The next two drops went perfectly. Fedic began to feel confidant in the organizational skills of the Lyceum brothers. Perhaps it was part of a personality that studied a wide range of things, but the brothers seemed to understand the complexity the evacuation would need when it came. Fedic found it reassuring that the brothers would be the ones to organize the Sumerians for the evacuation fleet.
As the drops at the bunkers continued, AldSanni came to a conclusion of his own. He would stay on at Ba’Regan and help PraktuParBrahmad with the planning for the evacuation. Fedic wasn’t really surprised. Uruk was his home planet, and this was where he could do the most good for his people.
As the Recon Maiden approached the last bunker, Fedic was starting to think his job here was done. The sub-space radios were now being transferred from bunker to bunker across the planet, and all of Uruk would soon be covered. The bases with stores of extra food or supplies were smuggling them to those in need. The last outposts that might still hold surviving Sumerians were being contacted, and the occupants brought into the bunkers.
A centralized and networked underground, that’s what had been needed, and by all the saints, that’s what was happening! thought Fedic triumphantly.
The last thing he needed to do now was transfer AldSanni back to Ba’Regan. After that he would hide out in RockHaven until he could arrange a way off the planet. If the Sumerians at RockHaven were prepared to take the risk, they could use the Recon Maiden in support of the resistance until the evacuation ships arrived. Fedic would have to talk to AldSanni and PraktuParBrahmad about that.
The last night of his mission began with a faint silver glow creeping across the eastern horizon. It was clear the small Uruk moon would be putting in an appearance in the next day or two. The moon was almost stationary while the planet spun beneath it, and made one slow circuit of Uruk in a little over twenty days.
Fedic was pleased it had kept its face hidden while the Recon Maiden had been traveling to the bunkers. It was a simple matter now to deliver AldSanni to PraktuParBrahmad’s bunker at Ba’Regan.
Fedic lifted off in the early hours of darkness, and delivered AldSanni to the main base of the Lyceum brothers well before midnight. He was touched when they thanked him for his part in the organization of the resistance, but was not inclined to tarry. After finalizing a few things with PraktuParBrahmad, he decided to press on for RockHaven.
It felt as if a weight had been lifted off his shoulders as Fedic eased the Recon Maiden out of one of the boulevards, and into the countryside. For now he was a man without a mission, and he soaked up the delightful sense of peace and freedom.
The ship arrowed quietly over the landscape, and Fedic started humming to himself. The course to RockHaven was a straightforward one, and there was little for him to do. Until ten minutes later, when it was a different story.
A flash of light streaked past on one side of the Recon Maiden, and an enormous fireball hit the ground ahead of the ship. Fedic veered sharply right, then cursed himself for doing so. The fireball had to be from the Reaper ships orbiting Uruk. By reacting to the attack, he had confirmed he was a manned craft, and not some sort of natural phenomena.
Fedic knew what had happened. The Reaper ships had picked up something, some energy signature he hadn’t been aware the ship was discharging. They had done that despite the fact he was camouflaged and cruising quietly at treetop level. Mostly he was annoyed with himself. It had taken a bit too long to get the resistance organized, long enough for the Reaper ships to grow suspicious about the faint traces of his movements.
Another bolt slammed into the ground on the ship’s immediate right.
The only thing protecting Fedic now was the atmosphere. It was hard to pinpoint his position through so many layers of atmosphere over such a wide range of temperatures. He wondered if he could outrun the fireballs, and dismissed the idea.
Rockhaven was too far away, and besides, he didn’t want to lead the Reaper ships to the Sumerian presence there. He couldn’t run, but could he hide?
The ship’s scanners showed flat to rolling countryside, and no natural features he could hide behind. The scanners also showed no sign of ground ships. That was probably why the Reaper ships were trying to fry him from orbit. They were too impatient, he reflected dourly. Sending a couple of ground ships to track him would have had more certain results.
The scanners showed another fireball above him, coming in fast, but to one side. Then another, almost directly overhead. Fedic eased the ship sideways from under it. So far he was staying ahead of the bombardment. Then he checked again, and saw double rows of four fireballs appear overhead.
He had a bad feeling about this. He eased the ship into one of the few safe positions left to him, then checked the scanners again.
For a moment he just stared at the countless points of light, like stars in the sky. The slag-spawn Invardii were blanket-bombing him! He set the Recon Maiden for an immediate landing, and dived for the g-webbing.
He barely had time to slap the ‘secure’ panel behind him on the wall, and feel the webbing tighten about him, when the first bolt hit. It was like going over a waterfall in a barrel – at least, it was how he imagined such idiocy must feel.
The Recon Maiden was solidly built, but it jerked and shook in the air as hit after hit exploded around it. The countryside wheeled past crazily as the ship spun end over end, until a fireball ripped open one side of the hull.
Fedic felt the stomach-lurching sensation of free-fall, and then a giant hand gripped him fiercely as the g-webbing tried to stop him hurtling the length of the damaged vessel. The ship slammed into the ground, kicking up a fountain of dislodged debris.
When Fedic came to he didn’t know how long he’d been out. The lighting wasn’t working, and everything was eerily quiet. It seemed the salvos from the skies had stopped.
He slammed his hand on the panel behind him and the g-webbing retracted. The floor under him now lay at an angle of almost forty-five degrees, and he slid more than walked down the sloping floor. Fedic pulled himself to the great tear in the hull where the side of the ship had been shot away. Then he stepped outside, looking up at the night sky.
There were no more points of light overhead, nothing growing rapidly larger as it fell through the atmosphere toward him. His heart slowed to a more reasonable rate, and he leaned against the hull of the ship to catch his breath.
Several of his ribs hurt, and he did a quick self-check to see what injuries he had sustained. His mind began to clear, and he started to work out what his next step should be.
His night vision was settling in, but it was black out there. The faint silver of the Uruk moon barely tinged the sky with light. He knew he had night goggles in his backpack, and the first thing he would do was find them.
There wasn’t much food left on the ship, so that was going to be a major problem too. He dug out his night goggles by feel, and then he saw what a mess the ship was in. The medcenter no longer worked, but he had a kit in his backpack that had something for the bruising, and pain killers for his ribs.
He made his way to one of the chairs, now almost on its back, and rested up for a bit. While he was there he began to think about walking out to RockHaven. He figured it was still four days away on foot.
He would need more food, and he would have to locate and treat water as he traveled through the countryside. Perhaps a look outside in the darkness might find some useful items that had been thrown clear of the ship.
Adjusting the goggles, he began his search at the rent in the hull and scouted in ever-widening circles. The ship lay among scattered trees, and looking back he saw that it had broken one off half way up its trunk. The shattered stump looked out of place among the others.
Fedic was still a little shaky, but he took his time, making his way slowly through the lightly wooded areas and over open ground. He’d just passed his starting point on the third circuit when he heard a faint sound. He knew instantly that whatever had crushed tho
se dead leaves underfoot was very big, and very close.
There wasn’t supposed to be anything that big stalking him on Uruk. It had to be something that had escaped from the game parks near Ba’Regan. Fedic continued to walk forward, giving every impression he hadn’t heard a thing, until he was level with the tear in the hull. Then he spun left and sprinted for the ship.
He was most of the way there when something hit him a tremendous blow in the middle of his back. His feet left the ground, and he flew the remaining distance before slamming through the jagged rent.
There was a solid thump as something collided with the hull, followed by a furious scrabbling sound and some rapid, gurgled breathing. Then the noise was gone.
Fedic picked himself up off the sloping deck of the ship and flexed his back experimentally. Nothing seemed to be damaged. He took the backpack off and looked at the four neat holes punched into it, like the spread of a hand. He spread his own fingers as wide as they would go, and tried to place them on the holes in his backpack.
The thing outside was huge, it’s digits much bigger than his own, and they ended in claws. Fedic moved quietly to the wall, near the tear in the hull, and listened. Among the night sounds of the forest there were little hesitations, pockets of silence that moved through the forest around him.
Godsdammit! There was more than one of them. Even with his weapons he wouldn’t be able to get them all. It would be a race against his own tiredness if they followed him across the countryside toward RockHaven, waiting for him to make a mistake.
They were big brutes, and that had probably saved him. The one that attacked him had not been able to get through the hole in the side of the ship easily. It probably meant he was safe inside the ship, but outside they would be too big to stop with the weapons he had on hand.
The only consolation was he did have sub-space radio, so he could call on AldSanni for help, but what could the Sumerians do? At the best they would be several days away on foot, and they could be set upon by another group of these things on the way to him.
He could call Prometheus and have a Javelin here within a day or two, but how would it get past the Invardii blockade? It was starting to look like a very tricky problem, whichever way he looked at it.
CHAPTER 20
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The shuttle bucked hard, and Battrod almost lost control of it. The pilot’s chair dipped and swiveled on its dampeners, taking up the worst of the maneuver.
“Ease up a bit,” said Bosun, hanging in the g-webbing behind him. “Even if the Reaper ships did see us, they’ll take a while to get here.”
Battrod backed off the shuttle’s energy coupling a little, and the temperature readings on the heat shields climbed out of the red. He called up a map of Uruk from the data base in the computer, and let the scanners lock it onto the contours below them.
The shuttle had been dropped off in a fast by-pass of the planet by one of the Javelins, and was now plummeting through the upper atmosphere. It was heading for an agricultural area on a broad river plain, overgrown after the invasion by the Invardii armada. The rescue team would follow the river down to a small sea, that lay somewhere ahead of them.
Battrod adjusted the controls, and the red cross on the map, showing their impact point, shifted across onto the blue area on the map. He checked again to be sure. The shuttle would enter the sea just offshore from RockHaven.
“Glad it’s not me piloting this thing,” said Leana, hanging in the webbing next to Bosun.
“Know what you mean,” drawled Kanuk, further back in the shuttle, and flanked by two more Hud pilots. “Damn shuttles fly like a lump of snotburgin’ pig iron.”
The other Hud pilots chortled away in their harnesses.
What is it with language, thought Bosun. The old mining engineer from Finch’s original team had become a mentor for the young Hud pilots. The way people from other planets used language fascinated him. If the Mersa weren’t trying out every Human analogy and metaphor they came across, the Hud pilots were making up words just for the hell of it.
He kept forgetting how young the pilots were. Some of them were only ten or twelve in terms of their lives on Aqua Regis, but that was maybe eighteen or twenty in terms of Earth years. Their occasionally ultra-fast metabolism was strange in Human terms. It was a survival system that had evolved to protect them from a magnetically unshielded planet and torrent of solar radiation, from the moment they were born.
Still, if they had taken to calling him “the old man”, he could think of them as overactive teenage super pilots.
Battrod made the last adjustment to their course, and the shuttle flared out just above the surface of the sea. He held the nose up until they stalled out, but the shuttle still slammed into the water at considerable speed.
It wasn’t built for water landings, and the nose dug in immediately. That flung the passengers about in the g-webbing. Then the shuttle was descending through a watery gloom, full of hissings and cracklings as the heat in the shield bubbled away on the other side of the shuttle walls.
“The pig-iron brick has landed,” said Battrod dryly.
The shuttle settled to the floor of the shallow sea. If any Reaper ships had noticed the descent of the shuttle, they wouldn’t be able to find it now. The hull had cooled to the temperature of the sea, and the shuttle’s systems had been cut to a minimum.
Bosun was the first to free himself from his g-webbing harness.
“Right-ho people,” he said, “listen up. First thing we do is eat. Enjoy your last decent meal, because from now on it’s going to be survival rations.
“Once you’ve finished eating, double-check everything in your kit. Then we meet up front in the pilot module, and go through the plan one last time. We’ll surface when it’s good and dark. The RockHaven Sumerians will be expecting us.”
It was half way to midnight when Battrod reversed the magnetic polarity of the hull. Pushing gently against the magnetic field of the planet, the neutrally buoyant shuttle freed itself from the glutinous mud of the bottom. It rose slowly to the surface.
They didn’t have long to wait. After a short time bobbing around on a largely calm sea, they heard the rapping of a signal on the shuttle’s hull.
“That’s the one,” said Bosun, tapping Battrod on the shoulder to tell him to open the cargo bay doors.
The shuttle wasn’t made for towing, especially backwards, and it heaved and yawed behind the launch until they reached RockHaven. The hydraulic docks just managed to lift the shuttle out of the water and roll it away under the overhanging cliffs. It would be safe there while they looked for Fedic. Then they got some sleep.
The rescue team were briefed by the RockHaven Sumerians at first light. The Lyceum bunkers around the planet were now in constant contact by sub-space radio, and had consolidated their position. Along with a few remote outposts where the residents were still holding out, there was a population of close to a million waiting to be evacuated off the occupied planet.
The thickset Hud pilots would carry formidable weaponry for the mission, along with survival kits on their backs, and they were going to need the weapons. The Sumerians had confirmed that predators freed from the game parks were still active in the area. In fact they were becoming a problem right across Uruk.
The game parks had been very popular with the people, and the more fearsome the animals contained behind the sophisticated enclosure fences the better. That thrill-seeking attitude was now coming back to haunt them, and the numbers of the ferocious creatures were on the rise.
It didn’t help that the Sumerians had eliminated every large native carnivore when they populated the land masses some 8000 years ago. The new predators had no competition.
Bosun checked the positioning system he would carry. As long as the rescue party was within range of the shuttle stored at RockHaven, it would work fine. After that they would have to use maps drawn up by the RockHaven scouts. All the global systems had been destroyed by the Reaper ships.
Bosun had a fix on Fedic’s last known position, and that was the point they would head for. Fedic had stayed in contact for a day and a half after the Recon Maiden had been downed by the Reaper ships, but then his sub-space connection had gone dead.
The RockHaven community saw them off a short time later, and they left under an early morning sun. Fedic’s position would normally have been a few day’s travel away, but Bosun and the team hoped to travel fast. A maglev sled would take the weight of supplies, and rest anyone who was tiring.
They settled into a pattern fairly quickly. Kanuk insisted on taking the lead, pointing to the survival instincts he had honed in the wilderness of Aqua Regis, and Battrod and Leana brought up the rear. The other two pilots flanked Bosun, who was amused to realize they were protecting him. They must think he wouldn’t be much good in a fight.
If they meant compared to them, he mused, they were probably right. The Hud pilots were half a head shorter than Bosun, but much broader, even though the older engineer had always been a powerful man.
The open fields weren’t a problem – they hadn’t had long enough to get completely overgrown – and there were still walking tracks and roads that had once carried farm machinery. The first few hours were largely covered at a trot.
The forests were another matter. Kept as reserves and parks they contained big trees, and were already reverting to wilderness. Squat broadleaf species sat in continuous rows, and downy conifers – something like a deciduous larch on Earth, thought Bosun – soared into the air around them.
Kanuk was jumpy in the forests. There were times when he motioned the team into kneeling positions, with weapons at the ready. His movements would become quicker, almost jerky, as his system moved into a hyper-alert state.
The first predator attack occurred after they had stopped for a brief midday meal. That was when Bosun learned how far the smell of hot food traveled if they were not very, very careful.
The others saw the long, lizard-like creature launch itself out of one of the conifers, and sail toward Kanuk’s back. They raised a collective yell of alarm, but Kanuk was already turning, his launcher held tightly across his chest. He’d heard the tree move as the creature launched itself above him, and he came around with the heavy metal slugs already spitting from his launcher. His movements were a blur as he sighted and fired.
Invardii Box Set 2 Page 12