Ten-second pulses of glowing waste continued to cross the 2nd Platoon sector every minute or so. Lanier’s troops had left a corridor as the engineering officers directed, but they’d still be glad for their dugouts’ overhead cover.
Nick and Top walked over from where they had been talking to the engineers. Bradley was carrying a communications screen of unfamiliar design in one hand. He looked okay again. Sienkiewicz had to watch the field first pretty careful nowadays, any time there might be Weasels around.
“Anything out there, Sie?” the major asked, casual but obviously ready to react if his big bodyguard could put a name to her forebodings.
Sienkiewicz shrugged. “Not that I can find, anyway,” she admitted. Her palms sweated against the twin grips of the plasma weapon.
The crane lowered the first section of casing to follow the excavator. Rock didn’t simply go away because you heated it gaseous and slung it out the back of your equipment at high velocity. Pulses rising along the casing’s magnetic field focused the waste in the center of the bore until it could be deflected to a tailings pile on the surface.
Kowacs must have been feeling the same thing Sienkiewicz did—whatever that was—because he touched the unfamiliar black object clipped to his equipment belt.
Sienkiewicz noted the gesture. “You know,” she said, “it sorta looked like the guy who called you over to the car in the yard there . . . like he was Grant.”
“Fucking spook,” Bradley muttered. His fingers began to check his weapons and ammunition, as though he were telling the beads of a rosary.
“Yeah, that was Grant,” Kowacs agreed. He started to say more, then closed his mouth.
The three members of the command team spoke over a commo channel to which only they had access. The wind that scoured these hills also abraded words spoken by unaided voices.
Bradley touched the black monomer case of the object Kowacs had gotten in Grant’s limousine. It was ten centimeters to a side and very thin. The outside was featureless except for a cross-hatched voiceplate and a small oval indentation just below it.
“I thought,” the field first said, articulating the same assumption Sienkiewicz herself had made, “that all this A-Potential stuff was supposed to be turned in after the last mission?”
Kowacs’ face worked. “It’s a communicator,” he said. “Grant says it is, anyhow. He thought . . . maybe we ought to have a way to get ahold of him if, if something happened out here.”
He stared grimly at the stark hills around them. “Doesn’t look like there’s much to worry about, does there?”
Sie’s right hand began to cramp. She spread it in the open air. The wind chilled and dried her calloused palm.
“What’s Grant expecting, then?” Bradley said, as though he were asking for a weather report. Wispy clouds at high altitude offered no promise of moisture to the sparse vegetation.
Kowacs shrugged. “We didn’t have time to talk,” the stocky, powerful officer said. His eyes were on the horizon. “Except, the other twelve excavators got sent out with Shore Police detachments for security. This is the only one that’s being guarded by a reaction company.”
“Anybody know who gave the orders?” Sienkiewicz heard herself ask.
“With a flap like this on, who the hell could tell?” Kowacs muttered. “Grant said he’d check, but it’ll take a couple days . . . if there’s anything left after the Syndicate fleet hits.”
Then, as his fingers delicately brushed the A-Pot communicator, Kowacs added, “There’s no reason to suppose somebody’s trying to get rid of the Headhunters because of what we saw on that last mission.”
“No reason at all,” Sienkiewicz said, repeating the lie as she continued to scan the bleak horizon.
* * *
Bradley stared at the pattern on the flat-plate screen. He adjusted the focus, but the image didn’t go away.
“Major!” he said sharply. “We got company coming!”
Bradley had borrowed the screen from the engineers so the Headhunter command team could eavesdrop on the excavator. A peg into rock fed seismic vibrations to the screen’s micro-processor control for sorting.
Though the unit was small, it could discriminate between words vibrating from the sending unit on the excavator’s hull and the roar of the cutters and impellers. Thus far, the only words which had appeared on the screen in block letters were laconic reports: