Their opportunity vanished. Trash and Albright opened fire into the rhinos’ backs. Bullets tore the insects to pieces, but sparked and ricocheted off the armor plates beneath.
Cozar lit a Molotov and flung it into the air. It arced down and struck with a crash barely audible above the hail of small arms fire, then exploded in a shower of yellow-orange flames. The monster at the center of the blaze roared in agony.
Jack lit his own Molotov and cranked his arm back, but before he could throw, a high-pitched crack sounded in the distance and the bottle exploded in his hand. Flames engulfed his arm, and he roared in pain. He dove to the ground and tried to smother his arm while another shot rang out.
His right arm sizzled and popped beneath him, and he chewed on his lower lip while fighting the pain. He didn’t even feel the heat anymore, just the sheer hurt. All the while, one of the assault rifles continued to rattle off rounds, and the rhino spun to aim at its attacker.
Jack yelled to get down in half-formed barks, but his team knew what they were doing. They were crazy as hell, but they had a plan. The rhino opened fire and angled its autocannon upward, the stream of burning blue rounds biting chunks out of the rock face, while Albright leapt down from her hiding spot and rushed up behind it.
The nimble little woman sprang into the air and latched onto the monster’s back. It spun around and futilely reached back to grab her, but she was faster. Her combat knife flashed out and slit its throat, spraying black blood to the earth.
It was over. Jack was in more pain than he could swallow, but he was smiling. He must have looked right loony at that moment, as he grinned and looked at the two dead monsters in the dirt. One was lying on the ground still aflame, and the other lay in a lifeless heap with tiny Lisa Albright triumphant atop it.
They didn’t have time to celebrate, though. They needed to get out of town and fast. Jack stumbled back to his feet, slobbering in pain the whole way, and with a breaking voice said, “Chase! Start the engine. We’re getting the hell out.”
The engine sparked to life and rumbled. Everyone came out of their cover, while Albright cleaned and wrapped Jack’s hand and gave him a shot of morphine to take the bite off his excruciating pain. The others removed the rhino’s head with a fire-axe, and heaved it into the back of the jeep, beside the creature’s similarly liberated autocannon.
When they were all loaded up, Chase pulled out and headed for Nikitin and Hartnell’s post. Jack sat in the back, slumped over to the side, and he managed to slip into a nice, deep sleep for the rest of the ride.
Chapter 29:
Snare
The tent’s interior was dim in the spare sunshine that managed to seep inside, and Jack was looking down at his gauze-wrapped hand. Six weeks had passed since the fight, and the roasted skin never stopped itching and aching. The burns could have been a lot worse, he admitted, but he was still short a hand. His good hand, even.
He made due. He started carrying a forty-five caliber handgun and learned to shoot left-handed. That hand felt damn near useless and learning to aim reliably was a struggle, but after a bit of practice, it started to come around.
He stretched his burnt fingers then made a fist, and had to grit his teeth against the pain. He had no room to complain, though. It took the surgeons a week to dig all the shrapnel out of Nikitin’s side, and he was still in a med-tent somewhere recuperating. With a little luck, he’d be back on the frontlines soon. Rebecca Hartnell didn’t fair as well; she got caught in direct fire that night, and one of the rhino’s autocannons took a fist-sized chunk out of her shoulder. She survived, but it was a safe bet her left arm would never work quite right again. Despite her best protesting, she was taken off active duty and given a desk job in the armory.
Considering all of that, Jack had made out alright. His hand would never be pretty, but it would work once he got the bandages off. Streaks of scarred skin twisted up from the hand towards his elbow, like permanently etched flames, and they’d serve as a reminder that the situation was never under control, no matter how simple it appeared.
He stepped out of the tent and into the full light of day. The sun hung directly overhead, and a dusty canyon stretched off in two directions beneath him. Their camp was on the Sinai Peninsula, in a known high-traffic area thirty klicks east of where the Suez Canal met the Red Sea. His troops were spread out in three-man groups along the top of the canyon, and his own was the furthest south.
Lisa Albright was a couple meters away with her rifle held across her chest. Stories of her exploits on the Gaza Strip spread quickly after their return, and she’d become a minor celebrity. As far as anyone knew, she was the only person to kill a rhino in hand-to-hand. Of course, rumors grew and twisted as they spread, and half the resistance now thought she’d faced the beast in single combat and snapped its neck with her bare hands. That was just the way rumors worked, Jack supposed.
She wore a dark red beret that someone gave her, and with her camouflage painted face, she looked less like a physician every day and more like a very tiny commando.
There were stories about Jack, too, but nothing like Albright’s tall tales. The brass were talking about his quick thinking and ability to stay cool under pressure, and in an organization starved for leadership, a lot of eyes were on him all of a sudden. His only option was to pick up the ball and run with it.
The resistance had scored a few small victories over the previous weeks, minor annoyances at best, but Jack thought it time to start really pissing the invaders off. He wasn’t content to skulk around the night setting booby traps. He wanted to do something bold and noisy. Something the enemy couldn’t ignore.
The Bravos, whose ranks had swollen to a few dozen soldiers, hid along the canyon for three days straight. They watched the alien walkers sprint through at two-hundred KPH, and they figured out a rough schedule. Around noon, single walkers tended to come through every forty-two minutes, and there were never any security sweeps or air support. The enemy considered this a safe region.
“Whaddya think, hero? Today the day?” Albright asked.
He nodded. “We’ll hit the next one that comes through.”
“Good,” she said. “I’m tired of this shit hole.”
Charlie Hernandez came bounding up the slope a moment later. Most of his black, bug-like armor was hidden under overlapping pieces of ragged cloth, and he looked like some kind of vagrant grasshopper.
The higher-ups wanted someone to observe and report back on the viability of Jack’s tactic. Charlie was between posts at the time and quickly volunteered. “The chain is set and ready to go. The forward team’s just waiting for a target,” he said in his mechanically altered voice.
“What about Trash’s group?”
“Locked and loaded.”
There was nothing left to do but take cover and wait.
Twenty minutes later, they spotted a dust cloud at the northern end of the canyon. Jack raised his binoculars up, and could see the alien walker galloping in at full speed.
“Here she comes,” he said.
From his vantage point, he could hardly see the forward team’s position five hundred meters on, and he couldn’t see the chain at all. That’s how it was supposed to be.
Then, just as the walker was about to pass the forward team, the thick metal chain snapped taught eight meters above the ground. The walker saw it at the last moment and tried to stop, but it was too late. Its forward legs buckled and snapped, and the vehicle lurched forward, tumbling end over end through the narrow canyon, and then skidded along the rocky soil.
It ground to a halt amid a thick cloud of kicked up dust right under Jack’s position. Trash’s team immediately went into action.
“Fire one!” Trash hollered, and a rocket propelled grenade raced down from out of the rocks with a hiss, followed by a trail of white smoke. The shot struck the back of the walker’s body and exploded in a ball of fire and debris.
“All clear!”
It was time for Jack’s team
to move. He, Charlie and Albright rushed down the side of the canyon, interspersing quick hops with controlled slides through the loose soil. By the time they came to the bottom, the smoke had cleared and the walker lay face first in the dirt with its blasted ass in the air, broken and twitching, a massive singed hole where its back-end used to be.
Chase and Trash came down the opposite side, and stopped behind a rock above the walker. They had their rifles trained on the wreckage. “Got yer back, chief!”
Jack team moved. His team clambered up the side of the vehicle and swept their barrels across the opening, ready to take down anything still moving. There was no motion inside the vehicle, only strangely colored blood and carnage. “Sweep through and put a round in every skull. No survivors. Charlie, you documenting this?”
“Recording as we speak,” Charlie said. “We’ll have plenty of footage.”
“Good. Albright, pick out two good specimens of each kind.”
“Roger that,” she said.
The creatures were strapped to the walls with tendril-like harnesses, much like the inside of a leviathan, actually. Jack quickly pushed the thought out of his head before he had a chance to feel anything approaching sympathy.
The three soldiers moved through row by row, and finished each occupant with a single round to the head. It was mechanical work, and they did it quickly and without passion.
“Jack, take a look at this,” Albright said from the front of the cabin.
He strode over to meet her, and found her standing before a creature they hadn’t seen before. Its flesh was shiny and off-white, like uncooked scallop meat. It was thin and spindly, with no apparent bone structure. It had six arms, a finned tail, and a bulb of a head with thin mouth and a single, off-center blue-green eye.
It sat in some kind of cradle, with its arms hooked into burrows in the walker’s flesh. It was alive, but badly wounded. It mewled in pain and fear.
“Must be the pilot,” Albright said.
Jack nodded. He thought back to the first village back in China, and remembered the floating, six armed creature that directed the operations there. It shape was right, but all of the details were different. “Sounds about right. I think they wear some kind of armor when they go outside.”
The thing was twitching uncontrollably, and whenever it jerked, the ruined walker quaked. It looked up at Jack with pleading in its giant eye, and it whimpered.
Jack had his forty-five in hand the whole time. He raised the weapon to the creature’s head and pulled the trigger, splashing grey and green on the wall behind. The creature was silent.
“You’re a cold son of a bitch, Jack.”
“You should talk,” he said. “If you can get it out of the cradle, take this one too.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jack heard the rumble of their troop transport outside. The forward team packed up faster than expected. That was good news. They needed to get out before the next walker came.
In silence, Jack and his team carried the alien corpses out, loaded them into the transport, and left for Al Saif. They left the broken walker out in the open, where it would be found a half-hour later. Jack hoped the message was clear.
Chapter 30:
Dissect
Jack wasn’t quite thirty and he’d already seen thousands of open wounds. He became numb to the sight of blood and gore, but that hadn’t always been the case. No, back when he first joined the Corps, he thought he was a real tough guy, but all the bravado flushed away when he came upon the remains of someone blown apart by a roadside bomb.
The air was thick and smelled like a slaughterhouse, but he didn’t immediately put it together. Not until he saw parts he recognized. A hand. A leg sheared off below the knee. Intestines spilling over a curb. Then the floodgates opened and realization rushed into him all at once. The smell was human meat.
Jack ran away and puked his guts out, and was grim and despondent for days afterward. That’s when he first met Leonid Nikitin, another young corpsman who already had a year of duty behind him.
Nikitin had enough sense to take Jack out for a beer and listen while the young corpsman came to grips with what he was feeling. He didn’t say a word all night, not until Jack was done, and then all he said was, “It’s good that you’re disgusted, Jackie-boy. You better be, because it’s a damn disgusting world out there. That’s why we’re here, ain’t it? Because we’re disgusted. Because we care enough to try and make things right. Need another beer?”
That was enough to help Jack pull through. He had a pounding headache the next morning, but when that passed, he was alright. Really alright. He got up, he did his job, and a handful of years later, he became head of his brigade.
That was eight years past, but Jack still thought about it sometimes. As he stepped down into the darkened shelter that had been converted into a ramshackle morgue, the smell brought the memory back again like a freight train. For a moment, Jack thought he was going to lose his lunch, but he metered his breathing and concentrated until the nausea passed.
It took him a little while to adjust to the light. The center of the room was sharply lit by a single overhead lamp, and everything beyond that faded to blackness. Something sat on a raised platform, attended by someone in a white coat. A moment later, Jack recognized Lisa Albright, who looked temporarily like a doctor again. She was busy dissecting and documenting the aliens, while Charlie stood off to the side, manning a camcorder.
Albright had protested that she wasn’t trained for this kind of work, but she was the best they had, and the bodies were already starting to decompose. Without refrigeration, they wouldn’t get half-way to the Russian Ark without falling apart.
Jack could make out more detail in the room. The thing on the table was one of the half-tonne rhinos, all of its limbs stretched out and its chest cavity split open. The thick, elephantine skin was pinned to the sides, revealing amorphous discolored organs. Several parts had already been removed and were sitting in shallow metal dishes.
He approached the platform and looked down at the lifeless creature with disdain. “You’re having fun, I see. What am I looking at here?”
“I haven’t identified everything yet, but most of it’s more like us than not. Heart, liver, stomach, lungs.” She pointed them out as she went, some still inside the corpse and others arrayed around the table. A la carte. “It’s all there in one form or another.”
“Learn anything useful?”
“Not yet, but a couple interesting things for sure. For one, they don’t wear the armor. It’s attached to them. Grows right out of the skin.”
“Weird. And the bugs on their backs?”
“Some kind of symbiotic relationship. The rhino has a secondary dorsal breathing tube, like a whale’s blowhole, and the insect is attached there. It has a snorkel organ that extends right down into the hole, and branches into the rhino’s lungs. If I had to guess, I’d say they have complimentary respiratory chemistries. The armor grew around the insect’s hooks, so it’s probably been attached for a while.”
She walked around the platform and pointed at the creature’s crotch. “There’s something else. The sex organs are horribly atrophied, probably vestigial. His gonads are about the size of rice grains. I can’t imagine it being able to breed at all, which seems to imply some sort of caste system.”
“Interesting. Have you dissected the bug yet?”
“Not yet, but I don’t expect I’ll learn much when I do. You could fill a library with everything I don’t know about insect physiology. I’ve already finished the jackrabbit and the pilot, though.”
“And?”
“Weird and weirder. The jackrabbits are all over the place. Their eyes are highly developed, with tapetum lucidum and full nictitating membrane. Their eyes also have multiple lenses, lined up in a series. I think. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
“Come again? I don’t speak Latin.”
“Good night vision, can probably see farther than us. Maybe telesco
pically.”
“Gotcha. Are the rabbits fixed, too?”
“Nope. The specimen we brought back is female, with fully formed ovaries and what appears to be a marsupial pouch.”
Jack chuckled. “Maybe we should start calling ‘em kangaroos, then?”
“Nah. The huge eyes and floppy ears are more iconic.”
“True.”
“As for the pilot… well, there’s just nothing like it on Earth. Or wasn’t, anyway. It’s kind of like someone yanked out some animal’s nervous system and made it its own creature. It’s mostly high density nerve bundles connected to a big fat brain, with a lidless, bioluminescent eye. Judging by the brain to body mass ratio, I wouldn’t want to play chess against him.”
“I hate chess.”
“Me too,” Charlie chimed in.
Albright chewed on her lower lip. “The thing that’s bothering me the most is that none of these things appear to be even remotely related. It’s like us teaming up with pigeons and crabs. I just don’t get it.”
Jack was still staring at the half-dismantled corpse. “I’m all for academic advancement and shit, and I’m sure this is all really interesting, but all I want to know is how to kill them. Tell me you found a weak-spot.”
Albright shook her head. “Sorry, Jack. No silver bullets. They live just like us, though. They eat, they breathe.”
“They bleed,” Charlie added.
“Then we’ll just keep killing ‘em any way we can.”
Chapter 31:
Dreaming in Color
Sal traveled back and forth between Mars and Legacy constantly during the construction of the second factory, and by the time the new complex finally sparked to life, she’d completely moved aboard Legacy. With every trip, she brought more tools, scraps and pieces of junk, until her workshop on the great alien vessel was a perfect recreation of the one she abandoned on the Arcadian Plain. The furniture, lighting and even gravity were all the same. She even rigged up a device to imitate the sound of small stones hitting the colony shielding; the noise had irritated her to tears on Mars, but much to her surprise, its absence bothered her even more.
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