Graham Paul - The battle for Commitment planet

"I'll be damned," he said, chastened. "That is impressive."

"We need to be. Those Hammer bastards have all the technology. Problem is, they rely too much on it. Those movement sensors of yours are good, but we expected them. Took T'chavliki hours to infiltrate your position."

"Lesson learned, Sergeant Farsi, lesson learned."

"I hope so."

Kallewi appeared with Adrissa close behind. "What's happening?" he asked.

"Corporal T'chavliki made it past our sensors without being detected," Michael replied.

"No shit!" Kallewi exclaimed, the surprise obvious.

"Yes shit," Farsi said, deadpan.

Kallewi laughed. "Getting past those things takes some doing, Sergeant. I think I might have underestimated you guys."

"Maybe," Farsi said; a small smile appeared for the first time. "If you're ready to go, I have a general waiting."

"Let us grab our sensors, and we're right."

"Do it."

With everything recovered, the group set off. As before, Farsi and a trooper led the way, and the pace was no less cruel. Regaining the path, Michael resigned himself to a long day's pain. To his surprise, they walked for thirty minutes before Farsi called a halt.

"One klick ahead of us is a line of Hammer sensors," he whispered. "They're not up to Fed standards, but they work well enough. Microphones, holocams, and signal processors uplinked to PGDF headquarters by satellite. The stupid bastards think we don't know about them, and we'd like to keep things that way. So here's what we're going to do…"

An agonizing age later, they had wriggled their way through the line of Hammer sensors; Farsi assured Michael that they had gone undetected. If the Hammers turned up, he had said, they'd know he was wrong. Michael did not have the energy to worry about it. He rolled over onto his back, his knees and elbows protesting after crawling, in places centimeter by centimeter, the best part of a kilometer across broken ground, a twisting circuitous route out of sight of the holocams.

"That was hard," he muttered to Adrissa when she crawled up and rolled onto her back beside him.

"Tell me," she said, breathing hard.

"On your feet, folks," Farsi said, untroubled by the effort. "Now the good news. Only fifteen klicks to go."

"Another fifteen klicks?" Adrissa grunted. She climbed to her feet. "Terrific. I have had it with this hiking business."

Michael had, too. His left leg was threatening to refuse the weight he put on it. "I think this leg has, too," he muttered as he tried to massage it back to life.

"Problem?" Farsi asked.

"Yeah. Rail-gun splinter at Hell's Moons, then a gunshot wound on Serhati. Bloody Hammers. Oh, sorry," he said, lifting his head to look up at Farsi. "I didn't mean it that way."

"Don't be sorry," Farsi said with a shake of the head. "Nobody in the NRA thinks of themselves as a Hammer. So don't give me any of that Hammer of Kraa religious shit"-he spit on the ground-"I gave up believing a word of it the day I started to think for myself. When we've kicked the murderous, corrupt bastards out of McNair-and we will-the Resistance Council's first law will be to change the name of the Hammer of Kraa Worlds. Revival Worlds is the current favorite. Anyway, we're wasting time. We need to go. Let me know if you need any help."

"Thanks, Sergeant."

"Come on, Michael, lean on me," Adrissa said, and together they set off after Farsi.

Many hours into the march, Michael was still keeping up, but only with Adrissa's help.

His neuronics' knowledge base told him they were now in limestone karst country. There was plenty of it: half a million square kilometers running southeast away from the floodplain of the Oxus River and the city of McNair, a plateau riddled with thousands upon thousands of sinkholes, many leading down to labyrinthine networks of uncharted caves.

For the Hammers, the karst was military horror writ large, a three-dimensional puzzle they could never solve: too big to isolate, too expansive to carpet bomb, too broken to cross on foot, too fractured to reconnoiter, every boulder an ambush site, every sinkhole an escape route.

But for the NRA, the karst was a sanctuary: big enough, tough enough, intricate enough to shelter tens of thousands of people far underground, secure enough to nurture an independent society safe from the Hammer's tacnukes, orbital kinetics, and fuel-air bombs, well watered and blessed with tunnels and thickly forested valley highways out of sight of drones and satellites.

For the first time, Michael began to understand why the Hammers had such trouble rooting out the NRA, how the tiny flame of resistance had managed to survive and flourish for more than fifty years, the full might and power of the Hammer state unable to snuff it out.

The topography had changed dramatically in the space of a few kilometers. Granite gave way to limestone, rounded hills surrendered to a flat-topped plain, water-worn valleys yielded to sheer-sided canyons, subtropical forest degenerated into a miserable tangle of scrubby bushes and trees fighting for survival in the thin soil. Michael's interest did not last long. He was overwhelmed by the need to keep going, to keep up with the rest of the group; the going was hard in the still, humid air.

Hour after hour, they plowed on. Farsi's people had an uncanny ability to find a way through the scrubby undergrowth; without them, their speed would have been measured in meters, not kilometers, per hour. "About time," Michael muttered when Farsi called a halt. Even with Adrissa's help, Michael knew he had only a few kilometers left in him.

"Okay. We're here. Welcome to Branxton Base. Follow me and stay close," Farsi said, and plunged into a small opening in the cliff.

Michael's heartbeat picked up at the prospect of meeting Vaas. He had last met the man in charge of the NRA in December '99 and wondered how much he had changed. Taking a deep breath, he followed Farsi.

"Michael. Welcome. Sure as Kraa didn't expect to see you again."

"I never planned to be back, sir," Michael said. "Shit! I never wanted to be back, much as I enjoyed your hospitality the first time around."

Mutti Vaas had aged since Michael had last seen him, skin washed gray by the cold lamps set around the wall of the cave and stretched over hunger-sharpened cheekbones, stress lines cut deep. His eyes had not changed: Dark brown, almost black, they looked right into him, unwavering, unblinking, unforgiving. Interrogator's eyes, hard, penetrating, cruel even, the eyes of a man used to untangling truth from lies. The eyes of a man not to be crossed.

"Can't say I blame you," Vaas said with a broad grin. He leaned forward as if to reassure himself that he really was looking at Michael Helfort, the fingers of his left hand fiddling restlessly with a small charm hanging from a thin gold chain around his neck. A tiny shiver caressed Michael's spine when his neuronics identified the charm. It was no charm; it was a gold sunburst, the insignia found on the lapels of every DocSec officer's dress uniform. Pity the poor bastard from whose uniform the sunburst had come, Michael thought; he would have died a bad death.

"After the Bakersfield business, after what you did to the Hammers at Kraneveldt," Vaas continued, "why would you? The Hammers still have warrants out for your arrest. Anyway, enough history. Michael, you'd better introduce me."

"Yes, of course. This is Captain Adrissa, our senior officer, and Lieutenant Kallewi."

"Captain Adrissa, welcome," Vaas said with a smile. "All a bit unexpected, I gather."

"Thank you, sir," Adrissa said, "and yes, it has all been a bit unexpected. This is not quite how I imagined spending the rest of the year, I must say."

Michael sympathized. "Unexpected" did not come even close to describing what Adrissa and her people had been through. Less than a week ago, she had been the senior officer of a Hammer prisoner of war camp, an unhappy but predictable existence. She might be forgiven for wondering what she had done to deserve this.