The power pack indicated a twenty percent charge. Talbot slapped it, but the readout remained the same. He glanced up at Capella; Donovan’s sun was as high as it would get in the turquoise sky. Twenty percent. That was all the charge his dying suit voltaics could produce.
Clouds were building off to the west, towering columns of fluffy white. Stoked by the moist breezes blowing in from the Gulf, they fed the constant afternoon cloudbursts.
None of which helped Talbot’s current problem.
The miracle was that his solar chargers had worked for as long as they had. No one had ever pushed combat armor this long or under such extreme conditions in the field. Operational conditions in Solar System had dictated the suit’s design. Tactical combat realities in the Corporate world rarely required a marine to be armored for more than three or four hundred hours at a maximum. The suit had been designed to function for a thousand hours of continuous operation before being returned to the unit armorer for refit and servicing. As if anyone would be expected to live in his suit for more than a month.
Talbot had been in his now for way more than two thousand hours. Not to mention that Donovan’s day was about 25.5 hours long. The miracle was that the unit had lasted as long as it had without servicing.
Moisture, mud, debris, biofilm—not to mention that he lived in the suit—all had a detrimental and corrosive effect. Only seven of the photovoltaic cells still worked. But it was the battery pack that was finally wearing out, taking less and less of a charge as the days went by. In a unit armorer’s workshop, the battery no doubt would have been a simple fix. Lost in Donovan’s wilderness? Without tools, let alone the training necessary to service the thing? No way.
He would have expected the servos that worked the joints to have gone before the power pack. That they hadn’t was a fricking miracle.
Talbot took a deep breath and sighed as he looked out at the vast green-blue panorama that spread before him. He’d found the next rocky outcrop—upthrust bald stone that so resembled the kopjes he had known in South Africa during his training days there. Like islands, they stuck up from the endless forest.
A flock of scarlet fliers burst from the treetops in the distance to the south. They wheeled, jinked right, and then left as a mob of the vicious four-winged predators chased after them.
For a couple of seconds the pursuit zigzagged above the highest branches. An instant later, the scarlet fliers shot down into the trees, taking their pursuers with them.
Talbot licked his dry lips and ran dirt-encrusted fingers over the armored carapace where it lay charging on the stone beside him. Should he put it on? Just the sight of the four-winged predator flock sent a shiver through him. The first time they’d attacked, he’d been on the forest floor. Had barely had time to fasten his helmet before they were pressing around him, biting, slashing, and beating.
As with so many of the threats he’d survived, his armor had proved impenetrable. In the end, the beasts had lost interest in slicing impotently and breaking their teeth on his hard exterior; they’d flown off in search of easier prey.
He couldn’t constantly live inside his helmet, but he kept it ready along with his rifle, and could clamp it on his head in a fraction of a second.
Like the time the monster had magically appeared from the very roots he walked on. A huge, three-eyed, dragon-like giant of a thing. It had flared a wide collar in a dazzling ruff of laser-bright colors. Then it let out a screech that half-paralyzed Talbot in his tracks.
He had barely clamped his helmet down before the thing leaped full onto him, tearing with claws, clamping fang-filled jaws around his helmet and shoulder.
Pinned in the beast’s jaws as he was, Talbot nevertheless had managed to claw his sidearm from its holster. Three rapid shots had sent the creature stumbling back. As the thing had screamed its rage and pain, brilliant bands of awesome yellow, black, and indigo rippled down its hide.
In a parting move, it had leapt high, hammered Talbot in the chest with both hind feet. Blasted him backward into the root mass. Despite the armor, the blow had stunned him. Without it, his chest would have been crushed. He’d barely crawled away from the roots that wiggled out of the ground and sent filaments out to discover the source of their disturbance.
I didn’t even see the thing!
How could a creature that big have been so well camouflaged that he’d almost stepped on it?
He ran his fingers lovingly across the scarred and filthy armor. But for its protection he’d have been dead more than a dozen times over.
“Not that it helped Garcia,” he whispered, remembering how the dangling creepers had shot down between the man’s neck and the suit collar. “What toilet-sucking fools we were.”
He shook his head as he stared off at the northern horizon. Up there—an impossible distance across that sea of forest—lay Port Authority. A place he’d never see again.
The power pack for his armor would never last that long. Without it to power the servos, he’d never be able to move, let alone use the suit’s ventilation and cooling systems, or the heads-up display that allowed him to avoid hazards, see at night, and detect threats.
The towering thunderheads in the west had marched even closer. He had perhaps an hour before the first downpour.
Talbot’s stomach growled, reminding him that he needed to shoot something with one of his last three bullets. Then, in the aftermath of the rains, he’d have to find fuel dry enough to cook his catch.
And when the last bullet was spent?
When the batteries refused to take even a residual charge?
“Donovan will win,” he whispered dryly.
Closing his eyes, he wished himself back in Devonshire. Put himself in his parents’ house. A place with clean water, dry linen bedding, and hot meals cooked on the stove. How he’d laughed with Brenda, his little sister. School days. He and his good friends: Matt, Riley, and Derek.
Cricket. He’d played cricket.
The bat’s grip clung to his palms like yesterday’s memory. He could see the ball as it was bowled, feel the swing, the vibrating crack.
Distant thunder broke the reverie.
Time to go. The charge was as high as it was going to get. By the time he’d donned the armor, climbed down off the rocky knob, the storm would have come.
Talbot stood, wondering—not for the first time—how Cap and Perez had crossed virgin forest without armor.
“You’re a tougher, smarter, man than I ever gave you credit for, Cap,” he whispered as he clamped the carapace over his shoulders and watched his lower armor energize.
Then came the arms, and he stood.
He had just slung his rifle and reached for his helmet when he saw the faint hint of brown rising above the forest to the northwest.
But what would make . . . ? Shit on a shoe, it couldn’t be.
He blinked, clamped on his helmet and chinned the magnification in his face shield. At the maximum twenty power, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing: a column of smoke.
Someone was burning something.
Targeting on it, he hit the rangefinder.
Forty-four kilometers.
Talbot fixed the coordinates in the navigational system.
It couldn’t have been a natural burn given how waterlogged the forest was from the daily rains. As far as he knew, the only creatures on Donovan who kindled fires were humans.
Forty-four kilometers.
Maybe three days’ travel if he didn’t hit a major obstacle.
Assuming his armor power pack lasted that long.
And if it wasn’t human? But turned out to be a volcanic vent? Some curious natural phenomenon?
“Then at least I’ll have a warm place to die,” he told himself as he started down the steep slope.