The Colonel by Peter Watts

 
    The insurgents are already vectoring in from the east when the flag goes up. By the time the Colonel’s back in the game—processed the intel, found a vantage point, grabbed the nearest network specialist out of bed and plunked her down at the board—they’ve got the compound surrounded. Rainforest hides them from baseline vision but the Colonel’s borrowed eyes see well into the infrared. From half a world away, he tracks each fuzzy heatprint filtering up through the impoverished canopy.
    One of the few good things about the decimation of Ecuador’s wildlife: not much chance, these days, of mistaking a guerrilla for a jaguar.
    â€œI make thirteen,” the Lieutenant says, tallying blobs of false color on the display.
    A welter of tanks and towers in the middle of a clear-cut. A massive umbilical, studded with paired lifting surfaces along its length, sags gently into the sky from the pump station at its heart. Eight kilometers further west—and twenty more, straight up—an aerostat wallows at the end of the line like a great bloated tick, vomiting sulfates into the stratosphere.
    There’s a fence around the compound of course, old-fashioned chain-link with razorwire frosting, not so much a barrier as a nostalgic reminder of simpler times. There’s a ring of scorched earth ten meters wide between fence and forest, another eighty from fence to factory. There are defenses guarding the perimeter.
    â€œCan we access the on-site security?” He tried—unsuccessfully—before the Lieutenant arrived, but she’s the specialist.
    She shakes her head. “It’s self-contained. No fiber in, no phone to answer. Doesn’t even transmit unless it’s already under attack. Only way to access the code is to actually go out there. Pretty much hack-proof.”
    So they’re stuck looking down from geostat. “Can you show me the ranges at least? Ground measures only.”
    â€œSure. That’s just blueprint stuff.” A schematic blooms across the Lieutenant’s board, scaled and overlaid onto the real time. Translucent lemon pie-slices fan out from various points around the edge of the facility, an overlapping hot zone extending to the fence and a little beyond. The guns are all pointed out, though. Anybody who makes it to the hole in the donut is home free.
    The heatprints enter the clearing; the Lieutenant collapses the palette down to visible light.
    â€œHuh,” the Colonel says.
    The insurgents have not stepped into view. They didn’t walk or run. They’re— scuttling , for want of a better word. Crawling. Squirming arrhythmically. They remind the Colonel of crabs afflicted with some kind of neurological disorder, flipped onto their backs and trying to right themselves. Each pushes a small bedroll along the ground.
    â€œWhat the fuck,” the Lieutenant murmurs.
    The insurgents are slathered head-to-toe in some kind of brownish paste. Mud idols in cargo shorts. Two pairs have linked up like wrestling sloths, like conjoined twins fused gut-to-back. They lurch and roll to the foot of the fence.
    The station’s defenses are not firing.
    Not bedrolls: mats , roughly woven, natural fiber from the look of it. The insurgents unroll them at the fence, throw them up over the razorwire to ensure safe passage during the climb.
    The Lieutenant glances up. “They networked yet?”
    â€œCan’t be. It’d trip the alarms.”
    â€œWhy haven’t they tripped the alarms already? They’re right there .” She frowns. “Maybe they disabled security somehow.”
    The insurgents are inside the perimeter.
    â€œYour hack-proof security?” The Colonel shakes his head. “No, if they’d taken out the guns they’d just— shit .”
    â€œWhat?”
    Insulative mud, judiciously applied to reshape the thermal profile. No hardware, no alloys or synthetics to give the game away. Interlocked