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Page 16.
 The two bolters, Kion and Piri, must put distance between themselves and Aerag-15, or become bleached bones in the dry sands of this remote terraformed but abandoned world, now a Swarm lair.
A third skimmer popped up, after flying low toward them.
"They've made us!" Piri cried. "We've bought the shed."
"Stay in order," Kion commanded formally. Inwardly, he was so scared that his fingers felt cold and numb despite the desert heat. His teeth rattled together. His hands trembled and his knees shook. It was the combination of terror and adrenaline. He must help the other man get away from their captors. "Remember, there must be escaped men and women somewhere out there, and we're gonna hook up with them. They'll help us."
The stealthy skimmer fired a load. The air above sizzled as a white-blue beam cut through, leaving a drift of smoke and an odor of welded metal.
"They missed! We'll make it! Follow me!" Kion began to sprint, and Piri gamely plugged along, with surprising new energy.
Kion dove head-first into a larger crater.
Piri sailed after him.
Both men's arms were forward as if they were divers. Their legs trailed in air.
More shots rang down.
The two men became separated among the boulders, out of sight from each other. The skimmer cut in with smaller energy fire. Micro packets sizzled through the air and slammed staccato into the ground and boulders, stitching rows of deadly dust puffs on impact.
One packet just missed Kion. It struck a large boulder on the canyon rim above. The impact sent hot, painful micro-fragments in all directions. Kion felt the sting, on his back and side, through his flimsy overalls. He held his sides and grimaced with pain. And yet, he exulted.
I'm still alive and free!
He had them on the run, not the other way around. The Swarm bastards just didn't see it in perspective yet. He'd show them, or die trying. As long as they were chasing him, and he wasn't tranked or in a net, this game was his.
Human 1, Swarm 0.
Grit flying around from a shot caused yet another tiny capillary patch in his skin to burst. A droplet of blood popped up on his cheek like red sweat. Whatever pain or fear he endured on the run, it could not be as bad as the prison from which he had just escaped. He pressed close to a house-sized boulder in the sunken alley, among ancient ocean stones. There, he waited as a skimmer made its pass overhead.
One minute…
Kion timed it by his pulse. He held one index fingertip to the tiny throbbing in his other wrist.
"Danos, we're dead."
"Bullshit. Hang on, we're gonna run again. On my count." Kion licked the cracks that split his upper and lower lips in the center, exuding festering milky-green pus that hardened into a painful ruddy crust. He'd carried these for days, and hardly noticed.They were tiny infections from macab bites.
He closed his eyes and tried to soak in the silence around him, the faint keening of the alien atmosphere, smelling of millions of acres of sand dunes whose glassy granules held a constant bio-rot of birthing, struggling, and dying microlife.
Reddish-green sand kelp, common on this world, hung from any partly shadowed ledge in translucent filigrees along the canyon walls. Sword plants leaned out of low crevaces.
Now and then, a leathery lizard darted in the periphery of his quavering, half-open eyes.
Kion inhaled once more. The work crews of Aerag-15 called it Rotting Sand. Liberty tasted and smelled like rotting sand.
Kion almost sobbed with fear and anticipation. "Where are you, Piri?"
"Over here," came the faint voice. A rag waved in the air—Piri's neck kerchief.
He could hear the merk skimmer whirring in quick, deadly increments. The craft was a dark blur, roughly shaped like a disk, about 100 heads (Old Humansh: 'feet') in diameter. At moments when it stood still, he skimmer's hue resolved into dirty beige streaked with leaking synlube and dented from hard hunting. The skimmer maneuvered up, down, left, right, yaw, pitch, roll. It had a cockpit front that made it look eerily deadly, almost spider-faced, except instead of crab pincers, where the mouth would be, the skimmer had two parallel-mounted guns capable of firing either (Old Humansh) 'bullets,' or ray packets like those that had been peppering the rocks around Kion's head.
A numb part of Kion's mind drifted away to a balmy place, before the war. He was with his mate, Anet, and their daughter Anetena, on the farm in the Bilton Hills of Tancran chA. His homeland was one of the best terraform jobs in the Ruby Arm. Anet had earned that generous tract of land as the daughter of a heroic Bild Confederation fighting commodore from a long ago war. A grateful nation…and so forth. That was long ago, far away, in another lifetime. After five years in war and then captivity, he could only hope that they were still alive, that the alienoid swarm had not roasted Narmaur and similar human-friendly worlds.
The minute was almost up.
"Piri! Last call, man! I'm taking off on my own!"
"Hey!" came a faint cry in the other man's voice.
"Where are you?"
"Over here!"
Kion peered from the shady alley between huge boulders. He looked out over the desert, recklessly unmindful that the skimmer could float into view in an instant and pepper him. Another man might have abandoned his impromptu companion, split forces, diverted the enemy while he made a run for it.
Kion saw a ragged cloth waving in a dirty fist about 90 heads away, and darted out of the fool's safety of the canyon. "I'm coming to you."
As he ran, a thought formed in Kion's mind. Perhaps this was good. No other merk skimmers had joined his tormentors. Their leader wanted the kill all to himself and his ratty crew of mercenaries. These rats had even been known to murder each other on the way back, to ensure fewer but larger slices of the cash pie. As he dodged from boulder to boulder, Kion tried to process how this might be to his advantage.
Shots popped, whined all around him, sent up sprays of bloody microglass.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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