Toni began to dread what came next and attempted to beg for mercy.
“–plagh!”
“Aah, there we are,” said the voice, positively delighted.
Toni was once again being dragged through the forest, the constricting strap ever tighter around his throat. Toni tried hard to think.
Next time, he decided, next time I’ll ...
Slowly, Toni returned to consciousness, still blind, aware only of the rustling of leaves as someone or something moved around him. His arms were bound behind his back around what felt like a tree and something had been shoved into his mouth.
Breathing hard, the creature approached Toni’s ear.
“Well, my fine young Sergeant. It seems we are still alive.”
Toni braced himself to be suffocated, but it didn’t happen. Instead, the voice spoke again.
“I must apologize for this treatment, since it is not in my nature. However, if I am to effect an escape, well, I will need to run very much indeed, will I not? I must apologize as well for the things I am about to do. They are terrible, yes, and you are only kinders, but this is a matter of justice, ya?”
Casually, Kaiser pulled Toni’s dagger from the sheath on his vest. In that moment Toni remembered that he had been armed with the weapon. Then he remembered the sidearm in his vest’s side-pocket and began to hate himself fiercely.
“Thank you, this is a good weapon. My first debt is the one I have to you ...”
Toni suddenly regained vision as Kaiser removed the MEWAC undershirt from his head. The earthling held Toni’s head firm and slashed him across the side of his face. Letting go as Toni screamed into the cloth in his mouth, the major observed his work with grim satisfaction. Turning about, he paused and spoke over his shoulder.
“I hope your arm rots off and you are unable to fight ever again, because if we ever cross paths again you will most certainly die. Now I really must pay your murderer friend a visit, I am deeply indebted to him ...”
He left at a casual pace, leaving his prisoner to bleed.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
North-west of the mining quadrant, Nature’s Night, 17th of June, 2771
Toni’s head swiveled at his surroundings, trying to glean clues as to where he was. He tried to shout, only to have the sound smothered by the cloth in his mouth. It tasted of sweat, and Toni knew it was part of the undershirt Ian had given Kaiser to protect him from the sun.
His prisoner was on the warpath and his camp was unprotected. He thought of the possibilities, and they terrified him.
The stranger in him reminded him that it was his fault. He should have killed Kaiser when he had the chance. He should have used the dagger when he had the chance. He should have used the pistol as well. But most of all, he should not have turned his back on the earthling. Each realization was a punch to the stomach.
He forced himself to calm down and think of a way out of the mess. Deciding to test his bindings, he gave them a good yank, feeling only his right arm’s wounds tear open and begin to bleed again. He cried into the cloth in his mouth, and then tried to spit it out, finding that a strip strapped around his head was holding it in place. He then tried to stand.
The tree he was bound to was a thick pine, but the wide strap that confined his arms afforded him enough space for the necessary acrobatics. Finding a knobby outcrop about a foot above the ground, he put his boot on it and threw himself up and forwards, tucking his body into a tight roll. His boots scraped against the trunk, sending bark everywhere, and slowed him down a little too much for what he had intended. He fell hard on his head, only his right leg managing to get clear, his bound arms still hugging the other leg as well as the tree itself. The jolt of the collision sent shockwaves throughout his body and he felt his wounds tear a little more. He screamed with the pain again, almost inhaling the cloth as he tried to suck air in.
Finding himself in a very awkward position, he found the knob and jumped again, his left leg finally managing to clear the tree as he fell onto his left side, still hugging the cursed pine. With enormous difficulty he stood again, his twisted body set in an upside-down hug. He leaned against the trunk and tried to grab his own wrists, working blindly.
Finally he gave up, realizing that they were still a little too far apart, and tried to kick at the bindings of his left wrist. They were too firm to slip off, and then he noticed that he’d been bound with his own rifle-strap.
I suppose that’s what Kaiser would call poetic justice, heh? The stranger sniggered.
Cart-wheeling over his head and on to his right side, he kicked at the bindings on his other wrist. They were slick with blood and gave a little. Desperately he pressed his boot’s edge against the bulge of the strap, ignoring the pain that shot up his arm, and felt it slowly begin to recede. The knot slipped off his swollen wrist with a particularly vicious kick.
Without delay, Toni lay on his back and pulled the pistol out of his pocket, loving the feel of steel against his palm. He chambered a round, pointed the weapon to the sky and fired off three shots, praying that he was not too late. He rose unsteadily to his feet and began to search the ground around the tree for drag-marks leading into the forest.
They were not difficult to find.
Moving as fast as he could, Toni followed the trail back to the camp and arrived there in under a minute. His comrades were already awake, hands gripping rifles in expectation of a fight, and they stared at their arriving comrade as if in shock. Ian appeared particularly surprised to see him.
“He’s gone ...” was about all Toni could say.
“We know ...” Hannah replied, her expression grim, and she pointed to the only prone figure among them.
Ray had been sleeping on his back when Kaiser approached him. He still lay that way. The only change was the gaping wound that had almost separated his head from the remainder of his body. The body lay in a pool of blood. The damage seemed almost impossibly great and Toni approached the corpse in fascination, taking note of the peaceful expression on its face. The cut had been clean, and it appeared to have begun well on the right side of his throat and ended well to the left, having only been stopped by bone. His dagger had done that. He also noticed the depressions where Kaiser’s knees had made an indent in the soil as he sat astride his victim, preventing him from making a sound.
So this is how a professional kills, he thought numbly.
He turned to Ian and pointed the pistol at his right shoulder. The weapon kicked satisfyingly in his hand, the projectile striking its target perhaps a little more to his left than he would have preferred. Ian’s face became even more surprised, and the Lacrau that he had been holding moments before slipped from his hands to hang from its strap.
Sueli fell to the ground and began to cry again.
“What are you doing, Toni?” Hannah demanded uneasily.
“Keep your eyes out for Kaiser ...”
“I said, what the hell are you doing, Toni?!” She shouted as Ian’s disbelieving eyes followed the blood that was flowing from his wound.
“KEEP YOUR FUCKING EYES OUT FOR KAISER!” Toni roared. Just as quickly he calmed down again and turned towards Ian.
“You are under arrest for aiding and abetting in the escape of a prisoner of war. I do believe that falls under treason, am I right?”
“You shot me ... I did nothing to you –” Ian sputtered incredulously.
“You did everything to deserve this. And if you open your mouth again, they’ll have to wire it back together.”
“It was your watch, your watch, not mine ...”
Toni approached Ian at speed. The cadet didn’t even bother to evade the assault as Toni’s boot crashed against his jaw. The bone didn’t quite shatter, although the impact did produce a satisfying thunk. Ian collapsed to the ground and lay there, cradling his wound.
He disarmed the fallen soldier and removed the rifle-strap from his weapon, using it to bind him.
“Toni, would you care to explain this?” Hannah insiste
d, keeping her rifle aimed at the surrounding trees.
Toni recounted what he had seen during Ian’s watch; of how their senior had had an opportunity to only appear to properly bind their prisoner, and how, when Toni had taken Kaiser to relieve himself, he had been distracted by a sound much like a rock thrown against trees. He also explained how Kaiser had not been in possession of Ian’s MEWAC undershirt at the time. And yet that very same shirt had been used to gag and hood him.
“And you think that will hold up in a court?! He’s a Templeton, you IDIOT!” She exploded at last.
“You know there’s no way Kaiser could have escaped from the bindings without somebody helping him, not the way we were doing it.” He insisted.
“You’re bleeding again ...” she muttered, looking him up and down, “Can’t you do anything without bleeding?”
A very upset Sueli kept watch while Hannah treated Ian’s and Toni’s wounds. The effort ended up taking much more time than expected, and before long the first tentative chirps of dawn could be heard.
Ian made a difficult situation easy by shutting up for good. Simplifying things even more, Sueli renounced her claim to the throne about as soon as seniority came under discussion. Thus Toni found himself the acting senior of the group, or at least what remained of it, and they finally broke camp, leaving Ray’s corpse where it lay.
The smell of smoke caught Toni’s attention, and he led the group to higher ground, where they contemplated what he supposed was Kaiser’s parting gift. A string of forest-fires extended out to their south-east, the nearest no more than a few kilometers away.
“The Winds will make that spread for days ...” Hannah breathed, appalled by the destruction.
“What worries me is that the fires are pointing out our axis of retreat,” Toni said, once again reminding himself that he was responsible for that.
“How do you think he set them?” She wondered.
“Did you see Ray’s travel pack? He must have taken it before he left, along with the box of matches from his survival pouch. And his rifle. And his pistol. Damn.”
“Maybe we should go ...” Sueli suggested apprehensively.
They set off again in a hurry, eager to get as much distance between themselves and the fires. They were fortunate in that the rising winds were blowing north-west-north, so there was little risk of losing a race against the inferno. Surprisingly, however, they found the wilderness surrounding them begin to teem with a multitude of escaping creatures, mostly several species of deer, but also wild boar and even a harassed-looking pair of foxes. The sight of the escaping wildlife pulled at the heart-strings of the femmes, but Toni surprised himself by seeing only Meat On The Run, and his trigger-finger began to itch for the chance to take one down.
He may have never thought of himself as a hunter before, but he had never imagined himself starving in the woods either.
About what he estimated was the middle of the day, Toni saw a solitary boar trotting anxiously by about sixty paces to their right. It wasn’t much to look at, but he decided it would do well enough. Setting his Lacrau to semiauto, he aimed at the beast’s shoulder-blade and fired off a shot. The result was almost comical; the creature leapt into the air almost as high as its own shoulder and took off at full steam as soon as it landed, shrieking as it went. It zigged and then zagged, and then disappeared into the forest.
Sueli gave Toni a dirty look, and then looked pointedly elsewhere; Hannah began to laugh, and she kept laughing until a quarter-hour afterwards, when they happened upon its corpse. Fear of pursuit quickly gave way to hunger, and before long they were trying to figure out how to gut a particularly hairy pig.
Finally they gave up trying and hacked off its hindquarters instead, surrendering the remainder of the feast to nature. Toni estimated that each leg still carried more than five kilos of meat on them, and felt that the effort had been a worthwhile. One was stowed away in Toni’s pack, the space there having become ample due to their dwindling rations. The other they placed over a campfire, where they spent the better part of an hour roasting and slicing their way to a distended belly.
By the time they resumed their march, Toni found himself looking over his shoulder at the darkening sky to the south-east. The winds were picking by then, and it seemed that the blaze had finally established itself in the land.
With no feeble earthling to slow them down, the group began to make good time over the course of the remaining afternoon. The air stank of smoke and Toni realized that the winds had changed again. Which was not too uncommon for that time of the month, although by the twentieth they could expect it to radiate from the Thau’s pupil and become very, very strong.
Nature’s Dusk came earlier than expected, and Toni suspected the smoke had something to do with that. Nevertheless they pushed onwards, a mute Ian almost leading the way in haste. Toni knew what he was thinking, but in the meantime he simply enjoyed the fact that he didn’t have to constantly prod his prisoner into movement.
They finally pitched camp at the military crest of a steep hill, not so much because of hunger or lack of sleep, but mostly because their legs had begun to fail beneath them. As the femmes set about foraging for firewood and Ian sat on his rump with a defeated expression, Toni collected the Mark 4 comm. boxes and began to mess around with the pendant cables’ male-female interconnections. He ended up connecting two cables in a line, with the third and fourth spreading out from its end to make a capital T.
“You think that’s wise?” Hannah asked as they returned with armfuls of rotting wood.
“It won’t be a good idea to transmit, but at least we can try to passively scan frequencies, right?” He suggested.
He tried to climb a tall pine and realized that the task would require two working arms, and so he gave up instead and sat opposite Ian. They tried very hard not to stare at each other as they awaited the femmes’ return.
“My, how in hell have men survived so long?” Hannah quipped as they returned with another load. She turned to Sueli with a cocky grin, “Look at them! Faces busted up, arms slung, unable to climb an itsy tree, they’re practically an endangered species ...”
Toni tried not to smile. It hurt his ego too much.
Before long, camp was made and a fire sizzled, half a boar’s leg roasting from a spit. Hannah climbed the tree and stretched out the antenna, leaving him to try to figure out the communicator’s functions. Before long Toni could hear the steady crackle of static over the comm., and he set the mode to frequency scan, carefully keeping his fingers clear of the PTT.
It did not take long for the scanner to pick something up. A simple non-repetitive clicking code was being transmitted from somewhere to their north-east.
“What, you improvised a Geiger counter?” Sueli asked, in high spirits due to the impending meal.
“Nope. I think it’s a signal from Lograin.” He answered with a frown, catching everyone’s attention.
“Press decode ...” Hannah suggested after some thought.
He fixed the frequency and pressed the decode button. Surely enough, after a few moments of listening, the device’s display presented him with the decoded message.
SOURCE: LOGRAIN AIR BASE (UNCOMPROMISED)
DISTANCE: 685.7 KM
MESSAGE: ALL WILD ROSE SURVIVORS MUST REMAIN PASSIVE ON COMMS UNTIL 500 KM FROM BASE. NO EVACUATION WILL BE ATTEMPTED BEYOND 500 KM RADIUS OF BASE. UNMIL FORCES STILL ACTIVE BEYOND ORIGINAL CONTACT LOCATION.
“How can they be so sure about their distance to us?” Hannah asked, apparently not too happy about the number. Toni smiled.
“All radios and transmission towers have synchronized atomic clocks. These emergency signals are sent at precise times, so the receivers only need to measure the delay in signal reception to calculate their distance to them. Direction’s another matter, though. Our antenna is non-directional, which is another way of saying we’re 685 clicks away from Lograin without a clue as to azimuth.”
“We’ll just have to keep following
the trail ...” she muttered.
“Follow the trail for the next two hundred clicks?!” Sueli cried, “That’s more than four days’ march, and the Winds will have hit us by then. No one sends rescue missions against the Winds!” She began to weep again.
“Then we’ll have to find shelter for as long as they last.” He suggested, disliking the defeated tone of her voice, “We’ve already proven we can hunt, but what we really need to do is find shelter that can stand up to the Rains. It might be a good idea to leave the valley up ahead and climb the Dogspine range. I’m sure we could find a cave or something like it.”
“How far up ahead is it?” She sniffed.
“A hundred clicks or so. Enough to get there in two days and settle down for the wait.”
“Alright, we will do that if we must ...” Hannah agreed.
Toni tested Ian’s bindings before going to asleep, noticing with satisfaction how the winds rustling the treetops had cleared away the smoke. They did not set a watch that night.
Toni was roughly shaken awake in the morning, finding an alarmed Hannah urging him to rise. He felt strangely heavy and had difficulty making out the camp, realizing finally that it was almost completely obscured in smoke. Vaguely he picked up a crackling sound from uphill, and his eyes widened in wonder as he saw an enormous tongue of flame reach towards the sky.
“You’re shitting me!” He exclaimed.
“I wish! We have only seconds to scoot!” She shouted as she began to stow her sleeping bag.
Feeling drunk with sleep, or with carbon monoxide poisoning, now that he thought about it, he quickly gathered his things and removed Ian’s bindings, and before long they were making a running descent of the hill. By the time they reached its base the entire heights were ablaze, and a strong wind was pushing the inferno further towards them.
He then remembered that he’d left the pendant cables hanging in the tree.
“Oh, no ...” he exclaimed, hating himself for yet another blunder.
“What?”
“Never mind ...”
Descent into Mayhem (Capicua Chronicles Book 1) Page 29
