Hunting Dog

by Andrew Beery

  As soon as our HALO suits had enough of an atmosphere to work with, they were programmed to begin to course correct using air-friction flaps. Soon enough we would be six hypersonic objects streaking across Prime’s sky.

  I had never HALO’d from such a height and certainly had not done a high altitude jump to the surface of another planet. This promised to be a unique experience… albeit one I hoped never to have to repeat.

  We had been surprised when the Gilboa II had first approached the planet to see all the signs of an industrial civilization. There was an abundance of roads, aircraft, and well-organized cities.

  We would learn later that the indigenous population, a race of people called the Thassi, were responsible for excavating a dormant Eshbaal some 40,000 years ago. Once activated, the Ancestor AI quickly took over the planet. The primitive computer systems the Thassi used to for commerce, education, and entertainment were no match for Eshbaal. Within a blink of an eye, the inhabitants found themselves dependent and ultimately enslaved by the AI.

  In the intervening years, Eshbaal had suppressed innovation; ensuring the indigenous peoples never posed a serious threat to the Ancestor AI. At the same time, it began to use the resources of Beta Mutara Prime to establish an ambitious program intended bring back its creators.

  As we were hurtling through the ever-thickening atmosphere of Prime, we knew none of this. This would be something that we would discover once we had boots on the ground.

  Soon enough, we began to enter the outer fringes of the atmosphere. As our HALO suits were heating up, and our teeth were being shaken out of our skulls, and the sound of air as it screamed past us was threatening to rupture our eardrums… boots on the ground was the extent of our ambitions.

  After about three minutes of this, my feet were beginning to get warm despite the Galactic Order insulation and heat dissipation systems built into my boots. Contrary to popular belief, a HALO jump from space involves entry feet first and not head first. In point of fact, our legs were inside of a heatshield fairing that bore the brunt of the reentry forces.

  To anybody watching from the surface, we would look like meteorites burning up in the atmosphere. We were actually a part of a sizeable swarm of celestial visitors. As the Gilboa II made good her escape, she kicked a number of rocks in the general direction of the planet. None were big enough to pose a threat, but they did serve to make the six of us appear to be nothing more than a part of a larger group.

  Our plan was to avoid direct contact with any of the surface dwellers as long as possible. For this reason, our HALO jump was targeting a point in the ocean about twenty kilometers of the coast of a moderately sized city.

  The nice thing about HALO combat suits was they were equally well adapted to use in space, water or land. We would be putting that to the test shortly.

  The ride was getting pretty rough. Prime’s atmosphere was about three percent denser than that of Earth. That may not sound like much, but it meant our angle of entry into the atmosphere needed to be a bit shallower to avoid that whole unpleasant overheating, burning up and dying thing that we were all trying to avoid. It also meant that our trip would cover about a thousand miles more.

  Mike was about a hundred and fifty miles ahead of me, which meant he was deeper in the atmosphere and decelerating faster.

  My HUD displayed the position of each member of our infiltration team. Merab was just off to my left by about two miles. Corporals Rodrigues and James flanked the Colonel with about twenty miles of separation. Everybody else was behind me.

  At exactly the right moment, when atmosphere heating began to fall off, Mike’s fairing detached. I had my HUD set to magnify and watched as the magnetic clamps released the heat shield. As the leaves tumbled away, they became less aerodynamic, which resulted in several fairly spectacular things.

  The pieces slowed down, and the atmospheric heating they had to deal with spiked tremendously. The result was the pieces quickly broke apart and superheated past the point the fairings were designed to handle. It made for an impressing light show.

  I was moments from my own fairing detach. The buffeting I was experiencing was, as I noted before, enough to shake my teeth loose. I tasted a small amount of blood in my mouth. The mouth guard that protected the aforementioned teeth had slipped during an especially rough bout of buffeting. I had bit my tongue while getting it back in place.

  That distraction might have accounted for what happened next. One moment I was fine, the next I’m slamming into a brick wall. In a million-to-one piece of bad luck, a hunk of Mike’s fairing impacted with my heat shield. Fortunately for me, it was a small piece, and it struck a glancing blow.

  Unfortunately for me, it destroyed the aerodynamic symmetry of my fairing and even worse broke the system that allowed the shield to detach.

  I found myself tumbling wildly. Alarms in my HUD were blaring wildly. Pieces of my own heat shield began to break off. Temperatures were rapidly exceeding the design specs for my HALO and the G-forces being generated by my tumble were threatening to render me unconscious.

  I began to smell burnt insulation, and various readouts on my HUD started the flicked out and go dead. Let me state for the record, at this point I began to become seriously concerned.

  I managed to bend far enough to grab the remaining bit of fairing with my right hand and pull it free. This restored my aerodynamics but little else. My HUD was completely dead at this put, and there was so much smoke in my helmet that I was having a hard time breathing… when I wasn’t trying to cough up a lung or two or three.

  I didn’t dare open my visor as my reentry velocity was still high enough to melt many metals. One of the many problems I was facing, aside from asphyxiation and a dead HALO suit was the lower half of my armor was seriously compromised by the abuse my fairing had just endured.

  A HALO suit is comprised of several layers. The first is an ablative heat shield, followed by a resilient ceramic armor, followed by thermal insulation, and then the embedded electronics and environmental systems.

  The fairings, both Mike’s and mine, had scraped big chunks of both the ablative and armored layers off. What remained was rapidly being destroyed by my now subsonic but still rapid descent through the atmosphere.

  Could feel my legs beginning to burn. That’s never a good thing. I used my arms as aileron flaps to flip myself over, so I was in a head down position. As I said before, modern HALO suits are not designed to function in this orientation but the way I figured it, I had better shielding on my upper torso than on my lower extremities at this point.

  I felt my legs begin to cool. I suspected I had some first or second-degree burn but nothing more serious than that.

  As I continued my descent, the air in my suit began to clear. Apparently, some of the internal systems had managed to self-repair and reboot. This was confirmed as my HUD flickered to life. As I digested what it was telling me I found myself almost wishing it had remained dead.

  I was off course by well over two thousand miles; nowhere near the ocean and only about three minutes from hitting terra firma. I actuated my chute deployment mechanism. No joy.

  Two minutes until impact. Secondary deployment systems failed as well. I jettisoned my helmet, so I could get a better look at my suit’s exterior. Yeah… it was not good. It looked like the forward chute panel was fused by the excessive reentry heat to the ablative layer of my armor.

  At this point, I had less than a minute and a half before I did a bug-on-the-windshield imitation. I was going to need some of that time for my chute to deploy and actually slow me down.

  I decided to try a time-honored military repair technique. I started hitting the frozen panel with my armored fist. After about four good whacks, the panel unfroze, and I was able to manually deploy my reserve chute. It had maybe fifteen seconds to slow my descent. The LO, low open, part of the HALO acronym was put to the test.

  Just so everybody is clear, 15 seconds is really not enough time to slow an Admiral clad in a one-h
undred-pound HALO suit. I knew my armor was not going to fully protect me, but at this point, I was somewhat committed.

  Per my expectations, I slammed into the ground at something approaching thirty miles an hour. I targeted the side of a small hill and attempted a roll to dissipate some of the energy of impact into the roll itself. I say ‘attempted’ because, as I hit, there was a loud crack which sounded exactly like a femur snapping. I did manage to roll but, in the process, my broken leg got repeatedly banged into the ground. It was not pleasant.

  After what seemed like an eternity, I came to a stop. My chute had failed to detach, so I was wrapped up in it like a bug caught in a spider’s web. I never have been much of a fan of spiders, and my current situation did nothing to improve my disposition towards them.

  Despite the agony of my left leg, I tried to concentrate enough to assess my situation. I was at the foot of a small hill that seemed to be surrounded by plum-colored trees. The ground seemed soft and moist, which might have contributed to my survival. I was in a marginally functional HALO suit, cut off from my companions, with a broken leg, tangled up in my parachute, with no comms to speak of, deep in enemy territory. Just another day at the office.

  My HUD showed that less than thirty percent of my HALO’s systems were online. HALO’s were incredibly sophisticated pieces of tech. They were able to repair many of their internal systems thanks to advanced reprogrammable gate arrays built into their electronics.

  My heart was racing, and the pain was making it impossible to think. I was sure I was going to have a stroke it I couldn’t get my breathing and blood pressure under control. I flagged the emergency medical systems and comms as priorities. A few minutes later, I felt a warm and comforting sensation spread throughout my body. Apparently, the EMS decided I would benefit from some pain relief. I wholeheartedly agreed.

  My busted leg was folded underneath me. A message flashed across my HUD. The EMS wanted to stabilize it, which meant I was going to need to find a way to straighten it. My problem was I was wrapped up in my parachute.

  I had an incentive to get the leg straight: my HALO could inflate an internal air bladder to hold the leg in place as well as any cast and the servos built into my armor could allow me to walk with limited reliance on the leg itself. I wouldn’t be running ant marathons, but at least I would be mobile.

  I slowly worked my right arm free and used my survival knife to cut away the ropes holding the chute. The pain meds were a lifesaver. I mean, don’t get me wrong, my leg still hurt, but I could function.

  With the ropes cut, the fabric of the chute could be pulled away. Now the fun part. I had to straighten the leg. I was dealing with a compound fracture that was bleeding into the leg of my HALO suit. My suit had applied an antibiotic mist to the wound site. I rolled to my right ever so slightly and attempted to grab my left foot. Pain killer or not, the experience was beyond description.

  By the third attempt, it was clear I was not going to be able to get the job done. The human brain was just not wired to allow a person to function at that level of pain long enough to lift and pull a broken and twisted leg wrapped in flexible armor. I could get the job halfway done and then would black out.

  I realized I only had one choice, and it was not one I relished as it would leave me vulnerable for an extended period of time. Of course, one could argue that I already was vulnerable.

  2100.1289.8859 Galactic Normalized Time

  Marmoot saw the objects streak across the evening sky. His covert surveillance systems had been tracking the meteor storm for days. He knew there had been a battle in space near the Titec Rasha asteroid belt. A number of the asteroids that made up that belt had been disturbed, resulting in the current light show.

  Most of the objects he saw would likely impact in the Sargosa Sea, but one of the meteorites looked like it was going to impact a mere seventeen dros from town. Marmoot had expected a sizable impact event, but at the last moment, just before he lost sight of it, the meteorite deployed some type of fabric wind scoop.

  Whatever this was, it was no mere piece of rock.

  Chapter 20: Lost Dog…

  I felt a sharp pain in my lower back. I knew from my artificially implanted Da’Tellen transfer device medical training that a needle had entered my spine near the L3-L4 vertebrae. My EMS was giving me a temporary spinal block. Almost immediately, my legs grew cold and then completely numb.

  I was now able to reposition the leg. There was a certain degree of resistance as the pieces of my femur rubbed against each other. I’m not a wimp, but I need to state for the record that I am not a fan of pain… especially when it’s my own. I was glad for the nerve block because I could not imagine I would have been able to do that otherwise.

  Once the EMS sensed the leg was in position, it used the flexible armor in my HALO’s leg to apply sufficient traction to set the bone in place. Did I mention my appreciation of the aforementioned spinal block?

  Once everything was in place, the EMS injected me with a cocktail of meds designed to enhance and accelerate healing. It would still be a week or more before the bone was knit enough to be walked on. Until then, I would be using the HALO armor to get around.

  My HUD was showing my armor’s systems were at fifty-eight percent. The system was sophisticated enough to warn me that repairs were going to max out at about sixty-one percent. Sadly, long-range comms were not going to be in the final mix. This meant I was effectively on my own.

  I looked around the grassy area I had landed in. My chute was flapping in a slight breeze. The fabric was a single layer of cross-linked carbon fiber. It was incredibly thin and incredibly strong. I used my hands to pull it towards me and bundle it up. As big as the chute was, it collapsed down into a volume little bigger than a soda can.

  I still did not have use of my legs. As a result, I was forced to improvise when it came to hiding the chute. Normally, I would have looked for a rock or fallen tree I could hide it under. Instead, I dug a hole with my hands and buried it. The disturbed soil and trample grass from my less-than-graceful landing were dead giveaways that something happened. There was nothing I could do about it, though, so I began to focus my attention on my next steps.

  It turns out that was a poor choice of words, as it would be hours before I was taking any steps… even with my HALO armor assisting my broken leg. I had ordered my EMS to administer the counter agent for the spinal block, but the system informed me that the supply of base chemicals it would need to synthesise the counter agent was depleted.

  Given the amount of fluids that had leaked all over the exterior of my armor, I suspected raw components had been lost to leakage rather than used in my treatments. Fortunately, pain management was a priority service, so there were redundant supplies for keeping me comfortable enough to function.

  My HUD beeped. Repairs were as complete as could be accomplished. The limited AI built into the suit had been able to eke out an additional two percent, meaning it was operating at sixty-three percent. In the grand scheme of things, that was somewhat impressive. I still had no comms worth mentioning and virtually no weapons beyond my knife and some very limited shielding.

  The good news, if there was any, was that my power systems were not damaged, meaning the suit could keep functioning for another six or seven years. Sadly, all the systems that could have used that power were dead. This included the aforementioned weapons systems, full shields, active camouflage, and long-range sensors.

  I turned the gain up on my external audio pickups. If something was coming my way, I wanted to know about it as soon as possible. The sun was beginning to go down, and I could hear whatever passed for this planet’s denizens of the night begin to move about.

  I was hoping that recently tenderized homosapien wasn’t on anybody’s menu tonight. I began to use my arms to drag myself to the nearby tree line. I felt terribly exposed where I was. Just as I got to the trees, my audio sensors picked up something that was alarming. Voices.

  They had the familiar g
uttural tones of my favorite almost-human biped… neander-thugs. This was not good news. I dragged myself deeper within the forest. It sounded like the bad guys were making their way to my crash-landing site. It wouldn’t take them long to pick up my trail. A blind hog with a sinus infection could follow the signs I was making with my feeble attempts to crawl using my arms while dragging my feet.

  The voices were getting closer. They were making no attempt to conceal their approach. I actually took this as a positive sign. It meant they were not expecting anything able to hear them at the end of their search. I guessed they were, at most, five minutes from the clearing at the base of the hill I rolled down.

  I wasn’t going to outrun these guys, so my only option was to hide… and fast because I was making as much noise crawling through these woods as a rutting moose. I figured I could go down or up.

  Down meant a hole or under something. The problem was the neander-thugs would already be looking down if they were following my trail.

  Up meant finding a big enough tree to climb and using my armor’s enhanced strength to pull myself up said tree. This seemed the better option.

  It took a few minutes, but I located a suitable candidate. The tree in question had a number of fallen logs near its base, which meant, if I crawled up on them first, I might be able to confuse my trail.

  About the time I wedged myself in a crook in the tree about twenty feet in the air and behind a clump of reddish-purple leaves; the neander-thugs arrived my landing site. Their rumpus conversation stopped abruptly. I couldn’t see them, but I imagined what they were doing.

  There could be no doubt that whatever had landed was not a natural phenomenon. A series of sharp guttural commands were issued, and then there was silence.

  I struggled with my armor’s enhanced audio pickups to track what was going on. Suddenly there was a shout and the sound of running. If I was a betting man, I would say one of the bad guys had found by buried parachute and had called the others over for a look-see. It won’t be long before they were following my trail into the woods.