Raising Caine - eARC (49 page)
Read Raising Caine - eARC Online
Authors: Charles E. Gannon
Tags: #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #Space Opera, #Alien Contact, #General
“Caine Riordan, you are not well.”
Caine almost laughed—
you think?
—but even the mild expulsion of air from the first chuckle was so painful that it smothered any momentary amusement. “Thnessfiirm, you and I need to stay together, to operate the AMP.”
“But it has no weapons left.”
“No, but. It can…distract the enemy. Make them…chase after…it. We have to—”
Dora’s distant Pindad was answered by a much closer automatic shotgun. Thnessfiirm started, jumped back toward the bushes.
Caine shook his head. “No, they won’t find us…right away. We can…”
But Thnessfiirm was continuing to back into the bush. Away from the sound of the guns. Away from Caine. “No, Caine Riordan. I am sorry you are so afflicted, but we cannot remain together. Humans are already slow in our forests, being unable to travel in the trees. You are now almost immobile. I would die if I stayed here with you.”
“You—you’re abandoning me?” Despite all the contingencies Caine had considered, despite all the unlikely events he had foreseen, this had not been among them.
“Caine Riordan, my species is not like yours. Individually, we avoid needless death.”
“So you’re just leaving me here?”
“I am saddened to say it, but you are sure to die. What good is it that both of us should die?”
Riordan stumbled away from the tree. “We humans—it is our way to stand by each other. Even when it puts more of us at risk.”
Thnessfiirm’s sensor cluster oscillated slowly, “And it is our way to survive individually, and so be most numerous when we re-gather.” Thnessfiirm bobbed briefly and was gone.
Riordan looked after the disappeared Slaasriithi.
And there, in two sentences, is why our races will never fully understand each other. Evolution has taught us lessons so radically different that a species-positive trait for us humans—sticking together as a team—is a species-negative trait for you.
Caine heard the shotgun’s stuttering cough close at hand, turned, and stumbled into the brush that stretched inland, away from the river.
* * *
Jesel bounded through the bush toward Suzruzh when he saw his distant cousin approaching, nursing his left arm and favoring his left leg. “Report! Immediately!”
Suzruzh waved an arm—prickled with red puncture wounds—back toward the streambed. “You heard the rockets. They waited until our assault, knew where we were coming.”
“And did you not pin down one flank, find their weak spot, and then—?”
“That is exactly what we did,
cousin
.” Suzruzh’s eyes narrowed. “I am not an imbecile. I know how to conduct a simple attack, arguably better than you do. But they must have eliminated Pehthrum’s flank attack—there were sounds of a pitched firefight there—and brought whatever resources they had left to cover against any move we might make across the streambed. One of them had an assault rifle. Two of my men pinned that one down, the rest charged across the flat ground with haste, must have been within ten meters of the other tree-line—” He shut his mouth abruptly.
“And?”
“And they were annihilated. It was comparable to a barrage from one of our own tactical support launchers. If I had not hung back, according the Nezdeh’s orders—”
“Yes, but now you are here and we must achieve our objective.”
Suzruzh looked at the one scout that had survived out of all of his men, then at Jesel’s reduced squad of six: one of his triads had been sent to join Suzruzh’s forces, to bolster the charge across the river bed. “We have few tools left with which we may achieve anything, Jesel.”
“That is true, but our duty remains, nonetheless. We must first know how many Aboriginals we are still hunting. How many did you kill?”
Suzruzh shook his head. “I am unsure. We could not search their abandoned positions thoroughly since one of the Aboriginals had us under fire. We did find their launcher, some kind of autonomous platform, hovering in a glade. It was no more than a frame. I suspect all its munitions cells were expended. We destroyed it, but we had no time to search for Aboriginal bodies. We had to see to our own wounded and hasten here.
“And have you indeed seen to all your wounded? I heard no shots.”
Suzruzh shrugged. “That would have revealed our position after the enemy broke contact. A knife sufficed—and there wasn’t much work to be done, it turned out.”
Jesel nodded, looked west, away from the river. “They will flee in that direction. They will not run back to the river; they can be trapped against its banks. I will take five of my men. I will leave one to remain with you and your survivor.”
Suzruzh flinched in surprise. “I am to stay here? To what purpose?”
“To return to our landing zone and secure our shuttle.”
“But you have locked it against all—”
“Suzruzh, shake off the ear-ringing of the rockets; it is addling your wits. When we left our security-locked shuttle, we had clear superiority over our targets. We numbered twenty-nine, with superior weapons, and faced a proximal foe. Now we are down to two Evolved and seven clones, and have no idea where our enemies might have gone. It is entirely possible that they could slip behind us and compromise our craft. Also, whatever went overhead just before we commenced this battle is not ours. It is not impossible that some Slaasriithi craft could be searching for us, which they will do by scanning for the dense metals of our shuttle.”
Suzruzh glanced away, annoyed, but said. “It is wisdom. I shall secure the shuttle.”
Jesel nodded curtly. “And I shall hunt down these low-born Aboriginal curs.” He hefted his rifle, gestured for one of his men to join Suzruzh, and nodded to the others. “We shall cut over the streambed farther inland from the river and seek their tracks or trails leading away from the point of assault.” He tossed two orders over his shoulder: “Staggered delta formation. Advance at the double quick.” He nodded to his cousin, then turned and pushed into the shoulder high growth, his men at his back.
Suzruzh stared after them, rubbing his left arm. “We shall travel in a staggered triad. I shall take the second position. We move slowly, carefully, and ten meters off the trail we used when advancing from our landing site. There have been enough surprises this day.”
The clones nodded and complied, falling into the ordered formation. Travelling swiftly, they became increasingy wary of every dense clump and impenetrable thicket. It took them ten minutes to make good their return to the shuttle, which, observed from the edge of the clearing in which it had landed, seemed unmolested. But Suzruzh, never a trusting sort, was even less so this day.
“Alpha-Six,” he ordered the clone that Jesel had assigned to him, “advance to the waist hatchway and examine it for any signs of tampering or attempts at forced entry.”
The clone hardly nodded before rising and advancing, weapon to eye, in a fast crouch to the side of the shuttle. He inspected the hatch for several seconds, then waved an all-clear.
Suzruzh rose, led the sole surviving scout from the streambed attack toward the craft. “We will make ready for immediate take off,” he ordered as they crossed the fern-spotted clearing. “We must be ready to return to orbit the moment that Jesel and his—”
Suzruzh heard three sharp reports: a high velocity weapon, very nearby—
At that same instant, three torso wounds cut through him like hot pokers: one vented his left lung, another pulped his liver, and the last sliced through his descending colon—before they all emerged from his back. He staggered, tried to initiate the venous and arterial constricture reflexes that might keep him conscious, but realized within the same second that the damage was too widespread, too serious for those disciplines to save him.
As he fell, the reports continued as a steady tattoo that dropped his two clones with multiple mortal wounds; unlike an Evolved, they had no way to mitigate or delay either shock or blood loss. As Suzruzh’s vision began to constrict, to become a view through a closing pipe, he had an impression of two armored figures advancing cautiously toward him—
—before the pipe was sealed by unremitting darkness.
* * *
Bannor Rulaine took cover next to the shuttle, sweeping the tree-line as Peter Wu crouch-ran forward to check the target who’d had the better equipment and had clearly been in charge.
Wu reached the bloody figure, turned and shook his head. “Gone. What now, Major?”
Rulaine looked at the figure slumped by the hatch. “Well, given that the leader didn’t let his lead troooper open the hatch, I’m guessing this shuttle is either code-locked or booby-trapped. Either way, we move on and find our people.”
“How? Back track where these three came from?”
“That’s a start, but we’ve got to stay off whatever trail they followed here. I doubt they took time to set traps, but this isn’t the time to guess wrong.”
Wu had already risen, entered the span of brush from which their opponents had emerged, found the faint trail they had left. “You think the others in this raiding team have finished their mission? And sent this group on ahead to prepare the craft for launch?”
Rulaine shrugged as he joined Wu. “Don’t know. There’s too much craziness here, as it is: a TOCIO armored shuttle and Optigene clones being used by the same attackers who pounded the crap out of us two weeks ago and knocked a cannonball aside a few hours ago? It doesn’t add up, so I’m not about to make any tactical assumptions. We just move forward and try to get in the game to save our people.That’s all the plan I’ve got right now.”
Wu nodded, looked at the wounds on the dead leader’s arm. “Looks like our people are putting up a fight, too.”
“That’s to be expected.” Rulaine checked his weapon, started toward the trail. “I just wish I knew if they’re still alive.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
Southern extents of the Third Silver Tower; BD +02 4076 Two (“Disparity”)
The water frothed and fumed above Ben Hwang before he broke the surface of the river. The streamlined compressor he held clenched in his teeth pulled free as the chop of the water buffeted him.
But a moment later, that turbulence was behind—or rather, beneath—Hwang and his three companions. The water-strider on whose back they had ridden rose up quickly, ascending toward the cone-trees clustered tightly along the eastern shore of the river.
W’th’vaathi, whose torso was adorned with four flat, multi-eyed fish that had affixed themselves to her respiratory ducts, gestured toward the stand of trees with a dripping tendril. “There we shall find the next boat that we have positioned for use along the river. With it, we shall reach the Silver Tower swiftly.”
Gaspard spat out the air line from his own pony tank. “How quickly?”
“Half a day, several hours: it depends upon the wind as well as the current.”
Ben shook his head. “Escaping interstellar pursuers by sailboat: this is madness. Do you truly think machines are so dangerous that it is better to live, and die, like this?”
W’th’vaathi’s tendrils rolled in a waving fan that indicated the world around them. “We do not fear complex machines, but we only use them where necessary. As I explained, they are disruptive to our society.”
“Technology is not evil,” Mizuki murmured, shaking. Although they had only traveled underwater for ten kilometers, it had felt much longer and the currents and cold had obviously bothered her wounds, particularly reddened eye.
W’th’vaathi signaled agreement. “Indeed, objects cannot be evil. But they have an inducing power of their own, and for us, anything that circumvents natural processes and their tempos threatens to unravel biological balance. But let us turn to practical matters: we will resume travel most swiftly if you help me ready the boat.”
Hwang strapped on his filter mask and followed W’th’vaathi beneath the canopy of a particularly large cone tree. A boat, its stepped mast affixed to the deck with some form of elbow joint, was hidden under what looked like a cross between cobwebs and Spanish moss. Several of the fibrous “boxes” that they had first encountered on Adumbratus were stacked next to it. “Equipment and provisions,” W’th’vaathi explained as she set about removing the covering from the boat.
Gaspard looked at the slim hull, hands on hips. “You are sure we shall be safe, now?”
W’th’vaathi’s neck oscillated. “Captain Riordan’s plan did not merely allow us to escape, but should have convinced the attackers that we are dead. They did destroy the first boat which we were towing, and did not seek further along the river.”
Hwang worked his pinky into a water-logged and sound-deadened ear. Although they had towed the first boat almost two hundred meters behind them, the concussive and audial aftershocks had been painful, had staggered the water-strider beneath them. “We were underwater. How do we know they did not search further?”
“There are no alert or distress spores in this area, Benjamin Hwang. Had there been an intrusion by an unmarked foreign object, biological or otherwise, the sign would be thick around us.” She waved two dismissive tendrils up beyond the canopy. “The local biota is unperturbed.”
Gaspard still stood motionless. W’th’vaathi stopped unfastening the lashings which held the mast down. “You are disturbed, Ambassador.”
Gaspard’s fine jaw worked. “Can your spores, or any of your biota, tell you what happened further upriver?”
W’th’vaathi’s tendrils wilted. “I have no away to ascertain the fate of your friends. Or of my people. I may only hope for the best.”
“And what of the ship we heard overhead? You say your spores perceived it as marked, so it must have been our corvette. Is there any way to project its fate, based on its speed, or angle of descent?”
“Sadly, our spores do not register such information. Now: we must ready our boat.”
* * *
Karam Tsaami glanced at the engineering board: a solid bank of red glared back at him. Not unexpected, but still depressing.
He looked out the canopy: the blue line on the horizon had become a white-flecked azure band, widening with every passing second.
Melissa Sleeman must have been watching his eyes. “Will we make it?”
“To the water? I think so, but that’s no guarantee that we’ll be able to slow this bucket enough to make a safe—”
“Karam, this is Tina. The reaction pre-heating chamber is going to go any second.”
But, without any gauges left—?
“How do you know?”
“It’s starting to glow dull red.”
Oh.
“All right. Then here’s what you and Phil are going to do with the severed coolant line. You’ve got to snug it into the engine trusses so that it’s aiming straight at the chamber, and it’s got to be secure enough to hold that position under pressure.”
Tina’s question arrived as a screech. “Under pressure from what?”
Phil Friel evidently saw where Karam was headed. “From coolant flow. Karam is going to open the registers again.”
Tina did not become less shrill. “And flood the whole chamber with the remaining coolant?”
Karam didn’t bother to keep his tone civil. “That’s exactly what I’m going to do. Seal your suits; it’s going to be pretty unpleasant”—
well, lethal
—“in there. Let me know when you’ve got it rigged.”
“Hare-brained scheme if I ever heard one,” Tina grumbled as she worked.
“Might be,” Karam admitted. “But we’ve got to cool that chamber down for just another minute, enough so that we can maintain thrust and not explode. You done yet?”
“Working.”
“Damn, you two are slow.”
“Shut up. There: we’re finished.”
“Good. Get in the equipment locker.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want you in the compartment when I uncork the remaining coolant on that line. The steam could melt straight through your gear.”
“Okay, we’re in the closet. Sort of.”
“Tight fit,” Phil agreed.
“Well, you two love birds make the most of it.” Karam was gratified by what he presumed was their embarrassed silence. “Releasing the coolant in three, two, one; now—”
There was a slight tremor on the bridge. Evidently, the effect was much more noticeable back in the drive room. “Holy shit!” screamed Tina. “Sounds like a tornado out there.”
“Banshees on steroids,” Phil agreed. “But it’s dying down already. Figure it will be safe to reenter in about four or five seconds?”
“Make it ten. But we’ll reach the coast, now. Just strap in and stay handy.”
“To do what?” Tina asked.
“Can’t say just yet,” Karam lied.
Because hopefully I
won’t
have to ask one of you to take an even more insane risk before this is over.
Sleeman breathed a sigh of relief as
Puller
cleared the coast-hugging foliage at one hundred meters altitude—then gasped as she was thrown forward against her straps. “What the hell—?”
“Just shifted one third of our thrust to our VTOL fans,” Karam grunted. “They’re in forward attitude to brake us. With any luck—”
But the onrushing blue horizon revealed that their luck had run out. Undetectable from their prior angle, the initial drop-off of the tidal shallows reversed itself, climbed up again to give birth to spray-wreathed rocks and a few small islands. Dragons teeth waiting to tear
Puller
apart. “Shit,” announced Karam calmly.
Lymbery had seen it. “P-pivot on your fans,” he stammered.
Damn it, the guy has good ideas when he’s too busy to be scared.
“Pivoting,” Karam confirmed, reaching down and cutting the starboard fans back to ten percent.
Puller
groaned, lost altitude crookedly, but heeled starboard, her nose swinging away from the rocks. “Great idea, Morgan. We just might—”
“Critical overheat,” Phil Friel’s voice shouted at him. First time the calm Irishman had ever shouted, so Karam accepted his report as gospel: he shut the engines down.
“We’re going in,” he announced in as calm a voice as he could manage. “Strap in. Stay calm.” The mandatory platitudes common to all imminent crashes.
Karam snapped on the bow’s emergency attitude control thrusters—compressed gas canisters usually used spaceside when the main engines were off-line—and blew what little was left in them in one long, concentrated burst. That brought
Puller
’s nose up a bit, which gave her a little more glide, a little more time to dump airspeed.
The blue beneath them began lightening: shallows. That was good for getting out of
Puller
safely, but not good for putting her down in one piece: if they hit the bottom with any appreciable force—“Call out our final descent, Ms. Sleeman. Tongues away from your teeth, folks.”
“Four meters, three, two—”
Melissa never got to “one,” but Karam had expected that. With
Puller
’s nose still slightly raised, her stern hit first, creating a momentary sense of drag, as if someone had half depressed the emergency break. Then a stomach jarring slam as the tortured ship’s belly swung down flat against the water.
Come on
, thought Karam,
rise up
—
And for just a fraction of a second, they were seemingly weightless again. The view in the canopy showed the water drop away for a moment—
—and then they dug in hard, metal screeching and squealing and half of the secured objects coming loose and flying about the bridge. Karam heard the air come out of his lungs like a bellows as he slammed forward against the straps—but he was smiling, even as he felt his sternum wiggle uncomfortably:
made it. Hit the right contact angle and skipped the hull like a stone on a lake. Only one hop, but that’s all we needed to surviv—
“Karam.” It was Phil Friel. Hushed but strident.
“Talk,” Karam answered;
Puller
was now drifting through the water, listing to starboard, with waves lapping up its long narrow nose toward the bridge windows.
Friel’s voice was low. “I’ve seen one wet ditch like this, with a hot power plant. I know what happens if this chamber floods all at once.”
Shit. Just what I was afraid of.
“Tina?”
“I shifted to a private circuit. This is you and me.”
Jeez. Calm, unassuming Phil Friel can get all business when he has to.
“I get it. But you can gradually flood the compartment if the inflow vents are still functioning—”
“They’re not. I checked them as soon as I got out of my couch. I’m guessing that during the fight, the hit on our fuel tankage warped the valve housing. So I don’t have any way to gradually cool the plant. Which will eventually blow on its own.”
“Or shred itself and us if it’s suddenly immersed in a rush of cold ocean water.”
Damn it, I didn’t want to have to ask this.
“Phil, I don’t know how to say—”
“You don’t have to say anything. Get Tina out of here. I can crank open the emergency depressurization vents. That will let the water in a bit at a time.”
“Yeah, but don’t stay a second longer than you have to.”
“I have no intention of being parboiled, Karam. Now, get Tina out of here so I can get to work.”
Karam watched the water edge up over the cockpit canopy, switched to the open circuit. “Tina?”
“Yeah?”
“We have to evacuate through the dorsal hatchway. You’re closest; check it, make sure it’s full-function, and pull the water-landing kits.”
“I’m on it.”
Karam unstrapped, rose: Lymbery and Sleeman were already at the bridge hatchway. His rueful and sardonic “Abandon ship” did not diminish the alacrity with which they entered the aft-leading corridor.
As they made their way back to the dorsal hatchway,
Puller
showed herself much worse for the wear. Lockers had sprung open, freshers were running and overflowing, access panels hung and swayed from both ceilings and bulkheads. But they reached the hatchway swiftly, helped Tina open it into a stiff breeze that mixed the smell of salt with that of musk.
“Where’s Phil?” Tina asked as she handed up one of the inflatable rafts.
Karam handed the raft down to Sleeman. “He’s coming.”
Puller
had settled on the bottom just after the water had risen up over the top of the bridge windows. Lymbery was standing on the hull, just beyond the reach of the lapping wavelets.
Tina Melah frowned. “He should be here by now. What’s he doing?”
“I asked him to secure the electronics,” Karam lied. “If we’re going to have any chance of raising this craft and flying her again, I can’t have a system-wide short out. We’ll inflate a second raft, leave it behind for him.”
Tina nodded as Sleeman and Lymbery avoided her eyes and inflated the second raft. As they clambered into their own slightly larger one, she glanced behind at the dorsal hatch.
Karam and Sleeman began paddling toward a small chip of rock that was almost an island: it actually had a single, wind-bent cone-tree on it. “I make that land about four hundred meters off,” Karam commented conversationally, hoping to distract Tina.
But her eyes never left the stricken
Puller
. “Something’s wrong,” she murmured. “We should go ba—”
She was interrupted by a sudden plume of steam hissing up from
Puller
’s stern, like the spout of a gigantic, superheated whale. Except that this spout did not relent; it only grew in volume and intensity as the water around the back of the ship growled and hissed.
Tina’s eyes widened. She rounded on Karam. “You bastard. You left him behind to cool the plant—and die. You lying bastard.”
Karam looked away. “Phil is a top hand at his job. If anyone can get himself out in time, it’s him.”
“Fuck you, you lying bastard. You made him—”
“Tina. He called me. He asked. He didn’t want you to be in there. He—” Karam stopped: if she didn’t already know that Friel was as quietly smitten with her as she was almost comically smitten with him, there was no point bringing it up now.
But Tina had turned from Karam to glare at the steam-spewing wreck of the
Puller
. “Well, Phil’s a lying bastard, too.” A single tear ran the length of her gracefully curved cheek. “A damned lying bastard.”