The Ramal Extraction (13 page)

“
Move
, Singh!”

An antipersonnel rocket lanced down from the carrier at the source of the rifle fire—

“Singh!”

“I’m clear,” he said. “Hold on—”

There was a small
whump!
to her left, and she saw the IR sig of a rifle grenade as Singh fired his launcher. It went off level with, but to the port side of, the transport, and was close enough to cloud the pilot’s armored window with shrapnel.

The carrier sheared off to avoid taking more fire but dropped fast.

Even as she ran, Jo saw the transport land and troops start pouring out.

“We got company, people, get gone!”

She cranked it up, moving much faster than an unaugmented human, the suit notwithstanding.

Fuck—!

Kay would have preferred to stop and use her claws on the human who stepped out to block her intended path; her rage was hot, but the transport had alighted and there were thirty more heavily armed troops on the ground, and she couldn’t afford the time. She shot the carbine, no sights, indexed the angle—

The bullet went through the man’s eye and exited the back of his skull.

Her way was clear. The rendezvous was a kilometer into the forest, off the approach line they had taken coming in. She didn’t wear a suit, but she could sense the others of her team. So far, they were all still alive and moving.

It had been a gull. The kidnapped female had not been in the building. She hadn’t been able to tell for sure until she was inside, and by then, the attack had begun. They were lucky none of them had been killed.

She was going to speak to a certain Rel about this—

Wink ran, feeling as alive as he ever had. A firefight. Unexpected, dangerous, they might still die, but so far, they had survived.

He had a small problem: One of the armor-piercing rounds had skewered his suit. It hadn’t done any real damage—it had hit just under his left arm, halfway down the lat, punched through the muscle, and exited the suit’s back. Kiting gave you good lats. The suit’s rudimentary medcomp stiffened a patch over the wound, a memory-foam pad that applied enough pressure to mostly stop the bleeding. The suit asked him if he wanted a local or a systemic painkiller, and he opted for neither—better to feel the injury and avoid doing more harm to it than to deaden it and risk fucking it up more. He’d hurt himself worse and lived with it, he could live with this.

Unless, of course, he got killed heading for Alpha point.

Getting shot was his own fault. He had expected to find the girl after he iced the “guard” and opened the door to the storage room. Instead, there had been a shooter who got a round off before Wink took him down.

He didn’t enjoy that part of it particularly, the shooting, but that was what you had to live with if you chose to carry a gun. Fucker shot him? Served him right.

He
really
didn’t like the
getting-shot
part—

Gunny knew a clusterfuck when she saw one, and this had been that. Yeah, she’d gone three for three inside the lodge, but when that fucking transport landed, there was no way they were gonna beat thirty-some soldiers, and that is sure as shit what they were—combat troops, not some raggedy-ass bandits who didn’t know their asses from holes in the ground. They weren’t in any kind of uniform she recognized, but they were moving right, they were
some
body’s army, and that put a new spin on this whole affair.

Somebody had known that they were coming; it had been a setup.

The question was, who?

There was
no
question what they were gonna do about it when they found out, least not in her mind. Assuming, of course, they lived to tell anybody.

Speaking of which, she hoped Jo was calling Gramps and getting his ass lifted. They were gonna need a ride pretty damn quick, or they were gonna get spiked.

“I’m here,” Gramps said. “How’s tricks?”

“Got a situation,” Jo said. “The lodge was a trap. No Indira. We shot our way out, but there’s a shitload of real infantry fanning out after us. We are going to rendezvous at Alpha. Be nice if you could get into the air and stand by for our go-to after that.”

“Copy, Jo. Anybody hurt?”

“Wink says he got a minor wound; nobody else reporting any injuries.”

Gramps felt a flush of relief. He waved at Nancy, gave her the hand-swoop up-jive for get-it-in-the-air.

The engines had been on standby, they came online and whined up to full power.

“Pick a spot,” Gramps said. “We’ll meet you there.”

“Acknowledged. Tell Nancy to keep her eyes open—they got a transport with a platoon, and they are carrying J&S Rails, they can probably afford ground-to-air or a warbird. If you get shot down, we have to walk all the way home.”

“Well, we wouldn’t want that, would we? Stay edgy, Jo.”

“You bet your ass I will. Might want to pass it along to Rags, JIC. Off-line.”

Gramps sighed. A trap? How was that possible? They hadn’t told anybody but the colonel where they were going, and he wouldn’t have said anything to anybody. Which meant somebody knew where they were going
before
they ever lifted.

There was an ugly can of worms.

Well. Worry about that later.

He opened a secure pipe and hailed the colonel.

“What’s the situation?” Cool, but alert.

“Lodge was a trap, no girl. Team got out okay and are running through the woods, but there’s a platoon of what Jo calls ‘real infantry’ chasing them. They’ll decide on an extraction site once they see what’s what, and I’ll collect them.”

There was a short silence. “How did they know we were coming?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? Nobody but you and us knew that, we didn’t tell anybody and I’m guessing you didn’t, either, so…”

“…so they threw out a lure, and we bit on it.”

“Looks like, yeah.”

“And they knew we were there to go for it.”

“You need help?”

“Nah, Nancy and I got it.”

Another short silence. “Collect them and come back to base. We’ll work the rest out when you get here. Off-line.”

“Off-line,” Gramps said.

To Nancy, he said, “Keep it low and keep the scopes on high. Might be some smoke and fire coming our way. Shall we rise?”

The hopper lifted.

Kay was there when Jo got to the site. Singh and Gunny were the last to arrive, a minute after Wink. It was dark, the tree canopy particularly thick. No smell of other humans in the air.

“Everybody okay?” Jo asked.

Everybody nodded.

Gunny looked at Wink. “Doc, you let somebody put a
hole
in that suit? Rags will have your ass, much as these things cost.”

“Yeah, well, these suckers aren’t as great as they are supposed to be, are they? They are supposed to stop bullets! I might sue ’em for the puncture in my lat.”

They all laughed, save for Singh. He was still running on adrenaline, Jo realized; you could see he had a tremor. Best give him something to occupy his mind.

“Okay, Singh, what’s our best way to a place where the hopper can land for our evac? Be nice it was close, the bad guys are on their way to find us.”

Singh took a deep breath and blew most of it out. “There
is a gold placer site two kilometers from here, to the southwest. Abandoned and mostly overgrown, but a clearing next to the stream is flat, bare rock. I don’t think it shows on a map. You could land a small VTOL craft there.”

“Kay, take point with Singh. Gunny and I will cover our asses. Doc, you ride in the pocket. Anybody see anybody not us, spike them, but keep moving. We don’t have time to stop and play around. Go.”

As they dropped back, Gunny said it aloud: “They knew we were coming, Jo. And they knew enough to carry J&S’s.”

“That thought crossed my mind. We’ll suss it out once we get back to base.”

“You have Gramps call it in?”

“Yep. But Rags won’t send help unless we ask for it.”

“We’d never hear the end of how much that costs if we do that.”

Jo grinned. “Don’t I know it. We just need to outrun ’em, and we have a head start. You want left or right?”

“Right. Mah good side.”

They both smiled.

They were most of a klick along when Kay smelled the enemy. She stopped, held up one hand for Singh to do the same. “We have humans ahead,” she said.

“How many?” Jo.

Kay sniffed, inhaling deeply, swiveling her head from left to right, then back again. “A dozen. A picket line.”

“They must know about the placer site,” Singh said. “I don’t have them on my suit’s sensor.”

“Bollixed,” Jo said. “Can we go around them?”

Doc Wink arrived.

Kay looked at Singh.

“Maybe to the north,” Singh said. “There’s a ravine to the south that’s deep enough to be a problem. It can be traversed, but the going will be very slow.”

Jo and Gunny got there. Gunny said, “Our pursuers are five minutes behind us. They know about the pickets, got to figure they know about the ravine. Bet your bonus they’ll be angling to the north to cut us off.”

“So you are saying we are fucked?” Singh said.

“Nah, Ah’m saying we don’t have a lot of time to break through and hope Gramps and Nancy don’t get lost coming to pick us up. How far away are we from the site?”