Chimera Company: Rho-Torkis. Issue 2.: A sci-fi adventure serial

by Tim C. Taylor

  Osu was right. Their appearance into the ice plain went unnoticed.

  But a few hours later, a patrolling micro-drone spotted the dying remnants of their heat trail and begun a stealthy pursuit. And when it reached the party of five humanoids on hover bikes, its algorithms processed its observational data and categorized the party as hostile.

  The drone was too dumb to conceptualize the idea of hostiles as anything more than a category in an enumerated class. It could not feel hostility itself, any more than it could recommend a search and destroy team should intercept. It simply radioed back what it had found.

  But the operator who received the transmission was a far more complex being who was not only capable of feeling hostility but sparked with excitement as he called for a search and destroy team, because he would join the chase himself.

  OSU SYBUTU

  “What are we going to do about the spy drone?” asked Zavage.

  “The alleged spy drone,” countered Stryker, who was huddled next to the Kurlei in the bivouac of camo sheets stretched between the circled bikes. “I haven’t seen any drones. All we’ve picked up are two tight-burst transmissions, and the last was over an hour ago.”

  “What else could it be?” asked Zavage. He sounded distant from within the shadows of his hooded cloak. They all did.

  “We will assume it’s a drone for now,” said Osu, “but that’s not the most urgent question. What are we going to do about you, Urdizine?”

  Everyone looked at the Zhoogene legionary whose answer was a groan of pain that had been held in for far too long.

  “Sorry, Sergeant. Think I caught a fragment of Yergin’s bike when he blew it up. Thought it would self-heal. Didn’t want to be a burden.”

  “Injuries are to be reported and assessed. It’s my place to decide whether you are a burden, SOTL Urdizine. Not yours. What’s your status?”

  “Shrapnel caught me upper-left abdomen. This armor I’m wearing smells like boiled slug hide but it managed to soak up most of the energy. I thought the hydraulic bands that underpin my muscles would push it out. They haven’t, which means the fragment must have worked its way into the bands themselves. Someone needs to take a look who’s skilled in Zhoogene field treatment.”

  “That would be Jonson and Bulmer,” said Stryker wistfully. “None of us is skilled in patching up talking shrubbery like you.”

  “There’s a Militia base forty klicks northeast of here,” said Osu. “Fort Iceni. We could detour and drop you off.”

  “Allow the Militia to poke inside me?” Urdizine sounded indignant. Beneath his hood, the stems growing out the top of his head would be waving angrily. “I’ve a better idea. There’s a town ninety klicks to the east called Raemy-Ela. It will be a much shorter detour and I can make it that far. Believe me, I’m not as fragile as you humes. All I have to do is harden my hydraulics around the wound. Can’t do sit-ups, and I dread each bowel movement, but I won’t die on you.”

  “You and your hydraulics,” murmured Stryker. “If we’re operating under cover, we should be using codenames. Hydro. That’s your cover, Urdi.”

  “Hydro,” Urdizine repeated, testing out the name. He laughed and immediately winced in pain. “Don’t make me laugh. You’re killing me. Hydro. Hey, it’s not bad.”

  Why didn’t I think of that?

  Osu beat himself up. There hadn’t been time to stop and consider such practical details, but of course that was no excuse.

  “Good thinking, Stryker,” he said. “If we really are being followed by a drone, it will have cameras, and in clear daylight it may be able to lipread. You will each have a cover name and from now on, we use them exclusively until I say so. Even inside your own head, think of your comrades by their codenames. Use your new name when thinking of yourself because one slip could make the difference between success and failure.”

  “Old Guard was my call sign on Irisur,” said Stryker. “That works for me, but what about frond-head?”

  Osu regarded SOTL Vol Zavage. “You’re Teep because no one believes that thing you do with your head is anything other than telepathy.”

  The Kurlei sighed. “You humes are as predictable as always.”

  “If only that were true, Teep,” answered Osu. “Zy Pel has to be Bronze and… Yergin. He earned a name, and it’s Michelangelo for his beautiful ice sculptures. Maybe Angelo. Yeah, that sounds more practical.”

  A somber silence came over the bivouac as they dipped into memories still raw.

  “Hydro,” said Osu, “relieve Bronze on watch.”

  “Wait,” said the Kurlei whom Osu told himself to think of as Teep. “There’s someone still unnamed. We need a name for you, Sergeant, and you can’t name yourself. That would be bad luck.”

  “I’ve already decided,” Osu replied. “Figured luck’s been so bad, nothing we can do will make it worse. Call me… Sanderson.”

  A few minutes later, with the wounded Zhoogene outside on watch, replacing Bronze – Osu was trying hard to stick to the codenames, even in his own thoughts – it was time to make further decisions.

  “I need to get that crazy walking plant seen to properly,” Osu informed the crouching circle of sappers. “That town he mentioned is too far away, so I intend to change course and head directly for the Militia at Fort Iceni. If hostile forces are tracking us – and I think they are – then this should flush them out. It’s only a half day’s journey to Fort Iceni. We’ll force the issue, and then reassess Hydro’s state. If he’s worsened, I’ll order him to seek treatment at Iceni. If he hasn’t, we’ll make for Raemy-Ela together.”

  “I don’t want to go anywhere near the Militia,” said Stryker. “I don’t trust the treacherous skragg-wipers.”

  “And me?” Osu spat. “Do you think I can ever forgive them?” He took a deep breath. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  It was difficult to be sure beneath the hoods of their cloaks, but the others appeared troubled yet acquiescent. Not so Bronze. Having initially recoiled at his new name – as if it invoked a ghost from his past who still haunted him – he settled into the ritual of filling and lighting his pipe without the slightest sense of urgency.

  Should have called him Stove, Osu mused.

  “Have you something to say?” he challenged Bronze as the sapper blew his first plume of smoke.

  “Yes… Sanderson.” Bronze spoke Osu’s codename with obvious disapproval. “How are we to defeat any pursuers?”

  “Ambush.”

  “Good. Urdizine should be in the ambush party.”

  “Urdi’s wounded,” said Stryker. “I mean, Hydro.”

  Bronze clamped his pipe between his teeth and raised both hands in supplication. “The green man is my friend too. I want him well. I want the frenzied panic on your faces when he comes into season again – when the weeds in his head bloom and cause mayhem because for a few days everyone succumbs to an insanity in which green is irresistibly sexy. But we watched thousands die in seconds. We can’t bring them back by shielding a single life. They’re gone. Ambush duty’s dangerous, is all I’m saying. Hydro is not too good at traveling right now, but he can still fire his weapon.”

  “If Hydro dies in the ambush,” said Osu, “that removes one obstacle in the way of our mission objective. Is that your point?”

  “Of course it is. Look, Hydro is a Zhoogene. He’s outside on watch in the howling winds, but he can still hear every word we’re speaking. Would you like me to ask him in, so he can volunteer?”

  “Very well,” said Osu. “Bronze, you lead the ambush party. Take Hydro and Stryker. Zavage, that leaves just you and me. Oh, hell! Zavage! Teep! Hydro! No, this isn’t going to work. Zy Pel, your name has the potential to flag alerts far beyond everyone else here. You stay as Bronze. I will be Osu or Sybutu as everyone prefers. No one is to call me sergeant. That leaves, Urdi, Zavage, Stryker, and… Yergin. Commo talk is to be sloppy. Do like the Militia. We’ve ten minutes to figure out how to make that drone think we’re still travel
ing as one unit before we move out. Destination: Fort Iceni.”

  LEP CLYNDER

  The three surviving targets rode their bikes in a tight column, headed directly for the Militia base twenty klicks away. Their leader was making the same distinctive gestures he’d been using since Lep had first picked up their trail when they’d emerged from the forest. He would sweep his arm or point as if indicating locations, but most of all he twisted around periodically to check his party was still cohesive, even though there were only three left after whatever had befallen them at the bivouac.

  Target-1, Lep had designated the man, and he was reassured by the target’s consistency, because precious little else made sense about the targets.

  Lep peered into the viewer and tried to focus the drone’s image. It was a hopeless task. The snow had started to fall once more, and since the event at the targets’ bivouac, interference had been cutting static through the picture.

  He couldn’t even be sure that Target-1 was a he. But back when the image had been clearer, the PatRec system had decided the leader was most likely male human, so that’s what Lep would run with.

  Taking point, Target-2 had a slighter frame. Working assumption: human female. Lep’s biggest question was the identity of Target-3. It seemed too short to be the wounded Zhoogene, but on the other hand, it was hunched over and rigid, exactly how a Zhoogene would be if its filthy alien body began locking up.

  Even so, Target-3 had literally not moved a muscle in hours. It was a macabre thought, but as Lep studied the snowy scene taking place about twenty klicks northeast of his warm GPC-4 hover carrier, he began to think the rigid figure in the tattered cloak had been dead for some time, their corpse frozen solid and carried to its final destination by a bike on autopilot.

  Sod it! They were Cora’s Hope Division – supposedly one of the Rebellion’s elite units – and his reconnaissance drone couldn’t tell its operator whether a surveillance target was alive or dead. They were supposed to turn the galaxy upside down with equipment like this?

  He tapped the image of the rigid biker and gestured for medical assessment.

  Text appeared in the status window.

  Supply higher fidelity surveillance data.

  Lep banged on the monitoring system. “What you think I’m doing?” he grumbled at the stupid thing.

  He had the whole scout-upgraded sensor suite wrapped around him. Heavy banks of interpretative quasi-intelligences topped up with monitors and status displays. The others quipped that his station was a nerd mecha, and it did feel like he was wearing mechanized armor.

  Fat lot of good it was doing them now.

  “Problem, Technician?” asked Ensign Zywroal from the front of the carrier’s personnel compartment.

  Technician First Class Lep Clynder glanced jealously at the dozen scouts riding with the ensign. Most of them had dozed off, and he couldn’t blame them in the smooth ride and gentle hum of the GPC’s gravitics. They had nothing to do until the lieutenant finally decided where she would make her move. Or maybe she would never make her mind up, and the scouts wouldn’t be woken until they were required to stroll down the egress ramp and back into the forward operating post. There they’d pat themselves on the back and congratulate themselves on a job well done before going to grab a coffee and cake.

  Was there a problem?

  Yeah. The drone didn’t work, and this military operation had been far too easy. But the truth wasn’t what officers wanted to hear.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Lep told the ensign, but also Lieutenant Nwyhypnaguran who was pretending to ignore him but would be listening in on every word. “I still can’t say why, but something is wrong about the picture I’m seeing.”

  “But you have no new information to convey,” said the lieutenant from her command position just behind the pilot and co-pilot.

  “No, sir.”

  “Something’s bugging Clynder,” said Zywroal. “We might do well to follow his instincts. Recommend we change course and intercept targets one through three before they get too close to that Militia outpost. We can always return to the bivouac site after.”

  “Stay calm, Zywroal.” There was an acid edge to Nwyhypnaguran’s voice. She did not appreciate the unsolicited opinions of her subordinates. “We proceed as planned to the bivouac site. Technician Clynder will monitor the three active targets via the drone while we investigate the two inactive ones in person. May I remind you, Ensign, that our role here is to acquire intelligence. I wish to know who these people are, not to kill them. Their extermination is a task for the pacification forces who will follow.”

  Lep stuck his head into the monitoring system and kept his stupid mouth well and truly shut.

  ——

  When he judged Lieutenant Nwyhypnaguran to be engrossed in the scene outside, Lep took his chance and raised his head from the feed streamed to his monitor by the drone twenty klicks away, and looked instead at the bulkhead screens showing what was happening outside the carrier.

  The GPC was circling around the spot in the Great Ice Plain the targets had used to set up a bivouac stretched across their bikes.

  It looked like an explosion had ripped their shelter apart. What had caused it? Lep didn’t know. The surveillance feed had gone dead for a few minutes. When it had restored, a crater had appeared that hadn’t been there before, and the three targets – who were still being tracked by the drone – were already riding north as fast as their bikes would take them.

  Had the targets been attacked? Certainly, no member of Cora’s Hope Division would abandon their comrades without good reason, but Lep had flown the drone around the site and it had not been obvious that the fleeing targets were in any immediate danger.

  The carrier looped around a scene of destruction frozen into permanence by the cold.

  Two humanoid corpses sprawled just beyond the lip of the crater. Their loose cloaks were frozen in the act of billowing in a wind that had died away hours ago.

  Already, Lep was beginning to fear the cold of Rho-Torkis more than the prospect of the inevitable Legion retaliation that would come, perhaps within days.

  The two bikes also looked frozen into place. The blast must have thrown them up and dropped them on their rears, resting against the side of the crater. They appeared caught in the act of pulling a near-vertical wheelie – not a bad trick for a hover bike.

  “Hey! That one moved,” said Uxham. “The body farthest to the east. Its hand moved.”

  Lep followed the scout’s pointing finger to one of the bulkhead monitors.

  All he could see was a body whose contours were softened by snow.

  “Been eating those special cakes again, Uxham?” piped up one of the other scouts.

  But whoever it was, he didn’t get the laughs he was after because everyone was watching a hand raising feebly out of the snow.

  Uxham was right.

  The figure rolled out of its snowy covering and waved pitifully for help. Then it lay still, its last energy reserves spent.

  “An excellent turn of events,” said Lieutenant Nwyhypnaguran. “I had feared the corpses would prove too frozen to extract much information. Pilot, circle us around that wounded target. Remain cautious and pull out immediately if anything smells wrong to you. If I judge this scene is as innocent as it appears, then we’ll set down a hundred meters away and, Zywroal, you will secure the area before approaching the target.”

  “Sir, I think the live target is the Zhoogene,” said Lep. “Movement is all wrong for a human. We know it’s been wounded since we first tracked it.”

  “So,” said Nwyhypnaguran, “they’ve left behind their wounded. Whoever we’re facing clearly has no honor. And you, Clynder, are supposed to keep your eyes on the drone feed! If you disobey orders again, it will be you who’s abandoned out there in the snow.”

  Lep gave a vague apology, but his mind was too busy filling with horror to worry about the lieutenant’s threats.

  If the Zhoogene was here, who was Target-3,
twenty klicks away?

  He glanced back at his monitor. The display was blank except for a dangerous message.

  No input feed. Reconnect device.

  “Sir!” he snapped, but before he could give his warning, one of the other scouts beat him to it.

  “Movement! Below us. Inside the crater.”

  “Bugging out!” announced the pilot as the smooth hum of the engine suddenly roared, throwing Lep against his restraints.

  Helpless, he watched as two hostiles emerged from concealed hollows in the sides of the crater and punched the controls of the two bikes without bothering to mount them.

  They’d timed their appearance to perfection. The speeding hover carrier passed over the firing arcs of the bike cannons as they spat blaster fire into the air.

  Impacts rippled along the GPC’s underbelly.

  And then the craft shuddered in the air as the gravitics blew out.

  That was the problem with gravitics. Always had been. Put as much armor as you like elsewhere, but gravitic vehicles would always be vulnerable to attack from underneath.

  Which was why 2nd Regiment had upgraded their ride to the GPC-4c “Fat Belly” variant. It maneuvered like a drunken Littorane out of water, was slower than praise emerging from Nwyhypnaguran’s lips, but had layers of armor bolted between the deck and the bank of gravitic motors.

  They lost all lift and skimmed across the ground in a blinding spray of snow.

  Nervous glances spread like a disease, but although the gravitics had blown, the belly armor held. They were shaken, and immobilized. But they were unhurt.

  And spoiling for revenge.

  “Alpha Section, man the gun ports!” bellowed the ensign. “Beta, ready to deploy. Final check.”

  While half the squad began calling out that they were ready to charge down the ramp, the rest opened the armored shutters in the bulkheads and poked out their blaster rifles, seeking targets.

  They were already too late.

  One of the hover bikes had ridden up a ramp built into the side of the crater, and was sailing through a hurried volley of blaster fire before landing on the GPC’s roof. The rider even had his face exposed, wearing a hat, and – of all things – he had a long smoking pipe clenched between his teeth.