Above him, the great shape of the creature was ahead—moving terribly fast. At times, past the leaves and the canopy life, Dane could see the bundled mass of Hopskirk still held in its maw.
“Hold on!” Dane shouted over the comms as he ran and noticed that the branch was getting thinner and thinner by the moment—
Frack it! There was another branch that went in the same direction to the right, Dane took a hop, skip, and leapt.
>Activate thrusters . . .
He was thrown forward by the confident kick of the pulse generators on his back. They fired for just a brief moment, allowing him to land, roll, and bounce back up—and he was running again.
The bug creature was just above and to his left as it, too, ran along branches before flinging itself wildly from one to the next. Dane could almost reach out and touch it, it was so close. Dane jumped—swung from an overhead branch—landed, and kept on running. He could see that Hopskirk was halfway into the thing’s maw now, and Dane couldn’t tell if he was still struggling through the mass of tentacles that surrounded him.
Oh no oh no oh no . . . Dane put on extra speed, seeing that the tree branch he was running along was about to twist away to the right—
Leaving nothing but a gap in the canopy beyond it. Nowhere to jump to alongside the creature.
Nowhere, that is, except . . .
Dane leapt, firing his pulse generator rockets as he did so to fly upwards, reaching out with his bare hands to seize onto the thing’s shelled back, tumbling and turning for a moment before his gloves caught, and he was bouncing along the back of the thing as it charged ahead—
Now what!? Dane realized that he had lost his Field Blade. His rifle was still magnet-locked to his back, but it was too large and bulky to be wielded one handed. He still had his pistol on his hip . . .
And the smart laser on his forearm.
The creature was bucking as it charged forward, trying to fling its human passenger from it. Dane raised a fist and shot down with the bright orange beam of light, straight at the thing’s shoulder.
“Kreeeee!” The thing lurched to one side on the branch as shell and flesh boiled and burst, and then it was suddenly, violently attempting to slow itself . . .
“Whur!” Dane was flung forwards towards the thing’s head as it hurriedly tried to stop itself. He bounced once across the thing’s scales and was then seizing onto the creature’s shoulders as he saw ahead what the thing was desperately trying to avoid.
The branch they were on was thinning and wavering up and down violently—straight over a chasm. Many such branches swung out over the deep gorge that cut through the forest floor, but the one that they were on was coming to an end.
“Hopskirk!” Dane could see one outstretched arm as the Marine was clearly still struggling within the mass of tentacles. Dane reached forward to grab it as the bug skidded forward . . .
“Gotcha!” Dane grabbed Hopskirk’s hand as the bug started to lose balance on the branch, more of its weight leaning further and further out over the abyss below.
“Rockets!” Dane hollered as he activated his own, and the bug scrabbled and fell . . .
Dane was flung forward, and there was a burst of orange fire as Hopskirk fired his own rockets too—which tore the Marine from his tentacled prison as the weight of the bug dragged it backwards, kreeing and screeching into the chasm as Dane and Hopskirk tumbled through the air . . .
WHAM!
>Suit impact! All areas! -25% . . .
Dane and Hopskirk were flung from each other as they hit the other side of the chasm in the jungle, bouncing off of tree roots as large as they were and crashing through smaller plants before finally skidding to a halt.
Dane saw blackness and stars before it finally resolved into dirt. Alien dirt.
“Urgh . . .” He groaned, flopping himself onto his side and seeing that most of his orbital AMP suit was now dented and scratched.
Hopskirk! And there, in the dirt a few feet away, was the other Marine, stilled and lying on his back. Dane struggled to his feet and lurched towards him, checking his vital signs on his own suit’s telemetries . . .
He was still alive. There was a heartbeat.
“Hopskirk? Hopskirk, can you speak?” They must have been flung over twenty or thirty feet, and from perhaps twenty feet up. Dane thanked whatever deities cared to listen for the fact that they were both wearing the Assisted Mechanized Plates, even if they did both resemble crushed tin cans more than they did the human avatars of war . . .
“Grrrgh!” Hopskirk suddenly started spluttering and coughing, jerking upwards to his knees as he groaned. “What the ever-suffering, living piece of . . .”
Hopskirk was all right, Dane figured. There was a crash of movement on the other side of the chasm as Bruce appeared.
“What the hell?” Bruce shouted over to them.
“You’re telling me,” Hopskirk agreed. It took them a little while to find a place narrow enough for Bruce to make a running jump and pulse-fire to get to the other side, but he did so with a grunt and a rolling landing on the other side—a landing that looked far less painful than the one that Dane and Hopskirk had.
“What’s the problem?” the big man laughed as he got to his feet, ignoring the other two’s groans as he moved ahead through the trees. “The Beacon should be this way, right?” Dane heard Bruce saying, before there was a sudden silence.
A special sort of silence. The sort you get when you suddenly cut off in conversation because you’ve just seen something so shocking that it scrubs away any other thought in your head.
“Cheng? What is it!?” Dane suddenly broke into a run (well, a limping jog, to be more precise) around the nearest tree to reach the big guy. Dane was half expecting the worst. He unslung his rifle as he saw Bruce standing stock still in the space between the trees ahead of him. Dane was at least expecting another one of those bug creatures there, waiting for them.
“Bruce?” Dane asked, stumbling to a halt to look at what had so stalled Bruce.
To see that, standing just below them where the land dipped once more, were two Exin.
8
Trust in the Dark
An Exin stood about as tall as one of the orbital AMP suits, making them roughly seven feet tall, but not as wide. From afar, someone might think that they were insect men or somehow related to a praying mantis, but in fact, they were not related to any such mundane Earth creature. The aliens were covered with scaly, architecture-like shells or plates, each cast in a deep turquoise, blue-green hue and dotted with rondels and shell-like modules which appeared to be their form of utility belts and equipment pouches.
Their large legs were backwards-jointed, ending in large, three-pronged claws. Their upper arms were small in comparison with the rest of their bodies, but they could strike with enough force to throw a human into the air.
But the strangest part perhaps was their heads, a forward-pointing dome of scale and shell with tiny black beads for eyes, and ending in a mouth that had moving mouth parts like mandibles. When they talked, Dane had heard them emit a guttural, chittering and clicking noise that sounded like twigs being snapped or stones scraped together.
So—even seeing any members of the Exin warrior caste was enough to cause alarm in a human, given how strange and unearth-like they seemed. The Exin might not have actually set foot (or talon) on Earth for over three years, but their memory stretched long, and they were still a nightmare vision for many.
Dane and Bruce and Hopskirk were perhaps a lot less affected than most humans when seeing their natural enemy, given the number of times that they had seen them, fought them, and killed them. In Dane, at least, it was an intimate hatred that sprang up inside of him, one that made him raise the rifle to his shoulder and step forward automatically just at their sight . . .
Before he realized what was wrong about these two Exin.
They were stock still and hadn’t moved a muscle, claw, or scale an inch—and they were colored dark blue-
black, like basalt rock.
“Wait, they’re . . .” Dane murmured.
“Statues,” Bruce muttered angrily. He had his rifle held at ease across his body, but from the quiet intensity in the man’s voice, Dane thought he sounded ready to burst into action at any given moment.
“Why the frack are their Exin statues sitting here in the middle of the jungle?” Hopskirk breathed. “I can guarantee that no human put them up there.”
“No,” Bruce said heavily. “And that’s the point, isn’t it? No human did that. The Exin must have.” The big guy took a step forward warily to where the forest started to lower ahead of them, and Dane followed, keeping his rifle up.
To see that there were another two Exin statues further back, half hidden by the undergrowth.
“I am going to file this yet again under ‘Why the frack didn’t Professor Honshou mention this!?’” Dane muttered half to himself as they started to descend into the forested bowl that contained the avenue of alien statues.
“Honshou, like the rest of them, was only doing his job,” Bruce muttered irritably, making Dane frown inside his suit. Why was Bruce defending Honshou all of a sudden?
Ahead of them was an avenue of statues of Exin, always one on each side to form a group of two, with enough space for a procession of four or five such Exin to walk in the middle.
“Come on!” Bruce said urgently, nodding to the floor where, although there were vines and small rocks, the avenue was not marred by the giant roots or large trees. “There was a path here once, and the expedition might have taken it.” The insistence to the big man’s voice made Dane throw a look at him. Even the usually solid Bruce seemed on edge.
“Guys, you know, I am really starting to get a bad feeling about this,” Hopskirk said at the back. “How do you know this isn’t a trap or something?”
Dane nodded. “Good point, and we don’t. But the thing is—this is downright weird, and Bruce is right.” Another wary look at the silent Marine. “It could explain what happened to the expedition. Both why Private First Class Tychus and the others turned into what they did, and where Professor Honshou and the others are . . .”
“Or it might just get us killed,” Hopskirk growled irritably to himself, as they stepped forward between the statues.
It was quiet. Dane wondered if it was his imagination as he strained his ears to the suit microphones to hear the distant creaks, cracks, and scratches of the alien forest. They were still there, but seemed somehow muted under the weight of the canopy and vegetation beyond the avenue of statues he walked down.
So far, they had passed at least five pairs of the stolid Exin, and each one, Dane saw, was unique. Some were carved standing straight, some looking to one side, and others held ornaments like orbs or daggers or sticks.
“I’m figuring some kind of ritual? Temple?” Dane breathed uncertainly. He had never even thought that the Exin had religion, only hate.
“All I know is that this means that the Exin were here, on this planet,” Bruce grumbled deeply.
Yeah, Dane thought. This New Earth wasn’t the Eden that they had thought it was going to be, that was for sure. The Martian mercenaries and cultists had told him that Planet 892 had been detected by Earth scientists a long time ago, another Earthlike planet that, prior to now, humanity didn’t have access to.
“And so, as soon as we got ourselves a jump station, we decided to check it out,” Dane muttered to himself, keeping himself on his own private suit channel instead of broadcasting. But these statues indicated that the Exin had gotten here first. That they had been here way before humans had.
That this planet that humanity hoped to colonize was their territory.
Dane flicked his suit comms over to public chat between the suits. “Well, whatever the past was—it looks like the Exin abandoned it for some reason. Their loss is our gain!”
“We already lost one expedition team to this hellhole,” Bruce muttered.
Fair point. Dane sighed, turning to check where Hopskirk had gone. He found him lagging behind, kicking at the vines that threatened to snag at him like tentacles. “You good, Hopskirk?” he asked.
“Hgh. Good? You’ve got a funny opinion about what counts as good, Williams!” Hopskirk aimed another kick at a nest of vines. A handful of small insects like dragonflies suddenly jumped and whirred off into the green. Dane opened his mouth to suggest a bit more caution, but seeing what the man had just gone through, he said nothing. Instead, he clicked onto private suit-to-ship channel with Corsoni.
“Joey? Have you got anything out of the base camp servers yet?”
“Working on it,” Joey said. “Snippets, that’s all. Some boring stills of them setting up the camp, and a few bits of activity logs. Let me see . . .” There was the sound of keys being pressed over the suit channels. “Yeah, so days one and two for the expedition seem pretty regular, working shifts, deploying the Earth-Mover and Loader, and what have you . . . Then I’ve got a log from day four, where the rifles and service armor and climbing gear were clocked out of the stores . . .”
“They went on a mission?” Dane thought. “Probably to here?”
“Can’t say for sure, Williams. But they packed just about every bit of firepower they had with them. And, yep, by that point, their Private First Class Tychus is registered in the medical bay.”
“Oh.” Dane thought. Was this the mapping mission that Professor Honshou had been talking about? The one that had earned Tychus his infection and which had somehow spread through the entire base camp, to their demise?
“Okay. Well, keep at it. If you recover anything about something called the device, then I want to know about it.”
“A-ten, Williams.” Corsoni gave the affirmative and sounded as though he was about to sign off, when Dane cleared his throat.
“Oh, and Joey? One other thing . . .”
“Shoot.”
Dane hesitated and then shook his head. No, I have to ask. “What readings are you getting off Hopskirk? The guy’s been through a hell of a morning, he’s got a lot of reason to be annoyed . . .”
“But . . . ?” Corsoni asked warily, although the engineer didn’t wait for an answer. “I’m accessing his suit bios now. He’s got elevated temperature and blood pressure, but that’s about it . . .”
“Okay,” Dane winced. Was an elevated temperature the same as a fever? Was it out of the ordinary or the result of hiking through a forest in a compromised orbital AMP suit without a functioning faceplate?
“Oh, and another thing . . . his immune system is up. High white blood cell count.” Corsoni read from the medical scanners that were installed in every AMP suit and logged into the Gladius server acting as the main hub for their mission data.
Oh crap, Dane thought. Doesn’t that mean . . . ? He cast another sideways look at Hopskirk to see that he had stopped to peer into the green undergrowth around them, his thoughts seemingly far away.
Was he fighting off an infection? THE infection? Was he about to turn into a raving mutant troll-thing?
Dane hesitated, licked his lips where he stood, waiting for some sign—anything.
Suddenly, Hopskirk turned back towards him, making him startle just a little as he saw Dane looking at him. “Everything all right there, Williams?” Hopskirk grunted at him as he passed.
“Yeah, of course . . .” Dane said uneasily, as Bruce’s voice cut through the awkwardness.
“Heads up! We got something!”
The something that Bruce had found was an archway leading into a wall of rock, and, at its foot—a body.
A human body, Dane saw immediately.
“Rifles!” Dane hissed instinctively, raising his own and sweeping the area around them in a broad arc. The avenue of Exin statues led straight to this rocky outcrop in the middle of the jungle, festooned with creeping vines and ferns. The archway alone was as large as the avenue. Carved into an archway were apparent squiggles and scrawls along the archway’s edge, like . . . writing? Dane wondered if
it was a warning.
There was no sign of trouble from the surrounding forest. Dane even raised his rifle to scan through the trees above, but he couldn’t make out anything coming for them. His sensors didn’t show any power, radio, or electromagnetic frequencies coming their way, either.
Dane turned back to what did lie on the ground before the darkened archway: A human body, and it was clear from their suit that it was one of the expedition team.
“I can’t see any visible injuries,” Bruce was saying as he knelt to gingerly reach towards the man’s shoulder—and then turn him over.
“Well, I think we can all guess what got him!” Hopskirk grunted angrily at the clearly visible blackened hole in the middle of his chest and the blotches and florets across his face of the alien infection.
“They fracking well shot him. One of their own!” Hopskirk spat, standing tall and glaring at the other two Marines. “Isn’t it obvious? This guy got sick, and so when he started looking ill, they decided to lighten their load!” The Marine was beside himself with rage, and his voice sounded wounded and desperate.
“Hopskirk, we don’t know that,” Dane started to say.
“Of course we do!” the Marine almost bellowed, taking a half step towards Dane.
“Hey!” It was Bruce Cheng, stepping forward surprisingly fast for someone of his size and laying a hand on the shoulder pad of Hopskirk’s suit. “Easy there,” Bruce muttered in his deep voice, and there was something about the big man’s solidity and certainty that had a calming effect on the other Marine.
“This looks bad, I get it,” Dane could hear Bruce saying over their suit-to-suit public channel. “And I promise that we’ll get to the bottom of it somehow. We’ll find out what happened. And we’ll bring the perpetrators to justice. It’s what we do, after all. What we’re here for.”
Bruce said his piece in an easy, steady rhythm, and Hopskirk’s shoulders sagged as he did so.
Metal Warrior: Precious Metal (Mech Fighter Book 5) Page 6
