Suddenly the woodland calm was shattered by a bird’s hooting alarm call followed swiftly by the snapping of wings desperate to reach escape velocity. A moment later, the bird shot into the clear sky above the tree canopy.
On the far side of the clearing. Where his scouts were.
Frakk! Some of the Marines had claimed that Arun was becoming arrogant, overreaching. Maybe he should listen more. He believed in the idea of the Human Legion, but he sometimes forgot its personnel were still inexperienced. Such as scouts that gave themselves away.
As Barney was taking Arun’s carbine off safety mode, Arun lifted the barrel to track an incoming aerial drone which was swooping at high speed just above the treetops. Barney magnified Arun’s vision of the target and framed it in white, indicating a non-hostile.
Arun laughed. Not hostile to him. It was a false alarm. What he’d feared was a combat drone was in fact a guinshrike, a saber-fanged monster of the skies with a wingspan over a meter long. The guinshrike slammed into the fleeing bird, holding it firm in its talons as it flew off a short distance before disappearing into the trees.
Before the civil war, Arun had befriended a huge insect-like Trog who’d told him the White Knights had first been interested in breeding humans for war because they’d seen the natural human instinct for violence. Even if there was any truth to that, Arun considered the guinshrike to be much more of a natural killer. It was said that the guinshrike expended such energy in each swoop that if it failed to make the kill, it had no reserves to try again. Kill or die every time you ate. What a life!
“Area is clear of hostiles,” reported Gupta. “We detect no surveillance devices. Our defensive perimeter is in place.”
“Thank you, Sergeant.” Arun changed his suit from stealth mode to camouflaged. He still looked like a patch of purple woodland ground cover, but without the advanced full-spectrum effect — and the unsustainable power drain — of stealth mode. To his right, the Resistance leader, Boon, lay in the undergrowth, doing her best to hide despite being the only one in the group without a battlesuit. Arun tapped Boon on her shoulder and gave her a thumbs-up.
Boon nodded and got to her feet.
Arun winced. He admired her bravery in presenting such an inviting target. In fact, once removed from the festering squatters’ camp that Detroit had become, he was raising his assessment of Jennifer Boon. True, there was a defiant sloppiness about her, but with a little motivation, she nonetheless radiated the aura of someone who got the job done.
The Resistance fighter was wearing long-sleeved fatigues and a peaked kepi in olive green. Her clothing helped to shield her from the dangerous rays of the sun, but against the backdrop of purple foliage, did nothing to shield her from prying eyes.
Boon advanced several paces into the clearing, far enough for the sun to pick her out clearly. Then she slowly turned around 360 degrees.
Arun thought about reactivating stealth mode and shifting to a new location, away from the patch of grass from which Boon had emerged. It made perfect tactical sense. But he didn’t feel it would send the right gesture.
Instead, he did the opposite. He deactivated camouflage mode, and allowed his armor to revert to its default setting of dull gray. “If Hardit spy monitors are present,” he said aloud to Boon, “they’ve already seen you. Let them see me too.”
“Keep down, you idiot,” hissed Boon. “You’ll spook the sentry.”
Arun stayed on the ground. Sentry? Where was the sentry? Was a weapon trained on him right now? Arun felt the itch between his shoulder blades that suggested there was.
“I wouldn’t worry yourself about spy monitors anyway,” said Boon. “Hardits distrust electronics in general and surveillance in particular. Despise races that do. They rely on scent. In your suits you’re scent-sealed. But we’ve not all got suits. If a Hardit patrol comes by tomorrow, they will know I’ve been here through the odor traces I’m leaving. And if there are any Hardits nearby, they will already know I’m here.”
“Let them come. And die.”
Boon frowned. “You’re clueless about Hardit warfare, aren’t you? They won’t appear in plain sight to give us target practice. Not unless they have overwhelming numbers. They hate being on the planet’s surface under any circumstances. And when they’re forced to they’re rapidly exhausted. The air’s too oxygen-rich for them, some say. Now the war’s over, the only Hardits you’ll see above ground are the scum of Hardit society. Militia. Their military equivalent of tunnel Aux. It’s gotten us out of a tight spot before now. We’ve seen Hardit patrols and they’ve seen us — must have scented us long before we knew they were there. They kind of snarl and back away. I guess if they don’t report they’ve detected us then no one gets hurt.”
“They probably expect us to die off before long anyway,” said Arun. “Like your alleged sentries that I can’t see.”
“Our sentries are hidden. I don’t know where. It’s best that way. Why? Do you paint yours in fluorescent colors?”
Boon raised her arms in the air and extended two fingers on her left hand; three on the right.
“Come on,” she said. “Time to meet Spartika.”
Arun and Alpha Fire Team – Hecht, Caccamo, Ballantine, and Monroe – rose from the undergrowth and followed Boon into the building. The opening didn’t even boast a doorway, being a simple rectangular hole in the wall. There were no windows either. The only adornment was the flat roof which had been covered in so many years of leaf litter that trees and bushes grew from it.
As he crossed the threshold, the unhelpful thought struck Arun that Springer or Del-Marie would make far better negotiators than him. Maybe next time.
He emerged into a low, rectangular room largely claimed by Nature: unidentified creatures scurried through the rotting leaves to reach the cover of broad toadstools. Two stairwells at either end of the building led underground. Mounting brackets were set at regular intervals along the windowless rooms, but whatever they had once held had long ago rotted into oblivion.
Boon froze.
She’d been making for one of the stairwells, but now she turned and looked back at the area they’d passed through, where the light streaming through the doorway meant it was relatively well lit.
“Trouble?” Arun asked. He noticed now that some of the toadstools had been broken and trampled.
“Identify that,” Boon said. She was pointing at a dark patch on the far wall.
“Do it,” Arun told Hecht.
The lance sergeant took Caccamo and together they shone their helmet lights on the patch, instructing their AIs to analyze it.
“It wasn’t there before,” said Boon.
“It’s scorching from plasma rounds,” said Hecht. “Blood spatter too.”
“Everyone out!” Arun ordered.
The Marines raced for the cover of the tree line, stealthing their suits and rolling in random directions before leaping up and running deeper into the trees.
No shots rang out. No explosions.
Instead, a message from Gupta. “Sir, we’ve located a sniper. We’ve got two carbines covering him.”
“Hold fire and let me see.”
Arun might be in command, but Gupta had a better model of battlesuit that enabled him to control the visor display of anyone in BattleNet, and to see what they saw. Gupta swapped Arun’s display to show the view through Marine Norah Lewark’s helmet.
Thirty meters from Lewark’s position grew a Sagaria tree, one of the titans of the forest. The trunk was so wide, you could fit a squad inside. About 20 meters up, a branch grew parallel to the ground. Arun could see shades of purple fern-like fronds and glistening brown nuts, but Barney was nudging him to shift his focus farther out from the trunk, where the distributed intelligence of BattleNet painted a figure in a battlesuit sitting astride the branch and pointing an SA-71 carbine at the clearing.
Barney had shaded the sniper in a shimmering pale orange that faded in and out of view apologetically, as if not convinced that the
figure was truly there.
“How did you spot the sniper?” Arun asked Gupta.
“The local wildlife is avoiding that area, and has been for days. See how more nuts have grown to ripeness there? The sniper should have changed their observation post more regularly.”
“Well done, Sergeant. Return fire only if they fire first, and shoot to wound. I need to act as if I haven’t seen the sniper. Get a drone down inside that building instead. I want to know what’s happened to Spartika’s unit.”
“Yes, sir. Caccamo, get your box of flying tricks down those stairs.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
Ten seconds later, Arun’s visor was showing the view from the recon drone Caccamo had sent down.
The drone hovered through the upper floor of the building, just long enough to verify there were neither ambushes nor surveillance devices. None that it could detect at any rate. Then it descended the larger of the two stairwells, the one Boon had been heading for.
The stairs were broad and deep, not high. Long years of use had worn away a central channel, a fact revealed because someone had recently pushed years of accumulated dirt to the sides, leaving the stairs clear.
The first level down wasn’t accessible from these stairs. Narrow slits were set into the walls. Radar confirmed the idea that the hidden first level rooms were guard posts, there to keep out invaders advancing down from the ground floor… or perhaps to prevent escapees from the deeper levels.
The second and third levels down suggested the latter explanation. Plastic manacles and shackles littered the floor of what looked to be slave pens. The shackles were far too large for Hardit or human limbs.
“Move it on,” ordered Gupta when Caccamo dwelled on the slave pens. They didn’t look to have been disturbed in recent years.
It was back in the stairwell, as it curved down to the fourth level, that the drone found the first corpses: two Hardits. Scruffy militia fighters with crude rifles still grasped in their prehensile tails.
“Keep moving!” urged Gupta.
Caccamo steered the drone through a makeshift ops room. A portable power generator was still running, powering a heater, lights, and a processor block attached to several viewscreens tacked to one wall.
Caccamo peeled the drone away but it turned back of its own accord, its AI overriding its human controller. Something had aroused its intense interest. That something was one of the viewscreens. The drone hovered millimeters away from the viewscreen.
The screen revealed nothing that Arun could see. It was blank. In a low-power mode that required human touch to reactivate it.
Arun couldn’t stand not knowing what was happening. “What’s the drone doing, Sergeant?” he asked.
“Unknown,” Gupta replied curtly. “Don’t think it knows itself what’s wrong yet. That’s the problem with AIs, stubborn bastards who couldn’t explain what they’re doing even if they wanted to. Best give it a minute.”
Gupta growled deep in his throat when the drone added a bright-red overlay of what was hidden from the natural eye. A mechanism was concealed behind the viewscreen, wiring connecting it to a box concealed behind the processor block on the floor.
The drone was giving its educated guesswork as to the concealed item’s construction. Arun didn’t need the precise details, because the AI had revealed enough. This was a booby trap.
Its message conveyed, the drone allowed itself to be pulled away and proceeded down the stairs at a far more cautious speed than before.
After passing four more Hardit militia corpses, it reached Level 5, which looked like the accommodation block for the human resistance group. It had recently been fitted up with light, heat, power, sleeping bags, portable stove, spare boots and clothes. There were three more Hardit corpses here… and two human.
“You’ve lost two fighters,” Arun informed Boon, who couldn’t see what the drone was reporting. “I’m sorry. I’ll describe them. Both male. One’s tall, his nose broken repeatedly. The other, average build—”
“Bright orange scarf?” asked Boon.
“Confirmed.”
“That’s Rossi and Diop.” After a pause, Boon added, “We need to bury them.”
“Negative. The drone’s reporting that the skangat Hardits have booby-trapped your dead. They’ve done the same to their own fallen too.” Arun felt nauseated. Death and danger were one thing, but disrespect to the fallen another.
“I’m not surprised,” said Boon. “If a high ranking Hardit had died, they would hold a public ceremony of mourning, and force thousands of slaves to pay respects. These militia, though, are expendable as far as the Hardit commanders are concerned.”
There were further levels down, but it was clear that they hadn’t been penetrated by Hardit or human for decades.
“Bring the drone back topside,” said Gupta.
“Recon’s complete,” Arun informed Boon. “Two human males dead. Who’s unaccounted for?”
“There should have been ten here altogether, including Spartika.”
Arun knew he had a key decision that he couldn’t duck out of. Rescuing Spartika could be the key to winning over not just the remnants of the human resistance in Detroit, but the wider human population.
Going after her could also get the bulk of his Marines killed.
“Without Spartika we’ll crack,” said Boon. There was a hint of panic to her voice. “We can run things for a while without her, but it was Spartika who provided our backbone. She led. She could do so again if you can free the slaves from their labor camps.”
Arun watched Boon as she removed her kepi and ran her fingers through her collar-length dark hair. He looked into her gray eyes and liked what he saw. There was defiance in those eyes, an unquenchable human spirit. Maybe he was only seeing a dim reflection of the flame that burned in Spartika, but the fire was there nonetheless.
Boon had said that further resistance was hopeless, but her words betrayed that, and so did those eyes. Deep down, Spartika clearly still inspired Boon. Arun couldn’t do that himself.
And that meant he needed Spartika.
“I’m going to try to get her and all your people back,” Arun said. “Then we’re going to break open the camps and liberate a human army of resistance. Will you help me?”
Boon nodded.
“I’ve seen enough. Caccamo, retrieve the drone. And, Boon?”
“What?”
“Call your sniper down from the trees before someone gets hurt.”
— Chapter 11 —
The sentry’s name was Pak, and he was proud to be a Marine.
After thirty years on ice, Pak had been thawed just in time to flee Detroit forty minutes later, still groggy from his revival. For the past thirteen days he’d not left his branch up in the Sagaria tree. The suit couldn’t maintain continuous stealth mode for anything like that long, but he had kept the scent-seal function operating.
As part of his novice training, Arun had spent three weeks in his suit, abandoned by himself in an orbiting training hulk. The suit kept him alive, but no novice forgot what it was like to be encased in your own stink for weeks, or the gnawing emptiness in a gut deprived of solid food for so long.
Pak didn’t complain, as he reported his story. He didn’t even try to remove his helmet. Arun was impressed. This Marine’s discipline was still good.
Or so Arun thought until panic started ringing clear in Pak’s voice. “They must have broken our signal encryption,” he wailed. “They lured us here. A trap. Without Spartika we’ve nothing left.”
Gupta planted himself in front of Pak.
Arun recorded the strange sight of two humans facing off against each other in pretty, purple-dappled battlesuits. Even with all the worries of command sucking out his sense of humor, he could still see this as a ridiculous sight. If he ever made it back to Beowulf alive, Indiya and Xin would want to know what they’d missed.
“Keep your mind clear, Marine.” The sergeant’s words appeared to steady the sentry. “
This location is free of Hardits.”
“It’s her,” said Boon, spitting onto the ground. “I’ll never escape her.”
“Stay calm,” said Arun, struggling to follow his own advice. “I know you have bad history with Lieutenant Nhlappo but I will not allow you to insult my officer.”
Arun’s words snapped Boon out of her funk, but not the way he intended. She looked at him, the grim despair on her face overlaid by amusement.
“You puffed-up fool,” she said. “Tirunesh Nhlappo is a cold-hearted lizard who is far too conceited to ever admit her many mistakes. Nhlappo will gladly ruin everyone around her if it makes her look good in the eyes of a Jotun. But she’s not a traitor. As for torture and death... I wouldn’t put it past her to use them as a means to further herself, but she doesn’t delight in them for her own sick pleasure.”
“Stop playing games,” roared Gupta. “Tell us who you’re referring to.”
“The local Hardit leader,’ said Boon. She turned to the sentry. “It was her, wasn’t it, Pak?”
Pak nodded. “Here to gloat, she was. Literally rubbing herself with glee. Yeah, it was Tawfiq. Took them away to Camp 3. I heard her say it as they–”
“Tawfiq Woomer-Calix?” interrupted Arun. In the privacy of his helmet, his jaw dropped open. “You’re kidding.”
“Do we look like we’re kidding?” growled Boon. She frowned. “How do you know her?”
“Oh, we go back,” said Arun. “I’ve beaten her before and I’ll do it again. We’ll get your team back, Boon. And I promise you more. I’ll kill Tawfiq myself.”
“What are we waiting for?” said Boon. “Let’s go.”
“Hold fire,” said Arun. “First, I’m going to check in with Lieutenant Nhlappo.”
“But you can’t radio her. I know I said Hardits distrust electronics and nanoware, but even they are capable of intercepting radio comms.”
“Who said anything about radio comms?” Barney interpreted Arun’s wishes and activated the FTL link with its precious charge of entangled chbits that were fast running out.
Renegade Legion (The Human Legion Book 3) Page 4
