Chapter 8:

Bushwhack

Drop Pod Romantic Error Log


Jack dripped next to the kimberlite pool, rubbing the top of his foot.

Still sorta chuckling, Taru said, “You okay?”

“Yeah, I just kicked something down there.”

“A rock?”

“Yeah. Or, no. Too light to be kimberlite, not rounded enough to be a river-rock from upstream.”

He couldn’t see past the gray webbing of his shoe, but he assumed a bruise was blooming where he had kicked … whatever it was. Churn from the small waterfall kept the water away from crystal on the clarity scale, but he had gotten a glimpse of a dark shape bouncing away. Something squarish with perfectly straight edges. Something a bit smaller than his head.

No. If it were this close we’d have picked up the mission objective’s transponder on scan. But didn’t they say the pod it came from exploded? Maybe the transponder is toast, then—

“Wait,” Jack turned to Taru with a touch of excitement that begged for quinine. “What does the black box look like?”

“… I’ll give you two guesses.”

Thrashing back into the pool, Jack hunted through the frigid water. Swimming goggles would have helped, but even then he was looking for a black object on a foggy river bed of dark gray stones. Though the pool was small, visibility didn’t reach even a meter. He resurfaced and asked Taru if she would get in and help him look, which she answered by splashing him and suggesting he get out so they could get back to work. But Jack was serious. They were well within the search zone, there was no reason the black box couldn’t be here. He just needed a better way to search the bottom.

Jack moved into the shallows and unzipped a slim pouch that sat flush in his jumpsuit against his left thigh. Within, three slim rods coated in azure wax nestled. He slipped one free and redid the zipper to keep the rest safe. Pulling on a metal tab near the top, Jack ripped the top of the wax jacket off, exposing a matrix of magnesium and gray powder, which he pressed against the denaprene palm of his glove.

“You might want to cover your eyes. Or look away.”

“What is that thing?”

“A flare.”

“You idiot.” Taru sat on a rock with her arms wrapped around her knees. “Flares go in a gun.”

Jack looked away and struck the flare across his gloved hand. It seared white.

✧✧✧

About half a kilometer north, the Curator was reconsidering its choice of target. Its sensor contact on Jack and Taru had been intermittent at best, and based on such hazy readings that the Curator had to admit possibility that it had been hunting a pair of stoella. There was a more consistent, more predictable blip to investigate a kilometer away. It perched on three ceramic struts, calculating probabilities when its infrared instruments picked up a pinpoint heat source in the woods. The Curator didn’t lift off or rise—its landing struts swung up while the rest of the contraption hung motionless as if bolted to the air. The heat source vanished, but that was okay—it knew the paths out of that little forest, and none of the local wildlife knew how to make fire.

✧✧✧

“Fuck!” Taru flinched and shielded her face from the light. “Ow. What is wrong with you?”

By the time she had blinked away most of the flare’s after image, Jack was sloshing out of the water, smile on face and black box in hand. The bright fizzle of white illuminating the water behind Jack told that the flare was still going strong, he had just hidden it behind his back with the other hand.

“Think we got it,” he said, and tossed the box to her. It was black and boxy, and alongside all the printed serial numbers and manufacturer metadata, it had etched the number “057” in angular grooves.

“Oh.” Taru looked up at him. “You actually did it.”

“Of course,” Jack murmured and tried to slide into a tough-guy pose he remembered from a movie he loved back in high school. He didn’t pull it off. Partly because he had such a svelte build that he just couldn’t occupy space like the broad-shouldered Mose Orakka. Also, Mose didn’t sway his hip and relax a knee into contrapposto. “I’m a Wayfinder. Eyes and ears and swiftest feet on any team.”

“Yet somehow most teams get along just fine without you.”

“I know, doesn’t make any sense, right?”

While Jack tossed the remains of the still-burning flare under the waterfall, Taru got on the radio and called in their find. Mission control offered some stale congratulations and provided the coordinates to a drop-pod that had finished its reconfiguration and refueling for the flight back to orbit, and insisted that their find could be verified only once secured on the station. Taru thanked them and hung up.

“Hey, Wayfinder. Let’s go home.”

Jack fell in next to her and they found themselves chatting almost immediately. They kept an eye each on their surroundings at first, but as they went and forest gave way to towers and their conversation deepened the barrel of Taru’s chain gun started ignoring some of the side alleys and Jack watched only his terrain scanner’s heads-up-display.

“… no, growing up on Demeter was great,” Taru said. “Every house had a six-burner grill or better and a real grass yard. We had ten lane roads with no speed limit in the suburbs. And we build our cars to be right-hand drive, like civilized people. You probably don’t know what ‘right-hand drive’ even means.”

“Of course I know what it means.” Jack had never heard the term before, but it sounded self-explanatory. Right-hand, plus drive. So, drive on the right side of the road with steering wheel on the left. Easy.

She shot him a doubting look.

“No, really, I may not have got driving lessons from my parents or school, but .…”

The only lights on Jack’s scanner were green dots of distant friendly teams. He thought nothing of the alley’s mouth ahead and continued strolling along. His eye was drawn down the alley by a deep burble of water, as if a spring had forced itself up through the pavement, and Jack looked just in time to see the Curator charge up and fire a shot into his ribcage. As he stumbled and fell, the red icon appeared on scan. Little late, you shodware.

Wait … Taru stared at Jack for two heartbeats when he hit the ground, then swung the chain gun around and opened up on the drone. 10mm rounds filled with high explosive thumped out of the gun’s barrel. The Curator looked off balance, with the slender struts supporting a bulky arrangement of four ammonitic shells, all lying on their side and stacked. The upper two bore luminous glass, the second from bottom was largest and had fired the shot that put Jack bleeding on the ground, and the lowest shell projected a whorl of dark water between the Curator’s carapace and Taru’s gun. On hitting the watery shield, most of Taru’s bullets exploded harmlessly, while the few that made it through tumbled as they went.

Come on, die. Taru let go of the trigger just long enough to adjust the governor of the chain gun’s motor. The whorl of water withered and she saw a violet glow rising in the Curator’s mouth. She threw herself to the side and felt the shot graze the back of her armor. Scrabbling away from the alley’s mouth, now she had a wall between her and the Curator. A crumbling wall that went to powder under her fingers. But at least she had the black box? Good.

“Shit! Jack, better part of valor, what do ya say?”

He didn’t answer. Or stir.

Seconds to act before the Curator stopped waiting and floated around the corner to meet her, Taru leaped up and sprinted as much of the distance as she dared before spinning around and laying down a barrage of suppressing fire to cover her retreat. The Curator emerged and kept its shield up, floating over Jack and the reddened moss beneath him.

I’m sorry. I won’t forget you.

Then Taru pivoted on her heel and dashed down a connecting road, zigzagging her way through an evening that seemed to be racing to bring down night on top of her before she could leave. Running in this armor had always been a bit awkward, but each step now seemed to make it cinch tighter, and the power-assist servos took over while squeezing her to stillness within. Even after she had left the Curator far behind, Taru’s feet had to keep going and keep increasing the pace because she was leaned so far forward into the sprint that if they stopped or slowed at all she would fall. Only when Taru ran into the drop pod’s floodlight could she slow and trip and catch herself on the railing of the ramp that led her up to the seats and the harness. Taru climbed the shaking ramp, handed over the black box, locked up her weapons, and only then discovered that Nekkau was already strapped in.

“When did you … no, where were … nevermind.”

Taru took a seat next to Nekkau and watched as they retracted the ramp and began closing the hatch.

“Where’s Ja—”

“Hey, Nekkau, have you ever visited the Demeter colony?”

“Uh, no.”

“Well, you should. I know we don’t have any leaning towers or pyramids, but we do have the largest single-roof shopping mall in the Scutum-Centaurus Arm ….” Taru talked Nekkau’s ear off about home for the whole flight.

✧✧✧

On a space station that spent half of every forty-ish minute orbit bathed in sunlight, morning arrived the same way every time: the bedroom walls stopped making cricket noises and started to glow a warm orange. Taru pulled the sheets over her head and mashed her face into the pillow. The walls upped the brightness and added some light birdsong to the mix, but the lump under the covers held steadfast. Obeying its programming, the walls brightened steadily and added a few more pleasant sounds—the creaking sway of bamboo, a forest creek, etc.—to the mix. An hour past wake up time, Taru had succeeded in falling back to sleep despite her bedroom walls’ best efforts.

The walls didn’t get mad, they played a bass-boosted recording of a squawking raven flying headlong into a windowpane.

Taru shuddered, got up, got dressed in dust-colored jeans and a plain navy t-shirt, and stumbled bleary-eyed towards her bedroom door. Her memory was still sleeping in, and would remain so until it got either coffee, or a really good shock.

Opening the door, Taru found the apartment’s common area had become a sea of red, with Jack wading through it.

What the actual fu—

Taru blinked and rubbed her eyes. Still red, but now the red had texture and whorls—flowers. It was flowers. Roses to be exact. Enough roses to bury the table, the sofa, and every inch of the floor. They stood stock still. Silent sentinels bloody red. She watched as Jack hum as he went, lifting and looking under and setting down each bouquet in reach in turn, then he moved forward a pace or two to do it again.

Okay. The flowers can’t be for Jack’s funeral because he’s fine, apparently. Somehow. She had heard that he had died only to see him alive again, but that first time was just a rumor. This time she saw him go down. To her still sleepy brain the appearance of the flowers made less sense. But Taru pulled a flower from the nearest bouquet and felt the pressure of a thorn against her thumb, sniffed the sweet but faint aroma of the flower that had been bred for centuries to appeal to the eye rather than the nose, and she plucked a petal and rubbed its supple texture. Felt real enough.

“Jack. These flowers … are they yours? From you, I mean.”

“No,” Jack said casually without interrupting his search pattern. “I wouldn’t go this overboard. Aha!”

Stooping down, he reached into the sea of red petals and pulled up a hand, which was thankfully attached to an arm and mercifully still connected to a person. Jack scooped Nekkau off the floor and draped her over his shoulder like a sack of barley.

Taru tried to rush over to help, or at least check on her teammate, but everywhere she might put her foot would crush a dozen roses or more. “Is she okay?”

“Yes, she, uh, she gets anemic if she skips a meal, and she couldn’t make it to the commissary for breakfast with all the flowers in the way.”

Damn I’m smooth, Jack thought, until he realized his lie required him to take Nekkau to medical or the commissary—both meant moving away from the power adapter, which lay in Nekkau’s foodless room. I’m a moron.

“Oh, okay. But then, the flowers?”

“Check the card in the bouquets.”

Taru plucked a white card from between two roses. It read as follows:

My dearest Uranishi Taru, fate has brought us together again circling this ancient world … blah blah purple-prose blah, and then: My feelings for you are the same as ever, and I will be back soon to convey my affections in person. You need never be alone. Yours forever: Selene Nieuport.

“I’m looking forward to our dates. Fake dates, of course. Unless ….”

“Oh,” Taru said. “Fuck.”

Koyomi
icon-reaction-1