likely by far, they would find the Turusch bloodied but fighting mad, ready and waiting for the new arrivals. They wouldn’t know until they actually dropped out of metaspace and saw the situation for themselves.
At least that damned Senate liaison had finally taken the hint and was staying out of CIC. That was one particular aggravation he didn’t need at the moment.
Koenig had already lied to the Senate Military Directorate about one key aspect of this operation, and he wasn’t eager to face Quintanilla’s questions.
That particular problem could wait its turn.
Blue Omega Seven
Eta Boötis IV
2335 hours, TFT
Daylight had come and gone with astonishing swiftness, and it was dark now. The optics implanted in Gray’s eyes allowed him to see by infrared, but he wasn’t used to working in an environment where you saw things by the heat they radiated, smeared and fuzzy and out of focus.
He was exhausted. He’d been running, it seemed, for hours before the weaving tendrils underfoot had thinned out and he’d entered a scorched-bare and rocky desert. Scattered patches of surviving tendrils on the ground glowed with radiant heat, their movements an eerie shifting difficult for the eye to follow. Here, too, patches of bare rock glowed yellow-hot under infrared; he suspected that he might have entered the barren kill zone surrounding the Marine base, where the ground cover had been burned off by the ongoing bombardment by Turusch heavy weapons.
He felt more exposed now, to Turusch scanners and observation drones, which were certain to be lurking about. He would have to move more cautiously here. At least those damned leeches, the gray, swift-gliding leaf shapes, appeared to have vanished once the orange ground cover had given out.
What the hell had those things been? His e-suit was still intact, but he’d had the distinct impression that those things had been scraping away at the outer carbon nanotube weave of the garment. That material was incredibly tough, but Gray wasn’t about to trust the integrity of his environmental suit with those things swarming over it, not when a single tear could leave him gasping in high-pressure poison.
Gray staggered to the top of a low, bare-rock outcrop and studied his surroundings. Somewhere to the north, across that empty desert, was the Marine perimeter. He needed to decide now whether to keep walking, or if he should hole up here and start transmitting an emergency distress call.
The only way he was going to get through the Marine shield would be if they sent a SAR—a Search and Rescue mission—out to get him. He had no way to get through the tightly folded space of the shield … and though his e-suit would protect him well enough from the radiation, it wouldn’t let him weather a nearby burst from a nuclear warhead, or a bolt of charged particles searing down from low orbit.
On the other hand, the moment he started transmitting, he was likely to attract attention from Turusch battlespace probes, or even from enemy spacecraft in orbit.
Shit. Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t.
He wondered how long he had before daylight. His implant RAM had a brief listing of planetary stats for Eta Boötis IV—Haris, as the human colonists called it. He knew the planet’s rotational period was short—only about fourteen and a half hours. But the planet also had an extreme axial tilt, literally lying on its side as it circled its hot primary once each four years. At the equator, daylight lasted about seven hours throughout that long year, followed by a seven-hour night. At the poles, the sun would disappear for a year at a time, alternating with year-long periods of sunlight, and with everything in between.
What a freaking weird world!
He wasn’t sure what the length of the day or night was at this point on the surface. Mike-Red, he knew from his briefings, was at 22 degrees north. He knew that this was late fall or early winter in the northern hemisphere. That suggested that the nights in this region were longer than the days, but he didn’t know how long that actually might be.
Not that it particularly mattered. Whether he attracted the attention of a Marine SAR aircraft—or of a Turusch battle-cruiser—they’d see him, no matter how dark it was.
The distant thunder of battle had faded away a long time ago. He wasn’t quite sure when the landscape had become eerily silent, but it had been before it had gotten dark. Did that mean the battle was over, or merely that there was a temporary lull in the fighting?
If the battle was over, who had won?
He looked up at the darkness overhead—a solid cloud deck masked by darkness. Cloud cover over Haris ran around ninety percent. The skies cleared occasionally, but most of the time they were clouded over. He wished he could see the stars.
Gray sagged to the ground, his shoulder propping him up against a small boulder. God, he was exhausted! His legs, his whole body ached, and the high gravity had his heart pounding, his breath coming in shallow gasps.
How long could he survive out here? Theoretically, the e-suit would keep providing him with air, water, and a nanotech-assembled paste that passed more or less plausibly for food, all cycled from the local atmosphere, handfuls of dirt or organic material poured into a hip pocket, and his own wastes. But even the best machines, he knew all too well, had their limits.
In any case, sooner or later someone would detect him and track him down. The question was whether that someone would be human or … or whatever the Turusch were.
He shuddered at the thought. Very little was known about the Turusch, about their culture, their biology, their psychology, even their true shape. They were part of the galaxy-spanning empire of the Sh’daar, and they had a military technology equivalent to—or perhaps a little better than—that of the Confederation of Humankind. The scuttlebutt was that the Marines at Mike-Red had managed to capture a few of the bastards, which was why this mission was supposed to be so damned important.
If the Turusch picked up his come-get-me call, he might be about to see them firsthand.
Not a pleasant thought. But there was nothing else he could do. If he didn’t start transmitting, he would either die out here or the Turusch would get him, sooner or later. At least if he was broadcasting on the emergency band, there was a chance the Marines would get to him first. Closing his eyes, he focused his thoughts on three discreet mental code groups, then clicked “transmit” on his IHD. The signal was coded, designed to attract the attention of human equipment and to look like noise to the enemy … but no one counted on the Turusch not being able to recognize the signal as artificial, at least.
The fleet ought to be overhead within another few minutes. That, more than anything else, had decided him on whether or not to trigger the distress beacon. If the Turusch were still up there, they shortly would be too busy to notice a single pilot on the ground.
Gray wondered if the Dragonfires were still up, still fighting. Hours ago they must have run dry on expendables, but they would be able to restock at the Marine base. Boss Al would be sending them out on CAP over the base, until the battlegroup arrived. And if one of them happened to swing out this way …
He caught movement, a flash of short infrared sliding across his peripheral vision. Whirling and dropping flat on the ground, he stared into the darkness. Had a Turusch probe, or even a ground patrol, found him already?
There it was again … another flash of movement. With a miserable sinking feeling at the pit of
