by Mel Odom
Stampede growled in the back of his throat. “Marker buoys.”
Scatter thought briefly then nodded. “Yes, they serve the same purpose.”
“If no one on your world is violent with anyone else, why would you have something like that?”
“We knew we were not alone in the universe. Even though we had not branched out into space, the people who designed these bodies knew we would need ways to defend ourselves. Knowledge of enemies is paramount. The marking system was simple and direct.”
“And only other fractoids can read it?”
“As far as I am aware, yes.” Scatter reflowed and suddenly stood looking back toward camp. “I should really return. Dr. Pardot sleeps fitfully at best. But I wanted to warn you that they may turn against you.”
“We’d already figured that.”
“I thought you might, but I wanted to let you know you were not alone.”
“Thinking of leaving?” That surprised Hella to a degree.
“I fear I cannot at this juncture.” Scatter hesitated. “There are a number of reasons that I must stay till the other fractoid is found. I still wish to return to my world. I have hopes that Dr. Pardot and Dr. Trammell will at least provide a path for me to follow that will allow me passage.” He paused then stuck out his hand. “I bid you good luck and good hunting. Neither malice nor murder.”
Stampede took the hand and shook it, and Hella did the same. Scatter’s hand was cold and hard, and she felt the familiar tingle of her nanobots acknowledging him.
In the next instant, Scatter turned into a silvery cloud and floated rapidly back down the hill like fog.
“Hella. Wake up. We’ve got company.”
Before she could shrug away from Stampede’s grip on her shoulder and roll over to pull the blanket over her head, Hella heard the thrum of powerful engines rolling through the swamplands. The sound was distant but close enough it had to be investigated, especially since they’d heard nothing but the expedition since they’d entered the wilderness. She slid out from under the covers, grabbed her rifle and slung it over her shoulder, then pulled on her boots.
By that time Stampede was already through the tent flaps.
Hella followed him, taking two steps to every one of his to match his stride.
Riley and his hardshells shifted through the camp as well, taking up positions along the outer perimeters.
“Who is it?” Riley stood encased in his armor.
Stampede waved the handset radio that connected him to the security team at Riley. “Hella and I are going to take a look. We’ll let you know when we know.”
“I can come with—”
“No. You stay here. If I need you, I’ll let you know.” Stampede ran past the man. “Keep everything here locked down tight in case we have to hold a perimeter.”
Ten minutes later Hella sat hunkered down on a bluff overlooking the trail that cut through the Amichi Mountains. The expedition had traveled hard the past two days to reach their present location. They’d also left the trail behind.
Early dawn lay over the land, cloaking the trees and brush in darkness that pooled over the ground and made most of the forest’s features blend. A line of lights ran along the trail, though, winding around the morass of swampland that spotted the forest.
Hella focused her binocs on the riders, knowing from the engine sounds that they were motorcycles and ATVs. She wasn’t surprised to spot the bikers riding in single file. Some of the ATVs pulled small trade wagons behind them. Closer inspection revealed them to be Sheldons. She couldn’t tell if they were flying the Purple Dragons colors. If they were, they’d evidently lost more members.
“Must have taken down a trade caravan this morning or last night.” Stampede hunkered down twenty meters away.
Hella silently agreed. “How close do you think their camp is?”
“Too close for us. From here on in, we’re going to stay away from the trail. If they find our trail, they’ll track us down.”
Hella knew that was true. The expedition had too many wagons and wheeled vehicles for the highwaymen to pass up. Not only was there the physical evidence of everything they had, but stories flew along the trade routes. The biker gang could have heard of them.
Stampede took the radio from his chest pocket and spoke briefly. Then he put it away and glanced up at the sky. “Riley says Dr. Trammell says the ripple we’ve been looking for is about to open up any second.”
“Bad timing.”
Stampede growled in agreement.
Shifting, Hella found a spot where she could peer up at the sky through the trees. The rose-colored dawn pushed shards into the reluctant darkness giving up the night.
When the ripple arrived, it was only a minor tear in the fabric of reality that was much closer to the ground than the one that had delivered Scatter. Something streaked out of the ripple and left a white contrail behind it. For a short time, it was eerily silent. Then, just before she lost it in the trees, sonic booms hammered the forest around her.
Stampede cursed. “No way did that go unnoticed.”
“No.”
“Let’s hope the Sheldons stay fat and happy with their score and stay out of our business. In the meantime, you and I need to see if we can find that meteorite.”
“Fractoid, you mean.”
“Yeah. Otherwise we’re going to be out here for a while longer. Did you see where it landed?”
“No. But I know the direction.”
“Let’s go.”
Hella took the lead and wished she’d thought to grab a bag of rations. Her stomach growled almost as loudly as Stampede.
CHAPTER 24
The object missed the Amichi Mountains and landed in the middle of one of the nameless swamps that filled the lowlands. Hella stopped eighty meters out and surveyed the surrounding wilderness. For a short time after the impact, the motorcycle and ATV engines had headed in their direction, but they stopped at least a klick away.
In a large area in the northwest corner of the swampland, a good seventy meters from the shoreline and in the boggy depths, the heated object caused the water to roil and bubble. The gasping, burping noise of it echoed across the flat waters of the swamp and around the shoreline. Birds flew from the treetops, abandoning the area. Chemical stink filled the air and burned Hella’s eyes, nose, and throat. She took a piece of cloth from her kit and wound it around her face. Her sunglasses helped somewhat, and breathing the filtered air was better.
Stampede talked quietly and quickly over the radio that connected them to Riley and the expedition. Finally he dropped it inside his chest pack in frustration. “Riley won’t hang back. He heard the bikers’ engines too.”
“He’s an idiot if he comes this way.”
“He’s doing it, though.”
“The Sheldons are going to be even more interested if they see him or his men.”
Stampede nodded. “I pointed that out too.”
“They don’t trust us.”
“I’d say that’s about the size of it, Red.” Stampede nodded toward the roiling water. “You or me?”
Thinking of entering the murky water gave Hella pause. She didn’t like not being able to see everything around her. And the water slowed her down. She swallowed and slipped off her rifle, putting it by a tree so she’d remember where it was so she could get it on the run if she had to. Draping a coil of rope and a grappling hook from her kit over one shoulder, she stood. “Me.”
“Okay.” Stampede laid his rifle over a rocky outcrop and sighted on the swamp. “I’ve got your back.”
At the shoreline, Hella hesitated a moment and thought about taking off her boots.
“You’ve got another pair back at the camp. You’ll have to squish all the way back when you get those wet, but that’s better than stepping on a spine-fin while you’re wading through that swamp.”
Hella knew that was true. Spine-fin were some kind of mutated cross between a catfish and lizard. Equally at home in the water and on
land, they remained a constant threat to the uninitiated or the unwary. The spines were sometimes as long as twenty-five centimeters and pierced flesh like edged steel. They also carried enough toxin to cause a great deal of pain but no permanent injury. The larger ones were a meter long and weighed upward of forty kilos.
She morphed her hands into weapons, reminded herself that bullets tended to ricochet off the water surface, and waded in. Her throat grew tight with anticipation with each step she managed into the muddy bottom.
The swamp got deep quicker than she’d thought it would. Nearly twenty meters out, the water was up to her hips. Another ten meters and it had risen to her shoulders. Her stomach tightened and she thought she would be sick.
Throw up and you’re just going to chum the water. Everything in here that feeds on everything else is going to show up for breakfast. She made herself breathe deeply and willed herself to remain calm, but she’d have rather been facing a dozen Sheldons than be out in the water.
“Easy does it, Red. You get water in your ear, and our comm link is going to get garbled.”
“I know that.” Hella didn’t mean for the reply to come out so sharply, but it was gone before she knew it. “Sorry. I don’t like this.”
“I know. It doesn’t feel any better from up here.”
Hella visualized Stampede in her mind as she pushed forward and started swimming toward the bubbling spot in the swamp. He’d be behind his rifle, both eyes open, one trained through the scope, finger resting on the trigger guard.
“Gotta go under.” Hella took a big breath of the stinking air, hoped she’d be able to hold it in her lungs, and dived. The water felt warmer as she swam down to the object resting on the swamp bed.
Only a few feet down, the object that had landed there glowed a dull red. The bubbling water muddied the image, but she felt confident that nothing that had a brain would be anywhere near the thing. With all the action, the outlines of the thing were blurred and indistinct.
She put out a hand and managed to get within a few meters before the heat made her pull her hand back. Nearly out of breath, she surfaced. When she blinked the murk from her eyes, she spotted the telltale triangular head floating barely out of the water as it arrowed toward her.
The muddy-green alligator was easily twice as long as she was tall, not the biggest she’d seen in the Amichi Mountains, but a lot bigger than she’d ever wanted to meet face-to-face. Treading water, knowing she’d never get away in time, she lifted her arms, turned her hands to weapons, and took quick aim.
“Stampede!” Her voice sounded odd in her ears, and she didn’t think the communication got through.
The alligator opened its mouth, exposing the pink-white gums and throat and the curved, yellow teeth. Then its head evaporated in a bloody mist. Decapitated, the vicious creature slid past her, jostling her with its scaled torso and one leg.
“Thank you.” Hella glanced up at the hillside and made out Stampede behind his rifle. She couldn’t hear if he made a response. Sliding the rope from her shoulder, she took a few quick breaths and went down again.
Face almost scalding from the heat, Hella dragged the grappling hook over the orange blob till tension tightened the rope. She swam backward, shoved the alligator’s corpse out of her way, and stopped when she could put her feet in the mud. Leaning back, she hauled on the rope.
The object stubbornly remained immobile, causing her to wonder if it buried itself too deeply in the mud. Then finally the suction gave way, and the object slid toward her. Despite her best efforts, the grappling hook slipped off twice before she got the thing into the shallows so she could see what she was working with.
Judging from the humanoid shape, Hella felt certain she was dealing with another fractoid. Making out specific details about the creature was hard. When it cleared the water, the heat baked the sludge caking it into a hard, dry crust.
As she walked off a few paces toward the rising shallows, she set herself to pull again. A second alligator exploded up from the depths where it had evidently been lying in wait for unsuspecting prey. It hurled itself from the water and lunged toward her.
Hella didn’t try to run because the buoyancy of the water would lift her and the mud beneath her boots would betray her. Instead she shifted her weight to one side and twisted her shoulder away from the predator. Her left hand came up instinctively and formed a weapon. A line of bullets hammered the alligator’s side as it twisted and thrashed.
A round from Stampede’s rifle punched through its body and tore out its heart before it reached the shallows again.
Shaking, heart pounding, Hella took up slack on the rope and discovered that it had come free during the attack. It took her a moment to defeat the paralysis that gripped her and walk back into the deeper water to secure the fractoid again.
Trusting the heat-resistant rope, she coiled three loops around the fractoid’s head and secured the grappling hook. She put her back into pulling, stretching out each stride she took to cover more ground more quickly. Even when she reached the saw grass that covered the shoreline, she didn’t feel safe. The grass concealed predators as well as the water.
Even worse, the grass impeded her efforts to drag the fractoid across the open ground to the tree line. Stampede held his position to watch over her.
She looked up at him and took the comm link from her ear. Her breath blew hot and quick from the effort of dragging the fractoid. After shaking the water from the comm link, she slipped it back into her ear. “Can you hear me?”
“Yeah.”
The connection sounded a little shaky and crackled every now and again, but Hella didn’t feel cut off anymore.
“Is it still in one piece?”
“She.” Gazing down at the recovered fractoid, Hella saw that the being was definitely female. She had breasts and rounded hips. Mud obscured her face. “I don’t know. She’s got mud and muck all over her. And she’s heavy. Even after she cools down, she’s going to be hard to move. We should have brought Daisy.”
“Yeah, I know how that would have worked out. The first time Daisy saw one of those alligators going for you, we’d have had a battle royal in the middle of that swamp.”
“Is Riley still on his way?” Hella knelt, slipped her knife free of her soaked boot, and picked at the hardened mud coating the fractoid.
“He’s practically on top of us.”
“The Sheldons?”
“So far there’s no sight of them.”
“At least Riley and his guys can do the heavy lifting.” Hella examined the scorched metal revealed under the crust. The surface was burned black, but a silvery gleam remained beneath the flakes. However, the fractoid woman had melted down in several places. Sadness touched Hella’s heart as she regarded the inanimate body. “I don’t think this one made it.”
As she stood up, Riley and his men arrived. She slipped her knife back into her boot as Riley fanned his men out to set up a protective perimeter.
“Hella?” Riley looked from the inert fractoid woman to the dead alligators then to Hella.
“I pulled her out of the swamp as soon as I could, but I think she was already gone before she got here.” Hella started to stand up, but the fractoid woman reached out for her and locked partially melted fingers around Hella’s wrist.
Pain surged up Hella’s arm and tore a scream from her throat. She looked down as her wrist cooked in the heated grip of the metal woman. Hella yanked her arm and tried to get away, but the fractoid’s hold was merciless.
Riley ran over to her, but even with the hardshell’s amplified strength, he wasn’t able to budge the woman’s cruel grip. The stink of her own burning flesh filled Hella’s nose.
Then a silvery mist poured in from above and instantly took Scatter’s shape. He reached down and took the fractoid woman’s hand, and the harsh grip finally opened.
Her mind wrapped in agony, Hella looked at her cooked wrist and tried to move her fingers. When she couldn’t, when she realized that he
r hand no longer obeyed her, she grew even more afraid. Finally, thankfully, Riley grabbed an ampoule from his med kit and stabbed her in the leg with it. The pain, and her conscious mind, drained away. The last thing she remembered seeing was the fractoid woman’s crazed, soot-blackened gaze as Scatter held her tenderly in his arms and broadcast that machine language.
Hella struggled through the cobwebs that wrapped her mind. She tried to open her eyes, but they felt as heavy as bricks. When she tried to take a deep breath, it felt as if someone were sitting on her chest.
“Easy.” Stampede spoke softly. “You need to rest, Red.”
Everything came back to Hella in a rush. Adrenaline spiked through her system when she thought about her ruined hand. She opened her eyes and tried to sit up.
Moving gently, Stampede pushed her back into her bedroll. No, it wasn’t her bedroll. She gazed around the unfamiliar tent.
“Pardot gave us access to one of the med tents.” Stampede sat cross-legged beside her. His rifle rested across his knees.
“My hand?”
Stampede tried to speak and couldn’t for a moment. “It’s bad. Pardot was all for amputating it.”
Hella drew her injured arm up to her chest. The pain still throbbed, but it felt a million klicks away.
“I wouldn’t let him.” Stampede’s ears flattened. “I don’t think he was as invested in the situation as he needed to be to make that kind of call.”
“More interested in his new toy?”
“Yeah.”
“Even though it’s broken.”
“Not entirely broken. Scatter has been able to talk to her a little. The fractoid woman isn’t tracking very well.”
“I know the feeling.”
Stampede touched her shoulder lightly. “We’ll get through this.”
“I know.” Hella closed her eyes for a second and realized she was parched. “Is there any water around here?”