by David Adams
“Eh,” said Chuchnova, stepping in after him, likewise sinking into the slop. “Even Mother Russia has heat waves. My parents are from Volgograd. They tell me that it was over 40 degrees last summer.”
That was true. It was the same as how most people forgot that planets like Syrene had a variety of climates; it was easy to think that the whole of this miserable world was fetid jungle, but it had glaciers, plains, and a variety of climates, just like Earth did.
“Back in the mud,” griped Jakov. “Great.”
Yup.
The four of them began walking away from Hammerfall, their feet squelching loudly as they pushed through the thick mud. In moments, they were splattered up to their waists in thick brown slop.
Behind them, Pavlov could see people moving around on the landing pad. Scientists, hopefully. They weren’t armed. They didn’t move with the urgency of people about to fight. Instead, they just stood in a line, motionless and eerie.
Watching them.
The thick jungle closed in, and the scientists were swallowed by the green. Pavlov could still feel their eyes on him as they went deeper.
“I honestly don’t know that much about Russia,” said Pavlov, trying to keep his mind off the rancid stench invading his nostrils. “Not more than what we learnt in school. Most of which I had to filter through the propaganda lens…mighty Russia, strong power, standing up against the United Earth bullies and their unchecked aggression and all that.”
Chuchnova seemed pleased by his response. “You’re sounding like one of us,” she said. “We’ll make a neo-Communist of you yet.”
“Hardly,” said Pavlov. “Honestly, I don’t think it matters. Doubt any of us are getting out of this shit alive.”
Ilyukhina snorted dismissively. “Way to give us all an inspiring speech, Fearless Leader.”
“Arf arf,” he said, taking a moment. “Sorry. You’re right. I probably could have done better.”
A moment of quiet fell over everyone. Pavlov pushed aside a thick branch dripping with rain; the tree had been damaged in the mortar bombardment, the trunk mostly blown to splinters, but still it managed to be green and full of life.
Maybe he could make some point out of that. That it didn’t matter that they were damaged, hurting, they’d grow back stronger than before.
They passed another tree, this one blown in half, the broken remains of its trunk brown and dead. Shattered shards lay all around, burned and blackened.
Maybe that was a better representation of how their fortunes would fall. Just randomly killed for nothing. No reason. Why that tree? Why that plant? On a world full of plants, that particular one had been hit by a falling mortar. What must it have thought? Why me? Why, out of all the plants on the planet, have I been chosen to suffer?
* * *
Pavlov’s Cell
“Do you really think I need to hear this?” Yanovna touched the bridge of her nose. “This whole discussing-the-thoughts-and-feelings-of-plants thing isn’t really helping your I-wasn’t-crazy-they-were-crazy defence.”
That actually made sense. There came a time to shut one’s mouth. That was probably now.
“I agree,” said Chainsaw. “That is pretty weird, comrade.”
“Yeah, yeah, okay,” said Pavlov. “So. Anyway, we were walking through all this mud…”
* * *
Jungle surrounding Hammerfall
Thinking no more of the feelings of the local flora, Pavlov and the others pressed on through the jungle, and soon Hammerfall was hidden behind them, concealed behind a thick screen of leaves.
Most of those leaves had bullet holes in them. Shredded by Chainsaw’s guns and the rifles of Pavlov’s Dogs.
This was where the Separatists had been first engaged. Cut down like beasts, unable to see where they were being shot from, dying in the jungle mud for no reason.
Chuchnova seemed to be having a hard time with the travel. She walked with her hand over her nose, face scrunched up like a lemon.
“You okay?” asked Pavlov. “I know it stinks.”
“The smell isn’t nearly as bad as I thought,” said Chuchnova, her voice muffled and distorted. “It’s worse.”
He snorted, immediately regretting inhaling so much rancid air. “You’ve never come out this far?”
“Never outside the building, actually. There’s a reason I preferred my air-conditioned office. It doesn’t stink and it’s nice and cool, thank you very much.” Chuchnova struggled through a thick patch of mud, her rifle clutched in her hands. “Ugh. I feel like we’re being watched.”
“You are,” said Pavlov. “By me.”
“Thank you, Captain Obvious.”
“It’s Lieutenant Obvious. Thank you.” Pavlov spat into the mud, trying to clear the smell out of his nose and mouth. “So, doc. You’re the scientist. You tell us: what’s made our guys go crazy?”
She shrugged helplessly. “I’m not that kind of doctor,” she said. “I deal with cows and stuff.”
Cows and stuff. Helpful. “It’s not something infectious, is it? From the animals? Like…mad cow disease, or something?”
“Extremely unlikely,” said Chuchnova. “We employ pretty strict health regulations. I mean, it’s possible that there’s some kind of…”
Pavlov tuned out as Chuchnova described, in great scientific detail and using a lot of words he was sure were accurate and meant something to another scientist, a hypothetical infectious disease that could spread from bovines to humans and cause the kind of symptoms they had observed.
“…but that’s just a theory.”
“Great theory, doc,” said Ilyukhina. She and Pavlov exchanged a look. Nerds, right?
Chuchnova began blathering again, and Pavlov ignored all of it. He kept his eyes high as the three of them trudged through the muck of the jungle, trying to put as much distance between them and Hammerfall as possible.
“Wait,” asked Ilyukhina, a sudden urgency in her tone, “where’s Jakov?”
CHAPTER 20
Jungle surrounding Hammerfall
JAKOV WAS GONE.
IT WAS as though the thick jungle foliage had swallowed him. One moment he was there, and then…
“We need to backtrack,” said Chuchnova. “He couldn’t have gotten far.”
He could very well have gotten far. He could walk at the same rate they could. If he had turned around, then he could very well be all the way back at Hammerfall by now.
Maybe he’d just stepped off the path to take a piss, and was only a few footsteps away in the green…
But what if he’d gone crazy?
“What’s the play, sir?” asked Ilyukhina.
Tough to decide, but that’s what officers were there for: to make the hard decisions. It was worth the risk.
“Jakov,” he said into his radio. “We’ve lost sight of you.”
“I’m here,” he said, to Pavlov’s immediate relief. “Just back a bit. I stopped to take a piss. Didn’t want to upset our lady friend.”
“Upset me?” asked Ilyukhina, practically spitting the word. “You think women don’t piss, Jakov?”
“I meant Chuchnova,” he said. “Obviously.”
Obviously. Pavlov ground his teeth. “Well, hurry up,” he said. “Follow our footsteps. In this mud, it won’t be hard for you to—”
Crack. A gunshot, distant and muted, echoed throughout the jungle. It was low and powerful, as though from a high-velocity round of significant calibre. An anti-tank weapon, perhaps.
A pained groan rang in Pavlov’s ears.
“Jakov?” Pavlov cursed his lack of visor information. “Jakov, who’s shooting?”
“I’m hit,” Jakov said, his breathing fast. “Bastards got my leg! Aww, fuck. Cука блядь…”
Shit. “Let’s go,” said Pavlov, stepping into his muddy, half-collapsed footprints, retracing his steps, shoving foliage out of the way. “Where are you, buddy?”
“Here,” Jakov shouted. “Here, here!”
He half
waddled, half ran through a sea of brown and green, following Jakov’s voice. Behind him, Ilyukhina and Chuchnova followed, crashing through shrubs and splattering mud in all directions.
Nearly tripping over a low bush, Pavlov came upon a clearing in the jungle where a mortar round had blown a hemisphere in the land. At the edge of the crater, Jakov lay in a pool of blood.
Jakov’s leg lay about a metre away, twitching faintly, blown clean off from the knee down.
Cука to the motherfucking блядь.
“Is it bad?” asked Jakov, twisting around, trying to look at it. “How bad is it? It doesn’t hurt.”
“It’s fine.” Pavlov leapt into the crater, keeping his head low, running along the churned-up soil at the base of the crater, sliding in next to Jakov. “You’re good, buddy.”
“It doesn’t hurt,” said Jakov again, his face slowly turning white. “It doesn’t hurt. That’s good, right?”
“Yeah. That’s good.”
“You’ve been shot before, right?”
Pavlov pulled out a bioform pack and jammed it against the severed stump of Jakov’s leg. “Yeah, buddy. I’ve been shot before. It hurt like hell.”
“But you survived,” said Jakov. “You survived, you didn’t die, and it hurt, so that means that if it hurts, it’s good.”
Gotta keep him talking. “Nah, buddy. I was talking to Apalkov about this—” He turned and shouted over his shoulder. “Ilyukhina, stretcher!” And then back to Jakov. “I was talking to him. He said if it doesn’t hurt, it’s good.”
Jakov said something that Pavlov didn’t catch. The guy’s lip was jerking, twitching, as though he were trying to form words but just couldn’t. His whole body went white.
Then he heard a voice from the lip of the crater. Apalkov. “I can save him,” he said, face weirdly distorted by a huge smile. “Believe me, I can save him.”
Pavlov snatched up his rifle, levelling it to his comrade. “You break him, you fix him,” he said, lining up the sights on Apalkov’s head. “You try any funny business and I will fucking end you.”
Apalkov, seemingly heedless to the threat, crouched beside Jakov.
“Fuck you,” said Jakov, breathing rapid and pained. “You piece of shit, you shot me. Pavlov, shoot him. Shoot him in his fucking head! Shoot him! Shoot him!”
He almost did. He almost shot him. Pavlov’s finger curled around the trigger, his visor lighting up as the weapon’s limited computing facilities drew a cross over Apalkov’s body, indicating friendly fire. A blink to the side overrode it, and then…
He didn’t shoot.
Apalkov walked slowly, deliberately down the lip of the crater, and laid his hand on Jakov’s bloody stump. For a brief second, nothing happened. Jakov’s blood trickled over Apalkov’s hand.
The urge to shoot rose again. This wasn’t medicine. This was some kind of—
Jakov shrieked, convulsing on the ground, his body spasming. For a split second, he seemed in immense pain, as though some great surge of energy had leapt through his body.
Then, with terrifying swiftness, Jakov’s whole face became a smile.
“You feeling better, comrade?” asked Apalkov. “Feeling good?”
“Yeah,” said Jakov. The guy sat up, regarding the severed stump with the casual detachment of someone inspecting a broken piece of unimportant junk. Colour returned to his face, the ghostly shock-white fading. “A lot better.”
“What did you do to him?” asked Pavlov, unable to keep the entirely manly tremble out of his voice. “What the hell have you done?”
Jakov smiled with the same empty slasher smile that Apalkov and the new guys had. “He showed me,” said Jakov. “He made me a part of something…amazing. Something wonderful. My comrade has given me an insight into a world you could barely understand if it were explained to you. It’s a world we wanted to show you, too…one of us came to you. One of these people you call Separatists. He was here to murder us all, but we showed him that there was a better way, a more noble way, a way we could all—”
Pavlov shot him in the chest.
* * *
Pavlov’s Cell
“Holy shit!” said Chainsaw.
Pavlov didn’t see the humour in it. “You should have seen him,” said Pavlov. “His leg was just lying there, in the mud, and he looked at it like it was nothing. No, better than that, as though this was the best thing that had ever happened to him in his entire life. It wasn’t shock. It wasn’t his injuries. Apalkov’s touch took away the pain. He was the most levelheaded I’d ever seen him. Ever.”
“So,” said Yanovna, “you shot him for being levelheaded?”
“I shot him because he was nuts,” he said. “Ilyukhina backed me up on this. So did Chuchnova. In fact…”
* * *
Jungle surrounding Hammerfall
Pavlov put another round into Jakov—or rather, the thing that used to be Jakov—and behind him, he heard Ilyukhina fire as well. Then the snap-crack of Chuchnova’s 6-1.
Apalkov and Jakov died with smiles on their faces, their bodies falling unceremoniously into the mud.
Chuchnova climbed into the crater with Pavlov, making her way over. “He’s dead, right?” she said, a tremor in her voice. “He’s definitely dead?”
Pavlov pointed to the remains of Jakov’s head, bright pink gore splattered on the jungle floor. “Definitely. No magic touch can bring you back from that.”
The three of them, as though uncertain of the truth of that, watched for a few seconds. Definitely dead.
A round whistled past Pavlov’s ear, so close the crack that followed almost hurt him. He ducked below the lip of the crater.
“The other fuckers are still out there,” he said. “Chuchnova, grab Apalkov’s weapon and let’s get out of here!”
She didn’t move, at least not in any meaningful manner. Her hands were shaking, her lips snapped shut, like if she opened them she might die.
Pavlov growled and reached over the lip, grabbing hold of…something. Something wet and squishy. He tried again. Hard and steel. Apalkov’s gun.
He pulled his hand back as another round splashed into the mud, inches away from his head. Slop rained down over his body. Someone was sniping at them at long range. Keeping them pinned.
They had to get out of this crater.
Pavlov touched his radio, hoping that the crazy ones were listening in. “Careful with that anti-tank rifle,” he said, “you’ll put someone’s eye out.”
No response. That was okay. They might have still heard, but it would hopefully…
Nah. He stopped kidding himself. The banter only served to make him feel better.
Cука блядь…
“Chuchnova, okay. Listen. Listen to me.” He grabbed her shoulder. “I’m going to count to five. On five, we need you to get up and run for that tree line. We need to get out of the range of that weapon.”
“But they’ll shoot us,” she said, eyes flicking to the thick wall of jungle green. “We can’t make it.”
“They won’t. With the mainframe down, that rifle’s being manually aimed—and it’s designed to hit tanks. Without computer assistance, it can barely get close to stationary targets at this distance, let alone moving people. We can make it.”
“But they got Jakov—”
“I know, but we have to get out of this crater, or we’re going to die here.”
She took a breath, her face hardened, and she nodded grimly. “Let’s get the hell out of here then,” she said.
“One. Two. Three. Four…”
CHAPTER 21
Jungle surrounding Hammerfall
“…FIVE!”
TOGETHER, THE TWO OF them broke from the crater and ran.
Squelch. Squelch. Squelch. Pavlov hunched over, sprinting as fast as he could, powering toward the tree line. Chuchnova pulled ahead of him; he imagined it was her fear propelling her, but the difference was probably due to the weight of his armour.
Any second now, the sni
per would fire again. He knew this because if he was the shooter, that’s what he would do. He could feel the crosshairs burning a hole onto his back. Any second now, any second…
“Down!” Pavlov threw himself into the mud.
Chuchnova awkwardly tripped and landed face first in the mud.
As they lay there, a round whistled overhead, so close the shockwave from the high-velocity round thumped against his helmet. By sheer accident, the shot had been perfectly timed. Any sooner and it would have hit him. Any later and he would have been tempted to get up again.
The weapon would need to reload. They didn’t have long.
“Up!” he shouted, but he didn’t need to. Chuchnova was already on her feet, and within a second, she disappeared into the tree line.
She could run, he’d give her that.
His armour seemed stuck to the mud, pressure sucking him down. He struggled with the weight of it, and then finally—nearly sending himself sprawling again—he clambered up to his feet and, like a mud-ghoul, waddled toward the tree line.
Crossing the threshold seemed to take an eternity, and Pavlov swore that the shooter would have had an opportunity to fire again, but death did not come. He slipped into the protection of the thick tree trunks and the wall of greenery.
Looking back the way he had come, through the foliage, his visor’s limited sensors showed nothing without the mainframe, but the double blind would work both ways. They wouldn’t be able to see him either.
They left Apalkov and Jakov’s bodies behind them, in the mud, and headed into the green.
* * *
Pavlov’s Cell
“How did you feel?” asked Yanovna. “Having just shot two of your squadmates? People under your command?”
He couldn’t really tell her. “Hand me your tablet,” he said. “I’ll write it down.”