by C. Gockel
Without the tree canopy for protection, the base was hot and getting hotter as the sun rose higher in the sky. He was sweating rivers. His beamer wasn’t recharging itself anymore. He hadn’t heard or seen Mairwen in the last ten minutes, and he couldn’t keep the worry from intruding, no matter how much he tried to subdue it.
He almost had coronary arrest when someone slid down beside him in the dirt.
“It’s me,” said Jerzi, only just avoiding Luka’s elbow to the face.
“Have you seen Mairwen?” Luka asked.
Just as Jerzi was shaking his head, he heard Mairwen’s voice through the earwire. “I lost my first wire. I’m fine.”
“How bad?” he subvocalized. Jerzi’s puzzled look said he wasn’t aware of Mairwen’s overly broad definition of the word “fine.”
There was a moment of silence. “A scrape or two,” came the answer. “You?”
“Functional,” he replied, ignoring the blood oozing from a large, long scrape on his right thigh. It had soaked his pant leg and seeped through the armor. He looked at Jerzi, who looked uninjured but was covered in dust and dirt. “Jerzi, why are you here?”
“For you,” Jerzi said, giving him a hand-beamer. He subvocalized so the team could hear. “I’m extracting Luka. Eve will keep them busy while we fall back to the shrubs where they can’t see.”
Mairwen gave more precise orders. “Skirt around toward the ship. Adams, set up to take anyone coming out of the building or going to the ship. Haberville, get as close to the ship as you can so we can get in fast. Luka, on my mark, slag the second shipkiller, the one closer to the flitter.”
“Will a beamer to the compulsator be good enough?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Under the cover of a flurry of weapons fire, Luka followed Jerzi as he slithered backward, aiming the hand-beamer at the window where a merc could have line of site. The window was empty.
He and Jerzi slid into the undergrowth. Somewhere along the way, Jerzi had abandoned his homemade sniper’s cloak. Luka felt vulnerable as they moved, knowing the mercs had more than enough firepower to kill them. They stopped long enough for Jerzi to retrieve his railgun and ammo bag, then worked their way toward the ship.
As they traveled, Luka made it a point to confiscate several unsafetied weapons from fallen mercs. He didn’t want to be caught without a working weapon again. He thought he saw Eve moving on the other side of the ship, but he couldn’t be sure. Jerzi found a spot he liked and waved Luka on.
Luka crept carefully toward the end of the building where the big shipkillers were. When he had a good view of the guns, the closest one looking distinctly charred, he focused on the high bay doorway and the storeroom beyond. He thought he saw at least one merc in blue behind some stacked crates, and he knew there had to be more. He was a fast runner, but not faster than weapons could shoot. Even if his armor prevented major damage, the impact of a projectile would still knock him sideways.
Jerzi’s voice came quietly in his ear. “I’ve got a clear vector on one target, north corner, second window in. Should I take the shot?”
“Not yet,” Mairwen’s voice said. “You’d have to move too soon.”
“Copy,” said Jerzi. He sounded marvelously calm.
Luka wished he could say the same. Waiting was almost more difficult than running for his life while dodging beams and bullets. His adrenalin pumped in fits and starts, and his stomach was in knots. He was heartily glad that he’d stayed in the civilian side of law enforcement and the military, because he’d have hated to do this for a living.
After what felt like hours but was probably only minutes, Mairwen’s voice came over the wire.
“Explosion coming in five seconds. Jerzi, take your shot if available. Luka, wait until I say ‘go.’ Haberville, get in the ship if you can, but don’t get hurt. We need you.”
“Copy,” said Jerzi and Eve, at the same time Luka said “Okay.”
A second later, Luka heard the high-pitched whine of a projectile and shattering glass. He doubted the unlucky merc’s body even had a chance to fall before a huge fireball of an ear-ringing boom shattered the silence. The northeast end of the building erupted in flames.
Inside the storage area, he saw a flash of movement as someone in blue ran toward the explosion. A high-pitched whine and a collapsing body said Jerzi had seen the runner, too. Another merc hulked out of the shadows holding a larger weapon, aiming toward the area where Luka had last seen Jerzi.
“Jerzi, move. Heatseeker pointed at you,” he said.
“Already gone,” said Jerzi.
Luka remembered that heatseekers were more useful in urban settings. Hot, humid climates threw off their targeting, but it would only take one hit to ruin Jerzi’s whole day. Luka was tempted to shoot the merc aiming the heatseeker, but if he missed because of the bad angle, he’d give away his own position. The merc, watching the display, started swinging the muzzle in wider sweeps, trying to lock onto a target. Luka flattened himself on the ground even more and angled his body away to make himself less detectible. He hid his beamer underneath him, to mask its heat signature. He hoped Eve was doing the same.
The merc stepped toward the open doorway and froze. “You’re mine, chingado,” he said loud enough that Luka could hear. The merc took another step, but instead of firing, he sank to his knees, dropping the weapon, then collapsed. Luka thought he caught a glimpse of blood at the man’s throat.
Silence prevailed.
Luka had lost count of the remaining mercs. He didn’t see any in the storage area, but maybe smarter ones were hiding in the shadows.
In his ear, Mairwen said, “Luka, go.”
He rose to his feet and half-ran to the shipkiller, willfully ignoring how incredibly vulnerable he felt to anyone who might be in the open bay of the storage area. He pulled out one of the large hand beamers he’d acquired. He tried to visualize the specs in his head to locate the power unit so he could fry it.
Suddenly he heard the rapidly rising whine of a flitter in emergency lift mode. The flitter only got about a meter off the ground before it started listing badly to the far side. A wide-array plasma beam from the flitter cut through the awning support pillar and scored a path through the undergrowth and onto the airfield pad, then up toward the sky before cutting off. The flitter’s front end swung around, and he got a glimpse of a snarling woman in merc uniform in the pilot bay. Luka knew she’d seen him. The wide-array beam stabbed out, but suddenly the flitter bucked out of control, and its beam went wide and seared the armored hull of the light-drive ship.
Luka couldn’t let the flitter destroy their only hope for getting off the planet. Dropping the beamer, he unlocked the shipkiller’s gimbal and free-aimed the barrel toward the flitter, then pushed the firepin. Nothing happened. The whine of tortured flitter airfoils assaulted his ears. Luka frantically looked for the problem and found a safety release. He aimed and pushed the firepin. The kickback knocked him on his ass, but the shipkiller round shot straight through the flitter, leaving a gaping hole.
Unfortunately, the flitter was still airborne, though sagging toward the back. The wide-array beam sheared off the tops of some trees.
Luka scrambled frantically for the manual feed mechanism to load another round, then re-aimed for the cockpit and fired again, bracing himself this time so he stayed upright. The round pierced the front and spun the flitter around like a wobbling top. The wide-array beam sliced up into the sky and then down into the building as the flitter broke apart and the pieces tumbled into the clearing and nearby undergrowth.
Luka bent to pick up the dropped hand-beamer. Suddenly he saw a flash, followed by an earsplitting whump, and the shockwave of a massive explosion slammed into him, knocking him off his feet and onto his left shoulder. Dust and burning debris stung his exposed skin as he curled into a protective ball.
He’d have liked to stay there until everything quieted down, but Mairwen was counting on him to slag the shipkiller. Telling the eye-water
ing pain in his shoulder to get in line behind the screaming pain in his thigh, he crawled back to the big gun, found the hand-beamer, and used it to thoroughly destroy the target controls. Even if he hadn’t gotten its power, the shipkiller would now be useless.
As the dust cleared, Luka saw that the whole north end of the building was obliterated, with only rubble remaining at the base. Whatever they’d stored in that part of the building had gone off like a supernova.
The only sound came from the ringing in his ears. He knew he needed to crawl to safety, but he didn’t know where that would be.
From far away, he heard someone calling his name. He looked around, then realized the voice was coming from the earwire still attached to his jaw. He tried to speak, but inhaled a cloud of dust and had to cough it out first. Finally he was able to croak, “This is Luka. I’m okay, but I can’t hear sjitt.”
Jerzi’s voice was loud enough to hear this time. “Same here. Eve’s in the ship, I think. Have you seen Mairwen?”
“No,” said Luka, as a new surge of adrenalin spiked through him. He needed to find her. He pulled himself to his feet and limped to what was left of the storage bay, hand-beamer at the ready. Inside, he found the body of the merc who’d had the heatseeker, with a knife impaled in his throat. The knife was one of Mairwen's, so Luka pulled it out. He used the merc’s uniform to wipe the blood off, then slid the blade in the back of his belt.
He stumbled through the rubble and found more bodies and another of Mairwen’s knives, but not her. The walls had collapsed, so to go further, he had to leave the building and approach it from the outside. He found what was left of two other bloody bodies, but they were wearing merc uniforms.
He was blackly amused that his wild reconstruction talent was meekly silent in a war zone, and planned to tell Mairwen about it. If she was still alive.
20 * Planet: Insche 255C * GDAT 3237.044 *
MAIRWEN AWOKE IN hot, humid, pitch-black darkness. Pain seeped into her awareness, but it meant she was alive, so she took it as a good sign. She was able to ignore most of the pain except for her head, which ached abominably. She was lying on her side, knees bent, and felt pressure above her shoulder and hip.
She cautiously opened her senses. Her hearing was impaired by multi-threaded high-pitched tones that signified temporary damage. At least she hoped it was temporary. As much as she’d once resented the senses that made her irreversibly different, she’d grown to embrace them if it meant keeping herself and Luka alive. She’d like to continue doing that in the future, assuming they had a future.
She smelled dirt, a mix of plants, plascrete dust, various unknown chemicals, metal, and her own scent, ripe with sweat and blood, some of which wasn’t her own. She tried moving her shoulder and hip and found she could without shifting whatever was on top of her, which smelled metallic. She had no idea how long she’d been there. She struggled to regain her sense of time.
Last she remembered, the flitter’s beamer was arcing down toward the building. She’d calculated she had only a few thousand milliseconds before it sliced into the corner where the negligent merc squad had stored their thermobarics, and a few more thousand milliseconds before the beam’s energy ignited the whole stack. She’d taken a running leap off the building’s roof into the shrubs and rolled when she hit the ground to channel her momentum. She’d just come up running when the shockwave threw her forward, out of control, and... nothing.
She concluded she’d been hit in the head, and that it was likely she was buried under debris. She’d been lucky, and hoped Luka, madman that he was to manually shoot down a flitter with a shipkiller, had shared her luck. Jerzi and Haberville had been farther away, so perhaps they escaped relatively unscathed, at least enough so that they could see to Luka and find her.
With some painful maneuvering, she got her left arm free enough so she could touch her face and neck, trying to see if the earwire had survived the impact. She couldn’t reach it and had no room to turn her head, so she excavated the dirt under her face, which stirred up enough dust to make her sneeze, causing sharp pain in her cracked ribs and pounding in her head. After all that, all she found was abraded and bloody skin along her jaw where the wire used to be.
She rested, breathing as shallowly as she could until the dust settled. Even with that bit of exertion, the heat was oppressive. She was in a poor position to get any leverage to move whatever was on top of her. With some painful twisting and maneuvering, she managed to get her last remaining knife out of her right ankle sheath. They’d been good knives. She’d miss them.
Just as she was considering where to dig and where to put the dirt she’d have to move, she thought she heard voices. It was hard to tell with the constant ringing, but she cut off her awareness of it and tried to listen in the between tones.
She thought she heard her name called, and it alarmed her that she couldn’t tell if it was Luka’s voice calling. Reversing the knife in her hand, she tried pounding the pommel into the metal above her three times, then waiting five seconds and repeating. She could hardly hear it, but the painful vibration in her hand convinced her she was making all the noise she could.
Time was still slippery, and she’d lost track of the number of repetitions she’d pounded by the time the metal was lifted off her. The sunlight blinded her. She felt her eyes start to water when she heard Luka’s voice asking where she was hurt, then calling for Jerzi. She felt rather than saw him kneel beside her.
“Head hurts… hearing loss,” she managed to croak. When the involuntary tears subsided and she could finally see again, she was relieved that Luka looked more or less intact, and Jerzi the same, though he sported an incipient black eye and his chest was thickly coated in wet grime. She smelled Luka’s unique scent and something more.
“You’re bleeding,” she said, her voice sounding like gravel.
“So are you,” he said with a small, worried smile, gently smoothing her hair back from her face. “Can you sit up?”
When she nodded, he took the knife from her hand and helped her up, then because she insisted, helped her get to her feet.
As near as she could tell, she’d been covered by a piece of the flitter, which had protected her from the thermobaric fireball. Although the side of her head and neck felt wet, she didn’t feel too bad until she turned her head too fast. Then dizziness caused her to tip sideways and almost take Luka down with her.
“Taktu það rólega… easy,” said Luka, holding the side of her hip and pulling her close to him for support.
For once, she was content to stand with him awhile, letting his solid strength soothe the worries and panic she’d been trying not to think about. Somehow they were both still alive. Again.
“The mercs?” she asked Jerzi, who was hovering anxiously in front of her. The muck on his armor and clothes looked like a mixture of mud and soot. His railgun was strapped across his back, and his pocket had at least one ammo pack sticking out.
“Dead, or as good as. The building fell down while we were looking for you.” His voice sounded nasal, and his nose looked crooked, like it might have been broken. “The light-drive ship took one beamer shot and was hit by some debris. Eve’s in there now. She’ll have to tell us if it’ll fly.”
She looked up to Luka, moving slowly this time. “She needs personal security.”
Luka nodded, but didn’t take his eyes off her. “Jerzi, go find Eve. The high oxygen hasn’t been easy on her. I’ll help Mairwen.” He tightened his arm around her hips.
Jerzi took off at a half run. Mairwen was glad he was young and resilient, and wished to hell she didn’t feel like she was a hundred and fifty years old. The sun position looked unchanged, so she’d likely been unconscious for only a minute or two, and she guessed it had taken them ten minutes to find and unearth her from her resting place. She didn’t feel very rested.
As they walked, she saw Jerzi hadn’t exaggerated about the building. Only the southern wall was left standing, and it looked none too steady. L
uka, muttering to himself in what she presumed was Icelandic, remained determinedly at her side as they made their way toward the ship as fast as they could through the debris, body parts, and burned plascrete.
Twice he made her slow down to purposefully hyperventilate, telling her it was to keep oxygen flowing to her brain, which he was worried had been injured. He was favoring his right leg, which was matted with blood, dirt, and soot, and he winced every time he moved his left shoulder. At least the beamer wounds on her left arm and ribs had been instantly cauterized, although they hurt almost as much as her head and neck now that she was moving. She’d hate to think how much worse they’d be if the flexin armor hadn’t taken some of the damage before failing. The flechette projectile hole through her lower left calf was hardly worth noticing by comparison, though the blood from it made her sock and boot sticky.
The ship looked none the worse for wear, despite the shiny mark where the beamer had raked its hull. She and Luka had just made it up the long ramp and past the wide airlock into the cargo area when the shipcomm sparked to life with a synth voice announcement in standard English: “Attention. Incoming communication. Attention. Incoming communication.”
“Andskotinn,” said Luka vehemently. She was getting quite an education in Icelandic cursing.
Haberville’s voice boomed through the shipcomm. “I set the navcomp to autoreply, but it won’t fool anyone once they get a visual on what’s left of the base. Jerzi, strap in. Luka, get the ramp retracted and seal the door so we can launch.”
Luka left Mairwen’s side go to look for the control panel. He found it, then swore at the agonizingly slow wakeup sequence.