Andromeda's Fall Read online

  “So,” Anders finished, “if you’ve had some prior experience with electronics, hydraulics, and or life-support technologies, that would be very helpful. Okay, enough talk. Let’s start with basic maintenance.”

  McKee was pleased to discover that she knew more about the inner workings of T-1s than Corporal Anders did. And that made sense since her family manufactured war forms, and she had a degree in cybernetics. But it soon became clear that he knew a lot of things that she didn’t, including which parts were substandard and how to carry out field repairs, that would have left her father shaking his head in amazement.

  As the orientation session came to an end, and the light started to fade, the recruits lined up to get their MREs. Then it was time for a final roll call and some words from Hasker. “Get all the sleep you can, boys and girls. We’re going for a stroll in frog country tomorrow, and this ain’t no training exercise.

  “It seems the gunrunners have been putting down about fifteen miles southwest of here. So we’re going to lay an ambush for the bastards. And if that don’t work, we’ll booby-trap the LZ before we leave. Load up for three days. That includes ten mags each. No more and no less. Reveille is at 0400. We’ll wade out at 0500. Sweet dreams, shitheads.”

  * * *

  After more than two hours of tossing and turning, McKee had finally fallen asleep. And when the lights came on, and the noncoms began to beat on the sheds, she had a sense of having been somewhere better, although she couldn’t remember where.

  There was no time to waste as the women rolled out of their racks and lined up to take five-minute showers, before returning to the main bay. After putting her jungle-style camos and boots on, McKee ducked under her poncho-style body armor and poked her head up through the hole. The bullet-resistant liner and ballistic inserts were heavy in and of themselves. And with full ammo pouches, a combat knife, first-aid kit, entrenching tool, and two canteens of water, the rig weighed more than forty pounds. Her weapon plus a small pack brought the total up to something like fifty-five pounds. She was stronger now, thanks to all the physical conditioning, but was she strong enough to carry half her body weight all day long? She would know by nightfall.

  There were attempts at levity as the recruits ate their rations, but the jokes fell flat, and there was tension in the air as the noncoms ordered the recruits to form up for an inspection. Not the kind they had experienced before, but a more casual affair, in which Hasker and Anders went over each recruit’s kit, checking to make sure they had all the required gear and that their body armor was properly secured.

  Once that process was complete, Hasker spoke to them over the company push. McKee could hear his voice via the speakers in her helmet. “Listen up . . . Anders and Chu will be on point followed by the first platoon and the second platoon. Fox and I will walk drag. Do your best to maintain visual contact with the person ahead of you but don’t bunch up. Because if you do, a single grenade could cause a lot of damage.

  “If we take fire, don’t shoot back unless you can see a target—or a noncom calls for suppressive fire. And if that happens, be careful what you shoot at. If you hit me, and I survive, you’ll wish I hadn’t.

  “Finally, keep those brain buckets on. Your HUD (Heads-Up Display) will show where you are relative to the rest of the unit and to Fire Base Charlie-Four. And so long as you are wearing your helmets, Corporal Anders and I will be able to remind you of how stupid you are. That’s what we get paid for.”

  After that, Chu carried Anders out into the swamp, and the first platoon followed along behind. The sun was only a dimly seen presence above the low-lying clouds, the normally green plants looked gray, and, with the exception of the icons on the inside surface of McKee’s visor, the men and women of the first platoon seemed to fade from existence.

  Then it was the second platoon’s turn as Pachek led them into the cold water while an unseen bird produced what sounded like a sardonic laugh, and McKee battled the fear that lurked in the pit of her stomach. It was an ally, or could be, so long as she didn’t allow it to control her. That’s what she told herself anyway as the relative safety of Fire Base Charlie-Four was left behind. Each movement sent wavelets out across the water, something coughed in the canopy above, and Drang closed in around her.

  * * *

  Kr-Kak, son of U-Keni and father-to-be, sat high in a soul tree as the strangely attired star devils wound their way through the swamp below. It was difficult to understand how they could be intelligent enough to create such devastating kill things yet stupid enough to walk past a sinuous choke slither without seeing it. Fortunately for them, the constrictor had feasted the evening before and wasn’t hungry. At least one of the off-worlders would have been killed otherwise.

  That didn’t apply to the huge death walkers, however. They were strong enough to kill a slither with their graspers, carried powerful boom weapons, and could “see” heat. So as one of the monsters splashed past fifty warrior lengths to the south below, Kr-Kak froze. There was a good possibility that the machine thing knew something was clinging to the tree above. But it couldn’t tell the difference between a warrior and a parasitic tree slug of the same size.

  Once the star things had passed, Kr-Kak stood with harpoon gun in hand, eyed the turgid water below, and dropped straight down. There were many pools. Some were shallow and some were deep. Kr-Kak knew the difference.

  There was a small splash as he went in, followed by a delicious coolness as the liquid caressed his mottled skin. Then, with a surety that Kr-Kak took for granted, he swam toward the slight turbulence signaling one of the planet’s many subsurface rivers and entered the flow. The current carried him downstream. The star devils were on the move—and Queen Mar-mi would want to know.

  * * *

  Gradually, as the clouds began to clear, and rays of sunshine slanted down into the jungle, the air grew warm and humid. That made the already-unpleasant journey even worse. There were three modes of travel. The first involved wading across large bodies of mostly shallow water. There were hidden holes, however, and they were extremely dangerous, especially for a person burdened with fifty pounds of gear. Because if McKee was sucked down into a subsurface river, she would drown in a matter of minutes.

  The second mode of travel, walking on solid ground, was better in some ways and worse in others. Because while she could see the ground ahead, the surrounding vegetation was home to a variety of creatures, including prunelike “crotch suckers,” so named because of their predilection for dropping off branches and oozing through damp clothing to a victim’s pubic area. The perfect place to tap into a femoral artery. And there were other pests as well, which found ways to colonize, feed on, or simply annoy the humans.

  But the worst mode of travel to McKee’s way of thinking was the so-called deep crossings, in which the recruits were required to half walk, half swim across murky lakes teeming with aquatic life. There was no way to know what was brushing up against one’s leg, why there was a sudden disturbance in the water nearby, or when the bottom would suddenly drop away. And being only five-six, she found it difficult to keep her head above water at times.

  It was on one such crossing that the company came across an abandoned village located near the center of a shallow lake. It wasn’t clear whether the surrounding body of water served the frogs as a natural moat, a ready source of food, or both. Hasker and Fox were out front and approached the seemingly lifeless island very carefully, knowing that such places were often booby-trapped.

  But after circling the village and inspecting the huts, Hasker pronounced the island safe. Two squads were ordered to guard the perimeter while the rest of the troops broke out MREs and ate lunch. The area smelled of rotting fish, but it was dry, and that made up for the stink.

  McKee hurried to eat her meal so that she would have time to inspect one of the huts before taking her turn at guard duty. She was sitting slightly apart from Pachek and the rest of them with her back against a log and her legs crossed when a group of recru
its approached from the right.

  What happened next occurred quickly. One of the men threw something. The object was already twisting and turning in the air when McKee recognized Larkin and heard him laugh. The snakelike animal was about three feet long and weighed a couple of pounds. It landed on top of McKee’s lunch, whipped around, and snapped at her unprotected face.

  She scrambled to her feet, spilling both the MRE and the reptile to the ground as Larkin and his toadies laughed and exchanged high fives. Rather than slither toward the water as she expected, the snake-thing came straight at her. So she grabbed the L-40, brought it up, and fired. The slugs tore the reptile apart.

  Like most fully automatic weapons, the AXE had a tendency to rise. But rather than take her finger off the trigger, or force the barrel down, McKee allowed the bullets to draw a line that led straight to Larkin before letting up. The last geyser of mud shot up an inch from the toe of Larkin’s right boot. “Oops,” she said. “That was close.”

  Pachek and half a dozen other members of the second platoon had witnessed the entire incident and laughed uproariously as Larkin’s face turned beet red. He didn’t say anything, couldn’t say anything, as Hasker arrived on the scene, but the hatred in his eyes was clear to see. He had been humiliated. And that was something he couldn’t bear. “What the hell were you shooting at?” Hasker demanded.

  “A snake,” McKee said calmly, with her eyes still on Larkin. “It came straight at me.”

  “Good shooting,” Hasker observed approvingly as he toed the bloody corpse. “Don’t forget to recharge that magazine. We wouldn’t want to come up short, would we?

  “All right, people . . . Enough sitting around. Get off your asses and relieve the folks on guard duty. Stay sharp now. There’s more where the snake came from.”

  * * *

  The afternoon was much like the morning, only warmer. Eventually, after wading across a shallow pond, Hasker and Fox led the recruits up a muddy bank and onto dry land. There were trees, but most of them were dead, as if from a blight. So there wasn’t much foliage. Just a litter of fallen branches.

  There was something spooky about walking through the maze of skeletal tree trunks. At first, McKee wasn’t sure why it felt that way. Then she realized that the feeling had to do with the brooding silence that hung over the area. There were no trilling birdcalls, hooting noises, or any of the other sounds she was accustomed to.

  On the other hand, it was a relief to be up out of the water, with clear visibility all around. So she was tired, but otherwise in reasonably good condition, as Hasker and Fox led the column along a game trail and into a clearing. And that was where both of them disappeared.

  It took Pachek a moment to absorb what had occurred before alerting Anders. “Charlie-Twelve to Charlie-Two . . . Charlie-One and Charlie-Six fell into some sort of hole. Over.”

  That brought Anders and his T-1 forward at a run. When he arrived, it was to find that Pachek had already established a defensive perimeter. Having jumped to the ground, the noncom went over to inspect the trap. McKee was there, along with half a dozen other recruits, all of whom were wondering what to do.

  Dead branches had been laid crosswise on top of each other to create a matlike structure, strong enough to support a two- or three-inch-thick layer of soil plus another hundred pounds or so. Anything heavier would break through the brittle branches and plunge down into the bottom of the pit. The trap was at least twelve feet deep, four feet wide, and six feet long. Carefully sharpened stakes pointed upwards from the bottom, and Fox was impaled on a couple of them.

  Hasker, who was still strapped in place on the cyborg’s back, appeared to be unhurt. The noncom was shaken, however, as was apparent from his uncharacteristic silence as he worked to free himself. “Hold on, Sarge,” Anders cautioned. “Wait until we can drop a rope down to you. One wrong move, and you’ll land on top of a stake. Fox, what’s your status?”

  “I took some damage,” the T-1 replied. “But judging from my readouts I’ll be able to walk. Assuming you can get me out of here, that is.”

  “Don’t worry,” Anders replied confidently. “We’ll dig you out. It looks like the frogs were hoping to bag something big for dinner and got you instead.”

  McKee wasn’t so sure about that but kept her reservations to herself as a rope was lowered to Hasker. Beyond the initial shock, the episode had a secondary effect as well. It served to underscore something that should have been obvious from the beginning. Hasker, Anders, and the T-1s were not the all-seeing, all-knowing gods she had initially believed them to be. They could and did make mistakes. Like walking on a game trail rather than parallel to it in this case.

  McKee was still in the process of absorbing that lesson as they pulled Hasker up out of the pit. Then began the long, tedious process of digging a ramp that would allow Fox to escape the hole. Finally, when that moment came, it was obvious that the T-1 had a noticeable limp. The damage done to the cyborg’s hydraulic musculature couldn’t be repaired in the field. But, all things considered, the company had been lucky to escape the incident without suffering a fatality.

  Darkness was falling by that time. So even though they were five miles short of their destination, the decision was made to bivouac in place and get an early start in the morning. And as McKee dug the fighting position (FP) that would become part of the company’s 360-degree defensive perimeter, she was forced to consider the night ahead. Up until that point, she had intentionally isolated herself from the others lest some slip of the tongue or other misstep inadvertently reveal her true identity.

  The net result was that now, as the gloom closed in around her, she had no one to watch her back. And that was dangerous with Larkin lurking about. The bully had directed numerous dirty looks her way during the course of the afternoon, and there was absolutely no doubt that he would seek revenge.

  There wasn’t anything that could be done, of course, since one could hardly strike up a friendship on a moment’s notice. But for the first time in her life, McKee realized that she was going to need help to survive.

  Such were her thoughts as she banked loose soil to protect her flanks and checked to make sure that she could back out of the FP if that became necessary. Then it was time to eat an MRE and put in an hour of sentry duty before returning to get some sleep. Fortunately, she remembered what the burly instructor called Hasker’s Law, which was: “If something can crawl into your boots, jump into your pockets, or slither up your ass, it will.”

  With that in mind, McKee directed a blip of light into her FP and saw that a coil of human feces had been left right at the center of the depression. She sighed. It was going to be a long night.

  * * *

  The sun had just broken company with the eastern horizon as the noncoms made their rounds. One by the one, the recruits stood. And because of the fog that lay like a blanket on the ground, they looked like zombies rising from their graves.

  Once she was awake, the next step was for McKee to brush her teeth while waiting for a heat tab to boil the water in her metal cup. Then she ate a fruit bar, washed it down with scalding-hot tea, and began to pack her gear. She was one of the first people to report to the assembly area at the center of the encampment.

  Fifteen minutes later, the rest of the company was ready to leave. The dimly seen sun was still only three fingers off the eastern horizon as Anders and Chu led the recruits into a foot of murky water. What promised to be a long day had begun.

  The march took the column across a shallow lake and through a mile and a half of thick jungle before delivering them into a clearing. From the look of things, fire had been used to clear a landing zone, but time had passed, and tendrils of green were pushing their way in from all sides. Within a month, the open area would disappear.

  There was a hillock off to one side, topped by three four-foot-long metal stakes, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out that they were crude grave markers. A crash site was visible beyond that. Had the gunrunners been killed dur
ing a particularly difficult landing? Or attacked by frogs while on the ground? Someone had survived, or so it seemed to McKee, since the indigs weren’t likely to set up grave markers. So where were they? It was impossible to know. But the presence of a dilapidated shack perched on pilings suggested a rudimentary base of sorts. Perhaps the survivor or survivors had been rescued by another shuttle.

  “This is as far as we go,” Hasker said as Fox came to a stop well short of the clearing. “Do not, I repeat do not, enter the cleared area. It could be booby-trapped. And even if it isn’t, our footprints would be visible from the air. We want to ambush the bastards, not chase them away.

  “Corporal Anders and I will select positions for you. Once placed, you will maintain radio silence, restrict your movements, and wait. If we’re lucky, the runners will put down in the middle of the LZ, and we’ll take them out. Over.”

  What followed was interesting, to McKee, anyway, who was busy learning everything she could. The noncoms set up an L-shaped ambush that would put the gunrunners in a cross fire but minimize the chances of a friendly-fire incident. That part was easy. The more difficult challenge had to do with hiding so many heat signatures which, if spotted from above, would be a dead giveaway. With the emphasis on “dead” since an incoming shuttle could hose the entire clearing with cannon fire and kill most of the company in a single pass.

  The key to avoiding such a disaster was thin pieces of high-tech material that the recruits could pull over themselves. They were called heat exchangers. Each “sheet” was equipped with a microprocessor that was woven into the fabric and capable of raising or lowering its surface temperature to match the air around it via thousands of tiny cell-like nanos.