The massive shadow of Aymes beat him to it. She thrust her knife through the man’s spine just above the shoulder blades. A good quick death. Aymes fell to a knee clutching at her side.
“Turn on your fucking proximity Fielding,” she gasped through gritted teeth.
“Shit, did I do that?”
“’Fraid so hero, I fucking hate gut shots. ‘Specially this far from a medic.”
Aymes’ grimacing teeth were visible in the minimal light and grew into sharp focus as Jonah’s VI and proximity came back on line.
“Shit, sorry Sarg. I had to go dark. They had me cornered.”
“Fuck that hurts,” Aymes gasped, eyes squeezing shut with the pain. “Unbelievable. One friendly in the fight. Still get shot by him. Fuck!”
“Let’s get back to camp, I need the light to patch you up, looks like the rest have gone. They took Ray.”
Aymes nodded that she knew. “Those bastards are gonna wish they fuckin’ killed me and next time I see Jager, I’m going to stab him in the eye with one of his own fucking ribs. Bet you anything he ordered us dead.” Aymes was puffing hard trying to breathe through the pain and not pass out.
“Gotta move Sarg, can you walk?”
“Stow that weapon before you get over here,” Aymes grimaced, looking daggers at Jonah.
Jonah jumped forward to help Aymes up.
They staggered slowly towards the camp, Jonah struggling to support Aymes’ weight while focusing his energy on any enemies that might still be lying in wait. The place seemed deserted with no signs of the vehicles. Got what they came for, Jonah suspected, though it seemed likely the he and Aymes were supposed to be dead.
Luckily, they had left Ray’s work light still blazing. Enhanced vision was good but lacked the resolution of natural vision for really fine work, like the suturing that Jonah suspected he was about to have to do on Aymes.
“Diamorph,” Aymes gasped sitting down hard on the ground in the pool of light. She started gingerly unclasping her antiballistic nano-gel vest, but needed help hauling the stodgy garment over her damaged shoulder. The garments were lighter and more flexible than old fashioned polymer armor as they were constructed from a fabric filled with a network of non-Newtonian fluid filled vesicles. Still stiff enough, however, to cause a problem for a woman with a smashed shoulder and a gut wound.
Jonah’s bullet must have missed the bottom of the vest which probably meant it hadn’t hit any major organs. It must have missed her femoral artery also as she would surely have been dead already in that case. Good chance it might have nicked her bowel though, Jonah thought.
He lifted the light medkit from Aymes’ pack that was still lying where she was about to bed down before they got jumped. Jonah stabbed Aymes with one amp of diamorph just to take the edge off the pain. He got her hip clear of fabric and managed to get her to roll enough that he could see the exit wound. Through and through. At least that was good. No bullet stuck in the wound. The wound was oozing but not spurting.
“Doesn’t look too bad from here,” Jonah observed.
“I’ll know in a couple of hours,” Aymes replied. “If I’m bleeding too bad in there, I’ll need a surgeon. Plug it anyway. The shoulder definitely needs reconstruction. Something broken up there for sure. I can’t lift it.”
Jonah turned his attention to the shotgun wound in her shoulder. He started picking out flecks of fabric and bone and poking around for shot in the wound. After a minute or two, he moved the work light closer and gave Aymes another amp of diamorph. She was blowing hard and sweating with the pain of the poking.
Jonah winced, “Sorry, you need to be able to move if they come back. I don’t want to knock you out … Yep, shoulder’s definitely broken, you’ll be out for a few weeks with this one. I’ll put a skin patch on so at least the muscle and tissue will regen but there is nothing I can do about the bone at the moment.”
Jonah fished out a small cryocan and broke the seal. A cloud of steam erupted from the opening as the minus eighty-degree environment in the can hit the warm moisture laden Dianian air. An inner cylinder pulled out of the can with a light tug revealing several tightly rolled strips and a few syringes. An indicator showed the temperature of the contents rising rapidly.
Jonah waited until they warmed to five degrees at which point the temperature indicator changed from red to green. Jonah took a syringe, injecting half the contents into the wound on her hip and half into the exit wound. Aymes winced again as catalyst in the liquid reacted with the bulk causing the contents to expand into a flexible biopolymer mesh that gripped the broken tissue of the bullet wound, sealing the hole tightly. A slurry of defrosting stem cells containing Aymes’ DNA waited within the matrix and mixed with the blood that rapidly soaked through the mesh, bringing the cells to life.
Personalized regen gels regrow tissue and muscle amazingly well, but wouldn’t work on intestine. Internal organ grafts took a few days to grow and there was no way to do it out here. Jonah hoped that she wasn’t leaking internally.
When the tissue patches were warm enough to unroll, Jonah applied one over a thick layer of regen gel on her shoulder. As always, the speed of blood profusion through expanding gel amazed him. Other chemicals in the gel broke down the blood that had already clotted and arrested the inflammatory process. The wound would revascularize and heal in a matter of days.
Jonah had received worse flesh wounds than this and could barely tell where the scar was. Even the hair follicles regenerated. The bone would remain broken and the arm useless until Aymes could get to a surgeon. Within a day or two though, she would be over the worst of the pain.
“I’m thinking of hiding you around here somewhere and following them. You’re not gonna be able to walk far for a couple of days and if your bowel is nicked we may need to move quicker… We need to get a vehicle,” Jonah observed as he finished the last of the dressing.
Aymes looked around, already assessing the bush for good hiding spots. She pointed in the direction of some extra dense ferns with her good arm and made to sit up.
“Hold still Master Sargent,” Jonah instructed, “I’ll slide you over.” He gathered her sleeping bag and lifted, first her legs, then her torso onto it.
The route wasn’t smooth, and it taxed the limits of his strength but eventually, Aymes was stashed deep in the ferns, one sleeping bag beneath her and one on top. Jonah set her up with a bunch of diamorph, three canteens of water, and a bunch of food bars that the CDSE carried. They shared a last look as Jonah clasped her good shoulder. No words were needed. Jonah would make it back if her could. If he couldn’t Aymes was on her own.
CHAPTER 24
Jonah shed as much as he could. He need to be fast for this mission. Rifle, small pack with water, a little food and fatigues. He dropped the weight of his armor and even his helmet. He quickly sent a message relaying the situation to Sparks and Nettle and received a long angry passage of text in reply. He decided to leave reading that until later. No distractions from here on in.
He had no idea how far into the Darklands they had taken Ray, but he suspected he was going to have a long run ahead. The tracks of the heavy transports were easy to follow and stuck to well used trails. Jonah lapsed into the slow shuffling jog that the marines were taught to use when trying to max travel distance without exhausting themselves.
Jonah was glad for the relative cool on the fringes of the Darklands and he set a good pace. To his enhanced eyes the forest shimmered bright silver. IR overlays showed the deep wells of thermal energy the bigger plants generated beneath the soil. From his lessons before shipping out, Jonah knew that the plants used sunlight to a degree but most of their energy came from metabolic processes beneath the ground. Only about ten percent of the bulk of these plants poked above the planet surface, top up charging the forest with weak starlight.
The vast network of branches and roots and bacterial bioreactor chambers beneath his feet churned out enough heat to stop the forest freezing. Enough heat to bring the
air temperature of the entire Darklands above freezing in fact. Terra-forming by evolution, Jonah thought to himself.
The information had washed over him during briefings but now that he could see the blooms of heat diffusing up through the soil, some so hot that plumes of steam filtered up through the undergrowth and wisped up the great trunks into the canopy, he felt like he was running on a living thing. He had the irrational impression that the planet knew he was there, like the tickle you feel when a small insect crawls through the hair on your arm.
Jonah alternated running and walking in thirty-minute stretches for the first six hours, taking only short breaks. His feet were hurting, and he was tiring badly but he knew from experience he could go for around another four hours at this pace until he would need a longer rest.
He climbed a tree to get a view across the forest to see if he could see lights up ahead and try to gauge how far he had to go. He saw nothing except his enhanced vision of the rippling forest canopy; impervious to his pursuit and seemingly endless. He descended and stared at the vehicle tracks stretching into the bush unchanging.
At some point the thin forest track he was on, had broadened into a wider road and a third vehicle track joined the two that Jonah followed. Jonah doubted they would have any reason to stop so he resigned himself to following at a slower pace. He might still have days to go. He sat and rested his back against a tree for a while. He knew better than to take off his boots. It would feel wonderful to be free of them but the psychological battle to put them back on would be exhausting.
He mentally toggled his proximity system through a range of modes that he rarely used. He picked up encrypted radio communication coming from behind and ahead of him. All that did was confirm that he was going in the right direction but gave no further information about range.
With one more marine they could have spread out and triangulated a source location but, by himself, all he had was signal intensity to tell him he was getting closer. He had a vehicle detection mode that picked up typical electromagnetic emissions from electric motors, but these were currently detecting nothing. No vehicles within ten kilometers.
“Not surprising,” Jonah concluded with resignation. He drank water, ate a little, and then hauled himself back to his feet. He set out, forcing himself into a long stride to eat as much ground as possible.
After a further four hours with few rests he was starting to trip and stagger, so he rested again. He was getting little info from the scanners. Jonah grabbed a Haemo-tab from his pack and swallowed it. Many marines took them at the start of a long hike, but Jonah preferred to take them when he was getting tired. The immediate improvement felt more dramatic from a state of exhaustion and made him feel superhuman.
He forced himself back into action and flicked on his radio detector. Since he last checked there had been a big increase in signal strength. Maybe he was going to get lucky and the trucks were not as far ahead as they could have been. Jonah selected a sturdy tree with low radiating branches and climbed.
This time, when he looked across the forest canopy, a brighter spot among the silver was visible. Jonah toggled off his enhanced vision. Against the black background, the light shining up through the forest canopy stood out brightly. Less than an hour away Jonah judged.
He descended and began to weave his way towards the lights More cautiously now and with his BE turned off and proximity alerts on, listening only. He began to see pools of light up ahead among the trees and could hear the distant sound of voices. Jonah frowned to himself. The echoing noise bouncing through the trees sounded like … like children. The unmistakable jumble of shrieks and laughter that comes from large groups of children at play.
Jonah crept forward again, trying to keep his mind off the unlikeliness of the children's voices and concentrated on looking for guard posts. He became aware of a stationary presence up ahead among the trees. His mind locked the presence to the rear side of a great tree some thirty feet ahead.
He immediately toggled his BE to off and waited while his eyes adjusted. Creeping forward in the shadow of the great tree, his vision silhouetted by distant light filtering through the trees.
He drew closer and heard murmurs of conversation whispering around the tree. He had hoped to take out the guard and grab a uniform but the prospect of taking out two without raising the alarm was a more daunting prospect. There must be at least one NOBE there.
Jonah froze unsure of how to proceed. Eventually he backed up and skirted, so he could get a decent look. He saw the faint outline of two guards, sitting on the roots, quietly conversing. He could kill them easily with a shot but that would undoubtedly bring more guards running. He could leave them but if the enhanced guard had IR vision, there was a good chance they would spot him approaching the camp.
The guards looked alert and focused as he watched them. Eventually they made his mind up for him. One of the guards stood up with a grunt, smoothing the front of his black CDSE security shirt over the bulk of his body armor. He shouldered his weapon, made a comment to his companion, and moved purposefully into the bush towards Jonah.
He let a trickle of power into his proximity systems, sniffing for the telltale emissions of bio enhancements. Nothing at all. To Jonah the man felt like a hole in reality. He could see him but couldn’t feel him. Definitely a NOBE. Jonah deepened his crouch and slithered a little to his left to intercept the man’s transit and to improve his cover. He drew his knife silently from its soft sheath and waited until the man passed him. Rising, he covered the distance in a stride, simultaneously covering the man’s nose and mouth with his left hand while drawing his knife across the man’s throat, cutting deep.
This was a move he had conducted many times in training but never in combat. The warm rush of blood on his arm and the smell assaulted his senses and took him by surprise. As he had been trained, he lifted the man clear of the ground, so he couldn’t force Jonah backwards. Blood loss of this magnitude should lead to unconsciousness in a few seconds.
In his mind, Jonah had expected the man to slump quietly into death but instead, he kicked out wildly with his feet and his hands grabbed at Jonah’s forearm, fingernails digging painfully. The heel of the man’s boot connected with Jonah’s shin and he stumbled, falling into collection of bushes and shrubs that crackled and snapped alarmingly. To Jonah the sound seemed so loud that security back in Atlas must have heard it.
Blood spurting from the cut, the fight ran out of the man swiftly and Jonah regained his balance, lowering him quietly to the ground. He listened for sounds of pursuit or for a call from the other man. Nothing came. Jonah knew he had to deal with the second guard who no doubt would be waiting for his partner to return.
The slick of blood on his hands and the smell made Jonah feel ill, his mouth flooding with saliva as he fought off the urge to gag. He wiped his hands on his uniform. No more knives he thought to himself. If he was going to steal a uniform it would be better if it were not covered in blood. Especially once he made it into the light.
He shook his head to clear his thinking and doubled back towards the tree. His view of the second guard obscured, he rounded the bowl of the trunk until he came into view, leaning back against the deeply rutted wood. This would be much more difficult than if he were standing, Jonah thought. Standing he could have gotten directly behind the man for a choke hold.
Jonah paused to steady himself then covered the remaining distance in two long strides, winding up to deliver a kick to the man’s temple. The guard clearly heard Jonah’s footfalls and turned towards the noise lazily, probably thinking his partner was returning. The toe of Jonah’s boot caught him squarely in the mouth instead of the side of the head. The man’s jaw caved in with a sickening crunch weakening the impact of the strike and failing to knock the man out.
He was flung back by the force of the blow and landed heavily on a tree root. Dazed, he struggled to scramble up. Jonah was glad it was too dark to see the state of the man’s face. From the strangled gurgles he
was making it wasn’t good. Jonah followed with the butt of his rifle delivering a sharp crack to the side of the man’s head, felling him like a stalk of wheat.
Jonah breathed for a few beats, clearing his head then stood on the man’s throat, pressing down hard until the involuntary spasms subsided and then a further sixty seconds after that to make sure he wouldn’t wake up. Jonah quickly stripped the dead man’s pants, shirt and helmet and changed into them.
He felt immediately more human casting his blood-soaked camos into the scrub and sliding the shirt on. Made to go over nano-gel armor it was baggy but would give him at least a half chance of going unnoticed. He grabbed the guard’s combat shotgun as an afterthought.
Suddenly with a pang of fear he wondered whether the status of the guard was monitored and whether he had just tripped the alarm by killing him. Unlikely he concluded, the hair on his neck returning to rest on his skin. Most bio-status info needed to be carried on a network unless the unit members were close to one another.
Jonah turned some of his systems back on to confirm there was no active network and while he was at it, he scanned for any other enhanced personnel lurking in the trees. Not feeling anybody in the vicinity he bent down and used the recognition coils implanted into his left hand to locate the downed security man’s RFID tag. On Earth, VI did the job of an RFID but most people had them for close-up ID scanner like the ones in train stations and for door access etcetera. Like most people’s, it was implanted in the flesh between the thumb and forefinger of the right hand.
Jonah dug a rough cube of flesh from the guard’s hand with his knife and checked that it contained the man’s tag and that it still worked. Without an active network Jonah’s system had no chance to ID him, but the implant was definitely working.
Earth-Net Page 19
