“Port!” Tabby hollered.
I veered just in time to avoid a cement block at the edge of the parking area. Apparently, we were only supposed to leave through a few narrow corridors.
“Show navigation path to York.”
A blue contrail that curved in several places stretched out in front of me and directed me to turn again. I slowed on the throttle and followed it around. For some reason, driving the vehicle wasn’t anywhere near as fun as I’d thought it would be. I really had to be vigilant to avoid crashing into debris that littered the area.
“A little pep already,” Tabby chided.
I pushed the throttle forward and we leapt ahead. Whatever power source the vehicle possessed, it was well-matched to the heavy bulky frame; I was able to accelerate faster than I was comfortable with. At twenty-five meters per second, I barely had enough time to navigate the turns in the poorly maintained road. Finally, I missed a turn entirely and bumped up over a large block of cement. The impact was jarring and I scraped the bottom of the vehicle as we passed over the object. I wasn’t sure which was more impressive: the screeching sound of metal on concrete or the fact that the vehicle just powered over the top — even though we bounced like a ball in low-g.
Tabby slid down into her seat once we leveled out. “Damn, Hoffen, is it that hard to drive?”
“AI says I’m going too fast for the road. I think it might be on to something.”
“The road straightens out up ahead,” she said.
I turned back onto the road and accelerated again. We were finally coming to the edge of Azima and the road was turning less and had widened such that it could accommodate several vehicles side by side.
“Whoo hooo!” Tabby yelled, standing up and sticking her head through the hatch in the vehicle’s roof again.
Acclimating to the requirements of the road, we were soon bouncing along at thirty meters per second, which was about as fast as I dared, given the terrain.
“Not very practical,” Tabby said as she slid back into the seat.
“Sure is fun, though. If you aren’t looking to travel into space, it’s a lot cheaper. The only reason this vehicle would be expensive is because it’s armored and all the mechanical parts have to be enhanced to deal with the weight.”
“Are these really ninety thousand credits new?”
“I’ve already received an offer in Manetra on this one for fifty-two,” I said.
“That’s crazy. What’s that mini-tank worth?”
“Eight hundred thousand — in pre-Sendrei shape, that is. I have an offer for the shell at one hundred twenty thousand.”
“Shite, he knocked six-hundred-fifty thousand credits out of it?”
“Good thing too,” I said. “I saw you get hit. How many of those could you have taken?”
“Not too many. Glad Goboble hadn’t loaded that tank with armor piercing shells. Marny says there’s an armor piercing loadout the Popeyes use for hunting tanks. The goal is to get something through that armor and have it bounce around inside, making scrambled eggs of the crew.”
“Nice picture,” I said.
“Her words, not mine. I’m pretty sure I never want to be a ground pounder,” she said.
After a few minutes, driving became routine as we flew across terrain that had turned from urban to completely wild.
“Hey. Shortcut — turn right,” Tabby said.
My AI had shown me the same route, which would take us around the back side of Quail Hill, just north of Kuende Run. I took a tight turn onto the new road. There was something thrilling about how the vehicle’s knobby wheels bit into the road and threw chunks of gravel in response to our acceleration.
“They say there’s a Kroerak hatchery in Kuende,” I said,
Two of the most insidious things about Kroerak were the rapid reproductive cycles and the instinctive behavior of the hatchlings. The young bugs’ first act was almost always to plant more eggs. Kroerak hatcheries tended to be in remote locations where concentrations of spawn ended up planting their eggs before they moved out into the world to mature. Left unchecked, the vigorous aliens could easily take over a planet.
The city of Kuende had failed due to its own success. As the city grew, the natural environment had been razed and replaced by urban sprawl. Zuri’s natural defense, the selich root, was nowhere to be found and cities like Kuende had thus been turned into natural hatcheries.
“I have a thousand rounds,” Tabby said. “I hope we see something.”
We finally arrived on the edge of the ancient city about an hour after Santaloo’s star disappeared behind Zuri.
“Kind of spooky, don’t you think?” Tabby asked, as an adolescent Kroerak darted in front of the vehicle.
“Shite,” I said. “That’s no hatchling.”
“I’m going to see if I can get one,” Tabby said and stood back up.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I asked.
Tabby answered by firing a few rounds, filling the cab of the vehicle with the rat-tat-tat sound of the turret firing. “Frak. They’re fast.”
“I’m not sure it’s such a good idea to call attention to ourselves,” I said.
“What are they going to do? Eat us?” Tabby asked.
“Probably not, but I’m not sure I want to find out,” I said.
Two more adolescent Kroerak jumped onto the road and made a dash toward the heart of the city. We really should have turned away from the area already.
“Follow them!” Tabby said and responded by firing. The turret’s bullets were certainly sufficient and she cut them down easily.
“You know what Abasi are paying for the big boys?” Tabby asked and then answered her own question. “Five-grand apiece.”
There was a bounty for Kroerak on Zuri. When delivered, hatchlings earned us three hundred credits each and larger adolescents were more valuable. Catching sight of another adolescent further ahead, I gunned the accelerator and we flew over the bumps in the road.
The bugs had become wary and stayed back as we drove down the long-abandoned roads. Tabby was having difficulty pinpointing them now. In the back of my mind, I considered that, at our current speed, we could be getting deeper into the city — and deeper into trouble — than we might want.
“Uh, Tabbs,” I said and pulled on her belt to get her back into the vehicle.
“Frak, Hoffen,” she said, resisting me as she saw what I had. Up to the right, the powerful lights of the patrol vehicle had fallen on a hole in the side of a hill. Hatchlings and adolescent Kroerak boiled out and down the hill.
“This is shite,” I said and slid the vehicle to a halt as Tabby poured fire into what looked like a never-ending supply of the bugs. “Frak!” I pulled back on the throttle and attempted to turn around, but bumped up over a thick log and my rear wheels became suspended in the air. When I tried to pull forward, I was unable to free us.
“Anytime, Hoffen,” Tabby said, only letting off her firing for a moment. “I’m burning ammo like there’s no tomorrow.”
I jammed the throttle forward and back. The front wheels bit into the loose gravel but I was unable to dislodge us.
The turret stopped firing.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “We’re stuck.”
“We’re out of ammo,” Tabby said, pulling the hatch down and locking it.
“They’ll come through the windows,” I lurched forward and slammed shut the armor that covered the front glass.
“I know,” Tabby said, annoyed. “I’ve got it.”
She scrabbled over the seats and easily hefted the passenger side armor panel into place, locking it down just before the side of the vehicle was impacted.
I’d tried to do the same on my side, but the panel weighed at least fifty kilograms and I’d only been able to drag it into the back seat. “Damn, it’s too heavy.”
“Cover me,” she said as she kicked at a hatchling that had discovered the open driver’s side window and tried to jump in with us.
Pulling my heavy blaster from my chest, I slid to the side, out of her way. She was more than strong enough, but I didn’t think she’d have sufficient time.
I fired across her back as she reached for the armor. An adolescent was reaching for her and jabbed a claw into the back of her calf. “Frak!” she screamed, but didn’t drop the panel.
It took a dozen shots and Tabby slamming the armored plate onto its clawed arm, but we finally got the bug to fall away.
“This feels familiar,” she said. “Help me.”
She’d placed the panel where it needed to go, but the buffeting of the bugs prevented her from locking it down. I fired again at a claw that had snaked beneath the panel and then jammed my back against the armor as we strained to lock it in.
“It’s just like being back in that gymnasium in Morris, Minnesota,” Tabby said.
“Your leg. Doesn’t it hurt?”
“I’ll live,” Tabby sounded more annoyed than in pain. “The suit stopped the bleeding, but I need to get a patch on it soon or there’ll be serious rehab ahead.”
The vehicle rocked as more and more bugs hit the sides.
“Think the armor will hold?” I asked. “We could call Marny.”
“It’ll hold,” she said, sitting back in the chair. Though pain filled her face, she wasn’t ready to admit or give in to it. “It’d take a full-sized warrior to come close to piercing this armor.”
It was one of those surreal moments that would later become memorable. I swear — a person should be careful of what they think and say. The very next moment the vehicle was rocked by something hitting hard, just behind the passenger's seat. The armor buckled but didn’t allow it through.
“Like that?” I asked.
"No way! That’s something else," Tabby said. "If there were warriors here, we'd know. The Abasi would never let that situation stand."
For a moment, everything went quiet. I lifted and twisted a latch that held in place a chunk of armor covering a finger sized slit. I peered through the opening into the darkness, unable to see anything.
“Shite, there’s more ammo back here,” Tabby said. I turned and saw the crate of ammunition she’d uncovered.
“How many rounds?” I asked.
“Two thousand at least,” she said. “Interface our suits with the truck. We’ll have to operate the turret remotely and I’ll figure out how to reload.”
When I peered out of the tiny window, the sensors in my suit picked up what I couldn’t see with the naked eye, projecting the images onto my HUD. Where there had previously been a flood of Kroerak, now nothing moved aside from a couple of bugs Tabby had winged.
I closed the slit and pushed my AI to interface with the vehicle’s sensors. We were still locked out of the vehicle’s sensor, targeting and automated weapons control systems.
“Recommend rebuilding and remapping of control systems,” my AI indicated.
“Predict success ratio and time to complete,” I requested.
“Seventy-eight percent overall. Two minutes forty seconds.”
“We’re going to reboot, Tabbs.”
“Think that’s a good idea?”
“AI’s having trouble hacking the software, but it can wipe and rebuild easily enough.”
“I almost have this loaded,” she said.
“Approved. Load with standard Loose Nuts administrative authorization.”
The interior of the patrol vehicle blacked out.
“Frak, Hoffen,” Tabby complained as she popped on her suit lamps. “Not like I’m working with explosive ordnance or anything.”
The stillness of the night was eerie. The only sound was that of Tabby maneuvering rope-lines of ammunition into tracks that ran the length of the vehicle. She finished with a final snap of the hardened covers that enclosed the ammo and slid into the passenger seat next to me.
“What’s up with the systems?” Her face glowed from the dim lighting around her suit’s collar.
“One minute,” I flicked the timer from my HUD to her.
“Why do you think they stopped attacking?”
“Wish I knew. Maybe they’re waiting for us to get out of the vehicle.”
“That’s a lot of patience for Kroerak.”
“How’s your leg?” I asked.
“Hurts a lot like getting stabbed by a bug.”
I smiled. Tabby wasn’t one to complain. “Wish I knew what was going on out there.”
A chime in my ear sounded as the interior lights turned back on. My HUD showed a view from the exterior of the vehicle. I acknowledged my AI’s request to fill my entire field of view. As I turned my head, it was as if there was no canopy on the patrol vehicle, although it rendered Tabby in real time, next to me.
The scene outside hadn’t changed much from the view I remembered right before we’d seen the swarm of bugs, except for the twenty Kroerak hulls leading down the hill. The surrounding area looked clear, but I knew better than to rely on mechanical sensors to pick up bugs that were hunkered down. It was very possible they were lying in wait in the thick brush on either side of the road.
“We need to retrieve those adolescents,” Tabby said.
“Are you serious? We need to free this truck from whatever I ran over.”
“Cover me,” Tabby said and swung open the door. “I saw a come-a-long on the front of this thing.”
“Tabby! Get back in here,” I called while sliding into her seat and grabbing the manual turret controls. I quickly rescanned the area.
“I’m just going to hook this up to a tree,” she said, pulling a cable from the front of the vehicle and walking toward the brush on the other side of the road. She limped as she spooled out the cable.
“Don’t, Tabbs. Kroerak could be in there. I’ll call Marny.”
“I got this,” she said.
“Frak.” I felt like I’d seen a small amount of movement in the brush two meters north of where she was headed. “I’ve got movement, Tabbs.”
“Almost there.”
Tabby was bowled over by an adolescent that rushed out of the thick undergrowth. I tracked the two with the turret, but had no shot. The bug slammed its razor-sharp talons into the concrete as Tabby furiously avoided them.
Two more medium-sized bugs burst from cover. I had no choice but to swing the turret over and pick them up. Thup-thup-thup. The patrol vehicle’s slug thrower might not penetrate mechanized armor very well, but it splattered immature bugs like … well … bugs.
Tabby squirted out from beneath the bug. Just as it swiped at her, she lifted into the air, using her grav-suit’s primary capability. She cried out as blood spray arced across the patrol vehicle’s beams, glittering in the night air as it fell. The bug had cut Tabby’s thigh.
Now that the two were separated, I only had to tamp down my fear and rage long enough to drill the pointy frak-bastard back to whatever hell it came from.
“Tabbs?”
“I’m okay,” she called.
“That’s shite! Get back here.”
Her bio scan reported that she was still losing blood and her suit no longer had the right meds to staunch the bleeding in her artificially grown limb.
Still in the air, Tabby looped the cable around a tree and tied it off. If she’d only flown over there in the first place, she would have avoided the entire problem. Hindsight, however, wasn’t particularly helpful and Marny’s voice in the back of my head prompted me to stay in the moment.
I engaged the come-a-long, or winch as my HUD identified it, and we slowly pulled forward and off whatever I’d hit. Tabby slid back into the seat and closed the door.
“We can’t leave all those corpses,” she said, weakly. “We need that bounty.”
“Bilge water we do!” I shouted, adrenaline pumping as the rear wheels struck gravel. “You’re bleeding.”
Her suit compressed around the gash in her leg, providing a tourniquet and slowing blood loss. The problem was, she’d lose the leg if the flow was stopped for too long. The su
it only bought us a short amount of time.
I aimed the patrol vehicle’s gun at the cable, shot it off the tree and jammed the throttle forward. We threw gravel as I spun around. I straightened her up and we barreled down the road toward home.
Chapter 8
Call to Battle
"What possessed the two of you to go to Kuende Run without backup?” Ada asked, wrapping Tabby’s leg with a med-patch calibrated with nano-bots designed to repair the synthetic tissues of her leg. One of the advantages of synth technology was that it worked like DNA; the cells of the synthetic tissue contained enough information to fully repair any damage. The only requirement was application of the correct nano-bots and materials, all of which we could now replicate.
“My fault.” Tabby had regained consciousness. “Liam saw the problem before I did and I pushed him to keep going.”
“Explain this, Cap,” Marny said, holding up a ten-centimeter-long barb that was broken at one end. My AI virtually projected the rest of the beast; a two and a half meter tall Kroerak warrior now connected to the broken shard.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked, looking over to the patrol vehicle that sat on the floor of Nick’s crowded workshop, only a few meters from where Ada had met us with medical supplies.
Marny’s eyes followed my own. “That’s right, Cap. I pulled it from just behind the passenger seat. Not sure why the warrior stopped, either. A couple more hits and it would have broken through.”
“It was weird,” I said. “One minute the bugs were swarming us and the next, they were gone.”
“Is that when you got out of the vehicle?” Ada asked.
“Yes. I high-centered us on a log. Tabbs went out to tie the come-a-long to a tree,” I said.
“Winch.” Nick corrected.
“Right. Winch. A couple adolescents jumped her.”
“That’s disturbing,” Ada said. “They shouldn’t have come anywhere near you with that selich root in your veins.”
Corsair Menace (Privateer Tales Book 12) Page 10
