by Timothy Zahn
And with a gasp as the pain suddenly sharpened and focused itself into arms, chest, and knee, she came fully awake.
She was in an awkward and thoroughly uncomfortable position, half-sitting and half-lying on her left side, the safety harness digging painfully into her chest and upper thighs. Blinking the wetness—blood? she wondered vaguely—from her eyes, she looked around the tilted and darkened interior of the shuttle. Nothing could be seen clearly; only after several seconds of straining her eyes did it occur to her befuddled mind to key in her optical enhancers.
The sight made her gasp.
The shuttle was a disaster area. Across the aisle the far hull had been literally blown in, leaving a ragged-edged hole a meter or more across. Strands of twisted and blackened metal curled inward from the gap like frozen ribbons; bits and pieces of plastic, cloth, and glass littered everything she could see. The twin seats that had been by the hole had been ripped from their bracings and were nowhere to be seen.
The twin seats that Layn and Raines had been sitting in.
Oh, God. For a moment Jin gazed in horror at the ruined struts where the seats had been. They were gone, gone totally from the shuttle . . . from thirty or forty kilometers up.
Somewhere, someone groaned. "Peter?" she croaked. Todor and Hariman had been in the seats just behind the missing men . . . "Peter?" she tried again. "Rafe?"
There was no answer. Reaching up with a hand that was streaked with blood, she groped for her safety harness release. It was jammed; gritting her teeth, she put servo-motor strength into her squeeze and got it free. Shakily, she climbed to her feet, stumbling off-balance on the canted floor. She grabbed onto what was left of her seat's emergency crashbag to steady herself, jamming her left knee against the bulkhead in the process. A dazzling burst of pain stabbed through the joint, jolting her further out of her fogginess. Shaking her head—sparking more pain—she raised her eyes to look over the seat back to where Todor and Hariman should be.
It was only then that she saw what had happened to Sun.
She gasped, her stomach suddenly wanting to be sick. The explosion had apparently sent shrapnel into his crashbag, tearing through the tough plastic and leaving him defenseless against the impact of the shuttle's final crash. Still strapped to his seat, blood staining his landing coveralls where the harness had dug into his skin, his head lolled against his chest at an impossible angle.
He was very clearly dead.
Jin stared at him for a long minute. This isn't real, she told herself wildly, striving to believe it. If she believed it hard enough, maybe it wouldn't have happened . . . This isn't real. This is our first mission—just our first mission. This can't happen. Not now. Oh, God, please not now.
The scene began to swim before her eyes, and as it did so a red border appeared superimposed across her optically enhanced vision. The sensors built into her Cobra gear, warning her of approaching unconsciousness. Who cares? she thought savagely at the red border. He's dead—so are Layn and Raines and who knows who else. What do I need to be conscious for?
And as if in answer, the groan came again.
The sound tore her eyes away from Sun's broken body. Clawing her way past him, she stumbled out into the littered aisle, eyes focusing with an effort on the seats where Hariman and Todor dangled limply in their harnesses. One look at Hariman was all she could handle—it was clear he'd died in the explosion, even more violently and terribly than Sun. But Todor, beside him in the aisle seat, was still alive, twitching like a child in a nightmare.
Jin was there in seconds, pausing only to grab the emergency medical kit from the passenger compartment's front bulkhead. Kneeling down beside him, ignoring the pain from her injured knee, she got to work.
But it was quickly clear that both the kit's equipment and her own first-aid training were hopelessly inadequate. Surface-wound treatment would be of no use against the massive internal bleeding the sensors registered from Todor's chest; anti-shock drugs would do nothing against the severe concussion that was already squeezing Todor's brain against the ceramic-reinforced bones of his skull.
But Jin wouldn't—couldn't—give up. Sweating, swearing, she worked over him, trying everything she could think of.
"Jin."
The husky whisper startled her so badly she dropped the hypospray she'd been loading. "Peter?" she asked, looking up at his face. "Can you hear me?"
"Don't waste . . . time . . ." He coughed, a wracking sound that brought blood to his lips.
"Don't try to talk," Jin told him, fighting hard to keep the horror out of her voice. "Just try and relax. Please."
"No . . . use . . ." he whispered. "Go . . . get out . . . of here . . . someone . . . coming. Has to . . . be some . . . one . . ."
"Peter, please stop talking," she begged him. "The others—Mandy and Rafe—they're all dead. I've got to keep you alive—"
"No . . . chance. Hurt too . . . badly. The mish . . . mission, Jin . . . you got . . . got to . . ." He coughed again, weaker this time. "Get out . . . get to . . . some . . . where hid . . . hidden."
His voice faded into silence, and for a moment she continued to kneel beside him, torn between conflicting commitments. He was right, of course, and the more her brain unfroze itself from the shock the more she realized how tight the deadline facing her really was. The shuttle had been deliberately shot down . . . and whoever had done the job would eventually come by to examine his handiwork.
But to run now would be to leave Todor here. Alone. To die.
"I can't go, Peter," she said, the last word turning midway into a sob. "I can't."
There was no answer . . . and even as she watched helplessly, the twitching in his limbs ceased. She waited another moment, then reached over and touched fingertips to his neck.
He was dead.
Carefully, Jin withdrew her hand and took a long, shuddering breath, blinking back tears. A soft glow from Todor's fingertip lasers caught her eye: the new self-destruct system incorporated into their gear had activated itself, shunting current from the arcthrower capacitors inward onto the nanocomputer and servo systems. Automatically destroying his electronics and weaponry beyond any hope of reconstruction should the Qasamans find and examine his body.
No. Not if the Qasamans found him; when they found him. Closing her eyes and mind to the carnage around her, Jin tried to think. It had been—how long since the crash? She checked her clock circuit, set just before the initial explosion.
Nearly seventy minutes had passed since then.
Jin gritted her teeth. Seventy minutes? God—it was worse than she'd realized. The aircraft the Qasamans would have scrambled to check out their target practice could be overhead at any minute, and the last thing she was ready for was a fight. Clutching at Todor's seat, she pulled herself to her feet and made her way forward.
The cockpit was in worse shape even than the passenger compartment, having apparently survived the explosion only to take the full brunt of what must have been a hellish crash landing. One look dashed any hope she might have had of calling the Southern Cross for advice or help—the shuttle's radio and laser communicator would have been mangled beyond repair.
Which meant that unless and until the Southern Cross figured out on its own that something was wrong, she was going to be on her own. Totally.
Barynson and the pilot—she realized with a distant twinge of guilt that she'd never even known that latter's full name—were both dead, of course, crushed beyond the protective capabilities of harness and crashbag. She barely gave them a second look, her mind increasingly frantic with the need to get out as quickly as possible. Behind Barynson's chair—thrown from its rack by the impact—was what was left of the team's "contact pack," containing aerial maps, close-range scanning equipment, trade goods, and base communicator. Scooping it up, Jin headed aft to the rear of the passenger compartment where the rest of the gear was stored. Her survival pack seemed to be as intact as any of the others; grabbing Sun's pack as well for insurance, she step
ped to the exit hatch and yanked on the emergency release handle.
Nothing happened.
"Damn," she snarled, tension coming out in a snap of fury. Swiveling on her right foot, she swung her left leg around and sent a searing burst of antiarmor laser fire into the buckled metal.
The action gained her purple afterimage blobs in front of her eyes and a hundred tiny sizzleburns from molten metal droplets, but not much more. All right, she grimaced to herself as she blinked away the sudden tears. Enough of the hysterics, girl. Calm down and try thinking for a change. Studying the warped door, she located the most likely sticking points and sent antiarmor shots into them. Then, wincing as she took her full weight onto her weak left knee, she gave the center of the panel a kick. It popped open about a centimeter. More kicks and a handful of additional shots from the antiarmor laser forced it open enough for her to finally squeeze outside.
They'd been scheduled to land an hour before local sunrise, and with the extra delay the forest had grown bright enough for her to shut off her light-amps. Leaning on the hatch, she managed to close it more or less shut again. Then, taking a deep breath of surprisingly aromatic air, she looked around her.
The shuttle looked even worse on the outside than it had on the inside. Every hullplate seemed to be warped in some way, with the nose of the ship so crumpled as to be almost unrecognizable. All the protruding sensors and most of the radar-absorbing overlay were gone, too, torn away in a criss-cross pattern that looked as if a thousand spine leopards had tried to claw it to death. The reason for the pattern wasn't hard to find: for a hundred meters back along the shuttle's approach the trees had been torn and shattered by the doomed craft's mad rush to the ground.
Gritting her teeth, she took a quick look upward. The blue-tinged sky was still clear, but that wouldn't last long . . . and when they came, that torn-up path through the trees would be a guidepost they couldn't miss. Keying her auditory enhancers, she stood still and listened for the sound of approaching engines.
And heard instead a faint and all-too-familiar purring growl.
Slowly, careful not to make any sudden moves, she eased her packs to the ground and turned around. It was a spine leopard, all right, under cover of a bush barely ten meters away.
Stalking her.
For a moment Jin locked gazes with the creature, feeling eerily as if she were meeting the species for the first time. Physically, it looked exactly like those she'd trained against on Aventine . . . and yet, there was something in its face, especially about the eyes, that was unlike anything she'd ever seen in a spine leopard before. A strange, almost preternatural alertness and intelligence, perhaps? Licking dry lips, she broke her eyes away from the gaze, raising them to focus on the silver-blue bird perched on the spine leopard's back.
A mojo, without a doubt. It matched all the descriptions, fitted all the stories she'd heard from her father and his fellow Cobras . . . and it was clear that none of them had done the birds proper credit. Hawklike, with oversized feet and wickedly curved talons, the mojo was as perfect a hunting bird as she'd ever seen. And in its eyes . . .
In the eyes was the same alertness she'd already seen in its companion spine leopard.
Again Jin licked her lips. Standing before her was living proof that the plan her father had worked out all those years ago had actually worked, at least to some degree, and under other circumstances she should probably have taken some time to observe the interaction. But time was in short supply just now, and academic curiosity low on her priorities list. Two twitches of her eyes put targeting locks on both creatures' heads. Easing onto her right foot, she swung her left leg up—
And as the mojo shrieked and shot into the sky, the spine leopard sprang.
The first blast from her antiarmor laser caught the predator square in the face, vaporizing most of its head. But even as Jin turned her attention toward the sky the mojo struck.
Her computerized reflexes took over as the optical sensors implanted in the skin around her eyes registered the airborne threat, throwing her sideways in a flat dive. But the action came a fraction of a second too late. The hooked talons caught her left cheek and shoulder as the bird shot past, burning lines of fire across the skin. Jin gasped in pain and anger as she fought against the entangling undergrowth, her eyes searching frantically to locate her attacker. There it was—coming around for a second diving pass. Praying that her targeting lock hadn't been disengaged by that roll, she triggered her fingertip lasers.
Her arms moved of their own accord, the implanted servos swinging them up at the nanocomputer's direction, and the bird's shimmering plumage lit up as the lasers struck it. The mojo gave one final shriek, and its blackened remains fell past Jin's head and slammed harmlessly to the ground.
For a moment she just knelt there among the vines and dead leaves, gasping for breath, her whole body trembling with reaction and adrenaline shock. The scratches across her face burned like fire, adding to the aches and throbs of her other injuries. Up until now she'd been too preoccupied with other things to pay much attention to herself; now, it was clearly time to take inventory.
It wasn't encouraging. Her back and neck ached, and a little experimentation showed both were beginning to stiffen up. Her chest was bruised where the safety harness had dug into the skin during the crash, and her left elbow had the tenderness of a joint that had been partially dislocated and then popped back into place. Her left knee was the worst; she didn't know what exactly had happened to it, but it hurt fiercely. "At least," she said aloud, "I don't have to worry about broken bones. I suppose that's something."
The sound of her voice seemed to help her morale. "Okay, then," she continued, getting to her feet. "First step is to get out of here and find civilization. Fine. So . . ." She glanced up at the sky, keying her auditory enhancers again as she did so. No sounds of aircraft; no sounds of predators. The sun was . . . there. "Okay, so that's east. If we crashed anywhere near our landing site, that's the direction we want to go."
And if the shuttle had instead overshot the Fertile Crescent . . . ? Firmly, she put that thought out of her mind. If she was going the wrong direction, the next village would be roughly a thousand kilometers of forest away. Collecting her three packs, she settled them as comfortably as she could around her shoulders and, taking a deep breath, fixed her direction and headed off into the forest.
Chapter 12
It started easily enough, as forest travel went. Within a few meters of the crash site she ran into a patch of mutually interlocking fern-like plants that lasted most of the first kilometer, giving her the feeling of wading through knee-deep water; and she'd barely left the ferns behind when she found herself having to use fingertip lasers to cut through a maze of tree-clinging vines that reminded her of Aventinian gluevines with five-centimeter thorns. But physical obstacles were the least of her worries, and even as she used lasers and servo strength to good advantage against the forest's best efforts, she tried to keep as much of her attention as possible on the subtle sounds filtering in through her audio enhancers.
The first attack came, in retrospect, right where she should have expected it: at the spot where the forest undergrowth abruptly vanished into a wide path of trampled earth bearing northwest. The path of a bololin herd . . . and where there were bololins, there were bound to be krisjaws, too.
She didn't identify the attacker as a krisjaw at first, of course. It wasn't until after the brief battle was over, and she was able to turn over the laser-blackened corpse and get a clear look at the wavy, flame-shaped canines that she could positively identify the beast. Vicious, cunning, and dangerous was how krisjaws has been described to her; and even with only this one interaction to go on she could well understand why the first generation of humans to reach Qasama had done their damnedest to try and wipe the things out. Wrapping a field bandage from her kit around the gash the predator's claws had torn in her left forearm, she continued on her way. Krisjaws were as nasty as Layn had warned, but now that she kn
ew what to listen for she should be able to avoid being sneaked up on. If the forest didn't get any worse, she decided, she should be able to get through all right.
The forest, unfortunately, got worse.
The line of trampled undergrowth marking the bololins' route turned out to be nearly three kilometers wide, and within that cleared area an astonishing number of ground animals and their ecological hangers-on had set up shop. Insects buzzed around her in large numbers, attracted perhaps by the blood from her injuries. Most of them were merely annoying, but at least one large type was equipped with stingers and showed little compunction about using them. It was as she was swatting at a group of those that she found out that krisjaws weren't Qasama's only predator species.
This kind—vaguely monkey-like except for their six clawed limbs—hunted in packs, and it cost her another clawing before she found the best way to deal with them. Her omnidirectional sonic, designed originally to foul up nearby electronic gear, turned out to be equally effective in disrupting the monkeys' intergroup communication, and the arcthrower with its thundering flash of current scattered them yipping back into the cover of the surrounding trees.
Unfortunately, the sonic had an unexpected side effect, that of attracting a species of gliding lizard that, like the monkeys, launched their attacks in groups from the trees above her. Smaller and less dangerous than the larger predators, they were also too stupid to be frightened by the arcthrower's flash. She wound up having to kill all of them, collecting several small needle-toothed bites in the process.
It seemed like forever before she finally reached the road cutting across her path.
* * *
Captain Rivero Koja gazed down at the high-resolution photo on his viewing screen, a cold hand clenched around his heart. The line of destruction through the Qasaman forest could mean only one thing. "Hell," he said softly.
