Cobra gear, warning her of approaching unconsciousness. Who cares? she thought savagely at the red border. He's dead-so are Layn and Raines and who knows who else. What do I need to be conscious for?
And as if in answer, the groan came again.
The sound tore her eyes away from Sun's broken body. Clawing her way past him, she stumbled out into the littered aisle, eyes focusing with an effort on the seats where Hariman and Todor dangled limply in their harnesses. One look at
Hariman was all she could handle-it was clear he'd died in the explosion, even more violently and terribly than Sun. But Todor, beside him in the aisle seat, was still alive, twitching like a child in a nightmare.
Jin was there in seconds, pausing only to grab the emergency medical kit from the passenger compartment's front bulkhead. Kneeling down beside him, ignoring the pain from her injured knee, she got to work.
But it was quickly clear that both the kit's equipment and her own first-aid training were hopelessly inadequate. Surface-wound treatment would be of no use against the massive internal bleeding the sensors registered from Todor's chest; anti-shock drugs would do nothing against the severe concussion that was already squeezing Todor's brain against the ceramic-reinforced bones of his skull.
But Jin wouldn't-couldn't-give up. Sweating, swearing, she worked over him, trying everything she could think of.
"Jin."
The husky whisper startled her so badly she dropped the hypospray she'd been loading. "Peter?" she asked, looking up at his face. "Can you hear me?"
"Don't waste... time..." He coughed, a wracking sound that brought blood to his lips.
"Don't try to talk," Jin told him, fighting hard to keep the horror out of her voice. "Just try and relax. Please."
"No... use..." he whispered. "Go... get out... of here... someone... coming. Has to... be some... one..."
"Peter, please stop talking," she begged him. The others-Mandy and Rafe-they're all dead. I've got to keep you alive-"
"No... chance. Hurt too... badly. The mish... mission, Jin... you got... got to..." He coughed again, weaker this time. "Get out... get to... some... where hid... hidden."
His voice faded into silence, and for a moment she continued to kneel beside him, torn between conflicting commitments. He was right, of course, and the more her brain unfroze itself from the shock the more she realized how tight the deadline facing her really was. The shuttle had been deliberately shot down... and whoever had done the job would eventually come by to examine his handiwork.
But to run now would be to leave Todor here. Alone. To die.
"I can't go, Peter," she said, the last word turning midway into a sob. "I can't."
There was no answer... and even as she watched helplessly, the twitching in his limbs ceased. She waited another moment, then reached over and touched fingertips to his neck.
He was dead.
Carefully, Jin withdrew her hand and took a long, shuddering breath, blinking back tears. A soft glow from Todor's fingertip lasers caught her eye: the new self-destruct system incorporated into their gear had activated itself, shunting current from the arcthrower capacitors inward onto the nanocomputer and servo systems. Automatically destroying his electronics and weaponry beyond any hope of reconstruction should the Qasamans find and examine his body.
No. Not if the Qasamans found him; when they found him. Closing her eyes and mind to the carnage around her, Jin tried to think. It had been-how long since the crash? She checked her clock circuit, set just before the initial explosion.
Nearly seventy minutes had passed since then.
Jin gritted her teeth. Seventy minutes? God-it was worse than she'd realized.
The aircraft the Qasamans would have scrambled to check out their target practice could be overhead at any minute, and the last thing she was ready for was a fight. Clutching at Todor's seat, she pulled herself to her feet and made her way forward.
The cockpit was in worse shape even than the passenger compartment, having apparently survived the explosion only to take the full brunt of what must have been a hellish crash landing. One look dashed any hope she might have had of calling the Southern Cross for advice or help-the shuttle's radio and laser communicator would have been mangled beyond repair.
Which meant that unless and until the Southern Cross figured out on its own that something was wrong, she was going to be on her own. Totally.
Barynson and the pilot-she realized with a distant twinge of guilt that she'd never even known that latter's full name-were both dead, of course, crushed beyond the protective capabilities of harness and crashbag. She barely gave them a second look, her mind increasingly frantic with the need to get out as quickly as possible. Behind Barynson's chair-thrown from its rack by the impact-was what was left of the team's "contact pack," containing aerial maps, close-range scanning equipment, trade goods, and base communicator. Scooping it up, Jin headed aft to the rear of the passenger compartment where the rest of the gear was stored. Her survival pack seemed to be as intact as any of the others; grabbing Sun's pack as well for insurance, she stepped to the exit hatch and yanked on the emergency release handle.
Nothing happened.
"Damn," she snarled, tension coming out in a snap of fury. Swiveling on her right foot, she swung her left leg around and sent a searing burst of antiarmor laser fire into the buckled metal.
The action gained her purple afterimage blobs in front of her eyes and a hundred tiny sizzleburns from molten metal droplets, but not much more. All right, she grimaced to herself as she blinked away the sudden tears. Enough of the hysterics, girl. Calm down and try thinking for a change. Studying the warped door, she located the most likely sticking points and sent antiarmor shots into them. Then, wincing as she took her full weight onto her weak left knee, she gave the center of the panel a kick. It popped open about a centimeter. More kicks and a handful of additional shots from the antiarmor laser forced it open enough for her to finally squeeze outside.
They'd been scheduled to land an hour before local sunrise, and with the extra delay the forest had grown bright enough for her to shut off her light-amps.
Leaning on the hatch, she managed to close it more or less shut again. Then, taking a deep breath of surprisingly aromatic air, she looked around her.
The shuttle looked even worse on the outside than it had on the inside. Every hullplate seemed to be warped in some way, with the nose of the ship so crumpled as to be almost unrecognizable. All the protruding sensors and most of the radar-absorbing overlay were gone, too, torn away in a criss-cross pattern that looked as if a thousand spine leopards had tried to claw it to death. The reason for the pattern wasn't hard to find: for a hundred meters back along the shuttle's approach the trees had been torn and shattered by the doomed craft's mad rush to the ground.
Gritting her teeth, she took a quick look upward. The blue-tinged sky was still clear, but that wouldn't last long... and when they came, that torn-up path through the trees would be a guidepost they couldn't miss. Keying her auditory enhancers, she stood still and listened for the sound of approaching engines.
And heard instead a faint and all-too-familiar purring growl.
Slowly, careful not to make any sudden moves, she eased her packs to the ground and turned around. It was a spine leopard, all right, under cover of a bush barely ten meters away.
Stalking her.
For a moment Jin locked gazes with the creature, feeling eerily as if she were meeting the species for the first time. Physically, it looked exactly like those she'd trained against on Aventine... and yet, there was something in its face, especially about the eyes, that was unlike anything she'd ever seen in a spine leopard before. A strange, almost preternatural alertness and intelligence, perhaps? Licking dry lips, she broke her eyes away from the gaze, raising them to focus on the silver-blue bird perched on the spine leopard's back.