by Aer-ki Jyr
“I don’t think we have a choice,” Rio added. “There are too many unknowns. We can’t run people out there without armor without some certainty. All our options are bad, but a little test seems to be the best bet. I’ll volunteer.”
“No, I will,” the other commando said. “And I’ll take Greg and Christi. We’re the fastest here, so if we do get spotted we’ll have the best chance. More than 3 will be a greater detection risk, and if we have to fight I don’t want to go with less than that.”
“It’s risky either way,” Victor said, uncertainty in his voice. “If you want to try, then you’d best do it now and hope darkness offers you some cover.”
“We’ll need a spotter on the edge to monitor,” he said, glancing at Rio.
“Done.”
“Then let’s get moving,” he said, tapping two others via battlemap ping. Rio saw them fall out with him and jog off into the woods. He hesitated a moment, nodded at the Knight, then trailed behind the three all the way to the forest edge several kilometers away where they held up, hunkering down behind the thickest trees and looking out through the thin ones on the edge.
“If we make it we’ll have to stay silent,” the elder commando said to Rio, “but we’ll be watching this area if possible.”
On Rio’s battlemap a section of forest a kilometer and a half long was highlighted on the far side.
“If you come under fire we’ll be skirmishing that area. Expect us there even if you don’t hear from us.”
“That could be enemy central,” Rio pointed out, given that the transport was only a few kilometers to the south.
“All the more reason to have friendlies there when the slowpokes come across.”
“I don’t like this, but I like sitting and waiting even less,” Rio said candidly. “Good luck.”
The elder commando fist bumped him then nodded…with the trio silently taking off through the trees and running out into the grasses, half disappearing from view even with Rio’s nightvision activated.
Knowing he needed a better vantage point, he backtracked a few meters and started climbing a tree that he thought would go high enough. Once he got halfway up he realized he was wrong and had to transfer from one to the other via walking out on a branch and hopping over to an adjacent one, then climbing a bit higher in it.
When he finally got a semi-clear view he could see the battlemap signal trackers from the trio making their way across the muddy terrain at fairly high speed, all running single file with a few meters of gap in between each of them. He glanced in the direction of the Skarrons, then searched what he could of the dark skies, looking for fighters but seeing no activity in either.
His gaze was drawn back to the three commandos, tearing across the terrain and sticking to what looked to be a combination of drier and lower regions…which was difficult to find, given that there were many puddles out there. Running cross country was something that commandos had a lot of training experience in, and even though this was an entirely new planet, mud was still mud.
Rio zoomed in with his helmet and watched the tiny silhouettes move out towards a kilometer, where he began to lose sight of them. The grasses were hiding their legs, with only their upper torsos and helmets visible…and those were bouncing about, coming in and out of view as they ran through trenches and up crests where they couldn’t avoid going elsewhere. Their tracking IDs were still marking their position, and given the clean line of sight he expected those to hold up most of the way across.
Rio found he was unconsciously holding his breath and forced himself to blow out and resume a normal rhythm. So far so good, but he still had a sinking feeling in his gut as they made it to the halfway point…then a bit of motion to his left made that feeling collapse into complete dread as a Skarron fighter zipped in and flashed past, firing plasma down on the trio.
They immediately split up, all heading in the same direction as the fighter looped around then came in slow and started bathing the area around one of them in plasma. Rio couldn’t see much more than a dot, and the flashes of plasma were trying to overload his nightvision. Eventually the tracking beacon for that commando winked out, with the fighter moving up a bit and chasing the next one.
Rio watched in horror as that one, then finally the third disappeared from his battlemap. The enemy fighter hovered in place, looking around for more soldiers. Finding none, it started to backtrack their route with it headed directly for Rio.
He jumped/fell out of the tree, hitting hard enough to drive his boots halfway into the soft ground on landing. Pulling them out he took off running back into the thicker forest and found a place a few hundred meters in to hunker down, backing up into a small hollow were an exposed root made a bit of an overhang that had dirt piled up on one side.
Rio waited there, hearing the faint whisper of the fighter’s gravity drive as it passed nearby without stopping. He froze in place for nearly five minutes afterwards before even thinking about moving, then gingerly pulled himself up into a standing position and looked around, listening intently.
Finding nothing he moved off, headed back to the main group to report on the three dead and there being no way in hell they could cross here.
With no other choice but to move further north, the group spent the next day trying to get further away from the Skarrons, limited in their movements by the civilians and wounded. They moved up another 11 kilometers before Rio volunteered for a single scouting mission…one with spotters deployed high up in the trees so they could scan the skies for fighters.
He went in the daylight and didn’t run, but rather jogged from point to point, taking breaks and hunkering down playing an imaginary game of Frogger with enemies that he hoped were not watching. The gap that he was attempting to move across was more than 5 kilometers wide…hardly a choke point, but that was also by design. If the Skarrons expected them to cross they’d be watching those and not the larger areas, or so he hoped.
When Rio made it halfway across he took a long break, looking around and just happy to be alive. He chanced using his comm on a slightly longer range and had a brief conversation with the commando on the forest’s edge as he sank himself halfway down into a tiny pond, with the water coming up to his chest as his feet got sucked into the muck below.
There he waited for another 10 minutes, seeing if anything was coming in after him delayed. When it appeared there wasn’t another commando retraced his path…exactly. Rio had recorded his movements, putting waypoints on the battlemap everywhere he had stopped and with his movements being plotted. On the other commando’s HUD there was a holographic marker that let him see exactly how Rio had moved and he followed it step for step all the way out to him…then sunk into the water beside Rio.
They waited again for several minutes, seeing if there would be a response. When there wasn’t another came, then another. When the fifth one arrived, this one being an unarmored civilian, they waited it out again, with one of the commandos using a small distiller cylinder they’d got from the emergency supplies to purify a bit of water, offering Rio a quick drink before he took off. Trailblazing another half kilometer, he set down more waypoints then hunkered down again in another oversized puddle, with people shifting more rapidly through both sections.
Three and a half hours after he’d started his trek across he slowly moved out of the plain and into the forest, scouting out the area and finding it clear. He held position there as the first few others came through, one at a time, and joined him in establishing a defensive perimeter…with one going up a tree to act as an aerial spotter.
Six minutes later that spotter threw up a warning signal, telling everyone to hunker down as a Skarron fighter flew up the length of the plain…and passed directly over them. Everyone stayed down for many minutes to come, but the fighter didn’t come back.
Slowly people started moving again, and over the next half hour some 16 made it across…then out of nowhere Rio spotted a Hobbit in the forest. A split second later it noticed him, with Rio
knowing that he had to act quickly. He took off sprinting towards it, firing his rifle and mowing it down before it had a chance to report in. He took two plasma hits to his armor’s shields, but they held up…then he noticed another Hobbit nearby.
It took off running in retreat and Rio went after it. It took more than two minutes for him to catch up to it and make the kill, but by then it was already too late.
A few minutes later the fighter returned, and despite everyone on the plain taking cover and not moving a muscle it found them and started blasting away as they jumped up and ran for their lives…with only two making it to the forest edge, both commandos with plasma damage to their armor.
Rio waited on the others until the last of their battlemap tracking signals cut out, including the Knight’s. He’d almost made it across, but was gunned down within 150 meters of the forest edge. Biting down so hard his jaw hurt, Rio forced himself to keep going with the others, four of which were unarmored, including their pilot.
Prodding the civy along as fast as he could manage, the survivors kept moving on…with what would be a constant trail of Skarron infantry following them, making it a footrace to get to friendly territory that the commandos couldn’t excel on, given that they could only move as fast as the slowest person…and damn their luck that they had to have an untrained civilian with them.
7
Chad ducked behind one of the commandos who half swung him around with a firm grip on his upper right arm as a salvo of white plasma dots flashed past with a few impacting the dull white armor’s shields, with the commando taking the hit for him. The man fired back but stayed put as more commandos moved around them, falling back and intercepting the Hobbits that had flanked them. The stupid little things were fast and there were many of them, with this being the third time since the plain that they’d been attacked.
Like before the commandos chewed them up, focusing on the weak point around Chad and the other unarmored personnel and moving outward like an exploding nova killing everything they came across. Soon the commando shielding him stood up and released his grip on his arm…then they were off running again, with Chad’s legs protesting heavily. He’d thought he was in good shape, having attained self-sufficiency long ago, but the aliens were just as fast and he knew the commandos were itching to run faster, but they wouldn’t leave him and the others behind, which Chad was immensely thankful for.
Pumping as much speed out of his fatigued body as he could manage he followed the commando through the trees, not worrying about where he was going but just with keeping up. Nearby was their pilot and a couple of other civilians, both techs. The pilot seemed to be holding pace fine, but the other two were just as worse off as Chad, each of which had a commando with them to keep them on pace and to shield them should the enemy close in. Fortunately none of the Skarron monsters were pursuing them through the forest, just the little ones, but they were deadly enough and didn’t seem concerned about their own losses…just in killing the Humans.
And what was worse was that the Humans couldn’t stop running. Chad was getting slower and slower, but if they stopped they’d be overwhelmed. He thought the commandos realized that they’d have to eventually, because every now and then he’d see some of them dropping back and hear weaponsfire behind them and he guessed they were going back to kill some of the enemy before catching back up to the slow moving group.
Chad didn’t know how much longer he could keep going without walking, but he had to at least try to keep moving. The others might not make it much longer either, but he didn’t want to be the one to cause them to stop. If the others did, then there’s nothing he could do about it, but if it was just a matter of his being able to stretch himself further then damn him if he wasn’t going to find a way to do it.
Thoughts like these were running through the back of his mind as he focused on his steps and keeping pace…then all of a sudden the commando he was following hit the brakes and grabbed him again, slamming him against the trunk of a nearby tree and holding him there as the forest erupted with a barrage of white plasma from ahead.
“Stay here, stay down,” he said, then the commando disappeared ahead as well. Chad did as told but knew that was bad. So far the aliens had been coming up at them from the rear, but now it seemed that they had gotten ahead of them somehow…maybe even cut them off.
He pulled out the stun pistol from the holster he wore, the first time he’d touched the weapon since he’d been given it. It couldn’t kill the enemy, but it could knock them down long enough for him to run and he clung to it now with a fierce grip as he kept his body melded up next to the tree trunk. He didn’t dare look around, so he watched what he could from his position, especially the area behind him where he’d expected the enemy to come from, and waited while the commandos did what they did best.
After what felt like an eternity of adrenaline-laced torment, the plasma fired died down but did not entirely quit. Frozen in place Chad jerked when the commando came back and yanked him onto his feet.
“Run!” he yelled, pointing ahead as the armored suit headed the other way.
Chad didn’t know what else to do so he turned and ran forward, not having anyone to follow. He spotted the pilot to his left and ran towards him, unable to keep up pace but visually following him and dropping onto his path as much as he could. Ahead and to his right there were explosions as plasma hit wood in a variety of places, none right nearby but still loud enough to send shivers up and down his spine.
Chad just kept running, not thinking, just running. His muscles had stopped complaining, for somehow they knew how close to dying they were so they shut up and seemed to work with him, but still failed to give the necessary speed. Another suit of commando armor shot past him, this one coming from the left and cutting across diagonally in front of him about 2 meters away. Chad hesitated, then forced himself back into a full run as plasma fire broke out behind him. A few steps later and his shoulder exploded in pain and he lost his coordination, with his own legs tripping him up and sending him crashing into the soft ground.
He turned right side up and started to get back to his feet, smelling the charred flesh of his own body but refusing to look at the wound just as a pair of aliens came into view. Chad grabbed the stun gun in his left hand and fired twice, missing the first and hitting the second time as plasma flashed by his head. One of the Hobbits went down, then the other one sent a shot directly into the man’s forehead, killing him before he even hit the ground.
When the commando told him to run, Davi didn’t hesitate. He knew how bad the situation was and he didn’t want to be in the firing line any more than he had to be. He took off sprinting in the direction he was told and didn’t look back, relying on years of training to deal with the fatigue creeping through his body. His legs, arms, and lungs were burning but that didn’t matter. He’d been through tough workouts in order to get his fitness level up and he knew he could take it and more…the problem was he was running a race against plasma, and unless the enemy was simply bad shots he was going to lose out.
His only hope was putting as many tree trunks between him and them as possible. He wore a pistol on his hip but didn’t bother to pull it out, needing every arm swing to carry him further away from the Hobbits. They were slow as far as foot soldiers went, but he wasn’t all that much faster and this terrain suited them well. Lots of trees, mostly flat, soft and moist with wisps of fog. He wished he had armor with a sensor helmet, but at the moment he was just going to have to rely on the commandos’ guidance.
Not long after he took off running one of them came up on him and flanked him for a few seconds, redirecting him slightly more to the left, then she tore off and headed for some unseen enemy. There was weaponsfire everywhere, mostly heard, but some flashes were visible through the trees. Davi desperately hoped he wasn’t running right into the enemy, but for the most part the sounds of battle were behind and to his right, which made sense with the leftward angle he’d been told to run.
D
own! a voice yelled at him so loud he almost jumped, but trusting in it he crashed to the ground just as a couple of plasma blasts shot across over top of him, one of which hit a tree and blew pieces of bark out like a fragmentation grenade. Two of them stuck in his forearm, imbedding a good half inch. Ignoring them the pilot rolled over and looked back just in time to see a ghost of silver armor pop out of a cloud of fog and hit a Hobbit so hard it literally flew three meters through the air before it hit a tree and slumped to the ground.
Nearby three others fell to the ground without being touched. The Archon reached down, grabbed one of their rifles and shot them with it in quick, accurate blasts…then shot the one unconscious by the tree before running over to Davi, who saw the man’s armor punctured in multiple places.
“You’re alive?” he asked, but the Archon didn’t have time to answer and just picked Davi up by the arm and began dragging him forward. The pilot got his feet under him and started running, with Iden finally releasing him and running off into the lead.
They ran for some thirty seconds before the Archon spoke into his mind again.
Stay on this heading, he said, then turned to the right and disappeared through the trees, accelerating to a speed Davi could never have hoped to match.
The pilot ran…and ran…and ran. He didn’t talk, think, or use a single muscle impulse to do anything but run as fast as he could until the sounds of combat finally disappeared. No one was around him and he wondered what he should do, but at the moment he just kept running, hard and fast, on the line the Archon had assigned him.
When he was finally considering stopping he eventually met up with a commando that waved him over. Glad to finally have some direction he followed the man forward until he met up with many others who jogged alongside him. None of them stopped, but the pace slackened a bit and Davi was able to ease off slightly, but he figured if he stopped and walked now he’d have a hard time getting his body going again at this speed.
