“Like an orphanage.”
“Better than that. A place where smart kids go. Special kids.”
“How do I contact you?”
“Memorize my e-mail and holo address. Can you do that?”
Bingwen nodded. Mazer told him the addresses. “Now recite them back to me.”
Bingwen did. Mazer stood and extended a hand. Bingwen shook it. “How long do I need to keep this cast on my arm?” asked Bingwen.
“Another two weeks. Try not to let any more trees fall on it.”
“Try not to get killed.”
Mazer smiled. “I’ll try.” He paused a beat, not wanting to leave. “No more heroics, all right? Just get north and stay safe.”
Bingwen nodded.
There was nothing more to say. The family was waiting, ready to move on. Mazer smiled one last time then turned on his heels and headed south, not looking back.
He stayed off the highway, moving parallel to it, and made good time. He had been walking slower because of Bingwen, but now he set his own pace. The soup had given him new energy. He found a patch of jungle and slept for a few hours, burying himself among the fallen leaves and staying out of site. When he woke, he got moving again. By now he was dying of thirst. He passed several puddles of rainwater, but he knew better than to drink from them. Late in the afternoon he thought he heard the faint sounds of a battle far west of his position, but he couldn’t see anything.
As dusk approached he heard aircraft. He crouched near some wilting shrubs and watched as a Chinese fighter engaged in a dogfight with a Formic flyer directly overhead. The fighter had more firepower, but the Formic craft was more nimble. It swooped and dove and clipped the wing of the Chinese fighter with a laser burst. The fighter was suddenly consumed in flames, spinning out of control, dropping out of the sky. The pilot ejected a few hundred meters from the ground, coming down fast. His parachute opened. His body was limp. The plane crashed some distance to the south. Mazer heard the explosion. The Formic flyer flew on. Mazer watched the pilot’s parachute descend out of sight, less than a kilometer away. He jumped up and ran in that direction.
It didn’t take him long to find the pilot. The man had landed in the middle of a scorched field, the white, downed parachute billowing in the wind, standing out against the black landscape like a beacon.
Mazer approached the pilot, who wasn’t moving. The man lay on his back, head lolled to the side, his helmet tinted so Mazer couldn’t see his face. The parachute flapped in the wind. It caught a gust, filled with air, and dragged the pilot on his back a few meters through the dirt.
There was a knife strapped to the pilot’s leg. Mazer ran for it, quickly unsheathed it, and cut through the suspension lines. The more he cut, the less pull he felt from the skirt of the chute, until at last it was loose and unable to catch wind anymore. Mazer dropped the knife and knelt beside the pilot. He tapped a sequence on the side of the helmet, and the tint of the visor vanished, revealing the pilot’s face behind the reinforced plastic. The pilot’s eyes were closed, and he didn’t appear to be breathing. Mazer pulled back the chest patch on the man’s flight suit to expose the biometric readout. The pliable screen was cracked but still functioning. The pilot had flatlined. Cause of death was a broken neck and severed spinal column. According to the data, it had happened microseconds after the pilot had ejected.
Mazer sat back on his heels. More death.
He looked upward, scanning the sky. He was out in the middle of a field, exposed. If the Formic should return or others pass by, he’d be an easy target.
He grabbed the pilot by the straps of his chute harness and dragged him backward through the dirt toward some wilting scrub. It wasn’t much cover, but it was better than nothing.