Remnants of Trust. Elizabeth Bonesteel

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СКАЧАТЬ she seemed to have no sense of where she was. Part of Elena envied her.

      “She’s not stable,” he said. “She’s in shock, her pressure’s in the toilet, and she’s not nearly unconscious enough.”

      “You misunderstand me.” She locked eyes with him. “I didn’t say should you move her, I said can you. Do you need help carrying her?”

      “Lanie, she’s had her arm torn off. Moving her like this could kill her.”

      She did not outrank him. She did not outrank any of them. She had no leg to stand on if she tried to give him an order. She wondered if Keita’s tactic with the rifle would work better for her. “Jimmy, if we’re not off this rock in seventeen and a half minutes, we lose our weather window, and we’re stuck here for thirty-seven hours. You fancy our chances for another thirty-seven hours?”

      He knew as well as she did that they couldn’t survive it. Trained infantry or not, they were foreigners on this colony, and the natives who were hunting them knew every side street and abandoned building in the city. Starvation may have driven Canberra’s settlers mad, but it had not rendered them stupid. Keita and Savin had been able to retrieve Niree from them, but over two nights and a day, none of Elena’s team stood a chance.

      Jimmy gave her a pleading look, but she did not shift. At last he sighed. “Yeah,” he told her, resigned. “I can carry her.”

      “Get her ready, then. We’ll move when Keita gets back.” Jimmy knelt down by Niree, and Elena turned, at last, to the girl whose life she had saved.

      She was fourteen, perhaps older. It was difficult to tell, sometimes, on planets where the children were chronically malnourished. She was short and thin and alabaster-pale, jet-black hair plastered to her cheeks by the soaking rain, and she had the sort of apple-cheeked prettiness that rarely bloomed into beauty with adulthood. She had stopped sobbing, but was still hiccupping, and her lips were blue. She stared at Elena with wide, frightened eyes.

      “What’s your name?” Elena asked her.

      A spark of hope rose in those eyes, and Elena could follow her thinking: perhaps I’ll be rescued after all. “Ruby.”

      “Ruby.” Elena nodded. “If you slow us down, or give even the slightest indication that you are conspiring against us, I will shoot you myself. Understood?”

      Those innocent eyes widened, and Elena saw tears filling them again. But Ruby nodded, and Elena turned away from her. “Can you fire and carry her at the same time?” she asked Jimmy.

      “How many arms do you think I have?”

      Just then Savin returned, and marching next to him was Keita, rifle still in his hands, the nose pointed at the ground. He would not meet her eyes, but Savin looked at her and gave her a nod.

      “Okay.” She faced the others. “Two groups. Savin, you stay with Jimmy and Niree.” Savin was a dead shot; she wanted him protecting their wounded. “Keita, you’re with me and Ruby. We’re heading back to the ship. We leapfrog each other, providing covering fire.” She looked at them, one after another. “We’re more than a kilometer off, and we’ve got less than sixteen minutes to get there, so nobody stops. For anything. Clear?”

      Three nods, including the child. Elena stared at Keita.

      “Clear?” she repeated.

      His eyes came up, dark and deadly, boring angrily into hers. “Clear.”

      Jimmy and Savin went first, Jimmy slinging Niree awkwardly over one shoulder. He was a tall man, but slight—medics did not have to maintain the same fitness levels as the infantry, and with this planet’s Earth-point-two gravity, it was slowing him down. Of course, mechanics didn’t have to maintain infantry fitness levels, either, but she did it anyway, in part to prove to herself that she could, and in part to ensure nobody could accuse her of taking the easy way out.

      If she had taken the easy way out, she might not have been a pilot as well as a mechanic. She might have missed this mission altogether. She might have been safe in Exeter’s engine room while her friends were running for their lives.

       Better, or worse?

      Shaking off the thought, she silently forgave Jimmy his high-gravity stumbles and beckoned to Keita, drawing her own weapon.

      They proceeded through the ruined city a few hundred meters at a time, and Elena’s universe contracted into a short routine: watch, aim, wait … then run like hell to the next bit of shelter. The gravity fatigued her with alarming quickness, and she could feel a faint sting developing on her skin from the long exposure to the polluted rain. She felt increasingly conscious of the time as the visibility contracted with the waning afternoon, but she kept moving—silent, methodical—Keita’s footsteps solid and constant next to hers. It crossed her mind that she should not feel so comforted by the presence of a man who had just threatened to kill her, but there was no one else she would have chosen to be at her side in a fight.

      It was almost a relief when the colonists started shooting.

      She heard the pulse impact and Ruby’s shriek at the same moment. They were still a meter away from the shattered storefront they had chosen as their latest shelter, and the shot blasted a fireball into the ground just before them. As one Elena and Keita dodged around it, their strides lengthening, and they dove into the dirt behind the wrecked building. There was another shot, and for a moment Elena thought they had lost the girl. But an instant later she scrambled in between them, arms over her head, abruptly willing to risk sharing the shelter of the soldier who had wanted her dead.

      “Where?” Elena asked.

      Keita nodded behind them. “That garage we passed, just after Savin’s spot.”

      “Long range?”

      He checked his ammunition. “I’ve got three.”

      “I’ve got five.”

      “You’re a crappy shot with a rifle.”

       Fair point.

      He took aim and squeezed the trigger. An instant later the roof of the garage blew apart, leaving a corner of the structure on fire. A volley of shots came their way, peppering the ground before their ruined shelter. The colonists were not terrific shots themselves, she reflected, but it was enough—Jimmy would never get Niree through that.

      She aimed her own rifle and fired back conventional pulse shots as Keita took aim again. She heard him inhale, then exhale. An instant later the rest of the structure burst into flames. Five seconds, ten: no more fire. Are they waiting? She caught sight of Jimmy and Savin through the smoke and flames, running across the remains of the city block. Savin had placed himself between Jimmy and the garage, and was firing one-handed as they ran past.

      She thought they might make it.

      Elena kept up her shooting as they ran, although she never saw anyone hidden in the dense rubble of what was left of the city, never knew what she was aiming at. Ruby had grown silent, and the one time Elena looked at her she saw the girl’s eyes had gone dull and cold.

       Probably for the best.

      At long last, with less than four minutes СКАЧАТЬ