Authors: Jason Halstead
“You guys don’t get along?” Fiona asked.
“He’s gotten a lot better since he got here. We had a few disagreements that got sorted out and now we’ve grown to respect each other.” Kira lightly punched her fist into her palm, indicating exactly how they’d sorted out their disagreements. “I’d like you to work for me instead. You’re loud, slow, and clumsy, but I can get you in shape.”
Jeremy laughed at the open mouthed expression on Fiona’s face. She turned to glare at him, then looked back at Kira. “With a compliment like that, how could I refuse?”
Kira smiled. “Great. Let’s get these folks rounded up, we’ve got a long walk ahead of us. After this valley there’s wide plain, lots of animals on it. Most of them you can see, but there are plenty of smaller ones that can sneak up on us. We’ll stay close together, I know a safer path. Takes a little longer, but with all this noise and stink it’s the best way.”
“Stink?” Fiona asked, flaring her nostrils as she tried to smell what Kira spoke of.
“You don’t smell right yet. Another month or so and you’ll be part of Vitalis. Until then, anything downwind of you will know it.”
“Wow.”
Jeremy nodded in agreement with Fiona. Kira started to turn away but Jeremy spoke up. “Wait!”
She turned back, one eyebrow raised.
“I…um, I just want you to know I didn’t um…” He trailed off, his mind still fighting against the recent memories. He sighed and looked at Fiona, only to find her just as curious as she met his eyes. “All right, I was in the Navy a long time ago. My kid was born with Spartan’s Syndrome and I had to have money to get her the best treatment I could. I stole military supplies and sold them. Made enough to cover what the Navy wouldn’t and when things started going bad for me, I skipped out. Bought a new identity and everything, then took some courses on biology. The last of it I used to bribe my way into being picked for this mission. I knew if I stuck around they’d track me down sooner or later – this way my paycheck could go to Jasmine and I wouldn’t be a disappointment when they found out.”
Fiona stared at him, lips parted again. Kira chuckled and said, “Got that off your chest? Good, now let’s go.”
“Is she really your ex-wife?” Fiona asked. Jeremy caught Kira rolling her eyes.
“Bleigh? Yeah, she found out what I was doing and wouldn’t have a part of it.”
“Smart girl,” Kira commented. Fiona and Jeremy ignored her.
“So you did all of this because of your daughter?” Fiona asked.
Jeremy hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah, pretty much. I saw her staring at me and knew that I needed to be a lot better than what I was. She deserved a chance, you know? I had to find a way to give it to her.”
Fiona’s blinked her eyes and sniffed, then she nodded. “Well, I guess they’d throw the book at you back in the Core Worlds. No court out here though, so we’ll keep that to ourselves. One thing though, I don’t ever want to hear who you used to be. Far as anybody here needs to know your Jeremy Sinclair, got it?”
Kira turned away, shaking her head. Jeremy watched her go, then turned back to Fiona. “What’s her deal? If she used to be a bounty hunter, why does the law matter to her?”
Fiona smiled. “That’s not it. She’s mad at herself and doesn’t want to hear anymore.
From what I saw in her eyes, she’s afraid she might end up admitting that she was wrong.”
“Wrong about what? Me?”
“Yeah, she might realize you’re not such a bad guy after all.”
###
Part 4: Screamer
Chapter 1
“You’re locked in Gunny, rapid deployment in five…four…three…two….Go!”
Gunnery Sergeant Elsadora Quinn tightened every muscle in her body as though it would make a difference. The explosive force of her deployment pod being released from the orbital ship was enough to knock a regular untrained human out. Elsa was anything but that.
The deployment pod, or screamer as the Marines affectionately called it, slipped through the vacuum of space alongside the other nineteen dark silver pods. It wasn’t until they breached the upper atmosphere that the heat resistant nose began to glow. To those on the planet below looking up it would seem nothing more than a group of shooting stars. Perfectly normal save for the concentration of twenty of them in a single area.
With the acceleration out of the ship’s deployment tubes completed, Elsa had recovered enough to begin to relax. Just in time, her pod started to vibrate around her as the planet’s atmosphere began to slow her descent. The low grade inertial arrester built into the pod kept the vibration to a dull buzz. It made the hair stand up on her arms but was nothing compared to what a low cost personal entertainment device could provide for entertainment during the lonely hours on a deep space cruise.
Elsa studied the holographic display on outwardly mirrored viewport in her helmet. Her rate of descent was falling. A few more seconds and she’d reach terminal velocity, at which point the screamer’s fins would deploy and its thrusters would fire. From experience she knew that was when things started to get interesting.
With the wings deployed a screamer had just enough of a signature to present a target. The odds of getting hit by any manmade weaponry were less than one in a hundred, but she’d seen it happen. It took a direct hit from a serious weapon to take one out — they were designed to deliver their payload all the way to a hard landing at speeds in excess of six hundred miles an hour, with the payload expected to survive the impact. What happened more often was aerial burst weaponry that would knock a screamer off course.
Elsa felt the sudden jolt of the thrusters engaging, propelling her pod back upwards into speeds going well past a thousand miles an hour. Another readout on the display indicated thirteen minutes until impact. It was always like that, somewhere between ten and twenty minutes, depending on the size of the planet and how thick the atmosphere was. The longest ten to twenty minutes of her life. She hated the feeling, being trapped in the cocoon with nothing but the smells of her own nervous sweat mixed with the resilient foam she was encased in.
“So this is how an egg feels,” she muttered aloud. She’d never seen a real egg, but she’d recently read about them while trying to pass the time on the journey to Vitalis. The planet was outside the edge of controlled space, five light years beyond the closest jumpstation. That meant hibernation cycles for the crew and marines. Nine months in, three months out. Only way to keep the body from falling apart. Seven years of that, even though it only felt like a little less than two, left a person with a lot of time to kill.
So she’d read up on Vitalis in her spare time, pulling everything the ship’s library could tell her. Humanity had been colonizing other worlds for close to one hundred and fifty years but terraforming had not been a practical or sustainable as promised. Mars had enough of an atmosphere to be comparable to living several thousand feet above sea level on Earth, but even Earth’s sister planet was lacking in nutrients and necessary minerals to support agriculture. With time and research resilient strains had been engineered, but the dreams of unlimited farmlands feeding the starving throngs of humanity had fallen short. And that was Mars, the planet that resembled Earth the closest.
Vitalis offered to change all of that, according to the preliminary data she’d seen. The planet not only supported human life, but the research conducted showed it supported super-human life. Data from the researchers that had been sent to the planet showed amazing preliminary results. It was as if the planet was a fountain of youth. That, in turn, made it a suddenly very valuable resource. All the more so since the beacon that notified the Terran Coalition of its existence had no one alive that claimed it, making it an open planet.
Her unit had been dispatched to the planet to offer support to the advanced research team onboard the
Terran Coalition Ship Explorer
. By the time Elsa’s frigate had left the
Explorer
was already a year enroute. They knew of the reported two crashed vessels, one a registered transport and the second an unregistered vessel that had launched a salvage beacon in orbit around the planet. When the research team arrived no survivors had been reported, making the salvage claim pointless.
A research station was established and the
TCS Explorer
was standing by orbit for support. The research settlement had been destroyed by an unknown force and within days the entire crew of the
Explorer
had died. The lack of further communications had changed the Marine vessel’s mission. When they arrived in system reconnaissance of the
Explorer
returned preliminary results of the entire crew dying of malnutrition. The larders and galleys had been full, confusing and complicating the issue.
A beep sounded, drawing her out of her reverie. Impact was less than two minutes away. She took a few deep breaths, ignoring how the unfiltered air tasted on her tongue. With ninety seconds remaining she saw the flashing warning of a proximity alert and felt the screamer jerk to the left. She stared at the screen, her fingers trying to push dents in the armor that covered her chest. Her breath whistled quicker as the seconds ticked off on the display. Being knocked off course was always a threat, but seldom a reality. When it happened it was always somebody else, never her.
With five seconds to spare the screamer exploded. She felt like she’d left her heart behind as the armored pod disintegrated around her. It took the last of the inertial arresting with it, leaving her in horrible motion that twisted her stomach into knots. The capsule slammed into the ground, sliding and rolling in the path made by the hardened nosecone of the deployment pod.
Chapter 2
Elsa spat out some blood from where she’d bitten her lip. Mouth free, she croaked out the command to open the capsule. The forceful ejection sent it flying straight out and into the wall of the furrow a few feet away. So much for the instructors promise that the pods landed right side up every time.
With the top portion gone, a fine mist covered her. Elsa fought to hold her breath but the smell of rancid peaches still assaulted her. The foam holding her in place dissolved rapidly, letting her slide out within seconds. She scrambled around the pod, keeping contact with it to retain some semblance of up and down until her body could compensate for the trauma she’d gone through. She triggered the release on the cargo bay and pulled the door off so it served as protection to her back. A few more twists and pressed buttons released first her X109 energy rifle then the large container of supplies that she slipped on her back.
Elsa spun around, rifle held at the ready, and surveyed her situation for the first time. The ditch dug by the screamer was roughly three feet deep. Giant trees and vegetation rose around her, enclosing her within the tropical jungle her pod had landed in. She frowned, the insertion point was supposed to be near the destroyed research outpost, humanity’s only real settlements on Vitalis. Whatever had hit her pod had redirected her.
Roughly sixty seconds at over a thousand miles an hour meant she could be up to twenty miles away from her target. She adjusted her pack before subvocalizing the command to call up a map in her helmet’s display. The map displayed, albeit at an orbital overview size.
“FIST team three, Dark Angel reporting in,” Elsa spoke after activating her radio, naming off her First Insertion Special Tactics unit then her individual code name. She waited several seconds for a response that never came. “Interference,” she muttered, followed by a curse fit for a Marine Special Operator. Previous reports from the
Explorer
logs had indicated intermittent problems with radio contact on Vitalis. Without connection to the orbital fleet her GPS was useless too.
She adjusted her pack one more time, anxious for a chance to find a secure position to break it apart and redistribute the contents to the various mounting points on her armor. She picked herself up enough to look over the wrecked capsule and survey the jungle . Her helmet’s light amplification made the scene almost as bright as a Vitalian day, while the superimposed thermographic indicators showed nothing large enough to be a threat to her, only some smaller mammals.
Elsa climbed out of the trench and turned around a few times to take in the scenery. She figured if she followed the trench the screamer had dug she’d be headed in the right direction. Both her internal compass and the one built into her helmet were failing her. “Guess that’s why they don’t let Marines with cybernetics on the FIST teams,” she mused aloud.
Elsa’s specialty was terrestrial insertions, but Vitalis at night was a different world from anything she’d been prepared for. Even a training stint in the rare protected jungle plots in Africa couldn’t have prepared her for the raw menace of the jungle around her. The trees had trunks often wider than she was tall. Even though she was only 5’6”, they seemed huge. She saw plants that looked both succulent and dangerous, though the flowers were closed at night. Some even seemed to recoil as she neared them, as though they could sense her. She smirked at the prospect, but moved on quickly after suppressing a shiver that she was alone in an alien place.