There was a bit of a mist rolling over what look like rolling hills that sloped downward. Rebecca picked up the pace, hoping that this would lead down to the valley. She walked on for an hour, following the downward slope. The mist thickened, until she was working her way through a world that had shrunk to the ten meter diameter circle around her. She kept moving downward, wondering how far she had walked. She could see the time on her implant, but with no frame of reference it was hard to tell distance.
The child stopped in her tracks as she saw a deep shadow ahead. She kept waiting for it to move, but it didn’t, and soon lack of patience overcame any fear of the unknown. She took a step forward, then another, before she realized what stretched in front of her. Getting down on her hands and knees she crawled forward, her eyes locked onto the shadow. She reached out questing hands, feeling the rock and dirt beneath her touch. And then her fingers felt, nothing, and she knew she had been right. It was a drop off, going down to she knew not what.
If I had kept walking along I would have toppled into however deep a chasm that is, she thought, backing up and getting back to her feet. She walked alongside the drop off, careful to stay well back from the shadow. The mist closed in around her until she could only see a couple of meters in each direction. The ground was still trending downward, until she came to a rock wall where she could go no farther.
What now, she thought, looking to the left where the chasm had been and seeing no shadow. She walked carefully in that direction, keeping her eyes down. She went past where the drop off had been further back, and then found herself on a steep slope going down. This is more like it, she thought, just before her feet slid out from under her and she was careening down the slope. She was hoping she could stop before she ran into something when the ground was gone and she found herself falling through the empty air.
* * *
“The Maurid patrol has not reported in, my Lord,” announced the Underofficer, stopping at the entrance to the General’s office in the bunker.
The commanding officer of the region that included everything south of the largest city on the planet, or at least the ruins of it, looked up from his computer screen. He had been scanning reports about the jungle campaign and scowling at his losses. It is better to fight in the built up areas, he thought. There he could use the air and space power of his forces to pummel the enemy. In the jungle, not so much. There they often didn’t know where the enemy was until contact was made. Then it was impossible to bomb them from the air without endangering his own forces. And the enemy would normally disengage at their own decision, and scatter into the jungle. After that it was like trying to swat individual insect with a particle beam rifle.
“When were they supposed to check in?” he asked his subordinate.
“They weren’t on any kind of time frame,” said the lesser male. “They were traveling com off so they wouldn’t give away their position to anyone that might be monitoring. But it was expected they would get in touch by sunrise no matter what they did or didn’t find.”
“What does the Prime Hunt Leader say?”
“The Prime Hunt Leader led a half dozen of his people on a search pattern to try and locate his missing Maurids,” said the Underofficer. “They have been gone since before sunup.”
“Send some aircraft to look over the mountains,” said the General, looking back down at his reports. The one he had been reading had discussed the possibility of pulling out of this system due to the ground loses. After all, the system was essentially neutralized as far as war related production went, and was unlikely to be a factor anytime in the near future. He was not in favor of that policy though. Ground Forces had paid the blood price to take the surface, and he hated the idea of leaving before they eliminated the pests completely.
“My Lord?” asked the Underofficer.
“Get some aircraft up and check out the mountains. It’s probably just some human stragglers, but no use taking a chance. If they’re a threat we can blast them off the mountain. If they just cower, then we can assume they aren’t a worry.”
“Yes, my Lord,” said the Underofficer, giving a hand salute and running from the office, leaving the General to handle the most boring and important part of his job, logistics.
* * *
The Prime Hunt Leader looked up the gravel road that ran to the visible switchback high above and waved his first pair forward. He had a half dozen Maurids with him, the most he could gather at a moment’s notice. He had lost more than he had feared when he fought the human augmenteds. And now two patrols had failed to check in. His other Hunters were off on patrols, so he had what he had to see what happened to the four that had gone up to the top of the mountains.
The Leader let the first pair get fifty meters ahead and took off with two more, knowing that his final pair would take up the rear. It was a long climb, but the Maurids were distance runners, able to keep up a high pace for a long period of time. They hit the switchback in less than ten minutes and started up the road. At the end of the hour they were on the ridgeline road and heading north, sniffing the ground as they ran.
It was a short time later that they spotted the crashed aircar they had been told about. They explored the area for a few minutes and moved on, as there was nothing there to interest them. A kilometer further on the lead pair stopped, one staying in the middle of the road while the other circled into the rocks on the side. The male started picking up rocks while growling loudly.
“We have bodies under the rocks, Hunt Leader,” said the Scout in the rocks, as the rest of the group fell to picking up stones and throwing them away, all but two who provided security with readied weapons.
“Our men,” said the Prime Hunt Leader as the scent of corrupted bodies reached his nostrils. He growled in murderous rage as the first body was revealed. This one had been separated, his upper body from the rest, and the Leader looked down and paid close attention to the wounds. It was a clean cut, with no scorching along the edges.
“A blade weapon,” said the Leader, meeting the eyes of his Lead Scout. “What do the others look like?”
“The same,” said the other male. “Different wounds, in different places, but same kind of weapon. Monomolecular blades.”
“These were not human stragglers then. They were their elite soldiers. But how many?”
“I’m picking up the scent of one human,” said the Scout on the road. “Heading to the north.”
“There must have been more than one,” said another male in protest. “One human couldn’t have killed four males with a bladed weapon.”
“We can’t track their superior humans by scent,” said the Prime Hunt Leader, looking to the north. “At least not by the scent of their bodies. So this was another human, along with them. So there is bound to be more than one.” Or this is one that is truly exceptional. My pride is not so great as to not admit the possibility that there are some better at the hunt than we are, though most of my people would think I had gone mad.
“We will hunt them down and kill them all,” he told the rest of his party. “But be alert, or we may be the ones buried under rock cairns. Go.”
The lead pair loped off, moving quickly, but not at the run, sniffing and looking over everything. The rest of the team moved out in their preferred formation, all eager to catch up to those who had murdered their brethren.
* * *
Only thirty more meters to go, thought Cornelius, trying to move a little bit to the side. There was a tree down below, not directly, but with a little shifting he could make it so. His thought was he could reach the twelve meter tall shrub before he reached the bottom, then climb down through the tree to get to the ground.
His hand slipped from its hold as he shifted, and he quickly gripped a rock that had not been his first choice. He stopped for a moment and breathed out, then in, trying to relax himself. He looked over at the next handhold, then started to move again.
The rock he was holding onto picked that moment to pull loose from
the cliff, and suddenly he had only two points of contact, his other hand already on the move. The Ranger dropped the rock and tried to get his hand back to another hold, but as he was doing that, failing with both hands to find a grip, his right foot slid from the wall and he was only attached by one point of contact. That was a recipe for disaster, and he fell back with all three of his unattached members flailing in space.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy. Sun Tzu.
AZURE. MAY 30TH, 1001.
Rebecca stifled the scream that wanted to erupt from her throat as her bottom left the ground. The sound of falling water came from her right, but with the mist she didn’t know if that was meaningful or not. For a couple of seconds she was falling in open air through the obscuring mist. Then she fell through the mist and into the open air, to the sight of a deep pool of water directly below her. Not again, was the one thought she had time for. She caught sight of water cascading down a stair step pattern of rocks to her right, but was not really able to make much out before her buttocks and legs plunged through the water that closed over her head. She hit first her feet, then her buttocks on the rocky bottom, and kicked off to go up.
Fighting back to the surface she broke out of the water and looked around. She was in a sort of grotto with an open sky. She turned in the water to see the falls, five meters wide of water working its way down a dozen or so steps. The top appeared to be about fifty meters up. There was a current pushing her out of the grotto and no observable shoreline for her to swim to. So she let the current move her out of the grotto, toward the mountain stream that flowed from the pool.
Something hit her foot, and the child looked down in panic, remembering the river predators of this planet. It was only a medium sized fish analogue visible through the crystal clear water, and she was a bit relieved. It nibbled again on her boot sole with sharp teeth, and she wondered if she would fare badly if she hadn’t been wearing the survival suit. More fish gathered around her, but none seemed to do more than look at her curiously.
The survival suit automatically inflated its air bladders, cued by continued contact with the water, and the stream floated her out. She floated at what she figured was four or five kilometers an hour for maybe six hundred meters, when she heard the sound of a cataract up ahead. That started another panic, and she looked frantically for a way out of the stream and control of her destiny once again. There was a bit of shore to the north, and she pulled for it with a couple of strokes and climbed out of the water.
The shore was narrow and rocky, maybe three meters wide. She stopped and looked around and up, finding the stream flowing through a narrow cleft in the rocks that must have corresponded with the chasm she had seen up above. This should lead me out of the mountains, she thought, walking ahead to where the stream was falling ten meters to a lower elevation. She couldn’t find any way around the cataract, but there was a pool below, and she solved the problem by stepping into the stream and jumping into the falls.
Below it was a repeat of above the cataract. The stream continued, with some narrow shore on both sides. She chose the south shore as being less rugged and moved on. The stream widened, as did the shore, and soon the stream was bubbling over a shallow rocky bed. Shrubs were growing on both shorelines, and she slowed down a bit to check out the bushes before she shifted past them.
At one bush something hissed at her, and she poked the shrub with a stick she had picked up a half kilometer back. A small predator leapt out of the bush onto the stick, got a good look at her size, and jumped into the stream to swim across.
Rebecca laughed, then sobered quickly. The cleft was widening, and there were real trees ahead. And real trees meant other animals, some bound to not be so funny. Now she was really on her guard, aware that things might be different here in the mountains compared to the lowlands. She pulled the particle beam pistol and kept both hands on it, one on the pistol grip, the other on the upper assembly so she could activate it at a moment’s notice. Remembering what the Ranger had told her, she didn’t want to activate the weapon if she didn’t have to, even though to her knowledge her old weapon had never given her away.
A couple of hundred meters further on the gorge widened into a small valley. She caught the scent of plantimals here, something that had been missing up in the mountains. She knew if she could smell them they were close, and she assumed that there was more than one if she could pick up their scent so clearly. She crouched down, knees on the rocks, and looked ahead. After a moment the distinctive rounded green shape of the creature appeared to her eyes. It was standing under a tree, its tentacles drooped to cover a good portion of that side of the stream. Behind it was another. She thought for a moment about crossing the stream and going down the other side, until she spotted some more of them over there.
“Crap,” she muttered, looking at the ambush hunters who had seemed to have set up the perfect trap for anything coming up and down this gorge. She considered trying to pass them close to the rock walls. She dismissed that thought as she saw movement next to the wall. What brought them all here? she thought, wondering why some of the big herbivores hadn’t come up here and cleared them out.
I’ll go between them, really slow and easy, she thought, stepping into the stream and starting to walk with short steps on the rocks. The plantimals only had eye spots, able to pick up light and dark, and movement. They had a lot of them though, as well as good hearing and other senses, especially for ground vibrations.
At first the creatures didn’t seem to react. To her the steps she was taking in the water were thunderous in their noise producing intensity. She tried to dismiss that thought, trying to be realistic. They can’t hear me, she thought, at the same time imagining what the pack of hybrid creatures would do to her if they caught her. It was not a pleasant thought.
She had gotten between the two plantimals which were closest to the stream. Both just stood there, and Rebecca tried to determine if they were looking at her. She basically had no way of knowing if any of those eyespots, so noticeable all over its body from close range, were looking at her or not. One tentacle twitched, and she almost jumped. She slid another foot and gripped her pistol tighter. The tentacle twitched once again, then another one came looping over her arm and grabbed at the barrel of her pistol.
Rebecca tugged hard at the weapon, refusing to let go. Her feet slid out from under her and she landed on her butt in the water, the impact jarring up her spine. She shifted her left hand on the gun and activated the weapon, tugging back with her right hand. The creature went into a frenzy, more tentacles whipping around, most going over the child, a few smacking against her survival suit and not penetrating. She almost let go of the pistol, letting the creature have it so she could crawl away. At that moment the activation light came on. She pulled the trigger on the weapon and twisted it in the grasp of the tentacle. The angry red beam sliced into the plantimal and through the one beyond it. She pulled the weapon free from the dying creature and moved it over the rest of the group, burning them down and exploding a tree right behind them.
Tentacles came from the other side, slapping down at the girl, and Rebecca rolled over in the stream and brought the weapon to bear on the cluster on that side. She pulled the trigger and sent the beam into the far right of the cluster, then waved it to far left like an infinite sword blade. All of the creatures died, before a weapon their tiny brains really couldn’t understand.
Rebecca released the trigger and pushed herself up to an upright sitting position. In front of her were many burnt and steaming plantimals, and pieces of the same, along with a couple of blasted trees. She turned her head and was greeted by the same. She had destroyed the entire group.
So much for stealth, she thought as she got back to her feet. She looked back up the gorge, then turned and walked down, keeping to the stream bed. The rest of the trip was uneventful, until she came out of the gorge and into the jungle proper. One moment
the cliffs were towering on each side above the vegetation, the next they were gone. Rebecca looked back and saw the cliff extending in both directions with a big cleft in the center, the gorge she had walked out of. She knew the prairie that took up most of this valley was ahead, and she started that way, staying alert. She avoided some more plantimals, and chased away a pack of hell hounds with a short blast of her particle beam, cringing as she shot to miss. Her main concern now was if someone was tracking the beam weapon’s electronic emissions. She doubted it, since it was just one weapon, and no one knew she was here to start. Still, she couldn’t rule it out as a possibility.
After a couple of kilometers the jungle ended, and the prairie spread out ahead of her. She could see the line of the jungle on the other side, about fifteen kilometers away. It rolled up over the hills on that side. A bright sun was shining down on the mostly flat area, only interrupted here and there by lone hills and clusters of trees. Some herbivores moved to her right, occupying the northern third of the valley. There were dots scattered on the land to the far north. She thought they must be more herbivores, though there was sure to be carnivores roaming that grassland as well.
Ahead was nothing but open land, unpopulated by animals. About three kilometers in from the other side of the jungle was the compound that housed the Cacas, fortified and with clear fields of fire in all directions. Just to the south of it was the airfield, recognizable by the vehicle coming in for a landing.
He’s south of here, she thought, looking that direction and trying to see if anything was moving. She saw nothing, and took off at a jog, keeping close to the jungle while staying in the open. She had a gut feeling that speed was more important than concealment, and that she needed to be close to the Ranger when he engaged his target. She didn’t know why, it was just a feeling. But she had come to trust her feelings since the invasion, and had no reason to doubt this one.
Exodus: Empires at War: Book 05 - Ranger Page 35
