CHAPTER 5
Felix reached up and dug his fingertips into a moss-covered cliff. The most direct way to Tabuk crossed over an extreme rise in elevation. He’d made the decision to take the shortest route to friendly troops, instead of following the lowlands, which would’ve taken days. The higher he climbed, the more he realized he’d made a poor decision. Getting back down the cliff would be quick, but that’s as far as he’d ever go for the rest of his life.
He pulled himself up and gripped a vine. A brightly colored bird flapped out of a nest hidden in the cliff, screeching at him. It dove at his helmet, claws scraping against the metal.
“Hey. Hey!” Felix waved a hand at it. “Leave me the hell alone!”
The bird kept flapping and chirping around him as he wedged the edge of his boot into a minuscule ledge. He extended his leg and leveraged himself a bit higher, his eyes on a solid-looking outcropping close to the top of the cliff.
The green and yellow menace landed on his shoulder and pecked his helmet. The strikes rang through his ears and Felix wagged his head back and forth, trying to shoo the pest away.
“I wasn’t going to feast on your children, but I’m changing my mind!” He let go with one hand and managed to brush it against the demon bird. Loose feathers floated past his visor and the bird finally flew away.
“This planet hates me,” he muttered. “Everything here hates me—”
A warning icon flashed on his visor. The batteries powering the exo-suit had several minutes of power left . . . at rest. The system was running hard to assist his climb, and the single percentages on the reader were ticking down fast. Very fast.
This cliffside was not where he wanted to be when the total weight of his Flanker gear fell solely to his muscles. He clamped onto the outcropping and strained to get higher. Roots snapped and the rock tipped over and slid out of the cliff.
Felix pressed his body against the moss and ducked his head. The rock hit his shoulder, sending one foot swinging into the air. One hand clutched hard against a vine for dear life as the other floundered about, his shoulder burning with pain from the heavy strike.
“I’ll take the bird! I’ll take the bird!” He thrust his hand into the hole where the betraying rock had been and found a knot of roots. They held his weight—barely—and he found another foothold. A dull buzz sounded in his ears as the battery reserves fell to three percent.
Felix looked down at the mists below him, unable to see the base of the cliff.
“Stupid. Stupid!” He swung an arm over the top of the precipice and gripped a handful of tall grass—which ripped out of the ground as he tried to pull himself up. He slammed clawed fingers into the dirt and raked away soil until he found bedrock. His upper body came over the cliff as his suit powered down.
The servos against his hips and knees locked up, and the weight of the exo-suit on his lower body dragged him back slowly towards gravity’s embrace.
Felix let out a long string of expletives and grabbed the emergency release buckle on his waist. He twisted the knob hard and pulled out the fastening bolt. The exo-suit on his legs and over his boots slid off his body and crashed against the cliff. The rig cracked and banged all the way to the riverbed below.
He swung a much lighter leg onto the plateau and rolled onto his back. The crump and clatter of his suit echoed through the canyon below.
“I am an idiot. Such a friggin’ idiot.”
Felix tried to sit up, but the weight of his exo-suit only let him barely get his head up a few inches. He pulled the emergency release on his chest and the last of the weight fell off of him. The helmet had its own emergency batteries, but the cooling systems were offline. He popped it off and let it roll into the grass. The sky was a drab gray, promising rain and humidity.
The map on his forearm screen was still powered on. Tabuk was still a good ways away. Getting there under his own power felt very real now. He rolled to a crouch, listening to the surrounding jungle. The damned bird cackled in the distance.
“I’ll fix your wagon.” Felix dragged the last of his exo-suit to the edge and tossed it over the cliff. If there were any insurgents in the area, best not to let them find obvious proof that a Hegemony Flanker had been through. Let them find the battered metal and assume he was dead and eaten by whatever else was in the accursed jungle.
He put his helmet on, slid the visor to the top of his head and held his carbine low across his waist. The more advanced optics needed the suit’s batteries, but the laser dot sight mounted to a top rail would still work for weeks.
Felix tapped a pouch on his waist. He had a bit of the tong jerky left and three magazines on his belt. The water purification tube across the small of his back felt intact, so he at least had the calories and hydration to keep going two more days. The flak plates on his front and back weighed him down, but he wasn’t about to give up the protection they offered.
He made his way through the jungle, stopping every hundred steps or so to check his bearing with the compass built into his forearm screen. After an hour, he stumbled across a trail heading in his general direction. The map showed a valley ahead of him, with a few buildings.
Old satellite imagery in the data files showed nothing but clouds. There were no major roads into the area and whatever settlement had been there didn’t even rate a name.
“Not much of a clearing, and who knows if there’s even something there,” he said to himself. “Sure as hell beats breaking my own trail.”
He continued down the path, stopping every few tens of yards to listen. The buzz of insects and call of birds were his constant companions, along with the rush of wind through the canopy.
The rain began slowly. Small droplets spattered against high leaves, falling as a mist around him. The storm intensified with thunder and the flash of lightning. Rain started to sweep down in sheets, soaking through his shoulders and sleeves within minutes.
Felix appreciated the drenching as it washed away the accumulated sweat and body odor he’d built up over the last few days. He couldn’t remember his last shower, but this was a decent enough wash down.
He put his back to a thick tree and dug out a hunk of tong jerky. The pungent smell of chili flakes, horseradish and vinegar made his nose scrunch, but the rumble in his stomach won out. He ripped a corner off with his teeth and chewed in silence as the spices set his mouth aflame.
“Why does this shit never taste good?” he asked the snack.
A branch snapped nearby.
Felix pressed himself into a recess in the tree trunk and moved a finger to press against the carbine’s trigger.
A voice shouted from where he heard the snap, every word in the local dialect. Two men wearing dull green fatigues and red sashes from right shoulder to left hip emerged from the jungle; both had rifles slung over their shoulders.
The taller of the two pointed to the other side of a small clearing and brushed the back of his hand against the other’s shoulder. The other stopped and tugged a pack of cigarettes from within the sash as the other continued into the jungle.
The shorter insurgent looked to be barely through his teens, but he bent his body forward to protect his lighter from the rain like a seasoned smoker. He puffed a cloud of gray overhead, then raised his arms and stretched from side to side.
Felix kept perfectly still. He took short breaths through his nose, his body on a hair trigger should the insurgent turn around. Shooting him in the back would only alert his battle buddy . . . and any other Flags in the area.
The teenager yelled something out and the other man laughed from where he was in the brush. He put his hands on the back of his hips and twisted his body away from Felix, then towards him. Felix saw the side of the teenager’s face.
The insurgent bent back at the waist, then looked over his shoulder straight at Felix.
Felix snapped his carbine up to his shoulder and kept the teen dead in his sights. The kid had peach fuzz on his cheeks, and his mouth hung open in shock. His eyes widened with fear and the cigarette fell from his mouth and sparked against his chest.
Felix shook his head slowly.
“Makisig,” the other man called out.
Felix trembled, adrenaline racing through his system.
“Makisig!”
The teenager slowly raised his hands up to shoulder height. Bushes rustled and thunder rolled overhead.
Felix turned his eyes to the disturbance at the edge of the clearing and saw the other insurgent emerge, a dead rabbit in one hand. He saw Felix and dropped the animal.
“Crab!” The insurgent went for the rifle still slung over his shoulder. Felix swung his carbine to the side and hit him in the chest with a three-round burst.
The teenager reached back and grabbed the handle on his rifle and lifted it up. Felix saw his scared, confused face through his carbine’s optic. He shot him center mass and the boy fell back with a brief cry.
Felix bolted down the path. His lungs burned and the muscles in his legs felt like they had molten iron running through them instead of blood. The path took a steep downslope and Felix could not slow himself. His stride became longer and longer as the path became a small stream from the rain.
He spotted the clearing through the trees and saw the stream veer to one side at the bottom of a slope . . . into a dug-out diversion.
A topless Dahrien man with a toothbrush in his mouth stepped out in front of the end of the path, a pistol on his hip. Felix, unable to slow or stop his momentum, lowered his shoulder and smashed into him.
The insurgent went flying into a fire pit, knocking a boiling pot off a hanger. The boiling contents sloshed onto two men cutting up meat and vegetables. The sudden chaos of screams and a burning man in the midst of the camp took all the attention away from Felix as he lay in the mud, his shoulder aching.
Felix snapped his head up. There were dozens of insurgents, with more coming out of low tents to investigate the ruckus. On the other side of a fire pit was a power station, the side solar panels raised and a wind turbine mast extended high to harness the storm. Rifles were stacked together nearby beneath tarps.
Someone reached under his shoulders and tried to haul Felix up, chattering at him in Dahrien, mistaking his mud-covered form for one of their own. Felix landed an uppercut to the man’s groin and he went down with a rumbling herk.
“Sorry,” Felix muttered and shook mud from the carbine. He aimed it at the exposed batteries in the power station and switched his weapon to full auto. A half dozen men in various stages of dress stared at him in shock as he opened fire on the generator.
Pierced batteries let out streams of sparks before bursting into flames and exploding a heartbeat later.
Felix didn’t wait for the camp to react. He turned to the right and ran off as fast as he could. He tore through brush and wide leaves, falling more than once. Bullets snapped through the trees and tore chunks of bark loose as he kept running for as long and as far as his body could manage.
His foot hooked on a root and he fell hard, sliding across wet undergrowth before coming to a stop between two violet ferns. He fought to catch his breath and he knew he couldn’t go any further. He lay there heaving as the storm abated. Golden rays broke through thinning clouds and he took a sip from the water blister on his back. It was muddy and brackish, but it was still the best he’d ever had.
He looked at his forearm screen . . . which had cracked. The final residual image faded in and out then shrank to nothing.
“Figures . . .”
There was no sound of pursuit by the time he recovered enough to push himself up to sit against a tree. He stared off in the general direction from which he’d come, unsure if he’d run, fight or just die here if the Flags found him.
He was tired. So very tired . . . but he couldn’t stop. Felix slid a hand beneath his front flak plate and found the dog tags of Gunnar and others from his platoon. If he died out here, no one back home would ever know what happened to them.
“Charon has to cross the river,” he said, and continued on.