David Weber - The Service of the Sword

"They didn't buy it, Ma'am," Palmer announced quietly, watching the display as the small tactical remote they'd deployed on a high peak several kilometers from their present position tracked the impeller signatures far above the surface of Refuge. The remote was too simpleminded to give them very detailed information, but it was obvious that the single pirate cruiser was deploying small craft.

"Not entirely, anyway," Hoskins put in, and Abigail nodded, even though she suspected that the pinnace pilot had only said it in an effort to make her feel better. But then another, deeper voice rumbled up in agreement.

"Chances are they're at least half-convinced they got us," Sergeant Gutierrez said. "At the very least, it's going to generate a little uncertainty on their part, and that's worthwhile all by itself. But whether they figure we're already dead or not, it looks like they're going to look down here until they're sure, one way or the other."

"We knew it was likely to happen," Abigail agreed, looking about in the dusk of an early winter evening. Their carefully hidden position was tucked away in a narrow, rugged mountain valley on the opposite side of the planet from Zion. It was winter here, and winter on Refuge, she was discovering, was a cold and miserable proposition.

She shivered, despite the parka from the pinnace's emergency survival stores. It was warm enough, she supposed, but she was a Grayson, raised in a sealed, protected environment, not someone who was accustomed to spending nights outside in the cold.

At least it should be hard for them to find us, she thought. Any planet's a big place to play hide-and-seek in.

These rocky, inhospitable mountains offered plenty of hiding places, too, and Gutierrez and his Marines had rigged thermal blankets for overhead cover against the heat sensors which might have been used to pick them out against the winter chill. Unfortunately, they had only fifteen of the blankets, which wasn't enough to provide cover for all of them even when their smaller personnel doubled up. Worse, they hadn't been able to do away with power sources. Their weapons, the two long-range portable communicators they had to have if they were ever going to contact Gauntlet when she returned, and at least a dozen other items of essential survival gear all contained power packs which could be readily detected by an overhead flight, and the thermal blankets wouldn't do much to change that.

They'd done their best to put solid rock between those power sources and any sensors which might fly past, but there was only so much they could do .

"All right, Sergeant Gutierrez," she said, after a moment. "Who's got first watch?"

"This has got to be the most boring fucking job yet," Serena Sandoval grumbled as she brought the heavy assault shuttle around for another sensor sweep.

"Yeah?" Dangpiam Kitpon, her co-pilot, grunted. "Well, 'boring' beats the shit out of what happened to the Hunter , doesn't it?"

Sandoval made an irritated sound, and Dangpiam laughed sourly.

"And while we're talking about things that 'boring' is better than," he continued, "I wonder just how 'interesting' things are being for Morakis and Maurersberger about now?"

"You've got an over-active mouth, Kitpon," Sandoval half-snarled, but she couldn't quite dismiss Dangpiam's question. It had been hours since Cutthroat and Mörder had translated into hyper in pursuit of the Manty cruiser. As badly damaged as the Manty had been, they had to have caught up with her quickly, so where the hell were they?

She concentrated on her flight controls, ignoring the moonless winter night beyond the cockpit canopy, and took herself firmly to task for letting Dangpiam get to her. Sure, it was a Manty, but there was only one of it, and it already had the shit shot out of it! It had just gotten lucky against Fortune Hunter , that was all, and—

A signal pinged quietly, and Sandoval's eyes dropped to her panel.

"Well, dip me in shit," Dangpiam murmured beside her.

"Wake up, Ma'am!"

The hand on Abigail's shoulder felt as if it were the size of a small shovel. It felt as strong as one, too, although it was obviously restraining itself, since it was only ripping one shoulder off at a time.

She sat up abruptly, eyes snapping open. The sleeping bag was like an entrapping cocoon, for all its warmth, and she squirmed, fighting her way out of it even as her brain spun up to speed.

"Yes? I'm awake, Sergeant!" she said sharply.

"We've got trouble, Ma'am," Gutierrez told her in a low voice, almost as if he were afraid of being overheard. "Overflight four or five minutes ago. Then whoever it was came back again, lower. They must have gotten a sniff of something."

"I see." Abigail sucked in a deep lungful of icy mountain air. "Should we move, or sit tight?" she asked the platoon sergeant, deferring to his expertise, and heard him scratching his chin in the darkness.

"Six of one, half a dozen of the other, at the moment, Ma'am," he replied after a moment. "We know they must have picked up something , or they wouldn't have come back. But there's no way to know what they picked up. For that matter, they could've come back around and missed us the second time, in which case they may decide that this is a clear area. In that case, it would be the safest spot we could find. And there's always the fact that people moving around are easier to spot than people bellied down in a good hide. I'd stay here, unless—"

Gutierrez never completed the sentence. The whine of air-breathing turbines seemed to come out of nowhere and everywhere simultaneously, filling the night with thunder. Abigail threw herself flat in instinctive reaction, but her eyes whipped around, seeking the threat source.

She caught a brief, nightmare image of a vast, black shape, looming out of the night like some huge, high-tech bird of prey. It wasn't a pinnace, she realized. It was an assault shuttle, the heavily armed, heavily armored kind that could carry an entire company of battle-armored infantry.

Then something flashed in the night.

"There!" Dangpiam shouted, pointing at the visual imagery as the low-light cameras swept the craggy mountain terrain. Sandoval darted a look at the display herself, but she couldn't afford to take her attention off the flight instruments this close to the ground. Not in terrain like this.

"I'll take your word for it," she said as she brought the big shuttle back around for a third pass. "Punch up the com. Tell Predator we've got them, and then tell Merriwell we're about to drop his people on top of the Manties. I'll stand by for support after that, and th—"

Lightning flashed somewhere beneath her and interrupted her in mid-word.

A Royal Manticoran Marine Corps rifle squad consisted of thirteen men or women divided into two fire teams and commanded by a sergeant. Each fire team consisted of a single plasma rifle, the standard heavy firepower of the Marines, covered by three pulser-armed riflemen and one grenadier, and was commanded by a corporal.

Platoon Sergeant Mateo Gutierrez had deployed his two squads to cover the narrow valley in which they'd found refuge, and his instructions had been explicit. No one was to fire without direct orders from Abigail or him, unless it was obvious that they'd been discovered. But if it was obvious, then he expected his people to use their own initiative.

Which was why four plasma rifles fired virtually simultaneously as Serena Sandoval, who'd forgotten that this time she was hunting Royal Manticoran Marines and not terrified, unarmed civilian spacers, swept back over them for the third time.

The assault shuttle was big, powerful, and well armored for an atmosphere-capable craft. But it wasn't well enough armored to survive simultaneous multiple plasma strikes at a range of less than three hundred meters. The incandescent energy ripped straight through its hull, and Abigail tried to burrow her way into the stony ground as Sandoval, Dangpiam, their flight engineer, and the seventy-five armed pirates who'd thought they were hunting mice, vanished in the brilliant blue flare of igniting hydrogen.