Goodbye, Macon
The old man stood at the door taking deep breaths like he was about to run a race with an M-16 in either hand and one strapped to his back.
“This ain’t gonna work,” said Jolo. “You said yourself you can’t outrun them. They’ll cut you off where ever you go.”
“Do you trust me?”
“Yeah,” said Jolo, but he secretly worried Trant would jump on the hoverbike and be gone. “Maybe I should go and you get the bike?”
“I know these creatures. Been hunting them for quite a while now. Are you ready?”
Jolo pulled the door open and there were fifty or so walkers milling about. Jolo and Mac had been quiet for an hour waiting for them to ease away from the door a bit, every moment Jolo imagining the big black ships coming down to take Katy and the rest away to God knows where.
Mac opened fire with both guns and mowed down a path right to the street. He didn’t start yelling until he’d blown a hole through the horde and was standing fifty meters from the entrance to the admin building. There were several hundred all along the main street, on side streets, caught up in buildings, bumping into old cars. But they all turned when Mac started yelling and firing the guns.
Jolo closed the door to the vault and started his internal clock. Mac said it’d take fifteen minutes to clear them out.
It seemed like days. He thought about just running for it, but he needed a clear path to the hoverbike, then time to load. Mac said don’t use the gun except as a last resort because it will draw them in.
Right at fifteen minutes Jolo eased the door to the vault open: one ten meters off, one at the entrance and one near the bike. Jolo grabbed the sledge and stepped into the orange light of day. Before his time in the vault he’d hated the dingy brown days of Earth, but now he breathed in the air and was happy to be outside again. The first walker didn’t see it coming. Jolo put a dent in a large man’s head and he fell to the ground. The next two came to him and a few moments later he was alone on the street. He ran to the hover bike which had been pushed back down the street aways by the walkers but otherwise in perfect condition. He did not engage the main engine, just pushed it along in hover mode back to the edge of the stairs on the first floor.
He figured he could get thirty or so guns into the cart, guessing the weight was roughly equal to the jet. There were tie downs and a cover so hopefully they would make it over the ravines. He left the jet and Koba’s rig behind. He put one of the M-16s on his back, engaged the hoverbike’s engines and headed to the rendezvous point. Trant had drawn a map in the dirt on the floor of the vault. He would lead them away, then double back to that point. Jolo wondered how the old man thought he could pull that off when even he wasn’t able to do it.
Jolo made it to the pickup spot but Trant wasn’t there. He could see the road to the north and thought about taking off, but couldn’t leave him. He circled back and pretty soon heard an M-16. He followed the sound to a tight group of buildings surrounded by walkers.
He found Evinrude Trant sitting on a first floor girder beam of a small building. The upper floors had rotted away and the weight of the horde pushing against the vertical beams made the whole thing sway. Rust and dirt fell from the old structure right on Trant but he didn’t move. His legs dangled down just out of reach of the walkers but soon the building would come down and he’d be dead. They were thirty deep all around him.
He sang to them. “I knew a girl from Altor 5!” he yelled. “She was ugly but so am I! I asked her momma, for her hand! She said Hell No you gunboat man!” He slapped their hands with the but of the M-16. He was out of ammo.
The crowd below screamed and wailed and clawed over each other, drawn in by his taunts and the sound of his voice.
“No!” yelled Jolo from the hoverbike. “It doesn’t have to be this way. Come with me.”
Trant stood up and waved. “Yes, it does,” he hollered back. “I need to do one good thing before I die. Go now and save your people and do not become me. I cannot come with you.”
“I could lead them away…” said Jolo.
“Go. You fool!”
Jolo turned to go and Mac called out again. “Under my rack, take my tags, my journal and my blaster and give them to Marin. Tell him I’m proud of him.”
“He reminds me of you. Stubborn and strong!” Jolo shot two walkers that got close but he still couldn’t leave.
Trant laughed, his arms spread out, palms up. “You still don’t know what this place is, do you?”
“Hell!”
“Wrong, captain. This is a worm world. It always has been. For all we know the Queen may have been born here.”
“No!” said Jolo.
“What do you think they’re doing in the other cities? The Queen’s progeny tended to by black-mouthed Federation fools! You stand on the doorstep of a much larger enterprise than you could imagine.”
Another walker got close and Jolo shot it.
“Go now, you fool!” Trant yelled. “And when the time comes, do what you must to save your people. Do what I couldn’t do.” Jolo still didn’t move.
The old man shook his head at Jolo. Then he threw the M-16 down into the mass of people. He took off his shirt and threw that down, too, and they tore at it and screamed. He took off each boot and threw that at them. Then he just stood there drawing the walkers in with his old man’s wrinkled flesh. He waved at Jolo and smiled. It was goodbye.
“NO!” yelled Jolo.
But Trant jumped down into the mass of walkers like he was jumping off a pier into a lake. Jolo saw a flash of his white hair and then nothing. He couldn’t watch and he couldn’t save him.
Jolo hit the throttle on the hover bike and did not look back. He heard screaming, but didn’t know if it was Trant or not. Soon the voice trailed off, replaced by the wind and the dust, and the deep, animal urge to return to the ice with thirty-five machine guns and blood on his mind.
The Captain Returns
Ten kilometers out Jolo started checking the hoverbike’s scanner, but there were no boats in the vicinity. He wondered if that was good news. Or had the black boats already come and gone? The dim light of day was just starting to fade when the ice under the bike got thick and gray and the nav on the hoverbike read under a kilometer to destination.
At 758 meters to go two red dots popped up on the bike’s scanner. Jolo looked up and two shiny, black Cruisers were right over the hotel. How did they get down so fast? They had to have gone through the atmosphere, then the slow drop down to the ground. He should have seen them long before they got to the ground so fast.
Jolo pointed the bike straight at the closest one and it turned, surely locking in to the hoverbike’s engines. Jolo put the bike on autopilot, jumped into the carryall, then pulled the manual release. The bike shot ahead straight at the black boat. The big Cruiser got into position, locked on to the bike and fired two quick ion cannon blasts. There was nothing left but melted ice and tiny bits of metal and plasticyte floating down onto the hard pack. The Cruiser then moved forward towards Jolo and the guns. He grabbed an M-16 and a grenade launcher and started running away from the carryall. He couldn’t let the Cruiser destroy the guns.
He fired a shot at the Cruiser’s nose even though he knew the black boat’s forward shields were the strongest. But he had to get the ship’s attention, and draw it in to him.
Sure enough, the ship turned, but it was slow, and unaccustomed to targeting one tiny man on the ground. Jolo sprinted straight for the ship. It fired it’s forward railguns, but they couldn’t get a bead on Jolo because he was just about under the ship by then. The Cruiser tried to catch Jolo in its jet wash, turning hard so the positional thrusters would blow him out from under. But Jolo held his ground, darting to and fro so he could stay directly under the center of the ship between the outer thrusters that were kicking up ice and dirt.
Jolo pulled up the schematic of the Cruiser on his computer and found the weakest point on the undercarriage of the boat: a sea
m joint towards the rear. He pelted the big alacyte ship but it showed no damage. The third shot put a hole in the fuselage and a fourth had the big boat trying to limp home. Jolo quickly took out one of the positional thrusters and the BG ship went into a spin.
Suddenly a hatch opened and a mech jumped down. Twenty meters or so it fell, crashing down onto the ground. It had pads under its tri-toed feet but it still sunk down and had to work its way out of the ice. Jolo checked his ammo, one grenade left. Once free, the big black mech ran towards him, the ground shaking with each step. It got bigger and bigger the closer it came. Jolo swallowed hard and shouldered the gun.
“Come here, you bastard!” yelled Jolo.
He waited until the mech was twenty meters off. Its angry red energy blades were lit and ready to cut him in half. Cocky bastard, thought Jolo. It knew the shot was coming but it also knew it could take a round or two from an energy blaster.
But Jolo wasn’t wielding a Fed weapon. Jolo fired the grenade and it hit the mech in the chest and for a split-second it kept coming, the end of the staff rising up so it could swing down and destroy the little human. But the grenade blew and the mech fell back, a big hole where the chest plate was. The worm inside dead instantly. No screaming.
The blast blew Jolo back and he landed on his back and slid on the ice. He looked up and could see the big ship limping back towards the other black boat. The second boat was on the ground. People were boarding. Women.
“Greeley, you there?!” yelled Jolo into his wrist comm.
“Kinda busy, Cap,” said Greeley. Jolo could hear gunfire in the background. “We’re pinned down in the parking lot and taking heat from all angles. They got a dang mech!”
Jolo had to make a quick decision. He looked up at the big black Cruiser. He couldn’t let it get off the ground.
“Greeley, hold what you got! That’s an order!”
“We cain’t hold much longer!”
Jolo ran back to the carryall and started dragging it towards the ships. Two more mechs jumped down and Jolo scrambled to find more grenades. The mechs came fast and this time were wary of the little human with the gun. They spread out and tried to take him from either side, each footfall a BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. They ran at him from different angles so Jolo had to choose one and wait. At twenty meters he fired and missed. By then the ground was shaking and his heart was beating fast. He took a deep breath and fired again. The grenade hit the mech in the chest and Jolo took cover behind the carryall. The mech exploded, black alacyte parts clanked against the other mech still coming hard. Jolo couldn’t use the launcher again because the mech was too close. So he dove out of the way and fired the Colt.
The bullet hit the mech but it only seemed to make him angrier. He came down with his staff and Jolo could feel the heat from the lit end as it grazed past his head. Two more shots from the Colt and the worm was screeching. It took a step back to right itself and that was all the time Jolo needed. He dove for an M-16 in the carryall. The mech attacked again, 2000 pounds of metal, the end of the staff pointed right at Jolo. But Jolo fired round after round and the mech fell at his feet.
Jolo didn’t waste any time. He reloaded the grenade launcher and pulled the carryall along. People were still being loaded onto the ship. The big rear hatch was opened and the four landing pads were down. The Cruiser Jolo had shot earlier was still in a spin, though maintaining position next to the other boat. It opened fire every time the nose came around with the rail gun and nearly took out the carryall. There was a worm hole close by and Jolo had to jump clear of the rail gun blast and not fall in. The big boat made a pass and Jolo waited for it to come around again. He fired a grenade right at the one working positional thruster and the boat veered off at an angle. It scraped the top of the other boat, pushing it down a meter or so into the ice. Jolo fired at the second boat, damaging the starboard engines.
Suddenly the hatch started to close and the big boat wound up her engines. The starboard one failed, stared to smoke, and was shut down. But she could still reach atmo with just the one. Jolo glanced up at the first boat and it had worked its way right over the mall. And then it happened again.
Jolo, the carryall, the rifles, and the boat started to float. Here we go, thought Jolo. He tried to get a shot off but ended up hitting the thick hull of the second boat.
And then another crazy thing happened. The first boat disappeared. It was there, holding altitude but clearly not in control, and then when it got over the mall, the air around it shimmered and sparkled, and then it was gone.
Everything fell back down again. There were guns scattered around. Some of them fell into the worm hole. Jolo jumped up and stared at the spot where the first Cruiser was. It was gone. He looked up into the orange sky and there was nothing. It didn’t just jump out.
He started throwing the guns back into the carryall. He picked up a grenade launcher, ran around to the other side of the ship and took out the port side thruster. The ship needed to stay on the ground. Katy might be inside.
He couldn’t hit the weak point, so he started to go for the starboard thruster, but the ground shook again and again as mechs started jumping down from the rear hatch of the ship. The first few ran out to block his retreat. They were too far off to try and hit them with the launcher, so he blew a hole in the rear stabilizer. The boat wasn’t going anywhere.
He scrambled around throwing the rest of the guns into the carryall. By then four more mechs had joined the party and they were closing in. He took down two with one of the M-16s, but he was running out of time. He couldn’t take them all. He put one more down and it fell into the ice. But the others were on top of him.
He pushed the carryall towards the worm hole and jumped in after it. One of the mechs came down at him with an energy blade and cut through his jacket. It got too close to the edge and it fell, too. And suddenly Jolo was sliding down the hole end over end with M16s and grenade launchers and a big mech trying to cut him in half.
He lost the gun he was using but ended up sliding on his back for a moment and was able to pull out the Colt. He got a shot off at the mech, but then the hole changed direction and everything shifted over. For a second the mech was bearing down on him, about to crush him. He pushed off of its head and jumped clear as the whole mess came sliding into one of the underground tunnels.
The carryall crashed into the wall of the dark tunnel, Jolo tried to gain his footing but fell. He scrambled up off the wet, dirt floor. The mech came in soon after, found its footing and took a step towards Jolo. He reached for the Colt, but it was gone. The mech cut a tight downward arc with the energy blade, aiming for Jolo’s neck. Jolo dove out of the way. The heat and bright electricity of the hot red blade burned his face, a white spot in his vision, the business end missing by a hair. The mech pulled the blade back again for a final blow while Jolo scratched around frantically in the wet, cold mud, but couldn’t find a gun. I’m going to die in a hole surrounded by enough firepower to take down a hundred mechs, he thought.
And then there was a flash of green and the clank of metal on metal as the mech was pushed back by a big man in a Fed battle suit. Jolo jumped back towards the entrance of the hole where there was a little light left and he saw the dark shape of an M16. Greeley didn’t stand a chance against a mech and now the blade was coming for him.
“Duck!” yelled Jolo. And Greeley went down and Jolo fired five quick rounds into the chest plate of the BG warrior. It fell on Greeley and Jolo had to pull him out from under the mech.
“’Bout time you got here,” said Greeley. “We been on the run trying to stay alive.” He reached down and picked up an M-16. He fired at the head of the dead BG warrior and it put three holes into its alacyte skull. A big grin broke out on his face.
“How’d you know I was here?” said Jolo.
“I followed the sound of the explosions. That weren’t Fed issue ordinance I heard.” It was Jolo’s turn to smile. He handed Greeley a grenade launcher. “Don’t fire it in close quarters.”<
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“Dang, captain. I’m gone get all misty and whatnot.” He eyed the launcher like a mother holding her newborn. He loaded a grenade into the chamber. “If you was a girl, Cap, I’d give you a kiss. Might give you one anyway.”
Greeley’s battle suit looked like it been through several wars. There were ragged burn marks angling down across his chest armor, scratches, bullet marks and even a few dents.
“Now we go hunting,” said Jolo.
Finding Katy
Greeley led Jolo to another one of Riley’s hiding places, off the main hallway of the mall towards the end where everything started to look more like a giant hole carved out of the earth. The front was destroyed, and no entrance visible. But Greeley pulled back a big piece of sheet metal and they crawled under, and once inside the space opened up and the walls were still standing. There was a sign on the wall: Peachtree Credit Un-. The last bit torn off in a blur of broken concrete and rebar. Greeley went to a hole in the back. He squatted down and whistled. A few seconds later they heard a high pitched whistle in return. Then Korley’s head popped out of the hole, the end of his gun poking through.
He stepped into the room. “Good to see ya,” he said to Jolo.
“That gun still got no ammo?”
Korley shrugged. Jolo reached into the carryall and pulled out an M-16. Greeley gave him a look but Jolo waved it off.
Korley saw the weapon and his eyes lit up. “Before I give this to you,” said Jolo. “One thing. Always get eyes on whatever you targeting before you pull the trigger. This thing’s got forty rounds. Make each one count. Make sure you are aiming at Hazuki, or one of his men, or a mech before you fire. Okay?”
Korley nodded. Jolo showed him where the safety was and handed him the gun. And then Greeley and Jolo went inside and left Korley to watch the entrance.
The Jolo Vargas Space Opera Series Box Set Page 57
