by Michael Todd
Madigan grumbled something under her breath, but Sal didn’t catch it. He still tried to figure out what Courtney was talking about. Besides, if Kennedy had something to say to him, she could speak up. It wasn’t like her to hold back if she had something on her mind. She was outspoken all the way.
The other teams assembled quickly now that the sun climbed above the horizon. The sky was still the vibrant mixture of deep reds and yellows of the desert dawn, but the slow rise in temperature told Sal that the last stray vestiges of cool air would soon vanish.
He pulled his helmet on. Young had said that they were understaffed for this mission, but it certainly didn’t look that way. Over four dozen people had already assembled and prepared to head out into the Zoo with enough vehicles to take them all already gassed up and ready to move. Whoever funded this run had some deep pockets. Even so, he was sure that the objectives behind the mission were widely overestimated, which was why there were petitions for extra people to join in at a lower hiring rate.
And there he was, bringing more people into the game already.
“Okay, folks, listen up,” a voice intoned over the comm line that they shared with the others heading out. Almost fifty expectant people had now gathered. Young had been right, though. It was past oh-six hundred and the sun was already fully exposed and working hard to reach the top of the sky by the time everyone had completed their preparations.
“The mission parameters will have been entered into all your suit databases,” the voice continued, and Sal now recognized it as Young’s. “This is a research-heavy run, so stick close to your specialists and follow their lead. Specialists, it’s on you not to lead your gunners into sticky situations. The same bounty for the Pita flowers applies, but they aren’t the main objective or money-maker for this run.”
“Another thing,” the leader called out before they turned toward the vehicles. “All research bounties will be distributed evenly. So the harder you work, the more all of us get paid. If anyone lags behind and tries to profit on everyone else’s work, I’ll beat you to death myself so we don’t have to share our bounty with you, is that clear? We’ll meet back at the JLTVs in five days. Anyone who isn’t there in time walks home.”
A horde of affirmatives issued over the comms.
“Good,” Young replied once it had all died down. “Your squads should show up on your screens now. Good luck.”
Sal checked his team. Predictably, it was made up of Kennedy and Courtney…Dr. Monroe, rather. But the surprise came when Young, Ito, Sousa, and Carson showed up there too.
“Hey, Sergeant Kennedy,” Young said. He joined them with the other three as they moved toward the vehicles. “I’m glad to see your face on my squad’s roster sheet.”
“Yeah,” she drawled and patted the man on the shoulder. “I’m sure that was simply a lucky coincidence.”
Her armor was of superior quality and make than Young’s government-issued suit, which meant that he stumbled a few steps from her tap before the inner gyros of his suit regained their balance.
“And you must be Dr. Monroe.” Young chuckled and moved quickly out of Kennedy’s reach. “It’s a pleasure to have you on board. You come highly recommended by both Jacobs and Kennedy, so I’m sure you’ll fit right in.”
“I appreciate it, Sergeant Young,” Monroe said as she shook the man’s offered hand. “I look forward to working with all of you .”
“All right, boys,” the leader said and thickened his drawl intentionally as they mounted up. “Let’s go make us some money.”
“Sure thing, Leprechaun,” Ito said with a grin.
“We sure are…estrogen-packed here today, aren’t we?” Sousa asked as he looked around and noted that three of the members of his seven-man squad were female.
“Yeah, consider yourself lucky,” Kennedy growled. She sat awkwardly, still not fully adjusted to her new suit. “I’ve been in testosterone-heavy squads before, and all the penis-measuring was pathetic.”
Young laughed and nudged his teammate on the shoulder. Sousa mumbled some inanity that was lost in the rumble as the engines started up.
Chapter Seventeen
Sal examined the power-armored arm on his suit. It still felt contradictory that he could actually grip without using his hand to do so. It looked pretty damn cool and all, but it would take time to adjust to it. That plus the need to focus to gain control of his arm again when it was time to shoot things was discouraging at the beginning of what would inevitably be a dangerous enterprise.
That said, the ability to disengage his arm from the power armor to be able to work as a specialist was impressive. It looked like he was shedding skin like a snake.
“I call it ‘specialist mode,” he said to Kennedy after he’d tried it a couple of times. “So when I actually do it, I’ll ‘engage specialist mode.’ And when I pull the arm back on, it’s ‘gunner mode.’”
“You’ll have to promise me that you won’t shout that nonsense when we’re actually in the field,” Kennedy growled.
“I second that motion,” Young said with a grin.
“Thirded,” Monroe said with a shrug. “Sorry, Jacobs.”
“Whatever,” he responded cheerfully and shook his head. “You’re all simply jealous of how cool my new hybrid armor is.”
“That or wonder why you focus on how cool it is instead of doing your job as a specialist and collecting data,” Madigan retorted. “We’re in the Zoo for a reason, you know, and it’s not to come third in a cool contest.”
“Hey, I…wouldn’t come in third,” Sal said. “Besides, that’s why we brought Monroe with us, right? To be the specialist so I could be a gunner?”
“No, we brought Monroe along so you could have help with the specialist-ing while you were being a gunner,” Kennedy said with a chuckle. “Besides, there’s two of you, which means double the people to make money for us on this trip. So get cracking and make me some money. I’m not here for the pleasant and aesthetic views, you know.”
“Are they always like this?” Monroe asked Young as they dropped back in the squad. The vehicles were well out of sight now, and the familiar sights and sounds of the jungle surrounded them and cut them off from anything but the Zoo itself.
“I’ve only been out here with them once,” Young said. “But that one time was enough to tell me that…well, yes, they are always like this. They keep the banter up almost non-stop. It’s actually good for morale and keeps people distracted from all the different kinds of death that we might find out here. Although I did promise death by beating to those who don’t pull their weight in this run so...”
“Right.” Monroe saw where he was going with that. “I’ll get to…specialist-ing, I guess?”
“Don’t…don’t do that,” Young muttered. “Don’t encourage him. It makes all this worse.” He turned to face where Kennedy and Sal still walked. “Hey, Jacobs, get to work. Make us some bounties. None of us are out here for free.”
“You’re jealous!” Sal called and shook his head. “Fine, I’ll go into…specialist mode!”
“Just fucking don’t,” Kennedy warned.
“Too late, already love it,” he said and switched his facemask’s HUD to the specialist software. It removed the targeting reticle that followed the assault rifle in his arm and allowed him to look around as he made adjustments to the different programs to figure out which he’d need at which time.
“You have the Pita tracker working on your phone now, right?” Sal asked in a private comms channel and glanced at Kennedy.
“Roger that,” she responded and kept her voice low even though her suit blocked anyone whom she didn’t want to listen in.
“Good. Keep our heading toward the nearest cluster large enough to warrant a visit,” he said. “Since we took a different direction from the rest of the squads, we should be able to keep clear of the money that they make while we make some of our own.”
Kennedy nodded and they clicked out before anyone noticed the communication. People tende
d to be suspicious of private channels, so Sal had learned to keep their conversations brief when it came to their own trademark method of tracking the money-making plants and their flowers. It was best to keep some things exclusive to Heavy Metal, right?
Sal peered into the heavy growth and made sure his motion detector was on. As they got deeper into the jungle, the lack of direct sunlight should have meant that smaller plants wouldn’t grow as much, which in turn would make it much easier to navigate the area.
He really needed to lose the natural assumption that the Zoo would behave like a regular jungle. The underbrush was as thick deeper in as it had been outside. And since it was much darker there, navigation was more difficult.
But then again, not as difficult as it could have been.
It took almost complete darkness to see the phenomenon with the naked eye. He’d noticed it on their last run while they set up camp. It had been later than anticipated, which meant that they had started off in the dead of night and so he’d seen it. Tiny blue lights glimmered like pinpricks in the trees and glowed through cracks in the bark. These were the minute indicators of the presence of the goop inside the plants.
Except that they were more noticeable now and easier to see. It was as if the bigger the jungle became, the more goop the plants had in them, which in turn made the forest grow faster…a perfect, balanced circle. Sal supposed that it went on ad infinitum too. The goop had created a jungle that was meant to grow, and that was exactly what it did despite all the efforts of the men and women at the Staging Area. He wasn’t even sure that the wall could stop it.
That was both terrifying and awesome at the same time, he thought with a chuckle.
Either way, he could tune the night vision in his HUD to detect the very particular kind of light that the goop in the trees emanated, which made navigation so much easier.
He’d given Kennedy the specs to put into her suit, as well as Courtney, with a stern warning to restrict it to Heavy Metal personnel only. He needed as much as he could to sell back to these people once he had finished there.
The altered night vision gave him an almost daytime view of the area, and when he engaged the motion detectors, there wasn’t much in range that he couldn’t see.
Satisfied that everything now worked optimally, he glanced around, and his eyes were immediately drawn to movement on the trees. He’d already noted the presence of advanced, tree-dwelling simians, but as he stepped closer, he noticed that something much smaller moved over the surface of the massive trunks.
“What is it?” Kennedy asked.
“Insects,” Sal said, almost amazed. “Well, make that arachnids, since they have eight legs but they act like insects.”
They shuffled along in a line in much the same way that ants did. He turned the viewer in his HUD up to give him a better view of them. They didn’t seem to notice that he approached.
“That’s weird,” Monroe said as she joined him. “I don’t think I’ve seen insects around here at all. Except the…you know, giant ones. Never anything scaled down to proper insect size.”
“Arachnids,” Sal corrected and spoke softly as he usually did when he focused. He didn’t want to interrupt the line, so he had to follow one of the tiny creatures climbing up the tree to get some decent, up-close shots. He made sure that they were all in the real lighting so that the perception wasn’t altered by his night-vision addition.
“What?”
“Eight legs, that makes them arachnids,” he said impatiently as he snapped as many shots as he could, both of the individual arachnid and all of them working together.
“They have a thorax as well,” Monroe pointed out. “That makes them insects.”
Sal shook his head. They could quibble over the exact species of the little bugs that they looked at later. For now, he was curious as to why they all carried small globules of bright blue matter in their jaws. Obviously, they carried the goop around. Had they taken it out of the tree? Or had they brought it to the tree? Both were valid options. Various species of insect had nests and hives in trees, but he’d never seen any of the animals actually interact with the goop in an outward fashion like this before.
He chuckled. They acted like insects, despite their eight legs. He didn’t know of any arachnids that worked in a hive-mind like this.
The two specialists took more pictures and added them all to the databases in their suits before they moved on.
“These are probably the first insect-arachnids we’ve seen out here,” Sal said with a nod. “Add that to the bounty. Do you think we’re not carrying our own weight now, Sergeant Young?”
“Shut up and get back to work,” Young responded. Ito made the sound of a whip.
Sal looked up suddenly, and his eyes flickered to their left. He could see Kennedy glance around too. He nudged a button with his chin, minimized all the specialist software, and reactivated the gunner capability of his suit. It was a nifty and well-designed piece of technology, he admitted as he focused and gripped his gun tighter when he raised it cautiously.
His improved view revealed a full pack of the hyena creatures, at least twenty of them. They chipped and yelped to catch the attention of the rest of the pack as they circled and moved closer to the squad.
“Heads up,” Sal said. The suit chambered a round in his rifle as he raised it level with the approaching pack.
“Make a circle, back to back. We have hostiles on our six too,” Young growled, his own weapon hot and ready. The squad complied and surrounded the more vulnerable member of their group. Sal was used to it being him, and he remembered how annoyed he had been by the concept. He could only imagine that Monroe felt the same right now.
Tough. If she wanted to live, she had to let her gunners protect her.
Sal opened fire. He remembered what these weapons felt like to shoot without the aid of power armor. They kicked hard and kicked high, which made it difficult to aim at anything when he wrestled with his own weapon to keep it down and relatively stable. He suddenly realized that his approach was all wrong. These assault rifles were designed to shoot like this. He allowed himself to work with the weapon and in a few minutes, didn’t even feel it kick as the shots were quickly filtered out by the suit to protect his hearing.
The effects were dramatically visible, Sal realized as the hyenas yelped and tried to evade the bullets. It was hard to feel sympathy for them, though. Memories of how they had tried to clamp down on his skull on his first trip were hard to forget. These attacked, but he’d noticed that they weren’t the bravest or most persistent of creatures. As soon as the fusillade began, they backed away quickly. He stopped firing when they turned tail and disappeared into the jungle. He didn’t like them, but there was no reason to kill if they didn’t attack.
He turned to see what the rest of the squad had to deal with. Five of the massive, venom-fanged panthers lay on the ground around the squad and a couple more now retreated. Sal narrowed his eyes. Unlike the hyenas, the panthers weren’t the type to run as soon as potential prey showed aggression.
Still, five out of seven made a heavy loss for the pack. He made a note of the change in their usual behavior.
“There’s nothing new here for us to pick up, right?” Young said as soon as they were clear of any animal attacks.
“I don’t think so.” Sal glanced at Monroe, both for her opinion and to make sure she was all right. She nodded in the affirmative, and he took it on both counts.
“We should still collect some samples, though. Just in case,” she said.
“Agreed,” Young said. “We’ll stick around for five, and then we move out.”
Chapter Eighteen
They didn’t need five minutes to collect samples. The most time-consuming project was when Sal collected venom from the panther’s fangs, and that was only because he needed to disengage from his power arm to do it. They set off again in no time.
His mood dropped slightly. He’d killed these animals before, and it had never been a probl
em. For some reason, and only for a short while, he had forgotten that killing was something that he actually had to do. That was why his spirits had been higher at the beginning than they were now once reality set in.
It wasn’t like his mood influenced the group or anything. He was sure that they would be perfectly happy if he became a bit quieter.
“Hey,” Kennedy said. She stepped beside him and nudged his unarmored shoulder. “Is everything okay? You’re quiet now, and I don’t think the jungle can take that.”
Sal smirked and shook his head. “Yeah, I’m fine. I remembered how much fun there is to be had here in the Zoo.”
She smiled and nudged him again, gentler this time. “Yeah, I get that. Keep your chin up, though. You don’t want the rest of our team to come and have this same conversation with you.”
“Well, maybe I like the attention,” he said.
“Yeah, that’s you,” she muttered and rolled her eyes. “Attention whore. Drama queen. Egomaniac.”
“I get the point.” Sal nudged her in the shoulder this time. “Stop…describing me.”
“Hey, do you pick that up?” Young called from the back.
“Pick what up?” Monroe asked and looked around a little fearfully.
“I have interference on my comm chat,” Young said and tapped at the console on his hip. “I can hear something, but I’m not sure what it is.”
Sal checked his comms locator. It was a useful device that let him know if there was comms chatter near him without the necessity to actually listen in. Something definitely pinged the signal above zero, but there wasn’t much signal.
“The Zoo causes all kinds of interference,” he said and linked the comms to the speakers in his helmet. He listened intently for a few seconds and could hear something other than the regular interference static, but he couldn’t make it out. “Kennedy, do you think you can clean this signal up a bit?”
“Sure, let me break out my quantum generator to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow,” she rumbled and waved a dismissive hand. “How the hell am I supposed to clean the signal up a bit?”