Last Man Out (Poor Man's Fight Book 5)

by Elliott Kay

  “Survey work? Are you joking? Tanner, who the hell is going to hire you?”

  Tanner lowered the scanner. He stared at the wall of rock and dirt.

  “You seriously haven’t thought about this? Hell, I figured if you were looking to do work in xenoarch at least you might find some independent university to hire you to show their principles or something. I mean, Fremantle took you in. That’s academia for you. But survey outfits are all corporate, or governments with corporate ties. They’re not gonna take you on. You’re Tanner Malone. Nobody’s gonna want that kind of baggage.”

  Nigel kept digging angrily.

  “I guess if you’re out on some far-flung planet out of the public eye, people could forget about you. That might work for a little while, but your name would still come up on company rosters. You’d still be filing reports with your name on them. Somebody hires you and sends you out into the middle of nowhere and then you’re stuck on some rock for weeks before you know you’ve been let go.”

  “Christ, would you stop fucking dumping on me?” Tanner snapped.

  Nigel jerked away, dropping his trowel with his hands up and empty. “Whoa, okay, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  His breath picked up sharply. His blue eyes were wide under his mop of dirty and sweaty blond hair. Nigel backed up practically against the wall of the pit, putting him a couple steps out of reach, but his body language punched Tanner in the gut.

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said all that,” Nigel began.

  “No, I’m sorry,” Tanner sighed. “I wasn’t talking about what you said.” He gestured down to his boots and pants, now covered with dirt. “All I meant was you’ve got me in your splash zone. Although I guess I meant the other thing, too, if I’m honest.”

  “Oh.”

  “I shouldn’t have snapped. I’m sorry. Say whatever you’ve got to say. It’s fine. I’m not going to get violent over words.” Tanner slapped his legs to brush off the worst of the debris, leaving him in a cloud of dust. He didn’t feel angry at Nigel. Perhaps he felt anger at himself, he thought, but that only left him tired.

  “It’s not… I didn’t think you were gonna get violent,” said Nigel.

  “Why not? Everybody else does. It’s all anyone knows about me. Like you said, I’m Tanner Malone. What that means isn’t up to me anymore. Hasn’t been for years. Everywhere I go, somebody reminds me.”

  “Who do you want to be?”

  Tanner looked up at Nigel again. He was slight of build, academically sharp, and insightful. In the short time they’d known each other, Tanner couldn’t remember Nigel ever being confrontational. Critical and outspoken, but not confrontational.

  He’d probably never been in a fight. Seconds ago, with his back to the wall of the pit, he’d looked completely unsure of what to do with himself. Tanner wondered if Nigel still doubted his own courage, or how many times he might think back to his reaction to Tanner’s anger with self-criticism or worse. Would he mistake his wariness for cowardice?

  “You, Nigel.” Tanner shrugged. “All I ever wanted to be was you. I only landed in the Navy because of a stupid fiasco before I graduated high school. And I think about that day all the time and how different things might be if I could do it all over again. A whole lot of people might be alive right now. I wouldn’t be going to therapy or getting protested at school or having assholes blow up my apartment. But a lot of other people would probably be dead, too.

  “So here I am, y’know? The war’s over. The Navy’s done. But I’m still here, and I’m still alive, so I gotta do something. All I ever wanted to be was a college honors student with friends and a social life and a career ahead of me,” Tanner said, gesturing at Nigel. “Maybe I can’t have that, but I gotta try.”

  He glanced around the base of the pit, retrieving his trowel and his brush. The dirt came off with a good shake.

  “I feel like an asshole,” Nigel admitted.

  “You’re not, but I can relate.”

  “Heh. No, I mean… it’s stressful being around you sometimes,” said Nigel. “But I guess it’s stressful being you, too, huh?”

  “Believe it or not, this is the result of a lot of hard work at letting go,” Tanner huffed. “I used to be wound up worse than this.”

  “What changed?”

  “Therapy. That, and I got tired of being so wound up. I got angry. Resentful. After a while, I guess I decided to let go out of spite. I still have my moments, though.” He gave the wall a couple of tentative scrapes. “I have thought about my job prospects. A lot. You aren’t wrong. Maybe I won’t find anything in survey work. But half of what carried me through the Navy was the thought of doing something better when I got out. I’m finally here and I like college. I like going to class every day and learning stuff. I’d like it better if people didn’t treat me like some psychotic leper, but it’s better than where I’ve been. I’m damn sure not gonna give it up now.”

  “Gat fuckin’ damn, man,” grumbled a voice overhead. Garcia loomed at the edge of the pit, staring down at them with one thumb hooked into his belt and his other hand holding his canteen. “Is this what college does to you? Turns you into some fuckin’ whiner talking about his feelings all day? This is the most boring fuckin’ job I’ve ever had in this outfit. Hell, I wish somebody’d come take a shot at us.”

  Tanner scowled up at the mercenary. “You wanna know the best part about not being in uniform anymore? It’s that I don’t have to pretend to respect anybody else just ‘cause they’re wearing a uniform, too. But hey, if you want to talk about something else, have a seat.” He patted the ledge of the pit. “We can talk about your amateur-hour combat webbing or your shitty operational discipline. Or maybe we can talk about your ridiculous fucking mustache.”

  “Shitty op—? Man, fuck you.” Garcia returned to his shaded spot against the canyon wall.

  Nigel sank down low enough in the pit to avoid Garcia’s line of sight. “Mission accomplished,” he murmured. Tanner grinned.

  “Hey, how are we doing over here?” asked a voice from behind them. Naomi set down a pair of bottles. “Anything good?”

  “I found some rocks,” said Tanner. “There may be some strange form of dirt over here, too.”

  “You can see the separation of layers along here,” Nigel said, tracing along a slight shift in the shades of sediment along the wall of the pit. “It looks consistent with the layering we’ve seen at the other test pits, but you and Vandenberg are the experts.”

  “Okay, Nigel found better rocks than mine,” Tanner conceded.

  Naomi hopped down into the pit, crouching to look closer at shifts in coloration and sediment types. “Think you’re right. I’ll run a comparison in a minute. Have to get my stuff.”

  “You sound happy about that,” said Tanner.

  “If there’s a consistent depth of ash and post-eruption sediment, we can scrape away that whole layer at once and save ourselves a lot of time. The pieces we’ve dug up near the top have all been around the stream or some other spot with an explanation for some churn. But the rest of this is just dirt. We’re not likely to find anything important there. Vandenberg thinks we have to dig deeper to figure out what this site was really used for before the eruption, and that might be true.”

  “Might?”

  “Well…” Naomi looked up to the canyon walls. “I’d like to survey the pathway up the wall to our little parking lot. Or the big mound against the far end of the canyon. Anyway, I came over to talk to you.”

  Nigel stood tall again to take a subtle glance over the ledge toward Garcia. “You want me to step out?” he asked. “If you two take a walk, you’ll probably be followed.”

  “Nah, it’s not like that. Intern stuff.” She turned to Tanner, tapping her holocom to bring up a screen of text. “It’s time for your first shopping trip. Vandenberg wants you to get this in before we’re facing one of those storms. The forecast has one coming in a couple more days.”

  The list cont
ained everything Tanner expected: food, drinks, more filters to deal with the dust and ash, and more medicines for sun exposure. Not everyone here knew how to pack for a long spell in the desert. A few machines marked for rental made sense given what Naomi had said about scraping away the top layer of the canyon floor.

  “You shouldn’t go alone,” Naomi added. “Somebody else might need a run into the city, anyway. Figure out who else you want to take into the city with you and get this stuff knocked out. Try to be back by nightfall.”

  “You realize at least one of the goons is gonna come with me, right?” asked Tanner.

  “Yeah.” Naomi looked out from the pit again, seemingly looking for the rest of the class. She couldn’t see much given their placement. “Yeah, I think that’s part of the plan.”

  * * *

  Naomi searched for the other babysitter as soon as she came around the stone pillar that kept Tanner and Nigel’s pit out of sight from the others. She found Corporal Solanke in his usual spot under the awning of their little hut, camped out in a folding chair with arms folded across his chest and his face in its usual scowl.

  With the babysitters accounted for, Naomi took in the rest of the camp on her way back. Everything seemed in order. Vandenberg coached a handful of students sifting through the stream bed. Other students kept working in their test pits scattered around the site.

  The sound of her name drew her attention to one such pit. Kim waved her over to a hole dug into a small bit of runoff along the canyon wall near the pathway up to the ridge. The path still bugged Naomi. It looked natural except for its convenience. She wanted to survey it, but the professor seemed sure it was a waste of time.

  “How’s it going?” asked Kim. She stood in the pit, resting her arms on the ledge. Grace and Jishen sat with her, apparently taking a break. They had plenty of shade over here.

  “Nothing new. Sending Tanner off on a supply run is all.”

  “Gotcha. So, uh…you might want to look at this,” said Kim. “Without getting excited. We don’t want to draw anyone else’s attention.” She tilted her head to suggest Naomi hop in. Fighting the urge to look over her shoulder, Naomi complied.

  At first, she saw nothing more than large rocks in a pile held together by sediment and packed earth. It was exactly what she’d expected: something had caused a rockslide from the canyon wall up above a long time ago, and looser earth had drifted in over time to fill the gaps. The early terraforming attempts on the desert plains took hold here in the canyon floor where there was abundant water and shelter from the winds, allowing soil development in this limited space. This earthen pile even held some roots and grasses.

  “Right here,” said Grace. She pulled away a small bag of digging tools from its spot against the wall of her pit, revealing a single, darker stone jutting out from the surface. Perfect ninety-degree corners along the stone caught Naomi’s attention instantly. So did the crystalline material embedded along its sides.

  “Holy shit,” Naomi breathed. She crouched over the little obelisk with her mind racing. The milky-white crystals appeared perfectly seamless within the black stone. To her knowledge, no artifact from Minos showed this kind of craftsmanship. Other than the dirt, the obelisk seemed completely free of deterioration.

  “When did you find this?” she asked.

  “Ten minutes ago,” Grace explained. In the cover of the pit, she didn’t try to hide the sparkle in her eyes. “We’ve been choking on our excitement ever since. I mean that guy Solanke had just walked by making his rounds. We didn’t want to draw his attention.”

  “I don’t think the guys with guns should make the first evaluation,” said Kim.

  “Yeah, probably not,” Naomi agreed. “You did good. Holy shit, look at this. Have you found anything else? Did you run a spotter or a scanner over the exposed surfaces?” Her fingers brushed the inner walls of the pit as if she might find another artifact by touch.

  “Not yet. We figured we’d dig through the pile to the natural base of the canyon floor before we did that stuff. We’re standing on it right now, or at least we think we are. It looks different enough. You’re the geologist, right?”

  “Right. Yeah, you can see from the color contrast. This thing probably fell down along with the rockslide.” Naomi looked up toward the canyon ridge towering above them and back down at the obelisk. Carefully, she lifted the piece to look it over. It was surprisingly light in her hands. “It doesn’t even look chipped. Wow.”

  “I imagine the professor will be thrilled, but I don’t know if telling him right this second would draw attention,” said Kim.

  “No, you made the right call,” said Naomi. “Okay, listen. We’ll cover this up or put it in one of the tool boxes or something until we can show it to Vandenberg alone. We don’t want one of these assholes confiscating it so they can sell it to some collector. In the meantime, let’s run the scanner over the exposed surfaces and see if we can find anything else.”

  Naomi looked up to the ridge above once more. They’d been here only a week. Though their first run with the peregrine drone revealed little, the finds started once they scratched beneath the surface. Now they’d already found something unprecedented. She wondered what had happened in this spot long ago.

  “We’ll have to be careful about when we examine this in the field lab, too,” said Jishen. “If they walk in while we have it on a table…” he shrugged.

  “That’s a good point,” said Naomi. Her head tilted thoughtfully as Tanner emerged from his sheltered corner of the canyon with Garcia in tow. “I might already have a good time in mind.”

  Chapter Fourteen:

  Walking Over Graves

  “Our ignorance about ancient Minos is in part understandable. The planet has been under settlement for only forty years. Much remains to be explored. Yet we would know far more if Minos Enterprises was not so laser focused on resource exploitation and profit to the exclusion of all else. Therein lies the tragedy, and also opportunity.”

  --Joseph Vandenberg, Expedition Notes, August 2280

  Dust storms were common in Tanner’s home town. Monsoonal dust storms, or haboobs, could stretch a mile into the sky and blot out visibility, leaving behind a thin layer of dirt and dust and making it uncomfortable to be outside. Yet plant growth mitigated those storms. The city of Geronimo was surrounded by scrub plants, helping to knock down some of the dust. Terraforming had taken hold all over his home planet, including the deserts.

  The forecast suggested Minoan storms were on another level. Naturally, he jumped at the first excuse to go out.

  “What the hell is so important we need it now?” grumbled Corporal Solanke behind him. His Nigerian accent came through sharply with every complaint. As they hiked up the path along the canyon wall, Tanner didn’t have to look back for his expression. He could feel Solanke’s glare.

  “It’s a battery pack supplement to a chronometric scanner,” Tanner explained. “The scanner helps determine relative ages of artifacts. But it consumes a lot of power, so we need the battery pack in case the generators go out in the storm.”

  Tanner kept up a steady pace. The climb up the canyon trail provided a chance to take the measure of the men behind him. So far, they showed no signs of fatigue. The mercenaries were legitimate infantrymen, at least: not only could they keep up the pace on an uphill climb, they could bitch endlessly while they were at it.

  Corporal Garcia was every bit as irritable as Solanke. “You gotta get this thing now?”

  “We’re not gonna dig or survey in the middle of the storm. Might as well do some indoor work like this.”

  “What have you found, anyway?” asked Solanke.

  “Broken pieces of stonework, mostly. And that jug I dug up when you got here. You didn’t even look at it, did you?” The rest was a lie of omission, but those were easier to tell. Particularly without having to look someone in the eye. And without having any sympathy for them.

  “Isn’t that shit all over the planet?” asked Garcia
.

  “A lot of it has been found already, yeah.”

  “Then why date it?”

  They came to the top of the ridge. The wind blew fiercely, but the dust wall hadn’t hit yet. It was still off in the distance. Tanner looked on in awe at the angry dark grey cloud rising five kilometers up from the ground on the near horizon. Flashes of lightning added to its aura of power. “Wow.”

  “What did you say?” asked Garcia.

  “Huh? I said, ‘Wow.’” Tanner gestured to the cloud.

  “No. I mean my question. Why? What’s the point?”

  Tanner looked from Garcia to the approaching clouds. “Because we can.”

  The expedition’s vehicles sat where they’d been left. Each was buttoned up for the storm. Tanner opened one of the rovers with the transmitted key on his holocom and climbed into the back. With his holocom active, he brought up a screen showing a close-up satellite image of the cloud bearing down on the camp.

  His timing was almost perfect. He only needed to stall for another minute. Tanner knew right where to find the needed gear, but he rummaged and flailed around anyway to kill time. “Gotta be here somewhere. Sorry, guys,” he lamented.

  “I thought you had everything unpacked on your first day,” said Garcia.

  Tanner turned back. “You know what that trail is like. We wanted to get to work. Carrying every little thing is such a pain.”

  “It’s gonna be a bigger pain going back down once that storm hits,” warned Solanke.

  “Oh man, you think?” Tanner asked. He poked his head out of the rover’s door to look at the clouds again. They were close now.

  “Will you get this fucking thing and let’s go?” Garcia snapped.

  “Oh, right, sorry,” said Tanner. He crawled back inside, then had an idea and turned back again. “Listen, I would’ve come up here on my own. I know you’ve got your orders. Sorry I had to drag you up here—”