"Damn, you're heavy, Sarge," Buccari grunted, struggling to breathe. No answer. No movement. Buccari heard the drone buzzing overhead and then more demonic whistles. The ground heaved violently, and Shannon's body twitched spasmodically as the blasts rolled over them, and then she felt the man's blood, warm and wet. Frantic, she wriggled out from under the grotesquely limp body and staggered to her feet.
"Oh, Sarge! No, Sarge!" Buccari still on her knees, wept. Shannon was dead, his back ripped open by shards of hot metal. She looked around, dazed, her ears ringing with concussion. The irritating noise of the drone pushed its way into her consciousness. Anger welled within her. The drone seemed closer. She looked up, and there it was—a hard, black form, a darker hole in the dark skies, hovering off to the side. She grabbed Shannon's assault rifle and snapped it to her shoulder. Exhaling, she aimed and fired a burst, pulling the sights across the target.
"Save the ammo!" MacArthur shouted, appearing from the dark. "Wait until daylight." He ran up to her, tripping over Shannon's form. "Get out of here," he said, kneeling to check Shannon's throat for a pulse. "Move, Lieutenant!" he shouted, grabbing the dead man's ammo belt and field glasses.
Buccari ran. Two more white flashes illuminated the bottoms of the clouds. Buccari and MacArthur dove behind a litter of fallen trees as whistling mortar shells car-rumphed into the wet ground, vomiting trees and dirt into the air. Hot shrapnel whistled and pinged through the forest, clipping tree branches and leaves—an expanding buzzsaw laid on its side! Ear-shattering impacts walked up the valley slope and spread apart, chasing the retreating humans. Buccari and MacArthur jumped to their feet and dashed across the hillside, climbing ever higher as debris fell around them. Explosions lit up the night. Mortar rounds fell continuously. After a hundred meters MacArthur reversed their traverse and headed back toward the others, continuing to climb. An eternity passed. The mortar fire stopped, but the infernal buzzing of the reconnaissance drone hung in the darkness above.
"We're out of range," MacArthur gasped.
Buccari struggled to get her wind. She heard crashing and stumbling ahead. MacArthur whistled softly.
"That you, Mac?" Chastain' s voice shouted back from the shadows.
"Yeah, Jocko. And the lieutenant. Who's with you?" "Mendoza and Schmidt," Chastain replied. "Schmidt's injured."
They caught up. Chastain and Mendoza were assisting Schmidt, though the Marine was trying to shake them off. Blood trickled from Schmidt's ears, and Mendoza's cheek was ripped, a flap of skin dangling. Schmidt had lost his rifle.
"Who else've you seen, Jocko?" Buccari asked. "Anyone else get hurt?"
"Petit bought it," Mendoza replied. "Caught a round in his lap. Nothing left."
Buccari saw shadows tramping upwards through the thinning forest of pines and firs. MacArthur shouted names and the others answered, sometimes needing voice relays to communicate over the distances. Everyone but Petit and Shannon. Buccari passed orders to climb to the tree line. There they would rendezvous and decide their next move. They climbed silently, gradually walking into a foggy overcast, the snarling engines of the drones fell behind; the cloud ceiling too thick for its detection systems.
"What have I got us into?" Buccari sighed. "Shannon's dead…and Petit."
"So they earned their paychecks!" MacArthur shot back. "Can it, Lieutenant! Shannon knew what he was doing. Your plan was good. We didn't know about their air force."
"A big screwup," she spit.
"Nothing's changed," MacArthur said. Tonto and X.O. hopped out of the night. Captain followed, but signaled bad
"The cliff dwellers?" she asked.
MacArthur lifted his pistol. He pulled the slide back, chambering a round. "Air-to-air combat," he said. "Just have to find the right time and place."
The clouds departed with the night. Morning arrived calm and bright. Longo' s soldiers marched at a steady, four-legged lope up the slope of the valley, much faster than a human could walk. The mortar team followed more slowly. The overcast had made it impossible to keep the aliens in contact, and Longo had held position on the valley flank until daybreak. With clear skies, one of the drones immediately regained contact, marking the location of the aliens and eliminating the danger of another ambush.
"They move along the top of the ridge, Colonel," a subordinate reported. Longo grunted and kept hiking. And thinking. The drone had detected seventeen infrared signatures. Nine of the signatures were distinctly larger and much warmer than the other eight. His technicians indicated the larger signatures were the aliens, of which only seven were left; they had passed one insect-covered body and the remains of another. What were the eight smaller IR signatures?
"We have adequate light for video, Colonel," the drone technician reported. "The smaller IR signatures have been identified as two-legged animals."
"Pets?" Longo remarked. "I was not aware of two-legged animals on this planet."
"Mountain flyers, most excellent Colonel," offered the technician. "Five disappeared in the night. Only three remain."
"Mountain flyers, eh?" Longo mused. He pondered their presence, and discounted them. "Which of the aliens have you identified?"
"The female that leads them and seven of the soldiers."
The drones were tracking the warriors—the soldiers and their puny female leader. The other females, including Gol'berg, were somewhere else. Where? The reconnaissance drones with their cameras and heat detectors would find them, too, eventually—after the warriors were eliminated. Without soldiers to protect them, they would be that much easier to capture alive.
The sun stretched to its zenith. Buccari stared anxiously at the cloudless skies. The barrel-shaped drone throbbed and hummed its irritating tune far above their heads, out of rifle range. It was newly arrived with a fresh load of fuel and charged batteries after relieving the first drone that had been monitoring them. The humans lay scattered about the rocks, some sleeping, some chewing on their last rations of dried meat and fish. They had climbed high above the shoulders of the valley and were perched on the flank of a rocky tor, its peak topped by twin pinnacles.
Even in her fatigue and fear Buccari marveled at the immensity of the land. To the west the valley lake radiated a luminescent blue light of its own. Beyond the valley and ranging to the north and south were the snowcapped mountains, uprisings of granite that defied description and gravity, and to the north and east could be seen the great herds of musk-buffalo, largely returned from their winter pastures to the southeast. Directly behind her, to the east, the terrain plummeted sharply into a series of mountain defiles, steep-sided, barren, with sheer cliffs and knife-edge ridges.
"I'll be damned! Where are the thermals?" asked an exasperated MacArthur. "They'll find us before we can take out the drone."
"Shouldn't we head for the woods?" Tatum asked.
"We have to take out the drones, Sandy," Buccari replied. "As long as they can track us we don't have a chance." The last scraggly stands of yellow-barked firs were far down the ridge.
"How far behind us are they?" O'Toole asked.
Tonto lay on a grassy spot between boulders, his thin chest heaving. The hunter had returned from a scouting mission, his heart nearly bursting.
"Tonto says close," Buccari said. She watched MacArthur stride over to where Captain and X.O. perched on craggy rocks.
"I have been given great honor," Braan chirped, awed by his responsibility. He tugged on the holster, ensuring it rode snugly and did not interfere with the motion of his sinewy arms. The weapon's heft was worrisome, but Braan had carried far greater loads aloft.