“Grikkas?” Dani wondered what else could go wrong that day. “They are lizards?”
“More like a dinosaur, Ma’am. Big, fast, tough to kill.”
Dani now looked not up at the tree canopy, but around her. “But they can be killed.”
“Anything can be killed. I only have five rounds left in my magazine, and that was my spare. Now I wish I’d taken it easy on the rock ‘n roll.”
“Sergeant, against that drone, we kind of had to spray and pray, or we’d be dead.”
“Maybe. You don’t have a spare magazine?”
She shook her head. “My spare is what’s jammed in my rifle.”
“If a grikka comes tracking us, we are seriously fucked.” Remembering he was speaking to an officer, and a person he did not know well, he added, “Ma’am.”
She rolled her eyes. “Harsh language may be our best weapon, if I use up these five rounds.”
“From what Shauna said, five rounds won’t even slow down a grikka. We do have a box of grenades,” Jesse suggested.
She had already considered that. “Without a launcher. How far can you throw a grenade?”
Jesse thought a moment. “Not far enough. Minimum time for a grenade is three seconds. A grikka would run past a grenade before it could explode.”
Dani propped the rifle against the tree. “I can’t lift this. There might be a winch or something in the Buzzard, but I think our best bet it to dig under the tree, to get you out.”
“I vote for digging, Ma’am. It’s,” he grunted. “Kinda crushing my thighs. My left foot is tingling, I think the blood supply is getting cut off.”
She tested the soil with her good hand. “I’ll look for a shovel or-”
“Shhhh,” Jesse held a finger to his lips. “We’ve got company.”
She looked left then right. The drone was still smoking and sparking, but inactive. “How do you know?”
He silently pointed to a puddle of water next to him, that had been dug in the soggy soil when the tree fell. A ripple formed in the water. Then another.
Dani froze.
“Rifle scope has a motion detector,” Jesse suggested quietly.
She retrieved the rifle, setting the scope properly, and slowly scanned completely around her. Once, twice. Nothing. On the third sweep, the scope lit up. “There’s something moving in the trees, across the river.” She shivered. “Something big.”
“It ain’t no squirrel,” Jesse declared, sitting up and working to dig himself out. “Makes sense there’s a grikka nearby, that’s what the drone was guarding.”
“Can grikkas swim?”
He really, really wished he had paid attention when Shauna talked about Grikkas. “They may be big enough to just wade across that river.”
“Shit! I can see it.” Her mouth suddenly dried out, and she had to swallow. “It’s, it’s coming toward the river. Sergeant, we don’t have time to get you out of there.”
“Ma’am, go, you don’t worry about me.”
“Fuck that, Colter, I am not leaving you. Or Fobish,” her hands tightened around the rifle with determination, forgetting her splinted thumb and finger. It would be awkward to use her middle finger on the trigger, but she could do it. She had to.
“Then,” Jesse glared to the woods across the river. “Give me one of those grenades.”
Dani was still connecting the grenades when she heard a loud, splash, followed by a huffing sound. Working with only one thumb made the task more difficult, and she fumbled the connections twice. Finally done, she ran to the rear ramp and climbed the ladder she had made, rolling inside the Buzzard. Instead of going forward into the cabin, she crawled over jumbled and broken equipment that cluttered the ramp, to the other side where she could get a view of the river. That side of the Buzzard was perched on the riverbank, two meters above the water.
The huffing sound was louder. When she leaned over to get a view upriver, she saw the grikka.
It was big.
All she could see was the head and part of the tail. The animal was dog-paddling across the deepest part of the river, breathing furiously through its nose, and all Dani could think was-
She covered her mouth to stifle a laugh.
It looked cute.
The vicious predator was struggling, like a dog that had fallen out of a boat and was swimming for the first time. Seeing such a formidable predator flailing around like a schnauzer in a swimming pool struck her as funny. That, or it was funny because her nerves were so keyed up. The beast was clearly uncomfortable, out of its element, and-
A thought chilled her.
The grikka was taking a risk by swimming across the river, because it wanted something badly enough. Something on her side of the river. Either the predator had heard the crash, or the battle against the drone, or it smelled prey. All three of the survivors had been bleeding, and the dead still inside the Buzzard would draw in a predator. A grikka, a beast that evolved on the Kristang homeworld, could not digest human flesh. But the grikka did not know that. Humans had discovered on several worlds that the native life could and would still bite and sting, even if their biochemistry was incompatible with the dietary requirements of local critters.
As the grikka neared the riverbank and its feet touched bottom, its back broke the surface of the water. Dani shuddered and clutched the rifle to her chest with the three useful fingers of her right hand, while the fingers of her left hand pressed buttons on a keypad on the Buzzard’s rear bulkhead. There was a grinding sound of tearing composites, and a whine as electric motors strained to open the jammed ramp. Outside, the grikka’s head turned sharply, directly toward Dani. The rational part of her mind knew the beast probably could not see her, hidden in the darkness of the Buzzard’s ramp. The rest of her mind was gripped with terror. When the grikka’s front shoulders rose above the water, she locked the keypad into attempting to cycle the ramp up and down, filling the aircraft’s torn hull with the sounds of protesting mechanisms.
Three rifle rounds were not enough to kill a grikka, unless she got extremely lucky. So far that day, her luck had been a steaming pile, she was not counting on that changing. Stumbling into the forward cabin, holding the rifle with one hand while hanging onto seatbacks and handholds, she did not bother trying to be quiet. She wanted the grikka to hear her moving around inside the Buzzard’s battered hull.
Jesse’s hands shook as he hefted the grenade, trying to judge its weight. The thing was the size of a golf ball, but heavier. With his legs trapped under a tree trunk, he couldn’t get good leverage to throw the weapon, and he was awkwardly positioned to hit his intended target. He had to twist halfway around to even see where he wanted to throw, and there was a tree in the way. Shit. It wasn’t going to work.
When Captain Grace gave him a single grenade, she had no doubt thought he intended to blow himself up if a grikka tried to eat him. Blowing himself to pieces, and hopefully taking the vicious beast with him, was indeed much better than the prospect of being eaten alive. But that was not Jesse’s plan. He hoped to live, to stay alive and kill hateful lizards and most importantly, see Shauna Jarrett again. If Shauna needed his help, he was going to be there, and no stinking dinosaur would get in his way.
His plan, his original plan, had been to toss the grenade toward where Urmat Fobish was laying asleep. If the grikka was following a scent trail from the Buzzard, or was attracted to the stack of gear that Grace had recovered from the wreck of the aircraft, it would likely approach straight from the river. Jesse had planned to set the grenade’s dial on a five-second delay, and throw it in front of the grikka, hoping the beast would run over it when it exploded. The device was a light antipersonnel weapon, not intended for use against armor unless the target was very close. Still, if the grenade detonated under the grikka, it could hurt the beast badly. Immobilize it, and give Captain Grace time to hit it with other grenades.
That was the plan, which he realized he should have thought through better. The angle was bad for him to get
off a good throw. With the grikka now emerging from the water in front of the crumpled Buzzard, he struggled to get his legs free, and only succeeded in causing a sharp pain in the knee of his good leg, as that knee was bent the wrong way.
Jesse leaned over to pick up the broken rifle, and began digging around his legs with the barrel, while the grikka began to sniff at the Buzzard, sticking its nose into holes ripped in its hull.
Damn, Jesse thought, that thing is huge. He dug faster.
Inside the Buzzard, Dani’s plan wasn’t working either. She had connected the grenades together with wires, and stretched tripwires on the ground next to the broken airframe. The wires were almost invisibly thin, and constructed of a stretchy, sticky substance. When, or if, the grikka stumbled onto a wire, it would wrap around the beast’s leg, activating the grenades at the same time. To give herself a decent chance to survive, she had adjusted the grenades to their maximum delay of twenty actons in the Ruhar measurement system, which was about sixteen seconds. It was a daring plan, a good plan, except the predator was not cooperating. Coming out of the water, it had approached the nose of the Buzzard warily, keeping low to the ground in a stalking stance. Instead of walking back along the hull to investigate the noisy ramp as it tried to cycle open and closed, the beast had used its claws to try tearing away the Buzzard’s hull around the cockpit. It wanted to get at the mangled bodies of the pilots, and the scent of blood was driving it mad.
Dani huddled on the river side of the cabin, clutching the rifle and trying to keep the barrel from shaking. Her hands were trembling, but what made the barrel shake was her breathing. She was on the verge of panic, gasping for breath fast and shallow. Breathe deep, she told herself.
That’s easy for you to say, her inner self argued back at her. There is a dinosaur tearing the airframe apart four meters from your head and you have only five rounds left. How am I supposed to be calm while-
The Buzzard stopped shaking and the sound of the grikka’s claws stopped tearing at the hull. She held her breath without meaning to, backing against the cabin wall. The only sounds were the whining of electric motors that tried to move the ramp, and the heavy locomotive-like exhaling of the grikka. Where was the damned thing, she felt like screaming? Where the F-
A shadow fell across a tear in the hull on the opposite side of the cabin and Dani found herself looking at an eye. An enormous, yellow-green eye stared through the opening at her. Directly at her. There was enough light pouring into the cabin through hull breaches that the grikka could easily see her and that turned her insides to water.
The grikka bellowed, a sound that shook the deck of the cabin and Dani screamed back without thinking. She reflexively squeezed the trigger, sending an explosive-tipped round at the vulnerable eye, but the beast had moved and the round turned to plasma against the thick armor bone of its skull, the plasma deflected upward and splattering uselessly.
Dani fell backwards, slumping against the broken body of a Ruhar and slipping on blood. The grikka roared and charged the Buzzard, slamming its bulk into the hull. Dani wildly reached out to grip something, anything as the aircraft rolled sickeningly. The airframe rocked back to the left, rolling back and forth then enormous claws were tearing into the composite skin of the main cabin. The grikka had been frustrated in its attempts to get into the cockpit because the structural frames came together there, but frames around the main cabin were spaces nearly a meter apart. A claw punched through the hull, ripping at the cabin floor and scoring deep gouges there. Dani braced herself on one elbow, bringing the rifle around-
The grikka was gone as suddenly as it appeared. She could see a vague shape through gaps in the hull, not enough to expend precious ammunition. Back! She needed the stupid animal to walk toward the rear of the Buzzard, so it could get tangled in the tripwires.
Swallowing her fear, she scrambled over broken seats toward the rear door of the cabin, falling as seatbacks flopped backwards under her. She ended up falling on her head in the aisle that ran along the left side of cabin, and used the rifle to lever herself up to her knees, then onto her feet. Before her courage could fail her, she held the rifle in her crippled right hand while she screamed and pounded on the cabin wall with her left hand, screaming defiance at the genetically engineered killer predator.
A paw full of sharp claws raked a tear in the hull right where she was standing and the paw shot through, reaching for her as she jumped back onto the pile of broken seats and other debris cluttering the cabin. She slid back down as the Buzzard rocked, the bulk of the grikka was pushing against the hull, its forearm squeezing through the gap, claws raking the air to get at her. Helplessly, she slid down a pile of broken seats, kicking her legs to keep away from the claws. One claw that was longer than her whole hand snagged her right boot and she kicked at it, but the claw snapped back, encircling her foot and trapping her. Another claw reached back to rake her shin open-
She squeezed the trigger almost blindly, and a round skimmed off a claw to punch through the hull. It hit something, for the beast howled and the great arm pulled back, releasing her to tumble onto the floor. Then she bounced as the grikka slammed into the Buzzard, rolling it onto its side. Dani windmilled her arms, losing her grip on the rifle. The floor became vertical and the Buzzard slid down the riverbank, water shot upward through holes in the airframe. When the broken aircraft stopped rolling, it was lying on its right side, partly submerged in water. Dani fought out from under the debris piled on top of her, and extracted the rifle. Its strap had stayed around her forearm, nearly wrenching her shoulder out of its socket when she was tumbling.
With the Buzzard on its side, she could move only by crawling over wobbling debris. The tough belly of the aircraft now faced the grikka, and though she could hear it breathing and snuffling at the ground, it was no longer clawing at the hull. The snuffing sound faded, making the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Where was it going?
“Ma’am,” Colter’s voice sounded in her earpiece. “We got a problem!”
Jesse had given up trying to dig with the rifle barrel, it was too narrow to make any progress. The soil was tangled with tree roots, making it difficult if not impossible to get under the trunk. He had been trying to work the rifle barrel along the outside of his left leg, to get that leg free or at least loose so he could wriggle out, but the roots were tough and the blood-curdling roars of the grikka were breaking his concentration.
The beast had knocked the Buzzard on its side and partway into the river after he heard a second rifle shot, and then the grikka stalked back and forth, shaking its head and licking at a wound on its left shoulder. As it paced, it came heart-stoppingly close to the tripwires set up between stakes sunk into the ground, but it turned away. With one last bellow of rage at the ruin of the aircraft, the grikka shook its head, and snuffled along the ground, lowering its belly in stalking mode.
Oh shit, Jesse gasped. The beast was following the scent trail that led right to Fobish. And Jesse. Fobish took that moment to groan and wave an arm weakly, attracting the attention of the grikka. It lowered its chin almost to the ground, hunching its shoulders to charge. Jesse squeezed the grenade in one hand, while he called Captain Grace on his zPhone. “Ma’am, we got a problem!”
Despite Dani’s hands shaking from her near-death experience, she slung the rifle over one shoulder, gathered herself, and jumped upward to seize cables that hung down from what was now the ceiling. Hanging from the cable and swinging her legs, she climbed until she could get a grip on a structural frame, and hauled herself out onto the left side of the wreck. On wobbly knees, she braced herself with one hand as the Buzzard shifted under her, sliding slowly into the river. “HEY!” She shouted so hard it hurt her throat. “Come get me you stupid animal! Come get me!” In her excitement, she rose to her feet, jumping up and down, pounding her boots on the unsteady skin of the aircraft. With a screech, she fell heavily on her backside, the rifle banging off an exposed frame. “Come over here,” she gasped, out of breat
h.
The grikka turned to look at her. Dani froze.
Then it charged at her.
Fuck, she thought. What the hell do I-
She flicked the rifle’s selector switch from single-shot to three-round burst. Three rounds were all she had left. Shooting the beast would do her no good, it was running with the thick armor plate of its skull facing toward her, the rounds would only bounce off uselessly.
And, the path of the grikka as it gathered speed was taking it straight toward her, away from her tripwires. Rather than trying to stand on the wobbling Buzzard, she crawled toward the rear, screaming incoherently and cutting her hands and knees on jagged edges of the hull. As she crawled, the grikka turned to follow her. With an instant of sheer terror, she looked down to check the tripwires were still in place. One of the stakes was leaning, but the wire was still attached. When she looked up, the massive bulk of the beast was bounding right at the tripwires.
She turned, rising into a crouch, and leapt over the side of the Buzzard, into the river.
The grikka roared when its prey disappeared, but it was too late to halt its momentum. It ran through the tripwires, yanking the stakes out of the ground. The grenades activated and the wires sprang back to the normal length, wrapping around the beast’s right rear leg. Unable to stop, the grikka crashed into the Buzzard’s belly, knocking the wreck upward to roll toward the river. The impact stunned even the tough predator for a moment, then it clawed at the hull, pulling itself up to follow its prey. The weight of the grikka made the Buzzard roll back toward it, until the animal climbed enough that its bulk was over the midpoint. Then, overbalanced, the Buzzard’s battered hull snap-rolled toward the water, throwing the grikka off into the river.
Deathtrap Page 31
