We had about forty kilometers to travel, so I settled in for what I expected would be almost an hour’s ride. The mission on which Redstone disappeared had been to assess the soil, vegetation, and animal activity in sector 376R as an early step toward development there. The mission log hadn’t mentioned mining, but given Caliber’s business, they probably always assessed that. Expansion wouldn’t reach sector 376R for at least four years, based on current rates for development of Eccasis. Maybe Caliber was that far ahead of the game, but it seemed more likely that they had some other purpose. Eddleston had mentioned research, and they’d want to keep that as far away from the main dome as possible, given that it might not be legal.
“Look at that, sir,” said Fader, interrupting my thought. A swarm of pink moths, each the size of a human hand engulfed the right side of the vehicle. Some of the insects seemed to bounce off the glass, almost like they wanted to get in.
“They’re beautiful,” I said.
“Deadly, too,” said Fader. “Just one of them is poisonous enough to rot a limb off a human. And they travel in swarms of thousands.”
“I’ll keep my distance,” I said.
“Our suits are proofed against them,” she said. “But there are plenty of other things out here that can kill you even in your suit.”
Williams’s voice broke in over the comm. “There are a lot of things that can kill you, but we’ve got scanners that track significant life-forms in the area. I can port it back to your screen if you’d rather have that than the visual-spectrum view.”
“Visual is good for now,” I said. “I want to get a feel for the terrain. I trust you to watch the scans.”
“Roger that, sir.”
“Do the civilian teams that come out have those sensors, too?” I asked. I hadn’t seen it in the report.
“I’m not sure, sir. I’ve never been in one of their vehicles.”
I made a note to check that when we got back. We slowed a few times to work our way around parts of the road that had developed holes and gullies, probably from the regular rains, but otherwise we made good progress. I directed Williams to the spot where Eddleston’s team had been. “Are we safe?”
“Scans show no major life-forms, and they’ve got a two-kilometer range in this terrain,” he said. “Keep your eyes out for snakes, though. Sometimes the scans miss them.”
“Roger.”
Mac handed Fader and me rifles, and I checked my load to make sure I had guided bullets. The rear door dropped, and Mac led our team down the ramp into a small clearing. He paused after a couple of steps and scanned, though a wall of green vegetation blocked everything past twenty meters. A low-growing plant with almost-round leaves the size of a kitchen table proved especially challenging to visibility.
“Holy crap.” I’d had doubts when Eddleston told me that they hadn’t looked for bodies, but now I got it. If someone went fifty meters from where I was standing, I might never find them. It took me a minute to locate a small path into the jungle, and I walked toward it. I’d have to crouch, but it would allow me to push past the first wall of jungle. “Pull up a map,” I said. “Tell me what’s in that direction. Is it toward the spot where the team disappeared?”
The net stayed silent for a moment before a female voice that I assumed was one of the soldiers answered. “It’s close, sir. About twenty degrees off, give or take.”
“Thanks.” So that part of the story checked out, at least initially. If Schultz had heard firing, he might have seen the hole in the foliage and moved that way. I started to push my way into the jungle, but Mac hustled to get in front of me. Williams and one of his soldiers hung back, weapons ready, keeping watch while I followed Mac in. Vines grabbed at my feet, which reminded me of the low-level pain in my robot foot that I usually ignored. After a few steps I figured out that if I stepped deliberately high, I could move easier. After maybe twenty meters we hit another clear area. I looked back, and I couldn’t see anyone from our team until Williams—identifiable by his size—broke through into the clearing.
“Are we okay out here?” I asked.
“We’re fine, sir. Darby will warn us if there’s anything headed our way. We’ll have plenty of time to make it back to the vehicle if that happens.”
“How far could we go and still be safe?” I asked. “It’s only a couple hundred meters to the site of the disappearance. Could we make it on foot?”
“It’d be risky, sir. The sensors would cover you, but if they did show a threat, you’d have a two-hundred-meter sprint through shitty terrain to get back to safety.”
“But in an emergency, you could do it, right? Especially if there was another team at the other end. Let’s go a little farther. I won’t push it.” I needed to know if Schultz could have made the trek, if only to rule some things out.
“We’re good, sir.” Williams held up a half-meter-long knife, which started to vibrate when he thumbed a switch. “If we’ve got to, we can cut our way out.”
I wondered if Schultz had had a vibro-machete. Eddleston hadn’t mentioned it. “Don’t use that for now,” I said. “I want to see how far we can get without it.”
“Roger that, sir.” Williams flipped the switch and the blade went silent.
I gestured to an opening on the far side of the clearing. “Lead on, Mac.”
We had to wind our way through a couple tough spots before we finally came into another, smaller clearing. I called a halt and looked around before we headed back. Schultz could have made it through. But how would he have known that in the heat of the moment? Maybe the sound of the guns had motivated him to take a risk, but the openings and paths weren’t obvious.
We worked our way back to the vehicle and loaded up for the trip to the spot where Redstone had disappeared. I timed the drive at eight minutes, forty-six seconds, which confirmed the estimate that Eddleston had given me.
“Where to, sir?” Williams asked, after we dismounted. “Looks like we’ll have to cut our way in if you want to move beyond here.”
“Let’s give it a shot,” I said. “Take a heading that would bring us to our previous location on a direct line. I want to press into the jungle for about forty or fifty meters and see what we see.” Not seeing an opening here didn’t mean someone couldn’t get through from the other direction, especially if they’d had gunfire to lead them.
“Roger that, sir.” The vegetation fell quickly to the practiced vibro-machete swings of Williams and one of his soldiers. Fader stayed with the third soldier, who remained with the vehicle again, in the top hatch, weapon at the ready, providing overwatch and keeping an eye on the sensors.
It took us several minutes to hit a clearing, only managing about five meters per minute, waiting for our guides to clear the way. Unfortunately, that didn’t tell me anything. Schultz could have found a clearer path from the other end. To know for sure, we’d have to re-create the event or search an entire arc around one side of the vehicle.
A burst of automatic fire jumped my heart into overdrive, and I whipped around. “What was that?” No response. I took a split second to check the settings on my comm before I realized the problem. Nobody else had spoken on the net, either. My comm was dead. Mac was banging the side of his helmet, probably dead too. Another burst of fire. I’d figure out the comm later. I started running.
Williams reached our recently cut path first, followed by Mac, and I chased them with the other soldier hot on my tail.
More shots. Two distinct weapons. Bitches. Probably the soldier with the vehicle and Fader. I tried my comm again. Dead. Except for the gunshots, nothing registered over us crashing through the jungle.
We tumbled out into the clearing with the vehicle and I swung around, looking for the reason for gunfire. A huge figure burst from the other side of the clearing, its green fur making it almost invisible against the jungle background. It had to be three meters tall. I raised my rifle to my shoulder and fired four quick shots. With guided rounds, I couldn’t miss from forty meters, and
they all slammed into the ape’s chest.
It roared in pain and stopped, arms raised, angry. It didn’t fall, instead focusing in on me as if appraising an annoying pest. Shots popped around me, but none hit it. Movement caught my eye. They had their own targets.
Shit.
I dropped my magazine, letting it fall to the ground, grabbed a mag of explosive from my thigh pocket, and slammed it home.
The monster—the hominivert—charged. I manually flipped my weapon to automatic and fired a long burst. The exploding rounds drowned out the gunfire. Blood and chunks of fur flew. The ape-thing screamed, took a staggering step toward me, and finally fell five meters away, thudding against the ground so hard that the vibration reached my boots.
I scanned for more targets and found two by the vehicle, pounding on it. One was on top while the other shook it from the side, rocking it on its wheels. I fired a burst of three into the back of the one on the ground and resighted on the one on top. It looked at me for a split second before I fired and leaped off the rear of the vehicle just as I pulled the trigger.
I missed.
I scanned for more targets but couldn’t find any.
“They’re running.” Williams’s voice in my headset startled me. “We have comms back.”
“Fader, are you in the vehicle?” I said over the comm.
“Roger, sir. Two of us in here. I’m hurt but not bad.” I assessed the rest of our force quickly, all four up and moving. Only the one dead hominivert remained. What was left of it. The one I’d wounded must have made it back to the jungle.
“Let’s move before they regroup and come back,” said Williams.
“No argument here. Load up explosive bullets, just in case.”
“We don’t have them, sir. It’s not part of the basic load.”
“There are more magazines in the vehicle,” said Mac, and Williams quickly moved to get them.
No explosive rounds? That made no sense, but I didn’t have time to dig into it now. I hustled to the vehicle, only then realizing how out of breath I was. I fell into my seat and we lurched forward, moving before I got belted in. Fader was already in her seat, and though it was hard to tell with her suit and helmet on, she seemed to be breathing deeply. “You okay?” I asked.
“Bruised, I think, sir. One of the creatures hit me from behind just as I reached the vehicle. Luckily the force of the blow threw me forward into the vehicle. But I banged my shoulder pretty hard.”
Shit. If it had grabbed her instead . . . we got lucky. I ran through the action in my head, trying to piece it together. If nothing else, we’d learned for sure that it was hominivert territory. That still didn’t explain something though.
“What the fuck happened to our comms?”
“Not sure, sir,” said Williams. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was jamming.”
I got a chill despite the sweat dripping down my face. It did remind me of jamming. I hadn’t thought to try an alternate channel in the moment, which is the first thing I’d have done in combat. The thing was, we didn’t even have an established alternate frequency set. I hadn’t even considered it for our type of mission. You don’t expect green apes to be able to jam your comms. What the actual fuck? The apes couldn’t have jammed us. Could they? That was absurd. The timing was so perfect, though. We lost comms right as they attacked, and I didn’t know of anything else out here that could interfere like that. “I’m going out on a limb, but hominiverts don’t jam comms, right?”
“They don’t, sir,” said Williams. “At least they never have before.”
That we know of. “I’m going to want the techs to go through the electronics when we get back and see what they can figure out.”
“You and me both, sir,” said Williams. “Darby, did you try the vehicle’s comm, or just your suit?”
“Both, Sergeant,” the driver responded.
“Just to us, or back to base?”
“Just to you, Sergeant.”
I could forgive Darby for not trying base. Headquarters couldn’t have done anything for us anyway.
“Did we have sensor warning?” Williams asked.
“We did, Sergeant, but it came late. The alarm flashed and I tried to call you and then they were on us. It all happened in just a couple seconds. I fired a burst in the air so you’d hear it.”
“That was smart thinking,” I said. She’d probably saved us. If we’d been caught in the jungle instead of in the clearing . . . I didn’t want to think about it. Instead, I focused on the hominiverts. From what I knew from Eddleston, they were territorial. If what had just happened to us happened to an unprepared team of civilians, I could close my case.
Again, though, this made everything almost too neat and clean. Something in the back of my mind rebelled against it. Redstone was a xenobiologist. It was her job to know these animals. Had their sensors failed, too? And why weren’t people carrying explosive ammunition, when the job clearly required it? I had too many questions to answer to even begin to think of putting a bow on the mission.
On a positive note, I had some ways to move forward now. We survived the attack only because we had weapons that nobody else knew about. We could have died. Almost kill me once, and that’s just business. But twice? That was getting personal. That’s where my mind went. My gut said that this attack wasn’t random, and I usually trusted my gut. Farric, Oxendine, Caliber, the governor . . .
Yeah. I had questions.
Chapter Ten
After sending Fader—against her will—off to get a med scan, I headed over to Oxendine’s headquarters. Mac practically stormed in front of me, slamming his feet down with every step. I felt very safe. Seeing him like that, nobody would dream of coming at us. The three soldiers scrambling to keep up helped too. Already informed of the events of our patrol, Oxendine was waiting for me in her outer office.
“How come your soldiers don’t carry explosive rounds?” I asked, before she could even get the door closed to her inner office.
“Slow down, Carl. I’ve got information you’re going to want.”
I paced over to a chair without waiting for her to offer it. “Okay. But I’m coming back to that question. You’re putting soldiers at risk.”
“Noted. There were some anomalies with the technology in the vehicle that took you on mission.”
“Anomalies?” I put a sneer into the word. No shit there were anomalies, and I was still pissed about the explosive rounds.
“The cameras that should have captured the attack didn’t.”
“They didn’t work?”
“They did,” she said, “Except for the time during the attack.”
“Same as the comms.”
“We’re still working on that.” She picked up her unlit cigar but didn’t look at it. “It’s not unreasonable to think that the same thing that blanked the comms also got the cameras,” she said.
“The sensors too.”
She sighed. “Yeah. A lot went wrong.”
You think? “Too much. Too often.”
“Too much,” she agreed. “I’ve forbidden single vehicle movements for the time being until we get to the bottom of this. It’s never been an issue before. The ’verts . . . they don’t bother vehicle patrols.”
“I disagree.”
“This is the first time,” she said.
“Unless it’s the second.”
She paused. “You think that’s what got the Caliber team?”
I still didn’t know for sure, and I didn’t want to blind her—or myself—to other possibilities. I also didn’t want to piss her off with a blatant lie. Frustrated as I was, I still needed her help. “Your investigation suggested natural causes. Hominiverts are territorial, and we were in the same area, so they’re definitely a possibility. Now, about the explosive ammo.”
“I’m under a lot of pressure from the governor to keep down the damage to the local ecology. When you give soldiers weapons, they tend to use them. You know that. The last thing I need
is a patrol lighting up the wildlife for fun or because they get nervous. Patinchak would shut me down over that.”
“So, you put soldiers at risk, instead.”
“Oh, fuck off, Carl. Until today it hasn’t been an issue. There hasn’t been an injury to a soldier by a large mammal in the entire year I’ve been in command here.”
I felt my face flush a little. I deserved that. Oxendine had to do her job, and I was second-guessing her decisions after the fact. “Might want to revisit that policy. If I hadn’t had my explosive rounds, we’d have been in deep shit.”
“I’ll take it under consideration.” She said it like she meant it, so I let it drop. I couldn’t force her, regardless. After a moment she spoke again. “We’ve got other problems, though.”
Her tone put me on edge. “What problems?”
“Eric Bergman, our suspected bomber, is no longer on the planet.”
“He escaped?”
“The governor moved him. The story he’s feeding me is that a high-powered lawyer got a change of jurisdiction from a judge on Talca, and he had no choice.”
“But you don’t buy that.” I didn’t buy it either.
“Of course I don’t buy it. I did what I said at the meeting—I sent a request higher for them to turn the prisoner over to me. I got approval, which the governor knew I would, so he moved him before I could enforce the order.”
“Why would he do that?” I asked.
“You mean beyond the fact that he’s a vindictive little asshole?”
“It’s got to be more than that.”
“Maybe,” she said. “My guess is that Davidson is responsible. He wouldn’t have the balls to do it on his own.”
“I’ll look into it.”
“Don’t bother. It’s not like we can get the ship back. It’s done. I’m pissed, but I’m not spending energy on it.”
I didn’t agree with that decision but kept it to myself. Whoever transferred the bomber interfered with an investigation into a person who tried to kill me, and I took that personally. But I had my own channels, and could look into it without Oxendine’s help, so I dropped it. “Sure.”
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