Theirs Not To Reason Why: A Soldier's Duty (18 page)

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Authors: Jean Johnson

BOOK: Theirs Not To Reason Why: A Soldier's Duty
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Kaimong managed to get farther through the bush than Ia would have expected, if she hadn’t had that brush with precognitive knowledge on her side. He had also drifted a bit to the north, and had stumbled upon a ravine sloping down toward the swamp flats to the north and west. And he had discovered the laser rifle had a calorie restrictor on it.
She found the proof of it at the bottom of the ravine, where rainwater seeping through the local limestone rocks had collected into the beginnings of a pool-fed stream. The skin of the saltwater crocodile’s head had been scorched in several hastily applied lines before he had apparently switched weapons and shot it with a HE cartridge, blowing chunks out of the animal’s side.
He hadn’t discarded the rifle, though. That worried her. Unless she wanted to take the time to submerse herself in the past through her somewhat weaker postcognitive gift, she didn’t know if it was because he feared someone finding the gun and realizing they were on the right course to track him down, or if he just wanted to carry it along until he could find and break the restrictor so that he could use the rifle fully—on who or what, she didn’t know, and didn’t want to know.
The uncertainty of just how dangerous he really was warred with her trust in the timestreams. There was a chance
she
could get shot and injured, particularly since he probably still had the clip of High Explosives loaded in his projectile rifle. She probably
could
avoid his attacks; Ia had trained in jungles just as thick as this one back home, albeit in a more temperate setting than this near-tropical climate.
A faint humming sound echoed down through the ravine behind her, barely audible over the rustling of the windblown leaves. In the same moment, her precognition twinged. It didn’t drop her into the timestreams, but it did warn her that the hovercamera now buzzing over the dead saltie, examining its unnatural wounds, had just been spotted by their mutual quarry somewhere up ahead.
A moment later, the humming grew louder. Sinking onto her heels to further hide herself in the bush, Ia waited for the camera. It swooped into view, circled around in front of her, and flicked on its vidscreen. The same sergeant from before appeared on the small rectangle, along with a projection of his voice.
“Good job, Recruit Ia. Looks like you’ve found his work. Other cameras are converging on your coordinates, and hovercars are en route. We’ll take—”
“Shhh!” Snapping her gaze to the side, she peered cautiously around the hovering machine, then pulled back. “Something moved,” she whispered. Lifting two fingers into the camera’s view, she flicked them to the side, then out to the north. “Take it west about twenty meters, then scout ahead to the north.”
The man on the screen eyed her dubiously. She kept her gaze ahead, crouching a little lower and peering more to the side. Lifting the remote-controlled craft, he guided it up over her and to her left, zooming out the requested distance. Waiting just a moment or two more, Ia started crawling through the underbrush, moving as quickly but quietly as she could manage.
Half a minute later, gunfire broke the storm-rustled forest with a
pop pop BANG BANG pop BANG
. It was followed by the sound of something heavy crashing to the ground. Grinning to herself, she scuttled forward. Two more hovercameras swooped down out of the sky, circling around the wreckage of the first one before darting forward, looking for their quarry.
More gunfire erupted, though Kaimong’s efforts at shooting the now bobbing and weaving hovercameras only dented one of them, sending it wobbling through the canopy for a few meters before it righted itself. Crawling past the twisted metal and plexi of the downed camera, she reached the edge of another ragged slope, one of several terraces separating the uplands from the swamp flats in the local stretch of bush. A twist pulled her own rifle into position, a flick warmed it up, and a crank of the nozzle and dial made sure it was on its tightest, highest setting. Ia knew she would only have a couple chances at taking him down, shots that would have to take place a lot closer on her end than his own weapon’s range.
There.
Movement from two directions alerted her to his position. One from Kaimong himself, a blur of brown dodging between two trees, and the other from one of the two new hovercameras, angling through the canopy as it followed him. Humming from her right warned her that the third camera had oriented on her own position.
“Recruit Ia—”
“Keep him occupied, Sergeant!” Ia hissed, flicking the safety on her gun so that it wouldn’t fire accidentally. Not because it would bother her if she accidentally shot herself in the leg with the stunner rifle, but because part of her was operating via the habits instilled in the future, where the soldier she would become would always flick the safety on her gun so that no one else could be stunned. She slung it down under her shoulder, out of the way, and lifted her chin at the trees below. “I think I can get a shot down there.”
“Recruit, this is not your jurisdiction. You are out of range, and out—”
Ia dove into the dirt as gunfire exploded again, this time with several
pow-BANGs
from the explosive bullets hitting the hillside right below her position. The stench of explosive stung her nose and watered her eyes, mixing with the earthy scent of the dirt-covered rock giving her a modicum of shelter from below.
“Distract him!” she hissed at the hovercamera, tugging her hat lower on her head. “He
knows
I’m up here, and that
makes
me a target either way! Get him to look the other way, and I’ll take him down.
You
can’t do that just yet.”
The camera swerved away after a moment and soared out over the next broad ledge of land. Scrambling back, Ia gauged herself in the timestreams. A deep breath calmed her mind and steadied her nerves, allowing her enough mental room to connect with the successful path for what she wanted to do. Ready, she scrambled to her feet and sprinted off the edge of the sloping cliff, leaping as hard as she could for the trees below her.
Ia fell both out and down in the light gravity. She ignored the scratch and scrape of passing foliage, focused firmly on her landing. Using the tree limbs’ suppleness to slow her crackling, bush-crashing fall, Ia dropped the last twenty feet without any support from the surrounding bush.
She did so just as Kaimong stopped shooting at the battered cameras buzzing him. Clearly aware of her descent, he twisted to fire in her direction instead. Hitting the muddy ground by the bank of the stream, Ia rolled in a controlled, compact tumble to absorb the impact.
Pulling her rifle up into position the moment she uncurled, Ia flicked the safety and sighted down the barrel, popping up less than five meters from his position. Her trust in her precognition kept her rock-steady as he fired once, twice, banging shots which went just wild from the poor aim of his haste to avoid her—in fact, if she had moved out of their way in the attempt to dodge, she would have moved
into
their way, as each cartridge
whizzed
past on either side of her. Without flinching, she pulled the trigger. So did he.
Zzzzzzt—Bang-POW!
Gunpowder stung her eyes, blurring her vision. She couldn’t see Kaimong, only hear him faintly over the pounding of her heart as he
thumped
to the forest floor. He had missed again, the third miniature grenade cartridge hitting the bushes somewhere beyond her in a spray of exploding leaves and dirt.
Freed from the press of Time to pay attention to the little things, Ia sagged to the ground much more slowly than Kaimong did. He flopped onto his side with a sigh; she sagged to her knees with a groan. Heart pounding, lungs heaving, she carefully switched off the stunner rifle in her arms. The last thing she wanted to do was accidentally stun herself, now that the post-combat shakes were setting in.
Not that she would fall unconscious, but she really didn’t need to add any more energy to her already buzzing nerves.
And I can blame my father for
that
lovely fact . . .
One of the cameras swooped over the clearing, recording and cataloguing the damage caused by the brief fight. The other glided up to Ia. The tiny image of the sergeant spoke again.
“Good job, Recruit. Unorthodox, but effective. You
should
have waited for the MPs to take care of the problem, however.”
Lifting her hand, Ia gestured at Kaimong’s quiescent form. “I had the shot, Sergeant, so I took it. If I hadn’t, he would have gone on shooting at Space Force equipment, and probably at the MPs once they arrived. I’ll point out, he did fire at my own location at the top of the cliff just now.” Bracing her hand on her thigh, she looked into the vidscreen’s pickups. “I’ve shot him at full stunner strength, so he should be out for an hour. Would you like me to secure his weapons, Sergeant, just in case he’s faking?”
The sound of a hover vehicle approached from behind her, more of a deep thrum than a hum. The sergeant on the camera screen negated her offer. “MPs are arriving on the scene, ETA 40 seconds. We will secure the weaponry. Unclip and surrender your weapon, Recruit Ia. Technically,
neither
of you are fully authorized to wield a weapon for combat at this point in your training.”
“Sergeant, yes, Sergeant.” Pulling the e-clip from the butt of the rifle, she waited while the Peacekeeper craft settled into a stationary hover over the tangle of bushes and trees.
There wasn’t enough room for the sturdy, brown-mottled craft to land, but there was enough room for two soldiers to lower a basket stretcher out of the vehicle, then rappel down to the ground beside it. As they fell, so did several drops of rain from the approaching storm. The humidity thickened palpably, while the temperature dropped a few degrees.
Glad that the first half of this incident was over, Ia surrendered her weapon without complaint and followed the MPs’ order to climb on up while they hauled Kaimong’s limp, slumbering body into the basket.
 
General Tackett finished his circling visual inspection of the young woman standing at attention in his office. “Recruit Ia. Why did you choose to go after Recruit Kaimong?”
She kept her shoulders back and her gaze forward, her words crisp and her tone respectful. “General, upon realizing that Recruit Kaimong had taken the HK-70 and the JL-39, this recruit feared for the safety of any unwitting personnel, civilian or military, who might cross paths with the AWOL recruit, sir. This recruit knew that without his military ident, Recruit Kaimong would be difficult to track from the air, and feared that it was possible for Recruit Kaimong to get farther than anticipated, a fear which proved true. This recruit had the skills and the immediate proximity to track his progress through the bush, assisting in the rapid recovery of the AWOL recruit, sir.
“There was even a possibility that the AWOL Recruit Kaimong would be able to evade pursuit long enough to leave the Camp grounds. This recruit felt that the risk to other, unsuspecting lives was unacceptable, while the risk to this own recruit’s prepared-in-advance person was proportionately small and thus negligible in the face of all the greater risks to potential others, sir.”
“You are barely past your second week of training, Recruit Ia. What made you think you were ‘prepared in advance’ for whatever your fellow recruit might do?” the Camp commander inquired.
“General, sir, preparedness in advance meant that this recruit already knew her fellow recruit was armed and therefore dangerous. This recruit knew the general direction her fellow recruit had fled. This recruit has studied Northern Territories flora and fauna in advance of enlistment, to be prepared to deal with said local flora and fauna, sir. Knowledge, skills, proximity, and heavyworlder abilities all combined to give this recruit a clear and undeniable advantage for locating and securing the AWOL recruit for neutralization as swiftly as possible, sir.”
Tackett started circling her again. Ia resisted the urge to follow him as he moved. Instead, she kept her gaze on the blue and gold seal of the Terran United Planets, depicting the main continents of the Motherworld on a grid-divided, elongated, oval map. Instead of being surrounded by the laurel wreath of peace, the Robinson projection of the Earth’s surface was mounted over the crossed, curve-bladed sabers of the Marines. He seemed to be waiting for more information, so she gave it to him, eyes fixed on the golden star representing the capital of the Terran United Planets, Aloha City.

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