The Midnight Sun (The Omega War Book 2)

by Tim C. Taylor

  “The Midnight Sun Free Company is finished. There’ll be no ransom from our owner.”

  “For some, no. It’s a cruel universe, I am afraid. Yet, luckily for you, there are other means to monetize your capture.”

  “As slaves?”

  “Tsk! I was myself a slave once. I’d never wish that upon my worst enemy.” Dove made a show of tugging thoughtfully at his beard. “But now that you place the notion in my head…there is a healthy trade in indentured service bonds.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter 95

  Branco crept back to the stream bank where he’d last seen Sun.

  Explosions had upended trees here, tumbling them over onto the bank, which had collapsed under their weight.

  Sun had been buried alive!

  He was picking his way through the thicket of shattered trees partly buried in the mud, searching for her corpse, when an alert in the HUD of his scout helmet warned of a heat flare beneath the trees. He hurried to investigate and discovered it was someone firing a laser pistol beneath a pile of splintered trunks and branches.

  His scout armor didn’t amplify his natural muscle strength, but something else must have, because he hauled away the debris with inhuman strength to get at the person trapped below. Only with the heaviest tree limbs did he slow down to cut through with his own laser pistol.

  And at the bottom of the heap of wood was Sun. She’d been pinned face-down in the mud, and when he freed her and began assessing her injuries, she told him to stop fussing because she was uninjured.

  She was all right.

  He grinned, ecstatic.

  She didn’t.

  “You were right,” she said grimly. “It was stupid to come here on my own. I was weak. What happened? Where are all the others?”

  “Sun, they’re gone.”

  “Gone? You mean dead? Everyone?”

  “No, the murdering bastards didn’t get us all.”

  A wildness flashed across her eyes, a madness just like her sister’s. But unlike her sister, she captured her anger, chilling it within her. She narrowed cold eyes. “Tell me what happened.”

  Branco reported. He told Sun of the betrayal and the fight in the camp. He also told of Venix’s magnificence as the Zuparti faced down an army of CASPers single-handedly.

  He was trying to explain about the gunshots he’d heard after Venix dropped off the cliff when Sun grabbed him by his armored shoulders and shook him.

  “Calm down, Branco. You’re hyped. I understand that. You want revenge, and we’ll have it. But first we need to live. Get your shit together, and we’ll pick over the camp to grab the gear to make them pay.”

  He nodded, rapidly cooling his anger as Sun had done.

  “And Branco…thanks for coming back. I won’t forget it.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter 96

  Rooting through the abandoned Midnighter camp with Sun looking for anything that might keep them alive was one of the hardest things Branco had ever faced. He was surprised that, despite the fatigue that dulled everything to pointlessness after the horror of the night before, it was humiliation that retained enough strength to burn in his gut like a smoldering coal.

  Because the night before, in this same place, the Midnighters had dared to harbor hope. They’d been fatigued. Diseased. Pursued, but not yet at bay. They had hope.

  Hope?

  How could they have deluded themselves for so long?

  He walked past Corporal Hoang lying in the ruined CASPer that had become her tomb. Hoang had believed they’d get out alive, because they all wanted to believe that. It hadn’t made it true.

  Branco had been as guilty as any in this great delusion that if they kept running, the relief would surely come to save the day.

  It hadn’t.

  And now Hoang was dead. And so was dear Soren Gjalp and so many others.

  He kicked a trunk in frustration. “For Fanden!”

  “I don’t know if your anger should be directed at yourself or at me,” said Sun, “but I do know the tree is innocent.”

  Branco regarded her. For a long time now, her presence had been so intense that he hadn’t actually seen her as she truly was – a wiry little woman who barely came up to his shoulder. Her jet-black hair had grown out a little from her normal crew cut, enough for stray ringlets to snake along her neck. When he’d first seen the sisters, he’d seen a strong Chinese heritage to them, but later he’d decided Sun looked more Somali or Ethiopian. Her voice, soft yet determined, spoke words in an English that was normally purged of any accent – at least to his Danish ears. But when she was relaxed, Sun allowed in a nasal quality that he recognized from his four-month mission prep in the Binnig offices outside Trois-Rivières. Was she a Québécoise?

  None of that mattered, of course. Even less since she’d obviously cut her ties with Earth. Yet Branco couldn’t help his intense curiosity about her. It was, after all, why he’d joined the Midnighters.

  Join a mercenary company, he thought, and see the galaxy…and Sun.

  Take home fabulous wealth and nail-biting stories – and do it alongside the major.

  Find a name, a new identity, and make it real. With her.

  Major Sun was the reason he was now in this swamp, cut off, without supplies, and surrounded by enemies. Had she been worth it?

  All the while she’d been watching him muse, saying nothing, giving nothing away with that poker face of hers.

  He smiled.

  Is she worth it? What a stupid question!

  She must have read something in his face because she rolled her dark eyes at him, but she smiled too.

  “Your adoration is noted and appreciated, Trooper,” she informed him. “But I need you to hunt for food, equipment, and weapons. Anything that’ll keep both of us alive long enough for me to show my appreciation at a more appropriate time. Deal?”

  “Don’t move!” Branco screamed.

  The tip of Sun’s boot had caught on a wire that now pulled tight between the roots of neighboring trees.

  “Keep still,” he told her.

  But it was too late.

  Sun overbalanced, stumbling forward and pulling the wire with her. It went ominously slack.

  Nothing happened.

  No booby trap explosion. And no Sun hitting the deck. She’d frozen.

  “Get down!” Branco shouted, and sprinted through the mud toward her. One step. Two.

  Sun began to react, to drop to the ground.

  Branco bundled into her back, reaching his arms around her and slamming her down into the mud, praying his flesh and his scout armor would shield her body.

  The explosions blew – K-bombs, most likely.

  They’d been hidden inside hollowed-out trees to either side. One failed to explode properly – the jungle environment was as hostile to hastily-wired booby traps as it was to human personnel – and it showered Branco with woodchips.

  The other blasted out hot shrapnel and vicious shards of the splintered tree.

  All forms of armor are a compromise between competing design criteria. Branco was wearing Daimler-Koch Series C scout armor, optimized for agility, concealment, and speed of movement. If you planned to stand next to exploding ordnance and survive, you’d wear a CASPer or EOD suit. The scout armor was comprised of a light helmet with extended but flexible neck protection, knee and shin pads, and a laminated shell that covered the torso and shoulders.

  For the backs of the legs – the only protection was to be facing the threat when it hit you.

  Hot fire pelted Branco, raking his back with pain as metal shards pierced his torso armor and cut into his shoulders. Bad as that was, his legs hurt far more. And the hurt was building.

  Sun slithered free from underneath him. “Shift your butt,” she commanded. “We need to get out of here fast.”

  She was right. The explosions would attract patrolling Condottieri for miles around. He tried to get up, but barely rose inches from the ground before sliding back down.<
br />
  “Oh, my God,” she screamed.

  Sun was looking at his legs in horror. Then her composure snapped back in place. “Wait there. Don’t move,” she told him and went off to loot Corporal Hoang’s CASPer of its first aid kit.

  As she applied bandages to his legs, she calmly offered her assessment. “The bleeding’s slowing, but you’ve lost the tendons at the back of both knees. Your right knee is worse. Shrapnel’s gone right inside.” She injected his thigh. “You’re stabilizing, and those nanites I just put inside you should keep infection from killing you, but you’re not walking again until we get you off planet.”

  “We’ve still got to move,” said Branco. “I can’t, so you’ll have to go without me. Maybe I can surrender to them.”

  “Shut up, Mister. I’m not leaving you. Grab hold of my shoulders.”

  Sun crouched low in front of Branco, and he gripped her shoulders. Grunting with effort, she staggered forward a few paces before losing traction and slipping face-first to the ground.

  “Too many pies, Trooper,” she quipped, but no matter how she tried manhandling him, she couldn’t move him more than a few feet. He was too heavy.

  When inside her CASPer, Sun combined the immense strength of her mecha with her own physical and mental endurance to keep going longer than almost anyone he knew. He’d never dared to use the word cute, but he’d secretly delighted in how she was such a contrast outside of her suit. She was as light as a child.

  It was a pity her cuteness would be the death of him.

  “Let me do it!” he said, waving her away. He used his arms to drag himself along the mud on his belly. The slipperiness of the ground helped a lot. So did the medical nanites, which had numbed the nerves in his legs so he wasn’t distracted by pain. At least, he hoped they were the reason he couldn’t feel anything below his waist.

  As the Midnighters had pushed up the escarpment that led to the bend in the river Venix had jumped into, the ground had dried a little. Narrow water channels drained the swamp into mere muddy jungle. They rolled down the steep bank of one such watercourse and squelched away to the southeast, back the way they’d originally come.

  After a few hundred yards, Sun hissed at Branco to keep still and silent.

  As they slowly sank into the rich loam, sounds of activity came from the abandoned camp. The undergrowth overhung the bank, but they were still too exposed. Neither said a word, but they both realized their predicament and its solution. They scooped hollows out of the bank, depositing heaps of worms and crawling insects onto the ground. When the sounds of stomping mecha headed their way, they pushed themselves into their holes. By now they were so caked in dirt they were one with the mud. Branco reached up and tugged the fringe of ferns and ground cover a little lower.

  A pair of CASPers came looking for them, one on either side of the stream.

  “Even if it was one of the sisters who set off those grenades,” said the trooper on the opposite bank as she passed, “there was too much blood. She’ll have bled out in a bottomless pit of this hell water.”

  “Maybe, but no one’s discovered her body,” said her comrade. “A hundred credits says it is one of the mad sisters, and she’s still alive when she’s found.”

  Branco watched the CASPer on the far side stomp away without slowing, each of her steps sinking a foot into the mud. The one on his side was walking ten feet away from the bank to avoid collapsing the soft ground. Even so, the CASPer’s weight sent dirt cascading over his head, but it also shook away some of the earth concealing his body.

  “You’re on,” said the Condottiere over the thump of his mecha stomp. “Bloodhounds will find her soon enough. Dead or alive.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter 97

  “Sun…Sun! What’s happening? Where am I?”

  She growled in frustration but took care to wear a concerned face by the time she’d crawled back to Branco.

  “It’s okay,” she soothed. “You’ve been hurt, but it’s okay. I’ll look after you. But you must keep quiet.”

  “My legs…I remember now.”

  “Confusion is a side effect of the medical nanites,” she lied. “They’re fixing you up but dumping a lot of waste products into your bloodstream in the process. Some of that junk gets in your brain. Clogs up those thought processes.”

  “Doesn’t seem to take much,” he joked.

  “That’s because you’re a man,” she replied. “Even the nanites can’t fix that.”

  His wry smile was reassuring. The episodes where his mind slipped away were less so. Maybe her bullshit about the nanites had accidentally been the truth. She thought it more likely that he was becoming delirious despite the nanites, not because of them. Doesn’t matter right now, she admonished herself. You’re overthinking. I just need him lucid for five minutes.

  “There’s another pool ahead,” she said. “Can you swim?”

  “A pool?”

  “Yeah. Some kind of beaver analog built it, I think. Backs up the water a ways. We swim close to the bank. If we can’t, we’ll have to risk getting out of the stream bed and go around.”

  “Are the Condottieri nearby?”

  “I…I think so. I’ve heard a skittering in the trees. Not sure what it is, but it sounds artificial.”

  “I’m good,” he said, and dragged himself into the slow-flowing stream.

  With Branco on his back, sculling gently, they floated effortlessly downstream and into a small lake formed by the beaver dam that blocked the confluence of two streams.

  The pool was 150 yards across, opening such a gap in the jungle canopy that raw sunlight, unfiltered by hungry leaves, danced over the gentle ripples as it fed the water with its warmth. She hadn’t seen this much sunlight since setting foot on the swamp world.

  The banks were higher and more vertical here. A fringe of bracken and bark chips crested the top of the bank, and as she swam closer, she saw they had been cut and shaped by gnawing teeth. Similar constructions of gnawed foliage reached out into the water from the bank like piers, or maybe breakwaters.

  “You know, Branco. If we weren’t running for our lives, this would be almost pleasant.”

  “Already got my vacation here lined up, Sun. Just need my ogre of a boss to grant me some leave.”

  The lake was so noisy that she felt relaxed enough to laugh. Flying creatures with wings – which were shaped like a bat’s but constructed from a single feather – swooped over the pool in the hunt for insects. They spent as much of their energy chasing off rivals with their raucous cries. The dam was draining the lake via a narrow channel, which added sufficient noise from its burbling flow to the bat-bird cries that Sun felt safe enough for a little banter.

  Not that she wanted chit chat, but she needed Branco’s mind to stay with her.

  “You saved my life back there,” she told him.

  “True,” he replied after a few seconds. “Then you saved mine right back. Did you ever think…”

  “What? Branco? Branco, stay alert!”

  He gave a non-committal grunt. Damn, he was going to drown at this rate. She desperately cast for ideas to engage his brain. “Hey, Branco. I think we owe each other one honestly answered question. I already know you’ve discovered my old identity, so I’ve nothing to hide from you. Ask me whatever you want.”

  He stopped sculling and floated on his back, carried by the current.

  “Branco?” she prompted, worried by this new silence.

  “Still here. I’m thinking of a good one. Got to make this count. Hey!”

  He splashed in surprise as his head rammed a purple lily pad, which was broader than his shoulders and shaped like an upturned beer cap.

  The bat-birds had stopped flying.

  “Here’s my question,” said Branco. “When you were a kid, did you play sports?”

  “Quiet!”

  By now, they had traveled half the length of the pool. The water splashing downstream as it drained was making it difficult to hear other sou
nds clearly, but she thought she heard something approaching their side of the water.

  “To the bank,” she hissed. “Now!”

  She grabbed his neck and swam hard for the shore, trying desperately not to splash.

  They reached a section of bank where three holes had been cut into the earth above the waterline. These burrow entrances were framed in chewed wood entwined with springy twigs. If this were Earth, she’d say these tunnels were the homes of otters or water voles, but scaled up to such a gigantic size that she might just be able to squeeze inside. Not Branco, though. He was far too broad to follow.

  They grabbed onto the wooden frame of the entrances and floated there, screened by the long overhang of woven twigs and leaves.

  “We can wait here a while in this porchway,” said Branco – far too loudly.

  She pinched his cheek and whispered at him to keep silent.

  Something was moving overhead.

  Some-things.

  It was a scurrying sound. Fast-moving limbs that halted for a minute or so before scuttling away to a new position.

  Then the ground shook with a familiar faint hiss and whine followed by sucking mud as two CASPers approached.

  “What’s up with the bloodhounds?” said one through his speakers. “Smell another dead snake?”

  “Dunno. Definitely picked up something, and with a 10,000-credit reward if we capture her alive, I’m giving the bots free rein.”

  “Fine with me.”

  Sun heard a splash upstream as something dipped limbs into the water before retreating to the bank. A couple more of these bloodhound bots were overhead.

  She looked at Branco to urge him to keep silent, but his eyelids were drooping. And he was sinking!

  She ducked under his shoulder and pushed up to keep his head above water.

  A shadow fell across the pool just five feet from where they were hiding.