Command Code

by James David Victor

  Frack!

  9

  Children of the Ru’at

  Hsssst. Thud!

  The glowing pillars of vegetation grew in radiance and darkened again, and every time they reached their crescendo, Solomon could see the dark, squiggling shapes of something alive inside of them.

  Hssst. THUD!

  As Solomon and others started backing away from this strange forest, he heard the unmistakable sound of a thud coming from inside one of them.

  Like whatever was inside was trying to get out.

  Like it’s about to hatch, Solomon thought. He remembered the lines of baby tanks that the Ru’at hologram had shown him in the judgement chamber. That laboratory had been back on Earth, masterminded by the mega-corporation called AgroMore. It had been a nursery for test-tube babies. For clones just like Solomon, who had their genetics rewritten by whatever strange processes the Ru’at contact had seeded into American soil.

  Rows and rows of babies in glowing tanks. Solomon’s heart started to hammer.

  “This isn’t a fracking Ru’at farm…” he hissed. “This is a Ru’at laboratory.” A Ru’at nursery, he added silently.

  “What?” Mariad Rhossily asked. The Imprimatur of Proxima looked at the lieutenant in alarm, then back to the alien forest around them, seeing the glow and the shapes, and hearing the chorus of thumps and thuds from inside each one.

  “Oh.” Her face blanched in the strange light all around them, making her look sick.

  THUD-THUD-Screeargh-kk!

  And then it happened. One of the largest of the pillars of vegetation shook, and instead of a thumping noise, there then came a horrible tearing sound.

  “They might be… Might be…” Kol was saying, stumbling back with the only gun that their party had raised before him. “They might be…pets?”

  “Would you call that a pet!?” Rhossily screeched as the tearing pillar of vegetation dissolved into a heap of moss and lichen, losing all internal structure and releasing clouds of dust and pollen-like particles…and a shape.

  It was indistinct at first, surrounded by the glowing pollen of its former shell, but quickly its movements and eventual shape became apparent.

  Solomon had never seen anything like it. He didn’t think that any human had ever seen anything like it, in fact.

  The creature had dark mottled skin, brown and russet patches over a deep gray and black surface. It was undeniably organic, undeniably skin. It wasn’t made of the metal that the Ru’at-controlled cyborgs were, but neither was it entirely normal according to any Earth standards of biology.

  As the thing wobbled and shook itself to its feet, Solomon saw that it had elongated back legs—much longer than its front legs, and backward-jointed like a dog or a cat. At the end of these back legs were large paws with three black, shining talons as big as Solomon’s entire fist.

  Its body was narrow in the middle, rounding out into a barrel of a chest with the same mottled viscera, and the humps and nodules of strange skeletal structures underneath. Its front two arms weren’t backward jointed, however, and in fact…

  They look almost human, Solomon’s mind registered in alarm. Almost, because they still had the strange skin tone and color, as well as the obscene bumps and nodules rippling along their surface. Where these forward legs met the ground, however, were two large ‘hands’ with five clearly visible digits, each one ending in another of the large, shining black talons.

  But none of this was even the worst feature of the creature, as it raised itself up on its hind legs, with its smaller ‘top’ arms—still longer than the average human’s, it had to be said—flaring out on either side.

  No, the worst feature was its neck and head.

  The neck was somewhat sinuous, a hand’s length longer than a regular human, but its head…

  The thing had no face to speak of. That was because the entirety of the creature’s head was a pulsating maw, fringed with smaller tentacles that waved and flared in the pollen-light around them.

  “Holy frack!” Solomon heard Kol say, and then—

  PHOOOM! The treacherous ex-Outcast Marine shot it with his Jackhammer. Kol reacted instinctively; he didn’t pause to put on burst or repeater fire. Instead, he had given the creature both barrels of the heavy Marine Corps weapon, and with a reassuringly pained shriek, the creature was thrown back into the first of glowing pillars.

  Thud-thud-thud-teeeear! More pillars started to collapse as they tore open in their own clouds of glowing pollen.

  “Get moving! All of you! Now!” Solomon said, seizing Ambassador Ochrie’s hand and running down the track.

  “Kol! Where’s this depot? The way out!?” Solomon shouted, and Kol spared a quick glance back, pointing to the furthest wall.

  “Under that sticking-out bit of rock. There’s a crawlspace—”

  “Kol! Twelve o’clock!” Solomon saw one of the strange creatures behind Kol’s anxious face, leaping out of the pollen-light straight at him.

  PHABOOM! The Martian sympathizer turned and fired at the thing in mid-leap, just in the nick of time. With a grunt and a grotesque, pig-like squeal, the attacking Ru’at monster was thrown out across the ‘farm.’

  But more shapes were already struggling and rising on wobbling legs in front of them.

  Did the Ru’at plan this? Is this some sort of a trap, or are we just exceptionally unlucky? Solomon stumbled, pushing Ochrie ahead of him with Mariad ahead of her. “There! That rock!” Solomon guessed. It was the nearest wall, and the only large rust-red boulder that stuck out anywhere nearby.

  Pig-like growls and yips came from behind them as the group of humans ran for their lives.

  Solomon and Kol, who had both been trained on Ganymede and had both also been dosed with the gene-enhancing Serum 21, easily outpaced the two women, but Solomon kept his speed in check so he was always behind them, and even Kol pulled back, spinning on his heel to fire another shot at the next closest Ru’at creature.

  PHA-BOOM!

  It seemed, at least, they were easy to kill. It was only that there were so many of them. And while the majority of the creatures were sticking to the path behind the humans they hunted, a few had separated off to bound past the pillars and through the vegetation on either side.

  “Oh frack, oh frack, oh frack…” Solomon could hear Kol panting, as he was only a pace or two behind them.

  A feral growl came from the undergrowth on their right and one of the creatures burst out, leaping straight for Ochrie.

  “No!” Solomon jumped, slamming into the ambassador’s back and sending her flying forward a second before the creature hit him on the shoulder.

  “Argh!” Pain tore through his shoulder as the thing’s claws swiped him on the way down, spinning him about and sending him sprawling into the undergrowth.

  “Lieutenant!” the frantic voice of Rhossily ahead of them, and then—

  “Keep on running!” Kol shouted in panic.

  Solomon backflipped onto his feet to realize that the others had raced past him already. Kol hadn’t waited, was Solomon’s first, very cynical, thought.

  No. Kol had to make sure the others got to safety, he corrected himself as he heard a growl and spun into a crouch.

  The thing had leaped and was already mid-air as Solomon rolled forward.

  The creature sailed over his head to crash into the ground on the other side of the path, snorting and shaking its head-mouth as it turned again.

  Thwack! Solomon jump-kicked the thing across the face, earning a squeal as it was knocked to one side, but it was already turning to pounce back.

  PHOOM! The Ru’at monster suddenly shot to one side as one of Kol’s shots hit it in the side. Solomon looked up to see that Kol had the Jackhammer leveled at him.

  “Kol, wait!” Solomon managed to breathe.

  “Down, sir!” Kol shouted, and Solomon dropped to his knees.

  PHA-BOOM! PHOOM!

  Two more shots sailed past Solomon’s head, and he heard two answering y
elps of piggy-like pain from just a few meters behind him.

  “Now, RUN!” Kol was turning again and racing ahead, as Solomon launched himself into a sprint.

  Maybe it was Solomon’s enhanced genetic code. Or maybe it was the fact that he was a clone. Or maybe, more simply, it was just the fact that he was terrified, which lent speed and vigor to the Outcast commander’s limbs.

  Solomon Cready’s focus narrowed to a tiny window of crystal clarity as the sounds of growling and thrashing and snarling behind him, as well as the screams and shouts of the humans ahead of him, faded to a muted blur.

  Solomon’s world became forcing his legs to stretch further, his knees to pick up higher, and his back to tighten and arms to pump as he ran for his life. In front of him he saw the Imprimatur of Proxima hit the dirt, sending up plumes of reddish dust as she slid underneath the large outcrop of rock that loomed into the cavern.

  Solomon’s adrenaline-enhanced sight could make out all the pinpoint details of her hair, and even her fierce expression of pain, concentration, and panic as she disappeared. There, underneath the lowest bulge of rock, was a low aperture like a letter box—large enough for a human to slide down.

  “Get!” Kol did not waste time on niceties before shoving the ambassador after the imprimatur, and then hesitated for a heart’s beat as he fired another shot over Solomon’s shoulder.

  The Outcast squad commander didn’t even flinch this time, knowing that the line between dying out here and living was so miniscule that anything might disturb it. He couldn’t afford to waste a second by ducking or dodging or flinging himself one way or another.

  “Skraa!” His pinpoint determination was rewarded by the sound of a pained yelp from nearby, behind him. Very nearby behind him. The outcrop of rock was only eight or nine meters away now.

  Ahead of him, Kol slid himself through the tunnel, leaving the way clear for Solomon.

  The growls were getting louder, the crash of pounding claws closer. Solomon could swear that he could feel the hot breath of the things behind him, beating on his back.

  “Please, by the stars!” Solomon threw himself forward into a slide, hitting the dirt and sending up dust and Martian gravel. Pain seared across his chest and arms as suddenly everything went dark.

  “Ooof!” And he was rolling to a sudden stop as he hit something soft.

  “Lieutenant!” It was Rhossily, grabbing him by his now-bloody arms and heaving him forward as something else hit the letterbox opening of the tunnel.

  It was dark, but the filtered light of the Ru’at laboratory-nursery outside cut through in thin beams from the tunnel opening a few meters away. The letterbox mouth opened to a small cave that dropped away suddenly, leaving the strange monstrous claws at the tunnel entrance, scrabbling and digging.

  PHA-BOOOOM! This time, when Kol reached up to discharge the Jackhammer point-blank into the thing, the sound of the gunshot was deafening in the confined space. Solomon felt his ears pop and instantly turn into a high-pitched whine.

  “Ow!” Solomon said, but couldn’t hear himself speak.

  At the mouth of the cave was a commotion of shadows and light, more scrabbling, as well as a spreading dark line of ichor from where Kol must have at least injured another of the things.

  “Will they be able to dig past that?” Solomon said, his voice sounding distant and muffled, as if heard through a door. He knew that the shock-based ringing would subside in a few moments, but he didn’t have the time.

  Kol was looking at him, shrugging, and when Solomon looked back up to the tunnel mouth, he could now see thin rivulets of gravel and dust falling as the Ru’at creatures dug.

  “I don’t know if that will hold!” Solomon tried shouting, which was marginally better.

  Kol was nodding that he understood, pointing further into the cave. “AIRLOCK!” He said the words loudly, and the rest nodded that they had received the message. Solomon took the lead this time, accepting Kol’s penlight to illuminate the way ahead.

  They had survived the new menace, but only just, and for how long?

  10

  Manual Unassisted Propulsion, Part 2

  “Lieutenant!” came the voice of Ratko over their suit’s telemetry band. Jezzy could see the pair clearly, but they were moving fast now—probably thanks to the sudden severing of their third and final member.

  “You’ll be out of suit range in a bit. Retain your mission objectives!” Jezzy shouted after them.

  “Lieutenant Wen, I might be able to—” Malady was saying, before his voice grew quieter and fuzzier in seconds, then finally clicked off altogether.

  Suit Communications Error! Gold Channel Network Offline!

  Jezzy’s power armor suit blipped the alert at her, and she wondered if she had been monumentally stupid by setting their squad channel to the narrowest, most restricted band she could find.

  Never mind. You’ve got bigger problems… Jezzy was spinning head over heels thanks to the severed cable. In itself, the spinning and twirling wasn’t the worst part of the experience. Any Confederate Marine had to become proficient in zero-G maneuvers and operations early in their career if they were to make it to where Jezzy was now.

  But what was problematic was that her spin made it hard to see the wreckage field in any detail. She flinched, after the fact, as a metal pipe the color of tarnished silver rolled past her, just a hand or so away from hitting her head.

  “Think, Jezzy!” she berated herself. “Power suits are strong. They can withstand most impacts.” She tried to sound convincing, even as she remembered that the same logic hadn’t helped the cable at all.

  “The cable!” It was still waving in front of her, connected to the blocky, built-up utility belt attached to her suit harness. Already the pair of spinning Outcast Marines seemed little more than children’s toys ahead of her, sparkling before the giant hulk of the Invincible.

  “Newtonian physics,” Jezzy remembered. When set free, the outward force will carry the centrifugal object perpendicular to the original motion… She recalled the study lessons that they all had to complete in basic training.

  Simple astrophysics, she had joked at the time. What was so simple about astrophysics?

  Quite a lot, as it turned out. The rules of physics in space were unreliable, of course, when it came to black holes and gravitational objects and the ripples of space-time itself, but when talking about basic movement properties, Jezzy remembered that it was actually far simpler than it was on the surface of a planet.

  For one thing, you don’t have an entire planet’s gravitational effect pulling everything off course, she remembered in a heartbeat. And in space, you also had such miniscule resistance as to be statistically irrelevant. Which meant that Newton was a god out here. If you push something, it will keep on traveling in that trajectory until it loses momentum, which is itself related to its mass and velocity.

  But with negligible resistance, that meant that the velocity and momentum of the object were virtually unchecked.

  Which, Jezzy knew, was a very fancy way of saying that unless she did something to change course, she was going to be flying at right angles to her battle brother and sister for a long time yet.

  “What do I have?” She had her Jackhammer. She had the cable. She had half a dozen small tools in her belt, and reserve oxygen.

  I could discharge some of the suit’s reserve oxygen, Jezzy thought. Which would act as propulsion, but would the Ru’at detect the sudden movement?

  “Well, they hadn’t detected three cartwheeling Marines—one of them almost as big as a car—so…” Jezzy thought, using the touchpad sensors on the inner mesh of her gloves to click open the suit’s controls. In a moment, green and orange holographic commands and functions scrolled down the inside of her faceplate.

  Atmospheric Seals: GOOD.

  Chemical, Biological, Radiological Sensors: ACTIVE.

  Oxygen Tanks: FULL (5.5hrs).

  Oxygen Recycle System: WORKING (1hr).

  Und
erneath the main command notices, Jezzy swiped through to a schematic of her suit. It was made up of different line colors. Gray for armor and mechanical systems, red for medical, blue for water cycling and filtration systems, and finally, green for oxygen.

  “I swear to the heavens that if I have to hack my suit one more time after this, I’m putting in a request for a technical specialism,” Jezzy growled as she cartwheeled. Being sarcastic was her way of not thinking about the possibility of imminent death.

  There. She spotted the command for Clear Tank 1, 2… Of course, she knew that her power suit did not actually have ‘tanks’ per se. There were no large cannisters of pressurized oxygen sitting around her body somewhere, waiting for a stray shell to rupture it. Instead, the Marine Corps and most modern encounter suits used a liquid oxygen system—converting it to breathable air when it hit the helmet cowl through a process that Jezzy did not care to understand. All that she needed to know was:

  “Where the frack does it vent from?”

  Answer: Small of her back. Perfect.

  She checked her distances. Now the two spinning Marines were nothing but shining blips against the bulk of the Invincible. She had moved quite a way out into the wreckage field. And I have no way of calculating the propulsion I’ll get, Jezzy thought. Spraying liquid air from behind her would give her forward thrust of a sort, of course, but she didn’t know if it would turn back into air. Would it create a jet, or immediately crystalize in its liquid state?

  Dammit.

  There was only one other measure she could take. She quickly unslung her Jackhammer and made a loose knot through its trigger with the end of her frayed cable.

  Now I have a grappling hook!

  Clear Oxygen Tank 1? Y/N

  Y

  It was like getting suddenly kicked in the back. Jezzy was thrown forward on an extending plume of freezing particles, at first going straight back the way that she had come, and then her trajectory altered as she started to spin.