The Heart of Valour (27 page)

“Well… fine.” Gunnery Sergeant Kerr trumped annoyance. “Can you do it from a little farther away!”

“Nope. Went away last night and look what happened.” He considered resting his chin on McGuinty’s shoulder but tossed the idea as being too di’Taykan. Also, his chin didn’t quite come up to McGuinty’s shoulder regardless of how close to a normal height the Human was. “What are you doing?”

His attention dropped back to the helmet. “Gunny asked me to separate out the staff sergeant’s drone identification program. Apparently, he can see them better than the rest of us.”

“Yeah, didn’t do him much good.”

“Wasn’t a drone took him down, Piroj—it was biology. If it was tech, I could fix it.”

“Like you fixed the CPN last night?”

“Fuk you, man.”

“Hey!” Hands up, Piroj carefully kept his teeth covered. “Just asking.”

“I didn’t melt the fukking node!”

“Okay, then.”

McGuinty sighed. “I didn’t.”

“Okay.”

“I had a worm running, something that might slide in deep enough to get me the data I needed, but it got fired. I figured I could refine a copy of it, but then Gunny put me on this…” He tapped the helmet. “…and I haven’t had time.”

“Can you walk and separate?” When McGuinty frowned up at him, he jerked his head toward the larger mass of the platoon on its feet. “Looks like we’re getting ready to move out.”

“Oh, great…”

Piroj swung his pack up onto his shoulders and frowned at the soft white flakes drifting past his nose. “Hey, it’s snowing.”

“Shoot me now,” McGuinty moaned, slipping the slate into his vest, reaching for his pack. “I hate weather.”

* * *

Barely visible behind a curtain of falling snow, Dunstan Mills was a cluster of prefab buildings within the curve of a frozen river. There was a small hydroelectric power station—a dummy but a good-looking one—thirty or forty individual dwellings and a two-story building that, with any luck, was exactly what they were looking for.

Lying flat on one of the ubiquitous ridges of rock, Torin adjusted her scanner and tried for more detail. A dummy anchor, built like the power station as a prop, would do them no good. They needed a real anchor, one used by Marine engineers to put this fake colony into place on Crucible and then left as part of the scenario.

It looked good, but she could only be a hundred percent certain by getting up close and personal, and that, unfortunately, wasn’t going to happen right away.

Sliding down to rejoin one/one, who’d taken point after the break, she frowned at the data scrolling across her scanner from the EYE she’d left up on the vantage point. Too small to be read by the enemy and useless more than three meters from a scanner, it was having a little trouble with the snow. Calibration helped, and the blip from the nearest sentry reappeared where it was supposed to be.

“You don’t post sentries unless you’re expecting trouble,” Kichar declared. “The enemy has the town.”

“Looks that way,” Torin agreed. Another time she’d have been amused by Kichar’s certainty.

“Activated or reprogrammed, Gunny?”

“Activated. If they’d reprogrammed, they’d never have positioned a sentry.”

“Because when we saw the sentry, we knew they had the town.”

“I think we’ve all got that, Kichar.”

“What about the Other that blew the CPN and took out McGuinty, Gunny?”

She ran the scan one more time just to be sure. “There’s no life signs anywhere in the settlement. Only drones, so now we need to figure out how to beat the scenario.”

Sakur’s eyes lightened as he drew his focus in to his scanner. “We don’t know what the setup is.”

“Sure we do. First, it’s supposed to teach you lot something.”

“Teach us what?” Sakur muttered.

“Good question. We figure that out and we’ve beaten it. In this scenario the enemy has attacked the planet Dunstan Mills is on. They’ve attacked the planet, Bonninski, because the Others don’t attack a single town and they’re our only enemy.”

“How did you…?” Bonninski flushed as Torin raised a brow. “Never mind.”

“A platoon of Marines—platoon because that’s the recruit training size—has been sent out to either protect or evacuate the people of Dunstan Mills, but they arrive too late and trap the enemy in the town.”

“And we know the enemy is in the town because we’ve seen the sentry.”

“Kichar…” Torin sighed and let it go. “That’s right. But there’ll be
sentries
.” She stressed the plural. “There, and there at least.” She positioned them in the sketch on the snow. “Logically, here as well if you’re defending all approaches. The enemy in the town feels that they have a defensible position, and so they make a stand. The recruits’ mission is to take the town back in as close to one piece as possible—probably for the sake of the power station.”

“What about for the sake of the townspeople, Gunny?” Hisht asked quietly.

“The Others don’t take prisoners. If they’re in control, the townspeople are dead.”

For a moment, only the soft hiss of snow.

“Enemy scanners will see a platoon coming.” Using a twig, Sakur drew in the scan overlap between the sentries. “There’s no way to get into the town without being seen. What’s that supposed to teach?”

“I’d say the futility of war,” Torin told him. “But as we generally like you to discover that on your own, the scenario’s got to be set up so there
is
a way into the town. I’d say a diversion here, big enough so it doesn’t look like one.” She poked another hole in the snow by the map. “Then the bulk of the platoon comes in from here…” A line along the edge of the river. “…and infiltrates the power plant where the majority of the enemy has gone to ground. Two reasons I think they’re in the power station,” she said before they could ask. “First, if they’re in the anchor, there’s no way to get them out and we’re back to the futility of war. Second, the power station is why they’re here, and so they’ll protect it. Now, experience tells me that the scanners right on top of the station are a little wonky—because the recruits are moving and the enemy isn’t, they can use that to their advantage during the attack. Once the enemy’s security has been breached, they’ll scatter, and the exercise becomes a vicious house-to-house fight for the remainder of the two tendays. From the scenarios I’ve downloaded, the Corps never puts drones and small buildings together without it becoming a vicious house-to-house fight.”

“If that’s the scenario,” Hisht said slowly, staring at the sketch as if he could see answers in the snow, “what happens differently in the real world?”

Torin grinned. “In the real world, we don’t give a crap about the power plant and we know that drones in scenarios don’t shoot to kill. And we’ve got Dr. Sloan.”

“So, if we’re injured, she can patch us up?” Bonninski asked a little wide-eyed as the rest of the platoon caught up to their position.

“Dr. Sloan,” Kichar said gleefully, before Torin could answer, “is wearing a noncombatant chip. The drones can’t shoot at her. The drones can’t even see her.”

“
Y
ou want me to do what?”

“Walk through the settlement to the power station.” Crouched in the lee of the rock, bootheels tucked up under her butt, Torin traced over the route with the point of her stick, gouging it a little deeper into the snow. “Confirm that a majority of the enemy is inside, place the charges where marked on the schematic I’ll download into your slate, and get back here as quickly as possible so that they can be detonated before the Others have the opportunity to reprogram the scenario.”

Dr. Sloan shook her head, smiling tightly. “You misunderstood the question, Gunnery Sergeant. I wasn’t asking for clarification, I was asking if you were insane. I’m not walking into that.” She gestured toward Dunstan Mills, outlines of the buildings barely visible behind a gently falling curtain of snow. “I’m not a soldier, I’m a doctor!”

“If you don’t do this, Dr. Sloan, you’ll have plenty of chances to practice your trade.” Torin straightened, never taking her eyes off the doctor. “In the time it would take us to crack this scenario, the Others will have their chance to take control of the drones.”

“Major…”

“Sorry, Doc.” Major Svensson frowned down at Torin’s sketch. “There may be a better way to do this, but we don’t have the time to think of it. We need a position we can fortify—and we need it now. The last thing we want is to be caught in the open between the drones from the settlement and any long-distance drones that might be on their way. If we had any more of those chips…”

“Fine.” Yanking off her mitten, she shoved her thumbnail up under the lower edge of the plastic square on her forehead. “You can have this one.”

“You’re going to hurt yourself,” the major said quietly after a moment, grabbing her wrists and pulling her hands down to her sides. “Remember, I told you it wouldn’t come off without a special solvent. You’ll be saving lives, Kathleen,” he added, sliding his grip down to her hands and wrapping his fingers around hers.

“You also told me that the drones in an operative scenario don’t shoot to kill, and you…” She freed a hand to point at Torin. “You told me this is an operative scenario. So why can’t we wait until morning?”

“For now this is an operative scenario,” Torin agreed. “The Others know we’re here—they turned it on. You need to destroy the drones before they can be reprogrammed to shoot to kill.”

“And we wouldn’t ask you if there was any other way,” Major Svensson assured her.

She stood for a long moment, the snow beginning to pile up on the bright blue shoulders of her jacket, then she sighed. “Do you guarantee the drones won’t notice me?”

“Just to be on the safe side, you’ll maintain comm silence, but that chip renders you invisible until the Others reprogram,” Torin told her. “After that, we can’t guarantee anything but a fight we might not win.”

“I thought Marines didn’t know the meaning of defeat.”

Torin kept her hand from rising to touch the cylinder in her vest. “We don’t like it, ma’am, but we know what it means.”

Her gaze flicked down, as though she’d sensed the movement Torin hadn’t made, and she sighed again. “All right, let’s get it done, then. First, how do I confirm the enemy is inside? Send in a questionnaire?”

“No,” Torin told her as the major grinned, “we’ll load one of our scanning programs onto your slate.”

“You can just do that?”

She believed they could
just do that,
Torin realized, and she didn’t like it. The irrational fear that the military could mess with civilian lives became no more legitimate just because someone was messing with the military.

“Gunny?”

She’d paused just a little too long. Unclenching her jaw, she faked reassurance. “No, ma’am. We need your security codes first. You can just put them into my slate,” Torin added, holding it out, “and I’ll never see them.”

Lips pressed into a thin line, Dr. Sloan did as Torin suggested.

“You can change them later,” Major Svensson reminded her.

“Don’t think I won’t.” She frowned at her screen. “This is it? MAR-SCAN?”

“Yes, ma’am, and there’s a mapping program as well.”

“Which will?”

“It’s dark and it’s snowing, Doc. You might need a little help staying on course.”

“I might need a lot of things, but I doubt I’m going to get them,” she told the major tartly. “Let me have it, Gunnery Sergeant. And it had better not mess up any of my diagnostic programs.”

“We’re one hundred percent behind that as well, Doctor. If you’ll check your screen…”

Backlit, it was a small rectangle of light in the gathering dark.

“This is where you’re supposed to go,” Torin explained as the green line on the doctor’s screen flashed. “This is you.” At one end of the line, a red light blinked slowly. “You don’t need to see your surroundings; you only need to see this.”

The edge of a mittened hand brushed snow off the screen. “Oh, joy.”

“And this is where you place the charges.” The image changed to an outline of the power plant. “We don’t know how the drones will react to our communicating with you—they’ll pick up the signal even if they can’t crack the code, and we’d rather not draw any more attention to you than absolutely necessary.”

“Thank you.” Definitely more sarcasm than gratitude.

“Because you’ll be on your own, we’ve designed things to be as simple as possible. Just match up your red dot with the yellow dots showing on the outline of the building, unwrap the charge…” Torin held up the small cube of explosives and mimed stripping off the back of the paper cover. “…and press it to the nearest hard surface. You activate it by ripping off this tab.”

“Lovely.” Dr. Sloan turned a cube between her fingers, carefully not touching the tab. “These little things will be enough to drop the roof?”

Torin nodded. “Set in the right places, yes. Once they’re activated, they’ll link up, blow simultaneously, and the pressure wave will collapse the walls.”

“That seems almost too easy. Shouldn’t it be harder to blow things up?”

“That depends on what side you’re on, ma’am.” The pack of explosives dangled off Torin’s hand for a long moment before Dr. Sloan took it and hung it off one shoulder.

“Don’t worry about being seen or heard,” Major Svensson told her. “I know you’ve walked a long way today already, and I’m sorry, but speed is your only criteria.”

“It’s almost dark.”

Torin reached out and tugged the sleeve of the doctor’s borrowed combats out from under her jacket, thumbing the cuff light on.

Dr. Sloan snorted and turned on the much stronger light in the cuff of her jacket.

“We really need a look at that catalog, Gunny.”

“Yes, sir.”

* * *

“She’s past the sentry,” the major announced. As darkness fell, the EYE had switched to reading heat signals. “A noncombatant chip is a wonderful thing, Gunny, although, I have to admit, it feels a bit like cheating.”

Her back against the rock, sheltered from both the snow and the enemy’s scanners, Torin watched the red line spooling out beside the green across the screen of her slate. “It’s not cheating to use all available resources, sir.” After a moment, the silence lifted her attention to the major’s face. His expression confused her. “Sir?”