Below us, jungle abruptly gave way to desert, and I saw my master tighten the straps on his harness and sit up straighter, his eyes beginning a slow, sweeping scan of the beige sand. I swivelled my own rocket launcher so that it was in front of me and followed suit.
This time, the first encounter happened only ten minutes into the desert. It was a small group of five Geshtoch on hoverbikes, and my master and I quickly took them out. The pilot radioed back to the Adavi base, letting them know how close to the city the Geshtoch had come. They would likely send out a few patrols to clear the area.
The next hour and a half was filled with a smattering of encounters, none of them serious, and mostly consisting of small groups of two or three travellers.
“They might just look like nomads,” Bryce commented at one point, “but HQ is working on the theory that they’re actually scouts, looking for new places to settle, or testing the Alliance’s defences. The instant we let them be, they start swarming in greater numbers.”
“Biggest mistake we ever made, signing that treaty,” my master muttered.
“The alternative was to annihilate the lot of them,” Bryce said. “And the Parliament was trying to avoid an all-out war.”
“And look where that got us,” my master said.
“Movement, eight o’clock!” Vosh’s frantic voice called, interrupting the conversation.
“Fucking hell!” Bryce yelped, and the rapid boom of rockets being fired rattled the transporter. “Bidge, get us the hell out of here!” he instructed the pilot. “Kade, six o’clock! There’s a swarm of them.”
I swung around, trying to find something to aim at, but the Geshtoch were lingering directly behind the transporter, making it near impossible toshoot them. The pilot swung to the right. That gave me a clear shot for only about two seconds, but it was enough to make good use of it. I fired twice, seeing at least three hoverbikes disintegrate into scrap metal. Then I was slammed against the straps of my harness as the transporter veered to the left, the engines thrumming as the pilot tried to gain height.
On the far side, the boom of the rocket launchers didn’t stop, while my master and I scanned the desert below us frantically, searching for a target to shoot at.
“Incoming!” Bryce yelled, and then a deafening boom cracked over the tail end of the transporter. Instantly, the string of curse words flowing through my helmet speaker stopped, as the comms went dead. A moment later, the churning rumble of the engines dimmed, the rotors slowing as the electronics on board were fried by the powerful EMP the Geshtoch had set off. The transporter lurched, my stomach dropping as we began to lose height rapidly.
Following the protocol from my brief training last week, I shoved the rocket launcher away, spinning my chair to face outwards from the transporter. The sergeant had been both thorough and insistent in the small group’s training on transporter emergencies. In addition to that, I’d been through numerous drills of this type back on Eumad, the principle the same, though the details had been different.
The seats inside the transporter were equipped with airbags and shock absorbers, giving both the passengers and the pilot a reasonable chance of survival, in the case of a crash. But the gunners were an entirely different matter. Depending on how the transporter landed, and on what debris was around, we could so easily be slathered across the ground like jam. I focused on breathing, slow and deep, as my heart pounded in my chest. My right hand gripped the eject release handle located over my right shoulder, and I spared a split-second glance over at my master, to make sure he was doing the same. With the comms dead, it was impossible to talk to him, but I saw him sitting in the correct position, his hand fisted around his own release handle.
Good. There was nothing more I could do to help him right at the moment, so I turned my attention to the ground rushing up beneath us. Transporters didn’t fly high enough to warrant parachutes in the case of needing to eject, so we had to time the release carefully. Too high and we’d hit the ground too hard. Too low and we wouldn’t be thrown far enough to clear the crash site.
Reacting more on instinct than any real calculation, I yanked on the release. My seat popped out of the side of the transporter, flung outwards and slightly upwards, while at the same time, a series of airbags deployed, effectively encasing me in a thick cushion of air. The fall took longer than I had expected, and I chalked that up to the adrenaline rushing through myveins. I’d done this sort of manoeuvre in training dozens of times, and so I had a fairly accurate expectation of how long it should take to land.
The impact came a moment later, bouncing me to a skidding stop on the hard sand. I thumped the chair release on my chest the instant I came to a stop, freeing myself from the deflating airbags and ripping the top half of my wind suit off at the same time. The less encumbered I was, the better.
I looked to my left, relief washing over me as I saw my master freeing himself from his own chair. With a nod to him, I sprinted back towards the transporter, which was now embedded in the sand some fifty metres ahead of us.
The Geshtoch would be closing in fast from behind, but with no obvious cover around, the best thing I could do was get back to the transporter and retrieve my rifle. I could only hope that Bryce and Vosh had been as successful in ejecting as my master and me.
Evidently, they had, I saw, as I got closer. Bryce was already stationed behind a rocky outcrop, firing shots at the Geshtoch with his pistol. If nothing else, that would slow them down while the rest of us got organised. Vosh was detangling herself from her seat, apparently unharmed, so I kept going, my master close behind me, until we reached the transporter. The port side was half buried in the ground, but that was fine for the time being. I vaulted up onto the starboard side and grabbed my rifle from its bracket, next to where the gunner seat had been. We each had a pistol in a hip holster, but the rifles had to be stored securely while we were in flight.
Seeing my master arrive just below me, I tossed my rifle to him, then light-footed my way across to the rifle next to his seat, claiming that one as my own. He took off around the front of the transporter, while I clambered up the side and over the top, taking the time to assess the incoming Geshtoch.
I felt a small amount of relief as I realised there weren’t that many of them – or if there had been, Bryce and Vosh had already taken them out. There were maybe four or five of them, darting in and out around the rocks, trying to come closer, but forced to take cover by Bryce’s well-timed shots. His ammunition wasn’t going to last forever, though.
“Fuuuck…” Vosh’s voice below me got my attention, and I looked down to see she was standing motionless, gaping at the transporter. Now was not the time for stunned inaction. I slid down, landing lightly on the sand, then turned to look at the damage… and to be fair, I could see why she was in such a state. The transporter had hit a rock outcrop as it came down, and the entire left side had been sliced open like a tin can, with a substantial section of the metal ripped away entirely. Bryce’s rifle was accessible, but my master was already fetching it, so I glanced towards where Vosh’s seat had been… and instantly gave up on that idea. The rear left of the transporter was buried, much of the weight of the vehicle resting on that corner.
“If we help the passengers, can you back up the Commander?” I asked my master, deliberately phrasing it as a question. Regardless of the current threat to our lives, it was not my place to give him orders.
“Got it,” he said, charging off towards Bryce, the second rifle in hand.
I swung myself into the exposed interior of the transporter, careful to avoid the sharp edges of the torn metal. The left side had taken the brunt of the impact, and…
“Oh, fuck me,” I muttered, as I got a look at the two bodies, still strapped into their seats. Or what was left of the bodies, at least. One of them no longer had a head, and the other was missing a large chunk on the left of her torso.
A whimper got my attention. I looked up, seeing Associate Nors still strapped into her seat, and it was only luck that meant she’d been on the starboard side of the transporter. There was a smear of blood on her face, but other than that, she seemed unharmed.
“Are you injured?” I asked her, grabbing onto anything I could reach to haul myself up beside her.
A wavering yelp made me look back, and I saw Vosh climbing gingerly into the transporter, her face a grimace as she took in the sight of the two aides. “Vosh, go check the pilot,” I instructed her. Hopefully, giving her something to do would stall her rising panic. I’d seen similar reactions in young trainees, back on Eumad, and learned that it was important to prevent them getting overwhelmed by their own spiralling thoughts. She nodded and began clambering towards the cockpit.
