Gunny grabbed his tags and set the timer on the d-charge. “Let's move it.”
I gave up working on the sensors. The Thorns knew we were here now. I set a path to avoid the patches of blue, knowing the flowers could be discharged by remote control. Behind us the keening wail of a Thorn alarm sounded then the whine of a combat sled as scouts gave chase. Gunny must have had some built in time-lapse computer because the sled followed our path and stopped over James' body just as the charge let go. The blast of heat flipped the sled and ignited the fuel cell and ammo in one giant explosion. The jungle was silent for a moment before erupting in squeals and squalls as animals and insects prepared for battle. Now we had the whole jungle against us.
“Move it, Harris,” Gunny yelled and we fled through the jungle as fast as we could travel.
There was a danger moving this fast through Thorn jungle, but the need to get Randolph and his info back to Intelligence made the risk acceptable, according to HQ standards. Without a trail to follow, the sleds couldn't reach us through the canopy of the forest. Any sled trying to slip down through the trees would face the same danger from the local lifeforms as we did on the ground. Only there were a lot of things living up in the trees that were small and deadly, as opposed to the large and deadly things living on the ground. You take your pick, I suppose.
Gunny had us set off the electronic scramblers in our gear so the Thorns couldn't track us by the magnetic fields of our bodies, which differed markedly from their own. The hunters would now be limited to sight and ground traces, giving us a fair chance of reaching the backup LZ.
“Split by twos,” Gunny whispered over the comm. “Disguise your trail and direction. Make it look like there's a battalion of us in here. Then meet up at the LZ in three hours.”
According to my heads-up display, that didn’t give us much time to travel that far, but we had to make it if we were going to get out before Thorn reinforcements arrived. A site like the one we had just found normally had an eight-personnel unit. Two of them went up with the sled, leaving six. There would be two more teams coming after us with the last pair staying behind to guard the center.
Those two teams following us would be on the ground. With any luck, they would follow the two teams that left trails while Gunny hid his footprints and got Randolph back with the intel. We got to play decoys. Fun. The Thorns couldn't just take sleds and sit over our probable LZ sites since we could take them out with rockets the same way they had nailed our transport.
“Harris, you take Billings and go left,” Gunny instructed. “Cutter, you and Jonesy go right. Make it good and I'm buying the first round when we hit base.” He nodded and we lit out, leaving Randolph and the other newbie, Johnson, with the Sarge.
Billings and I had worked together several times and knew the routine. We went side-by-side with enough room to move and fire, and avoided anything that looked like it was too open or too cluttered with brush. Too open usually meant a trap of some sort and too cluttered gave the little nasties too much room to hide. So we wove between trees and around rocks and tried our best not to make more noise than we had to. We moved for about an hour with nothing more than various animal nasties crossing our trail.
I spotted the hole of the fire beetles almost the same time we heard the Thorns behind us. Their stilted legs made a distinctive noise as they made their way through the forest, almost like they were letting the animals know they were coming and to warn them to get out of the way.
I set a minibomb next to the hole, where it would toss the nest into the air instead of closing it down, and motioned Billings to move ahead as I rigged the detonator. I waited behind a tree for the Thorns to show. They would be following our trail and would see the same signs we did.
The two Thorns moved into the open, too far away to shoot but close enough to see. In the dappled sunlight, they gleamed dark green with chlorophyll. They were soldier breeds, with the long stilted legs that could lift them fifteen feet into the air to see above short trees or heavy brush, and bodies covered with overlapping scales like armor. Their true-arms were pushed forward on a cylindrical body and had double opposable thumbs, one on each side of the hands. Their heads were inverted, truncated, five-sided pyramids sitting on a short flexible neck with four eyes, one on each side of the pyramid. To get binocular vision with depth perception, they looked past one corner of the pyramid to bring two eyes into focus. They literally had eyes in the backs of their heads. The overall effect was a six-legged spider with a short post on the front end and two grasping members in front. I hated spiders.
The Thorns were professionals, just like we were. They stayed too far apart for us to take them both out at once, moving carefully from tree to tree for cover, so I motioned to Billings and gave him the signal to take the one on the right after I popped the one on the left. He nodded and we waited.
As the Thorn on the left reached the spot where the fire beetles had their nest, it began to move past it just as I had. But I gave it a surprise as I triggered the minibomb and showered the Thorn with very angry fire beetles. While it was moving to brush the insects form its carapace before they found a way between the joints, it moved out of cover for just a moment too long and I fired a short burst of armor piercing rounds straight into its side. The shot hit home, destroying the neural junction as all six legs folded and it collapsed, leaving it unable to move but very much alive. I wasted no time pumping the rest of the clip into the pyramid to disrupt its neural center and make the rest of the body overload. Sort of like giving it a jolt of electricity in all the right places.
I ducked as a stray round from the second Thorn blew bark off the tree next to my head. Billings had done his job as well, and the second Thorn was flat and still. I keyed the comm for Gunny.
“Two down, two to go,” I messaged.
I waited for Gunny's reply or even the clicks that said he was under observation but heard me. Nothing. I looked over at Billings, listening on his own com, and we headed for where Gunny, Johnson and Randolph should be — to hell with the Thorns.
We traveled fast, knowing time was more important than silence at this point. If the others had been in a fire-fight, we wouldn't have known as the Thorn's weapons were as quiet as our own. But I had a bad feeling and I had learned to listen to my gut.
I almost missed them as we headed for the LZ. Randolph was propped up against the scaly bark of a snake tree with a round from a Thorn rifle making a strange third eye in his forehead. He must have taken off his helmet to wipe away the sweat at just the wrong time.
Johnson was in the space between two trees, his arms wrapped around the spiny carapace of a Thorn — daggers of chitin had shredded his body but he’d bisected the head of the Thorn with a brush knife as he’d died. For a newbie he’d done a pretty good, finishing the one that got him. I pulled his tags but waited to find Gunny before I set the charge.
Gunny had crawled into a shallow depression that let him see what was coming before it could see him. The Thorn rounds had stitched up the left side of his body and ripped off most of his left arm. The pressure closures in the camosuit had closed off but he had lost a lot of blood through the body punctures. He had fired off the clip in his weapon and had collapsed unconscious trying to load the new clip one-handed. I carefully took the weapon out of his grip and slipped home the clip. Gunny's eyes snapped open and his hand clenched around the stock in reflex before he realized who we were.
“Randolph?” Gunny asked weakly.
I shook my head and Gunny closed his eyes in pain at more than just his wounds. “Is the equipment intact?”
When I nodded he smiled, a feral grin that would have looked good on a wolf.