Jane glanced up at the yellowish-green clouds that blanketed the sky and guessed that the sun was about two or three hours past its zenith. It was impossible to be certain of the time in this manner, since the cloud cover never parted enough to actually see the sun, but Jane's years with the Resistance had given her enough experience Outside to be able to gauge fairly closely. There was a lot she could tell from the intensity of the ambient sunlight, and the amount of contrast in the shadows on the rock face that ran along either side of their path.
They'd left the city's dome a little before noon, after Jane had suggested that her charges find somewhere to get lunch, since it would be the last real food they'd have for at least a week. While the military-issue ration bars were one hundred percent nutritionally complete, they left something to be desired in the way of palatability.
That meant they'd only been Outside for a couple of hours. Of course, that was very much like saying they'd only been hiking around in a pressure cooker for a couple of hours. Despite their energy siphon vests, it was uncomfortably hot. Without those vests, it would have been too hot to withstand for any sustained duration. Jane had long since gotten used to operating in Outside conditions, and the Andromeda's weapons officer seemed to be having no trouble, undoubtedly due to his Nietzschean physiology. That left only the young engineer looking rather worse for wear. Unfortunately, there wasn't much help for it; they were stuck in these conditions until they reached the facility. The only thing Jane could do was keep their pace fairly easy, and frequently remind Harper to drink water.
Jane glanced over her shoulder to suggest that Harper take another sip from his canteen, when she noticed that the Nietzschean had stopped, his head cocked as if listening for something. Given that she knew how to get where they were going, Jane had taken point, and Rhade had fallen back and assumed rear guard. Now Jane let Harper pass her as she quietly approached Rhade's position. Nietzscheans, she knew, had better sensory acuity than unaugmented humans, and if there was someone following them, he would very likely hear them first.
She didn't speak as she came up to Rhade, letting her expression ask the question for her. She didn't want to interfere with his ability to hear sounds too faint for her to catch. In response, he pointed upward, at the rock face that stood above them. Her eyes followed his gesture, squinting through the smog at the rocks. After several missions Outside for the Resistance, and later as part of the recon team that had initially scouted the location for the air treatment plant, she knew the topography of this part of the world rather well, and the large cairn of loose rocks at the top of the defile definitely didn't belong there. In fact, though it was hard to tell from here, it looked almost artificial...
Shit. "Run!" She started pelting down the track in the direction they'd been heading. Behind her, she heard Rhade's heavy footsteps pounding the rocky ground as he did likewise. Harper, who had been trudging on ahead as if stopping would make him that much less likely to want to start up again, seemed slower to register the urgency of the situation. Jane heard the telltale rumble of stone scraping against stone. The weight of several tons of rock above them, starting to slide, was almost palpable. Sorry, Harper. It's time to move, whether you like it or not. With that thought, she launched herself into a running tackle at the blond engineer, letting her momentum carry her forward into a tumble, and twisting so that she took the brunt of their inevitable and forceful impact with the ground. Pain blossomed in her shoulder as the hard earth rushed up to meet it, but was soon overwhelmed in importance by the roar of a small mountain of stone and dirt collapsing into the ravine.
It was several long moments before everything stopped moving and the thick dust began to settle, making vision possible. When the air was relatively clear again, Jane sat up and took a quick inventory of herself. She quickly found several bruises and abrasions, a few scrapes, and a throbbing shoulder. However, it didn't feel especially dislocated or broken, so she decided to ignore it. She then checked on Harper, who appeared to be going through much the same process with himself. "You alright?" she asked.
Harper glanced down at himself, cracked his neck a couple of times, and nodded. "I think so; more or less, at least. You?"
"Yeah, I'm okay. I'll go find Rhade. Stay down; I think that avalanche was triggered manually, and the last thing I need is to have you make it through this in one piece only to get shot when those bastards come down the hill." She was relieved to see Harper nod and duck behind a fallen boulder, drawing his gauss gun.
Jane picked her way carefully across the rubble, peering through the dust and smog until she saw the Nietzschean's dark hair standing out against the lighter gray-brown of the stone. Rhade was a bit apart from most of the debris field; indeed, it looked like he might have gotten away completely unharmed, if not for the one large rock that had separated from its brethren and managed to come down squarely on his leg. As she approached, Jane saw him trying to work the leg free, while pretending that it didn't hurt nearly as much as it looked like it did. However, he didn't have the leverage to move the rock off and still have a leg when he was done.
She started to crouch down next to him, but dived for the ground as a pair of gunshots darted over her head. From behind her, she heard Harper snap off a few rounds in response, and a cry of pain followed by the sound of something landing with a wet thump on the rocks told her that at least one of the engineer's shots had found its mark. "Nice shooting," she called over her shoulder.
"Yeah, well, I do what I can," came Harper's reply. Evidently his adrenaline had kicked in; he sounded much more alert, and some of the exaggerated cockiness had come back to his tone.
Now that she wasn't being shot at, Jane crouched beside the weapons officer to get a better look at his leg. The rock had landed just below the knee, and from the angle of the lower leg, it looked fairly likely that both the tibia and fibula were fractured. That raised the question of what to do about the rock. Fortunately, the emergency first aid training that had been a part of Jane's formal military training had been recent enough that she thought she still remembered the important bits. She knew that if she tried to move the rock, she risked further damaging bone and muscle tissue, as well as allowing the crushed blood vessels to bleed freely, but if she left the rock until help could arrive from the city, the risk became one of nerve damage and infection. The choice was easy: broken bones and torn muscle could be repaired fairly easily with the medical facilities in the city or on the Andromeda, but nerve damage was trickier, and with all the dirt and smog and toxins floating around out here, the wound needed cleaning.
She unstrapped her pack and fished around inside for her first aid kit, confident that she had Harper watching her back against any other would-be assassins. She laid out the medical supplies that she needed in the lid of the kit: antiseptics, gauze, tourniquet, splints. Of course, the first step was moving that rather sizable rock. Jane glanced around her, then chided herself for the wasted effort. What exactly do I think I'm going to find around here, a stick? It's not like we've got trees. She was fresh out of ideas. "I need something to use as a lever," she muttered to herself.
Harper spoke up from the rocks nearby. "Use Rhade's force lance; it extends out into a quarterstaff." Clever, Jane thought approvingly. I think I'm gonna like having him around.
"It does? Well, that's useful." She'd never gotten the chance to examine an old High Guard force lance, as they weren't exactly common around here. She looked down at Rhade. "May I?"
He nodded and pulled the force lance out of its leg holster, keying it to accept any user before handing it to her. After a moment's inspection, Jane figured out which button extended the Swiss army knife of firearms to staff length. She found a smaller stone and set it into position to use as a fulcrum, and wedged the end of the lance underneath the bottom of the rock. "I'm not going to lie to you," she told Rhade evenly. "This is going to hurt like hell."
He nodded, bracing himself, and she pushed on the makeshift lever, prying the rock up and off of Rhade's leg. Once the rock was completely clear, she told the Nietzschean, "Out from under. Hurry, 's'heavy." Rhade, doing an admirable job of pretending he wasn't in severe pain, complied. Jane eased the rock back down, retracted the force lance, and handed it back to Rhade. Then she set about tending to the crushed limb as well as her three week's training in emergency field medicine allowed.
After about thirty minutes of quick but careful work, the Nietzschean's leg was cleaned and bandaged. Rhade talked her through the process of setting the bone and splinting the leg. The entire time, Jane felt like she had targeting crosshairs painted between her shoulder blades, sitting there out in the open without so much as a weapon in her hand. She bit her lower lip, forcing herself to trust Harper to prevent the shot that she kept expecting from landing. When she had finished and was looking through Rhade's pack for a radio flare, the weapons officer grasped her arm and looked at her levelly. "The two of you need to get going."
Harper, weapon still in hand, stood up and stepped away from the rock face and toward them. "No way, Rhade," he said emphatically. "We're not gonna just leave you behind."
"Harper, he's right." Jane didn't like the idea of leaving a team member behind either, but there was really nothing for it, given the circumstances. "Remember, you're the one they're trying to kill, not him. If we move on, they'll come after us. We'll actually be leading trouble away from Rhade. And we're only a few klicks out from the city; our people should have no trouble following the radio flare to his position. And until help arrives, he's got a weapon." She glanced over at the Rhade. "Are you as good a shot as your friend here?"
The Nietzschean snorted, half-grinning. "Better."
Jane arched an eyebrow. Evidently these two had some sort of friendly antagonism going. But that really wasn't the pressing concern of the moment. "There, you see? He'll be fine."
Harper still looked dubious. No, more than that, Jane realized, noticing his almost haunted expression. He has the look of a man who's had to leave people behind before, and doesn't want to do it again. She knew the feeling. Harper was about to speak again; she raised a hand to forestall his protest. "Let me tell you a story. My third mission with the Resistance was on a team sent in to sabotage one of the ore refineries, one of several acts of sabotage planned to go off simultaneously. On the first day out, we run into a patrol, and one of our team, a guy named Sullivan, catches a shot in the thigh. He can't keep up with us, so we have to leave him in order to make it to the refinery in time. The mission goes off as planned, but the rest of us go through hell on the way back to headquarters---ambushed twice, forced to double back and sneak through the sewage marshes, having to dodge doubled-up patrols. When we finally make it back to HQ, beaten, ragged, and exhausted, we find Sullivan there, playing video games and flirting with his nurse while we'd been running for our lives."
The engineer nodded, reluctantly beginning to see her point. She pressed on. "This mission's over for him. He gets to go back to base and relax. We're the ones that still have over fifty klicks of ground to cover, with people intermittently trying to kill us along the way. And the sooner we get away from here, the less likely they're going to run across Rhade while they're looking for us." And the sooner we get out of the open, and the back of my neck stops tingling like somebody's aiming at it, her mind added.
"She's right, Harper," the weapons officer affirmed. "Get out of here. I'll be fine."
The young engineer sighed. "I guess that does make sense," he conceded. Jane waved him over to her, and the two of them helped Rhade move closer to the shelter of the rock face. Again, Rhade took care not to give voice to what must have been quite a lot of pain.
Jane snapped the top off the radio flare, activating the beacon, and set it down beside the Nietzschean, who already had his force lance drawn. "Take good care of him," Rhade told her as she stood up and shouldered her pack.
She nodded. "Count on it."
Harper adjusted the straps on his pack and scanned the top of the defile, still a bit reluctant to leave. "See you in a week or so, Rhade."
The Nietzschean turned to him with a pointed look. "Not if you don't get going." Jane noticed that his eyes didn't quite match the sharpness of his tone.
"Alright, okay, I get your point. We're already gone." With that, Harper turned and followed Jane down the path.