Tritium Gambit (Max and Miranda Book 1) (13 page)

I jumped forward the instant the cannon was not aimed at me, crossing the distance to the robot in a fraction of a second. Unfortunately, that was all the time the robot needed to react and it rammed a metal fist into my gut and drove me to the ground.

I grabbed hold of the robot’s arm as I fell backward. The instant I hit the floor, I tightened my hold on its arm and used my legs to launch it over my head and toward the wall. It landed with a thud.

I rolled to my feet. The robot recovered quickly and took aim at me, and I darted to one side as it fired. There was a sharp sizzling sound and I looked back to see John grasping the robot. The robot fell to the ground, the lights on its panels dark.

“
How did you do that?” I asked.

He had a faint smile. “Luck.”

There was a banging on the door I had sealed and then shots were fired.

“
We need to get in that dinghy, now,” I said.

As I helped the sheriff inside, three robots entered the holding bay. I climbed inside the small craft, slammed the door, and hit the eject button to send us tumbling into space.

You don’t so much fly a dinghy as ride it. They are programmed to require no piloting skills and to find the nearest landing zone, which happened to be the planet Zeta-Terra. We were moving toward the planet’s atmosphere at supersonic speeds.

When we hit the air, the heat shields kicked in and the portholes were blocked. Unfortunately, dinghies don’t have gravitational dampeners. The designers also expected you to be buckled up, and so we were pancaked against the back wall of the craft. I never get motion sickness when flying a plane, but I always have problems with other people steering, even in cars. If I wasn’t driving, I would get ill. I fought with the revolt in my stomach as we plummeted toward the ground, now fervently wishing we had strapped in before I hit eject.

The inertial dampeners that deployed moments before impact were enough to throw us toward the front of the dinghy. Blue rigid foam instantly filled the cabin at the moment of contact with ground, protecting us partially, but my insides still got further scrambled.

I felt us skid along the planet’s surface for several seconds, and then we slammed into something hard that finally stopped us. The foam dissipated.

“
Are you okay?” I asked.

John gave a groan that I took to mean he was fine.

A hatch on the dinghy opened and sunlight streamed in. I blinked a few times, and when my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw that we were in a jungle. The trees weren’t normal by Earth standards, however. These were giant woody vines covered in small green vines. The largest plants I could see were over a dozen feet thick. The nose of the dinghy was embedded in the trunk of one of the large vines.

I started digging around the cabin for supplies. I found a first aid kit, four blankets, a popup shelter, and a bundle of rations. What we needed was a weapon, but apparently nobody thought to include that in the survival kit.

“
We need to get to higher ground,” John said.

I noticed he had burn marks on his shoulder from where he came in contact with the robot. I pulled some heavy gauze and tape and started working on his injury. He had several scrapes too, but he pushed me away.

“
We need to get to higher ground, now!”

“
What will that do for us?” I asked.

“
We’re on a remote planet with no way to get off. Our only ticket out of here is the Phoenix we just left. We need to get up high enough to see it land and then try to take Tyler by surprise.”

“
For all we know, he’ll land on the other side of the planet. Hell, if he lands 100 miles from here, we’d never know it,” I said.

He nodded. “I didn’t say our chances were good. I’m simply saying that’s the only chance we have of not being the last part-humans on this planet when the ship leaves.”

“
Fine. The ship was moving toward the planet for entry when we ejected, and so it stands to reason it might land near here. It is not likely that it will land close enough we can witness it, but it is possible.”

I helped the sheriff up, and we stepped out of the dinghy and into the jungle.

“
With your ability to leap, you should be able to get up higher much faster than I can. I’ll wait down here and keep a lookout for danger,” he said.

I didn’t argue because he was right. I could jump from the top of one woody vine to another easily. Trying to help him would only slow me down. I left the sheriff where we had been standing and bounded and leapt and swung on vines until I landed on the top of a large leaf several feet above the ground.

A plume of white smoke was trailing behind an object falling from the sky. I pointed toward it and called down to the sheriff, “I think I see them! It looks like they might come down about ten miles from us.”

“
Great,” he called back. “Unfortunately, that’s probably not going to be accurate enough for us. We can cross ten miles, given a bit of time, but because of how thick this jungle is, if we’re off by five-hundred feet, we’ll simply walk by the craft.”

I jumped down and landed lightly next to him. “Leave that to me.”

I hopped back into the cockpit of the dinghy and ripped the console open. When not in stealth mode, all Stellar Command ships had standard positioning and avoidance beacons. If Tyler had been using stealth mode, I wouldn’t have been able to see him enter the atmosphere; but he probably didn’t see a need to waste all that fuel when there wouldn’t be anybody who cared if he was landing on the planet.

As long as he didn’t shut down the ship, I could track him. I used medical bandages to hold wires together, eventually hacking the dinghy’s collision avoidance system to tell us where the nearest ship was.

“
Ready,” I said and jumped out of the cabin.

John was holding a stick that he had managed to sharpen with a hunk of metal from the ship. He tucked the metal into his pocket.

“
Lead on,” he said.

The way through the jungle of vines was slow. On my own, I could have traversed the distance to the ship much easier, but the sheriff could not keep up that pace and so we trudged through the dense foliage as best we could.

Chapter 13. Max

“
He looks crispy. Is he still alive?” Tyler asked.

I felt pressure on my wrist. “Master, he is alive,” said a robotic male voice.

“
It was fortunate for him we turned off the power in time,” Tyler said.

My eyes felt dry, and it hurt to open them. I could see Tyler standing over me with two robot guards at his side and a third bending over me, the machine checking my pulse. I grabbed the robot that had been holding my wrist, jumped to my feet, and spun the machine into Tyler and the other robots. Both of the robots guarding Tyler shot me, but they must have had orders for the shots to be non-lethal and I shrugged the shots off and swung a haymaker into Tyler’s face with everything I had. When he staggered back, I jumped forward to bash my fist into his throat but a robot clothes-lined me before I could land another blow. I crashed backward onto the floor.

I spun and swept my foot around, knocking over the nearest robot, then leapt toward Tyler. Before I could get to him, a second robot hammered me in the jaw and my vision went blurry. I spit out a tooth as I stumbled back a step. Then a flurry of metal blows struck my head and body. Darkness threatened to take me, but I fought off unconsciousness.

I rolled past the nearest robot, sprang to my feet, and landed face to face with Tyler. Before I could be taken down, I threw a punch, but a robotic hand intercepted my fist and clamped down with bone-crushing force. I ignored the popping of bones, the pain, and the robot itself. I swung my knee up toward Tyler’s groin. I might die, I thought, but I’d have the satisfaction of seeing him cry first. Unfortunately, the robot gripping my broken hand yanked me around before my knee could connect and backhanded me in the face, breaking my nose and my cheekbone.

I managed to rip out the exposed wires in the machine’s neck with my free hand and the robot’s dozen eyes went dark. I felt the pain of the two remaining robots shooting me again. I spun the disabled robot around to use as a shield against flying proton pulses. If that robot had any functioning parts left before, it didn’t after it was blasted about twenty times. When there wasn’t much left of it to use as a shield, I let it fall and launched myself at Tyler, who had been standing there nonchalantly watching his robots beat the crap out of me.

He seemed a little surprised when I connected with a left hook to his jaw, then an uppercut into his stomach. He fell to the ground as a flurry of proton blasts struck me in the back and legs. I couldn’t control my body and fell back to the hard metal floor of the ship.

Tyler regained his feet and stood over me. “You didn’t think you could win, did you?”

“
Questions are for pussies,” I whispered just before I lost consciousness.

When I woke up, I was tied to a giant stump on a rugged, boulder-strewn hill. Tyler sat on a blue-gray rock a dozen feet away with his fancy-schmancy antimatter pistol on his lap and four robots at his back. There were two suns in the sky, a large orange sun on the horizon emitting no warmth and only weak light and a small blue sun directly overhead that was brighter and warmer.

A line of alien foliage stretched from the limits of my vision on all sides, not trees like on Earth but giant tangled vines with woody shoots popping out at densely packed irregular intervals along the main trunk. The thickest vines were ten feet in diameter and had shoots at least two feet thick where they met their trunk, each topped with giant green leaves twenty feet long and fifteen feet across. Smaller more Earth-like vines draped every surface and carpeted the ground. Nothing grew on the hill we were on, though. There was no soil, only jagged and irregular blue and gray rocks jutting up on all sides.

The ground trembled. Tyler looked up, and I could see his grip on his pistol tighten. He stood and faced the green. The massive tangle of foliage to my left began to wave and stir. Something gigantic was making its way toward us.

I struggled against the ropes that held me to the giant stump, but they were really tight and there wasn’t any play in them. I couldn’t feel my legs, and I wondered if they were getting any blood circulated to them at all. My hands were uselessly at my sides under the rope.

There were many shapes moving in our direction, a procession of terror marching toward us. I only made out shadow and fur, the Wendigo I assumed, each of these creatures larger than a two-story house. Tyler seemed to be having second thoughts. He glanced over his shoulder, but he wasn’t looking at me. I assumed the ship must be somewhere behind me. I tried to crane my neck around, but it was no use. I couldn’t see past the thick stump I was tied to.

I looked back toward the creatures steadily crashing through the foliage. I could see them clearly now. The lead creature was massive, four stories tall with tufts of blue-gray hair on its head, knuckles, and torso. Its skin was bone white and smooth as marble, and each of its hands had four fingers, the first and fourth shaped like thumbs and the two fingers in the middle thick and powerful. The creature had a flattened nose with two obsidian-black eyes on each side of it. The creature had two bushy blue-gray eyebrows, one above each pair of eyes. If I squinted, excluding the extra set of small eyes, this beast might pass for a really big hairy naked human with a Goth look. The creature’s stomach was distended, but its limbs and chest were thin and drawn, and it occurred to me that it might well be starving. Its mouthful of terrifying jagged teeth notwithstanding, this beast could be a poster-child for the Feed the Aliens cause.

A swarm of more than a hundred large four-legged beasts burst through the underbrush. They were covered in green chitinous locking plates similar to lobster shells, but their bodies resembled that of a grizzly bear. They had four wild eyes, and each limb had four razor sharp claws. Tyler raised his pistol as the herd of wild beasts thundered around us, but these creatures weren’t attacking. They were fleeing the larger creatures, the Wendigo.

More Wendigo followed the first, all of them smaller than the leader. In fact, they seemed to be following the big guy in order of size, from largest to smallest. As the leader stepped out into the rocky clearing near us, I had to strain my neck to look up at its face. The stench of decay on its breath was nearly overwhelming.