Hard Contact

by Karen Traviss

  “One hundred klicks,” Atin said. He switched off his spot-lamp. “Helmets.”

  The compartment was suddenly dark, and there was a collective hiss of helmet seals purging and reengaging. They could only talk to each other at very short range now: on Qiilura, anything more than ten meters risked detection. The only visible light was the faint blue glow from the heads-up display in their visors, a group of ghostly disembodied T-shapes in the gloom, and the shimmering landscape playing out from Niner’s datapad. His head was tilted down slightly, watching the actual position of the utility vessel in the simulated landscape.

  The sprayer started to lose height, exactly on course. In a matter of minutes, they would be—

  Bang.

  A shudder ran through the airframe, and then there was no engine noise at all.

  For a second Darman thought they’d been hit by antiaircraft fire. Niner was on his feet instantly, moving forward to the cockpit, accidentally whacking Atin with his pack as he turned. Darman, without conscious decision, grabbed the emergency hatch handle and prepared to activate it for a bailout.

  Darman could see the droid clicking and flashing, apparently engaged in a dialogue of some kind with the vessel. The ship wasn’t listening.

  “AA, Sarge?”

  “Birdstrike,” Niner said, deceptively quiet. “Atmos engine’s fried.”

  “Can the R5 glide this thing down?”

  “It’s trying.”

  The deck tilted, and Darman grabbed at the bulkhead to stay upright. “No, that isn’t gliding. That’s crashing.”

  “Bang out,” Niner said. “Bang out now.”

  The Narsh dirt-crate hadn’t let them down. It had just succumbed to being in the wrong airspace at the wrong time, and met the local avian species the hard way. Now they were plummeting toward the kind of landing not even the latest Katarn armor could help them survive.

  Darman blew the hatch, and the inrush of air sent dirt and debris whirling through the cargo bay. The door fell away through the opening. It was pitch black outside, a challenge for a free-faller even with night vision. Darman was starting to experience serious doubt for the second time in his life. He wondered if he was becoming one of those despised creatures that his training sergeant had called cowards.

  “Go go go,” Niner shouted. Fi and Atin eased through the hatch and stepped out. Don’t try to jump, just let yourself fall. Darman stood back to make way for Niner: he wanted to salvage as much gear as he could. They needed the repeating blasters. He grabbed some of the dismantled sections.

  “Now,” Niner said. “You first.”

  “We need the gear.” Darman thrust two sections at him. “Take these. I’ll—”

  “I said jump.”

  Darman wasn’t a rash man. None of them were. They took calculated risks, though, and he calculated that Niner wouldn’t leave him. His sergeant was standing at the open hatch, arm held out imperiously, a clear sign to get on with it and jump. No, Darman had made up his mind. He lunged forward and shoulder-charged Niner out of the hatch, grabbing the door frame just in time to stop from plunging after him. It was clear from the stream of expletives that Niner was not expecting this, nor was he happy about it. The extra pack jerked out after him on its tether. Darman heard one last profanity and then Niner was out of range.

  Darman grabbed a strap and peered down, but he couldn’t see his sergeant falling, and that probably meant nobody else could, either. He now had a minute, more or less, to salvage what he could and get out before the utility hit the ground.

  He switched on his helmet lamp. He couldn’t afford the time to listen to the rushing wind and the complete absence of reassuring engine noise, but he heard it anyway. He dropped the bowcaster and began lashing the blaster sections together with a line. It was a shame. He loved the bowcaster, but they needed those cannons more.

  Knotting lines was hard enough with gloves on, but was even harder when you were seconds from crashing. Darman fumbled a knot. He cursed. He looped the line again and this time it held. He let out a sob of relief, dropped the weapon, and dragged the gear down to the hatch. Nobody could hear him at this range, and he didn’t care what the droid thought.

  Then he stepped out into black void. The wind took him.

  There was no rushing landscape beneath him yet to take his attention from the heads-up display. He was free-falling at nearly two hundred kilometers an hour, trailing sections of heavy, heavy cannon. He maneuvered into tracking position, pack square across his back, rifle tight into his side, the remainder of his gear on the container that rested on the backs of his legs. When he deployed the canopy at eight hundred meters, he would release the container. And he’d use the powered-descent option, because that might save him from the unsupported, potentially lethal weight of cannon that was falling with him.

  Yes, he knew exactly what he was doing. And yes, he was scared.

  He’d never jumped with so much unsecured load in training.

  The canopy deployed, and it felt like he’d slammed into a wall. The power pack kicked in, heating up the air around him. He could steer now. He counted down fifteen seconds.

  Something flared into brilliant white flame beneath him, off to his right—the Narsh vessel crashing some thirty klicks short of the target zone.

  Darman realized he had thought nothing of leaving the R5 on board the stricken utility. It was expendable.

  And that was how he was seen, he supposed. It was surprisingly easy to think that way.

  He could see the ground now. His night vision could pick out the tops of trees, right beneath.

  No, no, no.

  He tried to miss. He failed.

  He hit something very, very hard in the air. Then he hit the ground and didn’t feel anything at all.

  4

  This is the true art of genetic selection and manipulation. A human is naturally a learning creature, but it is also violent, selfish, lustful, and undisciplined. So we must walk the knife-edge between suppressing the factors that lead to disobedience and destroying that prized capacity for applying intelligence and aggression.

  —Hali Ke, senior research geneticist of Kamino

  Niner was hauling in his canopy when the explosion jerked him upright. A column of white roiling fire shot into the night sky above the tops of the trees. He knew it was hot and bright because his helmet visor’s filter kicked in to stop it from overwhelming his night vision.

  Even though he knew it was coming, his heart sank. Darman probably hadn’t made it. He’d disobeyed his order. He hadn’t jumped when he told him to.

  So maybe you’ve lost a brother. Maybe not. Either way, you’ll lose two more if you don’t get your act together fast.

  Niner triangulated the position of the blast and then went on bundling up the free-fall canopy, cutting away the lengths of cord before burying it. With a breaking strength of five hundred kilos, the cord was bound to come in handy. He wound each length in a figure-eight around his thumb and smallest finger and slipped the skeins into a belt pouch, then went in search of his extra pack.

  It hadn’t fallen far from him. The low-opening technique worked well if you needed accuracy. Niner found the pack at the edge of a field, covered in small dark-furred animals that seemed fascinated by it and were gnawing at the soft padding strip on one side. He flashed his spot-lamp to scatter them, but they stared back up the beam, burst into angry chatter, and then turned toward him.

  It was unnerving, nothing more. Their little teeth snapped impotently on his armor. He stood still, assessing them, his data bank scrolling in front of his eyes and telling him that they were gdans, and that they weren’t logged as a hostile alien species. All the nonhuman life Niner had ever seen for real, other than Kaminoans and various instructors, had been on Geonosis and through a blaster sight. He was utterly dependent on the intelligence loaded into his database—that, or finding things out for himself.

  All but one of the gdans gave him up as inedible within a minute and disappeared int
o the waist-high crop. The remaining creature worried away at his left boot, a tribute to its tenacity, if not its intelligence. Those boots were specced to withstand every assault from hard vacuum to acid and molten metal. The little animal clearly believed in aiming high.

  Darman would have found it fascinating, he was sure. It was a pity to lose him. He had all the makings of a good comrade.

  “Come on,” Niner said, nudging the animal with the butt of his blaster rifle. “I’ve got to get to work. Shove off.”

  The gdan, teeth locked around a clamp, looked up and met his eyes, or at least it seemed like it. It could only have really seen a faint blue light. Then it let go and trotted back toward the field, pausing once to stare back at him before disappearing into a hole in the ground with all the ease of a diver.

  Niner took out his datapad and calculated his position. There was no GPS he could lock in to without the Neimoidians detecting him, but he could at least use dead reckoning based on the sprayer’s last position, matching features on the landscape to his chart. It was old-fashioned soldiering. He liked it. He had to be able to do the business when the tech wasn’t there, even if that meant using nothing but a Trandoshan blade.

  If you stab someone in the heart, they can still run. I once saw a man run a hundred meters like that, screaming as well. Go for the neck, like this. Sergeant Skirata had taught them a lot about knives. Put a bit of weight behind it, son.

  Still, tech had its place. A speeder bike would have been handy, although they hadn’t thought they’d need them. The insert was supposed to be five klicks from the target.

  Never mind, he thought. It would make me look pretty conspicuous out here anyway. The gear would slow him on his way to the pre-agreed rendezvous point, but he’d get there. If Fi and Atin had landed safely, they’d be heading for RV Alpha, too.

  He started tabbing, trying to make ten klicks an hour, avoiding tracks and open ground. In the end he had to drag the extra pack behind him on straps like a sled. Tactical advance into battle—tabbing, as Skirata called it—meant walking at six to ten klicks an hour with a twenty-five-kilo pack. “But that’s for ordinary men,” the instructor would say, as if nonclones were subhuman. “You are clone commandos. You will do better because you are better.”

  Niner was lugging nearly three times that load now. He didn’t feel better at all right then. He decided to add a portable repulsorlift to his new list of gear to request upon return.

  Qiilura’s moon was in its new phase, and he was grateful for that. In his light gray armor, he would have stood out like a beacon. Hadn’t the top brass thought of that, either? He stifled the uncharacteristically critical opinion about his superiors and decided there had to be something he didn’t know but they did. He had his orders.

  Even so, he diverted to a narrow river shown on the holochart and stopped long enough to smear mud over his armor and gear. There was no point chancing his luck.

  At four hundred meters from RV point Alpha, he slowed down, and not because he was struggling under the weight. A silent approach was necessary. He hid the pack he was dragging deep in the undergrowth and recorded its location to collect later. Fi and Atin might have been tracked. They might not have made it at all. There was always the possibility of ambush. No, he definitely wasn’t taking chances.

  For the last two hundred meters, he got down in the grass and crawled.

  But they were there, and alone.

  Niner found himself staring up into the beam from Fi’s helmet and he knew that the infrared targeting was centered at the point between his filtration mask and the top of his chest plate. It was a vulnerable point, provided one got close enough and used the right caliber rounds. Not many hostiles could get that close, of course.

  “You gave me a start, Sarge,” Fi said, holding his blaster clear and looking him over. He killed the light and indicated his chest plate. “Great minds, eh?”

  Fi’s armor was no longer pristine, either. Niner wasn’t sure what he’d smeared over it, but it disrupted his outline well enough. The thought had obviously occurred to all of them. Atin was daubed with something dark and matte as well.

  “Shape, shine, shadow, silhouette, smell, sound, and movement,” Niner said, repeating the rules of basic camouflage. If it hadn’t been for Darman’s absence, he would have found the situation funny. He tried. “Shame they couldn’t find something beginning with S to complete the set.”

  “I could,” Atin said. “Any contact from Darman?”

  They were forty kilometers from the point where Niner had landed. “I saw the blast. He was last off.”

  “You saw him jump, then.”

  “No. He was grabbing as much gear and ordnance as he could salvage.” Niner felt he needed to explain. “He shoved me out the hatch first. I shouldn’t have let that happen. But I didn’t abandon him.”

  Atin shrugged. “So what have we got, then?”

  “We’ve got a brother missing.”

  “I meant by way of resources. He had most of the demolition ordnance.”

  “I know you meant that, and I don’t want to hear it.” If he could feel concern—even sorrow—for Darman, then why couldn’t Atin? But it was no time to start a fight. They had to stick together now. A four-man mission with three men: their chances of succeeding had plummeted already. “We’re a squad now. Get used to it.”

  Fi interrupted. He seemed to have a knack for defusing situations. “All our gear’s intact, anyway. We can still put quite a dent in them if we have to.”

  And what did they have to put a dent in, exactly? They had high-altitude drone recces of the target building, but no idea yet if the walls were just plastered blocks or if they were lined with shock-absorbing alloy plates. There could be just the thirty or so guards seen walking the perimeter, or hundreds more holed up in underground barracks. Without better intelligence, they had no way of knowing just how much gear was enough for the job.

  It was a case of adding P for plenty, just to be sure. Niner liked to be sure.

  “How much time are we going to spend looking for him?” Atin asked. “They know they’ve got company now. It wasn’t exactly a silent insert.”

  “SOPs,” Niner said. Standard operating procedures: that was how things should be done; how commandos expected them to be done. “We get to each RV point for the time we agreed upon, and if he doesn’t show we’ll go to the position of the blast and see what’s left. Then we’ll decide if we’re going to consider him MIA or not.”

  “You’d want us to search if it was you missing,” Fi said to Atin. “He can’t call in. Not at this range. Too risky.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to compromise the mission for me,” Atin said, distinctly acid.

  “He’s alone, for fierfek’s sake. Alone.”

  “Just shut it, will you?” Niner said. The good thing about ultra-short-range comlinks was that you could stand around and have a blazing argument inside those helmets, and nobody outside could hear you. “Finding him isn’t only the right thing to do, it’s the sensible thing to do. Locate him and we find his gear. Okay?”

  “Yes Sarge,” Fi said.

  “Got it,” Atin said. “But there has to be a point where we consider him dead.”

  “Without a body, that’ll be when Geonosis freezes over,” Niner said, still angry and not knowing why. “Until then, we’re going to sweat our guts out to find him, provided it doesn’t blow the mission. Now let’s see if we can sling this gear between some poles or something. We’ll never keep this pace up for tens of kilometers unless we find a better way of transporting it.”

  Niner set his helmet comlink to receive long-range anyway. There was no harm in listening. If Darman was out there, Niner wasn’t planning on abandoning him.

  The clearing hadn’t been there yesterday.

  Etain picked her way through flattened kuvara saplings and into a circle of blackened stubble, following Birhan’s steps. The air smelled of smoke and roasted barq.

  He was swearing fluen
tly. She didn’t know much Qiiluran, but she knew a curse when she heard one.

  “This is your lot again,” Birhan said. He surveyed the field, hands to his brow to block out the sun breaking over the horizon. Now that it was daylight, they could see the extent of the damage from last night’s explosion. “What am I going to do? What’s going to happen to our contract?”

  It wasn’t phrased like a question. The Neimoidians weren’t known to be sympathetic about the host of natural disasters constantly threatening the farming communities’ precarious existence. But this was no natural disaster.

  The blast area spanned around five hundred meters, and the crater at the center was twelve, maybe fifteen meters wide. Etain didn’t know how deep it was, but a Trandoshan and an Ubese were standing at the edge of it, peering down, blasters in hand, looking as if they were searching in the soil. They didn’t take the slightest notice of her or Birhan. She must have looked suitably starved and dowdy, rough enough to pass for a farm girl.

  It was probably too late to convince them the crater was caused by a meteor fragment. But at this point Etain didn’t know any more than they did.

  “Why do you think it’s my lot?” she asked.

  “Obvious,” Birhan said sourly. “I seen loads of speeders and freighters and sprayers come down hard. They don’t leave craters. They falls apart and burns, yes, but they don’t blow up half the countryside. This is off-planet. It’s soldiers.” He kicked around some of the charred and blackened stalks. “Can’t you have your fight on someone else’s planet? Don’t you think I got enough problems?”

  She wondered for a moment if he was considering turning her in to Hokan’s men for a few credits to make up for the loss of the precious barq. She was already an extra mouth to feed at a time when money he was counting on had just gone up in a fireball with much of his crop. It was time to find somewhere else to hide, and some other plan for getting that information off Qiilura.