The Last Charge (The Nameless War Trilogy Book 3) (22 page)

Chapter Ten

Figures in the Landscape

1st April 2068
 

The object was six metres long by seven and a half wide. Its speed and apparent density would put it outside the usual parameters of a natural formation, while its current course placed it on track to intersect the planet’s orbit within a fortnight. Two years previously, that last point alone would have been enough to warrant investigation. If the military established no threat was present, the orbital mining industry might have investigated to see if it might have any economic value. If they passed it over, the planetary defence grid would either have pushed the object onto a different course or used it for target practice.

That was then. There were no miners now and the defence grid was nothing more than a few orbiting fragments. Given time, the planet’s new owners would likely put their own systems in place, but for the moment no one was scanning the skies closely enough to spot such a small and apparently harmless object.

So no one got close enough to make out the cylinder form, the burnt out remains of the primary thruster assembly or the stencilled lettering along the sides that read:
ESCAPE POD 037 – BADEN BASE
. Ahead was the planet Landfall, once humanity’s, now lost. 

___________________________

Alice
whistled tunelessly as she laced fresh branches up through the netting that stretched from one side of the clearing to the other. Working with her arms over her head was tiring but it needed to be done. 

“You know, boss,” Badie said as they finished up, “we could really do with finding a better solution than this. We use up far too much time and effort on it.”

“I know,” Alice replied. “An actual camouflage netting would be my favourite. This lash-up really blocks out too much light. Still, just as well Darren came up with it.”

“Yes,” Badie said forbiddingly. “Well, he would know about concealing fields from aerial reconnaissance. I doubt it was banana patata he was growing though.”

Alice smiled but said nothing as she helped Badie put on his backpack then filled it up with the tools they’d brought with them. Despite the loss of an arm in the trenches of Douglas Base, Badie was still as strong as an ox and it definitely grated on the former policeman’s nerves to use something that had been suggested by Darren their – allegedly – ex-cannabis grower. Still, that might be what would get them through the next winter, assuming a lot of other things went their way.

It was a solid hour and a half hike back to the central camp. At one time that would have been enough to leave
Alice worn out. Like the netting, the long walk was another thing that burned a lot of time but again like the netting, was a necessary evil. As the two of them followed a game trail, Alice heard something, something out of place, and stopped dead in her tracks. Badie froze and then dropped into a crouch.

What is it?
His raised eyebrow asked.

She heard it again, something moving down the trail towards them, something that wasn’t too concerned about making noise. There was a faint pop as
Alice released the catch on the holster at her hip. In what was now a practiced motion, she checked the magazine. Eleven nine-millimetre rounds remained. She chambered one of the irreplaceable bullets and motioned Badie to retreat back into the undergrowth. He nodded and slipped back, a small axe gripped in his remaining hand, while she took a firing stance behind a tree. She’d only fired the pistol a handful of times and most of those had been warning shots against animals. The weapon might be more a symbol of authority than anything else, but its weight had often been a comfort. 

She could make out individual footfalls now, heavy and flat-footed – someone running hard, but only with the two feet of a human, rather than the four of a Nameless soldier drone. She half lowered the weapon just as the runner came into view. It was one of the girls from the camp, her feet thumping the ground as she puffed like an old steam train.
Alice stepped out of her concealment. The runner let out a cry of surprise, jumped sideways and crashed into a shrub.

“Juliet, what are you doing here?”
Alice demanded as she cleared the pistol’s chamber and re-holstered it. 

Juliet was still getting her breath when Badie reappeared, axe still in hand.

“William says for you to come, Boss!” Juliet said between gasps.

“What is it?”

“Something came down from the sky, Boss.”

“Nameless?”

No. In that event William wouldn’t be sending messages. He would know to pack up and run.

“No, Boss,” Juliet confirmed. “Something big came down on parachutes. We all saw it come down. It landed over the hills to the north.”

Alice glanced in the direction of the camp then down at Juliet. The girl was still sucking in air.

“Now what?” she muttered as she shrugged off her pack. “Badie.”

“Yeah?”

“You and Juliet take my pack. Make your way back to camp as fast as you can manage.”

“Go, we’ll catch up.”

When Alice reached the camp twenty minutes later, she could immediately feel an atmosphere. The sentries had been reprimanded often enough in the past about slacking. This time though, Alice heard the alert and the all clear being sounded before she even reached the perimeter. There was a smell of damp, smouldering wood from the fires at the very edge of the camp. Normally, these were placed there to distract any heat-seekers that might home in on them, but now they had been doused. Her second-in-command stood in the middle of the camp, pack on, arms crossed. Around him some people were milling about. Most were seated, but very obviously ready to go.

“William,” she called out as she jogged towards him.

“Boss,” he said in a serious tone. “We may have us a problem.”

“Tell me.”

He placed a hand on her shoulder and walked her over to the ravine that flanked the camp.

“About an hour ago,” he said pointing, “we sighted something coming down. Well, I say we, but it was actually Juliet who spotted it. That girl’s got eyes like a hawk. Anyway, it was coming down on a parachute and we got binoculars onto it.”

“A parachute? Not rotors?”

“Yeah. A lot like the old pre-contact space capsules.”

“So not a Nameless drop pod?”

“Human, boss, definitely human. It was a lander of some kind, a pretty big one by the look of it.”

“How far away?”

“I think it was drifting away from us when it dropped behind those hills – so twenty to thirty kilometres maybe?”

Alice chewed her lip as she thought. When they first escaped from Douglas Base, her plan had been to keep moving and never again become sitting ducks for the Nameless. That simple plan had been enough for the first few months. They’d been able to hunt and gather as they went along. Occasionally they risked entering abandoned human settlements. A lot had already been cleaned out by other groups of escapees from Douglas, but even a single packet of dried peas could make such an expedition worthwhile. The winter had been a wake-up call though. They’d gone to ground in a cluster of caves and damn near starved. After that, the plan had changed.

“If this area was inside the range of any radar system then it can’t have missed the pod coming down,” William said. “The sensible thing would be to start moving now, get out of the region as fast as we can.”

“And probably starve within the next six months,” Alice replied, glancing up at him. “We can’t bring the fields or the crops with us. If the Nameless come to investigate, they’ll come by air, in which case we couldn’t get far enough away to matter. And if we’re on the move, we’re more likely to be spotted.”

“Alright, Boss
. What’s the plan?”

“No point sending messengers to get the people working the fields – most of them will already be on their way back. We’ll go quiet for the next few days. No fires, no movement, wait to see if anything happens.” She paused and shook her head. “An entire
sodding
planet and it has to land next to us.”

“And if nothing does happen?” he asked.

“I need to think about that.”

As the sun dropped below the horizon, Alice sat with her back to a tree watching the northern skies. One part joke to two parts reality, her nickname ‘Boss’ was a far cry from the Alice who had originally arrived on Landfall. She’d been a civilian language expert then, working for the fleet but really only passing through. Then the war started and five minutes in, her ride was blown away. She’d fetched up at the Fleet Ground Base at Douglas, got drafted and assigned as a stretcher-bearer. By virtue of survival, she was judged to be command material and promoted to section leader.

When
Douglas’s defences began to buckle, she was assigned to lead two hundred and fifty refugees out into the wilderness to try to keep them safe. That had been more than six months ago. Since then they’d lost nearly fifty people. Most, small family clusters, simply slipped away, choosing to go it alone. A handful, weakened by the months in the underground shelters of Douglas, sickened and died. One man, a troublemaker, thief and, she suspected, a sexual criminal, she had personally driven off at gunpoint. However, survivors who joined them from other groups had replaced nearly all their losses. Going by their tales, many of those groups had been badly led. Some had been hunted down by the Nameless and destroyed, while others had turned on each other in the worst ways possible. In all that time, Alice’s authority had never been seriously questioned, not because of her gun, but mostly because of the threadbare corporal’s stripes still sewn to her jacket. Alice wasn’t trained, but she had survived the trenches of Douglas. In the wilderness of Landfall, that made her the equivalent of the kingly one-eyed man in the land of the blind.

“I’ve given it a lot of thought and this is a potential opportunity,” Alice told the small gathering of her most trusted lieutenants. “So we will go and look for that pod,”

For three days they’d watched the skies intently – three bright sunny days without a cloud in the sky. Obviously that didn’t rule out satellite surveillance, but at what point did caution give way to paranoia?

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” cautioned Alan Berkly. “If the Nameless come while we’re there – well God help us!”

“That is a fair point, Alan, but if they haven’t come looking after three days, then odds are they won’t look at all,”
Alice replied. “As it is, we’re short of a lot of things, things that might be on that pod, and unlike the settlements we’ve checked in the past, it won’t have been picked over by someone else first. Hell, one first aid kit would be worth it. Obviously we’ll take precautions, just in case. William, I’ll lead this myself. You’re in charge while I’m away. Minimum movement and keep the fields well hidden.”

“Okay, Boss.”

“The most likely result,” Alice added as she stood, “is that we won’t even find the damn thing. That’s thick woodland and God only knows how many square kilometres it could have come down in. I’ll be looking for volunteers because if we are spotted then we aren’t coming back here – we’ll lead them as far away as we can.”

For all Alice’s grim words, there was no shortage of volunteers, allowing her to select six dependable individuals, several of whom had been witnesses to the original descent. Leaving at first light, it took them a full day to reach and crest the hills the pod had disappeared behind. Examining the trees below, Alice identified several likely points where something large might have crashed through the forest canopy. After taking a bearing, they started down.

That was the start of three frustrating days crisscrossing the forest, more than enough time for
Alice to wonder whether the whole idea was a stupid mistake. All of this extra walking was burning calories that, unlike working in the fields, did not promise any return on the investment. She was within perhaps an hour of giving up when a shout came from the far end of their search line.

“I’ve found it!”

“Are you sure?” she shouted back.

“Oh, yeah!”

I just hope it hasn’t got stuck up a tree
, she thought as she made her way in the direction of the voice.

On that count at least, she wasn’t disappointed. The pod was much larger than the drop pods she’d seen before. Over seven metres wide, it appeared to have landed on and pulverised one tree on the way down. The red and white parachute had snagged on another tree and it was that splash of colour, which had helped Brahimi find it. As William had said, it was clearly human, confirmed by Brahimi as they gathered around, pointing mutely at the lettering on its side.

“Oh God, it’s from Baden Station!” Alice breathed.

“How the hell can it be here?” one of the women asked.

“These things don’t have jump drives, Sue,” said Brahimi. “It must have spent the last eighteen months in real space getting here.”

They all stared up at this symbol of defeat. The great space station of
Baden and the fleet that called it home, had been Landfall’s outer defence. An invisible bulwark that the inhabitants of the planet had mostly never thought about, they’d simply expected that Baden would always be there. But the Nameless swept it aside in less than two hours and that had been the start of the train of events that had led them here, hiding in the untamed and barely charted wilds of a world in which they had once been masters. Alice felt sick. Despite herself, she’d hoped the object would be something positive and new, a sign that somehow things were about to change for the better. It had been a foolish hope. Instead, all they had found was a distant echo from a golden past.