Eternal Enemy

by James David Victor

  Oh yeah. Anders remembered the abortive ambush. He hadn’t realized at first that they were only trying to capture them, not kill them.

  But at least I only gave him a disabling shot, Anders could have argued. He could have shot the guy through the chest if he had wanted to.

  “We can fix it,” said a voice as Dalia stepped casually forward, reaching up slowly to unlatch and decouple her visor helmet before shaking her braid of hair free.

  “What the—” Anders realized then just how clever the Ilythian was. These people had clearly never seen an Ilythian. Perhaps they had never seen an alien. Perhaps they didn’t even know that there were other intelligent cultures out there at all! Her sudden appearance completely put them on the back foot.

  “We have technology, serums, medicines,” Dalia said impassively, accepting the owlish and fearful stares of the humans of Earth with apparent ease. She didn’t appear to take notice at all of how the humans were looking at her.

  “Do you trust it!?” muttered one of the other men, an old-timer with short, straggly ginger beard.

  Anders felt a hot growl of outrage in his chest, but it was Patch who stepped forward first to confront the ignorance. “She is not an it,” Patch said smartly. “She is an Ilythian, whose race has been around for far longer than all of us have—and she has helped us humans out, even though she doesn’t have to.”

  There was silence from the watchful humans as each one tried to take in the new size of their galaxy.

  “She also broke Youseff’s wrist, and Frank’s ankle!” The leader, Hazan, was the first to recover.

  “Both of which we can also fix,” Dalia pointed out, slowly lowering her hand—to the sudden consternation of Hazan and his guards—to depress a release catch on a leg module, which opened out to reveal lots of small vials of biogenetic repair serum, which apparently Commander Malady must have stolen from the throne at some point and equipped these Outcast suits with. “These will fix the hurts of your people.” Dalia offered them to Hazan, who didn’t move for a second, before he nodded for one of the other soldiers to dart forward and seize the vials from Dalia’s hand and leap back, as if electrocuted.

  “I’m sorry if we got off to a bad start.” Anders cleared his throat, his words speaking an apology, but his voice speaking a growl. “But my people generally don’t respond well to being ambushed by strangers.”

  “Strangers?” This last comment appeared to rile their spokesperson up all the more. “We’ve been facing the golds now for as long as any of us can remember. We were born into this fight, and every now and again, some silver like you turns up, claiming to be a part of some great and ancient planetary rescue mission.” Hazan rolled his eyes. “They all die, mate. All of them.”

  “Hazan, they saved Apple and Sven. They saved me,” Arya pointed out, raising a warning palm to Hazan. “Do you really think that we can afford to turn their offer of aid down?”

  Hazan bristled at Arya’s reasoned words, and to Anders, it appeared as though this was not the first time they’d had this conversation. Hazan looked to his own men, half of whom appeared to be shrugging or nodding that Arya was right, but the other half of whom looked about as stern and angry as their leader. The decision of what to do with them seemed to teeter on the edge—until there was a flash of movement. Apple had dashed between the two groups and was standing in front of Jake.

  “Let ‘em stay!” Apple cried out in delight. “They can tell us new stories! Stories of up there.” Her voice was wistful as she looked up at the concrete, girder, and brick ceiling, and Anders knew that she wasn’t talking about just the surface of their planet.

  She was talking about the life they could be leading, out there beyond the stars.

  “Ugh…” Hazan didn’t have a chance against such pure enthusiasm and curiosity, it appeared. With a groan, he threw his rifle back over his shoulder and turned, snapping at them as he did so, before stalking back into the crowds and taking his armed men with him.

  “Fine. Keep them here until we see if these potions of theirs really do heal Youssef, Frank, and Kestrel. But if they don’t…” Hazan’s voice rang out, leaving the threat unexplained but perfectly obvious.

  There was a moment of silence over the crowd of spectators after Hazan and the others had left, but then Arya let out a sigh, and Anders felt the tension lift a little. “He’s always like that,” Arya whispered apologetically.

  Just great, Anders thought. As if we have time to hang around while there’s an ancient alien god-thing coming to devour us all!

  7

  The Net Tightens

  “We have them, sir,” murmured the sergeant standing at the edge of the ruined siding where Corsigon and the others had so recently been.

  The gulley itself was ruined, with great craters marring its banks and ancient trees obliterated, smoldering or sagging in their ruin. At one end, the entrance to the subway system was now nothing more than a great heap of devastated earth, completely obscured by earth and shattered rock.

  These Old Earth Marines had done a textbook job, Commander-General Cread thought, first isolating the enemy by means of search drones, and then shelling the site with mobile artillery.

  Imbeciles! Cread groaned. No wonder Old Earth was in such a state, with rampant primitives running around, picking off lone scouting Marine groups or hacking the local power grids.

  And no wonder that these fools—who never had the benefit of being trained by me, the commander-general thought—had let the quarry get away into the subterranean system that wormed through this part of the northwestern continent.

  But now, apparently, they said they ‘had’ them. Perhaps there was something good to be said about today after all. The commander-general stood overlooking the ruin with his requisitioned attack craft landed behind him, next to a much larger transport cruiser beside that. Teams of Throne Marines in their black-and-gold armor were arrayed around him, preparing weapons and checking their field devices for signs of the insurgents.

  “We sent our capture drones into the access points that we know about in this location,” the sergeant said, a gruff, older man who looked to Cread as though he had enjoyed a desk job for far too long.

  “That you know about?” Cread inquired, his tone light and easy, although any soldier or staffer who had actually worked close to him would know precisely what that meant. The commander-general was a man not shy about expressing his emotions. When he was angry he was furious, but there was another tone that most had come to be aware of, and that was this exact, almost-polite, almost-attentive voice that he used when he was waiting for one of his subordinates to say something really stupid.

  Just like the sergeant did now.

  “Yes, Commander-General, sir.” The sergeant assumed an air of familiarity. Another bad move. “There’s never been any need to map out the underlying area completely, as we have complete aerial and surface dominance, and, well, to be quite frank—”

  “Please do,” Cread murmured, his eyes narrowing slightly.

  “The insurgents that we face can rarely even get past a Throne Marine’s suit of armor, let alone the transport carriers, personal drone transports, or shielding fields,” the man said.

  The commander-general let out a small breath of resignation through his nose at these thoughts. It was only slight, but it was suddenly enough to alert the man to the notion that his superior might actually be displeased.

  “But, ah, we have the last-known location of the capture drones before they went offline, and that means that we know where they were moving to… Probably straight for New Eden, the insurgent stronghold,” the man said.

  “Oh. There’s even a rebel stronghold down there, too, is there?” the commander-general said, his tone now laced with steel.

  “Yes, Commander-General, sir, we’ve known about it for a few cycles and have kept them monitored—”

  “Enough,” Cread said, turning to survey the damage. He flicked his fingers, knowing that the sensors inside h
is gauntlets would utilize his personal field system to transmit a message to the rest of the group. “Calling Sergeant H’Keller, report immediately.”

  “Commander-General, sir?” The original sergeant looked quizzically as the second sergeant, who had previously been preparing a small squad of Throne Marines, jogged up to them. Keller was a slightly younger woman, who had steel-gray eyes and appeared to have a slightly stiffer backbone.

  “Keller, you are now Acting Operations Sergeant, under my direct supervision, understood?” Cread completely ignored the older man who had previously occupied that post.

  “But, Commander-General?” The older Marine made the mistake of adding a touch of whine to his voice.

  “I understand that you know where this New Eden is,” Cread went on. “I will personally be leading the offensive, with you as my second. I want every route in blocked by a Marine task force, understood?”

  “Sir. Yes, sir,” Keller said with a smart salute.

  There is some hope for this one, Cread thought.

  “May I ask, sir—” the older sergeant began.

  “No. You may not.” Cread made another flicking gesture with his hand.

  Throne Marine Power Suit/SERGEANT J’DEGAULLE

  >>Command Override/Authorization CREAD

  >>Termination Program.

  Cread’s gestures in the holo-field that only he could see relayed a small piece of code to J’DeGaulle’s power suit, causing the inbuilt kill program that every suit had within it to activate. Suddenly, white static energy crackled over the suit as its field generators fused and overloaded, cooking the man within. There was a small gasp over the suit communicators, and the steaming body of Sergeant J’DeGaulle fell to the floor in a smoking heap.

  “I want you to get your Marines into position, but wait for my signal to attack. We will isolate where they are getting their power from and cut their lines, understand?” Commander-General Cread continued without looking at either the recently-dead body or the new Acting Operations Sergeant.

  Keller, for her part, took all of this surprising well, just swallowing a little nervously before nodding and saluting behind Cread’s back. “Yes, sir,” she said smartly.

  “Good.” Cread nodded. “Then let us begin, shall we?”

  8

  Attack!

  “Do it again!” said Apple, kneeling and looking entranced by Jake as he sat on one of the pallet benches in front of her.

  Anders and the others sat in what Arya called the canteen-space, which was a narrow but long avenue between shipping containers, where long benches and tables had been set. Anyone could apparently go to one of the units to fill earthenware bowls from great vats of soups or various stews.

  Currently, however, the young Apple’s rapt attention was on the way Jake was slowly spinning a steaming bowl of soup in midair without any apparent field-technology or hidden wires.

  “Hm.” Anders heard as many disgruntled voices as he did entranced ones, and he shared a dark look with Dalia, who nodded with tightly-pursed lips. It seemed that psychics were not a common feature of the life of the native-born Earthlings, and indeed, some of them were viewing Jake with outright hostility.

  The team had come here after Captain Hazan’s ultimatum, and even though the general feel was one of a jovial community, Anders couldn’t help but notice the tension underneath it. A tension that apparently came to a head when one of the New Edeners, a man, stepped past Apple’s shoulder and slapped the bowl out of the air.

  “We don’t need that kind of stuff here!” the man said. He was scrawny, with a sleeveless jerkin that showed off long, home-inked tattoos of coiling serpents down each arm.

  “David!” Arya, sitting beside Anders, scolded the man immediately. “They’re only having fun!”

  “You don’t know, Arya, you’ve never been up to that temple thing of theirs. You haven’t seen what I’ve seen!” the tattooed man—David, apparently—said.

  The temple!? The facility that houses the LOHIU? Anders’s anger turned abruptly to that of obsession. “You mean the Gene Temple? The home of the Gene Seers?”

  The man’s eyes flickered over him with undisguised disdain. “Should’ve known you’d know all about it…” he muttered, earning another hiss from Arya.

  “Not a lot,” Anders continued, ignoring the man’s barb. “But it is why we’re here. In there is a—” Weapon? Tool? Person? Anders struggled to find the right word. “—something that can help us bring the Eternal Empress down.”

  “As if we care about some damn empress of yours,” David muttered angrily. “She can stay up there with all the rest of the golds for all I care. Just leave us alone!”

  Anders made an understanding shrug. He wasn’t about to tell the man that wasn’t possible, that his entire solar system was already controlled by the Eternal Empress and had been since before he was born. The entire system was even ringed by a giant defense grid of satellites—the largest deep-space infrastructure project that Anders had ever heard of.

  “You’ve seen this temple?” he asked in a neutral tone, already guessing that the man was just another blowhard wanting to have his say.

  “You bet I have,” David said proudly. “Me and Hazan scouted it ourselves more than once. It’s huge. Looks like a palace, sitting in the middle of the woods. No way in or out,” he said the words heavily, with a defiant look at Anders.

  No way that YOU found, you mean, Anders thought but didn’t say.

  “But that’s not the worst thing about it. The worst thing is…” David’s voice took on a conspiratorial whisper as he leaned forward. “…what happens outside, in the practice grounds they’ve cleared in the forest all about there. Horrible things. Unnatural things,” he said in a creepy hiss.

  “David. The children,” Arya said warningly, just for the tattooed man to snort as if it were no concern.

  “Maybe they should hear of it now, Arya,” David returned. “It’s about time they knew.” Another suspicious glance at Jake. “And perhaps it would stop them getting so worked up about what isn’t right.”

  Anders felt a flicker of nausea in the corners of his jaw and stomach, and he turned to look fearfully at Jake, who was slowly standing up from his pallet. The ex-policeman heard a few low sighs and gasps as other New Edeners around them could clearly feel the same tide of nausea as well, but apparently hadn’t associated it with the young psychic before them. Yet.

  “Easy, Jake…” Dalia’s softer voice murmured, and the youth, although his eyes still blazed, looked down at the stone and sanded floor at their feet.

  “They got some kind of practice grounds, where they have people doing just what he did.” But David was relentless as he shot his accusing words at the sullen Jake. “Moving stuff with their minds, sending things flying this way and that, hitting targets,” he said pointedly. “Like they’re an army. Or going to be one.”

  Anders could feel the panic and nausea rising in him even greater still, and he saw that Jake’s shoulders were starting to tremble.

  “And then I saw what they did to some that they tied up, on stakes, at the end of the grounds!” David carried on, his tone getting ghoulish and loud.

  “David, please, not in front of—” Arya tried to contain him, but it was useless.

  “A whole little gaggle of them filed out. Stood in a line looking at one,” David brayed. “They just looked at them. Looked. And then…” David clapped his hands together sharply, imitating something of what the genetically-cloned psychics did to the poor unfortunate.

  David looked up and glared in disgust at Jake, who was starting to raise his head to glare right back—

  —and then all of the lights in New Eden went out.

  Jake!? Anders thought, but he knew in that exact same instant that it wasn’t him. He could feel the ebb of anxiety and nausea in his heart and gut that came when the PK used his powers, but it was still low-level, not the full-blown, crippling panic attack.

  No, this was something else.


  “What’s going on!?” The voices of alarm started almost immediately as Anders stood up quickly and quietly beside Jake.

  “I’m here,” he murmured, already reaching for his helmet-visor…just as there was a stifled scream from not very far away.

  “Smoke!”

  HEAVY TACTICAL SUIT: Active.

  USER ID: Anders Corsigon.

  BIO-SIGNATURE: Good.

  SQUAD IDENTIFIER: Red.

  SQUAD TELEMETRIES: Active.

  Bio-Signatures: GOOD.

  Atmospheric Seals: GOOD.

  Chemical, Biological, Radiological Sensors: ACTIVE

  Oxygen Tanks: FULL (6hrs).

  Oxygen Recycle System: WORKING (1hr).

  The HUD inside Anders’s visor flickered into life, showing the small vector image of his own suit, already with several parts in a warning orange where the self-healing systems had failed a complete recovery.

  And the warning blip of a sensor in the top right corner:

  Warning! Carbon Monoxide Levels Elevated. Trace Air Pollutants.

  >>Analysis: Chemical Fire.

  >>Locating Source…

  His visor washed with sensing blue as it concentrated to the right of him.

  “All power out! Fire up the backup generators!”

  “What’s happening!?”

  The shouting was getting louder as alarm erupted amongst the group. For a subterranean people, the notion of being without power or heat—and with the nearness of fire—was a vision of hell…

  There. Anders found the signature. Off to the right of their position was a large heat source, heading in their direction. His dim blue suit lights were flickering on, as were the suit lights of the others of his squad, showing the people in the canteen area already struggling to their feet and past each other, hands grasping to catch a hold of the hems and sleeves and arms of their closest and dearest.