First Battalion left Road 45 that morning, angling northeastward toward Road 40 and the Smoleni column. The weather remained brutal. Even near noon, when Romlar spat at a tree, the saliva hit like a pebble, frozen. The cold sucked the heat from them, and the high-fat rations they gnawed from time to time weren't adequate, pressing as they were. By early afternoon they'd eaten the last of them. Such a speed march itself would burn more than ten thousand calories a day, and their bodies carried no fat to draw on.
More than the virgin snow made travel slow. Instead of roads, they found tangles of blowdown, occasional swamps of bull brush to push through, soft-snowed fens and bogs to cross. Twice they came upon old logging roads, but never in a suitable direction.
The impulse was to press, press, press, to reach the column and the captured Komarsi rations. Yet they needed to rest from time to time, and no one grumbled when Romlar called a five-minute break each half hour. Five minutes wasn't enough to cool down seriously.
They reached Road 40 near sundown, and followed the tracks of the column. It did not gladden them to find the bodies of several horses along the way, frozen rock-hard. They kept going until, soon after dark, a sentry challenged them. Minutes later they saw campfires.
Night held the forest in an arctic fist when Kelmer reached the road. He'd slowed the last hours, his reserves exhausted, and was weary almost to the point of collapse. He might have laid down in the snow an hour earlier, but his confidence had slipped, replaced again by anxiety and thoughts of Weldi. The road gave him new life, and briefly he speeded up, but it was only surface charge, and within the next hour he twice fell to the snow, to struggle up tight-jawed and push on.
Finally a ranger sentry challenged him. The Smoleni directed him to where the Iryalans had made camp, and trooper sentries directed him to the colonel's buried tent. The camp seemed dead, its fires cold and dark.
Kelmer stood his skis up by Romlar's and Kantro's, set his pack beside them, then opened the entrance flaps. Romlar wakened when he crawled inside. "Who's that?"
"Kelmer Faronya reporting, sir."
"Great Tunis!" A moment later a battery lamp lit the tent. "What happened to you?"
Kelmer took his helmet off. "I got hit. It was superficial. Enough to knock me out though."
There was a moment's silence. "Who bandaged you?"
"The T'swa. They found me unconscious, and recognized me as a noncombatant, so they let me go. Colonel Ko-Dan asked me to congratulate you for him. He said—" Suddenly Kelmer found himself thick-witted again, from exhaustion. "It's all on cube. He said fighting you had been a pleasure."
Romlar chuckled. "He would." Then, "You're bushed. Drag in your pack and bed down with us."
Kelmer found it a heavy effort to crawl back out and get it. When he'd laid his sleeping bag out, he saw the colonel's boots standing by the end wall, and took off his own. Romlar watched. "Here," he said when Kelmer had crawled half into his bag, and handed him a ration. Kelmer stared. He was so tired, he was asleep before he'd finished eating it.