away noticeably, degenerating into random volleys interspersed with intermittent strafing runs from the landers that achieved very little apart from wasting prodigious amounts of ordnance in exchange for a lot of noise and broken rock.
By early afternoon, the Hammers gave up what must have been an increasingly frustrating and fruitless operation. Kallewi’s pace thwarted the Hammers’ repeated attempts to flank them. As they were forced to keep coming head-on, the Hammers’ efforts to drop blocking forces in place were frustrated by terrain no ground attack should ever have to cross, their numbers and overwhelming firepower neutralized by never knowing for sure where their prey was hiding.
Michael watched the Hammers give up finally and start to withdraw, pleased to see an impressive number of casualties ferried away in a fleet of Serhati ambulances. Michael’s opinion of the innate good sense of the locals had gone up. A large number of Serhati troops had arrived in armored half-tracks early in the battle; keeping well back, none made even the slightest effort to lend the Hammers a hand, content to watch the proceedings from a safe distance. When the Hammer landers took off and roared back up into orbit, the noise of their departure shaking the rocks, the Serhatis left, too, leaving a single half-track behind to keep an eye on things.
Even with the Hammers gone, Kallewi refused to ease up; on and on, up and up, they climbed until late into the afternoon. When Kallewi called it quits finally and waved them into a shallow cave screened by a tumbled maze of giant boulders, Michael almost cried with relief. He was a mess: hands and knees ripped and torn, his right shoulder aching after a day of firing, the skin of his shredded right arm and leg stiff with dried blood and tightening by the minute, his head muzzy with the aftereffects of fuel-air bombs dropped too close.
Sprawled across the dusty floor of the cave in silence, the group lay there for a long time. Exhausted, Michael let his mind churn through the day, a chaotic grab bag of events, places, people. And noise: the awful, bone-jarring
That said it all.
Later, Michael took his turn on watch. It was a glorious night, the sky so dark and clear that he might have been in space, with only the soft crackling of slowly cooling rock and the occasional murmur of a passing surveillance drone to break the quiet. The drones had stayed when the Hammers pulled out, even though the task of tracking marinegrade chromaflage was beyond their optronics. They flew at random across the boulder fields, hoping to get lucky. Fat chance, Michael decided as his neuronics tracked one across the sky; with an effort he resisted the temptation to hack the thing out of the air. Cradling his rifle, Michael watched the drone disappear into the night. He felt better than he had in a long time, all fear and stress purged by the atavistic pleasure of shedding Hammer blood, comforted by the knowledge that he was safe and Anna was alive.
He stared down the slope across the starlit jumble of rock, his neuronics painting it a confused mess of grays and black. From time to time, he checked the feeds from the network of tiny holocams Kallewi had set up around the cave; they, too, showed nothing but yet more rock. Nothing moved. The Hammers were long gone, and there was no sign of their coming back, though Michael could not be convinced they had just given up and gone home. If he had learned anything that day, it was that the Hammers wanted him so badly that they would waste the lives of as many marines as it took to get their hands on him. Well, let them try, he vowed; he would kill himself first.
Michael made himself as comfortable as a bruised and battered body would allow. A satcom call from the embassy told them to stay out of sight, and for the moment at least, he stood his watch, quite happy to comply.
Wednesday, April 11, 2401, UD
Michael was not in good shape.
It was hot in the morning sun. It was dry. Food was running short. Water from the nearest spring was limited, its miserable flow delivering only enough to keep thirst at bay, never enough to clean up, to wash away some of the filth that encrusted his body. He stank: a sour mix of sweat, blood, burned rock, gun smoke, and dust. His body hurt, all of it. He was exhausted, his reserves of energy drained by the constant need to stay vigilant, to change their hiding place every night, to keep moving. With every fiber in his body, Michael wanted nothing more than to lie back and daydream the day away, but he would not trust the Hammers farther than he could spit. Nothing would convince him they had given up.
So he stood his watches: four hours on, eight hours off, the tumbled fall of rock in front of his position soon so deeply imprinted on his mind, he probably could draw it with his eyes closed. Bored he might be, but inattentive he was not. With scrupulous care, he scanned the approaches to their position endlessly.
For the fourth day in a row, nothing moved except dust devils and the occasional bird turning slowly in the hot morning air. Even the surveillance drones had gone home. He had not seen one for two days.
A shower of pebbles from behind him made him start; he swung around, raising his rifle, even though he knew it was Kallewi.
“Relax,” the marine said, sliding into position alongside him, Willems following close behind.
“I will,” Michael said sourly, “when we get off this godforsaken planet.”
“Well, in that regard, I have good news. In ten hours, a Fed task group will jump in-system, beat the shit out of the
“I’m pleased to hear it,” Michael said, “but what about us? I trust the plan extends to recovering us, too?”
Kallewi nodded. “It sure does. When the assault commander has the Serhatis under control, a pair of landers will be on their way to pick us up. Get the map of the local area up on your neuronics. Our exfiltration won’t be easy, and we need to finalize our pickup point.”
Michael’s eyes narrowed. “Can’t we just make our way down to the base of the rocks and wait there until the landers came?”
“That would not be smart, and I am not a trusting person. I know we haven’t seen the Hammers for days, but I don’t think they’ve given up. Their last chance to nail us is when we leave the protection of these rocks. So if I
