Ten Thousand Fleets Chapter 17: 17. Out of the Jungle

Read chapter 17 of Ten Thousand Fleets by DavidNiemitz on NovelPedia.

17. Out of the Jungle Jungle southeast of San Teodoro, Vidako Imperium Stellarum September 15, 2847 Arc, Cassie, and Natalie Ramírez rode all the way back to the lakeside camp carried together in the open palm of Vijay Iyer’s Janissary . The older cadet kept the mech’s left hand cradled up nearly against the enormous machine’s torso, articulated fingers and thumb gently curved upward to act almost as a sort of half-cage for them to cling onto. It was a good thing, too: for every careful step Iyer took, the mech’s palm rocked and swayed until Arc felt half sick to his stomach, and if one of them had fallen, it would have been a drop of seventeen or eighteen meters to the jungle floor below. They followed the same path that Arc and the other cadets had hiked to get to the waterfall, with Van Camp’s Tyro leading the way back. The evidence of the two pilots’ pell-mell rush through the forest was clearly visible to either side: broken and splintered tree limbs had been shoved out of the way, and the wet, loamy earth was torn up by the violent tread of running mechs. Arc kept expecting them to catch up with John Rixey and the rest of the group, but when it didn’t happen he assumed that they’d been met by a medical team. That assumption was borne out when one of the academy’s great, twin-rotored Saker VTOLs came flying in from the northeast, then descended by the shore of the lake, where the cadets had cleared so much ground while making camp. The Saker was off again, back in the direction it had come from, so quickly that Arc doubted they’d even turned the rotors off. Cassie grabbed his shoulder and gave a squeeze. “That means Seidl’s alive,” she said, having to shout over the sound of the helicopter and the crashing of the mechs through the brush. “They wouldn’t be hurrying back so fast if she was dead.” Arc nodded, and felt a knot in the pit of his stomach loosen. They’d take her to a hospital in the city, surely. He didn’t know how things would go from there, and he couldn’t see how the pounce of the tree-cat wouldn’t have broken Maja Seidl’s back, but it was still a relief to know that she was alive. He looked down at his sleeves, at his hands, and saw how much of the girl’s blood had stained him after only the short time he’d carried her. Before he could think better of it, he brushed his palms against his pants, but it didn’t help. The camp was a buzz of activity when they arrived. Arc’s homeworld, Zurah V, had never imported hornets as part of the original colonists' terraforming efforts—mulberry trees didn’t require a pollinator—so he’d never actually seen a hornet’s nest kicked, but the idiom had survived. Iyer walked them over to a waiting group of corpsmen, knelt, and carefully lowered the Janissary’s hand to the ground so that the three cadets could climb off. “Are you hurt?” one of the corpsmen shouted, over the thump of Van Camp’s Tyro walking past, toward the field maintenance station that had been set up at one corner of the camp. “I’m fine,” Arc called back. “It isn’t my blood.” It turned out that his word wasn’t good enough; all three of them were taken over to one of the grav-trucks, where the field infirmary had been set up. Arc was instructed to strip off both his bloodstained jacket and his undershirt, both of which he doubted he’d ever see again. Once the blood was washed off his hands and forearms, and he’d been thoroughly checked for cuts, bruises, scrapes, and broken bones, he was finally released—with a new undershirt. Ramírez wasn’t so lucky; the medics seemed to have no intention of letting her go until they were certain that the mad run along the jungle path hadn’t exacerbated her previous injury. “Hey Sandhurst!” Ramírez called out, as he and Cassie walked past. The corpsmen had her leg up, her pants off, and her bandage unwrapped, but none of it seemed to make the girl self-conscious. Arc supposed that days of camping together and squatting over a latrine would do that. “Thank you,” she said, and winc