Chapter 147
Chapter One Hundred Forty-Seven
When Kalpana wrapped her arm around Connor, he thought she might be making good on all her flirting, but she wasn’t even looking at him. Instead, she guided him toward the Badger.
The ringing in his ears relented enough that he caught the occasional crack of rock fragments raining down from the sky.
Most of the debris belched up from the pit was fine, white powder.
Snow, he thought.
Kalpana stopped beside the pile of scorpion corpses, where Vicente had removed his helmet. Ichor coated the big man’s thick arms and sections of his face where the visor hadn’t covered him.
After a second, he looked Connor up and down. “You look like crap, Boss.”
Connor realized the heavy weapons expert must have shouted. “I feel better.” He nodded back toward Lem. “They took the worst of it.”
Vicente climbed free of the dead bugs and kicked a few body segments away. “I got ‘em.”
“Careful with Selen. Her arms are hanging on by the skin.”
“Got it.”
Yemi had climbed out of the vehicle to light a cigar and study the distant horizon. When Kalpana stopped to let Connor haul himself into the vehicle, the driver pointed his cigar toward the trees. “Yemi outruns bugs. They come now.”
Spilling from the woods were dark form after dark form: too many of the giant bugs to count.
Connor sagged, then climbed aboard. He held a hand out for Kalpana, but the scout sneered and squeezed past him to take the farthest seat.
Now Yemi turned toward the rest of the approaching team. “Yemi says Selen stays.
Vicente was too far away to hear the driver’s words, but the way the big man cradled his captain, Connor figured he wasn’t the one who’d need to stand up for her.
Still, he squeezed Yemi’s shoulder. “Let it go.”
“Selen gets us killed.”
“The person who brought us here wasn’t Selen. I’ll explain it all to you later, but you need to give her a chance to prove herself all over again.”
“Yemi quits before. Yemi quits now.” The driver ground his cigar out with a boot, then stomped to the driver’s seat.
That would have to do for now.
When Vicente arrived, Connor helped secure Selen to the fold-down medical bed. Blood had soaked through the gauze wrapped around her arms, and the color was still gone from her face, but she was breathing.
The big man brushed matted hair from her hollow-cheeked face. “What happened to her, Boss?”
“Ever hear the term possession?”
“Sort of. Like demons getting inside of you? She said her grandparents told her scary stories about that.”
“Well, that’s what happened. Something got inside her and took away who she was.”
Lem cleared his throat, then put a finger on the latch of the fold-out bed on the other side of the vehicle.
Connor led Vicente forward while the android tended to his other patient.
They were apparently moving too slow for Yemi’s taste, because he was drumming his fingers on the console impatiently.
For now, no one was going to say anything to the driver. He was the single most important member of the team at the moment—the best driver, and the best pilot.
That ate at Connor—being so shallow on skills that one member could be so important.
But there were only six of them now, assuming Selen lived.
When Lem had Elise secured, Connor closed the side door and shouted too Yemi to go.
The driver leaned forward, kissed the console, then powered the vehicle up.
Acceleration tugged at Connor as he cleared personal belongings from a seat. Each time the Badger took a turn, he stopped to check on the console display.
Yemi was maneuvering through the ruins with typical recklessness, skirting around walls with mere millimeters between vehicle and crumbling structure.
Then the first hint of the threat the giant bugs presented became clear, as one of the large creatures darted out from an alleyway to block the street.
The driver swerved, tossing Connor onto the piled belongings and looted gear filling the vehicle.
He pushed up and climbed back to his seat. “How’d they get this far into the ruins?”
Yemi’s hands darted from vehicle control sticks to console and back. “Yemi sees them break off. Bugs try to cut off exit.”
At first Connor found himself thinking that they were just bugs, then he remembered how they’d burrowed behind the team after the shuttle crash. The influence of the imprisoned alien might not be what it had been, but it was still there.
Something banged against the vehicle, and part of the display went dark.
Connor craned his neck enough to be sure he had a good angle on the display: It was dark.
Another huge bug lunged at the vehicle as Yemi swung around a sagging ruin.
The creature slammed against the vehicle with a deafening crash, and another part of the display went black.
Not black, Connor realized. The display sections were going dark.
He shook his head in disbelief. “They’re not destroying the exterior cameras.”
Yemi growled. “Yemi squishes bugs. Guts cover cameras.”
If they kept at it, he would have to pilot almost blind, relying only on the sensors. That wasn’t a good idea with things shifting so fast, so he’d have to look out one of the side windows.
And if a bug could throw itself against a camera enclosure, it could certainly hit a driver’s head poking out.
“Can you get us out of the ruins?”
Yemi held up a hand to signal he didn’t need help. “Yemi drives.”
Another of the bugs charged toward the vehicle, but at the last second, Yemi swerved, banging the front corner against the sprinting thing.
The vehicle rocked sideways and shuddered before rising up on two sets of wheels, then something crunched beneath it, and the tires settled back to the ground.
A moment later, they were past the main body of the bugs and accelerating away.
Yemi cackled and kissed the console again. “Yemi drives! Now Yemi goes home!”
Connor leaned back in his seat.
They weren’t off the planet yet, but at least now it seemed like they might make it.
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