by Rick Partlow
The discharge of the weapon was a hundred times brighter than what had broken through the elevator lift tunnel, unfiltered by dirt and distance, and it ripped the night apart like the very fabric of reality had been sundered. Only the contact lens in my right eye kept me from being completely blinded by the flash; it blacked out automatically while my left eye was swimming in pure whiteness.
How the thing missed us, I’m not sure; maybe our shots had thrown off its aim. Instead of turning the eight of us into atoms, the blast hit one of the bunkhouses and blew a hole through it the size of a cargo truck. The rest of the building exploded outward on either side from the pressure of the superheated air and a wave of heat and force slammed into us from over seventy meters away.
I was already on my belly, but Sanders and Victor had been firing from their knees and the blast knocked both of them backwards with a grunt of pain and shock. The thing steadied itself and began to aim more carefully, and I was a hundred percent sure we were dead until I heard the turbojets again. I rolled onto my side and stared upward, trying to close my left eye to stop the purple flashes over my vision on that side.
It was the Wanderer, coming back around, nose pointed directly at the alien creature. I squeezed my eyes shut, knowing what was coming, and still saw the glare of the proton beam through them, heard it concuss the air like a spring thunderstorm. When I opened my eyes again, the Wanderer was pulling a tight curve that took it around the edge of the canyon, and the monstrous alien thing that had hatched out of the pod was gone. All that was left was a smoking crater, littered with blackened bits of whatever the hell it was.
I sagged slightly, feeling an overwhelming sense of relief.
“That…” Ibanez was stuttering, her eyes wide and white as she sat back on the dirt, in shock. “That fucking thing was a Predecessor?”
“No,” Yassa said grimly, shaking her head. “That fucking thing was what killed the Predecessors.”
“Ty,” Gramps put a hand on my arm, his voice shaky, too rattled to remember that Ty wasn’t my name anymore. He was pointing towards the barn.
I followed his gesture and saw another of the things scuttling its way out of the tunnel they’d blasted, just as big and black and ugly as the first. It cleared the hole and a second crawled out behind it…and then another…
“Kane!” Yassa was screaming into the pickup of her ‘link, as if she thought that would help the little device penetrate the background static here and reach the ship. “Kane, we need your help!”
Whether or not he heard her, Kane was coming back around in a tighter turn than I’d ever seen a ship that size pull. He’d just described an arc away from the canyon wall when the energy beam sliced through the night sky and sought him out like a striking snake. It clipped the Wanderer’s port-side delta wing, blowing a chunk off of it in a spray of sparks and vaporized metal and the ship went into a spin.
I felt my teeth clenching against the tightness in my gut, and I knew that I was less worried for Kane, for all that he was one of the crew, than I was for the fact that the ship had been our only way of fighting these things…and was our only way out.
Kane only had one option, and he took it: the belly jets ignited with a roar of white flame and power billowed out beneath the Wanderer, fighting with urgent desperation to pull her out of the spin before she slammed into the canyon wall. I wasn’t a pilot and I wasn’t a ship-designer, but I’d learned a few things from the pilots who’d flown my Recon platoon around, and one of them was why you didn’t want to try to break out of a spin with the belly jets. There was only so much stress a ship’s hull could take, and putting that high of a G-load on it…
The Wanderer’s BiPhase Carbide hull cracked on the stress points near the nose and the ship ripped apart like a child’s puzzle, torn into three pieces only thirty meters above the ground. The drive section rocketed upward, the belly jets still burning and the weight reduced, spinning like a top as it arced over the walls of the canyon, beginning to pinwheel as it lost stability. Part of me wanted to keep watching it, and part wanted to watch the cockpit tumbling down to crash near the wall of the canyon, past where the assault shuttles had landed…and a greater part still wanted to stare in horror at the alien things swarming out of the tunnel under the barn.
We were all frozen there for what seemed like long minutes but were probably just a few seconds. Then there was a roar, and a rumble like a distant earthquake, and a flash brighter than the sun and I knew that the Wanderer’s engine section had hit. It was kilometers away, on the other side of the hills, but the flare was brighter than a searchlight and I could already see a mushroom cloud climbing into the night sky, glowing with inward light.
What’s a little more background radiation on this place? I thought, a bit hysterically.
“The shuttles,” Yassa was saying, though I could barely hear her over the roar of the explosion. “We have to get to one of the shuttles!”
I nodded. They were the only way left out of here, the two of them that were still intact.
“Those things…” Gramps was saying, his face slack and grey. “They couldn’t have all been inside that one pod the whole time. It’s making them.”
“The shuttle will have a tight-beam laser transmitter,” I said. “There’s a kinetic strike package sitting in orbit.” I thought of my ‘link with the codes for the satellite programmed into it, and patted its shape in my jacket pocket. “We have to bury them in this canyon.”
I turned to the others, the plan formulating in my head about a half-second earlier than the words came out of my mouth. “Cap, Kurt, Victor and Bobbi, you’re one fire team. We bound by teams, but don’t fire unless they’re firing at one of us; we don’t need to draw their attention. We’re heading for the closest shuttle. And watch the Corporates, they’ll be thinking the same thing. Yassa, your team moves first.”
She gave me a nod, then waved for her people to follow her and took off at a sprint. The rest of us rose to a knee and trained our rifles downrange, and I took a moment to survey the nightmare scene laid out before me. Fires burned everywhere: the shuttle, the ranch house, the bunk houses---both of them now, the other had caught---and the barn. Smoke was twisting in black, spiraling eddies, caught in the gusts of wind that swept down off the rim and curled down into the trap below, and it was beginning to obscure the far side of the box canyon. I didn’t know what had happened to the ranch workers the CSF troops had rounded up; they were nowhere around and I didn’t see any bodies. I thought maybe they’d all taken off when the Wanderer began its attack run. I hoped they’d headed up the road and gotten the hell out of here.
The motion of the bug-like things was furtive and mysterious through the layers of smoke, but the movements of the Corporate Council mercenaries was less mysterious and much more predictable. They wanted the same thing we did: out. And they were doing the right thing, moving towards the shuttles in bounding over-watch formation, just like we were. But they made the mistake of shooting at the aliens.
Their lasers were even more visible in the fog and smoke, flashes of heat lightning in the distant clouds and cracks of tinny thunder. The return fire was more than visible, it was overwhelming, indescribable, the gods of old come to our world to lay down their judgment. I couldn’t see what happened where it hit, and the screams of the dying were trapped inside faceless helmets, but I knew nothing we had could stand against their weapons, whatever they were.
Yassa’s team reached the first cover, the shelter of a flatbed trailer loaded down with covered bales of hay, and I heard her yell “Go!” in my ‘link’s ear bud. I echoed the command to my group, slapping Gramps on the arm to make sure he heard me, since he wasn’t using one of our ‘links. He followed me, clutching the pulse pistol like a totem, and I tried to keep one eye on him and the rest of my team and the other on the multiple threats. The aliens were shadows, for all their gargantuan size, and panic gnawed at my nerve-endings at the thought that one of them might pop out of the smoke and haze r
ight in front of us.
“Munroe,” Yassa spoke from twenty meters away but still in a whisper in my ear, “if that pod can manufacture those things, what else do you think it can build?”
“Shit,” I muttered in return. “Thanks, Cap, as if I didn’t have enough on my mind…”
Ships. She was talking about ships. The pod had made living things, these bug warrior things, out of whatever was inside it. Could it make ships? Could the bug things make them? Could it make more pods?
I shoved those thoughts down as my team ducked behind the trailer beside Yassa’s and her team slid out to the other side with ours behind. I fell into a spot at the far right-hand edge of the trailer, near the tow hookup, and Yassa led her people past me, running for the next bit of cover while we kept watch.
I could see the remnants of the CSF force running back our way now, any sense of formation or organization lost in a blind panic. This was bad. The mercenaries didn’t worry me, not without any cohesion or leadership. But they kept shooting at the aliens, and that was going to attract their attention back our way…
“We’re not going to make it,” I heard Sanders say from beside me, his eyes on the bug things as they began scuttling closer, only a hundred meters away now. “They’re going to get us before we reach the shuttles.”
“You got any suggestions,” I snapped back at him, “or grenades, I wish you’d tell me about them.”
Yassa reached the burning ruins of the shuttle Kane had destroyed and her team crouched down behind the mostly intact tail section, sheltered by the BiPhase Carbide of the engine assembly. She looked at me as we ran to join them.
“Sanders is right,” she said grimly. “We sure as hell won’t have time to get it prepped and take off before they’re on top of us.”
Seventy meters away, an energy weapon vaporized two CSF troopers and several square meters of soil in an explosion of steam. I recognized a ripping, crackling noise to the shot that preceded the blast of its impact, but that gave me no further clue to what it was. There was another sound too, whining high-pitched above the echoes of the blast, and it took me a second to recognize it over the drumbeat of my own pulse in my ears as I ran to join Yassa and her team.
It was the turbines of one of the shuttles spinning to life. Someone was getting ready to take off without waiting for their buddies.
Chapter Nineteen
“Shit!” I yelled, shoving past Yassa and running out from the cover of the tail segment, heedless of the possibility of incoming fire.
The smoke billowing off the smoldering mid-section of the destroyed boat was like a curtain drawn across the valley, but even as I ran towards it, the hot breath of vertical take-off jets began to disperse it like a giant fan. I held my breath against the wall of heat and toxic fumes that washed over me, squinting as dust and sand scoured at my face.
It was the closer of the two remaining shuttles, maybe fifty meters away, already rising one meter, then two as fire and smoke roared out of its belly jets and I fell to my knees as the hot blast of the exhaust began to buffet me too strongly to stand against it. I yelled a curse that no one could have heard over the roar of its engines, and I wanted to raise my rifle and shoot at the thing, but I realized that wasn’t going to do us any good.
The aerospacecraft was nearly a hundred meters up and turning back along the canyon wall towards the barn and I thought maybe I’d misjudged whoever was flying it. Maybe they weren’t planning on running, maybe they were going to use the shuttle’s on-board weapons against the aliens.
The aliens must have had that thought as well, because the boat had only made it halfway into its turn when they shot it down. I blinked at the flashes, shaking the afterimages of the energy beams from my eyes, squeezing them shut before what was left of the shuttle impacted the canyon wall a couple hundred meters away.
When I opened them again, I saw the last shuttle, our only way left out of here, still sitting isolated and vulnerable almost a hundred meters away. The clouds of smoke had settled back down and I could smell them as they began to roll over me like a cloak, the image of the shuttle ahead of me appearing and disappearing in their black, oily folds.
I barely registered Yassa and the others gathering around me, recklessly exposed but beyond caring.
“I’m going to go draw their fire while you grab the boat,” Yassa declared. My head snapped towards her.
“Fuck no, you’re not!” I exploded. “Don’t even think about it!”
“Use your head, Sergeant,” she replied calmly. “You have the codes for the strike package, and destroying these things is more important than any of us.”
“I’m not going to let you kill yourself!” I yelled, feeling a red haze drifting over my brain. “You don’t have to do this!”
She didn’t yell back, just placed her hand flat on my chest for a second and smiled softly.
“Go home to your Sophia,” she said. “I’ve got this.”
I wanted to stop her, wanted to jump on her and restrain her, but I couldn’t because she was right. It had to be done, and I couldn’t do it.
“You need a hand, Captain Yassa?” Gramps asked her, standing straight.
“It would be an honor, Master Gunnery Sergeant Torres,” she said to him with a nod.
“Gramps?” I shook my head, uncomprehending.
“This is my mess, son,” he said to me, and I finally saw the man I’d known, the one who’d raised me. “I’m going to be the one to clean it up.” He smiled at me, just a bit of sadness in it but also something of the savage joy of a Marine heading into battle. “I’m sorry I let you down.”
Then the two of them were gone, sprinting into the night, into the haze and smoke, charging towards the sound of gunfire. Something was squeezing my chest hard, but I fought to get words out anyway.
“Bobbi,” I said to her, “I’m on point, you run drag. The target’s the shuttle. Anyone falls, leave them where they lie and take that damned boat.” I wiped something off my face; it might have been rain. “They’re giving us a chance; don’t waste it.”
Wellesley had left a team guarding the shuttles, and at least some of them had stayed at their posts even amid the panic and confusion…probably because they were too panicked and confused to move. I saw them as I cleared the wreath of smoke at a sprint, saw them huddled around the landing gear of the last intact shuttle, only sixty meters more. There was no more cover between us and them, but I thought for a moment that we could cross the distance clean, that their attention was totally focused on the aliens.
We were twenty meters from the rear of the armored aerospacecraft when one of them just happened to turn and see us. I’d had a microsecond debate inside my skull during the run about whether we could get out without fighting, but the decision was made between us without thought. My Gauss rifle had been at low ready, his pulse carbine was slung at high port and we both brought them on-line at nearly the same moment. I waited the microsecond before I saw my contact lens’ targeting reticle pass over his chest; he didn’t. His shot went wide to my right by less than a meter just before a heavy tungsten slug sliced through his chest.
I heard a yell behind me, but I couldn’t look back; there wasn’t time. The one I’d shot was wobbling on his feet, dead but not quite realizing it yet, when I switched my point of aim and put a round through the helmet of a CSF trooper who’d been crouched in the lee of a landing tread under the portside wing. Blood sprayed over the slate grey cover of the landing gear strut and he slumped to the ground, and then I was past the whole group and heading for the waiting boarding ramp. There was gunfire behind me and I fought the almost irresistible urge to turn back towards it, knowing I had to get to the cockpit.
The ramp vibrated under the stomp of my boots and I could feel a searing hot knife stabbing into my side from the wound there opening again from the pull on the muscles from heading up the steep metal slope. Exhaustion and hunger dragged at me and I felt incredibly weak, but I kept telling myself that I had this
one last run and then it would be over, one way or the other.
The interior lights in the shuttle’s utility bay backlit the man jogging towards the ramp, throwing his shadow across me and all I could see was his outstretched arm and the pulse pistol he held. The reticle from my rifle sight bounced around with my steps, and I knew he was going to fire first before it settled down, so I threw myself to the side. A glowing line of ionized air passed through where I’d been just a heartbeat before as he opened fire, and my shoulder slammed into the metal deck plating, my rifle only a meter away from him when I shot.
The slug passed upward through his chest and out the top of his skull before it spent itself inside the bulkhead. He collapsed to his knees, then hit face first beside me, missing the upper half of his head. He hadn’t been wearing armor or a helmet, just a set of black CSF fatigues, and I guessed he was flight crew. I didn’t look at what was left of him, just grabbed his pulse pistol from where it had fallen, then forced myself painfully back to my feet and slung my rifle over my shoulder. I didn’t need to put a slug through the hull or into the flight controls by accident.
I heard footsteps on the ramp behind me as I passed through the rows of acceleration couches where the troopers had ridden the shuttle down from orbit, but I had to just hope it was my guys and keep moving forward to the cockpit. The hatch between the utility bay and the cockpit was propped open, like the man I’d shot had just come out of it, but I could see an arm and part of a shoulder reaching through to grab the handle and shut it.
I snap-shot the laser, squeezing the trigger a bit too long and firing four rounds instead of the two I’d intended. There was less thermal signature here, inside the shuttle with no particulates in the air, just a slight flash and then the arm jerked back and someone screamed and there was an impact of a body against the deck. The hatch had swung halfway shut where the hand had grabbed it, and I kicked it open and stuck the pistol inside.
