Chương 70: Carried

Content Warning: Body Horror Estuary South of San Teodoro, Vidako Imperium Stellarum February 10, 2848 The best way to kill a Vidakan Spiked Terror was from a few kilometers away, preferably on top of a hill, while it wasn't even aware that you were targeting it. If you were really doing it right, you had an Outrider calling in data for a missile strike that would obliterate the thing before it had any idea there were mechs in the vicinity.

Tackling a cornibus already in a fighting mood with a training mech didn't top Arc's list of preferred tactics. Still, thirty-five tons of armor, artificial muscle, and weaponry built a lot of momentum in a very short time. Pika's Tyro carried the xeno-beast off Semirye's downed Culverin in a great rush that sent both the mech and the predator tumbling end over end across the soft ground of the estuary.

Arc dropped his targeting reticule over the place where the cornibus ended up, but waited to actually fire until it pulled itself back to its feet. Christina Fortin must have had roughly the same plan, because two beams of colored lights stabbed out at the same time, one from each of their CO-4 laser rifles. Arc's, aimed for the creature's center of mass, burned a blackened hole through its upper right chest, near the shoulder.

Christina, who had the benefit of probably twice as many hours in the cockpit, was more confident in her shot: the line of light that connected the barrel of her weapon with the Spiked Terror took it in the jowl. That shot blew out the back of the monster's enormous skull in a spray of fine red mist, brain-matter, and shattered bone fragments. It swayed on its feet for a moment, then fell heavily.

"Osprey squad, sound off," Christina said. Arc could hear how heavily she was breathing over the comms. He waited a moment, because Semirye should have spoken up first; but her Culverin hadn't moved since it fell, and she was silent now.

"Osprey three, no damage and no injuries," he said, once it became clear that something was wrong.

"Osprey Four," Pika said, close on his heels.

"Armor damage to my front torso and arms. All weapon systems on-line. No injuries." They stood there in silence, hoping for the exact same thing: that Semirye's voice would come over the comms.

"Shit," Christina said.

"She' got hurt again. I need to get into her cockpit. Cover me." Was he technically second in rank? With all of a single patrol in seniority over Pika, Arc supposed so. It didn't seem like much, but it was enough for him to speak up.

"Let one of us do that, sir," he said.

"You're in command."

"Right. It should be me, then," Pika said.

"I'm the strongest anyway, if she needs to be moved."

"Dammit," Christina cursed.

"Fine. We'll cover you." Arc maneuvered his Tyro to stand on one side of the fallen Culverin while Christina took the other with her Outrider. Pika, in the meantime, stood his own mech as close to the chest as he could, opened his cockpit, and unrolled his rope ladder. Arc kept one eye on his friend during the climb down, and the other on the estuary, where clouds of zombie flies buzzed above the brackish water.

For the first time since he'd got into a cockpit, he thought that it might be nice to have one of the military-grade flamethrowers the Janissaries sported. If any of those flies came their way, neither a laser rifle, an autocannon, nor a plasma sword was going to kill more than one or two at a time. A dozen meters below, Pika leaped down from the rope ladder onto the scraped and scuffed ceramic plates of the Culverin's torso.

He scrambled around for a moment until he found the emergency release, which required the manual input of an access code. It was cumbersome and slow, but it was better than either sawing the armor plates away, or having a remote computer input that could be cracked by an enemy. Finally, the armor telescoped away, revealing a cockpit that was wrong-side up, so that Semirye was resting on her back in the ejection seat, as if she was going to blast off on a rocket bound for orbit.

Arc used his Tyro's optical sensors to zoom in, so that he could get a good view as Pika climbed down into the cockpit. Everything looked right: Semirye was wearing her helmet, and the braces to either side of her head should have supported her neck when her mech fell.

"She's alive," Pika's voice came over the comms, a moment later, and Arc exhaled in relief.

"Her pupils are different sizes, and she seems kind of confused. All I've got is the first aid training from Hard Burn, but I think she might have a concussion."

"Not again," Christina exclaimed.

"At least the chair should have protected her neck from the worst of it. We're going to need to set up camp; I don't think it's a good idea for her to try to move that mech right away."

"We can't stay here," Arc broke in. He'd been keeping close watch on the flies swarming out over the water, and though the dark forms swirled like eddies in a stream, moving with the wind and whatever strange instincts drove the insects, he was becoming more and more certain that they were starting to creep up over the edge of the water, toward the jungle.

"Sooner or later, those flies are going to come this way."

"Alright," Pika said.

"I'll carry her up into my cockpit, and we'll leave the Culverin here for now."

"You can't carry her up a rope ladder," Christina objected. Rather than respond, Pika hauled Semirye up out of her cockpit and slung her over his shoulders in a fireman's carry. Then, he crouched down and used the same manual access to close her cockpit again. Carefully, he set one boot on the lowest rung of the ladder, reached up, and began to slowly climb.

"He's going to drop her!" Christina shouted, though Arc was fairly certain he was the only one paying attention at the moment. He recalled that Christina had introduced Semirye as her roommate; it wouldn't surprise him at all if they were close friends, after nearly two years spent living together.

"Pika's strong," Arc said, as much to distract Christina as to calm her.

"Even for an Alu'kan. He's picked up Cassie and I at the same time like it was nothing. They'll be fine." Still, watching his friend make awkward progress up the ladder, pausing with each step, adjusting Semirye's limp body every time he reached for a new rung, was torturous. He could never have done it himself, not in a million years. Arc was almost glad that he had the zombie flies to keep an eye on, so that he had an excuse to look away from time to time.

"Iceni," he said, when Pika was about halfway up the ladder.

"Are those flies coming closer?" They are, the AI said. Not all of them, but a significant portion of the cloud is breaking away and heading in our direction. Perhaps the cornibus carcass is attracting them.

"Christina, I'm going to need you on this side of the mech," Arc said.

"We've got zombie flies incoming." And no flamethrower. Normally, patrols didn't need one: so long as a pilot was sealed inside their cockpit, behind layers of ceramic armor, they were completely safe from the things. When it came time to camp, they chose locations away from the pools of stagnant water or decaying corpses that the flies loved. Netting and chemical repellents were usually all the precautions anyone needed. You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

"Is it another cornibus?" Christina asked, as she walked her Outrider around Semirye's motionless mech. By that point, the incoming zombie flies looked like a dark wave, welling up out of the water and onto the land.

"We need to keep them off long enough for Pika to get her in that cockpit and seal it behind them," Arc said. He dropped his targeting reticule over the advancing swarm and fired all three of his lasers—two from the shoulders, and the rifle. Three brilliant lines of blue-green light connected unit seventeen with the cloud of zombie flies. Unlike when he shot another mech in the simulators, or even when he fired on a spiked terror, none of the flies were large enough or tough enough to stop the beams.

Instead, each one of the three shots burned through dozens of flies in converging swathes of destruction. Most of the flies that were hit didn't even have enough of their bodies left to fall to the ground: instead, they simply disintegrated. Christina fired a moment after Arc did, killing another score of the oncoming flies, but it was already clear to Arc that it wouldn't be enough.

With hardly a pause to aim—it would have been essentially impossible to miss, so many of the insects were coming their way—he kept firing his lasers, waiting only for them to cycle back to readiness in between each squeeze of his triggers. The battery readout in the lower left of his vision began to visibly drop, and Arc unleashed blast after blast from all three weapons.

"Tell me when they're in the cockpit," he told Iceni, because his entire focus was on the flies. They've almost made it, the AI said. Two more rungs. Almost, unfortunately, wasn't good enough. The leading edge of the flies swarmed around the two mechs, despite the flashing lasers. Arc kept firing as best he could, but it wasn't going to be enough.

"Show me that cockpit!" he yelled, and Iceni did. Pika had thrown Semirye in first, of course. As Arc watched, he swatted one zombie fly out of the sky with an enormous hand, swung his leg over, and hit the button to roll up the rope ladder. As the ladder reeled in, Pika slid into the ejection seat of his mech, and Arc thought for a moment that his friend had made it. Then a fly flew through the opening into the cockpit, just as the plates of armor began to close.

Arc didn't see what happened next, because the Tyro sealed itself.

"Pika!" he shouted into the comms.

"I've got her," Pika said, his voice half a grunt.

"And I've killed the fly. Let's get out of here and find a place to get a better look at her." 𝝮 That place ended up being at the top of a sea-cliff, about ten klicks east of the estuary. They parked all three remaining mechs there in a triangle, and once Arc had opened his cockpit, he understood immediately why Christina had known the location would be safe from zombie flies.

The wind whipped in off the southern ocean with such force that they could hardly hear each other speak, and the only brush that seemed able to survive clung low and stunted, close to the rock. Christina and Arc were down their ladders first, while Pika, who had knelt his Tyro so that there would be less of a distance to climb, carefully carried Semirye to the ground.

"She's in and out," Pika told them, laying the other pilot on a stretch of some kind of pale, indigenous lichen. When he straightened up, however, Arc saw him wince. Then, he spotted the blood on his friend's jumpsuit.

"Did you get stung?" he asked.

"Let me see." Pika nodded, then heavily lowered himself down onto the ground next to Semirye.

"It flew in and got me in the shoulder," he admitted.

"I crushed it right away. Thing's been stinking up my cockpit the whole way here."

"We need to dig the eggs out," Arc said. If we called for a Saker right now, would he get back to the Academy in time? This is a good location to transmit from, Iceni replied, after some consideration. And to land. But that is hours of round trip, and those eggs should come out immediately.

"Build a fire," Christina said.

"I'll get a knife and the first-aid kit out of my emergency supplies." She spun about and climbed up the ladder to her cockpit as fast as a spider.

"I'll be fine," Pika said, waving one hand as if to dismiss the danger.

"I think I got it in time. And I don't think their stingers are long enough to get through Alu'kan fat reserves, anyway."

"Then it won't hurt to check, will it?" Arc said. By the time Christina had made it back down to the ground, he'd gathered as much dry brush as he could find without heading downslope into the jungle itself. He found a crevice, like an axe-wound cut into the rock of the cliff, and decided it was about as sheltered from the wind as he'd be able to get.

"Get that jumpsuit out of the way," Christina ordered Pika.

"Let me see it." It took Arc three attempts to start a fire, and even then it was a thin, frail thing, from which only the slightest trail of smoke emerged. He threw a pouch of repellant into it, made certain the pouch was burning, and then turned to help Christina. A hole in the shape of a perfect circle had been punched into Pika's pectoral muscle, just beneath the shoulder.

Christina had already wiped most of the blood away and swabbed the wound with disinfectant, and now she used a second swab to clean the blade of her utility knife.

"You ever do this before?" Arc asked her. Christina shook her head.

"Never. I just know we have to get the eggs out." Arc thought back to what Doctor Vogel had said, when she'd lectured them on the dangers of Vidako's indigenous wildlife during Hard Burn. They're small, slippery little buggers, and tend to slide further into the body every time you miss a good grip. That means you have to open your incision further every time you try again, and unless you're here at the infirmary, you can very easily end up with a patient who's in shock...

"You need to hold him still while I do this," Christina told him, and to Arc it seemed like a bad joke.

"There's no way I could ever hold you down, buddy," he told his friend.

"You're going to have to stay still and not move. Can you do that?" He pulled a set of thumb forceps out of the emergency medical kit.

"Not a problem," Pika said.

"Just go ahead and get to work." Christina took a deep breath, then used the tip of her knife to slice open Pika's skin. Arc's friend grunted in pain, closed his eyes, and clenched his fists.

"I see an egg," Christina said, her voice low and almost completely carried away by the wind.

"I'll hold it open, and you get it out." She used her fingers to spread the incision wide, and Arc could see a small sphere, like a skinned grape, sliding around inside the wound. He quickly wiped his hands with one of the disinfectant swabs, reached in with thumb forceps, and tried to pinch the egg between them. It squirted out of his grasp, deeper into the wound.

"Shit," Arc cursed.

"Don't lose it!" Christina exclaimed. Arc came at it a different way, the second time, trying to get the forceps beneath the egg, so that when it moved it wouldn't go any deeper. It worked—he sort of popped it out, and the egg rolled down across Pika's chest until Christina flicked it off him, onto the bare stone of the bluff. That whole operation set Pika to bleeding worse, and they had to wipe the blood away to get a good look inside the incision again.

"Do you see any more?" Christina asked.

"Cut it open a bit wider," Arc told her. More blood gushed out, but once he had room to look he counted at least half a dozen more eggs. The sight of it turned his stomach, but he couldn't let anything stop him from doing what needed to be done. One by one, he began popping out the eggs. Somewhere around the third or fourth one, he realized that his friend wasn't moving anymore.

"He's passed out," Christina said. It made the work easier, at least, because Arc didn't have to worry about Pika jerking or flinching. But he wasn't certain just how much more blood his friend could stand to lose. When he got to the last two eggs, the trickiest yet, the motion of popping the one on top out only drove the second deeper, until it was lost.

"Dammit," Arc muttered.

"I can't see it anymore. You're going to have to open him up wider." He could get it; he knew he could, if he could just find the thing.

"I don't think I can," Christina said, shaking her head.

"He's lost a lot of blood, Sandhurst." For the first time since they'd begun their operation, Arc looked away from the wound itself, and down at his friend. Pika breathed heavily, and the rock face on which he lay was stained red with blood.

"I'm going to close him up," Christina said. She swabbed the wound with disinfectant wipes again, and then got a can of chitosan spray out of the first aid kit. She shook it, and then waited while Arc held Pika's wound together as close as he could, the blood and disinfectant making his friend's skin slick. Once the cut was thoroughly sprayed, she passed him a bandage, and Arc pressed it tight to the wound. He couldn't stop thinking about the one egg—at least one egg—still trapped inside Pika's body.

Semirye groaned and shifted, but neither opened her eyes, nor stirred. Pika made no motion other than to breathe. Arc looked into Christina Fortin's eyes, and saw that she was just as frightened as he was. The wind off the sea pulled at her hair, sending bright red tendrils into her face. Somehow, the two of them were going to have to keep their friends alive long enough to be rescued by the academy.