Curly did not sleep at all that night. He remained perfectly quiet unless disturbed, whereupon he would begin his story over again. He did not speak loud enough to disturb those of us who were sleeping at the time, so whoever had the watch would tend to get Curly started so that he could hear the pilot's speech and thus know that he hadn't suddenly passed away. By the time I awoke in the morning, the ending of the tale had changed yet again; we died of starvation, traveling a dusty featureless plain from which there was no escape or even direction. According to Larry this was just the latest in a series of changes - overnight the ending had gone from the quake to a flood, and then from a flood to some sort of rotting plague. I personally was glad I'd missed the more detailed version of that ending, as I was rather hungry upon waking and didn't particularly want the appetite ruined.
Planes had passed overhead once again during the night while it was my shift. I assumed they had been the only ones, as the sonic boom almost certainly would have wakened me. Again they had showed no interest in our small group. Given that the first wave had not returned, I was hopeful that our city had survived the onslaught. We really had no choice, though. After a short and silent breakfast, we all continued along the path. Curly had fallen into unconsciousness again. I'd have much rather heard increasingly bad endings than have him become one.
One hour before sunset, the jungle abruptly ended. There was a stark line that divided it and the plain of short, cropped grass that made up the whole of the terrain from that point on. The dirt path turned into a paved road which lead directly into the city no more than a half mile ahead. The throbbing blue of its shield had not diminished at all in the past few days, and the panel confirmed my suspicion; the shielding of the city had not been damaged in the least.
Just outside of the blue of the shield, a mass of anti-aircraft equipment was pointed upward. A number of missile launchers - three quarters of which were obviously capable of reaching orbit - kept them company. None of the rockets appeared to have been fired yet, mysteriously. Even more surprisingly, there was little sign of troops or artillery - the city seemed woefully unprepared for a ground assault. All the more reason to do this very carefully. I punched a few buttons on the panel and explained to the remainder of my squad that I'd used a low-power narrowcast transmission toward the city to alert whoever was there to our presence. Given that none of us looked to be even remotely Poln nor Anor, chances were good that we'd be taken for what we were: mercenaries. I had a blaster, however, the technology of which was likely far enough in advance of theirs to negate any defenses they might have, and I also had a jungle's worth of cover behind me, so it could be said that I did have a plan in case the first idea didn't work out even if it were a rather rudimentary one.
A hatch opened up in one of the buildings near the city, and some sort of vehicle sped out of it. It was going faster than I'd have given it credit for, though a moment later I realized it didn't have wheels and was instead coasting about a foot off the ground. I motioned Moe and Curly to take cover and hide Larry somewhere. This was mainly because I knew I'd react faster to take cover than either of the others, and so it should be me taking point.
"Identify yourself!" the hovercraft demanded, still speeding toward us.
The translator indicated that there was not another translating unit on the other side of this conversation, and thus it was having to do all the work and could not guarantee that the translation quality would be as good as I was accustomed to. Hopefully this didn't mean it would get us into a fire-fight by mistranslating an innocent comment. To be fair, however, that'd only happened twice before. I replied something along the lines that I was under contract to deliver some personnel and we needed medical assistance.
The hovercraft continued speeding toward us, showing no sign of even slowing down. Moments before I was about to dive out of the way, it stopped abruptly. When I say 'abruptly', I mean that one moment it was headed full speed toward us, and the next it had stopped completely. There was no discernible deceleration. The sort of technology which would allow that was typically only usable in space, which made me wonder if I had severely underestimated the inventiveness of the Poln. Should they survive their current war, there might be quite a bit of money to be made in shipping their technology elsewhere.
"Command reports you to be the first contract to have appeared." The tall figure of a native Polnian stepped out of the hovercraft and looked through me to the woods. "Where are your charges?"
I motioned them forward and indicated Curly, then gave the being which would hopefully be our new host a quick run-down of events since we had entered the system. He didn't seem to quite understand the concept of the Twist, but he got the parts about going to a hospital. He motioned us inside the hovercraft and we sped back toward the city. At no point was there a sensation of acceleration, or even movement. I was going to make a fortune off of these people.