“Only if you filter it first,” a marine answered absently.
I looked at their chests. One had stripes and the name “Maxwell” on it. The other four were Mutambi, Fergus, and Morin. A fireteam? They seemed like it. They moved in sync together without speaking – at least out loud. A lot of marines had sub-vocal microphones, and they learned to subvocalize all their communications.
We waited long minutes before someone spoke.
“Where are they?”
I looked at my Tactical Interface. The people on the rock were all marked by green inverted carets over their heads. On my map there was a green inverted caret over our group and another one, heading in the opposite direction. They must have turned right on the cliff where we turned left. By now, we were far apart and soon it would be even further.
Ian was close to Corporal Maxwell, and he was edging closer by the moment. “Where’s everyone else?”
“Calm down, colonist,” Maxwell said. His eyes had the unfocused look of someone listening intently.
“Where are they?” Ian asked, louder this time, and looming over the shorter Corporal.
Two other colonists were standing at either of his shoulders, following his lead. I studied them closely. They seemed like criminals, rather than political prisoners. There was something hardened about their faces. They glanced at each other like they were no strangers.
The Corporal narrowed his eyes, and I saw his gun barrel twitch upwards. Was he deciding whether to answer or shoot? I edged away from the line of fire.
The Corporal made up his mind. “Our communications are down. I don’t know where Command is. SOP is to proceed to the rendezvous point. We’ll do that.”
I looked around at the trees and cliffs surrounding our tiny island. There were two dozen of us, with no back up and only four weapons. Things were about to get interesting. I didn’t have time to think about what that might mean because I was too busy trying not to throw up.
Chapter Four
“This way,” Corporal Maxwell said, pointing up the creek in the direction that the other group was heading.
According to my map, it was the fastest route, but it would leave us pinned between the cliffs and vulnerable to attack. Matsumotos weren’t allowed to fight, but that didn’t mean we didn’t study tactics and strategy at school. You can’t lead an Empire if you aren’t sure what your armies are doing.
“We’ll be vulnerable in the canyon,” I said, my eyes looking away from the Corporal and my tone diffident. I didn’t want a power struggle.
He ignored me and started giving orders to the squad. Mutambi was to take point, and Fergus the rear. Morin was to keep an eye on us to make sure no colonists got ‘lost.’ I thought maybe he meant ‘make sure no prisoners escape.’ Why would anyone want to run into a jungle filled with a mysterious enemy that fertilized massive fungi in corpses?
“Who does she think she is?” I heard a stage whisper behind me.
I glance back. It was one of the toughs.
Identify
Francis Ch’ng. Sentenced to lifetime as a colonist. Charge: Trade in living persons, Trade in restricted biotech, First Degree Murder
So he wasn’t exactly Raggedy Andy. With biotech listed on his rap sheet I’d have to be careful. I couldn’t afford to let anyone know about the illegal tech that I housed in my pretty little head, and someone familiar with it would see the signs if I wasn’t careful.
“She thinks she’s a Matsumoto,” Ian said, and when I glanced at him his jaw was set in a hard line. “She thinks she can toy with people and manipulate them into doing what she wants before destroying their lives.”
Ch’ng grunted in satisfaction.
“She really is a Matsumoto,” his buddy said, with a faraway look in his eyes.
Great. He was thinking about how he could use me to his advantage. Better men had tried. Take Ian’s father, for instance.
Identify
Malcolm Sentry. Sentenced to lifetime as a colonist. Charge: Fourteen counts of murder in the First Degree.
Yikes. Ian was making some swell friends. I’d be terrified right now, but I already passed ‘terrified’ an hour ago and was still accelerating.
“I have a score to settle with her,” Ian said, his eyes granite.
I guess he was thinking of his father and his own unjust imprisonment, not the stolen kisses and offers he’d made me.
“Never liked Matsumotos much,” Ch’ng said, with a shrug.
“Move out!” Corporal Maxwell called, and I felt a sense of relief to be moving again. We followed in no particular order, having been assigned none, but somehow I was close to the front of the pack again. I didn’t like that. It’s hard to watch your back when all your enemies are behind you.
We started out at a steady jog. Mutambi was in the lead, his gun ready, scanning the undergrowth intently. The colors of the foliage were so high contrast that I thought it would be possible to hide rather easily. The striped grass and dark leaves were playing merry hell with my ability to scan and identify shapes, and that was even with a helpful filter from my Tactical Interface.
It was going to be a beautiful planet to die on. Some of the trees along the creek were in flower, and the delicate blossoms were like something one of my ancestors would have written poetry about. They would have loved it here. The black, white and purple plant life would have looked great painted in minimalist styles.
I realized as I ran that I was less tired than I ought to be.
Planetary gravity? I queried
87% Earth Standard
Well, that was a small boon. We had to carry everything we were going to eat on our backs, so at least we could count on it not weighing as much while we slogged through the forest – and on taking longer steps, since our muscles gave us a better boost in the lower gravity.
A red inverted caret flickered in the jungle to my left. I tried to focus on it, but it faded. A few minutes later another one flicked up to the right and then vanished. The computer thought enemies lurked in the trees. Was the forest tricking its optics, or were they only invisible to me?
I felt that weird echo in my implant again. Maybe the blasted thing was getting buggy. That would be terrible. It’s pretty hard to get secret technology serviced in the middle of nowhere and having a malfunctioning computer inside your brain would be a penance all its own.
There was another red inverted caret that disappeared as soon as it appeared. Then we scrambled up a rocky rise in the creek bed and the thick trees pushed aside to a wide clearing. On either side, the pale yellow cliffs still rose one hundred meters tall, but the canyon floor was wide, and the creek split off into a dozen rivulets and slowed down. The stripy grass grew thick and bore delicate purple flowers.
Even running for my life, it took my breath away.
Suddenly, a red inverted caret bloomed, but this time it didn’t go out. A second popped up on the other side of us, and then my view was filled with red inverted carets. I still couldn’t make out the Natives, but we were surrounded.
“Contact!” Mutambi shouted.
“Contact!” Fergus echoed from the rear.
Maxwell’s head whipped back and forth like a flag in a strong wind.
I peered at the trees. They were more of those giant near-oaks we’d been seeing all along, rooted in the slow flowing creek we splashed through. We froze, dead center in at least twenty meters of clearing on every side, and a thick ring of trees surrounding that. The ground under our feet consisted of water, sharp, yellow gravel, and more of the stripy grass. There was no cover. How long would it take a native to clear twenty meters? I didn’t even know if they were humanoid.
Intelligence on Local Natives?
See Database 11B on Baldric or New Greenland
Well, that was helpful.
“I don’t see anything,” Ch’ng said from behind me.
“Watch the shadows,” Morin muttered.
The barrel of his nettlegun was tracing the outlines of rocks and trees
like he was trying to paint a virtual picture.
“Anything more?” Maxwell asked. A tac viewer was flipped over one of his eyes making him look half-man and half-frog.
“Nothing,” Fergus said.
We waited, holding our breath – or at least our tongues. Some of us were still panting from the exertion, despite the lower gravity.
The echo rang in my mind again.
Roman? Is that you? I asked, and then a little more forlornly I added, I miss you.
For a moment, as we all sucked in air, I had enough time to imagine him here, watching my back, glaring at Ian and making snide remarks in my head. I would have given a limb for that voice right now.
He’d say something like, Pretty boy isn’t looking quite as pretty now in that pale shade of green. And I’d feel like things couldn’t be as bad as they were if he was making cruel observations
“Well,” Morin let out a breath, “that’s a relie-”
A shadow...split... somehow from the stripy grass at his feet into a ten-foot-high form. Dark and undefined, it...flickered....and then settled into a mirror image of Morin, spat in his face and disintegrated. Morin let out a scream. His finger depressed the nettlegun trigger, as his body writhed in agony, scream after scream ripping from his open mouth. It sounded like he was shredding his lungs. I dove to the gravel, my face half submerged in the water. Were there more shadows nearby?
There were more screams as the nettles from Morin’s gun rippled into other colonists, and then the fire stopped and I risked a look. Morin’s eyes still flickered with life as a yellow shoot poured out of his mouth, climbing for the sky. Then, they rolled back and were displaced by two more shoots racing for the cloud line.
I screamed. I don’t usually, but these were special circumstances.
Beside me, Ian was down with a nettle in the leg. It didn’t look serious, but I moved to help. He batted me off, his gorgeous face alive in a sneer.
“Get off me. I don’t want Matsumoto anywhere near me.”
I obliged with a pang of regret. If nothing else, I had thought we were friends before the Emperor sentenced us. I’d been a confidant, and even a potential lover to him before. Now he couldn’t even look at me without pain and anger blossoming in his eyes.
The mental echo rang forcefully in my head, blocking out other thoughts. I scanned our group. Maxwell stood beside the pillar that used to be Morin. He was passing orders to the rest of his squad. They showed no injuries. Another colonist was dead with a face full of nettles. He seemed to have caught the worst of it. There was one other minor injury, like Ian’s. Other colonists bent over Ian and the other man with medic kits out.
I scanned the woods. Now that I knew what to look for, I saw shadows splitting off from their sources and then merging back. When they split the Tactical Interface assigned them a red inverted caret until they merged back. I had so many inverted carets popping off in my view that I basically had my own fireworks show going on.
“Matsumoto!” Maxwell said, looking at me. I suspected he’d selected me because he knew my name. “Get that fallen tree and drag it here. I’ll cover you.”
I felt like there was a tennis ball in my throat. A fallen tree, weathered and branchless, lay about four meters from the forest edge. A large shadow loomed behind it. Which made me wonder... why were the shadows still so long?
Local planetary time? I queried.
12:16 local planetary time.
What? How many hours are there in a Baldric day?
There are 43 hours in a Baldric day.
Thanks for mentioning that. I snapped at the AI.
Typical computer garbage. Always leaving out the most relevant information. Too bad my sarcasm wouldn’t even dent its artificial self-esteem. So that explained why we’d been running for hours and it still looked like mid-morning.
I’d been thinking all that to distract myself as I edged towards the log, but once I was there I couldn’t ignore the shadow anymore. I reached slowly towards it.
“Today, Matsumoto!” Maxwell called.
Little did he know, I still had 31 hours in this day. Or maybe he did know. The marines had been pretty cagey so far with intel.
I grabbed the log, my heart racing, and scrambled back across the gravel, towing it behind me. It was heavy, and I was bent double and skidding on the loose gravel as my feet fought to bring the larger muscle groups of my legs to bear. I dropped it at Maxwell’s feet and saw that other debris was being piled around us.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Ad hoc fort.”
Wow. It was a really terrible one.
“Inside, colonist.”
It took all of one step to get inside. We huddled low in a “fort” ten inches high made of random rubble. The three marines stood above us with their nettleguns, prepared to make a last stand.
The history of Last Stands is a long and varied one. I wrote a paper on it once. From Old Earth’s General Custer, to Blackwatch’s own Admiral Wiebe, there have been a lot of famously bad last stands. A Last Stand is always bad, because it’s your last, but for some reason, when faced with difficult odds there are a lot of people who just flip the card table over as if it’s not even worth seeing how the cards play out. This move by Corporal Maxwell, was an epic card table flip.
We were going to die badly this morning. A perfectionist by nature, this bothered me more than my impending death did. All this time associating with Roman and the criminal elements we’d battled together had given me a shred of tactical dignity I was unhappy to relinquish.
The marines checked their nettleguns, reloading as needed. They adjusted sights or tac scanners, also as needed. Those of us in the pile sweated and breathed too heavily.
Around us, a humming began. Softly at first. Then louder.
My research into Native culture so far had revealed two things that they had in common with us: they liked killing, and they loved famous last stands. They were about as human as amorphous shadows could be.
The humming gained volume until it was all I could hear...that, and the infernal echo.
I blinked, and they were there: a sea of red inverted carets, splitting off from the shadows behind the oaks and zooming towards us as rapidly as normal shadows do when the sun dodges behind a cloud.
The marines started auto-firing. I couldn’t tell if it was killing anyone. The numbers of the shadows were so great that if nettles hurt or killed them it would be impossible to tell. Their fellows would just queue up to fill their places.
I stood up. If I was going to die I’d rather do it on my feet.
A shadow split off and raced towards me, coalescing in front of me. It was similar to me in size, and shape, but the details were different. I could just about pick them out if it would just stop moving. I released the straps and dropped my pack. The shadow swayed in front of me, as if to say, ‘Bring it on.’
The echo was so loud I could hardly think, and then as I raised my hands to defend myself...I split.
Chapter Five
Or at least that’s what it felt like. One minute I was Vera Matsumoto inside Vera Matsumoto’s body. The next minute I was Vera Matumoto inside someone else’s body. I experienced seeing what they saw and hearing what they heard, but overlaid on that was a fuzzy black and white view of what was going on from my body’s perspective – only now it was out of my control. In the moment I didn’t have time to break it down like that, it was only later that I was able to sort out the details. Nausea overwhelmed me, and my head spun – or someone’s head spun. It took enormous effort to pull myself back together and concentrate.
I was in a briefing. There were Fleet and Marine officers in uniform in a brightly lit conference room. Everything essential was fixed to a hard surface so it couldn’t float away if there were gravity problems, suggesting that we were in a starship. The man at the front wasn’t in fatigues but in a dress uniform and he was giving the briefing.
“After planetfall you have two hours,” he said. His ins
ignia marked him as a Marine Colonel, and his widening midsection and thinning hair suggested he was old enough for the job.
While I could clearly see the Colonel, there was a faint overlay effect in my vision so that I could also see thru Vera’s eyes. She was fighting the shadow, her feet and hands lashing out quickly, connecting somehow with the inky mass. It spurted black puffs of shadow into the air every time she connected.
“Find Driscoll’s followers and capture them. Alive.” The Colonel was trying to channel his intensity into every word.
Vera fought like a machine, shadow after shadow. She flipped and ducked and wove, fists and feet flying in beautiful precision. Who was it that had taken over my body? Who was kicking butt over there on Baldric in my body? It was so amazing I could hardly focus on the briefing. It felt familiar, like I had seen that angel of death before.
A holopic was in the middle of the conference table. It showed a man in his forties. He looked like someone who could make trouble – as it seemed he was doing. He also looked intelligent and cunning. Whoever I was, I had better watch out. Like Eads McIsaac, this one had “predator” written all over him.
The colonel narrated as the holopic spun from image to image.“Patrick Driscoll was targeting the Matsumoto Dynasty with his attacks before we captured him. Last night his followers succeeded in killing Denise Matsumoto, the Emperor’s cousin.”
I stifled a gasp. Poor Denise. I felt my heart sinking, even as I watched a pool of shadows gather at Vera’s feet as she piled up shadow enemy after shadow enemy. Her reflexes were amazing.
But, Denise. Oh, Denise. Roman and I had fought so hard to save her, and now this. A tiny part of my brain reminded me that Nigel had called her a greater problem now that her mind was gone. He wouldn’t have set her up to be taken out by terrorists...would he?
“Their tactics are unique and highly dangerous. Do not let them touch you at any cost. They inject people against their will with a brain-hijacking technology. The technology is classified, but we warn you again not to allow them to touch you.”
The Splitting (The Matsumoto Trilogy Book 2) Page 3
