Apex

by Robert Appleton

  Vaughn drew without thinking. A gouge of disbelief cratered his composure. He didn’t breathe. Couldn’t. Outside himself there was a way to soften the blow that was to come – losing her, his Jan. The only way to survive it was to escape it. No, that’s not going to happen, a voice inside him said. Then the hollow crater flooded with fear and hate and the cruel reality of his predicament.

  The others scattered to a safe distance.

  He took a deep, measured breath. Said nothing.

  “Who the hell are you?” Isherwood yelled at Crutch Man, his own sidearm aimed. “What’s this all about?”

  Kirsten Zeller shouted, “Papademos! What are you doing?”

  “He’s not Papademos,” said Vaughn. “He’s not COVEX.”

  “Then who is he?”

  “A man named Sixsmith sent him…to do a job.”

  One corner of Crutch Man’s pursed lips curled into a wry smirk. “Not quite.”

  Vaughn thought back over the chase through the Big Red, and the man with the huge shoulders…and the gray sneakers. Unidentified, apart from one surveillance image that had assumed a match. That man had been more of a wrecking ball than a surgical insurgent. Crutch Man, on the other hand… “You’re Sixsmith!”

  “We’re all Sixsmith,” the man said. “So you know what happens next if you don’t lower that Kruger and let us leave unmolested. Your lady friend and me, we’re going for a ride. And you’re going to tell us exactly where Kyra Stone is hiding.”

  “Not in this life!” Vaughn’s knuckles whitened as he squeezed his grip.

  “Have it your way, Detective. But whatever happens, you’re going to lose someone you care about today. You do as I say, it’ll only be your niece. Anything else, Jane Hopper dies.” He paused to let Vaughn chew on that dilemma, then added, “Where have you hidden her?”

  Vaughn didn’t reply. He lowered his weapon, though. Tried not to let his gaze shift to the toyless Stopper sprinting up behind them.

  “Very good, Detective. Now, the coordinates.”

  Stopper leapt up and sank his bite into Sixsmith’s gun arm, somewhere in the triceps area. The thump of impacted dirt from the gun’s energy blast punctuated the killer’s cry. Stopper’s weight and momentum had wrenched the gun arm down, away from Jan. The involuntary pistol shot tore up the lawn to their right. Sixsmith dropped his weapon and let go his hold of Jan. He yanked hard at Stopper’s scruff, punched him again and again. But the big Boxer had fixed his grip on far stronger opponents than this. He dragged Sixsmith down to the ground, let go in order to get a better grip – a death grip. Once he got hold of the man’s neck, it would be until one of them expired.

  Two things happened in rapid succession to prevent it. Sixsmith squirmed away, kicking Stopper off his feet; and in the same motion he activated a smoke grenade from his belt. He set it on the lawn between him and Vaughn, and rolled back from the erupting gas. The smoke cloud quickly blotted his escape. Vaughn would have fired a high-yield snapshot, but Stopper, frightened by the noxious gas, had backed away behind it, disoriented.

  “Are you hurt?” He felt around Jan’s neck, to make sure the blast hadn’t nicked her somewhere.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Do me a favor. Put Stops on his lead till I get back. He can’t be any part of this.”

  The smoke enveloped them, filthy, inexhaustible. Before it clogged the air between them altogether, she flashed him a fierce look, neither approving nor disapproving, just…willing him to make it quick, so he could come back to her and this could all be over.

  “I’ll take it from here,” he said, running a hand through her unkempt hair.

  As he drew away, she caught his lapel in her fist. “Vaughn.”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is your home. You know it better than he does. Use what you know. Use what I’ve taught you.”

  “I won’t be long.”

  He took off through the smoke, which had reached the bottom of the verge by the time he breached full daylight again. Sixsmith was almost at the tree-line, committed now to that escape route. The rainforest. An easy place to get lost in. A difficult environment to master. An impossible one to leave alive if you got caught in one of its many traps, some of which Vaughn knew intimately, others not quite so well. And there were yet others he’d only heard about from Jan, the nightmare-giving kind that were only hinted at, in vague disclaimer terms, in the tour brochures. Even the most experienced rangers knew better than to venture deep into the heart of the forest.

  Vaughn entered a little farther to the west than Sixsmith had. He was wary of ambush, and he also knew a better place to cross the river – Bamboo Ford, where one of the easy forest trails began. Sixsmith had splashed his way across. The north bank was damp, the vegetation crushed where he’d climbed out. Commotion in the trees – bird calls, clambering animals, a general restlessness – told Vaughn his quarry was heading in a northwesterly direction. Was he armed? Probably. A backup firearm. More grenades. A blade or two. Perhaps something fancier, modern tech Vaughn hadn’t been acquainted with yet.

  He activated his wrist mount and summoned forth the two remaining germs – the others had been lost in the tidal bore. They hovered in front of him, indistinguishable from the other insects of the forest but for their obedience and perfect poise. The previous Sixsmith on Mars had disabled Vaughn’s entire germ hive with a click of his fingers. Unknown counter-surveillance tech that, for all he knew, might be standard issue for these latter-day killers for hire. He would have to be more careful this time, more circumspect. Let the little eyes spy from a distance. With intricate germ-craft he configured a scouting pattern that would seek to find, observe, but not to engage Sixsmith closer than a range of twenty meters. They flew off into the steaming forest ahead of his jog.

  The boles of several giant colossus trees towered around a conspicuously empty glade. That absence of any life whatsoever would have been reason enough for concern, but the rangers had also fenced the glade off and erected an Alien Safari sign that read, “Warning! Topsoil will not support a person’s weight. Dangerous swamp lies beneath. Absolutely no one must venture beyond this fence.”

  There were umpteen of these dotted around the outskirts of the forest, Vaughn knew, all ringed by colossuses and similarly fenced off for tourists’ safety. Further in, however, where the holidaymakers weren’t allowed – the tour maps made those boundaries very clear – these swamps were neither fenced nor signposted. Some were the size of football fields. Entire ecosystems lived around and, indeed, inside them. The dwellers of these bigger swamps were generally well-known for being vicious and carnivorous. Vaughn had never seen one, but Jan and Stopper had had close run-ins with a few of the nastier varieties.

  This is your home. You know it better than he does. Use what you know. Use what I’ve taught you.

  The germs pinged Sixsmith a quarter klick to the north. Their visual feeds spliced onto his wrist screen. He was lumbering through the undergrowth, well off the trail. Where was the bastard heading? There was a small maintenance depot somewhere in that direction. Vaughn pictured it on the official liquigraph map. It held caches of oxygen, food, water, first aid, antivenom…and, more importantly in this chase, a hoverbike and sidecar for emergency transport.

  So that was Sixsmith’s plan! Hop on a hoverbike, make for the nearest outpost, and fly off Hesperidia on a ranger’s shuttle.

  Vaughn accessed the official site map on his omnipod. The distance to the depot was…a little over two klicks from the killer’s current position. He’d made a wrong turn somewhere, missed the trail, but if he found it again, he had enough of a head start on his pursuer to reach that transport well before Vaughn could get there.

  Vaughn sprinted along the worn dirt path. It trended west, then north. Chrissakes. The depot was even signposted! A trio of entsupials loped across the trail ahead of him. One of them carried a brace of infants in its scaly pouch; their distended eye stems twined around each other’s and shared a static shock
that appeared to delight them, but not their mother, who tautened her loose skin with a spastic flutter, making the youngsters wail. The family disappeared into the trees to his right. Vaughn hurtled into the shaded gloom, where the forest canopy was so thick it let only the odd spear of sunlight through.

  Wood cracked apart near his shoulder. Warm sap spattered his neck. Vaughn dove to the ground and rolled behind the nearest tree as more shots ate up the bark and topsoil around him. He checked the germs’ feed. They had Sixsmith forty-odd meters away to the northeast, well covered by glabbus bushes. Good. That put Vaughn between the killer and his getaway. The bastard would have to fight his way past a better-armed opponent. He was a fair shot, but he’d wasted his best chance at catching Vaughn off-guard. His only chance.

  Vaughn backed away from the stout tree, using it as cover. He darted to his left behind the next. Sixsmith fired and missed.

  Okay, hotshot, see how you like the heat.

  Using the germs’ feed to triangulate his target, Vaughn hooked his arm around the trunk and fired a barrage of shots without looking. Each one hit within a couple of meters of Sixsmith. Enough to make him uproot and choose another position. The killer headed north. Vaughn followed, occasionally firing to veer him further away from the depot.

  They were soon off the official map, plunging into prohibited regions in a desperate duel to the death. The heat intensified. Vaughn’s bare forearms and neck began to burn; that puzzled him, because he’d mostly been in the shade for the past several…

  He scratched an itch on his arm and cursed at the almost instantaneous purple rash that formed.

  Heliomites!

  Those microscopic little shits had infested him before, shortly after he’d moved into Jan’s cabin. The rash was crazymaking if left to spread and fester. He zeroed Sixsmith’s position, then foraged around for cofuria leaves, a natural antidote to the heliomites’ poison. They were abundant around the girding lianas, he remembered. Bunching a few handfuls, he twisted the leaves to release the mucus-like salve, then vigorously rubbed every inch of exposed skin.

  A swell of schadenfreude buoyed him back into action when he saw, on the germs’ feed, Sixsmith engaged in a scratching frenzy of his own. Did he know about the antidote? If he did, he made no attempt to find it. Vaughn’s itching subsided. He seized the initiative, gained a decent unobstructed position, and fired a careful low-yield shot at his quarry’s fleeing form.

  Sixsmith staggered. The shot had clipped his right thigh. But he didn’t go down; he limped on, firing blindly behind him. Vaughn pressed his cautious, canny pursuit. An injured opponent bleeding into an alien realm that teemed with opportunistic feeders, he was moving fast up the menus of a thousand species. Best to keep this sucker on a long leash, thought Vaughn.

  Soil and dirt softened to mud, then to veiny, trench-like mires over which clay soil had curled and petrified into waves, shielding the morass of muck below. Through these disgusting trenches slithered all manner of horrific-looking critters Vaughn hadn’t clapped eyes on before. Out of one, as if from some Lovecraftian fever dream, the biggest jugerpillar he’d ever seen crawled up the trunk of a knottager, carrying a full-grown sprytox kicking and squirming in its mandibles, to its nest in a hollow above the bough.

  Once or twice Sixsmith tried to outmaneuver his pursuer. But those desperate counter-strikes were doomed to failure; Vaughn had eyes on him at all times, and he was reading the terrain better as well. He knew to avoid the beige sediment that stuck like brick mortar if you stepped in it. He knew to steer clear of the webs with the red trip-lines around the outer rim. They collapsed into a ball when touched, and the host animal, a vicious, carnivorous crawler, would spring onto whatever unfortunate interloper had mis-stepped. He knew the vines it was safe to pierce and drink water from. He knew which warning sounds to be wary of and which colors suggested venom in the smaller, less gregarious creatures.

  Sixsmith knew none of this. He was bitten several times. Umpteen creatures that crossed his path he simply blasted to bits, whether they were harmless or not. He drank fetid water, threw up in his breather, had to unclog the airways using that same fetid water before he choked to death breathing Hesp air. All the while Vaughn bided his time in steady, dogged pursuit. Observing remotely. Always planning ahead.

  “Okay. Okay. What happens if I give myself up?” Those husky words were from another animal entirely than the one who’d held Jan in a choke hold on Miramar green. Sixsmith sounded dried up. Beaten.

  Vaughn answered with another barrage of shots that sent the killer limping on through the undergrowth. Vegetation so thick that he had to blast his way through. One of these blasts disturbed a nest of diabolus aculeus in the hollow bole of a tree. The parent struck out like a whip. It bit Sixsmith on the side of his neck, then recoiled back into its lair.

  He flung himself away, and wrestled on through the tangle. Another nest in the bole of another tree spooked him. He fled from it. But in every direction, there were hollows in trunks and titters warning him not to approach. He’d wandered into a colony of one of the most venomous arboreal species in the rainforest. And he was already dead. A single bite might take twenty minutes to completely paralyze a grown man, but once inside the bloodstream, the poison was irreversible without a specific antivenom. Vaughn knew all that, but Sixsmith did not.

  He chose the only direction that didn’t portend danger, an opening between two giant colossus trees. An opening that led to a large, conspicuously empty glade ringed by colossuses. Vaughn fired a series of shots at the wounded man’s heels to make him go faster. Sixsmith accidentally reopened his comm channel. A semi-delirious cackle staggered his already labored breaths. Like a spent marathon runner crossing the finish line, he threw his arms out and lifted his face to the sun. Out onto the bronze soil that glittered across the brilliant sunlit glade, the man known as Sixsmith made several strides to salvation before the ground gave way beneath him. He sank to his knees, and the more he struggled, the harder it sucked him down, until he was up to his chest in slime so unyielding it clung to every lump his frantic swimming stroke threw out.

  By the time Vaughn reached a safe vantage point atop a raised bank overlooking the swamp, only the dome of Sixsmith’s bald head remained above the surface. When that went under, his arms continued to wrestle the slime futilely. They would go on fighting until his heart seized with toxic shock or the oxygen in his breather ran out and he suffocated. Either way, his every instinct to survive was churning him deeper into his putrid swampy grave.

  A truly horrific way to go. Trapped. Somewhere between drowned and buried alive.

  Vaughn sat there on the verge and watched the eerie swamp with a kind of morbid fascination. It appeared so still, untouched, even timeless, but every now and then a noxious bubble would gurgle up to break the tranquil spell. Then a tiny creature would skip across the topsoil at speeds almost too quick to see, and burrow down without warning, only to reappear somewhere else. There’d be a ripple here, a spout of silty mucus there, then nothing. It was hard to imagine anything living down there, but as he’d seen these past few days, the only truly predictable characteristic of life on Hesperidia was its infinite variety. If it could survive being frozen in rock for thousands of years, or paint pictures with bioluminescent light and color, it could certainly live here, in the depths of a swamp.

  That theory was proven not long after, when a froth of crimson bubbles erupted onto the topsoil where Sixsmith had disappeared. His epitaph spattered a surface that settled almost as soon as it had been breached.

  ‘Missing, presumed digested’, a Freudian slip Vaughn absently typed onto his mission report later that evening, made him shudder when the computer read the automatic transcript back to him. He changed it to ‘Missing, presumed dead’.

  At his request, Jan and Carlisle had airlifted him from the swamp – making his way back the way he’d come, past all those riled nasties, might be pushing his luck – and the three of them had had a frank discussion
on what to propose to the Congress oversight committee that would inevitably be convened to investigate this whole sorry mess.

  “It’s gotten too easy for these scumbags to fake their way onto the Hesp,” said Jan. “Sixsmith, Tynedale, Ruben, and God knows who else: our security is a freaking joke.”

  “It always has been,” replied Vaughn. “Remember the first case that brought me here.”

  “How could I forget? Those in power manipulating security left and right.”

  “And the same thing with Miz De Brock and her posse.”

  “What do you guys think we should propose?” asked Carlisle.

  “Tell them what they need to hear for now,” suggested Jan. “We’re the custodians of this world, not them. Let them fund the sat net and civilian security. But why don’t we push to make Alien Safari a private corporation? Fund our own research. Decide our own tourist capacity. Hire our own lawman to police the Hesp.”

  “I doubt we’d ever swing that,” said Carlisle. “But we should definitely push for greater autonomy. Whichever of us gets the top job, needs to have the final say on how day-to-day operations are run. COVEX is fine for policy, but it has no business governing from light-years away. We’re a fluid operation. We have the knowledge and the expertise, and more importantly, we live here. Show me a greater investment than that.”

  “Kill all politicians,” was Vaughn’s verdict. “Give me a ragtag group of ranger-scientists any day of the week. You guys get my vote to run this rock.”

  “Ah, but will you accept our offer?” asked Carlisle. And Jan quirked an eyebrow at her boyfriend as well, while she administered a soothing ointment to his skin where the heliomite rash had flared up. “Will you lend your Omicron badge to the Hesp on a permanent basis?”