by Richard Fox
“Stow it.” King hopped over a ditch and took the other path. “Tactical. Let’s move.”
Hoffman looked to the horizon as the last band of sunset faded away. They were about to enter the Beast’s jungle at night, with no optics and no good idea of where the Beast even was. The weight of an unpowered gauss rifle and quadrium rounds on his belt were little comfort.
“Team,” Hoffman said as they moved through the undergrowth, wide fronds and wet leaves sliding across their faces and shoulders as they moved, “Q-shells need a high-power gauss shot to activate. Don’t get trigger-happy and waste bullets.”
“The Beast will sit still while our batteries spin up, yeah?” Duke asked.
“If it’ll sit still, I’ve got a present for that damn thing,” Garrison said, slapping a satchel charge strapped to the small of his back. “Denethrite special. If that doesn’t finish it off, I’ll turn in my globe and anchor.”
“If your toe-popper does anything but blow it to proverbial smithereens, the Beast will probably poop out your globe and anchor at its leisure,” Max said.
“Wouldn’t that just be the cherry to top my day.” Garrison adjusted his crotch. “What’s the call on the Ibarrans, Lieutenant?”
“Lilith is the target,” Hoffman said. “Don’t put her in any danger if we can help it. The Ibarrans are declared hostiles. Treat them as such.”
“Finally,” King said. “There’s blood between us. Time to make them pay.”
Steuben stopped and raised a fist. The Marines went to one knee on either side of the paths, peering into the jungle. Hoffman came up to the Karigole at a crouch.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Do you not hear that?” Steuben flicked a thumb to the sky.
“No…what do you—”
A drone whizzed over the canopy, lights flashing. The crack of breaking wood and shaking branches erupted in the distance, the disturbance cutting across the path a few dozen yards ahead and continuing into the darkness.
“There is the Beast,” Steuben said and drew his short scimitar off his back.
“Gauss?” King asked.
“Not yet,” Hoffman said. “The drone might lead it away before we—a sword? Really, Steuben?”
“For them,” the Karigole said, pointing the blade to the right. Light crept through the jungle from a source Hoffman couldn’t quite make out. “The Ibarrans are there, Lilith too. I have her scent…the Dotari is with them too.”
“I’m right here.” Gor’al waved a hand. “Can we…can we please go somewhere else?”
“Wedge formation,” Hoffman said. “Movement to contact. Watch your sectors.” He winced at that last command—in this dark, they could barely see a few feet ahead of them.
The lieutenant followed Steuben through the jungle until they came up to a small clearing. A junk heap that was once a massive all-terrain vehicle lay behind several light poles, illuminating an excavation site.
A massive door, silver beneath a thin coating of dirt and mud, was at the bottom of a packed-earth ramp. Shadows—human-shaped shadows—danced against the vault door.
“That’s them,” Hoffman said. “No clear shot—”
A crash of breaking trees pulled his attention away as treetops fell against the last light of dusk. The noise of a wrecking machine moving through the jungle grew louder.
“It’s coming right for us,” Max said as he unslung his gauss rifle and readied a battery pack.
“Wait!” Hoffman made a slashing motion across his throat. “Wait, it’ll go for—”
A shadow leapt out of the jungle and knocked a light pole to the ground. The Beast bit the battery pack and shook it violently from side to side, like a terrier killing a rat.
“Lock and load!” Hoffman called out.
Gunfire broke out from the vault door and a legionnaire vaulted over one side. He held up a jerry-rigged battery pack and sprinted into the jungle.
“What the hell’s he doing?” King asked.
“Buying the others time,” Steuben said.
Hoffman slammed a battery pack into his gauss rifle and removed a glittering silver shell from a pouch. He slid it into the breach and watched as the magnetic accelerators charged—charged so very slowly.
“Come on, come on,” Hoffman said, giving his rifle a shake as if that would help.
The Beast slammed a foot against another light pole, casting a long shadow toward Hoffman’s team. It reared back on its hind legs then sprang into the air.
The legionnaire screamed. Briefly.
“I’m green.” Max hefted his rifle to his shoulder, eyes locked on the excavation site where the death cry had come from.
“Form a perimeter,” Steuben said. “Circle, now!”
“We know where it is,” Max hissed. He aimed down the gauss rifle’s optics then hesitated. “Or do we?”
“Perimeter.” King grabbed Garrison by the shoulder and shoved him to one side, orienting him toward the darkness.
Hoffman felt his rifle buzz—fully charged. He backtracked into the middle of the circle his Marines had formed, then craned his neck up slowly.
A shadow moved through the treetops.
“Up!” Hoffman jerked his muzzle high and fired. The quadrium round spat out in a hail of sparks. It struck a tree trunk and erupted into tendrils of lightning that lit up the night. Electricity stabbed through the Beast high in the canopy. The reek of ozone filled Hoffman’s nose and every hair on his body stood on end.
The Beast fell, breaking every branch on the way down, and landed a few feet from Hoffman. Static crackled along the angles of its exoskeleton and its claws twitched in the air.
“It’s…is it dead?” Booker asked from the other side of the Beast.
“How about we make sure?” Garrison said, swinging the satchel charge off his back. “Got a time fuse for…thirty seconds?”
“You’re only giving us thirty seconds to get away from a denethrite bomb?” Duke asked, his eyes wide.
“I dropped the other one!” Garrison said, his voice high and near panic.
“Hoffman, the vault,” Steuben said. The door was open.
The Beast shifted against the ground.
“Set it off! Follow me!” Hoffman swung an arm toward the vault and took off running.
“Courtesy of the Terran Marine Corps!” Garrison twisted a handle on the satchel charge and tossed it beneath the Beast.
Hoffman glanced over his shoulder as he made it to the vault door, counting Marines as they ran past him and into the abyss within. King was the last man in.
The Beast struggled to rise, its limbs seeming to move independently of each other.
“Bad place to be, sir.” Garrison grabbed Hoffman by the collar and yanked him back. The vault door slid shut with a hiss of metal against dirt.
The denethrite went off, slapping the vault door with a wave of overpressure. Dirt showered down in the near-total darkness.
Booker held a control pad in her hands, a wire leading from it into the wall.
“Pathfinders hacked the door,” she said as she tapped a finger against the pad. “Ibarrans were in too much of a hurry to close it behind them.”
There was a snap of glass and a glow stick lit up, casting sickly green light through the vault entrance. The walls were curved and covered in circles of tight alien script. King tossed the stick down the hallway, which continued into the dark. Boot prints made lines in the dust caked on the floor.
“We need to get out of this death funnel,” King said. “The Ibarrans are armed…not sure if the Beast can even fit in here.”
“I want to brag that the Beast is in a billion little pieces,” Garrison said. “But discretion may be a bit more useful than ego here. Assume it survived?”
“Now you’re modest?” Booker asked.
“I’d rather not count that chicken…especially when it could still eat me. You know what I mean. Hey, maybe we can lure it into a spaceship and then blow it out an airlock. That’s a tried-a
nd-true method,” Garrison said.
“Steuben,” Hoffman said, flicking the back of his hand against the Karigole’s shoulder, “you have their scent?”
“I do.” Steuben raised his chin toward the hallway. “There are hallways ahead.”
“Power down. Switch to assault rifles,” Hoffman said. “No need to have a beacon on for the Beast if it’s still kicking.”
Opal hefted his war hammer in both hands. “Smash Beast. Smash bad humans,” the doughboy said.
“Can he finally kill them?” King asked.
“No,” Opal said, shaking his head quickly. “But can smash feet. Ankles. Hands. Wrists. Ribs. Clavicle. Femur.”
“We get it,” Hoffman said.
Lights powered on up and down the hallway. Hoffman felt like they were walking down a spinal column as they hurried away from the vault door.
“Hate weird alien stuff,” Garrison said. “Hated it on the Dotty ship, hate it now.”
“I take no offense,” Gor’al said. “And I second your current sentiments.”
Chapter 17
Hoffman took a mirror off his belt and held it around a corner. No motion in the room beyond, but his gaze lingered over a heap of power armor on the floor.
“Clear,” Hoffman said.
“That smell…” Max wrinkled his nose.
Hoffman sidestepped into the room, rifle up and ready.
“Far-side security, go.” King slapped Max and Garrison on their backs and they hurried to the other side of the domed room, taking up positions near a hallway entrance on the opposite end.
Hoffman went to the power armor, a lighter version than what Strike Marines wore in the field, and colored deep blue. The Pathfinder crest was on what had been the wearer’s breastplate. The smell of rotting flesh was almost too much for Hoffman to handle.
“The Beast can get in here,” Steuben said.
Hoffman turned away, eyes watering from the stench. The walls of the domed room had shelves, all lined with tiny fragments of glowing porcelain.
“They were here.” The Karigole went to an empty stretch of shelves. “Lilith and one that carries a scent of perfume, soap…and blood.”
“Masha,” Hoffman said.
“But what did they take?” King asked. “And why the hell would they come in here? For all we know, it’s a cave with one entrance. If the Beast got out, the Beast can get back in.”
“Pathfinders don’t like the main entrance to any archaeotech,” Garrison said. “Bad habit of them being booby-trapped. Most of the time, they’ll cut a control entrance the first time they enter a place…if they can do it without damaging the site. Don’t look at me like I just grew a second head, Duke. I study other breach methods. That’s why I’m a consummate professional.”
“Then there’s at least another way out,” Hoffman said. “Lilith knows where it is…and we don’t.”
“Air,” Gor’al said. “Well, if we had our sensor gear, we could check airflows for higher humidity and backtrack to where the Pathfinders can—”
“I can still track them.” Steuben touched his nose. “Best to hurry. If they know another way out, they will not backtrack to the entrance to escape.”
“Holy moly,” Max said as he pulled a mirror back from around the corner. “Y’all got to see this.”
Hoffman looked quickly around the corner and motioned for Duke to come forward. “Got some sight lines you need to cover,” Hoffman told the sniper before he crouched and hurried out of the room.
The hallway opened up into a massive cavern where stalactites glowed from the ceiling and illuminated a space that could have held a battle cruiser. Blocks the size of tanks formed neat rows on the cavern floor, while a honeycomb of passageways and glass staircases made up the walls.
“I’m really glad we’ve got Steuben here,” Booker said. “Searching through all this makes the fun on the Dotty ship easy in comparison.”
Hoffman tested his weight on a glass catwalk before gingerly taking a few steps—with one hand on the railing in case it gave way.
Steuben shouldered past him. “They went this way,” he said.
The glow from the stalactites flickered.
“Got a bad feeling about this,” Max said.
A block on the ground twisted in place, exposing gaps.
“Charge up.” Hoffman looked down the catwalk for cover and found nothing. He did not want to be on the glass when it came time to open fire. The illumination shrank, then shone bright again.
Steuben cracked a half-dozen glow sticks and flung them into the air.
“Set,” Max said.
“Me too,” Duke said, his rail rifle pointed to the ceiling. “But if I do a full-power shot in here and—”
“Don’t. Garrison, get a—” Hoffman stopped as the stalactites faded to black. On the ground, the few glow sticks shown like sparse stars on the galaxy’s edge.
A shadow flickered over a light.
“Area fire!” King shouted.
Three Marines opened up, the quadrium shells shooting down like pyrotechnics from a Roman candle. Lightning crackled across the floor, flashing long shadows across the cavern as the Beast leapt from block to block. A tendril caught it in the head and it went down in a heap.
Hoffman’s gauss rifle trembled in his hands and the battery pack fused up. He tossed the useless weapon aside as the rest of his Marines did the same.
“Ow, ow!” Garrison flung his gauss against the glass and swung another satchel charge off his back. He jammed a timer into the explosive and held it over the railing above where the Beast had collapsed.
“Wait…how high are we?” the breacher asked.
“What the hell are you waiting for?” King roared.
“It’s shock-sensitive! Too much of a drop and we’ll be part of the explosion,” Garrison said.
“Do it.” Hoffman chopped a hand toward Garrison’s wrist.
The breacher shrugged, dropped the satchel charge, and took off running. Fast. Hoffman followed, remembering all the times Garrison had worn a shirt that said: “Bomb squad: If you see me running, try to keep up!” at PT.
If he ever wore it again, Hoffman swore he’d court-martial the breacher.
The Marines got to the end of the walkway to a silver wall with vertical gaps. Steuben thundered past Garrison, shoulder-checked him into a gap, then herded the rest of the Marines through, though Opal needed a kick to squeeze through.
“Cover your ears and open your mouth!” Garrison shouted.
Hoffman complied a split second before a concussion slapped against the wall, leaving his ears ringing and his inner ear off-balance. The cavern went pitch-dark.
“Team, count off,” King said.
Hoffman started the count, listening as all eight sounded off.
“Nine,” a new voice said, and cold metal pressed against Hoffman’s throat. A glow stick cracked on and a thick arm wrapped around his neck.
“Stand down!” the same voice said as the Marines raised their assault rifles. “Everyone stand down and we can get through all of this.”
“Medvedev,” Hoffman grunted as he tried to wiggle to a position with some leverage, “that you?”
The arm tightened enough to dissuade him from maneuvering.
“Yes, me and ten of my best legionnaires. All right behind me,” Medvedev said.
“Lies,” Steuben sneered. “There are three with you. One has a grenade with the pin gone. The other has her weapon trained on the fourth.”
“Got you dead bang, asshole,” Max said. “You want to let go of our LT now?”
“Crush you,” Opal snarled and gripped the haft of his war hammer.
“Kill us and that grenade will turn us all into paint,” Masha said from behind Hoffman. She came up to the Marine and gave him a quick pat on the head. “Why don’t we all play nice? Yeah?” She held up a hand and the female legionnaire put the grenade in her palm. Masha spoke a quick command in Basque and the other woman vanished into the darkness behi
nd them.
“The Beast isn’t dead yet,” Hoffman said. “We need to finish it—”
“You can’t kill it,” Lilith said, peeking over Masha’s shoulder. “It’s designed to be blown apart, hit by Xaros disintegration weapons. Any kind of abuse you can imagine, it will always reform. We can never destroy it.”
“Then you might as well pop that grenade and save us some trouble,” Garrison said. “Wait. No. Don’t do that.”
“Keep going,” Masha said to Lilith.
“We can’t destroy it, but we can trap it, put it back in the stasis chamber it was in for so long,” the scientist said. “Before the Pathfinders…activated it.”
“And then what?” Hoffman asked, still struggling to breathe with Medvedev’s arm tight against his throat.
“Then you let us walk away,” Masha said. “We’ve worked together during trying times. This constitutes grounds for a truce, doesn’t it?”
Hoffman snarled.
“We’ll need one of those neat little quadrium shells,” Masha said as she picked up a gauss rifle, one with a missing battery pack, from the floor. “And your cooperation. After that, you can have Lilith and then we’ll all go our merry ways, yes?”
“Sir, they’re Ibarrans. We can’t trust them,” King said.
“Last best chance to take out the Beast,” Masha snapped. “No reason to stay on Eridu.” She slapped a leather case slung over one shoulder. “I’ve got the good stuff—we can thank Lilith for pointing those out. You live and you can tell Fallon and Yarrow they can finalize the evacuation. Kesaht are only three days away. Not a week like you thought.”
“Lies,” Hoffman said.
“Her breathing and heart rate are the same,” Steuben said. “She’s telling the truth.”
“She’s a frigging spy, Steuben,” Garrison said. “Pretty sure she can lie better than most.”
“If we all die here, the rest of the colony will be ripe for the Kesaht,” Masha said. “So we ready to play nice together…or should I skip to the end?”
She jiggled the grenade.
“We have…a deal,” Hoffman said.
Medvedev released his hold on the Strike Marine and shoved him away. The legionnaire tossed his gauss rifle to King, then a battery pack. The gunney glanced over it, his face contorted with anger.
