Moss 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 spring for a piece of equipment that pricey. Besides, Johns hated the Colonial Marines; they were the archrivals of the Company Rangers. His prototype unit was a crude facsimile of the real deal, but it worked well enough to warn him if any nasties were getting coming up from behind. 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. The patch cord routed the blaring external speaker feed through the micro-speaker located just behind his left ear. 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 in 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 the 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 saw 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 speaker signalled like earlier with the newcomers. He believed it was interference, but then he started doubting himself. In his swirling mind, he heard Lockspur laughing about his paranoia. The device beeped louder than when he first noticed the beeping. Only 30 minutes earlier, it picked up six or seven targets behind him. Raptors weren't pack hunters. His unwanted tails were giving chase again. And from the increasingly shrill tones coming out of the micro-speaker, they were closing in and then falling back.
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 around until the new target popped up in his field of vision. But at that point, he was vulnerable to attack.
Moss's tracker lit up. A shrill alarm sounded just behind his ear and his heart thudded in his chest. His would-be murders were closing the distance. He reeled around, pointing the tracker into the darkness. Surely enough, they were there again. The sick of cat-and-mouse shit made his temples throb with anger. Every time he lost them in the dark, they popped out again, not far away. It was as if they had an idea where he would be before he did. And yet, oddly enough, they never caught him.
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 a fifty feet away, certainly not one-hundred-fifty feet away. Either way, his ears told him they were still too damn close.
The heavily armed brutes giving chase possessed more than enough combined firepower to move faster than Moss. Unlike them, limited firepower forced him.to tip-toe through the wreckage, evading the raptors. As a result, they were outpacing 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 where? His instincts told him something was off about their half-hearted chasers. They came closer over the last hour. The getting closer, he understood. But the repeated retreats made no sense. No one chases a target without having the intention of catching it. Unless these fuckers are pushing me.
An ear-bursting roar shook the wreckage and Moss fumbled backward, shoulders slamming against the wall beneath the hatch he just crawled through. Something big was out there in one of the dark compartments ahead. From the trumpeting foghorn roar 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 their way through his mind, none of whom he wanted to meet.
Adrenaline flooded Moss's veins. His heart raced and sweat filled his palms. Great. No way forward, and thanks to my oversized friends, no way back, either. "Shit," he said in a rueful whisper. He peered up at the open hatch he just fell through and turned towards the hatch at the far end of the compartment. The next hatch was closed. There was no way to tell if there was a nasty surprise waiting on the other side.
______________________________________________
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 for Dumort to come to his side. Dumort moved quickly, knelling down beside him. He held out the motion tracker. Benson looked at it. The readout showed a single fixed dot. The readout beside it flashed: 23 meters.
Benson pointed through the twisted hatch in the distance, and Dumort nodded his understanding. Their target stopped 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 goddam 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." 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 stuck with him and saved his ass on more than one occasion. All plans contain assumptions. The best plans rely on the fewest assumptions.
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. They had a tracker. That was a fact he was sure of. But something else was going on here. In 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 find his comrades by sheer luck.
He looked around the compartment, accessing the situation. It was bleak. One way in; one way out. Danger either way. Moss squinted through the green haze, trying to wrap his mind around how they could follow him. "They must be seeing the past. This shit has already happened. Right. Right. And 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 donned on him. He ran across the room, making as much noise as possible and presenting as big of a target as possible, knowing they would see him move forward. He stopped below the far hatch and listened closely. The voices stopped. He was right; they had a tracker, and they were herding him like a cow. He jumped up on the handrail. Pendulum'd his feet up and hooked the release lever. The weight of his lower body pushed the lever down, releasing the lock. The door opened a fraction of an inch and 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 open, but nothing burst through. He was right; they had known something was in there. And if he jumped through in haste, he would be fighting for his life right now. He reached out, grabbed the bottom of the open hatch frame, and slid down the wall.
Benson 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 in on his new position and realize they were discovered.
"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. The still connected patch cord saw to that.
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 way to proceed, and that was to continue through the next hatch. He could retrieve his ammo and weapon, then deal with the raptor. The hatch is the quickest way to get to Dahl and Lockspur. But his pursuers knew he would choose the safe path? The logical 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? Maybe there was more than one raptor ahead? Not this time. I need to find a route no one in their right mind would take. A path no one would ever consider. A path of 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 viscous 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. "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 countdown until their prey moved closer to certain doom. Time passed and all the while, Benson didn't realize it was Moss's equipment swinging on the handrail. The dot stayed fixed, but wavered and fluctuated. Both men stared wide-eyed at the tracker. The blinking dot dimmed, flickered, and then disappeared as the heavy equipment slipped off the handrail and hit the floor with an eerie sound like shit hitting a fan.
Benson and Dumort looked at each other, mouths falling agape in disbelief. "I think somebody forgot to tell him he was supposed to go through the hatch." Dumort said.
Benson snatched the tracker out of his hands, shook it like a wild man, and searched for the blinking dot. It was not a 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 room. 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. Thhe man said or did 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."
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 with no tracker and do that. His current position cloaked his presence for now, but he couldn't flee into the ducts without risking attack. That way led to death, and he couldn't get out as long as they had a tracker. If they were close, it would pick him up the second he emerged from behind the grate. Shit! he screamed in his head. Why did you leave the tracker?
"When he altered the events of this timeline," Benson raged at his men like they had caused what had just happened. "He created a tare 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 a return portal. We'll have no way to get back."
"What about their ship?" the man Benson punched in the face said. "We can use that to get home, can't we?"
"Commander Krone sent Msg. Avenesque and his team to destroy the mercenary ship. We're here to secure the girl and dispose of her compatriots. Then we will return to the point of entry in preparation to go into the core and secure the obelisk that bitch stole. But even if we accomplish all those missions and use their ship to get home, we'd still 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.