Blood, Oil and Love by Dorothy Grant

Author:Dorothy Grant [Grant, Dorothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sedgefield Press
Published: 2021-09-13T22:00:00+00:00

21

After The Sun Goes Down

True to their slipshod nature, the terrorist camp started packing everything up as the sun started sinking low on the horizon. There were lots of hours left in the day to train, but either the Fed wasn’t giving them enough money to run a lot of electricity at night, or they couldn’t motivate their troops to keep going after the sun went down. True to human nature, the recruits started eying the higher ranks and slinking aside, off to the nearest presumably unobserved spot for Officially Unapproved Activities.

Twitch might be officially off the clock, but the combat stims for insertion were still working their way out. He didn’t mind; the first 24 hours were critical for getting the feel for the place, and he grinned at the lights bobbing up the hillside on the far side of the valley, heading for the low saddle in the peaks between the camp and High Point. “There’s the smuggling trail.”

“Marking it.” DelAlmeida replied, and silence descended on the spiderhole for a while. Twilight’s silence wasn’t an absence of sound, but the settling chirps of the day birds as they roosted, the hum of insects all around. and the cheeping night-frogs from the creek running down the valley. Twitch cataloged each sound, noting the difference in ecosystem from the training area only a few hundred miles south. As young as the terraforming was here, the ecosystems and the wildlife could vary drastically from one semi-isolated segment to another. Even the places that weren’t supposed to have gotten terraforming yet, like NewCali where his lady was headed, were often full of humanity’s favored things competing with the locals. Life found a way.

Keenan, meanwhile, was marking a few spots around the edges of camp, including ones that had been used by the overwatch on the road during the morning delivery. When Twitch pinged his map with an interrogation, he replied, “Love nests. The guys are getting lucky.”

“Or the girls are. There are so few of ’em that they’ll find someone willing to overlook personality, sanity, and hygiene in pursuit of pussy.” Twitch thought that over. “Which is odd. The college campus cell Lizzes busted was almost all females, with some ugly and pathetic men who were using the cause as camouflage to get laid, and only a few true zealots. Wonder where they’re getting the men from?”

Keenan rolled over, and gave him a toothy grin that flashed bright in low-light vision. “Lizzes, Lizzes, Lizzes. So, when are we finally going to get to meet your Miss Olsen? Is it Mrs. yet? She going to be waiting for you with the rest of the wives when we get back in?”

Twitch winced, and hated that he did so: with friends like these, a wince was like tossing bacon to a black lab. “It’s not like that.”

“Bullshit. You’ve never left worried lovey messages on your way to a pre-deployment brief before.” Keenan was grinning, daring him to try to dig himself out of a hole.

“I’ve been waiting for this day for years.

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