Chương 14: Contact

Southeast of San Teodoro, Vidako Imperium Stellarum September 11, 2847 Cassie was on her way back from the latrines when the psycher cornered her. Rain had gotten better, as the weeks had gone on—there was no doubt in Cassie's mind of that. Having a group of friends helped, and the Alu'kan girl latched onto both her and Vee with the ferocity of a child clutching their favorite stuffed animal at night.

Being chosen by Lieutenant Kekoa to help with unarmed combat training had been a clear boost to the girl's confidence, as well; but she'd still been afraid to walk through the camp after dark without having Cassie next to her. So, Cassie had walked with her friend. It wasn't the threat of Vidakan zombie flies or tree cats, or God knew what off in the jungle that made Rain tremble. No, it was the approach of any man that she didn't know, and that made Cassie furious.

In all honesty, she was amazed that anyone had allowed Rain Makani into the academy; she couldn't imagine how her friend had passed a psychiatric evaluation. But then again, Senator Dorotea Catalina had quite a lot of pull, and what wasn't difficult to imagine was the woman quietly making a problem go away. It was one of the three reasons that Cassie had quietly been considering sending a message to her older brother.

The second was Arc Sandhurst, and the third stepped out of the gloom and directly in their path, into a circle of light illuminated by one of the LED bulbs which had been strung up and connected to the grav-trucks to illuminate the camp. The light seemed to soak into C'rise of Bian's head crest, the pearlescent shell glistening in a rainbow of colors, like that of an oyster.

Cassie doubted that many of the other cadets would have had a word for it, never mind actually having seen it before; but she'd walked along the beaches of Terra as a child, at Cape Cod and Virginia Beach and Bermuda and a dozen other getaways. The privileges of being a princess imperial. Cassie stopped immediately upon seeing the pink-skinned LeShaii, but, to her surprise, Rain moved.

Her roommate, usually so still and quiet, placed herself between Cassie and C'rise with all the bristling fury of a guard dog about to bite. C'rise's disturbingly vibrant eyes, shading to magenta at the edges, flicked to Rain, and then back to Cassie.

"I am not here to fight, or to argue," the psycher said. Four weeks of Hard Burn had softened that accent but not eliminated it.

"I am here to warn you both that there are dangers in the trees."

"We know that." Cassie chewed her lip. She didn't like the psycher and certainly didn't like having someone who could read her mind close at hand, but if this was some sort of peace offering, she also didn't want to be the one to throw it back in the girl's face. More accurately, she knew that her father wouldn't want that. Not after how hard he'd worked to bring the LeShaii into the Imperium.

"Doctor Vogel's lectures were… thorough," Cassie offered, after an uncomfortable moment's silence.

"But we have sentries standing watch, and four mechs. They're keeping them powered up, I was there for the diagnostics. Those sensors will be running all night, and an alarm will go off if anything too big gets near the camp."

"I can hear them," C'rise said, her voice dropping to a gentle murmur, so that Cassie almost had to strain to make out what she was saying.

"So, so much life, all around us. Small frightened things, hiding from hungry, great things. It reaches beneath us, even here, where the trees and the roots have been cut away. You must dig out the roots, princess. If you leave any of it behind, the organism will only grow back." Rain stepped back, and turned her head to meet Cassie's eyes, as if to ask a question. All Cassie could do was shrug and shake her head.

"Is there something coming this way right now?" she asked.

"Animal minds are easy," the psycher answered.

"They are aware of us. We intrude upon their territory, drive them back from the city. Press them up against each other. Hem in their hunting grounds." C'rise shook her head, as if waking from a dream, and her voice firmed.

"My people owe your father for his support. It would be a poor repayment to allow you to come to harm, or to die. Remember, it is the predator you don't see who gets the prey." With that, the psycher turned and vanished back into the hot, jungle night. 𝝮 In the morning, after breaking camp, they moved into the trees. A track had been cut between the trunks, but it was clear that no one had bothered to come out here and maintain it regularly.

The cadets at the front and sides of the march were given short machetes to hack away any brush that needed to be cleared—though having a fifty-five ton F-3 Janissary at the front of the march certainly went a long way. The front line mech, which had been painted in the combination of brown, red and black irregular shapes which made up Vidakan jungle camouflage, brushed aside saplings, fallen logs, and dangling vines with the same ease that Cassie might use a hand to sweep a gossamer spiderweb out of the way.

The sight of her cousin Bhaskar's mech taking the lead made Cassie's mind turn toward hangar 417, back on Academy Hill. She'd visited only a single time, in the company of Chief Dimitri Jastrow, on the fifth night after her arrival. It had taken them that long to get around to unpacking and removing the plastic.

"You are here to verify that it's arrived in one piece," Jastrow had told her.

"That's the only reason. I don't expect to see you again until you've qualified on a Janissary. Sign this." She'd signed and let her eyes linger on the clean panels of reinforced silicon nitride ceramic armor, painted a bright, gleaming white with gold accents. And then, Cassie had walked out of hangar 417 and quite firmly put what was waiting there out of her mind. Until now.

As she marched deeper into the jungle, with her friends and comrades arrayed around her, a rifle in her hands, Cassie couldn't help but think that a Vidakan zombie fly didn't have the slightest chance in hell of getting its ovipositor through mech armor. The 'weapons free' order was given the moment they marched into the jungle, and not five minutes went by that entire morning without the bark of a BA. 50 flechette rifle from somewhere along the line of march.

Cassie didn't see a zombie fly until they were a standard hour underway, and when the moment came, it was over before she had time to process what was happening. At first, she thought it was a bird, swooping down out of the boughs which crossed overhead, turning the path through the jungle into an enclosed tunnel with a roof some twenty-five meters above their heads.

But a bird would never dive directly at the tech cadets marching three rows behind Cassie, wings buzzing in a low drone that raised the thin hairs on her arms. Cassie swung round, shouldered her flechette rifle, and fired. After all the training, the motion was automatic, though she wasn't certain that she'd ever be entirely used to the kick of the rifle's butt against her shoulder.

There was a crack, an explosion of goo in the air, the cessation of that droning sound, and then the tech students scrambled out of the way with cries of disgust. Cassie took a deep breath and walked over to the corpse. She wasn't surprised that Arc, Pika, Rain and Vee went with her. Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

"That's a zombie fly, alright," Vee said, poking at it with the toe of her boot.

"Think it's got eggs in there? Should we crack it open and find out?"

"Let's not," Arc said, putting one hand on Vee's shoulder to hold her back.

"Good eyes, Cassie." She looked down at what was left of the fly—a fifty caliber flechette meant there wasn't much—and tried to remember whether she'd ever killed anything in her life before. Mosquitos, certainly, during some vacation to the surface of Terra. But those were small, and this was large enough to feel more real. It wasn't the last shot she fired over the two days they spent trudging through the jungle.

It rained that afternoon, which was an odd sort of relief, because Cassie knew from Doctor Vogel's lessons that the zombie flies wouldn't be able to take fly until their wings had dried. But it soaked the cadets through to the bone, and for all that none of them were in danger of freezing, due to how hot Vidako was at the equator, it was miserable to walk with sopping socks squishing inside your boots.

By the time they made camp on the second night, Cassie had a new understanding of why they'd been told to pack plenty of extra pairs. That night the crack of the sentries' rifles marked time more regularly than a clock, and when the sun rose in the morning all the cadets could see that there were piles of dead zombie flies heaped around the edges of the camp.

All through the second day, with no rain to keep them away, the zombie flies came, and by the time they stopped for a midday meal, every one of Cassie's friends had fired at least once. It was inevitable, she supposed, that for all they kept watch, sooner or later someone would be stung. It happened only an hour before they were due to reach their final waypoint and ground the entire march to a halt.

By that point, Cassie had stopped jumping at the sound of a flechette rifle firing; instead, she turned to confirm that the target had been hit. But the cadet who'd taken the shot—Delroy Watson, who'd been one of the tech students running mech diagnostics that first night—missed outright, and then the thing was among the ranks. Cassie started to swing her barrel up but stopped herself. She couldn't take the risk of hitting another cadet.

"Natalie, watch out!" someone shouted. A girl with her dark, curly hair pulled back in a bun spun around just in time to see the zombie fly coming. She swung the butt of her rifle at it, but the fly dipped nimbly below the swing and sunk its ovipositor into the cadet's thigh. She screamed and dropped her flechette rifle. Everyone else backed away, hesitating. Cassie dashed forward, letting her rifle fall and trusting her shoulder strap to keep it from hitting the ground.

She dropped to one knee and unslung her pack, ripping the zipper open and pulling out the standard-issue utility knife they'd all been given as part of their kits. One part of her mind observed that she needed it on a sheath, on her belt, for the next time this happened, because carrying it inside the pack was wasting precious seconds. She ripped the blade free, grabbed the zombie fly by its glossy, hard shell, and stabbed at it, first beneath the wings, and then near the stinger.

The thing went crazy in her hands, pulling its sharp ovipositor out of the fallen cadet's thigh in a spurt of blood in an attempt to fly away, but Cassie flung it to the ground and stomped on it with her boot. There was a sickening crunch, and then only one wing fluttered, weakly. Cassie's hands were covered in green ichor, and her knife was dripping with the disgusting stuff. She turned to the wounded cadet, who was pressing her hands to the puncture in her thigh." Jesucristo de mierda," the girl swore.

"Cut the damned eggs out of me already!" Cassie shook her head.

"I've never done that, and I'm not going to make this worse. Pika!" The big Alu'kan was already there, and without even needing to be told he scooped the girl up in his arms and carried her over to the grav-trucks, where the handful of corpsmen who'd been attached to the expedition were riding. The wounded cadet—Cassie hadn't even caught her last name—was taken inside, and she was left to wipe her hands on the leg of her pants and clean her knife.

𝝮 Just before sunset, the column broke out of the jungle onto the edge of a long, thin lake. Like the trail itself, part of the shore had been cleared some time ago, leaving an area perhaps three hundred meters on a side which the jungle had only begun to reclaim. Cassie guessed, now that she'd had a few days to think about it, that it had probably been last visited by the class before them, one year ago.

While the grav-trucks and two of their mech escorts moved into the positions that had been used with every previous camp site, one of the Janissaries and Cadet Ọlatẹru's Culverin turned aside, stomping off into the jungle by themselves. It didn't look as if they were following any particular path, Cassie thought. In fact, the Janissary had drawn and ignited a purple plasma blade, which the pilot used to carve its way into the dense foliage.

Cassie wondered whether that was her cousin, or the younger cadet; with both mechs using the same camo pattern, there wasn't a lot to set them apart. Before she had time to give it much thought, Lieutenant Kekoa called them all together.

"You've gotten a good bit of practice making camp along the way," he shouted, and his voice rang out across the still lake to the wooded hills beyond.

"But we're going to dig in here and set up for the next seven days and nights, so things are going to be a bit more permanent. Cadets Van Camp and Iyer will take lead on the camp itself, and Chief Jastrow will handle maintenance and cargo. I'll take charge of sentry shifts." It was Cal Madine, of course, who raised a hand and asked what all of them had been wondering.

"Is there a reason two of the mechs are heading out, sir?"

"Sensors tagged a target about seven, eight klicks out," Kekoa answered.

"Big enough to be a cornibus male, if it isn't a false positive. Cadets Xiao-Solaris and Ọlatẹru will check it out. Chances are even if there is something there, it heads away from us, rather than pick a fight. But if it comes in this direction, they've got more than enough firepower to handle it, and they'll call as soon as they make contact. That's none of your concern—you've all got work to do if you want a place to eat and bunk down tonight. Let's move, people."

Around them, the other cadets began to break up and head off to their tasks, but Cassie noticed Arc remained in place, looking in the direction of where the two mechs had disappeared into the jungle. He had a faraway look in his eyes that she'd already learned to recognize; it was funny how only a few weeks together, and Cassie felt like she knew her friends better than anyone she'd gone to school with on Terra. This was the look he got when he was thinking. He probably didn't realize it was so obvious.

Cassie took three steps over to Arc and bumped him with her shoulder.

"What is it?" she asked.

"I was just wondering why the lieutenant sent the mechs he did," Arc said, after a moment.

"One of the Janissaries makes sense, and if you're going to split them up, then keeping the less experienced pilot here for base defense is a solid choice. But the Culverin …"

"You'd do it differently?" Cassie asked. It was faintly ridiculous to listen to a boy who'd only been at the academy for four weeks second guessing the orders of a lieutenant. Based on what, the fact that Arc had won a war-game tournament? But there was something about him that made her take it seriously.

"I would have kept the Culverin back," Arc confirmed.

"It's not suited to close range combat. If there is a threat, she could have lobbed missiles right up over the canopy from here, using targeting data from the other mechs. I know the Tyro's meant for training, and not actual combat, but I would have sent Van Camp instead of Ọlatẹru."

"Not just because he gives you a hard time?" Cassie lowered her voice when she said it. After all, she didn't want to get Arc on the older cadet's bad side any more than he already was.

"No." Arc shook his head.

"That's got nothing to do with it—I'm just thinking about who's got more time in the cockpit, and what the mechs are best used for." Once again, Cassie thought about the hangar which was not empty, and what was waiting for her there. But she hadn't earned it, yet—and without the neural lace and the shackled AI needed to interface with a mech's computer systems, she'd never have been able to get it out this far into the jungle, anyway.

"Let's get to work before someone thinks we're slacking," she said, and took Arc by the arm. But as they turned away from the jungle, Cassie noticed that someone else had been watching the place where the two mechs had disappeared, as well. C'rise of Bian met Cassie's eyes for a long moment, and Cassie wondered just what the psycher was feeling, out there in the thick of an alien rain forest. She hoped that they never found out.