Wendy was impressed with her own landing. It was her best to date, and Anton, the soldier, patted her on the shoulder and complimented it. “It sure beats landing in a tree.” They all laughed.
She put down in a clearing, in the foothills of a mountainous region. There was a heavy tree line about a hundred yards away in the north and northwest, and a river to the south. The building they were after was about forty feet north of them, built next to a railroad that headed northeast to southwest around the mountains. The tracks were heavily pitted with rust and many of the railroad ties had rotted completely away. Oddly enough, the thick vegetation around just about everything seemed to avoid the old railroad tracks, highlighting them instead of obscuring them as she would have expected. The weather was decent, but they were high enough in elevation that it was still a bit chilly. Wendy imagined it would drop below freezing when the sun went down, and the snow covered peaks to the north seemed to confirm it. She wouldn’t want to spend the night out here.
There were two small hills to the east and west, and Anton humped up to the higher of the two hills to keep a lookout. The scavengers got to work right away, heading into the building in search of insulation.
Wendy kept herself busy for about ten minutes giving the aircraft a complete inspection, but was quickly bored after that. A few minutes later, Stanley, one of the scavengers, came back hauling an armload of heavy insulation. She wasn’t very fond of Stanley; he was always trying to hit on her and never took the hint that she wasn’t interested. He dropped the load in the ship’s cargo hold and smiled at her like she should be impressed. “We can easily fill up the hold with what we found in there. There is a bunch of copper tubing that’s in pretty good shape too. You want to give us a hand hauling this stuff out?” She had nothing better to do, so she followed him back in, making sure to walk behind him so he wouldn’t be looking at her butt the whole way.
After four trips they called in to base to check in and give them an update. They were at about six thousand feet of elevation, and hauling the heavy loads back and forth had winded her. She sat down to catch her breath. The other scavengers spent more time outdoors and were to hauling heavy objects in the lighter air. After a little rest, she checked the status of the cargo bay. It was nearly full and they had not even taken a fifth of what was here. When the next man showed up with an armload of booty, she told him to stop bringing insulation and get some copper and they could head out. Then she called in again to tell Chin that it wouldn’t be much longer. “New Hope, this is Salvage Crew three. Nothing new to report.” Out of the corner of her eye she saw Anton running back down the hill, waving frantically. She continued talking while she tried to make sense of what he was doing. “We should be ready to dust off in about thirty min-” An object came over the hill the soldier was running down, trailing a line of smoke. When she realized it was headed straight for her, she dove out of the way, only managing to say “Oh shit!”.
She had not hit the ground from her dive when the rocket hit the transport. The explosion threw her like a ragdoll for another ten feet before driving her into the ground. The impact nearly knocked her unconscious, and if she hadn’t been wearing the earplugs, her eardrums would have been shattered.
She struggled to get to her feet, but nothing wanted to work quite right. There was shouting coming from her left and in front of her. She became aware of a pain in her left leg, and right hand. Rolling over on her back, she held her hand in front of her face to see why it hurt. Two fingers were grossly swollen and some blood was dripping from one of them. Using her good arm she tried to get to her feet, but as soon as she got her left leg positioned to stand up, pain shot from her knee. The body armor had absorbed most of the impact, but her knee hit a rock when she landed and her hand took all her weight when she pitched forward. She hadn’t bothered to don her gloves or keep her weapon out, and she was paying the price.
Sitting up, she became aware of the gunfire. Anton had taken cover about twenty yards from her and was firing toward the hill in front of him. To her left, two of the three scavengers were heading toward her, one turning and firing bursts of rifle fire every dozen or so steps. She was having trouble focusing and could not see what they were shooting at. Her helmet lay about ten feet away but it might as well have been a mile.
The first of the scavengers reached her and the second took a knee and started firing back toward where he had been. “Are you okay? Can you walk?” She looked into his face and tried to comprehend what he said. It took a moment to understand.
“No, I smashed my knee. I can’t get up. What’s going on?” Her head was spinning and now she felt tired. Her eyes started drooping shut and she struggled to keep them open.
“Mutes. About twenty of them stormed the building. Stanley is dead. Looks like they hit us from two sides. What the hell happened to the transport?” The other scavenger was shouting something now, and Anton had stopped shooting and was heading toward them.
“Uh. I think an RPG...” Her vision was going dark and she lost control of her eyelids, which decided to close on their own.
The last few words she heard were, “We gotta get to the trees to get some cover... concussion... carry her...”
* * *
Jack’s leg bounced up and down. By the time they started their descent, he was ready to pick a fight with someone in the cabin, just to release the nervous energy. When they cleared the clouds, the plume of black smoke was the first thing he noticed. His heart sank when he saw the huge debris field at the source of the smoke.
The remains of the aircraft were about forty feet from a large building. As they got closer, he could see bodies all over the place. There were at least a dozen between the wreckage and the building, and another six or seven on the hillside to the east.
“Oh Christ. This doesn’t look good.” The pilot’s words reflected exactly what Jack was feeling. So far he had not spotted any bodies clothed in combat armor. That was a good sign, he hoped.
“Salvage Crew three, this is Rescue Team one, do you read?” Jonathan, the man next to the pilot, had been trying to call any of the salvage crew for the last ten minutes. Nobody answered.
Jack pointed at a body to the west of the wreckage, just south of the tree line. “Fly over there and let’s take a closer look.” If he were being chased with nowhere to go, he would have headed toward the trees.
The pilot circled around toward the trees while Jonathan called New Hope. “New Hope, this is Rescue one. We have reached the site. There is sign of a recent battle and what appears to be the remains of the transport. There are also a lot of bodies. Except for the transport, it looks like Mutes. No sign of the salvage team. We’re going to head over to the west and scan for any power sources.” The technology level of the Mutes was low enough that any power source they detected was most likely from one of the salvage crew’s possessions. That is, of course, unless it had been taken from their dead body.
Suddenly, the pilot hit the throttle and shoved the stick to the left, banking the aircraft hard in a left hand power dive. Jack rose up off his seat, his seatbelt the only thing keeping him from bouncing off the roof. He looked out the window in time to see an object hurtle past them, missing by inches, trailing a column of white smoke. He followed the smoke back to the woods below. “Holy shit! They shot a rocket at us!” Jonathan was already calling it in to New Hope.
The aircraft pulled out of the dive and lined up on the source of the attack. “I’m gonna cook those bastards!” He was flipping switches on the control panel, and Jack figured he was arming a missile.
“NO!” he exclaimed, “They could have our people captive down there. If you bomb them you could hurt Wen – one of our own!” He was not about to let the pilot start blindly dropping ordinance out there. “Put us down at the tree line and then go back up and watch for trouble from above. Stay out of range of those rockets!” He checked the safety on his rifle and chambered a round, then powered up his helmet and put on a thermal overlay. Scanni
ng the forest as they came down, he saw a definite source of heat about two hundred yards in. It was close to where the rocket came from, and there was more than one object.
As they neared the ground, he pushed the door open, prepared to hit the ground running. The soldier on the other side of the aircraft opened the door on his side, similarly prepared. When the aircraft was about five feet off the ground, five of the six other passengers jumped out with Jack. The transport hummed loudly and shot up to a higher elevation. He half expected to see another rocket come screaming out of the forest, but it was eerily quiet.
One of the soldiers held a device in his hand and was slowly swinging it back and forth. He stopped with the device pointed straight into the forest and said, “There is a faint source in that direction, but it’s barely reading, so it’s quite a ways in.”
Jack took the lead and plunged into the trees, not even checking to see if anyone followed him.
Chapter 29
The darkness lifted and Wendy became aware of the pain. On top of that, she was moving, and it was a bumpy ride. The motion combined with a headache quickly made her nauseas, and she vomited. When she finished, she was able to focus, and realized she was being carried over someone’s shoulders. What do they call this? The fireman’s carry? When she puked, the person carrying her stopped and with the help of someone else, gently put her down on the ground.
She took in the surroundings, unsure of what was happening. They were in a forest, surrounded by tall pine trees. Two people were with her, both trying to catch their breath. Memory slowly returned, and she tried to piece it together. She was on a salvage mission, and they were getting close to leaving. The last thing she remembered was calling in to tell New Hope they were almost ready to head home. These two people were members of the crew she brought out.
Before she could speak, another person came jogging up to them. It was Anton. He stopped for a moment, putting his hands on his knees to catch his breath. “Why did we stop? Is she awake?”
“Yeah, she just puked on me.”
Anton kneeled down to examine her. “Wendy, can you hear me?”
She tried her voice. “Yeah” she croaked. Her throat was still burning from the bile, and she tried to swallow a few times to flush it. A water bottle appeared in front of her face and she took a few sips. “Better, thanks.” This time it came out sounding a little more human. “What happened, where are we?”
“We’re in the forest in the northeast corner of Idaho, somewhere to the east and north of the factory building. Mutes attacked, about fifty of them, maybe more. They fired a rocket over the hill and took out our ride. You dove out of the way of the rocket but took a pretty big hit from the blast. You are concussed, and your knee is in bad shape. What’s the last thing you remember?”
She closed her eyes, trying to jar something loose, and finally it came back to her. The rocket, the explosion – “Stanley?”
The man who had been carrying her, Wayne was his name, shook his head. “He didn’t have his helmet on and took a round in the head when they ambushed us. We barely made it out of there alive.” He sat down heavily next to Wendy and leaned up against a large rock. “I think we can rest for a few minutes. I haven’t heard anyone behind us for the last half hour.” He looked at Anton, who had been hanging back to scout when they stopped.
“How long since they attacked us?” The sky above was visible through the trees, but Wendy couldn’t see the sun.
Anton said, “About two hours. We ran into the forest and they of course followed. We took turns carrying you, occasionally changing direction. I planted a few surprises along the way to discourage them from following. I’m surprised some of those blasts didn’t wake you up. I think it worked, but the Mutes are good at tracking. They will find us if we don’t keep moving.”
“Any word from a rescue party?” Her mind was still foggy but her estimation put a rescue crew there about a half hour ago.
“Nothing yet. We’re a good five miles from where we landed. We had to loop around a small hot zone, and I think the radiation between us and them is lowering the range of the radio’s in our PDP’s by quite a bit. Perhaps if we get a little further away we can reach any aircraft that might be in the area.”
Wendy nodded. With their own aircraft gone, they didn’t have a way home. If they couldn’t reach the rescue team on the radio soon they might be left out here alone. If they tried to head back toward the landing site, they could run into the Mutes again. It was not a good situation. She examined her hand. At some point someone had put some coagulant on her wound and patched it. The fingers were black and blue and swollen, and she couldn’t move them more than a fraction of an inch. Probably broken. She tentatively prodded her knee, and pain whisked up her leg. The knee was swollen, but as long as she didn’t try to touch it, it didn’t hurt too much. “Give me a hand, I am going to see if I can put any weight on the leg.”
When she got to her feet, she quickly discovered how bad of an idea that had been. The men put her down, sensing she had been about to scream. Before she could struggle out of her pack, Anton handed her the med kit from his own pack. She took off her leg armor and rolled up the under suit to expose the injured knee. It was very swollen, but otherwise looked okay. She located a local anesthetic in the kit and shot it into her leg just above the knee. The pain went away quickly, leaving her whole leg numb. She looked for her datapad, and couldn’t find it. “Anyone seen my pad?”
“I think it fell out in the blast. You lost your helmet too.” He pulled out his own datapad and handed it to her. She pulled a tube of heavy plastic from the med kit and unrolled it. The plastic sheet had an isotope in it that the full size datapads could sense. If you put the plastic sheet under something and the datapad on the other side of it, you could get what was, for all intents and purposes, an x-ray. She scanned her knee and looked at the image on the screen.
Wendy was no doctor, and had to wait for the powerful computer to analyze the x-ray. After a few moments the results came back as nothing broken or detached. It could still be a slightly torn ligament, or it might just be really badly bruised or sprained. She pulled out a syringe from the med pack and shot the contents into her knee. The syringe held the same sort of concoction that Teague gave Jack the day before. It would accelerate the healing process and within a couple hours she should be able to walk again. If a bone had been broken or a tendon or ligament detached, the healing medicine would have only made it worse unless the bone was set or the ligament positioned properly. Both would have required a skilled doctor, so she was fortunate. She wrapped the knee in a rubbery bandage to keep the swelling down then asked one of the men to find her two straight branches. Once the leg was splinted, she got up again and with the help of one of the men, was able to hobble along without having to be carried. She wouldn’t be able to run if they were attacked again, but at least they didn’t have to carry her.
“We’d better get moving. I set some more explosives back there, so if they make it this far they will get some more surprises. I think we should head northeast for a while, away from the radiation to the south of us. It will also put that radiation between us and the Mutes.” Anton had taken charge, and nobody was going to argue. The path would take them into the mountains, but anything was better than being captured. They did their best to cover the evidence of them being there, but it would only slow down the Mutes.
* * *
Teague’s datapad beeped and he checked to see who was calling. He had been hard at work with Thomas and his men planning the assault on Saber Cusp, and his mind was pretty well spent.
The pad showed Chin, and he figured he better take it. There was a little history between he and Chin, but it never stopped them from working together. It just made things a little more difficult sometimes.
“What’s up, Chin? The scavenging crews back yet?” If the day had been lucky, they might have the materials they need to start on the cold rooms.
“Teague, one of the scavenging c
rews went off line. We sent a rescue group to find out what happened, and they just called in to say that they found the wreckage of a medium transport near the factory they were checking out. The aircraft is a complete loss, and there are Mute bodies all over the place.”
This was not good news. It was bad enough to potentially lose a member of the community, but to lose a medium transport made it even worse. People, at least the infertile ones, could be replaced. But advanced equipment like that transport was in very short supply, and they lacked the resources to make more. “That’s awful news, but why are you calling me about it? What did Jack tell you to do?”
Chin suddenly looked uncomfortable. “Well, he sort of went with the rescue team.”
Teague’s stomach sank. “What! What the hell is he doing? We need him here! Why would he go?” Then it hit him. Wendy was on one of the scavenging groups this morning. If it was her team that went down, nothing would stop Jack from going to try to rescue her.
Chin looked like he didn’t want to answer any of those questions. He said, “He’s the leader of this mission, who am I to say he couldn’t go?”
“Call him and tell him to get back here.” Teague was conflicted. He knew that ending the rescue party now would greatly reduce the chance of helping survivors, but he had to keep the bigger picture in mind. Right now, Jack is more valuable to them than any member of that salvage crew.
Chin shook his head and said, “Can’t do that Teague, he is already on foot tracking potential survivors.”
This just gets better and better. “Fine, send another team out to find him and take over the search.”
“Sorry, Teague, can’t do that either... We had three of the medium transports out salvaging, and the fourth went with the rescue team. As you know, only the smaller flyers have any offensive capability, but they aren’t as heavily armored as the transports. We don’t know what they are up against yet. Someone shot a missile at the rescue team, but it was thankfully not very advanced and the pilot was able to evade it. Our smaller craft are susceptible to small arms fire, and I don’t think we should risk the few remaining pilots we have right now. If they ran into trouble they would be sitting ducks.”
The Freezer (Genesis Endeavor Book 1) Page 30