Sooner Dead

by Mel Odom

  Stampede remained focused on Pardot and drew the little man's attention through sheer force of will. "Do those parameters include possibly being flushed off your trail into the brush by a gang of scavengers? Because if it doesn't, your escape at some point is going to be on foot and will mean jettisoning everything you've brought with you."

  "Captain Riley and his men are well equipped enough to—"

  "Enough to be a major attraction for those Sheldons when they find out about you. The weapons your security men carry and those groundcrawlers are going to be necessary additions to an outlaw gang trying to survive its own numbers. If anything, they're more reason to attack. Once they find out about you, they may well come after you just for raiding privileges. Can you enter those facts into your little machine, Dr. Pardot? Let me know how that ciphers out for you."

  For a moment Pardot was silent. He shook with rage, which made his exo twitch even more.

  Hella didn't know how the argument would go. Mentally she was already packing her gear. She knew Stampede well enough to recognize a make-or-break call. And she thought she knew Pardot well enough too.

  Pardot put his PDA away. "All right. We'll do this your way." Without another word, the man turned and stomped away.

  Stampede continued to stand there. Then Riley's men grew self-conscious and wandered away. Growling under his breath, Stampede joined Hella at the fire.

  "That was surprising." Hella handed the bisonoid his bowl.

  Stampede sat cross-legged and held his stew in one shaggy hand. "Wasn't sure how that was going to go."

  "So why did he knuckle under?"

  "Because I'm right. I think he was maddest because this was something he would have thought of if he'd given the situation any consideration." Stampede shook his head and snorted. "Kills that sawed-off little runt for anyone else to be right before he is."

  Hella glanced around at the encroaching darkness. "We're lit up like a glowbug."

  "I know. I'll be surprised if the Sheldons don't attack tonight."

  "I'll take first watch."

  Stampede shook his head. "Not us, Red. Me and you are going to get a good night's sleep for a change. Lit up like this, there's not much you or I could do except offer an early warning. And out there, the Sheldons might take us before we knew it."

  "Not on their best day."

  "We've been pushing ourselves. The rain isn't helping. We need to rest."

  "What if the Sheldons attack tonight?"

  Stampede didn't hesitate before answering, and he didn't look guilty either. "We run. Even with those stupid defense bots, we're not set up to hold this place. We signed on to deliver experience and maybe to die protecting these people, Red, but we're not sticking our necks out if they insist on committing suicide. We sell our experience, our expertise, but we don't sell our lives. I've told you that since Day One."

  Hella chewed her food. Truthfully she looked forward to resting. Just the thought of her bedroll was almost enough to make her happy.

  Stampede blew on his stew. "So how did your talk with Dr. Trammell go?"

  Hella shrugged. "You were listening over the comm."

  "Thought maybe you had some insights you wanted to offer."

  Hella thought about everything she'd sensed about the woman. Stampede remained convinced that Hella could read humans, especially women, better than he could. "She doesn't like being here."

  "Why?"

  "She has a daughter back home; I got that. Doesn't want to be away from her. The only reason Colleen seems to be here is because she's sensitive to the ripples." Hella glanced at Stampede and studied his long, shaggy face. "You ever heard of anything like that before?"

  "No."

  "Do you believe it?"

  "Maybe. I've seen weirder things." Stampede smiled but the effort was joyless. "You have too. Some people that haven't gotten out much think I'm one of those weirder things."

  Hella didn't disagree. Bisonoids were few and far between. In all her years, she'd met only four. Some believed they were from another reality, not a strain of creatures that had mutated from local stock. Even Stampede didn't know. "There are people that hunt the ripples."

  "Fools."

  "Sometimes good stuff comes through them."

  "And sometimes whatever comes through kills you in a heartbeat." Stampede shook his head. "I'd rather face an enemy I know any day. You don't know what's getting hold of you till after it's crawled through a ripple. The people that go chasing after ripples have zero life expectancy."

  "Yet here we are."

  "Me and you are different, Red. We're not looking for what comes through those ripples. We're just here to guide these people through the 'Blight. The minute it gets any more dangerous than that, we fade back into the forest and leave them with whatever they've found."

  Hella spooned more stew into her mouth and gazed around the tent. She chewed thoughtfully, thinking about Riley and his men and the careful way they treated Pardot and Colleen. "What do you think they're after?"

  Stampede sighed. "I don't know and if you really start caring, you're stepping into a bear trap. Curiosity kills more people than stupidity. I've told you that from Day One too."

  Hella woke curled in her blankets inside the dome tent she shared with Stampede. Her hands were still hands, so she knew whatever had woken her wasn't immediately threatening. Stampede slept on his back only a short distance away. He held his big pistols in his fists, and the tent air was filled with the thick, animal stink of his fur. If the land had been more dry and the possibility of rain less strong, Hella would have slept outside. As it was, she'd been tempted to curl up with Daisy.

  She turned back over and willed herself to go to sleep. She could tell from the blackness on the other side of the tent walls that it was still dark outside. Getting so much sleep was pampering herself, but she didn't feel guilty. Her dreams had been disturbed by images of the dead people at Deener's Corner. They weren't any worse than a lot of dreams she'd had before but more fresh. The mutie-coyote things had been in there as well.

  After a few minutes, Hella discovered that her bladder had awakened her because she couldn't get comfortable. She hated to get up in the middle of the night for that, but she knew she wouldn't get to sleep any more if she didn't. Reluctantly she grabbed her pack, pushed herself out of her bedroll, unsealed the electrostatic door, and stepped out.

  The camp lay quiet around her. Riley had guards posted at all four points of the compass around the camp. Hella picked them out easily and knew that anyone with any kind of wilderness experience would be able to do the same. It didn't make her feel protected, but at least the hardshells would make them difficult to kill. That would provide her and Stampede a warning.

  "Red?" Stampede's voice sounded over the comm link.

  "Nature break. Go back to sleep." Hella sealed the tent flap behind herself and headed for the south end of camp. Riley's men had dug a latrine there. Normally on an expedition, she and Stampede didn't bother with niceties like that. Travel wasn't about comfort; it was about getting from Point A to Point B.

  One of the guards inside the camp stared at her. His direct gaze reminded her that Dr. Pardot had surrounded himself with men who were afraid of him, but they weren't necessarily good men. Stampede had pointed that out as well, and maybe that was why he was so watchful of Riley.

  After putting herself back together, Hella gazed up at the sky. Clouds still blocked out the stars, and the promise of more rain left her feeling dismayed. She was tired of the precipitation, but at least it wasn't toxic. Sometimes acid rain drifted up from Texas and burned holes into the forest. That was what gave the Redblight its name. Occasionally unprepared expeditions were caught unprotected and ended up dying before they could get to shelter.

  That was a hard way to go. Hella had seen the bodies. Even fresh dead, the flesh had sloughed away from the bone.

  A shadow drifted through the forest a few meters away. Out of habit, Hella froze. Movement drew the eye in
darkness. Until she took a step or shifted a hand, she knew she had a good chance of remaining invisible.

  Using her peripheral vision, Hella spotted Colleen Trammell walking through the forest. The woman moved slowly, almost gliding across the wet ground. She was dressed in sleeping pants and a sleeveless shirt that left her cleavage exposed. It wasn't the kind of outfit Hella thought a woman such as Colleen would wear around a camp full of men even if some members of the security team were women.

  Also, Colleen didn't move right.

  At first Hella thought the woman was drugged. Hella almost immediately discarded that notion, though, because she'd never smelled any kind of swampweed or dream shrooms on the woman. Nor had she noticed any usage of orchid beetle or night leech, both of which secreted toxins that released opiates in the bloodstream.

  Of course, there was the possibility that Colleen had brought something with her from New Mexico that Hella had never encountered. There were always new things in the world. She'd known that even before Stampede had given her an earful about that.

  Curious, Hella trailed the woman through the forest. Even though morning was still hours away, fog rose from the ground and softened the edges of everything. The world was mostly grays and blacks, and Colleen Trammel was just a pale shadow drifting through it.

  Unease prickled at the back of Hella's neck as the woman continued away from camp. A few meters farther on and she'd be out from under the protection of the defense bots.

  The possibility that the woman might be making an escape from the expedition crossed Hella's mind, but she didn't believe that either. Colleen was too careful about things, too organized, to simply walk away from safety in the middle of the night, especially without any kind of supplies. She was too clever and intelligent to think she could make it back to New Mexico on her own. And Pardot's wrath would certainly follow her back home.

  Hella convinced herself from the woman's jerky movements that she was sleepwalking. Just before she overtook Colleen and attempted to wake her, the woman stopped in a small clearing.

  In the next breath, Colleen started speaking in a tongue Hella didn't recognize. With all her years of expedition work, Hella knew smatterings of a dozen different languages. Even if she couldn't write them, she could at least speak them passably well.

  Colleen held her arms wide, as if she were calling to something.

  Hella took cover beside a thick oak tree and kept watch. The wind stirred the branches around her, and damp leaves tickled her cheeks. A droplet of cold water hit the back of her neck and ran down between her shoulder blades.

  A moment later, while Colleen was still speaking, a pale blue nimbus of light appeared in front of the woman. The light held steady for a few seconds then flickered and grew brighter like a cat opening its eye to stare curiously at whatever disturbed it.

  The blue cat's eye grew larger, from something only a few centimeters apart to something more than a meter wide, and it still grew. In the next instant, pink tentacles covered with suction pods flashed out of the ripple.

  Colleen stood before them as if mesmerized. The tentacles approached her slowly then the slid over her body and caressed her. A moment later a bulbous body slithered free of the ripple.

  The thing was a mass of tentacles that writhed around a body that looked like a fat, gray plum. It reminded Hella of an inverted jellyfish, but usually those invertebrates had no control over their extremities. The thing moved a dozen or so tentacles to the ground and held itself up. The rotund mass of its central body rose to head height less than a meter from Colleen.

  A trio of slick, black eyes formed a triangle on the body. It had no true defined features, but Hella couldn't help thinking of the eyes as part of the thing's face. Below the eyes was a ragged X. Hella didn't know what it was until the creature opened its mouth and four fanged flaps peeled back as it prepared to bite.

  At least Hella assumed the thing was going to bite. By then she was in motion. Her left hand formed into a gun while her right closed around the haft of the machete sticking up from her backpack. The steel sang as it pulled free of the scabbard.

  She was less than three meters from the creature when it turned toward her. Since it didn't have ears, she wasn't sure what had alerted the thing to her. Maybe the tentacles were sensitive to changes in air pressure.

  The thing wrapped four tentacles around Colleen, who still wasn't moving, and lifted the woman from her feet. Afraid the creature might scurry off into the dark with its prize, Hella ran faster and opened fire.

  CHAPTER 6

  Hella!" Stampede's voice exploded into Hella's mind over the comm link.

  "Busy!" Hella fixed at the creature's center mass, realized she'd forgotten to add tracers to the mix, and reshuffled the ingredients pulsing through her body. The nanobots reacted immediately, and within a dozen rounds, green tracers sped from her barrel fingers. "South of camp!"

  The tentacled thing swayed from its appendages, going violently from side to side and up and down so fast, Hella had trouble following it. Her rounds ripped through the air and exploded mushy purple foam from the tentacles, but she hadn't hit the bulbous mass yet. Most of her rounds ended up shredding trees and brush.

  Whether it was caused by the sudden movement or the thunder of gunfire, Colleen came to her senses and fought against her inhuman captor. Then she screamed.

  The gunfire and screams activated the defense bots, and harsh light suddenly exploded through the forest. Orange and yellow eyes of night creatures caught in the beams reflected, looking eerie. The illumination washed away what little color there was and rendered the immediate area in lights and darks.

  More tentacle things poured through the ripple, and Hella quickly lost count of them. There might have been a dozen, but there were so many legs and the things moved so quickly that she didn't know for certain. She wished she knew how to close the ripple. Some lasted for only seconds, long enough for something to come through or get sucked away, but others were reputed to stay open for days. Hella didn't know if that was true, but she hoped it wasn't.

  The thing that held Colleen darted behind a tree, ducked into the shadows, then swung back around toward Hella. Caught by surprise, Hella threw herself backward, flipping neatly to avoid a couple of tentacles that shot at her like harpoons. The tentacles snapped as they buried in trees behind her.

  On her feet again, Hella moved at once to the attack. Even before she'd started training to fight with Stampede, she'd known that trying to run only made her vulnerable to attack. She aimed at the thing's body again, but it swung away, which was what she expected it to do. Never breaking stride, Hella swept her machete through three of her foe's support tentacles and felt a cold surge of joy as the creature listed to the side.

  Taking advantage of the thing's being off balance, Hella continued on to Colleen and leaped up to slash the tentacles that held the woman. The purple, frothing stumps drew back in pain as their prisoner dropped to the ground.

  Hella reached Colleen's side. The woman appeared able to move under her own power except for the fear locking her up. Grabbing one of Colleens arms, Hella yanked her into motion. "Move! Back to camp!"

  Confused, Colleen started to run the wrong way

  Hella grabbed the back of the woman's shirt, bumped her with her body, and got her going in the right direction. "Toward the lights! Go toward the lights!" Hella hoped that the defense bots didn't mow them down as they charged across the uneven terrain.

  Ditches, rocks, and exposed roots tripped Colleen. Every time the woman went down, Hella grabbed her by the arm and got her up again, yelling at her to keep running.

  The tentacled thing boiled around the tree and came after them. Despite the missing limbs, the creature learned quickly how to move at speed on what it had left. It came on with inexorable speed, gaining quickly. Hella knew it was too far for the woman to reach, and Riley's guards were caught up in fighting the new onslaught of creatures that had poured from the ripple.

  Muzzle
flashes lit up the night, warring with the sporadic blasts of the defense bots as they locked on to anything that hadn't been scanned into their Identify Friend/Foe programming. Even Daisy had been scanned in. Hella had made certain of that. The lizard was too large for the security systems to miss.

  "Hella!"

  "I'm here! I got Colleen!" Hella sheathed her machete, formed her right hand into a weapon, and locked on to the charging tentacled thing.

  The creature tried the swaying maneuver again, but Hella adjusted to it. She opened fire, unloading full auto and depleting the stores her body could generate in that short amount of time.

  Bright blossoms of purple froth erupted across the bulbous mass, and one of the eyes disappeared into ruin. But it came on.

  Too stupid to die! Knowing her body didn't have any more ammo to give at the moment, Hella turned and fled back toward camp. She pumped her arms and legs, latching on to the adrenaline drenching her systems and letting it push her into overdrive.

  When she spotted one of the squat defense bots, looking like a meter-tall can bristling with weapon muzzles, Hella headed straight for it. A targeting laser tracked over her eyes, and she knew she was blocking the bot's field of fire.

  "Warning. You are endangering this unit's ability to respond properly." The mechanical voice piped into Hella's head over the comm link. The verbal equivalent was just a heartbeat later in front of her. "You are advised to break off your approach."

  Hella managed another stride then another.

  "Warning. This unit's parameters are established. Outside losses of friendly units are acceptable when camp integrity is threatened."

  Hella silently cursed the mechanical thing. A flesh-and-blood defender would have moved, not held position the way the bot did. If camp security were threatened, a flesh-and-blood defender—especially someone like Stampede—would kill her just as dead to take out an enemy

  The bot cycled its weapons, lifting slightly to alter the angle. Hella leaped into the air awkwardly. She flailed for balance then heard the defense bot open fire beneath her. Tracer fire drummed through the space she'd occupied only a heartbeat earlier.