by Rick Partlow
“We lost the battle,” I admitted. “The war’s not over.”
“The war,” Braun said, with the same dark fury somewhere behind his eyes, “is just starting.” He motioned towards the door back to the tunnels. “Let’s get to work.”
Chapter Eleven
The air smelled of ozone and petroleum and burnt flesh. I walked down the middle of the gravel road across a swathe of charred and bloody ground and surveyed my grisly handiwork. The eight Shock-Troops had been dropped by a stolen Amity City truck at the road juncture a few kilometers down the road, and had been followed by a pair of small, remote drones controlled by a technician in the truck. The drones had been the first target; I’d taken them out with pistol shots guided by the computer in my helmet less than a second before Sophia had triggered the bomb.
We had maybe ten minutes before they sent out an assault shuttle to investigate, and the team was stripping the bodies like vultures on a dead bison. KE guns, ammo, power packs, whatever armor had survived, it all went into backpacks and was dragged under cover. I kept checking the countdown clock on my HUD, pacing back and forth impatiently but not saying anything yet; stressing them wouldn’t help. I was searching the horizon for aircraft or drones and was seeing nothing but blue sky so far. Finally, Sophia waved to get my attention and gave me a thumbs-up as the last of the scavengers dashed into the brush, struggling to get a heavy pack over his shoulder.
I stepped over the nearly naked body of a Tahni soldier, his flesh torn and pale, his blood drained into the uncaring ground. Did he have parents who would miss him? Children? Did the Tahni even think that way? I didn’t know. I left him there and followed the others back into the woods. Whatever help might be coming, it would be too late for him, and too late to catch us.
It was a good four hour’s walk back through the forest trails to the nearest tunnel entrance, and it was nearly dark by the time we reached it. Once we were down there, the time of day didn’t matter. We’d left one of the powered carts waiting for us, and there was just room enough for all the loot and two people. Rank having its privileges and my armor beginning to get uncomfortably hot in the mid-summer humidity, I took shotgun while Sophia drove and the others had to hoof it. Anyway, I had a meeting with Braun to get to. Honest.
He was there when we arrived at the base, which was even more crowded now that we’d added a family with three kids. They had a couple folding tables set up and everyone was eating algae pasta and mastodon steaks when we arrived, cooked in the tiny kitchen next to the clinic. It had taken two rounds to the head to knock down the sub-adult male, mostly because we were using a Tahni KE gun to conserve Gauss rifle ammo, but he’d filled up the freezers we’d hauled over from the resorts and stored out in the tunnel and would feed everyone for a week.
“How’d it go?” Braun asked, handing us each a plate and chivvying some kids out of the way to give us a seat on the home-made bench someone had cobbled together from scraps gathered at the resorts.
“Same as the last few times,” Sophia told him, staring glumly at her steak for just a moment before digging in. She still didn’t like killing any of the Revenants, even if we’d followed her rules about which ones to cull. “No friendly casualties and we got a lot of gear intact.”
“We need to change up our routine,” I cautioned between bites of steak seasoned with that most wonderful of spices, hunger. “They’re going to twig to us hitting foot patrols and start backing every run up with an assault shuttle, and we’re not bringing one of those down with an IED.”
“What’s the next step, then?” Braun wanted to know. “You’re the tactician.”
“I’m a fucking Lance Corporal, Carl,” I repeated for what was probably the thousandth time that month. He was “Carl” now, rather than “Mr. Braun,” after much insistence. I was still “Munroe.”
He and Sophia both chuckled softly at that, used to the half-hearted protest by now.
“Okay,” I sighed in resignation, running a hand through my hair. It was longer now, nearly as long as before…when I’d been somebody else. But it was a sandy brown and it felt strange against my neck. Maybe I could get Sophia to cut it.
“They’re probably increasing security on the patrols already,” I speculated. “Probably making them two squads instead of one, and providing more air cover. But that has to come from somewhere. Even with all those troops they landed, they don’t have unlimited personnel. We need to send in more scouts, get an idea of where they’re thin. If I were their commander, I’d probably strip troops from guarding their base; they got to figure they have enough crew served weapons there for a skeleton crew to keep it secure.”
“Well, they do, don’t they?” Sophia asked reasonably.
“Maybe.” I shrugged. “Give me a day or so to think about it.” I caught Braun’s eye. “You still want me to pull security for the refugee settlement tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” he confirmed, wiping the last remnants of steak juice off his plate with a piece off algae-powder bread. It almost looked like the real thing after the processors got through with it. “We’re really cheek-by-jowl down in the tunnels now, and it’s getting so you can’t run a cart through them without almost hitting a kid playing around. We need to get those families to the new settlement ASAP.”
“Okay.” I nodded. It had been my idea in the first place, but I had to admit it made me nervous having that much activity going on in broad daylight, even way out in the hills and under heavy tree cover. “Want to come?” I asked Sophia.
“Sure,” she agreed readily, laying a hand across mine. She shot me a crooked grin. “I was going to head to a party at the Belle Epoch night-club, but the DJ cancelled.” She got up and took her plate to the rigged-up sink where a pair of young teenaged boy were doing dishes, and waved at me to follow. “Come on, let’s get some rest.”
“Rest” consisted of one of the few private rooms in the research base---it had been a closet, but I wasn’t complaining---making love on a bedroll that had once been the comforter from a hotel room, and a shared sponge bath after. It was a comfortable temperature there underground at night, and we laid on top of the covers, my arm around her shoulder and her leg draped across mine, awake in the dark.
“I don’t know about this, Sophie,” I said, finally.
“Which ‘this’ are we talking about?” She murmured sleepily into my chest.
“The attacks,” I clarified. “The bombs.”
“There haven’t been any more reprisals against civilians,” she pointed out, sounding a bit more awake. “Maybe the Colonel decided it wasn’t going to deter us.”
“Not that,” I said, shaking my head. She couldn’t see it; it was pitch black in the closet with the lights out, but she could feel it. “I mean, I still worry about that, but that’s not what’s bugging me right now.”
“Then what?” She propped herself up on an elbow and I could feel her eyes on me, even if I couldn’t see them.
“It’s been too easy,” I explained, giving voice to the doubts I hadn’t wanted to share with Braun. “The first time, sure, they wouldn’t be expecting it. When we did a couple at once, sure. But these last couple times, they should have been ready, and they weren’t.”
“Well, they haven’t followed us,” she argued. “And if they put a transponder on any of the shit we took off the bodies, it’s not showing up on any of the detectors you rigged up with Cammy.”
Cameron Urquidez was a communications specialist who had worked for the planet’s lone local programming net and between the two of us, we’d worked up some portable scanners to check anything we grabbed for implanted tracers. Sophia was right, we hadn’t found any so far, other than the RFID’s in the guns, and we already knew to remove those before we hit the tunnels.
“Your idea about relocating people is working, too,” she went on. “We’ve smuggled at least fifty people out of the city in just the last week, and the settlements are all mostly built now.”
“I’m missing something
,” I said softly, mostly to myself.
“Think about it in the morning,” she said, stroking my forehead. “It’s been a long day.”
I drifted off slowly, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that tomorrow might be too late.
***
“Are we there yet?” The kid asked me again and I bit back my instinctive response and took a deep breath. He was nine, and swearing wouldn’t have been appropriate.
“Just around the next bend,” I said instead. I wanted to tell him to quiet down, but the fact was, if the Tahni were close enough to hear him talking, we were dead anyway.
I sympathized with the little guy, and even more with his parents, who were carrying his younger sister; she couldn’t have been more than three. The going was rough through the forest on the game trail, with roots and ruts and tangle-foot vines trying to trip you up with every other step. The parents looked like indoor people, like they’d both worked in an office in Amity before the invasion and maybe taken motorized tours of Revenant Forest once in a while and never even thought about going camping for the weekend. Their clothes were baggy and borrowed and their hair looked like the ragged, overgrown remains of what had once been cheap copies of Earth styles.
The two other families following behind weren’t much better---they’d all been hostages in Amity City until about a week ago, when we’d smuggled them out---but they all looked eager to get someplace with more elbow room than the tunnels. And we needed the settlements to succeed, because we needed more places to hide out after operations; if we kept going back to the same tunnel entrances, sooner or later the Tahni were going to find one.
I waved at Sophia back riding drag on the formation, behind the last of the refugees, and she waved back. Things had gone pretty easy, aside from having to take too many rest stops. Damn kids had to pee every ten minutes and I half suspected, at least in the case of the boys, it was because they thought it was fun to pee on a tree in the woods. Still, considering what they’d been through, I guess the kids were handling it all pretty well. Better than I would have at that age if someone had dragged me out of our life of opulence and thrown me into a hole in the ground to hide from the bogie-man with not enough to eat and nothing to do.
I noticed the light filtering through the trees starting to get brighter and harsher and a quick glance at my HUD told me it was nearing mid-day. I hadn’t been lying to the kid; the settlement was around the next bend just a kilometer or so. Hopefully, we’d be there in time for lunch. We’d built the lean-to’s as simply and sturdily as we could, into the side of the hill near a natural spring where it flowed into a creek that was a tributary of the Lethe River, the main artery that wound through the valley and around the Revenant Forest. They were camouflaged with leaves and brush on the roofs and I felt they were about as undetectable as we could make them and still be able to deliver food to them.
Something skittered across the leaves and loam on the ground and the muzzle of my Gauss rifle flicked towards it almost of its own accord, but it was just a lizard or snake. It wasn’t anything native: this world hadn’t had any native animals or even much in the way of sophisticated plant life when humans had arrived over a century ago. That’s what had made it a natural for the Revenants; there was no competition from the native life.
I breathed a sigh of relief as we came around a winding curve in the path and the woods opened up onto the clearing around the creek. I could see a few people along the banks of the creek, a few hundred meters away, filling up water jugs; my eyes tracked back from them to where I knew the shelters to be; even then, it took a moment to see past the camouflage. That had been good work.
I was about to move out in the open and wave to let them know we were coming, trying not to alarm them, when my eyes rose up above the trees and I froze. Coming in low over the horizon, nap of the earth, just over the tree line, was a shape I couldn’t have seen without my helmet’s optics, just the right shade of grey to blend into the sky until it was too late. Its lines were sinister and jagged, a collection of weapons hard-points and sensor pods, and an icy lump of fear coalesced in my gut.
I opened my mouth to shout a warning, but before I could, I saw the exhaust trail of a missile looping away from the Tahni assault shuttle.
“Incoming!” I screamed, throwing myself backwards over the impatient nine-year-old boy and sheltering him with my body.
I could feel the heat from three hundred meters away, feel the concussion rolling through the ground, feel the shock wave toss me and the kid back a couple meters, rolling us over and over across the dirt and grass. I scrambled desperately to my feet, scooping the boy up in one arm, my rifle locked out in my other, pulled into my side.
Everything was a kaleidoscope of smoke and flame and fiery debris and I could see that the missile had hit the shelters and they were gone, vaporized along with half the hillside in a mushroom cloud rising slowly into the hazy sky. The boy’s parents, his sister…they’d been knocked down by the blast, even this far away. I let my rifle go, let the sling retract it to my chest as I spared a hand to yank the mother to her feet, her young daughter still in her arms.
I was shouting something, I wasn’t quite sure what. Something about moving, about getting out. I handed the boy to his father, pushing them both towards Sophia as she yelled at the others to run ahead of her. I turned back towards the carnage, trying to find the young teens who’d been getting water; no one could have survived back at the shelter, but they might have…
Through the smoke and dust, I could see the High Guard battlesuits descending on jets of steam from their backpack isotope reactors like angels of death, four of them coming out of ejection pods in the sides of the shuttle. Lightning seared the air around them as they sprayed the area with their electron beamers, ripping into what was left of the shelters and blowing apart the wreckage in sprays of flame.
I ran, not even hesitating. Nothing we were carrying could penetrate their armor and I had to get Sophia and those families out of here before they spotted us, but the truth was I didn't even consider either of those on a rational level. I ran with pure, stark panic dogging my heels, back into the trees, running so fast I caught up with the others in seconds and felt like cursing them when they slowed me down. The couple with the two children was trying to go as fast as they could, but the kids were screaming and had to be carried. I grabbed the nine-year-old boy and tossed him over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes, ignoring his yowling protests and letting his father handle the toddler.
We followed the game trail, but that was as much coherent thought as went into our flight; the rest was blind fear and roots and vines reaching up like the hands of the undead to yank at our ankles and try to bring us down and it seemed to go on forever. The boy was a lead weight on my back, throwing off my balance, and my breath was coming like the chugs of an old steam engine like I’d seen in a museum once. After a few minutes that seemed to drag like hours, the small part of my mind that was bothering to think at all considered that I was genetically engineered by my mother to be a perfect physical specimen, and honed like a combat knife by the Marine Corps into the best shape I could reach and I was getting tired. How exhausted was Sophia? Or the families ahead of me with their kids? We couldn’t keep this up.
I’d no sooner had the thought than the whole procession came to a halt and I nearly ran through the father of the boy I was carrying. I set the kid down and jogged up to the front of the line of panting, sweating, in a couple cases vomiting refugees. Sophia was bent over, hands on her thighs, wheezing and gasping, her face pale and slick with sweat. She’d been carrying a two-year-old girl, and now the toddler was running back to her mother, crying loudly.
“Are you okay?” I asked her urgently, automatically scanning our surroundings.
The trees were thicker around us now, not the big oaks but skinnier ones I didn’t recognize, closer together with thick grass between them making passage impossible for us and probably impractical even for the battlesuits. Overhead, th
e branches formed a canopy that filtered out most of the grey, overcast light and probably concealed us from any drones in the air. This was as good a place to stop as any.
Sophia was nodding, still not able to talk. I unsealed my helmet and pulled it off, sucking in great, gasping breaths of the humid Summer air, trying to get my breathing and my thoughts both under control. I turned to the others and motioned for them to sit down and be quiet. A couple of the younger kids were still sobbing, the coat of dust and dirt on their faces lined with the tracks of tears.
“Stay here,” I told Sophia, setting my helmet down next to her and heading back down the trail.
I walked back about a hundred yards, where we’d curved around a gentle rise, then squatted down and listened, trying to open my senses the way Gramps had taught me out in the desert. We’d come about four or five kilometers I thought, which should have put us somewhere to the southwest of the hill country where the settlement had been. If we’d managed to get out of there without being spotted by the Tahni, we should be okay to make it back to the Revenant Forest. If we had been spotted, the only way they could get to us was to send infantry down this trail.
I listened intently for about ten minutes, finding the rhythm of the woods, the subtle balance of birds and insects and frogs and squirrels and their regular calls and movement. It didn’t alter, didn’t deviate, and there were no other, foreign sounds. The Tahni weren’t on this trail. Satisfied, I rose and padded back up the path to where the others waited. They looked slightly less near death from exhaustion than when I’d left them, though three of the adults were still collapsed on the ground, heads between their legs.
“Okay,” I said, speaking in a casual, conversational tone to keep them calm, “I don’t think they’re following us. And we don’t have to worry about drones or aircraft spotting us in here, so we can rest a few more minutes if you need to, but I think we should start moving back towards the forest and the tunnels as soon as everyone’s ready.”
