Wild Space Pt. 04

"You can call me whatever you feel most comfortable with." She said sincerely, but her real name sounded so strange to her still, especially coming from him.

"When you get wherever you're going? Stay there. Stay there forever and leave all this, this place, me, us, your past...leave it all behind. For good. It's the only way."

******

The land was featureless and flat, so she saw the transport from a long ways off. Sita had never been very good with a weapon besides her old baton, still far away on Ajax's Scourge. But she had accepted an old slug throwing rifle of Hevik's anyway, though she didn't see the reason for it. There were no animals on the planetoid, and not much human life besides them. Still, when she saw the dirt being kicked up in the far distance, she was glad she had the unfamiliar, smooth wooden shape of the rifle in her arms.

There was no cover, and her own vehicle was too far for her to run to. Sita dropped to the dirt, trying to wriggle her way as low as she could get, her rifle at the ready. She desperately hoped this was just a bunch of drunk veterans off to do some target practice or something. But then the vehicle approached and slowed. She cursed under her breath and hunkered down lower in the tall grass.

Boots scuffled in the earth, crunching loudly. When she heard the voices she heaved a great sigh of relief. It wasn't who she had been fervently hoping with every fiber of her being that it wasn't.

"Contact?"

"Nope. Not enough people on this rock. Its creepy. Makes the base look downright hospitable."

"It would seem that our quarry is elsewhere, or perhaps she has already been apprehended." This one was a Montellan, speaking in a pontificating and roundabout way.

"Quiet, you two. Bao, the ridge. Hralka, get on the comms and check in with their people, not ours. String them along, you should be able to do that forever. Move.

"Ranger Sita!" She yelled and held her rifle horizontally in one hand above the grass. "I'm coming out!"

"Sita! Do it slow."

"If you were to toss any weapons you happen to be carrying away I'd be less apt to shoot you down when you stand, even if you are who you say you are." Hralka warned.

Sita did as they asked and stood with her hands up. Even with three weapons pointed at her she managed a soft smile. She could feel it twisting the burn scars on her face.

"Lieutenant. Bao. Hralka."

"You can put your hands down, Sita." Half of Chiugo's face was covered with his blast helmet, but she knew it was him from his voice and the ice and black stubble on his face. "Pick up your rifle, you're going to need it."

They were all wearing RANGERTAC uniforms. Full battle rattle, and with real weapons, too, not just clubs. All of which could only mean one thing. They were after her. At least they were going to let her be arrested with some dignity, at least. But armed? It didn't make sense.

"Let's hit the road, Sita." Chiugo said. "We can explain everything later. Just come with us."

"I'd rather you kill me than be hauled in before Admiral Jarrok, L.T." She said, feeling brave. She didn't mean it, not truly. But it would have been less painful.

"Never mind that. Get in the transport, Ranger." He snapped. "No time."

"Tell me what's going on, lieutenant." Sita said as she took the passenger seat.

Chiugo set them off driving with a roar. They roared past her own vehicle, one of Hevik's buggys, without a glance. She belatedly noticed they were heading away from the planetoid's ersatz spaceport. She wondered aloud where they were going.

"We've got to hide until the Capitals leave," He had to yell over the engine noise. "Sensors picked up a system of caves not far from here. Just hope its big enough to get this into."

"Lieutenant!" Sita said. "What is going on?"

"Caves are coming up." He said, ignoring her and pointing at the front video feed. "Damnit!"

"Too small?" Bao asked from the back seat.

"Far too small." The lieutenant cursed again, and brought the transport to a stop. "We're going to have to make it look like we crashed, camp out here for a while."

"What about our ride?" Bao said.

"Perhaps a bit of misdirection would serve us well," Hralka said vaguely. "In their haste to eliminate their targets and leave the Centralians may only give a cursory glance over some Ranger wreckage and not bother to investigate further."

"She's right. We'll have to scrap it, make it look like we crashed. Grab your weapons, gear, and some ration paks. Hralka, get that comm and don't let it out of your sight. No way off this rock otherwise. I'll rig the transport to auto and send it over a cliff or something. Hope we can find one tall enough."

"S-s-s-sir?" Sita asked, stammering. "The Centralians are here?"

There was a far off, shrill squeak of metal, the kind a big piece of farming equipment made, or a hover vehicle, like a...

"They've brought in the armor corps." Chiugo told her, taking off his helmet and jabbing it at the boring wilderness around them. "They'll be searching high and low for you and for their wayward daughter. Yes, the Capitals are here. An elite unit of them. They've tracked you and your friend."

"Lieutenant, I didn't do anything!"

"I know you didn't, Sita," He said calmly. "Maybe they do, too. But they don't care. You know how they operate. They're going to kill every living thing on this planetoid, including us if they feel like it, just to make sure the job gets done. We risked a lot, coming here."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me until we're away," Chiugo warned. "I did this for the Rangers, not you. If you aren't found here then maybe, just maybe, the Capital Systems will leave us be. But if you get caught and identified the entire force is going to be wiped out. Exterminated, like you and I would kill an insect."

"What about Edge?" Sita asked, glancing around her. "I have to get to her, I have to warn her!"

"You're not going anywhere," He told her firmly. "Look, Sita. More is at stake here than you. I have a thousand people back on that asteroid depending on me with their lives, the lives of their children. You cannot be found. If it looks like you're going to be found or run off I have to make sure you don't. No matter what. Are you tracking?"

"I'm tracking," She said with grim understanding. If the Capitals considered a Barrens Ranger complicit in the crimes of their wayward daughter then they would have their EDG units slaughter everyone at the base and the force would be no more, wiped off the face of the galaxy. Her heart felt heavy, heavier still when she thought about Edge. Oh, baby...I have to find a way to warn you.

Chiugo must have read her face. She could almost feel his eyes sliding over the burn scars there, unblinking, unfazed. This is a hard man, Sita realized, not for the first time.

"Let me get all this squared away and then I have a thing or two to tell you about your new 'friend.' Find me the autopilot controls. Move your ass, Ranger."

**

They had taken to the ground the moment they heard the far off rumble of armor. Edge's ears weren't quite attuned to the point where she could rattle off the make and model, but from the sound of it she knew it was big. Much bigger than anything on the planetoid or anything even in the motor pool back on Mapili.

She was armed with a commando style dagger and the worst possible gun for the scenario: a short, oddly shaped personal defense weapon. It looked more like a piece of construction debris or an obscure logogram or something. It consisted of a long handle that abruptly and awkwardly curved into a short, blunt, wide barrel. The trigger guard took some work to wriggle her finger into, but at least it had a strap. When she unslung it from her back Hevik's eyes goggled.

"I honestly thought that was a baton or something," He said. Unlike her he was sensibly packing for their wood chopping outing: a standard X1 rifle with a cloudy old fashioned scope on it and like her, an ax.

"That's why I brought it, in case we needed it for the wood." There was no need to lower her voice, not with the sound of mechanized armor all around them, but one never knew. "I didn't know I'd be taking down a tank with it. It's a room clearing weapon, whether you fire it or swing it. Fires huge, ugly bolts that can chop a man in half."

"So long as he's a foot away from you."

"I go exotic sometimes. It's a delightful quirk of mine."

"Not with what we're facing now," He said quietly in the same lighthearted tone, squinting through the scope. "Not delightful at all."

"I know, I know. What do you see?"

"A lot of dust and not much else, but by Ana they're raising a hell of a racket." He took his eye from the weapon and blew on each edge of the scope, cleaned it with his sleeve. "It has to be something big."

"Something, singular." Edge frowned. Hevik had the eyes of a hawk, as a good artilleryman should, but his specialty wasn't marksmanship or target identification. "Can I take a peek?"

When she had the weapon to her shoulder the scope made her dark eye appear larger and even more beautiful than it normally did. All she saw was a spectacularly big cloud of dust, as well.

And then she saw teeth, endless teeth, then an eye. And was suddenly very afraid.

Edge resisted the urge to throw the rifle away from her. Instead she slowly withdrew her face from the scope and squeezed her eyes shut, breathing deep.

"What is it?" Hevik asked her softly, barely audible under all the noise.

"Landwhale," She told him, and it was the first time she ever saw Hevik terrified, all his serenity gone in an instant.

**

"Did she tell you what she was doing on Mapili?" Chiugo asked. They had taken a few crates of supplies from the transport before sending it careening off the edge of a nearby cliff, destroying it below. As the officer he claimed one upended crate as a seat, and he kicked another over, pointing to it and indicating for her to sit.

"Alla never got to telling me about that. She was there hiding out, I imagine." Sita took an uncertain seat. "She had a mission there, she said, back when she was in EDG."

"She was on a new mission when you found her," The lieutenant's eyes met her face without flinching, unlike Bao and Hralka, who couldn't seem to bear to look at her hideous burn scars. "Know what it was?"

"Something with genetics. We found the geneticist, the racist, the war criminal."

"Crobe. Human first type. They kill him?"

She nodded. Like her, the lieutenant knew the homicidal proclivities of the Centralians all too well.

"I imagine he could have given you more details, but they were there to resurrect Vinjula's old girlfriend."

"What?" She asked, askance.

Just then there was a smattering of noise, closer than it had been. All the Rangers reached for their weapons and waited, but it didn't repeat itself. The far off, metallic whistle of hovering engines had replaced the sounds of the wind, and the dust they kicked up the sky. Chiugo sat back down, gave her a long and unflinching glance when he delivered the bad news.

"The Capitals gave me the name and some other details, but even they didn't care enough to dig too deeply into it. Some woman Vinjula served with. They were in love. She died on Mapili, however. That's when your friend went mad and became the Wayward Daughter. That's what they call her when we aren't around, by the way. Because she was once one of them, so they hate her even more."

"Mapili?"

"Right. The first job the Wayward Daughter ever did was to break into a government mortuary, dig up her old girlfriend." He saw the look on her face. "It gets worse. She kept the body preserved until she could gather all the materials she needed. Then she tried to force Crobe to bring her back from the dead."

It was a horrible thought, but knowing Edge it wasn't her fault. She was unbalanced. She was sick, not evil. Sita said as much.

"Sita..." He proceeded carefully. "One of the materials she needed was human tissues, or as close as she could get to it without starting a kidnapping ring. Can you think of any place where the Capital government found a human like species that nobody would care about?"

Mapili. She felt like the biggest moron on the planetoid. People were always having to drop hints for her, connect the dots. No wonder she was no longer a cop.

"Your new girlfriend committed a war crime and had those people medically tortured, killed. She tried to commit genocide." Chiugo told her softly, without a hint of a joking tone or irony. "That's the way they'll spin it, anyway, so don't think you can just run forever. They'll find you. They found you here. You know the only thing that will give you even the smallest bit of freedom. It's the only thing you have to offer."

Sita had been wondering when they would get around to asking.

"Where is she?"

****

There was no getting around it, Edge needed a new ride. And she had her eye on a tank.

"You're proposing to hijack a hover tank and blast your way to the fortified spaceport, of all places?" Hevik had incredulously asked her.

"I didn't say it was a perfect scheme. I said it was a scheme. Now are you in or what?" She had demanded. Lucky for her he was.

The landwhale hover platform consisted of a central, round core that expelled an unfathomable amount of air against the surface to propel it aloft. Taken by itself, the landwhale's core looked innocuous, even wonky, but it was still studded with both anti personnel and anti material energy weapons, escape pods, countermeasures, its trademark decorative teeth and eyes and other armaments and defenses. If an anti-tank crew or an artilleryman had luck on their side, a good tailwind and a powerful enough payload it might be able to crack the armor of the landwhale core. The issue with a landwhale, even small ones, always came when its pod of Orcas came back from their hunt.

From what Edge could see they weren't dealing with a very big fish here, perhaps a half dozen Orcas at most, but it didn't matter. The Orcas were the primary offensive and defensive deterrent to a landwhale. Each Orca tank, a sleek, house-sized black and white hover tank, could move independently of the core or couple back into it to greatly strengthen its weapons and armor. The Orca tank's primary armament was a hellacious looking 80 cm wide and nearly twenty foot long energy weapon its crews simply called the spear. Edge had seen spears cut entire buildings in half or flatten bunkers in the blink of an eye. Each Orca also had a trio of nasty, smaller bore energy cannons, one per side and one facing ahead, to cut down anyone foolish enough to approach the vehicle unarmored. The tank commander used a turret mounted harpoon attached to a nano-factured cable to hook other vehicles or so the tank itself could be towed, should it become disabled. Mortars, a missile launcher with a heavily armored external magazine for extra projectiles, and an efficient solar power plant with a conventional engine as backup rounded out an excellent design. Edge had never been inside one, let alone fought against an Orca, but they were feared for a good reason. And with all of them connecting together into a big landwhale, hardening their armor and fighting as one integrated unit they would certainly have their work cut out for them.

"Biggest one you ever seen?" Hevik asked, his breath huffing. All of the skulking and hunkering down was taking its toll on the one legged man.

"Only one I ever seen, but I know how they work in and out." A half dozen times Edge had begun to delicately ask Hevik if he might be comfortable finding a bolt hole to hide in, but to his credit he hadn't complained and he had kept up. It was killing him and he may be no good in a hand to hand fight if this continued, but his stubborn pride wouldn't let him quit. Her heart went out to him but it had to stop before he became a liability. That meant she had to step up and step up big.

"You've never driven one?"

"It takes a minimum crew of two to operate it and fight, so no. I've done simulations, though."

"Just like the real thing, eh?" Hevik gave her a sideways glance and a wink.

"Better." She said, glad he was calm enough to joke around. Then she glanced through the rifle scope again.

Two of the Orcas had detached from the landwhale to mount a patrol. Edge could tell by how they were driving that they were going to be at it for a while. She wondered what kind of crews they were running, and where exactly her old unit had decided to operate in all of this. If she was the commanding officer she would have kept the majority of her special forces on the move, in the Orcas. Their skills would be wasted back on the landwhale.

Or so she hoped. Because if she was wrong she was about to sentence Hevik to death.

**

The interior of the Orca was dominated by its target acquisition systems, large displays that made it possible for the crew to point and click instead of utilizing gun laying, and by the cavernous barrel of its spear. But the Orca could still scoot and shoot, should its computer systems be disabled thanks to its back up fuel tanks, but the process was not as efficient, and weapons would have to be eyeballed instead of aimed precisely. Ordinarily, facing a force that was approximate to theirs, that may be an issue. But now their enemy only numbered one or perhaps, two.

The EDG operator sat in the commander seat, a rank and position that she didn't hold, hadn't earned, but was so far overqualified for that the crewmen in the tank didn't dare raise their voices. After all, she was trained in their jobs and a dozen others, could shoot them down or break their necks or rig the entire landwhale to explode, and they all knew it.

The operator at least had more room than they did in the Orca. She was only five feet tall, a full six inches shorter than the female tanker squeezed in with her, and a foot shorter or so than most of the men. Her long, silky black hair was pinned up underneath a noise canceling tanker's helmet, and she had been delighted that there were no uniforms that fit her on the landwhale: she preferred the loose fitting robes of her homeworld, a shawl wrapped about her head, her face covered with a half mask. It was an ancient garb of her people. Even so, the outfit had drawn some looks from the tankers, but so far none of them had found the courage to remark, crack a joke or even snicker.

"We've reached waypoint delta," She announced into both the tank's comm channel and to their counterpart, the other tank on patrol. The channel fizzled. "Moving onto echo."

"Echo, copy that."

"Ma'am?" The tank commander, a grizzled old master sergeant, had been relegated to the recharger position, the lowliest in the bucket. But it was also the one with the least amount of work to do, a quiet move on her part that he should be included and share the command with her. To do otherwise would have only proved a distraction and probably a deadly one.

"You can call me 'Niami," She told him. She flipped up the tanker goggles she was wearing and blinked owlishly at the displays. They were so bright and vivid, no wonder the crews all used filtered eyewear. "What's up, sergeant?"

She knew what he was seeing: how young she was, how pale and un-soldier-like. Along with her tone, her garb, she knew that it all threw him off. But she was EDG, not rank and file. It meant she had a certain leeway, an air. Some of the operators in her unit wore uniforms on duty, others never bothered nor did they address the higher up brass by anything special except in special circumstances. She stood alone.

"Sensors are showing a vehicle up ahead."

"Armed?"

"No. Local buggy. Something the vets use to scoot around. Coming up on scopes now."

She pulled the goggles down, faced her eyes front and waited. Sure enough, the sensor ahead soon showed a scuffed up, four wheeled vehicle. She tapped it once with one finger, and a red circle surrounded it and blinked. Should she tap her finger again and confirm the automated targeting system would fire the Orca's spear, a devastatingly overpowered blow that would result in nothing but a featureless crater where the buggy had once been. But with one tap it only zoomed in the camera.