CHAPTER ELEVEN
945 Kilometers south-east of Lograin, 23H54, 13th of June, 2771
“Grove one-oh-thirty-one up ahead, fifty paces,” Toni heard over the comm.
Hirum’s voice was regaining that peculiar monotone.
He must be getting tired by now, but he’s already popped all his pills, Toni thought, far beyond caring. Anymore and he is going to crash. Again. And then Unit Fourteen will again be autostriding in the rear along with a sleeping Grimm and a handful of burnouts.
Fifty gigantic paces ahead, advancing in single file, they came upon a grove of Diesel Trees. Essentially Baobabs with particularly bulbous bases, the trees elongated somewhat closer to their crowns, only to branch out in a particularly spectacular manner, exposing their broad leaves to the sunlight as far as ten meters from their trunks. Toni identified the likely avenue of approach and stood directly before it, putting a knee to the ground. Units Six and Ten quickly followed suit.
Without delay, eight exoskeleton-clad footmen clambered off each Suit, having until then been hitching a particularly bumpy ride whilst gripping the units’ torso webbing. With little time before the main force’s arrival, they dispersed into pairs at a run, each approaching a tree on either side of the avenue. Toni watched them momentarily, and then directed his attention to their surroundings.
He had given up imagining enemy formations hidden amongst the foliage; he was simply too tired for the mental effort it required. Instead he observed without searching, counting on his innate ability to spot movement and pattern, his mind too familiarized to the forest sounds to associate any ominous significance to the occasional creak or snap.
The footmen continued their work. The corporal nearest Toni quickly removed equipment from his comrade’s travel pack and began to cut into a square scar at the base of the tree. The bark extended more than a palm’s breadth into the trunk and was hard enough to require vibrating cutters, but once the block was excised, the far more porous interior was exposed and began to exude a syrupy resin. The other footman then plugged the hole with a square metal peg of just the right size, inserted a thin perforated shaft into the slot at the peg’s center and shoved all two meters of it into the broad tree. The last few centimeters required some delicacy as he secured the shaft’s base snugly against the slot’s outlying lip.
Now came the easy part. The corporal’s pack was almost entirely composed of the Portable Refinery Module, a 60 kilo-weight device intended to extract and refine the Resinin oil contained deep within the genetically engineered tree. Laying the PRM on the ground, the corporal connected it to the shaft’s base via a wire-coated hose, initiating the diagnostic pump as soon as he connected his terminal to the device.
The pair had been quicker than their comrades; their PRM was the first to activate, the noisy pump breaching the silence violently enough to cause some upheaval among the nesting sparrows.
So much for noise discipline, Toni thought in disgust.
Shortly afterwards, the remaining PRMs added their voices to the din while their operators carefully gauged the progress on their terminals. Before a minute had passed all the devices ceased to operate, with the exception of the first; it continued on for a full twenty seconds more, producing a revving sound before slowing down and then cutting off entirely. The footmen, all logistics personnel, momentarily parleyed among themselves in an encrypted frequency before passing their findings over to Section One, LOGIS.
“Unit Six, this is Lightfoot, over,” the corporal sounded over the comm.
“What’s the verdict?” Bowker answered with his butch tone. Toni hadn’t yet worked up the nerve to discourage him from talking like that. The macho voice sounded fake and Toni suspected the more senior footmen thought so too.
“The site is adequate for Main Force passage; it’s the mother lode we were looking for, over.”
Toni felt a heavy load fall from his shoulders. They had finally found a grove large enough and with substantial enough oil reserves to fuel the entire expeditionary force. That alone meant they might suspend their march for the night, something the lot of them would certainly be grateful for. After all, it would probably take the entire night to fuel the multitude of Suits. Toni hailed Bowker once the information had been relayed to Wild Rose Ops.
“Unit Six, here Unit Seven, over.”
“What the deal, Seven?”
“Bowker, drop the badass tang, it’s me you’re talking to and they can’t pick us up.”
“Uh, right Toni, what is it?”
“I’m sure you know what’s gonna happen as soon as Main Force gets here, right? Alpha Sierra Charlie’s gonna put us last in line to refuel. Why don’t we refuel now and save ourselves the grief?”
“I dunno, Toni, that’s up to the corporal –”
“Bowker, use your head. Tell him we’re nearly out of gas and want to be ready for action. That isn’t exactly a lie, you know ...”
They needn’t have worried. The corporal wholeheartedly agreed, fully aware that soon there would be a traffic jam of Suits of all shapes and sizes waiting to be topped up, and seeing the opportunity to get a head start.
The armored Suits topped up in pairs with over five hundred liters of bioether-saturated Resil each, their APUs having been designed to run on the biofuel as a contingency. As refueling took place, the remaining footmen demarcated the loitering area, placing luminous beacons in a funnel along the grove’s axis of approach. Units Six and Seven were the second pair to refuel as the remainder kept up their vigil.
“Any idea when the sarge’s gonna show?” Toni asked.
Unit Six did not to answer for a while, perhaps in protest for Toni’s rebuke.
“When the fucker feels like it, I guess ...” Bowker answered as soon as his unit had been topped up.
Sergeant Dunn’s leadership had thus far been somewhat unorthodox, almost every member of his section having been rotated into command status on missions, thus leaving their cat-eyed commander to engage in activities unknown. The first indication those activities were for the section’s betterment had arrived in Lograin Air Base, when each Suit’s allocated ammunition was doubled from one hundred to two hundred twenty-five millimeter rounds.
LOGIS had left MEWAC base with five twenty-round clips of twenty-five millimeter High Explosive-Tracer ammunition and twenty-four flare cartridges in cluster pods per Suit, which only served to underline their commander’s statement that the platoon was to avoid combat whenever possible. The principal side-effect had nevertheless been a somewhat rebellious attitude from the ex-ASC section leaders, most notably from 2nd Sergeant Dunn himself. Upon landing in Lograin Air Base, barely a thousand kilometers from Unmilfor’s Projected Area of Influence, Dunn had performed a disappearing act, leaving a shocked Grimm to assume section command as they knelt along the airfield’s perimeter. It had been a very silent wait, mostly due to their impromptu section leader not having figured out how to communicate over the comm without tipping off their platoon commander.
When Dunn returned, moving lithely in his armored Suit as no SIC trainee could seem to manage, he had directed his section to the local ammunition depot, where they received another hundred twenty-five millimeter rounds, four hundred cartridges each for their spaulder-mounted anti-personnel sentry guns and a pair of anti-armor SABERO rocket pods, each mounted on their innermost spaulder pylons. Dunn’s Suit padded ponderously among them as they stowed the extra ammo.
“Unlike what you got at the Stables, the twenty-fivers you’re receiving here are armor-piercing incendiary rounds. From now on you will stack your clips with one HET round followed by two API rounds successively. If you need to lay down fire, you will fire in three round burst mode using the tracer for aim correction. With the three rounds being fired at eighteen hundred rpm, you’ll feel it as one kick against your chest-plate, but by then the slugs will be well on their way ...” he bellowed over his unit’s integrated loudspeaker as they set to work, making it happen.
“Never forget that the t
racer loses visibility at twenty four hundred meters, so consider that your practical range.”
He kept up the cascade of counsel even as Toni struggled with his clips; the hand-gauntlet interface should have been sensitive enough for the job, but Ruka’s warning had proven to be well-founded, leaving him no choice but to reset his unit’s synchronicity every few seconds. His efforts were helped not in the least by the magazines themselves, which were dented enough at their lips to occasionally send a half-kilo round flying. As he despairingly picked up yet another round rolling in semi-circles along the ground, Dunn continued with his rant.
“Never conjoin more than three clips for your twenty-fiver. Each of them loaded weighs more than ten kilo-mass, and you won’t want more than thirty kilos added to your main gun. The magazine detention peg is just not designed to take that much weight.
“You should consider yourselves fortunate. Only the fact that section one’s been tasked for combat resupply has allowed Command to open up an exception, otherwise not even my bitching would have allowed me to up-arm you.”
And just like that, Toni discovered that Section One had drawn LOGIS’s Great Prize.
Some of the news he’d gotten over the grape-vine as the great circus departed Lograin had been even more sinister. There were apparently those who believed that Dunn had negotiated for Sec-One to be up-armed in exchange of tasking to resupply detail. Toni wasn’t sure he believed it, nor whether, if it was true, he loved Dunn or hated him for it.
“Unit Six, here Brother One, over.”
Speak of the devil ...
“Er ... here Unit Six, inform, over.”
Bowker never tried to talk tough with Dunn.
“My unit is one mike from your location, coming in from your north-west with Main Force in tow. Upon Main Force arrival, Section One will be relieved by Alpha Sierra Charlie’s 1st platoon, 2nd section, and proceed to waiting area. LOGIS Prime wants a word with us.”