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Chapter Ten

Chief Miles O’Garran did his best to snarl rather than speak as he ordered his suit, “No: monitor freekset channels. Do not send again!”

Already annoyed at the Terran vacc suit’s comparatively clunky comms management, he indulged his growing annoyance. Of course he hadn’t been given one of the fancy Dornaani suits where you didn’t even have to give vocal commands; you just batted your lashes and curled your pinky to get it to do your bidding. And so what if it had been him who insisted that others get those suits because they’d benefit the most from Dornaani automation? And why not, since Miles O’Garran was so expert with bog-standard Terran gear that it actually gave him the best odds of survival?

No reason why a few pesky facts should be allowed to disrupt a perfectly good rant.

And it was just his luck to be first in the daily squelch-break rota, he fumed while checking that he was still on course toward Katie Somers. After all, wasn’t there some unwritten law that a SEAL had to be the first to send a signal in the clear? To make himself the most attractive target for opponents just waiting to triangulate and rain hell down on someone’s head?

Which was, once again, the sheerest crap, but inasmuch as griping was an art form and Miles was a particularly gifted practitioner, he wasn’t about to ignore an opportunity to exercise his God-given talent. Besides, he took especial pride in not being one bit bothered by the illogic of his umbrage or the fact that he was, in fact, an atheist. Well, an agnostic really, but since God was clearly a foul-tempered old bastard, the chief enjoyed calling himself an atheist, just on the chance it might piss off the Big Guy.

And of course Eku hadn’t broken squelch last night. Hell, if his transponder wasn’t still moving and circled in yellow, Miles would have written the factotum off as deader than dead. God above—bastard that He is!—knew that if anyone was going to buy the farm right out of the gate, it was going to be Frog-pet. And He also knew—and did not care—that Chief Miles O’Garran had done everything possible to keep that genius simp alive and so, had no reason to feel any guilt over his fate. Absolutely no reason, Miles repeated forcefully as he stole a look at the transponder marker and then at his HUD’s chrono. It was Eku’s turn in the freekset rota—had been for over a minute, now—and still no squeal-hissing that signified a sitrep or that Frog-pet was still taxing the universe with his infuriating existence.

Miles would have spit in annoyance, but of course, water was in short supply for him; Terran suits only had urine recapture. And it didn’t matter that he was far better off than Newton, Dora, and Yaargraukh, whose duty suits had no fluid recapture at all. Hell, the first two had come down within fifty or sixty kilometers of the tributary. And the Hkh’Rkh were harder to kill than tardigrades. So long-suffering Chief O’Garran had every reason to resent everyone else.

But of all of the sorry souls that Fate had shackled him to, none was more deserving of his ire than Corporal Katie Somers, who clearly was not pushing hard enough to close the distance between them. Which was particularly ironic, since the SEAL whom everyone called “Little Guy” had been tasked to carry one of the millstones—oh, right: “batteries”—they’d yanked out of the guts of the dead Dornaani robots. It was six extra kilos dragging his already dragging ass that much lower and slower, all because Commodore-Pretend Riordan had pointed out that “Everything we have is just so much dead weight without electricity.”

Well, that dead weight was now doing its level best to kill one Chief Miles O’Garran, who didn’t care about the blunt truth of his CO’s words any more than he did about the appeals of the idiot who’d insisted that said-same CO should not carry one of the batteries. He was the very same idiot who’d not only volunteered to carry the battery himself but who, more the pity, insisted on breaking out of a perfectly good descent pattern to caretake that snot-nosed waif Somers. Yes, the very same idiot that was said to bear a striking resemblance to a small-bodied but big-hearted SEAL chief who, by all rights, should be drinking a drink with an umbrella in it, surrounded by an adoring harem.

Miles looked at the lengthening late-day shadow stalking angrily beside him. “Am I right, or am I right?” he asked it. When it didn’t reply, he nodded, satisfied that in the case of shadows, as was the case in law, “silence grants consent.”

He pushed on, heading south toward Katie . . . and that much farther away from the river.

Of course.

***

O’Garran’s UCAS-manufactured HUD chimed; he glanced at the small transponder tracker tucked in its upper left-hand corner. His transponder and Katie’s were now superimposed and no longer blinking. Well, shit. After forty-plus hours of humping a ruck toward her, the bell finally rings . . . but there’s no one home.

He stared at the wastes around him, flat and empty except for some uneven ground to the south, which also lay directly on the heading he’d been following for the past two hours. He activated the helmet’s laser range finder just long enough to get a distance to the rumpled spot on the horizon: four kilometers.

He swung the pack off his back. Time to take a rest and take stock of the situation.

Eku had eventually broken squelch but after the hour in which he was supposed to. Not good. On the positive side, three of the transponder pairs had merged into single markers: Riordan and Yaargraukh last night, Dora and Ayana today and, a few hours later, Bannor and Duncan. Judging from the overhead, the pair closest to Miles—Peter and Craig—would make contact either tonight or early tomorrow.

He stared at the uneven ground where Katie should be. If he’d had a Dornaani helmet, or one of the kits that still had a monocular scope, he’d at least have been able to make out enough details to assess the best angle of approach. But once again, Chief O’Garran was the sad sack who got the dirty and deficient end of every stick with which Fate poked him. Instead, he tugged open one of the side pouches and pulled out a flare.

The chief figured there were three possible outcomes if he used it. Katie would signal back with one of her own or shine a light in his direction! The second would be that she might come out to him. The third could involve drawing whatever was pinning her down—or had devoured her—out to O’Garran, who’d be waiting with his grapple gun in one hand and his molecular-edged machete in the other.

Once he’d laid out the various tools that might be required for the various scenarios, Miles aimed the flare upward at a steep angle and discharged it. Instead of launching like a roman candle, it functioned more like a miniature missile launcher; a small clearing charge sent it five meters up before the solid rocket kicked in and sent it soaring—really soaring—high into the darkening sky. He stood back in grumpy awe at the Dornaani engineering which could launch a payload over a kilometer into the air from a handheld tube no bigger than an outsized pistol barrel.

The flare descended slowly, bright against the sky but floating much farther south than O’Garran had intended. If Dornaani are going to make flares that act like sounding rockets, they ought to put a warning on the package. On the other hand, there was no reasonable chance that Katie could miss such a high, bright object.

But instead of one of the three outcomes Miles had foreseen, he got a fourth and more worrisome one:

Nothing.

No answering flare, no light, no running Katie, no charging enemies.

“Well, shit,” O’Garran muttered. In order to slip an arm back through the straps on his pack, he laid aside the grapple gun. He’d practiced with it a few times since landing, but only used one grapple; best to preserve as many of the full, boosted loads as possible. Either way, the kick was extremely even and the barrel had jets that seemed to compensate for muzzle rise: a nice feature that would ensure minimum destabilization for zero-gee operations. But when fired with a “fresh” grapple, it became another example of Dornaani technomagic in action. The one-hundred-gram “warhead” was only half of the package; the other half was a booster that only ignited once the composite projectile was clear of the barrel. It provided a great deal more range and, significantly, velocity.

O’Garran finished shouldering his arms through the straps, scooped up the gun, made sure the telescoping gaff stick was handy, and double-checked that the fast-release toggle on the survival pack was unobstructed. Reflecting on how many times he’d needed it in situations that began just this way, he eased into a trot toward his objective.

***

The uneven ground was an odd collection of bumps and lumps, some simply hard-packed dust mounds, others naked, wind-smoothed stone. At the outer edge, he dropped his musette bag and kit, lowered into a crouch and began sliding along the surfaces, machete out, pistol held close and ready for a pivot to the rear.

The mounds were akin to an open maze, but even if it had been tighter and more challenging, he would have had no problem staying on course; he just kept heading toward the intermittent sounds near its center. They alternated between snuffling, growling, and annoyed squeals that were not like animal noises so much as wooden surfaces grinding against each other. Restricting his movement to the first moments of each new outburst, he crept closer to the center.

The mounds there were larger, a bit taller, and more frequently made solely of rock. As he started around one of the largest, the area ahead widened and the sounds became more clear, enough so that he could hear pattering of what sounded like broad feet or paws. Muting all helmet alerts and turning off its internal lights, he opened the visor carefully and leaned his head forward to look further around the curve of the stone he’d been following.

Ten meters away, two bipeds, no larger than preadolescents, were circling around a tall rock at the center of the open space O’Garran had expected to find. However, there was nothing young about their lean bodies, their strange heads that were broader than they were high, or the tapering claws on both their rude hands and wide feet—which were all routinely in contact with the ground. On all fours, they prowled around the pillar of rock that was the source of their frustration. Or rather, what was atop it:

A Dornaani device. Specifically, one of the reusable flash-bang grenades that came in every survival kit. As O’Garran watched, it blinked, and then did so again three seconds later.

Miles scanned the rocks that had vantage points on the pillar, noted two that resembled smooth, lopsided domes. He was aware of a possible third, similar shape but because it was close to the rock behind which he was hiding, O’Garran would have had to lean out too far to confirm it. As it was, he ducked back just in time to avoid being detected by the smaller of the two, which stalked away from the pillar as if disgusted—before turning and running back at it, preparing to leap.

But as it stretched into its final stride, the flash-bang emitted a yowl that ascended into extremely high frequencies, strobing as it did.

Shaking its head sharply, the creature aborted its leap and swerved away, snarling and snapping—which was when Miles noticed that its wide jaws were full of wildly barbed and cluttered teeth, rather like the sand tigers he’d seen during practice dives for the counterattack into Indonesia.

But the next moment, he was as riveted to the flash-bang as the two creatures . . . because it had started ticking.

Except, as O’Garran listened, he realized that the pattern was quite uneven. Well, not completely uneven, but—

God’s balls! That’s Morse code!

“—then break squelch,” the flash-bang clicked out, before pausing two seconds and resuming with “Chief, if you are there, break squelch. Chief, if you are—”

The chief not only broke squelch, but did so in a pattern that spelled out “Here.”

The flash-bang went silent, then resumed with, “Stand by. Break squelch when you are prepared for attack. I will count down to zero.”

Girl after my own heart! O’Garran closed his visor, hefted his weapons, and broke squelch.

The two creatures were already reapproaching the now silent grenade. But when they reached the two-meter mark, it quickly tapped out, “Three, two, one—”

O’Garran cut his helmet’s audio pickup, turned his head sideways to reduce the burden on his HUD’s filters . . . and stepped out, grapple gun raised as the grenade clicked “zero.”

A wild cascade of strobing colors painted itself on the facing rocks. He couldn’t hear the accompanying cacophony, but could feel vibrations through his suit; since the reusable grenade couldn’t generate a concussive blast, it compensated with ear-rending frequency clashes and overpowering volume.

The instant the light show ended, O’Garran turned back toward the creatures.

They had staggered back but were still facing the pillar: blinking, shaking their heads, and screeching in undiluted rage. Their bodies were already pitched forward in an attack posture: futile, since they couldn’t reach the offending device.

So: prone to mindless fury. Good to know, O’Garran thought as he extended the grapple gun toward the closest one, sight settling on its spine. He squeezed the trigger.

The grapple’s booster ignited halfway across the ten meters and drove the flaring projectile into the creature’s spine with a meaty crunch. It went down, but was still thrashing and immediately tried to regain its feet.

Well, fugg me, O’Garran thought, wishing he had the time to finish that one before reloading to shoot the other—which had already swung around and was sprinting at him.

Sprinting faster than a cheetah.

Well, fugg me again; new plan! Miles stepped back, dropped the grapple gun—no time to reload—while switching the machete to his right hand. He grabbed for the club-sized gaff stick—

—And drew it just in time to deflect the little monster’s raking claws and immediately stepped toward it, bringing down the machete.

Instead of splitting the creature in two, the molecular blade only left a gash—the kind a regular machete might have made by slicing into regular flesh. And barely that.

O’Garran leaped backward—what the hell are you made of?—and brought up the gaff stick.

Again, just in time: the insanely swift monster came up in a smooth leap, claws extended to pierce and hold flesh for its wide jaws to tear away. It batted past the gaff stick but that delayed it just enough for Miles to lean out of the range of its jaws.

But not its claws. O’Garran’s suit resisted the talons, but they left three parallel marks on it, partly because he didn’t take another rearward step. This time, he stood his ground as the creature’s rage and hunger almost tumbled after him, jaws snapping as they reached toward his leg—

Miles waited until the head was stretched out as far as the neck would allow and then cut down hard with the machete, trying to compensate for its light heft. The blade sheared away the left side of the creature’s face, a twisted ear hanging by a thread and part of the skull exposed and seamed. It staggered back, shrilling insanely, but not so much at the pain as the frustration of not being able to orient itself.

Before it could, O’Garran stepped slightly past its injured side, turned and, from the rear flank, finished the creature with a blow across the back of its bent neck. With a screech, its head sagged obscenely to one side and it fell its length.

A similar screech rose up behind the chief, who spun in that direction, machete and gaff stick raised.

Back at the pillar, Katie was standing over the first one, a fresh gash in its neck feeding a widening pool of dark mauve fluid. The smoking grapple still protruded from its back. But more surprising still was what Katie had slung across her back:

Her survival rifle.

O’Garran popped his visor, gaping. “Didja ever think to use that?” he shouted, pointing with the gaff stick.

She rolled her eyes. “Didja ever think it might be broken, ya daft man?”

Chief Miles O’Garran stared, opened his mouth, and was startled by his own reply:

Confounded silence.

***

“You should have sent a message in the clear,” O’Garran muttered as he discovered the fault with the survival rifle: one of the battery’s leads had joggled loose within the sleeve that shielded its connection to the acceleration coils. “That’s protocol if any of us are attacked.”

Katie Somers was still trying to get the grapple out of the first creature’s back. “Wasn’t being attacked, but would have been if I’d tried sending. Their hearing is not to be underestimated. Might have been safe if I’d sealed my visor, but if not”—she glanced up toward the top of one of the rock domes—“I think they might have torn their claws out trying to climb up to me.”

O’Garran frowned. “Yeah. As angry as the flash-bang made them, they went truly nuts when they saw me.”

She nodded. “On Earth, yeh dunna see that extreme predator reflex in any but the simplest species.” She stared at the corpses and shuddered. “But these . . . they were advanced enough to get frustrated, angry. Not that I could understand what they were saying.”

O’Garran forgot the survival rifle was about to reseal. “What they were saying?” He glanced back at the bodies. “They’re intelligent?”

She nodded tightly. “Enough to have something that sounds like language. That’s why I didn’t want to make any sound until you arrived. Saw your transponder approaching, then your flare. Knew you’d wander in here. And if they didn’t give up on the blinky light I left on top of the rock, I could be sure they hadn’t heard or smelled you coming.”

“Smell?”

She shrugged. “It’s how they found me to begin with, I think. I had to unload the suit’s waste desiccator. They came along about an hour later, nasty little noses up in the air. When they wandered off to search the rest of these lumps, I . . . er, dumped some more scent in the area. Kept them plenty interested . . . that and the grenade.”

O’Garran nodded. “Gotta hand it to you, it was a pretty good setup. Kept ’em distracted and looking in the other direction. I can’t ask for better than that.” He handed the survival rifle out to her. “And you can’t ask for better than this: good as new.”

She stared at it then shook her head. “No. You should have it.”

He frowned. “That’s nonsense. And stupid, Corporal. Now you take—”

“No, Chief. This is not the time for chivalry, which you’d deny, anyway. It’s time for plain facts. Aye, I’m CTR infantry, but my specialty is cyberweapons, drones, and proxies. Sometimes networking target designators with heavy weapons. Maybe even regional or orbital support fire. Aye, I qualify with my weapon; I have to. I’m not half bad. But I’m barely half good.

“But you?” Elfin Katie Somers snorted like a grizzled sailor. “You’re the Crewe’s CQC expert. What’s more, I’ve heard you and Duncan trade stories about marksmanship. So don’t patronize me; it’s best for both of us if you carry the gun.”

“If you can really call it that,” O’Garran muttered. “There were two versions. The others actually pack some punch and have decent batteries. This model? One hard shot—which is no greater than an old brass-cartridge pocket pistol—will damn near drain the battery.”

She folded her arms. “Dinna talk pish, Chief. It may not stop much with a single shot, but it shoots straight as a ruler for two, maybe three hundred meters. Plenty as might attack us will be leaking by the time they get close enough. Probably a few leaked dry, as well.”

Miles grumbled without bothering to turn the sounds into any particular words. “Well, then you take the grapple gun.”

She considered it solemnly. “Aye, I think I’ll do that.” She picked it up, held her hand out for the remaining grapples. “You saw that Peter and Craig linked up?”

The chief stood, nodding. “Just before I got started winding in among these lumps. The two of them are the only ones within five hundred klicks.” He hooked the weapon’s battery to the one he’d been carrying.

“And only because instead of moving toward the rendezvous point, they moved closer to us.” She frowned. “Why do you think they did that?”

O’Garran shrugged, glancing at the moon rising in the east. “Mutual support. They started almost four hundred klicks away from the nearest group to the east. By the time they linked up, the gap had widened to five hundred. So it was march alone half a thousand klicks to the rendezvous or link up with us and double their—well, our—resources to make that journey.” Katie had finished gathering the bodies, and her improvised scent baits, into a single heap. “I see you’ve got the mess gathered.”

She nodded back. “I’ll take it beyond the lumps.”

We’ll take it beyond the lumps,” O’Garran corrected, the Dornaani survival rifle light in the crook of his arm. “And keep that grapple gun handy.”


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