The cockpit moved back, jerking a bit and actually stopping for a second before moving. The plantimal on the other side of the craft made some questing movements, and its eyespots shifted to look at the open cockpit. Got to move fast, she thought, climbing up the foothold that had appeared and looking into the compartment, gagging a bit from the smell, her stomach also queasy from the sight of the blood splattered interior. Moving quickly she reached under the seat that was meant to carry the crewman out of the craft in an emergency, and found the survival pack that was there. She pulled the quick release and dropped the pack to the ground, then dove back into the cockpit to find every other packet she could locate. Rebecca unbuckled the crewman’s pistol belt and slid the holstered weapon off.
She caught a movement out of the corner of her eye, and ducked down and away from the plantimal tentacle that thrust into the cockpit. It touched the body of the crewman, then moved along the hard impact suit until it found the opening at his face. The tentacle pushed through the flesh and into the face, and Rebecca moved back down the footholds and to the ground. She picked up the packages and moved away, then dropped them to the ground again and plopped down next to them.
The packages yielded up a treasure trove of survival equipment. Ration packs, pheromones, a laser lighter, battery packs, a medium range com, another monomolecular blade, and some proton packs. The last excited her more that all the rest, and she unsnapped the holster and pulled a particle beam pistol out. The weapon was highly illegal on this world for civilians, being only authorized for government and military. Ted had shown her several of the weapons, and she hadn’t seen one exactly like this, but she understood the principles behind it.
After belting the pistol on she gave Benjamin her mag handgun. She was willing to trust him with the weapon at this time, after having proven himself with the sonic. She divided up the other supplies and started them on their way.
An hour later she was very happy that she had found the particle beam. They were moving through another clearing, staying at the edge as they moved around, as moving through the center was an invitation to detection by something they wouldn’t want to attract. The clearing smelled wrong to Jennifer. It smelled of decay and rot, and death. Not a sound to be heard. Her eyes were searching every which way, looking for the thing that was lying in wait.
When it came it was still a surprise, as hard woody tentacles erupted from the forest from their side and from the ground underneath. Several struck Rebecca in her survival suit and bounced away as the fabric hardened into impact armor. A few hit Benjamin with the same result, then the main attack came, as a wall of plantimal came out of the brush and threatened to fall on them.
“Get back,” yelled Rebecca, pushing Benjamin toward the other side of the clearing. She stumbled back in his wake, putting out some fire from her rifle and seeing no effect against the bulk of the creature.
It was an ambush hunter, and they had been ambushed. A tentacle that couldn’t penetrate the impact armor wrapped around Benjamin’s ankle and pulled him to the ground, where other tentacles attacked his suit. The child beat at the tentacles with his gloved hands with frantic motions, while the pseudopods of the creature attacked just as frantically.
Rebecca let her rifle drop on its strap and pulled out the particle beam pistol, pushing the arming switch. She aimed it at the mass, disengaged the safety, and pulled the trigger. An angry red beam sprung from the barrel of the pistol and struck the mass of the creature with a loud buzzing sound, while the plantimal was coming down on them like a wave. The beam struck the living mass and vaporized almost a meter into it with a flash of fire and steam. She swung the beam across, cutting into the creature like it was an infinite sword blade.
The plantimal stopped in its tracks for a few moments, the tentacles went still, and Rebecca set the pistol to maximum. As soon as she had it set to a wide aperture the plantimal started toward them again. She fired the beam into the mass and moved it slowly from left to right. This time the beam burned meters deep and almost a meter wide, vaporizing biomass as the fast moving protons converted their kinetic energy to heat. The creature fell back, while the tentacles withdrew into the earth.
“Come on,” yelled Rebecca, grabbing Benjamin by the hand, pulling him to his feet and moving him away.
“Is it dead?”
“I don’t know,” she said, glancing back at the writhing mass of the plantimal. “But we sure hurt it, and I don’t want to stay around to see if it’s alive or not.”
They stopped a kilometer further on, and she checked the pistol to see what condition it was in. Heat was still coming off the barrel, and the proton pack was still one third full, meaning she had used over four hundred grams of protons. The power pack was still at three quarters charge. She grunted in satisfaction and motioned Benjamin to move on, keeping the pistol out until it had cooled enough to holster without burning her. She thought the suit might protect her from burns, but decided it was best not to test that theory.
Later that day they saw another of those ambush hunters, something she was sure the people of the planet had never heard about. At least it was something she had never heard of. It had trapped a hell hound, and the rest of the pack nipped at its fringes, trying to free their mate. They didn’t accomplish that objective, and they left yet another pack member to be digested by the horrible creature.
That night they found another safe tree, but this time Rebecca checked out the area around the tree thoroughly, making sure there were no hidden surprises. Surprises on this world were deadly, and she didn’t want any more sneaking up on them.
Rebecca was woken in the morning by the screaming of Benjamin. She jumped up to see the child writhing and screaming in the hollow. She reached out to him and grabbed him, then screamed herself as she saw a line of insectoids running up his suit and into the opening at his neck. She looked over and saw where the line originated, coming down the trunk of the tree and going through what must have been a gap in the pheromone shield she had put up before they went to sleep.
She brushed the insectoids away from her brother, then pulled out a laser igniter and shined it on the line of little creatures as they came down the trunk. The small bodies burst as their liquid converted to steam. She ran the light up the trunk for ten meters, then dropped the lighter and pulled out a pheromone sprayer from her belt kit. First she sealed the barrier. Next she sprayed her brother’s suit with the pheromones, which forced the insectoids to fall off and look for some kind of refuge. He was lying on the floor of the hollow now, spasming. She looked at his vitals on her med scanner and saw that he was going into a toxic shock. She pulled the multispray syringe and gave him a shot of nanites and chemicals in the neck, then started opening his suit. She gasped as she saw his skin covered in swelling bite marks. She set the syringe and gave him another shot, then proceeded to complete disrobing the child.
It took her almost half an hour to make sure all the insectoids were off his body. He was still unconscious, going in and out of convulsions. She wasn’t sure if she should give him another shot, but thought it was the lesser risk. They stayed there during the day. Several times Benjamin went into respiratory distress, and Rebecca was afraid she was going to lose him. She prayed to the God that recently really hadn’t seemed to do much for her family or people. She grabbed the Star of David she had on a chain around her neck, a gift from her mother, and looked up to the canopy covered sky. She didn’t know what else to do. The little shit was the only family she had left.
Toward nightfall he seemed to stabilize, and a couple of hours into the darkness she felt he was past the worst. She struggled to get him into his survival suit again, made sure the hollow was covered against another attack, then fell into an exhausted sleep herself. She woke when it started to get lighter.
“I’m hungry,” said Benjamin, lying still and looking over at her.
Rebecca hugged him as the tears rolled her down her face, deliriously happy for the first time in a week.
/> Chapter Twelve
The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his. George S. Patton.
FEBRUARY 1ST -APRIL 14TH, 1001.
Azure, thought Corporal Cornelius Walborski, looking at his orders through his implant. Actually the orders assigned him to the Third Battalion of the Three Fifty-Seventh Rangers. But said unit was to deploy to that planet within the next couple of months, along with the rest of the regiment. They were to take the place of a battalion that had been chewed up and spit out on one of the smaller continents of the planet, less than twenty percent of its front line personnel coming home.
“We prefer giving new Rangers three to four months with their units before deployment,” said the Master Sergeant who stood at the head of the briefing room, looking out over the room of new special ops soldiers. “That way you become real Rangers, men with the training and knowledge of the unit and men they are to fight with. Then, we prefer that you train in the environment you will be deployed to for another couple of monts.”
Cornelius knew there had to be at least five hundred men in the room, all with brand new Ranger flashes on their left upper sleeves. He had graduated with his new Phase III group on time, not at the position he would have preferred, but well enough to make it into the top three. He looked over at Sergeant Chantamurta, the man who had made honor graduate of the company. The man had tried to intimidate Cornelius when he had appeared at the unit, replacing one of the few drop outs of Phase III. Cornelius had taken the warning to heart, and proceeded to do his best to unseat the man from his position. It had not been enough in the three remaining weeks of the course. It had been enough to earn the respect of the Sergeant.
“Unfortunately, we have a war to prosecute, and the demand for enhanced soldiers is greater than our ability to train them,” continued the Senior NCO. “I have no need to tell you why that is so. A briefing on the planet of your assignment has been downloaded into your implants. Study them. You will train on that environment in as much time as we can give you. Believe me, it will not be enough, so it is important that you start learning right now.”
Cornelius had worked as a hunt guide on New Detroit, leading trophy expeditions made up of mostly useless nobles wanting to prove their courage by killing animals with high powered weapons. And he had hunted the Cacas through the jungles of Sestius, a Class III threat planet, really a 2.5 or less, much more dangerous than New Detroit or any of the terraformed Earth type worlds. Azure was a Class II world, the most dangerous that the Imperial Colonizing Commission would authorize for colonization. He knew it would take more than a month to learn all there was to know about the biome, which would be as much his enemy as it was the Cacas’.
Devera met him outside the briefing room. She had attended his graduation, and they had hoped to steal some time before his deployment.
“It’s not to be,” he said to his lady love. “I will try to make it back. That’s all I can promise.”
“I’ll pray that you do,” said Devera, crossing herself in the Reformed Catholic manner.
Cornelius nodded, still not sure what he thought of the concept of God. He doesn’t seem to be on our side if he is there.
“We need to go, Walborski,” yelled Sergeant Chantamurta, who had also been assigned to the same battalion, long with a hundred and thirty-four other men from this training group. He had been tasked with taking charge of their deployment.
Cornelius looked over at the man and nodded, wondering why they really needed someone to run herd on them on the short trip to the station in orbit around Heaven. “I’ve got to go,” he told his lover, then leaned down to kiss her. Her arms held him in a tight embrace, and she seemed unwilling to let go. Cornelius pulled her arms away from him gently, then kissed her again. “Look in on Junior for me, if you would.” She nodded her head and he kissed the tears from her eyes, then turned away, to see some of the other men looking at him with smirks on their faces.
“You’re just jealous,” he said with a smile.
“Damn right,” said a PFC, his eyes scanning the lovely Sergeant.
“Let’s get going,” said Chantamurta, giving the PFC a glare for his effrontery to someone who was obviously important to the Corporal.
Cornelius studied the file about Azure on the flight to the wormhole gate. It seemed a fascinating place, and he would have loved to have gone there on a hunting expedition. One with all the comforts and security measures that his high tech society could provide. Instead, he would be out there with only the protection of his survival suit, his senses, and his ability to fight.
The animals were fascinating, and deadly. The kind his former employers would have loved to have hung the heads of on their walls. The vegetation was also fascinating, and some of it deadly as well. And the hybrid forms known as plantimals? Well, those were something else entirely. A man could crawl into a patch of the things without realizing what they were, until they attacked. He shuddered at the thought, which fueled his resolve to learn as much as he could about the place as soon as possible.
The wormhole gates were crowded with traffic, more than he could remember from his earlier trips. They had a fifteen minute wait for the traffic pattern to switch, then another ten for their place in line to get through. Cornelius used that time wisely, while the rest of the men chatted and gossiped about the war.
“Not the sociable type, are you?” asked one of the PFCs, the lowest rank any of the newly graduated Rangers held.
“I know we don’t have a lot of time,” said Cornelius, looking into the man’s eyes and reading the fear there. Well, I’m scared too, he thought. But trying to hide in banter is not going to help me.
“Some of the men would like to talk with you,” continued the PFC in a rush of speech. “You know, you’re the only man we know who has actually faced the enemy.”
“So?”
“We want to know about the Cacas,” said the man with a pleading look on his face. “Don’t you understand? They’re the boogie man to us. The unknown monsters. You can put a face on them for us.”
“OK,” said Cornelius, letting a smile cross his face. “PFC, Anderson?”
“Clifford Anderson,” said the man. “You might have heard of me.” Cornelius gave him a shrug. “I was a novelist. I guess I still am, but on hiatus at the moment.”
“Maybe I’ll read some of your stuff in the future. What do you write?”
“Fantasy,” said the man with a smile. “And now I’m caught in the all too real world.”
Cornelius went forward in the line and talked with the men, who all seemed to hang on every word with expressions of awe. “Just remember,” he said in finishing, just before it became their turn to jump into the portal. “I took out the bastards as a normal man. A driven normal man, true, one who really wanted to kill as many of the assholes as possible. Now I am like you, augmented, and I for one can’t wait to start hunting.”
Again the Donut was crowded. Given the size of the thing that was hard to comprehend, though the Corporal knew it had to have a lot of still empty space. He imagined that eventually that would not be true, the station would truly be fully occupied, with however many billions of beings that took. From the Donut it was another short walk to another world, then a shuttle flight up to yet another station.
They could all feel the change in the gravity field as they walked aboard the station. Cornelius figured it was not double normal, probably about one and a half times. He could feel the strain on his muscles. Nothing that he couldn’t handle. All of them were almost four times stronger than they had been before augmentation. That included bones and tendons that were even stronger. The second thing that struck the Ranger was the light, a harsh bluish tint that was hard on the eyes. The air was also different, thicker, with high humidity and an energizing level of oxygen.
“This must be where we’re going,” said PFC Anderson, smiling.
“Not my idea of heaven,” said Sergeant Chantamurta. “A warm day on
my home is a brisk eighteen degrees.”
“It’s something you had better get used to,” said a Major, walking out of a room and stepping in front of the line of men.
The men snapped to attention, and the officer waved them to ease. “Better get that garrison shit out of you. You men are Rangers, the best of the best. We don’t expect you to jerk to attention like puppets. Plus, I for one don’t want you telling some asshole on the other side that I’m important just because of the body language of the men around me.”
Cornelius smiled. He really hadn’t liked the chicken shit formality of the Army, though to him the almost cartoonish posturing of the Fleet was much worse.
“I am Major Igor Stravinsky, the XO of this outfit. Hopefully you won’t see me much out in the bush. If you do, you really know that the shit has hit it.”
The Major waited a moment, thinking of what next to say. “We will spend the next month and a half on this station, getting a feel for the environment we’re going to live and fight in. You will be assigned to your squads and teams, and get familiarized with the people you will be working with before deployment. I wish it was more. We normally like to work the new people in for three to six months before going to war. That’s not possible at this time. Sergeant Major.”
An older Asian man stepped up from behind the Major and looked over the troops, an expression of disapproval on his face. “What a bunch of momma’s boys they sent me,” he said, shaking his head. “I know we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel, but this is ridiculous.” The Senior NCO looked back to the group, craning his neck and catching sight of Sergeant Chantamurta. “At least we have some real soldiers here, even if they haven’t proven themselves as Rangers.” Then he caught sight of Walborski, and his eyes narrowed as he stared directly at the Imperial Medal of Heroism around the Corporal’s neck on its ribbon.
Exodus: Empires at War: Book 05 - Ranger Page 18
