CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Julian popped the seals on his helmet, took a sniff of the air, and grimaced as the temperature overcame the residual cool from his suit chiller.

"Christ, it's hot!"

The sweat that instantly popped out on his skin disappeared just as quickly. The blinding light from the salt flats was mixed with a light, parching wind, and the temperature was at least forty-nine degrees Standard—over a hundred and twenty degrees in the antiquated Fahrenheit scale still used on a few backward planets.

"Whew, this is gonna be funnn."

He gave a brief, unamused chuckle, and beside him Lance Corporal Russell juggled her grenade launcher into the crook of her arm and popped her own helmet.

"Yah! It's like being in a furnace!"

There was nothing to be seen but the four shuttles, scattered over a kilometer or so of blazing, empty salt, and the distant mountains. Julian's squad, as the only one with armor, had been unloaded first. The ten troopers had spread out with scanners on maximum, but they were barely detecting microorganisms. The salt was as dead as the surface of an airless moon—deader than some, for that matter.

Julian sent a command to his toot and switched to the company command frequency.

"Captain Pahner, my squad doesn't detect any sign of hostile zoologicals, botanicals, or sentients. The area appears clear."

"I see." The captain's tone was as a dry as the wind in Julian's face. "And I suppose that's why you took off your helmet?"

The sergeant rolled his tongue in his cheek and thought for a moment.

"Just trying to use all possible sensory systems, Sir. Sometimes smell works where others don't."

"True," the captain said mildly. "Now put it back on and set up a perimeter. I'll have the rest of Third move out to support. When they're in place come into the center as a reserve."

"Roger, Sir."

"Pahner, out."

"Modder pocker."

Poertena dropped the case of grenades onto the stack, wiped sweat off his face, and looked around. He'd spoken quietly, but Despreaux heard him, and she snorted as she ticked the item off her list. Despite the intense heat, she looked as cool as if she were standing in snow.

"Don't worry," she said. "We're nearly finished unloading. Then the fun begins."

Poertena took on the cross-eyed, inward look characteristic of someone communicating with his toot.

"Modder . . . we've been at t'is for hours!" He looked toward the horizon, where the sun was still well up. "When do tee sun go down?"

"Long day, Poertena," Despreaux said with another cool smile. "Thirty-six hours. We've got nearly six more until dusk."

"Pock," Poertena whispered. "T'is suck."

"And you know what's really gonna suck?" Lance Corporal Lipinski demanded of the universe in general as he affixed a large square of solar film to the top of his rucksack. All members of the company had been issued squares. The combined area was designed to partially recharge the powerful superconductor capacitors that drove the human technology. While the power gathered would never support the company's bead guns, plasma rifles, and powered armor, it would serve to maintain a charge in their communicators and sensors.

"What?" Corporal Eijken asked.

The Bravo Team grenadier jerked at the belt feed over her shoulder. If the feed wasn't aligned perfectly, the grenades had a tendency to jam, and that was something she really didn't want to happen. They were going to be walking a long way through really bad stuff. That much had already become evident.

The company had unloaded and prepared through the remainder of the day and into the night. As the sun went down, the temperature went with it, and by local midnight it was well below freezing. Even with their chameleon blankets, it had been a long, miserable night, and many of the troopers remembered why they'd signed up for the Regiment in the first place. Pride of position was certainly one reason, but another was so that they wouldn't have to do stuff like huddle under a thin covering in below-freezing temperatures on a surface hard enough for an interplanetary transport landing apron.

They'd been up and at it again before dawn, loading rucksacks and overbags, piling the spare gear on stretchers, and generally preparing to move out. As the sun came up, the cold came off, but now it was building into another scorcher. Which made for a certain amount of bitching, no matter how good the troops.

"What's really gonna suck," Lipinski replied, "is humping all of his gear."

He gestured cautiously with his chin in the direction of the prince, and Eijken shrugged.

"It's not that much spread across the Company. Hell, I've been in companies where the CO makes his clerk carry his gear."

"Yeah," Lipinski agreed quietly, "but they're not good companies, are they?"

Eijken opened her mouth to respond, but stopped as Despreaux left a gaggle of NCOs and headed their way.

"Company," the grenadier said instead, and she and Lipinski trotted towards the sergeant as she made an "assemble here" gesture at her scattered squad. Despreaux waited until everyone had gathered around, then pulled out her water nipple.

"Okay, drink."

The water bladders were integral to the combat harness of the chameleon suit: a flexible plastic bladder that molded into a trooper's back under his rucksack. The bladder held six liters of water, and had a small, efficient chiller driven by a mechanical feedback system. As long as the trooper was moving, the chiller was running. It didn't make icewater, but what it produced was generally at least a few degrees below ambient temperature, and that could be awfully refreshing.

"Uh, I gotta get mine," Lipinski said.

Sergeant Despreaux waited as the lance corporal and a private from Bravo Team retrieved their combat harnesses and the others took swigs from their bladders. Once everyone had gathered again, she glanced around mildly.

"The next time I see anyone without her harness," she noted, and then glanced pointedly at one of the plasma gunner's flat bladders, "or with an empty water bladder, I'm putting her on report. Your nanites may help you keep going even when you dehydrate, but only to a point."

She glanced around the team again, and then shrugged one shoulder. It was the one her rifle was slung over.

"And I'm also gonna put you on report if I see anyone without a weapon again. We don't know a thing about this planet, and until we do, we will consider it hostile at all times. Understood?"

She listened to the chorus of agreement, then nodded.

"The Captain is going to give a little talk before we get started. Get your teams together and get loaded up. We've got fifteen minutes before move-out. I want you to mostly finish your bladders, then refill from the tanks on the shuttles. I want you sloshing when we start out." She glanced around one more time. "Let's go over this again. Drink?"

"Water," the squad responded, more or less in unison and with a few smiles.

"When?"

"Always."

"How much?"

"Lots."

"And carry . . . ?"

"Your weapon."

"When?"

"At all times."

"Very good," she said with a blinding smile. "You're a credit to your squad leader." She gave them a wink and headed back over to where Sergeant Major Kosutic was standing.

Kosutic waited until the company's NCOs had gathered around, then raised an eyebrow.

"Well?"

"Just like you said," Julian said, taking a sip of water from the bladder in his armor. "Nobody had finished his water. Only a couple had refilled."

"Same here," Koberda said. "You'd think they'd learn. We're all vets, and we all went through RIP. Hell, most of us have spent time in Raider units! This is just same shit, different day."

"Uh-huh." Kosutic nodded in agreement. "How's your water level, George?"

"What?" Koberda's hand tapped the bladder on his back. "Oh." The bladder was mostly full, and Kosutic chuckled as he popped the drinking tube into his mouth.

"This is gonna be a long mission, By His Wickedness," she said, scratching her ear. "And we need to get the right habits right at the beginning. Most of your troops think they're tough. Hell, they are tough. But there's tough and there's tough, and, frankly, they're the wrong kind of bad news for this. Give me a bunch of fringe world mercenaries for an op like this one. We're used to having everything on a silver platter, and all we gotta do is drop, kick ass, and go home. This is about staying in the fight for months. That's not something we train for or plan on.

"The troops are gonna get worn out. They're not gonna want to eat. They're not gonna want to drink. They're not gonna want to keep alert. They are not, By His Evilness, going to care.

"So you've gotta be their momma and their poppa. You've gotta make them eat. You've gotta make them drink. You've gotta make sure they keep up their hygiene. You've gotta make sure they keep up their heads.

"Let the troops keep on the lookout for the bad guys. You squad leaders and platoon sergeants have to keep an eye on the troops.

"And I'll keep an eye on you," she finished with a laugh. "Now, drink!"

"Have you had anything to drink this morning, Your Highness?" Captain Pahner asked as he watched the prince unpack his weapon.

The rifle would have been a point of contention if Armand Pahner had had an ounce of strength left for silly arguments. He had nothing against the weapon as a hunting rifle: the Parkins and Spencer eleven-millimeter magnum was a gem among heavy caliber rifles. True, it was a "smoke-pole" rather than a bead gun, but the selectable action weapon (it could be fired in either bolt-action or semi-automatic mode) was the end product of over a millennia of development. The big, chemical-propelled round had excellent penetration and muzzle energy, and in the hands of an expert, it was deadly out to nearly two kilometers with the Intervalle 50x variable hologram scope mounted on it.

Yet whatever its virtues, it was also incredibly heavy, nearly fifteen kilos, and used nonstandard brass-cartridge rounds, which meant the prince would be unable to trade ammunition with the other weapons. Eventually, the prince's own ammo would run out, and he would be left with an extremely expensive, very heavy stick.

But Armand Pahner was done arguing with the arrogant young prick. About most stuff.

"Not recently," Roger replied with a headshake as he snapped the receiver into the walnut stock.

"Then might I suggest that His Highness drink water?" Pahner said through gritted teeth. He knew that the prince had all the military's nanite and toot enhancements, and a few that even his bodyguards didn't have. But he still had to have some water in his veins for the nanites to swim in.

"You can suggest it," Roger said with a slight smile. "And I even will, in a minute. But I'm going to get my rifle assembled first."

"Very well, Your Highness," Pahner said after a calming breath. It was hot as the hinges of hell already, and he didn't need this. "We're going to be moving out in a few minutes." The captain smiled faintly. "O'er Marduk's sunny plain."

"I'll be there," Roger said with a glance at the captain. The Marine's last phrase had not made sense to the prince, but he had other things to worry about, and he started loading ammunition into his combat vest. The handspan-long cartridges would eventually cover the chameleon cloth harness, actually providing an ersatz armor. He had a pack at his feet which was intended to accept additional rounds, and there were loops sewn into the legs of his combat suit. He would eventually be covered in bullets.

God help us if he gets hit by a stray bead, Armand Pahner thought.

Pahner glanced at Poertena. The armorer was racked out in the shade under one net-draped wing of the shuttle. The captain knew most of the troops had bitched about hauling the camo nets into place and staking them down, but he'd been adamant. The shuttles' hulls and wings were essentially one huge crystal display; as long as their internal power held out, their programmable skins could produce better reactive camouflage than a chameleon suit or even powered armor. But even though the power requirement wasn't huge, it was more than enough to eventually drain the shuttle capacitors, at which point the craft would stand out like elephants on a golf course if anyone happened to overfly them and look down. Even if that hadn't been the case, the best reactive skins in the universe couldn't do much about the shadows they cast, so he'd ordered the nets out. Not only would they take over when the power did run out, but they broke up the artificial angularity of the shuttle hulls and wings, which also broke up the artificiality of the shadows they cast.

Roger, predictably, had considered it a waste of time, although at least he'd managed to restrict his bitching about it to Pahner himself instead of whining in front of the troops. The captain had wanted—badly—to ask why he'd been so upset when no one was asking him to do the grunt work, but he'd decided against it after only a brief struggle. They'd already gone around and around about his decision to maintain a round-the-clock listening watch on all frequencies. It would only require a single trooper to monitor them through the sophisticated com equipment engineered into his helmet, which would hardly pose a crippling drain on their manpower. Despite that, the prince had done a deplorably poor job of concealing his opinion that worrying about possible communications traffic when the entire mass of the planet lay between them and the only high-tech enclave on it made no sense at all, and Pahner had no doubt that Roger had written him off as a terminally paranoid security dweeb.

Fortunately, the captain had discovered that he was remarkably immune to worries about the prince's good opinion of him, and Roger's arguments hadn't changed his mind about the listening watch or the camo nets. No doubt the prince was right when he pointed out that the chance of any one coming in low enough to see the shuttles, assuming there was any reason to be looking in the first place, on the completely opposite side of the globe from the only spaceport or landing facility on the entire planet was virtually nonexistent. Armand Pahner, however, was not in the habit of exposing his people or his mission to avoidable risk, however remote, even if the "extra work" did piss them off.

And it was remarkable how the troops' attitude had shifted when the sun came back up and they realized what nice shade the nets provided for anyone who could come up with an excuse to get under them. Like Poertena, who looked indecently comfortable as he snored with his head propped on a gigantic rucksack. The captain wondered, briefly, what was in it, then walked over and kicked the Pinopan on the sole of his boot. The armorer's eyes popped open, and he scrambled to his feet.

"Yes, Sir, Cap'n?"

"Circulate around. Leader's conference. Here. Now."

"Yes, Sir, Cap'n," Poertena acknowledged, and trotted off towards the knot around Kosutic, bead rifle at high port.

Pahner turned and looked towards the distant mountains. Trees were faintly visible on the lower slopes.