Under Strange Suns (33 page)

“First one I hit, apparently not a kill-shot. Believe it or not, I do feel for him. I’d like to see if I can help. But I haven’t had much luck helping wounded joon. And every minute I wait, the Lhakovi army gets that much closer to Girdled-by-Fields. If you want to tend to him, go ahead. You can catch up later.”

At that moment the screaming ceased.

“Well, that moral dilemma solved itself,” Yuschenkov said, beginning to limp after Aidan, leaning on his makeshift cane.

“Convenient,” Aidan said, though of course the moral dilemma would never be solved. A mere instance had sorted itself out.

After that he had little energy to expend musing. All his thought and will was directed toward placing one foot before the other while the weight of the travois seemed to increase with every jarring stride. Each shift of the load transmitted through the travois poles, altering the balance and activating an ache in yet another bunching cluster of muscle. His recent wound throbbed in time with each step. And then the near-healed claw marks on his arm began to itch.

Within an hour Yuschenkov had caught the rear of the travois. A half-hour later he had hobbled up neck-and-neck with Aidan.

“How you doing, Doc?” Aidan said, pushing out each word between panting breaths. He sucked down another mouthful from the water tube projecting from his combat harness.

“I hurt, to be honest with you. Movement is keeping the leg from stiffening up, but it’s also keeping the wound open. I’m leaking.”

“Well, if you don’t mind riding with Echeckok, I can give you a few minutes to rest.” It took Aidan about thirty seconds to get through the offer.

“Are you serious?”

“Doc, none of this matters if I can’t get you back to Girdled-by-Fields.”
They continued on in silence for another minute.

“Okay, just for ten minutes or so.”

“Damn, I was hoping you’d say no.”

Aidan halted, letting the travois poles drop. He stretched, then wolfed down a protein bar and a couple of pain tablets, chasing the meal with another mouthful of water. Meantime, Yuschenkov hauled himself aboard, shifting a battery and the radio amplifier to fashion a perch atop the heaps of equipment to the rear of Echeckok’s body.

Aidan took a deep breath, repositioned himself between the poles, and lifted. He felt the strain through his forearms and running up to his shoulders. At the first step, the strain continued on through his back and down to his calves. The second step didn’t want to come. He grunted, leaned forward, and forced himself to move, gathering momentum again.

Aidan had pushed through some serious humps on Earth, loaded down with a hundred pounds of gear. He was no stranger to the pain of endurance treks. He knew the mental tricks to motivate himself. Small goals. Pass that taller clump of grass. Get to the bottom of that dell. Just make it to the top of this rise. It is only temporary, every journey ends eventually. But this reached a new level, becoming a hellish nightmare of endless, monotonous pain. All beneath the oppressive stare of the great planet creeping above him.

He began to hate that planet, mild distaste gradually mounting to loathing.

And then the planet dropped beneath the horizon behind him and Aidan stumbled to his knees. Yuschenkov knelt at his side. The physicist had mounted and dismounted the travois many times. Aidan had lost count and had no recollection of stopping to allow the transitions.

“Drink,” Yuschenkov said.

Aidan sucked greedily at the water tube. Then he fumbled out a ground cover and tossed it, only half-open, on the springing growth before him.

“Two hours, Doc,” he said, his voice little more than a croak. “No more than two hours.” Then he let himself collapse forward, the upper half of his body lying on the camouflage tarp, the lower half stretching out in the blue clover beneath the travois.

He slept fitfully. His mind, no longer numbed by the interminable trudging, seemed unwilling to allow him to drift off. Instead images of Echeckok assailed him, and snatches of conversation with the joon that he’d never had–that he could never have had–indicted him. His fault. The young man was under his protection and he had failed. He had failed Checkok’s trust.

A faint echo of Brooklynn’s voice provided a temporary respite, a cooling breeze in a desert of guilt. But then her voice faded and Echeckok loomed up again, the arrow in him pointing accusatorially at Aidan, who gave up trying to decipher what Brooklynn had whispered.

He woke, not the least refreshed mentally, to Yuschenkov’s gentle shaking.

“Two hours, Aidan. We can rest longer. It’s still a few hours till the primary rises.”

“No, Doc. There’s light enough. We can’t wait. If we lose this race, we lose the battle.”

Aidan pushed himself to his feet. He folded the tarp and fumbled a bit stuffing it back in its pouch. He needed more rest, unquestionably. But when he gripped the poles again and willed himself into motion he found it had been enough. After a moment’s hesitation he set the travois underway once more.

The half-light–a demon glow on the eastern horizon reflected briefly by the satellites hurtling by overhead–remained eerie, despite his days of familiarity with Ghark. But eerie or not, it provided him with sufficient illumination to pick his way forward, allowing him to avoid dropping into ruts or tripping over exposed rock.

Yuschenkov kept pace for the first hour until the pain in his calf forced him to temporarily add to Aidan’s burden.

“I called the ship while you were sleeping,” Yuschenkov said. “And you were definitely out. You didn’t budge when I moved your arm to get to your datapad.”

Aidan grunted in reply.

“Exactly,” Yuschenkov said. “So, the update is that we are on pace. If we don’t slow much, we should get to Girdled-by-Fields at least a day before the Lhakovi army. And–get this–our transportation should be waiting for us. Apparently your geologist needed to get in some last-minute mining and your engineers had to make a few modifications to the lander. Brooklynn seemed hesitant to provide details.”

Aidan tried to process that. It took some doing; breaking out of his groggy fog of pain proved challenging.

“Only a day?” He trudged for several minutes, then said, “Is that going to be long enough for palladium mining?

“Doubtful,” Yuschenkov said.

“Maybe I can buy us a little time if Park came through with the explosives.” He tried to formulate plans, contemplate contingencies, but the fog recaptured him. And so the rest of the night passed: Aidan slipping into a semi-focused, almost trance-like state and Yuschenkov alternating walking and riding.

As the crimson glow of Tarik increased it eventually dawned on Aidan that they had passed the belt of marginal farms and had entered the fertile lands of Girdled-by-Fields. The day was quiet. He realized he had half-hoped to press a few joon farmhands into pulling the travois. But by now they must all be in Girdled-by-Fields, helping throw up the defensive works.

Disappointment.
Well
, he thought,
suck it up and drive on, soldier
. He did, stopping just long enough to devour another energy bar.

Two hours later he had dragged the travois within sight of a work party. Yuschenkov hobbled ahead to greet them. Aidan slogged forward a few more yards, then let his burden fall. He slumped to the ground, sucking in air.

Minutes later he found himself seated atop the travois, between Yuschenkov and the corpse of Echeckok while a string of joon hauled the travois at jouncing, high speed toward the village.

And thus they were in time to observe the fiery advent of McAvoy.

First, however, Aidan required waking. Despite the jostling, he had managed to fall asleep within the first minute. Yuschenkov’s elbow to his ribs snapped him to full alertness.

“Visitors,” Yuschenkov said. He pointed upwards.

He needn’t have bothered: the noise of retro-rockets burning flat-out to arrest the descent of the ungainly mining craft was enough to direct Aidan’s gaze skyward.

The mining craft wobbled and shifted erratically. It descended toward a cleared area within the defensive perimeter, beyond the buildings of the village, close to the nearest of the fields that gave Girdled-by-Fields its name. But each jink and waggle threatened to drop the lander off course, threatened to ignite a conflagration if its thrusters touched the thatching of any village roof.

“C’mon, McAvoy, bring that pig down,” Aidan said.

The travois was at a halt, the joon hauling it all standing frozen, staring upwards at the spectacle. The mining vessel was far from an aerodynamic craft. It was intended for use in hard vacuum or on low-gravity objects possessing only the merest traces of atmosphere. It looked more like a scuttling crab than a sleek shark, all lumpen pods, ore bays, claw-like diggers, jutting EVA airlocks.

Yuschenkov clambered down from his perch and began issuing commands, yelling in an attempt to be heard over the bellow of rockets.

Aidan figured it was futile. He could barely hear Yuschenkov now and the physicist was only yards away. But the travois team, at least, paid attention and backed away. That also seemed pointless. As near as Aidan could estimate, the mining craft had about a three-square kilometer safe landing zone–
safe
meaning the worst that could happen would be severe crop damage and perhaps the demolition of a partially completed earthen breastwork. But given the zigs and zags, no particular spot encircling that landing zone was safer than any other. Backing up a bit provided no guarantee.

The mining craft, now descended to about two-hundred feet, veered toward the travois. Aidan felt the heat curling the ends of his hair, lightly singing his eyebrows. Then the miner swayed back the opposite direction, lurching down fifty feet before a torrent of flame held it in a hover for a couple of seconds. It dropped, shifting south, ordered rows of some crop withering beneath the blast. Then north, falling at a forty-five degree angle from parallel to within thirty feet of the ground. The craft corrected, leveling out, then drifted back westward toward Aidan, before easing down in a roil of smoke, flame and a barrage of charred, kicked-up dirt.

The rockets cut out as the mining craft settled. The abrupt silence was filled with the popping and ticking of cooling metal and the guttural cries of joon who now began to converge. The clouds of smoke and debris dissipated. Aidan’s temporary bout of awareness allowed him a certain degree of curiosity when he noted the lumps, streaks and drips coating the lower half of the mining craft, as if it had been dipped in molten ore and slag. But as the surge of excitement abated, Aidan felt his exhaustion re-exert itself. He flopped back into his resting position near Echeckok.

“Doc, you mind taking charge of this before they lynch McAvoy? I’m gonna take a little nap.”

P
ONTIFEX-GENERAL VONGÜK OBSERVED THE YOUNG LIEUTENANT
coolly. Ghemel appeared to have endured a strenuous journey. That much of his story was plausible. His boots, armor, and gear were travel-stained, whip-scarred by tall grasses, gouged by rocks, and mud be-spattered. He had obviously not bathed for days. Yes, Vongük could believe Ghemel had traversed a significant stretch of enemy territory and had done so at a remarkable clip. It was an impressive feat of physical endurance. The Pontifex-General himself felt the exertions of field maneuvers. This passage across the wall was taking its toll on his aging frame. But his personal discomfort did not mean he could allow discipline to lapse. Indeed, if he could maintain hygiene, certainly this young, healthy specimen could.

So. Exhausted and filthy. The young joon had doubtlessly burned boot leather. But the rest of Ghemel’s tale–well, that was another matter entirely. Did the Lieutenant truly expect him to believe that his entire platoon had been wiped out by two–demons? A dozen hardened Lhakovi elite? It strained credulity.

And yet.

There was the evidence of the massacre of the Wild Wall patrol as reported by the survivors. When the bodies were returned to Bountiful Orchard, he had personally viewed the odd wounds that marred each fallen martyr. Further, there were the fireballs that had streaked through the skies. Two of them, though widely separated in years. And there were the reports from his spies that seemed to confirm at least one demon dwelling for years among these unenlightened savages.

Young Ghemel had sent a messenger earlier purporting to pass along a spy’s report of two demons, but as Vongük had been unable to question the spy personally he could not consider that report definitive.

So, inconclusive. It would be imprudent to completely discount Ghemel’s story. And yet, on the other foot, the young man had lost an entire platoon. That could not be overlooked.

“Your appearance, Lieutenant Ghemel, is an affront to the Watchful God and to good order and discipline. Your–anecdote–was hardly so pressing that you could not have first made yourself presentable.”

Vongük watched incredulity and anger roll across Ghemel’s expression before he regained a properly imperturbable visage. He needed reminding of his position in the Watchful God’s decreed hierarchy.

“As it seems an extravagance to entrust you with command, I am returning you to Captain Akhistal as a common soldier for the duration of this campaign. If the Watchful God deems you worthy of regaining your prior rank, no doubt his will shall be made manifest.”