by Marko Kloos
“Aye, sir.” Harper starts signaling the SEALs.
“I’m going to go two hundred meters that way, up the hill a bit,” I say. “See if I can get eyeballs on the lot.”
“Is that wise, sir? It’s a long run back to us if they spot you.”
“If they spot me, we have two Shrikes overhead that can ruin their day comprehensively,” I reply. “But I need to get line of sight if I want to designate the targets before they’re just over the ridge there.”
“Aye, sir. Need me to send someone with you as backup?”
“Negative. I’ll be quick.”
“I’ll come along,” Dr. Vandenberg says. “I want to get eyeballs on them, too.”
“I thought you’d had your fill for the day,” I say. “This might be another bad life choice.”
“Track runner, remember?” she says.
“You can’t outrun a Lanky at full speed. Track runner or not.”
“I don’t have to outrun them. Just you.”
I laugh and shake my head.
“Bad choice, but your choice. Come on, then.”
She starts to jog up the hill ahead of me, and Captain Harper raises an eyebrow. I know the kind of stuff podheads talk about over chow, and this ride-along will give grist to the rumor mill for weeks to come, in both the enlisted and officer mess halls.
“I’m starting to think that you’re just a really dedicated adrenaline junkie,” I call after Dr. Vandenberg, and she laughs without turning around.
“Move everyone between those rocks, Captain,” I say to Harper. “And if we have to run back and she’s in the lead, maybe wing her in the leg.”
“In truth, I’m scared shitless,” Elin says as we are walking up the hillside. “I don’t think I’ve stopped shaking since the shooting started in the colony city.”
“So why stick your neck out again?”
“Because it’s better than sitting around and waiting for shit to go wrong,” she replies. “And because you look like you know what you’re doing.”
“What gives you that impression?”
“All the shit you’ve survived. You’re either super good at what you do, or you’re very determined not to piss off your wife by dying.”
“I’m okay at what I do,” I say. “But I am very determined to not piss off my wife. The combination seems to work all right for me.”
We’re almost at the top of the hill, and I turn to look back at the landing site. The drop ship is standing nose-down at the end of a short furrow in the rocky ground. The ridgeline where I’ve ordered the SEALs to take an overwatch position is a hundred meters from the ship, and almost three hundred from where I am standing. With my bug suit’s power augmentation, I could run that distance in a minute, but a Lanky could do it in twenty seconds.
On my tactical screen, the icons for the Lanky patrol have updated continuously as the Shrikes’ sensors have kept eyes on them, so I know I won’t see any unpleasant surprises when we crest the hill. But as we reach the top and look down into the valley below, I can’t suppress a little shout.
The Lankies are a few kilometers away, but still obvious with their twenty-meter frames and their slow, ambling gait. I count eleven of them, trotting down the valley single file in a loose formation, kicking up puffs of dirt and moss with every step they take. My suit’s computer analyzes the targets and feeds everything into TacNet in just a few milliseconds, calculating speed, distance, and a hundred other factors. If I give the word, the Shrikes will roll in and shoot most of those Lankies with missiles, and then cluster bomb whatever is left standing in the valley for good measure. But these Lankies aren’t headed our way, so they’re not a threat that justifies expending twenty tons of precious ordnance. For the first year of the war, we followed the maxim that any Lanky that can be killed should be killed, to the point where we would have used a tactical nuke on those eleven down in the valley. But as the war progressed, it became clear that there are always more Lankies than ordnance, and that using our limited resources for indiscriminate destruction just accelerated our attrition rate and made them win faster.
“Type Three cranial shields,” Dr. Vandenberg says. She gets down into the prone position and peers at the group in the distance with the high-powered optics of her helmet’s observation attachment. I join her on the ground. The hillside is covered in a thick layer of broad-leafed moss that feels almost comfortable enough to sleep on.
“What’s that?”
“Their cranial shields,” she says and points downhill into the valley. “There’s five distinct types we’ve seen so far. These are all Type Three. All the post-invasion Lankies in one location always have the same cranial shield shape. The samples from Mars are all Type Five. We haven’t been back to Willoughby, so we didn’t know what type they had here. Now I get to fill in that blank.”
“I never knew that,” I say.
“ETA for the SAR birds is seven minutes,” Captain Harper says on comms. I toggle back a wordless acknowledgment.
“It’s interesting to know that there are different types of Lanky head shields,” I continue. “But I’m having a hard time seeing how that helps the grunts on the ground. I mean, I already know that those shields stop autocannon rounds. But the shape of the top edge is pretty unimportant to me whenever I have one of those things in my sights.”
“It may not matter in the short run,” she says. “Certainly not when it comes to killing them. But think about the long term. If there’s an observable pattern, it may help us to figure out how they spread out in the galaxy. And maybe even where they come from, eventually.”
We watch the Lanky procession in the narrow valley below for a little while. It feels strange to have so many of them in my helmet sights without taking active measures to wipe them out. But it’s undeniably interesting to see them in this context—as a sentient species of living creatures with their own needs and drives, not just as the mindless agents of death and destruction on the battlefield or the boogeymen in my nightmares.
“This is more like it,” Elin says.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Decent weather. Clear line of sight. A bunch of subjects to observe in the wild. And only a medium-high risk of violent death.”
“Living the dream,” I say.
There’s a slight vibration rippling through the ground underneath us, and we exchange looks. A few moments later, a low and ominous rumbling noise comes from the direction of the Lanky troop in the valley. I reach up to turn on my helmet’s comms display and contact close air support.
“Look,” Dr. Vandenberg says. “What the hell is that?”
There’s more rumbling, and a Lanky wail wafts over to our position. It sounds just like their distress calls on the battlefield whenever we mortally wound one of them. A few moments ago, there were almost a dozen Lankies walking down the valley in single file. Now there are two distinct groups of three, separated by a gap of a hundred meters.
“Where’d the other ones go?” I ask.
“What the fuck,” Elin says slowly.
The ground between the two groups of Lankies is in motion. We see puffs of dust as the surface of the valley floor seems to be churning somehow, as if the Lankies walked into a patch of water that just had a layer of dirt and moss on the surface. But the first group of Lankies crossed the same spot without incident, so I know that this has to be something else.
A Lanky appears from the patch of churning soil on the ground and wails another piercing distress call into the sky. It moves as if it’s trying to scramble back onto solid ground. When it’s almost out of the restless patch of earth, a fountain of ochre-colored earth sprays up, and something very large and very fast yanks the Lanky back into the dirt. I get a brief glimpse at something that looks like a hook or a pincer, slender and glossy black like the hull of a seed ship. Then the Lanky is gone beneath the ground again, and its wail is cut off abruptly. The soil ripples for a few more seconds after the Lanky disappears. When everything is still ag
ain, the patch that swallowed the Lanky forms a new depression in the ground, contrasting churned-up earth and rocks with the moss carpet of the surrounding valley.
“You have got to be shitting me,” I say.
The other Lankies are not displaying any sense of concern for their lost mates. They move away from the spot at brisk speed, faster than I’ve ever seen one move. The group to the right of the spot is almost at the mouth of the valley, on a flatter and wider patch of ground than the others, and we watch as they drop to all fours and run away from the valley and onto the plateau in an obvious hurry. Whatever just happened has sent them into a panic, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a scared Lanky. The other group is walking back up the valley to the left, a little slower and on two legs instead, but with no less urgency to their movements.
Underneath, the ground rumbles again just a little.
“What the hell did we just watch?” I say into the silence that follows. In the distance, the Lanky’s last distress cry is echoing back from the nearby mountain ridge, weak and insubstantial.
“I have no idea,” Elin says. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
“I don’t think anyone has,” I reply. For just a moment, I was feeling a pang of sympathy for the last Lanky that got pulled down into the ground, and that’s an emotion I definitely can’t integrate into my worldview right now.
The ground shakes again, stronger than before. It’s not the thrumming of a nearby Lanky’s footsteps. Instead, it’s a short pulse of a vibration, increasing in intensity and then fading again. We wait for more tremors, but none follow. Then it’s quiet again except for the sound of the wind on the plateau and the distant engines of the attack craft in the sky high above us.
“ETA two minutes,” Captain Harper sends over the radio. The unexpected sound of his voice makes me jump a little.
“We need to go,” I tell Elin Vandenberg. She nods and gets to her feet.
“Coming your way, Captain,” I say. “You want to tell the men to stay light on their feet when you head for the pickup spot.”
“Any particular reason for that?”
“I think we woke something new in the neighborhood. Something that eats Lankies whole.”
The SAR drop ships arrive a few minutes later, flying a slow circle over the area before setting down next to our broken Dragonfly. The Lankies on my tactical display have moved off to the east and west in two separate groups. Considering what we just witnessed, I am certain that we won’t need to worry about having to avoid them for a while. But it’s not the thought of the threats on the surface that have me putting an extra spring in my step as I follow the SEALs to the cargo hold of the waiting search-and-rescue drop ship.
“Can you give me a slow pass over this area before you start your ascent?” I send to the pilot when we are seated and strapped in. I have the TacLink map on my helmet display, and I’m marking the spot where we saw the Lanky disappear.
“What’s over there?” the pilot asks.
“Scientific intel,” I say. “For our guest from the R&D division. We saw something that might be relevant in the future. If we ever make it back here.”
“Copy that. I can give you a three-sixty before we leave.”
“Good enough, Lieutenant. Thank you,” I reply.
Elin Vandenberg is sitting next to me, watching the ramp as it rises with a soft hydraulic whine. I tap her on the shoulder, and she turns her head toward me.
“Your suit is not tied into TacLink,” I say. “I asked the pilot for a slow pass of the valley where the Lankies went under. I’m going to make sure to pass on the footage to you when we’re back on the carrier.”
“I appreciate that,” she says. “I have it on my own system from ground level. But that was from a few kilometers away. I have a feeling that this will make me the most popular xenobiologist in the Fleet for a while.”
When we pass the valley a few moments after takeoff, the pilot does as promised and puts the ship into a slow left-hand turn to circle the area. I watch the feed from the hull cameras as the terrain pans underneath the ship. The spot where the Lankies lost half a dozen of their group is now an almost perfectly circular patch of disturbed soil and shredded vegetation. For a moment, I am worried that even five hundred feet of altitude may not be sufficient to keep us in the clear, but the pilot finishes his turn before I can voice that concern over the radio. Whatever is lurking underneath the soil down there is big and strong enough to seize a three-hundred-ton Lanky and drag it under, and it’s cunning enough to lay deliberate traps for them. There’s no telling if something of that size even registers humans as a potential threat or food source, but I am not curious enough to find out right now. When the pilot levels out the ship and climbs above two thousand feet, I slowly let out a breath of relief.
“What a day,” Elin says. “Turns out that too much adrenaline gives you a bitch of a headache once it starts to wear off.”
“And nausea,” I say. “Don’t forget the wonderful nausea.”
CHAPTER 19
A DARK VIEW OF HUMANITY
“That colony was started fifty years ago,” Colonel Drake says in wonder. “Half a century. They were blasting holes and driving anchors for terraformers on every continent down there for years. Whatever that is, nobody has encountered it before.”
We’re sitting around the table in the flag briefing room, watching the aerial footage from the SAR ship side by side with the helmet cam imagery we took automatically. For the last hour, I’ve seen the ten-second event dozens of times. Even from a few kilometers away, it’s pretty clear that something ambushed the Lankies and pulled down half a dozen of them in the blink of an eye. I watch again as the straggler nearly escapes the trap, then gets pulled back in with such force and ferocity that it makes the dirt spray ten meters high.
Next to me, Dr. Vandenberg clears her throat.
“I don’t really think it’s indigenous,” she says.
Command staff meeting are usually only for the department heads, but nobody objected to the presence of the ship’s resident xenobiologist today. She looks out of place in her fresh, new pair of medical technician overalls. We’ve spent the last three hours on decontamination and debriefing, and from the way the day is going, we’re nowhere near the finish line.
“What makes you say that?” Lieutenant Colonel Campbell says. She seems to have transferred her mild dislike of me to the outside expert I brought along to the briefing, and her verbal interactions with Elin Vandenberg are curt and matter-of-fact.
“The Lankies aren’t,” Elin says. “And the chances that Willoughby has an organism on it that’s adapted in isolation to take them as prey is pretty much zero. Whatever this thing is, I’d bet money that it came from the same place where they evolved.”
“What kind of species brings its own predator with it when it goes out to settle another planet?”
“It may not have been on purpose,” Elin replies. “Could have been by accident. We’ve introduced invasive species to colonies by accident, and we have all sorts of procedures to prevent that.”
I’m freshly showered and in a clean set of fatigues, but I don’t feel renewed. The mandatory decontamination session after the mission was twice as long as normal, and the briefing followed right after. I’m yearning for a meal and eight uninterrupted hours of sleep because I still have the post-mission shakes, and those won’t go away until I’ve mollified my body with some carbohydrates and reset my brain with sedative-boosted sleep. Watching the same terrifying event over and over on the briefing screens isn’t helping much to soothe my frayed nerves, either.
“They accidentally introduced something that can hunt them,” the XO says with a skeptical tinge in her voice.
“We’ve done worse shit to ourselves,” I say. “As a species, I mean. By accident and on purpose.”
“I like the idea of Lankies getting eaten,” Colonel Rigney says. “In fact, whatever that thing is, I may make it our new regimental mascot.”
“I don’t have any particular problem with that, either,” Colonel Drake says. “But it does take Willoughby off the list for reconquest. At least until we can figure out if that species is a danger to us.”
Colonel Pace chuckles.
“Even if it’s not, can you imagine the pushback? Trying to send a bunch of settlers to a planet that has subterranean monsters on it that are big enough to catch Lankies?”
“Any idea what exactly we’re dealing with here?” Colonel Drake asks Elin.
She looks at the images on the screen again and makes a gesture to stop the repeating footage in a certain spot. It shows the dirt fountain erupting behind the hapless Lanky, and the pincer-like protuberance that’s shooting out of the ground to snag its prey.
“Lankies are ten meters from the hip to the top of the cranial shield,” she says. “On average. That grabbing appendage there is half again as long, and we don’t even see what it’s attached to. But with the force on display here, I’d say it’s something a lot bigger and heavier. Underground ambush hunter, so it’s probably what my little brother would call ‘dirto-dynamic.’” She smiles an apology.
“That’s a pretty vague set of parameters,” the XO says.
“Like a funnel spider. Or a millipede.”
“That’s one hell of a millipede,” Colonel Drake says. He unfreezes the footage and watches for the fiftieth time as the Lanky gets pulled back into the hole toward its unseen attacker. The thought of anything that size even remotely resembling a funnel spider makes me want to launch a twenty-megaton bunker-buster nuke at that spot.
“No shit,” I say. “One moment we’re looking at eleven Lankies. Next thing we know, half a dozen are gone. And it only took a few seconds.”
“Your new regimental mascot came up through the ground and grabbed a combined two thousand tons of prey in a single attack,” Elin says to Colonel Rigney. “I have no clue what other abilities it has, but that fact alone already makes it the strongest organism in the observed galaxy by far.”
“The Lankies were freaked out,” I say. “They didn’t stick around to fight back or try to help their pals. They just ran. First time I’ve seen a frightened Lanky.”
