Galaxia

by Kevin McLaughlin

  From the center, the vast nest somehow looked even bigger. He had, at first, judged it to be smaller. This was practically a fortress and he sensed that they were at least partially underground—perhaps in a sinkhole or ravine or something.

  Not that it mattered much, relative to his current situation. He might be able to drag himself toward the edge of the dome, slowly and torturously—perhaps.

  “What a fine test of German stoicism this will be,” he muttered and thought of how his Saxon and Prussian ancestors on his mother’s side might even have found humor in the situation. His father’s ancestors would probably have preferred to turn to God for comfort. He could not yet decide which was the wiser option.

  For now, he allowed his head to fall to the side so he now stared directly at a cluster of three eggs. One of them began to twitch.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Laura closed the door to Ernest’s bedroom-cum-beauty-chamber behind her. Now that he could no longer see how she’d react, she allowed her face to fall and her shoulders to slump. Everything had worked out perfectly until he had given his one condition for allowing the mission.

  “Most of the men will be in the mess hall or the pub at this hour,” Leutnant Ferris said, back to her usual brusque and businesslike self. There was no trace of gloom in her demeanor but then again, her military training might simply mean she was better at hiding it. “We should go there and talk to them.”

  “I suppose it’s worth a try.” She sighed.

  The Bull led the way down the halls. She strode with astonishing speed for such a short, bulky woman, and the researcher struggled to keep up. It didn’t help that she did not feel like hurrying at all.

  She supposed she ought to wait and see how things would go but she could not shake the oppressive miasma of intense despondency that had settled over her like a thick, black cloud. The task that awaited them would not be an easy one, and she felt as though she had already failed in advance. The idiot director had found a way to sabotage her even when she thought she’d had him over the ropes.

  His bedroom lay at the far corner of the base’s main section and was therefore much farther from the cafeteria than his office, which lay approximately in the center. They had a little time, then, to talk.

  “Do you really think this will work?” she asked and tried to sound as though she were merely curious and asking the woman’s professional opinion. The despair probably came out in her voice, though.

  “Oh, it may,” Ferris replied. She did not venture any further commentary.

  “Well, I suppose we might at least manage a single squad. That would be slightly better than nothing.”

  “Ja,” agreed The Bull. “But I think it will be more than that.”

  Laura sighed again. “If you say so, Leutnant Ferris. I do hope you’re not simply trying to cheer me up, though.”

  Roden’s condition was that he would only permit this rescue mission if the task force was composed entirely of volunteers. He refused to order anyone to die for this. The mission was too risky and was mounted to save men who were probably already dead. It would have been the kind of order that was bad for morale and therefore bad for publicity.

  Laura wanted to hope that, on some level, this meant the director cared at least slightly about his troops’ lives. But then again, the lives of Jan, Klaus, and any others who might be with them would all be forfeit if they did not try.

  “There is no way this will ever possibly work,” she remarked and shook her head as they approached the cafeteria. Ernest had at least agreed to her condition that she not be sent back to the UK unless specifically ordered otherwise. But right now, she had other concerns.

  “Shut up,” The Bull retorted without turning or stopping. She didn’t sound angry, merely annoyed. “You do not know these things the way I do.”

  “Perhaps you’re right. But from what I do know about Ernest, I can’t help but wonder if he set this condition of his to spite us because he knew it would fail.”

  “He does not know these things the way I do either.” Ferris grunted scornfully.

  They reached the mess hall and pushed through the doors. Perhaps thirty men and women were scattered about within, eating and drinking alone, in some cases, but more often separated into clusters that sat and talked or seemed to play card or dice games. Dull murmurs mixed with the sound of the overhead TV and food smells wafted on the thick air.

  “Hello there, Miss Laura,” Sonny the cook said when he appeared behind the counter. “Can I get you and Miss Ferris there something to eat?”

  “I’m sorry, Sonny, but not now,” she replied. “We have some rather important business.”

  “As you say. There’s always food for later if you want it.” He drifted into the kitchen again.

  She marveled at the man. He was so pleasant and yet seemed unable to grasp the seriousness of anything. Perhaps those two factors were related, she thought. He was very nearly the opposite of Jan.

  But this was not the time to contemplate Sonny’s character. She cast a hasty glance at her companion and drew her focus back to the task at hand. So far, the woman did nothing and said nothing. It seemed she would have to take matters into her own hands. She turned toward the throng of soldiers before her.

  “Excuse me,” she said, in a moderately loud voice. It was swallowed and muffled by the general clamor. She cleared her throat and tried again with more volume, almost shouting this time. “Excuse me! I have something important to ask you all.”

  Two or three of the troops glanced at her and returned to whatever they were doing.

  “Well,” she said to Ferris, “this doesn’t seem to be working at all so far.”

  The Bull cleared her throat. “Achtung!” she bellowed. The walls virtually shook.

  The entire cafeteria instantly went dead silent, save for the stream of German voices that issued from the television, and all eyes—now wide and alert—looked toward where the two women stood.

  The leutnant, with a satisfied expression, nodded and gestured toward Laura, then fell back a step.

  “Right, well then,” she began. “Listen, all of you, I have something very important to say. Several people from this base—officers and regular soldiers alike—are trapped in the Zoo as we speak. Those new primaraptor monsters captured several of them on the last couple of excursions and have them imprisoned there. We have reason to believe that most of them are still alive, although they’re in terrible danger and may not be alive for much longer.”

  Half of the soldiers nodded but they seemed to wait for her to get to the point as though they already knew—or at least suspected—everything she’d already said. Some of them might not understand English, either, although it seemed the majority at this base had at least a working knowledge of the language.

  She took a breath and pressed on. “We are trying to organize a rescue mission, which will depart immediately. However, because it’s likely to be very dangerous, Director Roden has refused to outright order anyone to go. Instead, it’s to be a volunteer mission. So, I have to ask, would anyone be willing to come with us into the Zoo for this? It’s hazardous but it’s for a good cause.”

  Some of the soldiers stared blankly at her. Others frowned or narrowed their eyes while they seemed to debate what she’d said. All of them likely knew how easily the Zoo could kill them and were probably aware that people who’d been captured by those beasts had very low life expectancies. A few mumbled to one another and some shook their heads.

  No one, however, leapt to their feet with fists pumping in the air. Laura felt the black cloud descend on her again.

  She looked a little desperately at The Bull. Oddly enough, the woman was smiling in a strange, grim way.

  “Tell them the rest,” Ferris suggested.

  Laura turned to the group of reluctant rescuers. “Please,” she said, “it’s to save Jan. Hauptmann Shalwar. He was taken too earlier today.”

  The eyes staring at her widened again, and several of th
e soldiers looked startled. It was as though the air in the mess hall were water and she’d run a massive jolt of electricity through it.

  Eleven or twelve soldiers stood at once. A few more quickly joined them and pushed to their feet with a kind of proud determination. Shortly after, the rest also stood. Soldat Gunter Grün was among them.

  “Ja,” half of them said at once.

  She was too stunned to react at once. After a moment, though, the black cloud rose, dissolved, and vanished. She smiled. “Well, then, that’s good to hear. Let’s find a ton of guns and a few of those big armored trucks, shall we?”

  Chapter Forty-Six

  After being dumped onto his back—and his injured leg—Jan had felt that he really needed a moment to rest before he attempted to crawl out of the egg-pit and initiate another half-baked escape from this nest. However, the sight of the eggs near him beginning to twitch and shudder changed his mind. In fact, it motivated him very effectively.

  He groaned and turned over, starting from his left side so he could at least leave his right leg on the ground. Still, it tormented him with searing waves of agony for having to move at all and having pressure applied to it. He lay on his stomach and his teeth bit into the dirt as his hands clenched into fists and tears ran down his face.

  Quite simply, he couldn’t do this. He could not crawl all the way out of this nest in time to escape the hatching baby primaraptors that would almost certainly look for their first breakfast. It was over.

  His mind, however, reminded him that it would be better to make the attempt anyway. It insisted that he force himself to crawl through the sea of eggs, regardless of the horrible anguish it would cause his leg, and then try once more to free his comrades. But it would be almost impossible not to scream in pain as he did so, which would attract the sentries once more and put an end to the futile endeavor very quickly.

  It would also be better to go out fighting. He knew that but could barely move, and he had no weapons. Making the useless effort to resist, at this point, would only prolong his suffering.

  Jan tried to console himself with the fact that he had at least tried to fight the mutant that had come into the dome after Hauptgefreiter Linzer had wailed in terror. And all things considered, as a mere man armed with a small piece of rock against such a fearsome predator, he had given a decent account of himself.

  But he had lost and died. It was purely semantics. He was already dead as of several minutes before when the creature had disarmed him and twisted his leg. The time had now come to start thinking of himself in the past tense.

  No one would come to rescue him, he realized. His fellow soldiers within this dome were all physically and mentally wasted by their long imprisonment, and the handful he had freed were imprisoned once again.

  The people at the base would not risk a rescue mission. Klaus and the remainder of his team had likely already been written off as dead and now, he was merely one more casualty to add to that list. Director Roden would send word to Berlin, and Major Reisenegger would return from Germany with one or two new hauptmanns to replace him and Klaus, perhaps along with another slew of rookies to be fed into the panting, drooling emerald meat-grinder that was the Zoo.

  Disheartened, he stared into the dim brown light and felt the damp, lukewarm earth beneath his hands. No one, he thought, would really even remember him. A few troops might say he had been a good officer and the German government might mention as much. But that would be about it. He hadn’t achieved anything sufficiently spectacular or important to make it into the military history books.

  And he essentially had no family. His parents were dead. He was not on speaking terms with their extended families, his brother, his ex-wives, or even his children.

  Michael. He still hadn’t tried to call.

  The hauptmann glanced at the eggs again. All three in the cluster beside him shuddered in place now, and the one that had begun to do so first sprouted cracks. Two or three others nearby seemed to stir and prepare to hatch as well.

  The primaraptors, he thought, were doing everything they could to protect and provide for their children. They were wise creatures in that regard. They safeguarded their legacy.

  Jan T Shalwar did not have a legacy beyond the simple biological fact of his offspring’s existence. Michael did not care about him.

  “And most of that is my own fault,” he concluded, speaking in a voice so soft the breath barely escaped his lips. He had been too guarded, too distant, and too beholden to his own rules and too focused on his work rather than the people he loved. That was why all three of the women he had committed to had decided to break said commitments, and the children they had raised all believed him to be a shithead who was irrelevant to their lives.

  He sighed and shook his head gently against the mud beneath it.

  As the first of the eggs began to fragment into random pieces and the small lizard head and monkey fingers protruded from the gaps, he felt around for a weapon with which to make his pitiful last stand—even though he was not exactly standing at the moment, he thought with grim humor. His left hand closed on a rock about the size of a golf ball. That was better than nothing, he supposed. Both Wotan and Allah would see that he had died clutching an armament, having not entirely given up.

  His hand tightened around his paltry weapon and he looked at the creatures that were about to end his existence. The first of the newly hatched primaraptors—tiny, bald, and slime-covered—blinked and flexed its small limbs, opened and closed its mouth, and adjusted to its first few moments of life outside the eggshell. The two other eggs beside had also cracked sufficiently for their inhabitants to push the shell-pieces aside and poke their heads and tails out. It would not take long at all for them to realize they were hungry.

  Jan’s left hand clutched the rock with calm deliberation. He had a few seconds yet. There was, technically, a very, very slim chance that Michael might call, but he chuckled to himself when he contemplated the actual odds of this—a one placed next to an extremely large number with an arseload of zeroes. Besides, he wouldn’t receive it in the Zoo anyway, so it was a moot but somehow inspiring thought. Hope in the face of one’s imminent demise was a strange thing.

  The first baby raptor noticed him now and hissed.

  He dragged in a breath and prepared himself for his final skirmish but someone shouted and heavy footfalls thumped from somewhere beyond and above where he lay. The sound, impossible to mistake, was of men in boots who jogged purposefully toward a goal.

  “What?” He gasped and wondered if he was delirious. “How?” This could not be. The odds of rescue, at this nadir of his hopes, was beyond calculation.

  The silence erupted into the unmistakable cracks and booms of guns blasting away, and fiery orange light illuminated the lower reaches of the dome-nest. He heard isolated fragments of human voices speaking in both German and English.

  He craned his neck to look up. Near the rim of the broad and shallow depression that contained the myriad eggs, one of the adult primaraptors raced forward to join the battle as tracer rounds streaked around it. It was furious, almost crazed, perhaps driven to a frenzy of bloodlust by the fact that this violence took place near the sanctuary of its young. Its fur had turned a deep, bloody red.

  A soldier came into sight holding a blazing rifle, his mouth open both to equalize the sonic pressure in his skull and to issue a battle cry. Under the onslaught of his fire, the mutant was driven back and blood spurted from half a dozen wounds. It stumbled out of sight, quite possibly dead or at the very least, badly wounded.

  The man who had shot it was young and his uniform was improperly secured in a slightly ridiculous fashion to accommodate the medical padding on his shoulder. He was, Jan realized, none other than Soldat Grün.

  The hauptmann laughed. Against his better judgment and professional discipline, something like joy swelled within him. It was too soon to be certain that he would make it, but also too late to presume himself dead. “Maybe, then. Just maybe�
��”

  The first of the baby raptors squealed at him and attacked.

  Even in his current, ravaged state, his reflexes were still quite sharp, and his left hand with the rock-chunk came up as the little brownish creature pounced. Its small jaws and sharp teeth sank into the muscle of his left forearm but before it could rip the flesh away, he simply pounded the arm against the ground and the mutant with it. The creature released him and lay stunned.

  He stretched across with his right arm and seized its neck to hold it in place as his left hand brought the small rock down on its skull once, twice, and three times. The creature whined and writhed as its skull fractured and caved in, then stopped moving. He gritted his teeth and allowed a bellow of pain as he rolled onto his back again.

  There were more, however. The two whose eggs had been closest to the first were free now. When he glanced to his other side, Jan saw two more, newly hatched and getting their bearings. He had successfully vanquished a single creature the size of a kitten but being virtually crippled, he had almost no chance against four of them at once. He looked at the ridge where he’d seen Grün.

  “Ich bin hier unten!” he shouted. “Down here!” No one seemed to have noticed him yet, but the sounds of humans and human weaponry had grown louder.

  One of the small primaraptors to his left pounced toward his side. His hand holding the stone intercepted it, but he only struck a glancing blow that simply knocked it off course. It stumbled farther down the length of his body and sank its teeth into his thigh instead. He gritted his teeth and growled in pain. For its small size and virtual infancy, the little bastard’s biting power was immense.

  He dropped the rock—he would not have been able to hit the creature with enough force with it at the very end of his reach like this—and instead, forced himself to lean upward and forward enough to grab the raptor by the neck and squeeze. Its jaws loosened and left a bloody strip of flesh hanging, and it thrashed in an effort to lacerate his wrist with its feet.