Petor resisted the urge to laugh aloud at his new friend’s comment. “Maybe he’s not as stupidworks as he seems. Looks to me like he knows what he’s after.”
“Oh yeah, he does,” Dean replied offhandedly, “but the trouble with Doc is he’s likely to get sidetracked and then remember that he found it ten minutes ago.”
Doc was oblivious to the stares and muttered commentary. His attention was focused solely on the papers in front of them, his lips moving soundlessly as he ran through his mind the images and words he could recall, trying to match them with each document as it unraveled before him. Had he really seen the map he remembered, or was it just a fevered imagining?
Doubts crept into the corners of his mind, black tendrils of hopelessness that his sanity had once again slipped… No, not now, not when he was so close to finding that which would help so much.
Doc unrolled another scrolled document. It was a map. Peering closely, banishing the doubts and fears beyond the furthest corners of his mind, Doc concentrated his attention on the paper in front of him.
He looked up with a smile spreading across his face. “I do believe I have found it…” he said slowly.
AL JORGENSEN was briefing his sec force. Down three levels from his meeting with the quorum, he was standing on a raised podium in a large, hangarlike room that was functional rather than decorative. The rock from which the redoubt had been hewn was still visible between the metal girders and struts that held the roof in place, and large neon tubing lights hung from thick-linked chains, bathing the vast hangar in a brilliant white light.
The podium on which the sec chief stood was in front of a large vid screen that, right now, showed a larger image of Jorgensen standing in front of a vid screen showing part of a larger image of Jorgensen. It was supposed to show the sec force what was going on in a potential area of combat, to acquaint and acclimatize them with their potential enemy and the territory in which they were moving. Unfortunately for the sec chief, the sharpshooting of Ryan Cawdor and his companions had rendered this option impossible, and so Jorgensen was forced to rely on words and some diagrammatic maps of the ground floor that lay above them.
He fixed his eyes on the faces in front of him. He knew almost all of the sec force by name, and he felt as if he had let every one of them down. Taking a deep breath and exhaling slowly, he began.
“People, this isn’t easy for me to say. You know we’ve been put on emergency standby to evac if necessary. It’s our job to make sure that it isn’t actually necessary. They’ve got us on the back foot for now, but we can turn that around.
“I know that I’ve failed—” he raised his hands to still a murmur of dissent from those in the sec force who had served longest under him “—no, hear me out. I’ve failed because we’ve lost a lot of people we shouldn’t have. I underestimated our enemy, and my tactics were a crock. The only explanation I can give to you for the deaths of your comrades—and this is no excuse, mark you, but a search for a reason why— is that the simulations and manuals are no substitute for real live experience. We haven’t had that, and just maybe we should count ourselves lucky that we’ve been left in peace so long. But the downside to this is that we got our asses kicked out there today. The only thing we can do now is learn from it and go back to kick their asses.
“They’re clever. I’ll give them that. And brave. They only have primitive weapons, although some of our laser rifles are now in their possession. They shouldn’t really have had the chance to train and use them, but we can’t be certain. What they do have is courage and a fighting instinct. They’re also adaptable. It seems that the women are solely the fighters, apart from a small group of five men who are with them. They are most likely from another tribe or group, and this may be useful to us as their methods of fighting may be different and may cause some dissent and distraction in the heat of battle.