Aura Overload

18 - Aftermath

“You heard him,” Mathews echoed through her command channel. “Run!”

Hector hadn’t waited for permission; he was already charging away from the mules, putting distance between himself and the encampment. He could hear Paige gasping and grunting as she sprinted in his wake, but Perry had either run in a different direction or he was still back there.

When Hector heard and felt a concussive report, he knew what it was; the big merc had dug out one of the high-caliber rifles—brought along in case they ran into a hook titan or similarly large rift denizen. The gun thundered again, and Hector turned to watch, wondering if Perry could hit the drone and, if so, whether its armor would make the effort futile.

He scanned the sky, spotted the rapidly descending drone, streaking straight toward the center of the earlier battlefield. Most of the harvesting team was still there, clumsily clambering over the uneven, corpse-strewn ground. The gun thundered again, but the drone didn’t so much as wobble. Hector grabbed Paige’s collar and yanked, pulling her to the ground with him.

The flash washed over them first, then the rolling peal of thunder that didn’t quit, and then the ground began to misbehave, bucking and rolling beneath them like a living thing. Hector wasn’t sure what kind of bomb the drone had been carrying, but when the shaking stopped, he was relieved to see he was still alive; he hadn’t been flash-fried by a wave of super-heated air or radiation or something like that. Considering all the horrific weapons of war humanity had come up with, he felt positively fortunate.

“Ungh!” Paige groaned, and when Hector glanced at her, he saw her lower half was pinned under a section of plasteel tread—a piece of one of the harvesters’ tractor-like cargo containers. The realization sparked a momentary flare of anger, a wash of hot blood that ran up his neck and into his scalp. He might not have been the target of the bomb—he didn’t know—but he’d sure as hell lost out because of it. Glancing past Paige to the site of the impact, he couldn’t see much other than dust and smoke, but he knew most of the harvested organics would be destroyed—not to mention the harvesting team.

“Sound off,” he growled into comms, pushing his anger aside so he could focus on more important matters. Paige was still scrabbling at the ground, trying to pull herself free. Her face was down and away from him, so she didn’t know he was there. “I’ve got you, Paige,” he said, allowing his helmet’s speaker to amplify his voice.

Kristy’s name flared on his comms: “Present—uninjured. I’m about a klick north of the…mess.”

“Frederick here. I’m near Kristina—fine.”

“Perry here,” the big man wheezed into the comm channel. “I’m, uh, buried, but here.”

As he gripped the rubber-coated plasteel tread, bracing himself to dead-lift it off Paige’s legs, Hector asked, “Mathews? Bobby? Red?” He knew the harvesters weren’t in their team comm channel, so he added, “Anyone got the secondary channel? Any of the harvesters—”

“I’m in it,” Paige gasped. “There are a few alive—hurt or trapped. We need to get in there—”

She cried out in pain as Hector heaved, hauling the tread off her legs and tossing it to the side. “We’ll get them, but the bomb’s going to draw attention.” As he spoke, Hector turned toward the rift, and his stomach sank. “Rift’s gone,” he said aloud, not wanting to announce the bad news to the entire team.

“We—” Paige gasped, turning onto her back so she could push herself into a sitting position. “We need to find it. It won’t be safe until it phases again, but we should locate it—wherever it moved.”

“Relax,” Hector said, squatting before her. He tilted her head left and right, examining her face as best he could see it through her visor. “We’ve got days to find it.”

“Right.” She nodded, clenching her jaw gamely against her pain. “As long as it didn’t move too far—hopefully not. It was just one drone, right?” When Hector nodded, she said, “Go, find the others. I’m patching you into the secondary comm channel. I’ll give you the location data for the ones with, um, active vitals.”

“Just sit tight.” Hector set up a location ping on his mini-map. “Kristy, can you come look over Paige? Freddy, help me dig Perry out.”

He wasn’t in charge—not by rank, seniority, or any other metric—but nobody argued when he started barking orders. He watched Freddy’s dot on the mini-map drift toward Perry’s flashing one, and broke into a jog, hurrying toward the billowing cloud of dust thrown up by the bomb’s impact.

A hundred thoughts fought for Hector’s attention. He hoped Mathews was all right despite her lack of vitals on the display—the others too, but he’d begun to grow fond of the commander. Along with that thought came one that made him feel guilty; she had the primary potentia scraper—the one he’d used to collect the blooms. The last time she’d given a report, the thing had been holding nearly eighteen-hundred units.

The harvesting scraper was built to withstand significant damage, but still, Mathews’s locator was near the center of the damn bomb blast. Didn’t she run at all?

As he jogged toward Perry, he passed the team’s mules—one was flipped onto its back, but the other had managed to maintain all four of its feet on the ground. He was just glad to see neither had been destroyed. He scanned the area; Perry had been near the mules when he’d run, but his blinking locator said the big merc was still fifteen meters toward the blast.

When he got there, Freddy was already digging, hauling hunks of dense, clay-like soil off the big guy’s green-tinted armor. “The blast threw off a shit-ton of this stuff!” Freddy grunted, his powered armor whirring as he hoisted a hundred-kilo chunk to the side.

“Cratered the ground,” Hector said, grabbing Perry’s arm and hauling him out of the piled dirt, dragging him clear. He flailed, scraping his gloves over his visor and peering around like a crocodile pulled out of its river. Hector waved a hand in front of his face. “You good?”

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“Good.” His reply crackled with static, but he held up a thumb, and Hector nodded.

“Get these mules moving; get to Kristy’s position.” Hector thumped Freddy’s shoulder. “With me.”

He didn’t wait for Perry’s response but jogged into the dust cloud, slowing when the ground sloped down precariously. Mathews’s locator said she was twenty-three meters ahead. His helmet was compensating for the lack of light and visibility, using wavelengths that made it easy to depersonalize what he saw in there. Everything was monochromatic, drawn in shades of blue-gray by the helmet’s AI, but it was also painting with a heatmap.

Warm objects were drawn in shades from red to yellow, and it was that residual heat that allowed him to recognize the body parts—an arm here, a leg there, someone’s torso—and then he saw his first survivor. A man was crawling toward him, one leg short of a set and leaving behind a trail in shades of orange and red. Hector grabbed his collar and dragged him rapidly out of the dust cloud. “Hang on, man.”

“Ling,” the man said, his voice surprisingly clear. “It’s Ling. Thank you.”

Hector put the man’s back against a pile of dirt, then looked down at his severed leg. “Your suit compressing enough? You’re still bleeding a little.”

Ling nodded, dusty air billowing out of his breather. “I’ll live a while, according to my AI.”

Hector pinged the map. “Someone come get this guy and bring him some bugs.”

“On it,” Kristy replied, and as her voice faded, another sound came to Hector’s ears—a distant chittering sound that deepened toward an echoing click.

He knew what it was; he just wished he didn’t. He glanced back to the dust cloud. “Freddy? You find Mathews?”

“Um…”

When he hesitated, Hector knew exactly what was going on; he had bad news and didn’t feel comfortable enough to announce it. “Spit it out, kid.”

“I found her, yeah. Let’s just say the lack of vitals wasn’t a mistake. I’m, uh, sorry, everyone—”

“Something’s out there!” Paige cried, stealing everyone’s attention away from the loss, at least for the moment. “We still have a monitoring drone up. There are large shapes moving around the edges of the blast area—west!”

Hector knew that, of course, thanks to his ears. “Can you move?”

“Yeah,” Paige replied, breathless from exertion or pain; he didn’t know. “Torn ligaments, but I hit myself with some nanites—and a stim.”

“Perry, Kristy—get Paige and move to my location. Freddy and I will find the other survivors.” He stared at his map, confirming they were moving, and then he opened a direct line to Freddy. “Did you find the scraper?”

“Not here, man. She’s pretty mangled, but I don’t see any sign of it. She wore that thing on her belt, right?”

Hector frowned. “Yeah. Maybe she tossed it.”

“Like if she knew she was about to get—”

“Yeah,” Hector grunted. “Okay, help me gather the survivors, but keep your eyes peeled.”

“Right. Hector, uh, you hear those clicks? I had to study rift denizens. I’m pretty sure that’s a flayer cat.”

“It’s at least three of them, kid. Let’s hustle.” He didn’t add the other part of his thinking—that the flayer cats were carrion eaters. Thanks to that little fact, they’d probably have time to clear out; the creatures were already sniffing out corpses.

Evie? Scan my visual feed for any objects that could be a match for the scraper in shape and size.

//That’s a clever idea, Hector. Overlaying LIDAR geometry with density mapping—isolating objects within expected mass range.//

Hector would have tried to find the thing by feel; he might have a chance of sensing the large pool of potentia, but the device had a densely shielded potentia bank; he’d barely been able to feel it when he’d held it in his hand. “Help’s coming,” he said to the harvester—Ling—and then he brought his rifle into his hands and moved back to the dust cloud.

“Got a survivor. I think she’s okay, just beat up. She was thrown clear,” Freddy announced.

“Bring her to the gathering point. No sign of Red or Bobby?”

“Nothing.”

Hector had two dots blinking on his mini-map nearby. One was Red’s locator, and another was one of the survivors from the harvesting team. He didn’t have high hopes for Red; his locator wasn’t reporting any vitals. Still, he started that way, scanning left and right, hoping Evie would spot the harvesting scraper.

Now and then he caught glimpses of the flayer cats—two-meter-long feline-like creatures with a nest of hook-barbed tentacles growing around their necks. They weren’t felines, of course; they weren’t even mammals, but they looked and moved like cats, and so the name had stuck. They’d gotten the “flayer” part of their name because they used the tentacles and the hard hooks at their tips to strip the flesh off their “food,” consuming it in layers from the outside in.

Hector had heard stories about people being caught alive by the creatures, screaming for hours as the cats slowly peeled away their flesh. Like many rift horror stories, he wondered how true they were. He got most of the tales from his time doing raids with the Invicti, and his teammates had loved tall tales.

His thoughts were interrupted when another familiar voice spoke into the comm channel—hoarse with a signal nearly drowned in static: “I’m alive,” Bobby croaked. “Batts got knocked out by the blast, but I rigged my comms. I’m free of the blast zone, but I’ve got a busted leg. I need someone to help me out here.”

“I got him,” Perry announced.

“By the way,” Bobby added, his voice small and tinny behind the thick static. “I’ve got the harvesting scraper.”

A surge of relief washed over Hector; he was still organizing his thoughts in a sort of triage—focusing on the most immediate concerns first, such as getting all the survivors together and away from the blast zone. Even so, a part of him had been contemplating the bigger picture: they were stranded on the rift world, and it was vanishingly rare for teams in such a position to live long enough for the rift to cycle again, allowing egress.

He’d been thinking about their odds, and the potentia in that collector was a big factor. If he could change his class and level up a few times, he’d feel better about their chances, especially if the others could advance, too.

His foot came down on a dirt-covered object, and the way it gave under his weight told him it was a body. He squatted, grabbed an exposed armor strap, and hauled on it until Red’s lifeless face emerged from the dirt. His helmet had come apart in the blast, and the damage to his skull was, without a doubt, fatal. A thought occurred to Hector, and he said into comms, “Hey, none of these guys have neurodecks, do they?”

Paige responded, “I wish. I’m afraid they’re gone-gone.”

Sucking his teeth in sympathy, Hector unbuckled Red’s gun belt. His pistols might have been flashy and designed to fit an iconic image, but they were good guns, and Hector couldn’t bring himself to leave them behind. As he slung the belt over his shoulder, movement caught his eye, and he jerked his head toward it. A dirt-covered person was sitting up not far away.

Hector glanced at his mini-map and saw that the figure coincided with the last of the blinking survivor dots. Reading the name, he called out, “Simo? That you?”

His voice was soft, almost a mumble, as he replied, “Yes. Yes, Simo is me.”

Hector walked over and held out his hand. “Come on. Can you walk? We’ve gotta get out of this dust.”

The man tried to grab his hand, but two of his fingers were broken so badly that he could barely grip. Hector took hold of his wrist and hauled him to his feet. “That’s it. Good job, buddy.” He steered him toward where he’d left the other tech—where everyone was gathering—and pushed him along, all the while scanning for the flayer cats. They were still out there, still clicking hollowly. It was a nerve-racking sound, but in another sense, it gave a slight comfort; at least they didn’t sound too close.