In the Valley (20 page)

Here on Samarra, his suit was mottled orange and pink. He hadn’t gone on patrols even once here; he was stuck guarding this stupid hotel. Paul wasn’t a happy camper, but duty was duty. He would guard his post. In five months he would be done with his rotation and leave Samarra behind, to wherever the whim of Force HQ would take him.

It was his dearest wish, of course, to be posted back on Earth. So far though, the assignment lottery had not favored him.

After Rio he had gone to Copenhagen 1, a chilly world dominated by tundra and moss. It was a fairly new colony. Much like Samarra, he couldn’t figure out why settlers would want to live there. Sure, there were actually edible fish in the lakes, and it was beautiful during the brief summers, but as far as Paul was concerned, you could keep it. Copenhagen was too darn cold.

Because it wasn’t coded as a combat rotation, Paul had spent three years there, like Rio. Most of the time, his platoon had helped out with construction (a good nonmilitary application of their suits), and they had to struggle to find time to maintain combat proficiency.

And the winters…Lord, Paul thought he had seen some winters in the Ohio Valley. They were a joke compared to Copenhagen. Eight months of monochrome wasteland and snow drifts. The settlers and soldiers had had to huddle around special lamps to keep from becoming murderously depressed. The halos helped some too, but Copenhagen had been a struggle.

When not engaged in helping to clear roads or digging out snowbound families, Paul’s platoon would go out into the whirling, white crap and do infantry drills and field problems, with three squads attacking and one defending. Their suits were snow white on Copenhagen and practically invisible without an assist from the halo feeds.

Of course, when engaged in construction work on Copenhagen, they had set the camouflage controls on the suits to “Safety Orange,” to avoid an unfortunate run-in with a plow vehicle.

Paul wished for the snow now in this desert hell of Samarra. Funny how the mind works, he thought. He would have sworn he would curse the day when he saw another snowflake.

His motion detector pinged at forty-one degrees. Paul’s eyes tracked an approaching vehicle: it pulled up and stopped in front of the hotel. The mil-grade halo ID tag floating above the ground-car said, “
REGISTERED TAXI
384711.”

A woman stepped out. She was wearing a conservative blue skirt and carrying a leather handbag. The ID tag above her read, “
LE BATTE, MATHILDA
.” His suit performed a sniff test on her bag and detected no known explosives or other munitions. Paul relaxed a little, but not entirely.

Who knew, after all, what little tricks the dissidents around here had up their sleeves? Paul had heard about a dog that had been packed full of explosives blowing some guys up last week. You never knew, and Paul knew that some high rollers called this hotel home. They were guys the dissidents would love to kill.

Paul pinged Mathilda’s halo as she approached, and an icon appeared in his view labeled “
AUTHORIZED GUEST
.” He waved her through, and she disappeared up the beautiful stromatolitic limestone steps and into the lobby behind him.

He scanned his surroundings again to see if anything had changed. Sometimes dissidents would use a decoy to fix your attention while they tried to sneak something by.

He looked into the near, intermediate, and far distance and saw nothing out of place. Neither did his sensors. Paul returned to his lonely vigil.

One of his men, Trooper Weisblum, chimed in. His post was on the northern side of the hotel, next to a service elevator. “Ghoul One-Two, this is Ghoul Three-Two.”

“Go ahead, Ghoul Three-Two.”

“One-Two, I might have a problem over here.” Weisblum sounded a little tense.

“Slaving feeds, Three-Two. Let me see what you’ve got.”

On the feed that Paul opened up on his lower right visual, he saw what Weisblum was seeing. There were two maintenance men in blue jumpsuits pushing a Dumpster toward Weisblum. Their tags read, “
AUTHORIZED MAINTENANCE PERSONNEL
,” but the Dumpster was reading explosive residue.

“Three-Two, stop those fucks right now.”

“Roger, One-Two.” Paul heard Weisblum challenge the men in high French to halt. One man stood there and looked confused, but the other man foolishly broke into a run.

It was judgment-call time. Paul rechecked Weisblum’s sensor readings for explosives; they were positive and getting stronger. In a few seconds, the asshole runner would be gone.

“Shoot the runner, Three-Two.” Paul saw Weisblum’s right arm point straight toward the running man as his targeting chevron dropped over his shoulders. Weisblum fired twice, a quick double tap. The man fell like a sack of potatoes, dead as a stone.

Paul prayed he had made the right call. On his orders, a man was dead. The other guy by the Dumpster dropped to his knees and begged for his life with his hands stretched as far overhead as he could get them.

“All stations, this net. Maximum alert status—there could be more attacks.” Paul immediately pinged his sergeant first and slaved him Weisblum’s feed.

“Three-Two, maintain station. Do not approach the Dumpster or allow the guy with his hands up to touch the Dumpster. Help is on the way.” Paul’s mind was going six miles a minute. “Oh yeah, Three-Two—good job.”

Paul scanned his sector with renewed intensity and shot the hotel clerk instructions to lock the doors and keep everyone in the hotel inside.

Ten minutes later, the off-shift and Sergeant First Gnadelos were outside sweeping the perimeter, with an assist from a micro. The sergeant first had called for an EOD bot and had set up an LZ for the EOD shuttle, which was inbound.

Three suited soldiers had taken up station at a healthy distance around the Dumpster, their suit sensors confirming what Weisblum’s suit had “tasted” in the air. It was old-fashioned composition four. The dead man lay roasting on the Plascrete; the other man remained in place, on his knees with his hands in the air.

Finally, the EOD bot arrived with the explosive-hazards team. The cute little tracked bot crawled up to the Dumpster and confirmed the presence of explosives. Then it latched onto the Dumpster and dragged it away to a large ground-car parking lot to the west.

After all, the best defense against explosives was to increase the distance from the target—in this case, the hotel. The EOD team figured if there was an initiator in place, it probably wasn’t motion sensitive, as the two guys had been pushing the Dumpster toward the building.

When the EOD team was satisfied with the location of the Dumpster bomb, they approached it with more bots and disassembled the device. They found 150 kilos of explosive material in the Dumpster, covered in trash.

The detonator was rigged to the Dumpster lid for victim initiation. The poor hotel maid who would have brought out a load of trash would have been in for an unpleasant surprise. The bomb was elegant, simple, and deadly. The only thing that had kept the hotel from having a large hole chewed in it was an alert guard.

After the bombing incident, morale actually improved. Sitting there, seemingly guarding nothing, had taken real discipline. Now Paul’s crew had a non-theoretical reason to watch.

The events of that day were the most dangerous moments of Paul’s tour on Samarra 4. In fact, it was the most excitement anyone in G Company, 1-14 IN (Armored) saw that year.

For his actions on that day and his solid performance as a noncommissioned officer during the tour, Paul was named “NCO of the Year” and received an invite to attend Officer Candidate School.

There were times thereafter that Paul thought OCS was an honor he should have declined. But Paul was a proud man, and he soldiered on regardless of what the force wanted.

Why, oh why, Paul asked himself, did I ever choose to take a commission as an officer in the force infantry? He was back in his favorite chair at Camp Kill-a-Guy, smoking a Fortunate. When he didn’t will it to stop, his hand shook, seemingly of its own volition.

Yesterday, the colonel and he had finally ended the seventy-two hours in hell that had started with the ambush. Paul thought back on what had happened and took another drag off his Fortunate. His hand shook, ever so slightly.

After the successful ambush on the shitheads’ donkey train, Paul and the colonel had counted the haul: five dead Dissidents, six loads of ordnance, one heavy repeater, two antitank rockets, and five Kalashnikovs.

Of course, the weapons and ordnance went straight into the Juneau Army’s inventory. They mostly used the same weapons as the dissidents; it made sense for them to use locally manufactured weapons. The force struggled enough to keep supplies flowing to their organic units, let alone their surrogate armies on over fifty worlds. (
Organic
was mil-speak for “belongs to”—in this case, the nonindigenous forces of Paul’s team.)

After the ambush, the donkey-train supplies went into Second Company’s bag, and the halo intel gathered by Paul and the colonel went straight to Green,
back at Kill-a-Guy. Their mission accomplished, Second Company packed up, and the whole crew be-bopped back to Camp Kill-a-Guy, where Green was waiting to debrief Z, the colonel, and Paul.

After the debriefing session with Green, Paul did the usual stuff with his equipment. He had a rule: he did not allow himself or his soldiers to eat or shower before the equipment was reset for possible surprise on-call missions. So he and Z cleaned out their ground-car, pulled field suit maintenance, and cleaned their weapons.

With pieces of his weapon scattered in front of him and the stink of the field coming off of him in waves, Z looked at Paul and asked, “Man, sir, why do we always go through this crazy bullshit when we come back in? Ain’t no mission comin’ down for days.”

Paul pulled a near-cig from his sleeve pocket, looked at Z, and lit it. He inhaled and spoke. “You never know when a mission is going to come down. We’d be failin’ the team if we weren’t ready.”

“Yeah, sir, but you know that ain’t gonna happen today.”

Paul took another puff and gave Z an exasperated look. “Don’t know, and don’t give a shit, Z-man. Keep cleanin’ your weapon; you can clean your balls soon enough.”

Z’s grumbling notwithstanding, all their gear was squared away an hour or two later. Both men sluiced the filth from their bodies, and they went down to their modest chow hall to eat.

No sooner did Paul have a spoonful of delicious eggs propped by his mouth when his halo pinged. Paul looked at his lower left visual, and he could see the colonel’s icon. Paul shoveled the eggs into his mouth and clicked the ping.

The colonel’s tired-looking Mediterranean face appeared. “Hey, Paul, we’ve gotta go back out. Third Company has a stuck ground-car; they need a hand getting it out. I’ve already pinged the mechanics; they’re getting ready.”

Shit, Paul thought. “How long do we have, sir?”

“We’ve got to leave as soon as possible; they’re in a bad spot.” The colonel sent a map; Paul looked at it on his visual and saw that the ground-car in question was stuck at the entrance to the Belt—definitely Indian territory.

“Roger, sir. We’re on our way.”

Z groaned, “Sheeit, motherfucker.”

Paul never said, “I told you so, dumbass.” His look said enough.

Within ten minutes, Z-man, Paul, and the colonel were climbing back into their freshly cleaned and prepped ground-car. They headed back to the Belt in their suits.

After a bone-jarring trip on the one of Juneau’s woefully inadequate roads, the mechanics, who had a little six-guy maintenance section on Kill-a-Guy, got the vehicle unstuck. The recovery was pretty easy with their heavy-pull ground-car. But then the mechanics discovered the vehicle in question had a burned-out transmission. There was no way the ground-car was going to make it back to Kill-a-Guy. Paul’s convoy would have to tow it.

The colonel took the news calmly, as usual. The situation was what it was. However, night was descending across the Zudnok River valley. And night tended to bring out the dissidents—and their bombs.

In theory, it didn’t matter to the force whether they were attacked in the day or at night; they were fully capable of operating in either environment. Paul’s
theory was that the dissidents tended to attack at night because of human psychological factors; the shitheads thought the night would hide them.

The night did hide bad guys from the civilian population; but that was it. Still, it was true that the attacks increased at night. The sun going down was not good news. The convoy needed to move out. After the mechanics hooked up to tow the vehicle, they started to roll.

Paul was driving the ground-car with his halo on the way out, and Al-Asad was operating the autoturret from the left back seat. The colonel was seated next to Paul on his right. An unsuited mechanic was riding in the back with Al-Asad.

In theory, any suited soldier clamped into the ground-car could operate any position with his mil-grade halo. Only force-issued mil-grade halos worked on their ground-cars. Random people who tried to operate the force’s ground-cars with civilian halos were out of luck. The colonel had made the team conduct drills where the vehicle crews operated the various positions in nonstandard locations. This was in case one person or another was incapacitated. However, it was traditional (and doctrine) for the driver to be seated in the front left, the vehicle commander to be in the front right, and the weapons operator to be clamped in the back.