“Shut that—” But Patent never got the chance to finish the order.
With alarming ferocity and speed, dragons swooped in from all directions—or maybe these were just this planet’s idea of “harmless” meadowlarks. Several of the flock held back the Alpha Unit members with the sense to reach for their weapons, pinning them in place, while others made off with the booty, carrying the ghetto blaster high into the air, and fighting between them for it. A snatch and grab was transpiring back and forth aided by beaks and talons severe enough to peel a man to the bone in one swipe—proven by the state they’d left Motown in when he’d had the audacity to reach for his ghetto blaster cum security blanket.
Patent had already suited up with his .50 caliber machine gun, the gun belt draped over one hand, the rifle spitting out bullets with the other. He was wearing that and his underwear, and even more oddly, a smile. Equally strangely, he wasn’t doing anything to knock out the radio which had drawn the creatures in the first place. Gabrielle found that a bit thick, even for him.
The birds rained down from the sky as if brought far inland by one of those waterspouts that sometimes dropped truckloads of fish and squid and crabs and frogs on you. Gabrielle had grown up in Texas—in the heart of Tornado Alley—and could attest to such things.
When the last of the dragons lay dead on the ground, Patent dropped the gun belt, and caught the ghetto-blaster in his hand, still blaring out Hank Williams.
Goodbye Joe, me gotta go, me oh, my oh
Me gotta go pole the pirogue down the bayou
My Yvonne, the sweetest one, me oh, my oh
Son of a gun we’ll have good fun on the bayou.
“Lesson one in survival,” Patent hollered to the group. “Learn to live off the land. Motown gets a medal right out of the starting gate for discovering how to lure and trap this planet’s idea of a canary. We’ll feast well tonight, boys and girls!”
Patent dropped the gun and marched over to Motown. “Nice job, young fella.”
“About being split down the middle, sir?”
“Oh yeah, thanks for reminding me.” Patent kneeled down on one knee, got the needle and thread out of the field medical kit Motown himself was carrying in his cargo shirt pocket, and began sewing him up.
“You think you want to spray the nanites first, sir?”
“Nah, we’ll save that for when you’re good and messed up. Don’t want to come up short when you need it most.”
“Uh, huh.” Motown took one look at himself laid bare from stem to stern and passed out.
“The kid must be having trouble adjusting to the thin air up here,” Patent mumbled. “That reminds me.” He raised his voice to make sure he was heard, “When you’re finished plucking those chickens, I’ve got a ten mile run planned for us to get you familiar with and acclimated to the new terrain.” Patent returned to his sewing without giving the matter of his group’s willingness to comply a second thought. And in the background…
Chorus:
Jambalaya and a crawfish pie and a fillet gumbo
‘Cause tonight I’m gonna see my ma cher amio
Pick guitar, fill fruit jar and be gay-o
Son of a gun we’ll have big fun on the bayou.
***
Alpha Unit, many busy stripping the birds of their feathers, were also making piles of weapons with the various types of plumage. The birds’ talons and beaks would make excellent daggers, or could be fashioned into other weapons, such as the hooks at the ends of chains used in martial arts fighting, or grappling hooks at the ends of ropes for climbing. The all-metal scales themselves could be used to fashion flexible body armor. They could be just as readily used in other capacities, say if anyone came up short of weapons to fight with, to lend them a cutting instrument, the smallest feathers doubling as silver-shark’s teeth that you might find on a 30 foot great white. The Alpha Unit operatives who had become separated from their flexible body armor and their weapons were keenest to explore the other applications for the hides.
All told, Gabrielle wondered how the hell Patent had managed to fell the giant birds at all with just that .50 caliber machine gun. The obvious answer was that the slugs he was using had been modified in some way using foresight the rest of the team didn’t have. She examined the gun belt, largely emptied now, save for a few unspent shells. Yep. The slugs were nanite bombs; on impact they’d release a cloud of nanites that could burrow through most anything and, once inside, explode like fireworks. Only a small percentage of the micro explosives would need to damage vital organs and blood vessels for a single shell to do its work. No doubt one of his own inventions.
Gabrielle continued to sponge in the rest of the scene.
Other Alpha Unit members had taken to cooking the meat, or slicing it thin and salting it for jerky. The salts were provided by the self-replicating nanites in the cooks’ bodies happy to do double duty as preservatives until they were needed back in the cook’s body to attend to other duties. All it took was a swipe of sweat with the back of the hand against the food preservers’ foreheads, or a hammering punch to the meat with their fists used as tenderizers for the “salt” transfer.
Gabrielle and the majority of Alpha Unit, however, were doing what they did best, playing with their tech toys, upgrading reality on the fly with their Augmented Reality goggles, and turning this latest excursion into a video game by identifying who got how many points for killing what kind of prey exactly, and who got how many lives before they had to master certain things or just stay dead out of a sense of fairness. The scouts out on the perimeter, who had joined Patent on his “bracer” of a ten-mile run, encountering heavy resistance, were doing much to help establish the Augmented Reality game’s parameters so points could be assigned appropriately to the different lifeforms based on the difficulty involved with killing any of them.
“Shit!” Gabrielle beheld her scanner’s output; one glance told her that the advance scouting party wasn’t the only one in trouble. Suddenly Mr. Shock and Awe was looking a hell of a lot more empathetic. She’d broadcasted the display from her wrist band into a virtual wrap-around screen, that for now was the only barrier between her and the enemy—and it was see-through. It was like throwing a soap bubble around a child’s rubber ducky for protection against the tidal surges of the bathtub. “Are you seeing this?”
Motown politely stepped up to her to enjoy the panorama. “I don’t see nothin’.”
“Are you blind?”
“My body is good for one bout of shock per day. So until tomorrow, they just aren’t there.” He turned sharply and went back to sticking strips of bird meat into the industrial-sized stewpot that someone had scouted up, scrounging it out of a tree. He was using the butt of his machine gun to stir the stew in the pot.
Gabrielle pressed down on her in-ear mike. “Patent, take a look at your screen,” she said, sending him what she was seeing on her display. All the pairs of eyes that had Alpha Unit completely surrounded, lingering at the edge of the clearing, were looking for an opportunity to pounce; the rest of the creatures’ bodies nearly perfectly camouflaged among the foliage. “I had to run some scans using my proprietary software. These things don’t give off body heat, so they blend a little too perfectly with the foliage around here.”
She could see Patent’s face as he regarded the display in his hands via the two-way camera on it. “Relax,” he said, “those are the cleaners. They’ll wait until you’re done cooking those birds and making jerky of the rest, and cleared out of the area to finish off anything left behind, down to the bones and drops of blood. The damn things can erase our presence from a scene better than our own cleaners. Best of all, I don’t have to put them on the payroll.”
“You sure?”
“Seen them in action while you kids were tucked in snugly to your makeshift bunks.”
“You mean the trees we landed in, sir, or the beds of gravel that we fell onto that cut better than beds of nails?”
“Excellent use of the te
rrain to make do, soldier. Remind me to hand out points later accordingly.” Patent signed off with his usual lack of aplomb.
“Bastard. Probably thinks this whole crash landing thing is the perfect excuse to lick us into shape.” Gabrielle gazed at the last remaining “canaries” still intact, waiting to be divvied up into the various stewpots. It couldn’t have been more than six feet from beak to talons, and maybe twelve feet from spread wingtip to wingtip. “Did it occur to anyone that these things might just be the babies, and around here somewhere there might be one hell of an angry mother?”
No one was listening. No one but Hank.
Thibodeaux Fontainbleau, the place is buzzin’
Kinfolk come to see Yvonne by the dozen
Dress in style, go hog wild, me oh, my oh
Son of a gun we’ll have big fun on the bayou.
***
The mother had found them, and she was not exactly happy about the fate of her baby birdies. She had circled their encampment a few miles back, but figured she would start picking off the enemy where they were weakest, going for the smaller unit of scouts cut off from the rest. Smart bird. For all her hysterical shrieking, she had kept her cool where it mattered most. Patent observed her circling them overhead, blotting out the sun briefly before swooping down for a landing.
Eagerly ran up to Patent, saluted. He was the one trying to salute him earlier with one leg, and always the first to fall into formation. “Permission to try and break that thing, sir.”
Patent took the cigar out of his mouth, hang-jawed. Glanced back at the dragon. Pointed with the tip of the cigar. “That thing?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I like your attitude, son.”
The teen saluted him and charged toward the dragon that had landed and was screeching at him and daring him to make her day. She was about three times the size of any of her kids—okay, maybe four times; size was a hell of a thing to gauge without anything to compare it to. Then the dragon got Eagerly in its beak. Yeah, definitely four times as large as the kids, Patent thought. Eagerly screamed, but with the latest generation of nanites, it would take more than the bone-crushing capacity of that creature’s beak to put an end to Eagerly. The bird gulped him down eventually.
The dragon plodded toward the next closest soldier. That Alpha Unit member refused to stand his ground, retreating. Patent shook his head. “Eagerly, son, I fear our shared bloodline is getting a bit over-diluted.”
The dragon stumbled, making choking sounds, as Eagerly crawled his way up its long neck, and eventually stood between the prized-apart upper and lower tips of the beak, before jumping down to the ground.
Eagerly ran for his grappling-hook weapon, a rifle based on the marine special forces standard. He rolled out of the way in time to see the dragon use its snout the way those excavating heavy-equipment rigs used their scoop blades. It left a crater where Eagerly had been just seconds before. But Eagerly used his time on the ground effectively, getting off a shot with the grappling hook which circled the neck of the dragon a couple of times before the hook caught under a scale. Eagerly sucked himself up on the line by pressing the button that pulled him up and over the back of the beast by way of the weapon’s hydraulic-powered pulley. He was now saddling the beast. How long that lasted would be another matter, Patent thought, taking a satisfying puff on his cigar.
The dragon, in an effort to shake Eagerly, threw its weight around, side to side, using its tail to help it generate the washing-machine turnstile action. Eagerly—clearly new to the whole bronco-busting concept—refused to let go of his weapon and simply grabbed hold of one of the scales on the creature’s back with his free hand. When that didn’t work out so well, he tried releasing the grappling hook and planting it around a shorter tether for use as a saddle horn. And how did that work out? Eagerly flew face first into a tree trunk the size of a giant sequoia. That pretty much pancaked the front of him. Then he was whipped by the dragon’s tail. The hooks on the tail dug into Eagerly’s back, and when the dragon whipped the tail the other way, he was hurled backwards at a boulder. That pretty much crushed Eagerly’s spine. None of this did anything to deter his agonized outbursts, which Patent preferred to interpret as defiant battle cries. And there was no denying the recuperative capacities of this latest generation of nanites they’d been injected with, which kept mending Eagerly nearly as fast as the dragon could break him.
“Sir,” another Alpha Unit cadet said, running up to Patent. “Don’t you think you should intervene, sir?”
“Nonsense. He’s doing a great job breaking that filly.”
“Maybe we’re not watching the same movie, sir.”
Patent gave his critic a wary look. “You know that weapon he’s using is the marine special ops go-to weapon for good reason. It’s incredibly versatile. I suggest you explore some of its range by making the most of this God-sent opportunity.”
“Yes, sir.” The cadet mumbled to himself as he hiked off, “For the record, this unit’s motto is not death before dishonor. We prefer strategic retreats are savvy.”
The cadet, for all his mouthing off, did as ordered, mobilizing the other cadets still hunkering down behind anything they could find to hide behind, fallen logs, boulders, brush. They charged into the clearing like the Lilliputians they were, trying to lasso Gulliver with their grappling-hook rifles.
To their credit, some of the more crack shots in the unit used the grappling hooks to sink the tips into the dragon—without allowing the tri-pronged hook to unfold from the tip of the weapon. They were using it more to sap the dragon’s will and energy reserve than to do permanent harm by inviting it to rip out the hooks seated in it that would tear its flesh free.
Others were practicing getting the hooks in place properly between the scales to reel themselves in close enough that they could inject soporifics into the beast. Others were using the end of the rope still attached to the gun to wrap around tree trunks and boulders, to help anchor the dragon.
About the time Patent was confident Alpha Unit had just gotten a lot more proficient with that weapon, the beast seemed to be running out of steam. By then, it had managed to cut another cadet in two by using the upper and lower tips of its beak like a scissors, stomp to “death” a couple others, who had to re-agglutinate themselves from mush, but the dragon was nobody’s fool. It could see that this enemy was impervious to its many ministrations, and so was settling into its fate. The intelligence in its eyes, though, suggested to Patent that it was just biding its time, awaiting its first opportunity to turn things around on them.
Eagerly walked his prize at the end of the leash toward Patent. “Care to take a ride, sir?”
“I do, but you kids earned the first flight. Form a line based on how many points you racked up according to the point makers back at camp.” Patent realized these kids turned everything into a video game, and he’d long surrendered the fight on that one. Cheers broke out as the cadets eagerly fought one another and quibbled over who belonged where in queue.
The last one in line, figuring he didn’t have to worry about losing his place, double-timed it up to Patent. “Almost makes you wonder why we bother with the nanite med-kit sprays anymore, eh?”
Patent took the cigar, billowing scented smoke for miles—one effective mosquito repellent—out of his mouth. “Don’t get cocky, soldier. The med-spray specializes in analyzing invading bacteria and viruses that Laney couldn’t predict or account for, and dedicates itself to filling the void. Use it sparingly and keep it with you at all times. Or death may be less of a relative term than you think.”
The cadet gulped. “Yes, sir,” he said before running back to his place in line.
***
Gabrielle had left some cameras behind at their last encampment, in the form of dragon-flies, to blend with the local insect life. She was curious to see these scavengers at work that Patent had told her about. What she saw, reviewing the tapes on her wristband device—unfolded now and stretched—sent chills up her
spine. That was more than just efficient scavenging. The predators even inhaled the aerosols that had been breathed out of the humanoid lungs. Any part of a body that had touched any surface, even the soldier’s clothing and boots rubbing against rocks and logs, were similarly inhaled for the trace elements in the air and on the surfaces of contact. This was more like a CSI crew hidden in the form of the local animals, just like her cameras were disguising themselves as insects endemic to the region. Just exactly what was going on here?
“What’s his deal, anyway?” Motown asked Gabrielle, his eyes on Patent, curled up on a bedroll he’d laid out, his snoring like a Gatling gun. In fact, anyone wandering into camp—that was the first thing they did upon hearing it was duck and reach for their weapon—to the laughter of the ones that had caught on to the joke, but never tired of seeing it played on someone else. “What Psychos-Are-Us clinic did they draft him out of?”
Gabrielle pocketed the scanner she was using to observe the scavengers. Engaging in mindless chatter with Motown was as good a way to shake off the heebie-jeebies watching them had given her as any.
She grunted, picked up and stirred her bowl of baby-dragon stew with her Swiss army knife with fifty-two extensions; there was no replacing the classics. This one even came with GPS in case she was unfortunate enough to drop it. And with the press of a button on her waist belt it would sprout legs and crawl back to her, after pinging her location on a secured channel. “He was Omega Force’s best fighter before Leon asked him to take over this unit. Though don’t let him hear you repeat that; he’ll likely snap your neck like a twig; he practically worships Leon.”
“I thought Leon was the man to beat.”
“For strategy and tactics, maybe. He isn’t their leader for nothing. He was their number two fighter when Patent was part of the unit; still is, now that Cassandra is with them.”
“Patent as a wing man? Isn’t that like using a cannon to light your cigarette?” Motown asked, his eyes still glued to the phenomenon that was Patent, causing him to miss his mouth with the spoon of stew he was ladling toward his face. That dragon had really tired him out; his reflexes weren’t exactly at a hundred percent yet.
The Star Gate Page 38
