In the twilight, the big teleport gate seemed to loom above the instrument van, and Carlis Voker, standing by it, grunted softly at the strangeness he felt. Kusu Lormagen unlocked the van's rear door and opened it, a light coming on automatically inside. He motioned the other two men in—Voker and a middle-aged civilian—then followed them, leaving the door open.
The portly civilian, a one-time Iryalan trade official on Terfreya, exuded tension. Though he hadn't received the true Sacrament, to be in the presence of anything as utterly non-Standard as this, anything so conspicuously, technologically new made him distinctly uneasy.
While Voker watched, Kusu keyed the power on, then called up and briefly checked several subsystem status reports. Satisfied, he called up a holomap, a globe, showing Terfreya's inhabited hemisphere, rotated it thirty degrees, moved the cursor to a point in the equatorial region, and called up a map of the district it covered.
It looked like a high altitude aerial holo. A black thread of river crossed it, and locating the cursor on it, Kusu called for another enlargement. Now, near the top, Voker could distinguish an irregular, light-colored strip—open ground—with the river a slender ribbon curving through it. Kusu moved the cursor, the map recentering as he did. "This one looked good to me," he said, and called up another enlargement.
The open ground showed now as a valley bottom more than half a mile wide; a white line in the upper left corner provided scale. The bordering ridges were jungle clad and fairly steep. Voker guessed them at perhaps three hundred feet high; Kusu didn't call for contour lines.
Again Kusu recentered the cursor and called for maximum enlargement. Now they were looking "down" at tall grass—a variable stand ranging, he guessed, from waist high to taller than a man, and mostly sparse, with scattered denser clumps and patches.
Kusu looked at the third man, whose face was the color of bread dough in the artificial light. "What can you tell us about that?" Kusu asked. "As a site to put a regiment down on."
"That's tiger grass," the man answered. "It means the valley floods briefly now and then, during heavy winter rains and maybe after exceptional summer storms."
"Winter?" Voker said. "That's near the equator there."
"They call it winter. Things cool down planetwide in the long arm of her orbit. The solar constant gets down to point-seven-eight about midway between the winter solstice and spring equinox. It gets chilly, even at Lonyer City."
Of course. I should have realized, Voker thought. "What makes the tiger grass so sparse?" he asked. "Is the ground mucky?"
The ex-trade official shook his head with tight little movements, over-controlled. "No. It's probably covered with a layer of stones. Flat rounded stones about an inch or two across. That's what you find when the grass is thin like that. And tiger grass never grows on mucky ground. Or so I've heard."
Kusu looked at Voker. "Okay as the transfer site?"
Voker nodded. The year was halfway into Sixdek on Terfreya;15 a flood was highly unlikely. "Considering the time factor," he said, "and what's likely to be happening to the cadets, let's get on with it."
He watched Kusu back off the magnification, move the cursor to where the grass was relatively sparse, and touch a key. Planetary surface coordinates appeared top-center, and Kusu touched another key, presumably entering them into the targeting equation.
"Now," said Kusu, getting up, "we tinker the equation and cut the error."
It was near midnight at the outgate site on Terfreya when the LUF—light utility floater—ported through well above the jungle's roof. It had two men aboard—a pilot and a T'swa corporal. The pilot parked the floater at 500 feet. All they could see below was forest; there was no sign of an open valley. After raising the roof hatch, he folded down a ladder from the overhead, climbed it, and took instrument readings on the sky. Then he climbed back down and fed them to the computer.
Their location within the planetary coordinate grid popped onto the screen. Not bad, he thought. We're less than eighty miles off target.
In Tyspi, the T'swi sent an open message pulse across the radio wavebands, a message which included their coordinates. Within seconds he had a narrow beam reply in unaccented Tyspi, from the cadet night CQ, getting the status of the war and all they knew about the locations of enemy forces and cadet units.
The boy's voice broke a couple of times, but from puberty, not emotion. They were operating as short platoons, he said, had lost a third of their personnel. Their walking wounded—what there'd been of them—had been gotten to local farms, where the farm families were hiding them.
The T'swi told the cadet what to expect, approximately where, and how they'd arrive. A couple of deks earlier the cadet might have cheered wildly at such a scenario. Now he simply grinned. "All right!" he said in Tyspi. "Tell them our T'swa say it's as good a war as any they've seen since Kettle."
After that the LUF landed in a little glade, and the T'swi guided a small, AG-mounted teleport out the door. The pilot set the teleport controls on a reverse vector. The T'swi peered through, signaling till the pilot had gotten the outgate site on the ground. Then he stepped back onto Iryala, with a radio to let Kusu know the correction and Voker the war situation. And to get himself picked up, of course.
The second LUF arrived less than seven miles off target and flew to the open valley, where it examined the target site first hand before porting a second T'swa corporal back to Iryala for a final correction.
When Kusu had entered the second error report, he left the teleport site to its guards, troopers from the regiment, and drove back to the Lake Loreen Institute with Voker and the ex-trade official. He left the official with Wellem Bosler. The man had become visibly upset when the first LUF had ported out. Wellem would get him out of it.