by Michael Ryan
The first action I’d programmed the missiles to accomplish was defensive. One of the high-trajectory projectiles dove and exploded between my nest and the convoy. The missile unleashed a wide net of ten thousand spinning, tumbling metal-alloy cubes, which created a shimmering screen between us. Through this diversion I fired an MQ-14 round into the third vehicle.
The MQ-14 projectile is made from an exceedingly rare metal. It’s radioactive, extremely costly, and highly classified, which sounds odd when you realize the round’s not meant to kill; it’s designed as a beacon.
TCI-Armor can’t withstand an MQ-14, but fortunately they’re PFE, so it’s unlikely an enemy would use one on an insignificant target like a single infantry soldier. PFE is military slang for pretty fucking expensive.
Callie and I had only been issued one for this mission.
My shot hit vehicle number three center mass. If a trackable MQ destroyed anything, that was a bonus, but it wasn’t intended to disable equipment or kill. Rather, it was engineered to glow like a sun on the missile’s homing receivers, which were also fed back to my system.
I was already running when the enemy’s defenses destroyed the second and third missiles. I wasn’t surprised – I’d expected decent antimissile countermeasures. I also knew that as much as the enemy wouldn’t mind killing me, it served no real purpose for them to divert energy and weapons to that task. All my missiles had been launched and were already in the air, so they’d have to assume that by now I’d be as far from the kill zone as possible.
I reached my secondary nest in a little under two minutes – a perch with a view of the entrance to the cave where Callie was hiding. I wanted to be sure that if I was tracked, I wouldn’t be followed back to her; but I also wanted to be able to defend her position if required.
I waited.
Nobody pursued me. They had their hands full.
Watching my display screen, I replayed the footage of my efforts.
Of the three remaining missiles, one high and two low, all had been picked up by countermeasures. The deadly game I’d launched had become a race.
The Teds had created four hot spots in an attempt to trick the missiles’ tracking protocols, but they’d been an instant too late. My program was designed to lock onto the MQ-14 round and not deviate.
The lead missile had taken a close-to-ground flight pattern and screamed along the river at the bottom of the gorge. After passing beneath the bridge, it circled up and back, locking onto vehicle number three. It was a diversion and detonated short of the target. Seventeen microflares burst around it. The sparklers were designed to mimic the trailing plume of the actual missile. At the same time, a brilliant explosion of chaff filled the air. Any antimissile ballistic solutions would be scrambled by all the confusing signals.
My second-to-last missile slammed into a tree as the vehicle accelerated along the road, but it accomplished its objective of masking the approach of the final missile, which streaked in just behind it and slammed into the target.
I ended the replay. A column of black smoke rose across the gorge, and tongues of flame licked at the sky as the surrounding forest burned. I activated suit lockdown so I wouldn’t accidentally flinch, enabled my camo feature, and counted the minutes as enemy drones did flybys searching for me.
They abandoned their hunt after only a few minutes. Their operators were vulnerable, and they’d presumably lost their VIP. Killing me wouldn’t bring him back.
Two hours later, I decided it was safe to move. I sent up a drone and scanned the area for any threats, but saw none. After a reconnaissance flight in expanding orbits around me, I called the drone back and prepared to retrace my steps to Callie’s hiding place, my mission successfully completed.
I found Callie waiting impatiently for my return. I gave her a double thumbs-up.
“You pull it off?” she asked with a smile.
“Yup,” I answered. “Let’s move.”
She stood and stretched. “I feel weird having missed all the fun.”
“You want fun?” I asked. I tapped my helmet with my index finger. “We’ve got to think up a way to get your naked ass safely to the pickup zone, and then how to get you into the retrieval boat, which will undoubtedly be under enemy fire.”
She frowned at me. “And I’m supposed to be the pessimist.”
I didn’t know how we were going to get Callie safely off-planet, but I took in her freckled face and dancing eyes, and I knew we would.
Somehow.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It is I alone who created the Naga!
~ Holy Writs of Vahobra, 1:19
After a half kilometer of slogging along a game trail, it became obvious that Callie was in bad shape.
Being so focused on the mission, I hadn’t realized that her feet were torn and bloody and that an ugly rash had spread across her arms and legs.
“We need to find food and water,” I said. I knelt in front of her. “Climb on my back and hang on.”
She managed to clamber up and clung to the back of my suit, using my munitions pack for handholds. “I’ll be fine,” she protested. “You worry about ambushes and carnivores.”
“Let me know if the ride gets too rough,” I said, and set off toward the pickup point.
Callie wasn’t a complainer, and I didn’t want to inadvertently hurt her because she was too proud to tell me to slow down. Based on my best guess, and taking into account the terrain and the slow pace I needed to maintain, we’d make it to the retrieval point with half a day to spare.
“When you go through the trees, please don’t forget I make you taller,” she said as we approached the jungle.
“I got you,” I said. “Hang on tight. I heard there’s a predator out here that likes to eat naked women.”
She rolled her eyes. “That’s nothing new, Avery – I’ve been dealing with it all my life. Now pay attention to the low branches before you knock me off.”
Our trek went uneventfully for the first three and a half hours.
“I think I saw something move,” Callie whispered.
I stopped.
All predators track movement, and they react to sudden flight. While I could survive an attack, I couldn’t fight safely in close quarters with Callie on my back.
I armed myself with my smallest weapon, a Gauss minigun mounted on my left thigh like the holstered weapon of an old-world police officer. Instead of a six-, ten-, or twelve-round capacity, the little beast could fire six hundred rounds without reloading.
Most mammals fear fire, so in my right hand I held my flamer. I wasn’t sure how something the size of the dino-lizards would react, but between the two weapons I felt reasonably secure. I couldn’t switch armaments without putting Callie on the ground, though, and I’d be reluctant to do that in a fight. Because of the condition of her feet, she couldn’t run, and even if she could, it was unlikely she could outrun anything fearless enough to attack us.
“Watch our six,” I whispered. “You’re blocking my rear camera.”
“I see nothing,” she said.
I did. “Oh, shit!”
A huge reptile advanced ten meters and stared at us with black eyes. I activated my camo system in an attempt to blend into the landscape, but I assumed the beast could smell Callie.
“We’ve got company,” she whispered. “Four of those things are tracking us from the rear. Twenty-five meters and closing.”
“Okay, hold on.” I sidestepped to the left, keeping the closest lizard in view, and did a visual sweep for additional threats. Besides the four I’d spotted, another three were flanking us, revealing that they were intelligent enough to pack hunt using some form of primitive strategy. I fired fifty rounds into the one I guessed was the alpha, but the bolts bounced off the creature’s scales like marbles against a concrete sidewalk.
I prepared for impact.
The group from the rear attacked first.
I held my flamer on them, but they didn’t stop coming – they only sh
ut their eyes and mouths. It seemed the flames were useless against their thick scales. The first of the creatures to reach me spun its body and tail-whipped me with violent force. I wasn’t prepared for an impact that powerful, and I stumbled, momentarily stunned.
Callie flew over my head and landed on the ground, and I nearly panicked.
I leapt toward her, grabbed an ankle, lifted her like a rag doll, and hurled her into the branches of a nearby tree.
She cried out in pain, and I winced. The move might have been necessary to save her, but it wasn’t pretty.
The second advancing reptile lifted its entire body off the ground using its muscular tail and snapped its jaws in the air at Callie. It missed her by centimeters. Its momentum exhausted, the beast fell against the ground with a thud. I jumped on its back, held the Gauss minigun against its head, and triggered the weapon on full auto.
The monster went crazy.
The rest of the first group attacked and managed to clamp a couple of sets of massive jaws on my arms.
The flankers moved in next.
I wanted to switch my flamer for something more productive, but my right arm was almost entirely inside one of the creatures’ mouths. As much as I shook my arm, the damn thing wouldn’t release it.
The one I’d pinned under me finally died after I’d run out of ammunition. I activated the flamer, but I couldn’t aim it effectively, and the heat didn’t seem to bother the dinos.
The alpha attacked just as my fuel ran out.
I’d only managed to kill one. Seven live monsters were now hell-bent on seeking revenge for the dead one, and with all the chomping and thrashing, I wasn’t sure whom the odds favored. The reptiles had me pinned down.
TCI-Armor is incredibly strong, so I wasn’t in any immediate danger. But the lizards were preventing me from retrieving and activating additional weapons, and time wasn’t on my side.
One of the predators began a death roll designed to crush its prey, and I silently screamed a string of curses as agony shot through my body.
Feeling pain in a suit usually only occurs just before death or a major injury.
My armor was tough, but it wasn’t designed to stop a two-thousand-kilogram reptilian monster from eating me. I fought to keep my arm from dislocating at the shoulder. I rolled in the direction of the spin and locked my suit the instant the pain receded to a manageable level.
The suit in lockdown mode is rigid and impervious to anything smaller than an HE-89, and I was pretty confident the pack didn’t have any explosives.
The creatures continued their attempts to remove my limbs, and I appreciated the irony inherent in the moment. I was armed with the most advanced weapons in the known universe, and I was about to be torn to pieces by creatures that were cousins to prehistoric Earth reptiles.
I remained frozen in a death grip for an hour while I tried to think of ways to extricate myself. My suit power would last another day and a half, give or take, if I remained in lockdown mode. But eventually my juice level would approach zero, and I’d have to self-destruct.
While I’d take the beasts to hell with me, it would be small consolation. Callie would perish soon after – a fact that bothered me more than my own death.
I needed a plan.
The human body can withstand a lot of extremes, but there’s a hard limit on dropping body temp. Hypothermia kicks in fast. I theorized that the reptiles were cold-blooded – and I didn’t mean metaphorically. I decided to test their reaction to a drop in temperature. I shivered as the suit’s external surface approached zero, which was the lower limit of its capacity.
At first there was no reaction from them. I supposed that they were used to mammalian prey losing body temperature as they died, but then they released me.
Likely because most meals don’t turn into ice cubes.
I waited for them to back away, but they remained curious. The alpha took a bite of my thigh, released it, and then nudged me over. I ended up on my back, with all my equipment jammed into the mud. I needed to roll back over to retrieve my weapons, or even just to run away.
Shivering and shaking inside the suit, I simultaneously raised the temperature and fired up my jet assist. I leapt like a grasshopper and took off at a sprint, my legs crashing through the underbrush. Much as I hoped they’d lose interest, the creatures gave chase as I headed for the tree where Callie was safely resting above the jungle floor.
As I jumped toward the lowest limb, the lead lizard lifted itself by the tail and chomped on my leg. I kicked it into the tree with all my strength, and it dropped to the ground. It stiffened as it prepared to try again, giving me just enough time to activate my grenade launcher and unleash everything I had left.
Viscous black blood splattered everywhere. As durable as their scaly hides were, the dinosaurs couldn’t withstand an HE grenade. The rest of the lizards scattered, the spectacle of their companions being slaughtered by me enough to make them rethink their appetite for the chase.
I pulled my Gauss rifle from my cache and unloaded a few thousand rounds at them in angry frustration. I felt childish at the display, but couldn’t help myself.
“Avery! Save your ammo!” Callie shouted from above me. “We still have a long way to go.”
I could tell she was tired, frustrated, and dehydrated by the sound of her voice.
“Sorry, you’re right,” I admitted. “I thought I was a goner.”
“I was thinking the same,” she said softly.
“I was worried about you.”
“Worry about yourself.”
“You’re part of me,” I said after a pause. “I wanted…”
“Don’t talk anymore,” she said. “Get me out of this tree and let’s move out.”
“Hold one,” I said. “I have an idea.”
As I’d been wasting ammo, I’d realized that the scaly hides of the lizards might make an incredibly tough armor. I left Callie in the tree and retrieved my EPL blade, which was a multipurpose electric plasma-laser knife that could cut through steel. It was messy work, but I managed to relieve one of the dead beasts of some of its skin.
Served the bastard right for trying to eat me.
After we’d been traveling for an hour, Callie tapped the back of my helmet. “This thing really stinks,” she complained.
“Sorry.”
The reptilian hide was still a bloody mess, even after I’d removed as much flesh as I could with the EPL blade. But I thought I’d done an adequate job considering the tools at my disposal.
“I hear water,” I said. “After you drink, I’ll try cleaning it.” I carried her toward the splashing of a waterfall and found an idyllic grotto surrounded by blooming flowers and lush plants. The trees appeared to be dwarf banana plants, but with dark purple fruit hanging from their branches.
“Don’t worry about the smell. We don’t have time for luxuries,” she said. “Let me down.”
I got to my knees and helped Callie to the ground. “Be careful.”
She looked at me with her hands on her hips. “No shit.”
I walked to the stream to test the water for her. “You’re weak and not thinking clearly,” I said.
“I’m totally–”
She didn’t finish her sentence.
A dun-colored snake struck, knocking her flat, and began coiling its body from her knees to her chest. Fortunately, it appeared to be a constricting species, not a venomous one. I reached down, crushed its head, and unspooled the dead creature from her body.
“Stay close to me,” I said, helping her to her feet. “Next thing we know, there’ll be–”
“Giant snapping turtles,” she said, pointing.
I followed her gaze. “Jesus, is there anything friendly on this planet?”
“The natives were pretty–”
“Don’t want to hear it. Climb onto my back again,” I ordered.
I didn’t want to take any more chances. The snake had blended in perfectly with its background, so we hadn’t seen it unti
l after it struck. I had to assume that it wasn’t the only threat hiding in the vicinity and sizing up Callie for an easy meal.
She returned to my back, blocking my rear-facing cameras and making weapon retrieval impossible again.
I walked cautiously to the water’s edge.
The snapping turtles fled into the stream, stirring up muddy water.
I knelt at the edge of the stream and placed a probe in the water.
<
<
“Shit,” I said.
“What?”
“It’s drinkable if we can sterilize it.”
“Um. Your flamer?”
“I’m out of fuel.”
“We don’t exactly have a kettle,” she said with a grimace. “I’ll just have to risk it.”
I frowned. “Too risky,” I argued.
“If we’re not on the boat soon, I’ll either be dead or forced to drink something just as bad. I’ll have to take the chance, Avery. If I get a stomach bug, I’ll be aboard in plenty of time to get treated. If I don’t drink soon, I’ll die of dehydration.”
I looked at the muddy slurry. “I don’t like it–”
Callie screamed.
We tumbled into the water as something heavy hit me from behind and clamped onto my left thigh. I reached down and grabbed two handfuls of fur. My suit’s vision was limited by the muddy water, and I couldn’t see Callie. I spun and retrieved the EPL blade with one hand and the Gauss minigun with the other.
I fired and slashed simultaneously, the water turned crimson, and the mammalian nightmare released its grip.
I stood on the gravel riverbed, with water to my shoulders, and searched for Callie.
I could see her just beneath the surface. In spite of the fact that she was underwater, I shouted to her. “Callie!”
Three feline creatures growled at me from the edge of the river. Their fur was blackish-brown, mottled, and slick, and they moved like pack hunters. The one I’d killed was floating downstream in the current, the water surrounding it stained red. Movement near it drew my eye, and a seething mass of silver and pink fish appeared and consumed the corpse. One of the beasts roared from the shore, and I turned and watched them race off in frustration.
