The Tejano Conflict by Steve Perry

Author:Steve Perry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-11-21T05:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

Gramps was dry and tight in the FCV when his displays splashed warning icons, and an alarm chimed: He’d just lost the last satellite feed.

The brunt of the storm was past, and some of the trees ahead on the edge of the forest hadn’t survived it; they were splayed and downed, mostly leaning in the same direction. The big clearing where the FCV was parked was littered with debris the hurricane had brought and left behind. Branches, trash, odd things he couldn’t even identify in the darkness. Quite the meteorological drama. He’d been through other storms, but none quite as big as this.

He shut off the alarm.

Shit, he thought, there goes the last link unit.

It was the third of three modules he’d set out before the storm. Each was connected to the FCV by optical cable instead of a wireless pipe. Wireless transmission could get iffy during bad weather, and especially as far out as he’d set them. The links had been designed to stay close to the FCV’s transceivers because nobody thought they might need to be anywhere else.

When the military-hardware folks designed things, they usually had something particular in mind, and flexibility in function was somehow never high on their to-do list. And their responses when queried about such things?

No, that is not within our design parameters. Do not attempt to utilize it in such a manner.

The first had died an hour into the storm. The second lasted two more hours.

Now the third was kaput, and that’s all they had.

Which was fine for REMFs who didn’t have to use the stuff with expressed murder blowing past your head at hypersonic velocity, or huge fucking wind and rain, but in the field, you had to make do.

Cable was really old-school, but hardwired sigs were better. And, he could switch his signal among the three squatty boxes and down- and uplink his ELINT profile geographically, as well as spread-spectrum, which was also easier. Wireless sometimes got confused at multiple sigs and would start to cry and keep rebooting, which was a pain in the ass. Plus the proximity of the signal-blocking trees was just one more brick on the load. He had found some relatively clear spots to set the links, but the wind moved all kinds of crap back and forth . . .

The squad that usually walked shotgun on the FCV would normally attend needed repairs, but they had to stay inside. No way they could roam around in that blasting wind and shrapnel-like rain anyhow.

He ran a diagnostic on the cables. Two of them showed patent the full distance to their respective units. The cables weren’t the problem; the units themselves had malfunctioned. Probably trees fell on them.

If truth was the first casualty of war, communications hardware was usually right behind it, and triple redundancy was no guarantee.

The third cable showed a disconnect seven hundred meters out, in the clearing and well short of the trees, which likely meant it had been broken somehow by the storm.

All he needed to do was roll out to the broken cable and patch it.

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