Expendable Heroes, page 10
“Fucking cunt.”
Rollo said, “Psst, she spent time working for an Australian spy base. Those are terms of endearment.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
A tense silence followed her words.
“Right, after all that, let’s look at the plan,” Jack said. He pushed the lunch plates and cups aside. “The ascent vehicle is here.” He pointed at the map. “It appears to be partially operational. It seems the scientists took it and managed to land it safely on the bank of this lake. We can also see that the buggy is here.” He pointed at a spot in between the buildings of the base and the low ridge that lay in between their current location and the lake. “I suggest that, since it’s not far from here, we have a look to see what state it’s in. We can fix it and use it.”
“Yeah, I don’t fancy carrying all our shit to the next valley,” Luciane said.
“How long would it take us to walk there?”
“Less than a day, if we’re all fit.” Jack looked around the table.
Rollo held up his hands. “Hey, don’t look at me. Who crawls into small spaces to connect wiring all day?”
“You ran away into the woods yesterday, we got shot at, buried a body, and then I gave both of you an injection that knocks most people around a bit.”
“Oh. Right.”
“None of us are fit. And yeah, it would be great if you didn’t take everything as an insult.”
“When you’re dumpy and hairy and come from a worker class family like me, that’s what you grow up learning to do.”
Luciane added, “Well, it’s not helpful.”
“Right, Mrs Bossypants.”
Luciane flew up and grabbed him by the front of the shirt. “No one—ever—suggests that I’m some man’s property, understand?”
“Luce…” Jack said.
She must have realised what she was doing, let go of Rollo’s shirt and sat down again.
“Don’t take everything as an insult, right?” Rollo said.
“Is there a way you two can stop this?” Jack said.
“It’s her. She is prickly about everything.”
“And so are you.”
“So are all three of you,” Steven said.
“So what’s wrong with you, Mr. Cucumber?” Luciane said.
“Nothing. I just don’t want to waste any time bickering. Actually, that’s wrong. We can bicker about the right things. Bicker about how we’re going to get the buggy. Bicker about what to do when it’s broken. Bicker about how we’re going to restore contact with the Marmoset when we need their software update to fix the ascent craft. Bicker about what we’ll do when it’s out of fuel.”
“We can fix all of those things,” Luciane said. “We don’t need to bicker over them.”
“Right, then let’s start.” He pushed himself up from the table.
“We can’t fix stupid or arseholery,” Luciane said behind his back.
Steven whirled around and grabbed Luciane by the front of her overalls. “Stop it or I’ll wring your neck!”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Jack said, his tone smug. “She’s very handy to have around.”
“See? I have a fan club these days.”
Steven let out a sigh and spread his hands.
“You three. If you’re well enough for this bullshit, then you’re well enough to go back out there to get the buggy.”
“No,” Jack said. “We’ll do this properly and we’ll do it tomorrow. I noticed that the plant junk is gumming up the springs on the suits. I want those cleaned first.”
So they took apart the foot springs of the suits and scraped the dried slime out. Then they cleaned the tools they’d used. It was hard work, but acid dissolved in water made it easier.
CHAPTER 14
Luciane didn’t want to come. She stood at the door with the laser gun slung over her shoulder as Steven, Jack and Rollo set out.
“You’re sure you don’t want to come?” Rollo asked.
“If those freaks turn up again? No, thank you. Someone has to keep our base safe.”
It was true, even if Steven also felt uncomfortable with leaving her alone. Luciane had something about forests. And something had happened two nights ago that had triggered memories in her. With Luciane being Luciane, she would probably rather die than tell anyone what bothered her. Steven had singled out Jack for keeping his personal life to his chest, but Luciane was no better. Yeah, her family came from the Philippines and she was a once-hacker. She might or might not have served in the military or might have been a hitman for crime lords. Who knew?
Look at the four of them. They were all broken people whom the prison system had damaged even further. Steven had believed that they were “all right” because they were political prisoners, but in reality, did such a distinction even exist? People who were rich and committed a crime got away with it. If you were poor or came from undesirable backgrounds, you went to prison, regardless of the seriousness of the crime.
The weather was overcast as they walked through the field, again crushing many stems into slime. They’d come this way only a day and a half ago, but already it was hard to see where they had walked.
“This stuff is just insufferable,” Rollo said at the back. “How can plants grow that quickly?”
“Well, they’re alien plants, and they obviously like this environment.”
But the plants grew worryingly fast. Steven had cleared out much of the area around the landing craft the day before yesterday, and already he could see evidence of regrowth. It was as if the faster they removed the plants, the faster they grew back.
To his horror, too, he noticed how when they arrived in the forest, little bits of growth sprouted between the leaf litter on the forest floor. This was the path they had taken the day before yesterday, and that growth had definitely not been there before. He’d become intimately acquainted with the ground, and he had not seen the plants. It was as if those plants followed the people around.
As if people contaminated the areas when they walked past by tracking slime everywhere. Damn. How long before this forest became an impenetrable tangle of weeds?
For now, the forest was still easy to traverse. You could even see all the signs of the fight two nights ago, and the mound of dirt that covered the body.
Tufts of plants also sprang up around it, in the shape of a body.
“Was that what you saw in the forest?” he asked Rollo. “Plants in the shape of a person?”
Rollo gave him a haunted look. “If we die, are we going to end up like that with plants sprouting out of our bodies?”
“Likely.”
With Jack in the lead, they made good progress. He held his info pad in front of him and followed the path marked out on the map.
He stopped at the top of a rocky outcrop not far from the area where the fight had been.
The buggy lay at the bottom of the rock slope. It had fallen on its side, and plants had grown over the wheels and the side of the vehicle. They probably hadn’t noticed this before, because it had been dark and because of the cover of vegetation.
A disturbing thought crossed Steven’s mind: when they encountered the researcher, was this man looking for this vehicle? Because otherwise, what had he been doing here? It would have taken him most of a day to walk here. Had he come to talk to them, warn them, or kill them?
He had tried to had tried to talk to the man and had been shot at in response.
But what if he couldn’t speak anymore and had been looking for help?
Shooting at people was not really looking for help.
Still, it was an uncomfortable thought.
They clambered down the slope and pulled all the plants off the vehicle. They pushed it back onto its wheels. It fell to the ground with a thud and bounced onto the tyres, releasing leaves and dust.
“It’s not heavy because someone removed the battery,” Rollo said.
“They probably took it back to the building.” Steven wiped sand out of his face.
“I don’t recall seeing it.”
Jack climbed into the tray and scooped out leaves.
Some type of insect colony had made a nest in the foot recess. Steven used his gloves to scrape the nest out. It contained a milky sticky residue. Ew. Little alien creatures crawled all over his sleeves.
“Look at this,” Jack said. He stood in the tray, looking at the back of the cabin.
Steven took a few steps back. Rollo had been cleaning out the battery housing so that he could insert the spare battery he had brought and he rose from behind the tray.
Jack pointed at two marks in the metal plating. “What do you think caused this?”
“They look like scratches,” Rollo said. “Like the scientist guy’s armour.”
“Were-tigers,” Steven said.
“Oh man, don’t you start, too.” Jack bent over the metal to study the marks. “There’s little holes in the metal just like there were in the armour plate. What’s the bet this was done by the same creature?”
Steven’s mind took him on an unwelcome vision of a man running through the field pursued by alien tigers, jumping in the buggy, and the tigers jumped into the back and clawed their way through the back of the tray. What had happened to the driver? He didn’t want to know.
“I don’t like this,” he said to no one in particular.
He could only think of the best laser they had, which was with Luciane, and the person most skilled at using lasers, which was also Luciane. It seemed they shouldn’t go into this forest without adequate protection.
“No,” Rollo said. “I’ll just do a quick job to get this thing rolling and I’ll fix the rest in the workshop.” He dumped the spare—and as yet unconnected—battery in the tray and pushed against the back of the vehicle. It moved a little bit—even if Jack was still in the tray, but it faced uphill.
“We need to turn it around and push it downhill.”
In this section of the forest, it was quite dark, so undergrowth was sparse and the trees stood far enough apart for the vehicle to find a path. The trouble would start once they came to the open field.
With much pushing and shoving, they managed to turn the vehicle around, after which it rolled relatively easily to the edge of the clearing. From there on, Rollo walked first with the laser to burn away the plants, after which Steven and Jack pushed the buggy forward.
It was hard work and slow going, but when they were halfway, Luciane came out to help them and they made it to the building.
They had to pull up the large rolling door which was glued stuck with what Steven now recognised as dried plant sap.
He heaved a sigh of relief when they could finally shut the door. It was already late in the afternoon. He appreciated Jack’s insight. If it had been up to him, they would have tried doing this yesterday afternoon, and they could never have finished it before dark.
What were these extremely sharp-clawed creatures that roamed around the forest?
“Were-tigers, as I said,” Luciane declared, standing in the tray and looking at the scratches. “We need to be more careful.”
“I’d rather we were more careful about not getting so much of this fucking plant crap on our stuff,” Rollo said, with his head under the open maintenance panel. “The shit is everywhere. When it dries out, it’s as hard as concrete.”
“Put some acid on it,” Luciane said.
“We’re going to run out of acid at this rate.”
And while they had a few more drums of acid which would last them a while, it was clear that if things broke and kept breaking and they kept having to clean everything they took outside, and the craft, and spend time looking for clues and people, they would run out of a far more valuable resource: time.
CHAPTER 15
It took Rollo the best part of the next day to fix the buggy.
The battery didn’t fit in the housing because it was not exactly the same model and because the tumble down the hill had bent that side of the vehicle.
They looked for, but couldn’t see, the old battery, and Steven concluded that it probably lay in the forest somewhere.
Apart from the panel in the back, the clawed creature had also ripped through wiring.
A spare wheel, the emergency repair kit and strangely enough, a set of rainy weather blankets were also missing.
This became the source of much speculation about what had happened to the scientists. The recorded version was that Leo had taken the buggy and crashed it off the cliff, but it also looked like someone had been back to retrieve the loose items from the vehicle.
Like the battery, the blankets, the repair kit and the spare wheel, however, were not in the building.
The four sat around the table at the end of the day, trying to figure out what today’s discoveries meant.
Jack said, “So what can we conclude? They tried to leave the base on foot, then decided to come back and use the ascent craft instead? That’s the only way it can make sense.”
Luciane’s face was dark. “I don’t like what that tells us about the terrain on the other side of the ridge. If we go from here to the next valley in a straight line, we’re only halfway once we’re on the highest point of the ridge. It looks like they might have decided that it was too hard.”
“Well, it would have been too hard taking the broken buggy,” Rollo said.
“But we don’t know if the buggy was broken before or after they tried,” Steven said.
“Hmmm. True.”
They were silent for a while.
“No news the Marmoset yet?” Luciane asked, while looking at Jack. Her expression was full of meaning, as if she expected the ship in orbit to have figured out that they’d hacked into the data.
Jack shook his head. “Just random bursts of garbled sound. I know I said that I thought Jeremy might be responsible, but after what we did two days ago, I would have expected a very clear message from them.”
“Why?” Steven asked. “They could prefer to keep playing the game.”
“I’m still a spy and an employee of theirs. They’ve got a lot of money riding on this medication trial.”
“So you think it’s genuine?”
“Could be. There is an awful lot of interfering noise on the line. I honestly can’t explain it in any other way than that. Something in this area interferes badly with radio transmission. If the scientists had to deal with garbage like that, and had to deal with these crap plants, I’m not surprised that they went silent and that they didn’t communicate what they’d done. They hoped to find a better location in the next valley.”
“And the fact that they went missing meant that they were unsuccessful?” Luciane said. “And we’re meant to succeed where they failed?”
“We have the poison antidote,” Jack reminded her.
“Maybe, but it might just mean we die even more slowly while everything we use and need for survival is fucked up by these plants.”
“We’re going anyway,” Steven said. “Getting the ascent craft is our only chance.”
They all nodded.
They went about preparing for the trip with military precision the next day. It was essential that they were well-rested, had studied the area, and had enough food. Hurry is the enemy of survival an instructor had told Steven in his planetary survival training.
Check everything, bring everything, have a plan, including a backup and a backup of the backup.
They sat around the table at lunch and discussed the hard questions.
Jack began. “I know these questions are uncomfortable, but it’s better that we address them now so that we’re all clear about where we stand and we have an emergency playbook.”
“You sound like you’ve done this before,” Luciane said.
“You don’t want to know. All right, first question: how much effort can we afford to spend to save any of the researchers who are still alive?”
“Fuck them,” Rollo said.
“They didn’t ask for this,” Luciane said. “They’re in the same boat as we are.”
“But what if they’ve all turned into monsters?”
Rollo said, “Obviously, we leave them here. Shoot ‘em if they try to stop us.”
“Would everyone be fine if they were all killed?” Jack asked.
“You mean, if we killed them?” Steven said.
Rollo nodded. “If they attack us like the other one did, shit, yeah.”
“Except it was never clear whether the man wanted to attack,” Luciane said. Her face bore a haunted expression.
“If they can’t or won’t talk to us, that counts as being hostile,” Rollo said. “If they’re alive, they’ve lived here for long enough that they can survive longer, and then Jeremy can fucking come down here himself. We’re prisoners and guinea pigs. We’re not even paid for any of this shit.”
There were nods around the table.
“What about if one of us becomes unable to continue?” Jack asked.
“If I’m dying, feel free to help me along and put me out of my misery,” Luciane said. She looked around the table as if daring anyone to challenge her.
Wow. That was quite… something.
“Luce, are you OK?” Steven said.
“Apart from being stuck on this fucking planet, never better. I mean, I’ve struggled to see for years how advocating for temporary contractors to be paid fairly justifies the type of ‘punishments’ they’ve given me, but that’s where we are.”
“You might also have been a hacker and that might have had something to do with it.”
“That’s only after they started coming after me. I needed to do something to defend myself, right? I can see that you’re shocked that I say this, but I rather be dead than go to jail again, because they’ll never let me out. So yeah, if I’m badly wounded, shoot me, make sure I’m properly dead, and leave me here.”
After a short but intense silence, Jack continued down his list of questions that had just become a heck of a lot more uncomfortable.
