His eyes were watering and bloodshot with the force of his vitriol. “Now shut that fucking thing up. You can finish tomorrow you…you…,” his mouth worked trying to find the insult he wanted. Finally, with a stutter he spat it out. “a..a..abortion.”
Ray felt her anger rising back at him but forced it down. She had other more important things to do that trade insults with this crazy man. Pritchard turned back to the camp and Ray hurriedly stowed the HHI amongst the nest of wires and loosely closed the tower access doors. She would have to come back for it later once they were asleep. Ray gathered her tools once again and shut down all but one work light, leaving that for the benefit of the camp.
Jonah caught Ray’s eye as she moved back through the camp, angling towards the last of the food that was still sitting on a trestle. Ray shook her head indicating Jonah should stay where he was. She ate her food looking at the ground but aware that Jonah was surveying the camp and keeping an eye out.
Strangely, Aymes had been absent for the last hour or so. Usually by now the CDSE men were either asleep or getting close to it. Tonight however, they talked in groups or lounged around engaged in meaningless pursuits. Ray noticed Pritchard had wandered off for the moment. Jonah sat on a branch of an ancient gnarled fallen tree that lay immediately adjacent to the giant stump from which the tree had broken, forced down by an ancient storm.
Her food finished, Ray stood up to deliver her plate to the wash bucket. Just as she made to move forward, the quiet dusk was pierced with the unmistakable clatter of gunfire some distance into the bush. The clatter was answered by deeper single shots and crashing footfalls approaching the camp.
Ray dropped her plate and turned to Jonah who had simply vanished. Somehow, she saw his hand beckoning from behind the tree stump. Feeling impossibly slow, Ray ran to get behind the fallen log and the cover of Jonah’s fire power.
She vaulted the fallen tree and tumbled onto the ground ten meters to Jonah’s left as he aimed around the right side of the tree stump. Ray scrambled to hunker in behind the log and looked through a gap in the old branches.
Aymes crashed out of the trees on the far side of the camp at top speed. Her face was set like granite. The effort of her sprint telling in her clenched jaw as she ran. A large round scar spread across the front of her body armor, terminating in a bloody mess of smashed tissue on her left should. Her left arm hung uselessly, and she carried her assault rifle one handed in her right.
Ray noticed that the camp was now devoid of CDSE personnel. Without hesitation, they had simply disappeared into the bush, dropping everything as they fled.
Aymes was half way across the vacant camp, two black suited CDSE soldiers in body armor and helmets powered out of the bush in full pursuit. Jonah pumped a short burst putting the first round through the left lens of the right soldier’s goggles. He flipped backwards as if he had run into wire at eye level. A second, longer burst raked through the unarmored legs of the second pursuer. He fell forward onto his combat shotgun, the weapon discharging accidentally into the log Ray was hunched behind. A pellet ricocheted off the wood, nicking the tip of Ray’s ear and making her duck down out of view.
The burn of the small wound brought home to Ray that this was real. This was really happening, and the bullets were deadly. Ray could hear the downed soldier cursing loudly as Aymes arrived, jumping the log easily but landing heavily on her uninjured side.
In the same movement she whipped out her sidearm, turned and rose to a crouch, leveling the weapon at the fallen man. The massive crack of the over powered pistol silenced him for good. Aymes ducked back down as a hail of automatic gunfire peppered their wooden barricade, smashing the smaller branches to shards and covering Ray with flying fragments.
The volume of the noise was staggering, and Ray struggled to think. Aymes dropped her sidearm and spare assault rifle onto the ground and slapped another magazine into her carried weapon. She looked at Ray briefly and gave her a nod which Ray assumed meant she was currently relatively uninjured.
Aymes and Jonah exchanged a look but nothing else, they seemed to move as if they knew exactly what the other was thinking. Suddenly Aymes popped up, unloading a hail of bullets into the bush, her muzzle flashing brightly in the dusk. She dropped back as the return fire erupted. Jonah released a sharp burst eliciting a cry of pain from someone beyond the green border before dropping back himself.
Silence fell and Aymes and Jonah both checked their ammo and reloaded while they could. Ray could hear her pulse thumping in her ears as the deafening silence pushed down on them. Finally, Ray heard a twig snap ahead of them as the CDSE soldiers moved.
“Head down Ray,” Jonah spoke over the silence, “attack coming.”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth Ray heard the crash of bodies accelerating through the bush across the battle field. Jonah and Aymes opened fire as bullets started smacking into the wood protecting Ray, some whining as they ricocheted and spun off into the trees.
Ray watched awestruck as Aymes and Jonah calmly took turns firing, covering each other easily as the other reloaded. They seemed perfectly aware of each other and moved as if choreographed. What’s more, they both seemed to be able to see targets that were totally hidden by foliage. Twice Jonah spun and fired into apparently empty forest, his shots resulting in cries of pain from unseen enemies. A ballet of lead and death.
A sharp sting in Ray’s neck brought her back into herself and she reached for the pain confused. How had she been shot through the thick wood of the tree stump? Her fingers searched for the rivulet of blood that she feared was beginning its course down her throat. Instead, her fingers encountered a soft ball which Ray pulled away from her throat.
She held the pink feathered dart in front of her eyes as the world started to tilt lazily. She could see Aymes and Jonah engaging the enemy but had no way to alert them.
The sounds of the weapons discharging, and bullets smacking started to feel distant and echoed as strong hands grabbed Ray from behind.
She felt herself sliding backwards, powerless to fight. Aymes turned towards Ray, stood and began to run, her eyes wide with fear and rage.
Ray watched her progress in a dream, as her neural systems began shutting down. Aymes bounded one long step, then two, before she was hit with a giant impact, catapulting her forward. She hit the ground just as a cascade of sparks and smoke poured from a can to her left, lighting the battle field and dulling the fragmented shafts of white light emanating from the lone work lamp.
As the smoke drifted in the gentle breeze the broken shafts of light trickled across the bush as if searching for her. How beautiful, Ray thought, as the last of her consciousness lifted away and she let herself fall into the hands pulling her towards sleep.
CHAPTER 23
Before the shots even began, Aymes’ jump in heart rate alerted Jonah that she was under fire. He felt her break into fast motion forty or so meters to the north among the trees. A cluster of other signatures moved after her, and others approached from the flanks.
Some he recognized from the CDSE crew they traveled with. He had emotionally tagged their digital signatures in the previous days. Others though, were unfamiliar to his proximity alert system. These signals loomed larger in his mind. Clearly enhanced with dangerous tech and hence they were prioritized as greater threats.
Pritchard’s signature was not among them. In Jonah’s mind, Pritchard’s bizarre array of bio enhancements gave the mental impression of sickness or disease. His system could ID very little of Pritchard’s tech and therefore he didn’t really know how to prioritize him. The men that were coming now were easy to pigeon hole, they were undoubtedly equipped with combat enhancements.
Jonah loped two strides to gain cover behind the jagged shards of a giant tree stump, flicking off his safety as he moved. He checked for Ray and was a little shocked that she hadn’t moved even as the first rattle of gunfire echoed away into the trees. She looked startled and was scanning the trees for him. He beckon
ed to get her attention and to get her moving.
A mental flare told him that Aymes had been hit but he could still feel her moving. He felt her veer left slightly, drawing the pursuers into Jonah’s line of fire. His V.I. extrapolated the position where he could get a clear shot at the pursuers and displayed a timer bar, so Jonah wouldn’t miss the shot.
Jonah aimed at the digital head and waited until the bar told him to fire. The man’s head arrived out of the bush and met his digital twin just in time for the bullet to snatch the better half of his brain out through the back of his skull. Jonah’s mouth instantly filled with a metallic taste and felt thick. Something that always seemed to happen when he killed a person up close.
With insufficient time to aim, Jonah raked a burst through the legs of the next closest pursuer, dropping him on his face. The percussive crack of the downed man’s shotgun initiated the stimulators in his auditory system to turn down the volume, so he could focus clearly.
Jonah’s V.I. had automatically made Aymes’ visual image mostly transparent. Jonah preferred to see mainly enemies during combat and his proximity system told him where Aymes was and would stop his weapon from firing if she were in the way.
There was very little chance of that. Her bio status readouts looked OK. Jonah could feel her now, to his left behind the fallen log. He took a second to visually check for Ray as she was invisible to his sensors among all this activity. She appeared unharmed.
With his natural vision he saw Aymes rise just beyond where Ray crouched, she had a nasty wound in her left shoulder but seemed otherwise unharmed. She got a good kill with her sidearm and then dropped back down, catching Jonah’s eye for a second. Aymes’ proximity signature flashed in his consciousness indicating that she was reloading. She rose again and fired a short burst before dropping back.
Silence descended as they both reloaded. Jonah’s proximity alert was now full of figures at range of distances. He could feel five high priority targets approaching in a group of three, and other lower priority targets scattered about.
The three targets in the middle charged. Jonah and Aymes rose and fired in concert, overlapping to give reloading time to the other. Targets in his mind were stopping but he had no way to know if they were hit or simply taking cover.
The two to the right were skirting sideways and his V.I. indicated that they would outflank his cover and have a firing line in a couple of seconds. Their range and cover level were not ideal but the risk they posed was too high to ignore. Jonah snapped off two quick bursts aiming center torso of the red digital figures displayed in his VI. The cries of pain coming from their direction told him he had hit something.
His focus returned to the remaining principle threats. They were now stationary in the bush. Judging by the number of bullets hitting his cover, they seemed to be laying down heavy suppression fire. Jonah fired at the digital renderings in short bursts but heard no cries and there was no letup in the barrage. They must be in good cover.
As he reloaded he heard similar controlled bursts emanating from Aymes’ weapon. This was a bad situation, they couldn’t outlast this many enemy if they dug in. They would run out of ammo and be dead. They had to move.
Jonah felt Aymes suddenly spin and dash backward away from her cover. He assumed she had come to the same conclusion and almost without thinking his body reacted and began to turn to move with her. He saw Aymes already on her feet but not Ray. As his eyes scanned left into the bush he saw two men running backwards dragging Ray’s limp body by the legs. Neither were visible to his VI.
An explosion behind Aymes lifted her off her feet and catapulted her towards the men and Jonah’s world turned into static and piercing light. Fucking Lightning Ball. Jonah had seen plenty of these grenades go off. He’d even thrown a few himself. They were a nice percussion grenade, but their main function was to spit out a series of electromagnetic waves and smoke, confusing the hell out of proximity systems like Jonah’s.
The reflectivity of Jonah’s VI had instantly dialed up to max to protect his retinas against the flash rendering his eyes an otherworldly, silver. With very little light getting in, he was blind to the natural world, but his V.I. still functioned.
With the Lightning Ball filling the air with electromagnetic junk, Jonah’s system told him he was standing in the middle of tens of unknown threats, flicking in and out of existence. Most were phantoms created by the grenade, but some were real. Jonah flicked his VI off and froze, blind for a terrifying second waiting for his vision to return as the flash protection dissipated.
Clearly, they wanted Ray alive. Thinking fast he strode the short distance to Aymes and grabbed her by the arm. She was trying to rise but struggling. Jonah heaved her up and propelled her in the direction that Ray had been dragged. He figured if they wanted her taken alive then the enemy behind them might be hesitant to fire in their direction.
His assumption proved correct as they plunged into the bush. The fire from the rear ceased. Large flat leaved ferns gripped against Jonah’s trousers and hanging vines whipped at his face. Deeper into the undergrowth the darkness was almost complete but Jonah’s VI simply enhanced his vision, giving it a silvery hue.
Aymes was coming around and moving better. Her left arm was hanging, and Jonah could see a steady flow of blood dripping from her fingers. Slowly, as the Lightning Ball discharged, Jonah’s systems came back online. The confusion of phantoms in his mind coalesced into a handful of pursuers.
The three high threat enemies were among them of course. Up ahead, where he imagined Ray might be, there was nothing. He felt panic rising in his chest.
“We can’t outrun them,” Aymes gasped between breaths.
“Can you see Ray?” Jonah replied desperately.
“Nope,” Aymes replied. ” Gotta be NOBEs. We need to split. Double back. Get to a vehicle.”
Aymes veered suddenly right. A split second later Jonah broke left. He wished he had a grenade, but they had only been issued rifles for this mission. Mentally Jonah checked his ammo. One and a half clips. Not much. After that it would be knife work only.
Three of the five pursuers broke with him at a range of about thirty meters. Jonah spotted a massive tree outlined silver against the bustling multitude of the bush and he dove behind the trunk, simultaneously shutting down his entire BE system.
Unlike a civilian system that would still listen for remote signals and check connectivity, Jonah’s went completely dark. The three pursuing him, Aymes, and her two trackers, disappeared from his mind and his augmented vision faded to near dark. Jonah shut his eyes tight to bring on his natural night vision and listened. Old school now, he thought. You can’t see me, and I can’t see you. The crashing in the bush behind him ceased abruptly. Jonah could hear the hisses of urgent whispering, but it was too distant for him to understand.
He waited, eyes closed, struggling to control his breathing. Gradually he began to hear soft movement. His position was too obvious. Silently he rolled to a low crouch. With his system dark his proximity signature would be gone but they could still use infra-red vision to spot him.
Jonah made a short low dash, as quietly as he could to another tree further to his right. Far enough he hoped that he might be out of the direct path of his pursuers. Shots never came. Maybe they had no IR or perhaps they had gone dark too. Either that or the undergrowth was too thick.
Jonah froze again, eyes shut. He forced himself to take long slow breaths, his hammering heart was crying for more oxygen, but he knew his body. He would recover soon. Back behind him he heard a strangled squeal the ended abruptly in a dull thud. Aymes was doing her work he smiled to himself. Four on two now. For the first time that night, Jonah felt confident they would get out of this alive.
Somewhere off in the distance an unearthly howl echoed between the trees setting Jonah’s teeth on edge and raising the hairs on his neck. Jonah’s fear for Ray ratcheted up a notch. With a sinking heart Jonah resigned himself to the fact that they were unlikely to recover
her now. The kidnappers would reach the vehicles before they had a chance to take care of their pursuers.
Not wasting the opportunity, he used the fading echoes of the howl to cover another quick dash back towards his pursuers at an angle into the bush. He found a spot where the lamp still shining in the campsite penetrated through the trees, giving just enough light that he could make out the color of the leaves in the corridor of foliage ahead.
There he waited, silent as death. Breathing almost normally now, heart still laboring but under control. It didn’t take long. The silhouette of a helmet passed through the faint light. Then another. Jonah waited until the third man passed before he moved.
Creeping low and quiet he joined the back of the trio. His vision had recovered fully, and he was starting to pick out details. A shiny leaf reflecting the meager light went dark as a body passed in front. Jonah picked up a fallen stick and tossed it out to the right, up ahead of where he thought the front man would be. All three shadows disappeared as the men dropped to a crouch.
Jonah froze, his eyes focused on the space the closest man had just vacated. Jonah heard a whispered command from the front and the sound of movement. He drew his knife and took two strides. The synthetic outline of a CDSE helmet stood out starkly against the forest shadows and Jonah stabbed hard just beneath it. He must have hit his mark because there was no scream. Right through the neck.
Jonah fired a burst into the forest where the two leaders had gone. He pulled the knife out releasing a gust of gurgling breath from the man’s lungs. He clawed at his neck, but his vocal chords were gone. Jonah use the sound of the man’s thrashing to cover his next move a few long strides directly towards the other men and then dropped to his belly in the scrub. His entire being focused as he heard the men half running back in his direction cursing in whispers. They passed within a meter of him.
He rose to a knee behind them and fired one long burst, emptying the magazine into the backs of the men. The impact of the rounds knocked them forward and they fell. One passed out instantly, but the other let out a long high-pitched wail that made Jonah’s teeth clench. Knife in hand he strode forward to finish him. Mouth thick again and steel on his taste buds.
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