Sister Time-Callys War 2 (32 page)

"You're about to die a horrible death alone in the wilderness. I can sympathize. And me, I'll rust away slowly, slowly falling more and more apart as my battery runs down and down and—"

"Buckley? Please shut up."

"Right." He sounded satisfied, as if something about the end of the exchange had made all right with his world, at least for a few seconds.

She was strapped to the metal table on Titan Base. The bastards were on top of her again, and
her head swam watching the unblinking, alien eyes through the imperfectly one-way glass above
her. The face of the man on her wavered between Pryce and George and back again, only Pryce
was Stewart and his ship was blowing up. They had tilted the table and were making her watch.

Over and over and over again. A lifepod ejected from the shuttle and spouted wings, flying back
towards the base as the ship and the table pulled her away, away, away. She was up to her elbows
in blood, freezing and congealing on the icy metal table as the man slapped her over and over
again. If she'd only been a good little girl and killed more Posleen, Daddy wouldn't have had to
nuke her again. Herman started talking to her, telling her she had to go swim with the dolphins,
but she couldn't go. Doctor Vitapetroni was holding her down, injecting her with something that
stung so bad and telling her she had to stay on the table until she could wipe the blood off, but she
couldn't because she didn't have a towel, and besides, she was strapped down anyway and
couldn't dance anymore. She started to cry.

Cally woke, sobbing, her throat raw. The dream must have been another screamer. She remembered it and shuddered, wiping the tears away angrily.

"Good morning. I have cataloged five thousand, four hundred and thirty-two ways we can die horribly today. Continuing to process. Would you like me to . . . begin . . . the . . . list?" The buckley sounded tinny and maniacal. Dammit, she'd left it on overnight. Not that she'd had a choice. In its condition, she didn't think the PDA could reboot. At least, expecting it to come back up would be expecting a damned miracle. From the diagnostics, it was a miracle it had booted even once.

"Buckley, please calculate, not look up, a prime number with more than a thousand digits for me." At least if he was number-crunching he wasn't thinking of disasters and might actually be able to be useful if she needed him.

"Okay. But even if we do encryption based on it, they'll still break the code."

"Just do it and shut up, buckley."

"Right."

She drank the icy melt water in the helmet before she left, glaring balefully at the nasty iron ration bar she couldn't even eat. Outside, the snow was up to her mid-thigh on average. She'd be avoiding the drifts.

She sure would give a lot for a pair of snowshoes, but she wasn't going to stop to try to rig a pair. She wasn't in Harrison' league with that improv shit, and she knew it.

It took her all morning to go those five miles, leaving a trail a toddler could have followed. Half the time she was picking herself up, the other half falling on her face again. The sky was heavy and gray. She hoped it started snowing some more soon. The cold would be bitter, but it would do something about her tracks. At the river, she pulled out the buckley and hoped that it could at least pull up pre-war road and terrain maps so she could figure out if she was east or west of the bridge.

"Buckley, I need a terrain map of the area and a street map. Old is okay," she said.

"I'm calculating."

"That's okay, you can interrupt it for this, but then go back to it, okay?"

"I can't display maps. They're all fragmentary. Go left."

"What?" It made the skin on the back of her neck prickle. The buckley's guess was probably better than hers, since she had no idea which way to go. She was good at her job, but she figured she was lucky she found the river at all. Part of being good at her job was knowing when to depend on her tech support.

She turned left.

"Not
your
left,
my
left!"

She turned the other way and started plowing through more snow. And more snow. And still more snow. Snow that began to fall again. Oh well, skipping frostbite wasn't going to happen this time.

Hopefully there wouldn't be too much to regenerate. Be a real bitch if she had to miss the big job over a little snow.

It had to have been about sixteen hundred by the time she hit the bridge. She'd tried to talk to the buckley twice, but he was no longer answering. Either one of the falls she'd taken and knocked something else loose or he'd run out of numbers to crunch and crashed himself. She'd tried to reboot, without any luck. Buckley was well and truly hors de combat. Again.

The bridge was a very welcome sight, since the winds had scoured it mostly clean of snow. The ice would be a stone bitch, but not so bad as the snow. Her adrenaline spiked as she caught movement from behind a snow drift. She dropped to the ground.

The first go to hell rendezvous point was roughly one klick north and five clicks east of their entry point to the base. It was good that Sunday and Schmidt One had managed to figure out where they were right away, from the updated terrain features, and orient themselves towards their pickup. It was an especially good thing, since within just a few minutes the snow was falling so hard that visibility for more than a few feet ahead was damned near nil. As the snow started sticking and turning everything white, it got harder to even tell how much visibility they had. They had enough trouble just following the internal compass on their PDAs and putting one foot in front of the other. Heads down against the blowing snow, it was pretty hard not to bump into a particularly sneaky tree now and again.

Getting to the pickup only took maybe twice as long as it would have taken in fair weather. Tommy was grateful for the snow, since it had screwed with the Fleet Strike people searching for them more than it had screwed with them. He hoped Cally made it out, but tried not to think about it too much. Not right now. He'd think about her when he got somewhere that he had a chance to do something about it. He'd only dared try to raise her once on the radio. Getting no answer, he didn't dare transmit again.

They would have missed the Humvee if George and Papa hadn't been smart enough to leave the headlights on. As it was, they barely caught sight of the glow before they passed it. Damned nor'easters.

All too many of them since the war. Why was a question for the academics—which they sure did love debating over lunches bought with other people's money. Piling into the warmth of the vehicle was like heaven.

"Anything from Cally?" It was the first thing out of Harrison' mouth. It would have been the first thing out of his mouth, except it came out more of a grunt as he shoved his way into the truck after the other man and slammed the door.

"No," Papa O'Neal said brusquely. "We keep the snoopers active to give us as much warning of hostiles as possible, we keep the lights on, we camp here for the night."

"Not to get in the way of a good plan, but I have cherished personal needs. Like oxygen with low carbon monoxide levels."

"Fans. George brought fans. We take turns on watch clearing the snow from one side of the car outside enough to make a chimney. More snivel gear in the back."

"George?" Tommy said. "Remind me never to complain about you being a paranoid son of a bitch again."

"Bet on it. Just be glad this Humvee is a hybrid," the blond said. "If we were running on pre-war chemical batteries, we'd be toast."

"Mmm. Toast. What good does running this beast do that we can't just do on its electric?" Tommy asked.

"Engine heat," Harrison mumbled. "It's not like we've got electric heating coils or anything. We can run the lights, we can run the snoopers, we can run the fans, but every couple of hours, we're going to have to run the engine enough to warm back up again so we don't all freeze. Speaking of not freezing, do you think one of you could see your way clear to passing some chow forward? It's about that time."

"What's plan B if Cally's not here in the morning?" Tommy couldn't help feeling disturbed that of all the team members, it was the girl who was out in the snow.

"She should be here. She had the same terrain and rendezvous data you did," George assured.

"If she loaded it, if her buckley didn't break, if she didn't get caught," Harrison had dry clothes out and was changing, shivering.

"Sounding a bit like a buckley yourself, aren't you?" his brother quipped.

"I didn't see her load the cube. I saw her face when she took it. Bet you fifty fedcreds she never loaded the thing," Sunday said.

"Okay, so if she's not here in the morning, we proceed to the bridge and leave a lookout—Tommy, I guess—then send a pair on foot to rendezvous two. We also alert Kieran that she may show up at the plane. The bridge and the plane are the most logical places for her to go if she somehow didn't get the memo. If she can find them in all this," George added.

"You're not suggesting we try to get the humvee all the way to the second rendezvous, are you?" Papa clearly considered this lunacy.

"Not if fixer-boy can come up with something for snowshoes—"

"Blow me," Harrison said mildly.

"Anyway, if we can make walking in the snow a little easier, you and I will go to the second rendezvous, and Harrison will take the vehicle to the plane. Get it under cover. It's more conspicuous in this weather than we are on foot. All three out in the cold pack some heater rations and beverages, first aid kits for Cally. If she finds us after a night out, she'll need it. If we don't find her by seventeen hundred, we get back to the plane and take the risk of hitting the radio."

"And if those don't work?" Tommy asked. He would have been trying to offer help, but he was too busy cursing himself for neglecting to bring a change of clothes for himself. It wasn't like anybody else's stuff would fit.

"We leave supplies at what's left of that bounty farmhouse, marked as well as we dare. We figure she's made it back to us from worse than this, and we get the hell out of dodge," Papa O'Neal said. "We plan further search and rescue once we're in the air and can phone home. We need IR and all sorts of things we don't have to mount a search in hostile territory, in inclement weather. We need to move, communicate and coordinate."

"You know our best chance of finding her is in the hours immediately after the incident," Harrison said.

"You don't have to fucking remind me. This is my granddaughter we're talking about. If we don't find her tomorrow, she's either captured, dead, or found someplace to hole up while going to her own plan B. If she's able, she'll get to the LZ. If she doesn't get herself to the LZ within a couple of days, she's captured or dead. If the former, we need a planned extraction, not a half-assed one."

The Schmidt brothers had a rougher night than Tommy or Papa. Former grunts had a special advantage in the combat skill of sleeping anywhere, in any situation, in any position. If sleep was not expressly forbidden by the regs or orders, taking any opportunity to grab a few extra winks was one of the things that separated combat vets from cherries. It helped that the ACS vet's silks were dry again within an hour of getting out of the storm.

The cold light of morning brought no Cally and too damned much snow. Their fixer earned his name by using some of the leftover bridge netting to give the hummer a surface it could drive over. Two pairs of improvised snow shoes and two sections of bridging allowed the truck to be stopped on one section while they went back to get the one they just drove over and move it forward. Since the material could be rolled and unrolled, their progress wasn't comfortable, but it was reasonably quick. By early afternoon, they had detached Tommy to the bridge. In silks, with silks gloves and full headgear, which he'd sorely missed while fleeing the base, he could stay out here for hours and hours. The thermos of coffee was a luxury he savored; he just didn't savor too much of it in case Cally showed up and needed the warmth.

About sixteen-thirty he saw damp blonde hair, over a splotch of black, bob across the horizon. When she got close enough, he stood up, unsurprised that she immediately disappeared into the snow. "Hey, Cally! It's just me!"

The blond head popped up again as she stood up and resumed slogging forward. Tommy just couldn't take watching it. He went out and met her on the way, ignoring her protests to pick her up and carry her to the bridge.

"I can just imagine trying to walk through this shit all day without snowshoes," he said. He flipped open his PDA and opened a transmission, "Charlie Romeo, say again, Charlie Romeo."

"Roger Charlie Romeo. RTB, out," Papa O'Neal answered.

"Cally, you're shivering. Here." The big man pulled a Galactic silk survival blanket out of his pack and wrapped it around her, then poured her a cup of hot coffee as she huddled under the blanket. She warmed her frozen hands around the plastic mug as she drank it down, to have the empty cup taken and an energy bar shoved in her hands.

"Eat that, one more cup of this, then we tackle the bridge."

"Where are the others?" she mumbled around a mouthful of food.

"At the second backup rendezvous point. You didn't load that cube in your buckley, did you?"

"Forgot. Then on the way out, didn't have time to go back for the stupid jumpsuit," she said.

"I win my bet," he said.

"Bet? Bastard." She punched him on the arm.

"You're recovering fast. Here, wash the last of that down with this and let's get going. You'll warm up faster on the plane, the sooner the better."

"Let me guess, the truck's at the plane where it's out of sight," she said.

"You got it. In this mess, we can walk faster than it can move."

She looked down at his snowshoes, bent bars of metal strapped together and laced with five-fifty cord, and held up one of her own soaked, frozen, sneaker-clad feet. "Speak for yourself."

"I am. You're riding over my shoulder in a fireman's carry after we get to the other side, because I'm not staying out in this shit one minute longer than I have to," he said. "So, why didn't you radio in? Your PDA get smashed up?"