Rain Daze

[Col. C.E. Harper 0]

After the excitement over the bear subsided, Charlie leaned against the entrance of the cave, watching the rain fall in cascading grey sheets. The lakeshore had turned completely to sucking mud, and she smirked a little, remembering...

 

2382 – Solaris III

 

Solaris, Harper reflected, was not living up to its name. There was nothing comfortable about the wide expanses of brambles, vines, rocks, and mud. Lots of mud. Green mud.

 

Exactly what made it green she wasn't certain. Some odd mineral configuration. What made it mud was pretty obvious. Three weeks they'd been here so far, and it had stopped raining once. For about two hours.

 

By this point, every thing they owned was green – either from mudstains or mold; no one was wholly certain which, and no one really cared to investigate. Being dry was a pipe dream: their uniforms were wet, their boots were wet, their packs were wet, their bunks were wet, their chow was wet… which actually might be an improvement in some cases.

 

Exactly one person on the team had been pleased with their miserable mudpit – that is, their base camp – and he was Gemarian. It rained four hundred twenty-two days a year on Gemaris. Towards the start of the second week – 'round about the time everyone ran out of dry socks – when he was still insufferably cheerful, the rest of the team had conspired to haul him out of his bunk and dump him in a particularly nasty bit of swampy mud. By the time he'd managed to clear all the goop out from under his skin folds, he was as grumpy about the conditions as anyone else.

 

"Hey, Charlie!" Corovis, her partner, whispered to her. "How about this one: two slime beetles meet on a log –"

 

"Shut up, Rover, before the enemy hears you," Harper hissed back. He only grinned, teeth bright in a mud-smeared face, and she hastily added, "Or the Lieutenant catches you again." The grin vanished, and he nodded.

 

Harper dug her binoculars out of a pocket and checked the post they were supposed to be watching. There was still no sign of life, even in magnification. She wished they'd move. Waiting wasn't fun under any circumstances; waiting while lying in mud under prickly vines was worthy of at least Dante's fourth circle. And her left leg was cramping – she'd move, but it squelched.

 

Corovis poked her arm, rather more sharply than necessary, and pointed. She looked over the binoculars and spotted a small party approaching the outpost. Quickly she refocused the viewer on them, and grinned, flashing a thumbs-up to Corovis.

 

He pulled a small laser out and flashed a signal to the other fireteam. Harper looked up in time to catch the response, two short and two long flashes.

 

Time to move.

***

Smoke made her eyes tear and her throat burn. She ignored it, concentrating on her phaser sight; squeezing off another round at the two barricaded behind the torn-off door. “Charlie!” someone yelled. “The scout!”

 

She whipped around and saw, vanishing into the woods, their opponents’ rear scout. Cursing, she jumped up, trusting her teammates to watch her back, and dove into the damp foliage on the other’s heels. Immediately she lost sight of – him? her? couldn’t tell – the forest here was thick with draping mosses and those prickly bushes that seemed ubiquitous on this world. But she could hear him; he crashed through the undergrowth with no attempt at stealth. She followed hot behind him, and it wasn’t until a topaz blast left a smoking gap in the moss that she realized the same would be true of her progress. Grimly she ran on.

 

He led her a merry chase; she was well and thoroughly lost before long. She would have been more impressed if she’d thought that he had any notion where he was going, himself. As it was, she was just annoyed. Indulging, since stealth was pointless anyway, in a little grumbling about idiots who took the drill too far, she shoved through another set of hedges and promptly found herself sliding downwards…

 

Splash! Icy water cascaded around her; she was half-sitting up to her chest in it. She’d come out on a stream bank, the sound of the water masked by the ever-present rain and the two marines’ headlong rush through the woods, and the waterlogged bank had crumbled.

 

She knew better than to try and climb up at the same point. Once the bank began sliding, it would continue to do so for a while before it resettled. Instead she sloshed a few meters downstream and began hauling herself up the bank there.

 

She got halfway up before it crumbled. Back down she went.

 

Swearing under her breath, she struggled to her feet and continued downstream, watching the banks for a good spot to try again.

 

Phaser fire spattered into the mud wall beside her. Yelping, she leapt for the opposite bank, pressing up against the rise where anyone trying to shoot her would have to hang over the edge to get an angle. Where had it come from? Warily she slid along the bank, trying to move smoothly enough to hear an enemy above the froth of the stream

 

I have got to get out of this creek, she thought grimly. Mud or no.

 

***

 

Her quarry had gone to ground. Taking care where she placed her feet, Harper crept towards the little stand of trees where she suspected the other of hiding. The phaser blast a moment later pretty much cemented that theory. She threw herself to the ground, reflecting wryly that the other needed to put in more time at the target range. Not that she wasn’t grateful for the lapse.

 

On her belly to avoid presenting a target, she patiently circled around, spiraling in towards the trees. At last she could nudge her rifle through a gap and peer through the targeting scope. It showed her a back as muddy as her own, hunched over a rifle extending through the foliage, sweeping carefully back and forth – but not behind. Idiot, Harper thought, shifting her aim to the back of the neck, where vest and helmet gapped. Does she think I’ll stay under her gun sight? She fired.

 

The Marine stiffened, then slumped to the ground. Limping, Harper struggled over to haul the unconscious woman face-up. "Sorek," she murmured, swiping a gobbet of mud off the slack features.

 

A quick double-tap on Sorek's commbadge. "Confirm kill: Harper." That would register the outcome of this little cat-and-mouse game with the scanners that tracked them. Normally the officers in charge of these exercises recorded such things, but they were way out of the assigned exercise zone. "And we'll probably catch hell for it, too," she informed Sorek's comatose form.

 

With a sigh, she settled in to wait for the stun to wear off. At least they could make the trek back together.

***

By the time they trudged into base camp, both women were liberally coated with mud. It worked itself down collars and up cuffs, slopped into boots, and Harper didn’t even want to think about getting it out of her gear. She already counted it a minor miracle that her rifle still worked.

 

They were, indeed, met by unhappy officers, but the expected reaming was not forthcoming. Instead, lips twitching, the captain ordered them to their bunks to clean up. Too relieved to question good fortune, Harper hightailed it to the barracks. The rest of her squad was already there, as clean and dry as any of them could manage on this mudball, relaxing in their racks. Heads turned as she entered, stomping on the mats to try and avoid tracking too much mud into the room.

 

It started with M’vek. She made a strange, choked noise, and when Harper turned to her, frowning, ducked her head, clapping her hands to her mouth. Kiral buried his face in a pillow, but it did little to muffle his laughter. Newbridge didn’t bother hiding hers, and Corovis managed, “What happened?” before collapsing in mirth.

 

She glared at them all generally, and tromped past to the showers. The door shut off the sounds of hilarity. But Harper hardly noticed. She was transfixed by the sight of her reflection in the mirror above the sinks. Green from top to toe, the mud blending nicely into the camouflage pattern of her uniform, and streaks of it across her brow and cheeks. Her hair was crusted with the stuff; braids long since tumbled from their pins, locks straggling free from the braids, and all of it going in a every conceivable direction, stiffened by the green muck.

 

By the time she’d bathed and changed, the squad had decided on ‘Medusa’ to commemorate the occasion, and so it remained, sticky as the mud of Solaris III.