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  "Come on puppies," he muttered, willing his wolves to acquire targets and return fire.

  And the ice around the enemy icons was starting to boil and be thrown in the air. One of the enemy icons winked out. His drones were returning fire with their deadly accuracy and inhuman composure. Then one of his wolves staggered back, armor thrown into the air in ribbons, but it kept firing and the other enemy units winked out.

  "Yes!" he yelled into his helmet, "Well done my proud beauties."

  He carried on running to his objective, the legs of his armor eating up the intervening distance. His helmet bobbed up and down at each loping, low-gravity stride. His knees, actually the knee actuators of the power armor, were pumping hard, but his mass driver stayed level in his arms, no matter how much he was moving, held in place by virtual gyroscopes and targeting algorithms.

  He took a detour to bring him close to the nearest place he remembered seeing a Buzzer icon wink out. He wanted a look at a Buzzer in the flesh, or whatever was left of it. As he ran, the ground got rougher. His wolves had pounded this location good, leaving craters and smooth areas where the ice had been liquidized by the force of the mass driver rod impacts and refrozen in the frigid atmosphere of the moon. The surface surrounding the dead Buzzer was particularly twisted. Several spurts of ice had been semi-liquidized, thrown into the air and frozen before they could hit the ground again. They looked almost intentional, like the contorted columns and arches of a small ruined settlement. The illusion was only aided by the obscuring banks of fog and driving cryovolcano snow.

  At the center was what was left of the Buzzer. Nothing complex or volatile remained, only the larger plates of its armored hide, still held together by the exoskeleton of its limbs and thorax. The head was completely missing and whatever weapon it had been using was vaporized. Buzzers had four arms and four legs, but only three arms and fragmentary remains of the legs were left.

  Knave looked away and kept running. His targeting systems lit up a constellation of uncountable Buzzers up ahead in the far distance, nothing to worry about right now. The interference coming over his communicator swelled again, forming, or seeming to form, words.

  "Don't trust your targeting data," the distorted voice said.

  Knave toyed with the idea of just switching the communicator's audio off, he knew that plenty of the other slugs did, but his orders were to keep it open, no matter how creepy and distracting it was.

  Now he had to choose between the optional objectives in his mission route. Some were obviously more well guarded than others, judging by the targeting data he was receiving.

  "No need to he a hero," he said to himself, and selected a low foothill that seemed to have much fewer Buzzer targets than any of the others. He locked it in as his objective and reported it to command.

  His display flickered and blanked out for a second. It was engulfed by the word, "OVERRIDE". Command declined his suggested target and replaced it with another. It was a hill swarming with Buzzers, if his tactical readout was to be believed.

  "Shit," he yelled.

  But it could have been worse. There were much more heavily defended hills. He'd gotten off easy.

  He headed where he was told, a screen of three wolves in front of him.

  The foothill he had been assigned was in shadow, a giant shadow cast by Fang Rock itself. The nearest firefight was just up ahead, so Knave slowed down. His role was to ensure that the Buzzers were not reinforced. He was to engage any Buzzer flanking units. He was not to just charge into any combat he happened into.

  In the more enclosed environment of the foothills his wolves were starting to bunch up. He could usually see three or four of them at any one time. It was funny calling them wolves when they looked for all the world like giant headless ostriches. Their long legs kicking high over the terrain to ensure they didn't get entangled in the snow and the ice boulders. The surface itself was much less smooth here too, with ridges and craters easily tall enough, and ravines easily deep enough, to hide Buzzers at every turn. Knave watched the plumes of ice crystals kicked up by his wolves, floating so high in the low gravity that they escaped the shadow of Fang Rock and twinkled in the dim sunlight from the system primary.

  There was a cloud of ice crystals hugging the ground up ahead where the real fighting was going on. Knave had a pretty good idea what was happening inside, relayed to him in the form of little icons superimposed on the impenetrable cloud of ice. Each icon represented a unit of Tarazet ground forces or Buzzers. He could see glimpses of both Tarazet forces and Buzzers through the snow.

  The Tarazet forces up ahead didn't seem to be doing so well. Knave saw a trooper hit by blaster fire, evaporating a chunk of his or her armor. The damage to the trooper's armor must have caused a breach. There was a moment of mixing, as the oxygen in the suit mixed with the surrounding atmosphere of the planet, followed by a detonation that blew the suit apart. It was a shocking sight, but whatever combat drugs the navy had him on deadened the impact of it. Knave already knew from experience, however, that the effect was only temporary. The full shock of seeing a human life extinguished would come back to hit him later.

  Knave was confused for a second at the size of the detonation but then Knave remembered from the captain's briefing that the mix of oxygen and local atmosphere was explosive, so, Knave thought with a wry smile, he didn't have to worry about asphyxiating. Any suit breach would cause a detonation that would rip him limb from limb.

  Up ahead, the Buzzers had formed into a wedge, broken through Tarazet lines and were now expanding out from the middle, making the icons for Tarazet units wink out of existence in his display. Things weren't going well for the Tarazet planetary assault. Knave bit his lip, felt an urge to run and help, but his orders, relayed to his helmet display as text, were sending him another way.

  He kept running, the ice ahead clear, as far as he could see through the snow. And was almost immediately confronted by a Buzzer, head-on. The surface of the ice exploded upwards as it emerged, explosive charges Knave suspected, and then came crashing down, catching two of his wolves under tons of ice. The Buzzer that was revealed was no ordinary infantry Buzzer either. It was the size of a tank.

  With their thick armor and flexible skeletons, he suspected the buried drones were still operational, but it would take hours to dig them out, if anyone ever got round to it. They could easily end up entombed on the moon, just two more chunks of discarded military hardware. But Knave couldn't worry about that, the huge Buzzer was already acquiring targets among him and his drones, its weapons twitching into position to fire.

  Chapter 4

  ––––––––

  "Our orders seem a little too specific to be part of a simple recon mission," the Skydancer's ship computer said. "Why don't we just give the planet a quick scan and move on?"

  "Let's just do as we're told," Merital said, "We will investigate the planet and report back."

  "Aye captain," the spaceship AI said.

  Skydancer made a series of small course corrections and headed for the jungle planet.

  "It's of no strategic importance that I can see,” Skydancer said to the captain, “It doesn't even have a name."

  "Would you like to name it?" the captain asked.

  "I would."

  "Go right ahead."

  There was a silence while Skydancer thought. The captain was pretty sure that the AI already had a name picked out but she appreciated the theater of the long pause for thought.

  "Jade Stone," Skydancer said at last, “Let's call it Jade Stone.”

  "Jade Stone it is," The captain said approvingly.

  She turned to a communications screen and sent out a general call to the crew.

  "Everybody to the bridge," she said simply, then hit a button to have the message repeated three times.

  Her crew appeared a short while later, one after the other like students slinking late into a classroom. When they had all arrived, the room was feeling a little crowded. All the acce
leration couches were full and people were standing pushed up against the back wall. The front wall was transparent armor and only one or two of the crew chose to stand with their backs to the stars.

  "Welcome all," Captain Merital said.

  She stood in the middle of the room, between the acceleration couches, framed by the big transparent armor window. She kept turning her head slowly, to make eye contact with the whole crew as she spoke.

  "The planet you are looking at," she said, indicating the planet looming in the view, "Is Jade Stone. We don't know anything about it, but our mission is to investigate it. The investigation will include a deployment of satellites from orbit and scramjets operating from two airstrips that will be established by dropships. We'll be sprinkling the surface with some random drones too, but not too many because we may not have time to pick them up. Any questions so far?"

  She was rewarded with a few halfhearted grunts in the negative.

  "Well okay, that's the spirit people. Let's get a few slugs ready to go down and keep an eye on the drones and scramjets, and the real crew can handle the satellites."

  ***

  The south continent scramjet base was operational in just two days, but was very utilitarian. They had a fence, an airstrip, a hangar, some scramjets and a sprinkling of temporary buildings, all carved out of the primeval forest of Jade Stone.

  Keen and Punter were the only humans on the base, the slugs who had been selected to keep an eye on the scramjets and the drones. They were responsible for searching half a planet with their handful of scramjet recon drones, their phalanx of combat drones, a few engineering drones, and a set of the vaguest orders Keen had ever seen. Keen was the veteran soldier, and a sergeant, while Punter was a simple soldier who had never been promoted. He was a lummox of a man who had to be shoehorned into his combat armor.

  Keen was walking the perimeter of the base, a habit she had picked up way back on Debelor. She had been in charge of perimeter security on a base among hostile local population. She had been taught then that a base with a secure perimeter was a thing to be treasured.

  The site for this present base on Jade Stone had been blasted from the verdant jungle by the first dropship. The patch of blasted jungle was roughly circular but the ground had been left churned up and strewn with fallen trees. The engineering drones were still methodically gathering up the trees, ripping out those whose roots still had a hold, and carrying them outside the perimeter to be piled up more or less haphazardly in the forest.

  Keen watched one of the engineering drones nearby. It was a huge machine, bigger than the trucks used to load and position goods in the hold of a starship. It was at least twice as tall as Keen, even in her combat armor, and towered over her as it went past. It was carried along on four legs, each with multiple knee actuators and shock absorbers to deal with most any non-vertical terrain. It had some of the massive remnants of the local tree-like fauna in its two giant, forward facing claws. It regarded Keen with numerous compound eyes as it came near, making sure to keep all dangerous edges and heavy weights away from the delicate human.

  Keen was wearing her combat armor, of course, and was far from delicate, but that made no difference to the drone's programming. It gave her a wide berth and carried on maneuvering between the temporary buildings towards the base's only gate.

  There were two drones positioned at the gate, doing sentry duty, their eyes simultaneously watching the engineering drone as it traversed the gate and scanning the surrounding forest for threats.

  Keen was quite happy with her drones. They weren't cutting edge, special operations drones by any means, but they were good solid machines with heavy armor, a versatile set of weapons and pretty up-to-date firmware and programming. She was confident they would make short work of any of the local megafauna that might decide to get nosy and investigate the base. A few warning shots would send even the largest predator, an ungainly tripod with a cat-o-nine-tails for a face, stampeding off through the forest. The honor of naming the creature had gone to the other scramjet base, where they had decided on the evocative name of, lashmug.

  Keen heard a couple of lashmugs blundering around nearby, but they must have seen the engineering drone coming because they made off through the trees to get away from it. Keen smiled.

  "Stupid things," she murmured.

  They had built an octagonal fence around their structures and around the scramjet VTOL pad, and it was at the corners of the octagon where the fence came nearest to the ragged edge of the blasted forest. At those points the forest seemed to be reaching out for the fence, the branches of the trees like sinuous but jointed, headless snakes, looking for something to twine around, seeming to sense the proximity of the fence.

  She went to the main gate, then went out through it, under the watchful eyes of the sentry drones. She walked round to the nearest corner of the fence, where there was hardly enough space to pass without the branches brushing her armor. The trees' branches had to be growing an arm length per day.

  She put in a call to Exploration Base North, to her counterpart, Masskin. Her signal found a likely satellite, recently seeded by Skydancer and started bouncing a wide stream of information from it. Masskin's hologram appeared beside her, projected from a camera in Keen's own suit, looking incongruous in the forest because she was standing in exercise gear, probably in the gym back at her own base. Keen kept walking around the perimeter and Masskin followed, although the legs of the hologram didn't move, smoothly repositioning to stay in her eyeline.

  "Hello," Masskin said.

  "Hello, It's Keen."

  "Yes?"

  "I'm walking the perimeter and I noticed the local flora is very fast growing. It's two days, at most, away from touching our perimeter, at the closest point."

  "So?"

  "So we don't know what forces it can exert, and how quickly."

  Keen stopped to gather up a discarded length of metal. She held it against a branch and watched as the branch wrapped round it. It took about four minutes before the branch had a firm grip.

  "Are you seeing this?" Keen asked.

  "Yes," Masskin said, "Can you pull that piece of metal away from it?"

  "Trying now," Keen said.

  She started with just the strength in her arm but, although the branch did bend, she wasn't able to wrest the metal free. She started incrementally adding strength from the elbow and shoulder actuators of her armor. She went to ten percent, then twenty percent, and then, finally, the metal ripped free.

  "It takes enormous force just to move one," Keen said.

  "All right. You convinced me. I'm going to walk the perimeter," Masskin said.

  Chapter 5

  ––––––––

  One of the Buzzer tank's guns was pointing directly at Knave.

  "Shoot," he yelled over his communicator, "Shoot, shoot, shoot."

  But he didn't transmit the audio to every drone. He had a plan. The tank-like Buzzer was among them and that was a big problem. Their weapons were so powerful that if they all started shooting at the tank-like Buzzer in their midst they were just as likely to blow each other to smithereens as to take out the tank.

  Knave turned and ran, zigzagging as best he could. A blaster bolt caught his shoulder and sent him face-down into the snow, but his armor held. His suit wasn't punctured and he was pretty sure his arm was still attached. He ordered the other wolves in front of the tank to run too, while he ordered the drones behind the tank to start firing.

  The ice and rocks around him were kicked into the air by blaster impacts and a very heavy mass driver left a lightning track above his head as its payload roared towards one of the fleeing drones. He didn't see exactly what happened, but there was an explosion and the drone's icon disappeared from his display.

  Then the fire around him slackened off as the tank turned to engage the drones that had opened fire on it from behind. The engagement was at such close range and the machines on both sides were armed with such heavy weapons that ther
e was a brief maelstrom of fire. Another drone icon winked out, but fire from the Buzzer tank creature had almost stopped. The remaining drones concentrated their fire and blew it apart.

  Debris from the Buzzer tank creature rained down around Knave, burying itself deep in the snow. Knave just lay there for a moment, his remaining drones beeping in concern through the distortion in his communicator.

  Knave felt spent, like he could almost go to sleep, but instinctively he knew this was a bad idea. Even so, he couldn't bring himself to move, until his suit computer reported a friendly approaching. A friendly that outranked him.

  A female voice came over his communicator.

  "This is captain Heldin, slug. Do you read me?"

  “Erm, Yes,” Knave said, “Don't worry, I'm alive.”

  He struggled to his feet. The new arrival, Heldin, was standing over him, her drones mingling with his. They were larger, more advanced.

  "We're going up the mountain," Heldin yelled.

  "Me too?" Knave asked.

  "That's right buster," she said.

  "Is there a plan?" Henrik asked.

  "Yes," Heldin said. She pointed at the mountain, "Climb upwards and shoot Buzzers."

  It seemed that Knave had been reassigned to front-line duty in the assault on the Buzzer positions.

  “That's just great,” Knave muttered to himself.

  ***

  Heldin and Knave soon caught up with the back end of the advance on the mountain. The Tarazet ground units were climbing the slopes in waves, spread out along a wide front. No matter how much the technology of war had advanced since the days when cave people threw rocks at each other, high ground would always be an advantage, and Fang Mountain was high. Very high.

  The main influence on the shape of the mountain was wear from the wind and falling snow making the mountain much smoother and more regular than a mountain on a planet where temperatures allowed liquid to form within the rock and then freeze to shatter it. It was also thickly coated in ice, which meant that climbing it required crampons and wrist axes. Even with the assistance of the actuators embedded in his armor, it was hard, tiring work. It was impossible to climb and shoot, so Knave climbed a little way, found somewhere secure looking to wedge himself, fired off a few shots, then carried on climbing. Climb, shoot, climb, shoot, over and over.