A Silence in the Heavens (16 page)

Here on the high ground the wind was keen, cutting through his regimental jacket, making him wish that he had his old wilderness gear instead. Standard-issue summer uniforms did well enough for the warm weather in the lowlands, but hypothermia posed a danger all year round on the mountain slopes, and could kill an infantryman as dead as any Steel Wolf ’Mech. Jock and Lexa didn’t understand the changeable mountain weather; he would have to keep an eye on both of them.

He scrambled back down the slope and into the shelter of the trees. The logging road wasn’t far. It was a dirt track, not meant for the use of ForestryMechs. The ’Mechs were mostly good for clear-cutting, and for working the ordered rows of conifers and hardwoods on the big tree farms. Here in the protected forest area, any harvesting done would be selective and small-scale, the timber hand-cut with one- and two-person power saws and hauled out on skiploaders along narrow roads that left no visible scars on the mountainside.

The protected forests had survived largely because offworld tourists didn’t like the big clear-cuts; and they didn’t appreciate the presence of hulking ForestryMechs spoiling their pristine wilderness vistas. Will didn’t know how much longer that concern for the mountains would endure, now that the offworld tourists were gone.

Except for the likes of the Steel Wolves, he reminded himself—and they aren’t here to admire the scenery.

He was still in a somber mood when he joined Jock and Lexa by the Fox armored car.

“Bad news?” Lexa asked.

He shook his head. “No sight of the enemy yet.”

“Maybe they’re not coming,” Jock said.

“They’re coming,” he said.

“There’s a thousand miles around us in every direction,” Jock said. “Why here?”

“Because Highway 66 is their best road through the mountains to Tara,” Will said. “Further north there’s Breakbone Pass, but that adds another two or three days to the trip even if the pass is clear—and I’ve known Breakbone to shut down for snow on the road as late as July or even August. Golden Gap to the south is a year-round road, but it’s even farther out of their way than Breakbone. No, this is where they have to come through. Right here in Red Ledge Pass.”

Unlike Jock, who was still looking dubious, Lexa appeared more eager than sensible. “Here? We fight them here?”

“No,” Will said. “Here is where we leave the Fox. From this point on, we’ll go on foot. A single man or woman is a lot harder to see in the woods than a machine.”

Jock heaved his gear out of the back of the Fox. “And has a lot less chance of stopping a ’Mech.”

Will shouldered his own pack and pulled his Gauss rifle out of the vehicle. “We don’t have to stop ’Mechs.

We spot ’Mechs, and we tell the people who
can
stop ’Mechs where to go find them. And we won’t accomplish either one of those things by staying with the Fox.”

“As long as we don’t forget where we left it,” Jock said. He was still rummaging through the supplies in the rear of the vehicles, including the box that Lexa had scrounged before they left camp. “Six blocks demo charge. Det cord. Gauss power packs and ammo. Right then.” He put the items into his rucksack as he named them. “Where to now?”

“That way,” Will said. He pointed back uphill to where red-tinged bareface, seeming to glow where it was touched by the setting sun, rose above the loose rocks and scrub conifers that covered the lower slopes. “Up in the saddle there, we can see down the pass in both directions. And that’s the way the Wolves are going to approach, if they’re being sensible.”

“The Wolves?” Lexa asked. “If you ask me, the Wolves are crazy. If they were sensible, they wouldn’t have bothered coming to Northwind in the first place.”

“She has a point, Will,” Jock said.

“Well, maybe they aren’t sensible,” Will conceded. “Just the same, if they’re bringing vehicles through the mountains, they’ll have to come along here. But us, we’re walking. So we can go wherever we want.”

“Then I want to go out for a drink,” Lexa said.

“We’ll have drinks together afterward,” Will promised. “All three of us, and I’m buying the first round. But right now we have a job to do. The Wolves are going to have people ranging out ahead of their column and off the marked roads, doing the same kind of thing that we’re doing. As soon as we run into one of those units, we’ll know that the main body is coming up not far behind.”

Jock said, “I hear that their infantry are some kind of specially bred supersoldier types.”

“Elementals, they call them,” said Will. “I saw a tri-vid special on them once.”

“I wouldn’t mind meeting one of them someday,” Lexa said, in tones of lascivious curiosity. “On a purely social basis, that is.”

“You’d like to meet
anybody
on a purely social basis,” Jock said.

“I’ll have you know I draw the line at pimps and lawyers . . . I wonder if the Wolves send those special-built guys out scouting, or do they save them for the big push?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Will firmly. “We have one thing on our side that the Steel Wolves and their fancy custom-made supersoldiers don’t.”

“And that is?” asked Lexa.

“Local knowledge,” Will said. “The Wolves are going to be navigating by offworld maps and scanned images taken from space. Their instruments aren’t going to be much help to them once they get into the pass, and they don’t have a trained wilderness guide along to show them the way and hold their hands during the frightening parts.”

33

Red Ledge Pass

Bloodstone Range of the Rockspire Mountains

Northwind

June, 3133; local summer

T
he communications rig in Star Colonel Nicholas Darwin’s Condor tank crackled into life. A moment longer, and Darwin heard the voice of the radar operator back at the DropShip landing zone on the salt flats.

“Negative sign of aircraft,” the operator reported. “All quiet here at DropShip base.”

Another voice came over the rig—Anastasia Kerensky, keeping a close eye on the armored column she had tasked with leading the way through the pass.

“Good,” she said. “Keep it that way. These are your orders: If it flies, it dies.”

Star Captain Greer spoke up over the column’s private command circuit. “What are we expecting by way of resistance?”

“Not much,” Darwin told his second in command. “Partisans at best. The available intelligence says that the Highlanders are unlikely to have any heavy ’Mechs—or ’Mechs of any kind—close enough to the pass to take up a blocking position.”

“Are you certain of that intelligence?” Greer asked.

“Nothing is ever certain,” Darwin said. “But I feel confident enough in it that I willingly cede to you the honor of going in first. Take point, full speed.”

“Sir,” Star Captain Greer replied, and his tank surged forward, passing Darwin’s Condor—with some difficulty, since the road was narrow—to take up his new position at the head of the column.

“Trouble, Star Colonel,” the sensor operator in Darwin’s Condor said a few minutes later. “Our magnetic anomaly detectors are showing us nothing but garbage.”

“The scouts predicted it,” Darwin said. “All this red rock is magnetite and hematite ores, and they throw off the sensors. Run series checks and do your best to compensate.”

“Yes, sir.”

Darwin climbed back to the Condor’s hatch and stepped so that his upper body protruded from the top of the vehicle. Risky, if a sniper was around, but with the sensors no longer functioning reliably, it was the only real way to see what was happening outside.

“Series checks show interference consistent with geologicals,” the sensor operator said after a few minutes.

“The receivers are acting correctly.”

“Not a thing we can do about it, then,” said Darwin.

“No, sir. But to the sensors, one heavy piece of metal is much like another. There is a chance that we could miss an enemy ’Mech in all this noise.”

“If the enemy does have a ’Mech out there, it can only stay hidden so long as it does not fire its main weapons,” Darwin said. “If the ’Mech fires anything, the signature will light up like sunrise on the infrared.

Now pick up the pace. We have places still to go, and very little light.”

“Will we be running at night, too, sir?”

“We will be, Warrior.”

Nicholas Darwin surveyed the landscape around him. The sun had gone down behind the mountains already, and the evening was growing both dark and surprisingly chilly for the season. The wind that blew down from the mountaintops had passed over cold mountain streams, and over shaded snowbanks that might last all summer without melting. Those of his soldiers who had worn lightweight uniforms because of the heat on the salt flats would be shivering now. He hoped he didn’t lose any of them to hypothermia and their own stupidity. The strike force could ill afford to take the loss.

“We will be,” he said again. “We will run all day, all night, and all day again if we have to, until Northwind is ours.”

34

Red Ledge Pass

Bloodstone Range of the Rockspire Mountains

Northwind

June, 3133; local summer

“N
ight’s coming on,” said Jock.

“So it is,” Will said. He looked at the sky to the west, where blue was fast shading into indigo and the setting sun touched the clouds with crimson. “We’ll have time enough to get up by Red Peaks before we have to show a light.”

“I’m worried,” Lexa said. “We haven’t seen any fliers all day. None of theirs, none of ours.”

“Could mean anything,” Jock said. “Maybe they’re mixing it up somewhere else.”

“It could be that,” Will said. “But if I had to guess a reason, I’d say that there was weather rolling in that the pilots don’t want to fly through.”

He gestured to the east, where thick clouds darkened the sky almost to blackness. “See that?”

“I see it,” Jock said. “But I’m a city lad myself. I couldn’t say what it means.”

“This time of year,” Will said, “it means trouble. If I were still at my old job, right about now I’d be telling all the bold offworld hunters and fishermen to get ready to spend their weekend playing cards back at the lodge, because the best place to be in bad weather is snug under a roof.”

“Too bad you can’t tell that to the Wolves,” said Lexa.

“Aye,” said Will. “But if we meet any of them, I don’t think we’ll have the opportunity for talk. Not with words, at any rate. Maybe with rifles.”

Lexa glanced at him curiously. “Have you ever shot anything? I mean, for real?”

“Just animals,” Will said, at the same time as Jock said, “No.”

“Me neither,” Lexa said. She ran a hand over the stock of her laser rifle. “I know I’m good at the targets.

But when it comes to the real thing . . . I don’t know.”

Will said, “When the time comes, we’ll all do what we have to do. Remember, our primary orders are to make contact and report. Delaying the Steel Wolves comes extra.”

“The three of us by ourselves aren’t going to be able to delay anyone very much, anyway,” Jock said.

“We’ll do the best we can with what we’ve got,” Will said. “Let’s go.”

They scrambled up the slope, with Will in the lead. The scrub conifers that grew at this altitude provided only scant cover, and the stones rolled under their feet, sometimes cascading downhill behind them.

“Don’t skyline yourselves,” Will reminded them as they approached the crest of the first slope.

“Don’t worry,” Lexa said. “We won’t. Just because I like to shoot at targets doesn’t mean I want to be one.”

They paused just downhill from the crest line, and flopped belly-down on the dirt to crawl the last few yards.

Will propped his binoculars in front of his eyes.

“See anything?” Jock asked.

“Nothing moving.”

For a while they watched the road below in silence. Then Lexa said, “All this waiting and watching is just grand, but you’d think that there’d be something else we could do.”

“I know what you mean,” Will said. “But first let’s get a little farther east.”

They crawled backward down from the skyline. Then they walked along the ridge, ten yards below the crest, for close to three kilometers, until Will said, “Here. This is the best place to watch the road.”

“I can’t see anything from here,” Lexa complained. “It’s getting too dark.”

“Listen for the noise of birds being disturbed. They’ll fly up from the woods. Look for smoke or dust.”

“And look for gunfire,” Jock added. “The Wolves are going to be out there looking for us at the same time as we’re looking for them. They don’t have a trusty native guide, either, so they’re going to believe that anything that so much as rustles in the underbrush is a Highlander scout patrol.”

“That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking,” Will said. “Which gives me an idea about what we can do with all that explosive firepower you’ve been hauling around in your backpack.”

“And what’s that?”

“How big is the biggest ’Mech you know?”

“I’ve heard that the
Jupiter
’Mechs are twelve meters tall,” Jock said. “I’ve never seen one of ‘em, though.”

“Doesn’t matter. Twelve meters tall would give it a stride of about five meters.” Will paced out the dimensions of a single giant step. “Give me a piece of rope. Great. Those demolition blocks you’ve got with you—measure out the footprints of a
Jupiter
. Lexa, use your laser rifle to drill holes down to rock so Jock can put in the charges. Separate detonators for each charge.”

“I believe I know what you’re planning,” Lexa said. She unlimbered her laser rifle and aimed it down at the rock. “And you’re a mean, mean man. I like the way you think.”

35

Red Ledge Pass

Bloodstone Range of the Rockspire Mountains

Northwind

June, 3133; local summer

“S
tar Colonel.”

Nicholas Darwin looked down at the sensor operator from his position in the open hatch of the Condor tank.

“What is it, Warrior?”

The sensor operator wore a set of heavy earphones. At the moment he was holding one of the padded earcups away from his head so that he could hear his commanding officer’s reply. “We have picked up something of interest on seismic, sir.”