Colony Lost

by Chris Philbrook

“Not sure. We wouldn’t want to compromise your habitat if we can avoid it. Throwing the case on the roof was a big enough risk. The bugs don’t seem to know you’re inside, but I don’t think that’ll last for long.”

  “What do you mean?” Margaret asked.

  “I bumped into Lt. Wendell at the command tent when we were in town. He’d been sprayed by that blue bullshit and had begun the mutation process. Pretty far along but he was different from the others we’ve seen. His eyes hadn’t gone deep black, and I swear he recognized me. Touched my name tag. Very bizarre. Scared the shit out of me. Call me crazy, but there was still some of him in there,” Dustin said.

  Margaret turned to Micah. “Is that possible? Could some of them retain human emotion or abilities?”

  “If we were to search through all of the known biological knowledge humanity has accumulated, everything that has happened here would fall under the ‘uncharted territory’ category. The species that is behind all of this is a unique creature and what it does to other life is utterly alien. These creatures evolved here on Selva, with Selvan biology, and now we’ve given them a whole new string of DNA to play around with.”

  “Are you saying we’re an invasive species?” Dustin asked.

  “Without doubt,” Micah replied, searching his shirt pockets for his remaining cigarettes. He abandoned the search after a few seconds. “We are the definition of invasive. I will postulate that you are not incorrect about the lieutenant. There is good reason to believe that the mutation, when applied to human subjects, won’t be consistent in its effects.”

  “How so?” Phillip asked.

  “Look outside for evidence,” Micah said. “Each creature hit by the slaver’s reproductive spray manifests its change differently. Some grow shells, some new limbs, others have their eyes change . . . The variables are infinite, it would seem. Take the indigenous creatures for example. The tiniest bugs seem to take to the spray faster than the larger ones, and either way their changes are different from creature to creature until they are fully metamorphosed. Compare to our fellows who have been sprayed. They seem to be the most changed in the shortest amount of time. We are very malleable to their way, unfortunately.”

  “Not good, eh?” Phillip muttered.

  “No, I would say not. It would stand to reason then that, in rare cases, a human might retain more personality and cognitive ability. The opposite could also be true. Please be aware I am–as you marines are fond of saying–talking out of my ass,” Micah said.

  “This is a nightmare,” Margaret said. “What if Lt. Wendell gets hungry, forgets he used to be human and suddenly remembers how to open a habitat door?”

  “Make sure your override lock is up,” Dustin said. “That’ll prevent the airlock from being accessed from the outside. The floor and ceiling hatches are a different matter. They were designed for emergencies and don’t have the same security. He could get a rock bug up there and rip it right open like a can of beans.”

  “He won’t need to bother,” Micah said. “All he’d have to do is have one of them walk up to a window and use one of their fists. They’re strong enough to punch a hole in the side of these structures. We’d be flooded with the tiny ones and our survival story would end abruptly.”

  “You have a shitty way about thinking,” Margaret said.

  “Yes. I’ve been told that before. Recently, even.”

  “Vindicator One,” Phillip said. “What are we looking at for a rescue timeline? Realistically what kind of a plan do we need to be making to survive until reinforcements arrive?”

  “The return trip can’t happen until the end of January. That’s when the trough opens. Plus transit time.”

  People began to cry in the science habitat.

  “Can’t we call for help? Ask them to come sooner?” Margaret asked.

  “No. There’s no way for us to reach Ghara. We’re headed around the sun beyond them and we need to come back before a trip is feasible, and that’s assuming we could even tell them what’s happening here, which we can’t.”

  “We need to figure out how to live here–like this–for four months?” Margaret asked, hoping Dustin might change his mind, or that the facts would reassemble into better news.

  “That’s correct,” he said back, unhappy with his own words. “Unless the colonies get bored and decide to come back early, and invented a way for the ships to survive the electromagnetic field of Selva at its worst.”

  “How do we make it?” Micah asked, for once without an idea what the answer could be or the willingness to offer up a suggestion.

  “Luckily, First Expeditionary Marines excel at this kind of thing, and you’ve got three of us here to work on the solution. Three of the best, I’ll add, and I don’t say that lightly. Look; it won’t be easy, and some of us might get hurt or die, but we will make it. We will survive this.”

  “How do you know that?” Margaret asked.

  “Because I will not let my fellow marines down. Because I will not let you people down. And I will not let my wife raise our child without me, and if I have to burn everything on this fucking planet to the ground to make it home to them, I will. I’ll leave nothing but ashes and shell casings behind, mark my words.”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  The ruins of Stahl, planet of Selva

  18 October 163 GA

  Dustin and Waren crawled across the pockmarked battlefield toward Stahl. Night cloaked them in darkness and the skies were free of the auroras. A small bit of luck, but a welcome one.

  “This is dumb.”

  “Were you under the impression that our friendship allowed you to circumvent the chain of command, Sergeant? And bitch during an op as if it’ll change anything that we need to do?” Dustin muttered.

  “I was under the impression that your intelligence and the mutual respect we have for one another might mean my opinion would matter. We can eat bugs. We don’t need to risk our asses to get some prepackaged crap made on an assembly line in Butthole, Phoenix out of the mess.”

  “Well I hear you, I respect our friendship, and recognize your concerns, but the decision is mine and it has been made. We are going to retrieve food we know for certain is safe to eat.”

  “Yes. sir,” Waren said brusquely as they low crawled on the stomachs of their armor.

  “Mom and Dad done arguing?”

  Steve had taken over the watch from high above.

  “For now,” Waren said.

  “Good. You two are coming up on our old firing position, so get ready to swing around to the east. You are clear outside the wreck of Punisher and the sandbags. Nothing moving anywhere near you bigger than a blade of grass.”

  “Roger that, Vindicator Three,” Dustin replied.

  Waren and Dustin continued their turtle-paced journey for another hour, moving over piles of loose shell casings, discarded magazines, blood soaked ground and the torn-up bodies of their dead comrades. They moved inch after inch, pausing more than once when Steve sounded the alarm that danger approached. They moved again when the threat passed.

  Eventually, the two marines reached the ruined hulk of an Armadillo personnel carrier. Dustin got to a knee and surveyed the open area between their position and the tents that housed the colony’s dining facilities.

  “It’s clear. Vindicator Three can you see anything I can’t.”

  “Negative,” Steve said. “Most of them are clustered on the northwest side of town, eating or fucking, or whatever it is giant evil bugs do when they’re not trying to kill us.”

  “We’re oscar mike. On me,” Dustin took off at a bent-over trot. Waren followed him, several meters behind.

  On the day Stahl died, the mess area had been unoccupied, with all hands present at the walls for the fight. Now, meals lay uneaten, rotting on the plates. Tiny insects scurried over the scraps, picking, then disappearing over the table edges.

  “It’s a graveyard for dinners,” Waren said as they moved between the long tables and the bench seats at their sid
es. “Each plate a headstone.”

  “Tell me about it,” Dustin said as he picked up a steak knife and slid it into a hip pouch. He grabbed a plastic cup and tucked it into his backpack. Waren grabbed miscellaneous items as they plodded their way toward the food preparation areas at the far side of the tent. As they stole time to search for loot they kept eyes up and on the hunt for any kind of threatening presence.

  The two marines slid to the side of the long counter filled with serving basins of what had been freshly prepared food. Fresh by marine standards, at least. At present, most of it was covered in a slew of colorful molds and furry Selvan vegetation.

  “I’ll cover,” Waren said, his rifle up and aimed at the edge of the counter.

  “Moving,” Dustin said, his own rifle ready. He switched to thermal and stepped around the corner, his rifle’s barrel eating up a series of tiny wedges of space as he moved sideways until he stood in the open space. He could see the entire length of the tent then. Dustin breathed a sigh of relief when his thermal view remained blue and green: dead, and empty. He lowered his rifle and strode with confidence into the narrow aisle and opened the doors on tall storage crates that contained unprepared food.

  “Jackpot. Pure water. There are months of freeze-dried rations here. Enough to feed the whole mission for eight months. Just gotta rehydrate them. There are cases of meal bars, too. Fill your bags, let’s move.”

  “I’m way ahead of you.” Waren shook off his backpack, and shoveled in armloads of packages. The bottles of gel-filled pills rattled sharply as they fell.

  “Shhh. Noise discipline. That’s louder than you think,” Dustin said.

  “I can only be so quiet, man,” Waren said, giving Dustin’s back the middle finger.

  “I’m serious.”

  Waren slowed the pace he loaded his bags in, and the decibel level dropped.

  A minute later, both their backpacks were full.

  “Let’s grab some sealed cases, too. We’ll head over to the science hab and toss one of the bags of food on the roof. Then we’ll take the rest fo the Armadillo, further if we can. That’ll shorten our return trips. You want to carry the cases or provide cover?”

  “I’m stronger, I’ll carry. I can probably heft three of them with the lower gravity and the suit assist,” Waren said, slinging his rifle. “Just make sure no slavers ass rape me with their blue mouth-sperm.”

  “Perfect. No alien sperm for you. Ready when you are.”

  Dustin slipped on his backpack. Waren carefully put his own pack over his shoulders, then arranged three of the squat plastic cases of food atop one another. He experimented with the weight once he had them locked together, and stood confidently, straining the tiniest bit.

  “Easy-peasy,” he said. “Lead the way.”

  “Move smooth,” Dustin said.

  “Move fast.”

  “My man,” Dustin said, and took the lead, weapon up. “Steve, you got any movement? We’re about to exit the tent heading south east toward the disabled ’dillo.”

  “Uh . . . nothing. The bugs are pretty attached to whatever they got going on. Keep it quiet and you might be able to walk the entire way to the science habitat. I’d actually recommend that.”

  “Sexy. We’re oscar mike to the hab. Tell the nerds we’re en route and to be real quiet.”

  “Roger,” Ping-Pong said.

  Dustin blazed the trail and Waren followed, burdened by the large stack of cases he held against his chest with his long arms and strong hands.

  Dustin peered in every direction with his enhanced view plate and then his rifle’s thermal sight before the two men walked into the open. The world around them had no life in it, and posed no danger.

  Dustin moved between the smaller habitat modules down what passed for a street in Stahl. With every step he took toward the science habitat, the structures around him became more like cracked, blood-spattered headstones in a giant graveyard. Each gray plastic and steel ship component marked the savage death of a score of humans. People who had risked all to advance their kind’s place in the galaxy.

  The two marines moved with measured patience and heightened concentration. Every shadow received the business end of Dustin’s rifle before they approached, and every looming roof was scanned for the hard shells and tiny eyes of the native monsters that sought out their flesh and blood. They moved ten meters, then twenty, then twenty more, before Waren set the heavy cases of food down.

  “Rest for a minute. I know those things are getting heavy,” Dustin said to his friend.

  “A little. Thirty meters more?”

  Dustin raised his rifle and put the crosshairs on the corner of the distant science habitat.

  “Thirty-four meters and change.”

  “Let’s move then. Get this bag off my back and get back to the tree house.”

  “Why have we not called it that yet?” Dustin said, shocked at the obvious name for their sanctuary. “That’s fucking genius.”

  “I’ve been called that before.”

  “Not true,” Ping-Pong said from the tree house. “You’ve never been called a genius.”

  “I am starting to wish I had different friends,” Waren said. Above, the sky’s rancid color swirled into a cleaner, more palatable yellow, then faded away until the stars blanketed space.

  “I am starting to wish I had more honest friends,” Steve said.

  “There’s an element of truth to that,” Waren blurted. He picked up the cases with a grunt.

  “Ready?”

  “As I’m gonna be. You lead.”

  Dustin turned back to the open pathway between habs that led to the scientist’s lab. The trip remained clear other than a few dismembered limbs and discarded gear. He moved with Waren trudging along a few meters behind.

  Dustin glassed the window on the front facing of the science hab. With thermal he could see the outline of the laser transmitter they’d propped up on a table and the bright hot faces of the survivors inside. He couldn’t read their expressions in the washes of color through the window, but he knew exactly how they felt.

  Nervous, the same way he did.

  “Let’s set the cases down, and get your pack off and up on their roof,” Dustin said.

  Dustin covered Waren as he heaved the heavy backpack in an arc up and onto the roof of the habitat. The bag landed with a soft thud. Dustin gave a thumbs-up to his friend and scanned the surroundings once more.

  “You’re good. I can’t see anything from up here. Get out while you can,” Steve said. “Bring me some fucking dinner.”

  “Bring me some fucking dinner, sir.”

  “Dinner, sir,” Steve repeated.

  Dustin looked back to Waren as he lifted the three containers filled with enough food for the marines to live for almost a month. As he turned back in the direction of the no man’s land and the jungle with their safe haven beyond, his vision suddenly clouded. Something large and humanoid had infiltrated their space and moved close enough to touch his face.

  Dustin fell backwards as whatever stood near him lunged forward. He pulled his rifle’s trigger twice, spitting two rounds through the monster.

  Human fingers interspersed with chitinous, segmented talons reached toward his neck. The creature’s grip had astonishing strength, and he could feel the neck seal of his armor strain to hold shut. His suit flashed a warning that compromise was imminent. Dustin’s low light vision illuminated a human face just centimeters away from his own, though it no longer could’ve passed for normal. The lower jaw had been pulled off, or had fallen away, revealing a maw of tubes and fangs that oozed thick fluids onto his chest, and face.

  The suit’s compromise warning flashed quicker.

  Please let that shit not be blue. Please let that seal hold.

  The mouth of stalactite fangs gnawed at the air and hissed at him as the bulk of the former human landed fully on him, pinning his rifle to his stomach, and his hand on the grip with it.

  The monster reared its head back
, and let loose a buzzing cry loud enough to wake all the dead across the entirety of the Rasima Plains.

  The dead ignored the call. Instead, it roused the monsters of Selva, and they came.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  The ruins of Stahl, planet of Selva

  18 October 163 GA

  With one hand jammed against his chest and the other keeping the thing’s fist at bay, Dustin struggled to force one of the piercing hand-claws away from his throat. He suffered the monster’s cry with a sinking stab of dread.

  That’s it. We’re dead.

  Then, Waren appeared above Dustin, jammed his rail gun into the twisted face of the monster, and pried its head back. He grabbed a clump of loose flesh on its scalp, and pulled the trigger. A ripple passed through the creature’s head, shattering the skull and blowing the back out just above the spine. The decapitated monster fell onto Dustin, dead.

  “Let’s go,” Waren said, hefting the creature off.

  “Thank you,” Dustin said as he got to his feet.

  “You fuckers better run and find a place to hide, and fast. Everything with teeth and fangs within ten klicks is coming to get to you,” Steve said. “I can’t kill them all.”

  Fucking things. “Ping-Pong, which way is best?” Dustin asked as his helmet informed him Steve had begun firing. The rounds were aimed at targets far too close for Dustin’s comfort.

  “Same direction you just came. If you can pass the Armadillo and head into the jungle you’ll have the best lead you can get. Go now.”

  Dustin ran, stealing a glance over his shoulder He saw waves of movement flooding over the tops of Stahl’s habitats and tents. An army of skitterers led the hunt. Steve fired and one exploded into wet bits that lured its hungry friends in for a meal. Behind them he saw the much larger slavers as they leapt over equipment with palpable hunger and fury.

  “Get inside the APC. We bottle up, and wait for things to settle down. I don’t think we can outrun them,” Dustin said, exasperated between deep breaths.

  “What? Are you fucking crazy? It’s not safe in that tank,” Waren said back, slowing. Behind them they heard the scratching, scraping, puncturing sounds of a thousand spiked legs picking their way closer and closer. They’d already lost half their lead.