Equinox was well past, and the snow, still twenty inches deep, had been settling wetly beneath the springtime sun. That noon, A Company had reached a "village"—a set of buildings crudely framed—only to find signs informing them that it had been "burnt" by "the enemy" when he'd left. Then, by snowshoeing hard all afternoon, they'd reached a meadow with supposedly an "enemy camp," arriving between sundown and dark. The "enemy" wasn't there, and when "he'd left," of course, he'd "destroyed his camp and taken his supplies with him."
It had been a tough bivouac. They'd been out for five days and four nights, breaking camp each morning and carrying it with them. Once a radioed message from regiment had routed them out at midnight, and they'd moved in darkness. On top of that they hadn't gotten their scheduled resupply, and had been on half rations. They'd been drizzled on and snowed on, and definitely preferred the snow. One morning they'd been ambushed, and one night their camp had been assaulted. In turn they'd ambushed or assaulted other companies twice, once in the night.
In general they'd enjoyed themselves enormously.
Of course, while the T'swa had set things up to seem as real as readily feasible, the casualties had been assigned by umpires, not bullets, and after each encounter were reinstated as alive, combat-effective, and ready to march.
They had cadre with them, but the T'swa had kept apart, saying nothing except as umpires when the company encountered a real or imaginary enemy force.
Carrmak set pickets out, and the company pitched their winter shelter tents in the adjacent woods. (The trainee company commander now was always either Carrmak or Romlar.) The command tent was somewhat larger than the standard two-man size—made with four panels, longer and differently shaped, sheltering Carrmak; Jerym as his EO, his executive officer; and the trainee first sergeant, Orkuth, from 3rd Platoon. They'd carried the panels and framing in their own packs, T'swa style, rather than having someone else carry them.
It was dark in the tent, but not utterly dark. The only artificial light was the tiny red dot of the power light on the command radio, on the floor by where Carrmak would sleep. But Seeren was at the end of her first quarter, wouldn't go down till around midnight, and the thin fine fabric of the tent roof glowed faintly with her light. Like daylight for the T'swa's big cateyes, Jerym supposed. He spread his insulating ground pad beside his rifle, unrolled his sleeping bag on top of it, opened the bag and laid down on it. His clothing was warm enough for now; he could crawl in the sack later, when it got colder.
They'd spoken very little in the tent. There wasn't a lot to say. Jerym lay with his eyes open for a little and heard someone's stomach growl. His own answered. They'd eaten the last of their field rations that morning, and his attention kept returning to his hunger. His last conscious thought was to wonder if it would keep him awake.
The moon was still up, the tent faintly lit by it, when he was awakened by the command radio: "Able Company, this is regiment, over. Able Company, this is regiment, over." It rolled Jerym onto his knees, instantly intent. Stripping off his mittens, he fumbled the orders recorder out of a pocket on his officer's pack. The voice had been Gotasu's. Carrmak, kneeling, picked the radio up. "This is Carrmak commanding Able Company, over."
"Able Company, I have map coordinates for you."
Jerym thumbed the record switch on his recorder.
"In quadrangle J-2-7-M-5-3. Coordinates are: X:2113, Y:1797. Again, X:2213, Y:1797. Over."
The pale oblong of Carrmak's face turned to Jerym. "It's recorded," Jerym murmured.
"Recorded," Carrmak said into the radio. "That's in our present quadrangle, coordinates X:2213, Y:1797. Over."
"That's right, Carrmak. Take Able Company and proceed to those coordinates at once. You will find vacant defensive positions dug in there—bunkers and trenches. You will occupy them by not later than 2400 hours, midnight. And wait for further orders, prepared to defend them if attacked. Over."
"If attacked," Jerym thought to himself. "Further orders." They're apt to leave us sitting there for a day without food, or have us get ambushed on the way. Or the defensive positions might have enemy in them when we get there. A real enemy could hardly be more unpredictable, a fact in which he found much satisfaction.
"Got that," Carrmak said to Gotasu. "Able Company will occupy dug-in defensive positions at X:2213, Y:1797, not later than midnight, prepared to defend against possible attack. Over."
"That is correct, Able Company. Regiment out."
"Able Company out."
Jerym looked at the time glowing green on his recorder, then thumbed it off: 2141 hours and seven seconds—they had just less than two hours and twenty minutes to get there. How far, and what was the terrain like? He took out the mapbook,13 switched it on, called up the quadrangle, and tapped in the coordinates as the display lit up.
A tiny white square appeared, with a hard white center dot, defining the exact coordinate point and the limits of coordinate precision. They fell within a pale yellow square, a field, surrounded on the holomap by the pale green of forest. This was a part of the reservation they weren't familiar with. But the terrain was gentle, which was encouraging, given the time limit. Jerym called up a distance scale with its two ends on their destination and their present position, then held the map board so Carrmak could see it.
"There's a crossroad within the square," he said. "The dug-in positions are probably to defend it. It's 7.12 straight-line miles from here."
"Good," Carrmak said. "Orkuth, roust out the company. Tell them they've got till 2150, eight minutes, to break camp and be formed up for the road. Alsnor, decide on a route and show it to me."
Deciding the route was easy. One of the roads that crossed the coordinates crossed the meadow they were in, a nearly straight shot. Call it seven and a quarter miles, allowing for the few curves in it. The only alternative was to go through the woods, which would slow them to no advantage unless they swung far enough from the road to avoid possible ambush. That would add distance, and time they didn't have. On snowshoes they'd have to push hard as it was, after having hiked all day, almost without food and only an hour and a half's sleep; no sleep at all for the guys on picket duty.
He showed Carrmak the route. Carrmak agreed, and they struck their tent, assembled their packs. Around them was activity, crisp and meaningful, with acting sergeants giving quiet orders.
It was a beautiful night. Seeren, seeming perfectly cut in half, was partway down the western sky. The air was absolutely calm, and still felt somewhat above freezing; the snow was doomed, Jerym thought. His mittens were in his parka pockets; the parka itself was open and the hood thrown back. The snow seemed to give off light of its own; visibility was no problem at all. It seemed to him that, outdoors, the T'swa could hardly see better than he could on a night like this.
When Carrmak sent the point out, and the flankers, Jerym's wristwatch read 2149:49. Two minutes later, Carrmak gave the order to march. They had almost exactly two hours and eight minutes.
The snow on the road was undisturbed, except for a slight hollowing caused by wind swirl from some hover truck before the thaw had started. But the warm weather had settled it so much, their snowshoes didn't sink in at all. They'd have no trouble reaching the crossroad by midnight, Jerym told himself, unless there was an ambush waiting for them.
Within the first hundred yards, the swinging stride, the soft crunch of snowshoes on spring snow, the moonlit snowscape, combined to produce a dreamlike clarity in Jerym's mind. His thoughts, what there were of them, seemed remote and out of time. He'd become a mobile observing unit; any computing was subliminal. Along the road, the forest canopy was mostly of deciduous trees that let the moonlight through, with here and there tall evergreens, their thick tops variously oval or pyramidal or ragged blacknesses. Occasionally he saw the small round blobs of yarpu roosting asleep in the treetops. And twice smelled urine and excrement somewhere nearby, beneath some evergreen, some koorsa tree whose top had been homesteaded by a burly, twenty-pound stinkpig who'd spent days or even weeks there feeding on buds, needles, and inner bark, relieving itself repeatedly onto the snow beneath.
Time did not pass for Jerym. He floated through it without effort, neither tiring nor hungering. Yet at any point he could have told you without looking what time it was and how far they'd gone and how far they had to go. He saw the ethereal tracery of branches against the night sky, the glint of stronger stars between them, those that could override the moonlight.
The condition lasted until, at 2341, they reached the crossroad. The defensive positions were a circular series of six-foot-deep foxholes with firing steps on both sides, connected by narrow, four-foot-deep crawl trenches. All dug by machinery in some past summer.
But snow-filled, they weren't evident, would have been hard to find except for the mounds of four snow-covered bunkers spaced along the circle. Carrmak had pickets posted, then set the men to digging out the snow with their trenching tools. They worked furiously; it was to be finished by midnight.
They'd cleared the foxholes and were working on the crawl-trenches when, without warning, the first explosions occurred in the middle of the circle, sending dirt and snow flying. The ground jarred with them, and the sound, unexpected, was stunning. The explosions went on, one after another and several at once, within and outside the circle. Between the explosions, Jerym could hear the violent hammering of blast hoses spraying the area. Their tracers seemed to float lazily, yet their blast slugs, slamming into the parapets, ripped them, throwing chunks of frozen dirt into the foxholes and onto the men that crouched in them. The noise, the violence, were shocking.
Yet after half a minute, the trainees crouched less low, gripped their rifles less tightly, checked to make sure there was a round in the chamber. When the barrage ended, an assault seemed likely.
A minute later it did stop, and they got onto their firing steps, ready. Though still somewhat deafened, they could hear the sounds of other, similar barrages miles away, before those too ceased. Then a bull horn sounded from a silent floater overhead, and they recognized Gotasu's voice:
"That's it, gentlemen, end of exercise!"
None of them got out of their holes though; they hadn't gotten it from their acting company commander yet. Then Carrmak crawled out of the bunker and gave them the word: "Able Company, fall in!"
They scrambled out and formed up ranks while the floater landed, unloaded Captain Gotasu and Lieutenant Toma, and left. The field was humps and craters now, brown mixed with white. Jerym wondered if the "shells" they'd been bombarded with had been explosive charges buried in the field long in advance. Or if the T'swa had such confidence in their own marksmanship that they'd used actual lobber rounds, dropping them safely, near but not too near. Most of the churned-up ground was toward the center of the circle or outside it by at least fifteen yards.
Gotasu looked them over. "A Company," he said, "you've done very well on this bivouac. Your trainee officers and noncoms have done very well. We are now twenty-one miles from the compound. We will march there tonight." He paused. "And the cooks will serve you a very good breakfast. Meanwhile, if the platoon sergeants will come to the vehicle, there is a carton of hardtack, with a packet for each man."
Gotasu waited while the hardtack was distributed and devoured. A packet held three ounces; it took about a minute to eat it. He looked at Carrmak then. "Commander, consider the war over, the enemy vanquished. You need not put out scouts nor fear attack. Move your troops out."