She could hurt it. Both of them knew it. Now she was facing an adversary that would bring every bit of cunning it had to the battle.
It came in low, on her right side. Charline stepped back with her right leg and swung her right arm down hard. The steel crashed into the insect again, and this time the impact sent it sprawling across the cave. it was up again in a flash, but she could tell that she’d injured it. It backed away, making more hissing sounds.
“That’s right. You should run for it while you still can,” Charline said, trying to keep the tremor out of her voice.
But she hadn’t broken its resolve yet. The insect backed away, spiking its claws into the wall and running sideways across the cave to escape her. It didn’t retreat back into the passage. She wasn’t sure where it was headed at first. Then she saw where it was going.
A body lay against the rocks on the far side of the room. That had to be Arjun. He was unconscious and helpless. In another few seconds, the bug would be on top of him. Charline didn’t know if it was going after Arjun out of spite or if it intended to use him as a hostage, but she couldn’t give it the chance to do either. Much as she wanted to stay as far away from the insect as possible, she had to stop it. Arjun had given them both a fighting chance. It was up to her to make the most of it.
Charline bounded forward, closing the gap with long strides.
“Oh no you don’t!” Charline yelled as she dashed forward. The insect didn’t stop, so she kept barreling on. Her suit smacked into the bug’s flank and crushed it against the cave wall. Its shriek was like tearing steel.
“Bet that got your attention,” Charline said.
Maybe a little too much, even. It wasn’t chasing Arjun anymore. No, she had all of its focus now.
Both ends of its centipede body wrapped themselves around her suit. Claws squealed against Charline’s steel shell as it tightened its embrace.
“Shit. Oh, shit,” Charline said. The plates shielding her belly bent inward under the pressure. Two claws punched through near her head, narrowly missing her face.
It wrapped around her like a boa constrictor. Mandibles and claws worked against the armor shielding Charline’s body. The insect probed for a weak spot. Sooner or later it would find one, or make one.
There had to be something she could do!
Charline felt her breaths come faster. Her pulse was racing. Her weapon of choice was a gun, damn it! Andy was the one for hand-to-hand fighting. But he wasn’t there. She was. And if she wanted to live through the next few minutes, she had to stop thinking and act.
One of her suit’s arms was still free. She raised the limb and then smashed it down on the insect as hard as she could. The alien didn’t release her, but it noticed the blow. Charline could feel it shifting its weight as it attempted to move further from the attack.
It was hurting. She felt sure of that. With new confidence, Charline reached out with that free arm and delivered three more hammerlike blows.
The last hit did the trick.
The bug reared back, lifting its upper body away from her. It rose then, jaws and mandibles closing on her head. The suit’s armor groaned under the stress. It began to bend. To buckle. Charline reached up. Both of her hands were free, and she locked them onto the bugs carapace. It kept trying to chew though her helmet, ignoring her attack.
“Fine,” Charline said. “Ignore this!”
The bug was probably the apex predator on this world. Maybe there was nothing here strong enough to crush its shell. But it hadn’t experienced the power of motor driven hydraulics before.
The suit gave a sharp whining noise as Charline depressed the studs to close both clawed hands. They ground slowly toward each other like the sides of a vice. As soon as they met carapace they stopped, and the whine intensified. It was a battle to the finish – human technology against alien biology.
“Come on, come on!” Charline said. A mandible punched through the armor over her head. She ducked to avoid it, but the tip traced a line of fire along her cheek. She was running out of time!
There was a loud cracking noise. She risked a glance outside her suit. The bug’s armored shell had finally given way. One side buckled in, then the other. The insect shrieked and writhed as it tried to escape her grasp, but it was helpless. Charline’s lips made a thin, determined line as she held down the buttons until the suit hands closed as far as they would go and the insect stopped moving.
She took a deep, gasping breath. It was over. The damned thing was dead at last. She pressed the studs again to open the suit hands, and what remained of the insect dropped to the cave floor with a sickening splat. Charline didn’t even want to think about what cleaning up this suit was going to entail. She couldn’t see, but imagined there had to be bug guts all over the front.
There was a handle set above her which released the upper hatch. Reaching up, she disengaged the bolts holding the lid down, and it popped open. There was a faint hiss as it slid up enough to let in some air. Charline recoiled from the smell. The bugs didn’t smell bad on the outside – that she had noticed, anyway. But they smelled terrible on the inside.
Charline reached a shaking hand up to the ladder behind her. She’d climb out, go check on Arjun, and maybe try to figure out a way out of this mess before another of the bugs came calling. Just because she’d figured out a way to kill them with the suit didn’t mean she was looking forward to repeating the process anytime soon!
Before she could lift the hatch all the way, a flicker of movement caught her eye. She dropped back into her harness, eyes alert. Was it another insect? Or was the damned thing not quite dead yet?
She watched for several long moments. Finally, she saw it again. The front legs were still attached to the head section of the bug. It had broken away when she squeezed. Now those limbs were slowly moving, like they were trying to drive the insect’s head back down the passage into the deeper levels of the caverns.
Charline had no idea if the thing could heal from such terrible wounds, and she wasn’t in the mood to find out. “Time to finish this.”
She strapped herself back into the harness, then lifted a leg. With firm deliberation, she lowered the leg onto the bug’s skull, pressing down with all the force the suit could manage. Charline didn’t stop until she heard the crunching sounds under her foot stop.
FOUR
Fresh air had never felt so good. Charline took in great, gasping lungfuls of the stuff as she descended the ladder on trembling limbs. She’d been in the suit too long. Her arms and especially her legs felt cramped and weak. The few steps over to Andy’s side were more like a limping stagger, but she made it and gave him a tight hug.
“I was starting to think we were never going to get out of there,” Charline said.
“We got to you as quickly as we could,” Andy replied. He sounded both hurt and worried. One of those things she couldn’t do much about. There was good cause for concern. They were in a lot of trouble, and she didn’t have any good ideas for getting them back out of it. Worse luck, it was her job to do so.
This wasn’t Charline’s thing. She wondered for the hundredth time how she’d managed to get talked into leading this team. People were not her specialty; computers were so much more reliable than human beings. The mission had seemed difficult enough back on Earth when she’d been assigned scores of specialized personnel and all the supplies they could load into a starship. Now the Satori was gone, off to who knew where along with most of her people and gear. They’d been preparing to evacuate the planet. Most people had already boarded the ship, and the lion’s share of the equipment had never been unloaded in the first place.
“I know you did,” Charline told Andy. She didn’t want him feeling badly. “That doesn’t mean it wasn’t scary as hell in there.”
“It looks to me like you were the scary one. Congrats on being the first person to beat one of those bugs in hand-to-hand combat, I guess?”
Charline chuckled. “It would have been a very differen
t story without the exo-suit.” She shuddered at that thought. If she hadn’t been wearing the suit when the cave ceiling collapsed, both she and Arjun would have been cut to pieces by that creature. Which reminded her.
“How’s Arjun doing?” Charline asked.
“He is with medical. What we have for medical, anyway,” Andy said. “We’re short-staffed. Most of our people boarded the Satori before it took off.”
“What happened? Why did they leave?” Charline asked. The starship’s captain was a good friend. there was no way Beth would have taken off without cause.
“I didn’t have time to get the full story,” Andy said. “I was worried about you.”
He ducked his head with a sheepish movement that Charline would have found adorable just about any other time. This won’t the time or place, though. She cocked an eyebrow, and his boyish smile vanished.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” Charline asked. It had to be, if Andy was cracking jokes instead of giving her a straight answer.
“Yeah. It’s bad. They’d detected a ship entering orbit,” Andy said. It was clear he wasn’t talking about a human ship.
“Naga?”
“No. It arrived by wormhole,” Andy replied.
“Shit.”
They knew there was a third player out there, somewhere. The Naga were fighting someone. The prevailing theory had been some sort of civil war inside their society. But Naga didn’t have wormhole technology. The only ship Charline knew about that could project an artificial wormhole was Earth’s starship, the Satori. The same ship that had just taken off and left her people behind. Another ship arriving by wormhole meant they had a second alien race out there. That was probably who the Naga were fighting. From the sounds of it they were losing against this mysterious new force, which was good and bad news.
The Naga were so distracted it seemed unlikely they would send a second attack at Earth anytime soon. But if the Naga lost? That meant this third race was even stronger. If they were as hostile as the Naga, it could prove the end of humanity.
Beth hadn’t come right back, either. Digging out the entrance to the cave had taken hours. She should have returned. Would have returned, unless something had gone wrong. Charline felt helpless, stuck down on this planet while her friend was somewhere above, possibly fighting for her life.
She took a deep breath. Beth could take care of herself, and she had an excellent crew on the Satori to back her up. Charline’s job was to take care of her people until the ship could return. She wasn’t even sure she could manage that much. This world was barren, dry, and had multiple life-forms which seemed more than happy to have human on the menu. She looked around, feeling lost. Where to start?
“Andy, what do you think we should do?” Charline asked.
“Me? This is your mission. I mean … I don’t want to just barge in. I’m not even supposed to be here.”
That was true. He’d snuck about the Satori to tag along and help her out. Beth and Majel caught him quickly enough, but they agreed to let him stay on anyway. Charline hadn’t been thrilled at first, but she was more than glad he’d come along now.
“Andy, I don’t know how to do this,” Charline confessed. She sagged as she said the words, feeling more defeated than she ever had. “I don’t even know where to start.”
She could feel her cheeks heating. He wasn’t wrong. This was supposed to be her job, not his. But she couldn’t see a way through.
“All right. I’ve already got two guys out keeping watch. We don’t want anything sneaking up on us. We need to assess what we have in terms of supplies, but we also need to find some cover,” Andy said.
“You aren’t thinking about moving into the cave?” Charline asked.
“I’d rather not. We don’t know how many more of those things might be down there,” he replied. “But we can’t stay here, either.”
Charline thought as she took a few steps away from Andy. She ran a hand through her dirty hair, wishing for a shower. Water might become a real problem unless they could access a good source. The cave had water. The sea was tantalizingly close, but it was heavily salted. There was a desalination filter in the equipment they’d brought. Had it been left behind? Too few supply crates lay scattered about. They were going to have to make do with what they had until Beth could return for them, or Earth sent another ship.
“Let’s get everyone who isn’t on guard duty helping with inventory. The sooner we know what we have, the sooner we can start figuring out which needs are most critical,” Charline said.
“Makes sense. I’ll round up everyone except Karl and Arjun,” Andy said.
“Karl?”
“Our medic. Big guy over there,” Andy said, pointing. “He’s patching Arjun up. I figure leave him to it.”
“Of course. Let’s get everyone else moving, though. Less time to sit around will mean less time to worry about what we’re going to do. A little activity will help everyone,” Charline said.
Herself included. Charline felt like her nerves were shot. She’d known this mission would be hard and dangerous, but to have it go so completely sideways within hours of landing was beyond anything she’d anticipated. She felt woefully unprepared for everything they were up against, and figured the rest of her team probably felt the same.
Except maybe Andy. He remained as cool as always. His face was impassive, his eyes scanning the horizon for threats. These sorts of dangers had always come easily to him. Even though Charline had been in enough firefights to consider herself a veteran, she doubted she would ever obtain the same cool detachment Andy was able to display in a crisis.
As she was watching him, she saw his eyes dart off to the left.
“What...?” Charline started to ask what was going on. But the sound of multiple gunshots cut her off.
FIVE
The gunshots made Charline jump with surprise. She whirled toward Andy to ask him what was going on, but he was already moving away from here. Toward the fight, predictably enough. He had a sidearm at his hip and he was drawing the weapon as he ran.
She had a gun, too. It was probably still strapped inside her suit, where it had been earlier. That would have been useful against the bug. It would surely help against whatever new threat they faced. She turned toward the exo-suit, standing nearby like a forlorn suit of armor. Darting toward it, she hoped she could get to the weapon in time to be of help. More gunfire rattled through the air. Whatever was happening, there were several guns shooting at once.
The suit had ladder-like projections built into the side for the wearer to climb up into the cockpit. The entire contraption stood about twice as tall as Charline. She’d never have managed the climb without the hand and foot holds, but spurred by adrenaline as she was, it only took her a few moments to clamber up.
She slid into the small pilot’s area, feeling a little claustrophobic. A quick effort of will shoved those feelings away. Yes, she’d been stuck in the suit a long time, but it had protected her, too. The numerous tears in the suit’s metal plating were evidence enough what would have happened if she hadn’t been wearing the thing when the insect attacked.
There was her rifle! It was longer than her arm, smooth metal with an almost white sheen to the polish. Rather than the rough, blocky shapes of most weapons her team had, this one gun was smooth, all rounded curves. It was a Naga weapon, capable of firing variable strength energy pellets. The little balls of force could hit with enough strength to knock someone out or punch through steel, depending on the gun’s setting. It was a flexible weapon that allowed Charline to face a variety of threats.
They were rare. This was the only one they had, and Charline was keeping it for herself. Not only was she probably the best shot of the group, but she loved the rifle. Rank had its privileges.
Charline grabbed the rifle and turned to exit the small space. She jerked to a stop as sharp jaws snapped closed right where she was about to put her head.
“Holy shit!” she yelled, all but flying backward into
the pilot’s mesh seat. A snarling face peered in at her through the cockpit opening. A row of deadly, knife-like teeth gnashed together. The thing scrabbled for solid purchase, looking like it was about to fall for a moment. No such luck. It clung on, recovered its balance, and started to creep toward her.
Ratzards. She’d named the things on their first trip to this planet. The creatures were the size of large dogs and looked like a mutant crossbreed of rats and lizards, which was how they’d gotten their name. They were a Naga bio-weapon and the reason for the planet being as desolate as it was. Their blood could infect waterways, turning them into sludge and ruining a biosphere.
The blood wasn’t what Charline was worried about just then. The ratzard’s claws and teeth were a more pressing issue. It reached toward her with a swiping paw. She leaned back, barely avoiding the strike.
Only a few feet separated them. Desperate, Charline slammed her hand down on the button which would close the suit’s hatch. Gears squealed as the cockpit lid ground downward. The ratzard hissed and leaped back. She could hear it crash to the ground outside. She was safe, at least for the moment. But from the sounds of the shooting outside, the attack involved a full pack of the creatures. Her people needed help.
She powered on the suit. It had proven useful against the alien bug. It would squish ratzards just as easily. Screens lit up, giving her a display of the area around her. The alien creature was on the ground nearby, hissing and growling up at her.
“You’ve just attacked the wrong damned person,” Charline said. Loudspeakers sent her voice booming outside, and the creature jumped back in alarm. She took a step forward. It lunged, trying to bite her ankle. Charline hear the clang sound as it impacted the steel armor encasing her leg. The ratzard darted back, hissing again.
Dust & Iron (Adventures of the Starship Satori Book 9) Page 2
