One
“What do you make of it, Sarge?”
The sergeant watched the Tressen sentry tug his face scarf back up as wind-driven snow needled the boy’s cheeks. North of Tressel’s Arctic Circle, winter days were short, and this one was already dying. In the fading light, the sentry hiked up his greatcoat and bent forward so he could peer down at the object that his kneeling platoon sergeant was studying.
The object protruded from a drift at the end of the snow furrow the sentry’s boot had plowed when he had tripped over the thing. It resembled an overturned white kitchen pot. A knee-high white wire stuck up from the bowl, thrashing in the mounting gale like a fern stalk.
The sergeant cocked his helmeted head as he knelt, as careful not to touch it as a hot stove.
The kid rolled his eyes. “Sarge, if it didn’t blow up when I tripped over it—”
The sergeant cut the kid off with an upraised palm. “The fish-eaters love second-touch booby traps.”
The kid smiled. “Come on, Sarge. There’s no rebels up here.”
The kid was almost certainly right. There had been few rebels anywhere since before the sergeant himself had been a green, stupid boot. But the object was too civilized for this wilderness, too sleek for this time. The sergeant stood back, hands on hips. “Well, I think it’s got something to do with wireless.”
It had been pure stupidity turned to luck that the kid had chosen to piss fifty yards in front of his fighting hole instead of in the designated latrine trench behind the perimeter. One of the boy’s buddies in the positions to his left or right might have shot him for an intruder. In fact, they should have. Their failure to do so would make for a lively instructional conversation later. Albeit a one-sided one.
The sergeant looked up at the flakes suddenly swirling around the two of them. Blizzard coming, and a long night as well. He sneezed into his mitten, wiped snot on his greatcoat, then dug inside his pocket for his signal whistle.
“Maybe our guests”—the sergeant spat the word—“will know what this thing is.”
The soldiers of the Yavi intelligence unit that the sergeant’s platoon had been ordered to escort weren’t of this world, but they were as human as the sergeant was. Yavi and Tressens were fruit of the same tree, abducted from the Motherworld thirty thousand years ago, or so the historians claimed. But Yavet had civilized faster than Tressel. Yavet’s technology was, they said, a century ahead of Tressel’s. Yavet had even leapfrogged Earth, the Motherworld herself, by twenty years, they said.
Whatever they said, the sergeant thought that if the rest of the Yavi resembled these intelligence poofs, the Yavi were twenty years more arrogant than the Trueborns, too. And it was hard to be more arrogant than a Trueborn Earthman.
The sergeant untangled the signal whistle’s lanyard, fumbling with mittened hands. Then he raised the whistle toward his lips.
Since the private had led the sergeant out here to the object, the kid had been shifting from one foot to another with ever-increasing frequency. At that moment he stepped forward, pointing with one hand. “Okay if I go over there and take a leak now, Sarge?”
The private’s single step yielded three results, each bad.
The first result was bad for the private. His step moved his helmeted head into the path of a rifle round then inbound toward his sergeant, which round was meant to prevent the sergeant from blowing his signal whistle.
The round perforated the private’s steel helmet like a finger through tissue, then split his head like a scarf-wrapped melon.
The impact of bullet against helmet, then bone, deflected and split the round so that its fragments sang harmlessly past the sergeant’s ear. The explosion of the boy’s head shocked the sergeant into frozen paralysis for two heartbeats.
The next result occurred two seconds later and was bad for the sergeant. A bolt-action Tressen service rifle with iron sights can accurately engage a stationary target from three hundred yards at a rate of one round every two seconds, if operated by an exceptional marksman. With the private’s head removed from the line of fire, the follow-on round struck the sergeant an inch below his left eye.
The sergeant’s head snapped back. Then his brain and skull atomized. His helmet fell on the snow, rocking like an inverted tortoise shell, while blood and brain-tissue mist condensed in the cold, then rained down around it.
The third result of the private’s step was bad for the marksman. Distance and swirling wind had carried the rifle shots’ reports away from the Tressen defensive perimeter. Blowing snow already dusted both bodies and would soon bury them. Therefore, the marksman’s efficient violence would have gone undetected, as planned, until the gathering storm passed. But during the two seconds after the private intercepted the first shot, and before the follow-on shot struck, the wind shifted as the sergeant’s last breath escaped through his signal whistle.
A gust carried the whistle shriek back, inside the defensive perimeter, then up and over the topographic crest of the ridge along which the perimeter stretched, and finally down into the shallow valley beyond.
In the valley, already shadowed by the Arctic night, driven snow fogged the glow of floodlights atop plasteel scaffolding. The floods lit a freshly blasted pit as wide and deep as an amphitheater, and in the pit’s center bustled a dozen Yavi and two dozen Tressens. The Yavi, warm and faceless in visored body armor that glinted under the lights, directed the Tressens, who shivered beneath steel helmets and within bulky greatcoats.
The whistle’s alarm caused both Yavi and Tressens to look up simultaneously.
Fluttering invisible above the pit, a hummingbird-sized surveillance ’bot recorded the image of the work party’s reaction, then transmitted the image as a signal too faint to be detected even by Yavi listening equipment. The ’bot’s signal barely carried as far as the relay pod that the poor, headless sentry had tripped over. The pod, in turn, recrypted the image into an equally faint signal that reached out barely three hundred yards. There the image displayed on the visor screen of a white-armored figure. The armored marksman crabbed backward, then lay belly down in the snow, now hidden from view on the reverse slope of the next ridgeline.
“Dammit!” The marksman pounded the snow, frustrated first by the necessity of shooting two grunts who presented no physical threat, and second by the fact that their deaths hadn’t salvaged the mission. The marksman’s junior teammate had already perished four days earlier in a crevasse fall, taking the team’s uplink transmitter down with him.
The marksman bit down on an inner helmet switch that signaled the relay transmitter and the imaging ’bot to incinerate themselves. Then the marksman considered a range of lousy options.
The rifle was Tressen manufactured, obsolete even locally. Its extra bulk during evasive action outweighed any future utility it might have in a shoot-out, if this fiasco deteriorated further. If found, the gun would be assumed stolen, which it was, then abandoned by an Iridian rebel, which it was not. The marksman’s armor, if found, would not, however, be assumed to be of Tressen manufacture. The suit looked like it came from another planet. Because it had.
The marksman chinned the helmet’s visor display to meteorologics. The squall would strengthen for the next twenty-six hours. Windblown snow should cover tracks and discourage pursuit. The marksman’s armor was less advanced than Yavi armor, but it could sustain its wearer under blizzard conditions for days. If the Yavi and the Tressens could be evaded in the meantime.
The marksman left the rifle behind, then ran into a thickening curtain of blowing snow, away from the patrols that were sure to follow.