“Is she really your ex-wife?” Fiona asked. Jeremy caught Kira rolling her eyes.
“Bleigh? Yeah, she found out what I was doing and wouldn’t have a part of it.”
“Smart girl,” Kira commented. Fiona and Jeremy ignored her.
“So you did all of this because of your daughter?” Fiona asked.
Jeremy hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah, pretty much. I saw her staring at me and knew that I needed to be a lot better than what I was. She deserved a chance, you know? I had to find a way to give it to her.”
Fiona’s blinked her eyes and sniffed, then she nodded. “Well, I guess they’d throw the book at you back in the Core Worlds. No court out here though, so we’ll keep that to ourselves. One thing though, I don’t ever want to hear who you used to be. Far as anybody here needs to know your Jeremy Sinclair, got it?”
Kira turned away, shaking her head. Jeremy watched her go, then turned back to Fiona. “What’s her deal? If she used to be a bounty hunter, why does the law matter to her?”
Fiona smiled. “That’s not it. She’s mad at herself and doesn’t want to hear anymore. From what I saw in her eyes, she’s afraid she might end up admitting that she was wrong.”
“Wrong about what? Me?”
“Yeah, she might realize you’re not such a bad guy after all.”
###
Part 4: Screamer
Chapter 1
“You’re locked in Gunny, rapid deployment in five…four…three…two….Go!”
Gunnery Sergeant Elsadora Quinn tightened every muscle in her body as though it would make a difference. The explosive force of her deployment pod being released from the orbital ship was enough to knock a regular untrained human out. Elsa was anything but that.
The deployment pod, or screamer as the Marines affectionately called it, slipped through the vacuum of space alongside the other nineteen dark silver pods. It wasn’t until they breached the upper atmosphere that the heat resistant nose began to glow. To those on the planet below looking up it would seem nothing more than a group of shooting stars. Perfectly normal save for the concentration of twenty of them in a single area.
With the acceleration out of the ship’s deployment tubes completed, Elsa had recovered enough to begin to relax. Just in time, her pod started to vibrate around her as the planet’s atmosphere began to slow her descent. The low grade inertial arrester built into the pod kept the vibration to a dull buzz. It made the hair stand up on her arms but was nothing compared to what a low cost personal entertainment device could provide for entertainment during the lonely hours on a deep space cruise.
Elsa studied the holographic display on outwardly mirrored viewport in her helmet. Her rate of descent was falling. A few more seconds and she’d reach terminal velocity, at which point the screamer’s fins would deploy and its thrusters would fire. From experience she knew that was when things started to get interesting.
With the wings deployed a screamer had just enough of a signature to present a target. The odds of getting hit by any manmade weaponry were less than one in a hundred, but she’d seen it happen. It took a direct hit from a serious weapon to take one out — they were designed to deliver their payload all the way to a hard landing at speeds in excess of six hundred miles an hour, with the payload expected to survive the impact. What happened more often was aerial burst weaponry that would knock a screamer off course.
Elsa felt the sudden jolt of the thrusters engaging, propelling her pod back upwards into speeds going well past a thousand miles an hour. Another readout on the display indicated thirteen minutes until impact. It was always like that, somewhere between ten and twenty minutes, depending on the size of the planet and how thick the atmosphere was. The longest ten to twenty minutes of her life. She hated the feeling, being trapped in the cocoon with nothing but the smells of her own nervous sweat mixed with the resilient foam she was encased in.
“So this is how an egg feels,” she muttered aloud. She’d never seen a real egg, but she’d recently read about them while trying to pass the time on the journey to Vitalis. The planet was outside the edge of controlled space, five light years beyond the closest jumpstation. That meant hibernation cycles for the crew and marines. Nine months in, three months out. Only way to keep the body from falling apart. Seven years of that, even though it only felt like a little less than two, left a person with a lot of time to kill.
So she’d read up on Vitalis in her spare time, pulling everything the ship’s library could tell her. Humanity had been colonizing other worlds for close to one hundred and fifty years but terraforming had not been a practical or sustainable as promised. Mars had enough of an atmosphere to be comparable to living several thousand feet above sea level on Earth, but even Earth’s sister planet was lacking in nutrients and necessary minerals to support agriculture. With time and research resilient strains had been engineered, but the dreams of unlimited farmlands feeding the starving throngs of humanity had fallen short. And that was Mars, the planet that resembled Earth the closest.
Vitalis offered to change all of that, according to the preliminary data she’d seen. The planet not only supported human life, but the research conducted showed it supported super-human life. Data from the researchers that had been sent to the planet showed amazing preliminary results. It was as if the planet was a fountain of youth. That, in turn, made it a suddenly very valuable resource. All the more so since the beacon that notified the Terran Coalition of its existence had no one alive that claimed it, making it an open planet.
Her unit had been dispatched to the planet to offer support to the advanced research team onboard the Terran Coalition Ship Explorer. By the time Elsa’s frigate had left the Explorer was already a year enroute. They knew of the reported two crashed vessels, one a registered transport and the second an unregistered vessel that had launched a salvage beacon in orbit around the planet. When the research team arrived no survivors had been reported, making the salvage claim pointless.
A research station was established and the TCS Explorer was standing by orbit for support. The research settlement had been destroyed by an unknown force and within days the entire crew of the Explorer had died. The lack of further communications had changed the Marine vessel’s mission. When they arrived in system reconnaissance of the Explorer returned preliminary results of the entire crew dying of malnutrition. The larders and galleys had been full, confusing and complicating the issue.
A beep sounded, drawing her out of her reverie. Impact was less than two minutes away. She took a few deep breaths, ignoring how the unfiltered air tasted on her tongue. With ninety seconds remaining she saw the flashing warning of a proximity alert and felt the screamer jerk to the left. She stared at the screen, her fingers trying to push dents in the armor that covered her chest. Her breath whistled quicker as the seconds ticked off on the display. Being knocked off course was always a threat, but seldom a reality. When it happened it was always somebody else, never her.
With five seconds to spare the screamer exploded. She felt like she’d left her heart behind as the armored pod disintegrated around her. It took the last of the inertial arresting with it, leaving her in horrible motion that twisted her stomach into knots. The capsule slammed into the ground, sliding and rolling in the path made by the hardened nosecone of the deployment pod.
Chapter 2
Elsa spat out some blood from where she’d bitten her lip. Mouth free, she croaked out the command to open the capsule. The forceful ejection sent it flying straight out and into the wall of the furrow a few feet away. So much for the instructors promise that the pods landed right side up every time.
With the top portion gone, a fine mist covered her. Elsa fought to hold her breath but the smell of rancid peaches still assaulted her. The foam holding her in place dissolved rapidly, letting her slide out within seconds. She scrambled around the pod, keeping contact with it to retain some semblance of up and down until her body could compensate for the trauma she’d gone through. She tr
iggered the release on the cargo bay and pulled the door off so it served as protection to her back. A few more twists and pressed buttons released first her X109 energy rifle then the large container of supplies that she slipped on her back.
Elsa spun around, rifle held at the ready, and surveyed her situation for the first time. The ditch dug by the screamer was roughly three feet deep. Giant trees and vegetation rose around her, enclosing her within the tropical jungle her pod had landed in. She frowned, the insertion point was supposed to be near the destroyed research outpost, humanity’s only real settlements on Vitalis. Whatever had hit her pod had redirected her.
Roughly sixty seconds at over a thousand miles an hour meant she could be up to twenty miles away from her target. She adjusted her pack before subvocalizing the command to call up a map in her helmet’s display. The map displayed, albeit at an orbital overview size.
“FIST team three, Dark Angel reporting in,” Elsa spoke after activating her radio, naming off her First Insertion Special Tactics unit then her individual code name. She waited several seconds for a response that never came. “Interference,” she muttered, followed by a curse fit for a Marine Special Operator. Previous reports from the Explorer logs had indicated intermittent problems with radio contact on Vitalis. Without connection to the orbital fleet her GPS was useless too.
She adjusted her pack one more time, anxious for a chance to find a secure position to break it apart and redistribute the contents to the various mounting points on her armor. She picked herself up enough to look over the wrecked capsule and survey the jungle . Her helmet’s light amplification made the scene almost as bright as a Vitalian day, while the superimposed thermographic indicators showed nothing large enough to be a threat to her, only some smaller mammals.
Elsa climbed out of the trench and turned around a few times to take in the scenery. She figured if she followed the trench the screamer had dug she’d be headed in the right direction. Both her internal compass and the one built into her helmet were failing her. “Guess that’s why they don’t let Marines with cybernetics on the FIST teams,” she mused aloud.
Elsa’s specialty was terrestrial insertions, but Vitalis at night was a different world from anything she’d been prepared for. Even a training stint in the rare protected jungle plots in Africa couldn’t have prepared her for the raw menace of the jungle around her. The trees had trunks often wider than she was tall. Even though she was only 5’6”, they seemed huge. She saw plants that looked both succulent and dangerous, though the flowers were closed at night. Some even seemed to recoil as she neared them, as though they could sense her. She smirked at the prospect, but moved on quickly after suppressing a shiver that she was alone in an alien place.
Elsa felt the same soreness in her back that had plagued her for the last three screamer trips. She owed that to a rough landing followed by catching the tail end of a blown up aeroskimmer. Her armor had been compromised and her spine broken, but there was virtually nothing technology couldn’t overcome. Modern medicine could fix the damage, but the pains stayed longer as she got older.
She emerged into a small clearing. A river, easily two dozen feet across, crossed her path diagonally. The trench from the capsule had disappeared several minutes ago. She stayed hidden amongst some massive roots that created a small shelter under one of the mega-oaks. She smirked, wondering at the size of the acorns they might drop in the fall. If Vitalis had a fall, she couldn’t remember reading about the seasons of the planet.
The water moved smooth and swift but didn’t seem violent. She frowned and wished her vision extended beneath it. It would be easy enough to look under the surface, but she doubted the water was crystal clear – it was running too quickly for that. Instead she looked up, hoping for some sign of air support or a sign of what it was that had knocked her off course in the first place.
Dark shapes flitted across the nighttime sky, obscuring the stars in patches. She frowned and subvocalized commands to zoom in so she might get a better look at them. A gasp escaped her lips as she realized they were birds of some sort. Her rangefinder and their relative size combined to form an icy lump in the pit of her stomach — many were larger than her screamer!
“Indigenous life forms,” she whispered, sinking back behind the tree. They were nocturnal hunters. She racked her memory for more details of the native life of Vitalis. She’d been focusing on the human need to explore Vitalis for potential medicinal and rejuvenative purposes. Her job had always involved people fighting people, exogenous life forms seldom, if ever, came into the picture. The simple fact was that humanity hadn’t run across much in the way of alien life. What had been encountered was fungus, bacteria, barely developed plant life, or a few species of very aquatic invertebrates. Vitalis had offered the first fully developed ecosystem not originating from Earth.
And the life, she now began to recall, was massive. Vitalis had been likened to a pristine Earth from millions of years ago, complete with enormous creatures not so dissimilar from Earth’s dinosaurs.
Elsa turned to stare at the winged beasts flying through the sky again. “Aw fuck,” she muttered, noticing for the first time the dark line that stretched across the sky below the birds. A quick check of her suits limited sensors confirmed that it was a cliff and it was nearly three hundred yards high. Her capsule had missed it, but that meant she was even further off course than she’d first estimated.
Chapter 3
She slipped back into the shadows beneath the roots of the tree. Environmentally contained suit of armor or not, she’d been sweating for a while and she needed a moment to rest. She decided to take the opportunity to slip off her pack and start breaking it down into smaller attachable portions. It distributed the one hundred and twenty pound load more evenly across her body and gave her a chance to take a drink from one of the water nodules it contained.
Breaking protocol and better judgment, Elsa also broke the seal on her viewport and pulled the transparent metal out of the way. The humid jungle air assaulted her, causing fresh beads of sweat to spring up on her face. In spite of the wet heat the fresh air smelled good. Not just good, it was incredible. She inhaled deeply and looked around, the helmet no longer amplifying the ambient light. Her own eyes, genetically modified to better than perfect day or night vision, paled in comparison. Even without the enhancements of technology she marveled at the raw power she felt being surrounded by nature.
Ruining an otherwise surreal moment she heard a rumbling noise that rose to a crescendo. It wasn’t nearly as distant as she’d have liked, considering it had come from the direction that her screamer pod was located. She’d never heard anything like it before, but deep in her belly she knew what it was. The sweat on her skin, once sticky and uncomfortable, now felt like ice.
Else snapped her visor down and reactivated her radio transmitter before the echoes of the monstrous roar had faded. “FIST team three, report in!” Her only answer was the rapid breathing in her own helmet.
“Get it together Gunny,” she whispered to calm herself. Without fear of her words being heard over the radio she loosened up her discipline. With the visor down there was little chance of her being heard outside her helmet. The smart armor encased her completely, providing protection from environmental, biological, and even limited nuclear threats. She wasn’t worried about physical threats either – the armor could handle just about any civilian energy weapon. Anything else, from a ballistic weapon to an ion or plasma burst, would either be too low powered to harm her or big enough to tear her apart.
She was a Marine and that meant either something couldn’t kill her or she’d be dead without a moment to suffer, why stress it? A giant animal hunting her down and tearing her apart one limb at a time, on the other hand, was something she’d never considered before.
Elsa broke from her cover and moved the remaining seven yards to the river’s edge. She tracked a stick floating in it, her suit calculating the current at roughly two feet per second. Elsa broke her rif
le down in smooth practiced motions, securing the two pieces to firm points on her armor. She walked into the water, holding her breath subconsciously as the bottom fell away quickly.
Else found herself struggling against the current almost immediately. Beneath the surface it ran swifter, tugging at her and trying to send her downstream. She fought it, putting one foot after another into the rocky river bed. The armor had air enough for half an hour of moderate activity, more had she brought some of the modular oxygen tanks. Vitalis had an atmosphere that was ideal for human consumption — they’d all assumed there’d been no need for spare oxygen. Else bit back the curse muttered by deployed soldiers since the beginning of time — never enough supplies in the field.
She changed her display mode to a mixture of sonar and thermographic, mapping out the river bed and looking for potential hot spots. The water registered at a surprising eighty seven degrees Fahrenheit. Even at night it was warm enough to use as bathwater. She was trying to adjust her display to modify the thermal gradients when something bumped into her from behind.
Else jerked around, catching the blurred image of something swimming around her. She kept twisting, cursing the current for her slowness. On a hunch she counter-spun, rotating back around and catching what seemed to be a large fish coming at her. It struck, teeth scraping against her armored belly and sending her off balance. The current finished the job, knocking her off her feet and sending her rolling and floating over a dozen feet downstream before she was able to stop herself.
She looked up from her supine position and saw the carnivorous fish coming after her again. It was longer than she was tall and for the first time she wished the sensors in her helmet weren’t state of the art. She could make out teeth that would have made a Terran shark envious.
Elsa climbed to her feet, pulling out her V-Bar combat knife as she did so. Distracted by the current, the fish, and the adrenaline bursting through her veins she didn’t notice the faint humming that the powered up knife emitted. The fish came on, sensing an easy target, and tried to tear off her arm. Elsadora jerked her arm back, angling the knife towards it.
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