Oblivion, page 15
“Blue Two, advance parallel to the canyon rim at a hundred meters,” John said. “I’ll advance at fifty. Kelly will take rear guard, staying low and out of sight.”
A trio of LEDs flashed green—despite being down in the canyon, Linda was also acknowledging the transmission—and John set off across the plateau. The crystalline plants had a flaring habit that left only about a half meter between their crowns. Whenever John brushed against a leaf, it would break off, and the wound oozed green sap. The leaf would shatter, then the shards would rise on tiny gossamer wings that made him wonder whether the bushes were plant, animal, or mineral—or somehow all three.
He advanced fifty meters at a time in a high crouch, then rose to his full height for a quick look around before dropping back into the brush and continuing forward. After nine hundred meters, he spotted a line of broken crystal plants crossing his path at an angle. He signaled Fred and Kelly to stop, then remained in a high crouch, keeping watch for a full five minutes in case there was an alien close by, trying to lure him into an ambush.
Finally, when he saw no sign of trouble, he spoke over TEAMCOM. “There’s some sort of trail ten meters ahead of my position. I’m going to check it out.”
He received a trio of green flashes, then slowly rose and examined the area more closely. The rim of the canyon was fifty meters to his left, just starting a gentle rightward curve as it followed the oxbow where Kelly had spotted the rock spatters on the road. He knew Fred was fifty meters to his right, hidden too well to be spotted even when John knew exactly where to look. He didn’t even bother to check behind him. Kelly was back there somewhere, keeping watch over both him and Fred, but she would be even better hidden than Fred.
John dropped back into a crouch, then advanced to the line of broken crystal plants. It was actually more of a furrow, with a quarter-meter-wide swath of leaf stumps leading from the interior of the plateau toward the suspicious oxbow—or perhaps it led away from the oxbow. There was really no way to tell which direction their mysterious traveler had been going.
A few meters down-trail—which meant toward the canyon in John’s mind—an entire crystal plant had been crushed. He went over and found a round, hand-size impression in the leaf stumps. There seemed to be a raised ridge down the center, perhaps where there had been a split in the pad.
John examined the ground in each direction. Whatever had crushed the plant would have picked up a lot of green sap. So if he could find a smear or two, he could track which way the thing had been traveling.
He discovered nothing for three meters in either direction. Either it had a very long stride, or the sap didn’t smear.
Both seemed pretty unlikely.
John rose to his full height again, intending to see if he could spot the source of the trail.
Instead, he found a second trail, about four meters away and running parallel to the first. Exactly parallel, as if it had been made by a second leg. Whatever had left the evidence was a lot bigger than John had realized. He dropped back into a crouch.
“Blue Two, you still have that strut?”
“You mean the spider leg?”
“I mean get over here,” John said. “I need you to look at something.”
John spent the next couple of minutes searching down-trail for more tracks. He found another print in a dust-filled hollow, but it was as round as the first one. There was no way to tell which direction it was pointing, and there was no green sap left behind.
Fred emerged from the brush, strut in hand, and knelt next to the print. He displayed the bottom of the pad, showing it to be a perfect match in size and shape, then looked up.
“How about that. Still think I was seeing things back there?”
“I’m not sure what you saw.” John squatted and took the strut, trying to determine whether there was a way to tell which direction the track was pointing, then asked, “Could it have been some sort of Covenant all-terrain vehicle?”
“Sure,” Fred said. “Except I think it was carrying kids, not aliens.”
“You could tell that from five hundred meters?” John asked. “It couldn’t have been Grunts?”
“No. It didn’t look like they were wearing breathing masks. Or methane tanks.”
“What about some other kind of alien? Maybe Covenant, but one we don’t even know about?”
Fred considered that, then finally said, “I’m going to go with kids.”
“So you could see their faces?”
“It was more their body shape and proportions. They looked human. Maybe a meter and a half tall. Skinny arms and legs, small hands and feet. No fur, no wings.” Fred rose to a high crouch and started down-trail toward the canyon. “You know . . . kids.”
“That just doesn’t make sense,” John said, falling in beside him. “Netherop is uninhabited. Where would a couple of human kids come from?”
“I don’t know,” Fred said. “Where did we come from?”
“You think a prowler dropped them off? Two kids and their spider wagon?” John slapped the strut into Fred’s belly armor. “I don’t think so. They’re aliens. That means we need to be on guard.”
Linda’s status LED flashed red, and by the time they had dropped to a squat, her voice was coming over TEAMCOM.
“I have movement on the rim,” she reported. “At least twenty figures . . . and, Blue Leader?”
John flashed a green status light, telling her to continue.
“I believe I’m going to give this one to Fred. They do resemble kids,” Linda said. “I think they are human.”
John rose to his full height and looked down-trail toward the canyon. It ran straight to the canyon rim, which was only a hundred meters distant, and he saw nothing at the end of the trail except the shimmering brown ribbon of a reflection mirage.
“There.”
Fred pointed toward the end of the oxbow, where an oval-bodied machine was rising out of the brush. And it did look like a spider—one with six small torsos protruding above its back. John could tell that they wore loose-fitting cloaks and swaddled their faces in scarves. He magnified the image and immediately realized Fred had been right all along. They had stringy blond hair and delicate brows over blue eyes, but it was their expressions that convinced him—anger and fear, alarm and determination, all mixed together and all very human.
After a moment, John realized the children were looking back at him, so he raised his free hand and waved.
Only the pilot did not duck down inside their machine. A moment later, two kids popped back up, holding what looked like a sickle-shaped dish antenna. They dropped the support pole into a notch on the back edge of the passenger compartment and swung it toward John and Fred. John thought it might be some sort of communications device, but then the spider machine began to scurry off across the plain, its ten legs moving so fast he could barely see them.
“Wait!” Fred waved both arms above his head. “Hold on!”
Three more spider machines rose out of the brush, their sickle-shaped antennae already affixed and pointing toward him and John, and they quickly turned to race after the first one.
Fred started after them. “We just want to—”
Twenty meters ahead of him, crystal plants began to shatter and burst into short-lived towers of flame. John had no idea what the antennae were shooting at them. He caught Fred by the arm and pulled him back.
“Stand down,” he said. “They think you’re chasing them.”
“I kinda am,” Fred said. He turned to John. “Don’t you want to know who they are? And what they’re doing here?”
“Sure,” John said. The spider machines were still running and still making crystal plants burst into flame, and now there was a thin curtain of white smoke rising in front of the two Spartans. “But maybe giving chase isn’t the best way to introduce ourselves.”
Fred stared through the smoke at the rapidly diminishing ovals of the spider machines, then said, “You’re right. It might be better to wait for them to come to us.”
“Maybe.” John started down the trail toward the canyon rim. “That depends on what they were planning.”
Fred fell in beside him, but Kelly remained behind them in hiding. John left her there. Until he had evidence to the contrary, he would continue to treat the kids as a potential threat.
“You think they wanted to ambush us?” Fred asked.
“It crossed my mind.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Good question.”
They reached the canyon rim. John peered over the edge, but he could not locate Linda in the heat haze. He waved anyway.
“Go another fifty meters,” Linda said over TEAMCOM. “They seemed to be spread along the sharpest part of the bend.”
“Acknowledged.”
John led the way toward the end of the oxbow and quickly began to see black, head-size rocks lined up along the rim. He stepped on the first one, crushing it beneath his weight and confirming that it was exactly what it looked like—coal. More puzzled than ever, he knelt and peered into the canyon again.
On the ribbon of highway three hundred meters below, a handful of dark dots shifted back and forth in the rippling light—almost certainly the range markers Kelly had identified earlier.
He sat back on his heels and looked up at Fred. “They were definitely planning to hit us.”
“Yeah.” Fred picked up a chunk of coal and crushed it in his power-armored grasp. “What’d we ever do to—”
“On your six!” Kelly warned over TEAMCOM. “Spider machine coming fast!”
John dived past Fred’s legs, and Fred leaped over his back, and they both went into a forward roll and came up ten meters apart, their battle rifles cocked and ready to fire.
A spider machine was crashing through the crystal plants at a full charge, a young girl leaning over the pilot’s controls with her blond hair flying behind her. A pair of boys stood beside her, braced in the front corners of the passenger compartment, working together as they swung their antenna-weapon toward Fred.
A line of crystal plants leading toward Fred shattered and burst into flame, then a cage of lightning crackled over his armor. His FRIEND symbol vanished from John’s motion tracker, and he went down as stiff as a steel beam.
John opened fire, putting a long burst through the dish of the weapon. It flashed white and began to spark, and the flaming crystal plants around Fred subsided into a smolder. Then the dish exploded, spraying shrapnel over the entire vehicle. One of the boys screamed and thrust a bloody hand toward the sky, then fell back into the passenger compartment and disappeared.
The pilot pushed her control orb in John’s direction, and the spider machine banked toward him, folding its legs low on his side and pushing off with the legs on Fred’s side. It was a meter in front of John almost before he could react, its round nose rising up to block his firing angle and protect the pilot.
He threw himself onto his back, intending to let the spider charge over him, but the thing stopped dead above him. The legs folded upward, and the belly dropped.
“Blue Leader?” Kelly’s tone was almost panicked. “Are—”
“Under it.” John rolled toward the legs, then felt the thing’s undercarriage land on his shoulder—and stopped short. “Stuck.”
He had no idea how heavy the spider machine was, but it wasn’t all that much larger than a Warthog, and he had been pinned under a couple of those before without having his Mjolnir crushed. He pushed off with his lower arm and felt the thing rock . . . then it lifted its legs off the ground, and his arm collapsed beneath him as its weight dropped.
“Stuck harder,” he said. “Help.”
“Have patience.”
A string of pings echoed through the spider as Kelly fired a burst into its back end. Muffled voices, panicked and young, echoed down through the hull. John tried again to dislodge himself, this time by rolling off his side, but it was no good. The thing had lowered its entire weight onto him, so even if he managed to roll onto his belly, it would simply drop down on top of him.
The bang of a detonating grenade sounded somewhere out in front of the machine. The results were visible to John only through the top edge of his faceplate, a small curtain of dust and plant shards dropping to the ground. But it was clear that the grenade had been intended only as a warning, having landed too far away to cause any damage to either passengers or vehicle. There were more pings from the rear of the machine, then a muffled clunk as something landed on the floor of the passenger compartment.
“Kelly, you didn’t—”
“Of course I did,” Kelly said. “But it’s not armed.”
The girl and her two boys were already leaping out of the machine on John’s side of the passenger compartment. The girl’s hair was matted with blood—it could only be a result of the dish weapon’s unexpected eruption—and one of the boys landed awkwardly and went down when his knee bent sideways. He cried out, and his two companions circled back and grabbed him under the arms.
The second boy could only use one hand, because the other had an antenna shard through it. The girl had a jagged shrapnel wound in her scalp, and when she glanced back toward John, her face was covered in blood. But at least all three were alive—and John was pretty sure that was better than what they had intended for him and Fred.
The trio glanced toward the rear of their machine, then hobbled into the brush as Kelly raced up with her MA5B assault rifle in hand. She eyed them long enough to be sure they were no longer a threat, then returned her weapon to its mount and grabbed the spider thing where its legs entered the body. She managed to lift it high enough for John to roll onto his belly.
As he scrambled from beneath it, Fred’s FRIEND symbol reappeared on his motion tracker.
“Blue Two, status,” John said.
Fred’s status LED flashed amber. “In the middle of a hard reboot, but it looks like all systems are coming back online.”
John rose, keeping a careful eye on the departing kids. They had mostly vanished into the crystal plants, but were leaving enough of a blood trail that it would be a simple matter to track them down.
“Any injuries?”
“No, my armor went into lockdown when everything started to short-circuit. They must have hit me with some kind of electro-magnetic blast.” Fred paused a moment, then added, “My onboard says it was a microwave burst.”
“Microwave?” John had never heard of such a weapon; microwave kilns and microwave cauterizing wands, sure. But a microwave gun? That was a new one. He signaled Kelly to catch the kids, then returned to the spider machine and rose onto his toes so he could look into the riding compartment. “None of this makes any sense.”
The back third of the compartment was divided into a trio of low coal bins, which were separated from each other by a pair of narrow corridors. A meter aft of the coal bins, a soot-filled pipe rose about ten centimeters above a cabinet set into the surrounding deck. Even to John, who had never been a passionate student of mechanical engineering, it seemed obvious that the cabinet contained a coal-fired engine.
But there was no smoke rising from the pipe, nor were any fumes shooting out of the bullet holes that Kelly’s rounds had opened on the interior side of the engine cabinet. Whatever the spider machine had been using for power when the kids charged, it wasn’t a coal-fired engine.
Forward of the coal bins, the passenger area was filled with coarsely woven baskets filled with foodstuffs—tear-shaped leaf paddles, curly orange stems, long snaky roots—and water bladders made from what seemed to be animal stomachs. On the floor between the baskets, John could see the seams of pull-up access panels, while the meter-high walls that encircled the compartment were divided by a line of pullout drawers. At the front rose the spider machine’s controls, a thick glass column that ended in a transparent orb larger around than John’s helmet.
“It’s like a band of hunter-gatherers built a luxury ATV,” Fred said. He was across from John, peering into the compartment from the other side. “Before they invented wheels.”
“Like I said.” John spotted Kelly’s unarmed grenade lying on the floor next to a basket of water bladders and hoisted himself up to retrieve it. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“I could use some help with these children,” Kelly said, still speaking over TEAMCOM. “Unless you’d rather I just shoot them?”
“Negative,” John said. He didn’t think Kelly was serious, but better to be safe. She was not the most patient of Spartans. “I want to talk to them.”
“You’re not the only one,” Fred said. “They have a lot of explaining to do.”
John flashed a green status light to show that he agreed, but he was actually less interested in what the kids were doing on Netherop than he was in their spider machines. If he could find a way to strike a bargain with them, he might be able to send some of them back to retrieve Petrov and the rest of Blue Force. Or, at the very least, to force these three to give him and the other Spartans a ride.
John and Fred followed Kelly’s trail for fifty meters before they saw her crouching next to a broken crystal plant. The kids had stopped about ten meters ahead of her, and the girl was standing behind her companions, whirling a loaded stone-sling over her head. The blood was streaming down over one eye, and she kept wiping it away with a dirt-crusted robe sleeve. With the lower half of her face still hidden behind a loosely wrapped scarf, it was hard to tell her age. But judging by their size, neither she nor her companions could be much over ten years old.
John began to pull his weapons and grenades off their mounts and lay them on the stone at Fred’s feet.
“I’ll catch the girl,” he said over TEAMCOM. “Kelly, you take the standing boy. We’ll leave the one on the ground for now.”
A loud clang sounded inside his helmet as it was struck by a fast-moving stone. He looked back toward the kids and saw the blond girl, eyes wide with fear, folding another stone into the pocket of her sling. The boy with the wounded hand stepped forward and hurled a rock with his good hand. The noise was not as loud.
