The tree stood some thirty yards back within the jungle's edge, but rose well above any others around it. Hensi Kaberfar, age thirteen, had climbed the lianas that laced it, and lay on an ascending branch thick enough to obscure him from the road nearly half a mile away.
The 300-acre piece of jungle he was in, he and his platoon, occupied a low bulge of quartzite, its soil shallow and infertile, bordered on two sides with fields and on the third, a road backed by scrub. On the same three sides it was surrounded by Klestronu marines. On the fourth, the north side, flowed the Spice River, eighty yards across, with extensive jungle on its opposite side. Gunships watched its brown current from a distance deemed relatively safe from cadet rockets. If the cadets tried to cross it, the gunships were to move in quickly and chop them up.
Hensi's tree was on the south side however, and from its height he watched the marine company deployed along the road. There'd be other companies on the east and west sides, he knew. Sooner or later the Klestroni would have to make a decision. Send a company into the jungle—maybe two companies—or sit around behind their electronic sentry fields and try to starve their quarry out. Starve them out or root them out. Odds were, Hensi thought, they'd called for armored missile trucks, each carrying a battery of launchers that could pour scores of ground-to-air rockets into an area in a hurry.
All for an understrength platoon—twenty-one cadets.
Just now Hensi's sniper-scoped rifle was cross-slung on his back, and binoculars occupied his hands. He wore no helmet, but a throat mike was clamped to his collar. The artillery would come up the road from the west, if it came, and he was to report when it appeared. The Klestroni were a light brigade, without any real artillery, and their missile trucks were not heavily armored. They tended to use them sparingly, in favorable situations. The idea was for this to seem like a favorable situation.
The plan had been for two platoons to ambush a company of marines on a road, by daylight, pour fire into them for half a minute, then take to "the bush," a district of mostly overgrown, abandoned farmland.
The Klestroni didn't have an endless supply of gunships either, so troops on the road usually rode unescorted in armored assault vehicles. A gunship, or more than one, could be sent in a hurry if called for.
The ambush had been a success. They'd holed some AAVs and killed maybe twenty or thirty Klestroni, then all but three guys had taken off into the young forest. The three who stayed were well separated and carried surface-to-air rocket launchers. A gunship was armored but not invulnerable, and given enough hits—a single hit if you were lucky—you could bring one down.
They'd hit the bugger all right, and although they hadn't brought him down, they'd sent him veering off, clearly hurt and no doubt radioing for reinforcements.
Klestronu scout floaters and two more gunships had arrived minutes later. And gotten glimpses now and then of a cadet or cadets moving through the scrub, glimpses most often deliberately allowed. One platoon had laid low, as planned, then slipped away unnoticed. It made no sense to expose both.
Hensi's platoon had been larger when the ambush was made; they'd numbered thirty-one then. When someone exposes himself to a gunship, there's a good chance he'll get his ass shot off, along with assorted other body parts.
Now Hensi saw dust. It was the missile trucks coming, he had no doubt, but he waited to make certain. When he was, he radioed. When they'd parked, gravitically locked to firing positions along the road, he radioed again. When they began to fire, he didn't need to radio; missiles slammed into the jungle with a ragged roar heard for miles. Hensi could easily have been killed then, but as usual he was lucky. And instead of scrambling back down, he sat tight; he wanted to see what happened next.
The launchers themselves were noisy enough that the Klestroni ignored the two gunships at first, even when they'd begun strafing. And when they became aware of what was happening, it was with disbelief, because gunships were their own—had to be. The cadets had none. So the response, briefly, was shock and indignation instead of returned fire.
The gunships passed over two hundred feet apart, the first giving its attention to the emplaced troops, the other to the missile trucks. They didn't make a second pass. Then lobber fire began to land on the emplaced marines from behind, lots of it, accurately. Someone had established the range in advance.
The missile trucks stilled.
Hensi slid to the first crotch below him, then went hand over hand down the lianas toward the ground. If the Klestroni reacted as expected, their gunships were already responding, leaving the river unguarded. The platoon would be concealed along the riverbank, watching for their chance, ready to drag their boats to the water, boats that locals had stashed for them. He'd have to run all the way or be left behind.
When the Klestronu artillery had begun firing from the south road, the two companies along the east road had been grimly pleased. Their rifle platoons lay ready and alert, watching mainly the jungle in front of them, into which their mortar platoons began to throw their own high explosives.
There were two companies on the east side because there was no longer any open field there, only the road, with forest in front of them and an abandoned field, more or less overgrown with scrub, behind. This was the side the cadets had come from, and these two companies were part of the force that had pursued them, "driven" them. Its marines had been nervous till now. The cadets had long since established their capacity for tricks, surprise, unpredictability.
But not from the air; the cadets had no air support.
The regiment's gunships, having shot up the artillery along the south road, rounded the corner and surprised the two companies along the east. The result was more than casualties, though there were lots of those. It was also shock and utter confusion. Thus when 1st and 2nd Platoons, A Company, came out of the scrub to the rear, hoses and rifles blazing, the surviving marines, most of them clinging to the ground, hardly reacted. Grenades arced, roared.
Then Jerym Alsnor, the assault team leader, saw another gunship line up with the road. The regiment's were gone by then. He barked an order into his helmet mike, and barreled back into the scrub, Tain Faronya beside him. She'd recorded the assault. A dozen seconds later, energy beams—butcher beams, the cadets called them—slashed angrily through the regrowth, severing fronds and young stems. Then, for the moment, it was past.
Another hundred yards of running took them into older regrowth, dense young woods sixty to eighty feet tall. There they pulled up, breathing hard, beside the streamlet that bordered it. There were more sounds of falling fronds and branches, as if the gunship was ranging over the scrub and forest shooting blindly.
Jerym had allowed for the gunship response. His assault line had been thin, its men initially a dozen yards apart. Thus fleeing through the scrub, they'd been mostly unseen and very scattered targets.
Again he spoke into his helmet radio, ordering the two platoons to their rendezvous. Fourteen minutes later he arrived at a cutbank above the Spice River with Tain beside him. There were stragglers—able-bodied troopers helping three wounded. After an hour, twelve of Jerym's eighty-plus troopers had not arrived and could not be raised by radio.
Hopefully 4th Platoon A Company had gotten away unscathed; it had been they who'd shelled the south road with lobbers.
Jerym moved his men out then, hiking through forest, upstream along the river. He'd given, and received, his first casualties—given a lot more than he'd taken. But now the excitement and exhilaration were past, and he lacked both the perceptivity of the T'swa and their deep calm. Thus he felt the deaths as personal losses. After all, the casualties were men he'd lived and trained with for more than a year.
Tain sensed his feeling and said nothing, felt it herself, though not as sharply as she would have expected. Nor was she angry or indignant. Her two sessions with Lotta had done more than help her over the lingering effects of teleport shock, and this was war. Fought at least on this side by warriors, men who warred by choice and did not fear dying.