Mazer hopped out, removed his helmet, and set it on the ground. “Patu and Fatani, we need to strip down. Whatever was exposed to the air, whatever may have come in contact with the defoliant, starting with your fatigues. Dump them here in a pile. Don’t let your clothes touch another part of your skin or anything inside the HERC, if it can be avoided. Keep your boots.”
Mazer undressed quickly, keeping on his undershirt, shorts, and socks. He left his fatigues in the dirt. Fatani and Patu stripped down as well. Mazer then removed a first-aid kit from under his seat and took out a bottle of surgical antiseptic. He poured it into Patu and Fatani’s cupped hands and told them to wash their hands and neck thoroughly. Mazer then did the same. The liquid was cold and brown and smelled like a hospital. When they finished they used gauze loaded with the antiseptic to wipe down their helmets, boots, and weapons.
Mazer then grabbed another of the flares and pulled the igniter pin. The end of the flare spewed hot sparks. Mazer bent down and set the sparks to the clothes. They caught fire and burned. He tossed the flare into a nearby rice paddy, where it sizzled and extinguished.
“Now what?” said Reinhardt. “We’ve got no one on the radio. No extra clothes. Barely any weapons.”
“We need extra clothing,” said Mazer. “More of our skin is exposed now. And there could be hundreds of troops out there putting that mist in the air. We need to cover up.”
“We need to reassess what the hell we’re doing out here,” said Reinhardt. “We’re not equipped for aerial combat, Mazer. This is out of our league now. Rescue effort is one thing. Aerial assaults is another. We are officially over our heads here.”
“Everyone’s over their head,” said Mazer. “Nobody’s prepared for this.”
“If we go back to base, they’ll confiscate the HERC,” said Fatani. “We’ll be out of the fight.”
“We’re not armed for a fight,” said Reinhardt. “That’s my point. Load this baby with missiles and bigger guns, and it can do some good. As a rescue aircraft, we’re target practice. We need to give this back to the Chinese and let them use it for what it was made for. This is their resource, not ours.”
“We can still do some good out here,” said Patu. “There were a lot of people on the ground back there. Still on foot. We need to get them centrally located, away from the chaos. Up to the makeshift hospital maybe. At least until they can be extracted properly.”
“There isn’t going to be a hospital,” said Reinhardt. “Did you miss the events of the last twenty minutes? Those medevacs are down, Patu. Toast. No one’s building a hospital. Right now we’re it. If we take those people up to the hospital, they’re no better off up there than where they are.”
A beeping noise sounded in Mazer’s helmet.
Reinhardt turned to the dash, suddenly alert. “I got two incomings. Moving fast. Chinese fighters.”
Mazer could hear their jet engines now. He looked up and saw them coming from the south, flying low, screaming across the sky. They flew almost directly overhead a moment later. One of them opened fire at a cluster of alien troop carriers in the distance. The other fighter launched a missile, which hit its target. A troop carrier exploded, its wreckage twisting, falling, burning. Mazer and the others couldn’t help but cheer.
Then the tables turned. All of the alien aircraft in the vicinity suddenly changed course, as if moving as one organism, and converged on the Chinese fighters. Mazer quickly put on his helmet and zoomed in, following the dogfight. The Chinese fighters saw the danger and climbed, trying to shake their pursuers, banking left and right. The smaller alien skimmers, which likely only held a single pilot, were much faster and more maneuverable than the troop carriers. A cluster of the skimmers soon caught up with one of the fighters and fired in unison. The Chinese fighter exploded, sending a spray of shrapnel and fire in every direction.
Mazer and the others went quiet, watching the burning wreckage cascade down from the sky.
“We’re over our heads here, Mazer,” Reinhardt repeated. “We should talk with the Chinese. They’ll be desperate for help now. They’ll put us back out here.”
Patu, Fatani, and Reinhardt watched him, waiting for him to make a decision. Good sense said to go. The sooner they armed the HERC, the sooner someone could be in the air with it, putting it to good use. He looked south. He could still see people coming down from the hills, fleeing the lander on foot, scattering across the landscape in groups of four or less, completely disorganized. Mazer couldn’t see their faces from this distance, but he knew what he would see if he could. Fear, grief, confusion, helplessness.
“We need to move as many people up to that farmhouse as we can,” said Mazer. “We can’t leave them out here unorganized. It doesn’t matter if the medevacs are down. We can make it a hospital.”