by B. V. Larson
When we broke through to the innermost chambers, I found Anne Grant personally. She was a bio who I’d had an affair with on my last campaign. She was slumped over her revival unit, trying to protect it with her body as a woman might defend a helpless child.
Her back was a patchwork of burn-holes. Acids had penetrated her smart-cloth uniform and sizzled into her flesh. Her fair skin was still smoking in places.
“Dammit,” I said, prying her clutching fingers from the maw of the revival machine and placing her gently on the floor. As I closed her eyes with my fingers, someone eagerly clanked past me to inspect the machine.
“I think this one is okay,” Carlos said, tapping at the console.
The revival machines were semi-biological, as I said, but they had an electronic data interface grafted on, so humans could work with them.
Carlos breathed hard as he checked the diagnostic data.
“I’ve got yellow bars on the fluid levels,” he said. “We’ll have to fix that. And the free-floating nucleotides are all bound up. We’ll have to dump this batch and do a full reset—but Vet, I think we’re in business.”
I glanced up at him. I was still kneeling over Anne.
“Don’t worry about her, man,” he said. “Didn’t you hear me? She’s coming back. I’ll bring her back first, if that’s what you want.”
Heaving a sigh, I shook my head. “Let her rest for a bit. She had a bad death, I can tell. Get some other bio out to run this contraption.”
“You’ve got it. You feel like helping me?”
“No,” I said, and I strode out of the chamber.
I’d personally operated the revival machines in the past, when I’d had to, but I wasn’t like bio people. They practically worshiped these alien contrivances. I didn’t even like them. They were disgusting and, if the truth be told, a little frightening. I’d always eyed them the way soldiers had eyed a surgeon’s tools throughout time. Bone-saws and sharp scoops designed to remove flesh purposefully—these things were instruments of the Devil in my opinion. And the revival machines were the worst of the lot.
That said, the alien machines had also come to mean life itself to every legionnaire. We guarded them more closely than we guarded our own lives because they effectively made us immortal.
I left Carlos behind because I knew what he was going to do. The dead would be used to reprocess into the living. We recycled our own corpses to form fresh ones in the guts of our wondrous, horrific machines. Like I said, they were disgusting…and a little creepy.
I didn’t want to watch Carlos feed my former girlfriend into the blades to regrow her again. I’d seen enough of that kind of thing. Compared to the work of the bio people, our combat missions were nice and clean. All we did was kill people—we didn’t grind them up and process them like raw sausage.
Graves caught up with me outside the chamber. He had a glimmer of a smile on his face. That was a rare thing for him.
“McGill,” he said, “you did a good job back there at the hatch. I knew you could take out that nest of aliens.”
“Thank you, Centurion.”
“I just reported in to Winslade. We’re the first unit to make it this far in, but more support from the cohort is on the way. The other cohorts are patrolling the rim, the engine room and Gold Deck. There were numerous breaches, but none so critical as ours. Winslade is very happy.”
I thought about that and nodded. I knew what Winslade was probably doing right now. If I had to guess, I’d say he was on the net chatting with Turov, taking personal credit for our hard-fought victory.
Graves watched me and chuckled. I could tell he knew what I was thinking.
“You’re thinking about Winslade, aren’t you?”
“Yes sir,” I admitted.
“It’s almost sad to watch you grow up, boy,” he said. “You’re not the wide-eyed country bumpkin you used to be.”
“This can’t just be a social call,” I said, eying him back. “Your orders, sir?”
“You’re right again, McGill. I’m here to ask for a little more of your magic. I want you to cheat.”
Blinking, I shook my head. “How’s that, sir?”
“Bump my troops up in the revival queues. We took this deck back solo, and we saved Winslade’s and Turov’s bacon whether they want to admit it or not. I say our people should breathe again first. To hell with the automated queues and priority systems.”
I nodded. “I’ll try, sir.”
“Just do it. I know you’ve hacked the machines before—among other things.”
He left me then, and I stared after him. Just how much about my unsanctioned editing of official equipment did he know about?
Shrugging, I walked into each of the revival chambers one at a time and fiddled with the controls. Carlos and the other bio people that were filtering in from other units squawked at me, but I ignored them. I had orders from Centurion Graves, and I informed them they could take up the matter with him.
They grumbled, but no one went out to find Graves and complain. They knew better than to try.
-14-
Several hours later I sat in a lifter, riding down toward the planet. The final stages of our approach to the target world had gone smoothly. There’d been no further attacks from space—but few of us thought this battle was over.
We watched as the shells reached the target world long before our invasion forces did. Turov made sure to funnel the video of the strike to everyone’s tapper. I had to admit, it was a morale-booster.
The combined explosions of a full broadside were always a shocking spectacle. Each warhead packed a multi-megaton wallop. At first, all you saw was a brilliant flash of light, as if a new sun had somehow ignited itself on the surface of the planet. Then the light kept growing in pulsing waves as more warheads detonated. Finally, the light dimmed and turned orange while shockwaves spread like brilliant raindrops splattering into a puddle. Then, even the shockwaves vanished, consumed in a looming cloud. To me, the cloud didn’t look like a mushroom. It looked more like a bulbous gray growth from out in space.
“The broadsides have done their work,” Turov announced confidently. She’d begun broadcasting again after the invaders were pressed back, and we’d buckled up for the final approach.
Sitting in a lifter and craning my neck back to see the imperator displayed on the ceiling, I marveled at the woman’s gall. The alien boarding effort had almost been successful, but she made it sound like a glorious victory.
“The identified base on the enemy world has been obliterated,” she said with pride in her voice. “They attempted to board but were repelled with contemptuous ease. The attack was an utter failure. By the time Winslade’s cohort reaches the ground, we will have revived every lost soldier.”
Carlos rapped on my breastplate with his gauntlet. “Hey look,” he said, “the new guy puked.”
I glanced down, and I saw it was true.
“Lau? Pull it together, trooper,” I chided.
Lau looked sheepish and nodded. I frowned back at him. Last year on Machine World, he’d been in a light unit. Maybe they’d promoted him to the rank of regular and put him in my heavy unit too early.
“Too bad they didn’t project Turov’s face down on the deck,” Carlos remarked. “Lau’s puke would have nailed her.”
I had to chuckle at that. Carlos was often irritating, but every once in a while he was funny too. It almost made it worth having him around.
“All of you shut up and listen to Imperator Turov,” I ordered my squad without conviction.
Dutifully, they all gazed back up at the ceiling again, where the imperator was still droning on.
“We’ll take what’s left of this planet for the Empire,” she said. “The result is inevitable. To help speed the effort, our techs have made a full study of these aliens. It has been determined that the invaders were a form of biological construct. They aren’t very intelligent, but they’re still dangerous when they get in close. My advice to the infantry is to keep them at
range. Such creatures will not stand a chance against a large formation of our troops employing focused fire.”
I had to admit, she had a point there. It was one thing to get surprised by a grabby alien in a storage closet. But when you put armies up against one another in the open—well, ranged weaponry always won out because you could put all your fire onto a single point and break an enemy before he could get close.
“The results of the upcoming conflict are a forgone conclusion,” Turov continued. “We don’t know who made these plant-creatures and sent them at us, but it doesn’t really matter. In the end, they will fall to our legions. After that, things will get even worse for them. They’ll be utterly destroyed by the Imperial fleets that will follow. Our part will be done by then. We’ll have added another conquest to the Empire’s infinitely long list of victories. These creatures may not yet understand why we’re here or how futile their efforts to resist us truly are, but they will learn! The Empire will not be denied. Justice must…”
She went on like that for a long time. I fuzzed out pretty quickly, as I always did when someone made a speech.
When the lifter lurched and began to shake a few minutes later, indicating we’d touched the top of the troposphere, I was relieved. Surely, Turov had to stop pep-speeching us now.
“As a final gift,” she was saying, “I want to leave the brave soldiers of Primus Winslade’s cohort with this glorious thought—”
“Ah jeez,” I whispered. The woman was still going.
But at that precise moment she stopped talking. She turned her head, frowning off-camera.
“Just a moment,” she said. “There’s a disturbance—what’s that?”
Someone talked to her, but we couldn’t see who. After a few seconds, she turned back toward the camera, sourly.
“There appears to be a little life left in the alien constructs that violated this ship’s integrity earlier. Do not worry about us. Stay focused on your mission. The other half of your cohort is now being launched from orbit in pods. We’re watching this two-pronged attack closely. If the lifter touches down without incident, it will be designated the best approach to a full-fledged invasion. If, on the other hand, the pods make it down and the lifter doesn’t, theirs will be the preferred method of insertion into—”
She broke off, jumped a little, and glared off-camera. Carlos and I exchanged quizzical glances. What the hell was going on now? More green pods from space? We’d figured the alien invaders were wiped out.
“I’m sorry,” Imperator Turov said, returning to her audience. “Tribune Drusus is now telling me that we have confirmed invaders in the engine section. Apparently, they’ve been burning their way through the thicker hull and radiation shielding since their initial attack. The shielding was so thick it took many hours to melt the hull and achieve access. They’re tenacious beasts, I have to give them that. But have no concern! They will be defeated, just as they were on the prior occasion. I have no doubt—”
Again, Turov paused and looked around. The camera tilted a little then righted itself. Turov had been jostled, there was no other explanation.
For some reason, I felt a trickle of sweat in my armpits. I wasn’t even on Minotaur, but this didn’t look good.
“When they hit us before,” Carlos said, “the whole ship never shook once.”
“I know.”
“I bet I know what’s going on,” Natasha said, leaning in close from my other side. She was a tech specialist I knew well, possibly the best friend I’d ever had.
“Talk to us,” Carlos said.
Natasha began to explain, and I considered stopping her. Sometimes, grim news was bad for morale, but I didn’t because I wanted to know the truth myself.
Natasha, being a tech and one of the best, always seemed to know what the hell was really going on before I did. Techs communicated privately, and even if she didn’t get the best information from her buddies, she was good at divining the truth from observable phenomena and using her logical mind.
“The invaders might have breached the core directly,” she explained. “Think about it, they’ve probably been melting their way down into the engine all this time—for hours. What happens next all depends on where they broke through. Some might be coming out in the engine room, causing a lot of damage, killing engineers. In that case, they could be defeated and repelled just as they were before. But, if they came out right inside the reactor itself…”
“What?” Carlos demanded. “What then?”
Natasha shook her head. “They could rupture the cooling jacket. They could release the heat and radiation from the core. There could be an explosion—which would disrupt the entire ship.”
My eyes flicked back up to the ceiling, but Turov had vanished. The signal had gone dark.
“Hmm,” I said, running my eyes over the metal roof of the deck. “Did she say anything before shutting off the transmission?”
“You weren’t listening, were you?” Carlos said with a dirty laugh. “She said she would reconnect when we landed. She was going to personally oversee the defeat of this second boarding attempt.”
I looked to Natasha, who nodded in confirmation.
“Unit, this is Graves,” said a gravelly voice I knew too well. “We’ll soon lose contact with Minotaur. We’re in the upper atmosphere now, and we’re in for some turbulence until we reach lower altitudes. When we reach the ground, I’m sure we’ll hear the rest of the imperator’s glorious speech.”
A few dared to groan.
“Hey,” I said to Natasha. “Do you have one of your bugs planted upstairs?”
She’d been watching her tapper. She looked at me and nodded. She piped her feed over to me, and Carlos craned his neck to watch.
Natasha was a bundle of technological surprises. One thing she liked to do was release a buzzer, a tiny spy-drone, into the air of any ship we were flying in. By directing it to a portal, in this case one in the upper decks which were reserved for crewmen and officers, she was able to get an external view of space.
I watched the transmission with interest. The mysterious overgrown planet loomed, filling the image with its purplish-green vegetation and fluffy white clouds. As I watched, the steamy atmosphere of the target world consumed us.
“Turn it back into space,” I said, “get a shot of Minotaur.”
Natasha worked her controls, and the camera angle shifted. By sending the buzzer crawling up the glass, she was able to get a clear image between two droplets of condensation.
“There,” she said to me. “I’ve zoomed in as far as I can. A buzzer’s cameras aren’t really designed for long-distance shots.”
I saw a silvery-white tube surrounded by the blackness of space.
“Is that Minotaur?”
“I sure hope so,” she said. “If it’s not, we have more company in this system than we thought.”
“The ship is venting something,” Carlos said. “You see that?”
Squinting, I could barely make out what he was talking about—then I saw it clearly for a moment. A plume of gas was jetting from the aft modules.
“Doesn’t look like much,” I commented.
Natasha chewed her lower lip and stared. “At this scale, that plume is better than a kilometer long—it’s almost as long as the ship itself.”
I looked at her in alarm. “That sounds pretty bad. We have to tell Graves.”
“What the hell for?” Carlos demanded. “All that will do is get the buzzer swatted—or us. Get away from me, McGill. I never saw anything.”
He scooted as far from me as possible and stared in the opposite direction. Natasha continued to watch the grainy image on her tapper until it was shrouded by the gray clouds that had begun surrounding our lifter as it descended. We were bouncing around now, deep in the troposphere.
Ignoring them both, I contacted Graves. I felt I might have information that could affect his command decisions. Commanders needed input to make the right decisions.
“This had bett
er be good, McGill,” Graves answered.
“Sorry sir, I have to report something. Minotaur appears to be venting from her aft modules. I believe her engines have been damaged.”
“How the hell—are you hacking into command chat again?”
“No, sir.”
“Well then, shut up. We know about it. Brace yourselves, we’re trying to find a break in the megaflora, and when we do, we’ll slip down into the lower ecosystem of this planet. Be prepared for anything. Graves out.”
The channel closed. I turned to Natasha, who looked scared.
“They know about it,” I told her. “The officers are in contact with Minotaur, and they’re doing what they can.”
She nodded and looked at the floor.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I’m scared, that’s what.”
“We’ve faced death before. Don’t let it get you down.”
She looked at me for a second then she leaned close. “James,” she said in a low voice, “I don’t think there are any revival units aboard this lifter.”
“Why wouldn’t they bring at least one?” I asked in alarm.
“Think about it: Why would the brass send something so valuable down with a ship that they half-expect will blow up during the descent?”
I blinked then frowned. The more I thought about it, the more worried I became.
The trouble was she could be right. They normally sent lifters on landings with a revival machine to support the cohort. But this mission had been deemed a dangerous experiment. If they lost a lifter and a cohort—well, that was one thing. But a revival unit? The brass didn’t like to lose those. Not at all.
And that meant…
“We can’t recover,” I said aloud.
Natasha looked back at me. Her face had reddened as if she was holding back tears. Natasha was probably the smartest person in the unit, but she wasn’t the toughest.
I extended my hand toward hers, and she clasped it.
“You’ve got it now,” she said in a hushed tone. “If we lose Minotaur, they can’t revive us. And we can’t revive them. We’ll be stuck down there on the surface, assuming we survive this landing, with only one life left to live.”
