by J. L. Curtis
Diez ran an override code, repowered the armor, and commanded autonomous recovery mode. The code sent the armor climbing toward the upper end of the ravine enroute to the drop shuttle. The three of them, now in skinsuits and masks headed in the opposite direction going down the ravine as it shallowed out. Fargo remembered looking up at the twin red suns, and being thankful the temps were manageable by the skinsuit, and the air was marginally breathable as they moved quickly to put distance between themselves and their armor.
Fargo missed the armament, including the heavy pulse rifle, but his implicit trust in Diez and his intel expertise overrode the desire to keep it. At least he had his 6mm bead pistol and 16mm bead rifle that he’d recovered from the suit’s locker, as did Diez. DenAfr, due to its size, was able to detach the 20mm pulse rifle from its armor, and carried the one hundred pound rifle with ease in the pseudopods it had extruded. The other thing Fargo carried was a bandoleer with the two recovery cans containing the remains of Pop and Hardt.
They’d made it about 10 klicks down the brush-choked ravine when DenAfr rounded a blind corner, and ran head on into four Traders. It shot two and bludgeoned one, but wasn’t fast enough to get the fourth one. Neither Fargo nor Diez had a shot until they’d cleared DenAfr’s bulk, but by then it was too late.
That they had killed the last of the four Traders wasn’t much comfort, as the loss of DenAfr meant they were really in the hurt locker. Without DenAfr, they would have no warning if the Traders decided to throw a Biowep at them. Fargo remembered checking the telltale on their skinsuit, confirming it was red, then keying the suit and turning away as it burned down into a can. Surprising Fargo, it was exactly the same size as the cans for Pop and Hardt. He added it to the 40mm bandoleer he’d grabbed out of his armor. He ran his thumb over the tabs on the ends of the can and watched as each lit with the GalScout personnel code for the individual’s remains.
He and Diez had made it another seven, maybe eight klicks, circling back toward their camp through the waist high bluish colored brush toward the drop shuttle homing beacon before they’d been caught in the open by another group of Traders in light armor coming over a distant ridge line. They took cover in a wallow about fifteen feet across, six feet deep at the edge, ten or more feet deep in the middle, muddy and filled with what looked like bone fragments. It stank with a rank scent he could smell even through the filters and Fargo saw what looked like deep claw marks in the sides. Thankfully it was empty and deep enough to protect them from direct fire, but it was also hard to target the Traders without their armor. Instead they had to physically climb up to the top of the wallow using the claw marks like steps, shoot and slide back down before the incoming fire took their heads off.
Diez had psi-linked with Fargo and confirmed he’d triggered the emergency beacon before they evacuated the camp and he’d also sent out a blind broadcast while they were on the run, hoping there was some friendly ship that might hear it.
Fargo had thought, Well, that’ll be a fat chance in hell, the scout ship isn’t due back for another ten day, and we’re so damn far out in the boonies I doubt there is anybody else in this star system.
Fargo knew he was at the end of his rope physically, but noted that even though Diez was as tired as he was, there wasn’t any indication of that in the telepathic link, which earned a chuckle from Diez. “See, as long as I’m breathing, telepathy works. I stop breathing, it doesn’t work. File that one away Fargo.”
Fargo thought back, “Yeah, breathing is good. Getting out of here is going to be a problem.”
Diez crept up to the lip of the wallow, fired and slid back down to the bottom projecting, “Well, I think we’ve cut them down a few. I see three out there and I think I got a hit on one of them. The most you sensed was nine, right?”
Fargo thought back, “I screwed up, I wasn’t open enough. I was trying to sense if there were any animals, and I was blocking higher order in our band. But yeah, nine. And something else, probably a Dragoon. At least that’s all I could sense on the higher levels when I opened up.”
Fargo climbed up to the lip, stuck his head up slowly, and surveyed the plain to the east of their camp and the drop shuttle. Looking slowly and opening his mind to any empathic sources again, he was jarred to feel someone behind him with a sense of gloating. As he started to turn, Diez had both projected and screamed, “Opposite lip! Drop!”
Cursing himself, Fargo was half way through turning loose of the edge and sliding down, but couldn’t disengage his feet in time. He felt a blow to his leg as he dropped back to the bottom of the wallow, firing on the way down. Diez had fired on full pulse at the one weak point they knew on the Trader’s light armor, the connection plate between the body and helmet. From an upward angle it was actually fairly easy to kill them if you put enough beads on the seam. Diez was in the process of reloading when two more heads popped over the edge of the wallow. Fargo yelled at Diez as he fired at the one he thought was aiming into the wallow and took him out, but the second shot down into Diez before Fargo could shift his aim.
Diez reared up, screamed both verbally and telepathically as he was hit across the chest and hips, but fired on pulse again and chewed up the side of the wallow, then the lip, and finally the second Trader as Fargo also fired. Fargo felt a blow on his left arm, and lost his rifle. He watched in horror as the arm and rifle cartwheeled away from him; then the pain hit.
Fargo looked down and realized most of his left arm was gone, just as the pharmacope hit him with another dose of pain killers. Fargo’s mind was a little fuzzy, but he realized he’d already had one dose, and wondered why. He started to get up to go to Diez, but fell over. Rolling over, he looked down and saw that his right leg ended at the knee. Oh, that’s where the other dose came from, damn good thing these skins have smart tech built in, he thought.
Diez had slumped to his knees, and his pain came hammering through the link hitting Fargo until his pharmacope dumped pain killers into him as well. Crawling over, Fargo managed to get to Diez, and propped himself against the side of the wallow as he pulled Diez across his lap. Panting, Diez thought, “Damn, this shit is not good! Well, hate to say this Fargo, but I think they stuck a fork in us.”
Fargo thought back, “Stuck a fork in us?”
Diez coughed and pulled his breathing mask to the side, spat a mouthful of bright red blood, then left his mask hanging. “Old Earth term. We’re done Fargo. Well done. It’s been a good twenty-five years. Had more fun than the law allowed. Got to see more shit than I ever thought I would. Proud to serve with you. Couldn’t ask for…”
Fargo said, “Diez, you gotta hang on man. You can’t leave me now. Your pharmacope is as good as mine and mine’s keeping my ass alive. Diez. Diez!” Fargo leaned over and looked Diez in the eyes, then saw more blood dribble from his mouth.
Diez seemed to focus on Fargo, a half smile forming on his lips and one last thought came across the link. “Fargo, you’ll never believe what you missed.” Diez shook his head, almost in sadness and continued, “You’ll never believe…”
Fargo screamed as he felt Diez die, and thought his head was going to explode. He blacked out briefly, then slowly came back around, staring up at the yellow-green sky. Something was wrong with his head, it was like he had double vision, except that it was in his mind. He slowly reached down and checked Diez’s telltale. It was blood red.
Sliding Diez off his lap, he keyed the destruct code and rolled away as Diez was consumed inside the suit and it shrunk into another can. He picked it up and placed it in the bandoleer with the other four, running his thumb across the tops of each can and getting the ID codes for the remains encased in the can. Pulling his bead pistol, Fargo leaned back against the side of the wallow awaiting the inevitable on planet X423W as he dictated an updated status to his skin suit’s memory.
After a couple of minutes, Fargo decided to climb to the lip of the wallow and get it over with, rather than sitting in the bottom of a hole waiting to die. He was a former Ter
ran Marine dammit, and Marines go out on their feet, not on their asses. Holstering his pistol, he started slowly scrabbling up the side of the wallow, every bump of his leg or arm sending shooting pain throughout his body. Rather than give in to the pain, it pissed him off even more and he redoubled his efforts. After what seemed like an eternity, he made it all the way to the lip of the wallow, and rolled slowly over.
As he lay there, he wondered if anyone would ever find them, or even care if they did. He wasn’t much of a praying man, but he said a prayer for his team members, and hoped there was an afterlife so he’d see Cindy and Ike one more time. Levering himself up on the body of the Trader he’d shot, he looked across the flat, sensing, and then seeing two more Traders accompanied by one Dragoon coming out of the forest in armor.
His thoughts turned to the last stanza of Fiddler’s Green he’d learned in The Basic School on Earth.
And so when man and horse go down
Beneath a saber keen,
Or in a roaring charge of fierce melee
You stop a bullet clean,
And the hostiles come to get your scalp,
Just empty your canteen,
And put your pistol to your head
And go to Fiddlers' Green..
He checked his pistol, settled down behind the Trader’s armored body and waited for them to get in range. Then the world turned black.
Alive
Fargo was in and out of consciousness as his body slowly healed; memories and reality seemed to be one and the same, at times. He wasn’t sure if he was alive or dead. If these visions were dreams or was his life passing slowly in front of his eyes.
The original planning for what was Planet Z43F5 consisted of reviews of the first contact team’s probes. The fact that there appeared to be some structures, possibly ancient terraformers, and other objects grouped near them had been an exciting twist for Fargo and his team, especially since the world had been classified as a T-1, B which was about as close to Earth as one got. They’d never drawn one of the ‘lost’ worlds, and the probes showed good O2 saturation, breathable air and the presence of water, but there was no sign of higher level intelligent life or sentient beings.
Fargo and his team had planeted near one of the terraformer structures in the southern temperate zone and found a rudimentary landing pad, around a thousand empty containers, and the remains of what might have been a small shuttle, but per SOP they’d stayed in their armor for the initial sweeps, and didn’t investigate it any further as the whole area was overgrown and slowly deteriorating in the moist, tropical conditions.
Fargo’s thoughts were interrupted by a strange conversation that seemed to be taking place in his mind. He didn’t know who it was, but they were discussing his body for some reason. Fargo wanted to remember to tell them that whatever they were using tickled, but he dropped back into unconsciousness.
Sometime later, Fargo’s thoughts segued back to what he now knew as Hunter’s world, but how did he know that? Why did he think of it as home? He had a mental image of shaking his head, and another memory drifted to the surface. At the fourth and last planeting on Z43F5, they’d discovered a more complete landing pad and another thousand containers, with one major difference. Two of the containers had been opened, set up, powered up and lived in for an extended period of time. And the containers were still connected to the terraformer’s power, so the sonics field around them was intact.
It was a basic Hab unit and inside they’d discovered a written log and other documents.
According to the documents, the SierraSafari Club had the rights to Z43F5 in the first great colonization expansion from Earth in 2250, and had dedicated the world to a hunt preserve. They had put down terraformers to complete the transition to mimic global areas based on their historic documents and had started shipping first-landing equipment and a few hundred set up personnel, along with arks of flora and fauna, and apparently even arachnids, insects, and worms from Earth just before the great war.
Apparently there had been a total of four terraformers, offset ninety degrees from each other, two in the southern hemisphere, and two in the northern hemisphere. Diez had recognized them as being an old de Perez design, and joked they were guaranteed for a thousand years.
Fargo’s thoughts were again interrupted by an overwhelming need to scratch his arm and his leg, and he ‘heard’ voices in his head much more plainly, “Look at the spike in Neuro. I believe he’s itching like seven hells of a Dragoon’s lair. That tells me the nerve and bio interfaces in his arm and leg are starting to connect.”
A second disembodied voice said, “We agree. We will increase the pain blocker to eight milligrams per milliliter. That should be sufficient.”
Moments later Fargo felt something like a cool breeze and the need to scratch stopped. As he puzzled over that, he once again dropped into unconsciousness, catching one last comment from the disembodied voice, “We wonder if Fargo is truly under. His brain and lace activity are higher than they should be in the tank. We must ponder on this. This is not possible.”
MKwerts! a Kepleran and also named Pop, pointed to the cranial scan, “OneSvel, look at this, his neural lace is not a standard GalScout lace. He’s got extra chips in the frontal, parietal, all of his nodes and the neocortex!”
“We missed that.” OneSvel dug back through Fargo’s medical records, finally finding a cranial scan from his induction physical thirty years earlier. Putting the holograms up simultaneously, they slowly overlaid them. “This is unusual. We must research this. He apparently had a…”
OneSvel waved another terminal to life and accessed Fargo’s personnel record after the system verified his need to know. “Ah, Marine. He has what I believe is an independent command lace.”
Pop asked, “Marine? Independent command lace?”
OneSvel brought up another hologram, merging it slowly with the other two. It overlaid almost perfectly. “See how they overlay? Need to know information here, Fargo was a Terran Marine prior to GalScouts; we are not supposed to know that. They insert command modules into officers that will have any kind of combat commands. But the Marines should have nulled those modules when he left. Based on what we are seeing, I believe they are active. That would explain his heightened activity and resistance… no, never mind.”
Pop shrugged, “Do we need to remove them? I can set up the autosurg to do that in about ten minutes.”
“No! They have an autodestruct program. Any attempt to remove them will cause them to self-destruct and kill Fargo.” OneSvel muttered to itself, Marines, Terran Marines… What were they known for? Ah, recovery of their own. They even recovered their dead. One wonders if that caused Fargo’s problem on the ship. OneSvel filed that thought away for later contemplation, but didn’t make any official entries in Fargo’s medical record.
***
Fargo surfaced once again, this time the memories were much older. Home leave, walking hand in hand with Cindy along a tree shaded path on the front range of the Rockies, smelling the freshness of pines and clean air. A freshly minted second lieutenant in the Terran Marines, he remembered his pride in finishing The Basic School at the top of the class. Proposing marriage, and their agreement to get married as soon as he’d finished space training on Luna.
***
Fargo walked from the meadow into the nearpine forest, and stared up at the old growth in amazement. There were few limbs below thirty feet, and the pine straw was like walking on a mattress. He inhaled the scent of the pines as he listened to the roar of the waterfall a hundred meters away. I could live here. Reminds me a lot of home, but there’s nothing there for me now, and I’ll never get back there any time soon, anyway.
He continued through the forest to the waterfall, noting the location of the creek bed and how it ran in almost a perfect perpendicular to the bench, then fell in another waterfall into the canyon below. Pacing beside the creek bed, his Marine background kicked in and he noted the gradual slope for about seventy yards, then a fla
ttening for another hundred yards before the bench ended. The sight lines were excellent in the meadow, and the bench extended another three hundred yards to the west, which meant lots of evening light from the sun. He marked the location on his datacomp without conscious thought. Yeah, I could definitely live here. Prefab cabin, plenty of water, thirty-fifty div flight to the strip. Shit, I must be dreaming.
He could see DenAfr trudging back up the slight slope to the shuttle and he picked up his pace, extending his senses. Other than some low level awareness, he picked up nothing else, and nothing threatening. They met at the ramp and DenAfr said, “We found what appears to be an excellent concentration of ore, and hard rock structures. These trees appear to be another overseed of an Earth variant-”
Fargo interrupted, “Long leaf pine. It is what is called old growth on Earth. I think this is probably like what we’ve seen at the other sites and matches what was in that log.”
DenAfr inclined the pseudopod carrying the recorder, “We agree. Very little of the original vegetation here seems to have been of anything other than bush size. I have found nothing to indicate larger cover. Examination of mulch shows that, prior to the terraformers, there does appear to have been a stable atmosphere, but containing less oxygen than now, and a much higher concentration of argon. We are concerned however, about what is knocking out the flyers. We are down to only thirty left.”
Fargo shrugged, “I’m guessing some native airborne species that we haven’t seen. Maybe like that fuzzy thing we saw from the shuttle last ten day. We lift in two days to meet the ship, and frankly, getting back with any of them is good.”
***
Fargo realized he was awake, and sniffed the air softly. Hospital smell, now the question is where. Subtly testing his muscles, he realized he was strapped down. And he was itching. Both his left arm and right leg were itching like hell. Must be in the tank again. Yeah, I remember losing the arm, and I guess I lost the leg too. Letting his empathic sense expand, he didn’t sense anyone or anything close, but his mind was hearing a babble of thoughts, emotions, something.