“Man, I don’t need no part of that,” said Double-X. “Catch you later, Sarge.”
“Yeah, see you on punishment duty,” said Brandy. She didn’t laugh, and neither did Double-X.
“Where are we?” asked Phule. He had opened the jeep’s canopy and was standing up, scanning the horizon for signs of…He realized he wasn’t sure what he was scanning for, but at the moment there was nothing noteworthy in sight, unless the boulders and scrubby vegetation concealed secrets beyond his guessing.
Beeker looked up from the map he had taken out. “Very approximately, sir, we are midway between the Zenobians’ capital and our own base. We have strayed some distance off our original course, however, and I cannot locate us exactly. Our instruments are not providing meaningful information at the moment.”
“Yeah, I got that impression,” said Phule. He sat down in the seat and looked over Beeker’s shoulder. “Does the map show any landmarks in this general area?”
“Nothing, really,” said the butler. “But this is an ordnance survey map provided by our hosts. They could conceivably have omitted items they preferred not to let us know about.”
“That’d be a lot of trouble to confuse an ally,” said Phule, although even as he said it, he remembered being ordered to provide similarly doctored information to Leftenant Qual when the Zenobian had been an observer with Omega Company. He shrugged. “Anyway, there’s nothing obviously military in eyeball range. Unless they’ve got it pretty well camouflaged, that is.” He paused. “Hmmm…we are trying to locate an invader that appears to have unusually effective camouflage…”