“Frede,” I said slowly, calmly, “my orders are to knock out the Skorpis base on this planet. Setting up the transceiver was merely the first step toward that objective, you know that.”
Her face hardened. “And you’re going to try to obey those orders, with fifty-two effectives?”
“That’s what we’re here for.”
“Then you’re going to get all of us killed.”
“That’s what we’re here for,” I repeated.
She glowered at me for a moment; then, strangely, she broke into a rueful grin. “You’re sounding more like a real officer every day.”
She marched off and started giving orders just as if nothing had been said between us. I was glad that I had not been forced to use the conditioning phrase. But I thought that Frede’s moment of questioning was not the last discipline problem I would face. Indeed, it was probably only the first.
It got cooler as the ground rose toward the mountain chain. The nights grew chill, with a steady wind sweeping down from the mountains. It rained for several days in a row, until we were coughing miserably, sodden and muddy. But we doggedly slogged ahead, following the natural pass made through the mountains by the river as far as we could, until the river itself dwindled to a set of shallow gurgling streams that splashed over the rocks and tumbled into picturesque waterfalls.
The rain turned to snow, light at first but thicker every day. We left the streams behind and plodded cold and wet through the snow-filled rocky defiles, camping in caves each night. At least we could light fires and sleep dry. We could see the jagged mountain peaks rising above us, covered with snow. Some days the winds up there whipped the ice crystals into long undulating plumes that caught the sunlight in dazzling prisms of color. It would have been beautiful if it weren’t so damnably cold. We floundered through snowdrifts hip-deep, shivering and hurting. Then at last we found more streams, unfrozen, gurgling through the snowbanks. We had crossed the mountain divide. Now our path lay downhill.
A week later we were out of the snow at last, sweating and complaining about the growing heat as we descended the mountain range. Then we caught sight of the ocean. And the Skorpis base.
The base was not as huge or well fortified as I had feared. But it was big enough to make me wonder how my handful of troopers could even approach it. There must have been a thousand Skorpis warriors there, at least.
Studying it at the highest amplification my visor sensors allowed, I could see no trenches or fortifications protecting the base, although there were plenty of gun emplacements ringed in a semicircle around it. The base was built on the edge of the sea, along a bright width of white sand beach. Low buildings with roofs that glittered with solar power cells. Many rows of square tents, all neatly lined up with military precision. Some long metallic projections jutting out into the sea, like piers, with cone-shaped buildings dotted along them.
A tendril of memory tugged at me. I swept my gaze down the beach, past the outermost posts of the Skorpis, along the dunes and beach grasses for several kilometers, and…
There it was! The beach I had seen in my dream. The ruined city, blasted and burned down to stumps and scattered debris. It was real.
I pointed to it and asked my officers, “Can we get to those ruins without the Skorpis seeing us?”
Quint immediately shook his head negatively. Frede looked skeptical. But Manfred said:
“If we work our way along the ridge up here until we’re past the ruins, and then come down there, where that river runs into the sea, we can edge up along the beach and keep the ruins between us and the Skorpis perimeter. Unless they send patrols out that far, we ought to be able to make it undetected.”
“If they don’t send out patrols,” Quint echoed.
“And if they don’t have surveillance satellites in orbit,” Frede pointed out. “We’d show up nice and bright in infrared, I imagine.”
“Not if we go along the beach in daylight,” I said. “The beach itself will be pretty hot from the sun.”