The Ramal Extraction (11 page)

“Once you dance with Dame Death? No other partner will do.”

Wink knew he liked to say it because he had heard him
repeat that at least twenty times during his rotation through Morse’s class. How he meant it was not how Wink thought of it, but it was a nice line.

He was also self-aware enough to know that he was addicted to it, dancing with Death.

The feeling was easy enough to fix. There were chems or augs that would damp the adrenaline surges, the fight-or-flight reflex that lived in the cave at the back of a man’s mind. Pop a pill, stick a derm, trigger an implant, you could smooth the jagged rushes considerably. Do it in the middle of a firefight, darts and missiles singing into your ears as they zipped past, bodies dropping all around you, you could be as calm as a vacuum, heart rate slow, blood pressure low, no more excitement than somebody checking the time of day. As it was, he was getting there on his own.

Or you could reverse the process and make your body feel all the symptoms of about-to-die, with no real threat at all.

He could do either of those. But he wouldn’t. Tricking his system into or out of it wasn’t the same. It had to be real. There had to be that knowledge that each encounter with Dame Death might be his last.

He lived for those moments.

It had always been his secret, from the time he’d been a teenager. He had known even then that he shouldn’t tell anybody how he felt, and he’d learned the way to pass a psych test by skirting questions that were designed to ferret out such things.

It wasn’t a death wish. It was a see-how-close-you-can-get-and-live wish.

Go to a kite contest, hang out with free climbers, cave divers, speed racers, you met your fellow defiers. They knew each other, and they knew why they were there. Brothers and sisters under the skin, hormone junkies, thrillwalkers…

He’d be carrying guns on this op, carbine and a sidearm. It wasn’t the regular military, and even though he was a
medic, he had no problems with shooting somebody trying to kill him. Not that he was gonna win awards for his marksmanship, but at close range, you pulled the trigger and waved the gun like a hose’s nozzle, you’d hit something. He’d done it before, and if he made it past this time, he’d do it again.

Maybe he’d get a chance to use his knife.

“Wake up, Gramps, time to go to work.”

He opened one eye and regarded Gunny. “Says the woman who has been snoring like a bone saw grinding on a steel plate.”

She gave him a little grin. “I just hope you don’t fall back asleep once we are on the ground.”

“Not a problem, given how entertaining it is to watch you stumble through anything thicker than a new-mowed lawn. I keep the recording, hell, I can sell tickets to it later: ‘Behold! The Bumbling Buffoons. Critics agree, it’s the funniest thing on the galaxyweb!’”

Gunny gave him the finger to go with the smile.

He would be riding the command chair here in the hopper once they landed, and observing. He could have stayed at the base camp—he was not foremost a foot soldier but a desk jockey, and that’s where he’d be able to do the most good. But he wanted to be closer to the action than hundreds of klicks away, and able to do something should the need arise. And he wasn’t too old to get sore feet marching if it came to that.

Normally, in a hot op, the team would be wired, full telemetrics and audviz, so he’d be able to see and hear what they saw and heard, assuming the fucking casters worked like they were supposed to, which was never a given. Truth is the first casualty in war, but communications is the second. In this case, however, they were running silent, no transmissions other than LOS lasercom to each other in the field.

Sometimes, even encrypted was no good—you didn’t
want to give anybody a heads-up by having them come across a transmission where there wasn’t supposed to be any—they might be disposed to go see what was making it. Unseen but known was not the same as invisible.

In the middle of a battlefield, not a problem. Out in the briars, where there might not be much electromagnetic traffic? Not so good.

If the team needed a ride in a hurry, they could break sig-silence and holler. The hopper was better than walking, and it had enough hardware to make an enemy keep his head down or risk getting it blown off. There were enough scramblers and sig-suppressors on board to keep most robotic smart stuff off them; enough sheathing to keep them blurry on sensor scopes; enough armor to stop small-arms fire if somebody eyeballed them. The pilot was good at the job. Wouldn’t be the Air Cav coming to the rescue if everything went into the toilet, but it would give an enemy something to think about maybe long enough for the team to get their asses in gear and the hell away.

“Use a bigger hammer!” had its place, but sometimes a laser scalpel was better than a maul.

“On approach,” the pilot said over their coms. Her name was Magil, but for some reason, everybody called her Nancy. “Hang on, it’s a little tight.”

The hopper began to settle. Demonde looked through the thick porthole plastic, but it was dark and even with his spookeyes lit, nothing to see but trees, trees, and more trees, the tops of which were getting really close…

Abruptly, there was a clearing, and the hopper dropped into it with a stomach-lurching suddenness, slowing as it neared the ground.

Gramps noticed that there wasn’t that much empty space around them as they settled into the landing.

“We’re down,” Nancy said. “And thank you for flying Cutter Transport. We hope you enjoy your destination, and do come back, if it isn’t final…”

The engine sounds faded, and it got quiet.

“My grandfather cleared this spot forty years ago,” Singh said. “He used to plant a couple of acres of Heavenspice each year. He figured that was small enough and far away enough from the town so poachers would have to work to find and steal his crop. He installed a retractable live-camouflage net over the clearing, so it was invisible from a few hundred meters up.”

“Did that work?”

“Mostly. He never talked about it to me. It’s a tightly regulated business. As I understand it, he didn’t have the proper permits and licenses, so it wasn’t legal for him to grow it. But I heard my father talking to my uncle once about what happened to a team of thieves who somehow found the crop.”

Gunny said, “And…?”

“There were four armed men who supposedly arrived here to steal the harvest. My uncle said that my grandfather hid and caught them unawares. They were never seen again.”

“Sounds like my kind of man,” Gramps said.

“What—old and sneaky?”

“Exactly right, Gunny. And don’t forget ‘deadly.’ And ‘handsome.’”

That brought smiles all around.

“Okay,” Jo said, “let’s get this show on the road. We have six hours of darkness and a hard three-hour march to get to the lodge. Singh?”

“This way, sah,” he said.

Kay was at the door before Singh. She couldn’t wait to get outside.

The Sanvi Forest straddled the borders where New Mumbai, Pahal, and Balaji came together, in the foothills of the Rudra Mountains. Most of the mountain range was in Pahal, but there were fair-sized peaks in all three countries, and the
march was uphill almost from the moment they started. Singh and Gunny took point, Wink and Jo behind them, with Kay ranging behind and to the sides. Normally, Kay would have been out front, but Singh knew the territory.

It wasn’t easy going, given the pace, but it wasn’t like a jungle you had to machete your way through; the tree canopy blocked much of the sun, and the needles lay thick and probably acidic upon the ground, so underbrush wasn’t a problem. The biggest trees were two-and-a-half to three meters in diameter, substantial suckers. So it was asses and elbows on a quick march, the FAS’s heavy enough to make it work. There was enough light for the spookeyes to work so they could see, the computers in those giving a faux-visual color, albeit the color was somewhat dim. And sometimes, the computer’s speculation at what color a thing was tended to be off. She’d had to make a mental shift when something she’d seen at night through spookeyes as dark blue turned out to be crimson when viewed in daylight.

Kay moved through the forest much quieter than her human companions, picked soft spots and almost instinctively avoided things that would crack under her feet. Hunters who made noises frightened prey, and in the days when that was how her people fed themselves, prey faster than you who ran meant you didn’t eat.

There were animals here, she could smell them, occasionally hear them, and now and then, catch a glimpse of one as it froze or moved away from the team as it advanced. No predators of any significant size she sensed, but her research had mentioned that there were some in the forests that might be dangerous. That could be an adventure, but they couldn’t afford the noise. She’d have to shoo it off or kill it quietly.

In the dark, she relied more on her nose than her eyes,
but she could see well enough; her vision went deeper into the red and violet than unaugmented humans’.

She didn’t like being at the rear though she understood the need. The local human leading them knew the way, and stealth and speed were both necessary. Should there be any enemies about, they would not be sneaking up on the team from behind, could Kay help it.

The pace was quick for humans, if slow for her, and she ranged back and forth, stopping frequently to look and listen, to sniff the warm night air, alert for any signs of other humans in the woods. Unless they were much more adept than most of their species, there weren’t any others here. Yet.

Jo didn’t need an external timer since she had a heads-up aug for time and distance, though she was pretty good at guessing, then checking herself. The PPS, which was receive-only, said they had gotten to where they needed to be.

Singh confirmed it. “We are a kilometer from the lodge,” he said.

The five of them moved in close. Kay kept her back to the group, scanning the area. Even clumped together, any DLIR overflights wouldn’t pick them up in the FAS’s. Kay was the only one of the five not in an FAS, and she’d probably register as an animal.

Kay would wear armor, old-fashioned Dragonskin sheath or ultralight flexifoam-ceramic, if they made her, but since the suit’s sensors were only marginally better than her own senses, she didn’t see the point in slowing herself down with a suit, and her argument was simple: If she could dodge faster than somebody targeting her, was that not better than depending on the suit to stop the missile?