by Mel Odom
Cannot confirm Private Jahup’s condition. Range is too distant.
Riding out the Roley’s recoil, Sage fired again, this time aiming for the man’s center mass. Fired only a second apart, the first round hit the man’s helmet and evacuated everything inside, and the second round knocked the man down.
The faceshield picked up two other people on the ridge as they took cover behind trees and boulders. For a moment, the foliage and underbrush hid them, but Sage switched over to thermal imagery and the hostiles stood out as red and yellow silhouettes. He targeted one of them as the reds began to cool, letting him know their opponents had cutting-edge hardsuits with built-in cooling capabilities. They also had training, knowing that Sage would use thermal imaging to pick them out.
Squeezing the trigger twice more, Sage watched as one of the rounds cored through the tree the target hid behind, then slammed the person backward. The second round struck a boulder just a few millimeters from the tree and cracked the stone into chunks. The flattened ricochet punched into the target as well, just before the armored figure struck the ground.
Two more hardsuits joined the surviving one, but they were moving more cautiously now. The one who had dug in unleashed a barrage of fire that tore through the jungle around Sage. Two of the rounds skimmed off his armor.
Reaching into a thigh compartment, Sage removed a smoke grenade, set it off, and tossed it a couple meters ahead of him. The grenade hit and rolled in the underbrush, then exploded with a whumpf! Almost immediately, dense red smoke filled the area and started spreading out.
Sage pushed up and got moving. The pain from the repeated contact with the ground had been walled away. He’d feel it later, but he didn’t at the moment. His right leg felt weak and he wondered if he’d torn something or sprained something, but the hardsuit compensated almost immediately and his gait smoothed. All he needed to do was move and the hardsuit’s muscle memory would pull him up to full performance.
On the run, Sage pounded through the trees and leaped over a twelve-meter-wide creek. His boots sank nearly thirty centimeters into the soft bank on the other side, but the suit’s musculature pulled them free without breaking stride. He ran opposite from where Jahup lay. The boy was alive or dead or wounded, and there wasn’t anything Sage could do about any of those things except try to stay alive himself.
The hardsuit functioned perfectly, getting the strides right and managing the rough terrain without a hitch. Sage held the Roley at port arms before him, using it as a barrier as he ran through branches and circled back toward their attackers.
“Identify hostiles,” Sage commanded.
Identification failed. Hardsuits are not registered or are masked.
Sage figured the people belonged to a small drug lab in the area. His team had taken down a few of the bigger ones, as well as the DawnStar operation Velesko Kos had been running, but that hadn’t put everyone out of business. Makaum was too rich in pharmacological resources for criminals to ignore the profit potential.
They’d also kill not to get caught.
Jahup still hadn’t moved. All things considered, it was better if he wasn’t 100 percent to stay down.
Sage just hoped the boy wasn’t dead. He dragged his thoughts from that and focused on the men ahead of him. Three of them remained viable.
The circular path Sage was taking had cut the distance between himself and the gunmen to 376 meters. They were also starting to anticipate his speed and were getting closer to him. When a round clipped his left shoulder, tweaking the injury he’d already suffered, he went with it, following the momentum to the ground. He rolled like he’d been badly wounded and came to a rest on his back. Underbrush covered him as he pointed the Roley at his targets.
He managed to get off three rapid rounds, watching as one of the shooters took a round in the chest that split the armor open. Unless the shooter had a really good onboard med system, a corpse hit the ground.
The second round missed, but the third round caught a shooter in the ribs. Off balance, the shooter spun and dropped. The third shooter looked at the two nearby and decided to escape.
On his feet now, Sage broke from the circular route he’d been following and ran straight for the ridge. The hardsuit’s boots tore into the turf and threw divots behind him, but he managed six-meter strides. He crashed through brush, leaving broken branches and uprooted saplings in his wake.
As he started up the hill, Sage noticed the rough road that had been cut through the ridge in front of him. Someone had cleared a path almost four meters wide. Shorn stumps showed where trees had been cut down and potholes left empty spaces where big rocks had been removed to enable vehicles to pass. The thick canopy of interlaced branches blocked an aerial view of the primitive road.
The first shooter Sage reached was dead. The damage to the hardsuit and all the blood that had leaked out was proof of that. The second shooter was still moving a little farther up the inclined path. Sage raised the Roley and heard the roaring rush of a magnetic drive coming over the hill.
He shifted his aim just as a six-wheeled boxy mud-brown ATV shot over the hill. The ATV had an open top and roll bars to protect the driver and passengers. A cargo net secured the crates in the crawler’s storage space at the rear. A mini-rail gun swiveled at the top of the roll bars and the near-AI warned Sage of a potential target lock.
At the top of the ridge, the ATV went airborne, the mini-gun lost the target lock it had acquired, and Sage’s round ricocheted from the reinforced undercarriage. Twenty meters down the hill, the ATV landed on the shooter, who had managed to stand. The shooter went down under the spinning tires but caused the ATV to list to one side. Sage fired again and the round skimmed along the crawler’s side, leaving a scar at least a centimeter deep.
The three wheels touching the ground grabbed traction and forced the ATV forward. The mini-gun swiveled again, either on autopilot or under control of the shooter behind the ATV’s steering wheel.
Sage’s faceshield tinted red in warning, letting him know the mini-gun had him in its sights. He squeezed off another round that chewed through the roll bar by the driver’s head, leaving the bar shuddering and jerking, throwing off the mini-gun’s target acquisition.
Depleted uranium rounds ripped through the trees along the path near Sage and chopped into the ground, throwing up fist-sized clods and leaving craters. The driver steered for Sage, turning the ATV into a weapon. Even if impact with the ATV didn’t kill him, Sage knew the crawler would pin him up against the trees and the mini-gun would finish him off.
He turned to retreat into the jungle, aiming for a thick copse of trees, knowing they would block or at least slow down the ATV. Before he reached them, a round caught him in the back and threw him off-stride. Unable to recover his footing, Sage fell and listened to the crawler’s magnetic drive coming closer. The HUD’s view was difficult from the angle he was lying in, but he saw trees going down before the ATV. He forced himself to get up, but the soft ground betrayed him in his haste and he fell again. The hardsuits were heavy. He should have remembered that.
Rounds cut through the trees over his head like a scythe cutting through wheat. The trees toppled and Sage’s faceshield tinted full-on red again, letting him know the mini-gun had him locked once more.
Frantic, Sage rolled to the side and tried to bring the Roley up. The ATV was ten meters out and closing quickly as the mini-gun roared and flashed. Rounds ripped gouges in Sage’s hardsuit, but none of them hit him squarely. The armor held—barely, and the near-AI let him know that.
Take a defensive position!
Just before Sage could drop the Roley’s sights over the driver’s helmet, the man jerked sideways and spilled out of the seat. On autopilot, the crawler continued coming and the mini-gun stayed locked on Sage. He leveled the Roley on the mini-gun and squeezed the trigger just as the ATV-mo
unted weapon exploded into flying scrap. Some of the rounds cooked off in midair, adding to the noise and smoke and confusion.
Rolling again, Sage managed to get out of the ATV’s path. It rolled on another six meters into the jungle before jamming into a huge boulder.
“Sage.” Jahup sounded excited over the comm link, but Sage didn’t blame the younger man. His own blood pressure and heart rate were up because of the stimpack.
“I’m here.”
“I thought he had you.”
“Me too.” Sage rolled to his feet and got up, feeling time snap back into place around him. He walked to where the crawler continued grinding away at the ground with all six wheels. He switched off the power. “That was good shooting.”
“I was lucky. I don’t know how the round didn’t hit a tree. There are a lot of trees between you and me.”
Sage glanced at the jungle and silently agreed. “Lucky’s good. It was bad luck these guys saw us, so having a little of it come back our way kind of evened things out.”
He walked to the back of the crawler and saw a number of protective black cases inside the crates. He’d been wrong about the shooters working on a drug lab. They’d been stealing plants, mushrooms, and other flora.
“Were they making drugs?” Jahup asked.
“No.” Sage picked up one of the protective cases and scanned the information contained on it. “They were biopirates. Gathering up samples.” He put the case back and stared around the jungle. “I don’t know if this is all of them, so let’s be careful looking.”
1151 Hours Zulu Time
The biopirates had operated from a small camp set up in a tree hut constructed eight meters from the ground. The hut was five meters by five meters and two stories tall. Lab tools and a small kitchen occupied the lower floor and bedrolls were on the second floor.
There were no other biopirates.
The dead were a mixed bunch. Two of them were Tyxetis, who were mostly humanoid but had double-jointed limbs, and hooves instead of feet. Two of them were Terran. And the remaining one was a Worall, a being covered with light green fur and an opossum’s narrow features.
Three of them were in the criminal database in Sage’s files. Two of those were wanted for murder in addition to other crimes.
“They might have been stealing plants,” Jahup said as he stood at the lab on the first floor of the hut, “but that wasn’t all they were doing.”
The hut was dark with shadows due to the mosquito netting that covered the windows. Evidently the transplas sheets hadn’t kept all of the bugs out. Or maybe the netting was part of the hut’s disguise.
“What do you mean?”
Jahup tapped a transplas container where yellow spores sprouted on a piece of rotting meat under a grow light. “The spores are vesgar. They’re hallucinogenic. The offworlders who trade in this call it Snakedream. When the spore is properly prepared and ripe, you burst it and breathe it in. The spore dust moves slowly and comes up in a twisting stream.” He took his hand back. “If it’s not prepared correctly, it causes brain death.”
“That doesn’t sound like something someone not from this world would know,” Sage pointed out.
“Vesgar occurs naturally in the jungle,” Jahup replied. “Honits, small flying lizards, eat the austa plants that grow at the top of the canopies. The honit can’t digest the seeds. If the honit dies before it can pass the seeds, which happens when a predator fails to kill them, the seeds turn into spores. But only in honits.”
“Why?”
Jahup shrugged. “We don’t know. My people learned to stay away from vesgar. We destroyed it where we found it. It is the offworlders who have turned it into product. They are the ones who embraced the evil the spores contain.” Anger colored the young man’s words.
Sage thought about the attack on the fort that had happened that morning. He wondered how Jahup would react to that. The boy was torn between two worlds as it was.
“The biopirates didn’t learn about vesgar on their own,” Sage said. “Someone had to tell them about it. Someone had to show them how to cultivate it and prepare it.”
“I know.” Jahup faced Sage. “But your people brought the temptation to my world. If your people had never arrived, we would not have the problems we’re now facing.”
“My people are here to help,” Sage replied. “The Army isn’t like all offworlders.”
“Yet some of them have cooperated with the drug manufacturers and others who steal from us.”
“That’s right. Some of them have. But most of us haven’t. We’re here because we want your people to get a fair shake on the interplanetary scene. You’ve worked with us. You’ve seen that.”
Jahup looked like he wanted to say something, but he didn’t.
“Would you have shown an offworlder how to find vesgar?” Sage asked.
“Never.”
“Why?”
“Because it is evil.”
“Yeah, I heard you say that. But one of your people showed somebody, Jahup. That’s how people are. Not all of them have the same values. When people are given choices, they don’t always do the right thing.”
“No! We were not like that. Not until the arrival of your ships. Not until you brought your war to us.”
“The war was going to find you,” Sage said quietly. “It’s been headed this way for a while. We didn’t bring it. We’re trying to stop it. We’re trying to protect your world.”
“Can you?” Jahup demanded.
Hearing the harsh, ragged fear in the boy’s voice, Sage realized that the anger wasn’t from the discovery of the vesgar. And it wasn’t anger. It was fear about the Phrenorian base. Seeing that fortress out in the jungle, knowing what it was, had made the war more immediate to Jahup. His world was suddenly more fragile than he’d thought it could be.
“Can you stop the Phrenorians?” Jahup asked. “Because if you can’t, if my people make the wrong choice by joining you, then they will be killed by the Phrenorians.”
“If you work with the Phrenorians, they’ll make slaves of you. I’ve seen it happen. They’ll strip this world down to nothing, take everything they want, and leave you people to die. If you’re not dead before they accomplish that.” Sage met Jahup’s gaze. “You and your people don’t get the luxury of sitting this one out. If nothing else, that base we found should tell you that. The Phrenorians want Makaum, and they’ll take it if they can. If we hadn’t come—if the Army hadn’t come—Makaum would have been lost to the corps and then to the Phrenorians. One of the problems we have facing us now is that your people are trying to stay out of things, not choose one side or the other. That’s not going to save you.”
For a moment longer, Jahup stared at Sage, searching for something, but Sage had no clue what the boy was looking for. Sage knew the decisions were hard. He’d seen his mother and her family have to make similar decisions when war had ravaged their country in South America. At the time, Sage had been young, but the things he’d seen, all the death and carnage, had stuck with him.
In the end, his mother had lost her country, her home, and things had never been the same for her again despite her husband and son.
Sage put a hand on Jahup’s shoulder. “All I can promise you, Jahup, is that I’m not going to quit on you. I’ll be here. I’m not going to leave.”
Jahup nodded. “Not everything is in your hands, though, Sergeant.” He turned and walked away.
Sage watched the boy go, knowing there was nothing he could say.
THIRTEEN
Outer Perimeter
Fort York
1413 Hours Zulu Time
Ahead of Sage, Jahup passed through one of the checkpoints to the fort. The gates slid smoothly to the sides as the RDCs approached, already alerted by Sage when he sent their identification on ahead. The boy stood up on
the crawler and took note of the constructor bots repairing the damage to the training building. New steel gleamed in the afternoon sunlight on the patched portion of the fence that had been burned through.
Jahup slowed down and almost stopped.
Sage rode up beside him and opened the comm link between them. “Come on. We’ve got a lot to do.”
“You knew about this?” Accusation rang in Jahup’s voice.
“I knew.” Sage wasn’t going to lie to him.
“You didn’t tell me?”
“No, I didn’t. We were concentrating on getting back alive. You didn’t need to be distracted about this then. We couldn’t do anything about this while we were out there.”
“What happened?”
“We’ll talk about that when we get inside.”
Jahup sped up through the gate and raced toward the blocky motor-pool building, where crawlers, Bubbles, and other rolling stock sat outside in neat rows. Jumpcopters occupied the top two floors.
Sage noticed that the motor pool had more armed soldiers standing guard today than normal, but didn’t know if that was in response to the attack or to the fact that Jahup was riding in. He sped up and followed the boy into the massive building.
“You’re late, Top.” Colonel Halladay stood in the doorway of the hallway leading from the motor pool dressed in a hardsuit. His helmet was adhered magnetically to his hip and he carried a Roley slung over his shoulder. The colonel didn’t usually carry an assault rifle through the fort.
Sage leaned the RDC on its side and booted the kickstand into place. Jahup parked his crawler beside Sage’s. He fidgeted, as if uncertain what to do, but Sage knew he was upset.
Sage took off his helmet, slung it at his hip, and saluted. Halladay returned the salute, and Sage was aware that the three of them held the attention of all the motor-pool personnel in the cavernous space.
“We ran into some trouble on the way, Colonel,” Sage replied.