Chapter 2089: Reading the Storm

The voices came through broken and overlapping, interrupted constantly by the storm and whatever interference frequency the enemies were running, and Ning could tell almost at once that the messages were arriving with a noticeable delay.

By the time an allied unit’s report reached him, whatever it was describing had already changed.

In the observation gallery above the chamber, the display showed the same churning wall of white.

Several cadets groaned at once.

"A blizzard," one of the cadets from Hale’s academy said, almost sounding sympathetic. "That’s brutal."

"Worse than the desert," Tobin said, leaning forward against the railing with a grim expression. "At least in the desert, you can see. In a blizzard, you can’t see anything at all. You don’t know where the enemy is, you don’t know where your allies are, and half the time you can’t even tell which way you’re facing."

Elena nodded slowly beside him. "I heard a pilot from the hub tried it once on requalification. She lasted less than three minutes."

Hale, leaning against the railing a short distance away, smiled faintly.

"Well," he said, to no one in particular. "That’s unlucky for him."

Inside the pod, Ning did not panic.

He did not need to see.

Instead of pushing forward into the storm the way most pilots would have, desperate to find something they could actually look at, Ning slowed down. He brought the Mecha to a careful halt, steadying its stance against the wind, and for several long seconds, he did almost nothing at all.

He listened, and he watched.

He knew that he could not perceive anything inside the simulation the way he could perceive the real world.

The battlefield around him was nothing but data, generated moment by moment by the machinery around the pod, and there was no true energy for him to sense out there in the storm.

And even if there had been a way to cheat, he would not have taken it. That would have ruined the fun.

But he did not need to cheat. The battlefield was telling him a great deal, if he paid attention.

He watched the weapon fire first. Even through the storm, the brightest bolts left faint smears of light across the whiteness, and from the angle and color of each one, he could tell the direction it had come from and roughly how far it had traveled.

Human weapons and Mekharan weapons did not glow quite the same way, and once he had noticed the difference, he could separate the two.

Then he listened to the allied reports.

The messages arrived late and broken, but late was not the same as useless. If he knew how long the delay was, then he knew how old every message was by the time it reached him.

And if he knew how old a report was, and what it said, and how the battle had moved since then, he could work out where that allied unit was now, rather than where it had been.

He began to listen for the delay. After the third report, he had it worked out, and after the fifth, he was certain.

Then there was the wind.

It roared constantly, but not uniformly. It carried the sounds of the battle toward him from some directions and swallowed them from others, and the deep thud of an explosion reached him slightly differently depending on whether the wind was carrying it toward him or away.

Once he knew which way the wind was blowing, he could use those differences to judge distance and direction.

And finally, there was the snow itself.

The storm was not perfectly even. Where large machines moved through it, the snow swirled and eddied in their wake, and where something stood still for long enough, the snow began to pile against it on the windward side.

Most of it was too faint for anyone to notice, buried beneath the endless white, but if he looked carefully at the patterns, he could see the places where the storm was being disturbed by something large moving within it.

He gathered all of it together, every faint smear of weapon fire, every delayed report, every shift in the wind and disturbance in the snow, and slowly, piece by piece, a picture of the battlefield began to form in his mind.

He placed an allied unit to the northeast, holding a position behind what was probably a ridge, and a second one further east, moving slowly southward.

He placed a cluster of Mekharans somewhere to the north, firing toward the allied position, and a smaller group to the west, moving quietly through the storm.

There was something large and stationary to the south, perhaps a wrecked vessel or a damaged Mecha, and the wind howled differently around it.

He was not certain of everything. There were gaps, and places where the picture was blurry. But within a minute of the simulation beginning, Ning knew roughly where nearly everything around him was.

And one thing in particular had caught his attention.

A Mekharan was standing alone to his west, some distance from the others, almost directly in his blind spot. The storm hid it completely from his sensors, and he could not see it at all. But the snow had been piling against something on the western side for several seconds now, and the wind was swirling in a way that only something tall and solid could have caused.

Every few seconds, a faint smear of Mekharan weapon fire came from that direction, aimed at an allied unit further north.

It was standing still and firing. It did not know he was there.

Ning turned the Mecha slowly to the west, raised its weapon arm, and aimed into the empty, howling whiteness.

In the observation gallery, several of the cadets frowned.

"What’s he doing?"

"He’s aiming at nothing."

"Is he even facing the right way?"

Hale let out a short laugh. "He’s panicking. He doesn’t know where anything is, so he’s just picking a direction and hoping."

Ning fired once.

The bolt vanished into the storm.