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War's Oversight

Chapter 10

Sarah felt herself come gradually awake at the unpleasant chill of a gust of cold wind against her upper arm. She squeezed her closed eyes further shut in an attempt to rid herself of the pounding headache between her temples, and didn't succeed. She also felt dust against her cheek.

She clenched her fingers and found that they were stiff and aching, along with a surprising lot of the rest of her body, and also that she seemed to have a loose handful of dust to show for her efforts.

She pried one eye open, but all she could see were shadows.

All at once, she came fully awake in the flash of memory she had from before she'd fallen unconscious, and she sat up sharply, her face still covered with dust and flakes of rock. The explosion! she thought. The - Fuck! There's a Chakri somewhere around here!

She scrabbled at her belt for her pistol, but could find nothing except the lanyard attached to her flashlight. She grabbed at it, hauled it hand-over-hand as fast as she could until it cracked against the side of her wrist. She quickly clicked the switch to the 'On' position, was only mildly relieved to see that the flashlight was undamaged, and waved the beam in a wild arc back and forth in front of her.

She was apparently at the base of a rock formation, with her campsite opposite her across the defile between. The remains of her campsite, in fact - the steaming, smoldering pile of debris which was nine-tenths crushed under a massive block of stone was only just cooling down to where it no longer glowed a dull red.

She waved the beam around again, frantically. Where's that sonofabitch and where the FUCK, she thought, is my pistol?

The beam of her flashlight caught a number of small- to mid-sized fragments of freshly-shattered rock where they had come to rest after being blasted free of the parent rock face above, but there was no sign of the Chakri.

After what seemed like an eternity spent waving an ineffectual beam of light to show her one rock after another, she caught sight of her pistol laying in the dust only a few metres away. Closer than that, however, was the outstretched glove of the Chakri's clawed hand.

She almost twisted her knee coming to a halt within reach of her pistol and snatched it up with a speed that scraped her fingertips raw. She almost lost her balance bringing her outstretched arms to bear on the still form on the ground nearby, but the weight of the sidearm in her right hand gave her enough confidence that she managed to calm her nerves by a fraction as she made sure the safety was off.

After a few seconds, it was clear from watching the Chakri's still form that it was probably not in a position to threaten her. Blood was dripping from a substantial rent in its mechanical, goggle-eyed helmet, and it appeared to be breathing only shallowly as its arms and legs twitched from time to time.

She crept closer, her breath held, and prodded it with the muzzle of her pistol. Nothing. Not even so much as a reflex. Clearly, it wasn't_dead_ but it wasn't in a position to help her, either.

As if to emphasize her situation, the wind picked up sharply, and the cold bit into her arms and through the thin fabric of her shirt. She shuddered despite the flush of adrenaline that had nearly numbed her to her hurts and aches. Despite not feeling frozen except in her extremities, it was when she glanced at her wristcomp to get a sense of the temperature that she felt her stomach turn to ice.

What had been her faithful companion, fulfilling the roles of scribe, advisor, and sometime guardian, was now a quiescent piece of composite and metal, with a dark spiderweb of cracked crystalline screen element telling her nothing.

She backed her way from where the Chakri was laying in a sprawled heap, and back toward the remains of her tent, sweeping her flashlight in increasingly frantic patterns to keep the former illuminated while she moved.

A few seconds of tugging on the collar of her cold-weather suit produced the coat, but there was no sign of her cold-weather pants. The protruding pieces of her tent were firmly wedged between the ground and the rock which had very nearly killed her, and it gradually dawned on her that just about everything she might have used for her survival was now under a piece of stone that could have been carved into the statue of Abraham Lincoln.

I'm going to die, she thought.

There was nothing else for it. She had no idea what time of night it was, but it had to be well past 2230h, since the sun had set. She wrapped her coat around herself and threaded her arms into the sleeves, realizing that the coat's fastener had been ripped completely off. 2230h._That meant that the air temperature would be dropping past twenty below. Even out of the wind, it would be _fifty below around midnight.

I'm going to die.

All of a sudden, despite the fact that she was shivering with the cold, she felt her insides start to smolder with an all-consuming rage. She turned and fixed her flashlight beam squarely on the form of the Chakri who had accosted her. She carelessly slammed her pistol into its holster, not even bothering to safe it first, and fairly stomped her way across the dusty ground to where it lay.

She slapped her flashlight against the ground so hard that she swore she could hear it crack, but she was beyond caring. She grabbed the Chakri by an arm, flung it over onto its back, and then grabbed it by the throat of its environment suit.

"You Tabby motherfucker!" she bellowed into its face. "Wake up!" She hauled back her right hand and cuffed the Chakri across its helmet, which snapped sharply to one side.

"You fucking IDIOT!!!" she screamed. " Do you realize what this means?!?" She shook the creature by the throat until its head snapped back and forth like an unstrung puppet. "You're gonna die out here! And guess what?!? I'm gonna die out here too!!!"

Her tirade devolved into a string of obscenities as she kept on heaping abuse, both verbal and physical, on the Chakri's limp form, until her lungs rasped with the cold air and her arms were burning with exhaustion. She released the alien's heavy form, which obligingly slumped back onto the ground and didn't move.

She sat on the ground for what seemed like minutes, breathing heavily and shivering, with her knees tucked up to her chest and her arms wrapped around to her shins.

A fragment of wisdom came to her - something her father had once told her.

"There are five stages to coping, sweetie. I know that you miss your Papa very much, but it's important to know that even this sadness you feel won't last forever. The stages are denial, anger, bargaining, fear, and acceptance."

Sad that I would think of that now, she thought, since I'm coping with the looming prospect of my own death. She sank her head down to her knees and felt the possibility of tears burning in her eyes. I must be past denial and anger by now. What do I have to bargain for? Whether I freeze solid giving this fucking planet one middle finger or two?

She slipped her head to one side on her knees, looking at the abused figure of the Chakri laying in the dust next to her. What she hadn't noticed before, though, was the dim white shape of her field surgical kit laying in the dust beyond.

She slipped her right hand into the partially-fastened waist pocket of her coat, and was aware that she was holding the field medical kit she'd been allocated.

She was also aware that the Chakri laying nearby had resumed a slight, intermittent twitching.

Sarah's brow furrowed, as she got to grips with the problem that was facing her. This Chakri is wearing an environment suit, but not carrying any supplies, she reasoned. Therefore ...

"Shit!" she exclaimed to herself, and scrambled on all fours over to where the surgical kit was, snatching it quickly up and then releasing its carrying strap, so she could sling it over one shoulder. Then she turned her attention to the figure on the ground, again.

She put her ear to the creature's broad, suited chest and listened carefully. Faint, rapid, and shallow breaths were all she could hear, along with a rapid but strong heartbeat.

She was reassured, but only slightly. She prodded at its chest roughly, in the hope of rousing it, but it failed to respond. In the light afforded by her flashlight, she clumsily searched for the clamps or latches which held its helmet in place, and eventually managed to loosen the thing enough to begin pulling it off. She had no idea if this was going to result in this Chakri's broken neck, but there didn't seem to be any help for it.

Its helmet came off and spilled a great mass of brown fur onto the ground, in the middle of which was a face.

Sarah had never seen a Chakri up close before, and any trepidation she might have felt at being near one was muted by how this one looked. It had undeniably feline features, from its oversized, cupped-forward ears, to its powerful jaws and clenched, bloodstained teeth, and to the broad, leathery nose at the end of its muzzle.

It was bleeding from a gash somewhere under its mane, and this had soaked into a lot of its facial fur. Its eyes seemed clear of blood, but they were firmly shut.

She took to giving it a few slaps across the cheek, but it still failed to respond.

"Fuck!" she exclaimed, grabbing it by its mane and raising its head partway up. "Wake up! We're in deep shit here!"

She could barely detect the faintest of quivering in its eyelids, but otherwise her plea fell on deaf or insensate ears.

She narrowed her eyes, and taking ahold of the Chakri's muzzle, with the nail of her thumb at its nose, gave its face a sharp twist.

With an ominous strangled growling noise and a surge of hot breath at her palm, the Chakri's eyes came partway open, and two vertically-slitted pupils wandered for a moment before settling in her.

Before it could raise its left arm completely across its chest to grab at her, she had her pistol's muzzle leveled at its right eye.

"Don't move!" she shouted. "I'll shoot!" Privately, she doubted if she was going to blow this Chakri's brains across the dirt in advance of freezing to death, but she felt that confidence was called for.

It hesitated, and then let its left hand drop to its chest, closing its eyes.

"Wake up!" she hissed. "We need to get under shelter or we're going to freeze out here!"

It opened its right eye and looked at her with undisguised contempt. It was hard to say how she identified contempt in its expressionless, half-opened eye, but she felt confident in her guess. It was also pointedly ignoring the pistol that was only a handspan away.

She paused, and then leaned a fraction closer to it. "You can understand what I'm saying," she asserted. "Can't you?"

It made no reply, staring her down.

"I want you to take me to shelter," she said. "Understand? You have to have some place nearby that we can go to, right?"

It closed its eye again, and seemed to ignore her.

Inwardly, she bristled with anger. "Hey!" she protested, jabbing the business end of the pistol at it. "I can just shoot you and take my chances, eh?" She grabbed a handful of the Chakri's environment suit and hauled its heavy form partway off the ground. "I think if I start by wearing this suit of yours and adding my coat, I might just make it on my own!"

At this latest tirade, the Chakri opened both its eyes and, it seemed, turned its head painfully to give her a more serious appraisal. Its eyes flicked to her pistol, and then back to her.

It seemed to come to a decision, and raised its left arm slowly up over its head to probe around aimlessly in the area where she'd discarded its helmet. As much as she felt like keeping it at gunpoint, she was also a few minutes from her fingertips freezing solid, so she quickly used her free hand to grab its helmet and fling it over to where it was able to grab it.

The Chakri made an effort to fit the mask portion of the helmet to its face, and appeared to scan the surroundings as it slowly rotated its head in a slow circle. At length, it removed the mask, and made a gesture in the direction of the far end of the defile.

She carefully kept her pistol trained on the Chakri as she rose out of her crouch, and gestured with it for the Chakri to get up while she tried to wrap her coat more closely around her body.

The Chakri made to roll partway to a prone position, and she was faintly disturbed to see that the Chakri's right arm appeared to be misshapen inside its environment suit, and hanging limp from its shoulder. It also had some difficulty getting its feet under it, as it struggled to stand upright.

Just as it appeared that it might be able to start walking on its own, it attempted to put some weight on its left foot and toppled forward with a strangled grunt, breaking its fall awkwardly with its left hand.

Fucksakes! she thought, and took a moment to bend her flashlight into a convenient right angle before stuffing it into a pocket on her belt. She quickly stepped over to where the Chakri had fallen, at about the time that it seemed painfully to flop onto its side and begin a kind of exhausted panting.

As it was making no attempt to look at her, or even rise from where it was slumped against the ground, she unslung the field surgical kit from her shoulder and began to rummage through it for anything that might help. I could swear that one time I saw on the list of contents for this stupid thing ... Yes! her brain exclaimed as she found what she was looking for.

It appeared, to the untrained eye, to be a bundle of black composite rods, each no thicker than her little finger, and wrapped up in a folded length of very thin fabric. At this, she hurriedly laid the rods and the fabric on the ground before she began throwing materials back into the surgical kit and closing it up, flinging it up and over her shoulder in an awkward position.

Quickly, she began threading the rods into each other, end into end, until she had two rods left, each perhaps three metres long. As she hurriedly unwrapped the fabric, which resolved into a three-meter-long banner of fabric which appeared to have frayed ends, two small but functional handles fell to the dust and lay there. It was a poor time for anything made of black polymer to be falling to a grey, dusty surface after sunset, but the four locking pins stuck to their surfaces were faintly luminescent and could easily be seen in shadow.

As though she was awkwardly arranging a set of curtains, she quickly forced one rod through one hollow hem of the fabric sheet, and then scrabbled with the emerging end to insert one of the locking pins through the rod. At the opposite end, she inserted another of the pins above the fabric's edge to lock the rod to one of the handles.

Grabbing up the other handle in her hand, and snatching up the trailing ends of fabric while her other hand hefted the attached rod, she made her way over to where the Chakri had collapsed.

She worked quickly, keeping her right hand on her sidearm's butt as it lay waiting, in her holster, laying the assembled rod and fabric next to the Chakri's spine like some kind of absurd battle flag.

Less than a metre from the rod she had already inserted, the fabric had another hollow seam, and it was into this that she slipped the second rod, before pinning it at the bottom and fastening the handle to the top as with the first.

Taking a deep breath, she gripped the Chakri by one arm and one leg, and hauled the fallen creature toward her, against a muffled growl which proved that it still had some strength left in it. As it flopped onto its back, sprawling between the two rods, it merely lay there, panting heavily and apparently unwilling to raise an arm or even its head in protest.

She made for the free ends of the fabric, which were fluttering loosely in the wind as it gusted here and there. Unlike the rest of the fabric, the remainder was mere strips, maybe a hand's breadth across, and only in three bands which described a spot near each of the Chakri's shoulders, waist, and ankles.

She quickly ripped the luminescent plastic off the trailing ends of the fabric strips, exposing the adhesive affixed there, and carefully made to loop the ends around the exposed rod at near the Chakri's shoulders and ankles. Through a tiny, tiny gap in the fabric, she was able to secure the last fabric end to the rod at its waist.

Pretty amazing materials, she thought, as she panted hard with the exertion of bending and stretching past the Chakri's inert form, and began giving the second of the two rods a slow clockwise twist. As she did so, the fabric began a slow rolling around the rod until it neatly pinned the Chakri bodily in place. Not quite as good as a spinal board, she considered, but it'll have to do.

With the Chakri on the lightweight, emergency stretcher she had constructed, she still had doubts about whether they might survive to reach shelter. She spared a moment to snatch up its discarded helmet, jamming it awkwardly into a pocket of her coat, before she stooped down to grip the stretcher's handles and carefully levered the thing up so that she was holding onto it at shoulder-level.

Christ, this fucker weighs a tonne! she thought. Still, with her legs under her and the Chakri's weight being somewhat supported by the stretcher acting as a travois, she could do nothing except set her feet toward the opposite end of the defile and begin a slow, laborious trudge.

* * *

Time passed slowly, at an agonizing pace, matched only by the increasing pain she was feeling in her fingertips, at her ears, and every other part of her body which was slowly developing frostbite.

Looking around, however, she could see nothing of her campsite in the distance and only the towering crags of rock formations around her. Unlike the hike which had been slowly wearing down the reserves of her strength, there was now no direction in which she could point herself that was any better than another.

She gritted her teeth as her protesting muscles made to lower the Chakri to the ground as gently as she could, and then she sank to her knees to one side of the alien's scarcely-moving form.

It was still breathing in a rapid panting manner, but didn't appear to be doing anything other than laying still, with its eyes closed.

She put her hand on the butt of her pistol, but kept it holstered. "Hey!" she hissed, in a throat constricted by cold and parched by the wind. She gripped the creature by one of its ears and gave its head a forceful nudge. "Wake up!" she spat in frustration. "Where the hell are we?"

After a pause in which she became frightened - the possibility of the thing falling deeply unconscious was something she wanted to avoid - it eventually stirred and opened its right eye again, squinting into the beam of her flashlight as she shone it in the vicinity of its face.

"Which way do we go?" she insisted.

It began a laborious twisting of its head from one side to the other, apparently taking no obvious note of how its forearms were pinned to its waist by the stretcher's fabric cover. However, as she agreeably diverted the beam of the flashlight away from its face, and its eyes once again became accustomed to the dark, it fixed its gaze somewhere off to its right.

She turned the flashlight in that direction, and a slight sweep of the beam from side-to-side revealed a minor shift in the shadows. A boulder? she thought. But why is the shadow behind so close to it?

She pointed with her free hand. "In there?"

The Chakri gave no reply except to stare at her, its rapid breathing giving a kind of raw, honest quality to its proposed route.

She took a moment to stare at the ground, shaking her head. Then, with a squaring of her shoulders, she walked to the head of the stretcher and levered it up again to begin dragging it to her left, making for the bounders as carefully as the broken ground would allow. The bobbing of the flashlight beam from her belt made for slow going.

After a few dozen metres, she found that the boulders narrowed to a passage she might be able to squeeze through with difficulty, but the stretcher would never make it through. Shit! she thought. Much more of this and they're going to find me frozen solid.

She wondered how that might eventually look. Me, next to a Chakri, frozen stiff and enemies, but without having strangled each other to death. She spared a very brief chuckle as she was cranking the stretcher's fabric cover to suitable slackness. Maybe it'll keep the analysts confused for months ...

The Chakri bit back something pained as she grabbed it by the fabric at its shoulders and began to haul it backward into the winding, narrow passage, taking frequent pauses to check behind her.

Just as her fingers felt like they would break off, from a combination of fatigue, cold, and muscle strain, she was confronted by a blank slab of rock, with all the customary roughness of the rock she had seen while she was collecting samples.

A completely blank slab and a dead end. The poetry of the moment wasn't lost on her.

The Chakri, on the other hand, was reaching with its good arm toward the rock face.

She gently touched the slab.

It resisted, but as she sagged partway against it in an expression of fatigue and defeat, it moved slightly.

Her mouth dropped open in surprise and she applied more force, which had the effect of swinging the slab like a pendulum. On the opposite side was a small passageway, and a depression in the floor which permitted the slab to swing and also descended gently down to perhaps two metres below ground level.

She hurriedly twisted the cover on her flashlight to change its illumination from narrow-beam to omnidirectional, grabbed the Chakri roughly by its shoulders again and pulled with all her might, bringing the heavy creature into the passage with her and rapidly down to where the floor became level again.

The lack of the biting wind felt almost warm against her skin, and she sagged to the floor with the Chakri panting hard and immobile in front of her. She took a moment to unsling the field surgical kit from her shoulder and let it fall gently to the stone.

She swept a hand through the sweat and dust caking her forehead, and into her hair.

With an audible click! which betrayed the injury to its left leg or ankle, the Chakri threw a kick against the wall. In the moment it took for her eyes to lock onto the point of contact between its foot and the stone, her eyes made out a small square approximately the size of her palm, which had depressed under its touch.

She had just enough time to register a tingling sensation which swept over her entire body, feeling suddenly like goosebumps but having nothing to do with the cold, before her flashlight carved a bright stroke through the dark of the passage and then spit out a sharp _crack!_of its own as it expired.