The big Asgardian was very good in the mountains. He moved like a mountain goat, just as surely and almost as silently. That was why Julian had included him on this little jaunt, and the NCO nodded in agreement with his observation as he took another look at the objective. The mercenaries weren't stupid, and they had guards on the wall against the possibility of a night attack. But they were very complacent, for there were no sentries actually patrolling the camp they'd established in the valley. Or maybe complacent wasn't exactly the right word for it, he conceded after a moment. No Mardukan raiding force could possibly have come after them through these temperature conditions, after all, even if it could have made the climb up the cliffs in the first place, which was questionable.
'This is going to be a cakewalk,' he whispered.
'Something's bound to go wrong,' the plasma gunner disagreed, getting up carefully to avoid sending a rock bouncing into the valley to give away their position.
The two Marines moved back to the bivouac the team had established. It was an overcast, moonless night, and without the vision systems of their helmets, they would have been stumbling along blind. As it was, the faint reflection of the fires of Ran Tai was enough to give them near daylight vision.
They rounded the small projection of stone that shielded their camp from view from the valley and squatted down by Macek. The private was heating a cup of soup with a resistance heater. Technically, that was a violation of doctrine, since they were supposed to be making a cold camp, but the resistance heater only radiated in infrared, and it wasn't like they had to worry about scummy scan teams picking it up.
'That looks good,' Julian observed as he flopped down on his open bivy tent.
'Fix your own, then,' the private suggested, and Gronningen chuckled and pulled out a piece of jerked capetoad. The meat from the animals had yielded several hundred kilos of jerky that some of the company relished.
Julian generally found it awful, but he was hungry enough to pull out a piece of his own and start gnawing on it.
'I can't believe that after all I've done for you, you begrudge me a little soup,' he said in a whiny tone.
'Yeah? Like dragging me up a mountain to alternately freeze and bake?' the private asked, then chuckled. 'Hell, I was making it for all of us,' he admitted. 'It's not much, just a little jerky and a few leftover pieces of tater.'
'Sounds good,' Gronningen said. 'I'm ready to get off this hill, too,' he admitted reluctantly. The Asgardian religion had some extremely stoic overtones.
'Me, too,' Julian assured him. 'I'm ready for some of Matsugae's cooking.' He sighed. 'Or even some of the stuff in the town. It's not too bad, you know.'
'I want a bitok,' Macek said. 'That doesn't seem too much to ask.'
'Oh, man,' Julian said, smacking his lips. 'You would have to say that. I want one, too. About an eighth of a kilo. With cheese and onions.'
'Yah,' Gronningen said, leaning back in his own bivy and masticating the shoe-leather jerky. 'A bitok sounds good. Or my mutra's lutefisk.' He sighed. 'It's been a long time since I had my mutra's lutefisk.'
'What's lutefisk?' Julian asked as he took the cup out of Macek's hand and sipped.
'Lutefisk?' The Asgardian frowned. 'That is . . . hard to explain. It is a fish.'
'Yeah?' Macek took a chew of his own jerky. 'What's so special about a fish?'
The Asgardian thought for a moment about trying to explain the attraction of cod soaked in lye, then decided to give up.
'It is a family thing, I think,' he said, and retreated into his normal reticent shell after that while Julian and Macek wrangled quietly over the quality of different bitok joints in Imperial City. Eventually, they both agreed that the only thing to do was get back to Earth and go on a bar-crawl to compare them properly.
They finished the soup, then divided up the watches and settled down for the night. One more day of alternately baking and frying on the plateau, and the company should be on its way.
* * *
Roger pulled himself over the lip of the plateau and stepped forward to let the next Marine up. The windy tabletop was beginning to fill up with the company, but the Marines stayed well away from the northern wall. One noisy, rolling rock could ruin the entire operation.
Roger nodded to Kosutic as she walked up. The flattened view in the night vision systems worked hand in hand with the helmet's face shields to make everyone anonymous, but the helmet systems threw up little tags as people came into view. The tags were effectively invisible, once you got used to them, unless you consciously concentrated on seeing them, but they provided a way for the user to distinguish who was who.
'How we doing, Sergeant Major?' the prince asked. He looked around as the last Marine hauled herself onto the plateau and checked his toot for the time. 'I think we're a little ahead of schedule.'
'That we are, Sir,' the sergeant major replied. She glanced around and saw that the team leaders were getting their people into position. Everything was working out smoothly, exactly as planned.
Which made her very, very nervous.
CHAPTER FIVE
'Ah, finally something that's working out,' Julian said quietly.
The two oversized squads which were all that remained of Bravo Company were lined up along the middle section of the gorge. The gorge snaked back from the entrance for nearly three hundred meters before opening into the mining area, where the majority of the barbarians were bivouacked, but the only guards were on the gates themselves. By landing between the barbarians' camp and the guards, the company could take the mercenaries by the throat . . . assuming everything worked as planned.
'Remember,' Roger said over the company frequency, 'minimum violence. I want them taken down, and taken down hard, but no killing if possible.'
'But don't take unnecessary chances,' Kosutic added.
'Right,' the prince agreed. 'Okay, you all have your targets,' he said, clipping his drop line into place. 'Let's do it.'
The platoon dropped down into the darkness like the shadows of so many chameleon cloth-covered spiders. The drop clips automatically slowed them as they approached the nearly invisible bottom, then detached as their feet hit the ground. Then the shadows split up, one squad heading valley-ward while the other headed for the gates.
* * *
Roger moved through the sleeping encampment and wanted to laugh. The barbarians were pretty clearly a nomadic cavalry outfit, since the recon teams had confirmed that they had their women and children with them, but their picket lines were well up the valley. The
Julian and his team had determined which hut belonged to the leaders of the barbarians, and the prince had chosen it as his personal target. He hoped that if he took the leader, he could convince him to surrender. He'd been able to negotiate an agreement with Deb Tar and the city authorities of Ran Tai to let the barbarians go free if they surrendered, so he had that to bargain with. If the barbs wanted to fight, though, things could get messy. Whatever else these scummies might be, and however overconfident they might seem, they were also professional warriors, and unlike the Kranolta, they had firearms. As cavalry, they carried the big wheel lock pistol/carbines, not the heavier-caliber infantry arquebuses with their resin-coated slow matches. Developing reliable gunpowder and ignition systems for firearms on a planet with Marduk's predominately humid, one might almost say 'saturated,' climate must have been a nightmare. It had certainly required more ingenuity than had been the case back on Terra, and from what the humans had been able to discover so far, the several-times-a-day rains which were so much a part of the normal Mardukan weather experience were a major tactical factor in their use. Armies without arquebuses, or with fewer of them than their opponents, strove mightily to avoid battles under anything except rainy conditions, and no scummy in his right mind would have dreamed of building an army without plenty of old-
