Raising Caine - eARC (51 page)

Chapter Fifty

Southern extents of the Third Silver Tower and Far orbit; BD +02 4076 Two (“Disparity”)

Caine Riordan awakened with a gasp, struggling for air, couldn’t get his lungs to expand enough. Frantic, he grasped about, hitting the two fallen logs on either side with his elbows. And then the sun went away. Alarmed, he looked up.

The water-strider that had entered the glade a minute—an hour?—ago was standing over him, crouching down. Having become accustomed to the creatures during the days of travel down the river, Riordan felt a strange sensation of relief, almost as if a friendly dog had trotted over to check on his well being.
Strange, the bonds we forge
—

Then the sun was back; the water-strider had risen abruptly, rotated towards the west side of the clearing. Something was coming from that direction; Caine could hear it too, albeit faintly.

The water-strider spread its legs in a stance Riordan had observed during their occasional dominance tests; a kind of four-legged sumo come-and-get-me posture.
Oh Christ, no, you poor beast; you can’t hope to—

The water-strider turned slightly. The two full eyes on its right side, both the one above and below the jaw, gazed steadily at him. The creature emitted a low, mewling grunt—a sound of affection between water-striders—and backed up a step, its rear legs just clearing the far side of the two thick logs between which Riordan was coffined. Then it turned to face the west again.

A babble of voices speaking in a mishmash of English and Javanese-accented
behasa
grew, then quickly stilled as they entered the clearing. Caine rose up high on one elbow, a broad leaf concealing everything but his eye.

Five clones and one other person had entered the treeless expanse—and the hair on the nape of Riordan’s neck rose: that other person was not a human. Not a terrestrial human; that was a Ktor. The angular features, the build, the strange, almost archaic habits of speech, and above all, the aura of imperious disdain for his soldiers, made his identity as clear as if he had been wearing a sign on his back.
But what the hell are
you
doing out here, with Optigene clones—?

The six spread out into a broad arc, the leader at the center, keeping slightly greater distance from the water-strider. Overhead, Caine could not only smell, but almost feel, a strong release of musk from the creature. Was it fear? Aggression? Dismay?

It peaked when the humans approached to twenty meters. The water-strider swiftly raised its long, graceful back-sails. Suddenly limned in orange bioluminescence, they shuddered as the creature released a long ululating hoot, both from its spine-paralleling respiratory ducts and its steam-shovel mouth. The humans stopped and raised their weapons.

God, no—

The water-strider stamped one wide foot, made to move forward—

The clones unleashed a stream of automatic fire into the body of the creature, which ducked, writhed, bucked—but neither charged nor fled. Nor did it fall; the Pindads, while effective weapons, were not elephant guns. The wounds they were inflicting would no doubt eventually prove mortal, but “eventually” might mean hours or even days.

The Ktor stepped forward, adjusted the Jufeng dustmix battle rifle, raised it, fired a single shot. Riordan knew from the sound what settings he’d chosen: semiautomatic fire, maximum propellant per shot, and expanding warheads.

The water-strider shuddered under the extraordinary impact of that round, which did approximate that of an elephant gun. As the stricken creature tried to right itself, the Ktor fired the Jufeng as steadily as the relentless pulse of a metronome.

After the fifth shot, the swaying water-strider exhaled heavily; its knees unlocked, bent, and the huge body started falling—directly toward Caine.

Who thought,
better this way than at the hands of that bastard Ktor.
The falling trunk of the water-strider rushed down, growing along with blackness of its widening shadow.

Which swallowed him.

* * *

Jesel checked his weapon after waving two of the clones over to inspect the body of the ungainly beast he had just slain. Perhaps a tooth would make a good trophy? No; there wasn’t the time—

“Leader, the targets must have used this as a staging area. Note their packs.”

“Yes,” Jesel replied but wasn’t really listening. This entire attack had gone miserably awry. There were still at least three or four Aboriginals unaccounted for. At the clearing there were signs that one had run further west. That could have been the one that had crippled Macmillan or a different one. Two of the humans that had skirmished with them during their approach and Pyrrhic assault had been silenced, but their bodies had not been located. There was no way of knowing if other humans had been on hand for what he had to assume was the complete annihilation of Pehthrum’s river-side flanking attack. The only reasonable option was to return to the shuttle and risk nap-of-earth flight to scan for fleeing Aboriginal biosigns. Since they were no longer packed in among Slaasriithi signatures, they could now be hunted down one by one. It might be dangerous to stay that long, but if he returned with so profound a failure to report—

The first impact was so sharp and forceful that Jesel was on the ground even before he was aware he’d been hit. He rolled over, grasping for his weapon, saw a red crater of mashed grey snakes where the left side of his abdomen had been. He tried to control the blood flow, tried to make sense of what was happening.

He watched three of his clones go down: one round into each center of mass. So: a counterattack by professionals. Incapacitating each and then—

The last two clones, the ones that had been inspecting the dead water-strider, bounded deeper into the bush.
Cowards,
he wished he could shout after them, but he had to conserve his strength, focus his senses.

The fire was coming from the south edge of the clearing. He brought up his rifle, switched the propellant feed to fifty percent, the rate of fire to two hundred rounds per minute, swung it toward the bushes—

And fell back heavily, his neck and head riddled by eight millimeter Colt Browning jacketed expanders.

* * *

Bannor Rulaine rose up, hand-motioned Peter Wu to circle around the clearing while staying within the tree line. Now to get the two clones who had—

A short stutter of gunfire from yet another eight millimeter CoBro sent Bannor diving into the loam. It was usually a friendly sound, but today, that didn’t prove anything.

However, the small, limping silhouette that emerged from the northwest edge of the glade near the survival kits confirmed everything that Bannor could have hoped for: Miles O’Garran.

“Are we clear?” Rulaine asked, keeping his prone position, but crabbing around until he was covering the southeast end of the glade. Always watch your back was an axiom by which he lived, and had survived.

“Far as I know,” answered Dora Veriden, who emerged behind O’Garran.

Wu leaned out of the brush. “Bad landing?” he asked the pint-sized SEAL.

“I’ve had worse,” O’Garran replied. “Can’t remember when, though.”

Bannor rose up on one knee. “We’re going to have hell of a time finding everyone.”

“If anyone else is left,” Wu amended faintly.

“Yeah, there’s that.”

“Look, guys, let’s save our own lives first.” Dora threw a hand up toward the sky. “This can’t be all of them. I’m pretty sure some beat feet back toward their shuttle.”

“They did.” Bannor felt a smile bending his mouth, a smile that his first DI had told him would terrify any human under the age of fourteen. “They aren’t going anywhere.”

Dora’s smile wasn’t any more heart-warming. “Oh. Good. And by the way,” she added, glancing at the dead Ktor, “lucky timing.”

“Not luck,” Wu corrected. “First we heard a shot, much further inland.” He pointed west. “We were heading there when this area started sounding like New Year’s in Taipei. We just followed the sound of trouble.”

But Veriden was no longer listening; she was pacing around the glade, searching, frowning. “Where’s Riordan?”

Wu crossed the clearing to the northeast corner. “He was here?” He looked, saw the discarded filter mask.

Veriden looked up. “Yeah, I think—”

Wu saw a faint impression in the ground cover, a spatter of vomit, and, looking more closely, a faint trail of broken or bent ferns that led out of the clearing and straight toward—

Wu stood up sharply. “Everyone. We are going to need some help.”

“Help doing what?” Rulaine asked.

“Lifting this dead water-strider.”

* * *

Nezdeh Srina Shethkador already knew what Zurur Deosketer would report: “Still no reply on the lascom from the strike team.”

Nezdeh leaned back in her command chair, watched the two new cannonballs race to fill the orbital gap above the assault zone. Jesel’s shuttle had signaled a safe landing three and a half hours ago. Fifteen minutes later, her sensors had picked out the thermal flare of the supposedly destroyed human corvette, performing what might well have been a suicidal maneuver that brought it briefly over the same zone. And then they had waited. And waited.

Nezdeh suppressed a sigh, turned toward Idrem, who was no longer at gunnery. He was here for counsel and, though she dared not even admit it to herself, for comfort. “Jesel has failed.”

“It seems so.”

“It was wise that we did not equip them with any of our technology. It would have fallen into the Aboriginals’ hands.”

Idrem nodded carefully. “The Terrans have been denied access to any conclusively incriminating evidence or advanced knowledge.”

“You are guarded in your words, Idrem.”

“I am hesitant to consider our exposure fully controlled. There are two corpses planetside whose genelines were on the threshold of Elevation. Their genetics will yield much to sustained examination.”

Nezdeh frowned. “Agreed. But what options do we have? We could fire a missile spread in an attempt to obliterate that evidence, but that presumes that the Slaasriithi do not have unrevealed planetary defense batteries, in addition to their drone ships. We might achieve nothing other than blatantly bombarding their world.”

“This is true.” Idrem nodded. “And I concur that the Slaasriithi, while reluctant to deploy offensive systems, seem quite ready to commit their defensive technologies. I suspect we do not have enough missiles to saturate the assault zone and eliminate the spoor of Jesel’s assault team.”

“So you agree that we must live with the marginal exposure that has occurred?”

Tegrese Hreteyarkus interrupted from her station at Gunnery. “We do have one nuclear weapon,” she pointed out.

Nezdeh and Idrem exchanged surprised, then carefully neutral glances. Nezdeh turned toward Tegrese. “We are in a system adjacent to the Slaasriithi homeworld. We have trodden a terribly fine line between plausible deniability and overt responsibility for the attacks here. And you would have us ‘correct’ the faint evidence of our possible presence with a nuclear weapon?”

Tegrese looked away, her jaw bunching. “I merely mentioned the option.”

Nezdeh turned away, did not want Tegrese to see what might be in her eyes at this moment: the ruthless calculation behind her unbidden thought,
She might have to be liquidated; she is worse than the males of this House. And she is only of a subsidiary gene line.
Nezdeh shifted her attention to the holosphere.
“Ulpreln.”

“Yes, Nezdeh.”

“Plot a rendezvous with the
Arbitrage
. We are done here.”