Guerilla (11 page)

“We would compensate you for your shortened timetable.”

“Triple the amount. Half now, half when the job is done.”

Merih didn't hesitate. “Agreed.”

When Merih immediately put through the cred amount on Morlortai's credstick, the assassin knew the (ta)Klar had managed to hide something from him. It didn't matter. He had thirty-­eight hours to figure it out, and the team was already 50 percent ahead of what they had expected for the contract.

 

TWELVE

Southwest of Makaum

1127 Hours Zulu Time

E
ven though he was tired, Sage picked up the target-­lock warning ping on his faceshield immediately. By the time he recognized what it was and yelled, “Jahup! Take cover!” the unidentified person's outline showed up on his faceshield and the trajectory software kicked in, revealing a round streaking for Jahup.

Instead of abandoning the RDC like Sage had told him, Jahup accelerated, perhaps thinking he could outrun whoever was shooting at them, or perhaps he was hypnotized by everything taking place on the faceshield. The boy still didn't have enough time in on the combat simulator for the helmet and HUD to be second nature.

Already leaping from his RDC, Sage tucked himself for the impact against the ground. Right before he hit, he took over control of Jahup's RDC and shut it down. The two-­wheeled crawler immediately fell onto its side, just as the software was programmed to do. Sage had had the motor pool install the override on Jahup's RDC just in case the scout panicked.

Sage hit the ground and his HUD display scrambled as it tried to make sense of the visuals juicing through its circuitry. The RDC had been doing a little better than 100 KPH at the time he'd left it. Bouncing off the ground, still controlled by his momentum, Sage skipped like a stone and struggled to regain control of his fall.

Two depleted uranium rounds sped in his direction. The HUD tracked both of them intermittently, and one of the rounds struck a nearby tree with a trunk thicker than Sage's leg. The projectile cored through the tree trunk, reducing at least a ten-­centimeter square of it into kindling. As Sage hit the ground and rolled again, the tree fell, narrowly missing him.

Sage kept his arms crossed over his chest, one hand knotted in the Roley's sling, and his chin down. He kept his legs tucked and trusted the armor to do its job. That was what a soldier was supposed to do when he was in a situation he had no control over.

Control over his careening skid came back, though. Contact with the ground slowed him as it hammered him at the same time. He slammed into a tree on his left shoulder and felt something fracture at the impact in spite of the armor. Momentarily stunned, he struggled to roll to his stomach. Once he was there, it took two tries to get the Roley off his shoulder and into his hands.

Administering stims
, the suit's near-­AI informed him.

“No.” Sage didn't want a stimpack coursing through his body. He liked to remain in control, and the stimpack shut down some of the critical thinking and problem processing a soldier needed to stay alive. Command believed a soldier who thought he was bulletproof could get out of a situation better than one who concentrated on survival alone. Stimpacks could trigger a berserker rage, allowing a soldier to take a lot of damage before going down.

Sage crawled on his knees and elbows, looking for Jahup and searching for whoever had shot at them. Double vision plagued him and he couldn't quite catch his breath.

Parameter override. Soldier is more damaged than acceptable. Administering stims.

Sage cursed as he felt the pinpricks at his jugulars. The chems ripped along his systems, powering through on the deluge of adrenaline already flooding his body. The pain went away and his double vision sorted itself out.

Deploying extra oxygen.
The AKTIVsuit routinely scrubbed carbon dioxide buildup from the suit's contained air and could filter fresh oxygen into the interior atmosphere from outside air if necessary. When sealed off from outside resources, the suit's onboard air bladder provided a few hours of air in open space, underwater, and in hostile environments flooded with unbreathable atmosphere.

Gratefully, Sage sucked in a lungful, feeling the extra oxygen move through his body. That wasn't as bad as the stims. The oxygen cleared a soldier's head and allowed him to operate on a reduced breathing capacity if that was a problem. Oxygen was fuel.

“Find Private Jahup,” Sage ordered. The military designation wasn't legitimate yet, but the boy had to be entered into the system.

Searching. Private Jahup located.

A blue-­limned figure showed up on Sage's faceshield. Jahup lay in a heap 63.7 meters from the overturned RDC and wasn't moving.

“Confirm Private Jahup's condition.” Sage settled in behind the Roley. The sniper targeting screen opened up on his faceplate, magnifying the image and painting the man on the ridge overlooking them just long enough to get the distance. The targeting recalibrated for five hundred meters and Sage raised the rifle. He selected depleted uranium munitions for the rifle because an electromagnetic burst wouldn't scramble a target's EM field at that distance. His finger settled over the trigger and he squeezed with the reticle over the man's head.

Cannot confirm Private Jahup's condition. Range is too distant.

Riding out the Roley's recoil, Sage fired again, this time aiming for the man's center mass. Fired only a second apart, the first round hit the man's helmet and evacuated everything inside, and the second round knocked the man down.

The faceshield picked up two other ­people on the ridge as they took cover behind trees and boulders. For a moment, the foliage and underbrush hid them, but Sage switched over to thermal imagery and the hostiles stood out as red and yellow silhouettes. He targeted one of them as the reds began to cool, letting him know their opponents had cutting-­edge hardsuits with built-­in cooling capabilities. They also had training, knowing that Sage would use thermal imaging to pick them out.

Squeezing the trigger twice more, Sage watched as one of the rounds cored through the tree the target hid behind, then slammed the person backward. The second round struck a boulder just a few millimeters from the tree and cracked the stone into chunks. The flattened ricochet punched into the target as well, just before the armored figure struck the ground.

Two more hardsuits joined the surviving one, but they were moving more cautiously now. The one who had dug in unleashed a barrage of fire that tore through the jungle around Sage. Two of the rounds skimmed off his armor.

Reaching into a thigh compartment, Sage removed a smoke grenade, set it off, and tossed it a ­couple meters ahead of him. The grenade hit and rolled in the underbrush, then exploded with a
whumpf!
Almost immediately, dense red smoke filled the area and started spreading out.

Sage pushed up and got moving. The pain from the repeated contact with the ground had been walled away. He'd feel it later, but he didn't at the moment. His right leg felt weak and he wondered if he'd torn something or sprained something, but the hardsuit compensated almost immediately and his gait smoothed. All he needed to do was move and the hardsuit's muscle memory would pull him up to full performance.

On the run, Sage pounded through the trees and leaped over a twelve-­meter-­wide creek. His boots sank nearly thirty centimeters into the soft bank on the other side, but the suit's musculature pulled them free without breaking stride. He ran opposite from where Jahup lay. The boy was alive or dead or wounded, and there wasn't anything Sage could do about any of those things except try to stay alive himself.

The hardsuit functioned perfectly, getting the strides right and managing the rough terrain without a hitch. Sage held the Roley at port arms before him, using it as a barrier as he ran through branches and circled back toward their attackers.

“Identify hostiles,” Sage commanded.

Identification failed. Hardsuits are not registered or are masked.

Sage figured the ­people belonged to a small drug lab in the area. His team had taken down a few of the bigger ones, as well as the DawnStar operation Velesko Kos had been running, but that hadn't put everyone out of business. Makaum was too rich in pharmacological resources for criminals to ignore the profit potential.

They'd also kill not to get caught.

Jahup still hadn't moved. All things considered, it was better if he wasn't 100 percent to stay down.

Sage just hoped the boy wasn't dead. He dragged his thoughts from that and focused on the men ahead of him. Three of them remained viable.

The circular path Sage was taking had cut the distance between himself and the gunmen to 376 meters. They were also starting to anticipate his speed and were getting closer to him. When a round clipped his left shoulder, tweaking the injury he'd already suffered, he went with it, following the momentum to the ground. He rolled like he'd been badly wounded and came to a rest on his back. Underbrush covered him as he pointed the Roley at his targets.

He managed to get off three rapid rounds, watching as one of the shooters took a round in the chest that split the armor open. Unless the shooter had a really good onboard med system, a corpse hit the ground.

The second round missed, but the third round caught a shooter in the ribs. Off balance, the shooter spun and dropped. The third shooter looked at the two nearby and decided to escape.

On his feet now, Sage broke from the circular route he'd been following and ran straight for the ridge. The hardsuit's boots tore into the turf and threw divots behind him, but he managed six-­meter strides. He crashed through brush, leaving broken branches and uprooted saplings in his wake.

As he started up the hill, Sage noticed the rough road that had been cut through the ridge in front of him. Someone had cleared a path almost four meters wide. Shorn stumps showed where trees had been cut down and potholes left empty spaces where big rocks had been removed to enable vehicles to pass. The thick canopy of interlaced branches blocked an aerial view of the primitive road.

The first shooter Sage reached was dead. The damage to the hardsuit and all the blood that had leaked out was proof of that. The second shooter was still moving a little farther up the inclined path. Sage raised the Roley and heard the roaring rush of a magnetic drive coming over the hill.

He shifted his aim just as a six-­wheeled boxy mud-­brown ATV shot over the hill. The ATV had an open top and roll bars to protect the driver and passengers. A cargo net secured the crates in the crawler's storage space at the rear. A mini-­rail gun swiveled at the top of the roll bars and the near-­AI warned Sage of a potential target lock.

At the top of the ridge, the ATV went airborne, the mini-­gun lost the target lock it had acquired, and Sage's round ricocheted from the reinforced undercarriage. Twenty meters down the hill, the ATV landed on the shooter, who had managed to stand. The shooter went down under the spinning tires but caused the ATV to list to one side. Sage fired again and the round skimmed along the crawler's side, leaving a scar at least a centimeter deep.

The three wheels touching the ground grabbed traction and forced the ATV forward. The mini-­gun swiveled again, either on autopilot or under control of the shooter behind the ATV's steering wheel.

Sage's faceshield tinted red in warning, letting him know the mini-­gun had him in its sights. He squeezed off another round that chewed through the roll bar by the driver's head, leaving the bar shuddering and jerking, throwing off the mini-­gun's target acquisition.

Depleted uranium rounds ripped through the trees along the path near Sage and chopped into the ground, throwing up fist-­sized clods and leaving craters. The driver steered for Sage, turning the ATV into a weapon. Even if impact with the ATV didn't kill him, Sage knew the crawler would pin him up against the trees and the mini-­gun would finish him off.

He turned to retreat into the jungle, aiming for a thick copse of trees, knowing they would block or at least slow down the ATV. Before he reached them, a round caught him in the back and threw him off-­stride. Unable to recover his footing, Sage fell and listened to the crawler's magnetic drive coming closer. The HUD's view was difficult from the angle he was lying in, but he saw trees going down before the ATV. He forced himself to get up, but the soft ground betrayed him in his haste and he fell again. The hardsuits were heavy. He should have remembered that.

Rounds cut through the trees over his head like a scythe cutting through wheat. The trees toppled and Sage's faceshield tinted full-­on red again, letting him know the mini-­gun had him locked once more.

Frantic, Sage rolled to the side and tried to bring the Roley up. The ATV was ten meters out and closing quickly as the mini-­gun roared and flashed. Rounds ripped gouges in Sage's hardsuit, but none of them hit him squarely. The armor held—­barely, and the near-­AI let him know that.

Take a defensive position!

Just before Sage could drop the Roley's sights over the driver's helmet, the man jerked sideways and spilled out of the seat. On autopilot, the crawler continued coming and the mini-­gun stayed locked on Sage. He leveled the Roley on the mini-­gun and squeezed the trigger just as the ATV-­mounted weapon exploded into flying scrap. Some of the rounds cooked off in midair, adding to the noise and smoke and confusion.

Rolling again, Sage managed to get out of the ATV's path. It rolled on another six meters into the jungle before jamming into a huge boulder.

“Sage.” Jahup sounded excited over the comm link, but Sage didn't blame the younger man. His own blood pressure and heart rate were up because of the stimpack.

“I'm here.”

“I thought he had you.”

“Me too.” Sage rolled to his feet and got up, feeling time snap back into place around him. He walked to where the crawler continued grinding away at the ground with all six wheels. He switched off the power. “That was good shooting.”

“I was lucky. I don't know how the round didn't hit a tree. There are a lot of trees between you and me.”

Sage glanced at the jungle and silently agreed. “Lucky's good. It was bad luck these guys saw us, so having a little of it come back our way kind of evened things out.”