are? Twenty meters?”
“Sounds about right.”
“Five, maybe six hundred KPH.”
Nikitin let out a dry laugh. “I love the pause. Made it sound like you did some serious arithmetic before making a blind guess.”
“You know me too well,” Jack said, and folded his map.
Chase and Trash snickered over their cards.
Another moment later, four more walkers appeared in the distance. They were enemy vehicles, each carrying foot troops to parts unknown, but Jack couldn’t escape the feeling of being out on safari, watching a herd of wild animals cross the plain. There was a lot of traffic, and he wondered if it was always like that.
At 11:42 AM, things started to go wrong.
Cozar came bounding up the stairwell. “Incoming from the North. Walkers. Four or five.”
The enemy vehicles had impressive straight line speed, but they were slow and ponderous in close quarters. Compared to the cuttlefish, they were lightly armed and armored, with only a set of anti-infantry guns to keep interlopers out from under them.
The real threat was the two full extermination squads hidden within. A squad typically included four of the rhinos, heavy shock troops with autocannons and mobile artillery, and another five of the jackrabbits armed with long-rifles, who acted as fast scouts and snipers.
“ETA?” Jack asked.
“Three minutes. Maybe less.”
Their building was at the northern end of its pocket of ruins, with the rest of the buildings stretching to the South and West. To the East lay fields full of tall crops, beyond those another small group of ruins and then the rock outcropping where their four-wheeler was stashed.
Jack made the only decision he could in the face of overwhelming odds. “Disperse and hide. Stay on the upper floors, keep your damn heads down, and hold your fire unless there’s no other choice. The second you pull that trigger, we’re all dead. Cozar, get Hartnell and take up position across the street.”
“Roger,” Cozar said, and took off back down the stairs.
“Chase, Trash, cross that field and lay low in the next group of buildings, then head to the jeep the first chance you get. If things heat up around here, get the hell out of dodge.” Then they were off and running as well.
“Nik, stay here and keep an eye on those two. If anything gets near ‘em, take it down. The jeep is our top priority. Clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Albright, you’re with me.”
She acknowledged with a duck of her and shouldered her rifle. The weapon looked to be fully half her size.
Down below, Trash and Chase emerged from the building and then disappeared into the tall rows of green crops. Their heads popped out every couple of steps, but Jack couldn’t have seen them if he weren’t looking for them. Once he was sure those two were safe and on their way, he grabbed a couple empty drink bottles from the floor and tossed them in his pack. Then he waved Albright on and went up the final flight of stairs to the roof.
The air above was clear. No cuttlefish or clouds. Just blue sky and bright sun. The walkers were approaching in the distance, still a few kilometers out, and raising a hell of a dust cloud behind them.
Jack and Albright were four stories up, looking out across a strip of closely packed buildings. The gap between any of them was never more than two meters.
He scanned the other roofs and spotted his target quickly—a building abandoned while under construction— and he took off running. He chose Albright because they’d done some mountain ops together, and of anyone on his team, he knew damn well she could keep up. She was small but fast, and he figured she’d been into gymnastics as a kid. She had that bouncing, energetic quality, and he could easily picture her whipping out a few somersaults and flips.
Jack took a deep breath and he was off and running. His legs pounded across the dusty roof, then he was airborne for one long stride and landed on the next roof. He heard Albright’s boots keep pace behind him.
No time to stop and look. His breathing was falling into rhythm, and with another few strides, he was up in the air and then down again. This roof was lower, and he rolled with the landing, then was back to his feet and on the move.
There was only one to go. With his final leap, Jack sailed through the open air and collided with the wall. In another second, he had his leg up on the ledge, and he clambered over. Albright was only a step behind.
He hit the deck and took a moment to catch his breath. The tiny woman beside him was hardly warmed up, and Jack shook his head. “Doesn’t anything wear you out,” he asked.
“Only one thing I can think of,” she said. “So, what’s so great about this place?”
“You’ll see,” he said. His breath came back under control and he hopped back up to a low crouch, then hurried across the half-completed roof and dropped down into the top floor. He was glad to be back out of direct sunlight. Back under cover.
A quick scan of the room revealed two things: enough unused ducting and lumber to hide in, and a pile of painting supplies in the corner. The supplies were what he was after. He’d seen the scaffolding outside when they first arrived, and it came to mind the moment he heard they had company. “Bingo.”
He sat down with his back against the wall, where he could keep an eye on the window, then brought the drink bottles back out of his pack. He lined them up, three in total, grabbed a can of paint thinner from the pile and filled them one by one.
Albright caught on. She drew her survival knife and started tearing strips from a canvas sheet, then handed them to Jack, who balled them up and jammed them in the tops of the bottles. The Molotov cocktail was a weapon as old as the hills, and he’d seen first hand the kind of damage they could do to people. With any luck, the exterminators were just as susceptible.
“You’re not planning something stupid, are you hero?”
“Me?” Jack asked. “Hell no. I just want a fallback if things turn from bad to worse.”
“Roger that.”
She bounced off to scrounge a couple bottles of her own. Meanwhile, Jack peaked through the window, and could just see Hartnell and Cozar rushing through the building across the street with their rifles in hand. Jack grumbled that they needed to get down, and as if by remote control, they did.
An alien walker strutted up to their settlement and stopped at the far end of the street, beside the building where Jack’s team had been just moments before. In the distance, he could see other walkers had broken formation, and were milling around the other pockets of buildings.
The nearby walker bent its long legs and lowered its small body to the ground, which then split open down the middle like a pea-pod and released its contents. Jack counted eight rhinos and ten jackrabbits flooding into the street, just as he expected. The creatures split up once on the ground. That was out of the ordinary, according to briefings. The exterminators always worked in packs.
The empty walker lifted back up to its normal height and began to pace the perimeter of the neighborhood. Albright returned around that time, hunched over an armload of various glass bottles. “What’s going on out there?” she whispered.
“Not sure. I thought they were after us, but this is way too much for seven sets of boots and a jeep. That doesn’t look like a combat formation, either.”
“Just a coincidence then?”
“Maybe. Dunno.”
“Christ, we have the worst luck.”
Each of the exterminators entered a building alone. If they knew about unfriendlies on location, that might work as a search pattern, but it was a reckless one that would rack up unnecessary casualties. Jack had trouble believing they were that careless. Never underestimate the enemy, and all that jazz.
Then he waited. The thump of the rhinos’ massive feet echoed through the streets, and the jackrabbits made their strange tittering noises. Jack figured it was some kind of language, but it sounded like random clicks and yelps to him. Maybe there was still a linguist somewhere who could make heads or tails of it.
