The Archimedes Effect

30

Desolation Swamp

The Planet Omega

Jay had paid off, and now there were four of them outside the prison and on the run. Jethro, who had already given him all he knew; a giant of a man named Gauss; and a grizzled old guy who called himself Reef.

Five hundred meters away from the walls, Jethro stepped into the maw of a flesh-eating plant and was gobbled down in this slow-motion peristaltic spasm that took a while, though the plant apparently injected him with some kind of narcotic so that he was smiling as it ate him. Jay had a handgun, a blaster that fired a charged-particle beam, and he’d started to cut loose on the plant, but Reef said, “Don’t! The guards’ll spot the beam on their sensors this close! Jethro’s already dead anyhow, no point in shooting.”

So Jay, Gauss, and Reef kept running. They wanted to be deep in the swamp before the guards came looking for them.

If they could stay alive for a while—and Jay would make sure of that as best he could—he should get something from the two escapees that might be useful.

A thunderstorm rolled in from somewhere, fast, and lightning and thunder flashed and boomed as a rain so heavy it turned the world into watery grass fell.

“Don’t step on anything red or blue,” Reef said. “Or round,” he added.

Given how hard it was to see anything, much less colors or shapes in the deluge, Jay was trusting to mostly blind luck about that.

After fifteen minutes, the rain stopped, as suddenly as it had come, and the sun burst out and started cooking the water away. They splashed through puddles, avoiding red, blue, and round.

“There’s a caldera that way,” Reef said, “Hot springs. That’ll throw off the guards’ IR scanners. They won’t put anybody on the ground there, it’ll be skimmers above the treetops. If we can make that before they come looking, we’ll have a chance.”

“How do you know this?”

“I been in the Cage for thirty-three years—what there is to hear, I heard five times already.”

“Lead on, then.”

“I don’t suppose you want to give me the blaster, since I’ll be in front?”

“You’d be right about that,” Jay said.

“You don’t trust me?”

“Not to put too fine a point on it, but no, I don’t.”

The old man cackled. “I wouldn’t trust me, either. Come on. Keep an eye on the trees, there’s hanging serpents there look kind of like moss—one bite, you’re done.”

“Nice place.”

“Only bad men get sent here, son. We’re all guilty.”

As they walked, Jay figured he had better get whatever information he was going to get sooner rather than later. He was a little ways behind Reef, ahead of Gauss. He dropped back a little more so he could talk to the bigger man.

“So,” he said. “Stark.”

“What about ’im?”

“You tell me.”

Gauss shrugged. “Soldier. Killer. Got shot in the back trying for the gate when a supply flitter came in.”

“I know that much. What else?”

“He hung with ex-troopers, mostly. Mercs, freelancers, guys who made money in shooting wars, guarding dopers or smugglers.”

“Any names?”

“Groves. Russell. Hill. Thompson. Carruth. Couple others I never got to know. Special Forcers—Recon, green hats, Rangers. Badasses. Just as soon kill you as smile at you.”

Ahead, Reef said, “We’re almost—ah, shit!”

Jay turned his attention to the old man, who had dropped to his knees. What—?

There was something that looked like an arrow piercing the man, the barbed point of it coming from his back. As he watched, Reef was jerked off his feet and dragged along the wet ground. Jay saw that the “arrow” was actually the end of a long, vinelike tentacle, connected to a creature he couldn’t immediately tell was animal or plant. Looked kind of like a squid, but squatter, and covered with what looked like scales or bark. It had a huge, circular mouth with lots of pointed teeth in concentric rows.

Whatever Reef had, there was no getting it now.

Terrific scenario, no question. Scared himself.

“FREEZE RIGHT THERE!” came an amplified voice.

Jay glanced up and saw a five-man flitter floating twenty meters above them, the snout of a plasma cannon pointed over the side at them. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another. Crap.

“I’m not goin’ back!” Gauss yelled. He started running, lumbering through the brush.

The squidlike thing fired a sharp-ended tentacle at Gauss, but missed.

The gunner in the flitter was more accurate. He opened up with the plasma cannon and when the bolt hit Gauss, like a tree being hit with lightning, Gauss’s sap turned into superheated steam and blasted him apart—ka-blam!

“Euuww,” Jay said. “Ick!”

Time to leave.

“End scenario,” Jay said as the gunner started to line up on him.

Not much, maybe, but he had a few names. Something, at least.

Washington, D.C.

Lewis, at home, worked out the best way to deal with Carruth. There were a few risks, but she figured she could handle those. It was all in the setup.

First, she had to pick another Army base. Which one didn’t matter, as long as she could convince Carruth he had every chance of getting in and out okay, and that ought not to be a problem. Then, it was just a matter of how best to make sure he wouldn’t be captured alive.

She could use a vox-scrambler and make the call from a moving car in the middle of the city; she knew who to talk to to get the maximum response, and they’d never be able to get a fix on her in time.

She imagined how it might go:

“Listen, don’t talk—the terrorists who have been hitting the Army’s bases are going to hit another one.” She’d fill in the blanks here—time, place, like that. “But here’s the thing: the leader of the group, guy named ‘Carruth’? He’s an ex-SEAL who won’t let himself be taken alive. He’s already killed a bunch of GIs, plus a couple of civilian cops—he carries this monster handgun—and he has wired himself up with explosives. There’s a button on his belt, if he pushes it, he’ll take down half a city block when he goes. . . .”

She smiled at the scenario she was creating. She could easily imagine that she was the officer in charge of security. They wanted these suckers, bad, but they sure as hell wouldn’t let Carruth and his boys get within a hundred meters of anything they didn’t want to see blown up. So the ideal place to take him down would be in the middle of nowhere. But if they stopped him before he got onto the base, they’d have to bring in the civilian authorities—local and state police, FBI counterterrorism force, Homeland Security, maybe even the National Guard. The Army wouldn’t like that for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which would be the lack of control.

If, however, they could channel Carruth once he was on the base—a detour into an artillery range would be good, like that—then they could surround him somewhere relatively safe, and if he went nova, too bad. There were some stiff antiterrorism laws on the books these days, but if Carruth was simply captured, eventually he’d get a day in court.

An Army security guy would almost surely be thinking that it would be better for a bunch of killer terrorists to go up in smoke than maybe having some bleeding-heart liberal lawyer convincing a jury to let the clowns off because they had unhappy childhoods or some such crap.

That Carruth wouldn’t be strapped with bombs wouldn’t matter. Some Army sniper who could shoot out a bug’s left eye from a kilometer away would be perched somewhere with a scoped rifle and when Carruth tried to run—believing that he could get away, because Lewis had convinced him there was a secret bolt-hole he could use—then Carruth would be no more. . . .

Shoot, she could even set it up that he had to go into the base alone—that since he was just going to collect a colonel, there wasn’t going to be any shooting necessary. . . .

She smiled again. She was good, she knew it. Good enough to pull this off.

Carruth didn’t have a prayer.