The Broken Cage (Solstice 31 Saga Book 2) (5 page)

“I don't know. What can you do?” Jim asked, seriously.

“I am a sensor data analyst. We have portable sensor systems packed with our gear.”

“Do it. Integrate that gear with the
Memphis
. See what you can discover. Report directly to Matt, if you pick up anything.”

The room emptied.

CHAPTER FIVE

Rand Runs

“My only plan was to survive. Not think. Otherwise, I'd never stop throwing up.”

--
Solstice 31 Incident Investigation Testimony Transcript: Master Chief Nancy Randall, senior surviving security member of the Ventura's crew.

<<<>>>

Rand fell asleep in the cockpit of the spider. The seats reclined and slid back, giving her ample room. She knew the crash would come. Spending a whole day on adrenaline had taken its toll.

When she awoke, the storm was still in full force. The HUD was on dim, showing the local surrounds. It was called ‘here’.

“Good morning, Rand. You have slept for six hours and three minutes. We have not established a current local time, as of yet. Dawn may have happened less than thirty minutes ago. I have some new developments to report, when you are ready.”

AI~Poole's voice was a perfect HAL—calm, helpful, even friendly.

“Why are we parked so high?”              

The body of the EM was extended to near maximum height. The view ‘here’ was in the rafters about five meters up.

“Standard hostile environment survival protocol. Do you wish to modify the defaults?”

“No. I just need to pee,” Rand said through a yawn, as the spider lowered and the gull-wing opened. “Prep a full status update on the HUD, and when I get back, you can brief me.”

“Very well.”

The rain pounded the wood shingled roof of the barn. She didn't like it. It masked a lot of the sound. She took off the tactical vest, setting it on the seat of the cockpit. It was heavy with the large 10mm caliber rounds and the 9mm mags for her Glock handgun.

She moved through the attached shed door where she found the hide, hanging on the wall, as she unsealed the jumpsuit from her navel down to the small of her back. Out of habit, she drew her pistol from her thigh holster as she squatted to pee. The jumpsuits were designed for this inconvenient necessity.

She smiled as she looked about because that particular feature on the jumpsuits was more often used for other reasons. Her smile faded. She remembered, all her friends were dead.

Dammit to hell.

Finished, she holstered her gun and resealed the suit. Everyone still called them zippers, but they were actually slidelocks. Utterly silent when opening and closing, they were also neatly watertight. They were even used in pressure suits. No teeth was a bonus.

At that moment, her HUD came alive. “WARNING: Riders Approaching.” A view came up in a window as she moved, showing the POV of her Fly. Through the rain, she saw four men riding, hard, on horseback. She double-timed it back to Poole. She grabbed her vest and asked, as she put it on, “How soon before they get here?”

“ETA eight minutes.”

She climbed in and closed the door. The cracked seam was still visible from the passenger’s door. “Poole, let's be gone before they get here.”

The spider moved toward the door with its arms extended all the way. It pushed the doors open and walked out. The doors closed behind it with the help of first one then the other rear leg.

The spider moved smoothly around the barn, away from the men, approaching down the road. Rand directed Poole to move into the trees. It was a smooth ride as they sped to seventy kph. The EM had six-leg mode movements down pat.

Neither Rand nor Poole noticed the trackers crouching at the edge of the woods, watching the giant, hairy, brown-and-black spider run for the woods.

The Fly tracked the riders all the way to the barn. They looked like they wanted to get out of the rain as well.

“Poole, let's recall the Fly, covering our tail. And, I'll have that status report now.”

Several windows opened on the HUD. There was weather, hardware and software systems statuses, Fly view and stats, tactical maps, direction, speed, and other windows.

“The most notable, new information is that we detected satellite communications traffic. Using this traffic, we have located several population centers with uplink traffic of various kinds.”

“Can you monitor the comms?”

“The traffic is encrypted. There are various distinct types. Ground station to sat traffic, which is the most powerful. Ship to sat, ship to station, and small device traffic to sat.”

“Static powerful sources, medium strength fast-moving mobile sources, and I have also detected weaker comms devices, probably handheld.”

A window opened labeled: Tactical Objectives. It included the following list:

●
        
Maintain radio silence

●
        
Escape-and-evade

●
        
Refine maps

●
        
Move into an unpopulated area

●
        
Obtain native comms unit for analysis

Another window opened entitled: Critical Inventory

●
        
Weapons?

●
        
Ammunition?

●
        
Food?

●
        
Water?

Rand retrieved a power bar from one of her pockets and ate absently as she studied the displays. The spider descended a ravine. Her rifle shifted and slid forward to the right, out of her reach because of the five-point harness. As she reached across, water dripped down her neck.

Sonofabitch
.

“We need to find a place where I can work on a rifle rack, dammit.”

“Rand, those men concern me.”

“How's that, Poole?”

“I was analyzing the imagery the Fly obtained. I believe they came in on the same vector we did. We did not travel via the roads. Travelers in a rush would take the roads. There are good roads here.”

“Are we emitting any RF that they can track? Should I recall the Fly?”

“The Fly RF uses a high-entropy encryption and it does directional transmission. They would have to be in the middle of it to even sense the comms that are designed to look like local radiation.”

Oh, shit,
Rand thought.

Rand pulled up the rear view.

“They are following our footprints.”

She saw them, great gouges in the turf, as they sped along a floodplain beside a river. “They followed us all the way from the crash site.”

“We need to lose them, by speed or by stealth,” AI~Poole said dryly.

“I have another idea.” Rand smiled.

***

Rand headed to the west, across an open plain of grass, running parallel to the forest. When the rain stopped, she turned into the woods and doubled back a kilometer, until she found exactly the spot she wanted. Poole raised his body up into the limbs of the trees, giving Rand a perfect view of the plain.

She only had to wait two hours before the Fly picked them up. They were moving fast, galloping directly in Poole's footsteps.

When they were about 1,000 meters out, Rand opened the gull-wing door and rested her rifle’s bipod on the dashboard. She assessed, then decided on an order, and tagged each target.

The last rider’s head exploded, and none of the other men even seemed to notice him topple over backward from the saddle. When the second from the last man’s head burst, his corpse slumped forward, his hands wound in the reins. The third man sat up a bit before the bullet found him on the chin, severing his head in a spectacular arch that finally made the galloping horses behind him veer away.

The lead rider turned his head, taking the bullet in his left ear.

All three of the riderless horses slowed to an eventual stop. By the time Poole had walked up to them, they were no longer breathing heavily; they were grazing. Well-trained to stop and stay, if the rider fell out.

That makes six.

She collected saddlebags and blankets. All the saddles had full quivers of arrows or bolts. She took the bridles off the horses, and then the saddles, just letting them fall into the grass. She found a single bow and two crossbows on the corpses. She collected these, as well as any pouches and long knives. One of the corpses had not soiled the dark gray and green cloak much, so she took that as well.

She would go through it all later. The trunk was full. The bow case went into the passenger’s seat. As almost an afterthought, she retrieved all the bridles and tossed them in the trunk.

She climbed back in, just as it began to rain again.

“Poole, we know they can track our passing, can we make that harder for them?”

“I believe we can.”

***

They moved down to the rocky river that ran in their desired direction. Walking in the water was slower but effective. For two days, they followed the water. Twice, they had to bypass villages that were situated on the water. Both times, with the aid of the Fly, they avoided people.

When they found a large rock outcropping, they decided it was time to turn north. A thick area of thorny vines was very easy for the spider to navigate, but would be impossible for a man, or a horse. Ultimately, they ascended a ridge that would have been impossible for them without the dual grapplers and winches.

They made camp on a ledge, just below the top of a stony ridge. They were hidden and safe, for the moment. Rand slept that night, again, in the cockpit.

At dawn, it was clear and cold. They could see in every direction to the horizon. They would rest, wait and watch for pursuit. The Fly could do some high altitude mapping surveys.

“Good morning, Rand. We need to perform an inventory. We have forty-four liters of water and nineteen days of MREs remaining. Water is not a problem. I can load and filter water at the next source we encounter. Food is more problematic.”

“Open up and pop the trunk. Let's have a look at our donated supplies.”

Rand looked at the weapons first. The three knives she collected were all lovely. Two of them were perfectly balanced, double-edged blades. Their cleverly designed sheaths made them perfect boot knives. The third was a huge, single-edged blade. The blade was very thick and nose heavy. The edge wasn’t very sharp.

The crossbows were beautifully made by artful craftsmen. They proved deadly out to 100 meters, maybe more. She didn't want to risk her limited bolts finding out how rotted that stump really was.

She now had three heavy, woolen bedrolls and three ten by fifteen oiled canvas tarps. Apparently, they had been made as camouflage and used as tent tarps.

Their pouches yielded a large selection of gold, silver and copper coins of various sizes that she consolidated and stored in the spider. She kept six gold coins out; and she placed them in six different pockets, so they would not clink together at the wrong time. Their personal pouches also held tinder boxes, and dried meats and fruits, in oiled, canvas inner bags. There were three water skins. One had water and the other two had strong wines in them. There were various sized needles and threads and a whetstone.

The saddlebags were much more useful.

Each carried a change of clothes, additional food, and various other items, including a small, leather-bound children's book about a farmer with too many rabbits.

But, most notably, one of them contained a map of that very region. She held it up for Poole to capture a detailed image, and he instantly refined his annotated tactical maps with the hundreds of annotations on this map.

“Rand, I find it interesting that most of these annotations are in English.”

The new tactical map appeared to Rand with region names, city names, rivers and landmarks, all labeled. Their current position was indicated. They were currently on the Ram's Head Ridge.

“Poole, look at this.”

She indicated a small annotation that looked like the character for pi. There was one of these marks on the other side of the ridge, less than a kilometer away.

“Let's have the Fly do an initial recon. How many of those marks are there on this map?”

“I count 181 of these marks.” AI~Poole highlighted them all. They were scattered all over the map, evenly. “The Fly will be there in seven minutes. Here is the high altitude view of that location.”

It was simply part of the rocky mountainside. There didn't seem to be anything there when viewed under maximum magnification.

She continued to search the saddlebags. They were primitive versions of her survival pack. There were additional, useful items—a small cook pot, a kettle, a set of plates, spoons, and forks, as well as a ladle.

The Fly arrived at that location and began a standard pattern search; and, in less than a minute, it found what it was looking for.

There was a door, flanked by two windows. It was built directly into the hillside. It was well-hidden. Only from a close position, directly in front of it, would it be noticed. She would have passed right by it. A high stone outcropping on the hillside made its roof.