Climb, Drive, Rescue

Jaques’s back ached. It had started to ache on the first day of the crawler’s journey and hadn’t stopped. The seats here were far from comfortable, and the See soldiers and medic mechanics didn’t really care to take his plight seriously.

Why should they? Jaques was a coward. Jean had offered a spot in the party, but he had declined. He had rationalized and excused and apologized for his decision. He had lied to both Grower and himself. The truth was that he was terrified of the Conclave. Terrified of dying. Terrified by the unknown the four were now heading towards.

But at the same time, the prospect was thrilling. Going to see new lands, to find a hidden artefact, or whatever it was the group was searching for. He hadn’t been told, because he hadn’t joined. Now it was too late.

He supposed he should be content that the See had honored their pact and bestowed financial aid, with the addition of a domicile in Venetia in gratitude for informing on a Conclave operative. He could live out the rest of his life in peace, maybe open a shop or a private holdings company. That would be nice.

The crawler jostled and bumped, causing Jaques’s back ache to pinch and shoot up to the back of his skull. Damn thing, so crude.

He heard the gunner shout something from atop the crawler. The other red clad See soldiers in the passenger compartment tensed, their hands tightened around the grips of their guns. One of them raised a hand to his ear.

“What’s going on?” Jaques asked.

He was shushed by a soldier, then, all of the armed men shot up from their seats and ran toward the boarding ramp. Other soldiers, off duty, entered from tiny bulkhead doors in various stages of readiness.

More shouting from outside atop the crawler. Then came a sound that made Jaques go numb. The steady rumbling he’d started hearing a few minutes ago wasn’t the land-crawler’s engine, or the joints of its many legs and auxiliary tracks. No, this was the sound of aircraft. Their thruster scream was familiar to everyone who had once visited a city to the east.

The sound grew in intensity, and after a shockwave of preliminary bombardments washed through everyone inside the heavily armored land-craft, the captain of the soldiers shouted, “Conclave! Get ready men!”

Warning claxons blared, the crawler came to a dead stop. Jaques banged against his restraints, and the boarding ramp slammed open.

The soldiers had gathered in full, and as soon as the thick iron of the ramp came down, they charged. Outside, the Conclave aircraft, a boxy, black and deadly looking machine had landed not two hundred meters away, disgorging its own band of killers.

Jaques screamed and flinched as weapons from both vehicles opened fire. The staccato booming was louder than the claxons. Anti-armor rounds banged against the crawler’s thick walls. Some massive bullets or energy beams ran through soldiers that hadn’t made it out yet. They were reduced to mist and pulp in an instant, painting the insides of the passenger compartment a dark crimson. Jaques wasn’t spared.

Someone grabbed his arm in a vice grip, and the restraint harness snapped up.

“Come on!” a red armored man, brandishing a pistol, shouted in his ear.

It was the pilot.

Jaques stammered protests as the man led him toward the ramp. He didn’t listen. Jaques saw the battlefield outside. Self-foldout barricades had been shot from both vehicles, some had landed perfectly and now served their purpose, while others had landed crooked, and jutted out from the sands like the ruins of some old temple. Still more came. He saw one careen from somewhere above the land-crawler then land atop a grey-clad Conclave soldier. The boxy projectile, as soon as it made contact with the unfortunate man, snapped open into a waist-high wall. The soldier was crushed, then bisected.

“Go!” the pilot shouted.

Jaques didn’t register the words, he merely looked at the pilot with a dull shock.

“Go!” the pilot shouted again, pushing Jaques toward a small aperture in the portside bulkhead.

“What?” Jaques finally managed.

“Follow the passage forward. There is a hatch on the deck, it has stairs leading down to the bilge. Stay there until I come get you!”

If not for auditory augmentation, Jaques wouldn’t have heard a single word over the gunfire.

Pale, his left side spattered with the blood of an unknown man, he nodded and hopped inside the cramped passage. He turned in time to see the pilot fire a few shots, then charge into the combat, before the aperture closed.

Alone in the dark his mechanical eye automatically switched to dark mode. The interior became a wash of luminescent gray and white. It didn’t take him long to find a round handle protruding from the deck. He turned it, and as soon as he heard the locking mechanism clank, the hatch opened on autonomous hydraulics. A horrible stench wafted up from below, making Jaques gag.

For a moment he hesitated, not wanting to dive into the slop below. Then another explosion rocked the crawler. Something large and heavy detached from above and banged down the outside. Jaques’s instinct for self-preservation took over, and without a further thought, he grabbed the rungs and began lowering himself into the rancid darkness.

---

As the final rays of sunlight began disappearing below the horizon, and the sky beyond was black, the buggy slowed, then stopped, then went quiet as Lucia cut the engine. The desert, now a deep blue and orange instead of ochre, was cold, as it always was during the nights. Buddy’s lackluster internal heaters were at max output, Jean was tucked within a fat hibernation sack, and Lucia, though wearing a heavy faux-fur coat over her enviro-suit, had her elbows up to her ears.

The only one unbothered was Hound, who lay on the front passenger seat, emanating heatwaves as he regulated his core-heat to be more accommodating.

“The hell are we stopping for?” Buddy asked. He checked his faulty chronometer, still flickering and snapping between numbers. The distance meter still worked, though, and it showed that they had traveled two hundred and fifty kilometers.

Lucia shivered. “The outpost has lights-out protocols. No one, be they See agents or civilians, enter or exit once the sun sets.”

Jean jostled in his sack, sat up, and looked confusedly around. His face, rosy from the cold, peeked from the small hole in the bag. “Why are we stopping?”

“Good morning,” Buddy said.

“It’s morning already?”

“No.”

“We’re camping here for the night. We didn’t make it in time to the outpost,” Lucia explained.

Jean looked at the mechanic, then at the bounty hunter, then he lay back down, curling up into a fetal position. “Okay,” he said, and promptly fell back asleep.

“I’m not hibernating in the buggy,” Buddy said, “you have a tent or a bivy in this thing?”

“One tent and two standard sized bivy’s,” said Lucia.

“I call the tent, and Hound. I’m too big for standard size.”

Hound’s ears perked, and he turned to look at the grumpy cyborg. “You’re the least organic, Buddy, I think the Grower or Ms. Lucia would profit more from my heater than you.”

Buddy looked at Jean. “He looks comfortable enough.”

Lucia patted the top of Hound’s head. “The bivy has an in-built radiator that can be hooked to the buggy. I’ll manage with that.”

“Very well,” Hound said.

Not long after, the bivy and the tent were up, their respective occupants within. Hound lay by Buddy’s side, who rested his head on his poncho he’d folded into a pillow. Buddy eyed Hound’s pale, silicone ears, and the cabling that punctured his neck and shoulders. In his night vision, all looked a grayish white.

After a while, evidently sensing the tension, Hound spoke up. “You want to know if I’m Conclave tech.”

Buddy laced his fourteen fingers above his chest. “I’ve thought about that since you came a running at me in the desert.”

“I’m not. At least, I don’t think I am.”

“Sure doesn’t seem that way. Especially when we fought off that kill-bot,” Buddy said, nudging Hound with one knee.

Hound kept watching the tent flap, one ear angled toward the bounty hunter, the other toward the freezing desert outside. “I’ve scanned my software more times than I can count, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I am completely autonomous. Whoever created me made me this way.”

Buddy mulled over his next question for several seconds before voicing it. “You sure you ain’t AI?”

Hound chuffed. “I lack the pseudo-personality matrices that would make me so. Also, there’re no intelligence operating systems in my software.”

“Really?”

Hound nodded. Then, after it seemed as though the conversation wouldn’t continue, he said, “if it turns out I am a Conclave sleeper agent, what will you do?”

Buddy felt his cooling systems squirm. He’d worked with backstabbing mercenaries before, giving him an intuition regarding sincerity. Hound oozed it. It made the thought that popped into his head difficult to voice. So, instead he said, “we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.”

Outside, darkness had blanketed the Great Waste Territories. Cyber-critters skittered from their sandy hidey-holes, chirped, and went about their pre-programmed tasks that mimicked the creatures they were based on.

---

It had been hours since the firing had ceased. Less than that until Jaques could hear no more footsteps banging off the deck, far less before he had heard the dropship cycle up and leave. Now it was dead quiet. The only sounds were his labored breathing echoing metallically in the darkness of the bilge, the lapping of the slop water, and the tinkling of a sandstorm against the iron hide of the crawler.

His organics had misfired and sent signals on numerous occasions, trying to void an inexistent stomach. Especially when a Conclave soldier had inspected the hold through the hatch. Jaques had dived under the murky, oil-thick fluids to hide. The results had been wet coughs and dry hacks, with the occasional spout of lubricants and hybrid amino acid slime through both mouth and nose. Unpleasant to say the least.

But now they were gone. He waited until the sandstorm abated, then he made his way up the ladder, flinching at each sound he himself made, then to the passenger compartment.

The pilot who had ushered him to safety lay not two steps from where Jaques had seen him last through the closing aperture. His chest was riddled with impact holes, and his chipped red helmet was caved in, revealing a crater of ruined cybernetics, flesh, and bone.

Another misfire made Jaques gag. Though fragile in his constitution compared to others, Jaques had seen his fair share of violence. It didn’t make the mangled bodies any less disturbing to behold.

He hurried to the cockpit to find some device with which to contact someone, but found the entire place was ripped and shot to shreds. Then he went to his sack, only to find his possessions strewn about, destroyed, or buried under the encroaching sands of the desert.

Covered in blood and bilge, his sack half the weight it had been, he crept down the boarding ramp, glancing at, then retrieving the unfortunate pilot’s pistol and a spare magazine, placing the latter in the pocket of his robes.

Once he was outside, he stopped.

Night had fallen, and as far as he could see with his cybernetic eye, there was nothing but black sand and black sky. Some rocks here and there and some un-scavenged bones of ancient sea beasts jutted from the wastes, otherwise there was nothing. The lines of fold-out walls and corpses littering the battlefield were already two thirds buried buy the ever hungry desert. The air was cold, and smelled of rust, oil, rads and blood.

He looked out into at the desolate vista, and a tear fell down his cheek from his cloudy organic eye when he realized he had no means of escape. He was stranded, alone and forgotten. Just over a week ago he’d been comfortable, in a stable job with a retirement plan, with his own house. Now all prospects of that life, or something akin to it, had been blown away like ash on the wind.

Then he went rigid. He squeezed the grip of the pistol, shakily panning it toward the sound he’d just heard.

Cold blue and orange against the blackness, he saw in thermal, a person. They were half buried by the sand, with only one arm, torso, and helmeted head exposed.

With a thought Jaques activated the in-built light in his prosthetic, then switched to true sight, and he saw that the person was a See soldier. Beside them, also half buried in the sand, Jaques saw a white and red frock, singed, pierced and bloody. It seemed that before she had been executed, Sandra had tried to minister to this lone survivor.

A single word rasped through the soldier’s helmet visor.

“Help.”

Before Jaques even realized, he was kneeling beside them, digging at the sands with cupped hands. Once enough was revealed, he hoisted the soldier by their armpits, pulling the rest of them from the sands. His aching back protested throughout.

One leg was missing from the knee down. Luckily it had been artificial. Once he’d lain the soldier down again, Jaques removed their helmet. Within were the sharp features of a female. Dried blood caked her nose and the skin around her mouth. Her eye was black and swollen. Beneath the stubble of a buzz cut Jaques could see graft work and implant scars.

“Thank you,” she rasped.

Jaques nodded by means of reply, looked around nervously, then asked, “what’s your name?”

The soldier looked around confusedly for a moment, then back at Jaques. “Everyone is dead?”

Jaques grabbed her by the shoulders. “Don’t mind that. What’s your name?”

It took her a while to focus on him. Slowly, she raised a hand and caressed his face near the socket of his cybernetic eye, as if to make sure he was there. “Justinia,” she replied at length.

The touch sent a tingle through Jaques. He shook it off. “Alright, Justinia. The Conclave have left, but I fear they’re going after the Grower, remember him?”

Justinia nodded.

“We need to warn them. Do you have any personal comms units on you?”

Justinia’s eye glazed over. A common sight when someone accessed their internal software. She flinched, sucked in air through her teeth, and brought a hand to one of the cables stretching across her scalp. “Damaged. Transmitter is non-operational.”

“Machine god’s cog!” Jaques swore. “Oh, how are we going to get out of this blasted desert?” he whined.

Justinia grabbed his wrist. “B-bi—” she coughed a gobbet of sand and blood. “Bike.”

A light of hope dawned in Jaques’s machine eye. Yes, of course. “W-wait here, I’ll see if I can find it.”

He left the soldier lying in the sand and circled to the crawler’s port side, reigniting his prosthesis-light, searching the sands. He held the handgun out shakily, expecting lingering threats to shoot from the sands. In the darkness the crawler looked like some giant beetle from a time when organic insects still existed. Most of its limbs had snapped, and the auxiliary tracks had been blown up. Impact craters pockmarked the hull. Then after a long, fumbling search, mumbled protestations, and even some prayers, Jaques found what he was looking for.

Jutting out from the cooling sands was the two-wheeler that had been dislodged during the ambush. He returned to Justinia, knelt by her and said, “the two-wheeler is intact. Are you in condition to drive.”

She shook her head. “You…” she rasped.

Jaques ground his teeth. “I have no idea how to drive!”

Justinia pointed at the dead medic mechanic laying nearby.

Jaques retrieved the sack of medical and repair equipment, placing it gently on Justinia’s lap. From it, she pulled out a self-inject syringe with a short fat needle, which she promptly stabbed into her thigh. She bared her teeth, then let out a pained breath as the crude nanotech salves and stimulants did their work. Jaques watched the leaking stump of a ruined leg begin to knit itself closed.

“I’ll walk you through it,” Justinia said after a long exhalation of relief, “we’ll have to drive through the night to catch up.”

Jaques nodded and wiped away the cooling perspiration from his face. “They were headed west, right?”

Justinia nodded. “Decimum Iuxta Mari outpost.”

“Good. Let’s go.”

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