whom was bent over a large plasma cannon aiming out the door on a pintle mount.
Mallory came to a stop as soldiers started dropping out of the aircraft on zip lines. He backed up and crouched for some cover as two dozen men dropped to the ground.
He knew enough tactics to realize that he was pinned. The aircraft would have the imaging gear to see if he ran. His only hope to avoid detection was to hug the base of this tree and hope they hadn’t bothered to sweep this area of the woods yet.
He waited, hearing nothing but the massive roar of the hovering aircraft. If they hadn’t picked up his transmissions, if they hadn’t seen his IR signature running through the woods, if they hadn’t caught sight of him any of the times he was in LOS.
Those were too many ifs.
It only took the soldiers five minutes to have a trio of armed men surround him. Mallory took some comfort in the fact they didn’t shoot him out of hand.
On some level then, it still counted as a rescue.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Hallowed Ground
Sometimes the crazy person is right.
Never make the mistake of assuming the universe is sane.
Nickolai followed Kugara through the woods. It was mostly clear and downhill, meaning they made good time, probably doing better than eight kilometers in the first hour. That made it all the more annoying when a pair of aircraft passed within a klick of them, heading to their northeast, back to where their lifeboat landed.
Kugara stated at the shadows visible through the canopy and said, “I don’t believe it.”
“Should we go back?”
Kugara stared after the aircraft and sighed. “No, we’re closer to the outpost you spotted.” She turned around. “Hand me the flare gun.”
Nickolai reached into the emergency pack and retrieved the flare gun. It was the last in a long list of signaling devices stowed on the lifeboat and, being the one object not reliant on electronics, it was the one that had survived their lifeboat’s impact. Unfortunately most of their high-tech equipment had either taken too much of a beating or was burned by the same shielding breach that had fried the internal electronics of the lifeboat itself. Only the ship’s distress beacon survived all of it, and they couldn’t take that without taking the whole lifeboat. So they only had a single flare gun that was included in the sparse survival kit almost as an afterthought.
He handed it, butt first, to Kugara.
“Let’s hope they see this,” she said. “We have only, what, three more flares for this thing?”
Nickolai nodded.
She backed up, looking upward, as the sound of aircrafts’ maneuvering fans receded. She held the gun two- handed, pointing up and away from both of them while looking for a hole in the forest canopy. She smiled as she looked up to a ragged blue opening in the green above them.
She aimed the gun upward and fired.
Nickolai heard a click followed by a sharp snap. Nothing happened. Then the gun started hissing.
Kugara screamed, “Shit!” and tossed the flare gun away from her, running toward Nickolai. Before the gun hit the ground, a horribly bright red flame shot out the barrel in a continuous stream. Even with his eyes auto-adjusting, the forest was briefly turned into a two-tone image in blazing red-white and ink black. The air filled with the smell of molten metal, burning leaves, and the toxic smell of melting synthetics. The hiss grew into an insistent low-level
