Screamer by Jason Halstead Page B

command to open the capsule. The forceful ejection sent it flying straight out and into the wall of the furrow a few feet away. So much for the instructors promise that the pods landed right side up every time.
    With the top portion gone, a fine mist covered her. Elsa fought to hold her breath but the smell of rancid peaches still assaulted her. The foam holding her in place dissolved rapidly, letting her slide out within seconds. She scrambled around the pod, keeping contact with it to retain some semblance of up and down until her body could compensate for the trauma she’d gone through. She triggered the release on the cargo bay and pulled the door off so it served as protection to her back. A few more twists and pressed buttons released first her X109 energy rifle then the large container of supplies that she slipped on her back.
    Elsa spun around, rifle held at the ready, and surveyed her situation for the first time. The ditch dug by the screamer was roughly three feet deep. Giant trees and vegetation rose around her, enclosing her within the tropical jungle her pod had landed in. She frowned, the insertion point was supposed to be near the destroyed research outpost, humanity’s only real settlements on Vitalis. Whatever had hit her pod had redirected her.
    Roughly sixty seconds at over a thousand miles an hour meant she could be up to twenty miles away from her target. She adjusted her pack before subvocalizing the command to call up a map in her helmet’s display. The map displayed, albeit at an orbital overview size.
    “ FIST team three, Dark Angel reporting in,” Elsa spoke after activating her radio, naming off her First Insertion Special Tactics unit then her individual code name. She waited several seconds for a response that never came. “Interference,” she muttered, followed by a curse fit for a Marine Special Operator. Previous reports from the Explorer logs had indicated intermittent problems with radio contact on Vitalis. Without connection to the orbital fleet her GPS was useless too.
    She adjusted her pack one more time, anxious for a chance to find a secure position to break it apart and redistribute the contents to the various mounting points on her armor. She picked herself up enough to look over the wrecked capsule and survey the jungle . Her helmet’s light amplification made the scene almost as bright as a Vitalian day, while the superimposed thermographic indicators showed nothing large enough to be a threat to her, only some smaller mammals.
    Elsa climbed out of the trench and turned around a few times to take in the scenery. She figured if she followed the trench the screamer had dug she’d be headed in the right direction. Both her internal compass and the one built into her helmet were failing her. “Guess that’s why they don’t let Marines with cybernetics on the FIST teams,” she mused aloud.
    Elsa’s specialty was terrestrial insertions, but Vitalis at night was a different world from anything she’d been prepared for. Even a training stint in the rare protected jungle plots in Africa couldn’t have prepared her for the raw menace of the jungle around her. The trees had trunks often wider than she was tall. Even though she was only 5’6”, they seemed huge. She saw plants that looked both succulent and dangerous, though the flowers were closed at night. Some even seemed to recoil as she neared them, as though they could sense her. She smirked at the prospect, but moved on quickly after suppressing a shiver that she was alone in an alien place.
    Elsa felt the same soreness in her back that had plagued her for the last three screamer trips. She owed that to a rough landing followed by catching the tail end of a blown up aeroskimmer. Her armor had been compromised and her spine broken, but there was virtually nothing technology couldn’t overcome. Modern medicine could fix the damage, but the pains stayed longer as she got older.
    She emerged into a small clearing. A river,