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

by Joel Babbitt

  “Boss,” Wolfman said as he walked slowly, bent over and shining his flashlight on the ground like he was following a trail. As Colonel Alexander came over, he stood up to explain what he was looking at. “He has genmods, that’s for certain. He leapt from the quadcopter just before it hit. Used the branches to slow him down. And what’s more, he swung from that branch,” he said, pointing up at a thick branch, “and landed feet-first back there,” he said, pointing at a clear patch of ground behind him.

  Alexander’s alarmed look and the residual concern on his face showed what he thought of an opponent who could swing from a tree while falling from an out of control quadcopter.

  “This trail here be where he ran, not walked, strong and healthy as ever, up the mountain toward the pass,” Wolf finished.

  Alexander rubbed the back of his neck in thought, shaking his head and grimacing. As Sergeant Thompson’s truck caught up with the group, he looked up at the specialists and yazri around him.

  “Alright, everyone. We’ve got one downright hard-as-nails quarry to track, so mount up and let’s get at it. Be on your toes now; I’m sure he’s expecting us.”

  Chapter Twenty One

  Jim Ryker was surprised to feel his dark matter radio, or dimmer, vibrating in his pocket as he held his sonic up at the two men who were trying to stop him from taking their mining cart. The sturdy little cart was shielded from the EMP blast by at least a hundred meters of earth, and so it was unaffected. But as Ryker had switched it on and began driving out of the main mine shaft, a pair of security guards had noticed him—but they came from the surface, so their sonics didn’t work.

  “Back away, now,” Ryker said, motioning the men toward the wall. “No one needs to get hurt.”

  The two guards backed away from their guns, which Ryker could clearly see were fried, and toward the wall. Kicking the cart out of crawl mode and into trail mode, he pressed down on the accelerator and in seconds he shot out of the mine entrance going over fifty kilometers per hour. Miners that were standing around gawking at the destruction and fireworks down in the valley below them scattered and cursed Ryker’s reckless driving, oblivious to the fact that the cart was stolen.

  Once he got out onto the paved road that led down to North Principay, Ryker pulled the dimmer from his pocket and saw the impossible—a message from his sister, Rianna Firstwave. Slowing down enough to read it, he punched the notification and read it with horror.

  “Jim. Am hurt. Bad. Need help. Tracker on.”

  Stopping to tap the dimmer against his linker to retrieve the coordinates, Ryker thought for a moment that it had to be a trap. After all, three EMP bombs had gone off down there. Dimmers were EMP shielded, but he didn’t think they could resist that much EMP. In the end, however, it didn’t matter. Ryker would follow any lead to find his sister… but he’d also keep his weapon ready.

  “On the way, sis,” he tapped back, then throwing his dimmer back in his pocket he took off down the hardball road at full throttle.

  * * *

  Rianna lay on the ground outside Titus Brutian’s command center. The pallor of her skin, the listless way her eyes opened and closed, the dazed look on her unrecognizing features all showed clearly that her life was slipping away. She lay in a pool of her own blood, the sticky red liquid pooling below the puncture wound in her stomach. Her hand shook as she feebly tried to hold it over the wound, trying to apply some pressure to staunch the flow.

  Jim Ryker leaned back from the corner and reset his situence glasses from magnification mode as he sat on his haunches. Shaking his head, he picked up his blaster pistol. This was no time for the sonic pistol. Whoever had done this to his sister deserved to die. Looking back around the corner, he studied the area again. He couldn’t see Rianna’s dimmer, and that concerned him. The lack of people, of movement, of anything other than Rianna laying there at the foot of the tower, had his senses in hyper mode. This was beginning to feel more and more like a trap.

  Checking the power clip in his Mk-17, Ryker held the blaster pistol in both hands and made a short sprint to the corner of the next building. Still seeing nothing moving, he sprinted to the base of the tower, not three meters from his sister’s listless form. Waiting and listening for a few moments among the support beams at the base of the tower, Ryker quickly holstered his pistol and pulled out a small first aid kit that came with the Principay Security Forces kit he was wearing.

  In a dash Ryker was over next to his sister. Turning her onto her back, he pulled out a broad syringe of bleeder sponges and pushed them into the wound. A faint groan that escaped her lips was the only sign of life he could detect. Spraying plastiflesh over the hasty blood-stopping treatment, he threw the empty syringe to one side and gently picked his sister up. Struggling with the awkward load, Ryker lifted Rianna onto his shoulders, putting one arm around her leg and holding her arm with his hand.

  “Okay, Ree, I’ll get us out of here,” he mumbled to his sister as he stood and drew his blaster pistol.

  “How sweet.” The flat, cold voice came from above, startling Ryker. “Now, put down the blaster pistol or I’ll be forced to shoot both of you.”

  Ryker slowly turned around a looked up. Standing on the railing of the command center’s deck was none other than Colonel Alexander’s turncoat captain Josh Langdon… and he had a crossbow aimed at them. A couple of moments later two other similarly hardened-looking men appeared pointing crossbows at the pair as well.

  “Crossbows?!” Ryker said in disbelief.

  “That EMP blast seems to have made them valuable for more than just hunting,” Langdon said with a wicked smile.

  “Oh, you mean the EMP blasts that you caused… and that the Solkin Authorities are certainly going to come investigate?” Ryker said.

  A slight moment of doubt crossed Langdon’s features, but was quickly suppressed.

  “I had nothing to do with it,” Langdon said.

  “Really, so you had nothing to do with the secret caribou drone herd that was carrying the three EMP bombs? And you had nothing to do with the financial transactions between Principay and Stellar Corp, I’d imagine?”

  Ryker didn’t know who was supplying the weapons to Principay. He was just fishing. But by the look on Josh Langdon’s face, he’d clearly hit the mark.

  The other two men who were standing next to Langdon both looked at him in alarm.

  “Boss,” one of the men said, “I didn’t sign on to tangle with the Solkin Authority.”

  “Shut up!” Langdon snapped at the man. “Marik’s stooge here can’t prove anything. In fact, I think we blame the EMP attack on Marik!”

  “That would work… if we didn’t have your authorizations on the drones that attacked our hovercraft, and your identical authorizations on the EMP bombs,” Ryker lied.

  Langdon’s face fell. He knew that if the Solkin Authority got that evidence, he’d be a dead man, guaranteed. The other two men both started backing away from Langdon as if he had some highly contagious disease.

  “The gig’s up, Josh,” Ryker said, seeing his guesses had hit the mark. “We already have the evidence we scanned on the bombs when we intercepted the drone herd out on the eastern steppes. If I were you, I would start running. Who knows, the Solkin Assassins may not catch you.”

  The two men with Josh Langdon had both left by now, running down the back steps of the command tower’s wrap around deck, intent on getting as far away from what they knew would be coming as they could.

  Langdon hesitated, lowering his crossbow for just long enough… Suddenly, Ryker whipped his blaster pistol up, aimed, and took a shot. Langdon pulled back instinctively, saving himself from the bolt that would have hit him in the face. The laser bolt sheared off the front of the crossbow, however, causing the front half of the weapon to explode away from Langdon.

  Not wasting a moment, Ryker began to run for his vehicle with his sister draped over his shoulders.

  Langdon didn’t waste any time either. He knew that those three E
MP bombs were not the only forbidden tech he and his company had provided to Titus Brutian.

  With a determined smile on his face, Josh Langdon ran toward the mining complex to retrieve a vehicle. All he had to do was make it to the war bunker with all its equipment and the Solkin Authorities would never find him…

  * * *

  The young night-shift doctor in East Principay’s medical clinic was used to traumatic injury, but he wasn’t used to operating in the dark by feel with only non-powered medical equipment. Strewn around the facility on emergency stretchers or just laying on the ground were some thirty or so people, most of which had burns and lacerations from exploding electronics. His staff just wasn’t adequate to handle such an emergency, and the day-shift staff was showing up slower than the inflow of patients. So far he had only two medtechs on hand, with no other doctors present. All his helperbots were fried; even the sweeperbots were reduced to doorstops.

  It was going to be a long night.

  Then the strangest thing arrived; one of those four wheel, all-terrain mining carts. Its lights lit up the entire yard in an eerie, horizontal blaze of light. The contrast with the inky black darkness of this quiet corner of the compound, whose only light had been the moon and the distant glow of the fading fires of the power stations up in North Principay, was enough to turn every head that could turn. What was inside the cart, however, was to be expected.

  “Doc!” Ryker called out as the mining cart skidded to a stop.

  “I’ll be with you in just a moment,” the young doctor said, pulling another piece of glass out of the older woman’s arm that he was tending to at the moment, taking advantage of the light while he had it. When Ryker turned off the cart, however, the lights went back out and he was momentarily blind.

  “Do you mind turning the lights back on?” the doctor called out as Ryker walked toward him carrying someone in his arms.

  Setting his sister down next to the doctor, Ryker pulled a small tube out of a pocket on his hip. “How about this, doc; I give you this flashlight and you tend to my sister here right away.” He turned it on and pointed it at the wound in Rianna’s stomach.

  The doctor looked where Ryker was pointing. It was obviously a rather serious wound, in fact he was surprised she wasn’t dead already by how pale she was. Looking up sourly at Ryker, the doctor took the flashlight and immediately got to work.

  Grabbing the field medical kit he had pilfered from the mine offices, Ryker pulled out a trauma glove from the kit and held it up for the doctor to see as he crouched next to him again.

  “Now you’re talking,” the young doctor smiled as he slipped the cuff of the trauma glove over his hand, seating the two fingers and thumb of the glove with all their helpful tools. Tapping away at the controls on top of the glove, the doctor shook his head. “Wherever did you find a functional trauma glove?” he asked.

  “Underground in the mine,” Ryker answered. “Everything underground was protected from the EMP blast.”

  The doctor muttered some sort of acknowledgement. He was already digging through Rianna’s wound. After a couple of moments, he looked up at Ryker. “Hey, tap your linker to the glove, will you? I need to see what my fingers are touching.”

  Obediently, Ryker tapped his linker to the glove, bringing up on the linker screen the feed from the trauma glove’s fingercam. The mass of tissue and ubiquitous blood that showed was completely unintelligible to Ryker, but as the doctor searched and found layer after layer of punctured tissue with the fingercam, cauterized them with the minilaser on the middle finger, Ryker looked on in wonder.

  “I know. It’s primitive. I should be using plastiflesh to seal the wounds and regrow the damaged areas of the diaphragm and intestines, but without an autosurgeon I just don’t have the tools to do that,” the doctor said as he carefully searched for the next perforation in Rianna’s intestines.

  Ryker shook his head slowly. “I’m not complaining, doc,” he said reverently, watching the doctor’s life-saving skills in awe.

  “Tech!” the doctor yelled out without looking up.

  In a few moments a young woman came to his side. “Yes, Doctor Silverstein?” she asked.

  “Go into the clinic and make four bags of hemosynth for this patient, please,” he said rather perfunctorily. “Oh, here, take this flashlight,” he said as an afterthought, pointing with his chin to the ground next to him.

  The young tech grabbed the flashlight and disappeared into the clinic, returning a few minutes later just as the doctor was sealing Rianna’s abdominal muscles.

  “Here, hook her up and pump all four liters in,” the doctor said.

  “Yes, doctor,” the tech said as she bared the intravenous needle and prepped Rianna’s arm to receive the large needle.

  When the doctor finished sealing the puncture wound in Rianna’s upper abdomen, he lifted the trauma glove, punched a button that sterilized both his hand and the device with a small pulse, then stood up.

  “Let her soak up all four liters,” he said, “then take her home to rest for a few days. The EMP knocked out all our nano-batches, so she’ll have to recover the old way; with plenty of rest.”

  “Thanks, doc,” Ryker said.

  The young doctor was already on to the next patient, however, and didn’t even hear him.

  * * *

  “Whatever are you doing?!” Colonel Alexander asked Ryker when his face finally popped up on the linker.

  “I’ve got my sister,” Ryker said.

  Alexander grimaced and growled, but in the end he couldn’t say anything to that.

  “Are you going to join us?” Alexander asked.

  “Can you send the quadcopter for me?” Ryker asked in return.

  Alexander’s hesitation told Ryker that something was wrong before his words ever did. “RePete’s dead, Jim,” Alexander said in a calm, even tone. “Titus Brutian stabbed him, it appears, then somehow survived this crash,” he said, panning the linker’s camera over to the wreckage of the quadcopter behind him. “And he did it without a scratch. Then he took off over the mountain. We believe he’s heading north toward who-knows-what.”

  Ryker’s eyebrows were raised when Alexander brought the linker back to his face. “I guess you won’t be sending the quadcopter for me, then,” Ryker said.

  “Uh-huh,” Alexander said, annoyed.

  “Okay. Well, I’ve got one more errand to run, and then I’ll join you,” Ryker answered.

  “It’s your funeral, Jim,” Alexander said as he hung up abruptly.

  Ryker shook his head. “I don’t think that guy likes me changing his plans,” he mumbled to himself as he long-blinked the link closed on his glasses and kept driving.

  * * *

  Ryker twisted the steering wheel, flat sliding the little cart and kicking up gravel in a spray that caused the five security personnel that stood in the path to cover their faces. Stomping on the accelerator, Ryker’s little cart spun its wheels, kicking out more gravel behind it as they sped off between two small workshop buildings.

  “Hang on, Rianna,” Ryker called out, though Rianna was still unconscious and strapped in the cargo bed of the little cart. With the five security personnel running after him, Ryker sped down a couple more side lanes, coming back to the main road half a block further up.

  Looking at his linker, Ryker took a quick turn at the next intersection, speeding down another block before taking another quick turn. Within moments he was in the residential area, a rather upscale one by the size of the pre-fab buildings and by the rather lavish landscaping for a colony. The people in the streets talking about the EMP event all moved aside readily enough, however, so Ryker pressed on. Within moments he had made another couple of turns and found himself in a small circle of five identical houses.

  “She’s not there,” a weak voice came from behind him.

  “What!” Ryker looked back to see Rianna grimacing in pain, semi-conscious, but looking groggily over at him. Jumping out of the cart, he ran around next
to her.

  “Alyssa’s in the bunker,” Rianna whispered, her head aching with the effort of speaking.

  Ryker was surprised, but grateful that his sister was conscious.

  “Do you want to sit up?” he asked as calmly as he could.

  Rianna just wobbled her head a little.

  “Well, then hold on,” Ryker said as he jumped back into the driver’s seat. Punching the accelerator, he tore up a small stand of bonsai trees as he ripped through one of the five yards that belonged to Titus Brutian’s five wives.

  As he cleared the rear of the house, the large plasticrete dome loomed some fifty meters away, just past the outbuildings and garages that supported this seemingly normal—yet rather strange—neighborhood. Behind him, Rianna groaned. Ryker pressed on, screeching to a stop just outside the dome’s front door.

  Running to the door, Ryker tried the old-style, mechanical lock that clearly locked the thick steel door. After pulling on it a couple of times to no avail, he stepped back and shot it a couple of times with him blaster pistol. It did little more than score the hardened plasteel housing.

  Then, from behind Ryker, his sister’s voice came in little more than a whisper. “I have… the key.”

  Ryker didn’t ask how or why. Taking a small ring of mechanical keys from his sister’s outstretched hand, he immediately started running through the ring, trying each one until one fit. Turning the key, he pulled the heavy door open to see a woman with three young girls, one of them a toddler and another just a baby, huddling together forlornly in the middle of the bare floor. The woman only glanced up, not daring to look Ryker in the eyes. But even in that glance he recognized his sister’s best friend from years before, the woman whose brother Rianna had married, the one who had become a widow with Rianna when their husbands’ ship has been destroyed in a core overload.