Now!
Full three-sixty, he kept heading toward his predefined stop point on the far shore but didn’t care how fast or how circuitous the route it took to get there. In back, there was a sudden flare of beams in the infrared, shooting out in all directions. He and the suit maneuvered up, down, all around, unable to move quite as fast as the beams could scan but every second getting farther away from them and thus becoming less of a target.
And sometimes you worked in nanoseconds.
The disruptor beams had no sooner flashed on behind him when the suit’s tracking and evasion systems, thinking at near light speed, dodged and maneuvered, even as the beams came close and all around him.
She missed! Close, baby, but no cigar this time! She hadn’t figured he could do a three-sixty, had she?
Now the beams cut off as quickly as they’d flared. The moment she sent out the targeting beams and even before firing the disruptor pattern, he’d tracked them back and now knew, for a brief moment, just exactly where she was. There was no need to consciously command anything; he fired his own pattern.
Unlike her, he could keep firing for a while, keeping her pinned down while he continued on toward the shore which was now not very far away. Hell, she could already see him, if she and her targeting system were good enough to figure out what his defense was doing, but if she fired, then he knew her precise position. She was cutting back and ducking for cover under the barrage.
Using that, he made it to the fixed point he’d picked on the other side and immediately turned and did a camouflage blend, just where the water met the shore and against the backdrop of the forest and wisps of fog. He instantly powered down all targeting and sensor systems to minimum level and remained perfectly still, all systems and weapons still at the ready. Now she had to come to him in the open. Either that, or she’d have to abandon the hunt, and he knew it wasn’t in her to ever do that.
Sweet Jesus, he was good! For the first time, the rush replaced the lingering fear and he felt his old confidence. Still, it was tempered with the knowledge that it wasn’t anywhere up. to the levels he’d once had and probably would never be again. Even Bambi would eventually have to face, if not the doubt and fear that he had, then the fact that everybody slows down sooner or later. But, right now, if he didn’t have to think about it, or if he was in the winner’s seat, he was as good as they came and he knew it.
“Eugene? How the hell did you do that? You ain’t supposed to be able to move and shoot like that both at the same time!”
He kept his transceiver off. He could pinpoint her if she kept on a few more sentences, even from across the lake. He’d rather she didn’t know his position, or, worse, imagine him on a beeline for the exit.
Damn! He hadn’t thought about that. Seventeen minutes! And they’d have laid some kind of tricks right at the end he’d have to figure out, too. C’mon, Bambi! 1 ain’t got time to wait you out!
She could afford to just wait him out, if she could be certain that he was stopped and waiting for her, but she wouldn’t want to win that way. No, she’d come across now, everything on, lit up like a Christmas tree, inviting him to the duel. Now he had the free shots.
And, within a minute, here she came. She did surprise him for a second or two, coming out well down the Lakeshore from where he’d started, and that did gain her a few points, but now she was clear as a bell, all sensors on, full scans and instant tracking. The moment he opened up, she’d return fire to the exact same point automatically. He might well get her, but it would probably be mutual destruction if he did. She’d figured out that he had the advantage now, and she knew that coming as she did was suicide but that he could not stop her from returning fire until she was knocked out.
So he let her come, watched her come, let her go right past him and into the jungle, almost feeling her confusion that she was still “alive.” Then he opened up with everything he had from behind her, and he heard her scream in pain and go down and out even as she was still letting loose with the longest string of creative cussing even he, a lifelong Navy man, had ever heard. She kept it up, occasionally switching to Italian, until the bushes and vines closed in and finished her off. Well, she’d now have to lie there in a dead suit and wait until he exited. Then she could either call for aid or, once the sim was switched off, manage to get out on her own.
He felt so good about it that he stood there, hovering just above the edge of the lakeshore, looking at where she’d bought it, enjoying the moment even as he knew he had only fourteen minutes to get out himself.
It wasn’t a serious problem.
The sea monster reared up with lightning speed and swallowed him in mid-gloat.
FIVE
Survival Rituals
There was a storm coming. Even before you could see it in the sky or hear it in the distance you could feel it—everybody could. The temperature dropped, and for a moment it seemed like the whole world paused to get a breath, so quiet and still it was as the clouds rolled in fast, then ever faster, covering the sun and then the rest of the sky with a bubbling, frothing mass of angry cloud.
Father Alex looked at the sight and shook his head. It wouldn’t take more than one or two more generations before the faith of their fathers was even more muddied than it was now, and this sort of thing would be taken as the act of an angry god, and perhaps not the only one.
The camp was already on the move, and in a manner that their ancestors would have found astonishingly wrong had they seen it. Instead of moving to shelter, to groves of trees that weren’t all that far off, they instead all moved quite efficiently out into the open, away from trees or flowing water, out into the tall grass. Only then did they huddle together, the women cradling and comforting the children, the men simply standing or sitting, waiting. They retained their guard circles, of course, but each had stuck his spear in the earth at a slight angle, where it was available but not in his hand.
Jagged lightning darted out of the clouds and found targets on the ground. Storms here, always violent, had become even more so since the Titans altered the planetary ecosystem to suit themselves. The storm sounded like an artillery barrage, and the lightning danced all over the sky and the ground as the sky grew so dark it seemed that the sun had already set. There was no way you could outrun such a thing, and if any of that hit you it was God’s will. But it was less likely to strike you in the open, they knew by experience, and more likely to strike trees or wooden poles or reclaimed pieces of metal than someone simply standing or sitting naked in the open.
Even Father Alex found it difficult during times like these to maintain his faith, though he knew that when his faith wavered he was in no position to require the straight and narrow from his flock. Had not he been taught that the great leader of God, Moses, had seen his flock turn from God and be nearly destroyed? And he was no Moses; God had never spoken to him, nor dictated to him holy books, nor did he even have holy books to look at and take comfort from. How much error was already in the memorized texts held by various Families? How much understanding was possible in such a system that, each generation, grew farther away from the source of light?