The Ramal Extraction (32 page)

Cutter grinned. “I’ll drink the bourbon, you can have the scotch.”

“Done. Discom.”

Well, well. Best get this show in the air…

Formentara said, “Colonel, we got a J-Corps force on spysat, debarking from a carrier near the border where Rama’s army crossed over.”

“Figures. They’ll be monitoring the action. How many?”

“Short company, a hundred or so.”

Cutter nodded. “We’ll have to make sure we don’t shoot any of them by accident. Hatachi has let it be known that a bottle of good scotch won’t buy us out of that.”

Zhe didn’t speak to that.

“Everybody ready?”

Zhe said, “All green on the log-ins.”

“Okay, you’re in charge. Don’t break anything while we’re gone.”

Formentara grinned.

“You ready to fly, Nancy?” Jo asked.

“Honey, I’m always ready to fly.”

“Might get shot at.”

“I been shot at. Not a problem if they don’t hit me. I am allowed to dodge, right?”

Jo looked around. The team was all on board: Rags, Gunny, Gramps, Wink, Kay, and herself.

And Singh. The colonel had him come along, and Jo figured it was more because he wanted to be sure that Singh wasn’t bending the Rajah’s ear. When you hire the locals, you always keep a sharp eye on them, JIC.

“Okay. Let’s go places and rescue people,” Jo said.

The hopper’s engines revved, and they lifted.

The colonel said: “Okay, once more, here’s what we will be dealing with. Rama won’t try to run his armor through the woods, so it’ll be infantry. And it’s gonna take a while because there is a huge forest, hundreds of kilometers wide at the border and that far extending into Balaji.

“The forces at the front will be his best and toughest, and Singh here has indicated that they aren’t too shabby.

“Rama’s Navy will sail round the Eastern Horn of Pahal, and there will be armored vehicles hauled that way. Tanks and juggernauts will be airlifted via VTOL lifting bodies and plunked down where he thinks nobody will be expecting ’em, somewhere east of the Inland Sea.

“Air will overfly where it can—the Thakore has a decent-sized air force of his own, so that won’t be overwhelming.

“Nobody uses nukes, if they keep to the treaty. No satellite-deployed ceepee. No biologicals, and not even poison gas, outside of civilian crowd-control stuff.

“Both armies will be plugged and sonic-damped, so they won’t be spraying puke ’n’ crap, nor cranking up the amps to blow out eardrums and addle brains, except for civilians who get in the way. We will don our nares filters and pass-through wolf-ear plugs, just in case. Might get messy otherwise.”

Gunny chuckled.

They’d all done training that involved exposing themselves to various noxious chem, and “messy” was an accurate term.

“We’re leaving the suits home. Both sides will be throwing stuff hard enough to hole them, and we won’t be doing any stand-up fighting if we can help it. Getting in and out fast and staying off the pradar is a better way to go. We’ll have Formentara’s magic transponders, and those should help.”

“Nancy is going to sneak us in ahead of Rama’s advance, and it will be cutting it close, but that’s the best option. Once they engage, the armies will be shooting at anything that moves, and transponders or not, we run the risk of getting friendly fire from both sides.

“We collect Indira, Schrödinger’s—either way, we get the hell out ASAP.

“Questions?”

Nobody had any. They had covered all this before, it was just to make sure that he went over it again.

“Nancy puts us down in that clearing, we go through the woods, get to where we want to do, and take care of business. You need to pee, visit the head now.”

The edge of the forest was just ahead, and since that’s where Rama’s camp was, the going would be faster once they cleared it, but that would mean air attacks would be a risk. Lot of dumbot drones on both sides flying around, looking for something to shoot. Plus J-Corps wandering around on the QT.

Not that they couldn’t be detected in the thick of the woods with DLIR or pradar, but with all those heavy-boled trees to absorb the shock, the explosives didn’t work as well. Nobody was supposed to be throwing nukes, and having a meter-thick tree between you and a shower of bomb fragments was way better than having to absorb them yourself.
Plus nobody wanted to burn down the valuable trees, so more likely they’d send in infantry to deal with them.

Nobody was particularly likely to notice a handful of un-IDed troops during all the goings-on.

But: Speed was of the essence now; they had to get in and out or risk getting crushed between the two armies. The fog of war made everything that moved a target for everybody with a weapon. Lot of friendly-fire killing went on.

Cutter looked at his team. He was getting too old to be doing this shit though he had to admit to himself that there was an element of, well,
joy
in it.

Never felt so alive as you did after you came out of a battle in one piece. And if you were dead? You wouldn’t feel that…

Jo said, “Two klicks, southeast, Colonel. Kay and I have the point.”

“Go for it,” Cutter said.

The tricky part would be getting next to Rama. In theory, Formentara had adjusted their transponders so they would be autotoggled by any military pradar ping. If Rama’s army looked at them, their ID sigs would match his; if the Thakore’s army did the same thing, the sig would show up as belonging to him. There were always rangers and speckunit boots on the ground in a battle, and as long as the sig matched yours, you tended not to worry as much. Plus a handful of troops weren’t any real threat anyhow.

At least that was the theory.

If they got painted with pradar from both sides at the same time?

Formentara had shrugged. “Transponders will schiz out, offer one, then the other. You’ll be in deep shit, both sides shooting at you. Better to not let that happen.”

Cutter adjusted his low-ready grip on his carbine and watched Jo and Kay take off.

“Move out,” he said.

Jo was up for a party, but she kept her augs running at minimum. They needed to move quickly, but it might be a long engagement, and better not to burn up her energy too soon. No suits for them this time, only helmets and pliable-ceramic armor, and that minimal cover. Fast and sneaky were the keys here, not round-resistance. No way for six of them to offer a stand-up fight against two armies.

She and Kay were LOS lasercom only, so if they couldn’t see each other, they couldn’t hear each other. Not that they needed to talk that much, they’d use jive to signal each other, and both of them had enough night vision to track each other even here in the trees—it was dark, but not completely so.

If they came across resistance this early, they’d need to avoid it or take care of it quietly if they could.

Kay stopped, raised her hand, closed it into a fist.

Jo froze.

Kay pointed, and Kay followed the line in the dark forest…

There, a picket, not looking in their direction, but rifle held at his waist. Not quite low ready. Expecting the possibility of company, Jo figured, but from another quadrant, and no target in view.

Kay pointed at herself, then the soldier.

Jo nodded.

It was always fascinating to watch the change as Kay went into her stalk. She seemed to shrink, become something less conspicuous, and she moved with a stealth Jo could only envy. She crouched lower, stepped slowly and with great care to avoid making any noise.

She stole to within five meters of the soldier.

He wore spookeye goggles hinged to the front of his helmet, so if he glanced in her direction, he’d see her, but so far, his concentration seem to be to the north. Jo didn’t ping
his transponder, didn’t want to risk alerting him, so she wasn’t sure whether he was Pahali or Balajian, but it didn’t really matter—either was as much a worry as the other.

Kay crouched, silent, still as a rock. Waited.

Something must have subconsciously spooked him. The soldier turned toward Kay.

Jo raised her carbine and put the floating green dot on the man’s throat, above his pec-plate. She was forty meters away, and the scope compensated for parallax automatically to ten times that distance. The carbine was suppressed, but it would make some noise—

Before the picket could bring his weapon to bear, Kay sprinted in, incredibly fast, and lashed out with one claw—

The false image her aug gave the blood that spewed from his neck made it a maroon color in the spookeye field. He dropped his weapon and reached for his ruined throat, no more than a fading gurgle accompanying his fall as he dropped onto his side.

Kay dropped next to the dying man and hastened his end with another claw.

She did like that throat strike, and with good reason: Land it, it always worked. And so far as Jo could tell, Kay always landed it. If you planned on hand-to-hand with a Vastalimi? You wanted to wear a nice, thick titanium collar…

Moving on now, people…

There were supposed to be two sentries outside Rama’s temporary shelter, but it turned out there was a third. Kay and Jo were set to deal with the expected ones.

“I got him,” Wink said.

The third man was behind the building, a dome-shaped thing with surface e-camo lit to hide it from an overfly.