Galaxia

by Kevin McLaughlin

  Chapter Three

  Hauptmann Jan T Shalwar strode out of the mess hall and toward his small office, where he had to double-check a few things before he met with his team. The soldat he had reprimanded struck him as the cocky type who had barely suppressed an attitude, but he had not actually been insubordinate. He would learn, however. Everyone did. The people at home did not prepare these new recruits for what they would deal with in this place. He supposed he could simply get a particularly large piece of paper, print all his rules on it, and hang it somewhere. But then again, it was useful for the rookies to hear one rule and immediately grasp that there were others. Many, many others. It prepped them mentally to obey all of them, sooner or later.

  Men and women nodded respectfully as he walked past. He returned the nods when he could. The CO had imposed a ban on saluting, essentially treating even the base itself as a combat zone.

  There were so many personnel there and so many new arrivals all the time that it was virtually impossible to memorize every single person’s name. He made an effort, nonetheless, and was at least good with faces.

  The door to his office was open and the light was on. That likely meant that The Bull was already there. He stepped in and confirmed the correctness of this assumption.

  “Everyone is assembled in the bay, Hauptmann,” The Bull said, “and here are your notes.” She gestured to a supremely neat and orderly pile of small slips of paper.

  “Thank you, Leutnant,” Jan replied. Most people took one look at Leutnant Agatha “The Bull” Ferris and knew they should not fuck around in her presence.

  She was about the same age he was, short but thick-set, strong, and solid, and she could move with astonishing speed when needed. Her brown hair was pinned up tightly and her heavy, square face was almost never seen to smile in the presence of the enlisted men. He was privy to her nicer side, although at times, she even intimidated him a little.

  “Playdate with the children, then?” Jan asked.

  “Ja,” The Bull replied. “Another discovery field trip. I already distributed the diapers in case any of them ask if we can stop at the lavatory.”

  “You are such an excellent officer,” he replied and gave her a small, wry smile as he picked up the notes from the corner of his desk. He had purchased a very large quantity of the kind of pocket-sized notepad paper which already had lines, numbers, and sub-headers printed on it. This saved him the trouble of having to find a ruler and draw the lines himself since it was difficult to keep them perfectly straight.

  “Maybe this time, we will only have an injury or two or become totally exhausted,” Ferris went on, “instead of both.”

  “For shame, Leutnant,” he said. “You must be losing your edge and growing soft. Have you spent time loitering around the director’s office and fraternizing with his coterie of Brits?”

  “No, no,” she threw back with mock indignation. “I still have some standards to maintain.”

  “Well, then, I suppose you’re qualified.” He folded his notes neatly after reviewing them and slipped them into a zippered pocket. Then, he triple-checked to ensure his sidearm was loaded, clean, and ready, and did a fast visual scan of the folders and envelopes on his desk. All represented bureaucratic matters that could wait until he returned. They had an extraction scheduled, and it needed to be undertaken very soon. It wasn’t quite a rescue mission as yet, but it sounded like it was on the verge of becoming one.

  “March,” Jan said. The Bull nodded and strode out of the office before him, leaving him to close the door on his way out and follow her. She was wider than him, anyway, and so did a good job of plowing the way through the halls so he could walk unimpeded.

  The two of them entered the bay where most of the menial activity had been pushed to the sides. The platoon waited for them in the center of the floor. Everyone stood at attention when they noticed the officers.

  “Achtung!” The Bull shouted redundantly but did a fine job of making absolutely certain that they took things seriously. When she shouted, her deep, ragged voice did actually sound a little like a large, angry land mammal of some kind. She could have said anything—“ice cream,” or “pantyhose,” or “the,” and it would have conveyed the meaning of “attention” all the same.

  Jan strode in, his arms folded behind his back as Ferris took her position a little to the side.

  “I am Hauptmann Jan T Shalwar, your commanding officer,” he stated, “and we will depart immediately. But first, a very brief review.”

  Everyone looked at him, wide-eyed. He had mostly rookies for this mission, it seemed. A full platoon was large enough that it could grow unwieldy in the Zoo’s dense jungle, but between himself, Ferris, and the base’s generally competent Feldwebel, they were able to run a tight ship and prevent the men from falling into disarray—usually.

  More importantly, a full platoon would give them enough firepower to blast their way in and out without having to duck and hide overmuch. The unit in need of extraction didn’t have time for them to waste with all that.

  “For all that the Zoo is dangerous,” he said, “men and women regularly go in, only to come out alive. The way to achieve this is to be like them. Which means being smart and following the rules.”

  There wasn’t time to relay all the rules to them, but some deserved particular attention.

  “You have already been drilled and trained and instructed in Zoo protocol and the basic standards of the Bundeswehr. You will also learn some of my rules. For example, Rule Number One. Never go on a mission without the right people. Your NCOs were hand-picked by me because they do an excellent job. Listen to them, and we will all emerge from this mission in one piece.”

  He went on to regale them—briefly—with the parameters of the mission itself, which were very simple. Proceed into the jungle, head toward the coordinates of the team in distress, find them, and get the hell out before dark.

  “Is this understood?” Jan asked as he finished, his face stern and impassive.

  “Yes, sir,” they yelled in unison.

  “Good.” He nodded. They seemed like a sharp group, all things considered. He had led successful missions with worse. The Zoo demanded respect. Never, ever could they wander into it operating at anything less than one hundred percent. Nor could they presume that it would welcome them and gently permit them to leave at their leisure, if at all.

  The platoon departed. They marched out of the bay and across the open ground that separated the base proper of the British-German sector—housed in the wall complex itself between the outer and main walls—from the large, high-tech gate built into inner wall between the base and the Zoo.

  This gate was already being designed when Wall One still stood and the second wall had its first foundations laid. At that time, the United Kingdom had a sector all to themselves before Germany as a country was allowed in on the action at the bases themselves.

  Which also allowed them to make use of world-famous German engineering, of course. Indeed, the gate was so impressive that it almost made up for the fact that the wall complex, in general, was still incomplete. The ongoing construction meant that sections of the work in progress were still protected mainly by a jumbled maze of chain-like fence, sandbag barriers, barbed wire, and rudimentary guard towers rising incongruously from the sand. These makeshift defenses were effective enough—for now—at keeping unwanted visitors from the Zoo out of the base but they simply looked rather shabby.

  This section was anything but. On either side of the gate were remote-controlled turrets outfitted with state-of-the-art heavy machine guns, and a narrow walkway between them allowed service personnel to access them for manual takeover or maintenance. The gate itself was three feet thick and made of materials even beyond Jan’s knowledge, powerfully reinforced and virtually indestructible except by heavy explosives or something along the lines of a meteor strike. The Zoo had yet to produce any creatures who’d be able to hammer or claw their way through. It opened at its center and each hal
f receded horizontally into the wall to either side. When activated, it both opened and shut very quickly as the designers had understood that it might well have fleeing men passing through it who did not want anything else to get through it after them.

  Attached to the inside of the wall was a small cubicle where the guard waited. Jan detached himself from the rest of the troop and made his way toward the cubicle in question. “Hello, Coop,” he said in English.

  Sergeant Gerald Cooper was, strangely enough, almost the only person ever found manning the gate. He was relieved for a few scant hours a day but this did not seem to bother the man and the base’s authorities obviously trusted him. He was a tall, round-faced, pleasant-looking black man who had made innumerable friends and, to the hauptmann’s knowledge, zero enemies. Yet one always had the impression that the man’s vigilance never really wavered and his hand was never far from the gun at his side.

  “Hello there, Jan,” he replied, pushed to his feet, and stepped out to examine the platoon. “A full platoon, all German, with yourself and Ferris in command. And with you in charge, it seems safe to say that all the T’s are crossed all the I’s are dotted, and every sentence ends with two spaces after a period. Although I never heard your opinion on the Oxford comma.”

  He grinned despite himself. The man’s good nature was positively infectious.

  “Of course,” Coop went on and there was a subtle shift in his tone and demeanor, “I’ll still need to know what the mission is and your expected time of return. At least a ballpark estimate. You know I cannot—and will not—allow anyone in or out if there is even the slightest security risk or chance of illicit activity.”

  Jan nodded. In addition to the monstrosities created by the Zoo itself, human activity had repeatedly caused problems. In the older, more lenient days, corruption at the gates on Wall One had allowed plundering gangs of mercenaries to penetrate the jungle’s depths, many of whom almost managed to smuggle specimens out and generally caused all kinds of problems for the Americans in particular. No one wanted a repeat of those disasters. Coop, understanding his duty to prevent that type of thing, was not a man to be trifled with.

  “We are tasked with the extraction of the two squads who went in at dawn,” the hauptmann stated. “They are not in very deep. We expect to be back by 1800 and will attempt to send word if for some reason we are not back before dark.”

  “So be it,” the other man said. “Be careful in there, my friends. And try to keep The Bull from hurting any of those poor creatures that are merely minding their own business.”

  He sighed to hide a possible crooked smile. “Even I can only do so much,” he replied.

  Coop returned to his office and did something at his console. The gate hummed, opened, and seemed almost to suddenly disappear and reveal the expanse of empty desert that separated Wall Two from the Zoo. As Jan returned to the unit, a few of his men gasped. Beyond the aperture lay the undulating sea of sand dunes and bare rock, the lonely and wind-blasted wasteland of the Sahara where nothing separated the naked earth from the vast and cloudless blue sky.

  In what might have been a shocked silence, they marched through. Once everyone was safely clear, Coop closed it behind them. It slammed shut and its blank metal face stared at them as it cut them off from the closest outpost of human civilization.

  Their trucks waited for them beyond the wall. Jan watched and gave a few simple instructions to ensure they divided themselves evenly between the vehicles so men with the appropriate weapons rode in each in case they were attacked en route to the Zoo.

  The trip didn’t take long, but the tension that emanated from the rookies was palpable. They knew they were driving into a war zone. Soon, the vehicles came to a stop and he ordered the men to dismount and assemble outside with their weapons prepped and eyes open. Following them out, he stood on the sand behind a few young troops and paused to clear his own head as the new soldiers stared in awe.

  Before them, the desert simply ended and the jungle began. In nature, there was always some form of transitional zone between arid and humid biomes but the Zoo was not entirely natural. The grasslands of the Sahel, farther south, separated the Sahara from the rainforests of central Africa. Here, the alien jungle—which was capable of synthesizing its own water out of the atmosphere, changing the landscape, and even producing its own localized weather—sprouted directly in all its dark-emerald lushness from pale land which planet Earth had long ago written off as dead.

  “Gott im Himmel,” someone muttered.

  “Not heaven, I’m afraid,” Jan said as he passed the man to take his place near the front of the column. “But that is where we are going.”

  It didn’t take long to clear the small strip of desert that remained between their trucks and their destination. The jungle, with all its hidden primeval dangers, loomed before them.

  “Maintain trigger discipline. Do not fire at random,” he instructed the men. “However, make us aware of anything you see or hear moving around. There aren’t many species native to this habitat, to begin with, and regular unmutated life forms don’t last long here anyway, so it may be safely assumed that any leering vine or hulking animal is a Zoo creature preparing to kill us. Or at least considering it. Nonetheless, if we are vigilant and keep calm, we will all come out of this alive.”

  “You heard him,” The Bull shouted. “Do not die.”

  Two or three men chuckled but most did not, either because it hadn’t occurred to them that she was the joking type or because the Zoo itself had overwhelmed them with awe and terror.

  There was a rough trail amidst the trees which the German and British personnel of Archway had used on past missions and routine patrols. The jungle was very good at adapting to whatever humanity threw at it and covering all traces of human incursions with its own flora. Nevertheless, the frequent tramp of boots had made the foliage a little thinner on the regular route.

  Green fronds and greenish trunks and branches seemed to part as they moved through before they folded over and around them. The daytime heat of the desert was slightly less in the shade but the humidity increased with shocking rapidity. Faint clouds of steam seemed to rise between the stands and tangles of pseudo-familiar plant life.

  “Remember to keep an eye on the information coming in on your HUD,” Jan ordered. “The technology is designed to keep you alive. Use it.” He knew that when confronted by the abominations in the Zoo, rookies all too often fell back to relying on their senses rather than their HUDs. More than one ran off in the wrong direction, ignored warnings from their HUD, forgot to access their map, and ran directly into danger and ultimately, an ugly death.

  Soon, all of them had filed into the jungle. The memory of clear skies and daylight faded behind them.

  “Watch out for those kinds of roots,” he said and pointed them out. The Bull and his Feldwebel immediately relayed the information to the soldats. “They’re often connected to man-eating vines that descend from the trees. Also, try to avoid stepping in deeper patches of mud. Be alert to any rustling sounds.”

  Even with the team being largely inexperienced, they moved quickly. Their leader had done this many times now, and he was good at it. For all its seeming intelligence, the jungle simply was not as creative as a human adversary might have been so he mostly knew what to expect. At least until the Zoo’s next leap forward in evolution.

  “Hauptmann,” Ferris said, and her bulk suddenly materialized at his side. Her speed still amazed him. “They should be only half a klick from us at that forked tree there.” She pointed.

  “I had noticed it, but thank you, Leutnant.” They approached the tree in question and he fell back to inspect the men and keep them in formation as they veered to the side along a path less well-traveled. With his guidance, it did not slow them much. It seemed that the Heer had improved its overall training regimen as far as ensuring that soldiers knew how to move through dense jungle. Now that it was clear that the Zoo would be a permanent—or at least long-ter
m—concern of the world’s major governments, they’d obviously seen the wisdom of it.

  So far, things were going well.

  The afternoon began to wane when a bedraggled man suddenly appeared between the twisted trunks and curtains of vines in front of them. “Are you the extraction force?” he asked.

  “Of course,” Jan replied. “What are you doing away from your unit?”

  “We heard something, and they sent me to scout,” he stammered.

  The hauptmann frowned. “Take us there immediately,” he said. “One man can, you realize, unwittingly lead others directly into an—”

  Something rustled and out of the corner of his eye, he saw a black flash. Other men around him gasped and raised their guns. The reality of their situation finished his sentence for him.

  Ambush.

  Chapter Four

  “Lead the targets,” Jan shouted. He wasn’t overly agitated, all things considered. Still, even communicating directly with his men through their HUDs, he had to raise his voice to make himself heard over all the gunfire. “Aim about two to three meters off the ground.”

  His men had formed a roughly oval perimeter around a semi-clear patch of the jungle floor and now stood packed as tightly as they could without interfering with one another’s aim. Seconds after the scout from the beleaguered party had found them, the jungle had come alive with the hideous creatures the Brits and Americans called devilcrows. They were mostly flightless birds the size of a tall man, covered with thick, black feathers, so named for their bizarre resemblance to both crows and Tasmanian devils. They had the wild, beady eyes and furry face of the devil, with a razor-sharp beak that could snap a man’s leg in half in one bite. Even the most fortified suit could do little against a biteforce like that.

  Everyone loathed them but at least they couldn’t fly like crows.