Triple Point    Chapter Seven	

There is a clearing in the woods, that is being quite crowded as I look around. It is not a large space, maybe eighty by a hundred metres, but there are eight IJ-28 hovertanks sitting in it, my own small team of SelbsKavellrie, and the remains of another of our teams who are to any inspection rather more than simply dead. There is silence for a few seconds.
	Grimsley is sitting on the turret of the nearest IJ-28, and waves me forward. "Ey, folk want to talk. Can you offer a truce, like ?"
	Hannah Ritter wades forwards through the snow, her kevlar fabric throw-rug swishing slightly as she moves - many eyes are on her cervine form, some of the Siberians eyeing her with appetites of one form or another. But that is being all right, I tell myself, for we too have supplemented our rations with that which comes in uniforms rather than cans. The Siberians, we understand - it is the Scandinavians who are bafflingly prejudiced about such things.
	"I'm authorized for it," she nods to Grimsley. "Authorized to do with this band, all I see fit that they'll agree to - after all, they're not technically under orders."
	Grimsley relays this to the Commander, and there is a puzzled-sounding conversation in English between the ermine and the mouse. I smile, slowly setting the safely catch on the flank cannon. Though we function as part of army of the Greater Liechtenstein Reich, none of us have actual rank - I lead by consent, something that is rather nearer one of the Cossack bands of old. All subjects of the GLR are in some sense its property, but in other ways remarkably free - there is no law against us doing this, or getting paid for it. International lawyers are hating the idea, but then, we are not being popular enough to care about such things .....
	

	It is two hours later, and we have pulled into a defensive formation around the clearing. The eight IJ-28s are deployed in a ring at the edge,  pointing down possible escape routes - there are another two that are in the middle, a tarpaulin roof stretched between them.
	"This is their Commander, Strikes-Side-Armour, and his Shaman, Walks-Unseen," Grimsley waved at the two ermines, as we sit under the shelter. "Funny sort of names they have - those troopers are Ice River, Screwdriver Death, Fast Rocks Crossing and The Hat. Though The Hat's not wearing one, like. They've been sent on same mission as us - but a bit heavier on the resources. "
	Natya shifts, eyeing the mouse a little posessively. "That's nice.  But don't go getting too friendly with them. " Her armour clicks, as she flexes her jaw switch and runs through a systems check.
	I look around, at the ten of us nestled in snow-scrapes against the slightly warm hovertank skirts. Obviously the troopers are here to add weight of numbers - we have sent Torm and Eric to watch outside, for they are little equipped for this discussion. In my nose is the scent of hot metal and alcohol fuel, the peculiar mix of machine scents and dried fish rations that long association has told me is the scent of Enemy. But I look outside, where the snow is covering the shapes of that which some other Enemy has found first - next to that, these Siberians are a welcome sight indeed.
	The Shaman speaks. His gold medallion sparkles in the dim light, long ermine tail twitching animatedly. For about a minute his high-pitched, chittering voice sounds, and then the Commander starts relaying the Siberian tribal dialect into English for Grimsley to pass on to us.
	Hannah sighs, looking around. "This really is no way to run a mission. Two sets of translation, and only one translator for each step. There has to be a better way."
	

There is a silence. I am looking round at the strange company, realising this is the first time I am seeing Siberians up this close without knowing one of us will be very shortly dead, and it is being a strange sensation. All of them here are ermines, snow-white fur in their Winter modes, much of it revealed as they sit in the shelter with their outer  snowsuits unfastened - and they are not wearing much beneath the windproof, snowproof outer layers. It is being maybe ten degrees below and cooling fast, but I have heard what Siberia is like in February, and these are folk whose ancestors evolved to live there in bare fur.
	One of them, the one Grimsley has named as The Hat,  bursts out into a long stream of that chittering native language - I know some Russian, and this is a wholly different speech, hardly a word  that I recognise. Next to him,  the commander nods, and turns to Grimsley - I am wondering how much of what The Hat really said, will get through English translation into our native VolksDeutsch. It is being some trouble at the best of times, with our Natya thinking in Ukrainian and Grimsley in English !
	The mouse nods, pulling out a map, which he unfolds on his lap. "Folk here agree wi' that, like," he looks round at us. "That's why they're an all-Sib unit, apart from some o' the main Russians not being so keen on a few of their ..  traditions." He winces a little at that, eyes flicking over to Strikes-Side-Armour, who under his snowsuit is wearing a home-cured fur scarf  that is almost certainly  a battle trophy. "Here's where they've come from - way North, yesterday they were at Lake Pochronedva, if that's how tha' says it." He shakes his head,  squinting at the map. "Idea is, we stay split up, each take a flank and head out that way, where the thing went to before it vanished ...  nobody's ever seen it and lived, which gives us some hope."
	Vaclav's armour clicks slightly as the deer restlessly turns. "I can live with that. It's not much of a plan, though - when that ..  Entity vanished, it didn't go anywhere marked on this map ! Oh no - that thing came from somewhere Outside - and I don't mean the usual places like you get Japanese tourists going to since the Millennium.  Don't forget,  what brought Grimsley's aircraft down was a Psychotronic blast - that travels outside Space as we know it, to get here. And the sort of hole it leaves behind ...  well, I think we've seen what comes through it."
	Hanna's long, round-tipped ears dip as she acknowledges the stag. "True enough, as far as it goes. Grimsley, translate, please. It's a Psychotronic effect, yes. Only the EC forces ever dared to use those, and only at the end, when they faced defeat in Belgium itself. But - it doesn't necessarily mean that's who's using it NOW - I've heard what it was like at the end there, anything might have been sneaked out of Belgium by anybody - and we wouldn't know."
	I can see when that part is translated, by the instant the ermine commander winces, his tail twitching. He replies briefly, and what words of English I know seem to be mentioning canoeing up a polluted river without the right equipment. 
	The Siberians confer, and the Shaman pats a long scabbard at his belt.  Cautiously he draws one of the long native knives, and presents the hilt to Hanna, who studies it curiously.
	"They folk thought as much, before they were sent in," Grimsley confirms, a minute later. "There were Russians around at the end, in the EC wars. They saw what came in,  the - Cute stuff. The things that weren't only pretty, but drop-dead gorgeous, troops'd drop dead at sixty metres frontal arc exposure." His narrow tail twitches, and his eyes suddenly seem far-away.  "I weren't on the ground at the time, but three of my squadron flew too close - they went criminally insane at twelve hundred metres wi' a few seconds eye contact."
	Hanna hands the knife back.  "Which is why they've equipped their Shaman with a tantalum-edged weapon - the only way you'll hurt one of those. But ..... " She frowns. "That's not what we've got, here ! There's a Belgian connection, all right,  but the rest of it doesn't fit !"
	Natya grunts. "It's all beyond me," she complains "but  you said, didn't you, that nobody knows what was happening at the end in the EC ? I know they were losing,  and the plush stuff wasn't proving unbeatable as long as you didn't run out of nuclear lunge mines - and folk who's willing to use 'em. So ... if  the EC folk who invented psychotronics, were still working till the end ....." Her voice trails off, as her eyes widen in horror at what she is suddenly thinking.
	My own ears and tail droop under the armour, as I finish her line of reasoning. "They'd have tried to come up with something else." 

	I am looking up at the skies, watching the darkness fall on the February  day.  So far North, we have barely seven hours light even now, and that is on a clear day.  My nose twitches, the helmet removed for the minute and ready on its quick-release hook, the neck ring fitting over the round drum of my starboard supercharger.
	Upwind of our camp, the wind speaks to me.  Cold pinewoods and the occasional eddying scent of alcohol fuel and hot iron from behind me,  are things that I tell myself to ignore. Whatever else is out there, it will be faint, it will surely not want to be found.
	For a few minutes I sniff, emptying my mind of all else.  Annoyingly, the wind gusts again, filling my senses with things I already know of our camp. Cooking scents, the mixed musks of fifty warm bodies, hot oil, the reek of explosives, both ours and theirs. The hovertanks are huge scent presences,  with the distinctive Russian lubricants that they never have made scentless, unlike the teflon and advanced dry bearings the Scandians use on their mecha.
	 I shake my head, trying to clear it of the scent of oil, explosive and rust,  that blood-like scent that our training officers are so very unhappy about if they scent  it on our armour. For a second I am back on the training grounds at Litzmannstadt, recalling our Mech sergeant.  A first-generation Genemeld he was,  born too soon to be guaranteed fully functional. His muscles were stricken by an inheritable wasting disease that my generation will never be troubled by, since the Genome scanning project which made the GLR famous and the subsequent ...  population control measures which made us infamous though healthy.
	"Sergeant ... Havilmann, that was him.." He had lived in his mecha, a first-generation suit that made his shrivelled frame powerful beyond the dreams of athletes. And he made us value our own suits higher than our hides,  in the time-honoured ways of Sergeants the world over. It was said that he wore out three megaphones a year just shouting, and none of us cared to dispute the story.
	Suddenly, I blink, my body jerking as if  an open cup of bleach or ammonia had been thrust under my  nose. Rust fills my scent sense, and I know for a fact that none of our suits have had time to corrode, even if we let such things happen to our best friends in the Triple Point.
	"Hanna ! Grimsley ! " I grab my helmet, jam it on and open the radio channel the instant the connection lights come on.  "There is something damn funny about those hovertanks !"

	The Shaman is unrolling a sleeping-bag on that odd flashing-tile floor on the back of his machine, when we arrive in a block.  He gives a questioning chirrup, and the commander's turret hatch pops open  .
	There is a brief three-way conversation and the Shaman shrugs, going back to preparing his bivouac.
	"They folk say,"  Grimsley translates hurriedly, "That the Russians back at base, don't get on with them. Standard hovertanks are aluminium,  or mebbe magnesium alloy. But that's expensive - ten percent are built with plain sheet iron hulls, supposed to be used for crew training. But Siberians often end up with them in the front line, if  supplies run short."
	"Schtroumph ...." Hanna swears softly, her tail swishing in frustration under its kevlar wrap.  "Why, why, didn't I think of that ? Cold iron ! We're the only side who still uses anything so low-tech - and we hadn't had any attacks from this - Entity."
	"Not until we sent in a unit wearing fancy ceramic-fibre gear,"  I finish, my tail flinching as it waves towards the direction where the remains of our comrades lie, mercifully hidden from sight by the drifting snow.  "I knew these hovertanks smelled funny - but they're not standard models anyway,  so I didn't think it through."
	Hanna looks up to the rear corner of the Shaman's machine.  On a servo-controlled mounting is a gray-painted box about a metre across, with plastic end-caps. I follow her gaze - it is a Sh-V 12  "Stomp Box",  a point-defense weapon that can spot an incoming missile and blast it with a swarm of hundreds of rifle-caliber rounds in a fraction of a second.  We usually see one or two hovertanks in a squadron carrying one;  with this squadron,  every vehicle mounts its maximum of two, and for a change I doubt the spares bins on the back hatch are empty.
	"Expensive," she comments. "Same as that tantalum fluff-sticker he's carrying, a solid gold one would be cheaper. But if these folk are wanted in the Triple Point right NOW, they can't be issued new vehicles in an hour, or a day either if they need to run them in.  They'd have to go with whatever they've got, or whatever you can bolt on in a hurry."
	Natya's tail flicks irritatedly. "What's all this about iron armour ?" She demands. "If we had enough titanium, I'd swap for it in a heartbeat ! " She looks over at the hovertanks, and frowns. "Besides, you and that Shaman don't have any, and you're still here !"
	The doe's  ears dip. Her eyes narrow, as she stares at Natya. With a grunt of suprise, the mare sits down heavily in the snow, her back legs folding under her.
	Hanna raises an eyebrow, as the mare struggles to all four feet again. "I don't recommend trading it in, right now - not unless you've got other abilities keeping you from the Entity's attention." She smiles wryly, her narrow muzzle twitching at the mare's discomfiture. "Think of it like this - Cold Iron's always been a weapon of choice against various things in legend ...  the sorts of legends we're looking at seriously, these days. If the Entity  was a radar, you might compare it to ..." she hesitates, " cold iron works, maybe,  about  as well as trying to hide using  Stealth tech. The Entity  knows you're out there from the odd flash and blip, but it can't pin you down exactly enough to get you.  And  what I've got, and Walks-Unseen seems to have, is more like an active jammer. I had to ...  attune myself, to that Entity, to stop it seeing me. Not nice."
	"I'll take your word for it ..." Vaclav murmurs, looking around at the assembled company as Grimsley translates for the Siberians, "either way, I think I'll stick to my usual tailor."

	The clouds from the North sweep over, and in another half hour it is fully dark.  Vaclav and Natya head out to join Torm and Eric on watch, leaving me with Hanna and Grimsley under the tarpaulin.	
	Grimsley looks hard at the doe. "That wasn't what Psykers are meant to do," he nods towards the big depression where Natya had fallen flat with her nervous system glitched for a second. "Nobbut we have many of 'em back home - but we've got laws back there. Intrusion laws, Control laws - tha' can't  just go about lookin' in folks' heads and stuff. T'ain't on."
	Hanna looks amused. "We're in the Triple Point, in case you hadn't noticed," she stretches, her reddish fur sparkling with snow in the torchlight. "We also happen to be heavily outnumbered by Siberians,  who I can tell you, are thinking your ears will make a nice pair of mittens. A truce is one thing - but they'll hold it just as long as they feel there's an advantage to having us with them. Now, do you think they'd appreciate it if  I'd taken a neural grip on one of their troopers instead, to prove the point ?"
	The English mouse nods, grudgingly. "Don't mean I have to like it, either."

	The snow-hole we dig that night is shallow, barely a scrape deep enough to lie down in,  some twenty metres along a firebreak leading out of the clearing. Torm and Eric drag branches out of the loose drifts to reinforce the roof; the half-wolves may not have language, but they can generally understand what is being wanted, even without such help as Hanna's power to tell them directly.
	"Almost forgot about this," Vaclav turns around to look at the Skippy, the little autonomous cargo carrier that has been following us for hours. He looks down at it, blinking. "You've seen a few things, haven't you ? Scandian-built, full of Japanese chips, liberated and put into GLR markings ... and what you've seen today ..." he shudders. "If we had the tech, we could use a company or two of scout robots for this job."
	"Which would see exactly Nothing." Hanna snaps. "Remember ? The Scandians have probably been scanning this area with radars that'll pick up a spent brass cartridge that's been lying here  from World War One, and they don't seem to have found anything. If they had, we'd know about it by now. This Entity is after life forms - it comes out from wherever it lives to feed, then goes back. " Her ears dip. "Believe me, I don't like the idea of being live bait any more than you do.  But if you want to tempt it out ... you've got to tempt it with something it wants."
	Vaclav's ears dip, and he busies himself with the Skippy.  It is a standard model,  hydrogen fuel-cell driven,  just a cargo deck and a front "cab" with the sensor and processor packs.  The top surfaces are matte-black solar cells, nothing like powerful enough to propel it, but with enough capacity to keep its processor awake. 
	The cervine centaur gives a  cluck of impatience, struggling with the reconnaissance pod lashed to the cab. "We got this one off a Russian drone, looks like .." he mutters, fishing in his armour's toolkit for a wrench. "Wonder what it saw ? The tape loop's run to the end, so it saw Something. Pity these things don't come with their own player ."
	Grimsley's ears twitch, under the loose white and gray-mottled snow hood. "Tha's willin' to let us Neighbors tek a look ?" He challenges Hanna, who nods cautiously. "Then mebbe I can find someone as brought his own."
	The mouse scurries off towards the Siberians, while Vaclav hands out the Skippy's load. We get 5 mm Mecklen ammunition, self-sealing  "bunch of grapes"  bags of  diesel fuel, and  the usual  assortment of rations from many countries. I look at what the deer hands me, and my snout wrinkles, for ersatz Soya meal stew has never been a favorite.
	"It's the best we've got here," the deer comments, spotting my expression. "Want to swap ? You could try the herbivore ration, it's potato with beetroot and enough oil to pump up the energy content." His eyes suddenly go distant. "At least folk back home aren't going hungry these days, since they declared the East Ukraine fall-out free. "
	"Since we started trading with Greenland, anyway.", Natya nods. "That's where Grimsley started out this trip, he's told me about it. Huge caverns in the ice, kilometers long - natural deep-freeze. They buy up hot food and let it sit for a few decades, half the radio-iodine's gone inside five years, half the strontium-90 in thirty. " She looks at one of the tins of fish, that has a label  specially coded with a "sell-after" date. "We traded half last years harvest  for this deal, and our grandchildren will  end up buying it back off them." She snorts, her breath hanging in a  thick cloud.
	Grimsley re-appears, ploughing through the drifts with two of  the ermine in tow. One of them is the commander Strikes-Side-Armour,  and the other one is a plain trooper.
	"'Ow do," the mouse nods. "They folk found someone with a player,  reckon it'll work. Ey, an' she speaks  a bit o' English, too ! Wire-in-Snow, that's her name. Was in Belgium at the end, she were, or as near  as folk got and came out wi'  brains in one piece."
	"She?" Hanna looks skeptical,  but looks the newcomer over. Wire-in-Snow  is a streak of death wrapped in snow and kevlar, nearly two metres tall and with a tail to match. She nods, grinning happily down to Grimsley,  her slanting blue eyes almost lost in the white fur of bulging cheeks that we know can power a killing bite. She chitters something in her own language, then carries on in something I can just understand.
	"Belgium, yes! Me Lena River Guards Army,   yes!"
	Grimsley's ears prick up, at a stream of English that goes too fast for me to catch. "Ey, folks, lass's seen some hard work. Says she was in last company left alive, got attached to one of our units, 438th Royal Boot and Stanley Regiment. Them an' 2nd Glaswegian Punjabis, held t' line at Bergen-op-Zoom the day it were ower."
	Natya glowers at the ermine, who is patting Grimsley between the ears -- he hardly comes up to her waist, ears excluded.  "Well? Has she got a player ?" She gestures towards Vaclav, who has retrieved the tape cassette and is holding it out.
	"Aye,  an' a screen, too." As  the mouse speaks,  Wire-in-Snow reaches into her tunic and pulls out a thick sheet of soft plastic, about as flexible as boot leather. 
	Vaclav  whistles, softly. "Nice ! Never seen one of those Japanese flexi-screens up close before. With the price they charge, I don't think anyone here could buy them out of their wages."
	Natya grunts, raising one ear. "Russians take along Jap tourists, same as we do. Maybe one of'em gave it her for ..  Services rendered.  Her eye twinkles wickedly. "Can't have been a tit man - I've seen more curves on a chopping-block."
	Vaclav's eyes roll up in despair, and suddenly I am grateful for our communication problems. Not that I find Natya's jibe wholly impossible, in some respects - though if the flexiscreen did come from one of the tourist platoons, it seems more likely that its original owner had no further use for it. The ermine gives a wide-toothed grin, and  I am thinking that any male who makes unwelcome advances on her, will lose equipment that cannot be replaced at an electronics store.
	As we gather round to watch, a flurry of snow suddenly descends.  It is wholly dark now at five, a blanket of cloud reaching fast over us from the North,  and a fresh wind springing up to shake more snow off the trees at us. But soon I am not worried about the weather, for Vaclav is fast-forwarding to the Skippy's film, and we are seeing what happened this morning.
	Even from a lashed-down and recycled camera, the pictures are sharp and filled with a hideous clarity. It begins with an hour of patrol that we skip through,  a cautious skirmishing through the pinewoods. But one snowy pinewood is very like another, so it is our comrades that I concentrate on.  As we knew, they are - were, I remind myself - a matched species unit, bovine centaurs of aurochs / zubra descent, their fairly standard size and shape fitting them to be testing a new armour tech in the field. That armour looks good, rounded ceramic-fibre shapes with ridged mouldings along the joints to deflect away a glancing needle-rifle bolt that might pierce the kevlar hinges. I am liking the look of the helmet too, a smooth bubble type that does not seem to mist up at all - and then I recall  the current - condition of  its wearers. What they had encountered, was nothing that the foundries in the Don basin had designed against.
	"Look .. Something coming up on the data bands .." Hanna points urgently to the multi-frequency tracker that the pod recorded, while the bovine squad are advancing with no signs yet of alarm. "A sudden spike there - and there. Electromagnetic field fluxes increasing ...  why haven't we been able to spot this with sensors ? The onboard compass is going crazy ...  surely they can spot it themselves by now ?"
	Indeed,  the lead scout is giving a tail signal to deploy for trouble. From the Skippy's low viewpoint we can see only a few of the unit, but they are looking around,  alert and ready for trouble. The nearest one has his helmet visor open a centimeter, and we recognise why - with all the technology in the world, nobody wants to disregard the Mark One Nose as an early-warning system.
	"Yiiiii!"  It is  Hanna who starts, her yelp of suprise just beating our reaction to what happens - and happens Fast. One second we are looking at a mundane scene of our small scout unit spreading out - then all Hell erupts. The very air seems to shimmer as with heat-haze,  the scene rocking violently. But even there I see something odd - not a snowball's worth is blown off the trees, despite the shaking of the scene - as if the skewing was directed precisely, planes and vortices of unearthly distortion slashing efficiently across the landscape - precisely to its targets.
	"They didn't stand a chance."  My throat is dry, fur standing up stiff as my armour will allow. "Not like with us - it was confused with us, but them - it took. Like that."
	"Like a baker kneading a piece of dough." Vaclav's eyes are wide open in horror, his armour actuators ticking and hissing as they pick up the fight-or-flight  trembling of his cervine reflexes. "And it's feeding - I'm sure of it. just ..  not in the physical sense."
	Just as we are telling ourselves that things cannot get any worse,  into the other side of the clearing comes the Russian patrol,  guns blazing. This ends very quickly, the last one fumbling for a grenade ten seconds later, but never having the opportunity to pull the pin. We look around, nodding in unspoken acknowledgment that the unknown trooper was intending the grenade for himself.
	"There ..  those bursts on the electromagnetic band again ...  it's a definite fix on the  direction-finder. " Hanna points out  the spikes on the data record, that in the player's usual leisure mode displays film subtitles and interactive notes.  "And the Skippy was moving all the time - must have gone a hundred metres, maybe more." She stops, her mouth open. "We've got a base-line !"
	The Siberians chitter between themselves, and Wire-in-Snow is evidently ordered off at a run  back to her camp. I nod, for I recognise the reason that Hanna is rewinding the tape to the first  Event, and noting carefully just which tree it had been passing at the time.
	But it is Grimsley the pilot and navigator who puts it into words, first for us and then for Strikes-Side-Armour. "Tha knows this thing's summoned from inside Triple Point area, like .." He says slowly,  looking under Hanna's belly at the map the deer is unfolding. "Puts a good limit on the area. Now tha's two bearings on what summoned it - time to take a look ower at where they cross, eh ?"

	
	
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