by Jeff Grubb
The marshal looked at the room and said, “Son.” It had a warning tone.
“Give me a hand here,” Mike said, grabbing Swallow’s knife arm, “We can haul her up and . . . Oh God.”
Lieutenant Emily Jameson Swallow no longer existed below the waist. Her flesh ended in stringy tatters of meat, and a few vertebrae dangled from a torn spinal cord like beads on a broken string.
“Oh God.” Mike let go of the body. It slid back into the pit with a sick, slithering sound. There was a squishy thump, and the sound of something else moving below.
Mike fell to his knees, leaned forward, and puked his guts out. Then a second time and a third, until all he had was dry heaves. His head spun, and he felt as if something had sucked all the blood out of his brain.
“Not to interrupt,” said Raynor, “but I think we need to go. I think all I did was take out one of their officers. Fragging the captain, if you take my meaning. They’re regrouping. We’d better go. I got a bike outside.” He paused for a moment, then said, “Sorry about your friend.”
Mike nodded, and felt his stomach make one last attempt to empty itself.
“Yeah,” Mike gasped at last. “Me, too.”
CHAPTER 6
CREEPS
War is easy to understand on paper. It seems so distant and academic in black and white. Even the vid reports have a cool, detached manner that keeps the viewer from understanding how horrible it really is.
This is nothing more than a sanity filter, allowing those that take in the information to separate the reports and numbers from the awful reality. It’s why those who lead armies can do all sorts of terrible things to their troops that no sane man would think of if he had to look them in the eye. Which is one reason they don’t.
But when you’re confronted with death, when you’re confronted with having to deal out death or die yourself, then everything changes.
The filters drop away, and you have to deal with the insanity directly.
THE LIBERTY MANIFESTO
“THEY CALL ’EM THE ZERG,” SAID MARSHAL Raynor, climbing onto his hover-cycle. “The little ones are called zerglings. The snaky one we blew up is called a hydralisk. They’re supposed to be slightly smarter than the small ones.”
Mike’s mouth still felt as if he had been gargling garbage water, but he said, “Who calls them those things? Who named them the Zergs?”
Raynor replied, “The marines. That’s where I heard it from.”
“Figures. Those marines mention anything about something called the Protoss?”
“Yep,” Raynor said, strapping the reporter in. “They have shining ships and blew up Chau Sara. May be coming here, too, I understand. That’s why everyone is beating feet for the exits.”
“Think they’re one and the same?”
“Don’t know. You?”
Mike shrugged. “I saw their ships over Chau Sara. I’d be surprised to discover that these . . . things . . . were at the helm. Maybe their allies? Maybe slaves?”
“Possible. It’s better than the alternative.”
“And that is?”
“That they’re enemies,” said the lawman, firing up the hover-cycle’s main plant. “That would be much worse for anybody caught between them.”
They circled the dead town of Anthem Base one last time. Liberty recorded the devastation on his comm unit as Raynor fired fragmentation grenades into the wooden structures. They left a pillar of smoke behind them.
Raynor explained that he was riding scout for a group of refugees. Local government types. They were another few klicks farther along, heading for a place called Backwater Station.
“There’s a refugee camp about three klicks back that way.” Mike motioned toward the rear. “Aren’t you heading that way?”
“Nope. There was a report of trouble up at Backwater, and we went to investigate it.”
“No mention of a refugee camp at all in your report?” Mike asked.
“Nope. Of course, does it seem like the Confederacy wants to have most of the planetary population running around like chickens with their fool heads cut off.”
“Somebody else said that to me just before we came here.”
“Whoever told you that,” Raynor said approvingly, “has his head screwed on right.”
They flew smoothly over the rough terrain, Raynor changing course only to veer around the larger obstacles. The Vulture hover-cycle was a long-nosed bike with limited gravity hover technology that kept it a foot above the ground. The onboard computer and sensors in the nose kept it at a steady pace, ignoring the smaller boulders and scrub trees.
Strapped in on the back, Mike thought, I gotta get . . . one of these and a decent set of battle armor. He thought again of Lieutenant Swallow and wondered how she would have fared had she been wearing her insulating cocoon of neosteel.
They caught up with Raynor’s pack of refugees within the hour. The marshal was right: this particular gathering had been the local government types, conveniently sent into the wilderness on marine orders. Mike could imagine Colonel Duke’s delight in issuing that particular communication. The march had been brought to a halt, and Raynor accosted one of the rear guard.
“Something ahead we hadn’t counted on,” said the soldier, one of the colonial troops in CMC-300 armor. “Looks like an old command post.”
“One of ours?” Raynor asked.
“Kinda. It wasn’t on any maps of the area. We sent the rest of the scout unit up to check it out.”
Raynor twisted around in his seat. “You want off?” he asked Mike.
“Off the planet, yeah,” Mike said. “But as long as I have to be here I want to take a look. It’s the job. Duty.” He thought of Anthem Base and didn’t trust old buildings all of a sudden.
Raynor grunted an agreement and gunned the bike forward. They crested a low hill and found the command post on the other side.
Michael knew what to expect from command posts. They were ubiquitous, even on Tarsonis. Halfdomes filled with sensor equipment and computers, they were little more than small automatic factories that ground out construction vehicles to work the local mines, and would not have much in the way of either a staff or a defense. Some brilliant developer along the way put jumpjets on the bottom of the structures to move them where needed, but if you ever had to move them, you had to shut everything else down.
This one was, well, different. It seemed a bit mashed along one side. Not damaged from without, but rather shrunken from within, like an apple that had been left in the sun too long. The sides were overgrown with riers and tangles. In a half-circle around it, the colonial forces, green local troops in worn combat armor, were cautiously approaching.
“Never saw anything like that before,” Raynor said. “All overgrown and such. For it to look that bad, it would have to have been here before the colony was settled.”
Mike looked at the ground around the base of the command post. He pointed. “Look there!”
“What?”
“The ground. It’s got that creeping gray stuff around it. We found it in Anthem before the Zergs attacked.”
“Think it’s connected?”
“Oh, yeah.” Mike nodded in agreement.
“Good enough for me,” said the marshal, flipping over the comm mike on his bike. “That building’s been infested with Zerg, boys. Let ‘em have it!”
Mike kept his own recorder open and said, “Tell them to look out for the zerglings. They like to burrow.”
He didn’t need to give the warning. The ground in front of the command center opened up and spilled forth a double-handful of the skinned-dog creatures. The colonial forces were prepared, and mowed them down as soon as they appeared. The zerglings didn’t stand a chance, and were reduced to pulpy husks in the first volleys. Having dealt with the initial threat, the local militia then fired incendiary rounds into the command post itself. The building started to burn.
Raynor stayed on the bike, firing fragmentation grenades from a stubby launcher unt
il the roof cracked open like a shattered eggshell. Mike got a good look within: the entire structure was nothing more than a tangle of pestilent vines, a riot of orange, green, and violet. Sacs of messy proto-somethings were hanging along one wall. They screamed as the fire reached them.
“You’re getting all that?” Raynor asked as the roof caved in, burying the smoking relics of the infested building beneath it.
“Yeah.” Mike closed his recording unit. “Now I need someplace to patch in for a report.”
Raynor smiled. “I told you, this band of refugees are government types. If anyone has a decent comm system, it’ll be them.”
Marshal Raynor was right. The refugees did have a more-than-adequate comm link, and in normal times it would be a smooth link. But as he logged on, it was obvious to Mike that parts of the system were going down worldwide. There were obvious holes in the net, and a high level of background noise. Like the farms, the communications network was being forcibly ignored, with immediate ramifications.
He crafted the tale as best he could, wondering what the military censors would pull out before giving it to UNN, and what Handy Anderson would change. The viewing populace, and all the steps in between, needed to know what was going on, regardless.
He packed most of the material from the refugee camp as a sidebar, but said nothing of the altercation between Swallow and Kerrigan. He went into detail about the situation at Anthem Base and provided footage of the firing of the command post. He closed with a note that the command post was not on any colonial maps, confident that the censors would pull that line, if they felt they had to pull anything.
He was also sure they would let run the shots of the brave colonial forces mowing down the zerglings. Triumphant actions like that always played well with the military censors.
As the report percolated through the buffer into the general net, Mike pounded the orange dust out of his coat. Then he hunted down Raynor in the mess tent. The sandy-haired man offered him a cup of coffee. It was military style “B”—boiled to a thickened sludge and allowed to cool. It was like drinking soft asphalt.
“You get off your report?” asked the lawman.
“Uh-huh,” Mike replied. “Even remembered to spell your name right.” He flashed a brittle grin.
“You okay?” Raynor asked. It came out “yokay.”
Mike shrugged. “I’ll hold up. Writing helps me work through it.”
“You’ve seen death before, right?”
Mike shrugged again. “On Tarsonis? Sure. Random shootings. Suicides. Gang hits and auto accidents. Even some things that would rival those bodies hung up in the tavern.” He took a deep breath. “But I’ll admit, never anything like this. Not like the lieutenant.”
“Yeah, it’s tough when you were talking to the victim moments before it happened,” said Raynor, taking another slug of asphalt. “And when it’s sudden. And just so you know, the answer is no, it wasn’t your fault.”
“How could you know that?” Mike asked, suddenly irritated. He had been thinking exactly that: that he was responsible for ringing Swallow to Anthem and to her death.
“I know because I’m a marshal. And while I’ve never seen anything quite like Anthem Base, I’ve been in situations where some people live, and some die. And the living feel guilty about still being alive. Afterwards.”
Mike sat there for a moment. “What do you recommend, then, Doctor Raynor?”
Raynor shrugged. “Pretty much what you’re doing. Get on with your life. Do what you have to do. Don’t get strung out. You got rattled, but you’re shaking it off.”
Mike nodded. “You know, speaking of getting on with life, there’s one thing I’ve been meaning to do.”
“And that is . . . ?”
“Learn to use that combat armor. I passed on the chance when I was flying around with the fleet, and I’ve been regretting it ever since. Seems like it might be a survival skill around here.”
“That it is.” Raynor looked over his mug at the reporter. “Yeah, I think we got a spare two-hundred-level suit. And we’re going to be encamped here until we hear from the marines. It might be a good time to learn.”
A half hour later Mike was suited up outside the mess tent. It had taken ten minutes to scare up the suit from all the cargo that the evacuees had brought along, and another twenty to suit him properly. He knew that Swallow could slip into her suit in three minutes, tops. Crawl before you can walk, Mike told himself.
The suit itself was similar to the powered combat suits used by the Norad II crew. It was invulnerable to small-arms fire, had limited life-support (as opposed to the full space-traveling suits of the marines), and packed basic nuclear/biological/chemical shielding. Still, it was an earlier model than standard marine issue, practically an antique. Apparently the local law got hand-me-downs from the Confederate government.
The complete suit raised Mike’s height by a full foot, the oversized boots containing their own stabilization computers to keep him upright. The suit also rode a little high in the crotch, as well, until Raynor showed him where the lever was to raise the foot supports. The suit could be sealed, and it would run for seven days on its own recycled waste. That was a thrill that Mike could pass on for the moment.
The shoulders were oversized as well, housing ammunition reloads and sensor arrays. The backpack was an oversized air conditioner, shunting away heat from the body. The more advanced models carried mufflers to cut down the noise and heat signature, but this was an ancient model, battered and repatched numerous times.
Parts of it seemed a bit tight, snug around the arms and legs in wide bands. Other places seemed loose and open.
“The tight spots are part of the salvage system,” said Raynor, strapping him in. “You take a big hit to an arm or leg, the suit seals off in a tourniquet. One piece goes but the rest survives.”
“Feels like a hollow spot under the arms,” said Mike.
“Yeah, well, this is marine surplus. That’s where the stimpacks would be. We don’t use them in the colonial militias. Too many people get addicted to the drugs in them.” He closed the last latch and sealed Mike in. The reporter swayed back and forth, feeling like a turtle on stilts.
Raynor was in his own suit, looking equally battered and worn. The lawman nodded behind his open visor and said, “The armor will stop most common slugthrowers, though a good needle-gun can still punch through. That’s why most front-line troops carry C-14 Impalers, gauss rifles that fire eight-millimeter spikes.”
“What now?”
“Now you walk,” said Raynor. Several other soldiers were now watching as well, and a small crowd was forming at the entrance to the mess tent. The lawman nodded again. “Go ahead.”
Mike looked at the telltales along the rim of his visor. He had read the manuals earlier, on the ship, and knew that the small lights meant that everything was hunky-dory. He took a step forward.
He expected the step to be like pulling out of mud, since he was lifting the huge weight of a booted foot. Instead the foot, tethered into sensors and backed by a ton of cabled ligature, came up almost to his waist. High-stepping, Mike overbalanced, leaning backward. The servos whined in response, and he twisted, falling on his side with a resounding thump.
Raynor put a hand to his face, trying to look sage but barely covering the grin that blossomed beneath his fingers. Mike saw that several of the other militiamen were trading money back and forth. Great, they’re, betting on this thought Mike. The telltales along his visor flashed a warning yellow. He looked at them, consulted the manual in his memory, and decided that they all meant “Hey, dummy, you’ve fallen over.”
“A hand here?” Mike said.
“You’re better doing it on your own.” There was a smile in Raynor’s voice.
Wonderful, thought Mike, slowly rolling onto his belly. He found he could push himself up on one hand, but moving the oversized legs underneath him was a tight fit. At last he pulled himself up to a near-vertical position.
�
��Good,” Raynor said. “Now walk. Go ahead.”
Mike tried shuffling this time, and the armor responded by slogging forward, churning up a cloud of orange dust. He shuffled ahead ten feet, then turned, and shuffled another ten. By the second turn he was confident enough to take real steps, and when he didn’t fall down, started moving normally. The telltales winked green at him again, and he was relieved that he hadn’t damaged the suit. He was also glad he hadn’t laughed too hard at the new crewmen during the drills on the Norad II.
Raynor went over to the colonial militia and came back with the gauss rifle. He handed it to Mike, and his armored hand closed over the larger of two grips. The smaller grip, used by nonarmored shooters, required the firer to use both hands to steady its long barrel. In the armor, Raynor could heft it easily.
“Take a shot at that boulder,” he said, trying valiantly to keep a smile from his face.
At first Mike thought the marshal was only amused by his performance, but as he leveled the gun, he thought about what he was doing. The armored turtle on stilts was about to fire a gun.
“Hang on,” he said. “How does this thing handle recoil?”
Raynor turned to the other militiamen. “See? I told you he was smarter than he looked!” Some of the colonial soldiers reached for their wallets.
To Mike he said, “You brace, go into a broad-legged stance. The suit knows the maneuver. It compensates along the gun arm.”
Mike turned back toward the boulder, braced himself, and let off a burst. A volley of spikes erupted from the muzzle of the rifle and peppered the boulder. Splinters of rock flew everywhere, and Mike saw that he had carved a white scar across the surface of the stone.
“Not bad,” said Raynor, smiling fully now. “That’s one rock that’s going to think twice about attacking good God-fearing people.”
Mike felt as though a load had been lifted from his shoulders. Swallow was dead, and there were strange xenomorphs all over a wilderness filled with refugees. But at least he was doing something about it.
As far as he was concerned, he had made an important, armored, first step.
