Armored-ARC

by John Joseph Adams

  The Poacher

  Wendy N. Wagner & Jak Wagner

  The medical request on Karen’s forearm display blinked a second time. Accept? She eyeballed the road ahead. Low fog. No traffic. Hardiman drove the Humvee one-handed, unconcerned, not even scanning the brush for wildlife. The display vibrated, demanding response. There might not be a better time to take her meds.

  She set her teeth as she jabbed accept. She’d chosen Earth knowing full well she’d spend the first three years adjusting to the higher gravity and an atmosphere choked with foreign particulates. It had seemed worth it, back on Luna, with Cirkan trade blockades cutting off supply lines and air scrubbers rationed so hard you had to scrub your biomech suit’s filters with a toothbrush just to keep breathing till the next supply drop. Earth meant all the oxygen a girl could dream of, real live trees and the space to run around them. The needle punched through the skin of her upper thigh, still tender from yesterday’s dose of immunosuppresants, hormones, and steroids.

  From the back seat, Gordo pounded her shoulder. “Can’t believe you go through all of this just to be a ranger. You had it made up there on Luna, girl.” Like every Earth native, he thought life off-world was all big money, firefights, and gravity-free blowjobs. He was saving every paycheck for a ticket off this rock.

  Hardiman answered before she could open her mouth. “Inspector Gadget here has ideals, Gordo. Dreams of protecting the rainforest and saving the whales.”

  “Very funny,” Karen snapped. The swipes at her interest in animals and the jokes about her dependency on the biomechanical suit—she wore power armor even off-duty as part of her transition to Terran life—were getting old. Her lips thinned. “I don’t see you turning in your ranger’s star to seek your fortune off-planet. Sir.” She flinched at a surprise jab in her thigh. She always forgot about the follow-up caffeine injection. It stung worse than the original shot, but she’d need it to keep her eyes open after the antihistamines set in.

  She tapped her armor, wishing she could rub the skin beneath it, and resisted the urge to glare at Hardiman. She’d given up on the older man. Karen didn’t know what had put the chip on his shoulder, but after two months serving together, she was sick of it.

  “It’s a job,” he growled. “And one I’m damn good at.”

  Karen had no answer for that. After all, Hardiman was the most decorated ranger in the entire parks system. During her training, Karen had memorized every report he’d ever filed. And there were hundreds. People thought Earth was a rural paradise, a place to enjoy a vacation in the woods and some fine wine. They didn’t realize the effort it took to keep it safe enough for tourists.

  In the one hundred years since Earth was declared a Human Heritage Site, fully eighty percent of the population had emigrated to space stations or the growing Martian colonies—and every single human still required Earth exports for irreplaceable biochemicals and microorganisms. All breeding stock for agriculture still came from Terran farms, and Terran luxuries like coffee and beef were worth their weight in gold. The entire planet would be pillaged if it weren’t for rangers like Hardiman, who’d worked his ass off fighting poachers of every stripe.

  That didn’t mean that at this second she wanted to sit next to him. The Humvee was big enough for four armored rangers and their gear, but right now the battery rack between their seats felt too small a barrier between them. She fiddled with her gloves. On duty, the team all rode in their power armor, but transit protocol allowed them to keep their helmets and gloves “at ready.” Karen slipped hers on, a kind of security blanket for her hands.

  And she did feel better. Natives like Hardiman and Gordo didn’t get it. To them, the power armor was a tool, something their job required that they would never use off the clock. Karen had grown up on Luna before the colony even completed its first greenhouse. With man-made atmosphere and artificially-boosted gravity, every kid wore a biomechanical suit, night and day. Plenty of people owed their lives to their biomech suits, and Karen was one of them.

  In the field, her experience showed. Hardiman could drive and deal cards in his power armor; Karen could do field surgery.

  Outside the window, something caught Karen’s eye. She leaned forward in her seat, staring ahead. “Hey, stop.”

  Hardiman tapped the brake. “See something?” Karen had proven her worth spotting oddities trailside. He was at least willing to listen to her when she said she saw something.

  Karen pointed at the sky, following a vee of rippling clouds. A rainbow haze shimmered behind it for a second, but if she had looked away, she would have missed it. “That’s a Cirkan cloaking signature.”

  “Well, fuck me,” Hardiman growled. “Those little shits are trespassing again.”

  Karen pulled her helmet from ceiling storage. Cirkans and humans shared just enough biological interests to guarantee trouble, breathing roughly the same blend of gases and building their bodies from carbon and water. They were too much like people: Slimy, resource-hungry, gray people.

  She slapped her visor shut as the Humvee’s tires screeched on the pavement. The radar blipped and a proximity alarm screamed a warning.

  “It’s right on top of us!” Gear crashed in back as Gordo dropped his helmet. It ricocheted off the front window and Karen swatted it out of her face just as a fireball hit the pavement in front of them. Hardiman cranked the wheel and the Humvee spun wildly minutes before stopping.

  “We gotta get out of here!” Karen had her seatbelt off and the emergency roof hatch open before the others even fumbled at their seatbelt latches. Black smoke obliterated the forest as the asphalt burned around them. She hit her thrusters and shot up out of the hatch, rolling off the roof and aiming herself for the tree line. The ground shook as the Cirkan ship strafed the nose of the Humvee.

  What the hell are the Cirkans doing? None of this made sense. It was one thing to break treaty trespassing, another to open fire on a military vehicle. At the upper left of her visor display, Karen’s blood pressure monitor flashed a warning. She shut it off. She toggled her visual displays to infrared and scanned the sky. The ship was up there, all right, and a hot burst of white billowed from its starboard engine. It would have to make an emergency landing. An illegal emergency landing.

  “Hardiman, they’re crash-landing in the forest!”

  Her helmet radio crackled back at her.

  “Hardiman? Gordo?” The smoke was thick, but not so thick she shouldn’t be able to see the others’ emergency safety lights, auto-activated in fire conditions. She hit her thrusters and pushed back toward the Humvee.

  A pair of shoulder lights nearly blinded her and she collided with another suit of power armor. A hand caught her elbow before she fell.

  “Get back to tree cover! The Humvee’s on fire!”

  Hardiman. She pivoted on one toe, feeling the pavement buckle beneath the pressure of her armor’s leap. Karen flew past the other ranger, moving for the tree line. “Where’s Gordo?”

  He shook his head. Something exploded behind them.

  “Fuck.” She scanned the sky, the armor’s camera systems supplementing her own vision with infrared and ultraviolet readings. “It’s still moving across the woods. We can catch up if we hurry.”

  “Let’s get this bastard.” Hardiman broke into a run. She cast one last look over her shoulder, back at the fading flames in the road, and then followed him into the dense woods.

  Running spun Karen’s mind into a kind of orbit, her conscious mind cut free from her body. Everything went on reflex, leaping logs, dodging branches, twisting around trees. Hardiman fell behind, his Earth-born skeleton weighing him down. Thrusters on, nothing could outrun Karen.

  A thruster-boosted leap over a fallen fir took her up into the tree canopy, face to face with a bird she didn’t recognize, ivory and speckled, its long beak probing a rotten limb. It froze, staring at her, and her visor auto-launched her field guide, scrolling the species name across her display: Northern Flicker. She grinned at the bird, memor
izing its shape even as she sank ground-ward.

  With a sudden shriek, the bird launched itself across her field of vision, and the cedar tree ahead of her burst into orange shards. Only her visor stopped a smoldering chunk of wood from spearing through her head. Momentum shot her backward, somersaulting into a clump of huckleberries.

  The suit shifted beneath her, reinforcing her ribs, pumping a dose of ibuprofen into her thigh. The blue of her armor had fuzzed over with sawdust, the wood pulverized on impact.

  She should have died. But she never even felt the pain.

  Karen’s skin crawled. She resisted the sudden urge to unseal her suit and check the damage for herself. To take back control of her body and her movements. On the training base, she could get away with that. Here, gravity would have her crawling in seconds. The muscles in her diaphragm would probably give out, smothering her in her own skin.

  Hardiman landed beside her huckleberry patch and yanked her to her feet. “Bastard shot at you! You hurt?”

  She shook her head. Her ribs would be fine before dinner.

  “I want you to circle back to the road,” he said. “Use full speed to reach the field testing station in Welches. Then contact HQ and get us some backup. Got that?”

  “Sir, I shouldn’t leave you. Protocol says—”

  “Protocol knows shit about aliens sneaking around the forest. Now get moving!” He punched his forearm display and vanished as his camo systems activated.

  “Shit,” Karen whispered. She didn’t like this. Alone was dangerous. Alone in the woods with a Cirkan stealth vehicle was positively suicidal. But a command was a command. She activated her own camouflage and started jogging.

  She could see the smoke of the ruined Humvee within a few steps. Her chest gave an asthmatic squeeze. She’d never lost a squadmate before. She couldn’t stop staring at the smoldering hunk of metal.

  Something moved beside it. Something in a blue and white ranger’s uniform.

  “Gordo?” She power-jumped to his side, dropping her camo. His eyes turned to her, the whites startling in a black-bubbled face. His hand fluttered beside him, still covered by the gloves of his power armor.

  “Where’s your suit, man? Why aren’t you suited up?” She shook her head, staring at him. She had a first aid kit, but it lacked the chemical arsenal of his armor.

  “Power unit…ripped out,” he whispered, and all around his lips, the blackened skin split open to reveal the raw meat below.

  “What?” Again, she shook her head, as if she could shake out the confusion and make sense of Gordo’s condition.

  “Hardiman,” he gasped. Pink foam bubbled up on his lips.

  “Gordo!” She grabbed his shoulders and she realized, too late, that the fire had burned through the back half of him. She felt her fingers sink into his cooked flesh. A scream gurgled up in his throat. His eyes rolled up, white crescents beneath fluttering lids.

  He jerked, his back arched and shook, and then he was horribly still.

  His weight settled into her arms, the suit making it bearable. He’d been more of a dumb kid than a co-worker. Always ready to jump in and do his job. And now he was dead.

  She pushed his body away. It hit the road and flopped, but wet chunks, red and black and fatty, clung to her gloves. She gagged. Heaved. But swallowed it down and wiped her gloves in the gravel. Once, twice, again and again.

  He was really dead, cooked by alien fire his suit should have protected him from. Would have if it had still worked.

  Hardiman. Had he really destroyed Gordo’s power unit? And if so, why? Her stomach churned again. There was no good reason for him to do it, but after two months working with the man, she felt certain Gordo was right.

  And Hardiman was a killer.

  He may have gone invisible, but Hardiman’s suit still broadcast its location over the GPS system. She kept its display up in her visor as she ran, the gold-lit map running over the terrain. She almost ran into a tree when Hardiman’s blinking icon switched course and stopped two klicks to the east. She slowed her movement and double-checked every display.

  All systems normal.

  The forest thinned along the course of a creek. She crept toward it. For a moment, she remembered her first trip into the woods, the mandatory sixth-grade trip to visit The Home World. They’d been hiking along a creek not much different from this when the ducks had come down out of the sky, banking their landing just like her dad’s shuttlecraft. Her camp counselor had to sit beside her while the others kept hiking. Karen couldn’t stop watching the ducks.

  There were ducks and chickens on the space station, of course. Eggs were a valuable protein source. But they all lived in cages, eating and drinking on schedule like feathered egg machines. These ducks were different. They sat on the water and brushed their bills against each other’s backs. They dove and swam.

  When Karen left Earth at the end of that trip, she’d promised herself she’d come back and see them again.

  But there were no ducks on this creek. The weekend’s rainfall pushed the mud-colored water to the tops of its banks, debris bobbing along the surface. Sticks, branches, a dead squirrel. A glistening gray ball floated past her boot—junk, probably. Some kid’s kickball covered in motor oil. But Karen’s instincts made her grab for it. The ball squished like jelly in her grip, like an oversized frog’s egg.

  Like a Cirkan egg.

  They grew their eggs in water, she remembered. They always had money to spend on water. It was a rare substance out among the stars. The hairs on the back of her neck rose.

  GPS brightened in the corner of her faceplate: Hardiman had not moved. Instinct made her activate radar and as it pinged off something big, Karen felt her stomach rise up in her ribs. The radar signature matched the cloaked Cirkan vessel. And Hardiman was sitting right underneath it.

  “I’ve got you, you son of a bitch,” she breathed. She cleared her faceplate display, sick of the flashing, the blinking, the moving lights. It felt too much like a video game. She wanted the forest, real and damp and dim and silent, except for a bird call, distant, some kind of warning to its kin.

  Shit. That seemed to summarize the situation. Alone, her team either liquidated or held by the enemy. Armed only with a standard-issue parks rifle, with no backup ammunition. No knowledge of the ground ahead, the blind spots or high ground. She leaned against a tree, weighing her odds.

  She had surprise on her side. No one would expect a rookie ranger to go against Hardiman’s orders or hike through the forest on her own.

  She had her armor. It tripled her speed, quadrupled her strength, sealed out any biochemical weapons the invader might use. She hadn’t had to test it in battle much since her posting here on Earth. She’d spent the last two months cruising around the Humvee, tracking elk and watching for poachers. But she’d done enough fighting in training to trust her biomech suit to watch her back. With Hardiman an unmoving lump on the radar, she was lucky she had anything watching her back. This fight promised to get ugly.

  With a cold churning in her gut, Karen studied the rest of her gear. There was a cutting torch built into the wrist of her armor and a tear gas grenade tucked into her belt.

  Nothing else.

  Fuck. She forced herself to take three deep breaths and began a hunkered jog along the creek’s edge. At least she had the element of surprise.

  The sound of Hardiman’s voice startled her. She slowed, listening. She couldn’t tell what he was saying, but she recognized the tin-can quality of his armor’s translation device in between his phrases. Her pulse quickened. There was a pilot on that ship, an alien eager to stay hidden. Like a poacher, she realized, ready to take whatever he wanted in the thick tree cover.

  She stepped out of the undergrowth, eyeing the backside of Hardiman’s armor, its regulation blue standing out against the green meadow bordering the pond. The water stretched beyond what the map had led her to expect, and dozens more of the Cirkan eggs clung to the shore. Some kind of translucent tubing ran f
rom the side of the lake into the clearly-visible Cirkan shuttlecraft. A gray egg wriggled down the tube’s length and dropped into the pool with a splash of water.

  The Cirkan craft took up most of the clearing, but its cargo hold yawned open, revealing an array of computer equipment and packing crates. A slim figure leaned against the frame, and if it weren’t for the gray skin and the protuberant eyes—like glossy black grapefruits—focused down on Hardiman, she could have almost mistaken it for a bald human. She crept forward, automatically analyzing the creature’s status as a threat. It wore a long loose vest, belted at what would be a human’s waist. She couldn’t make out any weapons, but who knew what it kept hidden on its person.

  But still, it was small, a little shorter than her own height, and probably half her unarmored weight. She felt cautiously optimistic about her odds in a fight.

  Two fleshy knobs unfolded from the top of its head and pointed right at her. It didn’t look so human anymore. She froze.

  And then it click-clacked something in its ugly language, something her helmet translated as: “Is that the ‘stupid girl’?”

  Hardiman whirled around, and Karen realized, too late, that she’d never reactivated her camo system. “Hey, Karen.” He hesitated. She wished she could see his face more clearly through his visor. “Hey, it’s not what we thought. This guy…he’s a refugee. His ship blew out its engine and he needs our help.”

  If she hadn’t run into Gordo, she would have fallen for it. She shook her head. “I don’t understand what you’re doing, Hardiman, but I know you’re helping this alien break the law. It’s depositing eggs in this lake.” She took a deep breath. His deeper treachery stung. “And you killed Gordo.”

  “He’d still be alive if you hadn’t spotted the ship,” Hardiman growled. “We were supposed to explore a dummy poaching trail, not follow after my contact. He panicked. I guess I did, too.”