So It Begins (39 page)

  Should we ignore it? command asked, thinking that the loss of a single individual was as nothing compared to the risks of extracting the survivor. Maybe the call was a ruse, a trap. Then again, it might be worth the valuable intelligence we’d gain to mount an effort. Fleet was desperate to learn anything it could about the Shardies, especially how a child had managed to elude capture by our relentless enemy.

  Nobody had ever escaped the Shardies, not since we discovered how they turned any survivor into organic components for their ships. The horror of those images, the undead bodies stranded into the controls of the one captured ship, had shown everyone that there were worse things than death, should they be captured.

  The Shardies had been relentless in driving us from our colony worlds. In deep space it was no better. They destroyed our most hardened ships with better tactics and weapons. Since we’d first encountered them, they had relentlessly continued to advance. If the war persisted as it had for the past three years, with us abandoning one world after the next, the Shardies would reach Earth within a decade, or maybe less.

  Fleet needed whatever information the survivor might have. Earth needed the hope that someone could survive to report what she had seen. We all needed to know.

  Command had no choice. Someone had to find whoever sent that signal.

  The deployment was carefully planned to minimize risk. Four high-speed, light-attack ships would emerge from blink just beyond the Holzberg limit, fire off a stick of five Rapture missiles and blink away, hopefully before the Shardies had time to react. The theorists calculated that if the total hang time near the planet was fifteen to eighteen seconds—the upper limit only if a ship had to roll into firing position—they all might have a chance to get away.

  The seconds after firing were the dangerous time for the ships’ crews. If they didn’t reach the Holzberg limit in those eighteen seconds, the overstressed drives would turn the ship and everyone on board into an instantaneously brilliant cloud of dispersing plasma. I had the easy part, they said.

  All I had to do was survive long enough to send my signal.

  The hundreds of fragments from the sabot spread out in an elongated, egg-shaped pattern over a thousand square kilometers along the path of the payload. Even if the Shardies weren’t preoccupied cleaning up the destruction from the missiles’ impacts and suspected something, they’d still waste a lot of time finding and inspecting that many pieces. Expand those searches over twenty patterns and you came up with the faint probability of my being detected. I knew that, even with that sort of insurance, they’d eventually find my landing spot. It was only a matter of time. I had to hurry.

  I discovered I was still in one piece when I uncoiled my aching body after the long bounce and roll. My left arm dangled loosely and a chunk of that shoulder was missing. Other than that all my parts seemed to be functional. I probed the arm and found that it had been dislocated by whatever I hit. That must have been what ripped that piece of shoulder away. A little pressure in the right places, a twist of the shoulder, and the arm was nearly as good as the day it was installed.

  I checked my position and discovered that I was about two hundred kilometers away from the location of the signal. Hell of an overshoot, but not bad, considering the variables. The deviation could have come from unexpected upper level winds or some other variable. I figured two days to hike there if I didn’t stop. I set out.

  The location was a tiny coastal village. There were thirty buildings that I could see from my perch on the ridgeline, twenty of them were homes. The long piers told me that this might once have been a fishing community, but whatever boats had docked there were now gone. One road ran down the center of town and there was a landing pad to the west. The landing pad looked too raw, too new.

  Judging from the amount of debris on the road there must have been a hell of a panic when they abandoned this place. Maybe that’s where the boats had gone. Had they been used to transport the colonists to an evacuation center?

  I imagined they’d scuttled them, rather than leave anything for the damned Shardie bastards.

  I watched the town until nightfall but saw no evidence that anything alive was down there. Not a stray dog or cat, not a rat, and no birds. An hour after dark, I worked my way down the slope, pausing often, alert for some sign of movement, some indication that I had been spotted.

  I kept my disruptor ready. One of the things we’d learned was that the Shardies were incredibly fast. I’d only have two milliseconds or less to react—just enough time to squeeze the trigger once, but that was all it would take.

  The largest building was filled with cold, rusting machines and long metal tables. Here and there were slender knives and curving hooks on long handles. Fishing village for sure, I guessed.

  I worked my way down the road, passing from one building to the next as swiftly and silently as I could. On the fifth building, a home, I found her.

  I shifted sight to infrared and surveyed the room. The only heat source was her small body. The only sound her slow breathing. The only light a shaft of moonlight through the shutters.

  I put a hand over the girl’s mouth and shook her gently. She struggled briefly and then went limp, her eyes wide in horror when she got a glimpse of me. “Sergeant Millikan, Fifth Marine,” I said softly. I doubted anyone could overhear, but you can never be too careful where the Shardies are concerned. “I’ve come for you,” I said, which while completely true, was not necessarily accurate.

  “I didn’t think anyone would come,” she said in a rush. “Especially not something like you.” She seemed to accept my assurance that I was a marine, but not quite sure that I was a someone.

  I took a good look at her: skinny, scraggly hair, and filthy, all of which would be expected from what she had been through. Her black hair was cut short, her nails broken—some bitten to the quick—and crusted with God-knows-what. She had a gash on the top of her head that might be pretty bad under the crust of scabby blood. She looked to be about fifteen, maybe a year or two more or as much less—too damn young to be in this situation, not that there was any other age that would be better.

  A pair of muddy tan boots that looked three sizes too large for her sat by her side. Nearby was a smelly pile of fish entrails.

  She caught my glance. “I fished last night,” she said. “By hand.” And ate it raw, I guessed. That was smart. A fire would attract attention.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked. “How did you get here?”

  “A week, I think,” she replied. “I was a mile up the coast before, but I came here after I used that ’phone.” She must have seen my puzzled expression. “A mile is about one and a half kilometers,” she explained.

  “Archaic measure,” I recalled. A lot of the colonies went back to the old measures as a signal of their departure from Earth’s ways. Well, that experiment didn’t last long, did it?

  But, a week? “Where were you before that?” It had been nearly six months since the Shardies arrived.

  She shrugged. “Running, hiding, keeping away from them. I just kept going until I found the ’phone—back there,” she waved a hand in the general direction of the door.

  I looked. It was an old unit, leaking battery acid and showing no power light. She must have drained it in that single cry for help. I left it there. Useless.

  “Are you taking me away?” she asked when I returned.

  That was a good question. Staying in the village wasn’t a good idea. The Shardies methodically erased all signs of human presence before they moved on, so it was only a matter of time before they destroyed this one. It could be next week, or within an hour. Or maybe they were too busy checking the debris and dealing with the effects of the multiple strikes. “Yes,” I said.

  The girl quickly gathered her few belongings—the boots, a ship’s jacket with a Fourth Fleet emblem on the shoulder, a wicked knife with a serrated back, and the blanket she had been sleeping under—before we set out.

  “My name’s Tashia,” she said softly.

  “Call me Sergeant,” I replied.

  I led her up the slope, following the same path I had taken in just in case they would follow our heat trail. Once we were on top I intended to stay to the rocks and touch the ground only where we couldn’t avoid it. That way we’d avoid leaving obvious signs of our passage. I knew we couldn’t escape detection completely, but there was no sense in making our trail easy either.

  She began to lag behind after we’d covered barely ten kilometers and slumped to the ground at fifteen. “Sarge, I can’t go any further,” she sighed. “I’m so tired.”

  I dug into my side pocket and pulled out one of my G-rations. “Eat this,” I ordered. The strong military stimulants probably wouldn’t do her weakened body any good, but the nutrients in the bar would provide her with the strength to last until daybreak.

  Intelligence had force-fed me every speck of information about this world they could glean out of the colonists. In the very early days of the colony there had been a small mining operation on this plateau. The vein turned out to be shallow and petered out within a year or so, but not before producing enough coal to fuel the first few settlements. After the mine was abandoned all of the miners had moved on, leaving behind only those things they could not take with them—foundations and the mine shaft. Machinery, building materials, household goods, everything that could be moved was taken away.

  I found the entrance to the shaft before the sky started to gray. I took us back deep enough that I couldn’t see the stars framed in the entrance. I flopped down with my back against the wall to face the way we’d come.

  Tashia sat near my side, arms hugging her stick-thin legs against her chest. “I’m glad you came, Sarge,” she said. “I was so afraid nobody would. I just used that ’phone to let somebody know I was alive.”

  “You said there were others. Tell me about them.”

  She shook her head. “Dad died, I guess.” She said that in such a calm voice that I figured she’d already drained emotion from the memory. “Dad and I were out camping when everyone else went away. I guess we sort of got overlooked.”

  I nodded. It could happen. Emergency evacuations are messy affairs at best, chaotic at worst. Easy to suppose the missing ones were on another boat, another vehicle. A few could get lost.

  “We didn’t know where to go. We couldn’t find anyone. It was like they all ran away.” She was trembling as she recalled that frightening time. “Then the things came for us.”

  “Things? What did they look like?” This was good information. A first-hand description might help someone.

  She shook. “I . . . I didn’t get a really good look, but they were glowing, sort of. It was night and they moved so fast. They put me in a sort of box. It was so small I couldn’t stand up in it. Dark, too.”

  “Did you hear anything, sense anything—a smell, an aroma, anything at all?”

  She was silent for a long while. “No. I was so cold. They took my clothes so I had goosebumps all over.”

  “Anything else?” I had to get as much information from her as I could in the time remaining. “How long were you in the box?”

  She frowned. “Maybe a few days ’cause I got really, really thirsty. One day I woke up, the top of the box was opened a crack. I stuck my fingers in the crack and pried it open.

  “I was in a white room with a lot of icicles, only they weren’t ice at all. More like glass, you know?”

  “Was there anything else in the room—somebody moving around, a machine, anything that you’d recognize?”

  She thought a moment before replying. “A couple of other boxes and those weird icicles everywhere.”

  “Go on, please. What did you do then?”

  “I ran. I had to get out of the scary room away from the box. I found a pile of stuff from our camp—that’s where I got some clothes—then I ran away into the woods.”