The Future Is Closer Than You Think

by Zaslow Crane

  We waited all day, thinking there would be countermeasures, and when the sun was dipping in the West, we decided that tomorrow would be the day we went in.

  The vibrations seemed to more persistent and they kept me up most of the night…I can’t speak for anyone else, but I heard nearly everyone stirring or talking in my one, point five deci-hour watch shift.

  Anyway, the night passed uneventfully and with four of us, and a six deci-hour night, it wasn’t tough duty. The next day after eating some MREs, we resumed the protocol from two days earlier. Pulse armor, and Pope and Saint, on one side with sensors; Abbot and me, on the other with a laser and railgun. Now that the sides were partially opened up, we figured we could shoot anything that moved inside.

  The hours spent moving slowly were well spent, I guess. Nothing happened. We finally, all of us, went inside. It looked empty, with alien writing on the interior walls that glowed slightly, but nothing else.

  I took pics with a handheld, just for fun. They might be helpful as a memory device later, I told myself.

  Abbot and I searched one side, Pope and Saint, the other, eventually we met in the far corner and walked back.

  Pope searched and scanned.

  She was methodical. The three of us searched, and she scanned every freeq she could find, methodically and carefully. She was good.

  “Talented she is!” Abbot grinned.

  “Correct you are! Indeed!” She laughed.

  This time he did smile at someone hijacking his speech patterns.

  We all were feeling a bit better.

  Pope was diligent and thorough. Each scan came back negative; each time her grin went from tentatively happy to slightly more relieved and joyous.

  I couldn’t speak for anyone else at that time, but my breathing had quieted a bit, having not run into any traps. After a bit, we resigned ourselves to salvaging Terranium only. And walking back to camp we began planning how to take sections out to make the structure fall in a controlled manner, so we could cut it up completely.

  We’d relaxed considerably and I consider it my fault.

  Suddenly, there was a rushing or buzzing sound from behind us. Before I could put a threat to the noise, dozens – maybe hundreds of anti-personnel flechettes were launched from inside the structure at our retreating forms! The damned thing sent little spinning sharpened arrows seeking us. That was the buzzing. Hundreds of projectiles coming downrange at high speed! The projectiles caught us unawares; and each of us numerous times, in the back, the legs…One took off Saint’s left hand, and crippled Abbot, burying a flechette deep in his right leg. I caught two in my back, and one in the arm just below the shoulder.

  We hurried to cover around forty meters from the maw we’d created and licked our wounds.

  There were three of us. Abbot, me, Saint…all injured… Where’s Pope?

  I saw her just outside the structure with a projectile half-protruding from the side of her head, not moving. She lay there in the dirt.

  The pulse armor didn’t stop these things! It sent hundreds of Lo Tek weapons after us…Lo Tek that our armor wouldn’t protect against!

  I shook a bit.

  Her scans; my experience were worthless. The thing suckered us!

  The damnable thing was waiting to get us after we’d left! It was intelligent…sentient…waiting, and guarding…

  And I’d decided: It was evil…

  “Feck…”

  We hurried as best we could to our camp. Saint was ambulatory, as was I, but she looked like she was going to puke, or go into shock, or both soon. Abbot’s leg was useless until we splinted it. I supported one side.

  He might walk with an exo skeleton, if one o’ them is in the med kit…

  I pulled out all the flechettes. A worry was in the back of my mind…On Earth, they used to coat them with nastiness like carbamate and saxitoxin. I doubted that I had antidotes to that stuff in the med kit, much less whatever poisons an alien bio chemist might think up.

  Oh well, it is what it is. I sweated profusely, hoping that we all didn’t get very sick and die in the next few deci-mins.

  Working off the hope that we might live a lot longer than a few more heartbeats, first order of business was stopping Saint’s bleeding. I put a cap on her arm and cinched it. You always hope to never use the damn things, but if you need one, they’re life savers.

  Then, I gave her a stim. In a few deci-mins she was lookin’ less pale; less like she was gonna keel over on me. I may need all the help I can get soon.

  Abbot’s wound was persistent. The coag mixture I dug out of the med kit washed away twice. He was too excited and his heart was poundin’ like mad. I could see the fear in his face.

  Seen that look before…He may be mad but he understands this. My eye fell on my boot. And then, an idea hit me right between my eyes.

  There’s nothin’ t’lose. Why not?

  I ripped Abbot’s pant leg completely away. I flinched and he saw my face. Looked bad. Very bad…

  I dug out the tube of rogue beetle and squirted a bunch of it into my hand, then I just placed my hand over the wound and held it there.

  The blood stopped flowing almost immediately.

  He looked down at his leg, visibly calmer.

  “Amazing…that is…Blest!”

  If it sealed up a leather/skin boot from rips, why not skin torn open by an arrow?

  After he was calmed and no longer bleeding, I looked to my own wounds, applying the rogue beetle as I had on Abbot to my shoulder. It worked just as well. I also wondered if Abbot was bleeding internally. From the look of the bright bright red, I think they’d severed an artery.

  I flexed my injured shoulder.

  Nothing broken…just hurts like hell. That’ll be my reminder: Never take these bastards for granted!

  I gave Saint something to do, to keep her mind occupied: “Saint, would you rub this stuff on the wounds on my back?”

  She just nodded. I spread some in her good hand and she applied it as I had.

  We sat there looked around and nervous, but slowly calming and getting our bearings.

  I got up and took a quick walk to the edge of the driveway, just to see if Pope somehow was moving…Maybe she’d wave or call out.

  “Pope! Pope! Move, call out. Wave a hand…anything. I’ll… we’ll get you out.”

  Her body was still and quiet.

  Shite…

  I turned and re-entered our camp.

  The air smelled like burnt garlic. Burnt Garlic? I thought. It’d cost a year’s salary to burn that much garlic…Is it coming from the artifact? And the Roc is attracted to it…Of course…maybe. That’s why the Roc smells as it does!

  After I checked on both my wounded compatriots again, I fixed up some MREs. Everyone seemed to feel a bit better with a full belly.

  I thought about posting a guard, and discarded the idea. Maybe Abbot was up to it, but Saint needed rest. If I did it myself, I wouldn’t be ready for whatever we decided tomorrow. I lay awake for a while listening for noises of something approaching and trying to figure out how to get all three of us back to the boat. Before I knew it, the sun was creeping into my tent and I heard Abbot and Saint already awake and talking.

  “They had thought pattern sensors trained on us. That’s the only way it would have known that we had let our guard down; that we weren’t watching it,” Saint whispered.

  I lay there listening.

  “True that is, I believe…So disable the structure, we must, eh?”

  “I still have lots of pulse bombs…I say we bombard the thing…degrade its ability to fight us. Eventually, it will become inert.”

  “And then, the terranium.…”

  “For us…Yes. After all this, I’ll use some of my money to have them grow me a new hand.”

  I climbed out of my tent scratching and feeling like I’d been run over by one of our Corvini six-wheelers.

  “Saint, why not just leave the stump to remind you, and all of us how fucking greed
y and stupid we are?”

  They both looked at me as if I’d slapped them.

  “How is it, that revenge is not topmost in your mind?” Abbot was bewildered and angry.

  Saint sneered.

  “He lost the least. You can’t walk without the exo steel.”

  It was then I noticed him standing without any help. So there was an exo kit in the med unit…

  Saint continued building steam, getting really angry.

  “And I lost a hand…and a lover!”

  She turned to face me, fuming.

  “All you got was a few puncture wounds. I saw them up close. That’s nothing! You’ll heal in no time!”

  At that moment, I realized and thanked my gods, that there was no bio toxins on the flechettes. They were bad enough without embellishments.

  I looked from Abbot to Saint and back.

  “You’re kidding, right? We’re lucky to be alive. And I would like to stay that way. If you’re staying, I’ll just take the first gem, and you can consider me paid if full.”

  “You can’t leave.”

  “Abbot, this is even worse than Taranga, in terms of numbers lost and having no support possible!”

  Abbot was livid. He wasn’t listening; nor was Saint. He actually seemed to vibrate, he was so angry. He wanted blood. Not my blood; alien blood. I could see it in his eyes:“They have to pay!”

  “We can’t stay. The three of us might make it. But we need to leave now; now before any of us is injured; degraded further.”

  “Not goin’ yet. I can still hold a bomblet launcher.”

  Saint gritted her teeth.

  Abbot nodded sagely, suddenly eerily quiet.

  “Nor me…nor you. Agreed, you did when we started. Agreed, you did that my word was law. You will stay. Helping. Us. Kill. It.”

  “Come on. The thing, whatever it is, beat us. We’re still alive. After everything, isn’t that enough?”

  “After everything? After everything – all we lost?” Saint spit, “No…It’s not enough. Even if we melt down that entire mountain of terranium, it will never be enough.”

  Unhappily, I took all this in, sifting the facts for the true nuggets of worth:

  One: I didn’t like my chances of getting back alone.

  Two: I didn’t like my chances of turning my back on Saint and Abbot, either.

  Three: We have learned a lot. We won’t make those mistakes again.

  And Four: They used flechettes. Old tek. Very old tek. They might not be so different from us. They use the some of same sorts of technology as countermeasures. Maybe we might think like them and beat them at their own game…Maybe.

  I thought back to “nugget one” and “nugget two”…What choice did I have? I may as well put a smiley face on it, in case I get a chance to bug out, then they might not be watching me so hard… “Okay. I stay for a while. We see how this plays out. What’s the plan?”

  They relaxed a bit and we ate, planning the next assault. My head swam. The audacity; the stupidity; the…anger. The madness. He’s infected Saint now.

  Never go into battle angry, if you can help it. Anger makes you do dumb things; dumb things can get you killed. I thought that rather than saying it out loud. Nobody would have listened to me anyhow.

  Saint outfitted all of our fliers with bomblets. Abbot figured to snug them all up all along the upper reaches of the monument. We didn’t see anything on the floor, so Abbot’s thinking was that they hid everything up high.

  “So, hit them there, hard, we will!” We had just under a dozen, but each needed one-on-one control.

  Apparently the module that would have controlled any number of them existed, but waited for us on the boat.

  So we flew them into the structure in waves.

  The first wave slipped right in. And using the onboard cams, we found little structures here and there that clung to the ceiling, like Earther wasp’s nests or Mirren bees. I snugged my flier up to the one, and waited for the others to get ready. Of course we coordinated all three and detonated the charges.

  I’d swear that the vibrations I’d been feeling for almost a week…was it only a week? I felt those vibrations ramp down a bit…Then slowly they ramped up again.

  There was more of that garlic smell in the air; carried on an errant breeze.

  The fucking bird is nearby…

  I took the next flier in alone. We’d taken pics of the hives clutching the ceiling and I knew where I needed to go. I got about halfway there and a huge shower of flechettes came buzzing out of one of the holes we’d opened up. My flier was cut to pieces.

  No surprise there.

  We next went to the far side and input the hives we wanted to hit into guidance on our controllers. We crept up as close as we dared under the circumstances and went in, dodging and weaving, all the while making for the three targets. Once we each got there we didn’t hesitate: one-two-three explosions racketed off the inner walls and tumbled out into the forest. I heard a bunch of nearby birds leave in a hurry.

  We waited a little while and did the same thing from the other side: One-two-three more explosions.

  This time, the vibrations stopped altogether!

  We looked at each other wondering if we should hope to feel triumphant. Then we hurried back to camp. To plan.

  “There’s no way we get away with that three times, people,” I said. “We need to think of another line of attack. We hurt it this time. I know we did. We’ve just gotta press this damn thing home!”

  “Truth, I feel he is talking, though tired, I am. This exo- prosthetic is heavy and it takes a lot of work to make my leg move. Sit for a while, just for a short while, I must.”

  Saint was still up for blood, even if it was unlikely we’d ever actually see any of the designers’ blood…unless it was them living in the hives…?

  Everybody’s gotta be somewhere, right?

  I tried to calm her, and finally did by handing her an MRE and pointing to the sun.

  “Time enough for revenge; for treasure. Do you want to go in there in the dark? I don’t.”

  She sat down next to Abbot and began eating.

  I looked at my boots again. Even slathering the rogue beetle crap on them wasn’t keeping them from starting to really fall apart. I guess I started too late. They were worse now than yesterday.

  Not good.

  I peeled the presstape seal off another MRE and handed it to Abbot. He devoured it as if he’d not eaten in days.

  I opened mine…and I just wasn’t interested. I was hungry, but…I don’t know…I didn’t feel like eating. I know, I know… Tomorrow would be a strenuous day and I needed to eat to stay sharp, so we could beat these fuckers…But I just didn’t feel like eating. I ate a few mouthfuls and set it aside. I laid down to watch the stars.

  In a couple of deci-mins, when I sat back up, the tray was empty.

  I looked at it and thought: “Who cares?”

  We all slept sitting-up, with a weapon across our thighs.

  Nothing much happened though. I awoke clear-headed and ready; appreciative of the fact that nothing came in the night to eat us or bite us…or shoot us. Except, of course the bugs.

  The bugs are a given.

  The next morning was completely spent doing prep. We decided to cut the bottom of the artifact between holes one and two on the left of the door. We figured that if we did that, the artifact would become unsteady. If we were lucky enough to be able to cut another portion off – like between the door and the hole we cut in the right side – we might make it really unsteady. It might fall over; if it fell over it might make it unable to send any more flechettes downrange.

  I could think of a few flaws in this plan, but since Abbot and Saint were still in murder mode, and since I figured that we could do all this from the relative safety of the end of the driveway, we’d be okay.

  They figured to use three big guns: Two Laser cannons and one railgun, two mounted on tripods. I wanted to hold mine and not be locked in to a site a
nd style. Tripods are great. You can be accurate; you can be steady, but at what price? You become a stationary emplacement to be knocked out. Right? Of course. Any military person knows that.

  The plan was to concentrate on the leg between holes one and two, to see if we could elicit a panicked response from the monument.

  In which case, we were ready: Field sensors, bombs, bomblets, proximity sensors with built-in triggers. We even set up a shear wall of upshooting lasers we’d hoped would protect our position. We’d rigged them to fire if we discovered any incoming projectiles.

  The first phase started out by the numbers: We set up and began wave-cutting with the lasers at the portion of the support we decided upon. Abbot stood ready with the railgun. He was well off to the left, behind an embankment. His tripod peeked over the top. I looked over at him. I could easily see that he was itching to shoot something.

  I knew the feeling.

  Abbot’s good leg was bent and the other was splayed out to his side, because it didn’t unbend easily, and, if we had to move quickly, he might have gotten caught by the folded leg not opening up fast enough to run.

  Saint was behind another dirt mound with a laser cannon. She also had a bomb launcher and a cache of bombs and bomblets ready to go. She was toward the middle of the driveway but behind a tall berm. – Safe from fire.

  I was opposite Abbot, in a dense stand of trees, ready to fire upon the support with my mostly used up laser cannon on Abbot’s signal. I didn’t know how long my battery would hold up. It had already had a lot of use.

  We were tense. Ready. I couldn’t speak for them but my trigger finger wanted to close with the actuator button and begin raining some retribution upon this…thing.

  We’d cut away another huge section in the support when I heard, then felt, a shockwave bursting through the place, and tossing us around as though we were leaves before an autumn storm!

  The uncomfortable buzzing picked up again in earnest. It was annoying in that it was almost within my hearing. I hated it; I hated them. It intensified. I picked myself up off the ground, feeling bruises and scrapes that would become more pressing and insistent later, when I wasn’t stressed.

  “Shockwave!” I shouted. “Ultrasonic…” Abbot shouted back. Saint was in the middle and she just hunkered down trying to keep on living.