by Rick Partlow
“Cover him!” I heard Victor yelling at about the same time the CSF troops started firing, not seeing me clearly but knowing something was coming.
Laser pulses flashed by as they fired from the hip or without a clear sight picture, but I was focused on that Gatling with its thick blast shield that would protect the crew from incoming shots even from our beamers; if they got that thing set up, we weren’t getting in. I was two meters away from the gaping, crystalline maw of its emitter when I jumped. I went a bit higher and farther than I’d intended, scraping my back against the roof tiles and coming down a good two meters behind the Gatling crew.
I hit on my shoulder and rolled, still feeling the air punched out of my lungs by the impact, but I had the beamer in my hands and its aiming reticle was hovering over the center of the CSF mercenary at the control handles of the Gatling. I touched the trigger pad and the wrath of Zeus himself erupted from my hands.
I’d never fired a beamer before, but the closest thing to it that I had experience with was a plasma weapon. This wasn’t quite as violent as shooting off a ball of superionized gas, but it was pretty damn close. Imagine being on the dealing end of a lightning bolt, except the bolt didn’t fork or deviate, just traveled in a dead-straight line that was so bright it blacked out the filters in my helmet for a heartbeat. When it struck home, the armored female I’d aimed it at blew apart like someone had opened her up surgically and implanted a quarter-kilo of hyperexplosives in her chest. The sound of the blast echoed back and forth inside the hallway, battering me physically and stunning the two mercenary soldiers who’d been on either side of the woman.
I was nearly as stunned, but I kept the beamer pointed in the same general direction and jammed down the firing stud again. This time the electron beam hit the Gatling laser’s magazine, melting through the thick polymer and striking the coiled, self-consuming belt of hyperexplosive lasing cartridges. Thanks to my headcomp slowing things down for me, I had the time to think that I had not meant to do that, just before the world exploded.
I knew what had happened, but I can’t honestly say I was conscious for all of it. One second I was lying on the floor on my side, with my weapon shouldered, and the next I was a good fifteen meters down the hallway and everything was filled with smoke and raining debris. My head was swimming and my vision was full of multicolored stars erupting like supernovae, and I couldn’t have told if I was right-side-up or upside down, much less a damn thing that was displayed on my helmet’s HUD. But my headcomp read the data for me and assured me like I was remembering something I’d read yesterday that, aside from a minor concussion and a strained muscle in my neck that I was fine.
I looked around, vision clearing and saw steaming metal fragments from the Gatling laser all around me and decided, Okay, I was wrong about the reflex armor. Not a single one had penetrated, even though I felt a dozen stinging bruises where they’d hit my legs and right arm. I suddenly realized that I should be watching out for the rest of the enemy troops, but there didn’t seem to be any near me. I heard thunderclaps outside the building, saw flashes of actinic lightning through the doorway and I knew where they’d all gone. The explosion had driven them out the front in a panic.
“Sitrep!” I transmitted, levering myself to my feet with the stock of the beamer. “What’s going on out there?”
By the time I’d made it halfway down the hall, the firing had stopped and everything was an eerie quiet, broken only by the crackle of the flames as a handle of fires smoldered from the explosion of the Gatling laser. Of the weapon itself, all that was left was a twisted, smoking collection of scattered metal, some of the wreckage still mounted on the carriage that had, unbelievably, not shifted a centimeter. Bodies and pieces of bodies were arrayed around it, most not moving but a couple crawling in pools of their own blood until I drew my pistol and ended their suffering with a single shot to each.
“We’re good,” Sanders told me. “I think we got them all.”
Another flash and a blast of sound off to the right and I ducked behind the cover of the exterior wall.
“Okay, now we got them all,” Sanders corrected himself.
“Come on in,” I told them, keeping my weapon trained down the hall. “I got you covered.”
Through the drifting smoke, I began to make out the details of the building. The front entrance hallway doubled as a cargo dock, where I assumed they unloaded supplies when Corporate ships arrived, and I could see a storage area at the end of it, through a set of open double-doors. Glaring overhead lights showed pallets of plastic tubs stacked in the center of the room, surrounded by a machine-shop worth of fabricators that I imagined could make whatever the researchers here needed for their work.
And hiding behind one of those pallets was a little man in stained utility fatigues. I wouldn’t have seen him if my helmet’s optics hadn’t isolated his thermal signature and zoomed in on the display. He looked young and he also looked scared as hell, lying belly-down on the concrete floor, his hands over his head like that would somehow hide him from view.
“I’m moving into the storage room,” I told the others, pushing away from the wall and trotting down the hallway. “Back me up.”
Too many risks, something in the back of my mind whispered at me. You’re taking too many risks. But I had to. There was only the five of us now, and if I didn’t take risks, then the other four would.
He didn’t try to get up when I reached him, just curled into a ball and clenched his hands tighter behind his head, like if he couldn’t see me then I wouldn’t be able to see him. I slung my beamer, grabbed him by the back of the neck and hauled him up, provoking a squeal of terror and a spreading stain on the front of his fatigue pants. I heard him whimpering something that might have been a plea not to kill him but it was too garbled for me to be sure.
“The researchers,” I said over my helmet’s exterior speakers. “The alien tech they’re working on. Where is it?”
More whimpering. I set him down on his feet so hard he nearly fell, then I slapped him across the face. Blood flew from his nose and he would have stumbled backwards if I hadn’t been holding onto the front of his fatigue jacket.
“The researchers,” I repeated. “The alien tech. Now, or I’ll beat you to death and find it myself.”
I was lying, of course. I would have just shot him.
***
“So, this is it?” Kurt asked, seeming unimpressed.
I walked around three sides of the device, trying to make some sense of it. I’d seen the Predecessor tech on their outpost planet and there was something about this artifact that seemed indescribably different. It was inhuman, undeniably alien, but somehow even more alien. The shapes of the things the Predecessors made were forms that would never have come from a human designer, but you could imagine them coming from a humanoid, something that walked on two feet and had two hands and two eyes and sensed the world generally the way we did.
This thing…it didn’t seem to have any sort of coherent shape. It was about three meters long and a meter across in most places, and it looked like some sort of fungus you might find growing on the backside of a diseased oak. The only reason I knew there was a front and back to it was that the business end was sealed inside some sort of heavily armored test bed, while the back was mounted on a kind of metal gantry, with power feeds spliced into it.
“This is the artifact,” Dr. Carol Van Landingham affirmed with sullen honesty.
She and the other twenty researchers assigned to the base had given up without so much as harsh language, but she was the lead scientist here, or engineer or whatever her official title was, and I think she felt she should have resisted more. Probably the fact that the rest of her crew was shut up in a break room with Kurt and Vilberg holding guns on them had convinced her that cooperation was her best hope for survival.
“What’s it do?” Sanders wondered. “Is it a weapon?”
“Yes,” the short, thick-jowled woman replied, shaking her head in denia
l of her own words. “But not a very useful one to us.”
“Be clear, concise and informative, Doc,” I warned. I held my helmet in my left hand, my pistol in my right and a very real threat in my eyes.
She nodded agreement, chewing at her lip.
“It’s not a Predecessor device,” she told us, looking from me to Victor to Sanders. “It was made by another…race? Species? Some enemy of theirs. We think they’re the ones who chased them out of this Cluster before recorded history.”
I felt a chill go down my back, remembering the scorpion-like biomechanical things that had been produced in something that looked like a huge seed pod on Gramps’ ranch on Thunderhead.
“I know exactly what you’re talking about,” I assured her. “Go on.”
“Well,” she gestured, palms up, “what we think, so far, is that the Predecessor ships used some sort of gravitational wave for their ships, their shields, their weapons. They’d pretty much mastered gravity, or at least they could control it a hell of a lot better than we can. With gravitic shielding, their ships would be very difficult to damage. That’s where this thing comes in.” She pointed at the artifact.
“We found it stored separately, in a sealed room, like they were almost afraid of it. We brought it here because we didn’t know how it might interact with Predecessor tech and we didn’t want to accidentally blow up everything we’d salvaged. We took it out here along with a few pieces of the more portable pieces of Ancient technology. So, we’ve been testing it, and against armor, electromagnetic fields, living flesh it does…” She sniffed. “…not a damned thing. But if we use it against a Predecessor gravity shield…”
She cocked an eyebrow. “I can show you.”
I nodded, but raised my pistol slightly.
She went to a control panel and waved a hand to activate a haptic hologram. Then she made some arcane gestures and inside the thick transplas shielding of the test bed, a faint green glow began to envelope what looked like a metal ball about ten centimeters across.
“The ball’s just a conductor,” she explained, sounding now as if she was teaching a class. “The gravitic shield is being projected externally, so we can repeat the test.”
The ball had been resting in a bed of what looked like sand. As the green glow grew brighter, it began to float into the center of the tank in fits and starts, finally coming to a steady hover there.
“And now we fire up the Skrela weapon.”
“Skrela?” Sanders asked.
She shrugged. “There were some recordings. They haven’t all been translated, but that’s as close as we can come to pronouncing the name they called their enemy.”
Another pass of her hand through the hologram and the oblong thing began to vibrate, humming in a frequency so low it was almost subsonic. The hum became louder and more intense over a period of maybe five seconds, and then it discharged. It was a feeling more than a sound or a flash, maybe a wave that seemed to pass through the fabric of reality. Inside the tank, the green glow intensified until it hurt to look at it, and then it shrank and took the metal ball with it, until it popped like a soap bubble and there was nothing.
“I guess that’s why the Skrela won,” Van Landingham mused, shutting the power down with another wave through the hologram.
“Is this really what we came for?” Victor wondered, sounding skeptical.
I thought of those cylinder-shaped Predecessor spaceships lined up on their landing pads in the outpost, thought of what Andre Damiani could do with them, and I slowly nodded.
“Yeah,” I said, smiling grimly at the thought that General Murdock was one smart son of a bitch. “I think this is exactly what we came for.”
I motioned with my pistol towards Van Landingham.
“Wrap it up,” I said. “We’ll take it.”
Chapter Sixteen
“Well, we got their damn toy,” Victor said, foot propped up on the bulkhead as we waited out the elevator ride down into the moon’s hangar bay. “Wonder how long we’ll have to wait before they decide to use it?”
Kurt grunted agreement, but I stayed silent. The trip back to 82 Eridani had seemed to drag on for endless days and everyone was getting a bit on edge. I’d have thought that going out on a mission would have let them blow off some steam, but we’d been on the ground less than two hours and the CSF troops hadn’t been as much a fight as a slaughter and I don’t think the whole thing had sat well with any of us.
Now we were going from one mostly-barren moon to another, and we were all having visions of more hours of tedious training or mindless ViRdramas to kill the time. Until the elevator reached bottom in the hangar bay and all of our mouths dropped open.
“Not that long, if I had to guess,” I answered Victor’s rhetorical question when I could formulate a coherent thought again.
The underground hangar was stuffed absolutely full, with barely a spare centimeter, of ships, troops and pallet after pallet of materials. The Nomad had been shuffled off to a far corner to make room for a half-dozen more Stealth-ships just like the Nightshade, crammed together wingtip to wingtip, their belly ramps open and techs scrambling up and down them, arms filled with diagnostic scanners. Gathered here and there in-between pallets of anti-ship missiles and tanks of reaction mass were groups of soldiers dressed in the same reflex armor we’d been issued, electron beamers slung over their shoulders.
“Captain Munroe,” Nightshade said, “you and your team are wanted outside. Please report to Major Al Amari on the floor of the hangar.”
“No downtime after all,” I said, pushing out of my seat and slapping Victor on the arm. “Let’s go see what the next op is.”
We’d barely made it down the ramp before a team of frantic, frenzied technicians scrambled up it with a loading jack to take possession of the Skrela weapon. I’d honestly felt nervous as hell carrying the thing in the utility bay all the way back from the Corporate Council station, worried it would somehow knock us out of T-space or transport us to some nightmare dimension or some damn thing.
“What are you gonna’ do with it?” Kurt asked a straggler as the squish-faced little man waited for the loading jack.
“We’re installing it on the Ombre,” he said, gesturing at one of the other Stealth-ships jammed into the hangar. “In the next couple hours, if we can get it done!”
Then he was inside and we were out, heading over to the nearest group of armored troops, half of them sitting on the casings of stacked missiles, the other half squatting carelessly on the floor with their weapons cradled in their laps.
“I’m looking for Captain Al Amari,” I told one of them, a tall, powerfully-built woman with hair as short as mine and eyes shaded an unnatural purple.
“There,” she barely looked away from her conversation as she pointed to the next cluster over.
I knew which one was in charge immediately, before I said a word to the man. He stood like a rock in a storm at the center of a group of seven troopers, hands clasped behind his back as he addressed them, his hawkish face calmly professional. He had skin the color of old teak decking, weathered from exposure to the climates of who knew how many different worlds and a voice that carried without shouting. He reminded me of my first CO in Recon, Captain Kapoor.
He paused in speaking to his team when he saw us approaching.
“You must be Sgt. Munroe,” he said, offering me a gloved hand.
I shook it, feeling more like I should be saluting him. His grip was powerful but restrained, giving me the feeling that he could have crushed my hand to powder if he was of a mind to.
“Yes, sir,” I acknowledged. “I heard you needed to see us.”
“Indeed. General Murdock wanted me to tell you he was impressed with your success in acquiring your objective and he’d like you to work with my group in the next phase of the operation.” He smiled thinly. “He’s playing the details of what that might be close to the vest at this point, but we’re being held in reserve for some sort of ‘plan B’ option while
the main force moves on Petra.”
“What’s a Petra?” Victor blurted and I shot him a reproving glare. He’d never been in the military, so he had no clue about the courtesies of speaking with a commanding officer.
“That’s where our old friend Andre Damiani is keeping the bulk of the Predecessor technology he’s found,” Al Amari answered, seemingly taking no offense at being talked to out of turn, “or so I’m told. But I’ve been tasked with briefing you all, and to that end, I need you to see something.”
He turned and began walking without waiting to see if we’d follow, so, of course, we did. He led us up a set of stairs in the corner of the hangar to an office fronted by a picture window that looked down over the gathered squadron of ships and the chaotic activity around them. Through it, I could already see the team of technicians hauling the alien weapon beneath one of the Stealth-ships, the hull plating over its weapons pods already disassembled and waiting for the new addition.
“I have to assume,” Al Amari spoke again as he sat down at a desk inside the office and activated a holo-projector set in its surface, “that you haven’t been accessing the Instell Newsnet during your flight back, or you’d have already seen this and been quite a bit more worked up.”
He passed a hand over a haptic control inside the cylinder of light above the desktop, and the formless glow coalesced into the golden Mercury of the Trans-Commonwealth News Network, the largest provider of newsholos and ViRfeed in the Cluster. The symbol evaporated into an image straight out of Hell, a devastated landscape of crumbling buildings that protruded from the charred soil like bleached bones. The very air seemed to shimmer with heat, and I wondered what uninhabitable moonscape this was.
"This," came a voiceover in the well-modulated, authoritative tones of a computer construct, "was Grenada, a small but prosperous colony near the inner frontier of the Cluster...up until three weeks ago. Today, it is a radioactive nightmare, and it would seem that all of its three million inhabitants are dead.
