AMoss removed the improvised listening device from his chest harness and pointed it into the darkness like a Colonial Marine motion tracker. It wasn't anything that reliable. Johns would never purchase equipment as pricey as Marines used. Besides, the Colonial Marines were archrivals of the Company Rangers. But the prototype unit Moss had fashioned was a crude facsimile of the real deal. It worked well enough to warn him if any nasties were in the area. To increase his odds of not being attacked, Moss connected the audio inputs on his glasses to the motion tracker's A/V output. The hasty connection was nothing fancy. A simple patch cord routed the blaring external speaker feed through the micro-speaker located just behind his ears. He didn't want to go slogging through the darkness with a speaker calling out to every hungry raptor in earshot. As a bonus, every time the speaker behind his ear beeped, a corresponding dot popped up on his glass's viewscreens.
Moss looked through the green, glowing readout in the lower right corner of his glasses and grimaced. He hated the night vision system in these cheap-ass glasses. The fluctuating Hz rate and intense saturation gave him wicked eyestrain, and this time out was no exception to that rule. It felt like someone was trying to pop his eyeballs out of their sockets with a dirty teaspoon. Mental note: from now on, buy your own fucking gear.
After a short time passed, Moss turned the high gain on the sensitivity control to its max +10dB. It didn't increase the unit's overall volume or extend the device's range, but it improved sound quality through the mid-range band.
Moss was no super engineer like Lockspur, but he fashioned a pretty good tracker out of a pile of old junk most people would have tossed in the bin. That made him proud. Few mercs made their own equipment. The device showed a few other useful stats like the number of nearby targets, approximated sizes, general direction of travel, and, to a limited extent, speed of approach. That readout proved useful, allowing him to evade a few fast movers before they sensed him. He just evaded a horde of raptors heading towards what he hoped wasn't a woman's scream.
But now, there were no signs of movement. The screen flashed, but showed no threats. Although a strange background interference emanated from the tiny speakers, making him question the reliability of his gear. In his swirling mind, he heard Lockspur laughing about his paranoia. The eerie sound intensified until the tracker picked up six or seven targets behind him. At that point, the interference became normal beeps.
Raptors weren't pack hunters. He knew that much. So, his unwanted tails were giving chase again. And from the increasingly shrill tones coming out of the micro-speaker, they were closing in only to fall back again. They were herding him.
One problem Moss noted with his frankentronics was that the tracker only revealed approaching targets. His glasses used small viewscreens, limiting visibility. Another problem was the micro-speaker sounded off if anything moved in the 360° area around him. If he wanted to find an unseen target, he needed to turn until the new target popped up in his tracker's field of vision. But at that point, he was already vulnerable to attack.
Moss's tracker lit up. A shrill alarm sounded just behind his ears, and his heart thudded in his chest. His would-be murderers were closing the distance. He reeled around, pointing the tracker into the darkness and, sure enough, they were there again. He was quickly becoming tired of cat-and-mouse shit, which made his temples throb with a mixture of anger and frustration. Every time he lost them in the dark, they popped out again, not far away. It was as if they knew where he would be before he did. And yet, oddly enough, they never caught him. Get close, fall back.
The seven lit-up dots on his monitor closed the distance for the third time. If they get any damn closer, he told himself, I'll be able to smell their aftershave. Moss focused on the readout, saw the ominous dots a few inches from his position. But the distance between dots didn't matter. He forgot to celebrate the unit before heading into the dark. He wasn't sure if the unit read in feet or yards. If it read in feet, his chasers were somewhere in the next compartment. Less than fifty feet away, certainly not one-hundred-fifty feet away. Either way, the echoing footsteps told him they were too damn close.
The heavily armed brutes giving chase possessed more than enough combined firepower to protect them from whatever they might encounter. Unlike his pursuers, his limited firepower forced him to tiptoe through the darkness, caught between the enemies he couldn't see and the ones he could.
As a result, his chasers outpaced him two steps to his one. The rising hair on the back of his neck told him to forget the unseen raptors and run. But his instincts told him something was off about their half-hearted chasers. If they knew where he was, what else did they know? They came closer over the last hour. The getting closer made sense. But the repeated retreats did not. Unless these fuckers are pushing me towards something.
An ear-bursting roar shook the wreckage, and Moss fumbled backward, shoulders slamming against the wall beneath the hatch he had just crawled through. Something big was out there in one of the dark compartments ahead. From the sound of the trumpeting foghorn still ringing in his ears, the creature was enormous. The reverberating challenge radiated through the closed hatch on the other side of the compartment. A fever dream of creatures clawed its way through his mind. Adrenaline flooded Moss's veins. His heart raced, and sweat filled his palms.
He looked toward the scream and then at the approaching dots on the tracker. Great. No way forward, no way back. "Shit," he said in a rueful whisper. He peered up at the open hatch he had just fallen through and turned towards the hatch at the far end of the compartment. The next hatch was partially open. But there was no way to tell if there were any nasties waiting on the other side. And still, the dots came closer.
______________________________________________
Master Sergeant Benson held up a meaty, broad hand, spread his pallid fingers wide and slowly lowered it towards the ground, palm down. His men fell silent, each taking a knee. He waved to Dumort to come to his side. Dumort moved quickly, kneeling down beside him. He held out the motion tracker, and Henson looked at it. The readout showed a single fixed dot. The readout beside it flashed: 23 meters.
"He's stopped, sir."
Benson pointed through the twisted hatch in the distance, and Dumort nodded his understanding. Their target was just on the other side of the hatch. Benson stood up and said in a loud, forceful tone, "Take five." His men stood up, blinking dumbly. He gestured for them to talk. He mouthed the words, make some goddamn noise. And as they did, Benson waited and watched his tracker, knowing the dot in the next compartment would move soon. The sheep will try to evade the fox.
"Stupid; stupid, stupid; stupid." Moss whispered to himself. His enemies were trying to trap him on both sides. "They're pushing me, hoping I'll run into a nest of raptors or lead them somewhere. Bullshit," he fumed. "Why let the raptors get me?"
Moss's adversaries possessed an unfair knowledge of his whereabouts, an advantage he didn't understand. Perhaps someone leaked the mission intel, or there was an inside agent in Lilith's organization. He needed to find his teammates or lure his chasers away. Neither would be straightforward tasks if his beaters had prior knowledge of his location. He needed an out-of-the-box strategy to escape.
Moss remembered something an old commander told him when he was a cherry lieutenant. The old warrior's advice had stuck with him and saved his ass on more than one occasion. All plans contain assumptions. But the best plans rely on the fewest assumptions. See the problem and go around it, not through it.
Moss sat down below the bent hatch, pressed his back against the wall, listening to the voices in the next compartment. He pondered the last few hours. Every time he stopped; they stopped and realized they had a tracker. That was a fact he was sure of. But something else was going on here. On a ship this size and this disorienting, he should have evaded them even with a tracker. The only logical answer was that his chaser had intel of where he was going. But how? For the last 45 minutes, he meandered through the darkness, hoping to evade the raptors and find his comrades by sheer luck.
He looked around the compartment, assessing the situation. It was bleak. One way in; guarded by an overpowering enemy. The other way, guarded by the unknown. Danger either way. Moss squinted through the green haze, trying to wrap his mind around how they could follow him. "This shit has already happened. You're a moron."
Moss scanned the darkness, trying to figure a way to shake off his tail. The room closed in around him. How do you escape an enemy that knows what you are going to do before you do? Then, a crazy idea dawned on him, and he ran across the room, making as much noise as possible and presenting as big of a target as possible. He knew they would see him move to the next compartment and then follow. So, he stopped below the far hatch and listened closely. They did not follow. The voices stopped. He was right; they had a tracker, and they were herding him like a cow. He jumped onto the handrail. Pendulumed his feet up and kicked the hatch open. The stench of bad breath and blood filled his nostrils. He remembered Dahl's earlier experience and pulled his legs away. Something behind the door bumped it, but nothing burst through. He was right; they had known something was in there. And if he had jumped through in haste, he would be in a fight for his life right now. He reached out, grabbed the bottom of the open hatch frame, pressed his body against the wall and dropped to the floor.
In the adjacent compartment, Benson had watched the dot race across the compartment, grinning at his good luck. His malevolent smile caught Dumort's attention, and Dumort motioned for the others to be quiet. The men fell silent, watching the tracker and waiting for the order to advance. They were ready. The chase was almost done.
Moss slid into the corner where the wall met the floor, pressed himself lengthwise into the horizontal corner, trying to mask himself from their tracker. His shotgun and motion tracker swung on the handrail, suspended on the wide carry strap. All he had left to defend himself with was a few handguns and 4 clips of ammo. He considered retrieving the weapon, but that would give away his position. Damn, he thought. If I'm lucky, whoever is out there might see his swinging equipment and think I'm standing beneath the hatch. He crawled around the outer perimeter of the room, stopping once to dump his unneeded shotgun rounds and disconnect the wire hanging from his glasses. After another 10 minutes of cautious crawling, he reached the open hatch, where he entered the room. He couldn't flee through either hatch. And if he stood up, they would lock onto his new position.
"Bastards," Moss whispered to himself. "If I'd gone through that hatch, I'd be dead." Moss lay in the dark, tapping the back of his head against the floor and watching the far hatch for signs of movement. Nothing came through, but he knew a raptor crouched on the other side waiting for a fresh meal. The speaker on his suspended tracker remained silent. But an eerie green flash pulsed in the darkness.
Benson knelt in the dark compartment, telling himself he had time to spare and that something more important was on his side. For Benson, this scenario had played out before. He was from the future, and the future always repeats itself. Benson grinned in the dark, knowing that soon, he would not only catch his prey, but that in the future, he had already caught him. It's good to have all the answers, Benson mused.
Moss had one logical option: retrieve his gear and continue through the next hatch. He could retrieve his ammo on the way, then deal with the raptor. The hatch is the quickest way to get to Dahl and Lockspur. But his pursuers knew he would choose that path? The only path? That's why they had stopped. That's why they were waiting. They knew Moss would take the straightforward route. But what else did they know? I need to find a route no one in their right mind would take. A path no one would ever consider. A path to certain death. Then he saw it. An 18" × 18" vent cover had fallen off the ductwork in a nearby corner. The opening was near the ceiling, but as the ship lay upside down, the opening was now near the floor. He did not know which way the ductwork snaked or what might wait for him inside. But it was the only unexpected option.
At least no big raptors could sneak up on him. But the little raptors were more vicious than their larger kin. And in swarms, they were unstoppable clouds of gnashing teeth and rending claws. In the confines of that space, Moss would only have his sidearm to fend off an attack. Come on, pussy, he thought. You're probably dead no matter which way you go.
Dumort stared at the tracker in his hand as if trying to will the dot to move onward. But the faltering dot stayed put. The swinging tracker still served a purpose. It gave a false reading. A ghost signal. "What's he doing?" he asked in a hushed voice as the dot blinked on and off.
Benson turned to him, looked at his wristwatch and said, "In 60 seconds he will proceed through that hatch and then we'll have him."
The two men waited in silence, watching the seconds count down until their prey moved towards the inevitable. Time passed, Moss's equipment swung, and all the while, Benson didn't realize his prey had fled. The dot hovered, but then wavered and vanished. Both men stared wide-eyed in disbelief as the equipment slipped off the handrail and hit the floor with an eerie sound like shit hitting the fan.
Benson and Dumort looked at each other, mouths agape, and Dumort said, "I think somebody forgot to tell him he was supposed to go through the hatch."
Benson snatched the tracker out of his hands, shook it like a wild man, and searched for the blinking dot. No malfunction. The target had vanished. "That's impossible!" he bellowed, jumping to his feet and gesturing for the men to follow him into the next compartment.
The seven men raced through the darkness, scaled the handrails, shoved their way through the hatch and fell to the floor, rifle flashlights bursting to life as they searched the empty compartment. They spun in wide-arching circles, ready to fire at the first thing that moved. But there was no sign of their prey. The dark room lay empty. The far hatch remained ajar as silence whispered, you're fucked now. "Which way did he go?" Benson yelled in a panic. He screamed into the darkness. The seven amped up, wide-eyed men missed the dark brown fingers slipping through the now-replaced grating in the near corner.
"Shit! Dammit! Fuck!" Benson screamed, swirling in all directions, trying to locate the predictable target that just went rogue with everyone's perfect timeline.
"That changes shit." Dumort said, staring at Benson.
"Fucking think so?" Benson snapped, punching one of his men in the face. The giant's head snapped to the side and then turned back to Benson. He said nothing. "The second that dot vanished, he fucked us." Benson saw Dumort's eyebrows furrow and added, "He goes through the next hatch and gets attacked by two raptors. Then we follow the blood trail straight to the girl."
"Does this mean the timeline has changed?"
Benson stared at the tracker, trying to will it to produce a single green dot.
Moss stared through the narrow slots in the grate, listening to their conversation and planning an escape strategy. But all he could see was that he had traded a large hiding place for a cramped one. A cramped one where anything could run up behind him.
They're after Dahl, he thought. He had to get to her before his chasers did. But now they were between him and her. He couldn't remain in the ductwork without his tracker and get to her. His current position cloaked his presence for now, but he couldn't flee through the steel ducts without giving himself away to the raptors. Inward led to death, and he couldn't get out as long as they had a tracker and he didn't. If they were close, their tracker would pick him up the second he emerged from behind the grate. And if he moved inward, they'd hear him. Shit! Trapped on both sides again.
"When he altered the events of this timeline," Benson raged at his men like they had caused what had just happened. "He created a tear in space/time. And now, the further he goes off course, the farther he drags us into a divergent time stream, right along with him."
"So let's just find him and make him go through that hatch," one of Dumort's men said, shrugging his mountainous shoulders.
"It doesn't work that way. Every time something new happens, the farther off course we're pushed. After enough changes occur, they won't be able to find us or send us through a return portal. We'll have no way to get back."
"What about their ship?" the man Benson punched in the face asked. "We can use that to get home, can't we?"
"Commander Krone sent Msg. Avenesque and his team to destroy their ship. And even if they don't. We can't use it to get home; we'd be going back to a world where no one knows us, or our mission. Most of our leaders are children."
Moss smiled in the lonely darkness and thought, you're welcome.