The sound of his laughter followed her out the door. She was going to miss that man.
Halfway to her quarters, the alert tones sounded in her earwire and echoed throughout the GSAR section. Hatya’s voice followed.
“Silver Team, report to Dock Bay Seven for emergency deployment to planet Perlarossa.” Per protocol, the tones and announcement repeated twice more.
Taz touched her earwire as she launched into a run toward her quarters. “Copy. Be there in ten.”
She allowed herself one moment of pining for her warm, soft bed, then started her deployment checklist. Uniform from her quarters, supplies from the lockup, gear from the storeroom, stay-awake chems from the clinic.
Questions could wait. Disasters never did.
2
Salamaray Township, Perlarossa • GDAT 3242.334
The close, familiar confines of Silver Team’s box-like airsled gave Rylando the illusion of a cozy nest, if he discounted the smell of raw fuel and being surrounded by erratically blinking controls. The wide, wraparound windows of the control cab showed nothing but the shadowed and scarred shuttle wall. At least the fold-down jumpseat he’d strapped himself into gave his stiffening thighs and back a rest. He should have asked Taz to help get the animal crates into the airsled instead of doing it all himself.
He closed his eyes and took several deep, measured breaths and imagined he was breathing in the scents of summer on the dock in his favorite countryside lake. Those memories reminded him why he put up with crappy GSAR equipment and an even crappier GSAR boss. Three more standard years and he’d be free to settle there permanently instead of mostly seeing it on holos. Like most rescuers, he had a hefty amount of paid leave stacked up, but rarely got approval to use it. He’d had enough of constricting space stations and urban disaster zones to last a lifetime.
The airsled’s insulation blocked the sounds but not the vibrations of atmosphere entry. Hatya’s skill made the entry smoother than GSAR’s regular pilots would have, but the oft-rebuilt, much-customized shuttle shook like a hellhound after a swim.
He raised his talent to connect with his animal team. Fortunately, they’d been through similar rides many times and considered them just part of their job. They’d been shaped by experience and his mental influence, but they were all unabashedly emotional creatures who operated on instinct. Part of his job was to manage his adrenaline and lead with calm.
Ordinarily, he wouldn’t have brought the whole team without knowing more about the ground conditions. But he refused to leave his animals with clueless space station military staffers who couldn’t tell a weasel from a wyvern. And the thought of Bhayrip finding them unguarded froze the air in his chest.
Hauling all the crates into the back made the airsled look like an overstuffed supply closet. However, it left more room in the shuttle’s hold for Taz’s GSAR mech suit and everything else of Silver Team’s they’d crammed in. With only two human rescuers, they’d need all the extra tech they could carry to make up for their lack of staff. Too bad they’d been no room for their skimmer. Now that it was finally running right, thanks to hours of work by Taz and Hatya, Bhayrip would probably “borrow” it and Silver Team would never see it again.
“Ready for a sitrep, sir?” He didn’t need the preceding identifying tone to recognize Taz’s distinctive voice through the earwire. Even when she subvocalized, the low-register, sultry quality came through.
Though he and Taz held the same rank, he had seniority, making him Silver Team’s nominal field commander. All that meant was his name went on reports. Taz didn’t need orders from him to do her job. And not even Bhayrip was boneheaded enough to bark out orders to an active, cybernetic-enhanced Jumper who could throw him out the nearest airlock without bothering to open it.
He touched his earwire. “Green go.”
“Salamaray—accent on the ‘mar’ part, by the way—is at the edge of a big mountain range. Southern hemisphere, early hot season. The town has maybe twenty-five thousand residents, tops, but it’s the hub for the whole region of micro industries and original family compounds. The earthquake was a Geo-K 19. A strike-slip fault ripped the town in half around dawn, local time.”
Hatya chimed in. “Wait till you see the nav-sat images. The fault line tracks across twelve-hundred kilometers.” Geology was one of her hobbies.
“We’ll be the first outsiders on scene,” continued Taz. “The planetary government’s only emergency-response office is twenty thousand kilometers away, and they already used up their annual budget.”
“Funny, that,” Hatya replied acerbically. “Governments never want to spend funds on disaster prep. Then it costs ’em ten times as much when disasters actually happen.”
“All too true,” said Taz. “But to be fair, Perlarossa was settled and scammed by those RSI assholes. The High Court judgment canceled the debt, so now the planetary government has to reconstruct all the records just to know what they have. RSI sure as hell won’t tell them.”
Hatya growled. “All settlement companies are lying, cheating manogi leaga. RSI was just greedy enough to get caught.” Her tone made it clear that whatever she’d called them in her native language wasn’t flattering.
“Back to Salamaray,” said Taz quickly, probably to avoid Hatya’s favorite rabbit hole. “Near as I can tell, we’re being deployed because it’s the hometown of High Council Leader Tsoh Yazhi Shua.”
“Betcha it’s a twist,” Hatya muttered darkly.
Realization dawned on Rylando. “Hatya is right. It’s a twist. Bhayrip’s been lying to GSAR about the unit’s staffing so they don’t cut his budget allocation. GSAR thinks Silver Team has a full staff of nine because he counts my animals. High Command probably ordered the deployment to impress Leader Tsoh. Bhayrip had to comply or he’d get caught.”
“So that’s why his orders kept harping on our advisory mission.” Taz’s disgust was plain in her tone. He could imagine the look on her expressive face.
“Yep,” he replied. “And why he avoided giving us details about the rescue part.” He snorted. “Couldn’t very well officially tell us to just pretend like we’re helping.”
Taz made a rude wet noise.
“You two can’t say it, but I can,” said Hatya. “My rock collection is smarter than your captain.”
Rylando laughed. “Thank you.”
A minute later, Hatya’s tone sounded. “Sitrep update. Yanoshi, the ERC, gave us coordinates. You pet your sweet doggos while we ask the ERC where they want us to deploy. We’re fifteen minutes from the landing zone.”
Hatya’s bluff good humor always made him smile. “Acknowledged and confirmed.”
With luck, the Emergency Response Commander had some background in actual emergencies. Not all did, especially in small towns.
Fortunately for Silver Team, Taz had a way with words that deflected grandstanding politicians and guided flailing leaders who were in over their heads. Diplomacy wasn’t his ace.
The more he got to know Taz, the more he wondered whose tender tail she’d stepped on to land in their sorry unit. Silver Team’s previous rescuers had been no loss when they’d moved on. Especially the violent asshole who’d hurt Moyo. Rylando had been doubly careful when Taz first arrived, afraid she’d be even worse.
Instead, she was everything he could hope for in a teammate. She did little things for him and the animals all the time without needing to be asked or expecting praise for it. Hatya liked her. Most importantly, his team liked her.
He used to think animals were all he’d ever need. He wasn’t a top-level talent, but he could connect with just about any land animal in existence, though he preferred mammals and birds. In the last few years, however, he’d found himself longing for human companionship, too. Not just joyhouse visits for physical relief, but people he could talk to and laugh with. People he trusted to have his back. People he cared about and who cared about him.
Hatya’s ready friendship had already broadened his horizons. Taz’s engaging p
ersonality and easy acceptance of his animals—not to mention her sexy everything—had him dreaming of more.
But even if he miraculously dreamed up the right words to tell her, he would never speak them. A relationship would ruin both their careers. Taz took her military oath more seriously than he ever had. Besides, he had no idea if she returned his interest. Probably not, since she was a professional, unlike the rest of Unit 1051.
He selfishly wanted her to stay, but her minder talent and skills were too valuable. Whatever her previous sins, GSAR would soon forgive her. Which was why he hadn’t told her that Shen had an implanted controller that—if he reactivated it—Taz could connect to using her own. He’d disabled Shen’s to save her from being ordered around by the other team members, who too often treat their dogs like fur-covered animated toys. He’d guiltily come to realize Taz wouldn’t do that, but told himself it was better that way. Shen would be devastated when Taz left her behind for a better post.
“Hang on,” said Hatya. “Landing zone looks like a stacker fell off the building and dumped flitters everywhere. We’ll have to improvise.”
The slim white woman in a dusty russet tunic and shiny gold boots finished entering data on her tablet. “Eli! GSAR 1051 is here!” Her piercing voice made Moyo, who stood next to Rylando on the muddy, sodden grass, duck her head and rub an ear with her paw. He wished he could get away with doing the same. The hearing protection implant in his left ear was malfing, and he hadn’t had time to get it fixed.
The structure behind the woman was an upside-down recycling container with a crudely cut doorway. They’d placed it on what looked like a softcrete children’s playground area, which itself was surrounded by a two-meter-wide ring of permeable hardscape. Rylando gave the town extra points for a creative solution to the problem of no pop-up emergency-shelter domes.
The woman turned around and vanished inside, leaving Rylando, Taz, Moyo, and Shen standing in the hot noonday sun. Water shimmered everywhere. Apparently, the earthquake had ripped underground water pipes, which had flooded this part of town. The playground in front of them looked like a manufactured archipelago in a flat sea of soggy green.
Taz tilted her head to indicate the mountains that loomed to the northwest. The dust kicked up by the earthquake made them look foggy gray. “Planetary weather AI says the wind will pick up this afternoon. It’s been a very dry year.” She shook her head. “The last thing this town needs is a wildfire.”
He agreed. Unfortunately, disasters didn’t care what humans needed or didn’t.
A booming deep voice came from inside the container. “...get someone to cut windows for the cross breeze. We’re stifling in here.”
A big, burly man with brown skin even darker than Hatya’s and a wild shock of black and gold hair exited the doorway. He shaded his eyes from the sun, then strode toward them at the edge of the hardscape ring. “I’m Eli Yanoshi, Chief of Regional Law Enforcement. Your pilot said it’s just you two and your service anim…” He glanced down at the dogs, then did a double-take at Moyo. Though she wore an official GSAR harness and vest, her party-colored fur often startled people. “We’ll take all the help we can get.”
Taz gave him a casual salute. “That’s why we’re here.” She told him their names. “Are you still wanting us to check out the Citizen Activity Center?”
Yanoshi deftly tied his coils of hair in a knot on top of his head. “Yeah, like we said, we don’t have high-power extraction equipment. “A sour look settled on his face. “The CAC is built like a frellin’ fortress. Supposed to withstand anything up to a planet-buster bomb, but you saw the images. The two-story end collapsed like an exploration spacer on a chems binge. We hope to chaos that no one was in that part.”
“How many people are likely to be in the main part of the building?” Rylando tilted his head toward their shuttle, about fifty meters back on a buckled plascrete ground-vehicle parking lot. “Our shuttle’s scanners indicated seven or eight lifesigns, but the thick walls are interfering with the readings.”
“Dunno.” Yanoshi made a face. Behind him, the loud-voiced woman came back outside and headed their way. “The settlement company built it to be the town hall, but the government moved out decades ago. They lease some space for commercial use and run the rest like a commons. No one had reservations to use it today, but the private businesses have entry codes and can do what they want.”
“Still no-go on the ground-based comms,” said the woman as she approached, “but we’ve got satellite comms up. Pinging the outlying hubs now. Anything I should tell Planet Gov?”
“Yeah,” said Yanoshi. “Tell them to evac the medical center first. RSI built that one, too. Chaos only knows what kinds of corners they cut there.”
The woman nodded and went back inside.
Yanoshi brushed dust off the front of his tunic. “We’ve put out an area call for equipment. My husband is riding in on our farm’s excavator, but it’s a snail, and the roads are iffy. We can use it to start clearing some of the debris.” His lips tightened briefly. “And recovering bodies.”
“Are you doing okay?” asked Taz gently. “I’m guessing this kind of work isn’t exactly what you signed up for.”
Yanoshi blew out a gusty breath. “Yeah, I’m good. Family’s okay. Our greenhouses are a total loss, but we’ve got savings and insurance. Good thing my husband is a plant-affinity minder, or we’d probably lose the business.” He looked at Taz as if seeing her for the first time. “Thanks for asking.”
She nodded respectfully, then lifted her arm to show him the rugged GSAR gauntlet-style percomp she wore. “It’d help if you share everything you can about the Citizen, uh, the CAC. Architecture specs, use plans, access codes, infrastructure, occupants, the works. We know Perlarossa construction regs, but it sounds like the settlement company built the facility before they were enacted.”
Yanoshi lifted his arm to tap on his similarly styled gauntlet. “I’ll send what we have now and more as we find it. Unfortunately, because the CAC was supposed to be our designated emergency-relocation facility, it also housed the regional hub for comms. Data access is slow as an ice flow until we stand up a replacement. A lot of little towns around here rely on us for comms, too. Planet Gov—that’s Perlarossa government—is reallocating someone else’s backup unit for us.”
Rylando made a snap decision. “We have an extra standalone hub we won’t need. It’s old, but it’s got extra capacity and range. You’re welcome to borrow it.”
“Yeah?” Yanoshi’s eyes narrowed. “What’s that gonna cost?” He blinked, then ducked his head. “Sorry, that was... It’s just that GSAR is part of the Citizen Protection Service, and we haven’t had… They don’t usually, er, share unless there’s something in it for them.”
Taz waved his apology away. “It’s okay. GSAR is outside the CPS’s core chain of command. Some days, we’re not fans of our agency, either. The hub is a spare. But we’ll need it back when we leave.” She twitched a smile at him. “Our boss gets a little salty when our tech doesn’t come back with us.”
“Deal,” said Yanoshi. “We should only need it for twelve, maybe eighteen hours at the most. Planet Gov promised to deliver ours by the end of the day.”
Shen bumped his knee. Rylando could feel her need to do something besides stand in the water and listen to humans chatter. “We thought we’d set up our temporary base on the Center’s front courtyard. Does that work for you?”
Yanoshi cast a dubious glance toward the big shuttle. “The fault really tore up that section of town.” He snorted. “This is supposed to be a geologically stable ancient lakebed, but we’ve already had two aftershocks.”
“How about we take our airsled for a quick survey?” asked Taz. “That’ll give you time to get the hub unloaded. Our Captain Wa’ara can sort it for you.”
“Works for me,” replied Yanoshi.
Thirty minutes later, Rylando sealed the entrance to the sturdy pop-up dome that was their new temporary command center. The
lock was keyed to only GSAR Unit 1051 personnel, which thwarted would-be looters or overreaching local incident commanders. Only one small area near the target building was flat enough to set it up. The rest looked like a road glass recycling yard.
He’d already rigged the animal team with their working harnesses and collars, then slipped into his own red harness with light armor and tech. Taz wore her GSAR-issue, fully enclosed, armored, tech-powered assist frame, popularly known as a mech suit.
In the GSAR publicity vids, the gleaming, streamlined mech suit was obviously modeled after the Jumper combat version. It looked nothing like the real ones used in the field. Instead of shoulder-mounted hellrail guns, GSAR mech suits had grappling and construction tools, plus a variety of hooks and straps for holding more gear. Shiny coatings never lasted beyond the first few rescue deployments. Each user customized their suit according to their own preferences and skills. With Taz’s enviable gift for tech and eye for decoration, hers was practically a work of art.
Rylando tapped his earwire. “Did you find a place for the shuttle?”
“About that,” replied Hatya. “I know you really need a third, but I have to fall out of line for this operation. I’d probably be the one needing rescue.”
Concern shot through him. Jumpers thought of themselves as invincible. That Hatya was taking herself off the front battle line meant she was seriously compromised. “Your leg and hip again?”
“Yeah. Too much sitting, I guess. Even if I used the cargo lift frame we brought, my new cybernetic controller might lock up. ‘Improved version,’ my ass.”
He hated hearing the thread of guilt in her tone. “We’ll be fine. Just a quick in and out.” Or so he hoped.
Galactic Search and Rescue: A Scifi Space Opera with Adventure, Romance, and Pets: A Central Galactic Concordance Novella Page 3