by Toby Minton
“We’ve met,” the other voice said, which seemed a weird thing to say. But Nikki was too tired to take a crack at him.
“Padre—Command. Do you copy?” a woman’s voice said, sounding like it was coming from the radio. Sam answered with more tension in his voice than she’d heard from him yet.
“Command—Padre. Package in hand,” he said. “Need medevac ASAP. LZ will be marked when clear…”
His smooth voice faded away as Nikki’s eyes fell closed. Screw it. She was done. Sam could yell at her all he wanted. He could even tell her about perennials. She was too tired to care, and everything below her neck just felt all thick and spiky.
Something shook her, and Nikki’s eyes drifted back open just long enough to see that she was moving through the trees, baldy holding the foot of her litter.
A little voice inside her was screaming at her to stay awake, and Nikki knew she should listen. So she tried her best, for a minute. She drifted in and out of half consciousness just enough to know Sam and baldy were talking to her, or maybe arguing, and they were moving way too fast to be carrying somebody on a stretcher in the dark woods. But ultimately the little voice wasn’t enough, and Nikki finally let herself drift off into the darkness.
* * *
Nikki gasped and sucked in a mighty breath, heart pounding in her chest, limbs tingling with energy, and her mind blessedly clearing. Michael. Finally, she thought. Then pain came rushing back along with consciousness, including a sting in her arm.
Sam eased a needle out of her forearm, holding her back on the litter with his other hand.
“Welcome back, Nikki,” he said, and she could see relief on his shadowed face. “I know the adrenaline is firing you up, but just stay still so you don’t do yourself more damage.”
She could see more than just his face. She could see everything. The moonlight was so bright should see individual blades of stubby grass in the broad clearing. It was even bright enough for her to make out the ridge of the mag-rail tracks in the distance. The bald guy, Impact, looked totally different now that he wasn’t so fuzzy. A really good different.
“Holy shit!” she said, her voice sounding like its usual perky self as she put her free hand to her pounding chest. “Why the hell didn’t you do that a long time ago?” she shouted around a laugh, feeling the pain of her injuries coming back just as strongly as before but ignoring it much better with a clearer mind.
“Because it’s not going to help you,” he said, stowing the syringe in his pack. “It might accelerate the internal bleeding. But when your heart stopped—”
“I died?”
“It just stopped for a minute,” he corrected. “You should be OK until our ride gets here.” He stood and secured his pack in place. “Impact will stay with you until then.”
The look she saw in Impact’s eyes held as much surprise as she felt.
“Where are you going to be?” Impact said.
“Making sure that lander doesn’t blow our transport out of the sky when you leave,” Sam responded, swinging his rifle around to the front again.
Impact stopped Sam with a hand on his arm. “It will take you what, ten minutes to get in range of the lander?” he baited, his voice hard.
“Maybe a little less,” Sam said evenly, shooting a quick glance at Nikki.
“Do we have that kind of time to spare?”
Sam’s face darkened, but Nikki could tell he agreed. A chill ran through her again as she realized what they meant.
“I can get there faster,” Impact said, locking eyes with the older man. “You know I’m right.”
“Yeah,” Sam said, clearly not happy about it. “If you do this you’re going to be dealing with more than just a couple guns. I don’t suppose you’d take this, even if I ordered you,” Sam said, indicating the rifle.
“You know I won’t,” Impact said, giving the weapon a flat stare.
“Then listen up,” Sam’s tone hardened to match Impact’s. “They’ll have you outnumbered, and they’ll be ready to fire. If you lose momentum, they’ll cut you down. So you don’t go for the lander.”
“That’s exactly what I’m—”
“You go for the pilots,” Sam said over Impact. “That thing’s going nowhere without them. You’ll be able to tell them apart. Just hit them and move on with a full head of steam, like you did back in the woods. Understood?”
“You don’t give me orders,” Impact said coldly, his eyes darting to Nikki, his back stiffening further.
“You’re one of few people I outrank,” Sam said evenly with a ghost of a smile. “So yeah, I do. But you can pretend I’m just sharing intel if that makes you feel better.”
They stared at each other in silence for a few seconds. Then Impact nodded and turned away.
“Just make sure you keep moving,” Sam said.
“You make sure you get her to her brother,” Impact replied over his shoulder. “I promised him.”
“Michael?” Nikki said. “You saw Michael? Is he OK?”
Impact was already halfway across the clearing and accelerating at an unbelievable pace. If he heard her, he didn’t show it before he disappeared into the trees on the far side.
Sam stared after him for a minute, then he pulled something from a pocket and hit a button. A small strobe starting flashing on the distant mag-rail tracks.
“Eagle this is Padre,” he said into his transmitter. “We’re clear for evac 1,000 meters north of the marker.”
“Copy that, Padre,” a man’s voice replied. “Evac in three.”
The pain in Nikki’s middle was worse than before, and her dizziness was already starting back in, which maybe explained why the directions weren’t making sense.
“Hey,” she called. “If those are the tracks, aren’t we east of that light?” Nikki could hear the delay in her speaking again already.
“West. We’re on the other side from where you fell,” Sam replied, giving her an approving look. “You’re wondering why I didn’t tell that to our evac.”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Since I said north, they’ll know to look west.” He smiled, but he was watching her wince at the pain, so it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Always assume the other side can hear what you’re saying.”
“God, you people are paranoid.”
A low whine overhead announced the transport skimming low over the trees behind them. As soon as it cleared the trees, it rotated and started lowering, lighting up the area with multiple floods.
“Sam, get me out of this thing,” Nikki said, tugging at the straps holding her to the litter.
“Nikki that’s not a good—”
“Please, Sam,” she said, squinting at him through the pain. “I’ve been rescued enough for one day. Just help me walk on that thing instead of them carrying me.”
From the look in his eyes, Sam clearly thought she was cracked, but some part of him must have understood. He produced a knife from somewhere and had her cut loose before the transport set down and the hatch on the back swung down into a ramp.
He had her on her feet, or foot rather, leaning her good side on him by the time somebody from the ship reached them.
“Easy on that side, Major,” Sam said to the tall, graying man before he could touch Nikki’s other side. “She’s pretty banged up.”
Nikki quit paying attention to anything other than swinging her good leg forward one step at a time, each step redefining the word “excruciating” to encompass a greater level of pain than the last.
By the time she made it up the ramp, she was shaking and too dizzy with pain to take in her surroundings. She closed her eyes and let them lay her down on a bench.
“Where’s Impact,” she heard a man say from behind her.
“Dealing with the lander,” Sam replied. “He said to get her to her brother.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” a third voice said from right over Nikki. The voice was calm and low, but everyone else shut up.
Nikki opened her
eyes, but she was too dizzy to make sense of what she was seeing. The hooded figure checking her over looked like part of his face was shadowed no matter how he turned. When he finally met her eyes, she was transfixed by the predatory look and faint red glow of the eye on his shadowed side.
“Her injuries are too severe,” he said. “If Impact doesn’t make it back, she won’t live to reach her brother.”
Nikki took that as her cue to black out.
Underground
Chapter 11
Michael
“Where are they?”
“I don’t know, Michael,” Ace said from behind him, her tone still surprisingly patient. “You know Command detected a trace and blacked out coms. We’ll just have to wait.”
Michael nodded and kept his eyes on the night sky. “Yeah. That was rhetorical, really. It’s just—two hours?”
“Take em time to get here, kid. They don’t want to attract attention,” Mos said around the strip of jerky he’d been gnawing on for the better part of the past hour.
Michael nodded and took a slow breath, but it did little to relax him. The last they’d heard, the team going after Nikki had been delayed. By what, Command didn’t say, but Michael could tell the woman over the com was being careful with what she shared. He had a pretty good idea what that meant, but dwelling on the worst case wasn’t doing him any good. So he stared into the darkness of the empty sky over the low and equally empty hills and tried to come up with at least one positive scenario.
The rendezvous point, such as it was, was a few klicks north of the first stop on the California side of the border. They’d slipped off the train as it was pulling into the station and made their way into the hills under cover of darkness, trying to avoid any soldiers Savior might have waiting. After an hour of meandering through the light scrub, constantly checking for pursuit, they’d reached a run-down hunting shack that looked like it might blow over at any minute. They’d commenced waiting.
An hour later, they were still waiting.
Every second that ticked by was like a blow to Michael. He knew Nikki was hurt, maybe worse than he’d ever felt through their link, yet there was nothing he could do about it. Instead of going to her, he was forced to stand here and do nothing, and try not to dwell on the guilt hanging over him.
This whole mess was his fault. If he had stuck to his policy of staying off the public radar, none of this would have happened. He and Nikki would be safe as surgeons in the Vegas free zone going about their lives as usual. Of course, that would mean a dozen families from the south side would be losing their battle with the latest flu strain instead of getting the meds they needed. So what, right?
He shook his head and breathed a dark laugh. Nikki would love that he was fighting an internal war with both sides wielding guilt as the weapon of choice. She’d laugh at him for hours, and probably drag the needling out for days. Guilt and worry just weren’t in Nikki’s emotional repertoire. She was constantly telling him he must have been switched at birth. There was no way they were related, she said, no matter how much they looked alike.
Right now, he wished he could be more like her. She would laugh it all off, just like she always did when something troubled him. She’d say there was no point in wasting perfectly good brain cells by worrying them to death when it would be so much more fun to burn them. Then she’d tell him about a club in Oakland they could slip into, or a rave in the Wasteland. Next thing he knew they’d be on the way. She would cut loose. He would try to pretend he wasn’t watching out for her, and of course that he wasn’t still worrying over whatever was troubling him. She would pretend he was succeeding. And somewhere in the wee hours of the morning, he’d figure it out. After hours of fending off advances, hours of dancing just to keep Nikki in sight, hours of battling exhaustion and minor injuries to keep her sober, his mind would relax enough to solve his problem, whatever it happened to be. He’d figure out how to do better next time.
That’s what he had to do now—figure out how to do better. Unfortunately, the silence and clear night air were not giving him epiphanies the way Nikki’s spontaneous excursions did. All he knew for certain was that once he and Nikki were back together, he’d do whatever it took to make them safe again.
Michael spotted the ship as soon as it appeared just over the horizon. It was just a point of light, one he might have mistaken for a bright star. But it was growing steadily larger and bobbing slightly to hug the hills as it approached. He knew it was just his pessimistic imagination, but the transport seemed to be taking its time, not hurrying to get Nikki to him like it should have been if she were still alive. He pushed that thought away and motioned to Ace and Mos.
“Let’s grab some cover, people,” Ace said. “Without coms we can’t be sure that’s a friendly.”
“It’s them,” Michael said. “It has to be.”
“Humor me,” Ace replied, grabbing his arm and pulling him toward the shack.
Once the three of them were inside, Mos eased the door closed as best he could. With only one rusted hinge partly attached, the door hung at an angle that left wedges of moonlit sky visible across the top and down one side. Mos and Ace took up positions by the door to watch the approaching ship through the gaps. Michael had to straddle a darker patch of…something…to get a view through a gap in the wall.
The stench rising up from the something forced Michael to hold his breath as he watched the ship’s slow approach, but he would have been holding it anyway, he was sure. He’d never really tried to focus on his sense of Nikki. It had always just been a part of him he tended to take for granted. In fact, he’d spent more time trying to ignore it to keep his stress level in check, unless he and Nikki were fighting. Even then, he paid attention to what he felt from her only to better adjust his attacks and maintain their power curve.
Now that he wanted to know if Nikki was getting closer and if she was OK, he didn’t know where exactly to strain or what to focus to extend his sense of her. So he waited, barely breathing as the outline of the boxy craft came into view behind its running lights.
“It’s them all right,” Ace said, the relief in her voice echoing Michael’s own. “Let’s move it.”
As the ship slowed and rotated sideways, Michael felt a faint glimmer of sensation from Nikki. Before he could make sense of it, Mos grabbed his arm and hustled him out the door behind Ace, causing a jolt of pain in Michael’s ribs.
They ran across the uneven ground, shielding their eyes from the dust and rocks the transport’s thrusters were kicking up as it landed. The transport was the same model as the hauler that had brought the medical supplies to Sky City, the one Michael had stolen, essentially. They headed aft to where the door to the rectangular cargo area was already lowering.
Michael ran up the ramp ahead of the others, past two armed men. One of the men said something to Michael but he wasn’t registering much of anything, preoccupied as he was with sorting what he was feeling from Nikki. Whatever he was feeling, it was too faint and far too calm.
The interior of the ship was much like the outside—boxy and Spartan. The rectangular cargo area in the back was a dozen meters long, three meters wide, and lit by recessed orange lights. A row of folding jump seats ran along both side walls under what looked like storage lockers hanging from the ceiling.
In the fore, on either side of the open doorway to the raised pilot area, the last few jump seats on each side had been lowered to serve as two makeshift beds. Impact was on the starboard side. On the port—
Michael dropped to his knees on the deck next to her bed, one hand holding his throbbing ribs, his eyes frantically searching Nikki for some sign of the injuries he knew he should have been feeling through the link. But he felt nothing. As far as he could tell, she was just—
“Asleep,” a low voice said from the shadows of the doorway up to the pilot area.
Michael turned his head to see a figure step toward him, a figure both disturbing and strangely familiar. The thin, hooded coat he w
ore was almost covering up what Michael could only assume was scarring of some kind. But what could cause that kind of glossy black tissue to form, Michael had no idea. And that one eye—he would swear it had glowed red for a second, and not just from the lights.
“Her injuries are healed,” the man said. “But what I did for her doesn’t compare to your…connection. It consumed what little strength she had. She needs to rest.”
“You’re Gideon,” Michael said, watching the man eye him and nod once. “Impact said you might be able to help her. Thank you.”
Michael dropped his eyes to Impact lying unconscious on the seats across from Nikki. He was breathing evenly in sleep, but his arm was heavily bandaged across his bare chest, blood stains showing through the bandage at the shoulder. “Is he all right?”
“Be better if he’d listened,” a quiet voice said at Michael’s shoulder. “But he’ll be OK.”
Michael turned his head to the man sitting in the jump seat at Nikki’s feet. He was one of the two Michael had blown past at the ramp. He was about Michael’s size, but five or ten years older, with darker skin, darker fatigues, and camouflage paint he was wiping off with a worn rag.
The other man he’d passed on the ramp was walking to the fore past Mos and Ace, who were stowing their gear. He was older than the others, but he looked even more the soldier—tall, strong, and with eyes that looked like they’d seen more fighting than he liked to remember. “Hatch secure. Get us in the air, Coop,” he called toward the cockpit.
“You got it, boss,” the pilot called back. Then he cackled and shouted, “Somebody hold little Mosey’s hand back there. I’ll try to take it nice and easy, but—”
A rumble from the thrusters firing shook the cargo area, setting a few of the locker latches to rattling as the transport started to rise.
“One time,” Mos mumbled with a grimace as he wrestled with his harness buckle. “That was one time! In a damn hurricane!” he shouted toward the cockpit. “A man can’t do a thing about his stomach,” Mos grumbled to no one in particular. “I warned him about messing with me. Now I’ve gotta bust him up.”
