Astral Fall

by Jessica Mae Stover

  Don’t think about that. It’s so quiet. Silence—why’s it quiet?—what happened?—orient—exfil craft’s in pieces—we got hit—Zii on the ground, under the craft, how’d he get there—IRON! IRON! IRON!—Zii is screaming inside his hardhood—scanning critical—what’s wrong—we got hit, move the hull—Zii’s legs, where are they?—suit off—take my suit off—put him in mine—this isn’t it—this is not it—say again, Monarch—Monarch’s already out of suit—seal him in, seal him in!—Widow targets, weapons away—firing at what?—nothing on scan—they’re on us—where?—can’t move yet—get him inside—get what’s left inside—his legs—Wheck, stay on Monarch, she’s no suit, no tech!—Luzie loop me to your ship and loop Zii out—Crave to Heliacal Rising, any crew receiving; mission primary ship down, extraction craft down, advance to primary ship mission lead with caution—terrestrial condition; one Nova down, one critical, another in the red, ah, one no-tech, over—Charis, stay awake!—Zii stopped screaming—Zii!—No, you’re on the deck—mines on the deck—there are mines on the deck—

  Crave regained the present in a teeth chattering shake, breathing like he’d just sprinted a kilometer. His mind fumbled to hold to the memory of the sea near his parents’ house, the hiss of receding foam escaping his grasp the way the horizon had when he fell from the rise.

  If he met with a mine, the blast energy would be small, precise, and horrifying. Then, it would bio scan him and pass his information to the other mines, so that if he tried to drag himself out of harm physically or using his suit tethers, the other mines wouldn’t activate against him unless he was about to escape the field. He’d die slow, as bait for more Nativity soldiers and tech that would try to rescue him, which wouldn’t be easy, unless he was unknowingly in territory the UNP had sowed. Mines were mapped by the force that laid them, so that their friendlies could scan and dodge through them at will, but Crave didn’t have any existing maps on UNP-deployed devices, and as his mission was a space assault, he hadn’t studied the deck. The reinforcing from his suit’s right ankle was enough to get the container’s weight up to 12.3 kilos, once he’d carved it out with his medpen’s incision mech.

  Nothing on the deck can be as bad as Transmorthea.

  He rolled the filled container hard ahead of him to get enough distance between him and a possible detonation, using it to systematically test for mines his dysfunctional IF couldn’t detect. He crawled in a controlled circular pattern outward from his position, while staying low with the drifts of floating soil to decrease his chances of being scanned or shot. He again rolled the container and followed in its wake, stopping where it stopped, rolling it again—and follow, and roll, and follow—periodically glancing up to the loop out of habit only to be reminded that he was cut off from unit and crew. He couldn’t exert his shoulder and back too much without disturbing his wounds, and his concentration lagged due to the amoscii wearing off, but he pushed himself to be patient, methodical.

  His back ached as the numbing agent wore painfully thin. He crawled with conviction, crested out of the crater, and skidded downhill after the container through a patch of hanging soil into the dip between his hill and the next.

  CRUNCH.

  His hand went through something brittle embedded into the soil and blown over with the deck’s sandy dust. It gave under his weight, trapping him up to the forearm.

  Shit!

  Crave stopped and pulsed to scan the item before he moved his hand, bringing data back to the front of his IF. His hood glitched and strobed; information spun past too fast, with flashes of unreadable artifacts interrupting, for it to be workable. He pulsed his face mech transparent and looked without a scan.

  Cosmos—

  He’d handplanted inside a shattered rib cage partially encased in trepid. The suit was active and moving. The seams struggled to self-heal, succeeding in some places despite mass damage, and failing where the trepid tech was so shredded that there was no opposite material for it to connect with and knit. Halfway up the first of a series of low grey dunes that lay in front of him, a hardhood protruded out of the sand at an angle, tilted upward. Etched on the side was a sickle moon.

  It’s the amoscii. I’m high. It’s not real. Visual is not accurate. Crave carefully withdrew his hand, retreated up the hill he’d come down, and sat for what felt like a long time, staring at the half-buried hardhood, saying Skregs’ name again and again as though he expected an answer over chatter, even though he could see the jawline of the disembodied head still tucked inside. It’s not real.

  With a quick reach inside the neck of his suit, he pulled his a-yank and frisked himself. Although the case to his culture cards was closed, someone had broken the package seal. Confirmed: someone was inside my gear from the time I suited up on ship until the time I woke up on the deck. My legs were golden, but not all of it was a hallucination.

  Crave sifted through the cards, scattering them on the ground, his grief and confusion flooding together; he was moving, there were faces fluttering, faces on the cards, faces twisted in shock on Transmorthea, the face of Skregs half crushed inside a hardhood in his hands…

  “Commander, no one is coming…”

  He set the hood aside, crawled the rest of the way up the dune. The faint grooves he saw inside the crater still extended as far as he could see, as though a massive machine had raked over the varied surface of the deck. Here, a ring of scattered trepid-armored body parts had disturbed the perfect rows. Wheck he ID’d by his hardhood honor markings. The fall had split and smashed him a thousand ways, so that his shape was unrecognizable.

  Thwip’s hardhood was cracked and had a concave depression on the crown, but his head and upper body were still sealed in his suit. It would have looked as if he was merely sleeping, arms at his sides, on a bed of mud and dust if his lower body weren’t missing at the navel, where he ended in a wet heap of gore that seemed too large to have come from one person. Crave pulsed his IF to connect to Thwip’s and failed. He located the end of a reknitting talon shot through Thwip’s right shoulder, crouched over Thwip with his hand on the forehead of Thwip’s striped hood in parting—his weight made them both sink into the mud—tore himself way, pressing himself to hurry, visually searching for one of their talons or gravii to give him at least some chance against the theater. None of their weapons were present.

  Charis. Charis would gather as much weaponry as she could before abandoning the site. Charis is alive. I don’t know how, but I can feel it. I know it.

  He pulsed his hardhood, searching for her despite its repeated malfunctions, surveying what he could of the dunes that lead to the rocky foot of the mountain. There was some cover there among the boulders, where the floating soil clung like foam on a seashore.

  Char, where would you have gone?

  He stopped scanning when he found a piece of fletched hardhood with a glob of red hair connected to a tear of skin. A few meters farther on he located a muddy dip between dunes containing Charis in a pool of herself, sprays of black and red against the grey, sinew like pale seaweed and jagged bone. The truth rushed in: it felt like his chest was caving, it was worse than being spaced.

  “Their status is dead…”

  Crave pulsed his suit to manage his emotion and dry-fired on empty chems, pulsed his mask back—the thinbents came back up—pulsed his chatter sys recklessly. “LEO, GET ME OUT OF HERE!”

  There was no reply.

  He gripped his hood, stood, and walked.

  He was running now, but unlike in every other mission, even Transmorthea, there was no extraction point ahead as a goal. No receiving unit. No fallback plan. No one in his ear or at his side. He started at a sudden ghostly drift of hanging soil, not seeing it until he was rushing through it, attention deep inside his head—somewhere inside he knew what was happening, but it was as if he was watching himself from the outside, as though his thoughts belonged to someone else.

  Maybe this is what happens to you when you die. You run around the barren, bloody deck alone for
eternity. Covered in the remains of everything you cared about.

  I lost them all. Forever.

  Red clouds. Position?

  “With the light low and red like that, it looks like it’s about to rain blood.” Skregs sounded gruff, which meant he was worried. “This is a dangerous position to begin with, and if it rains, this narrow canyon will flash flood and become a creek. Might make for sinkholes on the deck, too.”

  “Recommendations,” said Crave.

  Skregs, hooded and suited, lay prone in the dirt on Crave’s right, looking ahead.

  “It’s a hot sitrep, but the enemy hasn’t shot at us again, so it could be worse. We need to move before we’re scanned. I don’t know how we made it this far undetected, but I won’t complain. I won’t push our luck, either.”

  Skregs was quiet, and Crave knew he was reviewing his IF scans on the surrounding terrain.

  “We can hustle northwest across the deck and continue to gain higher ground, then sweep southwest to the northwest side of Ridrain’s mountain, and make contact. Scout, scan, and move in a one-three-one widespread diamond formation, spaced a hundred meters apart. From there we’ll have more options should we fail to reestablish chatter with Leo or the base. It’s our best shot.”

  “Skregs… I thought you were ghosted.”

  “You serious? I’m right here. You all right?”

  “Yeah. Golden.”

  “On top of evading hostiles and their scan tech, scanning for the deck’s mines will slow us down. Since you’re in inferior gear and your loop’s down, I’ll take the one-point, Wheck can take the rear, Charis the right three line position on high ground for sniper coverage, and you’ll take center in the three line, so we can protect you. Objections? Wheck? Wheck?”

  “Skregs…”

  Crave blinked heavily and Skregs vanished in the darkness of his eyelids. He covered his mask with his gloved hands and squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again and pounded his knuckles on his hood.

  Shit.

  He lay alone on his back, concealed in a narrow, rocky canyon. He remembered running uphill. He remembered tripping and falling down the side of the canyon. He’d stayed where he landed, numb to the idea of combat procedure and the passage of time, with the mech for emergency self-elimination cued on his spinning hardhood, in case hostiles tried to pick him up alive. When he managed to focus his eyes, the sky was dark and bloody, like when he woke on the deck for the second time, but this time the red-bellied clouds were swollen black with rain behind the blinking words EMERGENCY SELF-ELIMINATE.

  102 UNAVAILABLE HASH SEQUENCE

  INCORRECT SUIT

  That smell—my broken suit—it has human on it and I can’t vent it—it’s on my skin—my unit—suit’s damaged, I can’t vent it off.

  His shoulder and back stung, and his eyes were dry. His thoughts scattered. He cleared his IF, pulled his hood off, breathed heavily.

  Inferior suit. Canyon, creek. If it rains… the creek bed would flash flood, the rain would get the blood off my suit. Potential of drowning. No, I’m not in a trepid. No submersion threat. How much time has passed? Hours? Days? Maybe they will tether me home. Who? No one left to walk my suit out, and it’s damaged. It’s not even my suit, only weak tethers on an SI—Leo. Where’s Leo? The only piece of Yviss I brought back from Transmorthea was a piece of hardhood in Charis’ leg. Charis’ leg is in pieces on the deck. The only piece of Charis, Skregs, Wheck, and Thwip I have to bring back is their blood on my suit. It can’t rain; it will wash it off. I have to bring it home.

  He watched the emptiness of the dusty creek bed. He couldn’t tell where it led as it curved right a few paces ahead and was lost behind the steep, rocky walls lining the canyon to either side.

  Dangerous position. Someone went through my interior kit. Someone drugged me and scavenged my chem balancers. Someone stole our weapons. Someone shot Thwip and me in the shoulder. Get up. Find out how this was done to us. He dismissed the self-elimination option to the wings of his IF. Find Leo. Then go back and retrieve their bodies. Then finish the mission.

  Crave rolled over, his mind clumsy, grasping for trails of memory from his conversation with the scavenger as his training took over, pressed him to pursue leads to survive. Skyface said it was going to tell me a story. Instructions. It gave me instructions. “Dry creek bed. Where it curves…” Dry creek bed…

  He grunted in frustration at his patchy memory. It was coming back in painful jabs, and with drugs interfering, he still couldn’t trust himself.

  His hardhood lay next to him in the dust. He gripped it, rose to a crouch, and went forward, traced the canyon creek bed to where it curved right, and turned with it. Half his mind was still back near the dip, where he’d found them. His eyesight blurred, he blinked and listed right, staggering, brushing the side of the canyon. Ahead the canyon swung right a second time at the face of a widely split ridge, and then narrowed into a slot canyon with vertical walls marbled in grey and white. Crave ran a gloved hand through his hair, and little black flakes of dried blood fluttered around him.

  Pieces of the conversation with Skyface returned in slippery threads. He winced, although the pain had improved to a low throb. He crawled forward toward the ridge and crouched in the creek bed, a safe distance away, looking in more detail at the deep split that branched from the ground to the top of the ridge, slicing up the ridge’s grey rock in fine angles like lightning. He touched the branched scar on his face—his memory of Skyface sharpened—

  “Around the curve—a natural rocky ridge, a dramatic downward crack—”

  Crave dashed to the side of the canyon for cover, pulled on his hood. Without its full functions he couldn’t accurately scan the area, so he watched and listened. The sky darkened. He accessed his interior kit and brought out a few pea-size quick-flash spherical cells, then resealed the rest of what was left of his SI suit.

  After thirty minutes of marking no signs of presence, he abandoned cover with the flow of the thick, misty soil and made his way incrementally to the ridge until he was crouching outside to the right of the cavelike split. Might provide some cover from aerial scans.

  The darkness inside the crack was too deep to penetrate from outside without a hoodscan, and light would draw attention.

  Skyface has a C-mask. If it or anyone else is in there, then they’ll have already scanned me. They’ll know I’m here outside, and if they’re armed, they’ll be waiting for an unobstructed shot. Might even try to put me down warm so they can bring me in live for intel. Even if I retreat, I won’t be able to evade them now. Safer inside than out.

  He skipped a dormant spherical cell into the darkness and listened. It rolled for a few seconds before hitting something with a dull ping, but his IF wouldn’t connect to it to use it as scan point, rendering the cell useless. Minutes of silence passed. He skipped another cell into the darkness and rushed after it, taking a crouching position inside the entry, listening for it to connect. Ahead he heard another ping, and with his limited scan saw what the cell struck.

  A door.

  A reinforced, sealed industrial door stood fifty paces ahead, embedded into the other end of an empty, natural rock tunnel. His IF strobed and died.

  Outside the passage, a heavy rain began to fall.