by Craig Allen
“That’s what we’re going to do,” Sonja said. “Get back on the hopper. Cody, rig another viewer, and—”
“Oh, shit,” Bodin said. “Gunny, we just ran out of time.”
Across the cavern, the large door started to close. Below, toads swarmed over the ships, and hoppers rose into the air.
Sonja called out, “Contact! Hoppers incoming. They’re onto us.”
On the flat viewer in the hopper bay, five hoppers appeared. They flew up from the bottom of the cavern, all heading straight for them.
“They’re not at full burn,” Sonja said. “Not yet, anyway.”
“They must have seen the receiver shorting out.” Cody watched the hoppers as they closed in. “How long until that door closes, Sonja?”
“About two minutes. And I doubt that door’s going to open for us if we just set off an alarm.”
The hoppers moved slowly, which meant they probably weren’t sure what was happening, but they’d be close enough to figure it out before long—Cody guessed about one minute.
Bodin reached for his suit and pressed a button. The tether detached from his suit and dangled from the hopper.
“Bodin?” Cody watched as the tether automatically retracted into the hopper. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m staying.” He reached into one side of his helmet and drew forth a cable a few millimeters in width. “I’ll blow these things up myself.”
“What?” Sonja spun around in the cockpit. “Cody, you have to rig a new one.”
“I’m on it.” Cody ducked back inside the hopper and dug through a locker. “Bodin, get back inside. Let me try this.”
“You know better than that, Egg,” Bodin said. “Thirty seconds to get a viewer, five minutes to set it up, and minimum two minutes for me to connect it to the detonator. And look at those inbound. Look at that door.”
Cody pulled up the hopper’s external view through his suit. The hoppers were less than a minute out, and the door continued closing.
“Then we leave the bombs and return when we can,” Cody said. “We don’t have to detonate them now.”
“They’ll find the bombs before that, then they’ll secure the fuck out of everything.” Bodin pointed at the copy of the Washington below. “That thing is about done. We can’t let them launch this shit. That ship alone can go to any human world and kill millions.”
Cody tried to think of another possibility, but he was at a loss. They needed more time, which they didn’t have. That meant the only plan that made sense was Bodin’s, and that was insane, but they had no other option.
“Sonja, un-ass now,” Bodin said.
Cody couldn’t recall Bodin ever calling Sonja by her first name.
“Eggman, you better take care of her, or I’m coming back from the goddamn grave to haunt your ass.”
The hoppers were less than five hundred meters away. The other hoppers’ grasers would cut them to pieces so quickly they wouldn’t know they had died.
“Damn it, Lance.” Sonja’s voice cracked over the comm. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Bodin said. “It was a good idea. We gotta toast this whole place before they get these things finished.”
Cody ran to the nearby wall and popped open a locker. He grabbed a belt of two dozen fusion grenades, standard in every hopper, and a coil pistol. “Bodin!”
Cody tossed the coil pistol at Bodin, who snatched it out of the air.
“They’re here.” Sonja’s voice trembled. “We have to go.”
“Then go.” Bodin pointed at Cody. “I meant what I said on the Washington. You take care of her.”
The hopper drifted away as the hatch started to close. Cody ran for the cockpit and jumped in the copilot’s seat while Sonja fired at the incoming hoppers, enticing them to chase them and ignore Bodin. Behind Bodin, reeds, blobs, and creatures that might have been toads at one time scrambled from the wall to the pylon then crawled up the pylon toward Bodin.
Cody brought up one of the hopper’s external cameras on his suit’s HUD and focused on Bodin. One red tentacle thing slithered along the pylon ahead of the others. Bodin let the thing have it with the coil pistol, and it backed off at once. He fired at a blob farther down the pylon. Its head, or what passed for a head, disintegrated under the blast and dropped from the pylon. The others continued up the pylon, unmoved by the death of their comrade.
To make matters worse, a hopper approached him from below. His tiny coil pistol wouldn’t defend him against that. By that point, they were too far away for Cody to make out any more details. Ahead, the giant aperture continued to close. Cody gripped his seat. If they made it out, it’d be close.
Sensors registered a boom as they went supersonic, blazing through the cave while hoppers launched from landing pads. In a few places, Kali-sized vessels fired up their engines. Gravimetrics lit up everywhere. Creatures of all kinds stood side by side on the platforms, watching them race by. A few took potshots with coil weapons, which would do little. However, the hoppers behind them made Cody wonder if he was about to spend his last moments with Sonja.
“We’ll make it,” Sonja said. “Shit. I’m sorry we came down here.”
“We all agreed to do it.” Cody recalled Bodin’s initial reluctance but kept that to himself. “And we all agreed we had to do something about this place.”
Sonja jerked the stick, and the hopper started to spin. “Shit, they’re firing at us.”
The massive door lit up with sparks from the grasers that missed the hopper, doing almost no damage to the door itself. If those grasers made contact with the hopper, though, that was another matter. Also, the door itself was nearly shut.
“Twenty seconds,” Sonja said. “I can’t veer off course too much, or we won’t make it.”
Also, if the hoppers behind them locked on, they wouldn’t make it. That left one other option.
Cody pulled up the weapons console. He wasn’t sure if he could hit anything with accuracy, but it was worth a try. He brought up the weapons, which tracked the targets behind them. He chose a target and fired. The graser skimmed off its hull but did little damage. The rest of the hoppers scattered.
“Keep it up.” Sonja gritted her teeth. “You don’t have to kill them, you just have to hold them off. The bombs will kill them anyway.”
Cody fired over and over, trying to hit a hopper, but it was like shooting flies with a coil pistol. He half wondered what sort of damage he was doing to the inside of the cave. That was nothing compared to what would happen when the nukes detonated, though.
The door loomed before them. Sonja banked hard and slipped through the crack, shrinking ever smaller. Cody didn’t get an exact measurement when they skirted through the gap, but the number of meters was in single digits. Cody fired the graser one last time through the opening behind them before the door shut.
Low-light sensors illuminated the dark tunnel as Sonja raced up the tunnel. Nothing pursued them except time.
Sonja leveled the hopper in the center of the tunnel and gave it full throttle. “Christ, I hope Bodin can—”
The entire tunnel rattled. Cody pulled up a view aft of the hopper. The large door shivered briefly then collapsed into the tunnel. Fire raced after them.
Cody closed his eyes. That fire had consumed the creatures in the caverns, but it had also consumed Bodin. He put every memory he had of his friend into a secret place in his heart but only for the moment. When they were safe, he would open it and mourn. He would do a lot of mourning but only if they survived.
Sonja ran her fingers along through the controls, and a red light flashed. She pushed the throttle forward. “I’m passing the reactor’s safety limits.”
A crack appeared at the end of the tunnel, and the door split in two as it opened to the outside world. Cody grimaced. The door wasn’t opening quickly enough, but if they slowed down, the fire would get them.
Sonja maneuvered for the crack while the fire behind them closed in quickly. They pas
sed through the open door and into the bright yellow sky of Kali. Behind them, the fire blew past the doors, causing them to collapse inward. The entire plateau buckled and caved in, creating a crater a good six kilometers across.
Cody would’ve cheered, but Bodin was in the middle of that hell, a hell that destroyed that entire construction facility. Cody prayed that was the only factory the planet had, but he doubted that the creatures of this world would put all their eggs in one basket.
Sonja pointed. “What’s going on down there?”
The reeds covered every inch of the terrain around the newly formed crater, all the way out to the horizon, and they were taller than Cody had ever seen before. Some stretched a hundred meters in the air, quivering like the fingers of a dying man. The sight stretched all the way to the horizon.
“It’s like they’re in pain,” Sonja said.
Cody grimaced. “They’re all connected. Every reed on the planet knows what happened.”
“Contact!” Sonja leveled out the hopper. “On our six and closing.”
Cody checked the transponder to make sure it was still sending the false signal then brought up the rear camera. The hopper closed in on them slowly.
“It’s only one,” Cody said. “Our transponder signal should still be announcing us as one of them.”
“Yeah, but whoever it is probably saw what we did.” Sonja bit her lip. “They might announce to everyone else that we’re not who we say we are. The jig will be up, and I don’t know if we can get back to where we were without getting spotted.”
Cody started to say something when a message on the comm interrupted him. “Banshee Five One, this is Banshee Four Niner, do you copy?”
Sonja laughed out loud. “I read you, Banshee Four Niner. Glad to see you made it.”
“How did they make it?” Cody asked. Then he winced, realizing he was on the same open channel as Sonja.
“Wasn’t easy,” Sinclair said. “We managed to get away from those Kali ships back at the cluster. Their weapons fire never came close, like they were trying to scare us away.”
“That is odd, sir,” Sonja said. “Any idea why?”
“None.” The second voice was Ensign Francis. “And we didn’t care at the time. We got out as quick as we could, but when we got back, the Washington was gone.” He spoke the Washington’s name with reverence.
Sinclair continued, “We tried to park near the edge of the system, but the toads had us surrounded at once. They’re scanning every inch of the system with gravimetrics. We had to tangle with some hoppers and lost our Daedalus collar in the process. We managed to duplicate the transponder, and we’ve been undercover ever since.”
“Hey, you guys see any other survivors?” Francis asked.
“Negative,” Sonja said, “other than you two.”
“That’s a damn shame,” Sinclair said. “Hey, what happened to Sleepy?”
Sonja related the story of what happened to Lieutenant Hayes as they lined up together in the sky and flew west.
When Sonja finished, Francis spoke. “Damn. I’m sorry to hear that. He was a good pilot.”
“That he was,” Cody said. “How’d you know it was us in this hopper?”
“Gunny flies like a madwoman,” Sinclair said. “So I took a chance you weren’t a toad.”
“And we flew here when we detected that underground explosion,” Francis said. “What was with that, anyway? Did you see it?”
“Roger that,” Sonja said. “We saw it up close and personal.”
“You’ll have to tell us about it.” Sinclair pulled ahead of Sonja. “Follow my lead, Gunny. We set up a base of operations where we can decide what to do next.”
As they flew, Cody didn’t feel like celebrating even if he was happy to see Sinclair and Francis had survived. Bodin hadn’t, and neither had the crew of the Washington. They had accomplished much, but nothing had changed. They were still stranded on a world full of monsters ready to kill them, and they had no clear way to go home.
Chapter Seventeen
Sonja and Sinclair kept clear of jellyfish and dark clouds containing colonies of insects—both of which might have been working with the toads. They spoke on a coded frequency but still remained quiet when other hoppers flew past, like thieves quieting down when someone treads too close. Kali ships still hovered in orbit. Cody was certain there were more ships than could be seen on gravimetrics.
Cody noted that Sinclair’s hopper was broadcasting the same sort of transponder code they were. How they’d hacked it was the real question, and he wondered if Deveau had lost card games to people other than Bodin.
Poor Bodin. Cody’s mind raced, searching for some other way they could’ve detonated the nukes without killing Bodin. Nothing came to mind. He’d have had to know the future to save Bodin, and not even an admiral could manage that.
That didn’t make him feel any better, though.
Cody checked their course against their charts of the planet. They were headed for an island in the deep ocean, one of the many homes to the fliers. “We’re heading for the fliers?”
“That’s affirmative,” Sinclair said. “After we figured out that transponder trick, we ran into a few fliers that had a viewer and managed to contact them. We followed them here. Been using it as a base of operations.”
Cody let out his breath. “At least they’re still alive.”
“Last I saw, Doc,” Ensign Francis said. “They hid out in that cave of theirs when shit went crazy.”
Cody finally asked the question he’d been running through his head since they had met up with Sinclair and Francis. “So, how did you guys hack the transponders?”
“It wasn’t easy,” Sinclair said. “It took Francis nearly a day to get it. That’s how you did it, right?”
“Right.” Cody kept his expression as neutral as he could, as that didn’t feel like the right time to reveal they had a colonel’s access codes.
After a moment, the island appeared in the distance. Sinclair flew lower, and Sonja followed.
“Hang on a sec,” Sinclair said. “What do we have on gravimetrics?”
Cody himself checked, but Francis answered first. “The big boys are way above us, sir. No hoppers close by. We’re clear.”
“Good,” Sinclair said. “Let’s hurry. Gunny, we’re landing dead center of the island.”
“Won’t the fliers be upset?” Cody asked.
“Doc, they’re probably hiding in one of the caves on this island,” Sinclair said. “They’re tolerating us mainly because they understand we’re putting up defenses around the island. They keep asking about you, Doc. Guess you made an impression.”
The island appeared through the clouds. Cody didn’t see any fliers or anything out of the ordinary. They were well hidden, for which he was thankful, but caves wouldn’t protect them if the UET Council voted to nuke the planet.
“Follow my lead, Gunny,” Sinclair said.
“Yes, sir.”
Sonja angled the hopper for a landing. They approached quickly then slowed abruptly just before reaching the ground. Peering outside, Cody still saw nothing, as if the entire island had been abandoned.
A light flashed, and the view outside the canopy changed. At a distance of about fifty meters across was a circle of pylons. Intermixed between the pylons were G-1 Gauss guns mounted on turrets. Reddish rocks covered most of the island. Reeds couldn’t penetrate those rocks, so they had that going for them.
Cody still saw no fliers.
The hopper vibrated as the landing gear extended, then the hopper set itself down gently. Sonja shut down the engines and opened the rear hatch.
Cody followed Sonja out of the hopper. They had landed on a plateau about thirty meters higher than the ocean, visible to the east.
A garden sat at the base of some hills located farther inland to the south. Not far from where the hoppers landed was a cave where the fliers were likely hidden. A scientist on the Washington had designed a plant that grew a sort of ro
tten meat that contained all the nutrients the fliers needed. The fliers were ecstatic about the concept of farming and took to it readily.
All around them were large hooklike rocks where the fliers liked to perch. Also, a few places higher up would contain their nests. From what Cody understood, their mating season had already passed, so no nests were evident.
Of course, a lot of additions had been made since Cody had last been there. The pylons were emitting a glow directed into the sky. He recognized them as camo emitters, covering up electromagnetic signatures and even sending a false visual. They caused the flash he’d seen when they passed through the camo field. They’d fool even lidar, at least at a distance. Francis and Sinclair had just exited their hopper. No one else was around.
“You guys have been busy, sir,” Sonja said.
“Yeah, well, we had nothing else to do, you know?” Sinclair stroked the stubble on his face, which was long enough that Cody could see it was as red as the short-cropped hair on his head. “And Francis helped a bit.”
Francis rolled his eyes. His dark hair was a little longer than regulation. “We got two Gus Aces on turrets. Ammo out the ass, too. The fliers and our hopper, and now yours, are marked as friendlies. Anything else is going to get fired upon, at least once we activate it.”
The fliers certainly wouldn’t like the Gauss rifles on their island, particularly since the toads had used the weapons in the past. If it helped protect them, though, the fliers would tolerate it.
Sinclair patted one of the heavy coilguns. “We found them in a crashed hopper inland.” He bowed his head. “No survivors. We managed to get everything on board before getting spotted.”
“Are we the only survivors?” Sonja asked.
Sinclair rubbed the back of his neck. “We haven’t found anyone else.”
Cody had a hard time believing that. The Washington had been taken down pretty quickly, but at least some people had to have made it to escape pods. Then again, the toads could have shot them out of the sky.
Francis pointed at a small station next to two portable shelters. “We’ve got gravimetric and electromagnetic sensors in place, too, along with lidar. They’re all connected to the Gus Aces so they can take out incoming torpedoes and hoppers. And with the camo screens, it’s all being hidden.”
