nightmare of shattered trees, the ground a shambles of blast-tossed trunks blown into untidy heaps interlaced with branches stripped bare of leaves, the air thick with the acrid smell of charred wood and burned fuel, thin skeins of blue smoke drifting, twisting away into the sky.
Nothing moved, the silence oppressive. Michael scanned the valley for any sign of life. 'Nothing,' he said after a while. 'You see anything?'
'No. Any poor bastard caught down there would have had no chance. You think they were after the 48th?' Anna asked.
'I hope not,' Michael said with a heavy heart, 'though the Hammers must have seen something to justify a four-lander strike. Come on, they'll have sent recon drones on their way back to count bodies… if they can find any left to count, that is,' he added bitterly.
With a heavy heart Michael followed Anna. The Hammers' ability to rain death and destruction down on the NRA wherever and whenever they chose reinforced his growing fear that this war might be unwinnable. The prospect sickened him; for all its faults, humanspace deserved better than a victorious Hammer of Kraa: a vengeful, bloody-handed, and ruthless instrument of death.
Anna led the way back into the cool of the forest, forcing the pace now that the forest canopy minimized any chance they might be detected by battlesats or recon drones. Two more days should see them out of the granite country and back into the karst; another day after that and they would be home.
So Michael hoped. Saturday, November 24, 2401, UD Branxton Ranges, south of Perdan, Commitment
'I'm sure I saw something,' Anna whispered. 'Here, check it out.'
She spit on the inside of her wrist and pressed her forearm to his. Michael's neuronics went online with Anna's; a second later he was looking through her optronics-enhanced eyes at a tumbled cluster of boulders overgrown with thick strands of creeper, a tangled green nightmare.
'Okay,' he said, staring at the scarlet target icon Anna had laid over the image, 'but what am I supposed to be seeing?'
'Keep looking.'
Hard as he tried, all he saw was greenery. He shifted his optronics filters up and down the wavelengths, stopping in the infrared. Then he saw it, a patch of exposed rock toward the top of the outcrop that showed up a few degrees warmer than the rest. After a while he worked out what he was looking at: the infrared signature of a man's buttocks, a figure eight lying on its side.
'Nice work, Anna,' he said. 'Someone was sitting in that damn rock not long ago.'
'He was. We don't know if they are expecting us or not. We may have triggered a sensor,' she said, head swiveling around slowly to check their surroundings. 'Though I don't think so as I'm not picking up any radio transmissions from any sensor lines. We were very careful coming in.'
'I'm glad we knew about it. We owe those sensor recon teams a beer.'
'We do,' Anna said. 'Anyway, we need to get the hell out of here. Back the way we came before heading west… fast. If the NRA intel is correct, five klicks will take us around the end of this sensor line. If they did detect us coming south, we should be clear by the time they work out that we're not going to walk into their ambush. Let's go.'
Nerves jangling, Michael slid backward with infinite care, his every movement slow and deliberate, paced to ensure that he never overtaxed his chromaflage, that nothing except the sounds and sights of the forest reached the line of holocams and acoustic sensors the Hammers had strung across their path.
Once out of sight of the boulders and well clear of the sensor line, he and Anna turned. Moving fast now, they made their way to the end of the line of Hammer sensors before turning south again.
Finally clear, Anna stopped and waved Michael forward. 'Okay?' she whispered.
'Yup.'
'I think we're clear. Your neuronics picking up any radio transmissions?'
'No, still nothing.'
'Good. That means the Hammers haven't air-dropped any remote sensors. Let's go.'
With that, she was on her feet, moving quietly through the trees, the need for speed tempered by the need to stay quiet. The NRA knew the locations of the Hammers' fixed sensor lines; where they might have dropped thousands of short-lived microsensors to try to pick up the retreating NRA was another matter. Scattered at random in the thousands in the aftermath of any big NRA operation, the microsensors were card-sized boxes packed with a wide-angle holocam and microphone, an optical and acoustic signal processor, a power supply good for a week's operation, and a simple radio transmitter, all attached to a cable and cross-frame aerial designed to snag in the trees. Simple, cheap, and crude-just like the Hammers, Michael always thought-the microsensors would hang in the trees waiting to shout for help if something out of the ordinary walked past.
All Michael could hope was that they never ran into one; the Branxton Ranges was a big place, and even the Hammers could not cover every square meter of it with microsensors.
For hour after hour they did not stop, crossing a series of valleys and ridges until Anna declared herself satisfied they were clear and called a halt. Michael was beginning not to care much; his left leg was mounting its usual protest. Dropping to the ground, he fumbled around in a pocket until he found his supply of painkillers-his drugbots had run out long since-swallowing a couple with a welcome drink from his canteen.
'What a life,' he muttered. 'Wha-'
Michael's neuronics screamed a sudden warning, and without thinking, he was on his feet, dragging Anna with him. 'You get that?' he said as they started to run.
'Yup. Bastards have pinged us,' Anna said while they plunged through the undergrowth away from the radio transmissions detected by their neuronics. 'Those sensors were real close. All we can do is go like hell and hope they're slow to turn up. They'll be getting a lot of these intercepts.'
'Optimist,' Michael said, beginning to breathe hard.
'Come on, faster,' was Anna's response.
Michael ran as he had never run before, launching himself into a pounding, driving relentless plunge through the tangled undergrowth and down into the valley bottom, slipping and sliding across water-slicked rocks, forcing a path back up to the ridge, cursing when roots snagged boots, when branches slashed savage welts into exposed skin, when tanglevine snagged rifle or helmet or backpack, heart hammering, chest heaving, legs dissolving into molten rivers of white-hot agony. All pain was ignored in a desperate race to get over the ridge and into the valley beyond, then the next, and the next, pushed on by willpower alone, on, on, on, until his willpower ran out and his body crashed to the ground in a sobbing heap, lungs fighting to drag air in to feed muscles screaming for oxygen, legs locked, unable to take him another meter.
'Stop,' he whispered, straining to make himself heard. 'Stop.' It was all his tortured lungs would allow.
Anna did stop; she turned back and slid to the ground alongside him, breathing hard. 'Take five,' she said. 'Then we need to get into clear ground. We'll go one more klick that way, but low and slow this time. Okay?'
Michael nodded; he could not speak. Facedown in the dirt of the forest floor, he waited. Slowly the pain from legs and lungs abated. 'I'm ready,' he said at last. 'Let's go.'
'Okay,' Anna said.
Staying on her stomach, she was off, easing her way smoothly over the ground. With an effort, Michael made himself follow, even though all he wanted was to find a cool, dark, safe place to rest up. But giving up was not an option. He hated the thought that he might be the one who called it quits first. He would stop when Anna said stop, so he kept going, though for how long, he did not know.
An age later, Michael was close to collapse, exhausted, in pain, hungry, thirsty. Toward the end, the only thing that sustained him was Anna's relentless ability to keep moving, her body sliding ahead of him in complete silence over rock, through water and undergrowth, the pace set to allow her chromaflage to blend her shape into the background, invisible to any Hammer holocam. No matter how bad he felt, he always had just enough left to follow her, his eyes locked with manic determination on the tiny ID patch on the back of her helmet.
Crossing a small ridge, they slithered down to a thin trickle of a stream where a sizable clearing opened up by a fallen tree long covered by a sprawling mass of vine dominated the gully. Michael followed Anna under the tangled mess, overwhelmed with relief when she signaled a stop. Please let that be it for today, he prayed.
'I'm not picking up any radio transmissions,' Anna whispered, 'but I want a thorough check. If there are sensors around us, we need to know. If the area's clear, we'll lie up here while we work out what to do next. You take west through south to east. I'll do north. Okay?'
