Ahead of me was the checkpoint that would take me out into the National Park, away from the grime, closeness and proximity of the city. I’d spent the first thirteen years of my life in the park. My father, retired from the military, had worked as a hunting guide; my mother ran a business repairing fishing boats. Dad had taught me all about the country, how to survive, how to track, navigate, what the different fauna and flora were.
After a disgruntled client had killed him my mother didn’t have the money to stay in the park and we had to move to the Fintry Schemes in Dundee. She couldn’t quite scrape together enough money doing odd mechanical and electrical repair jobs to pay the rent and keep us fed. That was when I’d first gone to the pits. I was thirteen at the time. My mum had been a hand-to-hand combat instructor in the Paras and part of her family was Thai. Using the Muay Thai skills she’d taught me growing up, two hours a day every day, I was pretty good. I began putting more food on the table, paying my way competing in the clean unaugmented fights. Eventually I’d actually volunteered for the army, 5 Para Pathfinders like my dad. I thought the money I could send back would improve things for my mum but it was to no avail. She died shortly afterwards from a tainted dose of her favourite drug. Thinking back I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone who’s died a natural death.
The air was already beginning to smell better, more like air. I approached the checkpoint. Dundee was just a glow in the distance behind me. The barriers were up and police officers had already taken aim at me with their electromagnetic pulse rifles. I didn’t slow down. Instead I transmitted the priority security clearance that had been pan of the information that the Major had sent me. There was frantic activity as the barriers sank into the ground and the police moved out of the way and I raced past their wheeled APC.
I was out. I sucked in the cool night air, free of the city. The Triumph screamed down narrow roads, fields on either side, ahead of me in the distance the dark outlines of hills. It may as well have been another world. Dundee could have been a bad dream.
The ‘possible trench’ was about three miles off the Coupar Angus road, across a ploughed field. I put the Triumph into stealth mode, quietening the engine as much as possible. Using dirt and farm tracks, I approached as close as I could get to the coordinates I’d been given. Eventually I had to park up. I secured the bike and stood for a while acclimatising myself to the noise of the countryside before I set off on foot. I considered drawing one of my pistols but decided it would be a little melodramatic. The stillness of the night was calming.
I moved carefully but not as stealthily as I was capable. I enhanced my hearing and sight, regularly sweeping the area with thermographics. The rest of the time my cybernetic eyes were on low light, amplifying the ambient light of the moon and stars. Occasionally I would just stop and wait, let the nightlife become used to me before moving off again.
The coordinates of the possible trench were just off the summit of a low hill. As I approached the hill I stopped and had a look around. My father had taught me to track and 5 Para had improved on what I’d been taught. Even at night I could see the tracks of what looked to be a four-wheel drive. The tracks were fresh, someone had been there not that long ago.
Thermographics showed cooling chunks of heat surrounded the top of the hill. It was about this time that I wished I’d brought a motion detector. I drew the TO 5 secure in the knowledge that there was nobody around to ridicule my possibly overcautious action. If there was anyone around, they would probably be who I needed to shoot anyway. Tactically the situation was not great as it was all open ground up to the heat signatures. Just because I couldn’t see anyone around didn’t mean there wasn’t anyone there.
They used various castes of soldier. Each one appeared, according to the scant intelligence we had ever managed to get on Them, to be genetically created for a specific purpose. Their front-line soldiers, nicknamed Berserks, were bad enough. They were capable of going toe to toe with the most cybernetically enhanced trooper and even light power-armoured troops.
The Berserks weren’t the worst. The worst were Their much rarer silent killers. The ones that I’d lost the most friends to, the ones that had been predictably nicknamed Ninjas. Though I’d always thought of them as pieces of night that killed. They were genetically created or modified bioborgs, full of internal weapons and designed for stealth. They could control their body temperature and if They were going to send an infiltrator it would make sense to send a Ninja or an iteration thereof. It was fear of these things that kept me standing stock still in a field just outside Dundee.
‘Oh, this is bullshit,’ I muttered to myself. Keeping low, I held my laser pistol in a two-handed grip, the weapon extended in front of me as I headed up the hill.
I confirmed that the possible trench was in fact an actual trench, a deep one. Parts of the earth glittered, reflecting moonlight where it had turned to glass. Scattered around the site were bits of some kind of dark composite material difficult to focus on. I wouldn’t have found them had it not been for how much heat they gave off – though they were rapidly cooling. The material was the contradiction of a solid liquid that I had hoped to never see on Earth.
At the end of the trench was a needle-shaped craft roughly the size of a very large coffin. I’d seen them before. My shoulder-mounted laser pushed its way through the break-open panel of my coat and began to pan around behind me. I was more than a little nervous now. This was one of Their infiltration craft. An unpowered craft that was shot from a mass driver, designed to penetrate planetary defences and glide in. This one showed blast scoring, presumably from the orbital lasers, a result of the speculative fire. It looked like it had come in pretty hard but it was open and empty.
Suddenly I was aware of just how sensitive my boosted senses were and just how much noise there was out on that field. I mentally dialled the contact line that the Major had given me. I swung around behind me, bringing the laser up as I heard a sound, then again to my right at another rustle in the undergrowth. You’re rattled, I told myself. Calm down.
‘Yes, Sergeant?’ Major Rolleston was smiling as his representation appeared in a small corner of my internal visual display. The familiar surge of anger was muted by my current fear.
‘You have a problem,’ I said. ‘You’ve got a Needle here. It’s been damaged and come in hard but it’s empty.’
‘Assessment?’ Annoyingly, the Major was playing army. I swung around again at another sound.
‘You have a Ninja down here. Possibly injured, but their self-repair systems will have it up to full capacity in no time.’
‘A Ninja? Are you sure?’ Rolleston asked.
‘No, I’m not sure; maybe they’ve sent one of their caterers. What else would they send!’
‘Can you handle the situation?’ I was a little taken aback by this question. Could I handle it? What was he talking about?
‘Of course I can’t fucking handle it; it’s a Ninja. One of these things killed two of my squad, did God knows what to MacDonald and nearly took the rest of us out before we managed to get it, and that was with mil-spec gear.’
‘Calm down, Sergeant. Are there any signs of where it is?’
‘Can you actually hear me?’ I asked as I spun around again. ‘It’s a Ninja, would you like me to spell it? They don’t leave tracks. Oh!’ On the ground by the trench there were tracks. I put my paranoia aside for a moment and crouched down to examine them.
‘Sergeant?’
‘Shut up.’ Rolleston seemed to ignore the insubordination. The tracks showed hiking boots going up the hill, possibly from the four-by-four I had seen the tracks from earlier. They left the hill dragging something, something with two legs and two arms. I relayed what I had found to Rolleston.