by Nick Cole
“Not far now,” said the Monarch over squad comm. “Two more clicks forward, and we’ll reach the entrance.”
I’d gotten the Kid up and moving again. He looked shook, that was for sure. It was clear that was probably as close to death as he’d gotten in his time with the company. And honestly, as I looked at the dead things and their fangs and splayed claws all over the battlefield no one would remember, I couldn’t blame him. Jacks had been right. These were pure nightmare. Most of them wore a crude leather vest. A belt. And actual finished tools on their belts. The kind of tools you’d find on a starship. Hydro spanners and bulkhead locks. Hull plate ratchets. But they were all battered and beaten. And bloodstained. Like they’d been used as weapons more than tools.
“You okay?” I asked as I put the Kid’s tanto back in its carrier and stuck his rifle in his hands like a good NCO should when a man can’t remember that the primary job of an infantryman is to work the rifle.
He mumbled something. Which was good. He was coming back. He could speak.
“You’re alive,” I told him, looking him in the eyes to make the connection and reset his mental hard drive. “That’s the important part. Okay, now you gotta get back in this, Kid. I can’t send you to the rear ’cause we ain’t got one to send ya to. I need every rifle up for all of us to get through this one alive. And we’re gonna. So… good to go? We need you right now.”
Sometimes being a sergeant feels like being a used vehicle salesman. You can’t always bark orders and rumble. Sometimes you gotta get ’em to take the payments and EZ credit. Sorry, that’s just the way it is. Sometimes you gotta sell.
“C’mon, Kid. Clock’s burning. Six hours to make our ride off-planet. Lot to do. Are you in it to win it? Or do we gotta drag you?”
As I sat there waiting for him to mumble or nod that he was good to go, I realized something. Things might actually be going our way. This was the first fight in a long stretch in which I didn’t come out the other side with a dead friend staring at me.
So… I had that going for me. No one had gotten killed yet.
You’re optimistically sensing momentum, idiot, the pessimistic side of me whispered in my ear. I told it to shut up. I’d gotten twenty minutes of sleep this morning, plus a cup of coffee, and my studs had just fought off a savage army of gnashing death that would certainly go down in the Strange Company logs as one of the most bizarre firefights we’d ever been in. I had every reason to be hopeful.
Don’t rain on my parade.
Yeah, it had gotten close. A few of us had gotten knocked around. It was a good thing Hauser was a combat cyborg who could turn off pain centers, or really didn’t even have any, because a real man would have been screaming in agony from the wounds he’d received. Begging for death or Narcanene.
So maybe things were turning around, which is the only thing you can say when you just fought off a nightmare army of monkey soldiers. With guns. Monkeys with guns.
They’re apes, I reminded myself. And then I remembered I had seen monkeys on some starships in the past. Ferrying between worlds. Semi-intelligent hybrids who worked the lower decks, engineering and the nuclear stacks on some of the bigger transport ships with old and dangerous engines that weren’t rated safe for human operation. Wiggles, too. Hybrid human pigs that did worse jobs than the monkeys. Monkeys, according to the Monarch, were related to apes.
If you ever think you got it bad just go watch the monkeys and the wiggles work. Their life is a living radiated hell. Even if it is short.
Two clicks further on and we came to the entrance to the chasm the ancient starship had created when it drove its vast bulk into the crust of this world. What I saw as we rounded the last crimson-and-blood-orange-colored rock bend in the narrowing trail, where the rock had heated and boiled long ago, was unbelievable.
I would have told you right there that Stinkeye was right when he said the Crash might be something other than what everyone thought it was. Or whatever he’d said. Something along those lines. But I don’t think this, what we were now seeing as we stood on the edge of the fantastic chasm, was what our chief Voodoo operator and oldest living member of the company was talking about. What we were seeing was something completely different. Orders of magnitude different. Something that destroyed the Monarch narrative everyone had either been told, or inherently believed, about one of the great wonders, or mysteries, of the galaxy.
The ship was still intact.
Ruined for sure. Crushed and damaged along vast sections of its incredible length. It was easily larger than a Battle Spire from what we could see of it as it raced off into the cavern darkness at a down-angle of at least fifteen degrees. Which is to say it was huge. And it had driven itself straight into the planet long ago, creating a tube down into the crust.
“I always thought the ship was destroyed. That it was… it was actually a crash,” I murmured aloud. Everyone else was too dumbstruck to answer.
As the name on the official planetary maps implies. The Crash Wastes. I was supposed to be looking at an incredible crash of vast alien technology that was rumored to be fantastic. The Monarchs had held claim here, declaring Ol’ Amos’s patch of the desert specifically theirs. Allowing the rest of the planet to go to private investors willing to take a chance on the stellar frontier.
But perhaps that had been the game. Maybe they’d sold the whole Crash Wastes story about the total destruction of an alien anomaly of unexplainable origin. Naming it a crash, the Crash, was a great way to keep the serious at bay. Ever seen a starship crash? There ain’t much left. Ships that do light and just under have a tendency to leave very little but a giant crater. Put some apex predators out here to keep everyone away, sow some superstition and paranoia, and you can quietly keep a working alien starship unlike anything we’ve ever encountered to yourself.
Even this far out along the frontier.
The Monarch stared out across the chasm at it just as the rest of us were doing. Incredibly, power was still on in some sections of the immense starship that weren’t too badly damaged. Other sections were crumpled like crushed beer cans. And across the gap in the chasm, vines dangled or were tied to either the cliff or the canyon wall. Except they weren’t vines. They were ancient hoses and systems that had been torn from the ship and anchored to the chasm, or to the ship itself.
“That’s how they get across…” muttered Punch. “They swing. The apes. That’s how they do it.”
“Hard pass,” said Choker, who hated ship-breaching ops. Too much lack of control for a narcissistic sociopath.
Everyone ignored him. He always said that when it came to hull breaching. We always sent him first anyway. He had skills and was actually fairly good at it if you didn’t mind the hyperventilating.
“That’s correct,” said the Monarch softly. The silence was deafening inside the tube of the wreck. Maybe all you could hear was the black smoke boiling up from the gargantuan engines high above us. A dull kind of puffing bass rumbling that seemed to come from somewhere deep within. Her voice was monotone, like the voice of someone almost hypnotized by what she was seeing. A fully intact generational starship. Something out of Earth’s distant colonization past. Here, mostly intact, inside a deep canyon that seemed to fall away into an unknowable darkness to our left and down below. Where the ancient vessel had driven itself into this world long ago.
The whole scene played with your sanity.
“It almost looks familiar…” muttered the captain, who rarely said much beyond orders or questions on company biz. I could tell he too was taken aback by what we were seeing. The wreck was almost as much of a mystery as was his fabled past with the Ultras if that were to be believed.
“I thought it was a crash,” I said to her again. Staring at her now. Accusing her and not hating myself for doing it. Dismissing her otherworldly beauty and the pheromones that seemed to fall from her whether she liked it or not. Starting
to feel angry at her. I wanted answers. I needed answers and I was beginning to feel we were being lied to. That a lot of people had gotten killed for nothing except deceptions designed by someone to make someone else rich. Except this was something else. This was stunning and amazing. This was bigger than petty power games even if those games were played by Monarchs. This shook the foundations.
What had Stinkeye said? Shake the pillars of the galaxy stuff?
Was the war on Crash, or Astralon, nothing but a pretense to get this ship under Monarch control finally? Had we fought for nine months for nothing but a lie? I felt the world begin to spin just a little and I had no idea whether that was from the insanity of what I was looking at, or the narratives raging inside my head.
Ah, Sergeant Orion, I whispered to myself. You never fought for anything other than money. And money is the biggest lie of all, ain’t it?
My emotions were getting out of control. I grabbed a piece of my own skin and twisted, causing as much pain as I could. Getting myself centered.
I felt my hand creep toward my sidearm. I felt wild and dangerous regardless of the self-inflicted discipline I was forcing myself to endure. I knew I’d blow her brains out if she’d lied to us. If everything, all the universe and the lies about Crash… were just that. Nothing but lies.
I turned to look at the ship in utter amazement one more time. Wondering what ancient race had made such a thing that could hard crash itself into a world and survive.
I whispered something. I think I was muttering that I didn’t want the Monarch to say what she’d been saying all along. If she said You gotta believe in something, Sergeant Orion… Well, then… Boom. I do her right here and let the captain decide what to do with me on the other side of it. I was cool with the judgment.
But she didn’t do that.
“The primary ship was destroyed during reentry and the crash,” she said. “What you are seeing is… the lifeboat. This is how the ship crashed. Much of the larger ship exploded across the desert up there and created the crust fractures after her primary pulse shields overloaded and softened the landing by creating the continental crater to brake for impact. They were still going too fast and so the main superstructure detonated to save the lifeboat. We theorize some kind of superweapon fired and created the tube down into the core at the last second, allowing the lifeboat to enter with maximum armor, using something we think is called a ‘Repulse Ram’ and of course braking engines in full reverse. Farther down, the entire front end of the ship is smashed. The crew there were killed instantly. We’ve only been down that far externally and with drones. The damage is very bad there. Most of the technology is unrecoverable from those sections. But most of the ship beyond the bow survived.”
“That’s not possible,” said Punch. “That ship is bigger than a damned Ultra Battle Spire. The original ship would have to be… huge. Enormous. Gigantic even. Ain’t nothing like that ever been built in the galaxy, lady.”
“This ship isn’t from this galaxy. Not in its current form.” She came out of her trance and looked at the rest of us. Her eyes landing on me. Then the captain. “But…”
She looked at me again. Like maybe she’d said something she hadn’t meant to. And now she wanted to take it all back.
“We’re running out of time,” she said. “They’ll be directing more guards to react to us. We’ve got to cross now and enter the ship. We’ll be safer in there.”
“Safer from who?” asked Choker.
The captain, still cradling the shotgun, turned toward the Seeker. His voice was cold as the grave. Monarch or no Monarch.
“My sergeant has questions. I think you should answer them, ma’am.”
The Monarch must’ve sensed we’d all kill her right there. The company thinks as one. We may fight and gamble and play tricks on each other as much as we do on any enemy. But when the captain has made it clear he’s not happy with someone, well then, the company isn’t happy with that particular someone.
“Okay,” she said. Taking her hands off her wicked high-speed little machine gun. It dangled by the two-point sling. I was waiting for her to pop one of her dangerous grenades and do something freaky to us. Stun us. Gas us. Make us disappear to the ninth dimension. Heck, maybe she’d just turn into bats and fly away. Things felt tense and uneasy. Dark. Dangerous even. “But let’s get an advance team across the gap, Captain. We’ll be safer in there. I’ll explain as we go.”
“Safer from who?” mumbled Choker again.
“The apes,” she answered softly. “They’ll be back. In greater numbers next time. They’re the guardians of the wreck.”
The captain waited, staring at her. Not liking the deal. But knowing she was still our employer. I could see him thinking there are some deals you just don’t make. Shouldn’t make. Deals with the devil. And him thinking we’d made just that.
I didn’t think it. Didn’t need to. I knew it. Knew the kind of deal we’d made. Later I’d tell myself we had no choice. That we’d had to make the deal as the Ultras started their first pass. That we’d had no other real option.
But that’s a cop-out. You’ve always got choices. Some are just easier than others.
“I assume we’re using the cables to swing across,” said the captain. Allowing the bargain. Allowing the story of our tragedy to progress.
She nodded.
The Old Man turned to me. His eyes as hard as those nails in that cold coffin grave.
“Sergeant Orion, get a team across and secure a breach point.”
Chapter Forty-Two
The company worked mountaineering skills whenever we had a chance. We’d found combat climbing skills came in handy when you didn’t want to fight fair. And as a rule, our SOP was all about never actually fighting fair.
Fighting fair is for amateurs. Plus, we didn’t have the manpower, guns, and best tech to do so. Sometimes I was glad we didn’t. It made us work harder knowing we were lacking. If we’d had those things, maybe we would have gotten lazy. Then where would we have been?
The galaxy is filled with the graves of dead mercenaries who got lazy. But there are also graves for the pros who have to do it the hard way. I have to be honest about that because it’s best to. I’ve found that graveyards are sometimes the least discriminatory places you’ll ever go.
Death is the great equalizer. That’s for sure. Right, Orion? So get it on.
I slammed into the alien ship’s cold hull after following Punch and Jacks across on the first vines. Her voice was in my ear. In all of our comms. She was telling us what she knew. Why we were here. What was so important about this wreck. The whole show. The ticket to the ride if we were willing to buy it. And take it.
We’d established an entry point on the alien hull and selected vines that would take us roughly near that spot we’d selected, as she lectured us about exactly how weird the galaxy could get.
Now we were crawling down a couple of decks to reach what looked like some kind of docking port for small craft. The hull doors had been left open here. We opted for no access points in the damaged areas as the hull was too ragged. Getting cut up trying to go through hull breaches filled with jagged hull plating, possible live currents, and twenty other dangers was a great way to end up dead. Or wounded and useless. A drain on the little of which we had none to spare. Plus, the company had enough experience with breaching operations to know such maneuvers took time. Lots of time to do right. Explosives. Even in deep space. And time was a luxury we currently did not have. And an underground bottomless pit, clinging to an immense alien starship, seemed like a bad place to play with high-ex. The lack of forgiveness was stunning.
I crawled down toward the docking port, never minding the vertigo of the cyclopean dark tube the ship had created when it slammed itself in long ago.
“… the entire ship sacrificed itself to save the lifeboat,” continued the Monarch over our comm. This had ha
ppened at least ten thousand years ago. Long before Earth’s first moon landing.
Okay, I thought. So the engines are still lit ten thousand years later? Power?
I concentrated on not falling as I worked my way down the slick hull, looking for handholds where I could find them. Getting a weird feeling about all of this. Why was it weird? I didn’t know. Not then. But I put it down now because it was the first time I had begun to feel it. As I crawled across the hull trying to get to the breaching point two decks below where we’d landed.
Punch was silent as he worked along behind me. Choker was hyperventilating behind Punch. But that was just SOP for him.
“How do you know all this?” he asked, gasping and struggling with the vertigo of the fantastic cyclopean surroundings and what it did to small minds like ours.
“As a Monarch,” she answered across the ether of our comms, “I’ve had access to the science team and their reports. Most of that comes from up near the engines. In the hundred years since the teams first arrived at the colony and started working the wreck, we’ve only managed to make it through main engineering up near the surface and down into the mass tanks. And a few decks below that, which is nothing more than some sort of empty stores section that’s been held by the apes. That’s the best we’ve been able to do. Other teams have spelunked and tried breach points farther down the hull, but we’ve lost contact with them. We even sent in a combat cyborg extermination team. The best we’d ever developed. Omega Six models. Lost contact once inside the hull and never recovered them. Officially.”
“How come the ship is still burning?” asked Choker.
He thinks for us all, I muttered to myself as I slowly inched closer to the top of the cargo port. I was crawling down laterally at close to a fifteen-degree angle to reach the entry point. It felt like crawling down a cliff. If I let go now, I’d tumble and bounce off the hull for miles. I’d find the bottom eventually. But I’d be dead by then.
