Desperado (Murphy's Lawless: Watch the Skies Book 2), Kevin Ikenberry [reading the story of the txt] 📗

Aliza started toward him. Murphy’s guidance was to not take any excessive chances pursuing information. But given the relative emptiness of the thoroughfare in the early morning, this was an unusually low-risk opportunity. Far too many of the citizens had imbibed too much alaat, a sour mash alcohol, on the opening night of their festival. The noxious smelling brew appeared quite potent, and Aliza had only sipped at the beverage when one of the other women had handed her a sample at the festival.

The man atop the box looked at her. “You, sister? More kr’it for you and your family?”

That sounds like an invitation.

Aliza nodded. “Yes, with gratitude.”

“You are strong, yes?” The man grinned down at her. Several of his teeth were missing. “Then you may earn more for your troubles, yes?”

And that sounds like trouble.

“I can help for a load or two before I must be at the fields for harvest,” Aliza replied with a hint of strength in her voice. The pistol was heavy against her thigh and it comforted her. Even with the heavy, hooded robe, she believed she could draw the weapon quickly if required. Yet the security of the weapon was second to the security in understanding those around her, something at which she’d always excelled.

At the word “harvest,” any malicious intent in the man’s face vanished, and he called to others around her with renewed energy. Imsurmik’s populace was obsessed with processing food and kr’it. Soon, she’d learned, many of them would trek farther north in an attempt to escape the heat. For their journeys, they would need all the sustenance possible.

“Fine. Yes. Come with me.” The man gestured behind her. Other volunteers were gathering. “All of you, yes. Follow me.”

Aliza fell into the middle of the group. There were ten or twelve of them, and half were women. They passed the armed guards into the relative cool of the tunnel. Aliza adjusted her hooded garment and pulled it up against her neck and shoulders. Suppressing a shiver, she told herself it was merely the result of the temperature difference, not her rising anxiety.

She studied the low-powered lights and the ancient conduits between them. Lighting must be necessary given the length of the tunnel itself. How deep into the plateau did it go? Carved from the rock over thousands of years and braced every ten to twelve steps, the tunnel’s interior walls were worn smooth enough to appear polished. In some places, the artwork of children decorated them, but the chipped paints told her it had been many years since anyone other than those in authority had walked these tunnels.

Pondering why, Aliza moved deeper into the tunnels behind Imsurmik.

* * *

Assembly Area

Bo woke after only four hours of sleep. It was still the total darkness before R’Bak’s unusually swift sunrise. He finally rolled himself upright from his comfortable-enough sleeping position on the top of his command vehicle, realizing that some part of his mind had been thinking about the Troop Leading Procedures all night long. They were the cornerstone of small unit leadership. Everything he learned from ROTC forward always came back to them, yet he’d forgotten to incorporate some of them, and apparently his brain wouldn’t let him sleep until he figured out what needed to be done. In the end, everything pointed at the need to conduct a leader’s reconnaissance.

After staring across the narrow valley at the plateau, Bo realized his knowledge of the objective, even with Aliza embedded in the town, remained tentative at best. He needed to see the ground to better understand it.

The plateau sloped gently from west to east where it ended in an escarpment of exposed rock some thirty to forty meters tall in places, and the whole thing was about fifteen kilometers long. Its western end butted up against the low hills that meandered over a hundred kilometers to the east until they ultimately rose into the massif upon which they’d established Camp Stark many months before. It was from there that they had courted the land to make an undetected approach to what was now their forward operating base. Called Fences, it lay fifteen kilometers behind Bo on one of the best sections of key terrain they’d found. There they had high ground with excellent fields of fire, clearly marked avenues of approach coverable by that fire, and almost complete concealment in the tall scrub atop a similar plateau they called Masada. Yet the base itself was nearly vacant. Colonel Murphy’s intent to move the Lost Soldiers off the planet as the Sear approached was already well underway. Everything remaining on the surface had one mission: get everything to orbit and be ready for the next phase of the operation.

Bo knew conducting a leader’s reconnaissance with the bulk of his vehicular forces was not a good idea. They had considered disguising the different platforms to allow them to pass as one of the armed caravans moving along the roads between Imsurmik, the J’Stull capitol of Stullhaan, and the smaller satrapies arrayed in a rough arc along the border of the Hamain Ashband and the Greens. His larger platforms, the major weapons systems, couldn’t be camouflaged. If news traveled fast between the settlements, everyone would know they had captured those vehicles from the J’Stull: a far larger and more determined adversary which would likely sortie immediately against them. So once he rolled his big platforms out of their concealed locations, they needed to be ready to attack.

However, Bo wasn’t quite ready to show his hand. Removing the vehicles from the reconnaissance meant his whinnies needed to be the maneuver element. There were fourteen of them with trained riders. Given their herding nature, there were usually twice that many whinnies around who consented to being beasts of burden and would help move equipment and supplies as necessary.

Bo watched them graze