CHAPTER 23

 

Before the shots even began, Aymes’ jump in heart rate alerted Jonah that she was under fire. He felt her break into fast motion forty or so meters to the north among the trees. A cluster of other signatures moved after her, and others approached from the flanks.

Some he recognized from the CDSE crew they traveled with. He had emotionally tagged their digital signatures in the previous days. Others though, were unfamiliar to his proximity alert system. These signals loomed larger in his mind. Clearly enhanced with dangerous tech and hence they were prioritized as greater threats.

Pritchard’s signature was not among them. In Jonah’s mind, Pritchard’s bizarre array of bio enhancements gave the mental impression of sickness or disease. His system could ID very little of Pritchard’s tech and therefore he didn’t really know how to prioritize him. The men that were coming now were easy to pigeon hole, they were undoubtedly equipped with combat enhancements.

Jonah loped two strides to gain cover behind the jagged shards of a giant tree stump, flicking off his safety as he moved. He checked for Ray and was a little shocked that she hadn’t moved even as the first rattle of gunfire echoed away into the trees. She looked startled and was scanning the trees for him. He beckoned to get her attention and to get her moving.

A mental flare told him that Aymes had been hit but he could still feel her moving. He felt her veer left slightly, drawing the pursuers into Jonah’s line of fire. His V.I. extrapolated the position where he could get a clear shot at the pursuers and displayed a timer bar, so Jonah wouldn’t miss the shot.

Jonah aimed at the digital head and waited until the bar told him to fire. The man’s head arrived out of the bush and met his digital twin just in time for the bullet to snatch the better half of his brain out through the back of his skull. Jonah’s mouth instantly filled with a metallic taste and felt thick. Something that always seemed to happen when he killed a person up close.

With insufficient time to aim, Jonah raked a burst through the legs of the next closest pursuer, dropping him on his face. The percussive crack of the downed man’s shotgun initiated the stimulators in his auditory system to turn down the volume, so he could focus clearly.

Jonah’s V.I. had automatically made Aymes’ visual image mostly transparent. Jonah preferred to see mainly enemies during combat and his proximity system told him where Aymes was and would stop his weapon from firing if she were in the way.

There was very little chance of that. Her bio status readouts looked OK. Jonah could feel her now, to his left behind the fallen log. He took a second to visually check for Ray as she was invisible to his sensors among all this activity. She appeared unharmed.

With his natural vision he saw Aymes rise just beyond where Ray crouched, she had a nasty wound in her left shoulder but seemed otherwise unharmed. She got a good kill with her sidearm and then dropped back down, catching Jonah’s eye for a second. Aymes’ proximity signature flashed in his consciousness indicating that she was reloading. She rose again and fired a short burst before dropping back.

Silence descended as they both reloaded. Jonah’s proximity alert was now full of figures at range of distances. He could feel five high priority targets approaching in a group of three, and other lower priority targets scattered about.

The three targets in the middle charged. Jonah and Aymes rose and fired in concert, overlapping to give reloading time to the other. Targets in his mind were stopping but he had no way to know if they were hit or simply taking cover.

The two to the right were skirting sideways and his V.I. indicated that they would outflank his cover and have a firing line in a couple of seconds. Their range and cover level were not ideal but the risk they posed was too high to ignore. Jonah snapped off two quick bursts aiming center torso of the red digital figures displayed in his VI. The cries of pain coming from their direction told him he had hit something.

His focus returned to the remaining principle threats. They were now stationary in the bush. Judging by the number of bullets hitting his cover, they seemed to be laying down heavy suppression fire. Jonah fired at the digital renderings in short bursts but heard no cries and there was no letup in the barrage. They must be in good cover.

As he reloaded he heard similar controlled bursts emanating from Aymes’ weapon. This was a bad situation, they couldn’t outlast this many enemy if they dug in. They would run out of ammo and be dead. They had to move.

Jonah felt Aymes suddenly spin and dash backward away from her cover. He assumed she had come to the same conclusion and almost without thinking his body reacted and began to turn to move with her. He saw Aymes already on her feet but not Ray. As his eyes scanned left into the bush he saw two men running backwards dragging Ray’s limp body by the legs. Neither were visible to his VI.

An explosion behind Aymes lifted her off her feet and catapulted her towards the men and Jonah’s world turned into static and piercing light. Fucking Lightning Ball. Jonah had seen plenty of these grenades go off. He’d even thrown a few himself. They were a nice percussion grenade, but their main function was to spit out a series of electromagnetic waves and smoke, confusing the hell out of proximity systems like Jonah’s.

The reflectivity of Jonah’s VI had instantly dialed up to max to protect his retinas against the flash rendering his eyes an otherworldly, silver. With very little light getting in, he was blind to the natural world, but his V.I. still functioned.

With the Lightning Ball filling the air with electromagnetic junk, Jonah’s system told him he was standing in the middle of tens of unknown threats, flicking in and out of existence. Most were phantoms created by the grenade, but some were real. Jonah flicked his VI off and froze, blind for a terrifying second waiting for his vision to return as the flash protection dissipated.

Clearly, they wanted Ray alive. Thinking fast he strode the short distance to Aymes and grabbed her by the arm. She was trying to rise but struggling. Jonah heaved her up and propelled her in the direction that Ray had been dragged. He figured if they wanted her taken alive then the enemy behind them might be hesitant to fire in their direction.

His assumption proved correct as they plunged into the bush. The fire from the rear ceased. Large flat leaved ferns gripped against Jonah’s trousers and hanging vines whipped at his face. Deeper into the undergrowth the darkness was almost complete but Jonah’s VI simply enhanced his vision, giving it a silvery hue.

Aymes was coming around and moving better. Her left arm was hanging, and Jonah could see a steady flow of blood dripping from her fingers. Slowly, as the Lightning Ball discharged, Jonah’s systems came back online. The confusion of phantoms in his mind coalesced into a handful of pursuers.

The three high threat enemies were among them of course. Up ahead, where he imagined Ray might be, there was nothing. He felt panic rising in his chest.

“We can’t outrun them,” Aymes gasped between breaths.

“Can you see Ray?” Jonah replied desperately.

“Nope,” Aymes replied. ” Gotta be NOBEs. We need to split. Double back. Get to a vehicle.”

Aymes veered suddenly right. A split second later Jonah broke left. He wished he had a grenade, but they had only been issued rifles for this mission. Mentally Jonah checked his ammo. One and a half clips. Not much. After that it would be knife work only.

Three of the five pursuers broke with him at a range of about thirty meters. Jonah spotted a massive tree outlined silver against the bustling multitude of the bush and he dove behind the trunk, simultaneously shutting down his entire BE system.

Unlike a civilian system that would still listen for remote signals and check connectivity, Jonah’s went completely dark. The three pursuing him, Aymes, and her two trackers, disappeared from his mind and his augmented vision faded to near dark. Jonah shut his eyes tight to bring on his natural night vision and listened. Old school now, he thought. You can’t see me, and I can’t see you. The crashing in the bush behind him ceased abruptly. Jonah could hear the hisses of urgent whispering, but it was too distant for him to understand.

He waited, eyes closed, struggling to control his breathing. Gradually he began to hear soft movement. His position was too obvious. Silently he rolled to a low crouch. With his system dark his proximity signature would be gone but they could still use infra-red vision to spot him.

Jonah made a short low dash, as quietly as he could to another tree further to his right. Far enough he hoped that he might be out of the direct path of his pursuers. Shots never came. Maybe they had no IR or perhaps they had gone dark too. Either that or the undergrowth was too thick.

Jonah froze again, eyes shut. He forced himself to take long slow breaths, his hammering heart was crying for more oxygen, but he knew his body. He would recover soon. Back behind him he heard a strangled squeal the ended abruptly in a dull thud. Aymes was doing her work he smiled to himself. Four on two now. For the first time that night, Jonah felt confident they would get out of this alive.

Somewhere off in the distance an unearthly howl echoed between the trees setting Jonah’s teeth on edge and raising the hairs on his neck. Jonah’s fear for Ray ratcheted up a notch. With a sinking heart Jonah resigned himself to the fact that they were unlikely to recover her now. The kidnappers would reach the vehicles before they had a chance to take care of their pursuers.

Not wasting the opportunity, he used the fading echoes of the howl to cover another quick dash back towards his pursuers at an angle into the bush. He found a spot where the lamp still shining in the campsite penetrated through the trees, giving just enough light that he could make out the color of the leaves in the corridor of foliage ahead.

There he waited, silent as death. Breathing almost normally now, heart still laboring but under control. It didn’t take long. The silhouette of a helmet passed through the faint light. Then another. Jonah waited until the third man passed before he moved.

Creeping low and quiet he joined the back of the trio. His vision had recovered fully, and he was starting to pick out details. A shiny leaf reflecting the meager light went dark as a body passed in front. Jonah picked up a fallen stick and tossed it out to the right, up ahead of where he thought the front man would be. All three shadows disappeared as the men dropped to a crouch.

Jonah froze, his eyes focused on the space the closest man had just vacated. Jonah heard a whispered command from the front and the sound of movement. He drew his knife and took two strides. The synthetic outline of a CDSE helmet stood out starkly against the forest shadows and Jonah stabbed hard just beneath it. He must have hit his mark because there was no scream. Right through the neck.

Jonah fired a burst into the forest where the two leaders had gone. He pulled the knife out releasing a gust of gurgling breath from the man’s lungs. He clawed at his neck, but his vocal chords were gone. Jonah use the sound of the man’s thrashing to cover his next move a few long strides directly towards the other men and then dropped to his belly in the scrub. His entire being focused as he heard the men half running back in his direction cursing in whispers. They passed within a meter of him.

He rose to a knee behind them and fired one long burst, emptying the magazine into the backs of the men. The impact of the rounds knocked them forward and they fell. One passed out instantly, but the other let out a long high-pitched wail that made Jonah’s teeth clench. Knife in hand he strode forward to finish him. Mouth thick again and steel on his taste buds.

The massive shadow of Aymes beat him to it. She thrust her knife through the man’s spine just above the shoulder blades. A good quick death. Aymes fell to a knee clutching at her side.

“Turn on your fucking proximity Fielding,” she gasped through gritted teeth.

“Shit, did I do that?”

“’Fraid so hero, I fucking hate gut shots. ‘Specially this far from a medic.”

Aymes’ grimacing teeth were visible in the minimal light and grew into sharp focus as Jonah’s VI and proximity came back on line.

“Shit, sorry Sarg. I had to go dark. They had me cornered.”

“Fuck that hurts,” Aymes gasped, eyes squeezing shut with the pain. “Unbelievable. One friendly in the fight. Still get shot by him. Fuck!”

“Let’s get back to camp, I need the light to patch you up, looks like the rest have gone. They took Ray.”

Aymes nodded that she knew. “Those bastards are gonna wish they fuckin’ killed me and next time I see Jager, I’m going to stab him in the eye with one of his own fucking ribs. Bet you anything he ordered us dead.” Aymes was puffing hard trying to breathe through the pain and not pass out.

“Gotta move Sarg, can you walk?”

“Stow that weapon before you get over here,” Aymes grimaced, looking daggers at Jonah.

Jonah jumped forward to help Aymes up.

They staggered slowly towards the camp, Jonah struggling to support Aymes’ weight while focusing his energy on any enemies that might still be lying in wait. The place seemed deserted with no signs of the vehicles. Got what they came for, Jonah suspected, though it seemed likely the he and Aymes were supposed to be dead.

Luckily, they had left Ray’s work light still blazing. Enhanced vision was good but lacked the resolution of natural vision for really fine work, like the suturing that Jonah suspected he was about to have to do on Aymes.

“Diamorph,” Aymes gasped sitting down hard on the ground in the pool of light. She started gingerly unclasping her antiballistic nano-gel vest, but needed help hauling the stodgy garment over her damaged shoulder. The garments were lighter and more flexible than old fashioned polymer armor as they were constructed from a fabric filled with a network of non-Newtonian fluid filled vesicles. Still stiff enough, however, to cause a problem for a woman with a smashed shoulder and a gut wound.

Jonah’s bullet must have missed the bottom of the vest which probably meant it hadn’t hit any major organs. It must have missed her femoral artery also as she would surely have been dead already in that case. Good chance it might have nicked her bowel though, Jonah thought.

He lifted the light medkit from Aymes’ pack that was still lying where she was about to bed down before they got jumped. Jonah stabbed Aymes with one amp of diamorph just to take the edge off the pain. He got her hip clear of fabric and managed to get her to roll enough that he could see the exit wound. Through and through. At least that was good. No bullet stuck in the wound. The wound was oozing but not spurting.

“Doesn’t look too bad from here,” Jonah observed.

“I’ll know in a couple of hours,” Aymes replied. “If I’m bleeding too bad in there, I’ll need a surgeon. Plug it anyway. The shoulder definitely needs reconstruction. Something broken up there for sure. I can’t lift it.”

Jonah turned his attention to the shotgun wound in her shoulder. He started picking out flecks of fabric and bone and poking around for shot in the wound. After a minute or two, he moved the work light closer and gave Aymes another amp of diamorph. She was blowing hard and sweating with the pain of the poking.

Jonah winced, “Sorry, you need to be able to move if they come back. I don’t want to knock you out … Yep, shoulder’s definitely broken, you’ll be out for a few weeks with this one. I’ll put a skin patch on so at least the muscle and tissue will regen but there is nothing I can do about the bone at the moment.”

Jonah fished out a small cryocan and broke the seal. A cloud of steam erupted from the opening as the minus eighty-degree environment in the can hit the warm moisture laden Dianian air. An inner cylinder pulled out of the can with a light tug revealing several tightly rolled strips and a few syringes. An indicator showed the temperature of the contents rising rapidly.

Jonah waited until they warmed to five degrees at which point the temperature indicator changed from red to green. Jonah took a syringe, injecting half the contents into the wound on her hip and half into the exit wound. Aymes winced again as catalyst in the liquid reacted with the bulk causing the contents to expand into a flexible biopolymer mesh that gripped the broken tissue of the bullet wound, sealing the hole tightly. A slurry of defrosting stem cells containing Aymes’ DNA waited within the matrix and mixed with the blood that rapidly soaked through the mesh, bringing the cells to life.

Personalized regen gels regrow tissue and muscle amazingly well, but wouldn’t work on intestine. Internal organ grafts took a few days to grow and there was no way to do it out here. Jonah hoped that she wasn’t leaking internally.

When the tissue patches were warm enough to unroll, Jonah applied one over a thick layer of regen gel on her shoulder. As always, the speed of blood profusion through expanding gel amazed him. Other chemicals in the gel broke down the blood that had already clotted and arrested the inflammatory process. The wound would revascularize and heal in a matter of days.

Jonah had received worse flesh wounds than this and could barely tell where the scar was. Even the hair follicles regenerated. The bone would remain broken and the arm useless until Aymes could get to a surgeon. Within a day or two though, she would be over the worst of the pain.

“I’m thinking of hiding you around here somewhere and following them. You’re not gonna be able to walk far for a couple of days and if your bowel is nicked we may need to move quicker… We need to get a vehicle,” Jonah observed as he finished the last of the dressing.

Aymes looked around, already assessing the bush for good hiding spots. She pointed in the direction of some extra dense ferns with her good arm and made to sit up.

“Hold still Master Sargent,” Jonah instructed, “I’ll slide you over.” He gathered her sleeping bag and lifted, first her legs, then her torso onto it.

The route wasn’t smooth, and it taxed the limits of his strength but eventually, Aymes was stashed deep in the ferns, one sleeping bag beneath her and one on top. Jonah set her up with a bunch of diamorph, three canteens of water, and a bunch of food bars that the CDSE carried. They shared a last look as Jonah clasped her good shoulder. No words were needed. Jonah would make it back if her could. If he couldn’t Aymes was on her own.