scrubby, stunted trees. What now? Michael wondered. He followed T'chavliki down a gentle slope through trees thickening overhead until they came to a cluster of boulders tumbled together to form overhangs.
'We'll leave you here,' Farsi said. 'There's a stream thirty meters farther on, so water won't be a problem. You'll be safe if you keep those Kraa-damned neuronics of yours shut down, don't wander off, and don't light any fires.'
'Yes,' Adrissa said, 'but when can we meet-'
'Kraa! You Feds are an impatient lot,' Farsi said. 'All in good time. Be ready to move out at first light tomorrow. Let me see… yes that'll be two days' time at 07:15 Universal. Understood?'
Adrissa nodded. 'Understood. We'll be ready.'
For a moment, Michael was confused before he remembered Commitment's forty-nine-hour days. He had not been dirtside a week, and already he hated them. The twenty-four-hour nights were bad enough, but what was worse was the locals' insistence on using Universal Time so that the arrival of daylight and the start of the working day coincided only once every forty-one days. It was a nightmare and confused the hell out of him.
'Right,' said Kallewi as the NRA patrol disappeared into the scrub; like wraiths, they were there one minute, and then they weren't. The marine dumped his pack under an overhang. 'I know we have to trust the NRA,' he said, 'but even so, we'll post a sentry. Four hours on, eight off. Happy with that, sir?'
'One person enough?' Adrissa said.
'Yes, sir, it is. Brought some remote movement sensors. They'll give us plenty of warning.'
Adrissa nodded. 'Okay.'
'Just a few things to watch out for. Stay inside the movement sensors, keep your gun to hand all the time, keep quiet, and for chrissakes, do not take your chromaflage capes off unless you are under the trees. Hammer recon drones can pick up a human 10 klicks away, so be warned. Oh, yes, let the sentry know where you're headed and when you'll be back. I'll take the first watch. Michael and then you, sir. That okay with everyone?'
More nods. 'Need a hand with the sensors, Janos?' Michael asked.
'That'd be good. Running fiber-optics is a pain. Come on, let's go.'
Sighing with relief, Michael lowered his body into a small waterfall-splashed pool, the water tumbling down across granite rocks cool but not cold. The heat from his overworked legs leached away, and for the first time in hours, the pain in his bad leg started to fade to more manageable levels. He lay back and stared at the canopy of branches overhead. The last of the cloud from the tropical depression that had covered their attack on J-5209 was beginning to break, the sun now and again sneaking through to drive slivers of yellow-gold light down through tiny gaps in the canopy.
For a magical minute, tranquillity overwhelmed him, dragging him out of time and place to somewhere new, somewhere there were no Hammers, no Hartsprings, no death, no hurt, a place far from Commitment, a place where he and Anna might live out their days untroubled by all the stupidities that infected the rest of humankind.
The magic faded when a wandering recon drone passing to the south snapped him back to the present. 'Urggh,' he grunted, sitting up. Ignoring the protests from abused muscles, he started work on the muck accumulated over the days of hard marching. Job done, he lay back. Even though he missed Anna, he was surprised to find himself utterly content; for the moment at least, just knowing that she was safe was more than enough. Sunday, September 23, 2401, UD Branxton Ranges, Commitment
Michael had the watch, the minutes until Farsi's return dragging on and on. When one of the sensors reported movement, the shock jolted him upright.
'Stand to, folks. Company,' he hissed, bringing his assault rifle to his shoulder, holding the sighting ring steady on the new arrival's head as he walked into view. 'Stand down,' he said. 'It's Farsi. Welcome back, Sergeant Farsi.'
'Thanks, but just so as you know, Lieutenant,' Farsi said with a half smile, 'we blew your head off long before your sensors picked us up.'
'Eh?'
Farsi lifted his left hand; to Michael's horror, what looked for all the world like a bush slid out from behind a tree and stood up. It was T'chavliki, quite unable to conceal a huge grin as she stabbed her rifle in Michael's direction.
'I'll be damned,' he said, chastened. 'That is impressive.'
'We need to be. Those Hammer bastards have all the technology. Problem is, they rely too much on it. Those movement sensors of yours are good, but we expected them. Took T'chavliki hours to infiltrate your position.'
'Lesson learned, Sergeant Farsi, lesson learned.'
'I hope so.'
Kallewi appeared with Adrissa close behind. 'What's happening?' he asked.
'Corporal T'chavliki made it past our sensors without being detected,' Michael replied.
'No shit!' Kallewi exclaimed, the surprise obvious.
'Yes shit,' Farsi said, deadpan.
Kallewi laughed. 'Getting past those things takes some doing, Sergeant. I think I might have underestimated you guys.'
'Maybe,' Farsi said; a small smile appeared for the first time. 'If you're ready to go, I have a general waiting.'
'Let us grab our sensors, and we're right.'
'Do it.'
With everything recovered, the group set off. As before, Farsi and a trooper led the way, and the pace was no less cruel. Regaining the path, Michael resigned himself to a long day's pain. To his surprise, they walked for thirty minutes before Farsi called a halt.
'One klick ahead of us is a line of Hammer sensors,' he whispered. 'They're not up to Fed standards, but they work well enough. Microphones, holocams, and signal processors uplinked to PGDF headquarters by satellite. The stupid bastards think we don't know about them, and we'd like to keep things that way. So here's what we're going to do…'
An agonizing age later, they had wriggled their way through the line of Hammer sensors; Farsi assured Michael that they had gone undetected. If the Hammers turned up, he had said, they'd know he was wrong. Michael did not have the energy to worry about it. He rolled over onto his back, his knees and elbows protesting after crawling, in places centimeter by centimeter, the best part of a kilometer across broken ground, a twisting circuitous route out of sight of the holocams.
'That was hard,' he muttered to Adrissa when she crawled up and rolled onto her back beside him.
'Tell me,' she said, breathing hard.
'On your feet, folks,' Farsi said, untroubled by the effort. 'Now the good news. Only fifteen klicks to go.'
'Another fifteen klicks?' Adrissa grunted. She climbed to her feet. 'Terrific. I have had it with this hiking business.'
Michael had, too. His left leg was threatening to refuse the weight he put on it. 'I think this leg has, too,' he muttered as he tried to massage it back to life.
'Problem?' Farsi asked.
'Yeah. Rail-gun splinter at Hell's Moons, then a gunshot wound on Serhati. Bloody Hammers. Oh, sorry,' he said, lifting his head to look up at Farsi. 'I didn't mean it that way.'
'Don't be sorry,' Farsi said with a shake of the head. 'Nobody in the NRA thinks of themselves as a Hammer. So don't give me any of that Hammer of Kraa religious shit'-he spit on the ground-'I gave up believing a word of it the day I started to think for myself. When we've kicked the murderous, corrupt bastards out of McNair-and we will-the Resistance Council's first law will be to change the name of the Hammer of Kraa Worlds. Revival Worlds is the current favorite. Anyway, we're wasting time. We need to go. Let me know if you need any help.'
'Thanks, Sergeant.'
'Come on, Michael, lean on me,' Adrissa said, and together they set off after Farsi.
Many hours into the march, Michael was still keeping up, but only with Adrissa's help.
His neuronics' knowledge base told him they were now in limestone karst country. There was plenty of it: half a million square kilometers running southeast away from the floodplain of the Oxus River and the city of McNair, a plateau riddled with thousands upon thousands of sinkholes, many leading down to labyrinthine networks of
