by Jeff Grubb
“Right.”
“And this was not the place or time for an incident.” Slowly the color returned to her face, and she started breathing regularly.
“Not the place at all.”
“And it would be best not reported,” she said firmly.
Mike thought of Swallow’s former hobby. “Of course,” he said.
“We should go now,” said Lieutenant Emily Jameson Swallow, turning back to the jeep.
“Uh-huh,” Mike said, scratching his chin and looking at the place where Kerrigan had disappeared. He thought of chasing after her but realized that he would probably not even find her again, unless she wanted to be found. He wanted to ask her about a lot of things.
Particularly about how she knew what his next question was.
He was going to ask about the xenomorph sightings. That was the next question he was going to ask. This Kerrigan could have known that from talking to the same people that he had been interviewing.
Or it could have been something else about Kerrigan that let her know what he was thinking.
Regardless, as he loped to catch up to Lieutenant Swallow, he resolved never to get into a card game with Sarah Kerrigan.
CHAPTER 5
ANTHEM BASE
Nature abhors a vacuum, and human nature hates a lack of information. Where we can’t find it, we go looking for it. In some cases we just invent it.
That was the case on the Sara system. Willfully ignorant, we charged into the hinterland looking for answers—answers that we soon realized we didn’t want to find.
We were stupid to assume that we would be all right. We were stupid to go off half-cocked. We were stupid to go in undergunned. We were stupid to think that we understood what we were getting into.
And we were most stupid of all to assume that the Protoss were the first alien race that humanity had met.
—THE LIBERTY MANIFESTO
IT TOOK SOME CAJOLING TO GET LIEUTENANT Swallow to detour to Anthem Base. He told her what he had learned in the camp from the other evacuees, couched in neutral terms so as not to rattle her further.
Even so, the Kerrigan woman had shaken the soldier badly, and now Swallow drove with a wordless intensity across the back roads beyond the camp. The stimpack had given her control over her anger but did not eliminate it entirely.
A rooster’s plume of dust churned in their wake, and Michael Liberty was sure that the inhabitants of Anthem would see them coming.
Yet when they got there, the town was empty.
“Looks like they’ve evacuated,” Mike said, dismounting.
Lieutenant Swallow just grunted and moved to the back of the jeep. Opening a hatch, she pulled out a gauss rifle.
“Want one, sir?” she asked.
Mike shook his head.
“Pistol, at least?”
He shook his head again and headed for the nearest building.
It was a mining town, nothing more than about a dozen buildings made of local wood and preformed construction pods. It had become a ghost town. No livestock, no dogs, not even birds.
So why, wondered Mike, did he get the feeling he was being watched?
The first building was a claims office. Wooden floor, quarters in the back. The place looked as if its occupants had just left it. There were still blue crystals resting on the scales on a counter-top.
Mike walked in. Swallow lingered at the door, her oversized weapon at the ready. There was an acrid smell in the air.
“They’ve evacuated,” she said. “We should do the same.”
Mike picked up a coffeepot. It had been boiled to a solid sludge, and the pot itself was warm to the touch.
“This is still on,” he said, pulling the plug from the hot plate.
“They left in a hurry, sir,” Swallow said, a nervous tone now creeping into her voice. “You said the evacuees were complaining of being shuttled off.”
Mike walked behind the counter and pulled open a drawer. “There’s still money in the till. Can’t imagine any assayer leaving his cash behind. Or the marines not giving him a chance to recover it. Odd.” He disappeared into the back room.
Swallow shouted after him, and he reappeared.
“Somebody’s quarters. Looks like there was a struggle there,” he said.
“Unwilling evacuee,” Swallow said, looking hard at Mike. “They probably dragged him off before he had a chance to close up his shop.”
Mike nodded. “Let’s check the other buildings. You take one side. I’ll take the other.”
Lieutenant Swallow took a deep breath. “As you wish, sir. But stay in the doorways where I can see you.”
Mike crossed the street to the opposite line of buildings. A fresh breeze kicked up, and dust devils swirled down the main street of Anthem. The place was completely deserted by both man and beast.
Then why, wondered Mike, did the hairs on the back of his neck still bristle?
Across from the claims office were a pair of residences. Like the assayer’s office, they seemed only recently deserted. A video screen was active in one, flickering soundlessly with a bad transmission of a news report. Stock footage of a battlecruiser, identified as the Norad II, cruising effortlessly through space.
There was a spilled can of beer next to the easy chair in front of the video. Despite himself, Mike found himself checking to see if any cigarettes had been left behind. No such luck.
The third building was a general mercantile, and it looked as if it had been ransacked. Bins had been overturned and products pulled from the racks and strewn across the floor. Behind the register a large glass gun case had been smashed open. The guns were missing.
Perhaps this was what Sarah Kerrigan wanted him to find, thought Michael. The signs of an armed struggle. Against the Confederacy’s evacuation? Or against the Protoss?
Mike looked over his shoulder to see Swallow crossing to a two-story tavern on her side of the road. He stepped into the mercantile, and his foot struck something crunchy.
Mike knelt down. The floor was covered with some type of mold or fungus. It was a dark grayish substance, its edges crusty but slightly elastic to the touch. It contained a spiderweb pattern of darker bands, almost like arteries.
Something had spilled here, and some type of native mold had taken quick advantage of it. Very quick, he realized—it could not have happened more than two days ago.
There was something else about the mercantile. There was a sound from the back of the store, the sound of something sliding over the wooden floorboards. It shifted once, then was silent.
A wild animal? Mike wondered. A snake? Or perhaps a refugee who had escaped the initial evacuation, or returned later. Mike took another step into the room, the fungus crunching under his boots.
He was suddenly very aware that he didn’t have a weapon on him.
Swallow gave a shout from across the street. Mike looked at the door to the back room once, then back to Swallow. He backed out of the general store and crossed over to the bar. Swallow was plastered against the wall outside the door.
“I think there’s something over in the store—” Mike said.
“I found the inhabitants,” Swallow hissed. The veins were pounding along the scars in her neck and thundered at her temples, and her eyes were wide. She was terrified, and the fear was eating into her resocialization programming. It was clear that she had hit the stimpack again, as the discharged unit now lay on the porch floorboards.
Despite himself, Mike looked through the open doorway in the bar.
It had been transformed into an abattoir. Once-human forms hung by their feet from thick ropes attached to the ceiling. Many had been stripped of clothing and flesh. Others had had limbs removed, and three had been decapitated. The three skulls were set along the bar, and had been neatly carved open to reveal the brains beneath. Something had been gnawing on one of the brains.
As he watched, something like a gigantic centipede writhed around on one of the bodies. It was like a huge, rust-colored maggot. And it was fee
ding on the flesh.
Mike suddenly found it very hard to breathe, and wished he had a stimpack. He took a step into the room.
His feet crunched on the crusty fungus that covered the room. And he realized that he was not alone.
He felt its presence before he saw it. The sudden feeling of being watched returned.
He started to step back, out of the doorway. He started to turn. He started to say something to Swallow.
Something blurred from behind the bar, bolting forward in a single impossible leap, barreling for the doorway.
It didn’t hit Mike. Instead, something larger slammed him to one side.
Mike hit the porch floorboards with a thump and twisted to see Lieutenant Swallow, who had struck him, firing at a large dog in the street. No, it wasn’t a dog. It had four legs, but the similarity ended there. Patches of orange-shaded flesh were skinless, muscles showing through. Its head was adorned with a pair of huge, underslung tusks.
And it was screaming under the barrage of metal spikes from the gauss rifle. The hypersonic rounds riddled it in a dozen places, and it flailed in the dirt as Swallow kept her finger clenched on the trigger.
“Swallow!” shouted Mike, “It’s dead! Lieutenant Swallow, quit firing!”
Swallow let go of the trigger housing as though it were a live snake. Sweat rolled down her face, and the sides of her mouth were flecked with foam. She was breathing hard, and despite herself, her free hand went for her knife.
Mike realized that her resocialization had been stressed to its utmost, and she was about to lose it.
“Sweet Mother of Christ,” she said. “What is that!”
Mike didn’t care. Instead he shouted, “Back to the jeep! We’ll send armored troops! Come on!”
He took two steps, then realized that Swallow was still in the doorway, staring at the skinned dog-thing in the street.
“Lieutenant! That’s an order, dammit!” bellowed Mike.
That did it. The beauty of resocialization was that it made its subject vulnerable to orders, particularly under the effect of stims. Swallow suddenly was back in control, running toward the jeep, passing Mike. There was movement from the mercantile as they ran. More of the dog-things were coming through the doorway. They could leap prodigiously, Mike realized, and could strike them in the back as they fled.
The dog-things didn’t. Instead the creatures waited for them almost to reach the jeep when something else rose up behind the vehicle.
To Mike it was a snake, a cobra rearing to strike. A snake with an armored head that flared out backward in a road frill of bony chitin like a prehistoric lizard’s. It was a snake with two arms jutting from its body, arms that ended in wicked-looking scythes.
Scythes that now drove into the hood of the jeep, pinning it to the street. The snake-creature let out a hissing cry of victory.
Swallow cursed. “They’ve got us surrounded!”
Mike grabbed her by the sleeve. “The claims office. It has one entrance! Make for it!”
He headed in that direction, the soldier hot on his heels. Behind him he heard more gunfire and the screams of the dog-things. Swallow was backpedaling and firing at the same time, covering their butts as they fled.
He paused in the doorway of the office and quickly scanned the room. Nothing had changed since he had been there moments before. He ran for the counter and came up with a primitive shotgun. He broke it open and found a pair of rounds chambered.
Yeah, the office had been left as if its owner had been called away suddenly. Or dragged away.
Swallow was in the doorway, firing bursts. There were more inhuman screams, then silence.
He looked out the doorway to see a half-dozen bodies in the street, all of them dog-things. Now they looked even less like normal animals than before, the uninjured portions of their bodies riven with pustules and knotted muscles. One of them still twitched a leg in a pool of gelatin that could have been its blood.
Of the snake-thing with the scythes there was no sign. The jeep was a crumpled husk at the end of the street, its leaking fuel darkening the sand beneath it.
“Those were the things that killed Chau Sara?” Swallow hissed the question, her voice a strangled whisper. Her eyes were practically orbs of pure white.
Mike shook his head. The things they had seen in space had a frightful beauty about them. They were gold and silver and seemed to be made of lightning and elemental power itself. These things were nothing but muscle and blood and madness. It hurt him even to look at them.
“Oh Christ, where is the big one?” Swallow asked.
Mike choked back the dust and the fear. “We have to get out of here before they regroup.”
Swallow turned toward him, wide-eyed and panicked. “Out of here? We just got here!”
“They’re going to regroup and try again.”
“They’re animals,” she snapped, and the tip of her gauss rifle rose slightly toward Mike. “Shoot a few, the rest will run.”
“I don’t think so. Animals don’t hang up their kills. They don’t take trophies.”
Swallow gave a short, strangled cry and stepped back into the office. “No, don’t say that.”
“Swallow. Emily, I . . .”
“Don’t say that,” she said, stepping back again. “Don’t say that they’re intelligent. Because if they are, they know we’re trapped, and they know they can take us whenever they want to. Dammit, we’re fu—”
She took another step backward, and the floorboards gave way beneath her. She let out a strangled scream, and the gun fell from her hands as a pit opened beneath her feet.
From deep within the pit, there was the sound of angry chittering.
Swallow twisted as she fell, grabbing the floorboards to break her fall. The chittering grew louder.
Mike stepped forward, almost dropping his own weapon. “Emily, grab my hand!”
“Get out of here, Liberty!” Swallow snarled, her eyes almost all white from fear. With her free hand she grabbed her combat knife. “Oh God, they’re right underneath us!”
“Emily, grab my hand!”
“Someone has to get back,” she said, pulling her knife free and hacking at something unseen within the pit. “They’re going to attack from above as well. Get going! Hump it back to the camp. Warn people!”
“I can’t—”
“Move! That’s an order, dammit!” Swallow was snarling as the last of her resocialization shattered beneath the creatures’ assault. She let out a feral scream and started flailing with her knife.
Mike turned back to the door, and there was a shadow there. Without thinking, he pulled both triggers on the shotgun, and was splattered by ichor of the exploding dog-thing.
Then he ran. Not looking back, he ran, throwing the spent shotgun aside as he fled. Toward the jeep. Lieutenant Swallow had pulled the rifle out of a hatch in the back. She had offered him one. It had to be there still. Other weapons as well.
He nearly made it when the ground erupted beneath the jeep.
The armor-headed snake-thing, with the scythe arms. It had been waiting for him.
Mike sprawled out of the way of the eruption and started crawling backward, away from the serpent-thing. He was trapped in the creature’s eyes, luminous yellow eyes set deep beneath its armored carapace.
There was intelligence in those eyes, and hunger. But nothing that resembled a soul.
The creature rose on its tail, towering over the shattered jeep, ready to leap forward. Mike threw his arm over his face and screamed.
His cries were drowned out by the sound of a gauss rifle on full auto.
Mike looked up to see the huge serpent-beast twist and shudder under a relentless volley of rifle spikes. As it writhed, it shot spines from its armored body that peppered the surrounding ground like deadly rain.
Then a round found the remaining fuel in the jeep, and the entire vehicle went up, taking the serpent-thing with it. It bellowed something that might have been a curse and might have been
a cry to some unknown god.
The explosion pressed Mike backward against the ground, and the warmth of the fire beat against his exposed face and arms. He looked down the street. No sign of the dog-creatures. Only corpses.
There was a sound behind him, and he spun in place, still on the ground. He expected more dog-things, but he knew he was wrong even as he turned. It was the sound of booted feet, not callused paws.
A large, thankfully human figure blocked the sunlight. Broad-shouldered, and packing a heavy slugthrower from a belt holster worn low on his hip. Dizzily, Mike thought at first the shadow belonged to another of Swallow’s unit, that the lieutenant had somehow managed to call in reinforcements when they had split up.
As his vision cleared, Mike realized the figure wasn’t in marine uniform. His pants were buckskin leather, well-worn and rough. He was wearing a denim shirt, neat but faded, rolled up at the sleeves. A lightweight combat vest, made of some open, leathery weave, pegged him as some kind of military. So did the gauss rifle he was packing. His boots were well-made but as worn as the rest of his outfit.
“You all right, son?” The silhouette held out a hand.
Mike grabbed the hand and gently rose to his feet. He felt like one great ruise, and the figure’s voice sounded distant and tinny in his ears.
“Fine. Alive,” he gasped. “You’re not a marine.”
He could see his rescuer’s face now. A head of sandy blond hair and a neatly trimmed mustache and beard.
The figure spat into the dust. “Not a marine? I guess I’ll take that as a compliment. I’m the local law in these parts. Marshal Jim Raynor.”
“Michael Liberty. UNN, Tarsonis.”
“Newsman?” Raynor asked. Mike nodded. “Kind of far from home, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. We were checking out a report. . . . Oh God.”
“What?”
“Swallow! The lieutenant! I left her in the claims office!” Mike staggered toward the assayer’s office. The lawman followed close behind, his weapon ready. In the aftermath of the explosion, there was no further sign of the dog-things.
Mike found Lieutenant Swallow facedown, still half in the pit, one hand still gripping her combat knife, the other clutched tightly to a loose floorboard.
