Chương 16: Predator

Jungle southeast of San Teodoro, Vidako Imperium Stellarum September 15, 2847 Time seemed to slow down. Arc had the sense that the Vidakan tree cat was moving in slow motion, like an actor in a martial arts holo-vid. He had all the time in the world to see what was happening, to know that Maja Seidl, who was just brushing her hands, still wet from filling canisters at the waterfall, on the thighs of her pants, was completely unaware of what was coming.

Arc started to rise to his feet, to reach out a hand, to open his mouth, and she must have seen something in his wide eyes, because her face changed in the instant before impact. The tree cat took Seidl to the ground in a crushing pounce, and everything burst into motion at once. Cassie was the first to move, and one small, inane part of Arc's mind wondered just how many tailored genetic modifications were pushing her forward in that instant.

She swung the barrel of her BA-50 flechette rifle up and squeezed off a three-round burst. The flechettes weren't hooked into a neural-lace system. They didn't acquire the tree cat or register it as a target, and the optical sensors at the front of the. 50 caliber round didn't have time to process, even if they had.

The tree cat, standing on Maja Seidle's unmoving body, was perhaps five or ten meters distant from where Cassie took the shot—and the flechettes left the barrel of her rifle at a muzzle velocity of well over nine hundred meters per second. There was no time for the actuators inside the sophisticated casings to adjust the fins, or to steer through the air for increased accuracy. There was no time for anything but the flechettes to enter the tree cat's chest, then blow out its back in a spray of blood.

"Get it off her!" Arc shouted and dashed across the water-slicked rocks along the edge of the cascades to throw his shoulder against the still warm, shuddering body of the tree cat. John Rixey was there at his side, and though they'd hardly spoken two words to each other before this expedition, they threw themselves against the carcass with a common will and determination, straining with every ounce of muscle.

Arc had come to Vidako, and to Academy Hill, with the slender body of a boy who'd always disdained physical exertion. He'd never been interested in sports during his time at secondary school, and his parents hadn't forced him to work a job that involved hard labor. Now, in this moment, he regretted it—because while four weeks of torture at Lieutenant Kekoa's hands had given him a sort of wiry strength, it wasn't enough. If he'd only used his time better before coming here, he could have done more.

With a shout of anger, as much at himself as at the tree cat, Arc gave one final push, and John Rixey, perhaps unwilling to give any less, screamed at his side. Somehow, they rolled nearly four-hundred kilograms of dead weight off Maja Seidl and then collapsed, panting, next to her. Even having done it, Arc could hardly believe it was possible, and he could barely hear what anyone else was saying over the pounding of his heart, the thudding of his pulse in his ears.

Natalie Ramírez, who'd dropped her compass and map somewhere back among the rocks, fell to her knees next to Seidl and pressed her fingers to the other woman's neck.

"I've got a pulse," Ramírez said.

"She's still alive." Arc desperately thought back to their first aid training.

"We need a stretcher," he said.

"You two—" he pointed at two of the tech cadets, Tremblay and Moore.

"Get your knives and find two straight branches, just like they taught us. Trim them down. We'll need to use our coats." The two cadets nodded and got to work, while Ramírez stayed next to Seidl. Cassie came over and crouched with Arc, and he was grateful to see that John Rixey was up, flechette rifle in his hands, scanning the surrounding jungle.

The tree cat had broken a trail through the brush; it must have been moving fast, and something about that struck Arc as wrong, but he couldn't seem to make his mind work right.

"If her back is broken, we'll only make it worse by moving her," Cassie said, keeping her voice low and leaning in close. Arc nodded, but he was only half paying attention. His eyes were fixed on the broken branches, trampled undergrowth, and scraped tree trunks which marked the tree cat's passage. Tree cats were ambush predators. It didn't make sense for one to go charging through the rainforest at a group of ten targets, in a mad rush, instead of stalking them and waiting for someone to wander off alone.

The only reason that something like that should be running was if it was—"Forget the stretcher," Arc said, lurching to his feet.

"Rixey, pick Seidl up and carry her. We're leaving. Now." He reached up with his left hand to tap the button on his earpiece, turning the microphone on.

"This is Water Buffalo actual," he said, immediately feeling a surge of hot, burning hatred for Lieutenant Kekoa, for having given them such a ridiculous name.

"I have wounded and am returning to base, repeat, I have wounded and am returning to base, over." John Rixey, in the meantime, had knelt next to Seidl, and even reached out his hands, but was exchanging hesitant glances with Ramírez.

"You sure about this, Sandhurst? We could kill her moving her. Maybe we should just wait until— Leaves, moving at the end of the broken path. Arc knew that they were out of time.

"Now!" he shouted.

"Back to camp! Leave the water." He shouldered Rixey out of the way, rolled Seidl up, and scooped her into a princess-carry. It wasn't how they'd been taught, but he was only half thinking clearly. He felt something hot and wet on his hands, soaking into his sleeves, and realized that it was her blood.

"Something's coming," Cassie said, swinging her rifle around to point into the jungle. The boughs of the trees were moving—shaking, just like they had when the elevator was descending. Arc's earbud crackled, but the words didn't register, and he took off running back the way they'd come. The spiked terror— terribilis cornibus —came crashing through the brush, snapping trees off at the trunk in its pursuit of the tree cat.

The only reason that something like that would be running was if it was being attacked, Arc completed his thought. Attacked by something even worse. Half a dozen BA-50 flechette rifles barked out, but the terror roared, more in anger than pain. Of course; it was the sort of monster that could chew a mech's armor into scrap. The little guns they'd been given didn't have a chance in hell of hurting it, because they weren't meant to ever deal with this thing.

It was supposed to be run off by Ọlatẹru and Xiao-Solaris, that was the entire reason Lieutenant Kekoa had sent them out in their mechs. But somehow, impossibly, it was right here, and if Arc and his squad didn't move, they were all dead.

"Come on!" he shouted again, and this time they listened. A few of the cadets were still squeezing off shots, but the cornibus went right for the carcass of the tree cat which had taken out Maja Seidl. That was the only thing, Arc knew, that saved them—the only reason they had even a chance of escaping alive. He glanced back as he ran, boots scuffing along the dirt, branches whipping past his face, and saw the cadets who'd come with him to the waterfall strung out in a ragged line as they followed.

The cornibus had reached the tree cat's body, and it bent over, snapping the carcass up in its enormous jaws. It was smaller than he'd expected. There's no way that's twenty meters, he thought. Fifteen, at most. It isn't even as big as a Tyro. This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience. The earbud crackled again, and he recognized Lieutenant Kekoa's voice in his ear.

"Say again, Water Buffalo actual, what is your situation and location?"

"We were attacked by a tree cat while we were at the waterfall," Arc gasped. Talking while running desperately through the jungle and carrying a grown woman was nothing like a march around the campus, and his arms already felt like they were going to fall off.

"Cadet Seidl is unconscious. The tree cat was being hunted by a cornibus. Juvenile, I think. Fifteen, maybe sixteen meters tall." And if it was a juvenile, did that mean that the two older cadets had chased off the mother? Were there more around?

"Acknowledged," Kekoa said.

"Sending mech support to deal with the cornibus. Repeat, Van Camp and Iyer are coming to engage the juvenile. Your squad is not to engage, Cadet Sandhurst. Keep them moving and get them all back here."

"Yes, sir," Arc gasped, and then his boot came down on a wet patch of leaves, and he stumbled. For a moment, he knew that he was going to fall, that he was going to drop Maja Seidl. Then, Cassie was next to him, and she threw an arm around him. Somehow, with her help, he stayed up.

"Let me take a turn," John Rixey said, running up to the two of them. The prideful part of Arc wanted to refuse, to insist that he could carry Seidl the entire way, but it was only a small part of him. The rest was so grateful to hand off the burden that he felt ashamed. Cassie took a step back, as the cadets who'd been coming up behind them dashed by, and Arc waited while Rixey got a grip.

Between the two of them, they hoisted Maja Seidl's unconscious body up over his shoulders in a fireman's carry, and Rixey lurched forward. Cassie was about to follow, but when she saw that Arc wasn't moving, she hesitated. Arc was counting. Cassie, Rixey, Seidl and himself made four. Five people had run past them, including Tremblay and Moore. That made nine. Someone was missing.

He silently ran through a short list of names and faces, half of whom he'd only really met that morning, trying to figure out who was missing, and whether he was going to have to actually go back toward the monster. Then, Natalie Ramírez, limping on her injured leg, broke through the brush, lurching toward them as fast as she could, with her rifle slung over her back and the compass and map somehow still clutched in her left hand. Somewhere behind her, the trees were shaking with the movements of the spiked terror.

"Go!" Arc shouted to Cassie, and he ran back to Ramírez. He got under her arm, and slipped his own around behind her shoulders, so that he could support her weight on the side with the bad leg. She was hot, panting, soaked in sweat, and clearly terrified. Ahead of them, Cassie's face twisted between fear and determination.

"I'll stay back and cover you," she declared, and lifted her flechette rifle, aiming the barrel past them, in the direction they'd come from. Only when Arc and Ramírez caught up to her did she move again, and the three cadets hurried as best they could through the jungle. It wasn't going to be enough, Arc could tell, and he almost ordered Cassie to run on without them.

Even with him supporting Ramírez's weight, the two of them staggered along together like in some sort of schoolyard three-legged race, absent only the sack around their middle legs and screaming children to cheer them on. They were never going to cover enough ground to stay ahead of the juvenile cornibus.

What made it even worse was that, no matter how much Cassie insisted she be treated like everyone else, no matter that Arc considered her a friend—the first friend he'd made at the academy—she was a princess imperial. There was no way that he could let her get killed here. Thankfully, Lieutenant Kekoa had put Arc in charge of the expedition.

He was just opening his mouth to order Cassie to leave them when the cornibus came crashing through the trees, loud enough that he couldn't help but glance back over his shoulder. It snapped a low-hanging bough as it came, breaking the branch, which was as thick as Arc's waist, clean off the trunk and sending it spinning off into the jungle, crushing brush and snapping vines as it went.

Arc flinched away from the explosion of splinters that showered down around them, hunching his shoulders in the instinctive hope that it would somehow shield his head.

"You should leave me," Ramírez gasped.

"Get out of here." It was a simple calculus—sacrifice one soldier to save another two. And it was a choice that Arc had made a hundred times when he'd moved resin models around on a table. He'd done it without hesitation at the tournament that won him admission to the academy. But in Tacticalis, the models weren't people. They were put aside into a carrying case, to be taken out later for another game, no worse the wear.

They weren't trembling, pressed against his body with exhaustion and terror, and somehow still brave enough to tell him to leave them behind to die.

"Fuck that," Arc swore, and together they lurched forward, even if there wasn't the slightest chance they could escape. Cassie, who was the last one out of the three of them who should be throwing her life away, set the butt of her rifle against her shoulder, braced her feet wide, and began firing on the juvenile as it rushed up on them.

Maybe if she gets it in the eye — Arc risked another look back, and saw the spiked terror flinch, shake its head as if the fifty caliber bullets were little more than a cloud of flies, and then charge forward again. He tried to think of something they could do, but for once in his life, there was nothing.

Vijay Iyer's F-3 Janissary came barreling out of the rainforest, fifty-five tons of war machine painted in jungle camo, a massive ten-meter club of chromium-cobalt-nickel alloy clutched in both of the mech's articulated hands. Four twenty-millimeter revolving autocannons, mounted two on the outside of each shoulder, spat four streams of armor-piercing bullets, mixed with glowing tracer rounds, through the air above Arc, Cassie and Ramírez's heads.

The juvenile spiked terror reared back and roared, stumbling up against the trunk of a tree. If the rifle fire had only annoyed the xenobeast, it was clear to Arc that the Janissary's heavier weapons actually hurt it. Casings fell behind the moving mech like metal rain, and the wet wood of the nearby trees steamed where tracer fire slammed into them. The Janissary tore past Arc and the other cadets, enormous feet sending great clods of dirt spraying into the air with the force and speed of its charge.

Iyer kept firing, at the tune of a hundred rounds from each gun every second, until he was right up on the cornibus. With a brutal upward swing of the CrCoNi Alloy War-Club, he clocked the massive predator right under the chin. It was like watching a boxer take an uppercut completely unprotected. The spiked terror staggered backward, swayed, and then fell, crashing to the jungle floor. Its enormous body tore vines from the trees as it went down, and when it hit, the impact shook the ground.

"Take cover," Vijay Iyer said, the older cadet's voice coming in loud and clear through Arc's earbud at such a short range.

"Come on," Arc screamed, over the sound of the roaring guns, and with Cassie's help he and Ramírez staggered downhill toward the lake. The three cadets scrambled behind a boulder. Arc knew that it wouldn't do the slightest thing to shield them from the titanic forces being thrown around by Iyer's mech, but he couldn't resist the urge to at least get something between their bodies and certain death.

Twin pulses of green light seared through the jungle from the direction of the camp, connecting the wounded cornibus with Blake Van Camp's T-3 Tyro. The glare of the Centauran Optics L-27 light lasers left an afterimage in Arc's vision, a dark line across his sight that wouldn't go away no matter how much he blinked and rubbed at his eyes. For all that, the wounded spiked terror had it far worse.

When the beast lurched back up to its feet, its right fore-leg was blackened, burned, and nearly blown entirely off by the energy of the lasers. It roared in pain, but before it could even begin to react, Vijay Iyer dashed back in with his Janissary and broke the knee of its rear left leg beneath a second, crushing swing of the mech-scale club he wielded. Again, the juvenile spiked terror fell.

Both mechs opened up with their autocannons, and great gouts of blood spurted up from the thing's wounded body like eruptions from a volcano. Arc, Cassie and Ramírez huddled together behind the puny rock they'd found, their bodies pressed close against each other, flinching at every burst of heat, crack of fire, or impact of the club. It was the first time that Arc had ever truly comprehended the enormous, overwhelming power a mech wielded on the battlefield.

There was simply nothing that a single foot-soldier could do against such machines. They were utterly at the mercy of the two pilots. When Van Camp's voice came through Arc's earbud, it was such a surprise that he flinched again.

"I think that's it," he said, and though it was the same voice Arc had lived in fear of for four weeks, now the sound brought a relief like he'd never known. The broken corpse of the juvenile spiked terror lay, unmoving, amidst a broken mess of blood-soaked mud, splintered branches, and crushed foliage.