Galactic Arena Box Set

by Dan Davis

  Two of the legs were in fact tentacles, or arms, with long, thin blades along the inner part that they used for close quarters slicing. Two more tentacles were armed with spikes that injected highly concentrated alkaline chemicals that burned and poisoned humans. The final pair of unique arms were prehensile and grasping which they used for operating their weapons and other equipment. All could be used for locomotion if necessary. With their bulbous thorax on top, they looked to be top-heavy and faintly ridiculous. It was theorized that the species had evolved in a waterlogged, swamp-like environment of some kind but they seemed to get around perfectly well on dry land, too.

  They were also deadly and no human on record had survived a hand-to-hand combat with a hex.

  “Four hex at the ship,” Stirling said, his voice a whisper but loud inside Ram’s head. “Shall we engage, sir?”

  “No,” Ram said, hoping it was the right call. “Hold.”

  Red’s voice came through in response. “We must destroy the Great Enemy before they find us,” he said, his artificially produced voice lacking in nuance. Ram was not sure if Red was afraid or angry.

  “Hold your position or I’ll destroy you,” Ram muttered. “Stay off comms.”

  Their communications technology encrypted the content of their conversations and Ram had been assured the enemy would find it difficult to detect the low power, short-range signals and would be entirely unable to pinpoint their location if they did. But Ram found it hard to believe and so he preferred they speak as little as possible.

  Ram watched as the aliens examined the burning vehicle and peered into the furnace that was the interior. The Hex seemed to look around, each clutching their weapons low in their two grasping arms before advancing to the edge of the trees.

  Do you have anything like trees on your homeworld, you bastards? Ram thought. Or is it all swamps and weeds and mud?

  Ram stayed still but he clutched his rifle close and felt his massive heart thumping in his chest, certain that he would have to fight his way out. One of the aliens glided forward, its long tentacles undulating beneath it.

  “I have a clear shot,” Flores said.

  “Hold,” Ram hissed. “Stay off comms.”

  “What’s that?” Stirling muttered. “By the ship.” He put a marker on the target on the AugHud and the tiny icon pinged in Ram’s vision but the target itself was hidden behind a trunk.

  “Don’t have a visual,” Ram whispered. “What is the—” The target moved into view and Ram broke off in stunned silence. “Is that… a human?”

  Behind the Hex, tiny in comparison, a human stood looking up at the ship. He wore long white robes with a circular black emblem on the front. On his head he wore a white headdress flowing down past his shoulders. He looked almost like a Catholic priest or an Arab in traditional dress but whatever he was wearing it looked utterly out of place in the cold darkness of a North American night surrounded by giant, freakish aliens. But Ram suspected he knew who the man was. At least, what he was.

  A collaborator.

  His team had been briefed aboard the Hereward regarding the Hex’s conquest of Earth. Ram had listened in horror to the computer relaying the battles in orbit and on the surface as the aliens overran the military forces of every country. Millions had been killed in the fighting but it seemed as though the Hex were not interested in wiping humans out. They were content to let hundreds of millions starve in the chaos but they did not want the human species to disappear. Far from it, by all accounts.

  UNOP was convinced the Hex wanted converts.

  Once the conquests had been completed, the Hex began abducting humans in their thousands. At first, no doubt it was purely a matter of scientific study and most abductees were subjected to horrific mutilations as the Hex scientists took people apart to see how they worked. A few resistance fighters attempted rescues but these were largely in vain and all that got out permanently was information. Soon, the Hex investigations developed into attempts at communication with the abductees so they could master the various languages of humanity and also to understand the diverse cultures across the planet. And according to the reports sent off Earth, the Hex had used this knowledge to win humans over to their side through indoctrination.

  “The simplest way to think of it,” Lt. Commander Xenakis had said over dinner in the mess just three days before, “is forced conversions. Or reeducation camps.”

  “What, like a Hex religion?” Ram said, his mouth full of tofu pieces.

  “Some might say that but who knows how the Hex think? They don’t even have brains like us, how can we hope to understand what religion is like for them? But sure, it’s like they don’t just want our people to betray humanity, they want us to think as they do.”

  Private Cooper spoke from down the bench without looking up from his meal. “They worship the Orbs.”

  Kat pointed at him. “We don’t know that.”

  “Sure we do,” Cooper said, looking up and chewing slowly. “Red told me. The Wheelhunter rebels told UNOP all about it. I know you don’t believe them but we’ve got no reason to doubt it’s the truth. The Hex worship the Orb stations, they have been trying to conquer the Wheelhunters for decades and they’ve indoctrinated them too and now they want us to worship the Orbs, too. That’s what their religion is. And that’s what the human traitors worship. The Orb Builders are their gods.”

  “It might not have a spiritual component,” Kat said, shrugging. “It might just be political, you know? Cultural. We don’t really understand it yet. What’s the difference, anyway? It’s all the same bullshit.”

  “But there are traitors on Earth?” Ram said. “Collaborators, I mean. Humans who work for the Hex? What do we do if we meet one?”

  “I know what I’m going to do,” Cooper said, pointing his fork like a rifle and sighting down it. “Pop every traitor bastard I see.”

  Crouching behind the tree in the darkness, Ram glanced at Cooper and hoped he would hold his fire.

  “Be ready,” Ram whispered. “Wait for my order.”

  The robed figure called out to the Hex soldiers who stopped and returned to his side like four gigantic, skeletal squids, surrounding him and seeming to look down. He spoke rapidly to them and then strode away, back to his aircraft. The Hex appeared to turn back to the woods, as if they were looking into the darkness and their stalk-like legs jittered and moved them forward a few meters.

  “This is it,” Stirling muttered.

  Ram placed his finger on the fire button.

  Although there was as yet no set doctrine for engagement with the Hex, Ram’s team’s briefing had suggested that shooting the legs would bring them down and immobilize them. Other battlefield reports they had been provided with said that the Hex combat suits protected the legs against most ballistic and laser weapons and even with ten wounded legs they could still advance rapidly and kill the humans firing on them. On the other hand, the armor protecting their spherical thorax was also resistant to damage, so the best method of engagement was as yet known.

  I guess we’ll find out, Ram thought, sighting on the center of the thorax.

  But the Hex stopped, then drifted away and followed the human collaborator toward their ship.

  “Are they leaving?” Stirling muttered. “They can’t be leaving.”

  “Should we attack, sir?” Flores asked.

  “We cannot allow them to leave, Lieutenant Seti,” Red said. “We must destroy them now, while we have the chance. Their aircraft are quite powerful in the air.”

  Ram considered it. The idea was appealing. They might have the advantage in firepower and numbers for the moment. On the other hand, the aliens might rush through the fire, as they were prone to doing when outgunned and the hex soldiers were tall and strong and deadly at close range. But so was Ram and to a lesser extent Stirling.

  Despite all the unknowns, with the amount of firepower in his team’s hands they could perhaps bring down the hex soldiers in a few seconds. And the human collaborator
would be no trouble.

  Against the idea was that Ram did not have all the facts. How many more hex were on the craft? What weapons did that craft have? Was it armed with the weapon that had brought down their dropship? Could his team’s weapons damage the hex craft? They had grenade launchers, AP ammunition, and other options that could deliver enormous destruction.

  “Sir?” Fury said. “Going to lose the shot.”

  Even with so much unknown, Ram wanted to try it. He wanted to kill at least a few of the aliens who had invaded Earth and they were right there while he had his finger on the fire button. At his word, his team would unleash hell on them.

  But the mission was all important.

  Attacking and destroying the enemy might help him complete his mission but if they got away, he had exposed his team and the Hex leadership, wherever they were, would know precisely what they were looking for. As it stood, all they would know now was that a human aircraft was shot down and destroyed by fire. There was a chance the Hex and the collaborator believed any occupants had died in the crash. It was quite possible they did not know their vehicle had come from orbit at all and instead believed it to be a local aircraft.

  All in all, the risks outweighed the rewards.

  “Hold fire and hold position,” Ram said. “We’re on a tight clock and we’re already behind schedule.”

  As he spoke, the Hex aircraft powered up and rose into the darkness, engines whirring. It rotated and headed northeast, away from the mission objective. Watching it go, they collectively sighed in relief.

  But Stirling was not happy.

  “Might be a trick,” he said, watching the distant blue lights disappear beyond the treetop horizon. “Waiting for us to move so they can follow us. Remember the exobiology briefings? The Hex see movement.”

  “We all see movement,” Ram said. “Come on, we have somewhere to be.”

  3.

  “We are sixty-eight klicks straight from the objective and we’ll need to cover more than that to yomp around these lakes and that gorge,” Stirling said.

  “And we’ll need to add a few doglegs along our route in case we are being tracked,” Ram said, speaking to the whole team. “Where possible, we’ll keep beneath the tree cover.”

  Cooper snorted and muttered. “Like the Hex can’t sense us through the trees.”

  “They couldn’t see us just now,” Ram replied. “And we really don’t know what their sensor capability is, do we? In space, it’s no better than ours and it may be worse. Anyway, between us and the objective it’s mostly tree cover anyway so we’ll just be mindful to avoid clearings and lake shores, okay?” His team replied in the affirmative. “Alright, Flores, you take point. We’ll all keep to twenty-meter spacing.”

  “Twenty?” Flores said.

  “Ah,” Stirling cut in. “Further than standard, sir?”

  “The most common Hex trooper propelled grenade has a twenty-meter blast radius, isn’t that right, Fury?”

  “Mmm,” she said. “About right, sir.”

  Cooper snorted. “But it’s about providing effective support to your teammates in an enemy contact, Rama, not surviving—”

  “Hey,” Stirling snapped. “You call your Lieutenant sir.”

  Cooper hesitated but only for a moment. “Of course. Sorry, sir.”

  “It would make sense, sir,” Red said, his massive, strange wheel-like body lurking at a distance with his twin weapons pointing up. “If we committed to destroying every enemy that we see on sight. The Great Enemy does not—”

  It was obvious that his team did not yet fully respect him or his command, despite rank, prior achievements, and the brief two weeks of preparation for the mission. But that was to be expected. As long as none of them did anything outright insubordinate, he could avoid butting heads. He hoped Stirling could do that for him.

  “Listen, everybody,” Ram said. “Our objective is to gain entry to Outpost Omega, retrieve the weapon, and carry it to the launch site. One of us needs to trigger the intercept programs on the computer but that is all. Our individual survival is not necessarily important. If one of us is hit, wounded, or cannot continue for some reason, we will do what we can but the mission comes first. All of us understand that, don’t we?” They said that they did and Ram continued. “If we come into contact with the enemy, we will not engage unless we have to. As much as we want to kill them, we’re not here for revenge against the Hex and not even the collaborators. All that matters now is reaching the objective and getting the weapon to the launch site and then to rendezvous with the Hereward. Now, Cooper? Leave a drone here to keep watch on the crash site in case they return. Leave another every ten klicks on our route, do you have enough for that? Alright, Flores, lead the way. Twenty-meter spacing.”

  “Twenty-meters, yes, sir.”

  They marched through the trees in the darkness, the world seemingly illuminated and enhanced by the sensors of his armor and the augmentations to his physiology.

  I am on Earth.

  It was a strange thought. And it was strange that it should be so strange. But Ram had not been on his home planet for a long time, both subjectively and objectively. Even when he had been, Ram had not left his home for years. Only in his childhood was it that he had traveled through the teeming streets of Mumbai along with millions of other residents through the dust, the stench, and the choking pollution of the foul air.

  A handful of times, he had vacationed outside the city with his mother and father. Often, his father had delighted in pointing out the buildings that had been originally built by the British, much to Ram’s irritation and his mother’s great embarrassment. But Rama had never much enjoyed being out, away from home. Already in his childhood he was massive, taller than most adults, including his father, and growing increasingly obese. He told himself that seeing people’s contempt and revulsion never bothered him but the truth was he hated them for noticing and he hated himself for being the object of their derision. Being outside could be all very well but it was nothing like being at home or being in Avar.

  In Avar, Ram had traveled the world. Not just across the world but back in time, to Neolithic Harappa in the Indus Valley and to the Janapadas of the Vedic Period in Northern India, and to the mountains and forests of the shogunate of the Edo Period and the vast plains of the steppe where he had witnessed and taken part in the chariot conquests of the Andronovo. All virtual worlds, of course, created by Avarcheologists and other experts but it was real enough when experienced through Avar. And during his career with Rubicon, his cooperative, he had fought battles in Europe and the Middle East and North America. It wasn’t real, any of it, but Ram felt like he had been all over the world.

  And now I’m here for real.

  But was it any more real than Avar? He was completely separated from the environment in a hermetically sealed suit of combat armor so all his senses were coming to him second hand, through the sensors and tactile feedback systems. Even more, he was in a cloned body inside that suit, his mind downloaded into the brain after his previous, original head had been destroyed in the orb combat. If anything, the sensations provided by the Avar had seemed more real than experiencing it all through the armor.

  The forest was dense. Some of the trees had great thick trunks and many more were narrow and yet most were still incredibly tall and the tops were lost in the darkness of the broken canopy above. He knew it was bitterly cold, with the coming winter’s snow well overdue, but he was warm and he was dry and removed from the world. It was almost as if nothing was real, as if he was back in his Avar chair and running a simulation of real life. A horrific thought rushed through him, making him doubt for a moment that what he was experiencing was really happening but he quickly shook himself from that notion. Many a heavy Avar user had lost their mind by starting to doubt their reality. It had never been an issue for Rama and he wasn’t about to start doing so in the middle of a mission.

  “Do you really think those Hex gave up looking for us?” Stirling as
ked on their private command band.

  “Unlikely. But then we don’t know how they think, let alone understand their doctrine. Their military operations during the conquest were inconsistent, sometimes carrying out massive aerial bombardments, other times sending in waves of ground troops to get chewed up by our guys.”

  “Different commanders with different approaches.”

  “That’s one hypothesis. Another is they were testing to see what was most effective, but the tactics never coalesced into a consistent approach. And after the world’s militaries were smashed, the Hex have sat back, fortified certain areas and left humanity to collapse all on its own.”

  Stirling growled. “It’s like they don’t really care.”

  “Maybe. Like I said, we just don’t understand how they think. They’re truly alien. Maybe we can never understand them.”

  “Well,” Stirling sighed, “the biggest brains in UNOP are working on it in the outer system. If anyone can ever figure it out, it’s those lads.”

  “Doesn’t help us much now, does it,” Ram said.

  Stirling’s smile could be heard in his reply. “So, you’re saying you have no idea if the Hex and their pet traitor is looking for us, sir?”

  “Whether it’s them or another unit or the entire bloody species, we knew we were at risk of being discovered before we could complete the mission. All we can do is carry on.”

  “Aye, you’re right enough there, sir.”

  The sunrise seemed to take an age, with the sky lightening behind them gradually as they stomped through the endless woodland, turning at irregular intervals so that they approached their objective almost like a sailing ship tacking back and forth obliquely against the wind toward a port. Color came into the world, first blues and purples filling the gray of predawn, turning to greens and browns in a dozen hues while the sky clouded over into a low blanket of swirling cloud the color of graphite. Wisps of snow whipped through the air as the cold front swept over them and Ram’s suit whirred to keep him warm in his protective armor.