I’m going to be a very good mothdrive when I grow up! Jedao thought, with borderline hysterical cheer. Too bad he wasn’t really a mothdrive, or he’d be comfortably shielded inside a metal carapace and not subject to yet more atmospheric friction. With his luck, he was probably trailing smoke.
The two humans within bailed. In their position, he would have done the same. They receded behind him, their fall slowed by parachutes that showed up on his othersense as mushroom-billows of thin material.
Jedao was still accelerating. Shortly after that, they crashed through the top layer of the canopy. More bloody trees, fuck everything, he never wanted to encounter another tree for the rest of his life, and fuck Mikodez’s inexplicable obsession with green growing things while he was at it.
The trees’ branches flayed him all the way down. Inanely, Jedao thought of some of the pornography videos he’d watched. It had looked more fun in the porn than it was out here. Maybe he was doing it wrong?
He did remember to decelerate, but he’d left it to the last moment and his control wasn’t as good as he’d have liked. If he had anything left to scream with, he would have shrieked as the world hammered into him.
Shortly after that, the personnel vehicle exploded. It had physical shielding, sure. Said shielding hadn’t been intended for spaceflight acceleration levels of abuse, let alone this kind of impact.
Jedao lost consciousness as the fires washed over him.
He woke an indeterminate amount of time later, aching all over. Shit, how long had he been out? Was the fight over?
Concentrate, don’t panic. Jedao dragged himself upright, whatever that meant. He wasn’t sure his bones had healed right; something felt off about his balance. But he could deal with that later. All (“all”?) he had to do was repeat the breaks and then set them correctly. At the moment that would take time he didn’t have, so he wasn’t going to worry about it.
He was in a different part of the forest, small surprise, but reorienting himself took time. After that, his attention was immediately drawn to the non-moving human-sized masses scattered at ground level. At this point, Jedao became aware that he himself had been thrown clear of the explosion—reflex?—and was now uncomfortably draped over a tree limb whose protuberances pressed into his torso.
If he lived through this experience, he never wanted to see a tree again. Or a plant. Well, maybe the green onion, which he trusted Mikodez was looking after in between coaxing people to eat candies, ordering assassinations, and annoying Zehun. (Jedao didn’t like Zehun, mainly because Zehun thought the best place for Jedao was in an incinerator, but he also had to concede that Zehun had a singularly thankless job.)
Which of the damn human masses was Cheris? He focused on the shapes of faces until he found her. She wasn’t alone.
Next time I run afoul of some faction, I want it to be the Rahal, Jedao thought, aware that he was whining. He could have a nice, action-filled month filling out paperwork and getting yelled at for doing it wrong. It sounded like an excellent vacation.
Heat lapped against his flesh. There was a fire all around him, not surprising considering how he’d gotten here. Based on the change in density of the tree below him, it was on fire. He’d better get down from this stupid branch.
He didn’t know enough about the atmosphere and the trees’ composition to guess how much danger the fire posed. How much of a conflagration would it take to threaten him? Kujen had said that he should avoid diving into stars, and Jedao was happy to take that at face value, but he didn’t know what was necessary and sufficient, as they liked to say in math.
He spent precious seconds mapping locations and vectors. Only seven people remained active in the region, plus Cheris. He hadn’t thought he’d gotten that many out of the initial group, but Cheris wouldn’t have been sitting in a tree writing poetry that entire time. (According to Mikodez, most Kel poetry was either terrible or pornographic or both, anyway.)
This wasn’t any reason to become complacent. He had no way of guessing how many more reinforcements might show up. While he hadn’t gotten the impression that there were that many legitimate inhabitants in the settlement, who knew how many random secret bases the Shuos had elsewhere on this continent, or in space waiting to make orbital drops?
Be realistic, Jedao told himself, although he couldn’t help shivering, which aggravated the pain in all his joints. The Shuos might want to keep an eye on Cheris, but they also had finite resources. Mikodez hadn’t made any secret of his unending budgetary woes. He could have been faking it, but the Shuos probably didn’t have thousands of agents waiting to capture Cheris and Jedao.
Seven-to-one odds he could handle. Surely Cheris’s pickup would arrive soon, assuming she hadn’t simply abandoned him. If she had, he’d figure out a way to track her. He was highly motivated.
(Realistically speaking, Cheris had had two-plus years to prepare to vanish. At this point, as far as resources went, Jedao wasn’t even sure he still had clothing. Modern fibers were tough, but not tough enough to endure this kind of abuse.)
Jedao gritted his teeth (what he thought of as his teeth, anyway) and climbed down the tree he was stuck in, like an aggravated cat. The heat intensified as he scuttled downward, panting at the screaming pain in his hands and knees and feet. He was sure he looked ridiculous, and he was beyond caring.
Jedao landed awkwardly. He was positive he had done something bad to his ankle. But as long as he could crawl, he wasn’t finished.
The soles of his feet protested. Something crunched underfoot, although he felt rather than heard it. Jedao tottered for a second, then steadied. He had good balance, but his feet hadn’t healed straight, just his luck.
Flames beat against his perception. Jedao turned until he was facing the right direction, then broke into a sprint with a stifled sob at the prospect of more pain. “Sprint” wasn’t quite accurate. He was half-running, half-propelling himself by grabbing space-time and yanking himself forward, although at less hair-raising accelerations than he had when he’d brought down the carrier. His othersense gave him a mental map of the trees, so with any luck he could avoid crashing into them.
His control wasn’t perfect. Pain and exhaustion made matters worse. A thorn or twig—no appreciable difference at this speed—tore a chunk out of his side. His entire body felt raw. It startled him how much that new, unwanted sensation threatened to distract him, small as it was.
At least Jedao was going away from the heart of the heat. He didn’t want to test the limits of his resistance to fire. And anyway, his targets were human, and more vulnerable than he was to random environmental hazards. (Maybe not so random, considering that he’d started the blaze in the first place.) He thanked his nameless opponents for their good sense in fleeing.
Jedao didn’t know how good the remaining hostiles were at keeping watch, but surely taking out the carrier and their commander was worth something. His first target appeared to be completely unprepared when Jedao barreled into them.
Fortunately for Jedao and less fortunately for his victim, Jedao landed on top, which cushioned the fall. While they wore a combat suit, the impact broke it open at the seams, one of which was at the neck. Jedao jabbed viciously into the opening despite the way the edges of the break tore at his hand, clawed it open further, and began to throttle the Shuos, who struggled. Jedao simply absorbed the damage, the one thing he was good at.