Mazer could now see that a tube extended from the bottom of the canister on the creature's back. At the end of the tube was a short wand, not unlike the pack a pest-control worker might wear.
The creature got its good leg under it. Then, pushing upward with that leg, putting its back against the aircraft as support, it slowly got to its feet. Mazer almost pitied it then. It was such a short, broken thing. But the feeling lasted only an instant. He tightened his grip on his gun, aiming at the creature's head.
The creature hobbled forward, still oblivious to their presence. One painful step after another it put weight on its bad leg as it shuffled along. It reached the end of the lander and continued moving forward in the grass.
"Where's it going?" said Fatani.
"Don't know," said Mazer. "Keep on eye on the aircraft in case another one comes out."
He stepped toward the alien walking away from them, his gun still up, following it. The creature was moving slow. It couldn't go far. Mazer knew he needed to kill it. But what then? Should they try to recover the body? Surely China would want to study it. And if not the alien then at least whatever the alien was carrying in its container.
The creature reached behind it with its good, smaller hand and found the tube from the canister. It passed the tube up to its larger hand. The two hands worked in tandem, sliding down the tube until they found the wand, which the creature grabbed and pointed at the grass in front of it. A yellow mist emanated. The grass immediately wilted and turned black, dying.
Alarms started going off in Mazer's helmet. A biohazard alert.
"Masks!" shouted Mazer, retreating a few steps. He blinked the command, and the oxygen mask inside his helmet pressed against his face, covering his mouth and nose. He felt the suction of it and knew the seal was tight. Fresh oxygen poured in.
"Back off," he said. "It's spraying some kind of defoliant."
"It's in the air," said Fatani. "My helmet's going berserk."
The creature continued spraying. Wide swaths of grass around it died. The mist swirled and grew, carried away from them by the wind.
"We've got to do something," said Patu.
Mazer hesitated a moment longer then pulled the trigger. His gun discharged. The creature took the round to the head and dropped. The wand stopped spraying.
"It's the defoliant," said Mazer. "There are traces of it in the air. Get back to the HERC. Reinhardt, move the HERC upwind."
The HERC lifted slightly into the air and moved thirty meters north before it set down again.
"What if that thing isn't dead?" said Fatani.
"I got it," said Mazer. "Get back inside. Touch nothing. Don't sit down. Whatever it was spraying may be on your clothes."
They moved. Mazer blinked a command and turned on the thermal imaging. The creature on the ground showed a slight heat signature. Faint but it was clearly warm-blooded. Mazer squeezed off four more rounds, just to be sure. The creature took each in the back, jerking slightly as if kicked. Otherwise it didn't move. The head wound was bleeding out in the grass.
Mazer turned to the alien aircraft and climbed up on top of it. He stood at the edge of the door and looked down inside. At the bottom, clumped together in a heap was a mass of alien bodies, all of them armed with the same defoliant canisters on their backs. "It's a troop carrier. It's hard to get an exact count of how many creatures are in here. The bodies are all clumped together. I'm going to guess nine."
Mazer did the math in his head. He wasn't sure how many troop carriers had come out of the lander, but it had to have been at least a hundred and maybe double that. If each of them were filled with ten troops armed with defoliants, the casualty count to the Chinese could be enormous, to say nothing of the ecological implications.
One of the aliens moved, still alive. Mazer emptied his gun into it.
The pile went still.
He knelt down, took out his laser cutter, and began slicing away at a corner of the troop carrier, trying to cut a piece of the metal off for analysis. The laser, which normally sliced through steel with ease, cut slowly, having a hard time with the metal. Mazer had hoped for a larger piece, but the pace of the cut prompted him to settle for a tiny piece no bigger than a coin. He blew on it, letting the metal cool, then dropped it into a small container at his hip. Then he stepped off the door and tried to push it forward back into place, hoping to seal the aircraft closed and thus lock the chemical inside. The door didn't move. He briefly looked inside for a lever or switch or button but saw none.
He lowered himself from the troop carrier and ran for the HERC.
He stepped up onto the landing skid and grabbed a handhold. "Take us up," he told Reinhardt. "Directly over the dead grass."
The HERC rose.
With his free hand, Mazer dug under the dash until he found the flare gun. There were several signal flares attached to its base. He would have preferred another method, a more reliable incendiary that was easier to control--flares were so unpredictable--but it was all he had and he didn't want to get any closer to the dead grass. He loaded a flare and fired it straight down into the black patch of grass. The flare bounced once and ricocheted off to the side, landing a distance away, spinning like a firework in a patch of perfectly healthy grass, spewing sparks and flame.
Mazer loaded another flare and tried again. This time the flare hit the ground and spun wildly in place, spewing sparks in every direction before it shot off elsewhere. It wasn't as accurate as Mazer had hoped, but it was enough; the dead grass caught the flames and began to burn.
Mazer turned to Reinhardt. "Find us a flat surface nearby, preferably away from vegetation. A road maybe. Fast."
The HERC banked east. Mazer scanned the skies. The troop carriers and smaller aircraft were elsewhere, moving away from them.
Reinhardt brought the HERC down onto a dirt road, the first one Mazer had seen in a while.
Mazer hopped out, removed his helmet, and set it on the ground. "Patu and Fatani, we need to strip down. Whatever was exposed to the air, whatever may have come in contact with the defoliant, starting with your fatigues. Dump them here in a pile. Don't let your clothes touch another part of your skin or anything inside the HERC, if it can be avoided. Keep your boots."
Mazer undressed quickly, keeping on his undershirt, shorts, and socks. He left his fatigues in the dirt. Fatani and Patu stripped down as well. Mazer then removed a first-aid kit from under his seat and took out a bottle of surgical antiseptic. He poured it into Patu and Fatani's cupped hands and told them to wash their hands and neck thoroughly. Mazer then did the same. The liquid was cold and brown and smelled like a hospital. When they finished they used gauze loaded with the antiseptic to wipe down their helmets, boots, and weapons.
Mazer then grabbed another of the flares and pulled the igniter pin. The end of the flare spewed hot sparks. Mazer bent down and set the sparks to the clothes. They caught fire and burned. He tossed the flare into a nearby rice paddy, where it sizzled and extinguished.
"Now what?" said Reinhardt. "We've got no one on the radio. No extra clothes. Barely any weapons."
"We need extra clothing," said Mazer. "More of our skin is exposed now. And there could be hundreds of troops out there putting that mist in the air. We need to cover up."
"We need to reassess what the hell we're doing out here," said Reinhardt. "We're not equipped for aerial combat, Mazer. This is out of our league now. Rescue effort is one thing. Aerial assaults is another. We are officially over our heads here."
"Everyone's over their head," said Mazer. "Nobody's prepared for this."
"If we go back to base, they'll confiscate the HERC," said Fatani. "We'll be out of the fight."
"We're not armed for a fight," said Reinhardt. "That's my point. Load this baby with missiles and bigger guns, and it can do some good. As a rescue aircraft, we're target practice. We need to give this back to the Chinese and let them use it for what it was made for. This is their resource, not ours."
"We can still do
some good out here," said Patu. "There were a lot of people on the ground back there. Still on foot. We need to get them centrally located, away from the chaos. Up to the makeshift hospital maybe. At least until they can be extracted properly."
"There isn't going to be a hospital," said Reinhardt. "Did you miss the events of the last twenty minutes? Those medevacs are down, Patu. Toast. No one's building a hospital. Right now we're it. If we take those people up to the hospital, they're no better off up there than where they are."
A beeping noise sounded in Mazer's helmet.
Reinhardt turned to the dash, suddenly alert. "I got two incomings. Moving fast. Chinese fighters."
Mazer could hear their jet engines now. He looked up and saw them coming from the south, flying low, screaming across the sky. They flew almost directly overhead a moment later. One of them opened fire at a cluster of alien troop carriers in the distance. The other fighter launched a missile, which hit its target. A troop carrier exploded, its wreckage twisting, falling, burning. Mazer and the others couldn't help but cheer.
Then the tables turned. All of the alien aircraft in the vicinity suddenly changed course, as if moving as one organism, and converged on the Chinese fighters. Mazer quickly put on his helmet and zoomed in, following the dogfight. The Chinese fighters saw the danger and climbed, trying to shake their pursuers, banking left and right. The smaller alien skimmers, which likely only held a single pilot, were much faster and more maneuverable than the troop carriers. A cluster of the skimmers soon caught up with one of the fighters and fired in unison. The Chinese fighter exploded, sending a spray of shrapnel and fire in every direction.
Mazer and the others went quiet, watching the burning wreckage cascade down from the sky.
"We're over our heads here, Mazer," Reinhardt repeated. "We should talk with the Chinese. They'll be desperate for help now. They'll put us back out here."
Patu, Fatani, and Reinhardt watched him, waiting for him to make a decision. Good sense said to go. The sooner they armed the HERC, the sooner someone could be in the air with it, putting it to good use. He looked south. He could still see people coming down from the hills, fleeing the lander on foot, scattering across the landscape in groups of four or less, completely disorganized. Mazer couldn't see their faces from this distance, but he knew what he would see if he could. Fear, grief, confusion, helplessness.
"We need to move as many people up to that farmhouse as we can," said Mazer. "We can't leave them out here unorganized. It doesn't matter if the medevacs are down. We can make it a hospital."
"We don't have supplies," said Reinhardt.
"We have a few," said Mazer. "And we have more medical training than any of them likely do. We can help. And we can organize the ones who are unhurt to help as well. These people are fragmented and terrified. They need to gather, get their bearings, and get out of the open. Who knows how much of that defoliant has been sprayed. They could run right into a cloud of it. The best place for them is up high, out of the valleys, where there's more wind. That farmhouse is as good a place as any."
"We're not a transporter," said Reinhardt. "This thing can only take a few people at once."
"Then we'll take a few people at once," said Mazer. He climbed up into the cockpit. "Take us up. Fatani, watch the skies for incomings. Patu, you and I will help the survivors into the HERC and get them fastened in."
They all acknowledged, and Reinhardt took them up again.
They flew south but didn't have to go far. They landed near a family running across a field. The woman had an infant in her arms. Both she and the baby were crying. The father carried two toddlers, both of them clinging desperately to his neck. The children were maybe two and three years old. The family was poor and barefoot and dirty and terrified. They came to the HERC without hesitating. Mazer and Patu were out and helping them inside. The children were frightened and screaming. The mother huddled with her infant inside, knees up, trembling.
When everyone was secure, Reinhardt took them up again. They didn't go far before he was setting the HERC down once more, this time for an older couple. Each of them was carrying a bag. Their clothes were muddy and ripped. They looked as if they were still in a state of shock. Mazer and Patu helped them inside.
"We've only got room for one or two more," said Reinhardt.
Mazer saw a group of five people running toward them, waving their arms.
"Wait!" they were shouting. "Wait for us." They were crying and desperate.
"We can't fit all those people," Reinhardt said to Mazer.
"We'll squeeze them in," said Mazer.
The last group was a mix of people, likely unrelated. A teenage girl. An old woman. A child, maybe ten years old. A middle-aged man. A woman in her twenties. Some of them looked injured, limping or favoring an arm, but nothing looked serious. They had likely fallen during the earthquake or in the mad rush of it all.
Mazer squeezed them all in tight, putting the child and teenage girl up front in his seat, while he stood in the back. Reinhardt took them up and headed toward the farmhouse. Mazer addressed the people inside. He and his team were taking them to a farmhouse. They would make it a hospital. They would bring more people. Real doctors would likely come later. In the meantime, he needed everyone's help. Those who were uninjured would assist those who were. He asked about the ten-year-old boy: Was anyone related to him? No one was. He told the boy to stick with one of the women. She would tend to him. The woman agreed. Mazer told them to cover their skin once they reached the farmhouse, explaining as best he could about the defoliants. They needed to stay indoors. Supplies would come later. Water and food. There was already some of that at the farmhouse. He distributed what little other supplies he had in the HERC.
By then they had reached the farmhouse. Mazer slid back the door and began helping everyone inside. The middle-aged man assisted as much as he and Patu did, carrying in children and lifting the bags for the elderly. The old man and Bingwen were inside. They seemed grateful that Mazer had returned. They were happy to see the others. The old man recognized several of the people. They embraced.
Mazer turned to the middle-aged man. "What's your name?"
"Ping," the man said.
Mazer put a hand on his shoulder and addressed the crowd. "Everyone, Ping here is in charge until we get back with the others. Remember, stay indoors."
"We're not safe here," said the father of the young family. "Those planes. They could come back."
"You're safer here than where you were," said Mazer. "The military will come."
"Why aren't they already here?" said the man. "Why do foreigners save us?"
"Your military is desperately fighting to protect you," said Mazer. "It was their idea to make this location a hospital. They'll send someone. Supplies will come."
"You can't be sure of that," said the man. "You don't know. You can't be sure of anything. I saw the helicopters, the ones with the doctors, the ones the military had sent. They blew up. They went down. No doctors are coming. I saw it happen. I saw it with my own eyes."
He was getting upset, his voice rising.
Mazer made a calming gesture with his hands, patting the air in front of him. "Right now we need to stay calm, friend. We will tell the military you are here. They will send assistance as soon as they can. You're stronger together here than you were out there alone. We'll bring more people."
"More people means more mouths to feed, more water to share," said the man. "There isn't enough of that to go around already. If you bring more people, you will kill us all."
The man was terrified, in shock, irrational. And thinking only of his family.
The boy Bingwen surprised Mazer by speaking up. "This man pulled me from the mud," he said, gesturing to Mazer. "I was trapped under the dirt, and he pulled me out. He risked his life for me and my grandfather. He told us he would come back, and he did. He keeps his word, a man of honor. He and his team are trained. We should listen to them and trust them."
Th
e young father turned on Bingwen, furious. "What do you know of anything? You, a boy. Do you have little mouths to feed? A wife to tend to? No. You speak of honor, and yet you show none to your elders, speaking out of turn, giving me orders as if I were a child. Were I your father I would lash you for your loose tongue."
"You are not his father," said Bingwen's grandfather, rising to his feet and putting a protective hand around the boy. "And you speak out of turn, sir. Be grateful your wife is alive. Be grateful you have three of your children. The rest of us don't know what has become of our loved ones. These men are willing to help us, to reunite us all. We will listen to them."
The father's face was twisted with anger. He regarded the grandfather and Bingwen with contempt. Then he turned to the others, gesturing to Mazer. "These men are foreigners. We know nothing about them. They are not like us. We do not have to take orders from them."
"We're not giving you orders," said Mazer.
"You are making promises you can't keep. Just like all foreigners do. Talk and more talk. Can you command our military? Can you make them come? No. Can you make food and water appear? No." He turned back to the others. "I am not staying here. How are we better off here in this dump of a farmhouse than we were back in our village?"
"We're farther from the invaders," said Ping.
The young father scoffed. "Farther? Are you such a fool that you think this is far enough? We are a few kilometers away at most. That is nothing to a skimmer. They can reach us in a second. The big disc is right over those mountains. Is that far enough for you?"
No one answered.
"We need to keep moving," said the man, "get as far away from here as possible. On foot if we have to. We need to find military of our kind. My family and I are pushing on. Any of you are welcome to join us, but don't expect us to slow down for you."