Ten Little Aliens: 50th Anniversary Edition

by Stephen Cole

  ‘You were aware that you were risking the life of a team-mate,’ she said, deliberate and clear.

  ‘I thought if I could clear the gap we could reach the pods together,’ Shade said, meeting her cold grey gaze.

  ‘It’s clear to see what you thought,’ Haunt snapped. ‘You were wrong. What should you have done?’

  Shade blinked, opened his mouth to speak.

  ‘Denni told him Lindey was out of the game,’ said Joiks. ‘Shade could have asked Denni for Lindey’s last location.’

  Frog nodded, absurdly enthusiastic as always. ‘He coulda led the Kay-Dees away from Denni,’ she said. ‘Taken Lindey’s suit. Tight fit, but chances are the dampers were still functional.’

  Lindey threw up her hands, pretended to gag. ‘No! No way!’ She looked at Shade and shook her head. ‘You’re never seeing me naked, Shadow. Not even in death.’

  ‘Damned right.’ Shade smiled coldly back at her. ‘That plan occurred to me, of course. Figured I’d rather take the jump.’

  He got his laugh. Lindey pressed her lips into a mocking pout. ‘Love you, baby.’

  ‘All right, enough,’ Haunt said. ‘That’s good, Joiks.’ Haunt always sounded particularly disinterested when she was giving praise. ‘That would’ve been the best action you could’ve taken, Shade. In the circumstances.’

  Shade didn’t want to concede the point. ‘Then again, we could be issued with more reliable combat suits.’

  The room fell deathly quiet.

  Haunt looked at Shade, and he registered the sneer on her face. ‘You go in, Colonel Shade,’ she said quietly, ‘and you kill Schirr with whatever you’ve got.’

  Shade nodded stiffly. ‘Marshal.’

  ‘And Denni,’ Haunt went on. ‘I don’t know what bodily fluids you may have shared with Shade in the past and I don’t want to know, but you don’t spit them in his face.’ She smiled faintly. ‘We have to function here as part of a team. A single unit. One whole.’

  Denni nodded. ‘Marshal.’ Then she blew a kiss at Shade. Amid catcalls and laughter the atmosphere lightened again for a few moments.

  ‘All right.’ Haunt’s eyes, grey as old stone, stared out at them all from the screen. ‘You’ve got five minutes downtime. Then you’ll join the rest of the year in Theatre One for full mission debrief. And Shade…’

  Shade shut his eyes and inwardly groaned.

  ‘… You will kindly report in full combat armour. Out.’

  II

  Theatre One stank of sweat and polish. Shade looked around with worried interest at the two hundred-odd faces in the lecture hall, sticking out from the stiff necks of their regimental uniforms. Most of them he’d seen around before. He’d gone head to head with them on various missions over the last year. Now he was dressed for the part again, the only one here in a combat suit. But if Haunt had his humiliation on her mind, he’d settle for standing out. With a face like his, quite apart from being an Earthborn, he usually stood out wherever he went.

  And as usual, he was terrified that someone might recognise him, remember him for what he’d done. Might see him in training here and work out something they shouldn’t.

  A round of fierce applause started up as a long and motley line of Academy Elite training instructors filed onto the stage. These people were veterans of a dozen wars. Once they’d fought for the Empire; now they were glorified Phys. Ed. instructors.

  And there was Marshal Haunt. As one of the four Senior Staff Heads, she was almost the last to walk on. Only Principal Cellmek came after her. He’d lost both arms, but refused to get artificials fitted. He believed – and he had told them this so many times – that you had to take what life dealt you. Just take it. Brave and inspirational, Shade supposed, but the man stayed alive by sucking soup up a straw. That was just dumb. Shade had taken some flak from life – his face was full of it since New Jersey – but life had also made him an Earthborn. With that behind you, you could take pretty much anything, and entirely for granted.

  Shade hated that. He wanted to do different. But where would he be right now without his connections?

  Thinking about it, he could be lying in luxury someplace. Not about to get a rocket up his ass from the one person here he respected.

  Cellmek left the line to take up his habitual position at the lectern, and Haunt followed him. He stepped aside respectfully to allow her to take the stand.

  ‘Colonel Adam Shade, A-TE 287645,’ she rapped. ‘To the front please.’

  Shade attempted to saunter to the front, to try to salvage some dignity by making out he was some kind of rebel. But he was too self-conscious to do it well. He probably just looked constipated.

  Finally he reached the front of the hall and stood smartly to attention before the podium.

  ‘If I may crave your indulgence before Principal Cellmek begins mission debrief.’ Haunt intoned the words like a child saying prayers by rote, but immediately she had the whole audience rapt. She cut an imposing figure, staring them all out from the podium. The Beloved Butch Bitch, Joiks called her. Amongst other things.

  ‘Shade here has queried the reliability – and hence the validity – of the combat suits we issue to our troopers.’

  She jumped down from the platform to face him. Shade had never seen her in the flesh this close up. He was surprised to find he was almost a head taller than she was.

  ‘As many of you have witnessed in the viewing rooms, Colonel Shade and his team failed in their attempt to liberate the Harbinger from an incursion by the Schirr. Colonel Shade has since blamed his combat suit for his failure.’

  She was doing a good job on him, thought Shade. He’d be lucky to scrape through the year with any merits at this rate. Then he noticed movement in the wings. Saw two medics, standing by.

  Shade’s eyes snapped back to Haunt, alarm bells ringing. She pulled out a pistol and pressed it against his chest. He looked down at it in surprise, just as she opened fire.

  The blast knocked him screaming halfway across the hall. He heard the shocked reaction of the crowd. His heart was knocking at his chest like it wanted to jump out.

  Haunt spoke calmly over the astonished whispers filling Theatre One. ‘The standard-issue combat suit, sculpted from carbon nanotubing, you will observe, gives the wearer more than adequate protection from a direct hit at close quarters.’ He watched, helplessly winded, as she strode towards him once more. ‘It dampens your vital signs while signalling your location on a secure frequency to your team’s scanners – leaving you practically invisible to the enemy. However…’ She kicked him savagely in the ribs, then stamped down on his stomach. Shade grabbed hold of her foot, tried to twist it so she’d lose her balance.

  She shot him again, in the arm this time. He shrieked in pain, saw a rip in his suit and a livid gash in the flesh, felt a sharp pressure bite into the skin around it.

  ‘Obviously, since the suit must be more flexible around the soldier’s extremities,’ Haunt went on casually, ‘the combat suit is more vulnerable to gunfire in these areas. However, those sitting near the front – and Colonel Shade himself, of course – will note that the fabric of the suit constricts around the wound to staunch blood flow.’

  Shade rolled about on his back in agony, like some overturned insect trying to right itself.

  ‘In any combat situation,’ Haunt told her audience, ‘wear and tear on your suit may lead to the impairment of certain functions. In this eventuality, what do you do?’ The shocked silence went on, and it seemed no one was brave enough to break it for fear of being targeted themselves.

  ‘You fight on, Marshal Haunt,’ Shade gasped.

  ‘You fight on!’ Haunt bellowed. ‘Damned right you fight on!’ She hunched over him, yelled in his face, grey eyes flashing. ‘These are Schirr you’re going up against, Colonel Shade. You think a better suit’s going to save you?’ She turned back to shout at her students. ‘Well, the colonel may just have a point. Those pig-faced murderers don’t just like slaughtering soldiers. Like
the Spooks from Morphiea, they like killing whole cities. Whole planets. Planets they’ve never been to before, people they’ve never seen, and none of them given the option of wearing any damned protection.’

  The tirade stopped. Shade wondered if the only sound in the entire theatre was his hoarse, ragged breathing as he fought to ride out the pain, to stay conscious.

  ‘Medics,’ he heard one of the other instructors say softly. There were running footsteps. A shot of warmth. The pain lessened.

  Haunt pulled him up by his good arm. He saluted her. Don’t you know who I am? She saluted him in turn.

  He made it to a seat in the front row unaided. Every eye was on him. The Earthborn getting his ass whupped. He sat up straight on that ass. Hoped Haunt would think he looked like a man who had just learned a lesson, and who was the wiser for it. Much wiser.

  ‘All right,’ said Principal Cellmek quietly, once Haunt had climbed back onto the podium and taken her seat among the long line of grim-faced instuctors. ‘Playtime’s over.’

  He nodded to an aide standing impassively beside him. She hit a button on the lectern console, and a picture of the freighter they’d boarded in the simulation swam into view.

  ‘By now you’ve all of you had your chance to storm the Harbinger and get the crew out alive…’ Cellmek started his usual waffle about how their performance profiles would be affected by the various tasks they’d encountered during the simulation. All Shade could think about was Haunt. He watched her through narrowed eyes. She looked dead calm now. Just carrying on like her flip-out had never happened. Don’t you know what I can do to you? With just a couple of calls it can all be arranged.

  Cellmek finally got back to real life again. ‘The Harbinger was on a peaceful mission, with minimal armaments, mapping new trade lines around the Indochina system. The Schirr disciples first infiltrated the lower levels, then secured and held the bridge. Not with weapons. With Morphiean ritual. The AT Elite unit deployed failed to stop them. The real freighter was destroyed.’

  ‘Did the unit escape?’

  Shade looked across the hall to see who was speaking. It was some guy he’d not seen around. Denni sat beside him.

  ‘Only two men got clear before the Schirr detonated the ship, Creben,’ Cellmek announced.

  Shade gritted his teeth as the throbbing in his chest grew worse. So this was Creben, known by name to the principal. Only about twenty-five. Short fair hair. Neatly chiselled handsome features. Already he made Shade sick.

  ‘Eight hundred unarmed human civilians on board were lost,’ Cellmek elaborated. ‘But the explosion took out the Ardent too, with the loss of a further thousand. The two survivors drifted for weeks, into the fringes of the Spook Quadrant. We don’t know what happened there. But somehow their pod travelled back within the Earth frontier and was reclaimed. By then, both were dead.’

  ‘Then we did better than they did,’ Creben murmured quietly. But not quietly enough.

  ‘You were up against training droids with beta weapons only, Creben,’ Cellmek said calmly. ‘Those men had DeCaster’s fanatics to contend with. Schirr suicide squad.’

  Creben nodded deferentially, his head bobbing about like he was looking for a suitable ass he could climb up.

  But Cellmek wasn’t so easily appeased. ‘Perhaps this is a good time to remind all of you that we are not putting you through the most intensive training in the military to make you better people,’ he said sternly. ‘If the Spooks make good on their threats… If DeCaster and his disciples aren’t located and dispatched quickly…’

  It felt to Shade like the unspoken threat hung solely over those recruits packed in the hall, not over all Earth’s overstretched Empire. He checked out Haunt again. The mere mention of DeCaster – to quote Haunt herself from one of her spiels, the ‘most wanted pig-faced murdering Schirr in all space’ – always got her riled up. He noted spots of colour in both cheeks. Twin targets.

  Cellmek finally broke the interminable silence with more cheerfulness. ‘You’re here because you want to make Anti-Terror Elite. Because you want to hit back at the cowards who commit atrocities like on Toronto, or on New Jersey, or the Argentines. And the final stage of your combat training will be for real. Real ammo, not the peashooters you’ve been firing off. You’ve been grouped into tens, each group including one instructor. Your strengths and weaknesses, as extrapolated from the experiential web, have been inputted to Pentagon Central’s tactical computers. From this data the most appropriate training program and location will be selected from those in the systems. The e-rag will post your final training groups at twenty-one hundred. But for now – put on your websets.’ He paused for two hundred pairs of hands to fumble with the delicate metal headbands. ‘The experiences you’re about to endure were taken from the two dead men found in the pod. Now we can show you what the unit on that freighter was really up against.’

  Shade picked up his own webset and eagerly fitted it in place over his ears. Becoming someone else for a few hours, letting his own feelings, his own pain be swamped by a stranger’s impressions would be a blessing right now. The lights in Theatre One dimmed into darkness. He focused on his breathing, in and out, as his senses started to fall away.

  And suddenly we’re someone else, indestructible. Buoyed up with adrenaline and the camaraderie of our unit, barely waiting for the docking tube to clang home before we rush to board the freighter, to save the ship and everyone on it.

  An hour later the tiny detached part of him that still knew it was Colonel Adam Shade was screaming for his own pain, for the lights to be switched back on.

  III

  ‘Shade? You get your grouping?’

  Shade was woken from painful sleep by the sound of something yelling and kicking down his door.

  ‘Coming along for the greet?’ yelled the muffled voice.

  He checked the clock; it was gone twenty-two hundred. Rising stiffly, he peeled off the heal-pads from his arm and chest and padded across the cool floor. Hit the green button and watched the door swish open.

  Denni was leaning in the doorway. She was smiling, but it was hard to read the expression in her black eyes. ‘Sorry, Shade. Looks like we’re going to war together.’

  Shade half-smiled at her. ‘Lindey, Frog and Joiks too, right?’

  She nodded. ‘Best in squad.’

  ‘Uh-uh. We just need the most work.’

  ‘We must be good. You see who else is with us?’

  ‘I haven’t checked the rag,’ Shade admitted.

  Denni’s face softened a little. ‘You still hurting?’

  ‘Guess I had it coming.’

  ‘Guess Haunt is an uptight bitch.’ She paused. ‘She’s grouped with us.’

  Shade’s eyes widened. ‘She is?’

  Denni nodded slowly. She looked just a little concerned. ‘Her and Shel.’

  ‘Haunt’s mystery man,’ mused Shade. ‘Who else we got?’

  ‘Come to the greet, you’ll see.’ Denni grimaced. ‘Sorry. You’ve not seen the rag. The groups are meeting up. Just so we can see who’s going to be watching our backs.’

  ‘Joiks’ll be too busy ogling their fronts.’ Shade wondered about asking Denni into his room. But there was nothing in her look to encourage him.

  ‘Probably,’ she said. ‘You know, that big guy, Roba’s with us, remember him?’

  ‘Seen him around.’

  ‘And his best buddy, Tovel.’

  ‘The square-jawed hero. Sweet.’

  She paused. ‘And Joseph Creben, shining star of AT Elite.’

  Shade smiled tightly. ‘Think I’ll give the gathering a miss.’

  ‘You really hurting?’

  He looked into Denni’s eyes, hopeful she might actually care. No. Nothing there but polite interest.

  ‘I got things to do,’ he said. ‘Things to arrange, before the off tomorrow.’

  ‘Pulling a few strings on Earth to get the best cabin?’

  Shade closed his eyes. He wished there were s
omething warm in the way she mocked him. ‘You know that’s bull.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘Every time…’ He looked at her. ‘Why does my coming from Earth have to make a difference?’

  She became mock-pensive. ‘Because our glorious seat of Empire is outmoded and obsolete? Because Earthers stay rich by taxing to death the populations they chucked out into space in the first place? Because…’

  Shade felt tired. It was an old argument. ‘I’m running from Earth, Denni. I hate it as much as you do.’

  ‘Maybe you’ll prove that to me, one day,’ she said as she straightened up and stretched, a cat ready to slink off somewhere new. No loyalties to anyone dumb enough to stroke it.

  ‘Oh, I’ll prove it,’ Shade promised her as she walked away. ‘To all of you.’

  Big words.

  He hit red, let the door swish shut. Looked down at the vidphone. I got things to do, he’d said. A single call and he could turn all this around.

  Shade sighed, and called up the e-rag. The text played over his wall but he barely took it in, hardly heard the cheesy voiceover making a joke out of everything. He stood unmoving, kept staring at the phone as the minutes slid by.

  * * *

  A-T E—ZINE

  23.5.90

  supple+mental

  POSTINGS ALERT SPECIAL ISH! ++

  welcome adam shade. your training group posting is E87. shortcut yes? no?

  yes ++

  Breaking the news first as always – then stamping on it, shooting it full of holes and nuking it – your ever-lovin’ E-RAG proudly presents your live-ammo training team, adam shade ++

  ROBA, Dax

  ATE126673

  Age: 28

  Visual: Black male

  The big bruiser with the baby face, Roba’s had a good semester, scoring highest KD kill-rate over five simulations. Just hope he don’t give you the evil-eye – Roba was top marksman with the Volunteers out in Hunan and the Commonwealth and he’s been itching for the live ammo. Shoot to kill now, big guy, y’hear?