Girl Gone Nova (16 page)

The heat and humidity increased as the sun arced higher in the sky. Good thing she’d shed her flight suit. While it felt good to be in motion, her sense of unease built. She pulled her already silenced weapon. Her pace slowed as wary grew to near critical mass. If someone was tracking her, they were as good at being quiet as she was. Or they weren’t dirt side yet.

Something changed, though she wasn’t sure what. A tingle across her skin or a shift in the way the air moved? Her heart thudded slow and heavy, and adrenaline began a slow bleed into her system. Her feeling of being watched went into overdrive. Someone was out there. She was certain of it.

The underbrush shifted beneath her boots, the sound loud in the deep quiet. Even the bugs seemed oppressed into silence by the heat. Doc stopped by a large tree and eased her pack off with her free hand. It would suck to lose it, but it would slow her down if she had to move fast and it increased her silhouette. She kept the tree on her six while she did a perimeter scan.

Her body was a coiled spring, her senses so attuned to subtle shifts in the airflow, she had dropped and rolled before her brain processed the subtle whine of something incoming. It sizzled along her back before slamming into the tree where she’d been standing.

Doc fired in the direction of the shot, rolled and then fired again. Energy blasts hit the ground on either side of her. She did a fast, low crawl through the dense scrub toward one of the bogeys while she processed the attack.

Three shots from three directions. They had her ringed, not easy to do unless they’d been tracking her from space. Was that what she’d sensed? Remote transport? Drop in and shoot?

Not the way to make first contact with her.

Face close to the ground, she concentrated on filtering out the normal ambient sounds and smells, her brain now screening for what had changed.

“We wish to help you,” one of them called out, the sound coming from her three o’clock. His scent drifted toward her, too. That upped the opposition to four bogeys. “We observed the crash of your ship and we wish to help you.”

By shooting her?

“We mean you no harm.”

This was a new voice, coming from nine o’clock. That put the bogey count at five, though she wouldn’t count her bogeys until they were all unconscious.
Never assume.

As silence once more settled in, Doc began to sort bogey sounds from nature sounds. They were pretty good, but not good enough. The subtle shift of feet on grass. Soft inhale and exhale. Different scents drifted in, too. They had edged closer, trying to tighten the ring. Did that mean they were able to track her or were they overconfident? Her hand brushed a small pebble, her fingers closed around it. She tossed it, the movement small, but directed.

It hit the ground a few feet to her right. The sound was minute, but the response wasn’t. A light flashed from one of the positions she’d identified, striking the ground near her pebble. Firing revealed their positions.

Time to find out if they could track her.

She turned ghost as she low crawled through the dense ground scrub, heading straight toward the most recent shooter. She studied him through a shrub screen. His camo was of the
Conan the Barbarian
variety, and he was built like a tree trunk. His neck was the only missing body part. And he looked about sixteen.

She cussed silently. The Major would expect her to use her knife and make sure the kid ceased to be a problem, but she didn’t kill babies, even ones too stupid to live. She studied the terrain for a moment, then moved to his right, careful no sound gave her away. He showed no sign someone was feeding him her movements. He seemed to be focused on where she’d gone down. He could be a decoy while someone came up on her back. She checked her six, with sight and ears, then worked her way around to his. She knew her physics, knew she had to work with his weight and size, not against it. She stowed her weapon.

There was a tree branch hanging down at about the right height. She jumped at it, her body swung up, her legs hooking his neck. A quick twist and he hit the ground so fast only a choked cry escaped his mouth. His hands came up, clawing at her legs. She took his ray gun, shot him with it, and was back under cover in the scrub before his body quit twitching.

She hoped it was set to stun, but if it wasn’t, they
had
shot first.

“Cadir?” This voice was new, but it came from a previously marked position.

Doc was already low crawling to the next bogey. She did wonder why they didn’t just transport her up to their ship when they spotted her. Only reason not to, they didn’t want her to see their ship, but that was stupid. She knew it was there. It had yanked her out of the freaking sky. She frowned. Cadir’s clothes were pretty low tech. Was it possible she was dealing with a different adversary? No, that didn’t make sense either. They claimed to have seen her ship crash. Since it had crashed against the atmosphere, they’d have had to be up there, too. None of it made sense.

She hated that.

“Eamon, check on him,” the bogey directed. So this bogey gave the orders. Good to know. A young barbarian eased through the scrub, almost stepping on her as he moved to kneel by the downed Cadir.

“He’s been stunned,” Eamon said. “She has his weapon.”

She?
How did they know that?

She heard a muttered curse. She was pretty sure she was outside their perimeter now. She’d caught no sound or scent of further movement. If it had been darker, she’d have been tempted to let them flail around while she played ghost somewhere else, but the alien sun was high and bright, despite that low hanging purple moon.

She had a ray gun now, too, but if she fired it, it would give away her position, unless…

Doc felt around until she found another pebble, about the size of a quarter and continued her low crawl until she spotted another bogey. He looked a bit stressed.

She liked stressed bogies better than happy ones.

She sighted the ray gun on the center of his back, using a V in the scrub branches to steady the weapon, so she’d have a hand free. With a flick of the wrist, she sent the pebble sailing into the center of their perimeter. Doc was pretty sure they all fired. She knew she did. None of them appeared to notice her shot, except the guy she hit and he wasn’t talking. She didn’t take time to gloat. Only people who wanted to get caught took time for gloating.

She almost didn’t see the next guy. He must have moved while they were all shooting at the pebble. He stopped right in front of her, his body alert, his head angled for listening. It was the one called Eamon. He turned, putting her at his back.

Doc came up out of the scrub without making a sound and tapped him on the shoulder. When he spun around, she applied her knee vigorously to his groin. His eyes crossed. So did his hands—over the affected area. Some blunt force trauma from the butt of the ray gun took him the rest of the way down.

Doc had moved on before his body hit the ground. She found a big section of scrub and worked her way in to a depression hidden by the low profile branches.

The eerie silence had returned in spades. She wished she’d dared pause to search the bodies for radios. Whoever had set this up was a decent strategist. These boys had been trained. They just hadn’t expected her to be, well, her. Doc doubted they’d ever met anyone like her. They might have the brute strength, but she’d been trained by the best—and she’d eventually kicked their asses. The Major thought it was because she could think so fast, the whole genius thing. He might be right.

Now that they were getting a clue, how would they react? And how many of them were left
to
react? Right now if she were them, she’d be trying to smoke her mark into the open, trying to take back control.

She saw one of the boys emerge from cover. His back was to her, but there was a self-consciousness to the way he moved that made her roll her eyes. They knew they could mark her position if she fired the ray gun. She hadn’t used lethal force, so whoever was running this op didn’t mind using the kid as bait. The bait didn’t look happy. She’d heard the stun setting hurt like a son of a bitch, so she wasn’t surprised. He had his ray gun out and was making wide sweeps from side to side.

Doc set down the ray gun and eased out her hand gun.

Doc did another pebble toss and when he jerked toward it, firing in multiples, she used the confusion to cover her shot. The bullet hit the barrel just above his hand. He jumped like he’d been shot, his ray gun went flying, he said something that sounded like a curse and dived into the scrub. That was four, well, three-and-a-half identified bogeys down. Number four wasn’t unconscious yet.

She caught a flicker of something sailing through the air in her direction. She pushed her face into the dirt, hands over her ears. She felt the flash, heard
and
felt the bang. Dang that was close. So the aliens had their version of a flash bang. When the smoke cleared, four bogeys moved into the impact zone, their thrashing loud enough to cover a military band moving through.

If she’d expected to encounter this type of problem, she’d have been packing flash bangs, too. She didn’t even have a stinking grenade. Too noisy. She low crawled back to one of the unconscious bogey’s and did a quick body search. She didn’t find anything that looked like a radio, but she did find two unfamiliar devices hanging off his belt and took them and his ray gun. She did a quick check of the search effort. Four bogey boys all still bunched together. Bad idea.

It took her ten seconds to figure out how to activate the alien flash bang. She tossed it into the middle of them. One of them managed to get out half a curse before they all went down. Something sizzled past her position, but other blasts were going off in other directions, so she didn’t think they’d made her. Several blasts hit close, though. The idiots might take her out by accident.

She felt that odd tingling feeling again. Had they transported out? Or in? Reinforcements or strategic retreat? The rocky bluff might provide some protection from a low orbit scan, but she’d have to expose herself to get there.

She’d decided to stay put, when another wildly fired shot sizzled down her back. She stowed her hand gun, still reluctant to use lethal force. She gripped both purloined ray guns, counted to three and came up out of scrub, firing from both weapons. She lay down a line of fire, turning in a circle to clear her perimeter, and then took off running toward the rocky bluff. Her legs weren’t as long as Sara’s, but they were long enough. What she couldn’t go through, she went over, training and adrenaline working in perfect synch.

She saw the bluff, the fall of rocks just ahead and put out an extra burst of speed. It surprised her she still sensed the transport while running full tilt, still felt the change, the tingle of awareness. She almost cannoned into the stolid young man that materialized in her way. He tried to get his arms around her, but she had momentum and training on her side. All he had was his tree-like size. Even as she dealt with him, she knew he was the decoy, a distraction. She twisted, trying to turn to face the real threat.

She saw the bogey, but the ray’s blast was already tracking toward her. Even she couldn’t move faster than light but that didn’t stop her from trying. The beam caught her full in the chest. Hurt a lot worse than she’d expected. She felt her feet leave the ground, a short flight, and then the jolt as her body hit the ground. That hurt, too. Her body jerked as her overloaded senses began to shut down, the light around her shrinking to a small circle. She fought to stay alert and felt herself losing the battle. She had time to see a face swim into view, had time to learn it before the circle closed with a decisive snap.

* * * * *

The General had given Hel much to think about. At some point, he would need to tell Halliwell that Delilah wasn’t the first woman to go missing in the last year, but he needed more data. He sent a request for full details on each woman that was missing and then leaned back in his seat.

His quarters aboard his flagship were as comfortable as those planet side and felt considerably safer. Security was even now installing transport inhibitors, not to mention organizing repairs to his quarters. He didn’t mind the forced shift in location. It would be a lot harder for his enemies to track him. Oh, they could track his ship, but he had his own ways of dealing with that. In the meantime, he needed to decide what to share with the General and how much.

The General had been unexpectedly cooperative, though it was still a struggle. He hadn’t wanted to tell Hel that Delilah was missing. And he’d been shaken that Hel knew about Chameleon.

Early on, one of the diplomats had given Hel a dictionary. Before contacting the General, he’d looked the word up. What had interested him the most about the definition was the lizards “synonymous ability to change color.”

The first time he’d seen her pacing the perimeter of the room, he’d tagged her as lethal. Then she’d shifted to seductive and then, what? In their brief interaction prior to the explosion, she’d been aroused, then surprised into ordinary when he called her Morticia. For that moment, she hadn’t been anything but herself. And then?

She’d dealt with the roof collapse and defused a bomb. Two very disparate skills, but they did have one thing in common. She’d solved two
problems.

She had business on the outpost.

The General was worried about his people, missing through the portals. If Delilah was supposed to solve that problem, then her hasty departure made sense. She’d need to tackle the problem before war broke out. If she was the Chameleon Carig’s contact had spoken of, was it possible her ship had been intercepted by someone from the Earth expedition? They could have hired someone to do the intercept. Except the General had contacted Hel. He was suspicious Hel had been involved. That suggested the General considered her cover secure—at least until Hel had informed him that her cover might not be secure.

Just because Carig didn’t know the sex or real name of the Chameleon, didn’t mean the contact didn’t know. Hel rubbed his face. The General would have to pursue that angle and he would. He was no fool, even if he was easily riled.