March Upcountry

came online and the weapons went live, and he watched her eyes move as she ran the visual checklist. Then she looked up at him and nodded again.

“Okay, everybody,” Pahner announced, using both his external suit speakers and the all-hands frequency. “We’re live. If you have to take a dump or a piss, do it in the latrine.”

The latrines, like everything else about the camp, met the guidelines for a temporary camp in hostile territory. The latrines had been set up on the jungle side of the camp, and were dug to regulation depth and width. Inside the sensor parameter, each two-man team had dug in its own foxhole, and most of the party would sleep in them. The two-meter trenches were uncomfortable, but they were also safe. Those who weren’t assigned to a fire team, like the Navy personnel (or Roger), had erected temporary shelters with their one-man “bivy” tents within the perimeter enclosed by the foxholes, and the company would maintain fifty percent watch all night long, with one trooper covering the other as he or she slept. It was a technique which had kept armies relatively safe on multiple worlds and through thousands of wars.

Relatively safe.

“How are the troops, Sergeant Major?” he asked quietly. He didn’t like having to ask, but the constant wrestling with Roger was dragging him away from the troop time he preferred.

“Worried,” Kosutic admitted. “The marrieds, especially. Their spouses and kids will have gotten the word by now that they’re dead. Even if they make it back after all, it’s going to be hard. Who’s going to provide for their families in the meantime? A death bonus isn’t much to live on.”

Pahner had considered that.

“Point out to them that they’re going to be up for plenty of back pay when they get home. Speaking of which, we’re going to have to get some sort of a pay cycle in place when we get to whatever passes for civilization on this ball.”

“Long way off to think about,” Kosutic pointed out. “Let’s make it through this night, and I’ll be happy. I don’t like thisyaden thing. That big scummy bastard doesn’t look like the type to scare easy.”

Pahner nodded but didn’t comment. He had to admit that the Mardukan shaman had him spooked, too.

“Wake up, Wilbur.” Lance Corporal D’Estrees nudged the grenadier’s boot with her plasma rifle. “Come on, you stupid slug. Time to take over.”

It was just past local midnight, and she was more than ready to rack out for a couple of hours. They’d been trading off, turn and turn about, since sunset, while it got colder and colder. There’d been a few little things moving in the jungle below, and the sort of strange, unfamiliar noises any new world offered. But nothing dangerous, nothing to write home about. Even with both of the planet’s double moons below the horizon, there was enough light for their helmets to enhance it to a barely dusky twilight, and there’d been nothing doing. Just hours to wait and watch and think about the straits the company was in. Now it was Wilbur’s turn and the bivy tent was calling to her. If she could just get the stupid bastard to wake up, that was.

The grenadier was sleeping in his bivy, a combination of one-man tube-tent and sleeping bag less than a meter behind the foxhole. If it dropped in the pot he could be in the hole in a second; would be in the foxhole before he was fully awake. It also kept him in reach to be awakened for guard duty, but it had been a long day and it looked like he was sleeping pretty hard.

Finally, she got annoyed and flipped on her red-lens flashlight. It had the option of infrared, but prying open an eyelid and shining infrared in was an exercise in frustration.

She pulled back the head of the tent to flash the light in the sleeping grenadier’s eyes.

Roger rolled to his feet at the first yell, but he could have spared himself some bruises if he’d just stayed put. The instant he came upright, two Marines tackled him and slammed him straight back down on the ground. Before he could sort out what was happening, there were three more troopers on his chest, and more around him with weapons trained outward.

“Get off me, goddamn it!” he yelled, but to no avail. The limits of his command authority were clear; the Marines would let him make minor choices, like whether they lived or died, but not large ones, like whether he lived or died. They ignored his furious demands so completely that in the end he had no choice but to settle for chuckling in bemusement.

Several minutes passed, and then the pile began to erupt as arms and legs disentangled. There were a few good-natured wisecracks that he pointedly did not hear, and then a hand pulled him to his feet. He noticed in passing that it was as dark as the inside of a mine, and he was wondering what had changed their minds and convinced them to let him up when his helmet was placed on his head and the light amplifiers on the visor engaged. Pahner was standing in the doorway of the tent.

“Well,” the captain said wearily, “we’ve had a visit from your friend’s vampires.”

The grenadier was twenty-two, stood a shade over a hundred seventy centimeters, and, according to his file, weighed ninety kilos. He’d been born on New Orkney, and he had light reddish hair that ran thick on the backs of his freckled hands.

He no longer weighed ninety kilos, and the freckled hands were skeletal and yellow in the beam from the flashlight.

“Whatever it was,” Kosutic said, “it sucked out just about every drop of blood in his body.” She pulled up the chameleon cloth and pointed to the marks on his stomach. “These are at all the arteries,” she said, turning the head to show the marks at the neck. “Two punctures, side-by-side, just about the width of human canines. Maybe a little closer.”

Pahner turned to the lance corporal who’d been the grenadier’s buddy. The Marine was stonefaced in the light from the lamp as she faced the company and platoon leadership with a dead buddy at her feet.

“Tell me again,” Pahner said with iron patience.

“I didn’t hear a thing, Sir. I didn’t see a thing. I was not asleep. Private Wilbur did not make a sound, nor were there any significant sounds from the direction of his hooch.”

She hesitated.

“I . . . I might have heard something, but it was so faint I didn’t pay it any attention. It was like one of those sounds in a hearing test, where you can’t really tell if it was a sound or not.”

“What was it?” Kosutic asked, checking the inside of the bivy tent for any indication of what had slipped in and out of the camp with such deadly silence. The small, one-man tents were shaped like oversized sleeping bags with just enough room inside for a person and his gear. Whatever had killed the private had entered and left the tent without any apparent trace.

“It . . . sounded like . . . a bat,” the plasma gunner admitted unhappily, fully aware of how it was going to sound. “I didn’t think anything of it at the time.”

“A bat,” Pahner repeated carefully.

“Yes, Sir,” the Marine said. “I heard a real quiet flapping sound once. I looked around, but nothing was moving.” She paused and looked at the semicircle of her superiors. “I know how it sounds, Sir. . . .”

Pahner nodded and looked around.

“Fine. It was a bat.” He drew a deep breath and looked back down at the body. “To tell you the truth, Corporal, it sounds like just another creature on another world we don’t know much about.

“Bag him now,” he told Kosutic. “We’ll have a short service and burn him in the morning.”

The Marine body bags could be set to incinerate their contents, which allowed bodies to be recovered rather than left behind. After the cremation, the bag was rolled up like a sleeping bag around the ashes and became just another package which could be carried with a minimum of weight and space.

“A bat,” he muttered, shaking his head again as he walked back into the darkness.

“Don’t worry about it, Troop,” Gulyas told D’Estrees definitively with a tap on the arm. “We’re on a new planet. It might have real vampire bats, and those are sneaky suckers, let me tell you.” The lieutenant had grown up in the mountains of Colombia, where vampire bats were an old and known enemy. But Terran vampire bats didn’t suck a corpse dry.