Random Chapter#1

 

CHAPTER #

 

     The old man sits on the side of a hill, surrounded by tall, dense trees that conspire to hide him.

     His name is Jebbe. He has been, for most of his life, a smuggler. He thought he had retired. But he thought wrong, because here he is, on one of his routes from the days of the war again.

     He sits, as if carved from wood, or molded in clay. Unmoving, almost unbreathing. His cloak is covered in haphazard splashes of grunge from the ground he sits on. The hood is drawn low over a face painted with mud that fills the web of ridges in the skin below. In doing this, in a way, it makes him young again.

In the crook of his arm, like a baby, he holds a light calibre EM carbine. Its dark metal is sheathed in the mangy hide of an animal that died by its shot, when the weapon was new, a long, long time ago. And the weapon is older than the man who holds it.

     In broad daylight, you could walk up quite close to him, and not know that he is there.

     The sun hasn’t cleared the horizon, but the morning is already warm. There is rain. It is a light, tepid rain that would not bother one who stepped out in it for a while. But it is relentless. On these hills, in these forests, it almost never stops. There are stories, of men who have ventured here, driven mad by the persistence of the rain alone. Jebbe knows the stories to be true, because he has been in them. He has seen that jungle madness that slowly corrodes from within like an invisible cloud of acid smoke. He is one of the very few who have emerged on the other side of it. Damaged, and yet fortified by its course through him. Like a disease that leaves one weak, but immune.

     This is why he knows that the men who follow him now across the frontier will fail.

     Deep under his hood, his right eye is like a small tub of oil, lined with wafer-thin alloy. Within it is cybernetic circuitry that takes the landscape of the shallow valley spread out before him and reinterprets it to his advantage. He is sure his pursuers are similarly equipped. Probably better.

     To him, they are red spots in a buzzing field of teal. Like him, they wear thermal camouflage, but they are careless. The hoods are thrown back to let the rain provide relief from the heat. He sees them as floating heads.

Four men in a tiny clearing. Four Kilometers away. Standing in a worried circle around a dead mule.

He stood in that clearing a day ago and knew that they would rest here. Where would they tie the mule? Here, probably? Or here? He peeled Juga stalks of their spiny bark and scattered them near the trees. Irresistible to the animals. Neurotoxic.

The men are simple to read. He may have been underestimated by whoever has hired them. That is good. But he assumes something worse.

Behind him, under her own camouflage, augmented by wet leaves, his cargo is still asleep.

The girl is too young to be wearing the black veil of the Crow. But she is tall for her age, so her disguise works. Now that they are in the deep frontier, she does not need it until they cross the Ichor into the settlements at the fringes of Urul Aron, which is where Jebbe must deliver her.

But she never takes it off. He does not want to see her face. She never talks. He does not want to hear her voice. For him, she is cargo.

His eye changes mode to contrast-aware, pans, zooms, refocuses.

Among the low clouds, there is another spot. A microdrone. It shows as the tiniest black pixel, easily missed. This is new. Jebbe had hoped they would not have access to such. It complicates things. He can’t hide from it for the eight or ten days it will take him to reach the Ichor. He can do nothing about it except lure it close and shoot it down.

This will take away some of his advantage. The fools who have until now assumed that he is unaware of them, will know, for sure, that he knows. They will become cautious, vigilant. He would rather have left them in the forests to get lost and frustrated. Give up.

But once alert, with their resources, they may stand a better chance of getting close to him and his cargo.

Jebbe realizes that he is well past the age when, in direct confrontation, he could have taken these adversaries apart without firing a shot. Or even breaking a sweat, for that matter. Now he hopes such confrontation can be avoided.

He takes some satisfaction in the agitation that the floating heads show, then watches them as they gather some kit from the mules share, abandon some, and start their slow pursuit again.

The girl stirs and is awake. Her eyes dart about, looking for him in a small panic. She is a little afraid that he will abandon her in this unforgiving wild. She is also afraid of him, per se. She sees him now, only when he starts to stand. It is like watching a timelapse of a pine growing from a mound of earth to full splendor in front of one’s eyes.

Jebbe is, like her, taller than most of his kind. Taller than any person she has ever seen in her life. His cloak clings to a skeletal frame, angular, haphazard, graceless. To her, he now looks like some primal creature. A monstrous phasmid made by the forest to be one with it.

She sees him watch the sky, thinking. He gauges what it will take to trigger the sensor on the microdrone. He points.

“When I say. Remove your cloak and gloves. That tree. Run to it. As fast as you can. But don’t run in a straight line. Like you are dodging. You understand?”

His voice is a soft, kind whisper that she sometimes cannot believe comes from so intimidating a form.

She nods.

“When you reach there. Cloak up. Hold the tree. Around it, with your arms. Then wait for me. You understand?”

She bristles inside at the repeated ‘You understand?’ like children of her age do, when treated like children. The black veil hides her fleeting frown, like it hides her fear.

She nods.

He ambles across, slowly, to kneel near a tree of his own. The carbine is lovingly brought to bear at the sky, and gently lowered into the crook of a low branch. Wide awake now, she wonders what he is doing. Inside, she coils like a spring.

He stares through the scope for a while, then, in the same gentle whisper that barely carries to her over the sound of the sluggish rain...

“Now.”

The girl leaps to her feet.

Far away, electronic eyes see movement and heat. The microdrone has been hanging in the sky, an inverted metal teardrop with a dozen stalks protruding from it. Autonomously, it swoops down to the canopy to investigate, its computer vigorously scanning for the unexpected shift in the pattern that caught its attention.

Jebbe watches the single pixel dart about rapidly, then grow. In a corner of his vision, tiny numbers spell reducing range. 1600, 1200, 1000, 900. The EM lets out the tiniest whine at low charge. He lets out a slow breath.

800.

With barely a sound at the weapon, the magnetic bolt sighs through the air, in a silent, shallow arc. It doesn’t have enough momentum to destroy the microdrone, a weakness that it makes up for by having an explosive warhead.

There is a puff of black smoke in the uneven grey sky. The drone falls. The muffled ‘crack’ of the warhead reaches him a couple of seconds later.

Jebbe doesn’t wait for it to hit the ground, turning his attention to the floating heads. Tediously they continue to trudge through the forest as if nothing has happened. He waits for the ‘crack’ to reach them. A couple of them look around, not sure what they have heard. They float on.

This is bad. The drone is not transmitting to them. These men are not his hunters. They are bait. There is someone else here, somewhere.

He is not on an equal footing with his real foe now. The loss of the drone, the final data from it, narrows down his location. Whoever is behind it will be on the way. And he doesn’t know who to expect or from where to expect them.

There is little to be done about it. He walks over to the girl, who is hugging the tree as if she will now want to take it with her, her eyes above the veil clenched shut in fear.

“Come,” he says as he walks past without breaking stride.

She detaches and skitters after him into the undergrowth.

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In Bassa, a small village at the edge of Urul Aron, meanwhile, a diminutive woman awakens from a light nap at the inn she has inhabited for the past week. There is an alert on her palmscreen. Lieutenant Colonel Ellimin Aleone of the Three One Overguard grunts in satisfaction and draws a circle on the map taped to the wall beside her, then closes her eyes and goes back to sleep.

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