by Rick Partlow
I purposefully did not react to that, though I wanted to. Pulsing? When the hell had it started pulsing?
“A few hours. It does it every now and then for a few hours at a time, then stops.” Erenreich was lying through her teeth, and I hoped it was more believable to Wellesley than it was to me. “We still don’t know why.”
“Of course you don’t,” Wellesley sniffed with disdain, turning back to the pod. She couldn’t seem to keep her hands off of it. “The idea that a bunch of misfits and exiles with black market equipment could achieve anything in this toxic shithole is ludicrous.”
“What did you do, Heather?” Gramps said so soft and low I nearly missed it, even from right next to them.
“When I saw them coming on the security monitors from the house,” she murmured just as quietly, “I hit the pod with a massive dose of microwaves. It’s been doing that,” she nodded at the faint respiration that seemed to be coursing through the thing, “ever since.”
“You could destroy the fucking planet,” I hissed at her, disbelief crawling over the nape of my neck.
“And what do you think they’ll do with it?” Erenreich growled in return, eyes flickering towards the CSF troops, silent and unmoving.
“This thing won’t fit in that elevator,” Wellesley realized abruptly. She looked to Gramps. “How did you get it in here?”
“It was excavated with heavy machinery,” Gramps said.
“We’ll have to bring some in from Freeport,” the woman mused, seeming a bit put out by it. “Damn, that will keep us here for days.”
“We could level the barn with the ship’s weapons,” Petrelli suggested, “then expand the elevator shaft with hyperexplosives.” He shrugged beneath the armor, the motion barely visible. “It’ll be messy, but we could do it in a day.”
“Excellent idea, Captain.” Wellesley’s expression brightened. “You’re definitely earning a bonus this quarter. Get someone on it.” She turned to Erenreich. “I’m going to need every bit of research you have on this thing. Upload it to a data crystal; I’ll check it before we excavate. If I decide you’re holding out on me, all six of you will be coming with us to a CSF holding facility, and once you’re there, I wouldn’t count on ever leaving it again.”
“You’ll get it,” Erenreich promised her. She turned to a pale, emaciated little man with crazy eyes. “Gino, go back up the data as quickly as you can.”
Gino nodded and shuffled cautiously over to a data storage bank, looking back with every step as if he expected to be shot down before he got there.
“Leave a guard with this one,” Wellesley told Petrelli, indicating Gino. “The rest of us are heading upstairs. There’s no need to keep Mr. Torres and Mr. Callas waiting around here when Ms. Damiani is so eager to see them again.”
She seemed so cheerful about it that I wanted to put my fist through her teeth. On the other hand, I didn’t really want to get stunned or even shot, if they were in a bad mood, then stuffed into a hibernation tank for the rest of the trip, so I kept my fists and my anger to myself. My insides were churning, though, as we rode back to the surface. Mom had promised to have me psych-probed, and I had no reason to doubt she’d do it. With enough drugs and brainwashing, I wouldn’t even remember my old life or that I’d ever felt any other way than totally devoted to her.
Of course, for that to happen, I’d actually have to live to get off the planet. There was always the chance that the fucking artifact was going to blow the whole place up before I had the chance to get turned into a zombie. I was having trouble deciding which of those two I’d prefer.
“Get the explosives planted as soon as possible, Petrelli,” Wellesley was saying when I could pull my head out of my ass long enough to listen. “I don’t like being blind, and we’re pretty much blind on this planet. We can’t even maintain a consistent line to the lighter unless it’s directly overhead.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
My ears picked up at that. I knew what a lighter was historically, though I’d never seen one: a cargo ship armed and armored as a makeshift combat vessel. Nothing that would last a minute against a Fleet cruiser, but it would outclass anything the Pirate World cabals could produce. Its biggest weakness from Wellesley’s point of view was that it wouldn’t be well equipped for orbital fire support; the sort of weaponry that could pierce planetary cloud cover with enough precision to respond for a call-for-fire wasn’t something you could stick in a bolt-on weapons pod. It had to be built into the original design for the ship. But they did have those assault shuttles, which was probably more than they needed.
The horses were restless as we walked by them again and Wellesley paused to run a hand across the muzzle of an Arabian as we passed.
“Make sure to let the horses loose before you destroy the building,” she instructed.
I glanced at her in surprise, half-expecting her to make some snide remark and dispel the sudden air of humanity that the command had given her, but she said nothing more about it.
Nobody’s a bad guy in their own head, I reminded myself. It didn’t make her any less dangerous, and it didn’t mean I wouldn’t kill her if I could.
Outside, there was a flurry of activity as bound prisoners were hustled out of the bunkhouses and forced to their knees in neat and orderly rows out in the courtyard. Other CSF troopers were hauling heavy-duty polymer cases off one of the assault shuttles, the faces of the containers marked with the universal sign for caution and the military symbol for explosives.
Ten cases altogether that I saw, each big enough to hold at least ten kilos of hyperexplosives.
Jesus, I thought, feeling an eyebrow shoot up in appreciation. That’ll do it, all right. That was enough HpE to blow a hole in the valley floor fifty meters wide or, if you set it for directional blasts, a hundred meters deep.
We were being marched towards one of the shuttles and behind us, I could hear the whinnying and snorting of the horses as they were chased out into the pasture to a chorus of shouts and yells from Petrelli’s underlings. I wondered how much good it would do, and how long the animals would survive without Gramps to take care of them. Horses were fragile beasts even on Earth, and this place was much less hospitable.
I tried to chide myself for worrying about the damn horses instead of watching for a chance to escape, but I honestly didn’t see it happening. These guys were professionals, not just hired thugs like Constantine’s people. Maybe they weren’t as STRAC as a Force Recon platoon, but they were a damn site better than the next best thing around at the moment. Oh sure, I could take one of them down and get his gun, maybe get out past the house, but they had the assault shuttles and I wouldn’t be hiding in any fucking cave this time.
We were about twenty meters from the open belly ramp of the nearest shuttle when Petrelli abruptly halted and turned to Wellesley.
“Ma’am,” he said, urgency coming through the exterior speaker, “the lighter just contacted the shuttle via a tight-beam laser; it’s detected a thermal signature coming this way at high speeds…”
A bolt of lightning split the sky and struck the assault shuttle farthest from us, about a hundred meters away, just aft of the cockpit. My vision filled with afterimages and then went completely white as a hemisphere of glowing plasma engulfed the ship and a concussion wave threw us to the ground. A roaring filled my ears and my head and a blind panic filled my gut and for long seconds, I couldn’t breathe. I fought to suck in a mouthful of air, pushing against the pressure on my chest, clutching at the ground with desperate fingers.
I heard turbojets screaming overhead and then another lightning strike, what my battered brain was coming to understand was the proton cannon on a starship firing, speared into the ranch house and concussion struck again, this time from behind. I was already on the ground, my hands over my head, mouth open when it passed over me but it tumbled me sideways and I was on top of one of the CSF troops, his pulse carbine digging into my chest. My hands found the butt of a pistol, holstered on the troope
r’s chest, and I jerked it free as he threw me off.
He was coming to a knee when I fired, aiming instinctively, pointing the gun like a finger. I’d never fired a pulse laser before and it felt strange; it shuddered rather than recoiling, as a small hyperexplosive capsule ignited inside its chamber and pulsed that heat energy through a semiconductor rod, focused by the emitter crystal. A flash of ionized air connected us for a fraction of a second, and then the visor of the trooper’s helmet exploded from the inside as brain matter and cerebrospinal fluid vaporized and took the path of least resistance.
I rolled into a crouch, then got knocked back down as the barn went up this time. Corrugated aluminum walls were blown outward by superheated air and the ranch house exploded into a fireball as that rush of air fed the smoldering kindling. Flames licked up into the night from three sides and smoke and steam and clouds of debris floated across the canyon floor in a vision of hell from a poem of centuries past.
The barn, I realized. The house, the barn…I’d told Kane to hit the house and the barn.
That was him up there, in the Wanderer, come back to get me. I had to get out of here. I pulled myself up onto my hands and knees and looked around quickly, saw Gramps struggling up to his knees in the middle of two of the CSF troopers who’d been guarding us. I shot them, one round each, one in the head, the other in the chest, then I was up and grabbing Gramps by the arm, pulling him away and starting us both running for the pasture. We had to get somewhere where Kane could land and pick us up.
We’d made it maybe ten meters before they started shooting. The only reason we weren’t killed immediately was the fire washing out their night vision and the smoke clouding the targeting systems in their helmets, but a swathe of laser pulses smacked into the ground less than a meter from my right foot, spraying me with a hot wash of steam from the water vapor in the dirt. Gramps stumbled and went down and I skidded to a halt beside him, turning back and raising the pulse pistol, wishing I could link my contact lens ocular to its unfamiliar sights.
Two of the Corporate mercenaries had gotten to their feet and were running our way, and I was trying to aim for the closest when he jerked backwards at an impact against his chest, blood spattering from between his shoulder blades as something fast and powerful and armor-piercing cut through him. The other took a round through the visor before the first had hit the ground and that’s when someone on the other side figured out what was going on.
“Incoming!” Petrelli was yelling, probably intended for his troopers’ internal communications, but he’d forgotten he still had his external speakers activated. “Get to cover now!”
I picked Gramps up by the arm and took off again, in the direction the shots had come from, knowing exactly who had fired them. Those hadn’t been the rocket carbines my people had taken with them; those were Gauss rifle shots, and the only Gauss rifles I knew of were the ones in the arms locker on the Wanderer.
Chapter Eighteen
“Munroe!”
I heard Yassa’s voice before I saw her sprinting across the pasture towards us, the rest of the team spread out in a V formation behind her. They were dressed in the combat armor we’d brought with us and looked a lot less ragged than the last time I’d seen them, and every damned one of them was still alive.
“Kane found you!” I yelled inanely, stumbling toward them. “Holy shit, Kane found you!”
She didn’t respond, just grabbed me by the sleeve and pulled me down into the prone, hugging me around the shoulder at the same time. The wet grass bent pliantly under my knees and the ends of it teased at my face. Gramps collapsed next to me, horror and pain etched in his face as he watched everything he’d built up over the last six years burning to the ground before his eyes. I felt bad for the old man; I would have felt worse if he hadn’t been ready to betray me to Constantine a couple days ago.
Yassa had been carrying a spare weapon over her shoulder and she shoved it into my hands, along with a bandolier of loaded magazines, and nothing had ever felt quite as good to me as the weight of that Gauss rifle. I offered the pulse pistol to Gramps and he took it automatically, with instincts so deeply ingrained that they overcame even his current anguish.
“We’re here, Boss,” Yassa yelled into my ear over the roaring of the fires as I slipped the bandolier over my shoulder. She shoved a ‘link into my hand and I took it, realizing she must have grabbed mine off the ship. I slipped in the ear bud; it would, at least, be good for short-range communications, if nothing else.
“Kane is going to circle back around and give us some air support, then he’ll pick us up back closer to the canyon wall!” I could hear her through the ear bud now, clearer than over the din outside. She jerked a thumb behind her. “We need to move back another hundred meters and set up a perimeter for his LZ.”
“Hey!” That was Sanders, moving up beside us in a high-crawl, the grass still reaching nearly to his shoulder. “Something’s happening over there!”
He pointed over to where the shredded remains of the barn burned furiously, fueled by hay and fertilizer, about a hundred meters from us. It was hard to see in the glare from the conflagration at the ranch house, but I could tell that the wreckage was stirring, throwing showers of sparks and jets of black smoke where the sheets of aluminum twisted and shifted.
“What’s in there?” Yassa wondered, frowning in confusion. “No one could be alive in that fire.”
An actinic flare of light exploded through the wreckage, brighter than the fire, brighter than the unclouded sun that I hadn’t seen in days, and my first thought was that there’d been a hydrogen fuel cell in the barn that had blown. But it was too bright for that, too bright for anything natural. I looked over at Yassa and saw her face going pale. A second blast shot out at about a sixty-degree angle from the first, like something using a piece of a star as a shovel to widen a hole.
“Oh, sweet Jesus…” Yassa murmured, eyes widening. What did she know, I wondered, that the rest of us didn’t?
“Is this the artifact?” I said, grabbing at her shoulder to get her attention. “Do you think this is it activating? Is it about to blow up?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted, “but I get the feeling this is much worse than just a bomb, Munroe.”
There was a dark gap where the middle of the barn had been now, like something had swallowed up the wreckage there, and as we watched, something came out of it, something very, very big. It was lit up by the fires, but the black, chitinous surface of the thing almost absorbed the light, swallowing it whole.
What I could see… At first, I wanted to say it was an insect, but that was more a trick of the mind, trying to force something unknown into the familiar. Its body was segmented, armored, maybe less like a beetle’s than a scorpion’s, with curved, chitinous plates that covered its joints, and it moved on two sets of legs, the rear larger and much more muscular than the front. Above the front set of legs, the body curved upward in an almost centaur-like segmentation, with a pair of manipulating limbs at the shoulders that ended in wickedly articulated claws. The head was flattened, almost wedge-shaped, with any eyes or ears concealed deep within the armored shell.
It was alien, more alien than anything Tahni had ever been, but that wasn’t the most disturbing aspect of it. It was monstrous, evil on a gut level that had no time for ruminations on how different cultures and species might have different ideas of morality and ethics. But even that wasn’t the most disturbing thing.
The most disturbing thing was the massive energy weapon mounted on the armor of its left shoulder, meant to be manipulated by the arm on that side. I could have believed that the thing was an animal, or even perhaps a mindless automaton except for that one piece of high technology sitting there obscenely connected to the rest of what looked very much like a living thing.
“What in the living fuck is that?” Victor blurted, bringing his Gauss rifle around to aim at it.
I was about to caution him not to shoot, but the CSF troopers were closer
and just as freaked out. I could barely see them in their dark camouflaged armor running past what was left of the barn, but I saw the plasma flare discharging off their laser pulses as they opened fire on the thing. There was a shimmering where the lasers hit, like a heat mirage in the desert, but nothing that showed any real effect on that biological-looking armor, even when the shots impacted the massive head.
I thought the monster would shoot them, then, but instead it scuttled forward with deceptive speed, crossing the dozen meters between it and the closest of the troops in the space a breath and catching the luckless mercenary in the claws at the end of its left hand. That was when I got an idea of the size of the thing, seeing it lift the CSF trooper into the air by his waist. The scorpion-thing was at least three meters tall at the shoulder, and probably five from the tip of its head to the tip of its articulated tail.
Laser pulses spalled harmlessly and impotently off of its armor as it grabbed the man’s head in the mandibles under its jaw and ripped it off his body. Blood fountained black in the night and the thing discarded the rest of him almost negligently. Then it waded into a group of four more Security Force troops, crushing one under its front left leg and smashing another to the ground with its forearm, ignoring their weapons fire.
“Jesus,” Sanders moaned.
Victor cursed and opened fire. I didn’t realize it was him until I looked over at the deep-throated hum-snap of the Gauss rifle discharging over and over. I didn’t bother to order him not to; instead, we all joined in the fire, pouring dozens of tungsten slugs at the alien thing.
“Aim for the left shoulder,” I snapped. “Everyone! Aim for the left shoulder!”
It hadn’t used whatever that weapon was, and I was hoping we could keep that from happening by taking it out ahead of time. I could see the thing flinching, its shoulder twisting away as the slugs impacted, and I thought we were having more effect than the laser carbines. Of course that also meant we were going to garner more attention…
