"Grove one-oh-thirty-one up ahead, fifty paces," Toni heard over the comm.

Hirum's voice was regaining that peculiar monotone.

He must be getting tired by now, but he's already popped all his pills, Toni thought, far beyond caring. Anymore and he is going to crash. Again. And then Unit Fourteen will again be autostriding in the rear along with a sleeping Grimm and a handful of burnouts.

Fifty gigantic paces ahead, advancing in single file, they came upon a grove of Diesel Trees. Essentially Baobabs with particularly bulbous bases, the trees elongated somewhat closer to their crowns, only to branch out in a particularly spectacular manner, exposing their broad leaves to the sunlight as far as ten meters from their trunks. Toni identified the likely avenue of approach and stood directly before it, putting a knee to the ground. Units Six and Ten quickly followed suit.

Without delay, eight exoskeleton-clad footmen clambered off each Suit, having until then been hitching a particularly bumpy ride whilst gripping the units' torso webbing. With little time before the main force's arrival, they dispersed into pairs at a run, each approaching a tree on either side of the avenue. Toni watched them momentarily, and then directed his attention to their surroundings.

He had given up imagining enemy formations hidden amongst the foliage; he was simply too tired for the mental effort it required. Instead he observed without searching, counting on his innate ability to spot movement and pattern, his mind too familiarized to the forest sounds to associate any ominous significance to the occasional creak or snap.

The footmen continued their work. The corporal nearest Toni quickly removed equipment from his comrade's travel pack and began to cut into a square scar at the base of the tree. The bark extended more than a palm's breadth into the trunk and was hard enough to require vibrating cutters, but once the block was excised, the far more porous interior was exposed and began to exude a syrupy resin. The other footman then plugged the hole with a square metal peg of just the right size, inserted a thin perforated shaft into the slot at the peg's center and shoved all two meters of it into the broad tree. The last few centimeters required some delicacy as he secured the shaft's base snugly against the slot's outlying lip.

Now came the easy part. The corporal's pack was almost entirely composed of the Portable Refinery Module, a 60 kilo-weight device intended to extract and refine the Resinin oil contained deep within the genetically engineered tree. Laying the PRM on the ground, the corporal connected it to the shaft's base via a wire-coated hose, initiating the diagnostic pump as soon as he connected his terminal to the device.

The pair had been quicker than their comrades; their PRM was the first to activate, the noisy pump breaching the silence violently enough to cause some upheaval among the nesting sparrows.

So much for noise discipline, Toni thought in disgust.

Shortly afterwards, the remaining PRMs added their voices to the din while their operators carefully gauged the progress on their terminals. Before a minute had passed all the devices ceased to operate, with the exception of the first; it continued on for a full twenty seconds more, producing a revving sound before slowing down and then cutting off entirely. The footmen, all logistics personnel, momentarily parleyed among themselves in an encrypted frequency before passing their findings over to Section One, LOGIS.

"Unit Six, this is Lightfoot, over," the corporal sounded over the comm.

"What's the verdict?" Bowker answered with his butch tone. Toni hadn't yet worked up the nerve to discourage him from talking like that. The macho voice sounded fake and Toni suspected the more senior footmen thought so too.

"The site is adequate for Main Force passage; it's the mother lode we were looking for, over."

Toni felt a heavy load fall from his shoulders. They had finally found a grove large enough and with substantial enough oil reserves to fuel the entire expeditionary force. That alone meant they might suspend their march for the night, something the lot of them would certainly be grateful for. After all, it would probably take the entire night to fuel the multitude of Suits. Toni hailed Bowker once the information had been relayed to Wild Rose Ops.

"Unit Six, here Unit Seven, over."

"What the deal, Seven?"

"Bowker, drop the badass tang, it's me you're talking to and they can't pick us up."

"Uh, right Toni, what is it?"

"I'm sure you know what's gonna happen as soon as Main Force gets here, right? Alpha Sierra Charlie's gonna put us last in line to refuel. Why don't we refuel now and save ourselves the grief?"

"I dunno, Toni, that's up to the corporal –"

"Bowker, use your head. Tell him we're nearly out of gas and want to be ready for action. That isn't exactly a lie, you know ..."

They needn't have worried. The corporal wholeheartedly agreed, fully aware that soon there would be a traffic jam of Suits of all shapes and sizes waiting to be topped up, and seeing the opportunity to get a head start.

The armored Suits topped up in pairs with over five hundred liters of bioether-saturated Resil each, their APUs having been designed to run on the biofuel as a contingency. As refueling took place, the remaining footmen demarcated the loitering area, placing luminous beacons in a funnel along the grove's axis of approach. Units Six and Seven were the second pair to refuel as the remainder kept up their vigil.

"Any idea when the sarge's gonna show?" Toni asked.

Unit Six did not to answer for a while, perhaps in protest for Toni's rebuke.

"When the fucker feels like it, I guess ..." Bowker answered as soon as his unit had been topped up.

Sergeant Dunn's leadership had thus far been somewhat unorthodox, almost every member of his section having been rotated into command status on missions, thus leaving their cat-eyed commander to engage in activities unknown. The first indication those activities were for the section's betterment had arrived in Lograin Air Base, when each Suit's allocated ammunition was doubled from one hundred to two hundred twenty-five millimeter rounds.

LOGIS had left MEWAC base with five twenty-round clips of twenty-five millimeter High Explosive-Tracer ammunition and twenty-four flare cartridges in cluster pods per Suit, which only served to underline their commander's statement that the platoon was to avoid combat whenever possible. The principal side-effect had nevertheless been a somewhat rebellious attitude from the ex-ASC section leaders, most notably from 2nd Sergeant Dunn himself. Upon landing in Lograin Air Base, barely a thousand kilometers from Unmilfor's Projected Area of Influence, Dunn had performed a disappearing act, leaving a shocked Grimm to assume section command as they knelt along the airfield's perimeter. It had been a very silent wait, mostly due to their impromptu section leader not having figured out how to communicate over the comm without tipping off their platoon commander.

When Dunn returned, moving lithely in his armored Suit as no SIC trainee could seem to manage, he had directed his section to the local ammunition depot, where they received another hundred twenty-five millimeter rounds, four hundred cartridges each for their spaulder-mounted anti-personnel sentry guns and a pair of anti-armor SABERO rocket pods, each mounted on their innermost spaulder pylons. Dunn's Suit padded ponderously among them as they stowed the extra ammo.

"Unlike what you got at the Stables, the twenty-fivers you're receiving here are armor-piercing incendiary rounds. From now on you will stack your clips with one HET round followed by two API rounds successively. If you need to lay down fire, you will fire in three round burst mode using the tracer for aim correction. With the three rounds being fired at eighteen hundred rpm, you'll feel it as one kick against your chest-plate, but by then the slugs will be well on their way ..." he bellowed over his unit's integrated loudspeaker as they set to work, making it happen.

"Never forget that the tracer loses visibility at twenty four hundred meters, so consider that your practical range."

He kept up the cascade of counsel even as Toni struggled with his clips; the hand-gauntlet interface should have been sensitive enough for the job, but Ruka's warning had proven to be well-founded, leaving him no choice but to reset his unit's synchronicity every few seconds. His efforts were helped not in the least by the magazines themselves, which were dented enough at their lips to occasionally send a half-kilo round flying. As he despairingly picked up yet another round rolling in semi-circles along the ground, Dunn continued with his rant.

"Never conjoin more than three clips for your twenty-fiver. Each of them loaded weighs more than ten kilo-mass, and you won't want more than thirty kilos added to your main gun. The magazine detention peg is just not designed to take that much weight.

"You should consider yourselves fortunate. Only the fact that section one's been tasked for combat resupply has allowed Command to open up an exception, otherwise not even my bitching would have allowed me to up-arm you."

And just like that, Toni discovered that Section One had drawn LOGIS's Great Prize.

Some of the news he'd gotten over the grape-vine as the great circus departed Lograin had been even more sinister. There were apparently those who believed that Dunn had negotiated for Sec-One to be up-armed in exchange of tasking to resupply detail. Toni wasn't sure he believed it, nor whether, if it was true, he loved Dunn or hated him for it.

"Unit Six, here Brother One, over."

Speak of the devil ...

"Er ... here Unit Six, inform, over."

Bowker never tried to talk tough with Dunn.

"My unit is one mike from your location, coming in from your north-west with Main Force in tow. Upon Main Force arrival, Section One will be relieved by Alpha Sierra Charlie's 1st platoon, 2nd section, and proceed to waiting area. LOGIS Prime wants a word with us."

*****

All LOGIS members were free of their armored Suits for the first time since leaving Lograin, their units currently fulfilling the role of full metal gargoyles around the platoon's improvised mustering ground. From all around Toni and his comrades, a multitude of hard, flat titanium faces and ice-cold oculars stared down, contemplating the tiny creatures that controlled their fates. The platoon didn't form up, but huddled instead around Lieutenant Templeton, who for the first time in an age was simply the Ell-Tee instead of LOGIS Prime. His subordinates looked quite different from when last he'd laid eyes on them.

There were already some dedicated autostriders among the cadets, Templeton thought distastefully. Sueli Cassel was bright and dedicated, and yet she had been the first to fold, vomiting so much only a few hours into the land excursion that the inside of her Suit's interface cavity sloshed with every stride, much of the muck having been absorbed by her travel pack before finally sludging up and settling over the entire cavity floor.

Motion sickness had always been an issue with the Suits.

About as soon as the first walkers had begun to pad over the Thaumantian continent, their drivers had had to contend with it, the end result being that no rookie driver was able to operate his Suit for extended periods without medication. His platoon members were therefore regularly allotted several adhesive patches apiece, meant to be attached to the skin behind their ear before each session.

The first Driving Patches had been exclusive scopolamine vectors, until it was realized that the high atmospheric pressure on Capicua caused the anti-motion sickness medication to induce extreme dilation of the pupils. Several sergeants lost their eyes to glaucoma before the patches were reinforced with mirtazapine and clonidine, counteracting the blindness-causing pupil-dilatation and ocular hypertension. The patches were presently quite sophisticated, although some drivers had proven to be unable to deal with the multitude of side-effects from the combined medication.

Sueli had been relegated to the autostrider "brigade" at Main Force's rearguard, where she remained sick despite alternative treatments. It was not always so simple, however. Allerton had also been persistently sick, but an encrypted conversation with the driver had confirmed the commander's suspicion; Motion sickness was sometimes a mask for cowardice, and the lieutenant had heard enough to think about eventually directing the Allerton boy away from front line duty. Sueli, on the other hand, had proven to be a much tougher nut to crack, and she had hidden behind the motion sickness explanation as if it were a Spartan shield. She hadn't as yet spent more than a day away from the rear.

Hirum was the one most fraying on his nerves. Motion sickness wasn't the problem there at all, the driver's inner ear and stomach apparently being tough enough for the jerky accelerations inherent to Suit locomotion. But on the sixth day he had begun to suffer a persistent increase in his stress levels, accompanied by an abrupt decrease in performance. From that day onwards, Hirum had been experiencing what Templeton could only describe as a series of miniature nervous breakdowns, followed by suspiciously quick recoveries. Maybe the driver was trying to break the tempo of operations to suit his limitations. Maybe it was something else entirely.

Autostriders aside, it was clear from their expressions that exhaustion was taking a hold of most of the remainder, and it had begun to court the hardier drivers as well. He felt relieved at having requested the timeout.

"It appears you've lost more than five kilos apiece since I last saw you together ..." he stated.

It was no joke; they had probably lost that if not more. He began to chuckle.

"I won't lie, you all look like you've gone through the gut of a Master Sergeant."

A few grinned. There were even a few laughs, but Hirum's expression remained as empty as before. The cadet's lack of emotional response was known as blunted affect, and it never meant anything good about the subject's emotional health.

"That's why I wanted to record this moment of misery on photo. Tomorrow, whatever happens, you will survive. And when you do, I want you all to take a good look at your tragic mugs and laugh at what you see there. Sergeant, if you please ..."

Before long, what the lieutenant most desired began to happen. It was like magic, that strange phenomenon called morale. As they began to jockey for position with a pair of kneeling Mocas as backdrop, directed only sparingly by their section commanders (as he'd ordered them to), some cross-talk began to take place among them. Then someone made a joke (Rosa) and there was an outburst of laughter. From that moment onwards it didn't matter that their lips cracked and bled with the effort; quick grins covered their faces almost entirely, expressions softened and the motley crew reverted to their natural selves in no time at all.

He observed them carefully.

Rosa stood beside Miura at the back, plugging his nose theatrically and complaining at the stench of urine that apparently emanated from his fellow driver. He was quite the entertainer. On Miura's other side, Tani also seemed to be keeping her distance, although perhaps for some other reason, he supposed. Besides Tani, the troop's left flank was almost entirely composed of Miura affiliates, as he'd begun to think of them as. Winters, Hirum, Rosa, and the remainder of section one, sans Kimble, seemed to have clumped together into a group, the Boy with Strange Golden Eyes at its center. Miura hadn't as yet rotated into interim command of a mission, but Templeton had noticed over the comms how many had deferred to him when in doubt, even the Kimble character, although Miura often seemed as much at a loss as the rest. Perhaps there was more to him than appeared at first sight, he thought.

Then again, perhaps not.

Ian didn't think twice and pitched a tent in the center, and no one appeared to object to that at all. That didn't even qualify as ambition by afterthought; Templeton knew Ian was only thinking about how the Old Man would react if he saw his grandson in any position other than front-and-center. No one clumped around him.

The blonde cadet kept his face tightly disciplined as his platoon-mates positioned themselves to his flanks and rear, as if he were being surrounded by the enemy but was too polite to frown about it.

Tactical monster, Templeton considered. He cursed his older brother yet again for what he had done to his own son. The boy was probably damaged beyond repair, although the lieutenant was slightly impressed by the fact that no one had yet perished at his hands.

Templeton took a few stills and recordings, participating good-naturedly in the banter before handing the cam to a friendly footman. The platoon posed and then posed again, and the level of noise soon began to attract unwanted attention from nearby ASC drivers. The lieutenant hushed the troop at once and sent the majority to the waiting line to top up their Suits. Discreetly he called Miura aside.

"We need to talk a moment, Miura. Got the time?"

"Nothing but time, sir. Have I done something wrong?"

The lieutenant chuckled.

"Why is it every time I call a cadet aside, he think he's about to get squeezed? No, as far as I know you haven't done anything wrong. Tell me how things have been going for you."

That seemed to give the driver some pause for thought.

"Well," he finally said, "we've been on the move non-stop for twenty days, never knowing the enemy's location. I and my mates are in the same platoon, but today is the first time I've seen their faces since Lograin, they look as bad as I feel, and some of them look worse. I'm not even sure what day of the week it is, or where I currently find myself besides some position on some map, and no one else knows any better. I stink all over, I itch all over, I haven't washed since MEWAC and I feel like I have sticky paste covering my body and gun oil in my hair. Other than that I'm OK."

The lieutenant inclined his head in consideration and let the sarcasm slide.

"The Moca's operating system is a bit simple," he conceded. "That's to be expected, seeing as it was meant to be supported by an equally simple CPU. Has something to do with the price-tag, I guess. But the map is there and it is accurate. Trust me on that. As for where the enemy is, is it really that important to you?"

Miura nodded silently.

"Very well. We're currently forty clicks closer to Unmil than any UAVs have come before and less than four hours march from the mine plantation. We have some reports there was a disturbance around these parts a few months ago, heavy enough to cause a brand new dawn-wave to propagate over the continent. The Research Hubs compiled all the data pertaining to the event and processed it. The point is they figured the dawn's point of origin to be about three hundred clicks to our east, give or take a hundred.