by Jake Elwood
“I'm sure she's fine.”
Tom glanced at O'Reilly, who stood beside him, and raised an eyebrow.
“Oh, come on,” said O'Reilly. “You can't tell me you're not looking for Alice.”
Tom’s face got warm. “Well, she's a native. She might be able to guide us.”
“There's at least a dozen natives in the crew. That's not why you're looking for Alice.”
“Well, at any rate,” said Tom, “I don't see her.” What if she was still on the ship, trapped or injured?
What if she was dead?
“She's fine,” said O'Reilly. “You know how resourceful she is. We all came running outside with nothing but the clothes on our backs. We abandoned about a thousand different things that we’re going to need desperately by the time this is over. Alice is going to come out of the ship in a couple of minutes with a bag over her shoulder full of all the stuff you and I didn't think of.”
“Maybe,” said Tom. He lifted his gaze from the last straggling spacers to the battleship itself. The open cargo hatch was a shadowy rectangle at ground level. He squinted, trying to penetrate the gloom, hoping for a hint of motion.
When motion came, though, it was from the top of the ship. A fat gun barrel tilted, and the turret beneath it began to turn.”
“Look,” said Tom, pointing. “That turret.”
He glanced up, half expecting to see enemy aircraft in the sky. Maybe that was Alice, taking one last shot at the enemy.
But the gun barrel was tilting down. It was pointing at the ground, and the rotation of the turret brought the muzzle closer and closer to the retreating spacers.
Tom glanced over his shoulder, wondering if there might be Dawn Alliance forces beyond them. But the cold fist tightening in his stomach told him the enemy wasn't on the ground.
The enemy was still aboard the ship.
O'Reilly said, “Oh, shit.”
The gun fired. Flame belched from the barrel, the sound of the shot drowned out by the explosion, practically simultaneous, as the shell hit. The ground erupted near the middle of the column, a dozen paces to one side. People ducked and stumbled away. A woman screamed, clapping a hand to her shoulder.
“Scatter!” Tom bellowed. He lifted his arms high, then waved them to either side. “Spread out!” By the look of it, that was a thirty millimeter gun firing. It could throw out slightly more than one shell per second, enough to do terrible damage before the fleeing spacers could reach cover. The only hope was to deny the enemy a clustered target.
“Come on.” O'Reilly planted a hand on Tom's shoulder and shoved. “Take your own advice.”
Tom looked at him. “We should separate.”
So at least one of us will survive. O'Reilly didn't acknowledge the grim, unspoken thought. He just nodded and headed in the opposite direction at a run.
Tom ran, shouting at the others to spread out. It wasn't doing much good; he was drowned out by shouts and screams.
But not by further gunfire. A prickle of hope teased him. Maybe the ammo belts aren't working, or the gunners, whoever they are, don't know how to work them. Maybe they only had the one shell.
As if in answer, the gun fired again. The shell hit open ground close to where the first shell had hit. Clods of dirt spun through the air, but by the look of it, no one was hurt.
Then, less than a second later, another shot, and another. The gun tracked sideways, every shot coming closer to the fleeing spacers who'd been in the middle of the line.
Alice flinched back from the corner, then tightened her grip on her pistol and took a deep breath. I need to get at whoever that is. Before she could advance, though, Bridger moved. He rolled like a log, straight toward her, and she edged back to give him room. A shot hit the deck plates by his knees, and then his frantic roll took him past the corner to safety. He rose to his feet.
Ham, standing with his back to the far wall of the corridor, said, “Are you all right?”
“I may have wet my pants,” said Bridger. He gestured at the corner. “There's a woman in the hatchway to the turret. She's got pretty good cover.” He gave Alice a grim look. “She's wearing a Free Neorome uniform.”
“Great,” she muttered. “A traitor.” She stepped around Bridger, lifted her pistol, and leaned around the corner.
The shot came almost immediately, hitting the wall panel, plowing through, and bursting through the panel on Alice's side of the corner. Shrapnel from the panel peppered her cheek and mouth, and she swore as she pulled back. “Okay, a frontal attack isn't going to work.”
She looked around, searching for inspiration, her fingers absently exploring her face. She found a bit of fiber embedded in her upper lip and pulled it loose, wincing.
Bridger said, “Hey. Where’s Garth?”
Garth Ham was gone. She frowned, then shrugged inwardly. Ham had been captured and tortured by the Dawn Alliance, and his nerve just wasn’t what it used to be. She couldn’t blame him, not after what he’d been through. This would be up to her and Bridger.
“The gun is firing,” Ham said. “What do we do?”
Another shot came through the wall panel at the corner, and Alice yelped as she took another step back. That step became two, and then three. Fear clawed at her, and she turned. Then she made herself stop. There was nothing else for it. The two of them would have to barrel around the corner, guns blazing, and hope one of them got a lucky shot. It would be ugly. A frontal assault on a defensible position was suicide, but it was the only way.
She tightened her grip on her pistol and looked at Bridger. He took a deep breath, nodded, and said, “On three?”
“One,” said Alice, then whirled as boots thumped in the corridor behind her. She came within a hair’s breadth of firing as Ham came around the corner, panting.
Bridger said, “Jesus, buddy, I almost shot you.” He lowered his pistol. “What’s in the bag?”
Ham had a haversack over his shoulder. He opened the flap, hauled out a crater gun and a couple of magazines, then took out a small grenade.
Bridger’s eyes lit up. “Come to papa!” He holstered his pistol, snatched up the grenade, armed it, and lobbed it around the corner. Then he grabbed the crater gun, checked that it was live, and levelled it. The grenade exploded, and Bridger leaned around the corner, firing madly. He flinched back, swearing, as return fire peppered the wall behind him. “You got any more grenades?”
Ham nodded. “Not for you, though.” He knelt, pressing his palms to the deck plates.
Bridger shook his head. “What are you doing?” He stuck the crater gun around the corner, fired blindly, and pulled back.
“I’m looking for the ammo chain supplying that gun.” Ham closed his eyes and moved one hand. “The vibration is stronger this way.”
Alice followed as he moved to one side of the corridor, where he opened a door. The rattle of the ammo chain became louder. They stepped into a little room full of gauges and screens, their purpose impossible to determine. It also had a hatch in the floor. Bridger pried the hatch open and they looked down at a rectangular channel just big enough for the fat shells that went past, nose to tail.
Ham shoved a hand into the haversack and drew out a pair of grenades. He handed one to Alice. For a moment they looked at one another, not speaking. Then, as close to simultaneously as they could manage, they armed the grenades and dropped them into the moving chain.
Tom stood frozen half a dozen steps from a stand of spruce trees. He desperately wanted to take cover. His mind screamed at him to take the last few steps and throw himself down. The tree trunks were thickest at the base, so he’d hug the ground. But the gun was firing, people were dying, and he couldn't just cower. So he waved his arms, thinking that if the gun tracked toward him he still had time to dive for cover.
A line of explosions traced its way across the prairie, chasing a knot of six or seven spacers. The group began to scatter, and a shell hit right at one woman's feet. The explosion sent her shattered body spinning through the
air.
I'm too far away, Tom thought. If I want to draw fire I have to get closer to the point of impact. I have to make myself a better target. The logic was sound, but he couldn't make himself move. We have to get everyone under cover, and then we have to send a team back to the ship to track down the gunner. He lifted his gaze to the battleship. How are we going to reach it?
The distant gun barrel rose a couple of degrees. And then, like the answer to a prayer, the turret exploded. The gun barrel shot outward like a javelin and slammed into the ground muzzle first, a good twenty meters from the ship. Smoke billowed from the shattered remains of the turret, a black column that stretched toward the sky.
For a long minute Tom stood there, not quite ready to believe it was over. His eyes flitted across the hull, going from turret to turret, waiting for another gun to come to life. But nothing moved.
“What are you doing standing here like an idiot?”
Tom looked to his right as O'Reilly hobbled over to join him. “You're limping.”
“I bashed my knee diving behind some rocks.” O’Reilly gestured over his shoulder, grimacing. “That's the thing about rocks. The ground around them tends to be pretty rocky.”
“Well, that's why I'm standing here like an idiot. My knees are fine.”
O'Reilly pointed toward the battleship. “I guess we better go see what's left.”
Alice lay on the deck beside the open trapdoor, arms curled around her head, knees drawn to her chest. Her ears rang, drowning out all other sounds. She could smell, though. She smelled fire and burning plastic and hot metal, and underneath it a scent that made her think of summer barbecues. It was the smell of cooking meat, and to her horror her stomach grumbled. That's a human being burning, for God's sake. But no amount of appalled shame would keep her stomach from grumbling again.
She opened her eyes. At first all she saw was the yellow after-image of the blast of flame that had flashed through the ammunition tunnel. I'm still alive, so I guess the rest of the shells didn't cook off.
She relaxed her arms and light flooded in. She could see her own knees, and the textured steel of the deck plate beneath her.
Slowly, ever so slowly, she straightened her body, rolled onto her back, and looked up.
Ham stood over her, his lips moving. She caught his voice as a faint murmur, drowned out by a ringing echo. The side of his face was pink, and quite a bit of his hair had singed away. Half of one eyebrow was gone, but he looked basically unhurt.
“I can't hear you,” she said, then reached up a hand. He hauled her to her feet.
A black circle decorated the ceiling of the little room, with a matching dark stripe along one wall. That must have been one hell of an explosion. She looked at Ham, and he stared back at her, his eyes wide with shock.
She grinned and shrugged. “Let's go.” She didn't couldn't hear her own voice, but Ham followed her as she stepped through the hatch.
There was no sign of Bridger in the corridor. Well, I don't see his corpse, so that's good, right?
She found herself unable to remember what direction they had come from. Only when she spotted the bullet hole at the corner did she manage to orient herself. She peeked through the hole, saw no movement, and poked her head around the corner.
Smoke seeped through the hatch to the gun turret. A woman lay in the hatchway, draped over the sill in a way that would have been quite uncomfortable if she hadn't been obviously dead. She was on her back, arms flung wide, her face pointed at the ceiling.
She was badly burned. Her body below the rib cage was a blackened mess. “I wish she wasn't dead.” Ham's voice sounded small and distant, but Alice was greatly reassured by the fact that she could hear him at all. “I wanted to ask her why she did it.”
Alice stared down at the woman's face. The skin on her neck and under her chin was black, and there was a red burn along one cheek, but the rest of her face was untouched. She looked almost peaceful, staring into oblivion.
The collar of her uniform was burgundy.
“It’s not the traitor,” Alice said. “It’s a Dawn Alliance soldier.”
Ham stepped to the turret’s hatch, gun in hand, and looked inside. He flinched back, grimacing. “The gun’s completely demolished. I think a shell blew up in the breech.”
The clatter of running feet made Alice drop a hand to the butt of her pistol as she turned. Bridger came charging around the corner, then skidded to a halt. He had a first-aid kit in one hand and a bundle of firefighting gear under his other arm. He looked from Ham to Alice, then exhaled and dropped his burdens. He looked at the body, then glanced into the turret and grimaced. “What the hell happened?”
“The gunner’s dead,” Alice said. “The other one’s still alive, though. The collaborator.”
Bridger gestured back the way he’d come. “She didn’t go this way.”
That just left one direction. Alice edged her way past the turret, coughing as she inhaled smoke. She drew her pistol, moved to the next corner, took a deep breath, and stuck her head around the corner.
A woman in a green uniform was lurching down the corridor, maybe twenty paces away. Alice didn’t recognize her. She had long dark hair and a slim build, and blood soaked her right hip. She held a laser pistol in her left hand. Her right hand was against the wall of the corridor, holding her up as she limped frantically away.
“Stop,” said Alice, stepping around the corner. She took careful aim at the middle of the woman’s back. “I’ve got you dead to rights.”
The fleeing woman glanced over her shoulder, giving Alice a glimpse of her face. What struck Alice the most was how ordinary that face was. This was no monster, no twisted murderer. Just a woman, afraid and in pain and determined to escape.
The woman turned away and resumed her lurching flight.
“I’ll shoot you,” said Alice. “I can’t miss at this range.”
The woman didn’t react. She just kept hobbling away. In another half-dozen steps she would reach a cross-corridor. She might escape, or find cover and put up a fight.
What motivates you? You’re a colonist. Why did you turn on us? What were you thinking? What are you thinking now, knowing I’m about to shoot you in the back?
“We can’t let her go,” said Bridger. “There’s other gun turrets.”
Alice started to speak, started to voice one last warning. But Bridger was right. Alice’s shipmates were just outside, exposed and vulnerable, and the Icicle had plenty more guns.
The woman reached the corner, and Alice shot her between the shoulder blades. The woman pitched forward, landing face-down on the deck plates. She didn’t move.
“You know what?” said Alice. “I've had enough of this bloody ship. Let's get the hell out of here.”
Chapter 10
The road wasn't impressive by Earth standards, but Tom figured it was fairly typical for a colony world. It seemed to have been formed by dumping a lot of water-rounded rocks on the ground, pouring asphalt over them, and more or less smoothing it all out. The end result was bumpy but navigable, a strip of asphalt with smooth curved rocks poking up like cobblestones.
Tom was accustomed to the laser-straight roads that cut through the Canadian prairies. This road meandered and wandered, curving to follow the contours of the ground, bending to avoid outcroppings of crystal. He figured it would be frustrating to drive on, between the bumps and the curves. Walking on it was downright irritating. He had to constantly watch his step, all the while glancing up and down the road and scanning the horizon in every direction for threats.
Tom walked at the head of the column, while O'Reilly brought up the rear. The day was getting warmer, the heat exacerbated by exercise. Tom undid the top button of his uniform shirt and sighed, wondering how much warmer it was going to get.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”
He glanced at the woman walking beside him. He didn't know her name. She was tiny, with dark skin and straight hair and an exasperated expression. She s
aid, “What kind of colony imports mosquitoes?”
Tom looked around, checking for flying bloodsuckers, but didn't see any. He looked at the woman and raised an eyebrow.
She lifted a hand, ready to swat, then lowered it. “I can hear a mosquito. It's getting louder, too.”
Tom cocked his head. All he could hear was the scuff of feet and the grumble of conversation from the spacers behind him. Well, what's the good of being Commodore if you can't tell people what to do? “Everybody be quiet!”
The spacers fell into a startled silence. Tom kept walking, trying to move his feet quietly. He could hear the steady slide and slap of feet against the roadway, and birdsong from the closest clump of trees. Was that there all along? It's nice. Sounds like chickadees ….
There. Under the sound of birdsong and the rustle of grass and a light breeze. A wining drone, faint but growing louder.
“That's no mosquito.” Adrenaline lashed through his system, but he made himself stand frozen for a moment. He turned in a circle, scanning the terrain in every direction. The closest trees were on the left, but they formed an isolated clump. On the right, at a distance of fifty meters or so, there was a wall of pines that seemed to be connected to straggling fingers of scruffy forest that stretched for at least a kilometer.
“Aircraft coming!” Tom bellowed. The whole column fell silent, heads turning, eyes focusing on him. He pointed to the distant line of trees and took a deep breath. “We'll take cover in those trees. Double time. Let's move, people!”
They were halfway to the trees when someone gasped and pointed at the sky. Tom said, “Keep moving,” then turned to look.
The aircraft was a dark shape the size of a housefly just above the horizon. The sound grew louder moment by moment and the housefly grew to a bumblebee as the distance closed.
“Get into the trees,” Tom cried, and ran.
