Glory Main (20 page)

Mortas had been too scared to count them, but he now saw that there were roughly fifty soldiers in the group. As drained as they appeared to be, they were still well armed and even carried an assortment of human weapons in addition to their own. He was forced to worm his way further into the hole when one of them, presumably the ranking officer, posted a few guards in a loose circle around the group.

The Sims were still three hundred yards away, and quiet chirps carried across that distance as they saw to the wounded. The commander produced a handheld radio of some kind and began speaking into it while other Sims began sharing various items that appeared to be food. From a distance they could have been any human platoon, thrashed from hard ser­vice and nearing the end of their strength.

Trent's lips were on his ear, and Mortas didn't flinch as she spoke. “Must be part of the settlement's defense battalion. Out here fighting for days, they may even be the ones who attacked us last night.”

Gorman slid up next to him, moving an inch at a time. The Sim guards had given up on any pretense of security, sitting down with the others, and Mortas found his shoulders aching with the tension when he finally relaxed them.

He cupped a hand between his mouth and Trent's ear. “Looks like they're being taken out of the game. Must be some kind of casualty collection point.”

Gorman half-­climbed onto his back so that their three heads were touching. “If more of them come here, we're going to get spotted.”

“I know. But how do we get away without being seen? And wouldn't we just run into more of them?”

It was maddening. Setting up near such a prominent terrain feature had been a dreadful mistake, and Mortas mentally kicked himself for not moving them earlier. Now they were pinned down, and all it would take would be for the Sim commander to dispatch a ­couple of men to walk around, standard security patrol, and they'd be finished. His eyes dropped to the Scorpion, the weapon looking pitifully small and only containing five rounds.

“Just a second.” Trent lifted her head a fraction, scanning, judging. “Look at them and look at us. Dirty, beat-­up uniforms, a mix of human and Sim gear, and they're practically out on their feet. We're interchangeable.”

A surge of adrenaline pulsed through Mortas when he saw what she was saying, but it wasn't from excitement. It was from fear. Worse than fear, mortal terror at what she was suggesting.

“You want us to walk down and join them?”

“Not right now, of course. But they're waiting for some kind of transportation, probably a flight back to the settlement with the wounded. When that arrives they're all gonna get on, and we could go with them. We'd fit right in.”

“That's crazy. Think they don't know each other?”

“Right now I think they don't know their own names. And they've been out here a long time, taking casualties, probably got some extra bodies at some point.” She thought a moment. “Look there, at that group over on the left. Got those smaller helmets that the militia troops wear, the ones we saw at the bridge. One-­piece uniforms like me and Gorman. They've probably mixed in plenty of new faces.”

“Lots of assumptions there.”

“What else are we gonna do?” The words came out in a hiss. “Try and sneak our way through a cordon of fresh troops? Walk miles through the ravines and hope we don't get nailed? And even if we do that, how do we get inside? This is the only way.”

“Sure. Sure. We climb on board, the ramp comes up, and then there's some Sim medic speaking canary at us, asking if we're wounded. What then?”

Trent's face screwed up in annoyed concentration. Before she could come up with an answer, Gorman grabbed them both and pressed them down. Mortas tasted the grainy dirt of the hole, but he'd been so caught up in the argument that he had no hint of what the chartist might have seen. Whatever it was, it was close. He'd frozen as soon as Gorman had stopped pushing him down, but from that position Mortas could see nothing. For all he knew, enemy troops were walking directly at them. In a moment of fluttering unreality, Mortas was reminded of hiding under his bedspread as a small child, convinced that some horrible monster was coming toward him out of the darkness.

He learned what Gorman had seen a moment later, when a stream of high-­pitched chirping rose up from a spot only a few yards away. It was answered by more of the same, just lower and softer. Mortas didn't have to look to know another column of wounded had passed practically on top of them. Gorman's hand gave him a quick double pat as an all-­clear, but Mortas took his time sliding up to peer through the weeds.

The group had more than doubled now, with almost a dozen stretchers and over one hundred troops. The new arrivals were in even worse condition, dropping to the ground as soon as they reached the others. Where the original complement had set about tending to their wounded comrades, the second bunch seemed too exhausted to care. The commander of the first element could be heard giving quiet orders to some of his troops, and these Sims, presumably medics, began examining the new stretcher cases.

“I guess our ­people didn't kill as many of them as Major Shalley thought,” Gorman whispered, and then he looked back toward the high ground to see if more of the Sims were coming up behind them.

T
hey didn't have to wait long to learn that Trent's idea wouldn't work after all. A pair of enemy troop carriers flew overhead and settled on the plain just beyond the steeple in a roaring cloud of dust, and when the ramps came down the stretcher cases were carried out to them. Some of the walking wounded went as well, but the rest of them didn't so much as look at the machines.

Mortas had settled in for a long wait, hoping that the airships extracting the enemy would take them all at once so he and the others could move. The strain of the last few days, combined with two sleepless nights and the warmth of the sun, now sought to rob him of reason and consciousness. He fought to stay awake, but was losing the battle when he noticed something that demanded his attention.

While most of the remaining Sim troops were stretched out asleep or seated back-­to-­back in tired pairs, the commander and a few of the others now gathered in the center. They were studying a rectangular device, and from the finger pointing Mortas decided they were choosing a route for their next movement. His battered mind fought back at him as he considered the various possible destinations, but he couldn't imagine this ragged bunch being fit for anything but a hospital.

The assemblage broke up, and he marveled as two or three of the Sim leaders walked off shaking their heads.

They shake their heads the same way we do. I wonder if it means the same thing.

The senior Sims now approached their troops where they'd gathered in different bunches, and individual soldiers began waking up the ones who were asleep. The chirping got louder as the officers or NCOs conveyed the new information, and there was even more head shaking after that. One soldier, seated on the ground holding a canteen, flung the water bottle away in what could only have been exasperation.

“Amelia.”

Trent started, and Mortas knew he wasn't the only one who'd been almost asleep. “Yes.”

“Look at 'em. Check out the body language for me.”

“Never diagnosed the enemy before. Saw a few prisoners once, but they hustled 'em right by.” She rubbed her eyes and looked down on the scene. “If I had to guess, I'd say they're some pretty unhappy folks.”

Emphatic hand gestures from the leaders, accompanied by a sound that was more bark than chirp, soon had the soldiers gathering their equipment and getting on their feet. The leader then moved from group to group, obviously soothing raw feelings, as the back chatter quieted and then died. They began shouldering weapons and other gear, and Mortas saw the unconscious way that most of them began orienting themselves toward the high ground.

Getting ready to move. So chewed up they can't be headed anywhere but the settlement. Pissed off about
something
. . .

“They're not getting a ride back.” Mortas grabbed the sleeves of the others in excitement. “They're walking. They're gonna walk all the way to the settlement. Been fighting all this time, dead on their feet, and they got screwed out of their ride.”

“You sure about that?”

“Absolutely. Happened to me once in training. We'd worn this laser-­tag gear for days, and at the end of one long march we stopped near a convoy of empty movers. They let us think the vehicles were for us. They had us clean up the laser-­tag stuff and turn it in, and then we watched while they loaded it on the movers and they drove away. We reacted then the way the Sims are reacting now.”

Trent had been studying the slowly forming column, and she began to nod. “I think you might be right.”

“You bet I am.” Exhilaration burned his exhaustion away as it climbed into belief. “They've got a long-­ass walk in front of them and they know there's no reason for it. So if we fall in at the end, keep our mouths shut, and peel off once we're though the wire, we have a good chance of getting to the drome.”

“Lieutenant.” Gorman's tone was hard to identify, but Mortas feared it meant opposition. As much as his embryonic plan excited him, it also filled him with genuine terror. There were so many ways it could go wrong that Mortas knew his nerve wouldn't stand up to even the slightest argument.

“Yeah.”

“We gotta cover the Captain's hair. It's short, but not short enough.”

Mortas looked over at the matted tangle that was almost stuck to Trent's scalp. Gorman was right. They needed to cut it or cover it. He rolled over slightly and pulled Cranther's skull cap from his pocket. Understanding, Trent took the cap and pulled it down, but that actually made things worse: Now the longer strands stuck out, but no matter how he tried they were still too short to tuck up under the fabric. A hand nudged him, and Mortas turned to see Gorman holding out a stubby pair of scissors. Remembering them from the medical kit, he took the shears and began snipping off the excess hair. Mortas glanced over his shoulder in time to see the head of the Sim column coming toward them, and began to caution the others. Too many things to say, too many things to think of, not enough time.

“Remember: Not a word, not even a sound. We walk in the rear, we stay together, and don't make eye contact. If something unexpected happens, grab hold of each other and we'll just drift off to the side.”

Snip, snip.

“Once we're through the wire, pretend you're so tired that you need to sit down and we'll all just move off together.”

Snip, snip.

“They'll think we're settlement militia, and that we've got someplace to go.”

“Shhhh.”

He palmed the scissors and looked over the edge to see the first Sim pass not twenty yards away. It was the same troop who'd been on point with the first arrivals, and he was no more alert now than he'd been then. The others then started filing by, most with their weapons slung carelessly, and after a third of them had passed Mortas saw the leader. If he was exercising any control over this gaggle, it wasn't apparent. Perhaps he was as dead on his feet as the others. Perhaps he was annoyed that they had to walk back. Perhaps he didn't want to push his soldiers any further by insisting they assume a proper defensive posture.

Although they were barely moving, the tail end of the column came up much too soon. Mortas studied the last walkers, fearing they would be leaders posted there to encourage any stragglers. That didn't seem to be the case; if anything, these were the ones in the worst shape and the most likely to fall out. Their eyes were vacant as they moved, and most of them were unarmed. One of them sported a field dressing on his head that had seeped runnels of blood that had now dried on his cheek, and he looked ready to collapse at any moment.

With a fearful look into Trent and Gorman's equally petrified eyes, Mortas slowly came to his feet and started walking down the embankment after the Sims.

M
ortas was amazed that they covered so much ground in so short a time. He wondered if the heart-­racing fear of the first mile had made the distance fly by, but then he realized that couldn't be it. The Sims were walking slowly in deference to their wounded, but even so they climbed the first ridge and then left it behind in under an hour. That was when he saw both the truth and the strangeness of it: After having lived so long using cover and concealment, he was surprised by how rapidly they moved in the open because he was now unfamiliar with this careless form of travel.

And that was the correct description. Instead of seeking the higher ground in order to survey their surroundings for possible enemies, the weary Sims had climbed the ridge just far enough to find a notch that let them descend onto flatter terrain. Then they'd really begun to put the miles behind them. The brush wasn't as thick here, and the only obstacles were the crooked ravines that the humans had so recently viewed as the only safe way to move. The column, strung out in the open, twisted and turned as the lead soldiers tried to navigate around the gullies. Most of the time they found segments that were narrow enough to be jumped, but even those were too much for many of the injured. When the ravine proved too wide to leap, they were forced to slide down one side and clamber up the other.

And that was when Mortas began to believe their desperate subterfuge might actually work. Going up the opposite side of the first ravine, digging his fingers into the fresh dirt clawed by the many Sims in the front of the column, he was shocked into near-­paralysis when the enemy soldier just ahead of him reached down and offered his hand. It was a common act for human infantrymen negotiating an obstacle, but Mortas was so surprised that he almost went over backward. His boots dug into the ravine wall and his legs began pushing wildly, and the Sim on the top lunged just as he was about to slide back down. The hand that gripped his was familiar, four fingers and a thumb, and the face could have been any human lieutenant from his training class.