“We did get them, bud.” Vlad smiled, hoping it would reassure his brother.
“Mannie,” Beryl jumped in. “Iris says the drones shot you in the shoulder and you’re going to be fine. But someone needs to get you back to the caves.”
“Iris can monitor us that closely?” Heming asked no one in particular, letting the question hang over their heads. Vlad was somewhat reassured to know that he wasn’t the only one who had noticed the issue.
“Apparently. I had no idea, either.” There was no time to discuss this development or even to ask Iris how she was doing it. Mannie needed to get taken care of. Then, and only then, would they have time to ask Iris about the seemingly impossible monitoring.
“Mike, I need you to take Mannie back to the caves.” Vlad let go of his brother’s hand and stood up. The younger siblings looked to him, wondering what they could do without asking to help. Vlad didn’t have time to waste on them today. He told Alexis and Dean to run into town to find something on which they could carry Mannie back to the caves. Once that was done, Vlad ordered all of his siblings back to the cave.
He expected a protest—from Heming if no one else—but no objections arose to his orders. It appeared to Vlad that seeing one of their youngest siblings injured like they had, had sobered all of them to the realities of the fight they had found themselves in. When drones were exploding like fireworks in the sky, it had been fun. Now, fun was the furthest thing from their minds.
His siblings had marched off toward the caves and were long out-of-sight when Vlad’s phone buzzed again. He half expected to see a message about new drones headed their way, but instead, Iris was letting him know that other injured people in the woods needed his help. Beryl seemed to have received a similar text, and she headed off to another part of the woods to help take care of their injured.
Vlad wasn’t sure how much time elapsed between the time he got that first message from Iris on the injured people in the woods and when those messages stopped coming in. However long it had been, by the end of the messages, he was close to exhaustion. The only bright side to the situation was that, for all those who were injured, only five or six of them were as seriously injured as Mannie. Most of the injuries were minor, the sorts of things people could walk off. A significant number of those injuries had come not from drones, but from peoples’ own clumsiness. Several people had tripped over roots and other natural objects in the woods, and at least two people had admitted to suffering their injuries while celebrating the defeat of the drones. Miraculously, no one had been killed, but Vlad attributed that more to the bad luck of the drones to find a superior foe than to the skills of the Columbinians. They had gotten the good side of luck that day, and he knew it.
After the last plea from Iris to help out other Columbinians, Vlad found Beryl. She was sitting quietly on the ground near where Mannie had been injured, her back against a tree at the edge of the woods. Camp curled up next to her, the dog looking as exhausted as Vlad felt. Beryl looked to be less fatigued physically, but something about her looked mentally spent, as if she needed a stiff drink more than anything else.
Vlad sat down next to Beryl, letting the dog sit between them and leaning up against the same large tree. Vlad petted the dog’s soft head, which immediately made him relax a bit, as it always did.
Vlad leaned his head back against the cool bark of the tree, shutting his eyes and letting the warmth of the Columbinian sun heat his body. He had always wanted more excitement out of life. Now that it was here, though, he had decided that excitement might be overrated.
And then, Vlad felt the dog’s muscles tense beneath his fingers. The dog jumped up, growling.
“Shit,” Beryl said, about two seconds before his own phone buzzed with a message from Iris.
They had incoming.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Get back to the woods!”
As Vlad yelled, he heard dozens of others around them shouting statements to the same effect. It seemed he wasn’t the only one who had decided the best thing to do in their situation was to get to the relative protection of the woods. Despite all the dangers found in the Columbinian woods, the trees seemed to offer more protection than the open area of town. At least near town, most of what could kill the humans in the woods had been eradicated years ago.
Vlad scrambled to his feet and grabbed Beryl’s hand to help her up. Camp was already trotting off toward the woods, expecting the humans to follow him.
Vlad and Beryl covered the distance from the tree under which they had been sitting to the woods and took positions similar to where they had been during the initial drone attack, kneeling in the woods out of sight from each other, but within easy earshot. Vlad watched the sky, silently awaiting the confrontation he knew was coming as he knew Beryl was doing near him.
Trying to get comfortable, Vlad heard the first of the drones above him before he saw it. The scene was eerily reminiscent of the first drone attack. Finally, his eyes spotted what his ears were already hearing. The drones’ oval shapes were outlined against the blue sky, like a UFO attack in a black and white film. There seemed to be fewer drones in this second attack, but what the drones now lacked in numbers, they seemed to be making up for in size. The drones in this second wave of the attack were at least three or four times the size of the drones in the original one.
“Well, this is great,” Vlad said under his breath, knowing no one could hear him.
From where he knew Beryl was sitting, he heard her familiar voice rise out of the dense greenery. “Are you thinking this might be a good time to get back a little further into the woods?”
Vlad looked toward the woods between them and behind them. This close to town, much of the underbrush, with its ability to hide animals intent on killing and eating humans, had been destroyed long ago.
Despite the safety of the woods on this part of the planet, it didn’t mean people regularly ventured out into them. Many people had spent the first decade of life on Columbina without ever traveling beyond the usually safe confines of town. The majority of those who did go into the Columbinian woods stuck to the well-worn paths through the forest, following the known trails to known places in the thick forests, rather than striking out on their own.
Where Vlad and Beryl were sitting in the woods, though, there were no paths. Vlad wasn’t as good with finding his way in the woods as Beryl, but he knew the woods around town as well as anyone else. As a young teenager living on a planet instead of a ship for the first time in his life, the jungles of the planet provided his first chance to get away from other people and have time on his own. He had never ventured very far from town in those days, but he had grown to know the forests around town well.
He knew exactly where they needed to go, and he knew Beryl would know how to get there, too, even though the path to the place was nowhere near where they now found themselves.
“Head toward the Rocks,” Vlad yelled through the woods over the already-loud noise of the drones as he picked himself up from the damp floor of the jungle. As he headed there, he saw Beryl fall in behind him, moving quickly with her dog at her heels.
“Do you know where you’re going?” Beryl asked.
“Yes,” he said, surprised not to hear a snide remark from Beryl.
The main path to where they were headed was somewhere to Vlad’s right. Pushing branches aside as they scratched at his bare arms, Vlad wished they were close enough to make it worthwhile to cut toward it. The path was probably the most-used of any trail in the woods, leading as it did toward a popular rock formation in a clearing, which had been given the descriptive but uncreative name of “the Rocks.”
During the day, the Rocks were populated with kids sneaking out into the woods—usually without permission from their parents—to have a mini adventure. Once there, they pretended to fight off Vos, or they imagined themselves in space fights with invading aliens. At night, though, the Rocks were a well-known meeting place for teenagers and young adults looking to g
et away from the parents they still lived with.
This was definitely not going to be the first time Vlad and Beryl had been at the Rocks together.
The woods thinned as the Rocks got closer; Vlad could see them looming in the clearing before he and Beryl plunged out of the woods and into the open.
Behind him, Vlad heard the unmistakable sound of gunfire, even though the sounds were not entirely the same as he would have expected from their own weapons. The noise had to be the sound of gunfire from the drones.
Whatever weapons these drones were using, they didn’t sound like something Vlad wanted to mess with. He hoped that his siblings had all heeded his warnings and gotten to the Caves. Not that this would have stopped them from coming back out into the fight. Vlad would have been shocked if any of them stayed there once they heard gunfire.
Wherever his siblings were now, though, Vlad couldn’t worry about them. He had his own issues to deal with. Based on the growing sound behind him, those issues were going to be finding him soon.
In front of Vlad in the clearing, the Rocks towered above his head, maybe thirty feet tall at their highest point and probably half a mile around, though on their edges the rocks were short and easily climbable. More than a few kids had broken bones attempting to climb higher than those low rocks, though. Despite a few close calls, it had never happened to Vlad, but it had happened to Heming—twice.
The rocks making up the formation were rounded, likely from tens of thousands of years of winds and rains eroding any sharp angles. At some point, they had probably been much taller, but now they were more of a natural jungle gym, the dull yellows and reds of the rocks a temptation to all kids on Columbina to come explore the caves hidden throughout the rock structure. Any part of the Rocks that had a cave or other place to hide had a name casually agreed to by the dozens of children and now young adults who had spent time there.
“We should split up, we can cover more ground that way and cover each other better than if we’re both in the same place,” Vlad pointed his gun toward the rocks.
“Good call. I’ll take the hole.” Beryl said, heading toward a part of the rock on their right, toward the main path to the Rocks from town. Vlad looked at the rock formation and knew where he should head, based on where they were, and the time he thought he had to hide before the drones arrived.
“I guess that leaves me the cave.”
Beryl told Camp where she was headed, and Vlad watched Camp get a running jump toward the Rocks, knowing where she wanted him to go. The dog was slightly over knee-height, but his running jump was enough to get to the top of the rocks. Beryl scrambled up behind him and dropped behind the stones, suddenly disappearing from sight.
Vlad didn’t have to see them to know what they would find behind the rock—a small area about big enough for five or six people to sit comfortably. The hole got its name because it was surrounded by rocks several feet tall, with the only opening in them being the open sky overhead. From inside, Vlad knew Beryl would be able to almost stand behind the rock, facing the clearing, without being seen. From there, she could shoot back toward whatever came near the Rocks. Unless something came from directly overhead, she and Camp would be safe there.
Vlad headed toward the Cave. It was similarly well-protected but entirely different than the Hole. As its name implied, it was a cave, an opening naturally carved into the rocks. The ceiling of the Cave was not high enough for him to stand up to his full height once he was inside, but he could easily sit within its confines and crawl back to where it ended, about twenty feet from its only entrance. The Cave’s main attribute at that moment, though, was that its entrance was protected by a large rock. To get inside, you had to crawl over the rock and then down into the darkness of the Cave. He could easily use the front, protective rock as a shield and shoot around the rock.
Thinking about the two locations, Vlad cursed at himself for letting Beryl take the Hole. Not only was the Cave a better place to shoot from, but it was also far more protected. He should have let her take the Cave and taken the Hole himself. As soon as the drones figured out the opening above the Hole, Beryl would be an open target for them.
Behind him in the woods, Vlad heard a sound different than the sound from the drone’s engine.
Gunshots.
Even if Vlad could have convinced Beryl to trade places—an unlikely prospect, at best—it was too late to do that now.
“Did you hear that?” Vlad shouted. He probably shouldn’t have been shouting with the drones nearby, but he wanted to hear Beryl’s voice and reassure himself that she was OK.
“That wasn’t our gunfire if that’s what you meant.”
Vlad’s phone buzzed.
He looked down to see Iris sending him a message. “You have two incoming.”
“Did you get that message from Iris?” Beryl shouted to him, apparently also happy to have the reassurance of someone else’s actual voice.
“Unfortunately. Is there any chance she is going to break through their defenses and take these drones out that way? I don’t really relish the thought of being shot at some more.”
This time, Vlad heard Iris’s voice coming out of his phone.
“I heard that. I’m working as fast as I can. I think it will be soon.”
“Soon may not be soon enough.” Vlad thought the worry he felt inside was now coming out of his mouth.
“Any advice?” Beryl asked, her voice now coming across on his phone.
“Shoot back.”
“Good advice. Definitely beats my Plan A, which was to give up and let these Earth bastards shoot at me.” Vlad now spoke to his phone as well. The drones were getting closer by the second. This close, he didn’t want to take the chance that the drones could hear them and use that information to pinpoint their location.
“Do you hear that? That’s me not laughing,” Iris said. “The two drones are about to get to the clearing at the Rocks. You guys are on your own. Good luck.”
Iris went quiet, and the buzzing sound of what Vlad could only assume were two of the large drones replaced Iris’s voice. Vlad snuck his head over the rock to look to the woods where the sound was coming from in time to see two drones emerge from the woods into the clearing.
Up close, Vlad could see that these new drones were actually at least five times the size of the first drones. Unlike the first set of drones, though, these two were moving deliberately. It was clear to Vlad that they weren’t coming in indiscriminately, looking to shoot at anything that moved.
They also didn’t look to be as primitive as the first set of drones, though that fact was relative. If these hadn’t been brought by the Earth AI, Vlad would have thought these things belonged in a museum. They each had two guns mounted on their undersides, seeming to scan the clearing and the woods looking for something to shoot. Otherwise, their surfaces were entirely smooth, almost like stones in a river. Or, Vlad thought, like the rocks behind which he and Beryl were now hiding.
To his left, Beryl took a few shots. He heard a metal ping over the noise of the drone engines, but when he looked at the outside of the drones, they didn’t appear to have done so much as make a dent in the smooth surfaces of the large drones.
Vlad scanned the surface of the drone nearest to him quickly, looking for any weakness—a seam or a dulled piece of metal, anything that would provide him with a hint as to how to destroy the thing.
But there was nothing.
He looked again, frantic now to see if there was some way to get past the strong armor that seemed to guard the drones against even their smart bullets.
There had to be something.
Vlad was about to give up, to ask Iris if she had any idea what they were supposed to do when he saw it.
It was small and seemed to blend into the rest of the smooth surface of the drone, but it was a slightly different color than the rest. That minor difference was what he had finally noticed. And he knew exactly what it was as soon as he saw it because he had seen pictures of a
sophisticated Earth drone in a previously forgotten history lesson on drone technology through the years.
It was a camera. The drones were tracking them by watching them.
Unfortunately for Vlad, the reason he had seen the camera was because it had caught sight of him. His brief moment of realization was cut short when a barrage of bullets came whizzing toward him.
Vlad ducked behind the rock at the front of the cave. The rock acted as a shield, but it couldn’t stop the little bits of the rock broken off with the bullets from pelting Vlad. It felt like rain that had turned into painful pellets, pelting his skin like stings from a bee.
“A little help here!” Beryl shouted above the din. Now that their positions were known by the drones, it didn’t matter if the drones heard them. “Aim for the camera!”
So Beryl had seen the cameras on the drones, too. That didn’t surprise Vlad. He knew better than anyone that the woman with him there on the rock knew how to find and exploit weaknesses.
Vlad ventured to look up and over the rock. The drone that had been assailing him with bullets had flown off toward the Hole, where Beryl and Camp were now pinned. The other drone was already there, and he could see it had its dual set of guns aimed at the rock where she was sheltered. Vlad aimed his weapon at the camera of the drone which had been shooting at him seconds earlier, hoping to take out at least the camera and give themselves some sort of advantage.
His first shot was well placed and hit the camera dead on. However, instead of taking out the camera alone, the drone violently shook before it exploded, sending pieces of the drone shooting across the clearing around the Rocks.
“That worked!” he yelled, “I took out the camera, and the whole drone came down.”
Vlad’s phone buzzed. Iris must have heard him or seen what was going on. The message wasn’t to him, but everyone out fighting, telling them to aim for the cameras.
Blue Planet Page 11
