Tritium Gambit

by Erik Hyrkas

  Chapter 12. Miranda

  I didn’t want to leave Max behind, but there really was no choice. Getting killed or recaptured wouldn’t complete the assignment, and John needed my help. He was clearly still groggy from the mechanical spider bites and I had to drag him along toward the rear of the ship. I knew that Stellar Command ships were required to have sufficient escape dinghies to hold the crew and passengers, but because this craft had been stolen from a repair dock, it might not have all of its equipment.

  When we passed the first door in our escape from the holding area, I stopped and asked John, “Can you stand on your own?”

  John nodded. “I’m fine.”

  When I let go of him, he listed a little to the right but managed to stay on his feet. I kicked the door panel, smashing the keypad, then ripped away the debris and started yanking on wires, looking for the correct ones. I hotwired the power into the door’s motor to force it shut. It would take considerable force to get it open again, which would buy us time.

  “Let’s go,” I said. I grabbed John by the arm and led him toward the holding bay. When we entered, I noticed immediately that one of the dinghies was missing. Fortunately, there was still one remaining.

  “Raise your hands in the air,” a digital voice commanded.

  One of the dozen-eyed robots was pointing an arm in our direction, scary because of the proton pulse cannon mounted on that arm. John stumbled and fell to the side. The robot targeted the sheriff because of his abrupt motion, but the machine held its fire.

  I jumped forward the instant the cannon was not aimed at me, crossing the distance to the robot in a fraction of a second. Unfortunately, that was all the time the robot needed to react and it rammed a metal fist into my gut and drove me to the ground.

  I grabbed hold of the robot’s arm as I fell backward. The instant I hit the floor, I tightened my hold on its arm and used my legs to launch it over my head and toward the wall. It landed with a thud.

  I rolled to my feet. The robot recovered quickly and took aim at me, and I darted to one side as it fired. There was a sharp sizzling sound and I looked back to see John grasping the robot. The robot fell to the ground, the lights on its panels dark.

  “How did you do that?” I asked.

  He had a faint smile. “Luck.”

  There was a banging on the door I had sealed and then shots were fired.

  “We need to get in that dinghy, now,” I said.

  As I helped the sheriff inside, three robots entered the holding bay. I climbed inside the small craft, slammed the door, and hit the eject button to send us tumbling into space.

  You don’t so much fly a dinghy as ride it. They are programmed to require no piloting skills and to find the nearest landing zone, which happened to be the planet Zeta-Terra. We were moving toward the planet’s atmosphere at supersonic speeds.

  When we hit the air, the heat shields kicked in and the portholes were blocked. Unfortunately, dinghies don’t have gravitational dampeners. The designers also expected you to be buckled up, and so we were pancaked against the back wall of the craft. I never get motion sickness when flying a plane, but I always have problems with other people steering, even in cars. If I wasn’t driving, I would get ill. I fought with the revolt in my stomach as we plummeted toward the ground, now fervently wishing we had strapped in before I hit eject.

  The inertial dampeners that deployed moments before impact were enough to throw us toward the front of the dinghy. Blue rigid foam instantly filled the cabin at the moment of contact with ground, protecting us partially, but my insides still got further scrambled.

  I felt us skid along the planet’s surface for several seconds, and then we slammed into something hard that finally stopped us. The foam dissipated.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  John gave a groan that I took to mean he was fine.

  A hatch on the dinghy opened and sunlight streamed in. I blinked a few times, and when my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw that we were in a jungle. The trees weren’t normal by Earth standards, however. These were giant woody vines covered in small green vines. The largest plants I could see were over a dozen feet thick. The nose of the dinghy was embedded in the trunk of one of the large vines.

  I started digging around the cabin for supplies. I found a first aid kit, four blankets, a popup shelter, and a bundle of rations. What we needed was a weapon, but apparently nobody thought to include that in the survival kit.

  “We need to get to higher ground,” John said.

  I noticed he had burn marks on his shoulder from where he came in contact with the robot. I pulled some heavy gauze and tape and started working on his injury. He had several scrapes too, but he pushed me away.

  “We need to get to higher ground, now!”

  “What will that do for us?” I asked.

  “We’re on a remote planet with no way to get off. Our only ticket out of here is the Phoenix we just left. We need to get up high enough to see it land and then try to take Tyler by surprise.”

  “For all we know, he’ll land on the other side of the planet. Hell, if he lands 100 miles from here, we’d never know it,” I said.

  He nodded. “I didn’t say our chances were good. I’m simply saying that’s the only chance we have of not being the last part-humans on this planet when the ship leaves.”

  “Fine. The ship was moving toward the planet for entry when we ejected, and so it stands to reason it might land near here. It is not likely that it will land close enough we can witness it, but it is possible.”

  I helped the sheriff up, and we stepped out of the dinghy and into the jungle.

  “With your ability to leap, you should be able to get up higher much faster than I can. I’ll wait down here and keep a lookout for danger,” he said.

  I didn’t argue because he was right. I could jump from the top of one woody vine to another easily. Trying to help him would only slow me down. I left the sheriff where we had been standing and bounded and leapt and swung on vines until I landed on the top of a large leaf several feet above the ground.

  A plume of white smoke was trailing behind an object falling from the sky. I pointed toward it and called down to the sheriff, “I think I see them! It looks like they might come down about ten miles from us.”

  “Great,” he called back. “Unfortunately, that’s probably not going to be accurate enough for us. We can cross ten miles, given a bit of time, but because of how thick this jungle is, if we’re off by five-hundred feet, we’ll simply walk by the craft.”

  I jumped down and landed lightly next to him. “Leave that to me.”

  I hopped back into the cockpit of the dinghy and ripped the console open. When not in stealth mode, all Stellar Command ships had standard positioning and avoidance beacons. If Tyler had been using stealth mode, I wouldn’t have been able to see him enter the atmosphere; but he probably didn’t see a need to waste all that fuel when there wouldn’t be anybody who cared if he was landing on the planet.

  As long as he didn’t shut down the ship, I could track him. I used medical bandages to hold wires together, eventually hacking the dinghy’s collision avoidance system to tell us where the nearest ship was.

  “Ready,” I said and jumped out of the cabin.

  John was holding a stick that he had managed to sharpen with a hunk of metal from the ship. He tucked the metal into his pocket.

  “Lead on,” he said.

  The way through the jungle of vines was slow. On my own, I could have traversed the distance to the ship much easier, but the sheriff could not keep up that pace and so we trudged through the dense foliage as best we could.