“I can probably get around behind them,” he said, then flinched as another boom cracked open a slab of rock further down the canyon. He huffed out a breath, then said, “If they’ve got rockbreakers, the rest of you are going to be toast up there. If I can get behind them, I can take them out.”
“Do it,” I told him, then headed up the rock face. He would need us to keep the Geshtoch distracted while he slipped past them. I could only hope we survived long enough to do that.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Kade
The moon was bright tonight, and as I rounded a curve in the rocks, I could see clearly enough to follow the Geshtoch’s movements. Sure enough, one of them had what looked like a rocket launcher on his shoulder, another one loading a new round into the tube to be fired. But they were fairly out in the open at the moment, which wouldn’t give me any chance to sneak up on them.
A crack sounded from the pillar above me, and I grinned as the Geshtoch – there were four of them, not five – went scrambling towards the nearest cover. That was better, but I really needed them to move forward a bit if I was going to get behind them.
But it wasn’t likely that the rest of the team would be able to do much in the way of battle coordination. Their main concern would be keeping the Geshtoch ducking for cover, to prevent them from firing another rockbreaker at them. Ironically, the Alliance sometimes used the shells to help with terraforming efforts, and I idly wondered if the Geshtoch used them for the same purpose. They had managed to terraform a significant portion of their own territory, after all.
In the end, I decided I wasn’t going to be able to reach them from here – the north side of the rock cluster – so I sprinted as quickly and quietly as I could all the way around, until I was coming at them from the south. Here, they were slightly ahead of the last row of rocks, giving me a place to come at them from behind.
But just then, they managed to launch another shell at the top of the pillar, and I had to assume they had infrared scanners with them. Even I couldn’t see Bryce and the team up there with my eyes alone.
In the noise of the explosion, I darted forward and slit the throat of the one closest to me, clamping a hand over his mouth and lowering him silently to the ground as he died. It was a risk; I wasn’t sure I was farenough back to avoid the attention of the second one, but hopefully, he would be distracted enough by the noise and light to not notice me. A second later, I was back in cover, knowing damn well that my team would be shooting at the Geshtoch standing only a couple of metres from me. The one at the front crouched down, keeping his eyes on the pillar and yelling for the others to reload the rockbreaker. And seeing their complete lack of awareness of their greater surroundings, I agreed with my master’s earlier assessment that they were rather stupid creatures. They must have some redeeming qualities, to survive wandering the desert like they did, but battle strategy was not one of their fortes.
But I couldn’t afford to stand around and wait for them to fire the rockbreaker three more times to get my opportunities to kill them. Another volley of bullets came down from above, and I watched the Geshtoch’s movements, trying to get a feel for when my team would shoot, and when they wouldn’t. Another Geshtoch stood up momentarily, before hastily ducking down again… and that was when I realised that my team weren’t shooting at the Geshtoch. Rather, they were spraying the rocks around them with bullets, far enough away that they wouldn’t actually hit any of their enemy… or their teammate who was sneaking up behind them.
Stars, I loved working with such a thoroughly competent team. The front two Geshtoch were debating what to do next – and fuck, I loved the fact that my translator had been programmed with the Geshtoch language, along with the hundreds of others from across the local sector of the galaxy. The one at the rear was fidgeting impatiently… so I slid up behind him and dispatched him next, silent as a ghost, before retreating again. Even if the other two turned around and noticed the bodies, they wouldn’t immediately know where I was. Which might just give me the edge, if I had to fight two of them at once.
With two of them down, I debated whether to just shoot the remaining two. They were standing right next to each other, and taking another one out with stealth was going to be hard. The thing was, according to the documents my master had given me, the Geshtoch were both strong and quick, like the Culrads had been, back in the jungle, and if I ended up fighting one hand to hand, I wasn’t guaranteed to win.
Hm. Bullets it was, then. I drew my pistol, still keeping absolutely silent, and-
“Behind us!” one of them yelled, having glanced back and seen his fallen comrades. I’d put a bullet in his head before the second one had even turned around, but number two moved like lightning, darting sideways, rockbreaker abandoned as it crashed to the ground. But instead of ducking for cover, as I expected him to, he came straight for me, a long, curving blade in his hand. I vaulted backwards, getting two shots off before he leapt straight on top of me, the knife embedding itself in my arm as I fought tofend him off. Recklessly, I pulled the trigger again, not even knowing where the gun was pointing… and the Geshtoch slumped, dragging me to the ground as it went limp.
Breathing hard, I shoved it off me, then shot it again in the head, just to be certain it was dead. And then I looked down at my arm. Yep, that was going to hurt. The long blade was embedded firmly in my flesh, the tip poking out the back of my left bicep. It was tempting to pull it out, but I knew that wasn’t the recommended option. I forced myself to take a slow breath, and then a second one.
“All clear,” I yelled up to the top of the pillar.
“On our way down,” my master replied. I climbed to my feet, heading around the rocks to get back to where we’d dumped our supplies.
“Oh my god!” Associate Nors yelped, as she saw me coming. For a moment, I thought she was startled by my colour change; I was still jet black, and plenty of people had been caught off guard by that in the past. But her stare was fixed on the knife in my arm, and I supposed that to a civilian, it must look pretty terrible.
“Any problems with the… Oh, fuck,” my master cut himself off, as he came around the corner. “God damn it.”
“Someone’s going to have to pull it out,” I said, knowing it would most likely be my master. “And then put pressure on it. I don’t think it’s hit anything important.” For one thing, it didn’t hurt enough, and secondly, it wasn’t bleeding profusely. A steady drip of blood flowed from the wound, but not enough that the knife could have hit an artery.
“I’ll get a first aid kit,” Vosh volunteered immediately, going to rummage in her pack.
“Any other injuries?” Bryce asked, as my master pulled a glow stick out of his own pack. It wouldn’t provide a whole lot of light, but it would at least let him see the wound a little better. Anything that used electricity to generate light would have been fried by the EMP.
“No,” I told Bryce. “There are four dead Geshtoch. They’ve still got the rockbreaker and a few rounds of ammo, but I don’t know if you want to try carting that all the way to the outpost.”
Bryce thought about it, but then shook his head. “Not with you and Bidge both injured. If we had more people to carry things, I might consider it-”
“I can still carry my pack and my gun,” I tried to interrupt him, but he wouldn’t have it.
“I need to make sure my team gets home safely,” he said, fixing me with a stern glare. “And if that means we can’t scavenge everything, then so be it. Let’s get this knife out of your arm. Aiden, I’ll pull it out, then you put pressure on it.” There was a risk that pulling it out would make it worse, but we had to walk for two more hours, plus fight any more Geshtoch whocame along. Given the circumstances, leaving it where it was would slow me down too much.
“Vosh, come and hold this,” my master snapped, waving the glowstick at Vosh. The younger woman rushed over to help, ignoring my master’s sharp tone. He was worried, I assumed, and I couldn’t blame him. If he’d been the one with the knife in his arm, I’d have been much the same.
“Ready?” Bryce asked, taking a firm grip on the handle. I nodded, tensing my shoulder to hold still, and then he pulled it smoothly out, without giving me any more warning than that. My master was there a moment later, putting firm pressure on both the front and back of the wound, and I couldn’t help a groan. A shooting pain ran down my arm, making my hand spasm. It faded quickly, though, and I was left with a dull ache that was probably going to last for days.
It took a good ten minutes before my master was convinced the bleeding had stopped, and then he wrapped the whole thing, gauze and all, in a wide bandage. There wasn’t much more we could do until we got back to a hospital.
