It chirped loudly, but rather than leap away it dropped its head down and bit onto her thigh. It picked her up, the powerful beak inflicting similar damage to the armor on her leg to what it had done to her arm.
“You’re coming with me you fucker!” Elsa hissed, tightening her grip on her knife and putting every last ounce of concentration into locking the muscles of her arm, shoulder, and chest. It caused her V-BAR to slice up through the skin and muscle of its belly, cutting the organs beneath as well.
It squawked around its mouthful of Marine drumstick and let her fall. Elsa hit the ground with a grunt, spots in her vision. Immediately the spots were tinted red as the bowels of the creature fell through the gash she’d made and landed on top of her.
Chapter 12
“You got a death wish?”
Elsa heard the words but couldn’t believe them. She brought her good hand up and wiped the ichor from her helmet. A man stood above her. Not just a man, but the kind of man that she suspected primitive cultures worshipped as a god. She tried to release the viewport and slide it up but it was jammed. She scowled then tried to sit up.
Her first attempt reminded her of her broken arm. She yelped, then chastised herself. Weakness wasn’t allowed now, she wasn’t alone. She tightened her muscles in a show of mental self discipline and used her other arm to help her to sit up, then to rise to her knees. Her leg felt bruised and shaky, but aside from the broken armor plates grinding together it still worked.
“Gunnery Sergeant Elsadora Quinn, of FIST team 3,” She said after she stood up.
The man grinned. She noticed for the first time he was dressed — if dressed was the right word — in animal hides. He held a sharpened stick and had a bow and a sack full of arrows across his back. “Tarn Bledsoe,” he said with a grin. “I been chasing you for a while. Could have saved you a lot of trouble if you weren’t so damn fast.”
“Sorry to have inconvenienced you,” Elsa said. “Your name wasn’t on the list of personnel in the research station.”
“Only a couple of them left,” Tarn said. “Look, you want to stay here and chat or do you want to get out of here before momma and poppa come back?”
Elsa swore. “Let’s go — my unit’s supposed to meet up at the research station.”
Tarn chuckled. “Ain’t much there anymore. Kira and Fiona should’ve brought the survivors from your unit back to Treetown.”
“Survivors? What happened?”
Tarn shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me. Vitalis don’t take kindly to visitors from other worlds. Your screamers fell straight into the biggest damn flock of wyverns I ever seen!”
“Wyverns?”
“Yeah, legendary giant flying lizard.”
“Dinosaurs? Like a pteranodon?”
He nodded. “Something like that, except these are bigger and meaner.”
Elsa swore again, then realized what Tarn had said. “Wait, you know what a screamer is?”
Tarn shrugged. “Yeah, humans ain’t native to this planet. Well, at least not till there were some babies born back in Treetown.”
“Babies? How long have you been here?”
“Three years maybe? Easy to lose track of time, no real seasons where we’re at and the days kinda turn into one another. Some lawyer lady that survived the research station said the kids were natives and as long as no intelligent life was found, they owned the planet by TCS law.”
Else clipped her knife back into its sheath and wiped more of the blood from her view plate. “I still need to find my unit, I had ‘em on my radio a little bit ago, but my suit’s out of power, I need to recharge it.”
Tarn laughed. “Don’t bother, it’s beat to hell and even if it would work, it won’t last long.”
“Why not? Each part is independent and modular.”
He shrugged. “Suit yourself, but I’m telling you technology don’t last long here. Otherwise why’d you ditch your gun?”
She turned to see where the broken weapon lay on the ground. A black spot on the side of it showed where the ruptured energy cell had destroyed the weapon. Faulty power packs weren’t uncommon, but she hadn’t heard of one bursting into flame in decades.
“My team will wait for me.”
“There’s something up there that you don’t want no part of. If Kira and Fiona can rescue them, they will. Otherwise we’d best stay clear of it.”
“Fiona?” Elsa mused. The name was familiar. She went through the names of the researchers assigned to the outpost but came up blank.
“Fiona Kate, Lance Corporal,” Tarn said. “She was part of the Marine force assigned to defend the research outpost. Ain’t much defending to be done against a Megasaur though. Like I said, only a handful survived.”
“What’s so bad up there, the Megasaur? And is that what these were, baby ones?”
“Naw, this are just screechers. The adults get a little over 20 feet tall. A Megasaur is damn near twice that.”
She turned to stare at the dead screechers. They were toddlers then, each around six or seven feet tall. She shook her head. “They’re Marines, they’ll find a way and they’ll wait.”
Tarn sighed. “Fine, let’s go.” He glanced behind him. “Can’t believe their momma left them alone this long. Unless maybe daddy got eaten by something bigger.”
She stared at him. Something bigger like the Megasaur, she wondered. She had a lot of questions but if Tarn was right, time and distance were more important. “If something’s bigger than daddy, I really don’t want to meet it.”
“Momma’s bigger than daddy, and you’re right, you don’t want to meet her. The female of the species on this rock are bigger and meaner than the males.”
She’d read about some animals in Terran history being like that. Some societies had been matriarchal as well. Among her team she might have made a joke about penis envy, but with Tarn, an unknown man who looked like he could have wrestled one of the screechers into submission, she stayed silent. “Lead the way, Tarzan.”
Tarn chuckled before turning and heading deeper into the ravine.
Chapter 13
“So why’d you come after me? And why didn’t you show up a little quicker, I had a few close calls!”
“I didn’t have no power armor to help me climb that cliff.” Tarn tested a couple of rocks where the two walls of the ravine came together. It was angled harshly but enough broken rubble remained to allow hand and foot holds. “I killed that baby screecher you stunned with your ULF grenade.”
She’d thought the grenade had finished the screecher off, she’d been too busy to check on it. A glance at the spear he’d slung across his back with a piece of rope showed a few darker blood stains on the barbed point, confirming his claim.
Her broken arm ached where she held it against her side. There were several purplish spots on it from the bruises caused by the screecher and the near compound fracture. “How’d you get up the cliff?”
“There’s a pass further up, took me a while to get there though.”
Elsa swore, then swore again when she bumped her arm against the rock. “Can’t wait to get this damn thing fixed.”
“Don’t worry, it’ll heal.” Tarn pulled a loose rock and tossed it down behind them.
“It’s not even set yet!” Elsa scowled at her whine. She shook her head to clear it. As big as Tarn was, he wasn’t a Marine, he couldn’t understand what it meant to be self-disciplined and fully functional. People depended on her. Tarn should be depending on her, not the other way around. “When we get to a stopping point I need your help.”
“All right. No sticks to wrap it with though.”
Elsa stared up at him, impressed that he’d intuited what she’d wanted. She wondered what other mysteries Tarn possessed. He seemed older than he looked. Older or, she mused, prematurely experienced.
They climbed in silence for several more minutes until the ground opened up into a small shelf, complete with moss and some tropical trees. “I’ll be damned,” Tarn mutter
ed. “Might get a stick after all.”
Elsa looked at the trees and nodded. She moved over and took out her knife, then started sawing at a few branches. She cut one free then started on a second. Halfway through the knife suddenly felt dead in her hand. She pulled it away and stared at it, then tried tapping it against the tree trunk. With a mew of frustration she twisted the safety catch and pushed the release to eject the energy pack in it. A simple glance at it proved that it was ruined. Somehow some of the screechers blood had managed to get into the watertight compartment.
“Why you think I’ve got a sharp stick?” Tarn asked.
She scowled at him, then slammed the knife back into her sheath and tried wrenching on the tree limb. Tarn stepped up and broke it free, the muscles flexing in his arm. She forgot her disgust at her broken gear and waited for him to turn and face her. “You ready?”
“Let me get the armor off my arm,” she said, reaching across to work the manual releases on the armor.
Tarn walked around her and released the seals with hardly any fumbling. Elsa found her eyes narrowing as she watched him pull the armor off in a surprisingly gentle manner. “What?” He asked. “Told you I wasn’t always here.”
“No armor in the universe like Marine FIST armor,” she stated.
Tarn shrugged but offered no explanation. “You want me to set this or you want to talk about it?”
She scowled. “Set it. I’ll bra–“
Tarn yanked on her arm before she could finish, pulling the bone and seating the broken ends against each other. His other arm squeezed tight against her forearm, keeping the bone in place while he slowly released pressure.
“Fuck!” Elsa hissed. “You could have let me get ready for that!”
“Yeah, I could of. Then you’d be tensed up. Swelling’s already fading, didn’t want your muscles fighting back and making it worse.”
“Yeah, thanks…dick.”
“Here, hold this tight.” He pressed one of the branches against her arm and let her take over holding it against her. Then he pressed the other branch against it, but frowned before he proceeded any further.
Tarn leaned over and pulled her knife free, then went to the wounded tree and hacked another branch off. Elsa watched him, marveling at how he used a single chop to sever the makeshift splint. He came back with the third branch and eyed her arm and then the stick. He nodded, then cut the rope free from his spear.
“My high tech shit breaks but you’ve got rope?” Elsa mused aloud.
Tarn held it up closer to her face plate. “We made this here. That long grass you walked through, it’s got strong fibers in it. We figured how to wrap ‘em together to make rope.”
Elsa felt her eyebrows raise in surprise, then realized he couldn’t see her face through the helmet. It was stuffy and her nose itched occasionally, but considering how the helmet had saved her, she felt safe about it. Missing both arms and parts of one leg allowed fresh air to get in.
Tarn wound the rope around the splints, binding them tightly to her arm. She feared a loss of circulation, but she knew the sticks would keep her bones in place as long as she didn’t do anything stupid.
“You ready?”
“Depends, what’re you going to do to me this time?” Elsa asked. She secured her knife in his sheath again and caught Tarn’s smirk as he turned away.
“We follow that strip of grass up and around that rock, then find a way to get over the rest of the ridge. It can’t be far, then we’ll have to find a way down to the place you think you want to go.”
“I know I want to go there!” Elsa snapped.
Tarn shrugged. “Then quit yapping and start hiking.”
Chapter 14
Elsa guessed it took them another couple of hours to clear the ridge and reach the foothills on the far side. As Tarn had promised, there was no sign in the distance of the research outpost. There was a mound in the distance. Without any technology to assist her, she assumed the mound was the same place the colony had been.
Halfway down the ridge Elsa needed Tarn’s help in getting her helmet off. The humidity inside of it had gotten to the point where the view screen was fogging over. It took some work, the helmet had been bent and mangled badly, but finally he’d managed to beak the seal and work it free. She suspected he’d bent it back some to make it release, given the way he’d been grunting while working on it.
“You see that mound?” Tarn pointed it out.
Elsa nodded. She ran her fingers through her short hair, grateful that she’d gotten a hair cut before deploying. It was a long enough buzz to keep the sun from baking her brain but short enough to let the air in and keep her cool.
“That’s where them researchers were. The megasaur died there too, but it wasn’t your Marine buddies that killed it. It had some kind of infection or something, there ain’t no way to describe it. A whole shit ton of these things come crawling out of it and anybody that wasn’t killed by the megasaur were killed by them.”
“What?” Elsa heard what he said, but it didn’t make sense to her. “Babies or something?”
“No, parasites or something. Our best guess is that it ate some eggs and they hatched inside of it. It was being eaten from the inside and it went crazy and attacked your people.”
“Woah.”
“Yeah,” Tarn agreed. “Kira comes up to check on it every now and then, she figures there was a dozen or more the first time around, now there’s a hundred or more.”
“How big are they?” Elsa said after gasping.
“They hatch only a couple feet long or so. At full size they’re probably about as big as those screechers you killed.”
“That’s not so bad.”
Tarn chuckled. “Nasty fuckers. They got teeth, they can jump and run, they got a tail we seen ‘em use to smack their prey, and Kira’s been close enough to see them spit.”
“Spit?”
“Yeah. She saw one spit some kind of poison that was absorbed through the skin of brutasaur they were after.”
“Brutasaur?” Elsa interrupted.
Tarn scowled at her. “Big, six legs, stands about as tall as a Megasaur but they’re really dumb.”
“So this little thing spit on a big thing?”
“Yeah, a few minutes later it stumbled and fell over. Kira said it was still alive, just paralyzed. She said a couple dozen of them swarmed it and cut it up, then carried it back to their hole.”
“Holy shit.”
Tarn nodded. “Nasty fuckers,” he repeated.
Elsa nodded. “I gotta find my team.”
“I’ll take you down there, but you do what I say and we don’t get close to their nest, got it?”
She found herself nodding again. She was the Marine, but she could justify following a local guide. “What are they, insects or something?”
“Got a guy who used to be a veterinarian, he thinks they’re animals. They got one mother though, a queen or something, and she’s bigger and nastier. Or at least she was when she came out of the dead megasaur. Nobody’s dumb enough to go in the hole in the ground they made to find out how big she is now.”
Elsa let out a deep breath and glanced around. The smart thing to do would have been to get the hell away. Follow Tarn back to the Treetown place he mentioned. Any of her team that went in there were fucked, plain and simple.
“No Marine gets left behind,” Elsa said.
“Yeah, figured you’d say that,” Tarn sighed. “All right, let’s go.”
Elsa followed him down from the hills and into the chest high grasses on the plain. He moved slowed, pausing infrequently to look around. She even caught him sniffing the air once or twice. She tried it but couldn’t detect anything out of the ordinary. Then again everything smelled funny on the planet to her. So many scents and so much of it made her just feel alive. Even the dull ache in her arm had faded to a background irritation.
“Any chance they’d take prisoners?” Elsa asked.
Tarn held up his arm, using the
Marine gesture to call a halt. Elsa felt her lips part in surprise.
“Break our cover again and I’ll leave you to find your own way out of here!” He hissed.
Elsa nodded, sufficiently rebuked. She watched him as he turned back and motioned to continue. He walked through the grasses with a grace that looked very natural, almost as though he was just another predator on the plains. He held the spear ready, moving it every time he changed the direction of his gaze. Elsa found herself nodding, Tarn either had military experience or he’d been trained by someone who had.
He called a halt another half an hour later. She was used to uncomfortable missions but she couldn’t remember ever feeling as disgusting as she did this time. The unpowered armor was like an oven. She knew if her helmet had still been on she would have passed out. As it was she was dehydrated. Stripping the rest of the armor off, however, meant walking naked. Tarn looked liked a great guy to take for a clothing optional ride, but given the circumstances it was the furthest thing from her mind.
“This is it, no closer,” Tarn whispered.
“It’s still like a mile away!”
He shrugged. “You want it, you go get it. I’m telling you they’ll swarm and kill you before you know they’re there.”
“Swarm me?”
“They communicate. Not like people, but they got something that keeps ‘em working together.”
Elsa stared at the mound in the distance. It had grown larger as they approached, but she was sure it was no more than ten feet tall. It was probably close to a quarter mile around, if not larger.
“Come on, I smell something.”
Elsa jerked, surprised at his choice of words. She followed him, impressed with how quietly he moved through the grasses. He stopped once and pointed off to their left, closer to the mound. She stared for a long moment until she realized he was showing her some of the animals he’d warned her about. She couldn’t see them directly, but she could see the grass swaying as they moved. She turned and looked harder, now noticing the unusual pattern of movement that indicated a creature was moving through the grass instead of a simple breeze.
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