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War's Oversight

Chapter 09

The Chakri remained crouched at his vantage point for a long moment, trying to digest what he was seeing. His training had prepared him for the possibility that he would be approached by humans - whether soldiers or civilians - and that his primary responsibility was to observe, record, and hide if necessary.

And yet ... he was unsure whether it was his Chakri nature which compelled him to avoid retreating, or whether it was something else that compelled him to stay. Certainly, this human was an enemy, but she was alone. And she -

She. That was a thought which itself was unusual. As a lone soldier, deployed to a post of one, he was aware that he would develop an almost pathological form of loneliness - if he had not already. He was young, and his thoughts turned to females frequently. At least, the females of his homeworld, of course, and it was absurd to think he could count a female_human_ as worth thinking about in that manner.

Intellectually he knew, and he answered whenever he was asked, that there were no differences between male and female in principle. Chakri women were just as intelligent, just as capable as Chakri. Yes, there were the obvious physiological differences imposed by nature, which made Chakri as muscular and bulky as much as they made Chakri women fleet-footed and agile. And humans, of course, exhibited far less in the way of differences between the genders.

As he watched, however, he could see that there were similarities between the female Chakri and the female human, in form at least. A certain broadness in the hips, and the padding of a mature female's teats. It was, at least with this female human, possible to see her form as female even with the mass of hair streaming from her scalp.

He closed his eyes for a moment, willing himself to some semblance of calm. He knew that if the sight of a lone human was enough to divert his thoughts so strangely, he perhaps ought to be requesting retrieval and reassignment.

He opened his eyes.

Through his optical lenses, he could see that she was swaying as she walked. There was a peculiar sort of pattern as she strode across the dust, hopping slightly with each step and pausing before planting her boot in time with ... a marching rhythm?

He closed his eyes and, in an unusual lapse of discipline, let out a growling sigh of fatigue. Surely the time on this planet spent alone would begin to wear on one's patience, especially if his eyes told him the subjects he was tasked with observing were starting to dance.

* * *

Sarah unceremoniously dumped her rucksack into the dust and stood with her back to the indifferent rocks of the geological site. Fucking Rick, she thought, the idiot who couldn't manage a simple calculation to save his life. She'd made the trek to this point, the last waypoint on her trek to gather the visual scan data for the site, sweating and cursing Rick's name as she hurried in almost thirty-degree heat and dust to make it there on-schedule.

There were times that she shook her head at how unfair the universe could be - promoting a usually competent (but occasionally uninformed and error-prone) technician to supervise her, while she was perfectly capable of doing her own work and supervising herself.

As she erected the scanner tripod for the third time, and set it on the task of gathering the last of the visual data for the area, she called up a map of the area on her wristcomp. The site offered a few places where she could make her way into the interior of the rock formations at ground level, without much in the way of an uphill climb. That was simple enough, but what she wanted to find was something a little more complex.

She looked over at the crags of the tall, mountainous rocks in the distance. There were plenty of areas where the rock appeared to have been eroded away into a sort of gravel packed in with dust, but there were other areas where the rock appeared to have fractured like something crystalline, falling in great slabs and shattering like glass.

What she wanted to find was a place that was flat and level, and just large enough for her to erect her shelter. Preferably with a rock face on one or two sides, to shelter the whole place from the wind and dust. Maybe with a convenient depression I can use to dig in for a latrine, she thought, as she felt a minor but insistent rumble from beneath her stomach.

Thankfully, there were several such places within the perimeter of Omicron Kappa Geologic Survey Site 16. In fact, one such place seemed to be accessible from her current location, although she would need to meander her way through some canyons and depressions to reach it. Assuming the old survey data is accurate, she thought. I could get there and find it's just another mountain.

At the appropriate signal from her equipment, she was pleased to see that the scan of the site was complete. A cursory check of her wristcomp indicated that she had already received and compiled the scan data. She ducked her chin toward her collar and cleared her throat. "Base, this is Palmer."

A slight hiss of static garbled the greeting from Base, which came through as, " #### you loud and clear, Palmer."

"Base, I have the scan data from the first part of this survey," she advised. She wet her lips slightly. "You're coming through with a bit of static - I'm hoping I won't have to send the data twice."

The reply from Base was a touch cleaner this time. "Bandwidth is cheap, Palmer. How are you managing out in Hell's antechamber?"

Sarah smiled faintly to herself. "Tell Rick Bayer that he needs to work on his arithmetic. I had to hump it over the last half-hour or I was going to have to give up my lunch break."

There was the faint titter of laughter off-microphone before Base came back on the air. "I'll tell him, Palmer. What's the next phase of your survey?"

"I'm going to be moving further into the site to take samples. Communications might be interrupted, so I figured I would transmit now, while I had a clear channel."

"Thanks for letting us know, Palmer," Base replied. "Do you have an idea of when you will get back to us?"

Sarah looked at her wristcomp again and tapped at it a few times, reviewing figures and making an estimate of timings. "Base, I should be resting up until approximately 2000h, and then collecting samples for a few hours. If I'm lucky, I'll be under shelter before the temperature drops below freezing."

"Glad to hear it, Palmer," Base indicated. "Keep us advised of your progress."

"Will do," Sarah assured them. "Palmer out."

She tapped at her wristcomp again and sat very, very still as the numbers indicating receipt of her data crept upward from zero to near 100%. Despite the notion that she could just re-transmit the data if it failed to arrive, she found she was holding her breath.

"Good copy," Base advised. "Did you have anything else to report, Palmer?"

She shook her head, despite the notion that the Base communications operator could not see her. "Nothing else," she said, "and I doubt you'll hear from me while I'm on break."

"Understood," Base indicated. "Base out."

She took a moment to extricate her canteen and take a long drink of water before she turned her eyes on what was now the focus of her ire - the blighted landscape around her.

I suppose the only benefit of being this far out by myself, she thought, is that I can be alone with my thoughts if I want. She hurriedly packed the sensor apparatus and the tripod back into her rucksack, before heaving the thing off the dusty ground and over one shoulder. The angular, jagged features of the hills and mountains in front of her scarcely seemed inviting as she started toward them.

* * *

One of the problems with observation, this Chakri had long ago decided, was the business of remaining still and silent for hours at a time. He had sat crouched in a small, cramped hollow between two rocks, and had spent a long time shifting his weight from one cramping calf muscle to another, as he watched the small shelter that the human female had erected in a small region in the valley between two peaks.

Challenging his preconceived notions once more, he had noted that she had very expertly selected a flat area on which to erect her shelter, secured the shelter's exterior shell with straps and metal bolts hammered into the rock, and located the entrance to the shelter with line-of-sight to both ends of the valley.

She had set up her shelter, and had then spent a curiously long time inside and out of the worst of the day's heat. Unusually, his sensitive ears had detected what he could only describe as the gentle lilting of singing coming from the shelter opening, for much of the time she was inside.

Afterward, she had emerged without her large carrying pack, and had spent an unusually long time talking a more leisurely walk around the valley, examining the rocks, and using a small tool to break apart the more irregular formations into pieces large enough to handle and inspect more closely. A few of these, she tossed back onto the ground, but the majority of them she broke into even smaller pieces before stowing a select minority in a compartmented case that she had slung over her shoulder.

Watching her move was another unusual thing, challenging to his ideas about humans. She seemed oddly at home in rough terrain, with a spring in her step despite the gravity that was higher than the Terran norm. Even though she was occupied with the task of gathering small rocks for several hours, she did not appear to tire easily.

Wedged as he was between two irregular and jagged rocks, he still had no fear of being discovered by her - provided he remained very still. If she maintained her current pace and the scope of her activity, she might reach his rocky perch after a minimum of forty hours of continuous work.

He drew his lips away from his teeth and faintly sucked in a slow breath in the snarl-chuckle of Chakri mirth. She might have only two or three Terran hours of daylight left in which to stumble upon him, but as camouflaged and motionless as he was, he judged the probability of her actually noticing him as being astronomical.

One thing that had not surprised him, however, was how she would reach the high elevation of a path among the rock formations, and put a hand to her right ear. Close-magnification revealed that she was wearing a communications device inserted into that ear, as well as a wearable computing device on her opposite wrist. She made an effort to lift her left wrist as high as it would reach, but she was evidently not able to achieve the desired effect - she would let fall her wrist, remove the communications device from her ear, and stow it into one of her pockets.

This was no surprise to him. An unusual effect, for this range of unusual rock formations, and unique to the interaction of the strong winds and the particles of crystalline sand which whipped through the air, was the unusually high amount of electromagnetic interference. It was all the more pronounced when the area was in direct sunlight, as the minerals of which the sand was composed was prone to giving off interference whether exposed to light, or moving through the planet's broader magnetic field.

By dark, he reasoned, she would be secured inside her shelter, and thus at a far lower elevation than where she might ever possibly make contact with her colony.

At his disposal were a few strictly passive recording devices, for audible sound, infrared light, and so forth. While he might gain no new knowledge from a close-range examination of her shelter, he supposed it would be useful to make a close approach after she had retired for the night, and then make his way silently out of the valley and back to his own shelter.

* * *

Sarah had been wrestling with a mundane problem for several minutes, and she couldn't seem to find a solution for it.

Her shelter was warm enough, and after changing out of her uniform suit and running a slightly damp cloth over her skin, she felt reasonably clean after the kind of day she'd had - slogging over rough ground and sweating in the wind and dust for hours on end. The portable space heater she'd been lugging around as dead weight for most of the day was now plugged into the power cell at the far corner of her shelter, and she was getting warm to the tips of her toes after the chill of the evening.

She was now in a clean shirt and cotton pants - about as close to pyjamas as she figured she could get - and was just starting to relax in anticipation of going to sleep.

And now she needed to take a piss.

Warm air does it every damn time, she thought. She tried to relax, by closing her eyes and breathing deeply, but it became clear to her that she was fighting a losing battle.

She sighed, gathered her feet under her, and reached over to where her rucksack, brushed free of dust and emptied of some of its contents, was sitting near the shelter's entrance. A quick check of the appropriate pockets produced some field-grade latrine paper (which she knew full well was so flimsy that a stiff breeze would cause it to disintegrate into loose paper fibres) as well as her flashlight.

Also near the entrance was a small display panel which helpfully displayed both the interior and exterior air temperatures. 23 degrees inside, she observed, and minus 19 degrees outside.

Well, it was obvious that the longer she put this off, the worse it would become. She much preferred, if she had a choice, having the icy caress of a cold, nineteen-degree-below-zero wind against her thighs than something like fifty below zero, which would give her instant frostbite.

She reached up to the flimsy rack above the shelter's fabric door, on which were hung her socks from earlier in the day, and took down her belt so that she could clip a lanyard to her flashlight, and wedge the latrine paper into a pocket. She hurriedly buckled the belt around her waist, and gave the pistol holster at her hip a quick adjustment to keep it biting into the flesh of her hip. She took a moment to merely slip her feet into her boots, not bothering to tighten then, and squared her shoulders.

She took a deep breath, exhaled, and then parted the shelter's door with a quick motion. It was fairly dark, as the sun had already set and there was very little remaining light in the sky. Instantly, the air outside was a shock against the exposed skin of her face, neck, and hands, but she determinedly hefted her flashlight and flicked its switch to the 'On' position, casting a beam of light across the dusty ground to a spot she'd pre-selected earlier as a likely latrine pit.

She fairly danced over to the spot, breathing in light gasps in the chill air, and tried not to trip over her own boots as she found the slightly depressed spot in the loose dust she was looking for.

Keeping the looser utility belt above her navel, she hooked her thumbs into the top of her pants and hurriedly slid them down to just below her knees. Jesus! she silently exclaimed to herself as the wind suddenly freshened and assailed her buttocks, her thighs, and several more sensitive bits of her flesh with a new sensation of cold that she hadn't before experienced that day. She hurriedly bent at her knees.

It was an infuriatingly long number of seconds fighting against the tension in her stance and the cold before she was rewarded by the dull trickling sound of her urine making its way into the dust beneath her. She let out a relieved sigh, and through half-lidded eyes she saw her breath mingle with the cloud of vapor rising from the product of her efforts.

Eventually, after tossing the flashlight over to her left hand, she reached for the latrine paper wedged into her belt, made a hurried effort to wipe herself dry, and then tossed the soiled paper aside as she rose to her feet, hauling her pants on as she did so. With the toe of her boot, she ground the paper into the dust partway, and then she grabbed up her flashlight to sweep the beam back in the direction of her shelter.

One part of her brain was thinking to itself, "I'm gonna be glad to get back inside and out of this cold!" just as another was thinking to itself, "There's something vaguely wrong here ..."

She stopped in mid-stride, and swept her flashlight beam back in the direction it had been pointing a moment ago, frowning as she did so.

Even as the beam passed over what her brain had been so confused about, seconds earlier, her eyes locked onto it so fast that she damn near dropped the flashlight into the dust before she could steady the beam back onto it.

Crouched about three metres from where she was standing, dressed in a matte black environment suit and with a strange, skulltight, goggle-eyed helmet, was a figure that could only be a Chakri. In the ensuing unsteadiness of her flashlight beam, she took in a few details that she was later able to remember clearly - its thick arms and broad chest, its comparatively slender and reverse-jointed legs, and an impression that when it was standing erect, it would probably be about seven feet tall.

It had been looking toward her shelter when she had initially spotted it, but in the glare of her flashlight, it slowly swiveled its head and helmet to point those accusatory and soulless eyes at her.

She didn't drop her flashlight.

She grabbed for the butt of her pistol and hauled from its holster as fast as she was able.

The safety on her pistol had just clicked to the 'Off' position when the Chakri broke from its crouch and began an impossibly fast sprint in the direction of her shelter. Sarah was almost able to keep the thing in her pistol sights as she hauled wildly on the trigger. The high-pitched _scree!_of the Gauss-propelled rounds hurt her ears and competed with the curious sound of shattering glass as her shots blasted crater after crater in the rock behind the Chakri's accelerating form. She found she was yelling at the top of her lungs, mouth open and teeth bared, although she couldn't place when she'd started, nor what she might've been trying to say.

As the Chakri passed her shelter, she barely avoided putting a round through the door as she brought the muzzle of her pistol up, sending a round whistling its way up into the mountainside. At this break in the assault, the Chakri made an impossibly tight pivot on its feet and swerved in behind the shelter dome, diving for the ground and out of sight behind the structure.

Sarah found that she was standing in the middle of a dark, cold, and dusty patch of ground, with the wobbling beam of her flashlight picking out her shelter against a hillside, and the echoing of gunfire fading from her ears.

And now she had nothing she could shoot at.

"WHO ARE YOU?!?" she screamed into the night. After a fraction of a second, she was cursing this as being an unnecessary and rhetorical question. She needed to get into the shelter. She needed to get her communications earpiece. She needed to call for help.

I need to shoot this Chakri between its Tabby eyes.

She was alerted to a new development by a different tone of shattering glass - deeper, and a little more distant, but not directly in front of her ...

A rock fell past the flashlight beam and shattered into a handful of blocky fragments as it hit the ground. Her first impression was that it looked about the size of a basketball.

A rock about the size of her rucksack followed, smashing itself to bits handily, some of which hopped across the dust and rolled in an irregular fashion to near her feet.

The barest fraction of the Chakri's helmeted head showed above the top of her shelter dome. Instantly, she had her pistol's foresight wobbling on that far target, but just as she was contemplating whether to risk a shot on something so small, the Chakri's head came into full view as it looked straight up.

She followed the line of its gaze and swung her flashlight upward in time to see a rock that was easily the size of her shelter dome fall wide of the immediate area, but still send pieces rocketing past her as she instinctively ducked in the aftermath of its impact.

When she looked back, the Chakri had hurriedly but nimbly clambered over her shelter dome and leapt to the ground, but had paused, looking at her but without any obvious intention of attacking her.

In the moment she had to flick her gaze back upward, she caught sight of another rock - the biggest yet, in fact, being the size of a small storage shed - smashing into the slope just above her shelter, before grinding to a halt and slowly, menacingly, gathering momentum as it tipped toward her.

The Chakri backed up a pace, now no longer quite between her and the shelter, but Sarah realized in a flash of horror that inside_her shelter was an active power cell, containing as much energy as a sizeable warhead, and there was _no way in hell that its impact-resistant casing could stand up to being crushed by something that large.

She just had enough time to turn away and take a headlong step toward the darkness before the rocks in front of her erupted in a flash of blue-white light ... and then a blow struck her squarely in the back of the head.