by Mel Odom
Sage held the rifle in one hand and drew his burner as he lifted his voice. There was no time to clear the sabot because they operated on a three-second delay, which had to be almost gone. “Get away from him! Stay away!” The crosshairs fell over the web strand Terracina held. Sage pulled the trigger and the laser beam cooked through the strand.
With a look of shocked surprise or betrayal, Terracina fell. A heartbeat later, the sabot round detonated, splitting the sergeant’s fractured helmet into shrapnel, part of which blew up through the web strands. Terracina’s life signs darkened in the datastream Sage viewed and KIA rolled up onto his stats. The concussive wave slapped into the soldier and knocked him off balance, causing him to fall into the hole left by the burned strand. Sage managed to throw himself forward and slap a hand against the man’s AKTIVsuit. Juicing his glove with an electrostatic charge, Sage managed to hang onto the man and save him from the long fall waiting below. The soldier twisted frantically and grabbed onto the web.
“Warning!” The jumpcopter’s auto systems blasted into Sage’s hearing. “Incoming!”
Disengaging from the man he’d saved, Sage looked up just in time to see another surface-to-air missile slam into the jumpcopter. The bright flash temporarily overpowered the filter protection built into his faceshield, and shrapnel from the destroyed aircraft bounced off his armor as the web beneath him tore free of its moorings.
He dropped into the Green Hell, knowing the ambushers weren’t finished.
NINE
West-southwest of Makaum City
0358 Zulu Time
Tree branches collided with Sage’s hardsuit, knocking him around as he fell, making it impossible to control the descent. The AKTIVsuit absorbed most of the damage, but the jolting impacts scrambled his awareness. Everything outside the faceshield was blurred, but part of that was because the filter was still compensating for the flash. He concentrated on the HUD intel, anticipating the collision with the ground and knowing even with the hardsuit’s compensation measures that he was going to hit hard.
The jungle floor was 10.7 meters below and rising fast. And something was moving down there. The jerky movement told Sage it was alive, not an inanimate thing. It was also big, not as large as the kifrik, but definitely something to be wary of.
Everything in the Green Hell will try to kill you, Sergeant.
Sage tried to track the moving life signal, wondering how he had missed seeing an enemy on the ground. Heat signals could be masked for a time, but only through expensive tech. The Terran military didn’t offer that capability as standard issue. Right now, Sage knew he was lit up for any opponents that wanted to come for him.
The suit’s altimeter showed him at 4 meters as he tried putting out his hands to grab onto anything that came within reach. He closed his hands around two branches, both too thin to support his weight, and they didn’t slow his descent before tearing free.
He landed on his face. The AKTIVsuit absorbed most of the impact, but the sudden stop still wrenched the air out of him, emptying his lungs in a rush.
Breathe. Remain calm and breathe. The HUD displayed the suit’s instructions. You are in enemy territory. Breathe. Recover. Get to your feet. Move.
Sage cleared the script with a curse, letting the hardsuit’s near-AI know he was functional and in control. He took a breath, knew from the familiar pain that he had probably cracked or broken a rib.
Pain stressors are evident in your body. Do you require medication?
The hardsuit was still leaving him in control of his body instead of automatically pumping pain blockers and stimulants into his bloodstream. That was good. He’d dialed his autoblockers down, choosing to decide for himself when push came to shove.
“No.” Sage didn’t like the chems in his system unless he really needed them. They eroded a soldier’s natural survival instincts, took the edge off the adrenalin. He pushed himself up, tracking the movements he’d spotted earlier. “Where’s my rifle?”
The hardsuit’s HUD lit up and showed him the Roley assault rifle lying six meters way.
Sage lurched toward the weapon, fighting to keep his balance and against the disorientation that flirted with his senses. The panicked shouts and questions of the soldiers around him became brief focal points. Three of them winked out, dead stars with KIA above them. The battle and the killing continued. Whoever their attackers were, they weren’t done.
“Is the rifle functional?”
Affirmative.
“Track my team. Notify them of my location.” Senses still pinwheeling from the impact, his breathing not quite right, and the pain still shooting fire down his side, Sage sprinted toward the brush to the rifle.
Immediately the HUD pinged white stat reports of the team scattered across the landscape. Two more winked out almost as soon as they flared to life and KIA replaced them.
“Identify enemy troops.” Sage rounded a tree, distracted only slightly by the orange flares that marked the individual troops and vehicles. Red triangles marked unidentified targets within the hardsuit’s sensor range.
Cannot confirm identities of combative forces.
“How many of them are out there?”
Thirty-seven confirmed.
“Keep them lit up.” Sage intended to find a defensible area, but he wanted to go on the attack. As long as the ambush team felt like they had the upper hand, they wouldn’t go away. He had to figure out a means to bloody their noses, shake their confidence.
The wide tree towered in front of Sage. His armor brushed up against the trunk bark as he powered around it. Three vines lashed out at him, startling him because he couldn’t remember anything like them being mentioned in the downloads he’d seen concerning the plant life. One of the vines smacked into Sage’s faceshield, spreading wide to reveal a throat covered in hundreds of spikes, which unleashed a torrent of bubbling venom.
The HUD flared, providing a brief translucent image of the vines as it downloaded information from one of the nearby soldiers’ onboard systems. Strof, also called vampire vines, are a predatory species that live on blood. Although they regularly feed on reptilian blood, certain strands have evolved to seek out mammalian blood provided by the Makaum people.
Makaum didn’t meet strangers. The world adopted them, turned every new life-form into something it could use. One of the earliest science teams had noted that. The planet took in all forms of diversity and adapted to them, either subjugating them or creating something to destroy them.
Actually, only two of the vines were plant life. The other was a winged snake that had nestled up to the tree. The HUD identified it as an oskelo, noting that most of them tended to be three meters long and that they killed by constriction as well as with venom. They didn’t fly so much as glide from treetops because the meter-wide wings were actually hood flares, skin that stretched out on either side of the massive wedge-shaped heads and tapered down to half the length of their bodies.
“Stop unnecessary info.” Sage seized the oskelo as it tried to wrap around his right forearm. The pressure the snake produced was amazing, threatening even the integrity of the AKTIVsuit. He juiced electricity through his left glove as he gripped the snake’s head, hitting the reptile with enough of a charge to kill it or render it senseless. Pulling the thing from his arm, he flung the limp body away.
The rifle lay just ahead of him. He reached through the darkness for it just as a meter-wide section of the ground came up and enveloped his head and shoulders, pulling tight. Instinctively, he pushed back against his captor, thinking maybe he’d stepped into a foolie left by one of the ambush teams, only instead of cutting into him or blowing up as he’d feared it might do, the substance wrapped him more tightly.
“Identify.” Sage pushed again, using the AKTIVsuit’s servo muscle.
The membrane gave way reluctantly but didn’t release the hold it had on him. The mass oozed and slipped, changing shape slightly to accommodate his efforts without letting go.
Kukweed is an
indigenous spore that feeds on living things.
Sage pushed an electric blast through the hardsuit, expecting the hostile organism to crumple away. Instead, it held on just as tightly and started to spread over more of his body.
Kukweed is impervious to electricity, cold, and fire. Blooms from the—
“Does it have a central nervous system?” Sage interrupted.
Affirmative.
Cursing and curbing the small tremor of claustrophobia that trickled through him, Sage triggered the hardsuit’s finger blades and speared the kukweed with both hands. He heaved and pulled his hands in both directions like he was swimming. The curved six centimeter long blades sliced easily through the kukweed, shredding it.
Hunks of the spore organism dropped to the floor of the jungle and writhed as though in pain.
Sage reached down for the gauss rifle just as the massive beast he’d been tracking crashed through the trees and brush behind him. He spun and tried to bring the Roley up, but he knew he was already too late when he spotted the huge creature bearing down on him. Even without the HUD, he recognized the lizard as a slor, one of the most dangerous land-based predators on Makaum.
Massive and covered in thick, heavy scales, the slor stood almost three meters high at the shoulder. The blunt head looked like a battering ram mounted between broad shoulders. The curved mouth was a meter across, filled with serrated fangs as long as Sage’s forearm. Horns crested the head like a thorny crown. The exact color was hard to make out in the darkness, but whatever that hue was didn’t matter because the lizard’s dappled skin shifted, changing tints and altering patterns.
Before Sage could draw a bead on the swiftly moving creature, the slor ran into him, knocking him back a couple meters. He landed on the ground, skidding through the underbrush, but held onto the Roley. The slor sprinted after him, banging into trees and tearing through bushes as it sought him out.
“Sergeant Sage?” A woman’s voice called over the comm, sounding panicked.
“I’m here.” Sage pointed the Roley at the charging slor and squeezed the trigger, then rolled to the side, barely avoiding the huge lizard’s full-on attack. The creature’s foreleg clipped Sage and knocked him into the brush.
“Sergeant Terracina is dead. We’re awaiting orders. We need orders.” The hysteria in her voice was barely controlled.
Sage rolled to his feet and brought the gauss rifle up with him, pointing at the slor, which had sunk to the ground, muzzle buried in the soft earth. The lizard huffed and tried to get its forelegs under it, but the disorientation caused by the electromagnetic charge scrambling its brain made that difficult.
“Fall back to Delta Two and set up a defensive perimeter, Sergeant Thindwa.” Sage strode over to the slor, put the Roley’s barrel right behind its right jaw, and squeezed the trigger in a prolonged burst. The rifle vibrated in his hands as the charge leaped free and sizzled whatever neurons remained inside the lizard’s skull.
Brain-dead, wiped of even autonomous control, the slor’s systems shut down. The big creature shivered and lay still, the gray-black tongue lolling from its mouth.
Turning from the dead slor, Sage called up the map on the HUD as he plunged through the jungle. D2 was a promontory 250 meters on the outside of the lab compound. Natural rock formations gave the area some cover and created a defensible position.
On the HUD screen, the surviving members of the assault team hustled toward the designated region.
Sage pulled up the list of snipers left to the combat team. There were three: Anton Jaworski, Elyssa Dumervil, and Kjersti Kiwanuka were still alive and operational. Sage called for a secure signal to the three snipers, lighting them up on his HUD as purple blips.
“The three of you fan out from D-Two. Grab cover and put down as many of these people as you can. You’re in a target-rich environment.” Sage marked the spots by calling out site designations, placing the snipers in a pincer in front of D2 so they could cover retreating soldiers as well as pick off aggressive enemy.
“Roger that,” Kiwanuka responded. A quick look at her field report revealed that she had the most experience of the team. She was a master-class sniper and had put in seven months on Kimos, a planet that had seen plenty of action against the Phrenorians. The official report was that she was currently on Makaum rehabbing a cyberarm. There had been extensive other injuries as well. There was also another note, but Sage didn’t have clearance for it yet. Judging from past personal experience, Sage guessed it was a reprimand of some kind.
Sage sprinted through the jungle, avoiding the trees and thick brush when he could, crashing through the undergrowth when he couldn’t. With the nightvision on, the jungle became a frenetic layer of greens—strips of dark and light hues. Wind stirred the leaves and branches. Four-winged mothlike insects called lerlor fluttered from a nest to his right, exploding out from a disturbance less than a hundred meters away.
For a moment, all Sage saw were the insects hammering against his faceshield, then he spotted the two armed men near the tree bole who were taking aim at him. Reacting immediately, Sage threw himself to the ground, taking advantage of the tall undergrowth.
Laser beams cut through the brush above him, leaving burning leaves and small branches in their wake. Sage rolled again, knowing the men were already adjusting their aim. Their suits would be picking him out just as his was doing for him. He held onto the Roley with his left hand, plucked a thermite gel grenade from his tactical harness with his right, flicked the pin to activate the explosive, and threw the grenade at the two men.
The grenade struck one of the men on the head, sticking to his faceshield. Sage knew he’d been as lucky as he’d been good. The throw hadn’t been entirely blind, or without the hardsuit’s input, but it had sailed true.
The stricken man stopped trying to shoot and stood suddenly, afraid of what was going to happen next. His armor might have lost some circuitry, crisped in the ensuing blast, but the faceshield wouldn’t save him. He wiped at the grenade and the gel smeared across his helmet as he turned to his companion.
Startled, the other man backed away, wanting no part of his partner’s fate. The thermite flared to white-hot life and burned through the faceshield. Freed from the helmet, the man’s hoarse yells echoed over the surrounding area for just an instant. Then the heat slagged the man’s face and melted his skull.
The bright light of the detonation lit up the other man’s armor and lifted him from the darkness. The glow illuminated the man’s horrified features for a moment before his faceshield compensated to block out the light.
By then Sage had the Birkeland coilgun in hand, locked on target, and pulled the trigger. The blue-tinted beam stabbed through the air and pierced the man’s chest armor. As the man staggered back, his suit’s med systems already dosing him with chems, stims, and pharms that would perhaps keep him viable, Sage stood and put another beam through the man’s faceshield.
The man fell backward as his dead companion slumped to his knees with his head and upper torso on fire, cooking down while in a pose of supplication.
“Locate all operational powersuits.” Sage ran, skirting the lab compound. He needed the raw power and weps the powersuits could provide. Whoever they were facing in the dark jungle had a lot of firepower.
The near-AI responded at once, marking the five powersuits that had survived the fall from the jumpcopters. All of them had landed in separate areas. One of them—controlled by Corporal Owen Banda—was only 73.2 meters away and taking heavy fire.
Sage changed course for the man, burning energy from the AKTIVsuit as he raced across the broken terrain.
TEN
West-southwest of Makaum City
0406 Zulu Time
Are you still with me, Banda?” Sage called as he crashed through the brush.
“Roger that, Top.” Banda’s accent hadn’t strayed far from his native Malawi. “But I am taking a lot of damage.”
“Understood, Corporal. I’m going to do somethin
g about that.” Sage overrode the automatic controls on the surviving seven drones that had come with the jumpcopter he’d flown in on. He called them down, then assigned them to coverage over the immediate battlefield, spacing them out so there were overlapping zones.
Banda’s position was nearly overrun. Several laser beams chipped away at the powersuit’s armor, keeping the corporal off balance so that he couldn’t effectively return fire. Powersuits contained an arsenal of weps, but they needed time and space to employ them.
Seven armed men in hardsuits pursued Banda’s stumbling retreat through the jungle. He would have been able to hold his own against them, but two enemy powersuits closed in on the corporal’s position. Once they reached the battle, Banda wouldn’t last more than a few seconds.
“Kapito,” Sage called. “Do you read?”
Corporal Anson Kapito was the nearest powersuit operator. He also was taking fire, but his situation wasn’t as serious. He was 170 meters distant. According to the stats Sage could see on his HUD, Kapito still carried seven missiles, half his machine-gun ammunition, and was equipped with two shoulder-mounted laser rifles.
“Five by five, Top.” Kapito sounded tense but focused.
“Rendezvous with Banda.”
Only a moment’s hesitation came over the comm and Sage knew the man had checked Sage’s own position. “Roger that. On my way.”
Cresting a small hill, Sage peered down at the battle taking place below.
Banda’s powersuit stood eight meters tall and three meters wide, built like a block with arms and legs. The unit was sealed and the thick polycarb hide protected the operator within. His HUD relayed the outside environment.
The ambushers had taken advantage of the terrain, demonstrating their knowledge of the landscape. The attack had been coldly calculated and the designers had planned on using everything they had at their disposal. They’d herded Banda toward the river, cutting off his retreat, and were now closing in.
