Triple Point Three


	"It is one of those days," is what I am saying as the six of us are sitting out on the snow-cleared balcony in the Winter sunlight, "It is one of those days when things are not looking too bad."
	Now it is the middle of February, and the mid-day sun is quite high in the South. The building is an old and much-repaired dacha, in the forest some kilometres outside Semiozod-Alta, where we are resting up and awaiting equipment before heading back towards the Triple Point, that unmarked place where three Empires meet.
	Natya casts me a tolerant look. Since we arrived here a week ago, she has been spending all her time with the mouse pilot we found in the woods, Grimsley the English mercenary. Just what a tonne of centaur horse/horse hybrid finds of interest in him, is something it is hard to imagine, and dangerous to let her hear you speculating.
	"Ey, though but," Grimsley's accent shows through even when we all speak VolksDeutsch. "It's a grand day, happen there's folk who'd pay good brass for a winter holiday like this'un." He hands Natya a flower - still I have no idea where he manages to find these things. Grimsley has sharp eyes, "sticky fingers", and a strong sense of which side his ryebread is buttered, I remind myself as I look out over the snow-covered clearing in the forest.
	It is looking a peaceful scene: the six of us are on "detatched duty", partly because our mecha is still in the repair shops. And without it, our lords of the Greater Liechtenstein Reich will not be sending us into those woods. I shiver, as I look away from the sunshine, into the snowy forest North and West.
	Vaclav follows my gaze. His round-tipped ears dip slightly, and he winces. "Sixty thousand metres that way, and you're into our lines," he is murmuring, though to me or to himself it is hard to say. "Then - nothing but snow, Scandians and Siberians. And something else, now."
	My fox tail is somewhat restored after two weeks in armour: I motion him inside, away from the others. Natya and Grimsley are too wrapped in each other to notice, and the half-wolves, Torm and Eric, are not equipped to worry about this kind of thing. For an instant I envy the semi-sentients as they roll and mock-fight in the sunshine: give them their pack around them, a foe to fight and fresh meat for their bellies, and they are happy.
	Vaclav comes into the hallway that goes to the kitchen, closing the door behind him. His four hooves squeak slightly on the tiled floor as he turns to look at me. From out of one ear he pulls a button earphone, almost hidden in his thick Winter fur.
	"We are picking up reports, you know ..." he nods towards the North. "Traffic. We're getting trade." Vaclav was in Signals before he joined our Mech Infantry, and he still talks that way sometimes. He means we are listening to what is going on - whether we can decode the messages is one thing, but it is half the job just knowing where and when they are being sent.
	"Combats ?" I ask, recognising the look on his face.
	He nods. "The Russians and the S.U.N. alliance seem to be doing a lot of fighting. Which is odd - it's making no sense, the times and places. Almost as if ....." he stops, and his white-tipped tail twitches alarm.
	"The pattern doesn't FIT." He declares. "If we had a dozen sneak units popping up, raiding them and getting away - it'd look like that. Sharp, random battles where they least expect it. But we haven't ... a quarter of these we're listening to, are one-sided affairs. Or one lot isn't using any radios that's reach across town."
	I nod towards Grimsley: the pilot is here after something unexplained punched his aircraft out of the skies twenty kilometres above. "And Somebody is fighting Something. Connected, you think ?"
	Vaclav nods slowly. "I think," he declares slowly, his heartland Liechtenstein accent precise as ever "I think we are Very likely going to be the ones sent to find that out."

	We rejoin the others out on the balcony - it is a wide, stone-flagged affair some four metres across each way. Which is just as well, for our centaur bodies take up room. Grimsley is lying with his head resting on the reclining mare's huge barrel of a body; he looks quite content.
	"I've got ... this, you might be interested in," he reaches out and hooks his flight bag over with an agile, naked tail. Grinning, he pulls out two litre bottles of something that looks definitely unlike the ration brandy and plum slivovitz they issue us with.
	Vaclav unscrews one of the offered bottles, and his delicate nose twitches in delighted surprise. "Swedish aquavit ! How'd you get THIS ?" 
	I smile as I look at his expression, glad for the distraction. Our relationship with its manufacturers tends to be expressed in smart but expensive Saab missiles going one way, and swarms of cheap unguided rockets going the other.
	Grimsley's chisel-teeth sparkle, as he grins up at us. Of course, to him, most things ARE up. "Tha' Intelligence boys, lads as got me this job, freed me bank account - the one back in Yorkshire, an' the offshore one wi' Freedonia Banking plc an' all. Least I could do, give some of it back, grateful, like." He lies back down again, while Natya looks back soothingly like a mother hen with a chick. "I were in the S.U.N. a ways back, like, picked up a taste for it."
	Vaclav's eyes narrow slightly. "What were you doing there ?"
	The mouse's ears twitch, his trimmed whiskers vibrating with amusement. "Tha'd never guess. It were regular an' legal as tha' gets - sort of import-export. Tha' knows, back 'ome we're friendly wi' the S.U.N. ? Seein as we don't trust the rest o' folk as did the EC on us, and the Tsar's mob make us blood run cold. So we've old traditions, like, to keep up."
	He wriggles closer under Natya's flank, bending one of his huge ears to shade from the snow-reflected sun. "It were last year, I were there on cover for ... anyways, there I was in Uppsala, gettin' in essential ,supplies for us army."
	Natya frowns, puzzlement obvious in her cocked ears. "Mecha ? Munitions ? Big Volvo plant there, we've had a go at it a few times. Anyway, I didn't think the Swedish United Nations exported that stuff. Scarce resources, and all that."
	He grins up at her. "Nay, nowt like that. Tha' knows, in us Army, we've got Traditions. Chap gets to be Captain, gets pair o' green gumboots, a Volvo an' a black labrador. Next rank, gets a green body-warmer, an' a bigger Volvo every two promotions. Traditional, like - at least, t'were traditional before the EC stomped on t'lot of us. We's puttin' things straight again."
	I frown. Again, my eyes are drawn to the forest Northwards. It's only some finite, countable number of trees away, to where our troops are dug into the snow, freezing their tails off and wishing it was Spring already. Past that, is something Unknown, that has come to these woods.
	Vaclav must have seen me shiver. "It all comes round to the EC again, doesn't it ? What they did to seize power .. what they let in. And what's out there right now."
	We've all sorts of nations these days, I reflect glumly. The main stable blocks are Empires, with a few variants. Nobody really counts places like the Greenland Anarchist Non-state, with its rigid and sternly enforced anarchy. Our own Reich was put together as a buffer zone of what had been the old Eastern Block, too poor to join the prosperous nations further West ... for which we came to be supremely grateful.
	"Something that started in the EC Legomancy of Brussels, is in our woods." Vaclav stares out between the trees, as if expecting to see dark shapes flitting between the tree-boles. "Brussels is gone, but something .. escaped. "
	"And hid in the middle of an undeclared war," I fill in his thought. "If you can hide the right way - that's the best place you could pick. Nobody's doing detailed searches of the Triple Point - just straight in, and anything strange happens, we think it's something the Russkies or the Scandians dreamed up."
	"And they, do the same, but include us" Natya lowers her ears dangerously. 
	I wince. And gratefully accept the bottle Grimsley offers, for I have a feeling we will not be having much more leisure to enjoy it.

	Things happen faster than I fear, and I had never been too hopeful about waiting till Spring for our move. The phone rings the next morning: we are summoned, all of us, to the Field Mecha workshops.
	Now the daylight is gone; thick cold mist sweeps in off the Baltic, some hundred and twenty kilometres West. The holiday is over, as even the weather reminds us.
	"Ahg." Natya sneezes, steam billowing in a cloud as our transporter pulls up outside the long, low sheds next to the railway. "Back in harness. And just when I'd got my fur clean."
	Grimsley is riding happily on her back as we de-bus into the yard: snow is piled up in drifts that would be chest-deep on him. Suddenly he frowns, and whispers something in the big mare's ears.
	Natya turns to look at him, and her deep-set eyes flash. "Don't worry. We're not sending you out there in shorts and a string vest."

	"Mark Nine models !" The engineers rub their paws gleefully as they come to fit us out. "You're the second unit on this front to get them - somebody must like you."
	We exchange glances. Somebody must evidently think we'll need them. We'd been making do with the Mark six bis version of our mecha, and hoped to upgrade this year sometime. But then they wheel the base suits out on trolleys, and we are suddenly too busy to worry about anything else that day. Powered armour is what keeps us alive out there - and if you miss a trick, you bight not get a chance to learn it later.

	"Impressive." Vaclav is saying, as the fog outside darkens into another long February night. "This, I can get used to." He is looking in a mirror, turning this way and that to see how the joints flex, checking for any uncovered gaps.
	I nod, running my ungloved paw down the multi-faceted breastplate. The main front armour and helmets are close-fitting as ever, but now look quite different from the form-hugging curves we are used to. They are angular, like finely cut gems - this design, we have heard of. But I see Grimsley eyeing us up uncomfortably.
	"Ey, like, I don't reckon much to tha' idea o' Stealth," he mutters. He is in a flexible tank-rider's armour himself, as no biped could properly carry our weight of armour. "Happen it LOOKS like the bisiness, but all them protrusions.." he gestures to the welded-on lugs where the standard modules for weapons and power systems clip on "It spoils t'idea, like. Faceting's just one bit of it. Unless tha's got a steel that radars look right through." He cocks his head to one side. "Not a bad idea, though but. I were wi' the Reverend Hector Fortescue at Thirsk, he 'ad a full Stealth suit on. Liked to get up real close to the EC troops, did the Rev."
	I wince. I too have read "Jane's All The World's Fighting Vicars", and remember a reference to a Reverend Fortescue and his giant petrol-driven cheese-grater. Like the apolitical Commissars the Russians seem to still have, in England their Church seems to have coped with the truth about its deity being revealed at the Milennium. There may now actually BE a commandment involving feeding the foe through shredding machines....
	Natya pats him happily. Like the rest of us, she reads the equipment reports. "You're a pilot, not infantry by trade. This isn't Stealth - and it isn't even steel. We can't ALL afford alloy steel, you know. It's a very ... traditional form of treating iron, called Krupp Cemented Plate."
	"Battleships used to carry it," one of the engineers chimes in, some rodent of oddly mixed stock. (Evidently one of the less spectacular of us Genemelded folk, I tell myself wryly.) "You can't cast it in curved plates - it's deep-hardened, and barely annealed. Resists Armour-piercing rounds at point-blank range - they're sharpened for kevlar and fibre penetration, you know. Against this - they just bounce or splinter."
	"Though it is a little BRITTLE," I barely hear one of the techs mutter to himself. The others hush him vigorously, and send him off towards the Reactor sheds, where some unit of equines is being fitted with something towed and probably less shielded than they really like.
	"Ha. At least, we've a few strong arguments on our side." Natya grins, as she lovingly polishes her new rifle. The Russians keep to 4.85 and 7.62 mm as a matter of tradition - Natya's sidearm is in 110 mm, and has a barrel three metres long without the sword-bayonet. In practice, she'll carry it underslung between her forelegs, and woe betide anyone making snide remarks about her new silhouette.
	Just then, the telephone rings. One of the engineers picks it up, listens for a second, and waves us over - Vaclav is nearest, and grabs it. For a minute he listens wordlessly, then gives an abrupt "Ja", and puts the phone down.
	He looks around at us, searchingly. And then he turns to the engineers, his tail twitching even under the armour.
	"I'm afraid if anyone planned to get any sleep tonight, we can all forget it." His eyes are wide. "By Dawn, we've got to get this mecha assembled, online and tested."
	Grimsley swallows noisily. "Tha' means .... ?"
	I exchange glances with Vaclav, and he nods.
	"You'd better get used to that armour, yourself," I am telling him, even as I store away the memory of this good week we have had. "Something's happened, obviously. They want us in the Triple Point - NOW !"