by Isaac Hooke
The droplets seeped down those branches and trickled onto his ballistic shield, only to flow off the lower edge and into the mud next to the trunk below. He remembered a scene from a certain movie where the hero had smeared mud on his body to hide from an alien. He had to smile at that. It might work for a few seconds, but as soon as the mud warmed to body temperature—or in his case, machine temperature—the gig would be up. What the hero in that movie really needed was a thermal negative ballistic shield.
Eric heard a vague buzzing then. If he were still human, he would have held his breath, or some other cliché.
A small sphere passed by the edge of the tree. It paused overhead, partially obscured by the edges of the fern.
The sphere was about the size of his mech’s fist. It had twin, circular grooves running from pole to pole at right angles to one another. Inside those grooves, blue energy pulsed up and down. The buzzing, or humming, rather, seemed timed to the pulses, and he wondered if that was some internal energy source. No, it had to be a scanner of some kind, because he already knew the Banthar had achieved amazing miniaturization with their energy sources—they had constructed micro machines capable of devouring all metals in sight and then flying across an ocean without pausing, after all.
Eric remained motionless as the sphere hovered in place of course—he couldn’t move because he had shut down his body’s servomotors. The only motion came from the droplets of snowmelt, the only sound the drip, drip those droplets made.
Apparently satisfied that nothing resided below, the sphere continued onward and out of view.
Well, shit.
He waited. More humming came, and another sphere made an appearance on the opposite side of the tree. This time the scout didn’t stop. Several more spheres randomly passed on either side, at intervals that ranged from thirty seconds to two minutes. That he was seeing so many at his current location told him that he was either along some main route the scouts were taking, or more likely, there had to be thousands of them out there, fanning out across the forest.
And then finally no more scouts came. Three minutes had passed since the last appeared. Five. Still nothing.
The Bolt Eaters were trained not to break stealth mode until thirty minutes transpired since the last potential threat. So Eric waited, and when the prerequisite thirty minutes transpired, he re-enabled his comm node.
“Hello, this is Marlborough,” the Sarge came over the comm immediately. “I’ve instructed my Accomp to send out this message automatically to every member of the platoon, as soon as their comm nodes register as enabled. I want you to switch your antennae to directional mode only, and drop down the intensity of your broadcasts so that the range is fifty meters, max. Keep omnidirectional mode operating below fifty meters as well.”
Eric made the requested changes to his antennae and comm node.
“Well, that was interesting,” Bambi transmitted. “I counted at least twenty alien spheres passing by at my position.”
“Thirty here,” Frogger said.
The other Bolt Eaters reported similar numbers as they exited stealth mode.
“That means they’ve sent thousands of them into this forest,” Dickson said. “Probably tens of thousands, in fact, all along the eastern edge.”
“Looks like the Banthar are keen to track us down,” Bambi said.
“Wouldn’t you do the same, if alien intruders appeared on one of your colonies?” Crusher said. “Intruders who operated mechs you recognized from a planet you once tried to conquer?”
“Yeah, I suppose I would,” Bambi said.
“What do we do, Sarge?” Dunnigan said.
“We have to keep moving,” Marlborough said. “But very cautiously. The Banthar know we’re somewhere in this forest, so they’ll keep sending scouts back and forth until they find us.”
“We could hide out here for six months or some shit,” Slate said. “Eventually they’ll give up.”
“Sure, but the Brass are going to send in our clones far sooner than that,” Marlborough said.
“Oh yeah,” Slate said. “Hell no. We can’t let that happen.”
“No, we can’t,” Marlborough agreed. “Our clones would be walking into the worst ambush since The Battle of Fallujah 2122.”
“I haven’t heard about that one,” Mickey said.
“Probably for the best,” Marlborough said. “It wasn’t very fun. Look it up on the cloud sometime when we get back. If there is a hell, reliving that battle is the closest you’ll ever get.”
“Destroying the alien mothership twenty years ago was mine,” Eric muttered before he could stop himself.
The silence that came over the comm band seemed stunned at his remark.
Shit, shouldn’t have said anything.
He’d never told that to anyone, not even the girls. He compartmentalized it, packed away the horrors of that day deep in his consciousness, and now, when he was least expecting it, all those emotions had come leaping back out, spurred by Marlborough’s casual remark.
“Poor baby,” Crusher finally said, and from her tone, she meant it.
“Poor baby,” Slate mocked in a high-pitched voice. “Poor baby, my ass! Bro, we all died in that battle. Died! And you lived. So don’t tell me it was your hell.”
“But that’s exactly why it was,” Eric said quietly.
The platoon members remained silent at that.
“Getting back to the subject at hand,” Brontosaurus said, much to Eric’s relief. “Now that we’ve shown up at the door of these Banthar, if they don’t find us here, they’ll start installing permanent surveillance tech inside this forest. Those EM emitters Frogger told us about are starting to sound like a very good thing right about now.”
“Except for one thing,” Mickey said. “Sure, we’ll be able to pass a rudimentary first pass inspection, but if a patrol attempts to communicate with us to confirm our identities, or tries to access the equivalent of Banthar public profiles from ID chips they expect us to be carrying, but of course are not, we’re SOL.”
“What’s SOL?” Crusher said.
“Shit outta luck,” Mickey said.
“We also don’t have the resources to build them,” Dickson reminded them. “Which is exactly why we have to head home as quickly as possible.”
“I could try digging here...” Bambi said.
“Negative,” Marlborough said. “We have to get off this planet, pronto. That’s the only way out of this. We’ve done our bit, and now we’re going home. Eagleeye, send the Ravens forward first. I want them to map out every nook and cranny of forest ahead before we move on. Wouldn’t surprise me if some of those scouts stayed behind, lurking in the undergrowth, waiting to raise the alarm. So keep an eye out for that.”
“You don’t call me Eagleeye for nothing,” Eagleeye commented.
“Except you won’t be directly in charge of the scouts,” Dunnigan said. “They’re going to pass out of range very quickly here.”
“I know, but I’ve personally programmed them,” Eagleeye said. “So that’s just as good. They’re designed to take cover the instant anything out of the ordinary is detected.”
“Send them out,” Marlborough ordered. “I want them to cover the entire square kilometer in front of us before we proceed. The rest of you, hang tight.”
Eagleeye reactivated the Ravens and the units descended from the overhead canopy. Eric monitored the progress of the scouts while they were still within the reduced range of his transmitter. They operated in passive mode—no LIDAR or equivalents—and instead relied on the visual and thermal band for all data capture. Eric knew because he observed the Raven video feeds in separate windows on his HUD, and there were no wireframes overlaid against any of the imagery, which would have signified active mode.
He watched as the Ravens separated, one moving to the east, the other to the west; they passed out of range into the black, unmapped areas of the overhead map, reappearing a short while later, having repositioned further south—the di
rection of the team’s planned travel—by several meters. The explored sections they had covered filled out on the overhead map as horizontal bars to the east and west.
The units moved inward, filling in the map as they went, until their visual data overlapped; then they moved south several meters, and spread out to the east and west once more.
The Ravens continued moving in and out like that, and southward after each pass, like some dual-headed dot matrix printer from Eric’s former twenty-first century life. In that manner, the two airborne scouts mapped out the immediate area.
Eventually the Ravens passed entirely out of range to the south, into the unmapped, black regions on the map, and their indicators froze so that Eric could no longer observe the east-west motions.
The Ravens returned into range after an hour—Eric knew immediately when they arrived, because he was studying the map at the time, and the whole square kilometer in front of the platoon filled out. The forest ahead appeared little different from the terrain the team had covered before, but most importantly: no red dots indicating tangos were present.
“Seems clear enough out there,” Eagleeye said.
“All right,” Marlborough said. “We’re very cautiously going to move forward. We proceed to the next unmapped area at slow speed, and take cover again while the Ravens clear the next square kilometer. We maintain overwatch formations.”
The three teams moved forward slowly. Eric followed five meters behind Slate, who was on point in T1. Eric was offset to the left, while Brontosaurus behind him was offset to the right, in zig-zag formation. As he marched, Eric constantly eyed the trees and undergrowth of the rainforest around him, as did the others.
The droplets of snowmelt continued to plunge from the canopy overhead. Drip drop. Drip drop. Their feet crunched into the thin layer of snow.
They made it half a kilometer.
And then Eric noticed the undergrowth wavering beside him, as if something had moved there.
“Stop, I think something’s here,” Eric transmitted.
He approached the undergrowth, which was now motionless, and zoomed in on the forest in that direction.
Then he spotted it.
One of the scouts was moving rapidly away from the area. From the way it weaved between the different tree trunks without slowing down, he knew it had spotted them.
“Got one of the scouts,” Eric said. “It’s fleeing.”
He swiveled his laser into his right arm, and switched to the POV of the scope to aim at the retreating sphere.
“Take it down!” Marlborough said.
Eric switched to Bullet Time and aimed the crosshairs over the weaving target. He fired and scored a direct hit—thankfully the scout wasn’t shielded and promptly dropped.
“Done,” Eric said, reverting to normal time. “Not sure if it was able to get a signal out or not.”
“Looks like the time for stealth is over!” Marlborough said. “Increase pace!”
Eric switched to a jog, as did the other Bolt Eaters. According to the map, the tanks and Savages of T3 also accelerated, but they were lagging behind, unable to keep pace.
Eric heard a whirring sound coming from overhead, louder even than the clanging of the mechs that raced through the forest.
“The hell is that?” Slate said.
And then the canopy directly overhead vanished. It just completely disintegrated. The sun was still blotted out, though.
When Eric saw what had replaced the canopy, he couldn’t help the sudden despair he felt.
It was too late.
There was no escape now.
22
An airship floated above Eric. The size of a football stadium from the twentieth century, it filled the entire gap left by the disintegrated canopy, and blocked out the sun. The portion he could see was slightly ovoid in shape, the underside needled with turrets.
Eric switched to Bullet Time and deployed his shield above his head just as those turrets opened fire. The inside of his shield became completely red as the alien material attempted to absorb and distribute the impacting energy. The repaired sections failed almost immediately, and he was careful to hold the resultant holes away from his body as energy beams penetrated. The rest of the shield probably wouldn’t hold up much longer against that intense fire.
His first thought was of Bambi and Crusher; he turned toward Bambi, who was in T1 with him, but saw she was already racing deeper into the rainforest.
He followed her, along with the other members of T1, zig-zagging, leaping between fallen logs, ripping through the undergrowth. Around him, energy bolts smashed into the foliage. Dee controlled the Ravagers, steering them into the forest at his side.
And then he was out from under the dorsal portion of the airship, and canopy shielded the sky above him once more. He leaped behind a thick tree trunk and flipped his shield against the wooden exterior.
This was one of those trunks covered in a waterfall of snowmelt: as bolts smashed into the far side of the tree, he knew because of the splashes. No doubt those bolts dug deep, but they didn’t penetrate completely. A good sign—that told him the alien weaponry needed time to charge. That they were firing nonstop, without giving the weapons that charge time, was encouraging.
Somewhat.
He glanced at his overhead map.
Like him, the other members of T1 and T2 had retreated to the regions of forest immediately surrounding the airship, where the canopy remained intact. He confirmed that both Crusher and Bambi were all right with a quick glance at their status indicators.
T3 was farther behind to the north—the tanks and combat robots hadn’t been able to keep up when Marlborough gave the order to accelerate. That was good, because it meant they were in cover well beyond the range of the airship.
The attacks continued to rain down on Eric and the other Bolt Eaters hidden behind the natural terrain features on the ground around the airship.
“You know, when you called us the Bolt Eaters, I didn’t think you meant it literally,” Hicks said. “But here we are, eating friggin’ energy bolts!”
In Bullet Time, Eric switched to the POV of his energy scope, and leaned past the tree to aim up at the airship; he only had time to let off a few shots before he was forced to duck into cover once more. The edge of the trunk beside him blew apart, bombarding him with wood chips.
And then the firing stopped.
“That can’t be good,” Mickey said.
Was the airship finally charging up its energy turrets, preparing for a disintegration level attack that would level the surrounding trees, and perhaps the mechs hidden behind them?
He glanced at Bambi who hid behind a tree on his left; beside her, he could see the two Ravagers hiding in hollows.
“What are you thinking?” Bambi asked.
“That we’re screwed,” Eric replied.
“Well, yeah, I know that much,” Bambi said. “I guess I was hoping you had a plan.”
“I do,” Eric said. “Run!”
He turned around, and tore away from the tree. Bambi joined him, and Dee had the Ravagers flee as well.
“That would be a good idea,” Marlborough said. “Move deeper into the forest, T1, T2! T3, rendezvous with us to the southwest.”
Eric heard crashing sounds behind him. He glanced over his shoulder, expecting to see the trees disintegrated, but they all remained in place. Instead, he saw blurs of metal as large objects dropped down from the airship.
“Those bitches are launching some kind of shock troops,” Slate said.
“Look like tanks of some kind to me!” Eagleeye said.
Eric kept running; the snowmelt dripped down all around him.
Brightness filled the forest behind him as the airship moved higher, vanishing above the boughs, leaving behind that gaping hole in the canopy for the sunlight to penetrate.
He heard a continuous crunching sound coming from the clearing behind him; as if the undergrowth was being trampled underneath heavy treads.
“We got some friends behind us,” Slate said.
“I wouldn’t exactly call them friends,” Crusher said.
“Sarcasm, bitch,” Slate said. “Learn it.”
“Okay, fembot,” Crusher said.
He heard the sound of breaking branches ahead, and then caught a flash of metal within the canopy above—he realized the airship was forcing its way through the boughs.
And then much of the shiny dorsal section shoved through. That they hadn’t simply blasted away the canopy there told him it took them longer to recharge their disintegration level weapon than he thought.
A ramp opened up, and large machines poured out. They landed in blurs fifty meters in front of Eric. They looked like huge tanks with long, metallic tentacles on top.
Those tentacles swung toward Eric and his group. They were too far away to grab any member of his team, but when the tips glowed, he knew what was coming. He flung his shield in front of him, and changed course, moving away to the side. Beams erupted from the tips, hitting his shield.
He and the others fled to the west, keeping their shields behind them. The alien tanks pursued, rolling forward inexorably on their heavy treads. More of the units dropped to the ground from the airship behind them.
As he ran, Eric returned fire with his energy beam weapon, hitting the tanks, but energy shields reflected the blows.
“Damn these bitches and their energy shields!” Slate said.
“Launch your alien spears if you really want to hit them,” Brontosaurus said. “Or get close.”
“No on both accounts,” Slate said. “There’s too many of them!”
Eric glanced at his overhead map. The Bolt Eaters were spread out in small, fleeing groups similar to his own. Red dots indicating the tentacled tanks pursued them.
