Claire and Jill were already at the same gate we had charged through to take the facility in the first place, each manning one of the thin gun slits in the thick walls. Claire had exchanged her whip for a multi-barreled autocannon (appropriately named the Screaming Bitch, considering who was wielding it) while Jill had her psionic bow at the ready, a telekinetic arrow thrumming on the bowstring.
“Sitrep, Marines,” I called out as I took my own firing post at the gun port mounted in the gate itself. “Just how many bugs are we going to get to add to our kill counts today?”
“Somewhere between ‘endless legions’ and ‘all of them,’ Mark,” Jill frowned, eyeing me sidelong as I got a look myself. “Fliers, stingers, elites, the whole assortment of a Marine’s worst nightmare, they are all there, but so far they are simply massing at the top of the dune.”
Mina was naturally listening in and added, “She’s right, and I can only think of one logical reason why.”
“Now that the bugs are always logical,” I grunted, “but yeah. Whatever tech goodies Rayne is mucking with are something they can’t do without.”
Taking a look through the narrow, shielded slit, I could back up that the girls’ observations were dead-on. It made the largest bug offensives I’d seen in the past look like a trip to kiddie day-care. Surprisingly organized phalanxes of elite bugs surrounded tight formations of stinger artillery, with an air guard of fliers that only looked small in comparison to the overwhelming ground force arrayed against us. Pop-ups filled my HUD, trying to track the location, movement, and bounty rewards for each and every bug, and for a moment, I thought Annabelle was going to crash from all the garbage filling my display.
“Knock off the nameplates and all that bull, Annabelle,” I ordered as I tried to pick out where the center of command was in this horde. For the bugs to act in this fashion, utilizing tactics beyond overwhelming force and numbers, there had to be some higher-up, maybe even our bitch queen Anya herself, and our only hope now lay with outfoxing whoever was in charge.
“Thank you, Lieutenant Ryder.” Annabelle’s electronic voice almost slurred from the overwhelming processing power of producing all those Alliance pop-ups and it sped right back up the moment they all disappeared off my HUD. “If I can judge your eye movements, then may I assume you are searching for some central leadership?”
“You know me well,” I grinned. “Got anything to help with that?”
“Nothing so specific, sir, but I can pinpoint the most heavily protected area of the enemy forces. Logic would dictate that any Acburian dignitaries would be there.”
I was about to give her an affirmative when Mina sighed audibly over the channel.
“What is it with you and women, Mark?” she half-laughed, a tired, almost put-upon sound. “They always come running when you show up on a planet, don’t they?”
Jill, Claire, and I all turned to look out across the sea of death that lay before us, not that I didn’t already know what I would see based on Mina’s jab. True enough to my thoughts, hovering above her army, imperiously reclining in the arms of four fliers that held the bitch like she was in a throne, was Anya, the very queen we had put into power on Turan, the one Acburian who held all the cards here. She looked as I remembered her, a bizarrely attractive blend of human woman and disgusting bug monster, a crown of pure Ellebruim on her brow. Her multifaceted eyes, barely visible at the range she was at, seemed to immediately focus on me, meeting my own gaze through the thin slit.
“I told you,” she said, her telepathic voice bouncing right into my skull as she’d done before. “I told you that if you ever came back here again, we wouldn’t be friends.” I could only imagine the grimace on her face as she continued. “Guess what, Mark Ryder? We are not friends.”
30
“Did you really think you could come back to this place, a place where I am queen, without me knowing about it?” Anya asked, her flier escort bringing her closer as she looked down at our taken keep with anger in her mental voice. “I have known from the moment you got here. I have known from even before that.”
“Can I put an arrow through her stupid face, Mark?” Mina snarled over the comms.
“Not if I beat you to it,” Jill growled and pulled back her bowstring.
It was a great idea, sure, and I would have normally fully endorsed it, but even if they sniped Anya in the face, I wasn’t sure it would kill her, not when it took crashing a Bullet ship from orbit to kill the last queen we had fought. Even if it were a kill shot, it would still likely be a suicide shot.
“Hold your fire, ladies,” I ordered. “The only way we’re getting out of here and completing the mission is by being smart, not by shooting everything in the face.” I paused a moment. “Yes, I know, before you say it, Mina, that this is highly unlike me but …”
“Right. If we shoot her, we all die,” she acknowledged. “I hope you have a brilliant plan forming, Mark.”
“When don’t I?”
“No comment.”
Well, that was fair enough. Honestly, I didn’t have a plan per se, not exactly, but it was obvious the first part of any plan was to stall. Fortunately, Anya seemed ready to do for me, as the bug queen gestured to her throne of fliers to come closer, descending in front of the lead battalion of elites.
“You people think you are the smartest, most advanced in the universe,” Anya began to rant, no doubt transmitting to all of us mentally now. “You think you’re always a step ahead, but you couldn’t be more wrong. You can’t even keep your own people in line. Your own men believe you to be vindictive animals. They come to me. They contact me with information about your plans. They tell me your secrets, and they hand me your dossiers. And, when you put your foolish plans into action, they give their lives when I tell them it’s for the best.”
As much as I was sure that Reynolds had been behind our Bullet accident, it seemed now that he was in the clear. Well, partly. What he insinuated about Della’s fate didn’t sit well with me, even if he wasn’t behind our near-death trip.
“Annabelle, amp my voice,” I commanded, and the moment she complied, I shouted across the field, my voice booming. “You’re the reason we crashed in the first place? You’re the reason we almost died?”
“No,” she corrected me quickly. “That damn suit of yours is the reason you almost died. If it were up to me, you’d be dead already, but since you’re not, I might as well use this to my advantage.” She stepped forward, and Annabelle purred to life in my head.
“Lieutenant Ryder,” she said. “May I suggest some offensive maneuvers? Perhaps a – “
“Stop that!” Anya roared inside of my head. She waved her hand, and Annabelle’s voice went wonky and then silent. “You people, tying yourselves to machines because, in your hearts, you know you are the inferior beings. You know evolution has passed you by and that we are the true heirs to your planet and all its resources. Say what you’d like about the man whose life took your ship down, but at least he was brave enough to be honest with himself. At least he could face the truth of your real place in the world. Because of that, his life meant something. Yours, however, will extinguish like a single candle thrust into space. But not before I show you and your people what real power is, not before I force you to see what it takes to remain in charge, truly in charge.” She stepped closer to me and, as she did, the army at her back followed.
Though Anya had managed to cut Annabelle’s voice, I could still feel the AI pulsing at a low level in the back of my mind. All those defensive upgrades to her systems had paid off. While I was tempted to show off, to bring Annabelle back to full function and wave it in the queen’s face, that would be as bad as shooting her in the face. No, Anya was singing like a bird in her arrogance, and we needed to know everything she did to have a chance to fight back.
My eyes cut to the glowing sun magnetically leashed to Jill’s across the way from me. While I was unsure if an arrow or a pulse laser burst would kill Anya, that insatiable little thing mig
ht do the trick if we had a chance to use it. Not yet though, we had to reel her in, keep her talking. Mina would realize what I was doing and not wanting to break radio silence (no doubt being monitored in some way by the bugs now), I could communicate my intentions to the others with a few looks.
I raised a hand to Clair and Jill, silently telling them to wait, be ready to strike with the sun when the chance presented itself. Anya was in the middle of spilling her Acburian guts, and when we took her out, I wanted to come back home with a boatload of information about the extent of the leak we had in the Alliance chain of command.
“Is that what you think?” I glared at the approaching queen, now flanked by an honor guard of fliers and elites, a queen I helped to mint by taking out her chief rival. “You must be getting lazy and foolish in your rule, Anya. Thinking you’re in charge now, thinking you were ever in charge. It’s laughable.”
She sneered at me, her bug eyes narrowing as she came ever closer, now only a few hundred yards away from the front gate. Her elites, bound in armor and armed with spears and swords, were right behind her. They were definitely a humbling group and normally, even with the badasses we had on deck, I’d have been worried about our casualty rate. We had Jill’s invention though, and if what it had done to Annabelle and the landshark was any indication of what it was capable of, Anya and her bugs didn’t stand a chance.
Anya puffed up, sticking out her too-human chest proudly. “You’re in no position to laugh, earth scum, not from where I’m standing anyway.”
A plan came to me. It was bold, probably stupid, and was founded on a pile of lies that would make my father whistle in awe at the bullshit. Still, it would keep her talking at the very least, hopefully revealing the rest of her hand to us at best.
“That’s because where you’re standing is a lie,” I explained flatly. “You think any of this was real? You think the Alliance would ever be foolish enough to allow you to get your filthy bug talons into our systems? You believed what we wanted you to believe. We faked the crash, faked the cooperation with you, and it was all to get you where you are right now.”
“You lie,” Anya snarled in my head, her voice tense with accusation. “It took years for me to make the connections I needed to do this. When you came the first time, my plan was already in motion. That could not be faked, not at all, and the man who fulfilled his promise to me is dead. I had access to his biometric scanner. I watched it flicker off when the explosion occurred.”
“And you think you’re the only person someone is willing to die for?” I shot back. “While you’re out here, dealing with five meaningless Earthlings, entire divisions of infantrymen and women are stampeding onto your camps. At this very moment, they’re destroying everything you’ve built and freeing your prisoners.”
Now, of course, we were the only Earthlings on this moon that I knew of, but I needed her to believe it. I needed her to think her attention needed to be elsewhere, to her crumbling kingdom. Hell, this may go one better than her simply spilling all her intel to us. If she did go, maybe that would buy enough time for Rayne to crack the Acburian systems and set the virus up, then all we’d have left to do is get a Bullet ride home, now that we knew that Reynolds wasn’t going to immediately kill us off. Compared to that, getting Della safe would be easy.
“You haven’t the power to tear down what I have built,” Anya cackled. She was literally on our doorstep now, and it took every bit of rational thinking to keep me from giving the word to take her down.
“You didn’t even have the power to build it!” I yelled in response. “We did that! I took down a queen you couldn’t destroy. They were calling you a fake queen before I got here and when I leave this time, they’ll be calling you that again.” I grinned at the regal looking bug. “Do you know what happens to deposed tyrants on earth, Anya? I’m assuming it’s very similar to what happens to them on Turan.”
I shook my head. “So, kill us if you want to, assuming you can. It won’t save you. It won’t slow a single step from the Marines on the other side of this damn moon from destroying you.”
“Were you an actor on your planet, Mark Ryder?” Anya’s expression focused into a deadly glare. “Because, if you aren’t, you should be. That was very convincing. Did you think that peon of a pilot is as far as my influence goes? Did you think I was so cocky because of so little? And did you really think it would take years for me to get into your precious Alliance Command and I’d stop at such low rungs of the ladder?”
She shook her bug head. “I don’t go low, Mark Ryder. I go right to the stop.”
The queen held her hand out in front of her, and a bright light appeared over her palm. “Did you wonder why no one could know about this little mission of yours? Were you curious as to why your precious little Della female was suddenly deposed from her position of power? It’s because of one person.” In the light above her hand, a vision like a hologram took shape. Commissioner Reynolds looked back at us from the other side, frowning deeply, little dark eyes scanning the situation. “A person who is in my pocket.”
“I’m sorry it’s come to this, Marines,” Reynolds’ voice echoed through orb. “You have no idea how this pains me, but what I am doing here is for the good of two species, human and Acburian alike.”
This didn’t make any sense. Sure, I expected Commissioner Scumbag to be capable of a lot, such as sabotaging our Bullet and murdering us, but in the name of continuing the blood-and-guts war that had been going on, or at least for good old-fashioned greed. Neither of those motives fit with working with the Acburians, betraying all humanity. He was too staid, too old-fashioned.
“You son of a bitch!” I screamed, and I wasn’t alone in the cursing. Jill, Claire, and from atop the fortress, Mina all joined in with their own particular refrains on that same sentiment.
“Keep your emotions in check, Lieutenant Ryder,” Reynolds chided. “Outbursts like that are unbecoming of a military man.”
“I’m about to show you unbecoming, you hateful bastard!” I screamed back. ”Why? Why would you get in bed with the enemy?”
Reynolds pursed his lips for a moment before nodding. “Fair enough, Mark. You and Mina especially deserve to know why this has to be done, why you have to die like this, but first …”
Communications errors flashed across my HUD as, by order of the Alliance commander, all power was cut off to our suits. The armor turned to dead weight around me, around us all, as the light faded from every system, finally ending with communications and primary life support. At least the bastard was kind enough to leave backup life support on. Unfortunately, that cut-off signal also deactivated Jill’s death sun, no doubt linked to her suit’s primary command systems.
For a moment, I almost lost hope. Almost.
It was Annabelle’s mental pulse in my brain that kept that fire alive in my heart. She was still on, playing dead for the benefit of the queen and the commissioner. When the time was right, I could bring her back to life, and I hoped that the others could fire up their suits as well.
For now, though, it was time for the confessions of a madman.
Reynolds nodded gravely as he began. “Now, with you all in the proper condition, let me explain how the universe works to you.”
Sometime during this mess, Rayne had quietly slipped into the entrance chamber behind us, trying to stay out of the line of sight of the slits. I glanced back at her for a split-second, just long enough to see that not only had her enviro-suit and tool bracer to be in the same state as our own suits but to see the look of defeat on her face. Whatever human DNA had been there must have been too far gone for her to use.
Well, we’d just have to improvise.
“Lay it on me, Reynolds,” I barked out through the gate. “Show me this startling truth that justifies betraying mankind and murdering the five of us.”
Anya, for her part, looked utterly amused by the situation, an expression I’d eventually wipe off her face. Her compound eyes never left the eye slit I was st
aring out of, and I wondered if there wasn’t something else more carnal on her mind. Though my skin crawled at the concept, I kept it filed away in the back of my mind. You never knew what info would come in handy on the battlefield.
“Look around you, Ryder,” the traitor said. “This army, this infinitely powerful force, is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Acburians’ natural power. You know I fought this war for years, and I’ve been behind the desk and rising up through the ranks for years more. I’ve seen the face of the enemy, killed them, and seen countless lives lost to them. Generations later, has anything changed? Do the bugs look any weaker to you?”
I could already see the angle he was taking. The ‘woe is humanity, we can never win against such superior foes’ bit. “Oh, so you’re a pussy, and you think the rest of humanity is going to roll over along with you.” I laughed. “Got it.”
To my surprise, Reynolds didn’t flinch, and he didn’t look offended. Instead, he looked a little sad, pity evident in his holographic eyes. “I know that Marines like you and Mina here might not grasp the big picture. You win on the battlefield, and in your own little ways, you see victory and the chance for a final win at the end of your careers. But soldiers like you, so focused on the ground game, simply don’t know the information of what’s going on behind the scenes.”
He sighed. “The fact is that the Alliance simply can’t sustain this war. We are running out of men, running out of money, and running out of Ellebruim. The Second Battalion suit you wear, Dr. Garmin’s virus, and so many other last-ditch attempts to win, they each have drained amazing amounts of Earth’s resources. And still, the Acburians multiply and continue to evolve!”
I didn’t think he was exactly lying. Della herself often emphasized the resource situation, hence why the Alliance cared more about our damn suits than our lives. And yet, I could tell that fear was deeply rooted in the man. Had he been broken by the horrors of war and kept it hidden until now? Was that fear what was turning him from fighting to giving up, using some setbacks as the reason?
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