by Lee Stephen
“We’re watchin’,” said Max. Above him, the Vulture transport glided away to drop off Dostoevsky and the Nightmen. Max turned to look at his crew. “We’re supposedly on the broad end of the Coneship.”
“The engine,” said Oleg.
“That’s right. Let’s move in a triangle formation. Me and David will take point.”
The group affirmed and moved into positions, with Becan and Oleg grouping behind and south of Max, and Scott and Galina behind and north.
The woods were unnaturally quiet, though to Scott that wasn’t a surprise. Silence was often the loudest indicator that things were not as safe as they seemed. That applied tenfold to crash sites. There was a wet pine smell to the air, just as Travis had speculated. The ground was visibly moist, and each step he and Galina took was met with a squish.
“This is my first time to Lake Baikal,” Galina said softly behind him. She tried to smile. “Not exactly a vacation.”
Scott chose stealth over conversation, and a subtle hand signal relayed his preference. Galina obediently went quiet.
Dostoevsky’s earlier observation was an obvious one, but nonetheless needed to be acknowledged. If Clarke’s crew had already isolated one sniper, that meant there must have been more in the area. They probably weren’t true snipers. More than likely, they were the unlucky Bakma grunts who’d drawn the short straws, and were forced to take to the trees. If they weren’t snipers, they wouldn’t have snipers’ aims. They might need several shots to hit something.
“The moment you hear or see gunfire,” Scott whispered, “get low and behind a tree. They probably won’t hit you with their first shot.”
“How do you know?” Galina asked.
“I just know.”
Bakma did not have poor aims. Nonetheless, humans tended to make better marksmen. While the Bakma had the edge in technology, humanity appeared to outskill them. Maybe it was a biased opinion, but Scott stuck with it anyway.
“My team is down,” Dostoevsky said through the comm.
Travis’s voice was quick to follow. “Varya and I are going higher. We’ll orbit the area.”
“Very well,” answered the captain. “All units, please hold for a moment. We’re sending Brooking ahead.”
Scott held his forward progress and knelt on the ground. Galina took to his side.
“Esther will do well,” she said. “I believe in her.”
At least somebody did. Scott would opt to stay skeptical. He almost couldn’t believe how excited he had been when Esther and Maksim first arrived. Now it only seemed foolish. She stumbled right out of the gate, and he lasted all of two seconds. At least neither of them had been killed. The Eighth wasn’t so lucky.
Esther’s voice emerged from the comm a minute later. “I have a visual on the Coneship. Point is to the west—I mean east, point is to the east. Tallying hostiles…”
“At least she’s not comming the Bakma,” Max muttered off-channel.
“I have eight in sight on the southernmost side. Three on the rear, two on the point, and three atop the vessel.”
“Damage to the craft?” Clarke asked.
“Minimal on the exterior,” she answered. “There’s a trench behind it that comes in steep—it must’ve come down nose-up. I see evidence of cavitation on the hull, but it doesn’t seem physically ruptured.”
Becan gave his teammates a look. “Wha’s all tha’ mean?”
“It’s got a dent,” said Max.
“No sign of any canrassis,” Esther went on. “Nor of Ithini. But I’m blind to the vessel’s northernmost side. Shall I circle around?”
“Negative, private,” Clarke answered. “They won’t guard just one side of the ship. They’ll probably have equal numbers for both sides.”
“By that assumption,” Esther said, “there would only be three more that I can’t visually see. Which leaves a total of eleven.”
Max spoke through the comm for the first time. “That sounds about right, sir. These things carry about thirty-something crew members. If half died in the crash, which is likely, that’ll give us about fifteen to worry about. More or less.”
“Agreed,” answered Clarke. “Brooking, hold your position. We shall come to you. Max, Dostoevsky, continue pressing forward. Be mindful of the treetops.”
“Yes, captain.”
“You see,” Galina said, “she did very well. She was just nervous before.”
Her nervousness still got people killed, Scott thought. No sugarcoating mentality could change that.
“You heard him,” Max said. “Let’s move again.” The unit quietly affirmed and crept forward.
Far above the treetops, orbiting the Coneship’s crash site, the Pariah‘s engines quietly hummed. Inside, seated beside Travis in the chair customarily held by Boris, Varvara cast her blank stare out the window. She had said next to nothing since their arrival at Lake Baikal. She’d said next to nothing since Scott’s room.
But the echo of his words played in her mind.
Not one of you knows how it feels. To watch this place destroy what you love. You haven’t lost something here. When you find someone who has, you send them to me.
The repetition hadn’t ceased since they’d left.
“Varya?”
She couldn’t get those words out of her thoughts. His anger. His desire. His horrible sincerity with both. But it was those words that had caused her to tremble—that caused her to crumble apart.
“Varya?”
Scott had forgotten. Had he not, he’d have never said what he said. In the midst of his personal agony, the only wounds he could see were his own.
“Varya!”
When Travis said it a third time, Varvara flinched and looked at him. Her eyes were reddened with rawness.
“Varya, what’s wrong? What’s the matter?”
She waited for a long moment before she answered. “It is nothing, Travis. Please.” She turned her head away.
He stared at her. “Varya, I’m here if you need me. Did something happen?”
She lifted her hand in objection. “Don’t ask me these things now, please. I am serious.”
For a hesitant moment, Travis said nothing. They sat alone, side by side in the cockpit of the Pariah as it burrowed through the timberland air. “All right, then.”
Varvara did not speak again. She only stared out of the window. Scott had forgotten. He’d forgotten the other who’d lost. He’d forgotten the one whom he’d leapt for.
But she remembered.
Scott kept his head on a swivel. Had he brought a new helmet along, as his teammates had advised, he would have been able to use infrared to scan the trees. It was something he hadn’t thought about before. Nonetheless, he liked the open exposure. It freed his head movements, and his peripherals were completely unblocked.
The distant blasts of plasma fire shattered the silence. There were two blasts, one right after the other, followed by assault rifle fire. Then all was silent again.
Max and his teammates froze as Dostoevsky spoke over the channel. “One enemy sniper down. No casualties.”
Scott had been right. The Bakma fired first, and twice, and still hadn’t struck any of the Nightmen. They weren’t Bakma snipers at all. They were just the ones that had been picked to go up.
“I believe they are divided into quadrants,” said Dostoevsky. “Two snipers on this side, two on the far side.”
“If there were two on this side,” Clarke said, “they’ve both been isolated. Max, that means there’s two on your end.”
“Yeah, yeah, I copy,” said Max. He muttered disgustedly off-comm.
“Keep your eyes peeled, guys,” said David.
“If there’s two on this end,” Scott said, “they won’t be together. Not if they’re separated into quadrants. At least one of them will have to take to the ground to track us.”
“That’s a good point,” David agreed. “Unless we’re splitting them right down the middle.”
“Which means they
’ll both go to the ground.”
“Right.”
Clarke’s voice emerged once again. “We’ve reached Brooking’s position. The Coneship is directly ahead of us. I want both teams to move within a hundred meters of the vessel, then hunker down and wait. We’ll all strike at once as soon as we’ve coordinated.”
“We’re not quite ready for that yet, sir,” said Max. “We’re still quite a ways from the ship.”
“We have time on our side, lieutenant. We’ll be patient.”
Max closed off the comm channel and turned to his crew. “You heard the man. Keep moving forward.”
Scott longed to find a Bakma—or even to be charged by a canrassi. He longed for something that wasn’t nothing, and right now nothing was all there was. The forest around them was silent, as it had been since their deployment. He tightened his grip on his e-35.
“Shh!”
The hush came from David, and the entire group drew to a halt. Through the artificial silence of the helmet comms, Max whispered openly to his partner. “What is it?”
“Sticks,” hushed David. “Breaking.”
“Where?”
He pointed to the north—the direction of Scott and Galina. As soon as he did, the sound became apparent to all.
Crack! Snap!
Immediately, they dropped to the ground. Scott slid behind a tree and readied his rifle. Galina ducked behind the tree right beside him. The rest of the unit knelt at the ready.
Snap!
Scott tuned his ears to locate the noise. It was a large sound—a lumbering sound. With the saturated state of the ground cover, there was only one thing heavy enough to crack sticks with that kind of bumbling authority: a canrassi.
Scott knew there were two possibilities. First, the canrassi could be alone. It could have survived the crash and simply run away through the forest. They were domesticated, but they were animals nonetheless. Or, it wasn’t alone. There were at least two Bakma unaccounted for on their end, unless Dostoevsky was wrong about their formation. And he was rarely wrong about anything—even Scott would give him credit for that.
He attempted to further tune his ears, but the noise was no longer present. It was replaced by the unnatural silence. Easing his head around the corner of his tree cover, he scanned the northernmost woods.
Nothing. No movement, no noise, no disturbance. Nothing. Though Scott had no idea what kind of world the canrassi had come from, he could easily imagine it to be a forested one. The beasts had the design for it. This was humanity’s planet, but right now they were in the canrassi’s element. Or at least, that’s what Scott’s gut was telling him.
“I’ve got him,” said Max through the comm. “One o’clock from the north.”
Scott panned his eyes in that direction. Nothing but woods. “How far?”
“Forty meters.”
That was close—closer than they should have let it get to them. Canrassis had deceptive speed. Forty meters could be eaten away in seconds.
It hit Scott’s mind right then. This was humanity’s planet. It didn’t matter if canrassis were from forests, jungles, deserts, or volcanoes. It didn’t matter if canrassis were designed for this terrain. It wasn’t about design at all. It was about intrusion. It was about them being somewhere they weren’t supposed to be. It was about shooting trespassers on sight.
“I’m going after him,” Scott whispered through the comm.
“Hold on, Goldilocks,” said Max, “do you even see him yet?”
Scott offered no reply. He slipped from the cover of his tree and stalked forward.
“Scott!” hushed Max furiously. “Scott, what are you doing? Wait!”
Waiting had worn itself thin. It was time for them to be the aggressors. He knelt down beside a larger tree and bent his head around the edge of it. He still saw nothing in the direction Max had indicated. But that didn’t mean nothing was there. Propping his assault rifle on his shoulder, he took a careful step forward. Immediately he heard it.
Crack!
When his eyes traced the sound, he finally saw it. Its fur-covered back was hunched over as it crunched on a green, leafy fern. It was a black-fur. Though rarer, they were particularly nasty. They even stunk worse than their brown-furred counterparts. They smelled like a fermented horse.
Canrassis were omnivores. But it was a well-known fact that they preferred meat. They preferred to eat something that ran.
“Contact,” Scott whispered. He slid from tree to tree, gliding through the cover of the forest as he got in position to fire. His eyes never once left the beast, whose attention was averted away. Canrassis weren’t overly intelligent, and their fierce appetites gave them an odd tendency to ignore nearby threats. When separated from the aggressive leashes of their masters, they became solitary to the point of a fault. They became dumb.
Snap.
Scott froze. The sound hadn’t come from the canrassi. It hadn’t even come from him. Whipping his head to the north, he covered himself behind the thickness of a nearby larch tree.
He knew what the sound was immediately. The snap wasn’t nearly as loud as the canrassi’s. “New contact—Bakma,” he whispered. “No visual.”
“Where?”
“Eleven o’clock from the north,” Scott answered.
“Nothing on infra.”
“Then look on the ground.” Scott eased his field of vision back to the canrassi. It was still hunched over, its back to him, devouring the fern thicket. Oblivious. Or not yet threatened enough to be concerned.
“I’ve got the Bakma,” said Becan through the comm. “Thirty meters from your position, Remmy.”
“I don’t see him,” said Galina.
“Then stay down,” Scott said. “I’ll take care of him.” Shouldering his assault rifle, he unholstered his sidearm and stood.
Then it came.
Plasma fire seared the air behind him—from the opposite direction. Immediately, his teammates dove for cover.
“Second Bakma contact!” shouted Max, as he rotated to face the foe behind them. As if on cue, Becan and Oleg opened fire.
Scott didn’t see the second Bakma. But he didn’t have to. He had his own Bakma to take care of. And his own canrassi. His attention returned to his side of the forest, where he scanned his enemies again. He froze as soon as he did.
The canrassi was gone.
He backed against the tree and fell quiet. After a moment, the sound of return fire stopped.
“Got him,” said Oleg. “One Ex down.”
“Anyone got visual on that canrassi?” Scott asked.
No one answered.
“Scott,” whispered Galina. “Where is the Bakma?”
There was only one way to know. With a canrassi running loose, there wasn’t time to wait for the Bakma to appear. There was only time to press the attack.
Bursting from the cover of his tree, Scott readied his M-19 and dashed forward. As anticipated, a flash of white plasma followed his moves. Rolling behind cover to avoid it, he once again pressed his back against bark.
“I got a bead on it,” said David.
No, Scott thought. It’s mine. Bursting from cover again, he swung out his sidearm to aim. Once again, plasma followed his wake. Scott tumbled forward, aimed in the direction of the blast, and searched for his target.
He saw it. The Bakma was partially visible behind the brush of a thicket, its plasma gun firm in its hand—and preparing to fire again.
But not fast enough. Scott fired a series of rounds, and the Bakma toppled backward to the earth.
“I said I had it!” exclaimed David.
Scott ignored him. “Going for the canrassi.”
“Do you even see it?”
It didn’t matter. He’d hear it as it charged through the brush. There would be no mounted plasma blasts to dodge. Stepping furiously forward, Scott holstered his sidearm and regripped his e-35. Holding it at the ready, he pressed through the thickets and twigs.
He heard it the moment it roar
ed. Scott’s head quickly turned to the left, where the spider-eyed beast was reared up. It wasn’t even ten meters away. Scott hurried to lift his assault rifle, and he opened fire.
Bullets tore through the bearlike beast’s flesh. It hunched forward, as its massive hind legs churned for Scott.
Scott’s knees braced in place. His eyes narrowed and he held down the trigger.
Snap! Crash! Crack!
The canrassi lunged forward, saliva spewing from its jaws. Scott tumbled to the left to avoid it. The canrassi snapped its jaws and turned to pursue.
Scott never relented his projectile assault as he trained his bullets at the canrassi’s head. The beast’s face exploded with blood. It toppled straight down to the ground.
“Scott!” David yelled as he and the others hustled toward the lieutenant.
No time to answer. He unloaded a round into the fallen beast’s head, then leapt over it to find the Bakma’s body. He had to make sure it was dead. Dashing through the brush, he uncovered it. The instinct of assurance took over. He aimed his gun at the alien’s head and pulled the trigger. The Bakma erupted with red.
A moment later, the others were on him.
“Scott, what in the hell was that?” asked Max.
Scott shouldered his rifle. “Targets down.”
“About ten times as recklessly as they should’ve been!”
Scott matched Max’s glare. “They’re down. Is that a problem?”
“Scott,” said David as he approached, “work with us, not against us. We’re not the enemy.”
Max turned to relay their status to Clarke.
“I was the closest operative to it,” Scott said. “Letting anyone else go after it would only have put them in unnecessary danger.”
“But we didn’t need to go after it, Scott. We have guns!”
“What are our orders?” Scott asked, turning from David to Max.
Max finished his dialogue on the comm, then shouldered his rifle and looked east. “First plan is the same plan. Triangle formation, we move together. Then we wait for Clarke’s word to move in.”
“We’ll need to attack them fast.”
“We’ll see when we get there.”
“Clarke wants to be patient, but that won’t work. They’ve heard our gunshots. They know their soldiers are down. Every second of patience we give ourselves is one more second for them to get prepared.”
