Four
Polian stood over the dented, twisted armor suit that lay in the snow, glinting in the foggy cone projected by the skimmer’s headlights. Polian shook his head. “How long ago did you hit him?”
“An hour, sir. Give or take.” The skimmer’s driver knelt alongside his machine, wedged a boot against the bent debris guard. He grasped the plasteel tubing in two gauntleted hands, grunted, and pulled the guard back to a semblance of functionality.
Polian cut his helmet mike so he could swear, because Frei stood beside him.
Magnetometer! If they had been running normal thermal sensors, they might have detected this spy and taken him alive instead of pulverizing him. Now all Polian had was a third corpse. A corpse wearing Eternad armor, certainly. But the Trueborns would claim, successfully, that didn’t prove anything except poor inventory control. They would deplore the black market in restricted technology and ask the Yavi to help them tighten their security. It was so predictable, so phony.
Polian bent down and peered at the dented armor’s opaque faceplate, upturned toward the storm. One fact was undeniable. This one had been a covert-ops specialist, alright, and a good one. Crack shot with a gunpowder antique. Smart enough to discard the rifle, both to mislead and to lighten his load. He had probably shut down his own sensors to reduce his heat signature, and it had worked. Just dumb bad luck for him that the skimmer, blind to his presence, had whacked him.
Local technology had yet produced no vehicle that could keep up with a skimmer over snow, and as Polian knew from recent experience, smuggling anything as big as a skimmer down from orbit was nearly impossible.
That meant that this guy had route-marched at least a hundred and six frigid, snowy miles to catch up with them. But not just this guy.
Polian turned to Frei. “Get back on your grid. Pick up the search where you left off. And keep the thermal on this time!”
The younger man eyed the storm swirling around them. “Sir? There’s no other tracks. And we respooled the sensor recordings while we were waiting for you. There was just the one set of vitals.”
“Trueborn special-operations teams work as matched pairs. There’s another snake in this snow someplace.”
Frei saluted, then turned to the skimmer crew.
Partner or not, wearing Eternad armor or not, this guy had been a hard case to have followed them up here. From the tracks in the snow, after the skimmer bounced him, he had still crawled fifty yards from where he had landed before he collapsed.
Polian whispered to the motionless faceplate, “Oh, you lucky sonuvabitch. If we had taken you alive we might have turned you over to the local spooks. You self-righteous pricks call Yavi intel inhumane? Nobody can make a subject suffer like the ferrents can.”
Polian stood, stretched, and started to turn away.
Then the corpse groaned and twitched one arm.
Polian’s jaw dropped. Then he smiled.
Ten minutes later, two Tressen privates had gotten the Trueborn spy, armor and all, lashed to a skimmer’s rear rack. None too gently, and the spy moaned.
After waving the two Tressens out of earshot, Polian leaned down until his helmet was a handspan away from the spy’s opaque faceplate, and popped his own faceplate open. Then Polian reached down and worked the exterior faceplate latch on the spy’s helmet. He wanted to see the fear in the murdering bastard’s face, eye to eye, when he told the spy what the ferrents would do to make him talk.
Polian popped the spy’s faceplate open and stared down.
Polian’s eyes widened. “What the hell?”