Knox's Irregulars by J. Wesley Bush

Author:J. Wesley Bush
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9781466487048
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Published: 2011-10-31T17:00:00+00:00

***

Van Loon clenched his jaw to keep teeth from chattering, lamenting for the hundredth time that his LANCER suit had recently been deadlined. Its layer of gel-pad insulation would be a godsend in the bitter cold.

Winter was upon the isthmus in earnest now, and the glare from unbroken drifts of snow was almost blinding in the daylight. An incessant, cutting wind carried the powdery stuff, reducing visibility to virtually nil. In any other year, independent prospectors would be flooding into Providence to await the spring thaw.

With numb fingers, Van Loon pulled the face mask up just far enough to press a canteen to his lips. He choked down a few sips. They had added foul-tasting minerals to the water to keep it from becoming a solid block of ice. Quickly he yanked the mask back down, his lips already blistering from the chill.

After tucking away the canteen, he inspected the slender, tubed weapon he held across his lap. The trigger mechanism looked clear of ice. Peering down the tube, he ensured no ice was forming inside, either. After two days of battling frostbite, he didn't want to blow himself up with a barrel obstruction when he finally got a chance to shoot something.

Only twenty minutes more and Aldrich would be on duty. The snow cave they had hollowed at the base of an ash tree seemed as luxurious as a suite at the Hotel Placide just then.

Taking up the thermal binoculars, he did another sweep of the northern horizon. They couldn't use the targeting sensor on the launcher to track for suborbitals — any active sensors would alert the Abkhenazi and bring down a world of hurt in minutes. At the same time, migrating snow drifts made the naked eye useless. Instead they were relying on frequent sweeps with the binos to pick up heat signatures. Once they spotted a suborbital, there was a narrow window when they could activate the launcher and fire a shot before the craft was out of range.

A lot was riding on the operation. Eliminating the suborbital flights could temporarily hamstring the Abkhenazi war machine. With blizzards clogging the mountain passes with unstable mounds of snow, these flights were the enemy's only reliable source of supply.

Boosting the magnification, he did another hopeful sweep. Still nothing.

In spite of the cold, he was thankful for the solitude the mission provided. Since coming to the Catacombs there'd been no time to be alone, to collect his thoughts. He realized that it was at least a day since he had thought of his wife or his boy. Soon Tobias would be turning four. Would he recognize this strange, battle-weary man when he came home?

It was late afternoon, dinnertime. He pictured Hannah teaching Tobias his catechism after the meal. He wished to God the Abkhenazi would go home so he could too. Being apart from Hannah gave him a constant, low-grade sense of loss. They had met for the first time the night his parents arranged an "introduction." Only six years had passed, but already the time before Hannah was blurring around the edges.

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