by P. R. Adams
Grimacing, he twisted around just in time to see the second craft’s tail disappear over the edge of the butte. He rolled until he could see over the edge. The fuselage scraped, groaned, and deformed as the craft plunged to the rocky ground below. The echoes rolled out over the silent stones, drowning out the sound of the first craft’s propulsion system, which coughed and died.
Loose rock clacked down the length of the butte and pinged off the ruined craft below.
Rimes uncertainly got to his feet and checked himself. His leg ached, but took weight. He took a moment to admire his handiwork.
Only the BAS’s sound amplification saved him: boot scraping on rock.
He pivoted and thrust his arms up. The genie he’d shot earlier was on him, kicking. Rimes caught the kick’s force well enough to avoid any broken bones. He grabbed onto the genie’s boot and struggled to keep his footing; the genie had to twist and hop just to keep her own balance.
But she was forcing him backwards.
Rimes let go of her boot and dropped to the ground, arms splayed out. His left leg slipped over the edge, but he was otherwise safe.
Before he could roll away, another kick landed, cracking a rib just beneath his left armpit.
Rimes rolled clear of a stomp that would have dislocated his right shoulder. He scrambled to his feet and swung, landing a lucky blow that drove the genie back. He got his first good look at the genie. She was bleeding from a couple holes in her armor and favoring her left shoulder, but she was still up.
Skipping back toward the center of the butte, trying to buy time, Rimes thought the situation through. He couldn’t simply attempt the descent. Wounded or not, the genie would follow and would almost certainly kill him. The other genies had to be en route to the butte at full speed after losing contact with the craft.
Time was his biggest enemy at the moment.
The genie closed, making tentative kicks at Rimes’s head and chest, testing his reflexes and skill.
Like Shaw, she wore a light-armored flight suit. She had no helmet. Like the other pilot, she was fascinating to look at, with deep brown hair and high, sharp cheekbones. Her eyes were amber, with crimson flecks. Her strikes were catlike—quick, powerful.
Realizing his options were limited, Rimes went on the offensive.
When the next kick came, he stepped inside and took it on his left shoulder, momentarily hooking her leg just below the knee with his nearly numb left arm. He struck with his right forearm at her wounded shoulder. Her armor couldn’t do much to soften the blow; her eyes widened in pain and surprise.
Rimes pressed the attack, chopping at her neck, then backhanding her face.
She staggered backwards, now on the defensive. She managed to block most of Rimes’s blows, but she was no longer trying to kick him. Rimes shifted from going for her face and shoulder to working the areas her damaged shoulder made it impossible to defend. He landed a jab in her gut then another in her solar plexus.
She gasped for air and tried a desperate kick with her right leg. Rimes caught the leg in the crook of his left arm, this time securing it. He lifted the leg high, quietly groaning at his broken rib’s protest. If his own leg could have supported him, he would’ve shattered her left knee. Instead, he simply drove her backwards, pushing her to the edge of the butte, keeping her off-balance. She sensed too late what he had in mind and how impossible it was to stop it. With a last shove, he sent her over the edge.
Rimes dropped to his knees and sucked in the bitter, dry air. His side ached from the kick and the crash into the fuselage. His leg ached from the bullet impact.
And the genies were closing.
At least I’ve made a difference, probably gave the team their first real chance at survival.
He reached for his carbine only to find it was gone. He’d lost the assault rifle on the airborne craft. He was without a weapon.
Her sub-machine gun! He got to his feet and jogged to the area where the ramps had been.
It was the BAS that found it. Rimes scooped the sub-machine gun up and checked it. Functional, though meant more for close-quarters combat than long-distance engagements. He checked the magazine—near-full—then slammed it back home. A quick strap adjustment and he hastily hooked the weapon over his shoulder and began the descent.
The whole way down, he listened for the first sound of gunfire that would signal the genies’ approach and his hopeless demise.
27
26 October, 2167. Fourth planet of the COROT-7 system.
* * *
EVEN WITH HIS environment suit working at full capacity, Rimes’s helmet was a swamp—damp and foul with his perspiration and breath and echoing hollowly with his rhythmic, sharp breathing. Sweat trickled into his eyes, obscuring his vision. For a moment, he lost his footing in the soft sand and nearly stumbled. He quickly regained his balance and blinked the sweat away, then he re-focused on the BAS display, which glowed brilliantly against the black of the night.
A dozen red icons flickered in and out at the edge of the BAS’s range. At the display’s far right, a cyan circle marked the 332 crash site, just over fifteen kilometers northwest of his position. He was maintaining a roughly ninety degree angle relative to 332.
Every minute they chase me is another minute for 332.
Soon, he would have to alter his course even more dramatically, heading directly away from the crash site. The genies would have to make a tough decision.
It would also take him farther from his own goal and well on the way to complete collapse.
As it had for the last hour, the terrain continued to level out. He hadn’t seen so much as a rock or gulch for at least twenty minutes. For as far as the BAS could scan, there was sand. Occasionally, a low dune would show up at the edge of sensor range. Mostly, though, the ground was flat.
Rimes focused again on the closing red symbols. He shifted direction another forty-five degrees. The red symbols matched his course. He shifted another thirty degrees. The red symbols did the same.
The genies were staying on him. There was no question.
He switched the BAS off to conserve power. Piezoelectric generation could only do so much to satisfy the demands he was placing on the system. Pushing as hard as he was, he needed sunlight and his suit’s photovoltaics to maintain a full charge.
The last thing he noted was that at their current pace, the genies would catch him in an hour.
Reflexively, Rimes looked skyward, wondering how the task force battle was progressing or if it was already resolved. There was no history to draw upon for fleet engagements in space, really. Only in the last decade had anyone been willing to risk the money on something as risky as a large space-going warship. Metacorporate entities had come close to space battles with larger ships, but they were civilian ships with mostly defensive weapons systems. Ultimately, the insanity of losing tens of billions of dollars in such engagements had kept things from flaring up, even when the bounty had been abandoned alien ships whose technology and DNA made them potentially priceless.
How insane that we’re being forced past that threshold in a struggle to simply fend off our genocidal children.
An ache started in Rimes’s left side, forcing him to slow. The cracked rib was going to be a problem. He could manage through pain, but only so much. And even with the pain controlled, there was the structural problem the rib imposed.
Rimes hoped Sung had some bone paste left. There was simply no point in considering any other possibility than rejoining the others. Genies or not, Rimes had every intention of holding Molly again. He’d never even had the chance to teach the boys how to head a football.
Only one outcome was acceptable: he had to make it.
He shook his head defiantly. He wasn’t going to die, not on this sand-covered wasteland of a planet.
After stretching out, Rimes slowed for a moment and brought up the BAS. It was time to shift course again, to test the genies’ resolve.
He stopped in his tracks, stunned.
A single red signal showed intermittently, and it was moving away from him, heading toward the distant cyan marker.
They abandoned me.
He’d convinced himself the genies were fallible after all, that they’d locked onto a course for vengeance and wouldn’t alter it until seeing things through.
But the BAS wasn’t broken. The genies were going for the others now.
The genies were infallible. They were capable of shutting down their emotions. They were going for the big fish.
The BAS power indicator flashed an amber warning. Rimes turned toward the distant crash site, took a final reading on the route ahead of him, and shut the BAS down. There were no other options but to head for 332 and hope to somehow avoid the genies.
Sixteen kilometers. It was going to be a demanding trek.
THE GROUND STRETCHED on as far as his eyes could see. Sand. Rocks. All black in the night. Unchanged, unforgiving, unyielding.
With each hushed step, he felt certain he’d reached his limit. His right leg was a club now, an anchor determined to hold him in place. He couldn’t stop thinking about the genies. How was it possible for them to do what they were doing? Even an optimized human body had limits. How human could they be and still manage to push themselves as they were?
He brought the BAS up and rapidly flipped through the data. His eyes swept over the multiple layers and fields, taking it all in, storing what he’d seen, his sluggish mind struggling to make sense of it. The system angrily flashed a crimson warning—he was below twenty percent power.
Two readings immediately leapt out at him. Red dots, one set extremely close, another farther out.
He blinked in disbelief, then he dropped to his knees and elbows. He ignored the angry crimson warning and swiveled his head left, right, and up to see if it was a problem with the sensors.
The readings didn’t change.
Slowly, he lowered down onto his belly and did his best to sink into the sand. He played back through his uncertain memories.
How far had he come? How hard had he pushed himself?
One final look at the BAS readout, and then he shut it down. There was an impulse to reach for his weapon and another to stand and sprint. He smothered both impulses and focused on controlling his breathing and blotting out the pain from his injuries.
Cautiously, he opened his helmet, and rotated his head ever so slowly to the left, he scanned the dark-draped sand with naked eyes. It took several seconds for his pupils to relax after the light from the BAS. Finally, he saw it: a recumbent, humanoid shape silhouetted against the paler backdrop of the starlit sky. He rotated his head again and scanned the sands a few meters ahead and twenty meters to his right. There, once again, he found recumbent forms.
Run! Go!
Rimes rubbed his forehead with a shaking hand. He squeezed his eyes shut and counted to ten. The BAS had told him he was surrounded by genies, or at least several of the ones the system had managed to previously identify. More importantly, the BAS had identified five signals—Meyers, Munoz, and Watanabe among them—not five hundred meters from his current position.
Somehow, he’d managed to sleepwalk right into the genies without being detected. Worse, they were close enough to the camp to launch an attack with a mad sprint.
He twisted so that he could watch the genie to his left. The form was utterly motionless.
Could they be dead, maybe from a failed assault or booby traps?
Rimes’s shoulders shook from a quiet, desperate laugh. He knew better than to hope.
Sleeping. They’re sleeping. Or whatever it is they do to rest. Some of them can sense minds, thoughts. They probably have one focused on the crash site while the others rest.
He laughed again, still a silent act, this time at the thought the genies had limits of their own and could repeat mistakes.
No. Not a mistake. They wouldn’t necessarily know I’m hard to read, not unless the one I shot coming out of the tunnel got off a warning before she died.
But if not a mistake, then it was still an oversight or a sign of hubris. At least one of the humans had managed to slip past them and destroy their ships. In their shoes, Rimes reasoned that would have been enough to have curtailed reliance on the advantage of their ‘pushers’.
Scanning for silhouettes in all directions revealed no other genies. It made sense the sentry would also want to present a minimal profile for anyone from the crash site watching the horizon. They wouldn’t have moved so close unless they intended to attack.
I’ve got to get down there.
Slowly, Rimes began the arduous task of crawling toward the crash site. After all he’d endured during the day, the crawl quickly became hell. Extending his left arm was agonizing; pulling himself forward was even worse.
The shuttle was an alluring silhouette in the darkness. Buried in a two-meter deep trench, belly to the sky, wings clipped—it was a fortification.
But it was going nowhere.
Fifteen minutes into his crawl, Rimes swore he was stuck in a nightmare, never advancing, his enemies getting closer. He slithered across the sand for an eternity. Thirty minutes in, he was ready to simply abandon the effort and listen to the voices in his head: sprint for all you’re worth!
Finally, he saw movement: a dark form walked an arbitrary perimeter against the shuttle backdrop.
Rimes powered on his BAS.
The form rubbed at his nose, then suddenly froze. A connection request flashed from Kershaw; Rimes accepted.
“Captain Rimes, is that you?”
“Yeah.” Rimes started crawling again. The BAS flashed an insistent crimson. “You’ve got genies four hundred or so meters behind me.”
“Shit.” Kershaw mumbled something unintelligible. “Oh, shit. Everyone thought you were dead.”
“Don’t react. Stay calm. I’m guessing they’ve got someone watching you who can read minds to some degree. That might mean they can sense a change in your behavior or thoughts.” Rimes continued crawling. “I can understand why everyone would think I was dead. The odds were long from the start, and they only got worse as time went on. But here I am, and I intend to keep us all alive.”
Kershaw paced the perimeter again. He moved slowly, smoothly. Against conventional observers, even with minimal cover, it was a fairly effective method of perimeter patrol. “I can’t believe you got so close in. I’ve been keeping my BAS down to conserve power. I just happened to turn it on a few minutes ago.”
“I understand. It’s the right thing to do.” Rimes stopped when his right elbow struck something that moved in the sand. He thought it might be a rock at first. He stared at it until he could make out more detail. It was a foot. “Kershaw, did you lose a foot?”
“What?”
“I’m staring at a foot. Booted. Looks like one of ours.” Rimes pushed the foot aside and started crawling again.
Kershaw sighed softly. “Xye, probably. Or Ito. Poor guys got torn to pieces when their seats came undone on impact. They fell out of the shuttle on the second impact.”
“Who made it?”
“Sergeant Lopresti, but she’s banged up pretty good. Siamwalla too. Evinger, Munoz, and Takashi are okay. The lieutenant, but he’s…And that IB agent. And me.”
“Your pilot?”
“Nope. We never found his head.” Kershaw mumbled something again. “Should I wake everybody up, Sir?”
“Not yet. I want a plan before we do anything that might provoke an attack.”
“Yeah.” Kershaw stopped for a moment then returned to his patrol. “Any idea how many they have? Meyers said you killed nearly ten of them.”
We’ve done better than we have any right to expect. “Close to twenty of them out there. The shuttle’s on its back?”
“Yeah. We took a couple hits and lost flight controls. When we came in, we ended up upside down. I thought those harnesses were going to break our legs, but it worked out. Well, except for Xye and Ito. Everybody’s sore, but most folks can walk.
Sergeant Lopresti’s in a lot of pain.”
Rimes raised his head to look at the shuttle again. He was getting closer. “Is the belly gun intact?”
“I don’t know. Shit. No one thought to check.”
“Okay. We’ll get on that” I would’ve expected better from Meyers, but just getting the others to the crash site alive was a minor miracle. “What about weapons and ammo?”
“Good to go, Captain. We distributed some extra magazines to the others. Oh! You know Meyers brought some folks in from your shuttle?”
“Yeah, I picked their signals up on my crawl in. I got lucky and found the genies’ ships. Otherwise, we’d all be dead by now.”
Kershaw spun suddenly, excited. “You got their ships? We can get off this rock?”
“Settle down,” Rimes hissed. “I didn’t get their ships, not like you’re thinking. But they don’t have them anymore either.”
“Damn.” Kershaw mumbled to himself again. It sounded like an extended exchange. “Well, that explains why they didn’t attack. We’ve been waiting for it. Not much else you can do about it.”
Rimes could clearly see Kershaw at that point. “Kershaw, I need you to walk away from me, maybe make yourself a little more obvious. I’m going to make for the shuttle.”
“Got it, Captain.” Kershaw adjusted course and stumbled, corrected and brushed sand from his legs with exaggerated sweeps of his long arms.
Rimes did his best to jog for the shuttle. His shin protested, but he fought through it, grinding his teeth against the pain. When he reached the nearest point of the shuttle, he dropped and rolled onto his back.
Once the pain faded, he rose to a crouch and hopped, relying on his good arm and leg for most of the work. “Where’s Meyers?”
“He’s been hanging out in what’s left of the cockpit. He brought a radio with him. He’s been trying to get it to work.” Kershaw mumbled again. “I think he fell asleep.”
Shifting to his hands and knees, Rimes crawled the rest of the way along the fuselage to the front of the craft.