Critical Strike (The Critical Series Book 3) (22 page)

Half a kilometer to their left, a cliff side rose up almost completely at ninety degrees to the shoreline. Cut through the cliff was a chasm that looked entirely too narrow to take them, but Vingo steered toward it as they continue to pick up speed.

“I hope he knows what he’s doing,” Layla said, clutching onto Denver’s arm with her gauntlet. Charlie, next to him, gripped the side of the cockpit with a grimace on his face, as another blast struck just above their position, knocking down a huge chunk of stone.

It echoed with each impact as it tumbled down the cliff face. Vingo managed to easily swerve around it, which brought them within a straight run for the chasm. Even with the lights on, Denver couldn’t make out any details in the dark shadowy gap.

“Where are we going?” Denver asked.

“Away from the mech,” Vingo replied, still not giving anything away.

They flew with great speed into the chasm. Vingo hadn’t quite got his approach lined up and the left edge of the catamaran slid along the rough-hewn sides, sending vibrations through the hull and creating an awful screeching sound.

A few adjustments and the panicked tredeyan found the right space between the two cliff sides. Denver just hoped it wouldn’t narrow any time soon. At this rate, they’d have no way of avoiding it. Once they were inside, the whine of the engine echoed around the split in the cliff, making it sound like they were deep inside a cave.

Rushing water below them frothed around rocks and splashed up in squalls of white water as the tributary narrowed. Thankfully the gap between each face of the cliff remained the same distance apart, making Denver realize that it was probably made this way by the tredeyans to filter some of the water into other parts of the planet’s surface.

Layla seemed to be thinking the same thing when she asked, “Where does the water go?”

“Underground, into water-pumping stations. Hold on, we’re coming to a difficult branch. Where’s the mech?”

Denver and Charlie looked behind them. At first it seemed they had avoided it, but when Denver lifted his head to look up to the sky, a massive shadow blotted out the tall, thin gap of sun.

“The bastard’s still on us,” Denver said. “Above us, on the other right cliff—”

The sudden lurching bank to the left cut off his words. He slid into Layla and they both crashed into Vingo. The catamaran flew out of a narrow gap at the end of the cliff, the base of its hull scraping against the rough stone.

Their momentum took them out over a cascading waterfall.

“Jump!” Vingo yelled as the craft fell away from them.

A blast exploded at the rear of their position, crumbling more rock into the rapid white water. The blast caught the rear of the catamaran, flipping it stern over bow. Denver, Charlie, and Layla suddenly became victims of gravity and descended into the waterfall.

Denver tried to grab Layla, but the force of the water knocked him sideways. He crashed into an outcrop, jarring his outstretched arm and sending him cartwheeling out into the rushing rapid below.

He just caught sight of Charlie and Vingo splashing into the water and their helmets bobbing along. When Denver hit the water, he automatically held his breath out of habit, forgetting that the environmental suit provided his air.

The sound muffled, though, as his external mics picked up the crashing of the water. He tried to reach for the control panel on his arm to switch the mics off, but the force of the water was too strong even for the suit’s servo-assistance.

“Layla!” he yelled. “Charlie?”

No answer, just gurgling noises and another blast coming from somewhere up ahead. His body struck a rock, but the impact was lessened by the dampening within the suit. The shock of the direction change still made him wince.

His head rose briefly out of the water. He was facing back toward the cliffs now shrinking behind him as though they were nothing more than small rocky outcroppings. The croatoan mech turned and headed back to the east, its shape silhouetted by the rising sun. It either assumed they were dead in the blast, or that they would soon be dead, which didn’t fill him with much confidence as the raging water continued to drag him away to god knows where.

***

Denver lost track of how long he had floated before he came to a stop. For a while he knew he had fallen asleep, exhausted by the constant flood of adrenalin in his body. His muscles were sore and cramped and the water and air provided by the suit made his mouth dry and crack at the corners.

He became aware that his body was slumped up against something solid and stationary. “Hello?” he said. “Anyone hear me?”

No answer. Where the hell were they? They couldn’t be that far out of range. The alternative was too much to bear. They’d come all this way, survived for this long, he couldn’t handle it if they had died during a bit of a swim.

“Talk to me, dammit!” he yelled, letting the unfamiliar feelings of fear and panic go with a single exhalation. “If you can hear me, just stay where you are, make some noise or movement, I’ll come find you.”

Denver gritted his teeth and forced his body to move up. He discovered he had hit a rock and stuck there as the speed and power of the rapid had dulled to what now looked like a barely moving brook. The sun had risen above the now-distant cliffs, shining brightly down onto his position.

He was in an open area with fields to his right beyond a steep bank some five or so meters high. To his left was a shallow sloped cliff face rising up in a gentle arc. Large-winged creatures flew lazily over his position, circling far above. He got the distinct impression they were looking at him as a potential meal.

He searched around him for a gun, but he had lost that during the fall. All he had on him was the combat knife attached to the suit. He pulled it free with his right hand and kept it ready to use.

Making his way to the narrow shoreline beneath the shallow cliff, he saw dark shadows swimming in the water. He stopped and crouched down, looking into the water. The visor’s polarizing filter automatically kicked in, removing the flashing reflections from the surface, giving him an almost x-ray vision into the water.

The shadows were three times as long as an average human man and twice as wide. Now that he looked closer, he spotted that there were at least a dozen of them moving like snakes through the water.

Denver stepped back quietly away from the water, not wanting to get their attention. Even with the suit, he didn’t fancy his chances against a school of alien snake-sharks or whatever hideous creature they were.

Trudging along the shore, Denver kept talking, hoping one of the others on his frequency would reply. He must have walked for at least an hour. His limbs were growing tired and his chest tightened with every breath. He really need to rest, eat, and recuperate. Even his athletic, fit body couldn’t handle too much of the exertions that they’d had to go through since they got here.

He let his mind wander as he trudged on until he came to a makeshift dam that stopped the flow of the water. The shadows of the water predators reached it and swam around in circles for a moment before heading back. He realized then that they must have been tracking him—what else could have followed him that he hadn’t had the awareness to notice.

This was not like him; he prided himself on being a great hunter back home, but then he had to admit that he wasn’t exactly in a familiar environment, and he was so tired he could just collapse where he stood and let the local wildlife crack open his suit like a tin of spam.

Even the thought of biting into a lump of spam made his mouth water.

With a grim smile he knew it was bad when he craved that muck.

Come on, Den, get a grip, he thought, urging himself to carry on.

He reached the dam. The top was ridged into what looked like a walkway. With no other way to go, he crossed it, walking carefully, making sure the structure, made from some kind of gray material, wasn’t about to send him into the hungry mouths of the snake-shark things.

It held, and he came to the other side.

His heart sank when he climbed the bank to see that before him was just a barren scrubland of short, spiky grass. There wasn’t even any sign of war here, just an absolute nothingness.

Unable to face the prospect of trekking across kilometers of empty land, he turned east and decided to walk back the way he came, but on the other side in case he had missed something along the way. He travelled, in a daze, for about half an hour until his vision became too blurry to trust.

Exhaustion took its toll and he gave in, finding a small outcrop to hide under. He curled into the shadows and let his body rest, all the while mumbling into his mic until he could no longer do even that.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Layla had to resist the temptation to push Vingo into the water and let the creatures in there devour him. Constant moaning about the sun and the need to camp… all the while Denver remained missing. That little tredeyan fucker clearly didn’t understand humans as much as he thought.

For three long hours they had made their way back to the tributary after filtering off into a different route than the one she had seen Denver get carried away on. Vingo told them they needed to camp, rest, but how could they without Denver?

She had told Vingo it was time he did what they said for a change, and he would just have to deal with the sunlight for a while. The alien had a visor, after all; it wasn’t as if he were outside, exposed and baking beneath the strong star.

They slogged on down the shoreline, Vingo stopping every few meters to gather some kind of fruit into a storage sack he had within one of his suit’s pockets. At least the treacherous shit had shown them how to refill their suit’s water supply manually.

And she had to admit that the water did taste great. Fresh and with a slight hint of mint that made her throat and belly tingle. It was oddly comforting. She at first thought it had some essence of the croatoan root within it, but Vingo had dismissed that, saying the water on Tredeya, unlike Earth, did not have any salt content and that the plants that grew within it enriched it with minerals and vitamins.

She laughed to herself, thinking that if humans colonized Tredeya, one of the big corporations would ‘own’ the water and sell it back to the people at a ridiculous cost as they extolled its numerous virtues.

But her meandering thoughts didn’t last long when she saw Charlie break into a jog. He moved quickly down the shoreline, jumping over rock formations.

“What is it?” Layla asked.

“Denver,” Charlie replied, stopping and bending down.

Layla joined him and looked at what he held in his hand. “His combat knife.”

“This isn’t good,” Charlie said. “Denver wouldn’t just drop his only weapon like this. He can’t be in good shape.”

Vingo wasn’t responding. He just kept foraging at the water’s edge and moving along slowly, inspecting the various shrubs and flora that grew on the bank. The sight of him so relaxed while Denver was missing brought murderous thoughts to her mind. She could just go to him now, overpower him…

“Wait,” she said, spinning back round to join Charlie. “There, on the ground.”

Charlie brushed the grass aside. “Tracks,” he said.

The two of them set off, tracing the footprints on the muddy bank. The steps weren’t clearly imprinted and slid into one another. She pictured Denver tired or wounded, dragging his feet as he continued on.

She knew he was probably looking for them. When they had crashed out of the catamaran, she saw him hit a rapid and speed off until they lost sight of him. She figured that the crash had broken the intercom system.

Engaging her external speakers, she called out, “Den! Are you around?”

As she expected, there was no response.

Keeping up with Charlie was no mean feat, but she pushed herself onwards.

“Here,” Charlie said.

He stopped and bent down. “Vingo, what the hell is this?”

To Layla it looked like a cross between a shark and an eel. Must have been about four meters long and with a thick, wide body with a sleek torpedo shape. Its tail had a wide fin on the back. Its head was larger than a human’s and twice as long with a wide jaw, in which was set a triple row of back-curving teeth.

The side of its right flank was crudely cut open and the flesh jagged and torn. Inky black-red blood had pooled around it, staining the yellow and pale-green grass.

Vingo joined the others and placed his sack of berries and strange-looking fruit on the ground. Kneeling, he inspected the creature. “In your language, the closest pronunciation would be a ‘skertch.’ It’s a predator fish. We saw them earlier, remember? The shadows in the water. Their skin is… how would you say it? Changing in the light?”

“Photochromic?” Layla prompted.

Vingo gave his version of a shrug and nodded.

“Probably like our chameleons,” Layla mused. “I’m assuming it’s not natural to find one out of the water like this and in this condition? Although given what Denver and I saw last night, I wouldn’t put it past this planet to have some other fucked-up predator lurking about.”

“Not in sun,” Vingo said. “Not here.”

“Then what?” Charlie said.

“Only one species I’ve known to take on a skertch,” Vingo said with what Layla thought was a smirk on his face. It was hard to tell given the smoothness and subtle curves of his nose and mouth. His beady black eyes rarely gave anything away either, but perhaps it was just the tone of his voice. She couldn’t tell if it was mockery or a faux admiration.

“Well?” she asked. “What would have done this?” Not that she needed Vingo to say, she had a pretty damn good guess herself.

“It’s the foolhardy work of a human,” Vingo said, pointing one of his digits at the wound in the side of the beast. “Rough job, barbaric you would say.”

Charlie launched at Vingo then and smashed an arcing haymaker into the alien’s helmet. It didn’t crack under the impact, but Charlie’s strike did knock the alien to the ground with a heavy thud. Charlie quickly mounted him, pinning Vingo’s arms with one hand while he brought the knifepoint to a gasket joint between the helmet and the chest piece of the alien’s suit.