David Weber: The Service of the Sword

"God dammit!" Lamar slammed a fist on the arm of his command chair as the report came in. "God dam mit! What did those idiots think they were doing?!"

"I imagine they thought they were closing in on the Manties," St. Claire replied tartly. Lamar glared at him, and his exec glared back. "Don't let your emotions shut down your brain, Sam," St. Claire advised coldly. "It looks like Al was right—that pinnace was a decoy." He smiled sourly. "Ringstorff will be pleased we found them."

"Yeah? Well, now that Sandoval's gotten her silly ass blown out of the air, who have we got in position to go get them?" Lamar demanded scathingly.

"Nobody, right this minute," St. Claire admitted. "We've only got so many shuttles. But we can have another bird directly over them within twenty minutes, max. And this time, we'll come in smarter."

"Move, move, move !" Sergeant Gutierrez shouted, driving the Navy personnel before him while his Marines moved along the flanks. At least they all had decent low-light vision equipment, but that didn't make the terrain any less rugged, and Abigail had already discovered that running down a rocky gorge in the middle of a winter night was nothing at all like the track at Saganami Island.

She stumbled over a rock and would have fallen if that same shovel hadn't darted out and caught her. She was a slender young woman, but she knew she couldn't possibly weigh as little as Sergeant Gutierrez made it seem as he held her up one-handed until she got her feet back under her.

"They'll be back overhead as quick as they can," he told her, his breathing almost normal despite the pace he was setting. Of course, a corner of Abigail's mind reflected, Refuge's gravity wasn't that much more than half the gravity to which he'd been born. "The fire will screw up their thermal sensors, at least to some extent," he continued. "But they'll still be able to sweep for the power sources unless we can get back under cover in time."

Abigail nodded in understanding, but unlike Gutierrez, she had no breath to spare for conversation. She concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. That was quite enough to keep her completely occupied, under the circumstances.

"Here! Turn left here!" It was Sergeant Henrietta Turner, the sergeant commanding the second squad Commander Watson had assigned to Abigail all those lifetimes ago. She looked up, and saw Turner literally pushing Chief Palmer down a narrow ravine. Gutierrez had scouted the vicinity carefully before he settled on their first hiding place, and he'd chosen it at least in part because there were others, almost as good, close at hand. Now Abigail saw Palmer disappear, and then it was her turn to follow him into the ravine.

It was so narrow that she couldn't believe Gutierrez would be able to squeeze his bulk into it, but the platoon sergeant fooled her again, following close on her heels as she ducked her head under a stone overhang. The northern wall of the ravine inclined steadily towards the southern wall as it rose, until the gap between them was no more than a meter or two wide. Over the years, debris had gathered, narrowing the gap still further and effectively turning the ravine into a cave, and the party of refugees pressed themselves back against the walls, panting gratefully as Gutierrez finally allowed them to stop.

The overhead cover was actually better than it had been in their original position, but the ravine was so much narrower that they were hard-pressed to fit all of them into the available space. Worse, there was only one entry and one exit.

"Check the remote, Chief," Abigail panted.

"Yes, Ma'am." Palmer slipped his shoulders free of his backpack's straps and delved into it. It only took him a moment to extract the com tied into the remote still watching over their old encampment.

"Damn," Gutierrez said softly as he peered over Abigail's shoulder at the small display and the image of the second shuttle grounded beside the roaring flames of the first. "I'd hoped they wouldn't be quite that fast off the mark." He checked his chrono. "I make it roughly twenty-three minutes."

Abigail only nodded silently, but her heart sank. She'd hoped it would take much longer than that for a follow-up flight to reach their original campsite. The speed with which the pirates had actually managed it dismayed her. This wasn't the sort of tactical problem they'd trained her for at the Academy, and somehow, when she'd devised her plan, she'd assumed they'd have more time to move from covered position to covered position.

She patted Palmer on the shoulder, then nodded to Gutierrez to follow her, and the two of them made their way back to the mouth of the ravine. Abigail crouched there, Gutierrez squatting behind her, and gazed back up the way they'd come. Their position was as close as they were going to get to a private conversation, she thought.

"They're fast," she said finally, and half-sensed Gutierrez's shrug behind her.

"People who fly are always faster than people who walk, Ma'am," he said philosophically. "On the other hand, people who walk can get into places people who fly can't."

"But if they can pin us down in a place like this," she said quietly, "they won't really have to get into here after us, will they?"

"No," Gutierrez agreed.

"And it won't take them long to work their way here," Abigail continued in that same quiet voice.

"Longer than you think, Ma'am," Gutierrez assured her. She looked up at him, and her low-light gear showed her his expression clearly. To her surprise, he seemed completely serious, not as if he were simply trying to cheer her up.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"Ma'am, they can overfly us in just a few minutes, but we're under pretty good cover here. They're not going to see us from overhead, and that means they're going to have to send people in looking for us on foot. Now, we knew exactly where we were going, and it took us a good fifteen, sixteen minutes to get here at a hard run. It's going to take them a helluva lot longer to cover the same distance not knowing where they're going. Especially when they're going to be wondering if the same people who shot down their shuttle are waiting to shoot them up, too."

Abigail nodded slowly as she realized he was right. But even if it took the pirates four or five times as long to cover the same distance, they'd be to the ravine in no more than an hour and half or so.

"We need to buy some more time, Sergeant," she said.

"I'm certainly open to ideas, Ma'am," Gutierrez replied.

"How good are those thermal blankets at blocking sensors, really?"

"Well," Gutierrez said slowly, "they're pretty damned effective against straight thermal sensors. And they'll help some against other sensors. Not a lot. Why, Ma'am?"

"We don't have enough of them to cover all of us," Abigail said. "Even if we did, it will only be a matter of time until they work their way far enough down the valley to spot this ravine." She thumped the rock wall behind her. "And when they do—" She shrugged.

"Can't argue with you there, Ma'am," the sergeant said slowly, in the tone of a man who was pretty sure he wasn't going to like what he was about to hear.

"It occurs to me that if we just stay here, they'll get all of us once they reach this point," Abigail said steadily. "I'm sure you and your people will put up a good fight, but with us pinned down in here, all it would take would be one or two grenades or plasma bursts, wouldn't it?"

Gutierrez nodded, his expression grim, and she shrugged.

"In that case, our best bet is to decoy them away from the ravine," she said. "If we just stay here, we all die. But if some of us use the thermal blankets for cover while we move away from here, then deliberately show ourselves further down the valley, well away from the ravine, we can draw them after us, pull them past the others. There should even be a pretty good chance that they'll assume all of us are somewhere out there ahead of them and extend their perimeter past the ravine without ever realizing it's here."