Star Fire, page 12
part #1 of Stars End Series
But her head is pointed right at us, and she isn’t in the process of blasting us to dust. Maybe I’m right. Or maybe I’m totally wrong. Either way, we’re safe for the moment.
Lathar isn’t because he’s an idiot. Enough of one I decide there’s no way in hell he’s Special Forces. Probably standard infantry that skipped deployment on a rogue trader after an urban firefight confused the issue. I’ve seen it happen before. Only most deserters like that never make it as far as Warrick. They get a point for that.
They lose all their points for attacking the aliens.
Even I can see the muzzle flashes in the trees as Lathar and his squad opens fire, their rounds hitting the aliens square in their helmets. The rounds scuff the black carapace and ricochet off, only serving to tell the giants exactly where they’re positioned.
I hear the female’s voice. It’s higher-pitched than I expect for something her size, and it’s almost like singing—a soprano that spits out sharp notes like a bow over a violin. The other two respond in kind with their own short melodies, each picking a target and firing. Two of the shots successfully neutralize their targets. The female misses Lathar as he drops out of the tree, falling the last meter when his cord is melted.
He lands on his feet.
Then he starts running toward us.
Son of a bitch.
He’s got a wild smile on his face like he knows he’s a dead man and he just wants us to pay for that fact even though his stupidity is responsible. A quick glance at the alien shows me she’s turning her weapon to lead him, which is going to put her aim right on us in about four seconds.
I don’t hesitate another millisecond, pivoting on a knee and swinging my rifle up. I punch out three rounds, two of them hitting Lathar in the chest, the other in the head. He stumbles and trips about four meters short of our position, the change causing the alien to shift her aim away from us. She fires, hitting Lathar square and turning him into a literal hot mess.
“Get in the pod!” I hiss at Rozik, throwing myself inside. He’s just as quick to react, rising and leaping in on top of me. “How do I close it?”
“Button on the left,” he says.
I hit the button. The top of the pod swings down, closing with a soft thud. A hiss follows as the system pressurizes. A light activates.
I’m on the bottom, with Rozik’s face way too close to mine. I can smell his breath and feel the stubble of his chin against mine, and I’m already regretting the idea.
I have no idea if we’re safe here or if I just turned the capsule into our shared tomb. Worse, if we die then Joie is as good as dead too, fated to starve to death in a hollowed-out log in the middle of the Warrick forest.
“I never wanted to get this close to you, Alliance,” Rozik whispers.
“The feeling’s mutual,” I reply softly. “Your breath smells like it’s coming from the other end. Now shut up. They might be able to hear us.”
Rozik shuts his mouth.
My heart pounds, my body in a cold sweat. There’s only silence from outside, Lathar’s Team Two all joining Team Dead. I’m not sad to see them go. They were too stupid to live.
It’s impossible to tell what’s happening beyond the confines of the capsule. I’m stuck with Rozik’s weight pressing down on me, the attachments of his exo digging into my chest and thigh. There isn’t a lot of air inside the pod, and our body heat is already beginning to warm it past comfortable.
“Do you think they can see the pod?” Rozik asks, his mouth against my ear.
“No idea,” I reply. “Let’s hope not.”
I close my eyes, trying to push all of my physical awareness aside. I want my mind somewhere else, so I think about Shae. She’s a nurse. We met in the sickbay of Peralta, a light carrier that was part of Third Fleet Carrier Strike Group Four. I want to think I was there because I was doing something heroic on a mission against the Commune, but that isn’t the truth.
Truth is, I broke my finger playing basketball. Ball hit it just right, bent it back and fractured it. She fixed me up right away, using a PRE gun to knit the bone while I waited. The process took about twenty minutes. I had her laughing the entire time. I can be pretty funny when I’m motivated, and she was all the motivation I needed.
Then and for the rest of our lives.
It’s hard to date in the service, especially as a Skirmisher pilot. I was with Strike Group Four for six months before reassignment, during which time Shae and me managed to fall pretty deep in love. Or at least, I was pretty deep in love. I sent messages all the time, and she sent hers back, but it takes two weeks to pass comms across the front lines, and I always wondered if she would find someone else in the interim.
She didn’t.
We managed to swing four weeks leave at the same time, and we met halfway, on Tulsi, a planet known for its incredible flowering plants. We were married there, and by the time we parted again she was pregnant with Jaycee.
She dropped out of the service when Jaycee was born. I saw her every chance I could, which wasn’t near often enough. Time passed, we had a few more kids, politics happened and we finally got to live together on Spindle. The not-quite-retired ace Skirmisher pilot who saved the Alliance from losing the war but made the wrong people look like morons because they were, and the beautiful former nurse and mother of his children.
It was perfect. Too perfect. Things like that aren’t meant to last. Not in this universe. Not with so much conflict out there. Us humans have learned a lot of things over the years, but how to get along all the time isn’t one of them. I think we get bored without drama, and we make it happen to give us something to do, like busy little ants.
Ants. It reminds me of the aliens. I open my eyes, my senses returning. My legs are asleep from Rozik’s weight on them. His head is heavy on my shoulder. We’re still alive. That’s a win right there.
“Rozik,” I say, smacking the side of my head into his. “Rozik.” His eyes open. He lifts his head as best he can. “Were you sleeping?”
“I figured it was the best use of our time in here,” he replies. “Slows the breathing. Conserves oxygen.”
He didn’t figure wrong. I can tell the air is thinner than before. We don’t have a huge store left. “Any idea how long it’s been?”
“Twenty minutes?”
“Think we’re safe?”
“Only one way to find out.”
My heart starts thumping again as I reach for the button to open the pod. We have no way to tell if the aliens are still sitting right outside, maybe even just waiting for us to appear. But we can’t stay here either. We’ve got maybe twenty more minutes of air, and I’m eager to get Rozik’s weight off my diaphragm so I can pull a deep breath again.
“Ready?” I ask.
“Confirmed.”
I hit the control, and the top slides open again. I look past Rozik’s head up at the trees, waiting for a huge, ant-like helmeted head to lean over us. Either that or the oversized muzzle of a rifle. But neither happened. Rozik pushes himself up and out, and I sit up in the capsule. The charred remains of dead soldiers surround us.
The aliens are gone.
Chapter 26
“They couldn’t see us,” Rozik says as I climb out of the pod, keeping his voice low.
“No,” I reply.
“How did you know?”
“I didn’t know for sure. An educated guess based on the design of their helmets and our past encounters. I think they’re using a combination of sound and heat, and maybe some kind of echolocation, like a bat.”
“Bat?”
“You don’t know what a bat is?”
“There are no bats on my homeworld.”
“Which is?”
“Commune capital.”
“Kazani?”
“You know it?”
“Never been there,” I say with a smile. The Alliance and the Commune have been eager to shoot the hell out of one another’s capitals for years without success. The Commune came close once. “But of course I’ve heard of it. A lot more people on it than Vilsy.”
“By about two billion. Do you think they could see the pod?”
“Yes, but considering they left us alone, either they didn’t know we were inside or they didn’t identify us correctly, which by inference caused them to identify the pod incorrectly.”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s kind of like the Direct Cortical Interface,” I say, turning my head and tapping the connector on my the back. “I don’t know how much you know about the mesh system. But this is called a needle. It’s an AI. A learning machine. Every meshed pilot gets one when they graduate from the Academy. It’s usually inherited from a pilot who’s a match to you but who’s deceased. Mine broke off during the crash, which the Alliance Navy is not going to be very happy about.
“That’s the wrong part of the story. The important part is that the Skirmisher uses a number of different sensors to see, including cameras. But all of it is artificial, and it all gets aggregated from the ship’s computer to the DCI, which creates a visual representation in the brain. Eyes without eyes, so to speak. The AI knows what certain things look like, and it does its best to infer the rest based on the data available on the periphery. Since it’s designed for pilots, it cares about things that look like spaceships. Show it a gun, if it’s large enough it will turn it into a spaceship. Show it a rose, it might not be able to see it at all.”
“I still don’t completely follow you,” Rozik says, slightly annoyed at my description.
“Our positioning told the aliens we weren’t human. Maybe we looked like what they classify as a four-legged mammal like a bear.”
“We have creatures we call bears on Kazani.”
“Then that bear suddenly rises up and climbs into something and then vanishes, and the pod is compared against what they recognize. Their minds assemble all of the factors together. The bear. The trees. The pod. And the end result is that we went into our den or something. No threat detected.”
Rozik nods. “Now I see. And you think this is how they’re operating? Like machines?”
“Not acting like machines. Seeing like a Skirmisher. Without eyes.”
“You could be transferring your experience onto them. Defining them based on what’s already familiar to you.”
“True. But the outcome lines up with my definition, doesn’t it?”
“I can’t argue that. We’re still alive.”
“If we go with that theory, we might be able to use it against them.”
“How so?”
“Creating forms they can’t identify? I’m not completely sure yet. It’s just a thought.”
“Based on that theory, do you think the aliens can recognize individuals?”
“Probably not by sight. Maybe smell or sound? Or a combination of all the factors.”
Rozik nods. “They attacked Lathar and his gang like they had a chip on their shoulder. Like they believe he’s the one killing them.”
“And not taking any more chances that we’ll kill them first,” I reply. “That could be bad news if they head over the mountains.”
“We need to get there before they do.”
“That might be hard. They have ships and free reign over the planet. Walton is defenseless.”
“Yes, but they haven’t shown much interest so far. They know you and I are in the woods and on foot. They probably have an idea of how fast we can travel. We need to find a way to travel faster than that.”
“I just don’t get that part. They took out your fleet. They wiped our Spindle. They chased us here. Why not go after the city, if they’re intent on killing us?”
“They’re aliens. They don’t work on the same logic we do, even if they do have a resemblance to us. We have to work with the facts we’re presented.”
“Agreed,” I say.
“We can speed you up a little bit,” Rozik says. He returns to the pod and reaches in, taking out the exo suit. “Have you ever worn an exo-suit before?”
“What do you think?”
“It isn’t hard.” He unclasps it, allowing it to unfold. Without being attached to a person, the exo looks like a very basic drawing of a human skeleton with a large, flat battery pack in the center.
“Each of the clasps goes around a limb and snaps closed. The central unit contains a battery and processor. It senses your movements and augments them, reducing your physical exertion. Here, put it on.”
I walk over to him, turning around so he can fit the battery on my back and wrap the main straps around my chest. After that, it’s as simple as squeezing the clasps onto the parts of the body they align with.
“Now take a step,” he says.
I do. It feels completely natural, and at the same time I can tell there’s less effort involved, as if the exo is holding me up. “I like this.”
Rozik goes back to the pod. He recovers the emergency satchel, rifle and night vision, and hands them all to me. “Now you’re properly equipped. I would say our chances of surviving the night are a hundred percent higher.”
“I’m sorry about your sailor,” I say. And I surprise myself because I actually mean it.
“Yes. Ensign LaVeri. He was a fine young man. His death will help ensure our life, and possibly the lives of billions. Isn’t that what we join the military to do?”
“Maybe in the Commune,” I reply. “The Alliance military is sixty percent conscripts. That’s why we get people like Lathar. And people like me.”
“You didn’t join voluntarily?”
“No. The Vilsy government is a huge supporter of the war machine. They run mandatory mesh-testing on your eighteenth birthday. I got lucky.” I smirk to emphasize the sarcasm. “I’m not a fighter.”
Rozik smiles. “You could have fooled me.”
Chapter 27
We make it back to Joie in less than an hour thanks to Ensign LaVeri’s exo and night vision letting me see my way through the dark and keep up with Rozik. She’s in the same position we left her in when I duck my head low to enter our makeshift camp, and for a split-second my mind convinces me she’s dead.
Then her head shifts slightly, her eyes turning to look back at me. “I didn’t miss you,” she says.
I smile. “I didn’t miss you either.”
Rozik enters from the other side. He slumps against the side of the log, resting his rifle across his legs. “Twenty minutes. That’s all I ask.”
“What happened?” Joie asks.
I quickly and quietly fill her in on Lathar and his squad while Rozik falls asleep. I want to rest more than anything, but whether the aliens can see us or not, I’m not ready to let my guard down. All it takes is one mistake.
“I didn’t think any of the deserters made it this far out,” Joie says. “From what I’ve read, most of them get caught by the third hop.”
“They must have lucked out catching a rogue trader headed this way. Probably a black market ship looking to get involved in the illegal fur trade, or maybe a skimmer helping take a little off the top at the mines. Like my pops always said—you can’t have an organized society without corruption.”
“Your old man was kind of cynical.”
“Yeah, but for the most part he was also right. Are you feeling any better?”
“As long as I don’t move. Are you feeling any better?”
“What do you mean?”
She raises her fingertip to point at Rozik. I shrug. “I’m not sorry we went on the recon if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I think you know what I’m asking.”
Whether or not I’m any closer to trusting Captain Commie. “We got about as close as two straight men should ever get,” I reply as if that’s an answer.
“How do you know he’s straight?” she whispers back.
“I heard that,” Rozik says, one of his eyes sliding open. “Don’t worry, Commander, all knowledge of our secret affair will die with me.”
“Did you just make a joke?”
“Aww, it’s like Romeo and Juliet,” Joie says, adding to it. “Forbidden love. How romantic.”
Rozik smirks. Joie laughs. I lean back, letting them use me as the butt of their humor. “I trust him more now than I did three hours ago.”
“I heard that too,” Rozik says. “Should we kiss and make up?”
“Ahh...that’s taking it a little too far,” I reply, causing Joie to laugh again. Even Rozik makes a short coughing sound that I guess is his version of laughter.
A rustle in the trees causes them both to go silent. Rozik picks his head up, looking out his end of the stump.
We’re frozen in place, eyes narrowing slightly as we strain to listen. Another rustle follows the first, slightly closer. Then a third. Rozik slowly lifts the rifle from his legs, getting it into a better position to fire. I do the same while I pivot to defend my end of the stump.
If I’m right about the aliens, they won’t be able to see us in here. The tree will block most of our heat signature, and the terrain is too generic for anything to stand out. All we have to do is stay quiet and still and they’ll pass us by.
I’m surprised they’re even out here now. Not only is it still early morning and dark, but they already iced one group of soldiers. Why didn’t they stay at their ship until daybreak?
The rustling continues along with the crackling of twigs and small branches on the forest floor. It’s coming from Rozik’s side, and I watch his expression, waiting for him to provide a clearer indication of our situation.
His face is tight. Tense. His finger slides from the guard to the trigger as the aliens get closer. I do the same. If they come near the log, we’ll be ready.
“Stand down,” Rozik whispers suddenly, his entire demeanor changing. He shifts his finger and lowers his weapon, slumping back again. “It’s an animal, not an alien. I think it came to the stream for a drink.”
My muscles loosen. I didn’t realize I was so tense. I exhale sharply, lowering my gun. “A bear?” I ask.
