The Beast of Eridu

by Richard Fox

  "Colonel, we distributed the flares to the sentry posts," a soldier reported to Fallon.

  “Better to head toward flares than trying to figure out which way gunfire’s coming from in the middle of the night,” the colonel said. Darting his eyes between Yarrow and Steuben, he added, "Now that we’re done with Old Home Week?”

  “We’ll catch up later,” Yarrow said as he picked up a pencil and made a mark on a sheet of paper.

  "Did you require hormone supplements to grow that?” Steuben asked.

  "I knew you wouldn’t change,” Yarrow said. “You’re still a master hunter? Or did easy living on Nimrod take away that edge?”

  “Your Earth humor is not appreciated. Tell me of my prey,” the Karigole said.

  “We are the prey.” Yarrow pressed a series of buttons. “I'm activating the holo screen. Pay attention because I can only do this once before we go into mandatory shutdown. This is an exception to protocol 585.” He looked around the room for confirmation. Colonel Fallon nodded quickly.

  "Proceeding with the presentation," Yarrow said, starting the video as holo screens formed over the scale model of the city. Hoffman recognized helmet-camera footage from power armor, but the figures moving in the screen wore slimmer gear than Strike Marine standard. Men and women moved slowly and methodically through an alien structure. Hoffman bit his tongue at their technique, but these weren’t Strike Marines—they were Pathfinders. The Terran Union’s scouting and exploration corps didn’t have the same combat training as he and his Marines.

  "Is this on Eridu?” Hoffman asked.

  "Yes.” Yarrow’s tone suggested that interruptions weren’t appreciated. A sense of urgency filled the room as the holo played.

  The Pathfinders advanced using hand signals, sweeping the area with their infrared lights on their weapons. Hoffman knew that without the video feeds, they would be in pitch-blackness. The infrared flashlights were only visible with the enhanced optics of the operators’ equipment and their cameras. The recording scanned over dead alien specimens floating in tanks filled with murky liquid. As the Pathfinders moved into a larger room, they saw a tangle of snakelike creatures suspended in some sort of stasis.

  Massive doors lined one of the walls. The area was so large that Hoffman thought it looked like elephants or rhinoceroses could be used to play polo in one section of the underground complex.

  Yarrow and the others shifted uneasily as static snapped through the holo for a second.

  "I'm going to fast-forward through this part," Yarrow said. “There are several instances of this static. The Pathfinders start to get really nervous and there are arguments about going back—not something you normally hear from them. They’re almost as gung ho as Strike Marines.”

  Fallon shook his head. “Negative. I want them to get at least one uncut view of the sequence of events. They might see something we missed.”

  “We’ve come far enough. Let’s come back with more firepower,” a voice said.

  “Negative. There’s nothing down here but dead things,” the team leader said then activated his comm channel. “Away Team One for Command, we’ve found remnants of the planet’s lost civilization. Looks like the place has degraded since the Xaros stasis fields have collapsed. Doc, can you give me a reading?"

  Another Pathfinder spoke up. "I'm guessing about two decades. There's a slow decay that's very unusual…”

  The video went fuzzy for a second. The Pathfinders discussed the interference briefly but moved on as though it had already happened once or twice during their exploration.

  “I really don’t like this shit, boss,” a voice said.

  “Grow a pair. Or do you want to go back to the Strike Marines? It’s safer, I hear.”

  “Ha ha, that’s a good one. Can I at least bring a big gun next time? Maybe some real armor?”

  Screams came over the channel and the Pathfinders took cover. The shouting ended in a wet cough.

  Shadows moved, briefly overloading the team’s infrared optics. The head of a Pathfinder sprang off his shoulders and the camera view tumbled. For a moment, Hoffman was disoriented as the video view spun. When it stopped, he saw the Pathfinder’s feet. A second later, the body rocked and fell, blood spurting from the neck. The recording cut out.

  Yarrow exhaled slowly. “That's the last thing we got from the team.” He turned off the recording. With careful movements, he removed a folder full of high-resolution photographs. Hoffman had rarely seen actual printed photos in the age of digital tablets, heads-up visor displays, and holographic projections. A technician pulled out a battery pack from beneath the terrain model.

  Yarrow continued. “Our best guess is the Beast was some sort of experiment trapped in Xaros stasis for nearly a thousand years. The Pathfinders woke it up.”

  "And how is this Beast responsible for all these new protocols and why we had to give up our gear?" Hoffman said.

  "It's attracted to electricity,” Yarrow said. “We figured that out after we lost several security teams in the jungle. That's why I had to keep that video short. The Beast also disrupts powered tech—your armor would lock up when the Beast gets within a few hundred yards, leaving you to be a nice snack with a candy shell when it catches up to you. Any power source becomes a beacon for the Beast, which is why the city’s operating on candles and hydrocarbon tech we can power off completely. We can’t explain how the Beast is generating the disruption field.”

  Yarrow showed them pictures of crashed drones. “Anything that flies within line of sight gets fried. Anything that moves within a bubble of a few hundred meters of the Beast goes down…or the Beast wrecks it. We don’t have any recordings of the Beast, just the aftermath of its attacks.” He pointed at the ceiling. “We’ve fabricated a few lights that run off chemo luminescence—the mother of all glow-stick networks, essentially. But that’s limited. Most of the city is on candle and oil lamps. We’ll risk electricity during the day if there’s no sign of the Beast, otherwise we’d be making our coffee over a fire, Saint Kallen preserve us. Also, Steuben I need you to shut off your cybernetics. Sorry.”

  “To hunt a worthy prey with one eye and one hand,” Steuben removed his false eye and plucked out the battery pack. He bent his cyborg hand into a slight grip and yanked a small box from the bottom servos. “This will be a tale sung around the fires for years.”

  “And I thought you were a fatalist,” Hoffman said. “This Beast is a…tactical problem. No gauss weapons. No power armor. No comms network…and we don’t know what it looks like. There anything else you can tell us?”

  “It doesn’t eat what it kills,” Yarrow said. “I autopsied the bodies. No sign of any feeding.”

  “Animals kill for territory and for hunger,” Steuben said, “not for pleasure. The Xaros passed over this world, built the Crucible jump gate. If they encountered a living civilization, they would have erased all trace of it. The civilization here must have been extinct when the Xaros arrived. What do you know of the original inhabitants?”

  “Nothing.” Yarrow shook his head. “Original survey of Eridu showed the place was uninhabited. We did LIDAR scans after some artifacts were uncovered during the city’s expansion, and there are cities out there buried under thousands of years’ worth of jungle growth. That’s how we found the underground lab not too far away.”

  “Could the Beast have been meant as a weapon against the Xaros?” Steuben asked. “Something purpose-bred to fight their drones?”

  “That’s our working hypothesis,” Yarrow said.

  “Were you able to recover the Pathfinders?”

  “We lost nearly fifty Marines trying to get to the artifact site,” Colonel Fallon answered. “Then the Beast showed up on our doorstep. Ripped apart three battery sinks and killed another dozen personnel before we started shutting everything off at night. Started using what the troops called low-tech glow rocks and other kid stuff to see at night. Back to the fire age on Eridu. If it weren’t for combustion-engine-powered vehicles and the
pneumatic tubes, nothing would get moved around here.”

  “It prefers to strike at night,” Yarrow said. “We run critical systems for short periods during the day—hospitals, sewage, and fuel transfer stations mostly. Radar and sonar scans. Colonel Fallon puts his people on high alert and we take care of business as quickly as possible. It’s quite a production.”

  "Show me the Beast," Steuben demanded. “You must have something.”

  “I would if I could, but every camera or streaming device that gets within the disruption bubble gets fried," Yarrow said as he selected one of the print pictures and held it up to display a footprint: an oval pad with four fingers of varying length. “I can’t find a species on Eridu that matches this track or is as territorial. No local creatures disrupt electricity or show any sensitivity to it.”

  Steuben examined the picture. “The claw patterns are wrong. Asymmetry is always a sign of genetic inferiority. This Beast could not mate. Could it have been brought in from off world?”

  “That’s our second hypothesis.” Yarrow shrugged. “We don’t have data from neighboring systems and the original Eridu population didn’t leave any sign they had space travel.”

  “What does it matter?” Fallon asked. “It’s here. It’s killing our people. It needs to be dealt with.”

  "Why is this planet still occupied?" Hoffman asked. He knew the colonel's experience on Syracuse and expected the man to be more careful with civilian populations after that world had nearly been wiped out by the Kesaht.

  A grim silence spread over the room. Yarrow picked up another photo of a screen capture from a Pathfinder camera. It displayed a triangle the size of a basketball glowing with black bands around it. Hoffman felt a chill at the sight of it.

  "We found this in a message buffer, flagged critical. Do you know what it is?" Yarrow asked.

  “Qa’Resh technology. The Ibarras have been after that. They’ve got a thing for archaeotech sites,” Hoffman said.

  "Every species in the galaxy is after Qa’Resh tech," Fallon said. “That's why we’re still here. Earth wants that device. If the former occupants studied it and used it to make something as powerful as the Beast…it could be valuable to our own war efforts."

  Steuben growled in the back of his throat. "But we have to get through the Beast first. The device is in its lair. This is a behavior we can use for the hunt.”

  "That’s why we asked for you, Steuben," Yarrow said. "Hunting something like this with only low-tech devices…” He looked at Fallon, who crossed his arms over his chest and looked away. “We’ve had nothing but failure. Bloody, awful failure. Lost too many good men.”

  "The Beast attacks at night?" Steuben asked.

  Yarrow nodded. “Mostly.”

  "Then I will track it myself. Kill it myself. I will send its head back as a gift to the gethaar, then my hunt will continue."

  An awkward silence filled the room as though the Karigole warrior had just said he was going to fly into the sun.

  "Lieutenant Hoffman, Steuben, we have a technical expert waiting for you in the next room," Colonel Fallon said. “Let’s not rush to failure.”

  ****

  A thousand thoughts ran through Hoffman's mind as he left the briefing area and entered a smaller side room. The technical expert proved to be a small Asian woman with a metal brace on her right arm. He tried not to stare as the prosthetic moved the weakened limb for her. A bright pucker of scar tissue at the base of her skull caught his attention.

  "Hello, Lieutenant,” she said with a half-smile. “I’m Dr. Masako. Well, I’m still a resident, but it’s easier than saying Junior Doc Masako. Or Almost Doc Masako. Patients don’t like being treated by someone still on probation.”

  "Thomas Hoffman, good to meet you," he said, proffering his hand and immediately regretting it.

  The brace on her arm creaked as the metal exoskeleton jerked her arm forward. He shook a clammy hand, one that did not grasp his in return.

  “Sorry,” Hoffman said. “I didn’t mean to—”

  “Locals don’t shake,” she said, and her arm swung back down to her side. “It’s fine. Need all the practice I can get for the neural shunts in between power lockdowns.”

  “Shunts?” Hoffman raised an eyebrow. “I thought that tech was obsolete.”

  “It is, unless you burn out a section of your nervous system.” She touched the scar at the base of her skull with her other hand. “Armor. Almost. Managed to get my plugs and walk on Mars, then my body rejected the implant in a spectacular fashion. I tell myself I was lucky, could’ve redlined and spent my last days as a vegetable.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” Hoffman said.

  She reached out and back with her braced arm. “Few more months and the shunts will have remapped the pathways. Then I can get a transplant. Or that was the plan until the Beast showed up and screwed up my sync time.”

  “Then let us get on with the hunt,” Steuben said.

  “Oh, wow…you’re scarier in person than Yarrow let on,” Masako said. “Thought you’d be taller after seeing you in that movie.”

  Steuben let out a low growl and Hoffman held up a hand to signal her to drop the topic.

  Masako laughed nervously and swept a hand over a table filled with matte-black equipment. “Take a look, yes? What you see here are cameras. Did you know you can capture high-resolution images using light-sensitive film? No digitization or electricity needed. Strictly windup.”

  "It’s like the early twentieth century around here,” Hoffman answered. “Before Edison.”

  "It's our analog solution to getting a picture of the Beast. The colonel has people setting them up around the city. Your team will need to know how to operate them. Watch closely," she said.

  He stepped to the table and put his hands on it, directing all his attention to her lesson. Her soft voice made him wonder how she’d managed to get so far into the armor program before washing out. A decent bedside manner wasn’t a trait he imagined for the brutal soldiers plugged into killing machines.

  “This is the latch. Undo it, open it, and look here. Don’t pull the film out to look at it or you’ll ruin it. This cylinder goes here, and you pull out the film and hook it to these tiny teeth. Do you see how the gear advances the film?”

  "That seems…fragile," Hoffman said.

  "It’s ridiculous and archaic," she said, laughing. “If you Strike Marines can manage not to break it, it’ll help the war effort.”

  “Have you ever met Strike Marines?” Hoffman asked.

  “We have these all over the city, some of them with mechanical triggers,” she said. “Hard to know your enemy if you don’t know what it even looks like.”

  Hoffman tried to imagine the Beast stepping on a pressure plate and cameras and flashbulbs going off. The image from an old movie made him chuckle.

  "I should warn you that the film is extremely flammable. What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing; just imagined it at a photo shoot,” Hoffman said. “Thanks for the warning about the fire risk.”

  She handed him a small clip-on camera. “For your helmet."

  "This is a camera?"

  She twisted a key on the side of the small device and clicking filled the room.

  “Too much noise,” Steuben said.

  “Just turn it on after the shooting starts,” Masako said. “That isn’t very helpful or comforting, I know. We sent requirements for a better device back to Earth, but with the war, I doubt our request is a priority. This is the best we can manage.”

  Hoffman looked out the window and saw a flare go off against the twilight. It arced through the sky, rising higher and higher until it began its descent.

  Masako shifted nervously and flipped a switch on her exoskeleton. Her arm went limp against her side.

  "Where’s that?" Hoffman asked.

  "The supply depot," she said as a siren wailed in the distance.

  Hoffman called his team on the radio, cringing apologetically for using the technolog
y when Masako frowned at him. "I have to be able to talk to my team." He directed them to meet him at the supply depot.

  Locking him with an unusually intense stare that reminded him of a cross between a gunnery sergeant and a stern professor, she stepped close. “Radio use is up to you, but dangerous. Don’t think you’ve somehow found a safe zone where it can be used. Now, for one more thing you’re not going to like.”

  She pulled Hoffman's emergency tab on his armor and it fell off. She stepped to a pallet of gear and opened a carbon-fiber crate. Inside was analog gear that looked heavy and unpowered. "Get changed," she said. Then she began to remove her arm brace with a wince of pain as the unsupported limb flopped to her side.

  “I…OK, this will be interesting. Thanks for the warning about radio traffic. I won’t forget.”

  “Radio conversations—on any frequency—are a luxury, so don’t beat around the bush.”

  "Command for Hammer One,” a voice said in his earpiece. “We’ve got a situation.”

  Hoffman responded with the mic click, mindful of Masako’s warning about attracting the Beast. "We need your team to respond to the attack site at the supply depot."

  "Understood," Hoffman said. He pinged King’s radio. "Did you get the call to respond to the site of the attack?”

  "Yes, sir," King said. "We’re on the way. We got new gear, which is not what I want to wear in a fight. Doubt complaining will get us our stuff back."

  "Yeah, I’ve got mine. ‘Interesting’ is one way to describe it." He returned to the command room and found Steuben and Yarrow arguing over the scale model of the city.

  Locals gathered around, listening with worried expressions. Hoffman nudged his way through the crowd of soldiers, civilians, and scientists.

  "I can set up a trap, if you'll give me resources," Steuben explained.

  Yarrow shook his head. "Too many civilians in that sector. We're not bait."

  "Steuben, we've got a call,” Hoffman interrupted. “There's been an attack on the supply depot. The team's already en route."