Primary Targets (Earth at War Book 2)

by Rick Partlow

  “The vote went fine,” I assured him. “And then the losers decided they didn’t like the outcome, so they challenged the prime minister-type-guy to a fight with fucking spears, like we were on one of those stupid-assed sci-fi TV shows even worse than mine.”

  “Spears?” His eyes widened with disbelief. “Did you say spears?”

  “It was supposed to be this ceremonial thing, a fight to first blood, mostly for face and prestige. But the dude the opposition lady picked went too far and busted Caan-Fan-To’s skull. He was dead before he hit the ground. And then Joon-Pah got a pardon and took off like he owed us money, and the new Prime Facilitator, Gafto-Lo-Mok, said we were going to be executed and told the guards to arrest us.”

  I filled him in on the rest quickly, bile rising in my gut when I got to the part about Strawbridge being captured.

  “Oh, dude,” Patel moaned, covering his face with his hands. “We are so fucked.”

  “Yeah, pretty much,” I agreed. “My last hope was that Pops or at least some of the Delta team got away.”

  “And instead, you got me,” Patel said, laughing humorlessly. “Sorry, Andy. I didn’t even bring a pocket knife.”

  “Shit, I had a gun, Doc. Fat lot of good it did me. Okay, let’s think, here. What are our near-term goals and what are our long-term goals? Near-term, we need to get water, we need to get weapons, and we need to find a place to hide. Long-term, we need to find a way off this planet and call the Jambo to come get our butts out of here.”

  “Before the Tevynians invade,” Patel inserted with a rueful expression.

  “Hell, the Tevynians invading would make it easier for us,” I told him. “We could pass for Tevynians in a pinch. Ain’t no one here gonna think we’re Helta, even if I grow a beard. But there’s no way we’re lasting that long. Hell, I don’t know how we’ve lasted this long. I mean, this….” I motioned at the forest. I couldn’t see anything but trees, but I knew the walkways were out there, just a mile or two away. “…may look like a national park, but it’s more like Central Park. This is the middle of their fucking capital city. It’s not like they don’t know the area. And even if they didn’t know you were there in the treehouse, they sure as hell knew I was around. Why aren’t there Helta soldiers combing the forest right now?”

  “Oh, I know that one,” Patel said, smiling as if he was glad to finally be of use. “I asked this one Heltan, I can’t remember his name but he worked for their president or whatever you call him. I asked him why everything was off the ground and why they didn’t have houses down below. Apparently, it’s almost a religious thing with them. The translator couldn’t quite parse what he was saying, but I got the impression they really don’t like coming down here under the trees except during special pilgrimages, and then they have to come in naked and not carrying anything technological.”

  I snorted.

  “Tree-hugging interstellar were-koalas. And I thought California was strange.”

  “Those are our goals, you said,” Patel said. “But where do we go to get water and shelter and all that good stuff I’d pretty much kill for right now?”

  The thought struck me like a hammer right between the eyes and I blinked. It was so crazy that…no, strike that, it was just plain crazy. But it was also all I could think of.

  “There’s one place,” I said, “where I know for certain there’s water and a place to sleep and even commo equipment, or at least Helta commo equipment, and there shouldn’t be anyone there right now.” I pulled out my ’link and checked on another pin I’d dropped the day before. “And it’s only a couple miles that way.” I pointed off to his right and grinned. “More or less.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  In the daylight, the forest had seemed haunted, the animals teasing the corners of my vision, blending in and nearly silent. At night, with the massive trees shutting out the moon and the stars, lost in shadow, our only light the screen of my comm unit pointed carefully to the ground, it was something out of a horror movie, ripe for zombies or werewolves to come bounding out of the trees.

  Well, or just regular wolves. I would bet they had them here. And lions and tigers and most certainly bears. Would they keep grizzlies in the middle of their city, though? Probably. After all, they didn’t come down here. Maybe it was like a test for their naked forest hajis, getting back to nature and taking their chances with their own version of the gorillas in the mist.

  “Your destination is one hundred meters north by northwest,” the navigation program on my comm unit supplied helpfully into my earbud, making me nearly jump out of my skin.

  I cursed, realizing I’d forgotten to turn it off, then blinded myself trying to find the right menu to shut down the dead reckoning map program.

  “It’s a hundred yards ahead of us,” I whispered to Patel. “Do you see any lights yet?”

  He stopped and I thought he was peering out into the darkness, the whites of his eyes barely visible.

  “Not sure,” he admitted. “It could just be stars. But I don’t remember there being much light leakage from the place when we stayed there last night.”

  He was right about that. The treehouse where we’d spent the night, some sort of official government guest house, had been locked up tight when it came to light pollution. The only external light had been from the strips over the doors, and those were chemical lights like the glowsticks I’d used in the military, hard to see from a distance.

  “Are you sure there won’t be anyone there?” he asked me for what I thought was the seventh or eighth time.

  “They’re fucking aliens, Doc,” I reminded him. “How the hell can I be sure? But doing something is a lot better than sitting around waiting to die of thirst or get captured. If there’s any security there, I’ll take them out.”

  Which sounded all badass and everything, but I wasn’t at all sure I could do it bare-handed. Maybe if I could get one of those guns and figure out how to use it before they shot us…

  “Wait, there it is!” Patel was pointing at something and I closed my eyes for a few seconds, to let them adjust after staring at the screen.

  And then I saw it. What I thought was another redwood tree was actually a metal pylon, stretching from a broad base thirty or forty yards up into the tree canopy. The platform itself was nearly impossible to pick out from the leaves and branches, but I knew it was up there. So was the walkway, but I didn’t even try to find that narrow strip of metal amid the trees.

  “How the heck are we going to get up there?” Patel wondered.

  “The same way you got down,” I told him. I put a hand on his chest and stopped him one step before he fell into the compost pit.

  “The compost chute? Ah Andy, I just stopped smelling that stuff!”

  “Don’t worry, Doc, we’re climbing up the outside this time.”

  The chute was dark green, hard to pick out in the shadow of the platform, but I felt the sides of it under my fingers. It wasn’t plastic because they didn’t seem to use any plastic, not that I’d noticed, and I wondered if it was a conservationist thing or if they just never got around to developing it. It felt more like canvas or burlap, which was handy for us because it would be easier to get a grip on the material.

  I kind of wanted to make the Doc go first, so I could try to keep him from falling off and busting his ass, but if there were guards up top, I didn’t want Patel to be the one who ran into them.

  “Follow me in about five seconds,” I told him, speaking softly next to his ear but not whispering. Whispers travel farther. “If you feel like you’re going to fall, lock your legs in and rest your arms. Don’t be afraid to take your time, but don’t yell. If you slip, just dig in with your fingers and create as much friction as you can. Even if you can’t completely stop the fall, it’ll slow you down enough you shouldn’t get hurt. Clear?”

  He nodded. I was impressed with myself. I sounded very confident. The truth was, I had no idea if either of us could climb up the outside of this thing and the only reaso
n I didn’t tell him to stay on the ground was that I didn’t know if there was any way to get him to the top if I managed to make it.

  I stuck my comm unit on my belt, wiped my palms dry on my pant legs and jumped up, grabbing at the fabric of the chute and hoping if I fell, it wasn’t into the compost pit. It smelled really horrible. The fabric was coarse and soft and my fingers dug in and stuck and I only just managed to keep from screaming. It turns out, climbing really hurts when you have cracked ribs.

  I ground my teeth together so hard I felt bits of enamel on my tongue and pulled in my elbows, keeping them close to my chest, and tried to mostly use my feet and legs to propel myself upward. I didn’t think, didn’t have a strategy, just mentally shouted every curse word I knew, in six different languages, starting at English, working through Spanish, Chinese, Russian and then German. I’d even learned a couple Tevynian curse words from the interrogation of our prisoner and I used them to the fullest of their potential, calling the tube the motherless son of a broke-dick dog and wishing the Helta who had designed it would get crab lice. It was an oddly specific curse and I wondered how bad crab lice was in the Tevynian population.

  I had gone on to call Joon-Pah and Gafto-Lo-Mok tribeless horse thieves when I finally made it to the top of the tube, where the cylinder of fabric ended, attached to the side of the treehouse by a dozen braided cables. They were easier to grab, but they were rock hard and sharp and metal fibers gouged my palms when I tried to pull myself up. I cursed again under my breath, more vociferously because I knew I was repeating myself.

  Holding on to the end of the chute with one hand, I unbuckled my belt and yanked it out of the loops of my dress pants, then wrapped the length of it around one of the braided cables and used it to cushion my abused palms. I swung my legs out, hoping I remembered where the single metal bar the Helta used to brace themselves while peeing was. I caught it with my heel and pulled myself forward far enough to get my other foot inside, then unwrapped the belt and leaned against the wall of the bathroom, trying to catch my breath.

  Agony throbbed in my chest every time I tried to expand it and I hoped to hell I hadn’t turned a crack into an outright break because that was really going to suck. The bathroom was nearly as dark from within as from without, the only light another chemlight strip on the floor at the edge of the hole, so my first clue Patel had made it up behind me was the rattle of the canvas chute just below the edge and a hissed euphemism.

  “God bless it,” he said a bit louder, grabbing at the edge of the chute. “A little help, please?”

  “Hang on.” Which was a pretty inane thing to say to someone who was literally hanging on for their life, but I wasn’t at my best.

  I wrapped one end of the belt around the brace bar then held the other in my right hand and reached out with my left to grab Patel. Pulling him inside didn’t take that much effort, and it still felt as if someone had driven a boar spear through my chest and twisted it. Once he was inside, I propped my shoulder against a wall and slid to the floor, closing my eyes. I don’t know how long I sat there, but I was content to keep doing it, ready to never move again.

  “Here.”

  Here what?

  “Take this, Andy.”

  My eyes fluttered open and then jammed shut again against the light filtering in from the other room. It wasn’t bright or glaring, but I’d been in almost total darkness for so long, it was still painful. My eyes adjusted and the blur in front of me turned into Jack Patel holding some sort of bowl in both hands.

  “Cereal?” I guessed, shifting around, fully intending to take the bowl from him. When I tried to extend my hands out for it, pain lanced through me, too intense to even cry out and I gasped, clutching my elbows tight to my sides. “Oh, shit.” I squeaked, all thoughts of getting up forgotten.

  “I’m so sorry!” Patel said, his expression stricken. “I forgot about your ribs! Here, I’ll hold it for you. It’s water.”

  I felt like an infant letting him hold the bowl up to my mouth, but I was an infant with cracked ribs and I hadn’t had anything to drink for nearly twelve hours, so I let him. Some of it splashed on my chest and I didn’t even care because what made it into my mouth was the best water I’d ever tasted and I gulped it down so desperately I nearly choked.

  I sucked in air, careful not to breathe too deeply, then took another drink until the bowl was drained.

  “Want some more?” Patel asked me. “There’s a kind of faucet in there.”

  “In a minute,” I said. “Help me up.”

  “I don’t know if you should move,” he told me, grimacing in concern. “I hope you don’t have a displaced fracture.”

  “Naw, they’re just cracked,” I assured him. “Happened before. Either way, I don’t want to spend the night on the fucking bathroom floor, so help me up.”

  It was an awkward and painful process, but Patel eventually managed to haul my battered carcass into the main room. It was blessedly empty, but otherwise just as I remembered it from yesterday, and the bean bag chairs called to me, but I didn’t ask Patel to sit me down in one.

  “Take me to the communications terminal.”

  I remembered giving Joon-Pah shit about the terminals. They were so anachronistic, like something out of a 1970s imagining of the Twenty-First Century. On Earth, communication was decentralized. Video chats had been around for twenty years or more, but you could do one from your cell phone, from your tablet. The idea of a videophone screen mounted on a wall was ludicrous to us, but for some reason, the idea appealed to the Helta.

  “Do you know how to work this thing?” Patel asked me.

  “Not off the top of my head,” I admitted. “But I got a tutorial video on my comm unit for all Helta technology.”

  I felt like I was back in Vegas watching internet tutorials trying to figure out how to change an oxygen sensor in my SUV, but I managed to get the system turned on and called up their address directory.

  “Who are you going to call?” Patel wondered. “There’s no one here we can trust, you said so yourself!”

  “No one here,” I agreed. “But this thing can make calls anywhere in the system.”

  A Heltan popped into existence on the screen, his face much the same as any of the others I’d met. I’d learned the little differences over the last year, though, the slight chubbiness in the cheeks, the shape of the ears, the width of the nose, and I knew exactly who I was looking at. He was in one of the communal Helta sleep chambers, the lights off, only the glow of his own personal comm unit revealing his features.

  “Who is calling me?” Brannas-Fel snapped, wiping a hand across his face. “Could you not see from the notification that this is my sleep cycle?”

  “Sorry, buddy, but it’s an emergency.”

  The Heltan Engineer’s eyes opened wide, his mouth dropping open.

  “Major Clanton!” he exclaimed. “Why are you calling my personal number on the ship? Aren’t you down on Helta Prime?”

  “I guess you guys haven’t been following current events.” I sighed, leaning against the wall. “We’ve got big problems, and I need some help.” I filled him in on what had happened and his expression became more agitated with each new revolting development. “And that’s where we are,” I finished up. “It’s just the two of us and I don’t know how long we can hide out here before someone happens on us. We’re unarmed and I’m hurting and you’re pretty much all I’ve got.”

  “I owe you my life,” he told me. “If you and the others hadn’t come aboard our ship and saved us from the Tevynians at Fairhome, they would have slaughtered us. I would do whatever I could to repay this, but I am not sure what I would be able to do. I am engineering technician, not a commander. I could approach the ship’s Executive Officer, Riven-Col-En, but I don’t know if she is more loyal to you, our friends, or to our government.”

  “I understand that,” I assured him. “I don’t expect you to run down here and rescue us. I just need you to do two things. First, you have to f
ind some way to get a message through to the Jambo, get them heading this way. Can you do that?”

  Brannas-Fel was silent for a moment, and I wondered if he was considering whether he could do it or whether he was willing to do it. We’d saved the Heltan when we rescued the Jambo from the Tevynian invasion of Fairhome, but I wasn’t certain if it would carry the same sense of obligation with a Heltan as it did with a human. Some humans.

  “I believe I can,” he told me finally. “I may be discovered afterward, but I can do it. What is the other thing?”

  He hadn’t dwelt on what the consequences would be if he was caught, but I could guess they wouldn’t be a swat on the butt and being sent to bed with no supper. And this next part was even trickier.

  “We have to get some help down here,” I said. “If there’s anyone you know that you can trust, who you think might help us, I need you to have them pick us up here. I need medical attention, transportation and weapons. As many of those as you can get me. If you find someone to help, tell them to meet us here within eight hours, no longer.”

  “What if I can’t find anyone who will help?” Brannas-Fel asked.

  “Then I suppose we’ll do something stupid,” I said. “Because I’ve flat run out of smart things to do.”

  “I have known you only a few months,” Brannas-Fel said, “but I have learned enough to believe you. I will do what I can.”

  “I’m not a hundred percent sure,” I confided to Patel, “but I believe I was just insulted.”

  “I’m certain,” he assured me. “Eight hours, you said. What are we going to do here for eight hours?”

  The room was spinning around me and I put out a hand, grabbing at his shoulder.

  “I don’t know about you, Doc,” I said, my words slurring, “but I think I should find a place to lie down before I pass out.”

  Patel half-carried me to the room where we’d slept the night before and, as I hoped, the sleeping bags were still there. He lowered me carefully and I sighed as my back finally touched the padding.