by Rick Partlow
I ignited the fusion drives and heard Conrad grunt hoarsely as six gravities pushed us back into our acceleration couches. The moon’s uninhabited hemisphere was still facing the gas giant; its rotational period was the same length as its orbit, so it always presented the same face. I took the Artemis between the two, slipping into a lower, faster orbit before I boosted another g and dipped into the moon’s atmosphere.
All these missions, and the only atmosphere I’d ever piloted a cutter into was Inferno’s. Plenty of simulators, of course. I’d landed on every human colony in the simulator. There was a difference, no matter what they tell you. Even the interface can’t duplicate the feeling, the knowing that it’s real, the knowing that one little slip when you switched over from the fusion drive to the atmospheric jets would mean going out of control.
The air thickened quickly as we dropped altitude, powering into as steep a dive as I thought the jets could pull us out of. Clouds enveloped us and the cyclone winds of a hurricane-force storm battered at the Artemis’ ungainly, brick-like lines, and only the sheer power of the engines kept us in the air, and I longed for my brief career as an assault shuttle pilot. An assault shuttle was a bird of prey in an atmosphere, as graceful as an eagle; the missile cutter was a fat, awkward water-fowl flapping its wings relentlessly to stay aloft. The jets roared in their defiance of the storm, creating eddies in the clouds with their exhaust, and finally we were through. Rolling hills swathed in green basked in the constant twilight of the reflected face of the gas giant, or huddled in the complete darkness where the storms shut out even that dim light.
“I’ve inputted the projected impact zone,” Conrad told me, and I could see the coordinates glowing like a beacon deep in the trackless green below us.
“We’re going in,” I warned him. “Hold on, it may get a bit rough.”
We were on the edges of the storm and the wind still buffeted the boat, worse as we came down into the valley where the indicator glowed in muted reds over the muted greens, and even worse as I throttled back the jets and took us low over the clearing.
There it was, right where the projection had said it would be, the delta-winged wedge half-buried in the loam and moss with a trail of scorched black leading back from it where Ash had tried to hit the belly jets. He’d almost made the clearing, but he’d wound up snagging the belly on a stand of what passed for trees here, and nosing in. Doubt tried to claw its way out of my gut and I repressed a sudden image of Ash lying dead and broken in the cockpit of the Acheron, having ridden it into the netherworld like its namesake.
I swung the Artemis’ tail around to line her up with a stretch of bare ground just big enough for her to touch down, then cut the forward thrusters and fed power to the belly jets. My chin went into my chest and four hundred kilograms of mass smashed me into my seat and my teeth clacked together and I bit the inside of my cheek as the landing gear sank into the fuselage on shock-absorbing hydraulic pistons.
“Shit!” Conrad wheezed as the ship jolted to a halt, shuddering up and down on the landing treads before she settled in. The only reason I didn’t curse was that I didn’t have the breath left for it, but I did have an urgent need to know.
I yanked the interface cables out of my suit and hit the quick-release on my seat harness, scrambling out of the cockpit ahead of Conrad, ignoring his plaintive call to wait. The gravity was fairly light here, I realized in some tangential part of my brain that wasn’t obsessing over what was inside the Acheron; it felt about half Earth normal. I stumbled awkwardly in the lower gravity and caught myself against the far aft bulkhead in the utility bay, slapping at the control to lower the belly ramp.
“At least take a fucking gun!” Conrad was yelling at me, trying to catch up.
I didn’t acknowledge the warning, but I stopped and yanked open one of the lockers and pulled a pistol belt out of a drawer, buckling it on over my flight suit. The pulse laser felt strange and bulky in my hand; I hadn’t fired one since Attack Command school, and then only on a closed range. I remembered the safety and flicked it off with my thumb, keeping my forefinger away from the trigger pad, trying to keep it pointed in a safe direction as I jogged down the ramp.
The end of the belly ramp had barely touched the ground when I leaped off of it, the soles of my boots sinking into the mud. They were ship boots, not made for this, and I slipped and slid across the twenty meters between the two boats, careful of the laser. Shooting myself would be a damned silly way to die after all this.
This close, I could see the damage the Acheron had taken in the battle: a scorched, jagged rent in the upper hull that went through into the cockpit and probably out the belly. It had been a laser and it had come from nearly point-blank to penetrate that far. That had to have been what killed Chief Ngata, I thought. With the nose half-buried in the ground, there was no way to open the belly ramp; instead, I walked around the huge mound of dirt piled against the cockpit and went to the airlock.
That side of the ship was angled downwards, lost in the shadows, so I didn’t see until I was right up on it that the airlock was yawning open, the interior sheathed in darkness. I paused beside the edge of it, sidling up to the hull, feeling the warmth of it through my suit, feeling the cold dampness of the mud through my thin boots. I didn’t want to see what was inside the boat, but I had to.
I touched a control on my sleeve and the emergency light set in the side of my helmet snapped on. Shining it up into the airlock revealed nothing except bare bulkhead; I couldn’t see the deck from this angle, couldn’t see any further into the utility bay. I started to holster my pistol but paused and remembered to put the safety back on first, and then it took two tries to slide it into the plastic catches.
“Let me go in first,” Conrad said and I nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw that he was right next to me. He was in full combat armor, camouflaged in grey and brown and black streaks, and I couldn’t see his eyes through the darkened visor of his helmet. The barrel of his heavy Gauss rifle was pointed back the way we’d come, covering the approaches to the Acheron.
“Just keep watch out here,” I said, as if I were his superior officer and not the other way around.
“You damn pilots’ll be the death of me,” he muttered.
But he didn’t argue, just stayed out there, standing guard while I clambered up into the airlock. The utility bay was as empty as it had looked from the ground. Every locker was open and stripped bare, one of them with its door torn off the hinges. I shined the light on it more carefully, frowning in confusion. That didn’t look like crash damage
I moved through the passage, turning my head to the left and right to aim the light. The hatches to both cabins were yawning wide, and the drawers had been yanked open, the clothes that had been stored inside strewn around the compartment. The hatch to the head was ajar as well, but I ignored it and pressed on to the cockpit.
I could see the gaping wound in the hull even before I reached it, the edges smooth and polished and the interior bulkheads charred and blackened. Half the Crew Chief’s station was burned away, and I turned aside as I realized I could see parts of Chief Ngata melted into the plastic of the acceleration couch. Ash’s chair was intact, but unoccupied; he wasn’t on board. But the command station…it had been cut open with something smaller and more precise than the battle laser that had disabled the Acheron. Everything inside had been pulled out, the optical feeds cut.
“Sandi,” Conrad called quietly inside my helmet. “Come here, you need to see this.”
I found him over at the edge of the clearing, on the portside of the Artemis, down on a knee, staring at the dirt. I looked over his shoulder, the light on my helmet shining a bright circle at the impressions in the mud. They were rounded and regular and I knew they weren’t natural.
“What is it?” I asked him.
“Turn off your headlamp,” he snapped, and I did it automatically. “It’s the landing gear of a Tahni troop carrier.”
“Shit,” I spat. “They’ve
been at the ship. They’re the ones who stripped everything from it.” I closed my eyes, squeezing them shut against the tears that suddenly threatened to come. “They got Ash; we were too late.”
When I opened my eyes, Conrad wasn’t there; he was slowly walking across the clearing, head down.
“There’re a lot of prints from Tahni combat boots,” he mused, sounding as if he was talking to himself more than to me. “But there’s some that look like they came from ship boots like yours, but a larger size.”
I jogged over to him, skidding to a halt behind him as he stepped slowly and methodically along the tracks, until he came to the edge of the clearing to the west of where the Acheron had crashed. He paused there and looked back at me.
“The tracks head out this way, and there’re no Tahni prints around his. He got away.” He motioned back at the Artemis. “Go get armored up, fast. We need to get to him before they do.”
***
“How did they find him so fast?” I wondered. I worked my left shoulder; this combat armor didn’t seem to fit quite right, or maybe I just wasn’t used to carrying a rifle. “I mean, they didn’t see us come in…”
“He didn’t have much control from what I saw of the ship,” Conrad murmured, eyes still on the game trail through the thick foliage. “He probably had to orbit the moon once before he came down, passed right over the Tahni colony. Now be quiet and let me concentrate, and keep your eyes open for the enemy.”
That was easy for him to say. I’d never even worn a combat helmet before and the Heads-Up Display was busy and distracting and confusing. But he was the tracker and I couldn’t even see the footprints he was following, so I kept my Gauss rifle up at my shoulder and I kept looking.
Most of what I saw was the strange local growth. It grew to the height of Earth pine trees, but each of the things seemed more like a twisted cluster of hard, thorny vines than a tree, and they didn’t have leaves, just some sort of green fuzz more like a fungus except centimeters thick and slimy. It also tended to grow together in huge clumps, what I’d thought was a stand of trees from the air, except there was a lot less room between the clusters in the clump than there was between trees in a forest.
Something large and dark and weird-looking popped out onto the trail just twenty meters ahead of us and I cursed out loud and swung the barrel of the Gauss rifle around at it, a surge of adrenalin making my heart pound.
“Don’t shoot,” Conrad said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “It’s just an animal.”
But it was a big animal, and I suddenly knew what had made this trail. I couldn’t make out too many details, but it had four legs and a head and I thought I could see eyes. It made a sound like a snort and then it turned and headed down the trail away from us. It was out of sight in seconds.
“That thing didn’t evolve here,” I guessed, trying to get my heartbeat and respiration back under control.
“It’s a Tahni herbivore,” he told me. “They bring them out to all their colonies.”
“They eat those things?”
“No, but the animals are somehow part of the cultivation of the crop they eat, so they bring it along. These tree-things are from the Tahni planets, too.”
They must have been here a long time, I thought, looking at thorny clusters twenty meters tall and shuddering as I noticed something that looked like a cross between an insect and a snake slithering through the higher reaches of one of them. It was a good thing the combat helmets had a dead-reckoning navigation system built into them, because I don’t think I could have ever found my way back to the ship otherwise, through the twisted network of trails and the tree-things blocking out the sky. And we’d only walked a couple kilometers.
“Hold up.” Conrad had halted in mid-step and was turned slightly to the left, where another game trail crossed this one.
He went down on a knee again, and I automatically started scanning around, still trying to make heads or tails of the helmet’s sensors. It was so much more complicated than jacking in, but I was finally getting a sense of where we were in the mapping display and what the thermal and sonic readings meant and…
“Conrad!” I yelled, bringing up my rifle as panic surged through me.
The blob of green and red that had seemed like meaningless sensor noise a second ago had suddenly crystallized into eight separate, humanoid shapes coming down the crossing path from our right, maybe twenty meters away and walking single-file. I could barely see them through the encroaching twisted clusters of foliage, but I knew what they were immediately: Tahni soldiers.
I’d faced Tahni destroyers without flinching, but here, on the ground with a gun in my hand, naked fear rose inside me and I couldn’t hold the heavy rifle steady. I touched the trigger pad anyway and nearly tumbled backwards as it kicked hard against my shoulder. Two of the figures in my sensor display went down and the rest scattered to either side of the trail and I marveled at the fact I’d been able to hit even one of them, much less two; but then I realized that Conrad had been shooting from his kneeling position beside the trail.
“Let’s go!” He grabbed my shoulder and pulled me after him and we ran down the opposite direction from the Tahni patrol on the cross-trail.
Mud sucked at my boots and I had to cradle the rifle against my chest to keep it from snagging on low-hanging vines and snags on the narrow path. I heard a high-pitched whine and the “snap-snap-snap” of projectiles breaking the sound barrier just before a twisted, thorny trunk to the right of the trail exploded into wood-like fragments. Bits of it spattered against my armor but didn’t penetrate it; I almost pitched over from the impact, but Conrad still had a hold on my shoulder and he kept me upright.
What the hell kind of gun did the Tahni foot soldiers use? I struggled to remember intelligence reports in the Academy that I’d only half-listened to. Something we called a KE gun, I thought? Electromagnetic like our Gauss rifles, but shooting small, tantalum darts at a high rate of fire, where the Gauss rifles used heavy, tungsten slugs and could put out maybe one shot per half-second. I’d rather get hit with theirs than ours, but I really didn’t want to get hit with either one, so I kept running.
I couldn’t have told you how long or how far we ran, though I’m sure there was a way to figure it out in the damned helmet computer. But it sure seemed like it had been hours before Conrad yelled “In here!” over the helmet ‘link and pulled me into a thick, heavily shadowed grove of the thorn-cluster trees. My legs were aching and I was puffing heavily inside the helmet despite all the exercise I could squeeze into my downtime, and I didn’t know how the hell Search and Rescue or Recon Marine troops did it.
I slid in past where Conrad had fallen into a crouch and I slipped in the slick mud and banged up against a wall of thorns. The whole side of the twisted growth shuddered from the blow and I cursed, hoping the Tahni wouldn’t see the movement. I scrambled backwards, trying to get out of sight and then I bit back a scream and turned it into a loud profanity when my hand came down on something with the unmistakable feel of a body.
I didn’t need a light; the helmet’s optics used thermal imaging, infrared and light-intensifying filters and merged them into a computer-enhanced image that looked as bright as day. I could see immediately that the body was human, curled into a fetal position with its back to me, the shoulders rising and falling with a ragged, unsteady breathing. He was wearing a flight suit but no helmet, but all I could see was short-cut dark hair. I gripped his upper arm and rolled him over.
It was Ash, and he was alive.
Chapter Twenty-One
His face was pale where it wasn’t a massive bruise, and I could see the smart bandages wrapped around his right leg, bordered by scorched and melted fabric from the flight suit. But he was breathing and, finally, so was I.
“Watch the front,” Conrad snapped, pushing past me, ripping open a pouch on his tactical vest and pulling out a medical analyzer.
I crouched near the opening, pointing my rifle that way, glancing back and
watching as he touched the device to Ash’s neck for a few seconds, probably reading its output in his helmet display, then tucked it away.
“He’s stable, thanks to the smart bandages,” Conrad told me, “but he lost a lot of blood before he got them on. That wound on his leg is damned serious; I think it’s from the laser hit that damaged his ship. Looks like he might have a major concussion, too. Honestly, I don’t know how the hell he got this far. We need to get him to the ship, get him into an auto-doc on the Implacable if we can.”
“What about them?” I asked, indicating who I meant with a waggle of the barrel of the rifle.
Conrad moved past me to the entrance of the hollow, and I went back to Ash. He’d been beat up pretty bad in the crash, and his right eye was swollen shut, that whole side of his face a mass of purple bruising. I swallowed hard; if he’d been unconscious for long, that could mean brain damage. An auto-doc could fix him if we got him into one quick enough, but that would mean catching the carrier before she left the system…and that meant getting out of here fast.
“I don’t think they followed us this way,” Conrad said, turning back to me. “Can you carry him?”
He didn’t have to say the other part of that: I should carry Ash because he was a lot better with a gun than I was. I considered it for a second before I answered. Ash was a good thirty kilos heavier than me, but this place had half standard gravity.
“Yeah,” I decided. “I’ve got him.”
I handed Conrad my rifle and he slung it over his shoulder; he was still watching the trail but I could feel him keeping an eye on me to see if I could actually handle Ash’s weight. I felt a flare of anger, convinced for a moment that his doubt was because I was a woman, but I shook that off; it was because I was a pilot, and he thought pilots were soft.
