The Warhorse, scuttlebutt said, was trying to capture a Chinese soldier who knew something about the incoming PRC ship. Lucky thought the whole idea was pretty silly. Hell, they didn’t have room for the prisoners they held already, and the POWs they had weren’t willing to talk. Lucky had pulled guard detail over the Charlie prisoners a couple of times already; they were a smugly arrogant bunch, with facial expressions ranging from bland to sullen, who refused to even look at their captors. Adding to the catch was begging for trouble in Lucky’s opinion.
But when the action order called for bringing in another prisoner or two, that’s what he was going to try his best to do. Today it was his turn to go play hide-and-seek among the tortured icebergs in the broken ground east of the crater. With Jupiter glaring down at him from above the horizon, he and Liss had found a trail recently used by the enemy, planted a charge to cut them off, and settled down to wait.
The chances of actually achieving a contact were relatively slim; there were so many possible trails through the badlands. Still, Chesty had worked out the topology of the area and plotted a half dozen main paths between the crater and the Chinese lander still resting on the plain beyond the badlands to the east. Simply blocking Highways One through Six, as they came to be known, wasn’t enough since there were always side trails to let the enemy slip around a blockage. The Marines had better luck mining the paths, or trying to ambush enemy troops while they made the passage.
Lucky made his way down a sharply sloping surface of rough ice, sliding the last few meters and landing hard on a ledge a man’s height above the path floor. Two Chinese soldiers had been moving along this path moments before; Lucky had set off the charge to block their retreat, and now they should be coming back this way. He leaned against a spur of ice and aimed his 580 down the path, waiting.
Two minutes later, by his HUD timer, Liss joined him, scrambling down the ice slope from above. She was so close he felt the gentle shove of her SC shielding. “Anything?”
She spoke over the private channel at minimal wattage. Standing orders required them to use strict EM discipline to avoid being pinpointed by PRC scanners, but down here among the ice walls and tunnellike pathways, a weak signal wouldn’t be picked up beyond line of sight. Lucky was amused that they still tended to whisper, as though they could be overheard.
“Nothing,” he replied, not taking his eyes from the 580’s crosshair reticle, painted on the claustrophobic opening to a particularly narrow stretch of Highway Five just ahead, where the ice-path crevice was scarcely a meter wide. “Either they’re dead, or…”
“Or they’re sitting tight in there,” she finished the thought for him, “waiting for us the way we’re waiting for them. Yeah.”
“So what are we gonna do?”
“We go in and check.”
“Uh-uh,” he said. “Not a good idea. I think we try flushing them out.”
“You have any grenades left?”
“Two. Cover me.”
Lowering his rifle, he fished inside a pouch strapped to his suit combat harness, pulling out a steel-gray sphere with an arming button and a locking pin. He hesitated, judging distances. Throwing things was tough; a grenade went a lot further here than it did on Earth. Lucky had gone through low-G vacuum combat training on the Moon, as had all space-qualified Marines, but it was damned hard to just turn off your Earth-born reflexes in something as autonomic as throwing a ball.
He worked the pin free, set the timer for five seconds, cocked his arm back, pressed the arming button, and let fly, a long, high lob that sailed above the upper surface of the ice. He lost sight of the grenade as it fell somewhere among the crevice paths up ahead. Five seconds later, he felt a slight tremor in the ice.
More seconds passed. “Well?” Liss asked him.
“Damn it,” he said. “I hate this hide-and-seek shit!”
“Cover me,” she said. “I’ll go check it out.”
“No…wait,” he said. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he felt an eerie, prickling sensation, almost as though they were being watched—a sensation somehow focused on that narrow crevice just ahead.
Lucky was a Marine and he’d been in combat. Okay, so his cherry had popped just a week ago; by now, damn it, he was a combat veteran, and there were very few of those who hadn’t learned to listen to that gut-tickling inner warning that something was wrong. Most men and women who’d been in combat claimed to believe in senses science still refused to accept as measurable, testable faculties, ESP for lack of a better term. Lucky wasn’t convinced it was a genuine sixth sense. He held the theory, also popular, that the human brain was very good at picking up subtle clues and details and assembling them in ways that seemed magical, even extrasensory.