by Rick Partlow
The mules, thankfully, had survived the crash. It would have been a huge pain in the ass trying to haul this stuff down from the pass without them. The light, collapsible, four-legged cargo transports weren’t standard equipment for the Boys, but Jason had arranged for them to be delivered along with the weapons. We unstrapped them from their berths against the bulkhead of the utility bay, then handed them down in a chain until they reached the ground. There were six altogether, and each could carry ten of the standard cargo cases in which the weapons and ammo were packed.
I oversaw the assembly of the mules, then climbed back inside to take up the first position in the human conveyer belt unloading the cargo. After a couple hours, I was glad I’d taken off my jacket; it was warm inside the ship with all those sweating, panting people working as fast as they could. In the end, it took us nearly three hours to get the ship completely unloaded and by then I could see a lot of drawn, pale faces and heavy breathing.
I dropped down out of the utility bay and retrieved my jacket from where Rachel had draped it over the frame of one of the mules. Back out in the howling wind, the cold was gaining back its grasp from the temporary warmth of exertion and I was grateful to slip back into the electrically-warmed, thigh-length coat and pull its hood up into place.
I was stooping to grab my plasma gun when Tom McCrey stepped up to me, slipping on his gloves. Isaac hadn’t come along on the expedition; no one had volunteered why, and once we’d started hiking, we’d had to keep quiet until we were well up the trail so I hadn’t had time to ask. For whatever reason, Tom was in charge, and it was probably just as well since he didn’t seem to bring along the attitude Isaac was packing.
“Everyone’s pretty beat,” he told me, shaking his head. “I don’t think we can make it back without stopping for a few hours to rest.”
“We need to get away from the ship first,” I advised him. “Since the weather has cleared up, it’s only a matter of time before their satellite surveillance picks up its outline here and they send out a patrol.”
He sighed and a puff of condensation steamed out of his mouth. “Yeah, but I don’t know how far we’re gonna’ get fighting this wind.” He snorted. “At least it’s all downhill from here.”
“It’s your call,” I said, raising a hand palm up. “But we can’t rest here, it’s too open and like you say, there’s this damn wind.”
He nodded in resignation. “All right, everyone, listen up!” He pitched his voice to carry over the howl of the wind. I noticed that everyone dropped what they were doing to give him their attention and I felt myself nodding approval. “I know you’re all exhausted, but we can’t stay here. We have to get out of this pass and away from the ship before we can rest. Can y’all hang together for a few more kilometers for me?”
There were a few groans, but mostly just nods of stolid assent from pale, drawn faces. Of all of them, I only knew Rachel and Pete, though I thought I recognized a couple others as having been kids when I left. Pete looked tired, but he was young and unwilling to let me or anyone else think he couldn’t pull his weight. Rachel…she looked as hard as steel, like the wind and cold and exhaustion couldn’t touch her.
Everyone began closing jacket fastenings and grabbing rifles from where they'd stacked arms for the work while I went from one mule to the next, setting the control to slave them into a convoy pattern.
"Are you gonna' blow up the ship or something?" Pete asked me as I was adjusting the controls of the robot cargo hauler that would be leading the string. "You know, so we don't leave it for the enemy?"
I chuckled softly. My little brother thought he was some junior commando now. Then the humor died a-borning as I realized that he'd had to become just that. He'd had to kill and watch his friends and family die.
"Blowing it up would attract too much attention," I explained patiently. "They may or may not see it as it is, and even if they do, they won't be sure when it crashed. They won't get anything useful from the ship's systems; they're rigged to self-destruct in response to unauthorized tampering."
"Everyone drink some water," Tom was adjuring the group, pulling out his own canteen and taking a long swig by way of example. "Just because it's cold doesn't mean you can't get dehydrated.”
Everyone followed suit dutifully and I did too, even though it wasn't such a pressing need for me.
"The mules are ready to go," I told Tom, shifting my plasma gun off its sling and holding it at port arms.
"Let's move out," he said, waving everyone forward. "We'll try to make it to Cerulean Lake and stop there for a bivouac."
That was a good six kilometers of road and a thousand meters of descent. He was really going to have to push them and they all knew it. I took the lead with the mules following behind me; they would serve as cover for the others in case we came under fire, and they kept a gap of nearly thirty meters between me and everyone else. As we began heading down the narrow trail out of the pass, Rachel passed by Tom and came up to walk beside me. I shot her a doubtful look.
"I'm up here," I pointed out, "because I'm harder to kill than the rest of you, in case we have any trouble."
"That's why I'm up here with you," she told me, her voice muffled by the hood of her jacket. "This'll be where the action is."
I didn't argue with her. Honestly, I was glad for the company. We trudged along at a slow walk, keeping the pace slow enough that no one behind us would fall out, and it felt like we weren't covering any distance at all. The infuriatingly slow progress together with the incessant howling of the wind through the pass and the scrape-rattle of the mules making their steady way behind us all grated on my nerves and I needed distraction.
Unfortunately, I didn't know what to say. Every time I opened my mouth to ask her about her life while I'd been gone, I kept stopping myself, realizing I'd be dredging up memories she might not want to think about. She'd married Harry, for God's sake. They'd had a kid. Now she'd lost both of them to the Tahni and here I was, getting all warm and fuzzy about memories of a girl who didn't exist anymore. I felt like a huge idiot.
"Pete told me what happened to you," she spoke up, rescuing me. "About how you wound up in this special unit. What it's like? Is it what you wanted when you left?"
"It's everything I wanted when I left," I admitted, both to her and myself. "And it's nothing like I thought it would be. I thought I was going to be a hero, but I’m starting to feel more like a butcher."
"It's a war," she reminded me. "You’d think a boy from Canaan would know better than anyone how horrible war is."
I didn't respond, knowing she was right and knowing that didn't make it any better. We didn't speak for a few minutes as we came down a particularly steep stretch of the rough, rutted, old road and I had to keep an eye on the mules. Their strange, stilted gate and the weight of the cargo cases made me worry they'd tumble down the snow-dusted slope, but they were designed for this and they kept their balance.
"Has there been anybody?" The question took me by surprise, posed casually, without hesitation.
"Yes," I said. "There was someone." There was the image again, the death mask, but not so real and immediate this time, not like I was still there. It was just a memory. "She was killed." The words slipped out like ghosts.
"I'm sorry." I could feel her hand on my arm through the jacket and the Reflex armor.
"It's a war," I said in counterpoint and hoped she'd let it go. She did, and let her hand slip away as she fell silent.
"You know," she finally said, after we'd walked in silence for what seemed like a long time, "after you left, I spent a lot of time wondering why I'd been so damned angry with you."
I looked over at her and saw her eyes catch mine as she turned her head towards me.
"It seemed pretty obvious to me at the time," I said, surprised. "You felt like I was abandoning you."
"I was upset you were leaving," she said, "but that wasn't why I was so pissed off. I was pissed off because I knew what was going to happen if you left
. I knew that Mom was going to push me and Harry together, and I knew without you there, that I'd give in. I always did whatever she wanted. Except for you. You were the only choice I made for myself."
"I'm sorry, Rache..." I began, but she interrupted me.
"No, it wasn't your fault," she said. "It was mine. I could have fought her, I could have insisted on waiting for you and if she didn't like it, I could have left. I was angry because I wasn't strong enough to do that, and I knew it."
She said it so calmly, without emotion, like it was something she’d accepted a long time ago. I wanted to point out that it wouldn’t have mattered, that she would have been told I was dead in two years anyway…but I stopped myself. It would have mattered to her.
I let my eyes scan around to the next curve in the switchbacks heading down, as I tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t sound selfish or idiotic. Then I stopped in my tracks, bringing a hand up over my head, held in a fist.
“What…” Rachel asked, but I waved her to silence, listening intently. The sound was barely an echo, carried around the curve of the switchback off the granite rock faces on either side, and no Normal could have heard it over the wind, or separated it out from the background noise if they had.
It was the hum of an electric motor, the scratch of thick tires on gravel.
I motioned to Tom to have the others spread out on either side of the road and take cover, then I stepped back to the lead mule and touched a control on its bulbous nose. Its legs folded beneath it and it sank to the ground; the others followed suit, slaved to its motions. With a load of cargo crates strapped to the sides of each of them, they were still far from inconspicuous, but at least they had a lower profile now.
Rachel had crouched down beside the lead mule and I unfastened my jacket and dropped it next to her, then pulled my face hood from a utility pouch on my belt and slipped it on partway, leaving my mouth exposed as I knelt down beside her.
"Stay here," I said in a low tone, quieter than a whisper. "There's a vehicle around the next curve; I'm going to check it out."
I saw an odd look on her face, like she was debating what to do next. Without warning, she leaned up and kissed me. It was only for a second, but it felt as if I'd touched a live electric spark. She shot me a lopsided smile as she pulled away.
"Be careful," she told me.
I pulled my hood the rest of the way down over my face and nodded silently. Then I rose and sprinted downhill, hugging the inside edge of the rock wall carved out to make this road over a century ago. The shadows swallowed me up there, the chameleon camouflage of my Reflex armor blending into the dark grays and muted whites of snow patches on granite. I hopped from one island of stable footing to the next, guided by the instant analysis my headcomp performed and fed back to me as instinct, my passage nearly soundless under the whistle of the cold, cutting wind.
I slowed to a jog as I rounded the curve in the switchback, trying to take in what my senses would give me. The electric hum was stronger, probably no more than a hundred meters away, now and then punctuated by a rasp of polymer tire slipping on slick rock. Just a bit further and I could see it; it was a small off-road runabout, one of ours from the markings on the side. Six wheeled, partially covered by a clear, plastic canopy, it was one of several that the Constabulary used to patrol the old mountain roads at Night.
But the four bulky, armored figures crammed into its plastic bench seats weren't with the Constabulary. They were Tahni soldiers and they'd probably been sent up to investigate the pass because their satellite imagery had noticed something suspicious about the shape of my crashed ship. I went with that theory over the idea that our group had been spotted; if they'd seen us, they would have sent an assault shuttle.
I thought about just taking the whole vehicle out with a shot from the plasma gun, but that was a high-signature weapon. If I fired it, I was chancing it would be detected and we'd be discovered. With a sigh, I sat the gun down against the rock outcropping by the left side of the road. I'd hauled the damned heavy thing all the way back up here and I wasn't going to get to use it.
I sucked in a breath of chill air and gave myself over to the Machine. I jumped out onto the road and bolted towards the runabout, legs pumping, the spiked soles of my boots throwing up a spray of gravel. The chameleon camouflage would hide me for a second or two, even with the infrared filters in their helmets, and two seconds would get me more than halfway there. Fifty meters. I could see their laser carbines sticking out the open sides of the car.
Then another second while they debated inside their own heads what exactly they were seeing, wondering if it was just snow blowing off the side of the mountain. Twenty meters. The camouflage on their armor was brown and green, a forest pattern.
One final second when they realized what they were seeing but couldn't quite accept it, waiting for one of the others to confirm what they were thinking. I could see the stars reflecting off the visor of the driver's helmet through the plastic windscreen and then I was flying at him feet first with the combined speed of the car and my sprint.
The screen shattered and splintered and barely slowed me down; the soles of my boots struck him square in the faceplate and his neck bent backwards with a crack I could hear through his armor. I was lying on top of his body, half inside the car and half out, with the remains of the windscreen crumpled around me, and we were still moving, curving gradually to the left, where there was this little three-hundred-meter drop-off.
The Tahni trooper in the passenger's seat was trying to bring around his weapon, but I kicked it out of his hands and then ripped through what was left of the windscreen with my talons. Strips and fragments of torn polymer flew through the cab of the vehicle as I lunged inside, moving too fast for my conscious mind to control, in the grasp of the Machine. Things seemed to slow down as my mind was played a recording of them from microseconds earlier, as if it was happening to me, by my choice.
The front passenger tumbled out the open side of the car, blood fountaining from the yawning gap where my talons had ripped through the flexible gasket connecting his helmet to the collar of his chest armor and on through the flesh of his throat beneath it. Before his body had hit the ground, I was over the divider and into the back seat. One of the Tahni back there raised his arms to try to grab me and I sliced through the flexible joints under both of his armpits with my talons, severing the arteries that ran through his shoulders.
The last one almost got his laser turned around before I pistoned my legs and slammed him out the side of the car and onto the road. I retracted my talons from the torso of the dying soldier and threw myself out after the last survivor. I had a vague understanding that the car was still moving, still heading for the drop-off, but mostly I was focused on the last Tahni trooper still alive.
Real time had caught up with the Machine and I was in complete control as I sliced through the lanyard that secured his laser carbine to his armor, kicking the weapon away from him before he recovered from the fall. He reached for a blade strapped to his left thigh but I stamped a boot down on his shoulder and heard a snap of bone and a muffled scream and his arm went limp. I kneeled down on his chest and pinned his one working arm with my foot as I worked the fastenings loose on his helmet and yanked it off his head. Their radios were in their helmets and I tossed it aside before he could think to use it.
He was fairly young as Tahni soldiers went, not as old as I was now, but older than I'd been when I left for the Academy, I judged. His face was twisted in pain, eyes wide beneath the prominent brow ridges and his broad, flat ears were pale instead of their natural red. I drew my Gauss pistol and put the barrel against his forehead.
"Shut up and be still," I said to him in Tahni---as close to it as I could come with a human throat, anyway. He looked at me with what the translation program said might be surprise or maybe fear.
I heard a clattering, then a series of impacts, each more distant than the last, and I knew that the runabout had gone over the
side of the road and was crashing down the rocks into the gulley below. There was a distant, final crunch as it hit the bottom and came to a halt, and then I could hear the running footsteps behind me. I knew who it was, the sensors in the back of my hood filtering their data through my headcomp like a hunch.
"Holy shit," Tom McCrey said, staring where the vehicle had gone over the side. He made a sound like he was trying to say something more intelligent, but then just muttered "holy shit," again.
Rachel stood beside him, her rifle cradled in her arms, and said nothing.
I pulled off my hood and looked over at Tom. "You guys have any use for a prisoner?" I asked him.
Tom made a face. "We tried that once. They all have tracers embedded too close to their spines to get out while they're still alive; we lost ten good people finding that out."
"Damn," I muttered, backing off the Tahni and coming to my feet.
He rose up to a seated position, hand going to his broken shoulder, looking between the three of us.
"I guess..." I started to say that I guessed I should get rid of him, but I didn't get to finish. I was interrupted by the crack of a heavy bullet breaking the sound barrier merging together with the smack of the slug taking the Tahni prisoner in the head.
The back of his skull exploded and he slumped back to the ground, eyes frozen open, everything that made him who he was spread out on the dirt and gravel behind him. I looked around and saw Rachel holding her hunting rifle at hip level, a curl of smoke rising from its barrel.
Her face was impassive but for a slight uptick at the corner of her mouth. I stared at her for a moment and she shrugged.
"It had to be done," she said. "Might as well be me."
I said nothing, just grabbed the body by an ankle and dragged it over to where the car had gone off the road. I couldn't really see the wreckage in the shadows of the gulley, not even with infrared or thermal. It was too far down. I bent down and took hold of the wrist on the same side as the ankle, then tossed the body down to join the others. He skittered off the rocks in a windmill of arms and legs, bending ways they couldn't have when he was alive, and then he disappeared into the darkness.