by the sheer speed and ferocity of Shinoda’s attack to put up anything more than token resistance, resistance that vanished altogether when his senses were overwhelmed by the warmth and scent of her body, his tongue flicking out to meet hers.
Shinoda lifted her head only a fraction but enough to break the kiss. “I know we have history, and I know I said to make it real,” she whispered, her breath warm and sweet on his face, “but don’t get carried away, spacer boy.”
“Like to tell me what you’re doing?” Michael whispered back.
“Drone, you idi-sir.”
Shinoda didn’t have to say it. Michael did feel like an idiot. He could hear the steady, thrumming resonance of engines. A minute later a drone shot overhead and disappeared into the distance.
Pinned to the ground, Michael waited for Shinoda to let him go, something she appeared reluctant to do. Finally she rolled off him and onto her back. She lay there, staring up into the dense mass of greenery that hung over their heads. “Pity about that,” she said.
“Pity about what?”
“Lieutenant Colonel Anna Cheung Helfort, that’s what.”
“Ah,” was Michael’s only response. He did not trust himself to say any more. He was on very thin ice, and he knew it.
“Come on,’ Shinoda said. She scrambled to her feet. “We should move out.”
“We should. Think that thing saw us?”
“No. The new Hammer recon drones are a problem, but that version’s not,” Shinoda replied with a dismissive wave. “That was a KSD-31: no down-facing radar, limited ESM capability, and fitted with infrared and optical sensors only. And one of these-” She pointed at the massive fig tree. “-is as good as cover gets … well, short of a couple of meters of ceramcrete, that is. Right, sir,” Shinoda went on, all businesslike, as if the events of a few moments earlier had never happened. “Get geared up and we’ll move out. And triple-check your chromaflage. There’ll be surveillance drones around, and we can’t rely on them all being second-rate KSD-31s.”
“Yes, sergeant.”
Binoculars to their eyes, Michael and Shinoda lay under their chromaflage capes back from the crest of a ridge that ran parallel to the western boundary of Gwalia Missile Defense Base. The late afternoon sun burned hot on their backs.
The base was huge, laid out in a broad rectangle. It was studded with hexagonal ceramcrete structures that supported armored cupolas. Below each one was a quadruple Goshawk antiballistic missile launcher. The perimeter was secured by three razor-wire fences. They ran in parallel and were studded with posts cluttered with arrays of motion sensors and holocams. A road ran outside the wire, connecting a series of small blockhouses and laser batteries. Beyond the road, the ground had been scraped back to dirt for a good 500 meters. Michael didn’t need binoculars to know what the signs set in the ground every 50 meters said. The skull and crossbones symbol that headed each one was enough to tell him that the entire area was thick with mines.
In the center of the base was the command center. It was a brutal building, squat and ugly, built of ceramcrete with massive recessed blastproof doors and topped with an enormous dome that protected the phased array radar installation, its seamless skin blindingly white in the morning sun.
Michael shifted his binoculars onto the only thing that mattered to him and Shinoda: the road connecting the command center to the base’s main gate, a substantial installation in its own right, protected from attack by a chicane and flanked by dragon’s teeth; the approach was covered by blockhouses.
From the gate ran the one and only road that linked Gwalia Missile Defense Base to the town of Gwalia. It was down that road that Colonel Farrah would drive when Juggernaut happened.
“Seen enough?” Michael murmured. They had been watching for hours now, and he was beginning to get nervous.
“I have,” Shinoda said. “Let’s get out of here before we get spotted. I’d like to drive the road before it gets dark, and we should make sure the good colonel is still shacked up with his wife in town.”
By the time sunset arrived-always a protracted business on Commitment thanks to its forty-nine-hour day- Shinoda had picked a spot along the road linking the missile base to Gwalia. It was a tight curve forced on the engineers by a massive limestone reef that reared up out of flat ground.
Shinoda scuffed the toe of one boot through the dust. “Thanks to all this damn rock, there’s not as much vegetation as I’d like,” she said, “but this’ll do.” She looked up and down the road. “I’ll put you there-” She pointed to where a small outcrop poked its way clear of a thin fringe of bushes. “-while I go just here, alongside this boulder. Our man will come from that way.” She pointed down the road toward Gwalia. “He’ll slow right down for the bend, and that’s when we’ll hit him. We’ll put three of the remote holocams down the road. That way we can make absolutely sure we get a positive identification. Be a shame to shoot up the wrong car. And we’ll put the fourth camera back toward the base to make sure we don’t get blindsided by someone coming from that direction. All make sense?”
“Yup.”
“Our primary egress will be 50 meters back from and parallel to the road, back where we’ll stash the bot. If that’s compromised, we’ll follow the reef away from the road up to high ground, drop down to the Jerzic River, turn north, and try to reach the NRA positions in the Velmars on foot.”
“Long walk.”
“But doable. So what I want you to do is this: First, put the base-side holocam in position. Let me see; yes, you’ll need to run fiber back to here. We can’t risk a radio datalink, and we can’t get direct line of sight, so a laser link is out.”
“Roger that.”
“And point the bloody thing the right way, toward the base. Got that?”
“Sergeant,” Michael protested, “I’m not a complete idiot.”
“Maybe not, but you’d be surprised how many times it happens. Now, when you’ve done that, I’d like you to check our secondary escape route. Try to find a way through that will allow us to move fast; look for good ambush sites and ways to get up onto the reef if we have to. Got all that?”
“Yeah. How far do I go?”
“Let me see … Five klicks should be enough. But I want you back here no later than four hours from now and watch your chromaflage discipline. There’ll be drones for sure. Any questions?”
“Just one. While I’m doing that, where will you be? And I’m not being a smart-ass, sergeant, in case you were wondering. I just want to know where to find you.”
“Fair enough. I’ll set up the cameras, run the fiber back here, and bring up our supplies in case we have to abandon the bot. And when we’ve done all that, we’ll find somewhere to hole up.”
Shinoda commed Michael. “Just received the final go code from ENCOMM,” she said. “J-Hour is confirmed for 04:00 Universal. So let me see; yes, that’s just on dusk local time.”
“Any sign of life?”
“There’s still nothing moving.” The road was empty in both directions and had been since the last changeover of the base’s watch keepers.
“A snag?”
“As soon as the shit hits the fan, the missile base will to go from OPSTAT-4 to OPSTAT-5, and our man will come tearing down the road, right?”
“Which is why we’re both here, sir,” Shinoda said. She sounded irritated.
“But we haven’t seen the base go to OPSTAT-5, have we?”
