PASSING TWO KILOMETERS. IN THE GREEN.
PASSING FIVE KILOMETERS. REPLACING HEADS FIVE-THREE AND FIVE-FOUR WITH BACKUP UNITS.
PASSING EIGHT KILOMETERS. . . .
When there were no words to decode from vibrations travelling at sound’s swifter speed through rock, the screen mapped the surrounding hills. It had found a pattern there, also.
The command team’s dugout was as tight and crude as those of the remaining fire teams: two meters on the long axis, a meter and a half in depth and front-to-back width. The walls were stabilized by a bonding agent, while a back-filled sheet of beryllium monocrystal on thirty-centimeter risers provided top cover.
Kowacs bumped shoulders with the field first as he leaned toward the screen. Sie scraped the roof when she tried to get a view from the opposite end of the dugout.
“What is it?” Kowacs said. Then, “That’s just Hill Two-Two-Four in front of us, isn’t it? Vibration from the excavater makes the rock mass stand out.”
“No sir,” Bradley said. “There was a pattern, and it’s changed.”
His lips were dry. He’d never used a screen like this before and he might be screwing up, the way a newbie shoots at every noise in the night. But . . . years of surviving had taught Bradley to trust his gut, to flatten now or to blast that patch of vegetation that was no different from the klicks of jungle all around it.
Something here was wrong.
PASSING TWELVE KILOMETERS, the screen said, blanking its map of the terrain. HEADS RUNNING EIGHTY PERCENT, STILL IN THE GREEN.
The quivering map display returned to the screen. It shifted, but the clouds changed overhead and the planet surely trembled to its own rhythms besides those imposed on it by human hardware. . . .
“The digger’s getting deeper, so the vibrations don’t look the same up here,” Sienkiewicz muttered. She looked out the firing slit toward Hill 224 and manually adjusted her visor to high magnification.
“Headhunter Six to all elements,” Kowacs ordered in a flat, decisive voice. “Full alert. Break. Alpha elements, watch Hill Two-Two-Four. Break. Delta Six, prepare to redeploy half your weapons to Alpha sector on command.”
Metal glinted on the side of the hill a kilometer away. Bradley centered it in the sighting ring of his visor and shouted, “Support, target!” so that his AI would carat the object for every Headhunter within line of sight of it.
“Break,” continued the major, his voice as bored but forceful as that of a roll-call sergeant. “Knifeswitch One-Three—” Regional Fire Control “—this is Headhunter S—”
The transmission dissolved into a momentary roar of jamming. Bradley’s artificial intelligence cut the noise off to save his hearing and sanity.
The glint on Hill 224 vaporized in the sunbright streak of a plasma weapon. A ball of gaseous metal rose, then cooled into a miniature mushroom cloud.
“—arget for you,” Kowacs continued beside Bradley.
So long as he was transmitting out, the major couldn’t know that his message was being turned to garbage by a very sophisticated jammer. Instead of a brute-force attempt to cover all frequencies, the enemy used an algorithm which mimicked that of the Headhunters’ own spread-frequency transmitters. The low-level white noise destroyed communication more effectively than a high-amplitude hum which would itself have called regional headquarters’ attention to what was going on.
“You’re being jammed!” the field first said, slipping a RAG grenade over the barrel of his shotgun.
Airflow through the center of the grenade kept the cylinder on a flat trajectory, even though it was launched at low velocity. The warhead was hollow, but its 12-cm diameter made it effective against considerable thicknesses of armor.
PASSING EIGHTEEN KILOMETERS, said the borrowed screen. Sound—through rock or in air—was unaffected by the jamming. Bradley heard the fire teams to either side shouting because their normal commo had been cut off.
The side of Hill 224 erupted in glittering hostility. Bradley adjusted his visor to top magnification as Kowacs’ rifle and Sie’s plasma weapon joined the crackling thunder from all the 1st Platoon positions.
The enemies were machines. Individually they were small, the size of a man’s head—small enough to have been overlooked as crystalline anomalies in the rock when the Haig scanned for planet-wreckers.