by B. V. Larson
Swimming away from the islands on the very bottom of the sea, he kept going downslope into the darkening water. He never looked back. He didn’t care to know if they had subs or frogmen after him. He just kept going, deeper and deeper until the water became gloomy and clouded.
Six minutes after his last breath, he found a kelp bed. He dove into it and used it for cover like a man running in tall grass.
After about ten full minutes, he knew he was running out of air. Even the nanites couldn’t keep his cells going much longer. He turned upward and scooped powerfully.
He came up much too fast. He worried the rapid changes in pressure might damage his body, but he also knew that nanites swam inside him even as he swam in the ocean. They would repair the damage in time.
When he surfaced briefly, gasping, he only let himself have five or six breaths before diving down again into the cool depths. During that time, he had the vague suspicion that the airship—or whatever it was—was still there. Perhaps a sniper hung out the side, scanning the water for his head. He didn’t want to let them get a shot, so he dove again.
He swam at right angles to his original course. When he came up again, gasping and desperate for air, it was only few minutes later. He scanned the skies quickly, even as he sucked lungful after lungful of deep breaths. His oxygen-starved cells burned throughout his body and his vision slowly brightened.
He spotted something resembling a helicopter to the south. The airship was strange in configuration. It hovered low over an island made of black rocks stained with white guano. A man with a long-barreled rifle was lifted up into the craft.
Bjorn knew what that meant. They were retrieving their snipers to give them a better firing position in the air. He was hard to see from an island, just popping up like a seal from time to time to catch a breath, hidden among the waves. From the air, he would be easier to spot.
The craft was sleek, and black and had no blades whirling above it. No wonder it had been so quiet. He thought immediately that he’d been right—it wasn’t a helicopter at all. It was an example of alien technology built by humans.
Of everything that had happened today, this development worried him the most. He knew what a modern gunship could do, but this thing was an unknown. If they had employed alien tech for propulsion, why not for sensory equipment and weaponry?
He dove deep again, not wanting to wait until the sniper was harnessed in and targeting him. He turned east again and swam for a long time.
How long he stayed under this time he was never sure afterward. When he did finally come up, his vision had failed him. He’d gone blind. Possibly, the nanites were rationing the oxygen in his bloodstream, directing it to the most critical sections of his body. Since he was underwater, he needed his muscles and his heart and his brain the most in order to survive. Perhaps the tiny machines had decided vision was overrated and had switched that part of his body off.
When he surfaced at last, he popped into the open air like a balloon that had been released underwater. He gasped and choked. Only then did he realize he couldn’t hear anything. He could barely feel the water that pressed against him and the wind that cooled his head.
He didn’t care. He just lay on his back, trying to float and breathe in great sucking gasps. He did this for almost a minute before his vision returned. He was a sitting duck during this time, and he decided that if he survived the next few minutes he wouldn’t stay down so long again.
When his eyes began reporting to his brain again, and his ears could hear and his skin could feel the water and the breezes, he looked around. There it was, north of him this time, skimming over the waves. It was about fifty feet above the water and there was a gunman in a harness leaning out of both sides of the craft. A long-barreled weapon poked out from the sides of the craft in each sniper’s hands. They’d picked up the men and were doing sweeps, searching for him.
He dove again. This time, he didn’t go for as long as he could. He thought he’d been very near death the last time. And if he repeated that feat and lived, he’d still be blind and deaf when he surfaced. He figured it would be better to surface sooner and be vulnerable for a shorter amount of time.
Following a pattern of about seven to ten minute dives followed by thirty seconds of desperate gasping and looking around, he traveled eastward. At first, he switched course randomly to the north or south every other time. He didn’t think they would guess he was heading out to sea. It seemed far more rational for a thinking man to stay close to shore or to try to sneak onto another island. But that wasn’t Bjorn’s plan.
Each dive took him farther from land and farther from the men who were searching for him. Over the next several hours, he kept up a killing pace.
Finally, after dozens of dives, he came up to a darkened world. For a moment he thought he’d stayed under too long and the nanites had decided to dim his vision again. But then he noticed the sun was going down, causing the sea to turn magenta and blood red. He dared to stay on the surface long enough to have a good look around. He scanned every horizon and the skies overhead.
The sea was empty. He couldn’t even see land. He smiled, because he knew that he’d vanished yet again.
A fish nibbled the bloody scratches on his leg, reminding him to get moving again. He turned away from the sun, which was dipping down to touch the horizon in the west. He planned to swim like this, underwater most of the time like a tiny, human submarine, until he reached his final destination. He figured that if he kept going at a steady pace for a day or two, due east, he’d reach land again.
During the day, he used the sun to direct him, but at night it was harder. The stars were enough when the skies were clear, but often it was overcast. Sometimes he was forced to paddle idly for hours, unsure of his heading. The currents were a problem as well. He had to work hard to keep on an even course.
On the morning of the third day he began to worry. The water was quite warm and he wasn’t overly-tired yet, but he was getting very hungry. He tried, but found it difficult to catch passing fish. Even though he was fast, this far from land the fish were less common and they didn’t generally like to come close to a thrashing man. The water impeded his arms, and the fish he did touch slipped away.
He decided he had to do something or he might starve. For all he knew, he had missed his goal and was headed to Africa.
He took out his combat knife, moving with great care lest he drop it in the ocean, which was thousands of feet deep here. The knife was his only weapon. He used it to open a vein, then began thrashing around, creating a pink froth. The nanites quickly close the vein, but that was expected. He waited patiently.
After twenty minutes he decided he’d failed, so he cut himself again—and then again ten minutes after that.
Finally, on the eighth try, something bit him. Fortunately, it wasn’t a huge chunk of flesh that it took from his calf, but it did hurt. He drove his knife into the fish repeatedly, and soon the devil gave up its life for his. He hauled it up into the daylight, and saw it was a good-sized tiger shark, about seven feet in length. He chewed the shark meat raw, having no better options. The flesh was thick and disgusting, but it was nourishing. After he’d eaten his fill, he left the carcass floating in the water and swam away quickly, worried that more sharks were on the way to join in on the fun.
He swam onward whenever he could see the stars or the sun. He rested when he had to. One time, he saw a ship skimming by. He kept low and made no attempt to hail them. The ship steamed safely away. He had no idea if anyone was looking for him, and it occurred to him that the ocean was the ultimate place for a man to hide on this world. It was vast, empty, and incredibly difficult to search. Finding a lone man who did not want to be found out here was almost impossible. There was no better place to hide—it was the ultimate wilderness.
On the next day he began to get tired, but he was determined to keep going. He had little choice. It was early in the afternoon of…Friday? He wasn’t entirely sure anymore. It rained la
ter that day, and he caught every drop he could in his open mouth, swallowing greedily. Saltwater had been gluing up his guts for days, dehydrating him. The nanites had sensed toxic levels of saline and done their best to correct his blood chemistry, but he knew there had to limits even to their magic.
Later that same day, he spotted land. He wasn’t sure what he was looking at. He didn’t know the currents in this part of the world, and his navigation may have been off. For all he knew, he was looking at Cuba.
He decided the fun was over for him no matter where he was. He’d had enough of the sea. He wasn’t a fish, and it was time to set his feet on dry land again.
Long before he made landfall, he knew he’d reached the island that had been his destination all along. It was the laser turrets that gave it away. They were large and deadly-looking. They swiveled ceaselessly, scanning everything in range that moved and many things that didn’t.
When he came up on the beach he moved slowly, but the turrets sensed him anyway. Two of them, about a mile off in either direction, swung and directed their projectors at him.
He froze, heart pounding. He was an invader, after all. God only knew what the Star Force people had programmed into these things.
But after about twenty seconds, the two turrets turned away and went back to scanning again. Bjorn moved forward onto the beach in relief. At least they weren’t going to fry him immediately after that long, long swim.
He sat down because it felt great to do so. He’d never kept his body moving for so long without any real rest. He passed out on the dry sand and slept the sleep of exhaustion.
When he awakened some hours later he made his way down the endless strip of beach, looking for human habitation. He found destruction instead. Many of the laser turrets had been knocked out. They were burnt, sitting in puddles of crusty glass. Huge beams must have come down from the Macro ships and destroyed them.
Eventually, he found a Star Force patrol. They were full of questions, and he explained he was a new volunteer, a recruit who had been caught up in the battle and lost at sea. He didn’t have a unit yet—he hadn’t gotten that far.
The men could see he’d been to Hell and back. They all had. He could see it in their eyes. They let him into their strange flying vehicle and carried him back to base.
“What’s your name again, recruit?”
“Gaines,” he said. “Private Gaines. At least, that’s what I’m here to become.”
“You picked a hell of a time to join up, Gaines.”
“I know.”
Gaines realized in surprise that he respected these men. They were not only like him, they were quite possibly more deadly than he was. They had futuristic weapons and body armor. They also possessed his speed, strength and endurance.
Most of all, they were doing something that needed doing. Kerr’s speech hadn’t fallen entirely on deaf ears. Gaines had agreed with much of what the general had said. The world was dying, and it was time for all fighting men to choose sides.
But he hadn’t wanted to join Kerr’s side. He didn’t want to be a tool, a disposable instrument used to strike at a political enemy. He wanted to be something new, something respectable. A soldier, maybe a marine—not just a killer without a cause.
Right then, right there, looking at the marines around him with their dented, burned armor and unsmiling faces, he knew he’d made the right decision. He’d swam two hundred miles or more, and it hadn’t been a mistake. He was going to join Star Force. He felt that he belonged here with these men. They could do what he could do—what no one else on Earth could do. What’s more, it was something that had to be done. The machines from the stars had to be destroyed.
He smiled a real smile at that moment, the first one that had crossed his face in a long, long time.
His days of vanishing were over.
The End
From the Authors: Thanks Reader! We hope you enjoyed PLANETARY ASSAULT. If you liked the stories and want to see more, please put up some stars and a review to support the book. Let new readers know what’s in store for them!
More books by the Authors:
DOOM STAR SERIES (Vaughn Heppner)
Star Soldier
Bio-Weapon
Battle Pod
Cyborg Assault
Planet Wrecker
Star Fortress
PLAGUE WARS SERIES (David VanDyke)
Eden Plague
Demon Plagues
Reaper Plague
The Orion Plague
STAR FORCE SERIES (B. V. Larson)
Swarm
Extinction
Rebellion
Conquest
Empire
Annihilation
