“Thanks,” said Will.
“And if I were you I’d be moving out of here soon. There’s probably going to be hell’s own horde of Wolves coming through here before very long.”
Will nodded. “Sure.”
The infantryman in jump armor took off, rising from the ground in a long flat arc. The jets of his suit made a fast-fading blaze of light against the night sky. A distant observer, knowing no better, might have taken it for the path of a meteor.
Will and his two companions watched his departure in silence. Lexa was the first to speak.
“He’s right. We should go. But—”
“Aye,” said Jock.
Another drawn out silence followed. Finally Will said, “I think we ought to get at least a look at the Wolves before we run.”
“Yeah,” said Lexa. “I think we should.”
“Aye,” said Jock again. “But how are we going to do it?”
“Same as before,” Will said. “We take the Fox as close as we can without getting burned; then we get out and walk.” He thought further, and added, “One of us’ll have to wait on the road with the Fox’s hover jets running. We might need to get out in a hurry.”
Lexa and Jock nodded agreement to the plan, such as it was, and they soon had the Fox armored car back on the road. With Jock at the wheel, they drove to within a few hundred meters of the timberline. At that point the road ended except for a footpath—not much more than a blazed trail, and one that would have been useless in the dark if Will hadn’t known the way.
Will took his Gauss rifle from the Fox. Lexa hesitated briefly, then set aside her laser rifle in favor of the heavy particle gun she’d brought with her that morning.
“More firepower,” she explained.
“Can’t hurt,” Will agreed. “Jock, you get the armored car pointed back down the way we came, and keep it warmed up and ready to go.”
Lexa and Will took the footpath up to the timberline and across the bareface, then belly-crawled the last few meters. Will said, “This is as far as we ought to go. Any nearer the road and we’ll be out of cover. We’re looking at a blind turn down there as it is—anyone coming through won’t actually be within range until we’re almost on top of them.”
“Maybe you’re looking at a blind curve,” said Lexa. “For all that I can see, this entire mountain is as dark as the inside of a goat.”
“I’ve been here before. That’s the secret. I used to take parties of rock climbers through Red Ledge in the summertime, back before the HPG net went down and the offworld tourists stopped coming.”
“You’re kidding. Rock climbers?”
“God’s honest truth,” said Will. “The road’s about fifty meters ahead of us and fifty meters down, and the walls of the pass at that point are bare rock and go straight up. The rock climbers liked the challenge. They’d spend all day pulling themselves up the cliff face by their fingernails, and I’d go around by the trail and meet them at the top with a nice hot dinner.”
“I wish someone would meet us with a nice hot dinner,” said Lexa. “Are you sure we don’t want to get a bit closer? We aren’t going to get a real good look from here.”
“This is close enough. We’ll hear the Wolves a long time before we ever get a chance to see them.”
Time passed. With the sky covered in clouds, Will found it hard to estimate hours and minutes. He considered illuminating the face of his watch long enough to check, but reminded himself that an enemy sniper would only need one flash of light in the dark to pinpoint his location. After a while, he became aware of a low, almost subliminal rumbling—a distant noise that was almost more a shuddering in the ground and a tremor in the air than anything actually heard.
“Here they come,” he said. “Sounds like they’re pushing it.”
“Top speed, in the dark? Somebody sure has guts.”
“Nobody ever said the Wolves were cowards,” Will said.
“Not more than once, anyway,” Lexa agreed. “This bunch—how many of them are there, do you think?”
He shrugged, though he knew she couldn’t see the movement in the dark. “Can’t tell. Some kind of advance guard, probably—a noise like that isn’t just a couple of scouts.” A moment later he continued, moved by the same impulse that earlier had rendered him unwilling to turn tail without actually making visual contact with the advancing Wolves. “I think we can throw a scare into them, though—maybe get them to slow down a little.”
“How?”
“Let them come closer. Get the particle gun ready, and when I give the word, blast away with it against that cliff face I was talking about earlier. Try to hit it about twelve meters off the ground. Can you do that in the dark?”
Lexa chuckled. “I can do a lot of things in the dark, soldier. Hitting a rock wall isn’t even going to be one of the tough ones.”
They fell silent again. Will heard Lexa unlimbering the particle gun and settling down into a prone firing position. He had his own Gauss rifle close to hand. The rumbling of the Wolves’ advance grew closer, growing from a faint and steady noise to an enormous and overwhelming one.
Closer, Will exhorted the Wolves privately, as the air filled with the noise of engines and tank treads. Come just a little closer. Just a little more…
“Now.”
He fired his Gauss rifle at random into the dark. Beside him, at the same time, Lexa let fly with the particle gun.
The weapon roared. Its blast hit the red stone of the cliff with a noise of splitting rock, and illuminated the sheer bareface for an instant with a yellow light brighter than the day. Rock shards flew about in all directions like broken glass.
“Time to go now, I think,” Will said as the echoes died. “Leave the Wolves to stew.”
38
Red Ledge Pass
Bloodstone Range of the Rockspire Mountains
Northwind
June, 3133; local summer
Nicholas Darwin’s Condor tank lurched and grumbled along the highway—the narrow two-lane road, to give it a more accurate description—leading along the bottom of Red Ledge Pass. The tank’s hatch was closed, since in the dark night there was no advantage to leaving an observer exposed to possible enemy fire.
The Condor’s interior dimensions left little room for movement; tankers couldn’t afford to be claustrophobes. Darwin watched the display screens from a position bare inches away from the sensor operator’s shoulders.
Garbage and more garbage, he thought in frustration. His own eyes were blinded by the night and the clouded sky, and the sensors that should have augmented or replaced them gave back nothing but bad data—all of it rendered contradictory, fragmentary, or garbled by the high concentration of iron ores in the mountains that hemmed them in on all sides.
At least the road leading through Red Ledge Pass was open and clearly marked. All that the tank column had to do was stay on it, and overwhelm all opposition along it, and in time they would reach the far side of the mountains. And after the mountains, the capital.
The tank’s communications rig broke the silence with its wheebling signal. The comms operator listened over the headset, then turned to Darwin.
“It is a general communication, sir.”
“Put it on.”
The operator toggled the switch. A voice crackled. Bad interference, thought Darwin, those damned rocks again.
“Command,” said the crackling voice, “this is Scout Team Delta.”
“Go ahead, Delta.”
“I wish to report that we have made contact with the enemy.”
“Excellent,” Darwin said. “What is their position?”