“Go ahead, Delta Six.”
“Capt—Major?” The veterans had trouble remembering the CO’s promotion. Kowacs had trouble with it himself. “How did they locate these planet-wreckers, anyhow?”
Well, somebody was bound to ask that. Would’ve been nice if they hadn’t, though. . . .
“They used A-Potential equipment,” Kowacs answered flatly. The wind rush made his eyes water. “Toby English’s Ninety-second is in orbit aboard the Haig. The destroyer’s got the new hardware, and they’ve done subsurface mapping.”
“A-Pot shit,” said Bynum. “Like the stuff that left us swinging in the breeze on the last mission? The mission the brass said didn’t happen—only we took fourteen casualties.”
The only thing Nick Kowacs really understood about A-Potential equipment was that he never wanted to use it again. No grunt had any business tapping powers to which all points in time and space were equivalent. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea if some other friendly used the technology, but. . . .
The artificial intelligence in Bradley’s helmet should not have been able to emulate Kowacs’ unit and enter this discussion without the CO’s stated approval . . . but it could. The field first broke in to state with brutal simplicity, “If savin’ your ass is the only thing you’re worried about, Bynum, you sure shouldn’t’ve volunteered for the Headhunters.”
Kowacs took his hand away from the special communicator. The plastic case felt cold.
Bynum muttered something apologetic.
“Alpha Six to Six,” said the 1st Platoon leader laconically from the leading truck. “Hill One-Six-Fiver is in sight. Over.”
“Right,” said Kowacs. “Okay, Headhunters, we’ve arrived.”
If anything, this landscape of pebble-strewn hills and wind-carved vegetation was more bleakly innocent than any of the countryside the convoy had passed through on its way here.
“Dig in, keep your eyes on your sensors, and be thankful we’ve got a cushy job for a change.”
And while you’re at it, pray that Fleet Vice-Admiral Hannah Teitelbaum, whom Kowacs suspected to be a traitor in the pay of the Syndicate, hadn’t gotten the Headhunters sent here for reasons of her own.
* * *
Corporal Sienkiewicz surveyed the landscape, flipping her helmet visor from straight visuals through infra-red to ultra-violet, then back. Nothing she saw repaid her care—or explained her nervousness.
In addition to her massive pack and slung assault rifle, Sie cradled a three-shot plasma weapon lightly in her arms. She had no target as yet for its bolts of ravening hell, but somewhere out there. . . .
“Gamma Six to Six,” said the commo helmet. “We’re dug in. Over.”
The rock in 3rd Platoon’s sector was a little more friable than that of the others, so they’d finished ahead of 1st and 2nd. Probably wasn’t enough difference to make it worthwhile sending Horstmann’s powered digging equipment over to help Lanier and Michie’s men, though.
The excavation site, Hill 165, was one of a series of low pimples on a barren landscape. The crane was swinging the excavator into final position, nose down. Occasionally Sienkiewicz heard a bellowed curse as a variation in wind velocity rotated the machine out of alignment—again.
The Headhunters dug in by three-Marine fire teams, just below the hillcrest so that they wouldn’t be silhouetted against the sky. Each platoon, stiffened by two of Weapons Platoon’s belt-fed plasma weapons, was responsible for a 120-degree wedge—
Of wasteland. There was absolutely no chance in the world that this empty terrain could support more than the Weasel equivalent of a goatherd. Sie had imagined a Khalian city from which furry waves might surge toward the humans; but not here.
And not from a tunnel complex, either. If the Haig’s A-Potential equipment had located planet-wreckers lying just above the asthenosphere, it would have spotted any large abnormality lying close enough to the surface to threaten the Headhunters.
So what the Hell was wrong?
The self-contained excavator touched the ground. Its crew switched on their cutters with a scream that became a howl, then dropped into bowel-loosening subsonics.
The huge device disappeared into rock with the jerky suddenness of a land vehicle sinking in a pond. Just before the stern vanished from sight, a thirty-centimeter gout of magma spurted from it and spun 90° in the magnetic deflector positioned above the pithead. The molten rock crossed a swale to splash and cool against a gravel slope three kilometers away.