Extinction Wars: 02 - Planet Strike

by Vaughn Heppner

  “Back!” I roared, BOOM, BOOM, as I blew apart the dead and live Karg. “Back up, retreat; there are aliens in the tunnels!”

  I crawled butt-backward many times faster than I’d crawled forward. Several times, my boots bumped against the helmet of the crawling trooper behind me. At last, my feet hung over open air. I pushed, and I landed on the dead Karg pile.

  “Now what?” Rollo asked, with an I-told-you-so tone of voice.

  The impulse to rush him and swing was strong. I swallowed a retort, and we killed the new Kargs showing up in the portholes. This group proved fewer in numbers than the first wave.

  Near the end, my gun jammed, and I pitched it aside. I clawed through dead things, heaving bloody Kargs aside. I saw a barrel poking out of the bottom. I grabbed, yanked the weapon free of metallic tentacles and wiped crusted black gore from the firing apparatus.

  I test fired to make sure it worked. It did, and I slammed home a new magazine.

  “Commander!” a trooper shouted.

  My head whipped up to study the portholes, but they stayed empty. I wondered what the man wanted. That’s when the BigDog robots struck.

  Before the end of old Earth, the U.S. military had been into robots, fighting machines. BigDog had been a nasty thing that trotted around like a mechanical horse as it whined like an out of control lawn mower. The robot had wrong-angled legs, a big barrel body and cages to hold stuff. The idea had been to make them into U.S. Army mules, carrying soldiers’ supplies for the men anywhere, including hilly terrain. The robots could climb slopes and trot around in parking lots. If our Earth had been given a few more years, I suppose we’d seen those things patrolling our city streets, too. Before the thermonuclear warheads took out civilization, our police forces had been in the process of militarizing themselves into something other than regular cops.

  Anyway, the enemy had his own version of BigDog. It was large like a horse, or a Clydesdale’s torso, the kind of horse in the Budweiser commercials. Instead of wrong-angled joints, the Clydesdale-sized robot had tentacles. They were bigger and thicker than the regular Karg type of soldier-creature tentacles. A machine trotted around the corridor, and it carried three Kargs up top. These Kargs used robot-mounted weaponry with larger calibers than their pincer-held rifles.

  In seconds, four alien BigDogs bounded at us, with their mounted guns blazing. Assault troopers went down hard, blown against the walls.

  I knelt. Others did, too. We returned fire, killing the riders. One stubborn Karg shredded away a piece at a time—its chest, lower abdomen, a tentacle ripped away from its socket. Still the thing hung on with its other metal arm. Then three bullets exploded at once, and what was left of the body toppled away, leaving a flapping, clicking tentacle attached to the machine. Even as I watched the whipping arm, an internal machine gun appeared out of the BigDog’s forehead, slewing bullets at us.

  Raging at yet more Earther deaths, I dropped my rifle and leaped at the nearest BigDog. My bio-suit aided me, and I cleared the machine-gun mounted head. There weren’t any riding Kargs by this time, and I landed atop the thing. I beat at the mechanism with my fists, but did nothing expect bruise my hands. Yanking out my old Bowie knife, I hacked at a neck joint and loosened something. I tore off a lid, thrust my hand into the darkness and yanked wires and leads. The thing pitched me off as it lurched sideways.

  “Crawl away, Creed!” I heard over my headphones.

  I crawled, and I heard sizzling plasma in flight. Those must be ours—the boys firing the semi-portable cannons. That’s when bits of superheated stuff peppered my legs. My entire suit squirmed and threatened to come off. I’d be dead in seconds from the atmosphere if that happened. Twisting around, I swiped off the burning, bubbling plasma splashes. Then I got up and limped away.

  The four alien BigDogs had decimated us. With our other casualties, I was down to half a zagun. We found that the only thing that could really stop the new machines were the semi-portable plasma cannons. Luckily, my troopers had thought fast and killed all four machines with plasma.

  “What now?” Rollo asked. “Do we keep heading for the tube-train station?”

  I gasped, with my chest heaving. I’d been inches from death twice in this haunted corridor. Finally, it seemed as if the Kargs had found an answer to the assault troopers. The BigDogs changed the infantry ratios, turning it to the aliens’ advantage.

  “If we don’t get to the train-tubes, we’re finished,” I said.

  “That isn’t what EP told us earlier,” Rollo said. “We could use flyers.”

  “He said twenty people could use them,” I replied. “We need more than twenty of us down in the planetary center.”

  “It may be that the relic is wrong about the flyers,” N7 said, interrupting our conversation. “We may be able to take more troopers than that.”

  “We’d better figure out what we’re going to do fast,” Rollo said. “I hear more of those robots coming.”

  The clangs and tap-tap clicking was different from the regular Kargs.

  I bit my lower lip with indecision. The aliens were blocking us from the station. Did the Kargs realize how important the train-tube was to us? The answer was probably a big yes. They were pouring themselves against us and would likely continue to do so. It was one thing retreating before that, and another thing trying to advance into the enemy’s teeth.

  “We’re turning around,” I said. “It’s time to see how many flyers there are.”

  It took several minutes to communicate with the others in the parallel corridors, as the ultra-dense construction material hindered radio waves. During the back and forth comm-chatter, it became clear we’d lost our margin of separation with the enemy all along the line.

  We leapfrogged down the corridors and chambers, one zagun at a time providing covering fire for others. Because of the BigDogs, we had to keep the plasma cannons active. We set up ambushes for them. We threw grenades, hosed machine gun fire and slowly died ourselves one by one.

  Yeah, the aliens killed us by inches. We slaughtered them in droves. One thing, though: the moth-ships upstairs no longer beamed right down on top of us. The alien infantry had to hoof it part of the way from their drop-pods. For whatever reason, we were deep enough now so we didn’t have to fear the graviton rays.

  I’d played computer games like this before as a kid. Once or twice, I’d even wondered back then what it would have felt like being the lone marine against hordes of insect-like aliens bum-rushing his last position. I no longer had to wonder. I knew. It sucked because it tasted like bitter fatigue, the kind that dried out your mouth and make you gulp air as if it was the most precious commodity in the universe. I would have sweated like a pig, too. My suit ate that, or drank it. My sweat went straight to the body armor—that was part of the symbiosis. I sweated and the suit gave me strength, gave me spacesuit-like covering and a few stims when the time was right.

  So far, it had kept itself from doing that. While in Jelk service, the suits had stimmed us at whim. The Lokhars had helped us figure out how to turn that function on and off. Mostly—so far all the time—we kept it off. Being a berserker wouldn’t help us here, not yet at least. We needed our minds to outthink the banzai-oriented Kargs.

  “It’s time to run,” I said. “Next over-bound, we’re all taking off.”

  “The BigDogs will quickly catch up with us,” Rollo said. “You know what that means.”

  “I know. We’re going to run and get them to follow fast, without infantry support. Then we’re going to ambush the lot of them. Afterward, we’ll run again all the way to the flyers. We can rest on them or rest when we’re dead. Any more questions?”

  I fielded two more. They were both on tactical niceties. Afterward, we implemented the plan.

  I clutched my brace of enemy rifles, and at my word, I picked up the pace several notches. Lengthening my stride, I sprinted in twenty-foot bounds. Air wheezed past my throat. Fatigue threatened to turn my leg muscles into jelly, but I ignored that as
only a conditioned trooper could. I thought about all the heartache I’d been through this past year. I told myself it was down to this run. Soon, it would be over. First, we had a job to do.

  “They’re here!” Dmitri radioed.

  “There’s no finesse this time, boys and girls,” I wheezed. “Lay down prep fire and set up those cannons. Let’s toast these suckers.”

  I dove, hit the deck, twisted around and raised my first rifle, tucking the butt tight against my shoulder. Three seconds later, the trotting robots appeared. The way they lurched and moved with speed—the sight made me grit my teeth. I instinctively hated these things.

  I aimed and fired exploding bullets. So did the troopers near me. It did nothing but cause the machines to deploy their heavy weapons. Our plasma cannon boys proved faster this time, and superheated substance melted the things. The alien BigDogs flopped. They rolled, and those tentacle legs waved and thrashed as they lay on their backs. Some of our bullets found the right spots then. We killed the trotting machines, at least in this wave.

  I panted where I lay, exhausted, almost ready to faint. Instead, I steadied my nerves. I gave myself an interior pep talk, and still I lay there. I had to go back in my mind to the time the Lokhars beamed their ray at my dad’s shuttle. For a second, I didn’t think that would work either. But it did…barely.

  I dragged myself upright, and I staggered to prone troopers with their weapons tucked against their shoulders for firing. Not a one of them stirred. I would have liked to bend down and tug them up. I did not have the strength for that. Instead, I kicked them in the sides.

  “Up, up, it’s time to get a move on,” I said.

  I heard curses, my mother insulted and what a prick I truly had turned out to be. I kicked harder after that, and managed to get a quarter of them back onto their feet.

  “Good,” I told the rest. “I don’t need you weaklings anyway. Stay here for the Karg knives. Maybe I’ll see you later on a video as you’re strapped down and tortured. You can thanks the stars then you got a few moments rest here. So long,” I said.

  “Wait,” a trooper pleaded.

  “Wait for what?” I asked. “The stopwatch is ticking. We’re all out of time. If you want to come, tell me.”

  “Please,” the trooper said. “Let us rest a few more minutes.”

  “So long, pussy,” I said.

  A few of them raved at me. I pointed at standing troopers and told them to go and help the complainers. If a man or woman could curse, they still had the energy to keep moving. I wanted every trooper I could get, but this wasn’t the time or place to hold anyone’s hand.

  In the end, I got all but three troopers up. I went to those three and aimed at the nearest. “Good-bye, soldier,” I said, and I fired between his legs.

  The man scrambled up in terror, and he stood there, with his visor aimed at me.

  “Are you crazy?” the man bellowed.

  “That’s right,” I said. “I am crazy. Now start marching.”

  The last two decided to drag themselves to their feet. Then we started for the flyers, and soon we loped again. This time, no trotting robots caught up with us, at least not yet. We gained some separation from the Karg horde.

  I’d like to say I did deep thinking as we hurried for the flyers, if indeed any existed. I’d be lying, though. At that point, I endured. Setting one foot ahead of the other was all I could do.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t all about running down corridors. Negotiating this nightmare world was often as much about climbing. Sometimes I scaled down, down, and my arms ached.

  Finally, we stumbled into a hanger bay. There were flyers all right, open-air platforms with raised controls in the center. At least, I took them to be controls.

  “Ella,” I said. “Get over here.”

  Dmitri oversaw sentries setting up plasma cannons. Rollo provided them with rifle teams. N7 trailed our artifact-carrier.

  “It’s time to wake up the relic again,” I told Ella.

  The hanger bay had a hundred-foot ceiling over us, with girders crisscrossing each other. Light shined down from there. To the sides were big open shafts going down into the planet. I couldn’t see how far they went. Did they go all the way to the center?

  I backed away from an opening because dizziness threatened. Falling down the shaft would be a poor way of finding out the truth about them.

  “Ella,” I said.

  She sat cross-legged and hugged her ammo bag, rocking back and forth as if holding a sleeping baby.

  A quick glance showed me we had approximately two thousand troopers and maybe three hundred legionaries left. The Lokhars were exhausted, and they sat so all of them had their backs to us. Good. I didn’t want any trouble with them now.

  “Are you ready, N7?” I asked.

  “Affirmative,” the android said.

  I walked to Ella and crouched before her. “Take EP out of the bag,” I said.

  She raised her visor as if regarding me. “When do you think the artifact first used the pink ray on me?” she asked softly.

  “Probably right away,” I said.

  “I was going to discover their secrets,” she whispered.

  “I know.”

  “The Lokhars used me,” she said, sounding bitter.

  “No, Ella, the artifact used you. I don’t think the Lokhars are in charge of this game.”

  “Do you think EP is running it?” she asked.

  “I think the relic knows more than the Lokhar Emperor.” A thought struck me. “You know what? I bet the oracle is simply another Forerunner artifact.”

  “Ahhh,” Ella said. “Yes. That would make better sense than their religious nonsense.”

  The android squatted beside me. “Do you believe in the conspiracy theory of history?” N7 asked me.

  I didn’t twist to look at him. Instead, I kept crouched before Ella and the artifact. “Why don’t you enlighten me as to what you mean?” I told N7.

  “Conspiracy theory,” the android said. “That others behind the scenes manipulate the masses.”

  “Maybe some of the time I believe that, sure,” I said.

  “Do you believe that the manipulators are Jelk and Forerunner artifacts?” N7 asked.

  “What about the Creator?” I asked.

  “So far we have only seen supposition concerning His reality,” N7 said.

  “We don’t even have that,” Ella said.

  “I’m not going to argue about it,” I said. “This isn’t the time or place. All I know is that I’ve seen weird things this past year. The weirdest was the collapsing universe. Abaddon strikes me as awfully strange, too. An apparition down here of a giant snake with centipede-like legs didn’t help, either. Is this a war of angels and demons or ancient races? Who cares at this point? Maybe later we can hash it out. For now, we have to get out of here. Ella, take out EP or you’re going to lose the privilege of carrying him.”

  Her visor was aimed at me, and it never strayed. Did she scowl or frown? I don’t know. Finally, she unzipped the ammo-bag and withdrew our artifact.

  “EP,” I said, “wakey, wakey.”

  Lights glowed within the artifact. It lifted from Ella’s hands to hover in place.

  “You have reached a flyer bay,” the artifact informed us.

  “There’s more than a few craft in here,” I said. “If we pack in tight, we can carry everyone.”

  “I believe you’re right,” EP said. “I find that curious.”

  “How come you said we could only take twenty people before?”

  “I have insufficient data to make an analysis,” the relic said.

  The idea EP had huge gaps in its memories didn’t ease me any. In fact, it was getting more concerning by the moment. Yet what other choice did I have? None. I had to trust the Forerunner thing to an extent.

  “How about showing us how these flyers work?” I said.

  I’m not sure what I expected. What happened was the best possible outcome. The artifact floated to on
e, with the three of us following. Swiftly, EP gave us a rundown on the controls.

  “Do the flyers have enough fuel or energy for the trip?” I asked.

  “You will have to test them,” EP said, “as I do not know.”

  I climbed onto the nearest platform, hurried to the raised controls and began waving my hand over colored knobs. To my relief, other knobs lit up as the relic had explained, and I waved my suited hands over them in the sequence EP had described. The surface under my feet began to hum, and softly, gently, the platform lifted off the hanger deck.

  “It works,” I said.

  “How much fuel or energy does it have?” N7 asked.

  I checked a gauge. “By the symbolism, I’d say it’s half energized.”

  “That should prove sufficient,” EP said. “Now I would like to hibernate and conserve energy.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said.

  The artifact hovered near me.

  “Can’t you power up off these flyers?” I asked. “Can’t you drain energy from them?”

  “No,” the artifact said. “I cannot.”

  “Where can you gain power then?”

  “At the Altair Object,” it said.

  “Where does the object draw its power from?” I asked.

  “I do not know,” EP said.

  That didn’t ring true. I wondered. Could these things lie? Why not? “EP,” I said, “how do we know you’re telling us the truth about anything?”

  “I fail to understand your question.”

  “Are you lying to us about certain things?” I asked.

  “No. I can only speak truth.”

  I blinked several times. If the artifact could lie, it could have just told me one now. So I was no closer to knowing if it was trustworthy or not than I’d been a few seconds ago.

  “EP,” Ella asked, “could the Altair Object be draining energy from the collapsing universe?”

  The artifact hovered in place.