The caliban opened its mouth. The toothy, gaping maw filled his entire visor.
But then the thunder was right on top of them.
A mountain moved in front of the spinning sky.
The caliban looked up as it was engulfed in shadow and let out a pathetic squeak.
The mountain suddenly bent over and snatched up the wounded caliban with a webbed appendage the size of a house. Claws as big as constructor blades dug trenches through the ground, throwing up a cloud of dust that rolled over Jackson, blinding him.
There was an awful crunching sound high above as the mountain bit down on the squealing caliban. Blood fell like rain.
Blood and gore and dirt. It buried him. He knew he should move. He needed to get to the dropship. But that thought was far away, like someone calling from a large distance, and then everything faded to darkness.
Chapter 18
It was the rhythmic throbbing in his finger that woke him up. Every time his heart beat, it was like a little jolt of lightning.
Jackson slowly came to. His shoulder hurt. His head felt like someone had been at it with a ball-peen hammer. When he cracked open his eyes, all he could see were a few points of light because his visor was mostly covered in dirt. Gradually, he was able to focus through the gaps, but all he could see on the other side was a cloudy sky.
How much time had passed? He didn’t know. Was the big one gone? The world wasn’t shaking, so probably. Where was everybody? And then he remembered the sound of the transport taking off.
His throat was dry, and his voice rasped as he said, “This is Jackson Rook from the Tar Heel. Come in.” He craned his neck over, found the drinking straw in his breather, and took a sip. The water was cold and wonderful. Thank goodness that still worked. “Come in. Anybody?”
His radio was silent. His HUD was cracked. He was alone and trapped on a brutal alien world. Pilots don’t panic. That had been drilled into him when he’d been in training, and he repeated that mantra in his head until it came true.
When he tried to move, he was reminded that his exo was busted. Better it than his bones. The emergency release ring had slipped from its place as he scrambled around with his fingers trying to reach it. It was unbuckle from the exo or be stuck to the immobile frame until something came along and ate him.
He found the ring and pulled. The buckles around that arm released and he was able to wiggle it free. His first instinct was to immediately reach for his other arm to free it, but there could be animals close by…Especially considering how many edible bodies were lying around. So he slowly reached for his helmet and wiped the dirt off his visor so he could see better.
The big monster had kicked up so much dust that he’d been buried beneath a couple centimeters. The concealment had probably saved his life.
He shifted slightly to view the ravine and found himself surrounded by wet clumps of mud that smooshed beneath his fingers. Mud made from congealing caliban blood. But he was alone at the bottom of the ravine, and so he reached for his other arm, found the release, and pulled it.
A throb of pain squeezed his head when he sat up. He tried to relax until the pain subsided. Good lord, that one hurt. How long had he been out?
As he freed his legs, he noted a thin dark smoke trail rising into the sky. Jackson rolled over, got to a knee, looked, and listened. But didn’t sense anything coming to murder him.
He took stock of his injuries. Severe headache. Possibly a concussion. Shoulder in a lot of pain, but he could still move it. Trigger finger broken. He didn’t dare pull off his gloves to check, but it wasn’t tacky inside so the bone hadn’t broken through. Raj had smart weave, which stiffened a bit on impact. Between that padding and the exo limbs taking most of the hit, he’d been spared from any really serious injury.
Trying to make zero noise, he carefully crawled up the slope of the gully. When he peeked above the top edge, he saw the smoke was coming from one of the harvester vehicles. There were lots of bodies strewn about, including the dead caliban. In the middle of the harvesters’ work area was a new depression. It was huge, like somebody had been digging a pond. Until Jackson realized there was a tanker flattened at the bottom, which meant that was a footprint left by the big one.
Jackson spotted his Wakal lying in the grass just a few meters away. He slowly started toward it, but then heard a low rumble and a chuff. He stopped and turned toward the sound.
Fifteen meters away a caliban was gorging on a harvester. The man was headless. And as Jackson watched, the caliban bit into and wrenched one of the man’s arms off. It chomped the arm a few times, then gulped it down.
Jackson slowly lowered himself below the grass at the edge of the gully’s lip and held there. Holy hell, why hadn’t he stayed up in the orbital? Bushey had been right. He should have asked if Jane wanted to go swimming.
The caliban made another wet chomping sound, then something snapped. Probably a bone.
Jackson swallowed. Blew out a breath.
And then a second caliban exited the woods on the far side of the clearing. It walked down to a body, sniffed it, then began to tear off a leg.
Lovely, Jackson thought. There was a lot of meat here, and that probably meant more caliban buddies would be along to enjoy the carrion buffet. And if it wasn’t more caliban, it would be another one of Swindle’s delightful denizens. As thrilling as this nature show was, he just couldn’t stay.
But he needed more than sticks and stones for defense in this environment. He needed a gun. And one that didn’t draw the hordes of hell to you. The Wakal’s pneumatic bolts seemed to be quiet enough to do just that. He needed that Wakal. And so he nudged himself up until he could just see the closest caliban. The gun was right there, but so was the caliban. The animal wasn’t nearly as big as the one that had swatted him, but it was still the size of a horse. And Jackson had seen how quick they were. If it saw him, it would be on him in a flash.
The caliban tore at the man’s exo, trying to get to the tasty soft body inside. It moved to get a better position, ripped at the exo with its front claws and its mouth. It yanked again and turned its back toward Jackson.
That was his chance. Now! He pushed himself up and over the lip of the gully.
The caliban suddenly rose up as if alerted to something.
Jackson froze.
The caliban looked over at its buddy across the way. It too was staring into the forest. The two caliban held their alerted stances. Meanwhile Jackson lay there like a dead fish, right out in the open. And then the second caliban dipped its head back to his meal. The caliban next to Jackson waited a moment longer, then went back to prying open the exo.
Jackson took a breath, then reached out as far as he could, his heart beating with great big booms. He touched the stock of the gun, softly closed his hand around it, and began to slowly inch back toward the gulley.
The caliban stopped and titled its head.
Jackson froze again. Waited.
The caliban listened for a while, then turned back to its food.
Jackson began to move again, sliding the rifle along, nice and quiet.
Except the caliban stopped and turned its head directly toward Jackson. Blood was dripping from its jaws.
Jackson yanked the gun the rest of the way, and dove-rolled-slid down the grassy side of the gulley.
Above him the caliban chuffed, cried out, then marched over.
Jackson hit the bottom and spied a patch of tall, puffy grass next to a boulder. He scrambled in, pressed his back against the rock, and held perfectly still.
The caliban leaned out over the lip of the ravine, blocking the sun. It sniffed. And sniffed again.
Keep moving. There’s plenty of food right there. It’s not going anywhere.
The predator’s shadow moved across the base of the gully. Jackson put his unbroken finger on the trigger and got ready to start blasting. Except then there was some kind of barking. At least that’s what it sounded like. The caliban rumbled, then its shadow
disappeared as it darted away.
Jackson waited. Counted slowly to thirty. Then used the gun’s muzzle to part the puffy grass. He expected to see death staring down at him, but it was clear. He looked around to see if he was in view of anything else, but it appeared his moment had come.
And so he crawled out, rose to a low crouch, and began to move away from the feast, quietly as he could. Except when he tried to walk, there was a noise. Jackson froze. Listened. He took another quiet step, and then another short clacky one. One of the protective leg plates on the environment suit Warlord had given him had come loose.
He cursed under his breath, turned, and raised his Wakal, expecting to see the horned face of a caliban appear above the lip of the gulley. He waited for a few maddening heartbeats, ready to launch sharpened metal bolts at whatever came, telling himself to aim for the eye, because that had seemed to work a bit. But nothing showed. And then he wondered if it had circled around.
His heart raced, and he swung the Wakal around behind him, but all was clear. He breathed a sigh of relief, then examined his suit, found the offending piece that was clacking and held it fast with his free hand.
He started walking.
A shadow passed over the ground. Jackson spun to face his attacker, but the shadow was from one of the long-tailed Swindle birds soaring overhead.
There were lots of valuable supplies abandoned up above—comms, provisions, weapons—but from the barking and chuffing, more awful things had shown up to fight over the corpses. And that meant he needed to get as far from here as possible, before one of the losers who got chased away came looking for something else to eat.
Jackson needed to get to cover and fast, so he followed the gulley. It was clear that water sometimes ran here because the bottom was like an exposed creek bed. He avoided the mud, and a minute or two later reached the woods’ edge. There was an opening in the thick brush, like a little portal to the dark forest beyond. He slipped through it and into the shadows.
Twenty or thirty meters later, the ravine became so choked with vines and brush that moving at all was hard. So he climbed out of the gully and found that while the poofy trees up top were tall, the brush below them was thin.
Having put some distance between himself and the caliban feeding grounds, he decided he needed to stop and take stock of what he had to work with. The HUD used to have infrared, but it appeared it was now broken, and so he carefully scanned the area in a 360 visual. Remembering the kinsella, he also looked up.
He appeared safe for the moment, so he tried to call up data in the helmet, but it was busted. No infrared. A small amount of water. No food. No commlink. The visor had a big crack in it, but at least it was still filtering air. There was no headset assistant available, which meant no directions and no map. The wristband he’d been given had taken a hit, but hopefully it was still transmitting, and someone on Big Town would see he was moving. He dropped the mag and function checked the Wakal. It was fine, but there were only seven bolts left in the magazine.
And the atmosphere here was caustic, so that was a pressing concern. The air quality meter was still working, but the air here was code orange. Not immediately fatal, but it would be if he breathed it long enough. There was plenty of oxygen to work with, but the problem was all the other stuff. If his scrubber ran out of juice, he’d be dead shortly after. The battery was at ninety-five percent, but he had no real context of how long that meant in practical terms. Hours? Days? But what were the odds of one man surviving on Swindle for days? Something would eat him long before the battery ran down.
He was alone. Well, maybe not.
“Fifi?”
Sure enough, Jane’s little friend moved inside his pocket. She made a happy ping noise in the affirmative.
“Can you reach Jane?”
Fifi’s no sound was a sad chirp.
Jackson nodded. Fifi was so tiny she only had a short-range transmitter. When Jane talked to her from the sky, it was relayed through his comms. He supposed if a caliban attacked, he could sic Fifi on its eye. That might not save him, but it would be great revenge on the beast that ate his body.
He set about repairing what he could. He used the wire from the exo’s emergency release and twisted it around the plate that had come free to secure it. No more clacking. The air was poison, but he thought a brief exposure might be worth it if he could fix the comms. And so he removed his helmet.
The air was humid and had a definite bite to it. It also had a sharp smell. He quickly examined the helmet but saw part of the exterior had been bashed. The hardware where the antenna attached was totally trashed. However, what was left might just be enough.
He quickly reattached the antenna, then put the helmet back on and sucked in filtered air. The HUD still wouldn’t boot, but from the noise it appeared he had comms.
“SOS. This is Jackson Rook of the Tar Heel. I was abandoned on the surface of Swindle and need evac. Can anyone hear me? SOS.”
Still nothing.
“Fifi? Can you tell if I have a wide connection?”
Sad chime.
He flipped through the available channels, then stopped. There was nothing but static.
“Okay, Fifi, I need you to keep trying. Let me know when you connect.”
No comms, no problem, he lied to himself. There was still a chance. He just needed to backtrack their trail until he could find the mountain base. Except they’d done that via exos, which were far, far faster. But he was burning daylight, so Jackson set out.
Two hours later, he began to wonder how he’d gotten turned around, because he figured he should have already reached the kinsella by now. He was following what he thought had to be the Warlord’s T-bolt tracks, but the plants here were so resilient that they had immediately begun to spring back into shape.
Nothing on this planet was helpful. All the plants were confusing and there were no landmarks. Pilots from real militaries got survival training. They learned how to evade and navigate in hostile terrain. But Jackson hadn’t come from a real military. He’d come from Gloss. Their army had been a bunch of desperate, starving rebels. And he hadn’t even been a guerilla. His training had consisted of brain surgery, getting bonded to a piece of heavy machinery, and then being tossed into the deep end. Any dead-reckoning skills he had were picked up by observing his squishy, unarmored comrades.
A storm began to gather and darken the sky. But he pushed on until he came across a huge scat on the trail. A nice fresh load had attracted a bunch of green millipede-looking things. He skirted around the manure and suddenly spotted the long side of some creature maybe thirty meters ahead. In fact, there were three of them.
They weren’t caliban. They weren’t kinsella. They weren’t anything he’d seen so far. Their backs were at least a meter tall. They had mottled hides of short fur or feathers. He couldn’t tell from this distance. And they were rooting around on the forest floor.
He didn’t know if they were predator or prey. But he was pretty sure there was a good chance they might charge him with their short, curved tusks. And he didn’t want any of that, so he decided to skirt around them, and backtracked.
The clouds above hid the exact location of the sun, but he figured he knew where it was and could dead reckon that way. He counted his steps.
It took him twenty minutes to get around the animals. However, when he finished his pace count and reached the position that should have been a hundred meters beyond the creatures, the trail he’d thought had been the right one was gone. He walked a bit farther, counting every step, but found nothing.
He paused and reviewed his turns and paces, but now he was really lost. Above him, the sky grew blacker. He walked fifty meters back toward where he had spotted the tusked animals, but still couldn’t find the trail. Then he realized it was probably the gravity. The lower gravity meant he was taking longer strides. But they couldn’t have been that much longer, could they?
He took a calming breath. No problem. He’d just retrace his steps. Bu
t before he’d gone twenty meters the lightning cracked, and the rain began to pour. And not long after that, the water began to pool on the ground. Worse, the moisture caused the weird tubular grass to swell. Now he’d never be able to find the mech’s tracks.
He cursed. Then took in a breath.
“Fifi, do you have a wide connection yet?”
Sad chime.
Lovely, Jackson thought. Just lovely.
The wind gusted. The lightning cracked. Then cracked again. And again.
* * *
Jane was frantic.
She didn’t like being frantic, not one bit, but Jacky going missing was messing with her head. She had been born and bred to parse data with emotionless efficiency, to operate multiple complex systems simultaneously. This should have just been another problem to solve.
But it wasn’t.
She had hacked ever spy satellite feed around Swindle, but between the damnable atmosphere, weather, and the thick canopy, she’d failed to find anything so far. She’d been searching nonstop since he’d vanished and created a new surveillance program to sort through heat signatures to separate wildlife from humans. It was rather clever, and she probably could have sold it to some frontier planet’s search-and-rescue organization, but Jane could never risk having her unique programs out there in the wild where one of Savat’s hunters might find it.
She was optimizing her search parameters based on Jackson’s height and body mass, when one of the piggies she’d sent after Grandma’s mysterious contact returned home.
With part of her mind she continued to search for Jackson. With another she read about the piggy’s journey.
Shade’s messages had gone to a ship orbiting Raste. It was an unmarked fast courier that had come in from Nivaas a few hours after the Tar Heel. After receiving the message, it had sent a transmission out of system. The piggy had ridden that packet as it had traveled through three gates. All the way to the seat of government of the Kong.
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