Noah had a single weapon with which to fight, the Hog. Not ideal, but the man who’d saved him was about to die, torn apart by a gunfire. The drone eased into the hover. Movement under the fuselage signaled the aim and fire command was activated and in process. He squeezed the trigger in desperation, hoping for enough of a blast to force the weapon to lose target lock. The effect was instant. The micro-rocket warhead slammed below the large ‘Dawson Public’ lettering painted beneath the fuselage. The drone rocked in the turbulence of the blast and began to steady. It wasn’t enough. He fired and kept his finger depressed on the trigger. Another rocket launched and this time exploded to the right of the drone, showering it with debris. Something hit one of the rotors, and it dropped down before righting itself. One rotor splintered and sheared off, making its movement erratic and hard to control. The drone automatically withdrew, lifting up higher to avoid the buildings. He followed it with the enhanced optical guidance system, locked on the moving UAV, and pulled the trigger a third time. As it passed halfway, the onboard computer adjusted for speed, distance, direction, temperature, and windage.
The micro-rocket raced away and clipped the underside of the drone. The shot was a lucky one, perhaps even an unlikely one, but Noah watched in silence as it exploded in a spectacular display of pyrotechnics, and fragments dropped to the ground.
He didn’t wait to see them land. “Luther, move it. They’ll send more of them to find us. It’s not over.”
The vet was shaking his head, murmuring, “Sonofabitch.”
“Run!”
They pounded across the open space, heading for the cover of a long line of rusting pipework and tangled mesh that would make them difficult targets, if they could reach them.
“Cage!” Luther sounded breathless, and he glanced behind as he ran.
“What is it?”
“I’m done in. I can’t do this anymore. My chest feels like it's about to explode. I think I’m about to have a coronary.”
Before he could reply, two more moving objects zoomed down from the sky and dropped into a machine-controlled hover. The law had decided to throw everything at them. A kilometer further away, higher in the sky, two more drones were coming in. Luther had slowed, and he dropped back to help him, but a bright flash tickled the ground, mere centimeters from his boots. He had to make a decision. Stay to help him, and surrender, or keep going. Abandon the man who’d saved him, and leave him to the mercy of the Sheriff’s deputies. Together with their array of backward prejudices married to high tech weaponry.
There was a third alternative. Keep running and come back for him. If there was another way, he’d take it, but there wasn’t. In a matter of minutes, Luther had become one of his unit. They were joined at the hip after coming under the guns of a common enemy. He’d come back for him.
“Don’t lose hope, Luther. Keep calm, and do what they say. I’ll find you. Do you hear me? I’ll come back. I won’t leave you.”
His face stared back at Cage, and his dark skin had turned from the deep mahogany color to mottled purple. He needed medical attention, and with luck, he’d get it when they moved in to make the arrest.
“Get outta here. I’ll see you again.” He forced a grin, “Maybe in hell.”
I’ve been there, my friend, been there and back. It’s a place you need to stay away from, the hard face of Mars, airless, hostile, and if they catch you, a crippling incarceration while they pile on the pain.
“Show your hands. The drone's ROE should be programmed to recognize a suspect’s surrender. Even on Earthside there are some rules.”
His reply was a hoarse, pain-racked rasp, “Just get outta here.”
He went on, twisting, swerving, dodging beneath tangled steel wreckage, sliding down concrete ramps, and pushing his way through thick overgrowth; where nature had seized back control from the man-made concrete jungle. He’d lost all sense of direction, but his limbs powered him along, untiring, strong, able to keep him running for long periods, until the power faded. When he’d lost them, he’d stop and check the levels. With no access to a military installation, recharging was complicated. When the power reached a low level, it would draw on chemical reactions inside his body to trickle charge the energy store, but he’d lose his edge, and his speed would slow.
I’ll worry about that later. First, I need to lose them. Get back and spring Luther.
He climbed out of a shallow silo, its function overtaken by weeds and grass pushing through the concrete base, and sprinted across another stretch of open ground. In front, a mass of buildings stretched up the hillside. Over the decades, new growth had sprung up, and if he could make it in there, they’d never find him. The drones would be blind, and he could work his way out of the area and escape. His shopping list had grown. He’d spent too much time getting to the area, to explain things to Rose, and he’d be damned if he’d give up now. After that, Luther; he’d left men’s broken bodies stretched out on the Martian dust, and every night the memory of that final blast haunted his dreams. Not again. A promise to a long dead friend, and a promise to a man who’d saved his life.
I’ll come for you, Luther. Hang in there.
He wasn’t looking in the right direction and failed to see the Skyhunters change direction. They were heading right at him, the precision optical sights focusing without emotion, without excitement, without hesitation, on the one man. They were robotic demons that followed orders to the letter, and never ever backed down. Their Stryker carbines came online and prepared to fire.
* * *
Vos waited next to his car as the military transport dropped from the sky. From here it looked like an angry bug, with its bulbous body and large skids extending from internal storage pods. The craft settled into a hover as the onboard systems surveyed the ground beneath, and then it flared for a landing. It was a small utility craft, with an internal space little bigger than a truck. Its sides were open, and he could see a small unit of military soldiers inside. The pair of large motor turbines extended out from its flanks, sending dust flying in all directions. With its lack of wings and diminutive size it was clearly designed as a scout transport, and not for moving large numbers of men or equipment. It was close enough for the rotors to send him a blast of air before they chopped the power, and the blast of air slowed and stopped.
The man who stepped out first had that air of command common to senior military officers. He was lean, tall, erect, and hard-faced. Vos envied his flat belly, wondering how he kept that way doing staff work. He was an older man, with around twenty years on Vos. The four stars on his shoulder tabs underlined his function in the military machine. He gave orders, and men obeyed them, or else.
He went to greet him, but the man brushed aside his offered hand. “You Vos?”
“Sheriff Harrison Vos, General. I’m the man leading the hunt for the fugitive.”
He stared back at him, the eyes unmoving. It was like trading glances with a lizard or a snake. Vos noted his jacket bore the flashes of Mars Recon.
So he’s seen some fighting, maybe.
“You’re the man who let him escape, and so far, you’ve failed to apprehend him. He’s a dangerous criminal, wanted dead or alive. We’ll handle it from here on in.”
As he spoke, soldiers were emerging from the rotorcraft. They’d developed utility flyers like them decades ago, and the guidance packages required no pilot, which was useful, given the lack of skilled aviators. Vos had seen them before, but never had one land on his patch.
The men who jumped to the ground were MPs, big, tough men. The kind of soldiers who’d break a man’s head first, then start asking questions. There were led by an MP with Master Sergeant’s stripes. They wore camouflage gear, with bulging plates around the chest and limbs. Each man wore a tight fitting helmet, with a pair of smoked goggles at the front obscuring their eyes. A dull, metallic looking plate covered their faces, leaving no exposed skin, giving them an alien, almost robotic look. The Master Sergeant looked to his left and right, just
as a pair of short antenna reached up from the side of his helmet. Vos knew they’d be linked to the most important military and law enforcement computer systems, and the merest electronic sniff would flash a warning in front of their eyes, and zero them in on the target. Hartmann ignored the Sheriff and gave them his attention.
“He’s around here somewhere in this ruined plant. It’ll be hard locating him, but we’re updating the dataflow in real-time. The drones are…wait. They’ve found him. Check your HUDs.”
The MP Sergeant was already moving. “General, he’s about five hundred meters up the hill. I see it on the overlay.” He broke into a run, shouting at his men to follow him, and they raced away.
Hartmann glanced back at Vos. “We’ll show you how the professionals handle it, Sheriff. Come with me...” He looked up and down the civilian's body, doing little to disguise his scorn, "If you can keep up."
It wasn’t a request, and he struggled to keep up with the fast pace set by the older man.
I’ll have to cut back on the doughnuts. They aren’t helping my waistline.
“General, about jurisdiction. See, I’m the appointed senior law enforcement officer in Westbank, and I’m running this hunt.”
He didn’t even look over his shoulder as he replied, “You’re not running it. You’re screwing it up. It’ll all be over soon, but until then, you take a back seat. This won’t take long, and if you’re worried about jurisdiction, you can have possession of the body.”
He chuckled, but without a vestige of humor. He forced the pace, and Vos found himself falling back, as breathing became harder with the unaccustomed exertion. Until the shooting started, and he broke into a jog, ignoring the pain in his body that whined at him to slow down.
How the hell does Hartmann do it? Bastard.
* * *
A blast smacked down onto the cracked concrete, and he broke into a sprint. Forcing his way through the twisted and tangled wreckage, leaping over tangled overgrowth, pushing through until he entered a building, but the damage was already done. No roof. Nature, storms maybe, had snatched it away long ago. Or the metal scavengers, like Luther, but he was no less exposed than when he was outside.
One entire wall was missing at the far end. He pushed past rusting pieces of equipment, more pipes, and dodged aside as the drones fired a lone burst. Not one shot, but four interlocking blasts chewed up the ground, and he dove into a hole, little more than a burrow. The shots rolled past him, and he was up again, running. Overhead, the four drones moved as one. They were no longer following the direct commands of their operators, and Noah had seen this before on Mars.
Damn swarms, they'll be the death of me.
He'd seen a group of a dozen drones wipe out an entire platoon in the last war. By working together, they were able to multiply their fighting power, and if given a chance could isolate and punish units caught in the open.
Not happening to me, not today!
The buildings had almost disappeared, and he was inside what amounted to a dense wood, with trunks of trees intertwined with unidentifiable pieces of prefabricated aluminum. Corroded metal poked out between the intertwined roots, like a monstrous piece of modern art, ‘The Ascendancy of Nature over Man,’ but the shooting had stopped. They’d lost him, and he stumbled on, thankful for his cybernetic limbs; legs that enabled him to break away when thick brush threatened to trap and imprison him. A narrow lane opened up like a game trail, and he pushed through it. The overhead screen of branches thinned, and light dappled through the trees and wreckage so he could move faster.
A quick glance upward, and he couldn’t see the drones.
Why? No matter, I’m ahead of the game, with a good chance of losing them.
He shouldn’t have looked up. His boots trod on a discarded sheet of aluminum. He had to cross it. At first it flexed, and he tensed to make a flying leap to the next cover, crazy spaghetti of pipes and trees, some six meters high. He was sizing it up, assessing his chances of getting through and away. Big mistake, the extra weight he put on the metal sheet finished what decades of corrosion and ruin had started. It gave, and he went through, plunging down a long, smooth, shaft, some kind of overflow gully. It was long, almost endless, and he dropped out the end and rolled further down a concrete slope.
When he stopped, he was out in the open on a narrow track, which by some miracle was clear of the dereliction and overgrowth experienced by the rest of the plant. He assumed it was still in use by the locals, probably the scavengers used it to drive deep into the plant. A quick survey of the sky, and they were coming, four drones, moving as if they were in an air display. Each had now deployed membrane wings. They tilted forward and with the rotors pointed backward. The single eyes stared out at him, and their wings merged together, holding perfect formation. The swarm arrowed down, and the first shots lashed out at him.
Run!
Bullets riddled the ground, and one glanced off his right arm, peeling away a strip of NuSkin and exposing some of the electromechanical wizardry underneath. Noah snarled and kept on running along the track, but behind him, he heard a hoarse shout, and more shots whistled past him. ‘Smartguns’ registered on his brain, though he knew there was little chance that this policeman and his deputies could be packing such heavy weaponry. Something else was going on now.
The rifles lashed him with a stream of fire, and he desperately searched for shelter, but there was none. The track funneled between two steep earth banks, sheer, like the sides of a cliff. The drones were overhead, and he tensed for them to open fire, to end it all. It wasn’t the drones that fired first. A conventional weapon, the blast of a big, old-fashioned handgun punched two bullets into the ground centimeters from his boots. The revolver fired again, then the military smartguns joined in. In desperation, he dove and rolled, knowing there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. An engine was roaring further down the track, the sound of a vehicle hurtling toward him. Loaded with cops, for sure, and they’d stop alongside him and fill him full of holes.
He stayed where he was. No point in getting up, no point in doing anything, other than dying. The car came nearer, and he braced for the burst of firing that would chew through his body. It stopped.
Why don’t they shoot? The bastards are playing with me.
“Cage!”
He looked up. A girl, a young woman, was leaning out the side of a bright red SUV. The left door lifted up like the old gull-wing doors used to, exposing the interior to the open air. It was an odd mixture of old curves and new styling. Yet for the all the design, it had a ruggedness that wouldn't have misplaced on a military jeep of the past. Noah was confused. His brain struggled to fight through the confusing images until he settled on a memory from more than four years ago, a barbecue in Rob Romero’s backyard, a final get-together with families before they shipped out. He remembered the vehicle, a classic first generation electric, being restored by Rob.
The Falcon!
That was it, the classic he'd been droning on about all the way to Mars, a civilian version of the military utility, and a real collectible. And here he was, staring at the woman he’d come all this way to see.
Rose Romero, but how?
“Jesus Christ, get in! You wanna die out here? They’ll start shooting in the next few seconds, and we’ll both die.”
His brain cleared, and he surged into action. Racing ahead he dove through the open left door and landed on the back seat. Without stopping, he fought his way to the front seat against the bucking, bouncing movement; at the same time the doors lowered down on their whisper quiet mechanism. On any other day he could have spent hours looking over this classic, but not now, not as they raced away from the gunfire. She floored the pedal and raced up the track. The only noise was the hum from the wheels, and the bumping as they hit the hundreds of ruts. Away from the cops, leaving them in her dust, moving like a dart for a green tunnel of overgrowth. The drones were already firing as they entered the cool darkness of the interlaced branches. More shots pursu
ed them, and a final four-shot burst from the drones tore up the track behind them. Then there were no shots, and he relaxed. A fraction.
“Where does this lead?”
A grim chuckle; "It doesn’t lead anywhere. After about five kilometers, it peters out and maybe we’ll find a way through, maybe we won’t. What were you about to tell me? About Rob?”
She impressed him with her expert driving, countering the shifting geometry of the powerful Flacon SUV as it powered over deep furrows in the track, bouncing over fallen trees and abandoned junk. Rose Romero was one of those people who could multitask to the extreme. Fighting to keep them on a straight course, watching behind for any sign of pursuit, and holding a conversation with the man she’d just snatched out from under the guns of a vengeful bunch of cops. She was pretty. Petite, hair cut short in a bob, clear, dark eyes that radiated intelligence. She wore jeans tucked into lace-up paratrooper style boots, a sweatshirt with a short, unbuttoned woolen coat over the top.
He explained how it had happened, the words coming out fast. They had little time. The cops would be coming after them, and they’d hit them with everything they had. She nodded as he made his explanation.
“The thing I never understood was who fired those airbursts. The Martians don’t use them, don’t even own that kind of weapon.”
“You think your own people launched it?”
He shook his head. “That’s the way it looked. It came from our side, but why would they kill their own men? It doesn’t make sense.”
Last Life (Lifers Book 1) Page 8