by J. F. Holmes
They moved across the gap the crashing skiff had torn in the canopy and entered through the back of the craft where the last third had been ripped off before becoming the debris field that covered the lush jungle floor. Robert Lignal, one of Milo’s most talented warriors, climbed onto the waist-high causeway deck that ran fore-to-aft. The other two followed, and Milo brought up the rear, casting a wary gaze into that bright blue sky. “Let’s make it quick.”
Two of the men carried a pair of half-loaded Dynar two-point-five mil needle rifles and Robert a pair of Jochar ten mil caseless pistols. Milo had tried to get the man to use the more prolific armor-piercing needle rounds, but Robert refused. He claimed to enjoy watching the extra damage and blood the slug round caused his foes. Milo thought the needle flechettes plenty gruesome, and didn’t much care for the man or his blood lust, but he was a hell of a fighter, and he needed good fighters.
The causeway had once been a little claustrophobic, but it had also been straight and more-or-less uniform in its shape. Now, the deck rose and fell in response to insults to the airframe that bent the whole ship. The bulkheads caved in or flared out in response to the terrible forces played on them during the crash. Berths, nothing more than padded, coffin-sized slots with curtains to draw for privacy lined this section of the craft. Milo counted eight. Four on each side, stacked in twos.
No one moved. No one called out. The claustrophobic confines were filled with a thin haze of pungent smoke from still-smoldering fires. None of the once busy electronic panels showed life. It was creepy knowing that forty-five short minutes ago, this craft had been filled with a phrenic struggle to survive, but now, it was a fresh tomb for who knew how many. A tiny kitchen area broke to the left. Some kind of storage was kept in a closet-looking room to the right, its contents held in place by webbing. Milo admired the straps’ strength, to hold all that gear up through the storm of forces that did all of this.
There was a hatchway cut in the floor here, its door and handle recessed into the decking. Kyle tried to pull on it: nothing. No surprise. Milo cast his eyes across the warped spacecraft, none of these hatches was going to work. Besides, he’d seen enough of the wreckage to know: the lower deck was not survivable for man or machine.
They moved farther up the ship, the light spilling through the shattered nose more ambient. A ladder rose from the deck, ending at the mouth one of those deck-to-deck hatchways. The men looked up at it. One of the ladder legs had been sheared off during the crash, the rest of it looked like it might’ve been the subject of a Salvador Dali piece. It had become so twisted and misshapen, Milo wasn’t sure a man could climb it. “Milo, Pax is picking up multiple bogies inbound out of the southeast!”
“Southeast?” said Milo. There were no bases to the southeast and it was way too early for Xiang forces to be on-site. “Make ready for a fighting withdrawal. We’re on our way.” He motioned toward the aft of the ship, and a muffled voice came through the ceiling. He stopped, and tried to make sense of what he’d heard. “Hello? Is anyone there?” The voice came back louder so that he could almost understand it. Milo climbed the ladder, and strained to reach the latch, but it was too warped. He cursed to himself and dropped back to the deck. “Robert,” he said, still looking at the bottom of the hatch. “You got that ET?”
“Yeah, I got it.”
“Do it.” He climbed the warped ladder, his footing nimble and sure. The sheared leg caused it to wobble under his weight. He stuffed plenty of the putty in the warped jamb, placed a detonator before dropping back to the deck. They all moved from under the hatch and Milo shouted a warning. “Watch out! We’re cutting the door!”
Robert activated the detonator and the enriched thermite flared to life with a white hot hiss that wiped away the gloom of the causeway. Sparks poured from the grooves of the mangled hatchway in a hard rain. It burned and ate at the door for several long seconds before the metal core dropped to the deck with a clang, its edges and the edges of the bulkhead from which it had been cut glowing cherry red.
His earpiece sounded off again, “Milo, there are three transports. If we’re still here when they arrive…”
“Understood. ETA?”
“Less than five.”
Shit! “Copy.”
“Robert, you guys clear out. I’m gonna see what’s doing.” Robert started to move back down the causeway and Milo grabbed his arm. “Tell Andie to disperse and meet at the rally point. I’ll be a minute behind you.”
Robert nodded and was gone.
Milo climbed the wobbly ladder to the hatchway. He paused at the top, looking into the dark, gloomy compartment within. He could see the suggestion of a space crammed full of dark electronics, the blackness cut only by a tiny stream of light pouring through a crack in the ceiling. A human form sat motionless in an accelerator couch. No one sat in the station next to him. The beam of his handlight searched the rest of the tiny cockpit: the holo projectors were dark, so were the monitor screens. The mass of dead electronics and the claustrophobia of the tiny space implied no one could be up here, yet he had heard a voice. Hadn’t he?
“Hello? Hello?” thirty seconds was gone. He would either search, take a peek, or leave, but it had to be done now.
Milo looked at the blackened metal where the ET had burned through. It no longer glowed, but it was sure to be skin-searing hot. He drew his sarape and placed it over the edge hoping the metal had cooled enough that it wouldn’t burst into flames. It had. He managed to boost himself up and roll into a shattered pilothouse without the sarape slipping and casting him back to the metal deck below. He moved to take a look around and was staring into the working end of a Kharagof needlegun. It was hard to shift his gaze from anything but that tiny dark eye of death, but finally looked into a pale, rugged-looking female face beyond.
A thick curtain of black hair hung so thick past her crystal blue eyes, it was a miracle she could see to aim that thing. The woman was tiny, around a-hundred-and-fifty-two centimeters. She had been hiding between the bulky electronics and the forward bulkhead, and lashed out like a striking snake to hold the pistol to Milo’s head. “Orange is red.” The words seemed familiar, important even, but Milo hadn’t faced-down many guns, not like this. “Orange is red!” The woman’s voice took on an edge and her finger slipped into the trigger guard.
That was the jogging his memory needed: “Red is blue,” he replied.
Her blue eyes narrow in something that might’ve been disbelief or disdain. “You’re the wizard?”
“I don’t know about a wizard, but I’m here to meet you, and so is a Xiang reception party, so unless you relish torture and a life of captivity, I say we have this conversation later.”
The woman stared at him for several more heartbeats before giving him a faint, grudging nod.
Milo stood and snatched his sarape. It was singed but wearable. “We have to jump. Be careful and don’t touch the edges of the hole. They’re liable to still be hot.” He dropped through the hole and almost turned his ankle on the hatchway door he hadn’t thought to move on his way up. He squatted with his back to the bulkhead, pushing it away with his powerful leg muscles. “Let’s go!”
She dropped, landing with more grace than he’d displayed. They ran down the warped, twisted causeway, ducking sections of the ceiling that had buckled and almost tripping on a similar section of the floor. Milo thought he could hear the whirr of the approaching craft, but he dismissed it as imagination. It hadn’t been five minutes, yet. Had it? If so, they were both dead. They broke out into the light and turned hard to the left. If the ships were flying out of the southeast, breaking to the north and west would help keep the wreckage between them. The pair crashed through the jungle, heedless of the noise they were making. Distance was key. The farther from the crash site they could get, the more that would be between them and the Xiang sensors and the more ground the enemy would have to cover in a search.
The whirring of the engines finally struck Milo’s ears a hundred meters into
the jungle. He kept pumping his legs, driven by fear and the knowledge that Xiang often dropped patrols in large perimeters to protect the site and round up any careless scouts. They’d been on the move for twenty minutes before he turned and said: “Witch, I’m the wizard.”
“That’s not my code name!”
Milo smiled. “I’m giving it to you, and, after holding that gun to my head, you probably shouldn’t complain.”
* * *
Black Mamba mercenaries leapt from the open sliding doors on either side of the combat skiff’s passenger compartment, counting on their quantum stealth armor to shield them from prying eyes and invasive sensors and controlling their descent with jump jet backpacks. They were split into three squads: First Squad set up a perimeter around the wrecked skiff while Second Squad dropped onto the roof of the derelict craft and went to work with torches. Third Squad remained on the skiff as a tactical reserve.
Warlord Abayomi Olatunji watched it all from his command chair in the lead skiff. Each soldier had three body-cams: chest, back, and helmet. Their holographic images were tossed up onto the bulkhead before him, so he could see each squad and experience real-time conditions anywhere on the battlefield. He glanced at the strip of data going across the top of the display. The perimeter platoons were making landfall in the thick foliage. The bright green background of their tac-feed data indicated no opposition. He nodded his approval and turned to the boarding parties.
The ship was a wreck, bent and warped. The aft crew passed the bunks cut into the bulkheads, one ducking under the buckled ceiling, the other checking their six. “Negative contact.” Corporal Chikezi Rotimi’s deep baritone filled his ear. “Looks like there were no survivors.”
That’s when the forward crew and the topside crew met at the cutaway pilothouse door. “Someone survived,” said another voice. Olatunji leaned forward and frowned. The cameras left no doubt: that hadn’t happened in the crash. Someone had cut their way out of that compartment.
“First Squad, setup an LZ at the back of the target.” He unstrapped himself and began to don the soft, black armor over his black fatigues, their shoulder adorned with a soft grey patch depicting a coiled mamba, its black mouth open and threatening. By the time he had his webbing secured and pistol holstered, First Squad’s blast was dropping the trees that remained.
The pilot brought the craft to a smooth break and drifted above the crumpled trees. Third Squad descended the ramp before Olatunji and spread out in all directions, their weapons ready. Olatunji adjusted his black beret with a red-backed close-up of the black-mouthed serpent and strode down the ramp, wearing his dark wraparounds over his strong, coal black face. His neat, trimmed beard was thick and free of grey, giving him look young, virile visage.
He paused at the base of the ramp, standing tall and upright, looking left into the jungle trees and then right. His eyes stared past the combat HUD being fed into his glasses, searching of telltale signs of enemy troops or indication of how these people had escaped so completely. There was no effort to stay close to cover, no worry or concern in his demeanor, only intense concentration on his surroundings. He turned and strode through the shattered aft section of the craft, the soft-soled combat boots echoing softly on the metal deck. His wraparounds adjusted as he passed from the bright sunshine into the gloomy lighting of the wreck’s interior. It was just as the cameras had portrayed: twisted and shattered, barely recognizable as the inside of a ship. The acrid smell of burnt plastic and wires filled his nose and irritated his big brown eyes.
Rotimi had made his way to the forward compartment, standing with his weight on one foot, his short-barreled rifle slung over his shoulder. The quantum stealth armor had settled into the dull, faded black that defined the serpent from which his unit derived its name. A patch like the one on Olatunji’s uniform adorned his shoulder. Olatunji glanced at the cutaway hatch at his feet and then up through the hole. “Babatunde was right: this was cut,” said Rotimi.
Olatunji nodded, deep in thought. “But, by whom and where did they go?” He switched over to his comm. “Durojaiye, you’re sure nothing bugged of here on our way in.”
“As sure as I can be, sir. I can replay the approach, if you want.”
He didn’t think she’d missed anything, but you could never be too careful. “Please.” He changed his recipient. “Second and Third Platoon. Deploy drones and break into combat patrols. We have company out there.” It was worth the effort, but, Olatunji knew: these were jungle fighters. They were long gone. Next time, my little friends. Next time.
Chapter 2
“They were waiting.” The Witch’s name turned out to be Saundra, but Milo’s squad had taken to calling her Witch, and he didn’t think much was going to change that. She was sitting in the red grass of below the purple and orange canopy. “The pilot had been too careful. There’s no way they could’ve traced us, like that. Not unless they knew where we were coming.”
Milo leaned back. He traded a glance with Andie. It was just the three of them. Saundra had asked for a private meeting. “So, you think the leak is at our end?”
Saundra shrugged. “Why not? You had the same access to the rendezvous we did.”
Milo weighed that. There was a logic there, but: “What if the drone was a random patrol?”
“And, what about the detachment that almost bagged us? What was their approach vector? From the southeast?” She read the guilty look that passed between Milo and Andie: “They knew we were coming and where we were gonna be. They weren’t here by accident.”
“Who’s to say your people weren’t the leak?” Andie was staring hard at Saundra. “You said they had to know it was us because of the coordinates, but if was us they were after, why didn’t they just put boots on the ground here and nab us all in one haul? That’s what happened to Li’s crew.” Li Dong was a peaceful-protester-turned-resistance-fighter and was considered by many to be the original freedom fighter here on Vorcha. Now, he was dead or imprisoned. Some whispered betrayal.
Milo and Andie had been a Li disciple but had turned violent long before their master. They’d seen how Xiang Pharmaceuticals responded to Li’s threats to expose the company’s unsanctioned harvest of untested Gorax Root to UN inspectors and recognized it was going to take more than a bunch of unarmed collective farmers to bring down their operation. “It is your people who came to me, Saundra,” said Milo, reaching for the pistol on his belt. “Perhaps you reached out to Li first.”
She laughed in his face. “You got me! I set you up, put myself on that skiff, and let that drone shoot me down in sight of you, breaking the damned thing into pieces and nearly killing me in the process. And, let’s not forget: I’m the one who changed the damned coordinates as a matter of security protocol. Had I not done that…”
Milo took his hand off the gun. She had a way of making the notion sound completely ridiculous. “So, we have a mole.” When no one answered, he said: “We’ll have to keep this contained in the three of us, until we figure out who it is.”
Saundra nodded. “I can go with that.”
Andie nodded, too, though there was a grudging quality to it. “Agreed.” She looked at Saundra. “So, what do you have for us besides trouble?”
The woman smiled. “I bring help and support from the independence movements around the galaxy.” She looked over the tiny tent with something akin to revulsion. I hope you aren’t too attached to this place.”
* * *
Abayomi Olatunji sat on the second-floor balcony puffing on a fat cigar, his feet propped on a convenient chair. He’d shed his glasses to look out on the Vorcha jungle with his bare eyes. It was a nice day: almost thirty-two degrees Celsius with a humidity of ninety-percent, a damn sight better than working in some frozen tundra, or worse, in the harsh, cold vacuum of space. He’d taken those gigs, when they paid well, but this was like working in paradise, and he loved it. It was his employer he could do without.
The French doors behind him opened and Zhu Fan stepped
out onto the porch wearing a sleek, dark grey suit. His dress shoes echoed on the white-painted floorboards. Olatunji did not look up. He remained in his seat, enjoying the view, and spinning the big cigar between his thumb and finger tips. “Hello, Mr. Zhu,” he said without taking his eyes from the jungle. “I had not expected you so soon.”
Zhu offered a polite bow and spoke in a husky, Mandarin accent: “You were to report to us the day’s action.”
“What’s to report? Your intel was wrong.” He glanced at Zhu. “They weren’t where they were supposed to be, where you said they would be.”
Zhu might’ve flushed. His sloped eyes narrowed. “You say my information was bad? Perhaps you bungled the job.”
Olatunji turned his head in a slow, angry motion, his eyes locking onto Zhu’s like a targeting computer. “My people spent days on the ground, in the jungle. Three platoons, with full invisibility camo, ready to come down on their heads. Which we would have done, had they shown up where they were supposed to, where you said they would be. Rather, we had to recall our ships, rush aboard them, and fly to a new location sixty klicks away.”
Zhu held his gaze for several long moments. “The weapons?”
Olatunji turned his gaze back to the jungle view. “Snagged them all. Most were scattered across the jungle floor. The rest were crushed in the cargo hold when the ship crashed.”
“And the agent?”
“Slipped his leash.”
Zhu didn’t move for several long moments. “You said you could outperform our corporate security on this job in spite of our history together. You said you had UN fighting experience, that you’d fought the Indies before, that this would be different than the last time!”