Camallay: An Infinite Worlds Novel (Marik's Marauders)

by Joel Babbitt

  As one, the deep, hollow sound of both heavy sonic guns firing in unison at max power sounded, slamming the megarunner like a pair of massive fists. Both shots hit the megarunner in the snout, the first knocking its head off to one side while the other slammed its head back so hard that the massive predator’s neck broke with the impact.

  As the crested megarunner’s legs folded, the body of the gigantic beast rolled with the momentum of its run, shearing the fin-like crest off of its neck, back, and parts of its tail. The crest on its head had shattered from the impacts of the two close-range heavy sonic guns, and its head lay at an awkward angle under its left shoulder.

  “Alright folks, good hunting. One down, two to go,” Alexander called out. “Don’t go for the big one. You may fire when ready, Priest.”

  Up on vehicle number two, the yazri called Priest began firing the pulse laser. Very quickly the dinosaur’s hide had a number of fist-sized gouges burned in it. The laser was having the desired effect, as the large beast completely ignored the wreckage of vehicle three. Unfortunately, however, as the large beast gave a throaty roar and began lumbering toward the rest of the convoy, the larger megarunner took notice and began to run toward the convoy as well, completely ignoring the quadcopter that was buzzing around over its head at a somewhat-safe distance.

  “That’s not good,” Alexander said to no one in particular. Then, keying his linker, he shouted into it. “Go! Go! Go!”

  Bug didn’t have to be told twice, neither did the other two vehicles. Flooring the accelerator, the three vehicles began to retreat down the path. Not two hundred meters down the road, however, Colonel Alexander called for a full stop. According to the video Ryker was pushing him, the pair of crested megarunners had stopped at the body of their fallen pack-mate and were now feasting on its corpse.

  “Sir, we need to get Soar’s body,” Captain Washington’s private message to the boss read. “The yazri will want it for their burial rites. We can’t just draw them away.”

  Alexander was fully aware of the yazri burial rites. Besides, he needed to get to Thompson and Alphabet who were still stuck in the ruined hulk of the vehicle that had been their transport. Thinking for a few moments, he sighed. He knew what had to be done.

  “Okay, folks,” he called out over the linker. “Here’s what we’re going to do.” With that he laid out his plan.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The entire company was grim-faced as they marched down the trail, yazri on foot in the lead with humans in the three remaining trucks manning the guns. They were not only going to confront the beasts, but they were going to kick them in the snout, ensure they were stirred up and angry, then confront them. The hope was that they had the firepower to do the job. Either way, this would be a very short, very lop-sided battle.

  As they arrived not a hundred meters away from the frenzied pair of crested megarunners, Colonel Alexander, the survivalist Jack Wolf, and Captain Washington all dismounted from their vehicles and each brought a small metal box. Jack Wolf, eyes wide with fear between bushy red sideburns, set his down not twenty meters in front of the small line of yazri. Captain Washington set her box down ten meters further on, while Colonel Alexander walked to the midway point between the convoy and the feasting megarunners before carefully setting his box down and backing away slowly, never turning his back on the large predators.

  The yazri all stood stonily, Sergeant Hobbs and Priest with their area burst rifles and Gunner with his conc-gun, all pointed toward the big monsters as the three humans slowly made their way back to the trucks. As Alexander, Wolf, and Washington stood behind the yazri and checked their linkers, the human, kiz’zit, and trillo specialists brought the three vehicles into a tight row behind the group, side by side for maximum firepower, then put them in park and manned the guns up top while the yazri and the other three humans all took up positions behind their opened armored doors.

  All was ready. It was go time.

  “On my command… ready… Fire!” Colonel Alexander yelled.

  All three yazri fired their heavy weapons, the liter-sized fragmentation rounds and the con-gun’s brilliant ball of light bursting just over the corpse of the fallen crested megarunner, while simultaneously the specialists fired the two heavy sonic guns and the pulse laser.

  The effect was immediate and dramatic; fragmentation pieces sliced through one eye of the smaller of the two megarunners, while the pummeling from the sonic guns and the gouging by the pulse laser infuriated the larger megarunner. Both dinosaurs immediately turned toward the party and, with defiant roars, charged toward the stationary group, half-blinded by the energy burst.

  “Steady… steady!” Colonel Alexander called out. The tension in the air was almost palpable as the two twenty-some ton dinosaurs charged.

  As the larger of the two dinosaurs reached the first of the three boxes amid the shrapnel that the yazri were putting out, Alexander tapped the screen of his linker. A massive explosion rocked the entire area, sending rocks and debris up into the air around the massive beast and shattering its hind legs. With a mighty crash the larger of the two crested megarunners fell off to one side of the path.

  The second megarunner was half-blinded by the shrapnel and energy bursts, and driven almost to the point of insanity by the intense, burning pain in his eye. Knowing only that the source of his pain was in front of him, the last megarunner trudged onward, its roars pain-stricken as it flailed its head about. As it ran over the second of the three boxes, however, with a loud explosion its misery ended.

  As rocks and bits of dinosaur rained down over Marik’s Marauders, the entire group spontaneously broke out in cheers.

  * * *

  The three remaining yazri; Sergeant Hobbs, Priest, and Gunner, had wasted no time in digging the body of their battle-brother Soar out of the stomach of the largest of the crested megarunners. They were all completely shocked, however, when they opened the creature’s stomach and found that Soar still had a pulse.

  Apparently, because the beast had swallowed him whole, he was still intact, though he’d gone some minutes without air, constricted, and bathed in stomach acid. His new armor had apparently done its job; though it was in shambles, it had kept the damage to Soar to a minimum.

  His companions had stimjected him, and he had woken up with little memory of the event. Even now Captain Washington and Jack Wolf were checking him out, but other than having lost clumps of hair to the beast’s stomach acid in the places where his armor had failed or on his now hairless wings that the armor hadn’t covered, and being bruised all over from the constriction, Soar seemed to be physically alright.

  Mentally and emotionally, however, from that point onward Soar’s fear of dinosaurs took on a whole new dimension.

  “He’s got to be one of the luckiest people I’ve ever met,” Colonel Alexander was saying as he stood with Jim Ryker surveying the scene.

  Standing next to Colonel Alexander, Ryker grunted his agreement. “First he somehow survives the full blast from a vehicle-bomb with only minor injuries, then he almost gets ripped apart by pack raptors, and now we pull him out of the stomach of the alpha-male of a crested megarunner pack. I don’t know as how ‘Soar’ quite fits him. I think ‘Lucky’ is more accurate.”

  Alexander smiled and nodded. “I think after this event that his brother yazri will take care of the re-naming.” He turned and looked at Ryker. “A yazri can’t survive three death-defying incidents without his battle-brothers taking notice.”

  * * *

  Cross-loading everything from the destroyed vehicle into the other three didn’t take long. For how heavy the megarunner was that had jumped on the truck, the vehicle had taken it like a champ, maintaining most of its structural integrity and protecting both passengers and cargo. Even the heavy sonic gun that Soar had been manning was still generally intact, though Sergeant Thompson had to take a welding torch to one of the outer blast-shaping plates to get it back to true.

  The heavy quadcopter wasn’t ma
de for carrying a crew-served weapon, and the heavy sonic guns had way too much kick to them to even consider mounting on the light craft, but Thompson got the idea to mount the pulse laser on the quadcopter and Colonel Alexander had okayed it. So, as the rest of the crew sat eating lunch in the fading light of early evening, Sergeant Thompson, Specialist Alphabet, the kiz’zit Specialist Krrrz, and the three small beings collectively called Specialist Ya-da-na all went to work with a gusto, stripping the destroyed vehicle of its targeting system and mounting both it and the pulse laser on the passenger side of the heavy quadcopter. Before long the pulse laser would be on a swivel mount with the targeting system mounted between its handles.

  As the three worked feverishly on retrofitting the heavy quadcopter with the pulse laser, the four yazri sat around speaking in short sentences, talking of the exploits of the past several days. And, as Colonel Alexander had foreseen, they decided to give Soar a different battle-name.

  “You will be called Cheetah,” Sergeant Hobbs growled, cutting off Soar’s much talk as he used many words to describe first how he had survived the vehicle-bomb blast, then the pack raptor attack, and finally being swallowed by a dinosaur.

  Soar looked at his sergeant without understanding, speechless for the moment.

  “The humans say that cats have nine lives, and you have already spent three. And cheetahs are cats with spots in their hair, like you,” Sergeant Hobbs spoke, then turned away.

  Soar, now Cheetah, just nodded his head, still not sure whether he liked his new name or not.

  Once Sergeant Thompson and the three specialists finished fitting the pulse laser on the heavy quadcopter, Thompson spent several minutes showing Ryker the ins and outs of the targeting system. Standing off to one side, Colonel Alexander watched with a satisfied look on his face. As he stood there, however, he heard someone hobble up next to him.

  “Hunt master,” a yazri voice spoke.

  Colonel Alexander turned to see Soar tentatively looking down at him. “Yes, what is it Soar?” he asked.

  “Can you tell me what a cheetah is?” the tall yazri asked.

  Alexander thought for a moment before pulling out his linker. After a few moments of tapping at the device, he held it up to show the picture of a long, lanky cheetah, its spots prominently displayed in the sun as it sat looking into the distance from a rock outcropping.

  “Why do you ask?” Alexander asked the young yazri.

  “Sergeant Hobbs says I will now be called Cheetah,” the young yazri confessed, his worry eased quite a bit by the strong and able look of the cheetah in the picture Colonel Alexander was showing him.

  “Well, that is a noble name,” Alexander said. “Why Cheetah, if I may ask?”

  “He says they have nine lives, like me.”

  Alexander smiled a knowing smile. “I guess they are cats,” he said, suppressing a laugh.

  The young yazri looked down at the colonel, thinking the smile meant that it was a good name.

  “And I guess you did ‘cheat’ death three times,” Alexander said.

  The young yazri’s eyes opened wider as he thought about that. Then, with a broad smile, Cheetah hobbled away to tell his companions what the colonel had said.

  * * *

  By the time the short twilight of Camallay had turned to night, the company was on its way again, this time in three trucks and one quadcopter. Captain Washington had proposed possibly sleeping in the trucks in the clearing, but Colonel Alexander was determined to press on. He reasoned that they’d be much safer out in the open expanses of the eastern steppes.

  By midnight the convoy reached the edge of the Mon-Jikkik’s forest. Stopping where the path spilled out into the open plains, Colonel Alexander had the three yazri gunners run a thermal sweep of the entire area out as far as their optics would reach, which was several kilometers. Sending the quadcopter out a few kilometers to scout out what appeared to be a little valley ringed with low hills, Colonel Alexander gave the signal to proceed and the three armored survey trucks followed what seemed to be the beaten path toward the low ring of hills.

  In a few minutes the report came back that the place looked safe, and when the party arrived they could see that the place had been something of a camping spot for the yazri clan in the past. Fire pits with embers long cold, pens for holding their mounts, and pits for throwing the bones of their slaughtered prey all dotted the small valley, though it was obvious that the place had not been used for some time.

  “Looks like we’re home, people,” Alexander said over the linker. “Deploy the solar generator, hook two of the trucks and the quadcopter up to it, and let’s put the third truck up on top of that taller hill on watch.”

  Within a few moments of arriving Sergeant Thompson had a roster to rotate the yazri and specialists through guard duty, while everyone was working on deploying the equipment, then bedding down. Within five minutes the entire camp was quiet, a lone truck with Gunner and Triplets in it keeping vigil while the most of the rest of the company slept.

  * * *

  Out on the roof of one of the armored survey trucks, Jim Ryker felt a slight buzz at his hip. Rolling over, he pulled out his dark matter radio interceptor, or dimmer as it was called. He was surprised to see a brief text from his sister Rianna.

  “Jim, don’t go to Principay,” the letters crawled across his screen.

  “Why?”

  “Not safe. You’ll see why,” was all that she wrote back, then the link went dead.

  For most of the next hour Ryker sat checking fringe resonances, or getting the rather advanced tech on his dimmer to set traps on more mainstream resonances to catch anything more Rianna might send elsewhere. In the end, there was nothing more to be found.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It was mid-morning before the company awoke, got packed, and left the staging area near the border of the steppes. The excitement of hunting something as innocuous as a herd of caribou drones paled in comparison to the previous day’s excitement of confronting the crested megarunner pack… which was just fine with everyone—especially Cheetah.

  “You’ve been awful quiet for this whole ride, Cheetah. How are you feeling today?” Colonel Alexander asked the young yazri who rode behind him now in the lead vehicle.

  “I still hurt in many places,” he said, “and I wish the doctor had not left us. I miss my hair.”

  Alexander smiled as he turned back around.

  “Colonel Alexander,” Jim Ryker’s face appeared, projected in his situence glasses. “The ford of the first river the Mon-Jikkik talked about is coming up,” Ryker said. The whirr of the quadcopter’s rotors and the rush of air around Ryker was mostly negated by the glasses’ software, but it made him sound a bit robotic.

  “Roger that,” Alexander answered. “Make sure you scout it well. I don’t want any surprises.” The riverbed itself was sunken, laying probably five meters below the level of the slow, undulated plains. A lot of things could hide in a five meter deep stream bed.

  “Ah, come on,” Ryker answered. “I thought you liked fighting dinosaurs.”

  Alexander grimaced at the lame joke and long-blinked to hang up. Up ahead, if the intel that Ryker had gained was correct, they would find whatever remained of the metal caribou the Mon-Jikkik had taken down a month or so prior. He was pretty certain this would provide further proof of Principay’s involvement.

  “Boss,” Ryker’s face appeared in his glasses again, “it’s certainly here. I see the metal frame and pieces of something mechanical strewn about around it.”

  Alexander nodded. “Do you see any wildlife in the area?” he asked.

  Ryker looked around for a few moments, his face a mask of concentration. “No, boss. Area looks clear to me.”

  Alexander resisted the temptation to tell him ‘That’s what you said last time’—but only just.

  Within a minute the three trucks had pulled up and formed a triangle on the ridges of the riverbank where the ford was. Alexander was taking no chances.
Where there was water, there was life—big life around here. Within moments of stopping, the colonel jumped out of his rig and joined Jim Ryker and RePete, who had already landed the heavy quadcopter and were poking around in the mess.

  “I think we’ve already seen these before,” Ryker said, pointing at the scattered pieces of what was obviously a SKAD drone, the same type of drone as those that had attacked them on the MCS Glenda, their ill-fated hover ferry.

  “Yes… yes we have,” Alexander said, deep in thought. In a few moments he looked up from the wreckage and took a short walk down to the ford. The entire ford area was churned up, as if a herd of some animal or another had recently passed through here.

  “You don’t suppose…” Alexander said, but instead of finishing his sentence he walked up to where the parts of the caribou drone lay scattered about and grabbed one of its legs. Walking back down to the fording area where all the hoofmarks were, he stuck the hoof of the caribou drone leg in the soft mud next to another print, then stood up to look at the two prints side by side.

  Curious about what Alexander might have discovered, Jim Ryker walked up behind him.

  “Those are absolutely the same prints,” Ryker said.

  “Yep,” Alexander answered. “And I’d bet they came through here not more than a day ago.”

  By this time, Jack Wolf, the party’s survivalist, had dismounted and walked over to see the tracks for himself.

  “Yessen, those be fresh tracks,” Wolf confirmed. “These tracks be made by another herd coming through today-time, not the one that this bag-o-bolts was part of, for this one be destroyed nigh on a month ago. Ye be saying ye want to hunt caribou. I think ye be hunting them today if ye want.”

  “Wash,” Alexander said into the linker.