Of Soldiers and Scientists isn't finished, either. Part 2 and maybe Part 3 are forthcoming.
Sometime in the future…
Emily finished the last connector on her Refractor Array and glanced at the ground far below. “Done,” she called.
Reece pulled a lever in the cockpit of the Toreador, causing the Refractor to drift away. She knew the Refractor was staying in place and it was their airship that was moving, but the illusion was quite convincing.
Reece nudged the Toreador—a six-prop Screamer Class fighter—to a hover-stop five hundred feet away, allowing both of them to view their handiwork. “The Eponymous Refractor Array,” Emily whispered to herself, feeling a tingle of pride. It was a beautiful latticework of alumisteel and golden translucent panels, hovering high above the ground by virtue of a Repellium spray and her hand-crafted gyroscope. Maybe she could call it an Eponyscope? Someone had already made one, no doubt. It was how her luck ran. Besides, “Eponyscope” suggested some kind of visual enhancement. She watched it slowly spin in the predawn light, then turned to one of the ammo cabinets where her kit was stowed.
She fished her notebook out of her kit and scrawled “EPONYSCOPE” across the last page. As she stuffed it back into one of the many zippered pockets, she happened to glance at the ground just as the cloud cover broke.
“Reece,” she said, eyes glued to the greenery below, “have you ever touched ground?”
He had leaned back in the pilot seat with his cap partly covering his eyes. “Mm?” he grunted, sitting up. He pushed the cap back and rubbed his eyes. “Yah. Few times.”
“What’s it like?”
He looked over the bow a moment, remembering. “Full of life.” He looked down at the green vista under the breaking clouds. “It’s green like that everywhere. Dark green trees, yellow-green grasses, green so dark it’s almost purple. All kindsa jungle everywhere. You never woulda thought there was so much green. That’s only the first thing you notice though.”
She tore her gaze away from his face and peered at the ground again. “Then what?”
“The air. It’s thick, and it smells like… hell, I dunno what-all it smells like. Alla that green, and the dirt, with animals and mutants and dead cities. But you can feel the air pass in and out of your lungs, so thick with all that smell. It makes you a little drunk.”
They fell silent, both staring over the bow. The wind was still and the props of the Toreador were quiet as they floated on Repellium force alone. She imagined herself on the ground, staring up at clouds and wading through vibrant plant life. “Why?” she asked. “Why did you touch ground?”
Leather creaked as he shrugged. “In the service. Anybody that survives the Corps is gotta hit the ground sooner or later. Ya fight in the air, someone hits ground.”
He rubbed his jaw. It was so quiet Emily could hear the sound of his hand against the stubble on his cheek. “I remember the first time I landed.” His eyes unfocused, watching memories. “I was nose gunner on the Spirit, just a corporal at the time. Some Atlantan fart-floater had dropped out of a cloud and zinged us pretty good before we put her down. Our PM was shot—you know how it’ll give ya five or six whump-whump sounds and then it’s done?”
Emily didn’t have any idea what that was like but she nodded. She could scarcely imagine being on a large airship when the perpetual motion drive was that badly damaged. “Well lucky for us,” he continued, “we had a sheeyeh-hot mechanic named Lorris—Lorry, we called him. Lorry climbed through a hole in the deck out onto the belly—just hangin’ there in space off his one safety line as we glided further and further down. I can remember like it was yesterday, when he stuck his head through the hole in the deck and said ‘it’s well and truly fooked, Sarge!’”
He paused and looked her in the eye. “He hadda report to Sarge cause Capn Hollis took a round in the eye and tumbled over the deck in the fight with the Atlantan.” His eyes dropped. “Good guy, Capn Hollis.”
Emily shuddered. Since she met Bill Reece they had both come close to death a few times, but she had never lost anyone she cared about.
“Anyway,” he continued, “Lorry tells Sarge he can fix it but we gotta touch down. Sarge cusses a blue streak and tells the pilot—damned if I can remember his name—to find a patch of flat dirt. On the way down there’s nothing much for me to do but stay away from Sarge and gawk. All that green and brown, and the air gettin’ thicker and thicker, and then pilot says there’s a spot there, next to that ruin.”
Reece looked up from his memories. “The thing about ruins is; they’re like holy ground to the mutants. I heard some guys say they touched ground at a ruin and found all kind of knick-knacks and offerings and such in a little altar. Bunch of half-men worshipping a broken building in the middle of nowhere. Dunno if it’s true. Never saw for myself.
“But anyway, pilot says ‘ruins’ and we all get kinda excited and nervous so Sarge has ta give us work, so I didn’t see much of the landing. I remember steppin’ off the boat onto the dirt though. The ground was all springy and kinda tacky at the same time. Only took a few minutes for Lorry to set up, and he told Sarge it was gonna take an hour at least, so Sarge has me set up a perimeter.”
He snapped out of his reverie again. “A perimeter is setting up defensive positions in case of attack. The problem with a nice flat landing spot in the middle of a jungle is that it’s also a good ambush spot for the natives. We were sure we didn’t have too long before mutants or savages showed up.
“So I’m assigning guys to defensive spots around the Spirit, and Jackson finds a door.”
Emily blinked. “A door? In the dirt?”
He nodded. “Pretty much. When you looked at it from the landing site, it was just a grassy mound. But when Jackson walked down and around to the other side he found it. ‘Reecey,’ he says. ‘It’s military!’”
Emily gasped. “An ancient military site?”
He nodded again, grinning. “An armory. I found out later that the ancients stockpiled a lot of guns near the beginning of the Double-A, mostly near big cities. You can even find some revolvers that still work, but you can’t trust the ammo.
“Now, the first thing we should do is go get Sarge. But I figure he’s busy, what with landing on the ground an’ all, and the padlock on this door is damn near rusted through. So me and Jackson give it a couple whacks with our rifle butts and the door just kinda falls open.”
He wrinkled his nose. “First thing: the air was stank. We were all for elbowing each other outta the way to be the first one in, but the stank made us wait. And then we’re thinkin’ that Sarge doesn’t need to be bothered with this until we’ve had ourselves a loot—I mean, look. I’m sure Sarge will just tell us to mark it and get back to our perimeter, and I also think: to hell with that.
“So I radio the other guys on the perimeter and they’re all goosey-gassey. While I’m doing this, Jackson sneaks into that hole in the ground and starts digging around. I can hear the poor bastard whooping and hollering and thumping around in there, but I can’t go in because someone needs to man this damn perimeter that I set up!
“OK, so I’m staring out at the jungle and hollerin’ back and forth at Jackson for, I dunno, twenty minutes.” He stopped and looked up at the stars. “Really, it was prolly more like 10 minutes, but I wanted to see that stuff for myself, ya know? And then Jackson finally comes outta that hole, covered with ancient guns and belts of ammo. The jackhole had even tied a bandana around his head.”
Reece leaned forward and stood up from the pilot seat, leathers creaking and joints popping as he stretched. His Standard-brown features lost in thought. He was silent long enough for Emily to prompt, “then what?”
He didn’t move from his position; hands on the deck above the joysticks, looking out towards the spinning Refractor. He spoke again, voice quieter than before. “I was about to give him a dressing-down for covering himself with unstable explosives. Who knows when those ancient grenades and bullets are gonna go off? And when you pull the trigger on those ‘automatic’ weapons…”
“But automatic weapons don’t work,” she interjected.
“They work enough to make you stupid,” he replied. “So I was about to give him hells for shankin’ around, and his eyes got wide just about the time I hear the brush rattle behind me, and we’re gears-to-gears with a dozen mutants.”
He turned away from the sky and asked her directly, “what do you think happens when someone fires an ancient automatic weapon?”
“It explodes?” She had seen ancient vids and even a few documentaries with automatic weapons fire. The chemical reaction required didn’t hold true to form and became volatile. Scientifically speaking, this always leads to an explosion. “Since you asked I would guess that it’s not that simple.”
“They don’t call you ‘genius’ for nothing,” he said with a small smile. She suppressed a glow of pride. She loved it when he called her “genius.”
“Sometimes it doesn’t explode until you’re halfway through the magazine. It never explodes like a normal misfire.
“So before I can even think to say ‘don’t use that ancient piece of shee-yeh,’ Jackson pulls the trigger on that stupid oversized rifle.” He sat back in the pilot’s seat and began slowly rubbing his hands together, as if they were cold. He looked down to the deck as he spoke. “For a few seconds, it was like the old movies. I can even remember it in slow-motion. Jackson fighting the recoil, mutants chargin’ us all wavin’ their extra arms and tentacles, jerking and falling as the bullets tore their green and gray flesh. Then the gun made a carrump sound and twisted like licorice in his hands.” He stopped rubbing his hands and made a pin wheeling motion. “The gun came apart in bits of molten metal and wood… it was… it was a box of puzzle pieces dumped in the wake of a turbine. They flew in a huge arc in front of poor Jackson, shredding every damn thing they touched.
“It killed half the mutants and sent the rest of them running, but Jackson got the worst of it. The gun shredded itself in his hands, it… it turned into a whirly meatgrinder before it shot out to hit mutants. It turned his arms and most of his chest into a bloody mist, but it took long enough that Jackson had time to belt out one long, gargling scream.”
Emily jammed her fist against her mouth to avoid making a sound.
He didn’t move his head but his eyes came up to meet hers. “I don’t like to tell you things like that, Em. Way I see it, though… better you hear a horrible story than ever picking up an auto weapon.”
She didn’t trust herself to speak, so she just nodded with her knuckles still pressed to her teeth. Before she met Reece, she would have said the only possibility of her ever seeing an ancient auto weapon was in a museum. These days, though…
His eyes dropped to the deck again. “I found out later that I was lucky. Sometimes the explosion fans out in a complete circle, or launches large bits of the gun in one direction. I—hey, lookit that! Goggles, Em.”
The dawn seemed to strike the Toreador with an audible snap. They slid their goggles over their eyes and stood to watch her Refractor. The translucent panels tinkled musically as they sensed the sunlight and turned to take it in. The power indicator in the central ring began to light up.
Emily watched it for a few moments and said, “it’ll be ready in less than ten minutes.”
He looked down at her with eyes squinting behind his goggles. “You sure this will work?” he teased.
She pulled a frown and feigned deep thought. “You’re right. We should test it at least twice more.”
He groaned. They had tested it twice already and he was already impatient to fight the brood slavers that had kidnapped their client’s daughter—a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl much like Emily herself. “You are a rotten, rotten little girl.”
She suppressed a giggle. “No, I’m not,” she said primly with her nose in the air. “I am a scientist!”
