Three
The marksman burrowed into the snow, panting. It was full dark now. But colder, which meant that a heat source stood out more against its surroundings.
Eternad armor vented body and mechanical heat in irregular patterns. That theoretically camouflaged the wearer’s passive infrared signature. But Eternads blew less deceptively than Yavi armor did. And Yavi passive sensors were sensitive enough to detect even Yavi armor. Being twenty years behind the bad guys was a bitch.
The marksman shut down all the suit’s external sensors and the heater, cutting what the suit blew, then waited for the exhaust-temp and heart-rate displays to drop back into the green. The rest was welcome.
Minutes passed while the wind howled. The overall situation was more frustrating now. The signals spooks had got it right. The Yavi had inserted a unit here on Tressel, clandestinely and illegally. That had been expected, because clandestine and illegal was how the baby-killers always worked. Of course, it had been just as illegal to insert the marksman’s team in response.
Well, hardly “just as.” The Tressens, who were even bigger villains than the Yavi, knew the Yavi were here. In fact the Tressens had welcomed these Yavi, according to the images. The Tressens were providing security and labor to help the baby-killers get whatever it was they wanted up here in the frozen north.
And whatever the two most isolated and autocratic rogue worlds in the Human Union wanted was certainly bad for Earth. And probably worse for the rest of the Union.
But the chance to record proof of the plot had now gone up in smoke, literally. Earth couldn’t afford to confront its two most bellicose neighbors with a conspiracy that the Motherworld could neither prove nor understand.
The Motherworld also couldn’t afford to have a covert spook of its own captured here on Tressel. Trueborns were the Good Guys, the ones who played by the rules. The marksman’s presence here violated about a dozen rules derived from the Sovereignty Clause of the Human Union Charter.
The heat-signature readings and heart rate on the marksman’s visor display dropped back into the green. Time to run like you stole something, again.
The marksman sucked on the helmet’s water nipple, chinned the suit’s sensors back on, then stood in the storm and waited for them to activate.
A shadow barreled out of the blowing snow just as the marksman’s helmet sensors flashed red and howled.
The Yavi skimmer’s front debris guard slammed the marksman’s chest plate. A four-ton object moving at twenty miles per hour met a stationary object that weighed, all-up gear plus living tissue, one hundred eighty-one pounds. The result was predictable.
The marksman thought, somersaulting through blowing snow, that physics were a bitch.
Then there was pain, and, finally, darkness.