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Bordering Erob's Hold: Behind Enemy Lines

Thus far, Nelirikk's information had been accurate in the extreme.

Val Con crouched in the slender concealment of an armored landcar's rear wheel-well and peered cautiously out. His time in the generator shed and in the ammunition cache had been well spent, and he flattered himself that his most recent efforts in the motor pool would not be found despicable.

As he worked his mischief, he counted—air transport, land transport, foodstuffs and stocked ammo. The count had confirmed Nelirikk's theory that the 14th Conquest Corps, in its stretch for glory, had perhaps over-reached itself.

And would soon be overextended more seriously still. Footsteps sounded, loud in the night. Val Con ducked further back into his hiding place. Two sentries tramped by half-a-foot from his nose, eyes straight ahead, long-rifles resting on broad Yxtrang shoulders.

Val Con held his breath, exhaling very softly when finally they were past. His internal clock gave him two hours until the generator shed opened the evening's festivities. Time enough to create conditions productive of even more consternation before he removed to the flitter.

Carefully, using all of his senses, he checked the immediate area for watchers. Finding none, he eased out of the motor pool and melted into the shadows at the edge of the troop-way.

Some minutes later he entered a barracks, ghosting down the cot-lined aisles. He paused here, there and briefly by the soldierly caches of battle gear at the base of each cot—silent, quick and unhesitant.

The luck was in it, that he encountered no wakeful trooper, though he was forced to freeze in place for a time his heightened senses demanded for hours when a long form shifted in its nest, muttering an irritable order to one Granch to have done and fire the damned thing.

The trooper subsided without coming to a sense of his true surroundings, and Val Con ghosted on, out of the barracks and into the night.

 

The communication center was his last call of the evening. Deliberately so, for anything he might contrive there would need to go forth quickly, and at an increased risk of his capture.

Val Con sank into the thin dark place between a water tank and a metal shed bearing the Yxtrang symbols for "Danger: High Voltage" and assessed the situation.

Communications Central was well lit and very busy, indeed. There were two sentries at the entrance and a constant hubbub of coming and going. Val Con frowned, noting the abundance of officer's markings on the scarified faces of those frequent arrivals and departures.

Something had happened. Something big had happened. He knew it.

He sank back in the shadow of the two buildings, watching the crowd come and go. He checked his internal clock. Fifty Standard minutes before the first explosion took the camp by surprise. Not enough time, good sense argued, to listen at Yxtrang doors in the hope of hearing something worthwhile.

And, yet—If the 15th had arrived?

He slid to the very edge of the shadows, held his breath, chose his path across the brightly lit roadway, and waited. His patience was shortly rewarded by the simultaneous arrival of three agitated officers, whose jostling at the door distracted the sentries' attention just long enough for him to dart through the dangerous light and into the shadow behind the flimsy temp structure, where he followed the wires to his goal.

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Framed