by Alan Black
One of the piglets pointed at the lake and typed into its translator. “Water.” It typed much slower than Shorty.
Shorty slid to a stop next to Stone, his suit being slightly slower than Stone’s larger custom built suit. “He says the water has trace mineral elements, but nothing our suits can’t filter out. The chlorine in the atmosphere has dissolved in the water, but in minor concentrations, it’s no stronger than a strong disinfectant.”
Stone checked his HUD. The cart train was still a few kilometers back. The drascos were playing on and around the carts. Preventing eight drascos from jumping into the water to play was going to be a chore. He needed to find out if it was safe before Jay, Peebee, and the girls arrived.
The lake was too wide to bounce across and he couldn’t see either end using his suit optics. The water was only clear for a few feet, quickly succumbing to muddy murky depths. He couldn’t catch any odors coming from the lake, but that wasn’t a surprise as liquid often blocked telltale fragrances. His senses weren’t telling him anything.
The wind was whipping down the lake, squeezed between two high ridges of the mountain range. Here in the open, the wind was stronger than it had been when they were protected in the mountain passes or by the bulk of the shuttle. All small rocks, sand, and dust had long since blown away, leaving the shore of the lake covered in large rocks and boulders, nothing weighing less than a hundred kilograms.
Stone picked up a rock. The suit registered the weight at fifty-six kilograms. He gave the rock a little jiggle in his hand. Even in his suit, he wasn’t any good at throwing something in gravity and hitting anywhere close to what he was aiming at. Still, the lake was wide enough that he should be able to throw the rock somewhere close to the middle.
Tossing the rock, he glanced down at Shorty. The rock splashed, making a ripple that was lost in the wind whipped waves. He said, “Before we cross, I want to be certain we aren’t going to meet any local creatures who might pose a danger.”
Shorty had lived on Allie’s World long enough to understand the caution. He nodded and waved his people back from the shore. “Maybe we should try and go around?”
Stone tapped his chest and squeezed the appropriate finger. A bunker buster shot away from his chest. With exact precision, it hit halfway between the two shores. Sinking into the water, it exploded in a water gushing spout. The explosion surprised him. It hadn’t blown up where the bomb hit the water, but quite a few meters to the left. He wondered if some water creature had caught the bomb and started to drag it away, but there wasn’t any debris floating to the surface that he could see or smell.
Shorty said, “This is a river, not a lake. There must be a strong current under the surface. That eliminates going around it.”
Stone turned to watch the cart train sliding down the smooth slope to the riverbank. Though the train was visible in his HUD, turning to look was more a habit than checking his HUD. The drascos whooted as they stood balancing on the carts as the piglet drivers whipped the trains in wild abandon trying to unhorse the drascos. Bea and Charlotte took wild spills, rolling through the rocks. Both drascos leapt to their feet and raced toward the lake on foot faster than the carts could move.
Stone’s suit was capable of operating just as good under liquid as it did in a vacuum. He didn’t doubt that the piglets suits were just as capable, but he was loath to order Shorty to send his people into the river to check for danger. He leapt skyward following the track of his bunker buster bomb into the lake.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Faster than he could react, the weight of his suit drove his legs knee-deep into silt at the bottom of the river. Using enhanced optics, he spun the dial through all the various modes as he turned in a slow circle. Infrared, radiological, and x-ray didn’t reveal anything but water and silt as far as he could scan in any direction. He modified the magnification, looking for smaller and smaller creatures until he found a few ameba-sized life forms swirling in the muddy water.
He flexed his knees and bounded back to the shore, splattering Shorty with mud and water when he landed. The piglet looked at him though his faceplate in disgust. He flicked a few specks of mud off his suit and typed into his translator, “I see nothing in the water ate you.”
Stone smiled, “Nothing so far. Let’s take a break here and then cross after —”
He was interrupted by eight drascos racing past him, hitting the water with such force that anyone within a dozen yards of the shore was drenched. They disappeared underwater and surfaced quickly, spouting water and spitting streams at each other.
Tee said, “Like, this is cold, for sure.”
Anne giggled, “Right? Not like the beach at home, you know?”
Tee said, “Race to the other side. Last one there is a boogerbrain.” Jay and Peebee even joined in the race.
Shorty looked up at Stone. “Boss, I suggest we take a break on the opposite shore.”
Stone nodded. “Ya think?” He looked around at the carts. Finding the number he was looking for, he shooed a pair of piglets off the top and popped it open. Searching through it , he located the correct bin and refilled the bunker buster feed chain, replacing the one he’d fired into the lake. He’d been in combat enough to know he wanted a full load of everything at all times — just in case.
Shorty asked, “Will these carts get across the river? It’s too far for our suits to bounce, but we can cross by walking on the bottom.”
Stone pointed at his knees. “The mud is this deep. That’ll put it halfway up your waist. I’m sure your suits can move through that muck, but it would be an unpleasant trip. The carts can cross this river easy, just keep their speed up. My suit can make crossing, so you ride and I’ll bounce.”
He waited until the first mini-train of carts built up velocity and hit the water at top speed. The anti-gravity dug a furrow in the water, frothing the waves, but it maintained its rate toward the other shore. Other piglets followed him in no particular order, with suited piglets clinging to the cart tops.
Stone didn’t bounce high. Keeping his jump flattened for distance, he slammed into the far shore ahead of the racing drascos. He used his external speakers to broadcast his cheers, urging them all to race faster. Waving his arms, he greeted Jay as the winner of the race with Peebee coming in a close second.
Emily snorted, coming in dead last, “Not fair, our mothers are bigger, right?”
Ell laughed, “You’re a boogerhead.”
“Am not.”
“Are too.”
Before they degenerated into a name calling brawl, Stone said, “Emily, you didn’t come in last. Look behind you.” The whole string of piglets on carts had barely reached the halfway point in the river. Most were puttering through the water without any difficulty. One cart train was having difficulties as the driver slowed to keep from being swamped by spray from other carts and the wind whipped waves. It slowed to a halt, the anti-gravity keeping it from sinking, but it didn’t have enough surface grip for forward motion.
Stone added, “Emily, I’ll bet you can swim back out there and push those carts to shore.”
Emily hit the water before he finished asking. Tee and Ell followed her. Charlotte and Anne jumped back into the water, but rather than swim toward the carts, they began jumping and rolling trying to push the other’s head under water. Bea plopped her butt on the rocky shore and watched her sisters. Jay and Peebee stood by Stone staring up at the mountains surrounding them.
“We have to go through there, Mama?” Peebee asked.
Stone said, “Yes. Shorty and his people will find us a way through.”
Jay said, “They got us this far. They have to find a way through or we can’t fight the Hyrocanians. Right, Mama?”
Peebee answered for Stone, “That’s right. If we don’t stop the bad ones, a lot of marines will die for nothing and the bad ones may just blow up our ship and eat our daughters.”
Jay added, “No ship. No way home.”
Stone didn’t want t
o think about it, but the drascos were right. The younger ones may think of this as a fun outing, but Jay and Peebee obviously understood the seriousness of this deployment. Like all such coordinated attacks, this one was timed to the nanosecond. His team needed to hit the planetary base at the same time the marines hit the orbital weapons platform. Too much deviance and either location would discover the attack and come to the aid of its sister base. He checked the time on his dataport. They were ahead of schedule having found a quick path through the first set of mountains.
Early was just as bad as too late. He signaled Shorty, letting him know they would hold here until the scouts found a way through the next mountain range. Most of the piglets had been riding. Stone couldn’t tell whether Shorty sent the same batch out to search or if he switched them for a fresh group.
Pulling up his map, he kept one eye on his drascos and one eye on the map as it filled in with data from the scouts racing ahead.
Shorty shook one of the legs on his suit. From the looks of the piglets on the riverbank, Shorty had said something, but he hadn’t typed anything into his translator. Piglets broke down laughing, slapping each other on their backs, and rolling on the ground.
Peebee said, “I don’t know those words Shorty used, Mama.”
Jay added, “Marines and navy sometimes talk that way, too.”
Stone had heard more than one human use certain words, but he wasn’t planning on giving his drascos a course in profanity. He just said, “You just have to understand the gist of what someone is saying. When they talk like that you don’t need to know word for word.”
Shorty typed into his dataport translator, “You want to know what I said? Frakking new combat suit has started to malfunction. Stupid waste containment failed and is leaking down my leg.”
Stone tried not to laugh. “We can set up a sealed tent. Maybe you can get out of your suit and fix it.”
Shorty said, “Oh hell no! I’m going to give this thing back to the cretin who didn’t make it right. He’s going to clean it out, not me.”
Stone bent down to look at the piglet’s suit. It was a civilian made suit, but the systems were based on marine and navy suit capabilities. “This was originally a marine design, right?”
Shorty admitted, “Well, yeah! I’m a pribit — a pirate, remember? Stealing things is what I do.”
Smiling, Stone tapped a little hatch on the piglet’s left thigh. “Can you open this for me?”
“Huh?” The piglet was quiet for a moment as he looked for the appropriate control. “I didn’t even know that was there.” The little hatch popped open.
Stone waved at the piglet to follow him down to the river’s edge. Once there he tapped the left heel on Shorty’s suit. “Open this, too.” While he waited for Shorty to pop the little heel hatch open, he said, “Field testing equipment is one thing, but you should be more familiar with your suit before joining an operation like this.”
“Didn’t have much time. We’ll make do.”
Stone grabbed a hose from the left thigh hatch and stretched it into the water. Twisting a ring on the end of the hose, he waited for two seconds before dirty brown water began squirting out Shorty’s heel. He let the water flush through Shorty’s leg. He didn’t shut off the river siphon until the water pouring out was as clear as the river water.
He heard Peebee giggling and looked up. Piglets were rolling around on the shore in fits of laughter.
Jay said, “Shorty is talking funny again.”
Shorty’s finger even stuttered on his translator keyboard, “C-c-cold.d.d.d!”
Stone smiled in sympathy as he snapped the hose back in place and shut the hatches on Shorty’s leg and heel. “Your suit will warm you fast enough. We just flushed your waste containment system and washed down your leg. You’ll be fine.”
Shorty shook his head and typed. “I wish you’d have prepared me for that. Still, it feels better, although I’m not sure what we just did to the ecology of this planet. Dumping piglet waste here might change the destiny of this planet.”
Stone laughed, “No one has ever proven that the human homeworld, Earth, didn’t flourish because some visiting alien took a dump in some primordial goop.”
Shorty grinned, “Blasphemy. Everyone knows we all grew from seeds spread by galactic winds from the first great garden in the sky.”
Stone didn’t want to step on another species religion, even though Shorty sounded like he was joking. He thought back to the humans he’d rescued from the Hyrocanian warehouse ship. They claimed to be religious refugees. According to the man, the emperor had ignored their requests for help, but that didn’t sound like the emperor he knew. Emperor Alberto Garza wasn’t like some leaders in the past who’d ignored individual rights. The emperor was a fanatic about protecting and encouraging individual rights and responsibilities. He might have encouraged complainants to stand up for themselves first, but he wouldn’t have turned a blind eye to coercion and torture.
The emperor didn’t profess any one religion. He might hold strong beliefs, but expressing his personal faith might have come across as an emperors endorsement for one religion over another. Humans had fought wars in centuries past over differing beliefs, some fights as silly as whether Adam and Eve had belly buttons or not. Humans were still not mature enough to stop fighting over such foolishness, but the emperor wouldn’t sanction one religion over another and neither would Stone.
If Shorty wanted to believe in heaven as a garden, then who was Stone to tell him different. For all Stone knew, heaven was a garden and all the planets were populated by seeds strewn about at random by some unknown race of aliens — or gods, depending on your point of view.
He did know planets held more life than humans had once thought possible. Plants covered many planets in the Goldilocks zone of most solar systems, but a higher percentage held some animal life than any odds maker could justify. The number of intelligent species humans had met far exceeded any proffered probability statistic since Enrico Fermi criticized the Drake Equation. The equation was the first attempt to calculate the potential for life on other planets.
Shorty pointed at the map. Their scouts were backtracking and starting over more often than they had on the first range of mountains. These mountains weren’t any higher than the first set, but they appeared smoother, older, more worn down. Hopefully that didn’t mean all of the canyons and gullies were filled in. There had to be some gaps between the remaining mountain peaks.
With a silent wave of his hand, Shorty sent another dozen piglets fanning out into the mountains, searching for a way through. Stone checked his time. They were no longer ahead of schedule. They still had time unless they couldn’t find a way through quickly.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Stone looked at the crevasse. The wide gap was the last hurdle in this mountain range before his force reached the valley floor. His suit could make the jump across with less effort than walking up a stairstep and the piglets could easily span the distance in their smaller suits. The gap wasn’t so wide his drascos couldn’t leap across. However, it was too deep for the cargo carts to get across. They were only luggage carts after all, not designed to float across a hundred foot drop.
They were emptying carts faster than he’d planned. Many of the carts were filled with foolish expendables like drinking water and food. His suit could sustain him for a long duration by recycling his own waste supplemented with vitamins and nutrients. The piglet suits could do much the same for them, but moving through these mountains ate through their supplies at a prodigious rate. Bodies — human, piglet, and drasco — required extra fuel to operate in hard terrain under suboptimal conditions.
Once they started forward, he hadn’t left any carts behind. Not that he was worried about leaving such common human technology behind for non-human scavengers, but the piglets and drascos were all taking turns riding on the carts, resting and sleeping as they wound their way through pass after pass. Sleeping, scouting and driving had pushed them to t
he edge of the valley where the planetary base was located.
Stone hated being outside for so long. His agoraphobia had subsided — mostly because he was wrapped inside a combat suit that was little more than a fancy mobile metal box. The ceiling over his head was just inches above, but it was there. That presented a new problem for him. Everything inside the suit felt used and reused. The air tasted flat and stale. The water — by now mostly filtered water — had a scummy feel on his tongue. He really couldn’t smell anything, but he felt like the odor from his suit’s waste recycling system was wafting up to his nose. He knew several marines who had spent days on end inside their suits without complaint. He was trying not to complain to himself, but this trip was more difficult than he imagined it would be. It took a conscious effort not to open his faceplate, even knowing the chlorine-filled air would make him feel worse than he already felt.
After days inside the suit he was beginning to feel numb, not thinking straight. He should have taken his turn on a cart to nap, but he hadn’t. This was his operation. These were his people. He felt responsible and that kept him from sleeping. His suit provided him with enhanced nutrients and stimulants that kept him moving forward, but he had not taken the sleep aid his suit offered him. He didn’t want to sleep until this mountain range was behind him.
Stone stared stupidly down at the deep hole. Obviously, the deep crevasse had Shorty stumped; it must have looked insurmountable to him. Stone had been at the rear, more sleepwalking than riding drag until Shorty called him forward.
They’d made up ground and were six hours ahead of schedule again. If they had to backtrack and find another way around because of this crevasse, they might miss their attack time all together. Allie’s life was on the line — not keeping their schedule wasn’t an option.
Stone said, “Float the empty carts up here.”
