Horizon Storms - Kevin J. Anderson [221]
The worldtrees had created this on purpose. But for what reason? She went closer, drawn and intrigued as she looked into the rounded lump that would have been the carved man’s face. The features were crude but smooth, as if modeled in stiff clay without any refinements. After looking carefully, Celli got the feeling it was still completing itself.
Smiling with wonder, she reached out to touch what would have been a wooden cheek. The eyes opened.
Chapter 113 — TASIA TAMBLYN
Though she was stuck on the sidelines, the war still went on. EDF ships went out on recon flights in search of the faeros in hopes of convincing them to become formal allies; other ships attempted to keep track of hydrogue movements. Far too much military energy, however, was devoted to the stupid, red-herring conflict with the Roamer clans.
After destroying Hurricane Depot, the Eddies had gone to two other Roamer outposts whose locations they had discovered, only to find them hastily abandoned. The clans had always closely guarded their hiding places, and now they were slipping without difficulty through the fingers of the EDF. Tasia noted with no surprise whatsoever that the Hansa did not mention their failures.
Because of their doubts and suspicions about her loyalties, Tasia’s superior officers had stuck her here on Mars as a schoolteacher for bottom-of-the-barrel kleebs, most of them obnoxious and unmotivated. She wasn’t in a mood to take any crap from them.
Under olive skies, with her boots planted on rusty rock, she stood on high ground in her environment suit, watching the new batch of cadets as they went through routine on-foot drills. During her downtime the evening before, Tasia had planned the day’s exercises. The students hadn’t learned yet that the worse they performed and the ruder they were to her, the tougher she made their assignments.
In the canyons below, the kleebs marched in four separate groups, struggling to follow computerized topographic maps through convoluted terrain in order to reach a goal. It seemed a simple chart-reading problem, a team orienteering exercise, but she had spiced up the challenge by doctoring their air tanks so that some trainees had a surplus of oxygen and others did not have enough. As soon as their low-tank alarms went off, the cadets had the option of calling for pickup and rescue, but Tasia hoped each group would work together as a team to share resources.
From what she’d seen, though, most of the Eddy recruits had never learned how to think outside the box to fix an emergency. The Big Goose could learn much about survival and innovation from the Roamers; unfortunately, they had made up their minds to harass the clans instead. Their loss…
Here on Mars, Tasia was completely out of the information loop. Without her Manta command, she had no need to know about military actions, and she found out about full-scale operations like Hurricane Depot only long after the fact. Right now, General Lanyan might already be planning another idiotic attack and she would never be able to warn the Roamers, as she had done at Osquivel.
Later that day, her trainees returned to the base, some having failed, some completing their assignment. All together in the waiting room, they shucked off their suits to look at the exercise scores and see what they had done wrong. And they had all done plenty of things wrong. Tasia didn’t pull any punches in her debriefing assessment. She just hoped her students would eventually use their skills against the hydrogues instead of other Roamer outposts.
Two of the kleebs had called in for an emergency rescue. Only one team had taken the obvious solution of sharing air from their tanks so that the entire crew could move on. The fastest hiker from the second team, seeing that they wouldn’t all make it, had abandoned the rest of them for emergency rescue and run ahead just so he could claim a personal win. Tasia came down on that team the hardest—the alleged winner for making such