TRACKER (Revised 12/17/23)

Moss removed the improvised listening device from his chest harness and pointed it into the darkness like a Colonial Marine motion tracker. It wasn't. Johns would never spring for a piece of equipment that pricey. Besides, Johns hated the Colonial Marines; they were the arch rivals of the Company Rangers. His prototype unit was a crude facsimile of the real deal, but it worked well enough to warn him if any nasties were getting coming up from behind. To increase his odds of not being attacked, Moss connected the audio inputs on his glasses to the motion tracker's A/V output. The hasty connection was nothing fancy. The patch cord routed the blaring external speaker feed through the micro-speaker located just behind his left ear. He didn't want to go slogging through the darkness with a speaker calling out to every hungry raptor in earshot. As a bonus, everytime the speaker behind his ear beeped a corresponding dot popped up in his glass's viewscreens.

Moss looked through the green, glowing readout in the lower right corner of his glasses and grimaced. He hated the night vision system in these cheap-ass glasses. The fluctuating Hz rate and intense saturation gave him wicked eyestrain, and this time out was no exception to that rule. It felt like someone was trying to pop his eyeballs out of the sockets with a dirty teaspoon. Mental note, from now on, buy your own fucking gear.

After a short time passed, Moss turned the high gain on the sensitivity control to its max +10db. It didn't increase the unit's volume or extend the device's range, but it did improve sound quality through the mid-range band. Or as he thought of it. In the middle-aged band.

Moss was no super engineer like Lockspur, but he had fashioned a pretty good tracker out of a pile of old junk most people would have tossed in the bin. That made him proud. Few mercs could do that. The device showed a few other useful stats like number of nearby targets, approximated sizes, general direction of travel, and to a limited extent, speed of approach. That one had proven useful, allowing him to evade a few fast movers before they saw him. In fact, he had just evaded a horde of raptors heading towards what he hoped wasn't a woman's scream.

Currently, there were no signs of movement. The speaker signalled occasionally as it had done since his earlier encounter with the newcomers. At first he had thought it was interference, but then he started thinking something might be following. He could hear Lockspur laughing about his paranoia. The device beeped louder than when he first noticed the beeping. In fact, only 30 minutes ago, it had picked up six or seven targets behind him. He didn't think raptors were pack hunters. So, that meant his unwanted tails were giving chase. And from the increasingly shrill tones coming out of the micro-speaker, they were closing in and falling back.

The one problem Moss noted with his frankentronics was that the tracker only revealed approaching targets from the front. The glasses had small view screens, limiting visibility to front view only. But the micro-speaker sounded off if anything entered a 360° circle around him. If he wanted to find the new target, all he had to do was turn around until it popped up in his field of vision. At which point, his weapon would be pointing in the right direction. Which was good because the target could already be too close.

Moss's tracker lit up, a shrill alarm sounded just behind his ear and his heart punched his chest. He was fairly certain he knew who was gaining on him. His would-be murders were closing the distance. He pointed the tracker behind him. Surely enough, they were there again.He was sick of cat and mouse shit and his head was throbbing so badly, he thought his skull was splitting open. Every time he lost them in the dark, they popped out from a concealed position. It was as if they knew where he was going be before he did. And oddly enough, they never caught him. 

The seven lit-up dots on his monitor had closed the distance for the third time. If they get any damn closer, he thought, I'll be able to smell their aftershave. He focused on the readout and saw their ominous dots were only a few inches from his center dot. But the distance between dots didn't matter, he had forgotten to celebrate the unit before heading into the dark. For all he knew, the unit could read in feet rather than yards. And if that were the case, they were somewhere in the next compartment. Maybe less than a hundred feet away, certainly not three-hundred feet away. He was uncertain if the tracker could even reach that far with steel structure scrambling its signal. And even if it could, they were still too damn close for comfort.

The heavily armed brutes giving chase had more than enough combined firepower to move faster than Moss. Unlike them, he had to tip-toe through the wreckage, evading the raptors. As a result, they were outpacing him two steps to his one. The rising hair on the back of his neck told him to forget the raptors and just run. But where could he go if they already knew what he was going to do. His instincts told him something was off about their half-hearted chase. They had been coming closer for the last hour and a half. The getting closer, he understood. But the repeated evasions made no sense to him. No one chases a target without the intention of catching it. Unless these fuckers are pushing me, he thought.

An ear-bursting roar shook the wreckage and Moss fumbled backward, shoulders slamming against the wall beneath the hatch he just crawled through. Something big was out there in one of the dark compartments ahead and from the trumpeting foghorn roar still ringing in his ears, it had to be huge. The damn thing had screamed so loud he thought his ears were humming, and that reverberating challenge had radiated through the closed hatch on the other side of the compartment. Whatever was over there, he didn't want to meet.

Adrenaline flooded Moss's veins. His heart raced and sweat filled his palms. Great. No way forward, and thanks to my oversized friends, no way back, either. "Shit," he said in a rueful whisper. peering up at the open hatch he just came through and closed the hatch. He turned away, saw the next hatch was closed and grimaced. Open hatches were dangerous, but closed hatches could be down right lethal. There was no way to tell if there was a nasty surprise waiting on the otherside. 

______________________________________________

Master Sergeant Benson held up a meaty, broad hand, spread his pallid fingers wide and slowly lowered it towards the ground, palm down. His men fell silent, each taking a knee. He waved for Dumort to come to his side. Dumort nodded, moved quickly and knelt down beside him. He held out the motion tracker in his hand so Benson could see it. The readout showed a single fixed dot. The readout beside it flashed: 23 meters.

Benson pointed through the twisted hatch in the distance, and Dumort nodded his understanding. Their target had stopped just on the other side of the hatch. Benson stood up and said in a loud, forceful tone, "Take five." His men stood up, blinking dumbly. He gestured for them to talk. He mouthed the words, make some goddam noise. And as they did, Benson waited and watched his tracker, knowing the dot in the next compartment would move soon. The sheep will try to evade the fox.

"Stupid. Stupid. Stupid." Moss whispered to himself. His enemies were trying to trap him on both sides. "They're pushing me, either hoping I'll run into a nest of raptors. Bullshit." he fumed. "They could have killed me anytime. Why let the raptors get me?"

Moss knew his adversaries had an unfair advantage, an advantage he couldn't explain. It made sense that if the newcomers knew he would be there, they knew where the others were, too. Perhaps someone could have leaked mission Intel, or maybe there had been an inside agent in Lilith's organization. But none of that explained how they seemed to know what he was going to to do before he did. He had two options, find his teammates or lure his chasers away. Neither would be no easy tasks if his trackers knew what he was up to.

Moss remembered something an old Ranger Company Commander told him years earlier when he was a cherry lieutenant. He had barely been in his twenties, but the old warriors words had stuck with him and saved his ass on more than one occasion. All plans combine Intel and assumptions. The best plans are the ones with the fewest assumptions.

Moss sat down directly below the bent hatch, pressed his back against the wall, listening to the voices in the next compartment. He thought about what he knew as fact. They had stopped when he had stopped. They had a tracker. That was fact. But something else was going on here. In a ship this size and this disorienting, he should have easily evaded them even with a tracker. The only logical answer was they knew where he was going before he did. But how? He hadn't even known where he was going. In theory last 45 minutes, he had wandered aimlessly through the dark, hoping to find his comrades by sheer luck.

He looked around the compartment, accessing the situation. It was bleak. One way. One way out. Danger either way. How can these guys know what I'm going to do before I do? This shit makes no sense. Moss squinted through the green haze, trying to wrap his mind around how they could follow him. "Maybe they're seeing the past. Maybe for them, this shit has already happened. And maybe youre a moron."

Looking around the darkness, Moss tried to figure a way to shake off his tail. The room closed in around him. How do you escape an enemy that knows what you are going to do before you do? Then a crazy idea donned on him. He ran across the room, making as much noise as possible and presenting as big of a target as possible, knowing they would see him move forward. He stopped below the far hatch and listened closely. The voices stopped. He was right; they had a tracker, and they were herding him like a cow. He jumped up on the handrail, pendulumed his feet up and hooked at the release lever. The weight of his body pushed the lever down, releasing the lock. The door opened a fraction of an inch. Remembering Dahl's earlier experience with opening a hatch, he pulled his legs away. Something behind the door knocked it open, but nothing burst through. He was right; they had known something was in there. And if had jumped through, he would probably be dead or fighting for his life. He reached out, grabbed the bottom of the open hatch and slid down the wall.

Benson saw the dot race across the compartment. His malevolent smile caught Dumort's attention, and Dumort motioned for the others to be quiet. The men fell silent, watching the tracker and waiting for the order to advance. They were ready.

Moss slid into the corner where the wall met the floor, pressed himself lengthwise into the horizontal corner, trying to mask himself from their tracker. His shotgun and motion tracker swung on the handrail, suspended on the wide carry strap. All he had left to defend himself with was a few handguns and 4 clips of ammo. He considered retrieving the weapon, but knew that would give away his position. Damn, he thought. If I'm lucky, whoever is out there might see his swinging equipment and think Im standing beneath the hatch. He crawled around the outer perimeter of the room, only stopping once to dump his now unneeded shotgun rounds and disconnect the wire hanging from his glasses. After another 10 minutes of cautious crawling, he reached the open hatch where he entered the room. He couldn't flee through either hatch. And if he stood up, they would lock in on his new position and know he knew they were out there.

"Bastards, knew the raptor was there." Moss whispered to himself. "If I had gone through that hatch I'd be dead now." Moss lay in the dark, tapping the back of his head against the floor and watching the far hatch for signs of movement. Nothing came through, but he knew a raptor crouched on the other side waiting for a fresh meal. The speaker on his suspended tracker remained silent. The still connected patch cord saw to that.

Benson knelt in the dark compartment, telling himself he had time to spare and that something more important was on his side. He knew what happened next. Moss was right. For Benson, this scenario had already played out before. He was from the future, and the future always repeated itself. Benson grinned in the dark, knowing that soon, he would not only catch his prey, but that in the future, he had already caught him. It's good to have all the answers, Benson mused.

Moss had one logical way to proceed and that was to continue through the next hatch. He could retrieve his ammo and weapon, then, deal with the raptor. The hatch is the quickest way to get to Dahl and Lockspur. But his pursuers knew he would choose the safe path? The logical path? That's why they had stopped. That's why they were waiting. They knew Moss would take the straightforward route. But what else did they know? Maybe there was more than one raptor ahead? Not this time. I need a route no one in their right mind would take. A path no one would ever consider. A path of certain death. Then, he saw it. An 18" × 18" vent cover had fallen off the ductwork a foot off the nearby corner. Normally, the inaccessible opening was near the ceiling, but now the ship had flipped upside down, the opening was near the floor. He did not know which way the ductwork snaked or what might wait for him inside. But it was the only unexpected option.

At least no big raptors could sneak up on him. But the little raptors were more viscous than their larger kin. And in swarms, they were unstoppable clouds of gnashing teeth and rending claws. In the confines of that space, Moss would only have his sidearm to fend off an attack. Come on, pussy, he thought. You're probably dead no matter which way you go.

Dumort stared at the tracker in his hand as if trying to will the dot to move onward. But the faltering dot stayed put. "What's he doing?" he asked in a hushed voice as the dot blinked on and off.

Benson turned to him, looked at his wristwatch and said, "In 60 seconds he will proceed through that hatch and then we'll have him."

The two men waited in silence, watching the seconds countdown until their prey moved closer to certain doom. Time passed and all the while, Benson had no idea what he was actually seeing was Moss' equipment swinging on the handrail. The dot stayed fixed, but wavered and fluctuated. Both men stared wide-eyed at the tracker. The blinking dot dimmed, flickered, and then disappeared as the heavy equipment slipped off the handrail and hit the floor with an eerie sound like shit hitti g a fan.

Benson and Dumort looked at each other, mouths falling agape in disbelief. "I think somebody forgot to tell him he was supposed to go through the hatch." Dumort said.

Benson grabbed the tracker out of his hands, shook it wildly, and looked for the blinking dot. It was not a malfunction. The target had vanished. "That's impossible!" he bellowed, jumping to his feet and gesturing for the men to follow him into the next compartment.

The seven men raced through the darkness, scaled the handrails, shoved their way through the hatch and fell to the floor, rifle flashlights bursting to life as they searched the empty room. They spun in wide arching circles, ready to fire at the first thing that moved. But there was no sign of their prey. The dark room lay empty. The far hatch remained ajar as silence whispered youre fucked now. "Which way did he go?" Benson yelled in a panic. He screamed into the darkness. The seven amped up, wide-eyed men missed the dark brown fingers slipping through the now replaced grating in the near corner.

"Shit! Dammit! Fuck!" Benson screamed, swirling in all directions, trying to locate the predictable target that just went rogue with everyone's perfect timeline.

"That changes shit." Dumort said, staring at Benson.

"Fucking think so?" Benson snapped, punching one of his men in the face. The giant's head snapped to the side and then turned back to Benson. Thhe man said or did nothing. "The second that dot vanished, he fucked us." Benson saw Dumort's eyebrows furrow and added, "He goes through the next hatch and gets attacked by two raptors. Then we follow the blood trail straight to the girl."

Moss stared through the narrow slots in the grate, listening to their conversation and planning an escape strategy. But all he could see was that he had traded a large hiding place for a cramped one. A cramped one where anything could run up behind him.

They're after Dahl, he thought. He had to get to her before his chasers did. But now tbey were between him and her. He couldn't remain in the ductwork with no tracker and do that. His current position cloaked his presence for now, but he couldn't flee into the ducts without risking attack. That way led to possible death, and he couldn't get out as long as they had a tracker. If they were close, it would pick him up the second he emerged from behind the grate. Shit, he screamed in his head. Why did you leave the tracker?

"When he altered the events of this timeline," Benson raged at his men like they were responsible for what just happened. "He created a tare in space/time. And now, the further he goes off course, the farther he drags us into a divergent time stream, right along with him."

"So let's just find him and make him go through that hatch." one of Dumort's men said, shrugging his mountainous shoulders.

"It doesn't work that way. Every time something new happens the farther off course we're pushed. After enough changes occur, they won't be able to find us or send us a return portal. We'll be trapped here with no way back."

"What about their ship?" the man Benson punched in the face said. "We can use that to get home, can't we?"

"Commander Krone sent Msg. Avenesque and his team to destroy their ship, remember? We secure the girl, dispose of her compatriots, then return to the point of entry. Regrouping in preparation to go into the core and secure the obelisk that bitch stole. But now, even if we accomplish all those missions and use their ship to get home with the obelisk, we'd still be going back to a world where no one knows us, or our mission. Most of our leaders are still children."

Moss smiled in the lonely darkness and thought, you're welcome.