The Eternity Brigade (20 page)

“
He certainly deserves better than being stuck here,” Singh said. “That’s for damn sure.”

“But where do we go with him?” Ibañez asked.

“The only time I’ve been off the base,” Belilo said, “was to go to that bar in town—and it’s such a small town we can’t hide him there. I don’t know anyplace else on this world.”

“Let’s get him off the base first,” Singh said. “We’ll figure the rest out later.”

Green had slipped back into a trance as they dressed him in the dead scientist’s uniform. Hawker and Ibañez carried him to the door while Singh stooped over Philaskut’s corpse and carved off the head, hoping the scanners would still accept it to get them off the base.

They retraced their steps carefully, with Ibañez and Belilo going ahead to act as scouts. The scanners recognized Philaskut’s head and opened the doors for them along the way. They made it out to their floatcar and loaded Green into the back. Climbing in after him, they started off toward a side gate where they hoped the security would be less rigid. As yet there’d been no alarm about their escape.

The late afternoon shadows were lengthening as they reached the gate. There was only a robot sentinel stationed here, not a living person; that could be either good or bad. A robot could sometimes be fooled easier than a real person—but if it became too confused, it could activate alarms and bring the entire base down on them.

They stopped as the robot commanded, and Singh confidently showed it Philaskut’s head. The robot scanned it, and lights flashed. “Unacceptable,” it said tersely.

Singh was sweating. He looked at his companions. “Any ideas?”

“Maybe Philaskut wasn’t cleared for this gate,” Belilo said. “Or maybe his head’s been dead too long.”

“Try it again,” Symington said. “Sometimes I’d try a dollar bill in a vending machine and it wouldn’t work the first time, then it worked perfectly the second time. These machines are stupid, sometimes.”

“What’s a dollar bill?” Belilo asked.

“What’s a vending machine?” Singh asked almost simultaneously.

“Never mind,” Symington said. “Just try it again.”

Singh held up the head again, but the results were the same. In addition, a light in the machine’s forehead that had been blinking green suddenly started blinking yellow. The robot’s suspicions were definitely aroused.

“Oh, fuck it!” Symington said. Pulling his beampistol, he blew the robot to pieces. Immediately the air was filled with the sound of sirens, and the gates ahead of them slammed shut with a blinking red light.

“That was a shitheaded thing to do,” Singh exclaimed. “Now how do we get out?”

“Like this.” Symington pulled a grenade from his pocket and flung it at the gates. The massive metal portals blew apart from the explosion, leaving enough of a gap for the floatcar to ease through.

Singh tossed Philaskut’s head out of the car and piloted their vehicle slowly through the twisted wreckage of the gates, then gunned forward.

They sped along for more than a minute while the sound of the sirens died in the distance. Then Belilo spotted something on the horizon ahead of them. “What’s that?”

Singh squinted forward. “Damn. The outer perimeter line went up. Must have happened automatically when we breached the gate.”

As they came closer, they could see the walls rising out of the ground, with gun turrets stationed every few hundred meters around the top. The biggest guns pointed outward, but a few of the smaller guns could swivel in toward the center—and they were doing so now. As the car approached the wall, it would soon be coming under heavy fire.

“Even if we get through the wall, we won’t be safe,” Singh said. “They’ll point the big guns at us then and blow us off the map. Our only chance is to take out one of the turrets and hope it’ll give us an escape route.”

He steered the floatcar straight for the nearest gun tower. His passengers needed no instructions to get down as low as they could.

As the floatcar came within range, Singh began an evasive pattern that he hoped would keep them out of the automated gunsights long enough to reach the objective. His passengers were bumped frantically around against the walls and one another during his maneuvers, and then jolted forward as the car screeched to a halt.

“You can get up,” Singh said. “We’re at the base of the tower. We’ll need a few grenades to bring it down and open ourselves a hole.”

Ibañez had been on top of the pile, so he was the first one up. Grabbing a grenade from his pocket, he hurled it at the tower and, without waiting to see the effect, took out a second.

Several things happened at once. His first grenade exploded against the base of the gun turret, knocking it off balance and bringing it halfway to the ground, pointing at a cockeyed angle. At the same time, a beam from one of its guns neatly sliced off Ibañez’s left arm halfway between shoulder and elbow. The soldier screamed in pain and fell out of the floatcar, still holding the second grenade in his right hand. Hawker tried to get up to help him—but before he could, Ibañez scrambled to his feet once more and charged directly at the wall. Several more deadly beams hit him, but his momentum carried him up to the barrier and the grenade exploded, destroying him as well as blowing a hole in the wall large enough for their craft to fly through.

Singh didn’t hesitate, but gunned the floatcar through the breach. There was no need to comment on their comrade’s heroism; they’d all learned to view death as a temporary phenomenon.

Their destruction of the gun turret seemed to have done the trick; they had a narrow alley of escape through which the base’s fire could not reach them. The guns on either side did not overlap their range completely. Singh took advantage of this, racing the vehicle at top speed away from the installation. The other guns along the perimeter continued to fire, sometimes coming dangerously close, but Singh somehow avoided sustaining further damage.

“We’ve got company,” Symington commented. He’d been looking back over the edge of the seat, and was the first to spot the pursuit craft coming toward them. The runaways had perhaps a two-minute head start, but the army had vehicles that were much faster than a simple floatcar. Unless Singh could think of a few more tricks, their mutiny would be very short-lived.

The terrain around the base was largely undeveloped, dominated by heavy brush. As they sped outward, the land became more thickly wooded, and there appeared to be a forest up ahead. The floatcar’s maximum altitude was no more than a few meters, not nearly high enough to clear the trees—and the woods were dense enough to make passage through them difficult, if not impossible. They would either have to skirt around the edge—losing more time to their pursuers—or abandon the car and continue on foot, hoping to lose the pursuit in the forest. The latter was a forlorn hope, considering the sophisticated sensors the army now had available.

“I’m going to slow the car when I reach the edge of the forest,” Singh said calmly. “Then I’ll turn and veer off to the right. I want you all to be prepared to jump out when I give the word. If we’re lucky, they’ll still be too far away to see you leave, and they’ll chase after me. You can hide in the woods with Green. I’ll come back and join you after I shake them.”

“But...” Hawker began.

Singh stopped the protest. “Relax. Without your weights in the car, I can make this fucker do miracles. Get ready…now!”

The car swerved sharply, slowing and banking so abruptly the passengers were nearly tipped out. Hawker grabbed Green and leaped out with him; Symington and Belilo jumped out on their own. The instant the others were free of the car, Singh raced off to the right without a word of farewell.

Bruised from the rapid exit, Hawker got slowly to his feet, staring at the rapidly departing floatcar until Symington nudged him. “Come on; we can’t stand out here all day. We’ve got to hide.” The two men picked up Green’s limp body and carried it into the woods without another glance after the vanishing car. Belilo was in the lead, picking a path for them through the woods. All three fugitives knew they’d never see Singh again in this lifetime.

***

They went just a short way into the forest, deep enough so they couldn’t be spotted by surveillance craft, and found places to dig in. They had no way of knowing whether the army thought they were all still in the floatcar, but they knew some tricks to minimize detection. Motion was one of the easiest qualities to detect, as was their body heat. By scattering themselves out so they weren’t clumped together, each heat spot would be that much smaller and harder to find—and by staying still for several hours, a searcher might mistake them for part of the natural landscape.

Hawker stayed with Green, while Symington and Belilo were each a hundred meters away in different directions. As night approached, Hawker huddled with his friend for warmth, whispering quietly the story of what had happened so far. He wasn’t sure how much of the tale Green could comprehend, but there were occasional flashes of awareness in the other’s eyes that reassured Hawker he was doing the right thing.

With the coming of night, the temperature dropped severely. Hawker’s uniform was specially constructed for temperature control, but he could do little for his hands and face. He checked to make sure the controls on Green’s borrowed uniform were working correctly; he didn’t want to have gone through all this trouble only to have his friend die of exposure.

After about three hours, with the full darkness of night covering them, he heard a rustling in the bushes that turned out to be Belilo. “I think we’re probably safe enough for now,” she said. “If they’d had any idea we were in here, we’d have seen some sign of them before this. We can stay here for the night and move out in the morning.” She didn’t say where they’d move out
to
; at this point, she had no more idea of that than Hawker.

She was back a few minutes later with Symington. The three soldiers discussed their situation briefly, and agreed that the best direction for them to go was away from the base. None of them had much idea of Cellina’s geography; they could be heading out into a wilderness with no hope of survival. But that didn’t matter at the moment.

They had no idea, either, of what possible dangers might lurk in these woods, so they agreed to keep a watch. Hawker was still too keyed up to sleep, so he volunteered to take the first shift. Belilo and Symington moved off a short way into the brush—and from the noises they made, Hawker could tell they were relieving their tensions in ways other than sleeping.

The noises stopped alter a while, and by the time he went to wake Belilo for her watch she and Symington were sleeping a meter or so apart Neither Hawker nor Belilo made any comment; she got up quietly and he took her place on the ground. He thought he might still be too nervous to sleep, but the day’s exertions finally caught up with him and he slept until Symington woke him at daybreak.

They were all ravenously hungry, and finding something to eat became their first priority. Belilo discovered some berry bushes whose fruit proved both edible and delicious. Symington shot a small furry animal. They didn’t dare build a fire for fear the smoke might give away their position, but Belilo showed them a trick she’d learned with this model of beampistol—how to use it as a simple heat generator. That was enough to cook their meal.

They gave some of the fruit and meat to Green. At first they could just put it in his mouth, but after some time he got the general idea and began eating on his own. His stomach rejected the meal, however, and he threw up almost immediately afterward. This worried his friends, but there was nothing they could do about it now. All they could do was try again later and hope eventually they’d find something he could digest.

Belilo wondered how they would manage to carry Green, but Symington settled the point by hoisting the man over his shoulder and insisting he’d been on forced marches with a heavier pack than this. They set off through the forest at a slow but steady pace.

During a rest break, Belilo and Hawker improvised a travois to carry Green. The woods were not so dense that walking was difficult, and the trees kept them out of the worst rays of the sun. They made reasonable time under the circumstances, and by evening they found themselves at the far side of the small forest, facing an open plain of tall, waving grass.

They tried once more to feed Green, and again his stomach rejected what they offered. The twisted man looked at them apologetically, but could not speak comprehensibly enough for them to understand him. He seemed, at one point, about to cry, but his friends comforted him until he again lapsed into his normal trance.

Symington kept the first watch that night, and it was Hawker’s turn to go off into the brush with Belilo. They had sex with the same impersonal passion they’d had on Venus, both too tired from the day’s march to do more than go through the mechanical motions.

Afterward, as they lay side by side, Hawker said, “I’m sorry.”

“What for? You weren’t that bad. We’re both tired.”

Hawker shook his head, even though she probably couldn’t see the gesture in the dark. “No, I mean about this whole thing. I just wanted to help my friend, and now it looks like it’s all been for nothing. I’m sorry I had to get you all involved in this. It’s so silly—”

“It’s not silly. In fact, it’s the first thing I’ve done in I don’t know how many lifetimes that
isn’t
silly.”