But now that they got their orders, nobody wanted to go. Everyone felt an overwhelming sense of foreboding and danger. Even Jackie was missing his customary grin as they marched toward the armory. Connor didn’t know if the feeling of doom came from the thought of potentially facing the Ka’Rathi, or the thought that Rhondak’s murderous plan may finally be set in motion.
Chapter 25:
Unlike the other shuttles Connor had ridden in, this shuttle was a military troop carrier. It had two long rows of seats, one against the left wall, and the other against the right. Each side had a doorway on both ends that allowed for troop deployment from two points on both sides of the transport. Tiny oval windows spotted its armored walls.
Connor sat in the center seat of the shuttle’s left row, his weapon between his knees and resting on its foldable stock. It was a Galil. Connor didn’t know what that meant exactly, whether that was the make or model. Or maybe just some form of military slang. He’d heard a lot of that slang ever since he first met his CPF friends. The armory’s quartermaster had just said ‘Galil’ as he handed Connor that rifle. It looked like some sort of mutant offspring from the AK-47.
He looked at his friends seated in random spots around the cabin. Not that he could tell who was who. Everyone wore CPF arctic gear that covered them head to toe in white uniforms and carried Galils. Their helmets had masks to protect faces from the killing cold. The uniforms had Velcro patches on the chest for rank and names, but they weren’t issued any such tags. Other than Rana’s sergeant stripes all their Velcro patches were empty.
Rana and Charisma could be distinguished by their height. Both were visibly shorter than Jackie and Akshay. But if it wasn’t for Rana’s stripes of rank, he wouldn’t have been able to tell one woman from the other. Even Charisma’s ample breasts were hidden under the thick arctic uniforms and armored vest.
The two other men were also nearly indistinguishable in those all-encompassing uniforms. Except for their unique weapons. Aside from his Galil, Jackie had an almost man-sized sniper rifle strapped to his back. Akshay left the combat knife behind in favor of his huge kukri. Both weapons were about as subtle as a meteor strike.
Jackie’s constant chattering came through the intercom inside Connors’ helmet. In spite of his seeming lack of interest at the idea of leaving the compound earlier, he’d returned to his usual jovial self. Right now, he was sharing a rather bawdy story about a pair of sisters he met on Sanctuary. At random intervals in the story he’d stop and turn to Akshay and ask for his agreement for a certain important part of the story. If he was lucky he got a shrug. Most of the time, he didn’t get any response at all.
One of Connor’s favorite laughs accompanied Jackie’s voice through the intercom at all the right spots of his story. Connor turned his head and looked out the tiny window next to him at the fighter flying escort. Tejeda chattered in return from her position as pilot of that fighter, asking for details at this or that point in his story. She was especially interested in the two women and the lewd acts they enjoyed. The woman was as much a perv as Jackie.
“Two minutes!” came Ensign Baker’s call from the intercom. Their pilot was in her forward compartment, a cockpit separated by locked door from the cabin where the grunts waited to deploy. She’d remained quiet other than to inform them of take-off and now the drop. Ensign Baker made Connor’s skin crawl. There was nothing he could really put his finger on. Just something about her look when she gazed at them as they boarded the transport.
“Proceed to recon, Viper One,” continued Ensign Baker over the com.
“Roger, Limo,” returned Tejeda’s voice. “Good luck kids. Viper One out.” Connor saw the shadow of Tejeda’s Viper class fighter on the snowy forest below race out of sight.
“Limo?” Jackie asked the group.
“Must mean our luxurious accommodations,” Connor shot back. A round of chuckles greeted him. Connor smiled even bigger. Before sharing his televids, he’d have had to go into a lot more detail in the explanation of a limo.
Two men in Fleet arctic uniforms, stood from their positions near the two forward doors. Each doorway was equipped with a heavy machinegun mount that could swivel out of the way of oncoming or off going troops. The two were strapped onto those wicked looking machine guns that operated on mechanical jointed arms. Each massive weapon was capable of spitting 5000 rounds per minute. When combined with the turret beneath the cockpit operated by a copilot, the transports also made extremely effective gunships.
Captain Durand assigned a minimal crew, just the pilot and two gunners. Like Ensign Baker, neither man spoke during the flight. The door gunners pressed a panel on the transport walls. All four doors opened, the five-foot holes on both sides of the transport giving access to the frigid air. Even with their cold-weather gear, arctic wind cut into the group like swords.
Time slowed to an agonizing crawl as Connor waited for the drop. He could see some of the terrain out the door as it raced below. Snow covered trees formed a softly textured surface, like cotton batting laid out on a floor. It was a frozen forest that stretched as far as the eye could see. Paradise perfectly preserved in ice.
The meteor that struck Zlotoff IV hit the main atmospheric terraforming plant. Without its considerable influence, the remaining terraforming substations couldn’t cope with the thousands of tons of particulate launched into the atmosphere. In just a few weeks, the entire planet’s surface was frozen.
Soon, the landscape changed. Connor could see they were speeding toward a frozen lake in the distance. Or what Connor assumed was a lake. It was the only open area he could see from his window.
“One minute!” Ensign Baker called again through the com system. The group stood, Jackie and the two women to the left and Connor and Akshay to the right.
The last minute felt more like ten or even twelve. When the transport began its deceleration each member of the group grabbed straps that hung from the ceiling. The door-gunners barely moved thanks to the mechanical arms that held both them and their weapons in place.
Connor stood at the open door as the transport came to a complete stop. Akshay stood behind him as still as the dead. The man looked like a marble statue in his arctic gear. Their transport still seemed impossibly high when he heard the call.
“GO!” Baker’s voice cut through Connor’s mind as easily as the cold did his body. He hesitated for just a moment before leaping. Training kicking in as he hit the ice, his legs absorbed the impact with a roll and he was on his feet a second later.
Charisma and Rana were, also, both on their feet instantly. Akshay was less graceful, crumpling into the frozen surface, but was up relatively quickly. Last out of the transport, Jackie crashed onto the ice. He screamed and grabbed his ankle in one hand the other squeezing the grip of his Galil in agony.
A quick look around told Connor that the nearest edge of the frozen forest was almost a mile away. His training might have been meager compared to career military, but even he knew that no transport pilot would put their people down that far from cover. His stomach was already sinking as his eyes rose to the transport.
The sound wasn’t as much as a series of gunshots as it was one long concussive scream as the two door-gunners opened fire on the group. Again, Connor hesitated, incomprehension paralyzing his mind. Constant flame erupted from the barrel of the heavy machinegun as it tracked toward Connor. A sudden yank from Akshay was the only thing that saved his life. The pair fell flat into the snow as a stream of steel encased bullets shredded the ice behind them.
“Scatter!” Rana’s scream was almost drowned out by weapons fire.
Responding gunfire erupted from the other side of the transport. Rana fired short controlled bursts at the door gunner as she raced in a random direction away from the group. Charisma was helping the limping Jackie along as he fired his weapon back toward the door gunner, hoping the spray of lead would distract the man. Both Connor and Akshay sprayed bullets toward the gunner shooting at them as they rushed in
opposite directions.
The door gunner on the left side of the ship was the first to fall, a masterful shot from Rana’s weapon taking out his throat. He clung to his destroyed throat as blood sprayed through his fingers. Those drops of blood bounced off the metal floor of the transport, frozen just a few inches outside his body. Moments later, he hung lifeless from the machinegun’s mechanical arm.
The gunner on the other side of the ship found better luck. Akshay’s much larger form offered a far more tempting target than Connor. As fast as Akshay was, he wasn’t faster than the door gunner’s reflexes. His dive saved his life, but only barely. Steel covered rounds raced up the ice sending out shards that punched through his leg. His agonized scream echoed through all their helmets.
Connor knelt as the man tracked Akshay. He raised his weapon to his shoulder, finding his target before the man could swing his weapon back to the prone Indian. He fired a burst of three rounds into the gunner’s chest, hope bursting in his own. The man barely moved. His body armor was too thick.
Connor’s heart stopped as the man swung his heavy machinegun in his direction. Flame from the gunner’s barrel spit at him, and he rolled just under the salvo of armor-piercing rounds. He looked up at the door gunner, bullets from the man’s huge machinegun already chewing into the ice a few feet away and closing fast.
A distinct boom ripped through the air around them like a shockwave. A cloud of snow fell around Jackie, kicked up by the concussive force of his sniper rifle. The transport suddenly bucked, then dropped sharply. The door gunner’s barrel pointed wildly as the transport nosed toward the frozen lake, twisting as it descended. Connor caught a glimpse of Ensign Baker’s headless corpse in the cockpit just before the transport slammed into the ice.
As thick as the ice was, it couldn’t survive the impact of almost seventy tons of transport. When the drop ship slammed into the frozen lake, the ice gave an ear shattering crack and mist sprayed into the air around it. The door gunner was working desperately at the buckles holding him to the ship as the great mechanical beast began to slip into the frigid black abyss below the ice.
Great sheets of ice rose up all around the transport as it sank into the icy depths, heaving the entire group into the air. Connor felt the free, wild sensation of flight as the chunk of ice he was on flung him away. For a few seconds, it felt as though he hovered like a bird. But all too quickly, he started falling toward that unforgiving surface. He never felt the collision, only experiencing a sudden blackness on impact.
Connor knew he wasn’t out for long when his eyes opened to see what was left of the transport just sinking below the water. Jackie was still laying where he’d shot Ensign Baker, looking around at the group. Charisma was shaking her head at the opposite side of the ice-hole, blood trickling from a gash on her forehead. Her helmet lay just a few feet away. Akshay was forty feet in the air on an almost standing sheet of ice, held upright by the transports sinking frame. He clung to his kukri, its blade buried in the frozen sheet like an ice climber. When the transport sank low enough, the ice sheet dropped at such speed that Akshay was propelled forward as though shot out of a cannon. He came to rest 100 meters from the ice-hole, his kukri several feet away. But there was a disturbing absence from the group.
“Where’s Rana?” Connor shouted into his helmet radio, looking around. “Where the fuck is Rana?!”
No answer returned to him as he struggled to his feet. She was nowhere to be seen. Connor’s legs were shaking as he got up, eyes furiously searching the pure white expanse for any sign of his friend. Perhaps she was hidden in the snow. Her white uniform was designed to blend in with the snow.
But Connor was sure there was no way he could overlook her. The snow too pure, the ice too flat. Her uniform wasn’t pure white, it had gray patches as camouflage. And humans aren’t flat. They have curves, lines, joints, and equipment. She wasn’t anywhere around. At least, not on the surface.
He stumbled to the edge of the shattered ice, scanning for some sign of Rana. Jackie limped about on the other side doing the same. Nothing. Rana had disappeared.
They couldn’t get too close to the actual watery center of the ice hole. Many of the loose ice sheets were too small to support them. The ice would roll under anyone who tried to climb on and they’d end up in a watery grave. Just like Rana.
Charisma only glanced at the ice hole as she worked on Akshay, doing her best to stem his bleeding with her limited medical equipment. Both Connor and Jackie stood helplessly, as close to the water as possible and searching its black depths. With the exception of Akshay’s pained growls and Charisma’s maternal cooing, a deathly stillness settled over the area. Even the twenty-foot-wide patch of dark water had an unnatural calm.
Hope was dying, ripping a gaping hole into his center, when a hand suddenly exploded out of the water. Rana’s slim form clawed at the shifting ice. But each handhold just rolled the small ice sheets as she grabbed at their edges. She was barely keeping her hands above water. Her helmeted head was all but invisible in the water’s murk.
Connor dove toward those hands, hands that were obviously slowing.
“Connor, no!” came Charisma’s shout from where she worked on Akshay’s leg.
Too late. Each limb spread out to distribute Connor’s weight over as much of the unstable ice as possible. His right hand shot out and grasped Rana’s wrist. For a moment everything was steady. Exalted stability.
Then the moment was gone as ice shifted beneath him. It was parting to draw him head-first into the same dark abyss that was trying to swallow Rana. Her weight was dragging them both down.
Even with his protective clothing the temperature in that lake was crippling. It more than stopped his breathing, the chill tore his breath away. Cold made death’s black hand squeeze his chest even tighter than drowning alone.
The chill was stabbing at him. The water was smothering him. His lungs were burning. Connor could feel his body sliding ever so slowly deeper into the abyss. Already it had consumed most of his chest. Rana’s weight was pulling him in and his legs just didn’t have the weight to balance them both.
But he couldn’t let go of Rana. It didn’t matter Rana’s weight was about to drag him into oblivion with her. It was all or nothing. Either she lived or they both died. He couldn’t live with the thought that he’d let her go. Both hands were now wrapped around Rana’s cold wrist.
Connor had almost accepted his death when a heavy weight fell upon his legs. Strong hands pulled him slowly toward safety. Seconds later, light exploded through his visor as Jackie pulled him out of the dark, freezing water. Soon he lay on the ice with Rana in his arms, both their helmets off and coughing.
“Shit, I hate the c-c-c-cold!” Rana sputtered through clenched teeth.
“Starting to agree with you,” Connor said as he helped her to her feet. Normally he loved the cold, but this planet was too much even for him.
“We have to get them warm.” Jackie said as Akshay limped to the group leaning heavily on Charisma. “A fire or something.”
“In this temperature, a fire won’t do it,” Charisma said. “We need insulated cover.”
“It’s t-t-too far back to b-b-base.” Rana chattered.
“She’s right,” Charisma said. “We’d all freeze by nightfall. And those uniforms only work so well when wet. I figure they have less than an hour before hypothermia. Maybe less.”
“We can’t go back and we can’t go forward,” Akshay said. “What do we do?”
“I’ve been studying the map Krieger sent with us,” Charisma said. “There’s an old terraforming bunker at the southeast shore of this lake that’s not on any map I’ve seen in the compound. If we can get there, hopefully Durand will have no idea where we are.” As one, the group looked to the south east, frozen trees poking out of the horizon.
“That’s a long way off,” Akshay said. He’d limped away from Charisma to lean on Jackie’s shoulder. “You three had better be off.”
“Us thr
ee…” Charisma started to say.
“…need to be off since they’ll freeze if you don’t move fast,” Akshay interrupted motioning at Connor and Rana. “And once there they’ll need your help. Thanks to your medical skills my bleeding’s stopped, but I won’t be able to keep up. Neither will Jackie with his ankle. We’ll need each other’s help along the way.”
“But if you get lost…” Charisma let the thought hang. Jackie picked it right up.
“Then it’ll be because you got lost,” he said with his easy smile. “We’ll follow your tracks.” Jackie waved toward their footsteps in the snow.
Rana looked to the south east. “Looks about t-t-twelve klicks. C-c-can you make that before dark?”
The two men looked at each other as though she just asked them if they could finish a shot of liquor. Their responses came in unison.
“Easily!”
“Of course!”
Connor took one last look at the pair of men as he, Charisma, and Rana started off at a slow run. Jackie reached into his coat and pulled a flask out. The two men were moving at Akshay’s fastest pace as they drank and laughed. They seemed more out on a pub-crawl rather than racing the sun for their lives.
Chapter 26:
Connor’s mind was still swaddled in sleep’s sweet embrace when reality began to slink its way in. He fought it of course. The sensation of a truly comfortable sleep, achieving unparalleled relaxation, had become so foreign lately. As had the sensation of the soft, warm body pressed against his chest his befuddled mind was slowly starting to sense.
His euphoric realm of sleep hovered at an in-between world that held only enough consciousness for his mind to register the soft curves and silken skin of a woman in his arms. Images of Charisma awoke deep feelings and even deeper sensations as Connor did his best to snuggle even closer to the naked woman.
Her hair was intoxicating. Connor took a deep breath to draw the smell of that hair into the most sensual depths of his core. Something deep inside him recognized the bouquet of sweat and oils in her hair seemed just slightly different than they should be. But sleep was too comfortable and her body too irresistible for uncertainty.
Echoes of Avarice Page 23