by Rick Partlow
Chapter Fourteen
The first clue I had that I was still alive was how badly my head hurt. I’d had a bad concussion before, bad enough that only several hours in an auto-doc saved my life, but this wasn’t like that; this was like someone had stuck red-hot needles through my ears and into my brain. I pressed my hands against my head and moaned softly, not wanting to open my eyes yet.
“Sonic stun field.”
I pried one eye open, the right one with the night vision lens, and saw that I was somewhere dark, with sandstone walls close around me and the barest hint of light leaking through from somewhere behind. Crouched beside me was a hulking figure with bare metal glinting in that light on the side of his head.
“Kane?” I rasped. I rolled over onto my side, getting an arm underneath me as I slowly and painfully rose to a sitting position. “I thought they got all of you.”
“Got the others,” Kane told me, face impassive. “Sonics, like the fence you hit back on the path. Sonics don’t get me.”
I understood. He probably didn’t have physical ear canals anymore.
“Where are we?” I asked him, looking around. “Is this a cave?”
“Three kilometers from the fence.” He was frowning now, and I sensed it was because he was being forced to talk too much. “I watched. Saw you get hit, took you here.”
“How long was I out?” I wondered. I didn’t have my ‘link.
“Three standard hours,” he snapped off.
It was about dawn. Shit. That meant Yassa hadn’t made it out. It also meant they’d had plenty of time to comb the hills above the ranch.
“Have they been searching for us?”
He shook his head. That meant they either thought we’d gone down the wadi or else they didn’t think it was worth it to look because we were dozens of kilometers from town and couldn’t possibly get back on foot.
I took a deep breath and steadied myself. I was thirsty, and my head was still throbbing. I came up to a crouch and duck-walked to the front of the cave. It was about three meters deep and wide, and maybe a meter and change high. Outside, I could see the primary star piercing through the cloud cover near the horizon, sending a faint orange glow through the pervasive grey, and the wind was just a faint whistle that moved clouds of sand across the bare, polished rock that stretched out over my whole field of view. It would pick up later; it would howl across the plateau and scour it like a sander.
I scooted back out of the opening, feeling exposed. It might not have mattered, since they weren’t searching and couldn’t use drones, but it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck to be out in the open.
“I need some water,” I muttered, cradling my head in my hands.
“Back here,” Kane motioned towards the back of the cave.
I moved back on hands and knees as the ceiling grew closer and closer to the floor, until I began to hear the faint dripping. At the very furthest corner of the cave, at a spot where it was less than half a meter high, was a hollowed-out bowl of rock with a small pool of water fed by a slow but steady drip from out of the wall.
I swallowed down several handfuls and gradually, the pain in my head began to fade. I pushed myself back up to where I could sit down comfortably, up near the entrance.
“My great grandfather,” I said half to Kane and half to myself, staring out at the morning, “thinks I’m trying to plot against him, to keep him from using the artifact as a weapon against the Corporates.” I shrugged. “And maybe I am, now. The man I knew when I was growing up wouldn’t take a risk like this.”
“People change.” The two words seemed to contain more feeling than anything Kane had ever said to me. I didn’t look back at him, though; I felt like it would make him uncomfortable.
I was going to have to take a risk myself. There was only the two of us, and we couldn’t stay here very long.
“Kane,” I asked him, “do you think you could make it back to the spaceport on foot?”
It was a longshot. I knew I couldn’t do it, not against the hurricane-force winds, not for the ten or twelve kilometers of open ground he’d have to take to bypass the road through the wadi and avoid the guard gate there. It would take me days, and I’d die of hypothermia. But I didn’t have an isotope reactor implanted in my gut and a pair of bionic legs that never got tired.
“Twenty-three standard hours,” was his answer. I didn’t ask if he could find his way. If he thought he couldn’t, he wouldn’t have just volunteered. “Still got the air defenses.”
“Twenty-three hours.” I nodded. “In twenty-three hours, I’ll have them down.” He didn’t say anything, and I looked over to see an expression of doubt on the human side of his face. “If I don’t,” I clarified, “you can take off, sell the ship and use the money to do whatever the hell you want to yourself.”
He didn’t have to think about that for very long. “Need the codes.”
I looked him in his green eye, trying to read his expressionless face. The ship was only authorized to admit me or Yassa. It had seemed like a prudent decision not that long ago, when I had no reason to trust him. I still didn’t want to trust him; my track record for that had been spotty lately.
“There’s an override.” The words seemed to be coming from somewhere else, from someone else, because I didn’t want to say them. “I set it for an emergency. Type in the numeric 11-4-30, then it’ll ask for a spoken password. It’s ‘Sophie.’ That’ll get you in.”
“And do what?” It wasn’t a bad question. I wished I had a good answer for it.
“The ship’s armed. If I don’t contact you and say differently, start hitting the ranch house when you’re in range. And take out the main barn, bury it in the rubble.” I snorted. “Then you can land and see if any of us are left alive to haul out.”
He didn’t question my judgment the way almost anyone else would have. At the moment, I appreciated that. Instead, his question was more of a practical nature.
“Leave at sunset?”
I nodded. “Sunset.”
***
It was hard to walk, hard to stand, and even hard to see. The wind battered me as if I were trying to walk into the ocean against the incoming crash of waves, and I leaned into it, sheltering my eyes with one hand. Particles of sand abraded my exposed skin and kept trying to work their way into my eyes and mouth; I wanted to squeeze my eyes shut, but I had to keep my right one open to see where I was going and I wished it would just rain since that would be less painful than the sandblasting.
Kane had left an eighteen-hour day ago, but I’d waited till now to head back towards the ranch because no matter what happened, it wouldn’t take me twenty-three hours to shut down the defense systems. It technically wasn’t sunset yet, but it was dark enough that it didn’t really matter. I was starting to envy the cyborg at this point, and I was half-sure I’d gone off on a tangent and would never find the canyon when I very nearly tumbled over the side.
Squawking involuntarily in a tone high enough that I was very grateful no one else was around to hear it, I fell to my hands and knees and dug my fingers into the crumbling sand at the edge of the cliff. Stretched out below me, I could see the lights of the ranch gleaming upward, astonishingly bright and yet quickly swallowed up in the haze and dust hanging over the canyon. Once I had my breath and composure back, I did my best to look up and down along the canyon wall. I couldn’t use the path back down because of the sonic trap they’d installed there, which meant doing this the hard way.
There. Down another fifty meters or so, there had been a collapse of part of the canyon wall, and it had left an angled, sandy slope down the side. I couldn’t have climbed up that, but I might be able to travel down it. I moved slowly across those fifty meters, hunched over, trailing my right hand on the ground and keeping my eyes on the edge. It took what seemed like hours and when I reached the collapsed section, I nearly balked at how steep and unstable the edge looked.
This would be a damned silly way to go, and I had to re
mind myself that luck wasn’t something you could count on. I’d survived Demeter, but that didn’t mean I was going to keep rolling sixes. I could fall off the side of this cliff and Sophia would never even hear how I died. I winced as I thought of her waiting for me back on Demeter, going nuts worrying. Of all the things for which I was currently feeling guilty, leaving her to be part of this stupid shit ranked pretty high. She’d offered to come, very nearly forced me to let her come, but I’d reminded her that there wasn’t anyone else who could do her job if she left. I was glad she wasn’t along because it was bad enough worrying about people I didn’t even like that much who were counting on me to save their asses.
Sighing out a breath I couldn’t hear over the wind, I lowered myself down from the cliff edge to the platform of collapsed sandstone over two meters below. My boot soles slipped on the wet, bare rock and I yelped again as I grabbed at finger-holds and barely kept myself from tumbling down the slope.
“What the hell are you even going to do once you get down there?” I muttered aloud, trying to distract myself from the climb. “You don’t have as much as a fucking sharp stick and there’s got to be thirty people down there.” True, only about half of those were armed guards; the rest were ranch hands, but they’d probably fight if Gramps told them to.
Foot and hand on a hold before I moved. Down a meter, down two meters…
“Have to get a weapon,” I grunted, then swore as I nearly tore a fingernail off trying to gain purchase on slick rock. But did I want to kill anyone? They hadn’t killed any of us yet, as far as I knew. Did I want to cross that line, and maybe give Constantine ammunition to convince Gramps he should take off the kid gloves?
Loose sand and I was sliding, falling, biting off a scream, sure I was dead. Then my foot caught on something and wrenched my leg upward and I lunged forward desperately, grabbing at sand until I found a rock and pulled myself back up. I sucked in air, feeling sweat trickling down my back under my fatigue shirt and jacket, my arms and legs shuddering with the strain.
“Damn it, damn it, damn it,” I panted. Getting tired, had to get down before I fell down.
I twisted my head around and looked beneath me. Maybe another twenty meters, still far enough to kill me nice and dead. There was a fairly flat platform maybe three meters down, though, and then the base of the cliff fanned out into a cone of dirt and sand. I kicked away and clenched my teeth, bending my knees to absorb the impact as I hit. I slammed my shoulder into the side of the cliff and grabbed at it with battered fingers, steadying myself.
I maneuvered onto my butt and slid down the last few meters, feeling the wet sand and dirt cold under the seat of my pants. I hit the bottom, taking a deep, shuddering breath and enjoying the feel of the ground firm under my boots for just a moment.
That had been so much harder than I thought it would be.
I felt a wave of weakness, heard my stomach rumbling and realized I hadn’t eaten since the day before yesterday. I forced the thought down and tried to focus.
The barn was between me and the ranch house, the lights from it a halo around the metal structure. I was about to push myself up and make a quick run for the barn when I saw a flicker of shadow between it and the house, and I froze, trying to blend into the side of the canyon. It was a single figure, a man dressed in dark clothing. It had to be one of the guards; there was no reason for any of the ranch hands to be out this late. He moved farther to my right, past the edge of the barn, and I saw a long gun of some kind cradled in his arms.
They were ready for trouble. And if I knew Gramps, he wouldn’t have people patrolling alone. Sure enough, it was only a few seconds before I saw the second guard, a woman, trailing about five meters behind the first, also armed with a rifle or carbine. I slowly and carefully slid forward, easing down on my belly to minimize my thermal profile in case they had enhanced optics. My fatigues were designed to be resistant to night vision gear, but my head wasn’t.
They were circling the barn and I had a sense that their circuit was going to take them all the way around the edge of the canyon. The question was, would they see me before I could get to them? I couldn’t run now; I was locked in to this position. If I tried to exfil, they’d spot my movement and either start shooting or call for help. No radios, though, and they were outside the buildings, so no hardwire comms either. If I could take them out, no one would realize they were gone for a good while.
I realized with a start that I’d just decided to kill them. One guard, I might have been able to subdue silently without killing him; but with two in the patrol, I’d have to kill at least one and probably both. It didn’t bother me on a moral level. These people weren’t innocents, and I knew most of them had come in with Constantine. They’d supported him while he’d bullied and abused the shop owners in Freeport. But it was crossing a Rubicon with Gramps, and despite the conviction I had that he wasn’t the same man I’d known, I didn’t want to be put into a position where we’d be trying to kill each other.
The man in the lead walked right past me only a few meters away, never looking down, only out in front of him. My old instructors at Recon Selection would have torn him a new asshole for being that sloppy. I let him pass, my head down, the whites of my eyes mostly facing the ground, sensing rather than seeing the woman trailing him as she walked by me.
Was she a bad person? Did she have a father, mother, or children somewhere wondering where she’d gone and what had gone so wrong with her life that she’d had to run away from them?
Those thoughts fled from me as I moved into action, pushing up from the ground and pouncing on her from behind in one, broad step. My right arm snaked around her throat and my left hand grabbed my right wrist, squeezing hard just before I threw her off her feet backwards. She went down hard and I landed on top of her back, planting a knee there and then twisting backwards with all the weight and strength of my upper body, jerking back on her neck until I heard the sickening crack, felt it through my arm and had to shut off the sickening twisting in my gut.
The one in front had kept walking, seven or eight meters ahead, until he’d heard the thump of her body hitting the ground beneath me. He’d stopped then, starting to look around, unsure where the sound had originated.
“Lara?” I heard him start to say, just before Lara’s neck broke and she went limp.
I wanted to grab her gun, but there wasn’t time. Instead, I let her limp and lolling neck fall from my arm and I charged at him. His eyes finally settled on me, on the totally unexpected threat and the gruesome sight of his comrade lying dead; I couldn’t see them go wide because they were hidden by his night vision glasses, but I saw his jaw go slack and I saw the muzzle of his rifle begin to swing around.
Seven meters. That’s what I’d been told in Force Recon training: if there was a threat within seven meters of you, human or Tahni, and you didn’t already have your gun pointed at it, safety off, you probably wouldn’t be able to get off an accurate shot before it reached you. We’d gone over that scenario in shoot-houses a few times and I’d gotten to where I could manage a shot even under seven meters, but my reflexes were pretty far above average. This guy wasn’t even average.
I slammed into him with a full body block, smashing the receiver of his rifle into his face as I took him to the ground. He spluttered, tried to shout, but I had one hand pushing the gun against his face and the other wrapped around his throat. He had one hand trapped beneath the gun and was trying to hit me with the other, trying to grab at my eyes. I freed up my left leg and pistoned my knee up into his groin.
The sound that escaped past the vice grip of my hand on his throat was a hoarse ululation of agony, and the strength went out of his hand where it was trying to wrap around my face. I ripped the rifle free of his hands and smashed the butt downward into his face. There was a crunch of breaking bone, and the beginnings of a scream before I brought the rifle down a second time, then a third, into his throat, his temple, his skull. Over and over until he wasn’t making any sou
nds, until he wasn’t struggling, or moving or breathing.
Then I rolled off of him, wiping the blood out of my face, spitting and coughing at the taste of it in my mouth, trying not to puke at the coppery taste and the smell of the dying. Jesus, would I ever be done with this? Was this really the only thing I was good at?
I clenched my teeth against the rising bile and the adrenalin-fueled shudders and began stripping the corpses of anything useful, working quickly to avoid anyone else wandering out there and noticing the movement. Their rifles were an old design, a century out of date. I’d never seen one outside a museum but they were childishly simple and easy to fabricate out of local materials and, more importantly, so was their ammo. They fired rocket-assisted rounds like my pistol, but these were totally unguided and you couldn’t control or adjust the warhead, or the range. A small, caseless charge kicked them out at a high enough velocity to kill point-blank targets until the rocket motor could take them up to their maximum speed. The sights were rudimentary, but they could be synced with the night vision glasses the guards had been wearing.
I slung one over my shoulder and held the other in the crook of my arm as I pulled spare magazines from their tactical vests and stuck them in my thigh pockets. I grabbed the woman’s night vision goggles; the man’s were smashed into fragments. She’d had a knife as well, and that went into my jacket pocket. The man had been wearing a black, brimmed hat; it had come off when I’d hit him and I grabbed it and pulled it onto my head.
I wanted to keep searching them, but time was ticking down in my internal clock and I knew I had to move. I rolled both of them onto their stomachs to reduce their heat signature and reflective surfaces, then sprinted across the open ground to the barn.
My shoulder hit it harder than I’d intended and I winced at the solid thump it made. The livestock doors were closed, but there was a side door open, a smaller one for workers, and I could see that it was dark inside. I edged through it, pushing it shut gently behind me, hearing the click as it closed. I waited there for a moment, scanning around with my night vision lens but seeing and hearing no one.