Predator - Incursion (15 page)

She stood and skirted around to the south of the base. It was all single story, with a few areas like the garage buried deeper in the ground, and escape should have been easy. Yet the further she went without seeing anyone else, the more terrified she became. There were almost a hundred people on the base, mostly scientists from the ArmoTech division and indies that they’d hired themselves when the Company suggested that a Colonial Marine presence would not be required. A few kids lived there, too, belonging to researchers who couldn’t bear to be away from their families. In the beginning Palant had resented their presence, but then as the children grew older, she’d started to look at them with a gentle yearning.

Now, she felt so alone. Heat radiated from the burning base and aggravated the burns on her exposed skin, but her back faced the desolate landscape of LV-1529, the world they had never bothered naming. It was cold.

“Anyone!” she shouted. Her voice was weak against the blasting wind, the growling flames. Fires danced across the base, whipped by the storm. The stink of melting plastics and hot metals reached her, and something else.

Cooking meat.

She thought of the dead Yautja in her labs, and a rush of panic grabbed her. Then she felt ashamed when she remembered Rogers dropping down, his head bouncing away. Her research was stored in local data clouds and her personal quantum storage fold, but Rogers was gone forever.

Him and many more.

“Anyone!” she shouted again, and from somewhere a voice replied.

Palant ran, skirting around the edges of the base. She clambered over rocks, stepped across a rough track cut into the land by repeated rover missions, and circled toward the east wing. This part of the base was dilapidated and unused, and it appeared that Svenlap had not felt the need to plant any devices here. From one facade tumbled long ago, a line of people staggered out into the inimical landscape.

Isa ran to them, recognizing a few indies and some of the base support staff. As she approached a sense of panic gripped her, because she didn’t know who she was looking for.
My only friend is dead
, she thought, and although that was not quite true—because she mixed socially with most people on the base—Rogers’s loss bit in deep.

The people were confused, some injured, but the indies were reacting well to the crisis, making sure they all stayed together and moved away from the blazing buildings. A dull explosion thumped through the ground, and a swirling tower of flame and smoke rose above the north wing. This was the largest part of the expanded base, and home to Palant’s labs.

“Isa!” someone shouted. Milt McIlveen approached, and she surprised herself when tears threatened. He was a Company man, yes, but they’d grown friendly in the short time they had been working together. He had his orders, but he was very open about them. Now he looked lost and terrified. As he stood before her, blinking rapidly, she wiped her eyes and took him into her embrace.

“What happened?” he asked, his cheek against hers.

“Sabotage,” she said. “Come on. We’ve got to get away until the fire’s out, then see what’s left.”

“Life support is gone,” he said. “I heard someone say that as we came out.”

Fear stroked Palant’s heart.

“Control’s gone, too,” McIlveen continued, “and the main comms center, and no one knows about the landing pad.”

“Don’t worry about all that right now,” Palant said. “Let’s think about today. Tomorrow can look after itself.”

One of the indie sergeants approached her. “Rogers?” he asked.

“He’s dead,” Palant said. “It was Svenlap. We found her in the garage. She must have been living rough, building and planting devices, and when we chased her outside she detonated the bombs.”

Her words caught the attention of the other survivors.

“Let’s move away from here,” the sergeant said. “Everyone in twos, hold each other’s hands, follow in a line!”

“Where to?” Palant asked.

“For now, the processors,” he said. “It’s too dangerous to stay here. Automated firefighting systems are down. Life support’s fucked, and once these flames die down it’ll hit zero pretty damn quick out here. Love Grove Base is finished.”

“There’s nowhere we can survive long-term beneath the processor towers,” she said.

“I’m not thinking long-term,” the sergeant said. “Just until tomorrow. You all get to the processors, me and my team will stay here and look for survivors.”

Palant looked around. There were maybe fifteen people there, half of them indies. There must have been more survivors. There had to be.

“I’m staying, too.”

“Isa—”

“I’m staying, Sergeant!”

“Me, too,” McIlveen said, and Palant felt a rush of affection for him. He was shocked, terrified, but he didn’t want to run.

As it turned out,
nobody
wanted to run.

* * *

They looked for survivors. As the flames raged, fanned by the winds and fed by fuel inside the base—oxygen tanks, chemical storage rooms, food stores—the survivors were split into teams and led on a series of search-and-rescue missions.

Palant and McIlveen were on one team, along with the indie sergeant and a couple of the base’s technical and support staff. The techies carried key cards to every door, and knew override codes for almost every area of the base, so they took the lead, but much of the sprawling structure was already destroyed by explosions and the resulting firestorm. Although five teams searched for a long time, they found very few people to rescue.

They saw lots of bodies. Some of them they dragged outside. Others they could not drag.

At the back of Palant’s mind was the possibility of finding her way to her labs, but it soon became clear that the whole north wing was an inferno, roof collapsed and purple flames roaring from its heart where the fire had found a chemical store. They donned face-masks, but could not draw too close. The flames rose into an indigo glow that was shredded by the wind.

* * *

After several hours they regrouped beyond the ruined east wing. There were twenty people, including two kids who had both lost their parents. Everyone was wide-eyed and shocked—even the indies.

Some of them had been in bed when the first explosion engulfed the garage fuel tanks. Others had been working, a young couple had been drinking in the rec room, and one of the children was still wearing a VR suit. Everything had changed in the blink of an eye, and now that their artificial environment of false safety was gone, the cool indifference of their surroundings was starting to freeze their bones. The cold set the rictus of loss in their expressions.

Three survivors were badly burned. The indies gave them all a heavy dose of phrail to block the pain, and they sat huddled together sheltered from the wind behind a rock, wounds covered with bio-gel, goggles failing to hide their fear.

“Processor?” Palant asked.

“It’s our safest bet for now,” the sergeant said. His name was Sharp. There were rumors he’d once killed four men in a knife fight, back when he was a kid. He’d been burned during a rescue, the dark skin of his cheek and jaw now glowing with bio-gel.

“What about the landing pad?” The landing pad was north of the first processor, just over a mile from the base and out of sight in a shallow valley.

“Can’t get any signal from there,” Sharp said. “Only McMahon had time to get her combat suit on, and it’s registering nothing. That’s a problem for later. Once we get to the network beneath the processor, I’ll send two of my people to see what’s there.”

“You think she might have blown the
Pegasus
?”

Sharp shrugged. “Depends on what her reasons were.”

To Palant, the idea of Svenlap meaning them harm was indecipherable.

“If the
Pegasus
has gone?”

“Then we’ll have to arrange a rescue.”

“With no comms room?”

He held her arm, and she realized her voice had been rising. For some reason the other survivors were looking to her. Perhaps because she had been here longer than anyone else, or maybe because she was the senior scientist here. “Yautja Woman,” some of them called her behind her back, echoing Rogers’ nickname for her, though not always with affection.

“There’s always a way,” he said.

Palant nodded, and even managed a smile.

As they walked away from the burning base and toward the foot of the nearest atmosphere processor, helping the wounded and each other, the storm came in harder than ever. Rogers’s body was likely already buried beneath the dust.

Arrow-class vessel
Ochse
Near Yautja Habitat designated UMF 12, beyond Outer Rim
July 2692
AD

They were going to crash, and they were going to die. But not without a fight.

Frodo had successfully sealed the hull breach and settled the
Ochse
’s atmosphere imbalance, and three seconds later the protective foam layers the ship had sprayed around each surviving VoidLark had melted away. The ship was a mess.

The Yautja vessel, Bastard One, had straddled the hull with a spray-burst of laser fire, and the
Ochse
shuddered and shook as Frodo tried to settle their spin. Parts of McVicar’s body drifted around the cabin, bumping from bulkheads and control units. Faulkner brushed his torso aside and spat a gob of blood away. His eyes remained focused on his combat screens.

“Bastard One down!” he said. “Mini-nuke got through.”

“Thank fuck for that,” Cotronis said.

“Status,” Mains asked. Frodo answered, having already assessed all systems, both functional and damaged.

“Weapons fully online, life support seventy-seven percent, but I can hold that steady for a while. Hull breached in seventeen places. I’ve sealed them all but there’s still venting from somewhere. Attempting to locate. The drive shielding is damaged. Reactor compromised.”

Oh, fuck
, Mains thought. “Repairable?” he asked.

“Possibly, but remote systems in the engine compartment are smashed,” Frodo said. “Sorry.”

“I’ll go,” Cotronis said.

“Sara—”

“L-T, I’m the most qualified, and I’m all suited up. No problem.” She was already unstrapped and pulling herself across the flight deck, knocking McVicar’s drifting body aside. The air was speckled with bubbles of his blood and fluids, colliding and growing, splashing against objects and people. None of them could bear to mention the loss just yet. They were in combat, and introspection was a waste of time and effort.

Mains glanced over at McVicar’s comms station. A laser blast had punched through the unit and sliced the chair in two. If there was anything salvageable there, it would have to wait until later.

“There’s only one thing we can do,” Lieder said.

“The habitat,” Snowdon said.

Mains was glad they were all thinking it already. “You’re about to get your opportunity to meet these fuckers that fascinate you so much, Snowdon,” he said.

“I’d really rather not.”

“Lieder, plot me a course. Faulkner, enemy status?”

“Bastards Five, Six, and Seven standing off.”

“Waiting for the kill?” Snowdon asked.

“Frodo, what do we look like?”

“The
Ochse
is venting radiation from the reactor breach,” the computer said. “Bulkhead three is shielding the reactor from the rest of the ship, but the repaired hull breaches in the engine room are not shielded.”

“So to them it looks like we’re dead.”

“That’s possible, Johnny,” Frodo replied.

Cotronis was at the flight-deck door, sealing her collar and enabling all her suit systems.

“Sara,” Mains said. “Be careful in there. One nick in that suit and you’re dead.”

“No problem,” she said, as if it didn’t really matter—and perhaps it didn’t. They were contemplating crash-landing their stricken ship on a Yautja habitat.

Hell of a way to go.

Cotronis left the flight deck, and Faulkner caught their attention.

“Bastards Five, Six, and Seven are closing, distance less than twenty miles.”

“PBM ready?” Mains asked.

“Affirmative. If we fire in… seventeen seconds, field of fire will avoid the habitat.”

“Initiate,” he said. “Keep ready with a cancel command.”

“Got it.”

A countdown appeared on all their main screens, also reflected on their suit systems. They went quiet, checking statuses, monitoring their drift and spin. Lieder gave Mains the thumbs up, confirming that she’d calculated a successful approach.

Mains could only wonder about a landing. It was highly probable that the habitat had defensive systems that would blast them into a cloud of particles before they even knew what was coming. That, or more Yautja ships would swing out to finish them off. With the drive reactor damaged, any quick maneuvers might cause a catastrophic overload.

They didn’t have much fight left in them, but they might have one last surprise.

Three… two… one…

The ship hummed.

“PMB fired,” Faulkner said. “Bastards Five and Six are down. Seven has swung around and is heading back toward the habitat. Slowly. It’s venting atmosphere and radiation, and all ship’s systems appear to be offline.”