It took several minutes of careful manoeuvring to get the two of them safely over the jagged edges of metal. Bryce helped Bidge sit down on a flattish rock, while Associate Nors turned in awkward circles, trying toavoid looking at either the shattered transporter or the Geshtoch bodies littered about the desert.
“Okay, so where are we?” Bryce asked Bidge. He should have had a reasonable estimate of our location, based on our intended flight path.
“Twenty kilometres from the Honbin terraforming outpost,” Bidge replied, with reassuring confidence. “It should be directly east from here.”
“They’ll send a transporter to pick us up,” Vosh pointed out, but my master shook his head, glancing warily up at the sky.
“Not tonight. By the time it gets here, it’ll be well after sunset, and since none of us have working comms, they’d never find us in the dark. We’re on our own for tonight.” The Hon base would have been monitoring our location as we approached the city, and the sudden cut off of our signals would have alerted them to the fact that we’d been shot down. So despite the lack of any possible way to send them a signal, as of right now, they knew exactly where we were.
But given what was lurking in the desert all around us, that wasn’t going to be the case for long. “We need to move,” Bryce said, his mouth twisting in a grimace. “Any Geshtoch within three or four kilometres of here will have seen us come down and be headed our way. Bidge, can you walk?”
The older man scoffed. “You say that like I have a choice. Because the alternative is what? Stay here and become Geshtoch fodder? No, thank you.”
“Fair enough. We’re heading east, to the outpost. Vosh, you keep an eye on things out here. The rest of us will get our supplies organised.” He handed his rifle to Vosh and turned back to the transporter.
“Wait, should we really be going east?” Associate Nors asked. “If we’re heading straight for the nearest Alliance outpost, wouldn’t that be an incredibly obvious place for the Geshtoch to look for us?”
“Oddly enough, no,” my master said. “Geshtoch are surprisingly stupid. They have the intelligence of maybe a seven year old human? Or a ten year old Solof,” he added, though I didn’t know enough about either species to compare the two. “If we leave obvious tracks, they’ll follow them, but if we make sure we don’t leave a trail, they’ll just assume they’ve lost us. All we have to worry about then is any roaming Geshtoch who stumble upon us by chance.”
“What are the chances of that happening?” Associate Nors asked.
“Fairly high,” my master told her, choosing harsh truth over comforting lie. “But that’s why we’ve got guns.”
When there were no further questions, Bryce, my master and I climbed back into the transporter. Bryce opened a safety locker, retrieving several rounds of ammunition for the rifles and tossing them to me and my master. There were also two spare rifles, which would replace the one that had got buried, and give us a spare in case of emergencies.
Each seat had a blanket stowed underneath it – ostensibly for passenger comfort on longer flights – so my master went about pulling six of them out. Meanwhile, I retrieved our packs from the luggage compartment, and I was suddenly grateful that the Alliance insisted all its soldiers take emergency supplies with them on every mission. If we were going to be out all night, those meal packets and sleeping rolls would be very welcome.
Bryce also located a large canister of drinking water. He dragged it out of the transporter and rummaged in his pack to find a cup. “Everyone, take a good drink before we leave. The four of us have water canteens, but it’s going to be nightfall before we make it to the outpost, so we’ll be spending the night out here.”
“What about…?” Associate Nors made a vague gesture towards the transporter.
“A retrieval team will come and collect them,” Bryce assured her. “The Hon base knows where the transporter is.”
“Okay,” she said, her voice sounding watery.
Five minutes later, we were ready to leave. Nors made no mention of her abandoned luggage, made no complaints about being expected to walk a long distance, and even asked if she could carry anything.
Bryce shook his head. “We’ve got it covered. What you can do, though, is keep an eye on our surroundings and tell us immediately if you see anything move. An extra set of eyes is always a good thing.”
He wasn’t patronising her with the statement. The biggest threat out here was the Geshtoch, and if I’d had to make a bet on it, I would have put the chances of all of us surviving to the outpost to be only a little over fifty per cent.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Aiden
Ikept a close eye on Bidge as we trekked across the open desert. His broken arm shouldn’t stop him from walking, but either shock or pain could easily derail our plans to put distance between us and the transporter. So I was relieved when an hour passed and he showed no obvious signs of slowing down. Associate Nors, too, was moving at a reasonable pace, though she was sweating more than the rest of us. But though her breathing was a little laboured, she never once suggested stopping for a break. I was starting to think I’d got the wrong impression of her back in Adavi, with her fancy gardens and expensive meals. She might be accustomed to the finer things in life, but she didn’t expect them as an automatic right.
The sun was sinking in the western sky, warming our backs and casting long shadows out ahead of us, and leaving aside the ongoing threat of the Geshtoch, it was actually quite beautiful out here. But with nightfall coming on rapidly, we had some important decisions to be making. “We’ve got about half an hour of daylight left,” Bryce said, as he glanced over his shoulder at the sun. “Between now and then, we need to find somewhere to hole up for the night. The bigger the rock, the better.” A large outcrop would give us something to put our backs against, so that we didn’t have to worry about being attacked from all angles.
About fifteen minutes later, Kade announced, “Big outcrop over to the south.” He was walking at the head of the group, with Bryce bringing up the rear. “Want to head over that way and check it out?”
I’d noticed that about him, all the way through this mission. Whenever he had a suggestion or an opinion, he phrased it as a question. He would never say ‘I think we should check it out.’ Rather, it was ‘Do you want to check it out?’
But at the same time, he’d acted without the need for any kind of micromanaging. When the transporter went down, he’d retrieved weapons,shot Geshtoch, rescued our one surviving passenger and helped us get our supplies together, on the back of little to no instruction. So if this was a test of his suitability for life as a soldier, he was passing with flying colours.
“Let’s take a look,” Bryce said, and we veered to the right, quickening our pace as the light began to fade. There were a couple of emergency glow sticks in our packs, but once the sun set, we were going to have little to no light.
Five minutes later, we stared up at the large rock tower. It was about four metres high and twice as wide, peaked in the middle and sloping downwards on either side. On the western side, the prolonged action of wind and sand had worn a curving alcove into the rock, giving us protection on two sides.
