Part 5 (1/2)
Getting his men in motion was always the hardest part of the day. Once they were walking, even uphill, they were fine. It was a simple matter of overcoming their inertia.
Two hours later, they had settled into a rhythm, trudging single-file up the easiest face of Junk Mountain. Their boots crunched through the thin, icy crust and sank almost knee-deep into the wet, heavy snow underneath. ”We need snowshoes,” said Pembleton. ”Any of you know how to make snowshoes?”
Steinhauer replied, ”I do, Sergeant.”
”Consider yourself volunteered when we get back to camp.”
”Jawohl, Sergeant.”
Crichlow, walking point, lifted his fist and halted the squad. He looked back at Pembleton, made a V sign with two fingers under his eyes, and pointed to something several meters away, to the right of their position. Pembleton strained to pick out textural details in the vast swath of white.
Then he saw them: fresh footprints. Animal tracks.
Something big. Maybe even edible.
Graylock's infusion of parts and materials would have to wait. Their shelter wasn't perfect, but it would hold for another night. Food was a far more pressing concern, one that needed to be dealt with as soon as possible.
Pembleton eased his phase rifle off his shoulder and into his hands. The three privates unshouldered their weapons and mimicked Pembleton as he released his rifle's safety. With a series of quick gestures, he gave the order to move out and follow the animal tracks in the snow.
Crichlow remained on point, and the four MACOs remained in single-file formation as they stalked their prey. The trail led uphill, along a more treacherous section of the mountain's face. Within an hour, it was clear that the animal had taken refuge in a ma.s.sive formation of jagged, coal-black crags.
”Steinhauer,” whispered Pembleton. ”Scanner.”
The private, whose formerly severe crew cut had started to grow out into ragged shocks of fair hair, retrieved and activated his hand scanner. On Graylock's orders, the survivors had been sparing in their use of the devices, and also their weapons, because recharging them in the weak arctic sunlight was problematic. The team was supposed to resort to the powered equipment only as an emergency measure.
Starvation counts as an emergency, Pembleton decided.
Thrusting and slas.h.i.+ng with his arm, Steinhauer directed the squad through a narrow pa.s.s in the crags. The men braced their weapons against their shoulders and hovered their fingers over the feather-touch triggers. Every step of the way, Steinhauer directed them toward the animal's life sign.
Then he held up a fist. The group halted.
He checked the scanner again. Looked up and around. Held up two fingers and pointed in one direction, then another. Two signals, diverging. Retreating deeper into the crags.
Pembleton gave the signal to advance in pairs, with each covering the other. Steinhauer and Mazzetti pushed ahead, while Crichlow remained at Pembleton's side.
The pa.s.s grew narrow as the four men worked their way past several irregular switchbacks, trading the point position at each one. Inching around another corner, Pembleton saw the narrow trail open into a small clearing. It was somewhere in the middle of the towering rock formation, which jutted up on all sides toward the ashen sky.
In the middle of the clearing was a mound of gnawed-rough bones, half buried in the bloodstained snow. It took him only a fraction of a second to realize that he and his team were not hunters here in this frozen wasteland but prey.
He turned to give the order to fall back. Then he heard Mazzetti scream. The crags filled with the shrill echoes of a phase rifle firing on automatic. He sprinted back through the pa.s.s, his muscles burning with fatigue as they fought the gravity, his lungs screaming for oxygen in the thin mountain air. Stumbling through a hairpin turn, he found Steinhauer standing with his back to a slab of rock, snapping off short bursts of charged plasma into random gaps between the sawtooth stones. The man's entire body was shaking with the effects of adrenaline overload.
A few meters farther down the pa.s.s, all around Mazzetti's dropped rifle, there were ma.s.sive splatters of blood on the snow. Red chunks of viscera dangled from rough edges between the crags, along a steady crimson smear on the rocks-the kind of stain that would be made by dragging a mauled man over them.
”Cease-fire!” said Pembleton. He laid a hand on top of Steinhauer's rifle, and the private relented in his pointless barrage. ”Lead us out of here, Private.”
Steinhauer regarded him with a horrified stare. ”We can't just leave Niccolo to those...those things,” he said.
Pembleton took the hand scanner from Steinhauer's belt, powered it up, and made a quick sweep for life readings. Then he turned it off and handed it back to the private. ”Mazzetti's dead,” he said. ”Move out, back to camp. That's an order.”
With a keen awareness of now being the hunted, Pembleton retrieved the dead man's dropped rifle and herded his two shocked-silent enlisted men back the way they had come, out of the pa.s.s, and back down the mountainside. One man short, the squad retreated into the coming night.
Graylock will have to make do without any more spare parts, Pembleton decided. Because if the predators on this planet are anything like the ones on Earth, this isn't over.
He feared it wouldn't be long before he faced these creatures again. It would be dark soon.
The line between existence and oblivion had become faded and permeable for the Caeliar exiles. Robbed of ma.s.s, Lerxst now recalled physical sensations only as abstractions. Texture and temperature were no longer comprehensible to him since he had given up his frame of reference in the material realm. Motion was all but imperceptible. Pressure had given way to an almost unbearable dispersion of his essential being.
All that remained real to him was the emotional landscape of the gestalt, his communion with the other eleven Caeliar.
”Time seems to move faster now,” said Sedin, her thoughts instantly shared with the others.
Agreement resonated among them without words.
Ghyllac added, ”I no longer sense a distinction between light and darkness. Everything has turned to twilight.”
a.s.sent came from Felef, Meddex, and Ashlok.
”I can't remember twilight,” countered Denblas, drawing concurrence from Celank and Liaudi.
Ripples of concern came from their youngest, least resolute members-Dyrrem, Narus, and the trio's speaker, Yneth. ”We three cannot remain coherent for much longer without an influx of new energy,” she said. ”Our thoughts are...” She submerged into a long pause. ”Disordered,” she added at last. ”Entropic.”
”Without the anchor of ma.s.s, we cannot risk traveling this world,” Lerxst told her. ”Outside Mantilis, we could become dispersed by natural phenomena such as wind or tides.”
Sedin replied, ”And if we remain in Mantilis, we will slide toward chaos without even trying to save ourselves.” Cradling the psionic presences of Yneth, Dyrrem, and Narus in her gestalt projection, she continued, ”We must act to save our own.”
”There is nothing we can do,” Ghyllac said. ”Our grounding in the physical is now too fragile to tap this world's resources or to move toward stronger solar radiation at the equator.”
Felef replied, ”That is not strictly true. In the most extreme circ.u.mstances, there is always consolidation.”
A mental shudder traveled through the gestalt.
Liaudi asked with pointed curiosity, ”And how would we decide who was to surrender their energy to the gestalt? Would the strongest expire to sustain the weaker among us? Or would we claim the weakest to bolster the others?”
”It would be best if the selections were governed by dispa.s.sionate logic,” said Meddex, ”employing a calculation of how to achieve the greatest degree and duration of good from the least amount of sacrifice.”
Ashlok said, ”I have already made such an a.n.a.lysis. Despite the logic of it, the sacrifices it demands feel arbitrary. I think it might be best if we let ourselves be guided by our consciences rather than by a tyranny of numbers.”
”Might that be because you find the verdict of the numbers troubling?” asked Celank. ”Do they call for your divestment?”
”No, not at first,” Ashlok said. ”My concern is that, as Liaudi speculated, the physics of the situation suggest that the maximum survival rate is obtained by sacrificing the weakest for the benefit of those requiring the least aid.”
”Regardless of whether we consolidate according to logic or to our charitable impulses, it still amounts to a slow death by dissolution,” argued Dyrrem.