The Abyss of Time

Chapter Sixty

     Miller was tired. He'd been awake for nearly twenty four hours straight. He angrily blinked the fatigue out of his eyes. The others had all been awake as long as he had. If they could handle it, then so could he.

     Of course, most of them were younger than he was. Young people could work or play right through the night and make it through the whole of the next day without trouble. He'd done it himself back in his younger days. The trouble was that his younger days were long behind him. He was in his fifties now and both his mind and his body craved the comfort of a nice, soft bed. He shook his head and took a few paces back and forth to summon new energy before reviewing his troops.

     There were nine of them. Possibly there were more who would have been willing to join them but they couldn't take the risk. It was beyond doubt that the majority of the colonists would have obeyed Kathleen's order to stay put and they couldn't risk having one of their number sneaking away to warn her.

     So, just the twelve of then, including him, Jack and Dundee, to take on six cyborgs and three thinking war machines on the enemy's home turf. They would have the element of surprise, of course, but that would be their only advantage. Could they do it? If he could have taken their whole army there would have been no doubt and he silently cursed the council for handicapping him in this manner. If they pulled this off, though, then Miller and his men would be heroes and the entire council would probably have to stand down in a shame that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. For a moment he almost pitied them, but then he put them out of his mind and returned to the matter at hand.

     "First of all I want to thank you all for volunteering for this," he said to the nine men standing in front of him in the Engineering tent. Around them were shelves and cabinets of metalworking tools and a long bench along the far wall that was dusted with iron filings from the lathe that stood at the far end. For some reason the air carried the faint stench of burned cloth.

     "It can't have been an easy decision," he added. "To deliberately disobey one's superiors requires a strength and a confidence that most people lack. It's so easy to just obey orders, to take the safe, easy way out. To pass the buck. To allow others to take the responsibility. Because responsibility is a burden that most people aren't strong enough to bear. You do have the strength, though, and for that I thank you."

     He indicated three trolleys standing beside him. They stood on four large wheels and consisted of tents of fine copper mesh supported by an iron framework. "Burke and Cabot have built these for us," he said, nodding to two of the volunteers who smiled with gratitude. "They're Faraday cages, to shield the electromagnetic radiation that would otherwise give us away to the enemy EM sensors. All our equipment, our weapons, phones and scanners, will be carried in them. We'll carry them most of the way on the mules, but we'll have to pull them the last three or four kilometres through the jungle, across soft, bumpy ground choked with vegetation. It'll be exhausting and there'll be little time to rest when we get there, but it's the only way if they're not to know we're coming and be waiting for us."

     "I hope we have something a little more powerful than rifles and grenades," said Kaneez Vaz, the Asian looking woman who'd been with Lucy. Miller had been very careful to keep his daughter from knowing about this mission, knowing she would have wanted to be included. He would have preferred not to have had any women on the team at all, but Dundee had spoken to her, Maddie and Bilikisu before Miller had had a chance to veto it. Now he would have to be careful not to give any of them preferential treatment. Not to put any of the men at risk by trying to protect one of the women.

     "We have three shoulder-mounted rocket launchers, each firing an 85mm armour piercing warhead," Miller told her, meeting her gaze steadily and trying to ignore how young and pretty she was. Some of the men were younger, he reminded himself. "Andy assures me they'll take out anything on caterpillar tracks, no matter how big they are."