S. Swann - Prophets

“Here! We’re over here!” He heard Dr. Dörner’s voice as the engine noise retreated with the aircraft. There was a pleading note in her voice.

“They’ve seen you,” Mallory said. “If they didn’t see the drag chute, they picked up on the beacon. They’re probably looking for a landing site.”

“We’re over here!” the comm continued.

Mallory wondered if she heard him at all. He could hear Dr. Pak shouting something in the background.

Mallory tried to raise them, but in their excitement over seeing the rescue craft, she must have set down their comm unit. He couldn’t really blame them. His own spirits had been raised just seeing it.

It felt miraculous. Enough so that Mallory wondered if it was literally miraculous. It felt as if the hand of God had helped them safely to ground. The only thing that tempered that thought was his inability to contact the Eclipse or Kugara. He knew better than to try to interpret his survival as divine favor and others’ fate as divine punishment. That kind of simplistic thinking was spiritually wrongheaded, shown by Job onward.

However, it was very human to wonder why God had spared them.

Mallory broke into a jog toward the lifeboat, trying to get there in time for the rescue party. As he ran through the woods, he heard the aircraft returning.

What? They need an LZ, don’t they?

They returned, moving much more slowly. They passed above him again, vector fans roaring, and came to a stop about five hundred meters away from him. Right above where the lifeboat had to be. He broke into a run, and he was able to resolve details on the craft. Mallory recognized the design.

It was two centuries out of date, but the design had been a popular version of an airborne troop carrier. It was the kind of ubiquitous vehicle that you’d find in the vehicle pool of every riot police force and planetary militia in the days of the Confederacy.

As Mallory closed on the lifeboat, he saw the side doors slide open to reveal ranks of soldiers in full armor, one of whom was bent over a large plasma cannon aiming out the door on a pintle mount.

Is this a rescue?

Mallory came to a stop as soldiers started dropping out of the aircraft on zip lines. He backed up and crouched for some cover as two dozen men dropped to the ground.

He knew enough tactics to realize that he was pinned. The aircraft would have the imaging gear to see if he ran. His only hope to avoid detection was to hug the base of this tree and hope they hadn’t bothered to sweep this area of the woods yet.

He waited, hearing nothing but the massive roar of the hovering aircraft. If they hadn’t picked up his transmissions, if they hadn’t seen his IR signature running through the woods, if they hadn’t caught sight of him any of the times he was in LOS.

Those were too many ifs.

It only took the soldiers five minutes to have a trio of armed men surround him. Mallory took some comfort in the fact they didn’t shoot him out of hand.

On some level then, it still counted as a rescue.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Hallowed Ground

Sometimes the crazy person is right.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

Never make the mistake of assuming the universe is sane.

—August Benito GALIANI (2019-*2105)

Date: 2526.6.4 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534

Nickolai followed Kugara through the woods. It was mostly clear and downhill, meaning they made good time, probably doing better than eight kilometers in the first hour. That made it all the more annoying when a pair of aircraft passed within a klick of them, heading to their northeast, back to where their lifeboat landed.

Kugara stated at the shadows visible through the canopy and said, “I don’t believe it.”

“Should we go back?”

Kugara stared after the aircraft and sighed. “No, we’re closer to the outpost you spotted.” She turned around. “Hand me the flare gun.”

Nickolai reached into the emergency pack and retrieved the flare gun. It was the last in a long list of signaling devices stowed on the lifeboat and, being the one object not reliant on electronics, it was the one that had survived their lifeboat’s impact. Unfortunately most of their high-tech equipment had either taken too much of a beating or was burned by the same shielding breach that had fried the internal electronics of the lifeboat itself. Only the ship’s distress beacon survived all of it, and they couldn’t take that without taking the whole lifeboat. So they only had a single flare gun that was included in the sparse survival kit almost as an afterthought.

He handed it, butt first, to Kugara.

“Let’s hope they see this,” she said. “We have only, what, three more flares for this thing?”

Nickolai nodded.

She backed up, looking upward, as the sound of aircrafts’ maneuvering fans receded. She held the gun two-handed, pointing up and away from both of them while looking for a hole in the forest canopy. She smiled as she looked up to a ragged blue opening in the green above them.

She aimed the gun upward and fired.

Nickolai heard a click followed by a sharp snap. Nothing happened. Then the gun started hissing.

Kugara screamed, “Shit!” and tossed the flare gun away from her, running toward Nickolai. Before the gun hit the ground, a horribly bright red flame shot out the barrel in a continuous stream. Even with his eyes auto-adjusting, the forest was briefly turned into a two-tone image in blazing red-white and ink black. The air filled with the smell of molten metal, burning leaves, and the toxic smell of melting synthetics. The hiss grew into an insistent low-level roaring, not quite as loud as the aircraft engines in the distance.

Kugara, running blind, tripped on a dead branch. Nickolai stepped forward and caught her before she fell face-first into the dirt.

“Damn Mosasa,” she shouted into his chest. “You’re supposed to check those things periodically!”

The air choked with acrid smoke as the light died, finally sputtering out. “Are you hurt?” he asked.

She pushed away from him. “I’m fine.” She turned around and stepped over to the smoldering crater where the flare gun had landed. She stared at the remains of the gun. The barrel was still recognizable, but the mouth was black, fading to a series of rainbows back toward where the handgrip and the trigger used to be. Those parts had been synthetic, and were melted where they hadn’t burned away completely.

The smell of it made his nose itch. His eyes watered, but while he expected his eyes to itch, he realized he didn’t feel anything at all. Like my arm . . .

“Well, that’s a lost cause,” she said. She looked up at the wisps of smoke trailing up through the trees. “And if they see that, they’re better spotters than I’ve seen. Back to Plan A.”

Kugara picked up the pack she dropped, looked at her compass, and resumed the walk to the outpost. He followed. If luck and the terrain was with them, they’d reach it within the hour.

Forty-five minutes after leaving the smoldering remnants of the flare gun, they found the first sign of civilization. About five hundred meters from their destination, they faced a ten-meter-high fence. The fence was shiny new and dotted with signs saying, “Restricted/Warning/No Admittance.”

Kugara looked at the signs and said, “I guess they speak English here. Dr. Pak will be disappointed.”

Nickolai looked up at the top of the fence. Small black spheres topped fence posts, sign of either a stun field or surveillance devices. Probably both.

Kugara stepped back from the fence and looked around. “Left or right?”

“Most of the buildings were clustered on the eastern end.” He pointed.