Kill Before Dying (Tau Ceti Agenda Book 5)

by Travis S. Taylor

  There was still white steam and gray smoke and various other coolant and hydraulic fluids seeping from the space fighter’s armored joints. Dee was certain if she had her mask open that she’d smell burning plastics, lubricants, and other pungent odors of a downed plane. Dee pushed herself up to plank position and then rested on her knees. Dee inhaled deeply and took a second to steady her mind and collect her thoughts.

  Suit inventory, she thought. A three-dimensional translucent image of her suit popped up in her mindview with diagnostics and lists scrolling beside it. Arrows highlighted minor dings and damage, but there were no major malfunctions. The suit was functioning in proper order but there was a blatantly obvious missing item.

  “Forgot my fucking gun,” she grunted as she managed to raise herself to her feet and jump one-legged back up onto the right wing of the mecha. The canopy was cracked and open and there were very few useful systems still functioning. She reached over into the weapons compartment in the ejection seat and pulled out the M-blaster stored there, and then pulled a handle that had been hidden behind a closed panel marked “EMERGENCY.” There was a metal-releasing-from-metal grinding sound and that gave her at least some comfort. Dee turned from the cockpit and dropped to the surface of the planet, her jumpboots crunching against the tall, thick-bladed grass and into the dirt as she landed. Dee’s situational awareness rose as she began scanning quickly with the M-blaster in her right hand, brandishing it about looking for potential targets. She didn’t see any at the moment and the adrenaline rush she’d had from crashing was wearing off. She paused for a second to get her breath and to allow the immunoboost, stims, and pain meds to kick in.

  What’s the damage, Bree?

  Your left ankle is broken and you have two metatarsal bones fractured pretty severely. Her AIC brought up an image of her injuries in her mindview. It will be maybe as much as thirty minutes before you can run top speed and probably an hour before you should be using the jumpboots on the suit.

  Any uglies around?

  Not as best I can tell so far. Your position is being monitored by the Hillenkoetter.

  Are you in contact with it?

  Yes. I am in contact with Allison. She is monitoring your situation closely.

  Good. Dee was hoping they could send a SARs team down for her. But she wasn’t keeping her hopes up for it to come anytime soon.

  Dee! We need to get out of here. Bree’s mindvoice sounded alarmed. Allison has just informed me that a Chiata search vehicle is heading this way.

  “Shit! We’d better find a place to lay low,” Dee said audibly, jumping to her good foot and bracing with her elbow against the side of her trashed mecha. She did a quick inventory of what she could get to within the plane. There was the compartment that she had popped loose. It was time to see what was in it. The compartment was on the lower aft right end of the mecha, was about seventy percent covered in dirt, and was bent inward pretty badly, but it was open at one corner where the hasp had been. That hasp must have been the metal-on-metal noise she’d heard letting go when she pulled the emergency handle.

  Although the panel was bent inward pretty badly and was almost buried in the dirt, Dee managed to use the suit’s strength to tear it open and get at the survival gear within. There was a hypervelocity automatic rifle, extra ammo for the HVAR, reloads for the med kit in her suit, one food and water refill, and an inflatable one-man shelter. All of the kit other than the rifle fit in a small pack about ten by twenty by thirty centimeters. She slung the pack over her back and it melded quickly in place to the armor. Then she snapped the rifle across her chest plate where AEMs wore their weapons until they needed to fire them.

  We have to hurry. Allison is tracking them with the ship’s sensors. They are getting closer, Bree warned her. They are approaching in a pushbroom sweeping pattern from the south.

  Which way do we go? We should take the easiest terrain for now until my foot heals. Dee scanned about looking for any signs of Chiata. I don’t see anything yet.

  They’re not in visual range yet but I’ve added them to the battlescape view using the Hillenkoetter’s data and passive-only suit sensors. We should go further north for now. The terrain that way looks mostly flat and covered with forest and jungle.

  Dee looked around to get her bearings. The planet was tilted and was almost pointing at the star, with the axis of rotation tilted at about thirty degrees off the ecliptic. The northern axial pole of the planet at its present season was pointing toward the star. It was summertime and the region she’d gone down in was green, very green. There was thick-bladed grass standing almost waist high, with giant trees spread about every ten or twenty meters. The canopy was thick and much like the jungles of the Amazon on Earth. Or at least that is what Dee thought the Amazon would look like—she’d never actually been there.

  Dee’s armored environment suit was of the standard issue USMC mecha pilot variety. While it had the new Buckley shields and was a tough system, pilot suits were slimmer and slightly less bulky than the standard AEM suits. Being less bulky also meant less armored. While Dee was proficient in her suit and with her weapons, her hopes were that she wouldn’t be getting into any hand-to-hand situations with the Chiata anyway.

  Dee put weight on her left foot, and it felt weak and gave her only the slightest hint of pain. The pain meds had kicked in and the immunoboost was beginning to do its job. Her suit realized she was moving on the injury and overfilled the area with organogel and pressurized the armored boot to form a temporary compression cast. That made her walk with a stiff ankle joint on the left side but it completely removed the pain. The suit would know when to ease up on it.

  Dee moved as swiftly as she could through the alien jungle, wading through the high thick green blades of grass and doing her best to stay covered by the tree canopy and out of sight. The canopy was filled with motion and infrared signatures, and around every tree, bush, and blade of grass the yellow and green hues from the star’s light cast strange shadows about. Every sound and every flicker of motion triggered her startle factor, and she had to focus her mind and breathing to overcome the fight-or-flight adrenaline.

  After she’d limped several kilometers northward, the trees led her to a clearing at the edge of what looked like a swamp marsh. There was an outcropping of rocks at the bank of the swamp, and something that appeared to be a large termite or ant mound. She steered clear of it just in case it wasn’t friendly. Sounds of rushing water grew louder as she snaked her way around the marsh at the edge of the treeline.

  Wonder if there are any creatures in there on top of the food chain?

  Looks like a good place for snakes or crocodiles if they have them here, Bree agreed. But, I’d bet none of them are higher up the chain than a well-trained United States Marine in an armored suit.

  Ooh-fuckin’-rah. Dee smiled inwardly.

  I’m detecting incoming on passive sensors. Suit stealth is fully operational and functioning as expected. But who knows if their sensors can detect it or not. Would you like me to go to active stealth?

  No, Dee replied. We don’t want to take a chance that going active might alert them to where we are instead of spoofing their sensors. For that matter, who the hell knows if our active spoofers can actually engage the Chiata shit anyway?

  Commander Buckley or the STO might.

  Well, they ain’t here. Feel free to ask them next time we see them. Dee almost thought it catty.

  The suit blended into the environment and was for all intents and purposes invisible to the human eye and most sensors in the electromagnetic spectrum. Her DTM battlescape view activated and a red dot appeared almost on top of the blue dot that was her downed mecha. Dee was lucky in that there were still Fleet ships in the system and all their sensors were creating a system-wide battlescape view. The red force and blue force tracking systems were still transmitting data to her suit. The suit also had its own sensors but not with enough range to detect red force signatures at more than four or five kilometers. Th
e best the suit could do was a few hundred meters when pinging active with electromagnetics and a few tens of meters on passive. If the QMs were functioning the suit would do another factor of ten better, but none of the quantum membrane technologies seemed to function well in the region except for the barrier shields. Dee didn’t understand why they’d work and none of the other quantum-based systems would, but again, that’d be something to bother Buckley with the next time she saw him.

  Dee decided her best bet was good old fashioned recon, escape, and evade techniques. So, in order not to leave tracks, she took to the swamp. Carefully, she stepped out into the edge of the swamp water, using her imaging and polarization sensors to peer through the murky brown goop that spread out into something that looked like mangrove trees and lily pads that were much larger than they should have been.

  Give me the best resolution maps we have of the place, Bree, she thought.

  The Fleet ship’s sensors mapped the planet in great detail as soon as we jumped in. You are here, Bree said. And the Chiata search party is here.

  A map appeared before her eyes in her mindview with her blue dot on it and nine red images a few klicks away that were the aliens pursuing her. The edge of the trees and the marsh banks were clearly visible. The canopy did a lot to cover the imagery data in the visible, but the combination of all the electromagnetic spectrum, active radar and lidar, magnetic imagery, and the active particle scattering data gave her high-resolution detail down to the type of surface at better resolution than the unaided eye could ascertain. The maps could even give a general idea of the geological epochs the planet had gone through and would give mineral hunters most of the information needed to find whatever materials they were looking for.

  Looks like they found my mecha, Dee thought. This party is just about to get started. All we need now are streamers and noisemakers.

  Would you like me to release the present we left for them?

  By all means. Fox! Fox! Fox! Deanna said in her mindvoice.

  The red dots in her mindview scattered abruptly in several directions. Two of the nine dots turned black and vanished almost instantly. Three more of them didn’t appear to be moving any longer. About fifteen seconds later she could hear three very loud booms in the distance. Dee watched her mindview closely, hoping that the detonation of the missiles that were left on the mecha was enough to take out all the aliens that were searching for her, but apparently not. Four of the red dots clustered together very briefly and then began moving much faster than they had been previously. And they were headed northward.

  Shit! They’ve picked up my trail, Deanna thought. Deeper into the swamp.

  They’re moving fast, Dee. Very fast.

  Dee humped as fast as she could with one stiff suit ankle joint and a leg numbed from mid-shin to the tips of her toes. The bottom of the swamp wasn’t helping much either. Almost with each step she had to engage her jumpboots just to pull free from the muck. And to top that off the water was getting deeper. Dee pulled an imagery view of the area up in her mind and could see that the swamp spread eastward into a big outcropping of boulders that then dropped off as a fairly large waterfall splashing down several tens of meters into a broad river. The river was nearly a kilometer wide in places and it was only a few kilometers away. According to the map, the river died out into a stream at the base of a large ravine almost the size of the Grand Canyon nearly a thousand kilometers to her southeast. To the west, the swamp dried up, the vegetation started looking more and more sparse, and the terrain appeared to be very desolate and rocky.

  The images from the western direction sort of reminded her of the Cydonian region on Mars. The pole of the planet was very arid and dry, or at least that was the way it looked on the map in Dee’s head. The Marslike region made her think of her father and how he’d evaded enemy troops in his suit for more than thirty days a century earlier. And the suits back then were primitive compared to hers. She used that thought for reassurance and strength. She also wished her daddy were there to kill the monsters chasing her, get her off the planet, and take her home, but Dee was a Marine. She’d be fine. She’d escape and evade as long as it took. She’d just have to kill the monsters herself.

  We’ll head north until we hit that river and then we will see if we can take it eastward. Dee chose to stick with the cover of the trees and the swamp. Maybe we can use the water for cover.

  We must move faster, Dee. The search team is closing on us. Bree highlighted the alien squad’s location and zoomed out. A blue line snaked across the map showing Dee’s path. A red line tracked out and around the area where her plane had crashed and then turned to follow hers. They’ll be on our ass in less than five minutes at their current pace. It’s like they can smell us. Their path precisely overlays yours. I can only assume they have access to imagery data as good as or better than ours. If they can’t see you through the suit’s stealth they can certainly see your path.

  Hmmm, Dee thought. That might be worthy of note. And, we’ll have to cover our tracks better.

  Dee bit down on the bite block in her helmet for another shot of stimulants. It had been a very long day already and it was just getting started. She felt up the HVAR strapped across her chest unconsciously with her left hand and held the M-blaster in her right. Her stomach was beginning to tighten and churn like it always did just before being slung out of a supercarrier into “the shit” as it was often referred to. Well, she was in some shit now. The only problem was that she wasn’t sure exactly what type of shit and how deep it was. But that was always the way it was with “the shit,” it didn’t matter if it was the same or different. It was still bad shit and it was coming her way.

  Chapter 12

  February 19, 2407 AD

  Alien Planet, Northern Continent Southern Region.

  Target Star System

  700 Light-years from the Sol System

  Monday, 2:15 P.M. Ship Standard Time

  “Why the shit didn’t they just follow us in here?” Master Gunnery Sergeant Rondi Howser asked, almost rhetorically, because she knew nobody else had the answer either, especially not the only two junior surviving members of the AEM drop team. “I mean, they were all over us like stink on shit and as soon as we dropped over the edge of this ravine they just stopped. I’m sure they’re still up there.”

  “I don’t like this shit at all, Gunny.” Lance Corporal Jacob Roy was clearly shaken up. Rondi realized that she’d better do something to get the kid frosty or he was going to pop a gasket. “They were chewing us up and spitting us out. We lost almost all of the team, for fuck’s sake. They could blast us from above with the fucking blue beams any time they wanted to, even. What are they waiting for?”

  “Don’t give them any ideas. Besides, I don’t think they’re waiting at all, Mr. Roy.” Rondi nodded at the strange ruins they’d taken shelter in. The large granite structures were ornate and looked very similar to a hybrid mix of ancient Egyptian, Roman and Greek, and something extremely weird and alien-looking that she’d never seen before. There were large columns and arches but there were also buttresses and structures hanging out into midair that almost seemed to defy physics. They certainly defied ancient or primitive architectural knowledge. “Maybe there’s something in here they don’t like.”

  “Well, that’s just really fucking reassuring, Gunny!” Lance Corporal Roy was clearly shaking and Rondi was afraid the kid was going to lose control any second. It was possible he was getting suit jitters and needed to take a “chill pill,” which wasn’t a pill at all any longer. The “chill pill” had evolved into antianxiety medication that would be released into the body through the organogel layer.

  “I don’t have another explanation for it,” Rondi added. “Something in here is either valuable, rare, or scares the Chiata. The main reason for coming here was to find out why the horde hasn’t built another homeworld or just eaten this planet like they do everywhere else.”

  “Those fucking things out there are nightmares from He
ll, boogeymen if there ever was one, and they’re afraid to come in here? Fuck that.”

  “Maybe they smelled that you shit your suit, Roy,” Lance Corporal Constance Weems grunted almost laughing, but Rondi could tell that she was scared witless as well. Cut-down humor was her coping mechanism. In fact, Rondi had noticed over her years in the Marines that machismo and superego humor seemed to be a standard feature with most soldiers. Highlighting that other kick-ass heart breakers and life takers had flaws and got scared probably was reassuring that everybody got scared, even Marines.

  “Knock that shit off, you two,” Rondi scolded them. The situation was bad enough as it was. While a little locker-room goading was sometimes useful for coping with nervousness, she didn’t need the two remaining members of her team at each other’s throats. “Keep your shit frosty and eyeballs peeled. If there are some other uglies in here we want to find them before they find us. Is that straight?”

  “Yes, Gunny,” The two AEMs said in unison. But neither of them sounded too happy about it. Rondi didn’t blame them. If she was being honest with herself, she wasn’t that happy either. She really wasn’t happy that the Madira had been shot up and had to leave them there. For an instant the thought of Buckley’s quirky-assed smile popped in her head. She hoped he hadn’t done anything too stupid when things got bad up top. And now they were gone in hyperspace to who knew where. Hopefully, the Hillenkoetter would do better in system, but from the battlescape mindview she wasn’t putting any real money on it.