"It's okay. I have the command on loop now. I'd dumbly turned it off."
An AI referring to itself as dumb. Zane smiled. Maybe the ultimate Turing test pass.
"Let's get you back to the ship," he told her. "I don't want to take the chance of you losing contact with it again."
"The only way that would happen is if I can't keep the wall open, and if that happens, this mission would be fatally compromised anyway, since we can't penetrate the wall. I have many skills, including medical, which could prove useful. Besides," Patricia added with a smile that verged on impish, "I want to see what's out there with my own human eyes."
Zane gave her a weary nod. "All right. You're with us."
They stood by as Dan retrieved an Aerial Transceiver and launched it beyond the doorway. The pale blue antigrav-powered device rose soundlessly into the pseudo-atmosphere and faded from sight.
"Any theories about what we're dealing with here?" Zane asked.
"I'm guessing some sort of wildlife preserve," said Dana. "But why did the Guardians bring the crew here?"
"Maybe it's really a zoo," Mallory cracked with a short laugh. "Right now alien kids are eating popcorn and watching us on their theaters."
Dan Mueller's soft chuckle held a small note of apprehension. "If this were designed for entertainment, I'd think there would be more signs of intelligent oversight and initiative. But what we've observed so far, in my opinion, strongly suggests AI devices such as the so-called Guardians that are clearly acting like robots running on code from the past. Perhaps the ancient past."
"They seemed pretty damn intelligent when they kicked our asses," said Mallory. "Not to mention taking control of a star ship and bringing it back here."
"Operating under complex protocols and utilizing better technology." Dan shrugged as if nothing could be simpler. "As far as this place goes, I think Dana's wildlife hypothesis makes sense."
"You're saying Animus, including this preserve or whatever it is could be just running on its own?" Zane asked. "A kind of headless monster?"
"That's my guess."
"If that's true, there shouldn't be any problem retrieving Horace and his people?"
"They've let us get this far," said Dan with another shrug. "I don't see why they'd stop us from tracking down the crew and then taking them out of here."
"Let's hope you're right," said Zane. "Okay. Let's go find them."
The crew's trail wasn't difficult to follow. Fifty people tromping through the grass made fairly obvious impressions. Aside from flattened grass and boot prints, an occasional scrap of clothing or broken branch marked their passage.
Zane found it hard to classify the terrain, but then he wasn't much up on his geography. The rolling hills and dry grass reminded him of the foothills he'd grown up by near Sacramento, but the forests looked like jungle or maybe even rain forest. A snow-capped mountain in the distance might be solitary or part of a range. The temperature was warm but pleasant – 74.3 Fahrenheit, 40% humidity – according to his Environmental Analytics (EA) tablet he'd strapped for convenience on his forearm, as everyone but Mallory had done.
They'd walked about two miles when they encountered a rough circle of trampled grass littered with shredded clothing. Zane's heart started a bass drum beat in his chest. He unslung his kinetic rifle. Mallory already had his out.
"Oh, no," Dana groaned, eyeing her BADD. "This area is covered with blood. Human blood. And human tissue – "
She stopped with a gagging sound as Mallory lifted part of a hand and forearm from the grass. The hand, apparently female, was missing its thumb. The wrist and forearm, attached by a few ligaments and splintered bone, looked like it had been shoved into a meat grinder.
"It appears they were savagely attacked," said Malcolm.
"No shit, Sherlock." Mallory tossed the hand back into the grass. "Please don't tell me velociraptors."
"Canine," said Patricia. "A close match to our DNA records of Canis dirus. Some traces of Feliformia detected."
"Dire wolf." Dana choked out the words. "Based on hair and saliva. I'm not detecting any canine blood."
Zane took a moment as that sank in. "That implies the Peacemaker crew isn't armed. They put up minimal resistance."
"That's right." Dana was hunched over, one hand on her stomach.
"The cockroaches threw them out here without weapons," Mallory snarled.
"Estimated causalities?" Zane forced his voice into a monotone as fury and fear pulsed through him. Killed by dire wolves. Not an epitaph he could conceive of for his old friend and mentor.
"Twenty, at least," Dana groaned, walking around the flattened grass and tattered clothes staring at her BADD.
"I've detected twenty-nine different blood spatters," said Patricia, consulting her own BADD. "I estimate thirty-six wounded, twenty-three fatally."
Mallory made a punctured tire hiss. Malcolm and Andrea were shaking their heads in denial. Dan regarded the nearby jungle with a grim scowl. Patricia's frown appeared reflective.
"Can you tell with any accuracy when this happened?" Zane asked.
"119 hours ago," said Patricia. "Give or take an hour. They were taken here almost immediately after the conflict with the Guardians."
"If only twenty-three were killed, some of them escaped." Zane was working hard to find something upbeat in their discovery. "Would the wolves have pursued and continued their attack?"
"I'm no zoologist," said Dana, "but I'd guess not. From what I know about wolves, they'd probably stick with their kill. Protect it from competitors, that sort of thing."
"But the crew has been here for about five days." Zane was finding it near-impossible to cling to his sliver of hope.
"They were taken by surprise," said Mallory. "After the attack, they'd organize and the military dudes would make weapons. Especially if old man Horace is in charge. They wouldn't be easy victims next time."
Zane gave his sparring partner a grateful nod.
"In five days they could be fifty or more kilometers from here." Dana was staring with dread at the jungle before them. "It could take us days to catch up with them..." She hugged herself. "Assuming there is anything left of them."
"Right," said Zane. "Knowing that, I think it would be the best idea for you, Dan, Andrea, and Patricia to return to the ship. David and I can track down the Peacemaker crew."
"Hell, yeah," said Mallory. "We can go a lot faster than with these pointy-headed academics slowing us down."
His comment didn't draw any humorous responses from the others.
"It just makes sense to leave some of us at the ship," said Zane. "To make sure at least some of us lives to tell the tale in case things go south in here."
"I would live," said Patricia. "Even if this body were killed."
"Right," said Zane with a small scowl.
They turned back to the wall. It was only two miles away. They could still make out the small dark square that marked the entrance and their ship.
"We'll walk you back," Zane said. "Just in case."
They hadn't gone more than a couple hundred meters when Patricia announced in an eerily calm voice, consulting her BADD: "A group of animals is approaching from the south. Speed, thirty-three KPH. Current distance: five hundred and twenty meters."
Everyone turned to the south. A cluster of dark, swift-moving specks were surging toward them through the tall grass.
"Oh, God," Dana whispered. "Dire wolves."
"Remove your packs," said Zane. "Go full coverage with your suits."
The crew shrugged off their backpacks. To that point, they had been walking with their aug suit hoods and gloves off. Dana tugged uncertainly at her cuffs, her body stiff with panic. Zane helped her unroll the cuffs over her hands and then roll up fabric around her neck up over her head and face – sewn-in yellow-tinted carbyne goggles covering her eyes. In moments they all looked like blue-suited Spidermen.
"Will the suit stop their teeth?" Dana asked in a shaky voice.
"
They can take a direct hit from a fifty-cal," said Mallory. "So I don't figure any damn mutt can bite through them."
"You'll be okay," Zane assured her. "Everyone – form a line a few meters apart – prone position. Fire only forward, never sideways. The rounds can pass through bodies. Stay calm. Make your shots count. Fire at will."
He and Mallory slipped the eight-inch DARPA-Gerber diamond-bladed assault knives from their Planet Packs and placed them in their Parnell suits' tool sheathes. The 21st century and the advent of hyperdrive and matter-antimatter weapons and they still carried combat knives, Zane thought. Some classics never changed.
Zane forced his attention away from the awkward and uncertain postures of his crew and concentrated on the approaching targets, which were now less than two hundred meters away and closing with breathtaking speed.
Zane opened his collapsible scope and zoomed in on the wolves. He registered a moment of shock at their appearance: broad faces and chests, dun-colored, like a hyena-wolf mix. He painted four chests with the precision laser tracker before squeezing and holding down the trigger. The 43 gram tungsten projectiles launched in swift succession at 5200 feet per second with double cracks – first the electrical discharge from the graphene super-capacitor, followed by a sonic boom as it blew past the speed of sound by a five-fold factor. The 16K foot pound energy exceeded that of a fifty caliber rifle, and even with the sophisticated inertial dampening system the recoil was a bitch. The payoff was that a solid hit anywhere on even an animal as large and powerful as these creatures would mean game over.
In a perfect world, all four of Zane's projectiles would've found their marks, but with the dire wolves bounding over and around obstacles, only one went down. Zane painted two more and squeezed the trigger. Crack-crack! Crack-crack! One dropped, another rolled over and came up limping.
The wolves were now one hundred meters away and closing at Usain Bolt speeds. The others were firing in rapid bursts, but not a lot of wolves were falling. The science crew's brief training sessions with kinetic rifles and other weapons weren't cutting it. Even he and Mallory – who had put in a lot more time with conventional firearms than with DAH and laser rifles – were less than stellar.
"SHE rounds?" Mallory rasped.
Zane shook his head. The moment for those had passed. "Too close."
It struck Zane with sudden, chilling certainty that the dire wolves were going to reach them. They were only seconds away from contact. The wolves were either too dumb or ignorant or determined to be deterred by the noise and their falling fellows.
Zane sprang to his feet, yanking the mini-laser from his side-holster. After a sharp glance, Mallory did the same. The wolves were forty meters out, within the effective fifty meter range of the hand lasers. They wouldn't deliver the knockout punch of the DAH rifles, but they could bring a lot of pain and injury to a wide swath of lupine bodies.
The wolves yelped and stumbled or fell, but rather than making them back off, the lasers seemed to light a fire under their charge. Zane snatched up his kinetic rifle – as did Mallory a split-second after him – looking for some sure-fire, pointblank shots, but the wolves veered away from them straight into the ranks of their fellows.
Normally, firing a DAH rifle at bad guys in a crowd would be unthinkable, but in this case his people were wearing PA suits – which could, in theory, render a DAH round non-lethal - and they were uniformly on their backs attempting to fend off the slathering jaws of the hyena-wolves, something that would've been impossible without the suits' added strength.
"Waist high!" Zane gestured with his rifle. "Straight through them!"
Mallory nodded. "Gotcha."
They both kneeled as one and fired in a straight line. The tungsten bullets punched through one, two - three – wolves before lodging in the fourth, which collapsed on Dan Mueller's chest.
Zane enjoyed about one second of triumph before he was blindsided. It was a lot like being clothes-lined in football, except this time his tackler was biting down on his neck with eye-popping force. The world upended and he was staring up at the sky past a snarling mass of fur and one fiercely squinting golden-brown eye. The aug suit shunted extra nanotubes into his neck area, stiffening against the rows of compressing sharp teeth. A force that would've crushed his throat was reduced to the uncomfortable compression of a Jiu-Jitsu chokehold. He was lightheaded but more than capable of counterattack. And tapping out was not an option.
Zane felt for and found the Gerber knife in the sheath belted to his waist. He worked it out past the body pinning him until his arm was free and drove it blindly into the neck or head of the creature on top of him. The hardened steel diamond-coated blade did its thing, sliding through thick muscle and gristle up to its hilt. A startled yelp interrupted the wolf's steady snarl, and its grip on Zane's throat loosened.
Zane yanked the blade out and was preparing for another thrust when his opponent released his throat with a mournful whine and dropped to the ground beside him, legs kicking spasmodically.
Zane shoved to his feet, the power of his suit – now on maximum 5X setting in response to his heart rate and adrenals – propelling him a foot off the ground. A few meters away, Mallory was locked in a strange tug-of-war dance with three dire wolves – one latched onto his right arm, another on his left thigh, and the third clamped onto his groin - the aug suit spoiling their attempted dismembering.
Mallory's snarls were every bit as loud as the wolves', and far more colorful.
"Oh, you want a piece of me, motherfucker?" Mallory sledgehammered a fist down on the head of the wolf chomping on his groin. The wolf appeared to slump, but didn't let go. "Oh, you fucking liked that? Here's some more!" His fist slammed down into the broad head again. The wolf released his groin and staggered back.
Zane charged in, plunging his knife into the neck of the wolf clinging to Mallory's right arm and ripping its slumping body free. He snatched his friend's bloody knife from the ground by a wolf body and handed it to him.
"Thanks, buddy," Mallory grunted.
Mallory wasted no time in jamming the blood-stained blade into the back of the head of the Dire wolf attached to his leg and kicking its twitching body away.
They had gained the attention of the other wolves, which had everyone pinned except Patricia, who was fighting a pitched battle on her feet with a startling array of knife thrusts and strikes while Dana, Andrea, and Dan feebly pummeled the wolves attempting to savage them. Zane and Mallory charged, a triumphant war cry – more of a hoarse scream – bursting from Mallory's lips.
The remaining seven or eight dire wolves backed off the fallen crewmembers and circled warily. Zane thought he saw something change in their golden eyes – perhaps a dawning recognition that they were facing powerful, aggressive predators in their own right. Mallory snatched up a kinetic rifle. The remaining wolves burst into flight. He popped off a couple of rounds and one wolf fell. He lowered the rifle.
Dana and Andrea sat up with muffled groans. Patricia sheathed her knife and helped them to their feet. Dan pushed up on one knee, chest heaving.
Zane and Mallory noticed Malcolm first, lying several meters away in an ominous patch of blood. Zane's stomach clenched. There shouldn't be any blood.
"Oh, shit," said Mallory.
They walked over, following a trail of blood. Malcolm lay with his arms and legs bent at unnatural angles. His head, partly covered by the suit, was attached by a thin strand of muscle. . Dana made a retching sound and hastily tore off her head cover, falling to her knees in the grass behind them.
"Must not have got his headpiece on right," Mallory murmured. "No way they could get it apart if it was locked in."
Patricia was regarding Malcolm with what Zane thought was an odd mixture of puzzlement, curiosity, and grave assessment.
"Malcolm has suffered irreversible brain damage," she said. "His NDs are attempting to maintain critical body functions. Should I instruct them to continue?"
"No," said Zane. Malcolm's disap
proval of their mission was replaying in his head. If he'd taken his offer to fly to the Journeyer he'd be alive right now. Zane pushed those nauseous thoughts aside. "We'll take his body back to the ship for preservation and a proper funeral."
They gathered their weapons and strapped on their backpacks. Zane and Mallory tied rope from their packs under either of Malcolm's arms and started dragging him back to the Cheyenne. The crew followed in wary silence. Zane had trouble sorting his thoughts. From a planet-killing mission to fighting Dire wolves. It was like trying to connect two disjointed dreams.
Back in the ship, Zane and Mallory lowered Malcolm's body into a suspended animation canister (SAC). The preservation process was automatic, beginning with anti-freeze protein infusion and ending with pulsating waves of colder and colder temps. Normally, suspended animation was a three-day process - DARPA had mastered suspended animation two decades ago - but in this case Malcolm was not going to be revived. SACs played a dual role of preserving life during a long voyage and as a method of body preservation.
Zane and Mallory recharged their Parnell suits - which took their energy directly from the body in the field – loaded up extra capacitors and ammo, and scavenged food from the other packs.
Zane wasn't surprised when Patricia insisted on joining him and Mallory. And every objection he could think of fizzled before he could offer it.
"Fine by me," said Mallory. "She handled herself as good as you or me out there, Cap. No clue how she pulled it off, but she was a damn cool customer out there."
"I studied recordings and literature of hyperkinetic rifle and Parnell Augment Suit techniques, knife combat, the skeletal structure of dire wolves, and human-animal non-firearm conflicts where knives or other weapons were utilized."
Mallory stared at her. "When did you do all this?"
"After we encountered the area where the Peacemaker crew was attacked." She smiled at their expressions. "I'm pretty good at multitasking."
Chapter 7
THEY WERE TWENTY KILOMETERS and six hours from the ship, and the day showed few signs of fading. From the angle of the sun, Patricia estimated the season to be early July. The Peacemaker crew's trail continued west, according to their compasses. It turned out Animus had a magnetic field similar to Earth's, though Patricia didn't need that reference since she carried coordinates of their location and progress in her head.
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