by Michael Ryan
They headed downstream.
Callie screamed from behind me. She’d floated beyond my reach and had moved into the faster-moving water.
I retrieved my Gauss assault rifle. On the semiauto, twelve-round burst setting, it was hard to miss a target as long as you pointed the thing in the right direction. I blew away two of the creatures, but the third made it behind an outcropping of rocks before I could hit it.
Callie screamed for me again.
I pounded toward the bank. At the shore, I activated my jet-assist. Running and jumping as fast as I could without falling or breaking a leg – which is possible, even in a suit, when you’re going full speed over rocky terrain – I made it downriver of Callie.
Seeing that I’d left Callie alone, the remaining creature leapt into the water and swam toward her. I took aim. Callie’s head popped into my field of view. The predator was between us. A twelve-round burst would put at least one round into both of them, so I switched to the single-shot setting and took careful aim.
I fired.
A red hole appeared in the back of the creature’s skull.
Callie struggled to keep her head above the water. “Avery!” she shouted, in the middle of her frantic attempt to swim to shore.
The current swept her away.
I ran past her, noting that the second dead creature had attracted the corpse-eating fish. A ruby cloud spread around it as the school fed in a frothing frenzy. I ran into the water thirty meters past Callie, hoping the distance would allow me time to get to her. Swimming in TCI-Armor was impossible. While gear did exist that could modify an armored soldier into a minisub, I wasn’t equipped with it.
My boots felt their way along the bottom of the river, moving in an absurd kind of slow motion. My head dipped below the surface, but it was too muddy and dark to see much of anything. I stepped over a ledge and sank several meters. I continued moving in the direction I hoped would put me into position to grab Callie, but I was doing a lot of guessing about where she’d end up.
The river bottom began sloping upward, and I increased my pace. My head burst out of the water, and Callie screamed again.
She was ten meters and closing.
I caught a brief glimpse of something entering the water farther down the river, but my rear viewing cams were too wet to register a clear image. I moved closer to Callie and prepared to catch her. Her head sank beneath the surface as she neared me, and I reached forward and grabbed one of her arms.
I had to bat away several of the carnivorous fish that had begun feeding on her open wounds. She was unconscious and limp, but she was breathing. I heaved her body clear of the surface and headed toward the shore.
Something locked onto my left ankle and pulled us both underwater.
I kicked as hard as I could with my free foot and struck a fleshy surface. Whatever it was let go, and I scooped Callie up and stumbled toward the shore, her body held aloft to keep her clear of any further threats.
A sleek, two-meter-long lizard exited the water. My boot had wounded the side of its skull, and the open gash had drawn the attention of the silver fish. The creature shook its head, sending flashes of silver and blood into the air. It glared at me, flicked a triforked tongue, and scurried into the jungle.
I regarded Callie’s battered form. Her chest rose and fell, her breathing labored. She coughed and opened her eyes.
“Thanks, Avery,” she managed to whisper.
“I thought you were done for,” I said. “You still thirsty?”
She grimaced. “The question of whether I should risk drinking this shit is answered.”
“Can you make it onto my back?” I asked.
“Where’s our dinosaur leather?” she countered.
“Good question. I lost it sometime between the appearance of the hungry cats, your near drowning and killer piranha attack, and the new species of lizard that apparently has a taste for human flesh.”
“We should probably find it. I’m freezing.”
I checked my temperature gauge, and the air temp was sweltering. If Callie was feeling cold, it didn’t bode well. We retraced our steps to the point where we’d first entered the water, my assault rifle reset to fire twelve-round bursts as I scanned for predators.
“I don’t like leaving you here alone,” I said.
“I’ll be okay for a minute,” she said.
I set her down on the bank, noting her wounds without comment. “Yeah, or dead,” I replied.
“I’ll be dead without that damn skin.”
I knew she was probably right. I entered the water and hunted for it. A few minutes later I held up a clean piece of scaly-armored skin.
“Those little fish do a good job,” she said.
“Indeed.” The flesh-eating swarm had cleaned the hide as thoroughly as a machine.
“To our ride, sir?” she asked as she climbed onto my back again.
“Let’s get you off this planet.”
We headed toward the rendezvous zone, and I wondered what type of creature would try to eat us next, or what natives were waiting to demand tribute, or worst of all, whether any Ted patrols were in our path.
“Quit worrying so much, Avery,” Callie whispered. “How much worse can it get?”
CHAPTER NINE
Warfare is a ripe plum to those who have only heard of its glories.
~ Malforn Vooberntz
Returning to the Amphoterus would be the most dangerous part of this mission. Unless we’d completely annihilated the enemy – which rarely happened – the arrival of the retrieval boat would be impossible to hide. The key to survival was speed, surprise, and an optimal location.
The coordinates for our pickup were sometimes defined ahead of time, and on this mission we’d been given a 144-square-kilometer grid before the drop. We reached the edge of this area by nightfall. I found a tree with a view of a valley to the east and a ridgeline to the west, and using old-school techniques, built a blind high off the ground from branches and leaves. When I finished, I wrapped Callie like a burrito in our piece of dino leather and hoisted her into the makeshift shelter.
“Hold tight,” I said. “I’m going to see if I can find you something to eat.”
“I can manage,” she whispered.
“I know.”
She was weak from hunger, blood loss, and dehydration, and I didn’t want to think about what microbes she’d ingested while in the river. To make matters worse, her snake bite was clearly infected. The area around it was swollen an angry red, seeping yellow and pink ooze, and she was feverish. “Try to sleep,” I said. “I won’t be far.”
I lowered myself to the jungle floor and walked toward the sound of water, my vision and hearing amplified to max sensitivity.
I tried not to imagine what might be out hunting for meat as I searched for anything that looked edible. I came across a brook and startled a troop of simian creatures with black and bronze fur. They screamed and chattered at me and moved away through the trees. The water was shallow and provided a clear path through the foliage, so I followed them upstream, keeping my distance so as not to alarm them any further.
They eventually disappeared into the jungle, but not before I watched them eat fruit that resembled a pear, but was colored like a papaya. One thing I appreciated about the Guritains was their love of exotic fruits and vegetables. Gurt companies built massive hydroponic farms on Earth, but I’d never tasted many of these luxuries; the prices were too outrageous for the average human. If I weren’t in the armed forces, I don’t think I’d even know what a papaya tasted like.
I picked one of the fruits and broke it open. It was obviously safe for consumption by at least some mammals, and I had a few tests I could run that would minimize the risk to Callie.
I stuck a probe into the ripe flesh.
<
<
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I ran additional scans and decided it was safe for Callie to eat. It
would also suffice for hydration, as the fruit had high water content. I was worried about her fever and her infection, but there was nothing I could do other than feed her and keep anything else from attacking.
When I returned to the tree, Callie was safely asleep, her breathing rapid and her chest making an ominous gurgling sound with each exhalation. I reduced my external speaker volume to a low setting and spoke her name while gently shaking her. “Callie, wake up. I have something for you to eat.”
She opened her eyes. “Hello?”
“It’s me,” I said.
“Who?”
“Avery.”
She blinked in obvious pain and closed her eyes again. “Am I dead?”
“No. I need you to eat this.”
She squinted at me and I handed her a piece of fruit.
“What is it?”
“It’s safe. You need to eat.”
She ate three of them before falling back to sleep. I watched her for several hours before an internal system message beeped and startled me with a prompt.
<
The coordinates for our rendezvous were approximately four kilometers toward a ridge to our west. The time for pickup was before the local dawn. I allowed myself to enter a short meditative half sleep, trying to get some rest while remaining alert enough to notice if a hungry carnivore showed up to eat Callie – or worse, a Ted scouting patrol stumbled across us.
Three hours before dawn, I woke her.
We left the safety of the tree and hiked toward the ridge. An hour and a half later, we met up with a dozen others from our unit.
“Are they going to beam us up?” Callie asked when she saw the other infantry suits.
“Yes. Now be quiet,” I said. She was delirious, had been fading in and out the entire hike, and I didn’t want to explain that getting beamed up to a starship only happened in cheesy space movies.
“What the hell?” the squad leader asked when he saw her.
“Long story, Sergeant,” I answered. “Can we worry about keeping her alive, and I’ll file a report later?”
“First thing, Ford. Shit, I’ve seen everything now.” He reached out and touched the dino leather. “What’s this?”
“Native armor,” I answered. “You wouldn’t believe how many rounds it takes to kill a dinosaur, Sergeant. I’m going to roll her up in the thing and–”
“Damn,” he said, and shook his head.
“There weren’t a lot of choices. So I worked with what I had,” I explained.
He looked away and motioned to the men. “Hold tight, everyone,” he ordered. After a moment, he added, “Okay, people. Four minutes. Give the naked girl priority. I can’t wait to hear this one.”
I rolled Callie into the skin, told her that I loved her, and threw her over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
The boat arrived on schedule.
You never knew when the enemy would have a large troop garrisoned close to a pickup zone or available rail-cannons within striking range. War was unpredictable that way. But we were far from the ocean, there were no enemy starships above us, and all preliminary scouting had shown the area to be far from any Tedesconian troop movements.
We joined the rest of the company to the south and waited while the combat engineers from the boat began clearing a pathway.
I moved Callie to my front and held her in a bear hug. With my armor and her leather wrap acting as shields, I felt reasonably secure about her safety if enemy troops started firing on us with conventional Gauss guns or antipersonnel grenades. If the Tedesconians lobbed high-explosive mortar rounds or attacked from an aircraft, we’d have a different problem.
If, for instance, an H-73 ICBM Mark 6 hit us, we’d all be microparticles, turned to stardust in a blink of an eye. There wouldn’t even be time to say a little prayer. I never worried about these types of possibilities, however. They weren’t worth the effort. The Tedesconians and the Guritains had dozens of treaties, pacts, and other diplomatic agreements in place that limited large-scale weapons, although they couldn’t seem to share a planet without constantly being at each other’s throats.
I never quite understood these types of agreements, but they’ve been used on Earth since sometime in the twentieth century, when countries agreed not to use effective killing agents like nerve gases and biological weapons.
Which always seemed counterintuitive to me.
War wasn’t supposed to be friendly.
The combat engineers finished clearing the brush. Next, they assembled the light rail required for relaunching the boat. We kept watch while they worked furiously, knowing that we were on borrowed time.
“I have three YC-15s incoming, one hundred sixty-seven degrees. Moving rapidly,” a corporal announced over the all-company comm.
“Roger that,” our CO responded. “Squads, prepare for defensive action. Combat engineers, report to your leaders. Louies report directly to me. Acting LT personnel, please identify.”
We usually lost at least a couple of new lieutenants during a mission, and the chain of command on retrieval was always in a state of SNAFUness.
I tucked Callie behind a felled tree and put three hundred meters between us. If the incoming troops had something big enough to blast us both, we were already lost, but if they had anything more substantial than grenades, they hadn’t launched them yet.
I sent Callie’s location out on the all-company comm and wrote a quick program to alert the group in case I didn’t make it back.
The YC-15s landed to our east, far enough away to indicate that they were worried we had HE missiles at our disposal. Advancing by foot, their payloads were three or four minutes out. The terrain and jungle might work in our favor; we were the defenders, and they had no idea of our strength.
Undoubtedly there were bigger, badder, and more numerous enemies on the way, but if the combat engineers were on the ball, we’d be firing off-planet inside of five minutes. Seven, tops, but I liked to remain optimistic when our time on the ground was getting short.
Somebody in our unit still had a working drone. He sent it up, and a moment later the CO announced we’d have even more company shortly.
It takes three and a half minutes, if you’re practiced, to get a non-armored person into the pressure cooker, so I needed to move quickly. I switched to our squad line. “Sergeant, I’m on the move to get Callie into the PC,” I announced.
“Roger that,” he said. “Good luck.”
Retrieval boats have one chamber available for a non-suited person. Their primary purpose was to allow the transportation of a prisoner of war, and while they were rarely used, we were still trained in their operation.
When I reached Callie, she was barely conscious. I picked her up and ran. The first of the Teds arrived, and we took a lot of small-arms fire as I crossed the clearing to the boat, but nothing penetrated my suit or the reptile skin.
“What in the world?” the NCOIC of the combat engineers demanded over the close-proximity comm when I approached the craft.
“My partner,” I answered. “I need to get to–”
“Not my first day, son,” he answered, and helped me lift Callie into the boat’s loading bay. “You’d better have studied using the pressure cooker, because I have other duties. And get that damn foreign material off my boat.”
I tossed the skin and picked up my partner. She was no longer lucid, but she was still breathing. “Callie, stay with us,” I said. I heaved her into the PC – the tube-shaped chamber that operated much like our suits.
“I need you to open your mouth,” I said.
She didn’t respond.
Dexterity was enhanced in a suit, but so was strength. One slight miscalculation and I could break her jaw or shove the tubing too roughly and injure her. I strapped her arms and legs into place and slid a bundle of sensors and tubes into her mouth. After I gently pushed the whole mess down her throat, the row of sensors on the control panel lit up green. I lowered the chamber lid and locked it i
nto place, and activated the sequence to fill the tank.
Callie involuntarily struggled against her restraints, but she soon calmed. All monitors showed a successful transition from air to liquid breathing, so I made my way to my assigned slot.
Troops filled the boat and strapped themselves in. I tuned out the chatter on the comm and attached restraints to my suit in preparation for takeoff. There was nothing more I could do except hope Callie’s body didn’t surrender to the stress.
We survived.
The trip out of the atmosphere was uneventful, which basically means we didn’t die. Any recovery has a binary outcome: either it’s a success, or everyone’s dead.
The Amphoterus’s master guidance beam directed us into her belly, and the exterior hull door slid shut.
“What the hell happened?” a private asked. Callie’s presence had been announced to the ship crew after docking procedures were completed and support teams began their duties.
“Never mind!” Sergeant Veetea barked. “Get her into medical under priority.”
There were hundreds of returning soldiers, but only a handful ended up in medical. Injuries in-country ended in death more often than not, because to actually harm a TCI-Armored warrior, you had to inflict incredible damage, and a suit breach in an engagement was a death sentence.
The med team lifted Callie from the tank. They cleared her throat, ensured she was breathing, and wheeled her away in a sealed incubator. I felt confident that she would be okay, but I’d learned not to be overly optimistic. I think the military beats optimism out of soldiers like bad habits out of a mistreated dog.
Someone tapped my shoulder and pointed down the hall. It was time to get in line for the wash down.
