by Michael Todd
Wallace looked up as the radio went dead again. Falstaff, Akiwe, and two other men watched him warily, uncertain but excited. If Peppy had found the third Stallion, that would greatly improve their chances of getting home. Not to mention that they must have wondered where the hell Flemm and Graf had gotten to.
“You men stay here,” he said and looked at each soldier, in turn, to indicate that he spoke to the entire unit. “PFC Pérez isn’t far, and we need people to keep an eye on things and guard the safety of Monsieur Blancheau.”
The Frenchman, for his part, had slumped against the tree where he’d fallen some moments before and now dug the toe of his shoe idly in the mud like a pouting kid. He continued to mutter in French and shake his head.
“Yes, sir,” Akiwe said. “But—”
“Don’t question me, Akiwe,” Wallace snapped. “Corporal Glassner is in command in my absence. I know the Zoo better than anyone else here, and I’m harder to kill anyway.” He tapped his exoskeleton. “I’ll be right back.”
He turned and strode off into the forest and to the southwest. That would be in the deep jungle behind Kemp’s palace. He had virtually no idea what lay there. But Peppy was there, and if he found her, they might finally get some answers as to why everything had gone completely to hell. Again.
12
PFC Pérez was, as it turned out, closer to one hundred rather than two hundred yards from their camp. Of course, even that short distance seemed like far longer in the dense and uncharted jungle where screens of slimy vines, shuddering leaves, and fat tree trunks blocked human sight at any distance. In addition, the faint but all-encompassing sounds of the forest helped to mask those sounds which the plants themselves didn’t absorb.
“Well, you made it,” Peppy said in her dark monotone as Wallace broke through a curtain of mossy creepers. “Welcome, I guess. Sir.”
“Pérez,” Wallace replied, “are you injured? And did you find our targets?”
“I’m fine, to the extent that anyone can be ‘fine.’” She shrugged. “There is no sign of our lost politicians. They have vanished into the black void of oblivion, where at least they’ll probably meet many new friends. Our Stallion, however, is KIA.” She gestured vaguely toward a large mass of crumpled metal slightly behind her.
Wallace advanced into the tiny glade alongside the PFC and the fallen vehicle. Peppy did indeed look to be fine, if not overly cheerful, although that was to be expected. The Stallion, on the other hand, looked like it had been to hell and back. Its crude head-portion was destroyed to the point where it had caved-in, as though someone had run it directly into a tree. Its sides were dented and slashed. The legs were twisted and broken and the back left one was entirely gone. If Flemm or Graf had crashed, it must have been ravaged by scorpions or other Zoo creatures immediately afterward…which suggested that they’d probably done even worse things to the two politicians.
“Dammit,” Wallace said. Losing Flemm and Graf, with Blancheau injured and furious, effectively made this mission a failure. And until he at least got the last of his team back, it might, like the mission to apprehend Kemp and her forbidden fruit, even go beyond failure and into the realm of fiasco.
“Any news from civilization?” Peppy asked. “Not that I expect it to be good news. Just news in general.”
“If by civilization you mean our camp a hundred and twenty yards away, the main news is that we’ll be here overnight while Jimmy fixes the other two Stallions,” Wallace informed her. “We’d best get back.”
Peppy sighed. “Yes, sir.”
Above, them, on a large leafy branch, something rustled.
Both soldiers tensed and instantly adopted battle stances. They backed away from the offending branch, their guns up and ready. A dark form dropped silently from the limb and to the side of them. Wallace held his hand up and forced himself not to fire. He was glad that Peppy wasn’t the itchy trigger finger type.
It was Aade Graf.
“This operation is not going well,” she said and brushed herself off as she stood from the crouch in which she’d landed. She was dirty, scratched, and bruised, her outfit torn in several places, and her blonde braid had come partially loose into a ragged mess. She did not, however, appear to have any major injuries. Nor did she show any of the usual signs of panic that sometimes afflicted people in these kinds of circumstances.
Peppy lowered her gun. Wallace pointed his away from her, for now. He didn’t, however, precisely relax. “Ambassador Graf,” he said, “you need to come back to—”
“Your unit is not properly trained or outfitted for the kinds of surprises and overwhelming odds you experience in this place,” she went on, her dark blue eyes wide with subdued anger. Her lips pushed forward in a pouting expression, and she gestured with one hand as she spoke. “You have not given enough thought to orderly retreat as an option. The Stallion vehicles have not been properly integrated into the combat strategy. My security and—”
“You have not been properly vetted,” Wallace burst out, on the verge of totally losing his temper now. Peppy blinked in surprise to see him this angry. “You sabotaged our vehicles after trying to learn the weak points of our strategy and then fled. I will take you back to face a military tribunal rather than simply shoot you as a spy right here and now, but don’t think that I won’t—”
“It was not me,” Graf replied, her voice cold. “The one who is the spy is not the one who asks the hard and serious questions. It is not the one who is concerned with how well your unit functions.”
“Uh, guys?” Peppy interjected. “We have company.”
Wallace and Graf both snapped to attention. They all heard the rushing, swishing sound now, and it definitely moved toward them. Fast.
Wallace started to motion them away but two dark, glossy shapes burst through the foliage, with a third close behind them, opposite the fallen Stallion.
“This way!” Wallace said as the scorpions chittered and advanced while they snapped their claws. He gestured toward the destroyed vehicle. Peppy ran and leaped over it to land in the center behind it. Wallace and Graf split to run to either side. The sergeant fired a couple of quick bursts from his rifle behind him, one-handed, barely enough to slow the creatures down. Graf ducked behind the right side while he took the left.
By the time the ambassador and the sergeant had taken cover, Peppy had already switched her gun to full auto and sprayed an entire magazine at the giant arachnids. The one in the center seemed to have been at least slightly wounded and now hesitated.
As she reloaded, Wallace rose into a kneeling position, his rifle braced on the top of the heap of metal and unloaded the rest of his magazine into the face of the wounded scorpion. Its head seemed to recede into its body as it fell apart. The creature squeaked and thrashed and bled copiously before it collapsed.
As Peppy opened fire with a fresh magazine on one of the two remaining arachnids and Wallace reloaded, Graf suddenly grabbed his pistol and yanked it from its holster. His gut clenched, and he prepared to turn toward her even as he realized that she might be able to kill him first. Instead, she spun away, aimed, and fired at the other scorpion. Most of the bullets sparked off the creature’s armored hull, but a couple seemed to injure its head and forelegs. Graf quickly and correctly ejected the empty magazine.
“Not bad,” Wallace admitted. He fired another burst.
“I know how to use a gun,” Graf said.
“Good to know, but let’s get out of here,” Wallace replied. The remaining two scorpions had wavered and seemed ready to retreat. It would take too much ammo to go on the offensive and destroy them both.
“I agree with this course of action.” Graf shoved his pistol back in his holster.
As Wallace motioned back to where he’d come from—toward the camp—and signaled Peppy to take point, the ground beneath them began to shift and vibrate.
“Shit!” Wallace said. “Graf, go!”
The Ambassador pushed to her feet and fell in quickly behin
d Peppy. Wallace sprang up, his intention to guard her from the rear, when the earth immediately behind him became a quicksand-like vortex and another scorpion erupted. This was one of the biggest ones he’d seen. Before he could fire, the ground shifted beneath his feet and its claws lurched forward to knock his rifle aside. He managed to hold onto the weapon, although he had almost released it with the shock of the impact.
Peppy and Graf paused, turned, saw what was happening, and rushed back.
“Go ahead!” Wallace barked angrily. The arachnid, still half-submerged in the hole it had created, opened its mouth.
It possessed no jaws or teeth or tongue like any creature he’d seen thus far. What might be called a snout extended from under the carapace on top of its head. This opened in a radial pattern, like the petals of a flower, and out snaked a mass of dripping pink tendrils—multiple tongues like the tentacles of an octopus. They lashed themselves around his legs and drew him forward.
Wallace’s eyes widened in near-shock. He dug in and his suit whirred as its significant mechanical force resisted the scorpion’s pull. The snapping claws now moved toward him while he struggled to bring his rifle to bear on the creature’s open mouth.
Peppy slammed her rifle into Graf’s willing hands and pulled a grenade from her belt. The ambassador sprinted to the scorpion’s side, literally leapt on top of its arm to force its right claw earthwards, and fired three bursts—one at the tongue-tentacles and two into the mouth and face of the arachnid. It shrieked as the multiple tongues split apart and its head collapsed in a mass of black, bloody chunks.
Wallace dragged his legs free and struggled to his feet, partially with help from Graf, who took his hand and pulled him up. He could hear more scorpions milling around in a tunnel beneath the hole. Not only that, the two above-ground that they’d scared off now moved ominously toward them—emboldened, perhaps, by the knowledge that reinforcements were on the way.
Peppy pulled the pin on her grenade. “Whoops,” she said and dropped it down the hole.
“Move!” Wallace snapped. The three of them sprinted away and flung themselves behind a pair of large trees.
The explosion boomed more than it cracked and shook the ground. A geyser of flame, smoke, and burning earth erupted from the scorpion hole, along with flaming pieces of the arachnids themselves. It also almost obliterated the destroyed Stallion and scorched most of the plant matter nearby. Best of all, however, it seemed to have killed all the scorpions that had burrowed beneath them as well as one of the two that advanced from the forest. The other one, terrified by the blast, turned and scuttled away into the woods.
“That seems to have done the job,” Graf said. She stood and brushed herself off again as she’d done moments ago when she’d dropped from the tree.
“Yes, good work,” Wallace said. He shook his head before he pinched his nose and blew through it to pop his ringing ears and equalize the pressure in his head.
“As I tried to say before those things interrupted us,” Graf went on, “the culprit—the saboteur—was not me, but Flemm. He is the one who disabled your Stallions.”
Wallace both was and was not surprised. Flemm didn’t seem the type, and yet, didn’t the fact that the man seemed like a harmless dolt make him the perfect mole?
“Not to worry, though,” Graf added. She handed Peppy her rifle, butt first. “The good news is that the scorpions already got the bastard.”
13
It took only a couple of minutes for Wallace to lead them back to the mini-perimeter at their impromptu camp. His sense of direction was good, and he’d deliberately damaged some of the foliage on his way in to leave a fairly obvious trail. He noted that Graf seemed to notice this as they worked their way back. And she certainly knew her way around a firearm. Either she really was some elite spy and had lied about Flemm—although he doubted this the more he thought about it—or she’d had some actual training or even combat experience before she’d become a diplomat.
“Sir!” Corporal Glassner said as they emerged into the camp. “Are you all right? We were about to come looking for you.”
“No one is seriously hurt,” Wallace replied. “We encountered some scorpions but neutralized them with a grenade. They’ve burrowed underground, even in the jungle, so they don’t only have that ability in sand. Everyone needs to be extra careful of the possibility of a subterranean attack. Ambassador Graf is fine. According to her, Lord Flemm was, in fact, our traitor.”
“What? Impossible!” Blancheau sputtered. The Frenchman seemed on the verge of another hand-wringing tantrum.
“The Viceroy of Narnia?” Private Falstaff marveled. “Weird. That guy seemed like a fucking tourist out of an old BBC comedy, not a spy.”
“Exactly,” Graf said.
Peppy, meanwhile, looked around, her brown eyes half-hidden behind drooping lids as usual but a curiously tense, expectant, and even concerned look subtly visible on her face. “I see Gunnar isn’t around,” she said. “My earlier discharge of that plasma flamethrower must have lodged deep in the erogenous zone of his brain and gave him no choice but to validate his existence with yet another furious masturbation session off in the bushes.”
To her apparent surprise, no one laughed. Instead, the entire group went silent and avoided looking at her.
Wallace cursed mentally. He hadn’t wanted to say anything earlier as his focus had simply been to find her and the politicians, but now, he could no longer avoid it. He was the commander, and all that had happened had been on his watch and on his orders. Breaking the news was his responsibility.
He walked up to Peppy, who had grown visibly tense, and laid his right hand on her shoulder. “Pérez,” he said, “I’m sorry, but…Gunnar’s gone. We went up on that sandhill to scout, and those things opened a hole beneath him. Akiwe and I tried to save him, but they pulled him in.” He shook his head. “It was…over quickly, at least. He was a brave man.”
Peppy said nothing. She simply stared at Wallace, her expression still blank although he thought her lower lip started to tremble a little. The color drained slowly from her face. She turned away and walked a little way into the woods and stood there alone. Wallace let her be.
“All right,” he announced to the unit, “we’ve lost one of the people we were escorting as well as far too many of our own. I don’t want to lose anyone else. We will hold this position until Miss James is done fixing our Stallions so that we can ride out in relative safety and transport our wounded. We’ll rotate everyone on guard watch so that you’ll all get some time to rest.” He briefed them on the scorpions’ burrowing ability, including what sounds and sensations to watch for, and reiterated that they’d keep the plasma-thrower handy to repel any large attacks.
“This is shitty, man,” Falstaff complained. “How the hell could they have sent us into this crap without even warning us about this hill and the scorpions? And how could they have let a goddamn spy get past them to leave us stranded out here? For fuck’s sake—”
“Watch your tone, Private,” Wallace retorted. “I will make a full report of the many errors that took place above my own position in the hierarchy that led us to this point,” he went on. “But for now, our only concern is to deal with the situation at hand and get out alive—which we will succeed at. And as for our saboteur, Flemm, he’s dead now anyway. It will be up to Director Hall to deal with the ramifications.”
The troops grumbled and muttered and sighed as they prepared to do their respective duties, but they nevertheless performed as required. The jungle grew steadily darker now. The sun would be gone soon, vanished behind the tree line even before it was totally hidden by the horizon. Fresh men were rotated to guard the perimeter while others prepared to relax and sleep. Wallace planned to sleep three or four hours himself, if possible, but for now, he shared the patrol around the edge of camp and made sure everyone was frosty and everything well-organized. He might salvage a semblance of victory from this mission’s slide into failure.
Ever
y major expedition into the Zoo that he’d been involved with had ended in death and disaster, he reflected. His first—Kemp’s illegal and unauthorized quest to retrieve the files of original project leader Dr. Geraldine Marie—had ended with everyone dead except himself and Chris Lin. And technically, Kemp, but she was practically a zombie in the Zoo’s employ now. He’d survived, but he’d lost the use of his legs in the process. The civilian scientist, oddly, had been the only one who’d made it through unscathed. At least they’d gotten the files.
He’d led another, far larger expedition to capture Kemp and obtain samples of the strange, toxic fruit she’d designed, but that one had been even worse. Kemp had massacred his entire platoon, and he and Chris, again, had barely gotten out with their lives. They didn’t even have the fruit sample to show for their troubles.
And now, this current mission was halfway to being another blood-drenched fiasco. He would not allow it to fail that badly…and yet, he was so tired. He longed for the day when his efforts brought him to a plateau of success, where he could simply be commended for all he’d done and could then rest. Finally.
As darkness fell to envelop and enclose them within the shady little clearing amidst the savage and alien landscape, Jimmy continued to work on her pet projects. She occasionally requested the help of Wallace or one of the grunts, and guards rotated in and out from the perimeter. The forest was mercifully quiet tonight.
Peppy, meanwhile, had refused rest. She’d gone ahead to the edge of the mini-desert where the scorpion-hill lay and seemed poised to stand guard there all night. Wallace reflected, with no small pang of regret, that she was, for all intents and purposes, keeping watch over her friend’s tomb.