Devil Calls the Tune by Chris Maddox

Author:Chris Maddox [Maddox, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Theogony Books
Published: 2020-01-27T22:00:00+00:00

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Chapter 3

Devlin trudged on. Every few hundred meters, here and there, he’d see some scattered debris, nothing much, just…detritus. The first couple of times, he stopped and investigated. Each time he was disappointed.

After about an hour, he stopped and drank from his hydration vest. He scanned the horizon but saw nothing. After five kilometers, one would have thought there would be…

He thought he caught a flash in his peripheral vision. He turned his head a little north and watched. One minute. There it was again. It was a flash.

Hot damn, he thought and grinned. At least one other person survived.

He took another sip and picked up his pace. He walked briskly for a few minutes then started a light jog. He figured he had another five kilometers before he reached the source of the mirror flash. As he jogged, he saw the light flash every few minutes. But after about twenty minutes, the flashes quit.

When he figured he had traveled all but the last couple of klicks, he slowed to a walk and hunkered down for a moment. He took a drink of water, the wetness seductively sweet in his mouth. He had worked up a sweat during the run, but he figured it a good risk.

He pulled the one thing out of his vest that had survived his personal pack’s destruction, a combat monocular scope. Since it was something that couldn’t really affect the outcome of the survival test one way or another, it was allowed in his personal gear.

He raised the scope to his eye and examined the site. It appeared in the monocular, and the range showed 1.65 km. Good, he thought. Unless they had a scope, whoever was up there wouldn’t have seen him coming. No sense in being an idiot and rushing in before he assessed the situation.

Rule Number Twenty-Three: If you do not ASSess…you will eventually be an ass.

He couldn’t see anyone moving around the site. The crash chair was among a small field of debris from the shuttle. The crash chair was lying on its side, rather than sitting upright, which was the default landing position; the grav compensators in the chair were supposed to ensure that. The only thing that could keep a chair from doing that would be…well, an explosion that damaged the grav comp. Debris, he supposed as he thought about it.

He decided to move closer. Keeping low, he started to walk. It was slow going, but he had time. Another problem, from his viewpoint, was a complete lack of ground cover. There was no place to hide on this plain, unless the terrain changed.

It took another hour of walk and stop, hunker and assess, to reach the crash site. Like his, there was an assortment of debris, but Devlin ignored most of it in favor of checking out the crash chair.

The chair was lying on its side facing away. He heard a low moan and some labored coughing. He purposefully scuffled his boots to make a noise, but hopefully not startle the chair’s occupant.

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