Alien Game (The Thousand Worlds)

by Rod Walker

  “You’re not bringing destruction to anyone,” said Howard. “You’re staying in the vehicles. The General himself will rip me a new one if I get one of his Listeners killed.”

  “Yes, sir!” said Bull. “Then I am excited for the opportunity to bring destruction to the Dark vicariously, sir!”

  Howard blinked and his lips twitched. I suspect he almost laughed. “Let’s hope if can retain that enthusiasm, Corporal. Both of you, report to Sergeant Mendez and do whatever he tells you.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bull and I chorused in unison.

  Sergeant Mendez turned out to be a Hispanic man in his middle thirties with a scarred face and tattoos that were occasionally visible when he took off his jacket. He looked like an enforcer for a drug gang, but he ran a tight ship. I suspect the fact that he looked like he could murder you with his bare hands without blinking helped him keep order.

  “All right, you two,” said Mendez. “You’ll be with me in the second carrier.” He pointed at the second of the six M200 armored personnel carriers that would make up our patrol. “You’re new, so shut up, keep your ears peeled, and do your thing. You detect even a hint of Darksiders, you speak up right away, got it?”

  “Yes, sir,” Bull and I said in unison.

  “There’s going to be trouble on this patrol, so stay sharp,” said Mendez.

  “How do you know there will be trouble, Sergeant?” I said.

  “General said so,” said Mendez.

  By now I had realized that most of the men of Black Division regarded General Culver as something like a prophet. It was well-known within the Division that Culver had been trying to warn Washington and the Pentagon about the Dark for years, and that he had been warning them something like Invasion Day was going to happen sooner or later. The Pentagon had ignored his warning, save for occasional demands to increase the number of female combat troops in the Division.

  Well, General Culver had been proven right. It also helped that he seemed to be one of the few powerful people left with an actual plan other than hiding in a bunker someplace and hoping that his canned soup didn’t run out. And he had won the loyalty of someone like my father, and Dad hated everyone.

  “Will we run into the GDC, Sergeant?” said Bull.

  Mendez grunted. It sounded like a negative, but it was hard to be sure. I wasn’t about to ask for clarification.

  The GDC was one of the potential problems we might encounter. General Culver was a man with a plan…but there were other men with other plans, and some of them had formed a group called the Global Defense Committee, which we usually just called the GDC. The GDC controlled most of northern Mexico, nearly all of California, and a big chunk of the Southwest. No one knew much about them, but rumor held that they consisted of former California National Guard officers, former Mexican army generals, the heads of several drug cartels, and even a Silicon Valley billionaire.

  General Culver might have found himself a warlord, but he was a warlord with a vision. Nor did he permit misbehavior in his troops. A couple of soldiers had been executed for murdering and robbing or otherwise molesting civilians, and the General had made it very clear our mission was to defend the people of the United States, not to terrorize them.

  The GDC viewed things differently. According to the reports, they made a habit of using terror and intimidation to keep the local populations in line, including crucifixion and throwing people off roofs and burning alive and various other techniques that had been perfected in the Middle East in the last ten years or so before Invasion Day. Early on, they had tried to bring the territory protected by the Black Division under their control, and the Division had inflicted such a sharp defeat on them that the Committee hadn’t tried to make any trouble for General Culver since.

  It wasn’t just the defeat that kept the peace, though. Both the Division and the Committee had their hands full with the Dark; the Darkside base in Las Vegas was a particular thorn in the Committee’s side. Rumors that the GDC was going to try to ally with us, or attack us, were common, but none of them proved to be anything but scuttlebutt.

  “Naw,” said Mendez at last. “We’re too far north for that. The General thinks the Dark are due to make some trouble. Spokane’s their last stronghold on this side of the Cascades, and he thinks they’ll try to break out. If we find them, we shut them down. If we run into too many of them, we call for reinforcements. Now get into the vehicle and listen for trouble.”

  With that cheery thought, Bull and I climbed into Mendez’s M200. That lasted all of thirty seconds, when Howard radioed Mendez and told him to send one of the Listeners to his vehicle, since that way both Listeners wouldn’t get blown up if someone shot our carrier. Mendez told Bull to join Howard, and he obeyed with alacrity.

  Then we set off.

  Our patrol started off heading north along the old US Highway 195, but soon we turned west and headed off the road into the deserts of eastern Washington. The Dark sometimes used the roads to move their land-based forces, but they just as often abandoned the roads to travel cross-country, so we had to do the same. The deserts were pretty in a stark, austere kind of way, with a lot of rocky hills and a lot of scrubby little bushes. The M200s made good time over the uneven ground, and I listened to the radio chatter from the other vehicles, as Howard or Mendez ordered one gunner to cover various angles or discussed what approach to take through a valley. From time to time we stopped and checked our position via GPS. I wondered how much longer the GPS network would keep working. The satellites were still in orbit, but sooner or later they would fail, and there might not be a government left with the resources to replace them.

  There might not be any people left on Earth by then.

  I put that thought out of my head. General Culver and Major Randolph and every other officer I had encountered had strong words about defeatism and the evils they would inflict upon anyone caught up by such an unsoldierly vice.

  Then my head started to feel wet, as if water droplets were striking my face.

  It was bone-dry inside the M200.

  I tapped the sergeant’s shoulder. He ordered the driver to stop and told me to check in with Bull.

  I grabbed my radio. “Bull, this is Kane. You getting that?”

  “Yeah,” said Bull, a bit of excitement in his voice. “Yeah, I was just about to call you. What do you think? About three miles north of here?”

  “I think so,” I said. “Else we would have detected them before now.”

  “What and where, corporals?” Howard demanded.

  “Darksiders inbound, sir,” I said. “Twenty or thirty drones, I think. There’s at least one Overseer with them, too.”

  “Speed and direction?” said Howard.

  “Heading south right at us, sir,” said Bull. “It feels like they’re in a hurry, sir.”

  “I think we’re right in their path,” I added.

  “Roger,” said Howard. “Good work. Sergeant, a word.”

  Mendez leaned over and switched his radio to his private channel with the captain. I could hear Mendez’s half of the conversation, and it sounded as if they were planning a tactical maneuver.

  “All right,” the captain announced to all of us once they’d finished their little conference. “This is what we’re going to do.” He rapidly issued a series of orders, and the column broke up. Four of the M200s parked themselves in the Dark’s path, right in the middle of a little valley, spaced out so the enemy couldn’t kill us all if they had explosives handy. The gunners swung the machine guns to point to the north. Two of our vehicles climbed the hilltops on either side of the valley to provide covering fire. Both of those M200s had mortar teams, and Howard wanted the weapons sighed at the mouth of the valley. The troops all knew their business, and it wasn’t long before we were all in position.

  “Good to go, sir,” said Mendez.

  “Excellent,” said Howard. “Listeners?”

  I closed my eyes and concentrated. “They should be in visual range in about 60 seconds.�
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  “All troops be ready to fire at my command,” said Howard. “Anyone fires early, I’ll volunteer him for the Listeners.”

  Acknowledgments came over the channel. I felt a sudden eerie whispering in my head, like murmurs too quiet to catch. I was close enough to the Darksiders that I could pick up the communications of the local node of their hive mind, even though I couldn’t understand what they were saying.

  “Visual!” someone said over the radio.

  I saw the Darksiders on the monitor, stark and sharp upon the M200’s cameras. There were about thirty of the giant locust-like drones, similar to the ones that I had seen in Chicago on Invasion Day, but these were almost the size of horses. Their bladed forelimbs were as long as my leg, and if they managed to close with us, they could slaughter everyone in short order.

  An Overseer was behind them.

  Overseers look vaguely humanoid, albeit encased in obsidian-like chitin, though they have four legs instead of two, and you need to take off at least three of the legs before they stop moving. Their heads are a ghastly combination of insect, squid, and something with no earthly equivalent, and they’re tough. Their carapaces can shrug off small-arms fire, and sometimes they can even keep fighting after a direct grenade hit.

  Worse than that, they’re smart. Give me a strong but dumb enemy over a smart but weak one any day of the week, and the Overseers are both strong and smart. We think the Overseers are sapient, but they all seem to be in harmony with the hive mind. Despite that, they can take initiative and plan independently, and they had a bad habit of setting nasty traps for us.

  That said, it didn’t seem like this particular Overseer was all that smart. It was driving the drones forward, running behind them with great haste. It must have been in a hurry to get somewhere. As it approached, the sensation of their presence in my head shifted, and I looked up. That was stupid—all I saw was the riveted metal ceiling of the M200. But the presence of the Dark abruptly shifted in my head.

  “Sergeant,” I said. “There are flyers incoming.”

  “I got them,” said Bull. “Maybe twenty drones. They’re about sixty seconds behind the ground units.”

  “Then let’s take the groundpounders out first,” said Howard. “Open fire!”

  For a moment, nothing happened. Then I heard a faint whistling noise, followed by two dull thumps as the mortars landed in the midst of the charging drones and exploded. The scout drones came to a confused halt as their Overseer spotted us, and the other M200s opened up with their machine guns. We were all wearing electronic ear protectors as part of our helmets and radio headsets, which was a good thing because those guns were loud. Sitting in a M200 with a machine gun firing from its roof felt like sitting in an oil drum that was being used as an actual drum.

  Fortunately, the guns were just as effective as they were loud. Streams of machine gun fire ripped across the drones, mowing them down like grass. The Overseer stumbled as several rounds hit it, but the creature managed to get something that looked like a long black oval up to its shoulder.

  “Energy weapon!” I said. “Overseer has an energy weapon! I repeat, the Overseer has an energy weapon!”

  “Take it down!” said Mendez. “Gunners two, three, get it!”

  Two of the gunners turned the full fury of their machine guns on the Overseer. The stream of high-caliber bullets turned the Overseer into glistening black pulp, but not before it got off a shot from its weapon. Those energy weapons used some sort of hyper-accelerated plasma. I had seen a description in training, but I’m not a scientist and I don’t understand how it works. What I did know was that a blast of reddish-white fire came from the weapon and hurtled towards our M200.

  The driver was on the ball, and the vehicle lurched forward. The bolt that would have hit us head on instead clipped the side of the M200. The vehicle rang like a bell. Some of the displays on the walls and the driver station went dead, and the temperature went up by about thirty degree in a second. I smelled burnt plastic and hot metal. I was afraid that the plasma blast had hit the fuel tank and we were all about to go up in a fireball. But then the M200 stopped shaking.

  We had survived the hit. The impact had given me a headache, though, and I felt a steadily building pressure inside my head.

  “Aerial inbound!” shouted the driver.

  “Anti-air, anti-air!” said Mendez and Howard almost simultaneously.

  The tone of the machine gun fire changed as the gunners started shooting skyward. I heard a thump as a dead scout drone bounced off the side of the vehicle, and then more thumps as several dead scout drones hit the ground.

  Then a clang, and suddenly sunlight stabbed into the interior of the M200.

  A scout drone wrenched open the hatch on the roof, and it started to thrust itself into the vehicle. I saw the sunlight glint off its armored carapace, saw its mouthparts twitching and its multiple banks of antennae swaying back and forth like grass in a breeze. Every other man in the vehicle was fully occupied with their tasks. It suddenly occurred to me that being locked in a big metal can being opened by a Darksider was a great way to get carved to bloody chunks.

  Fortunately, I already had my weapon in hand. I raised it, flipping the selector switch to full auto and squeezing the trigger in one smooth motion. I sent a burst of fire through the drone, turning its head to black pulp, and the twitching body fell to the deck.

  “Secure that hatch!” roared Mendez. One of the gunners hurried forward, seized the hatch, and swung it shut with another clang. Mendez pointed at me. “Kane, report.”

  “I think we’ve got them all, sergeant,” I said, frowning. Confirmation was coming over the radio. But the pressure in my head was still growing. “Bull, you getting this?” No answer. “Bull, respond please.”

  “Yeah,” said Bull, his voice thick. “Sorry. Distracted. Uh, the pressure in my head? You getting that too?”

  “I think a gate’s about to open,” I said.

  Mendez swore. “Captain, you hear that?”

  “I did,” said Howard. “Corporal Kane, Corporal Bullock, location?”

  “About two miles south of here, I think,” I said.

  “Agreed,” said Bull. “But there’s something off about it.”

  “Go on,” ordered Howard.

  I frowned, remembering what I had learned from Major Randolph in training, about how to interpret the various sensations that came with being a Listener.

  “I think, sir,” I said. “I think the gate hasn’t opened yet. I think it’s about to open.”

  “Agreed, sir,” said Bull. “It feels like the gate is about to open, but it’s not all the way there yet.”

  “Then we have ourselves an opportunity,” said Howard. “Damage reports, quickly. I want to be headed south in two minutes.”

  Status reports came over the radio channel. Our APC was the only one that had taken any damage, and the plasma blast had only clipped the M200, shearing off some of the armor but not damaging any of the vehicle’s systems. The APC was still in fighting shape, though it would be vulnerable to any fire that hit the rear right quarter. The other six vehicles had come through without any damage, and still had enough ammunition for another fight.

  “All right,” said Howard. “Kane, Bullock. Due south?”

  “Ah,” I said, scrambling to examine the map and my compass, trying to triangulate the direction from the weird sensations in my skull. “Yes, sir. Directly south.”

  “Straight south, sir,” said Bull.

  “Move out,” said Howard. “I want spotters watching our path. If the enemy is opening a gate, we should see waste light generated by the process. I repeat, all spotters are to watch for waste light from the enemy gate.”

  The M200 rumbled back into motion, swinging down to the south, and I saw the other vehicles following suit. We drove south across the desert, and I felt the pressure in my head increase. The gate was opening, but I didn’t think it was all the way open yet.

  “Least we know where th
at patrol was going in such a hurry, sir,” said Mendez. “Probably coming here to secure that gate.”

  “Almost certainly,” said Howard. “Listeners. Can you tell how large the gate is going to be?”

  “I’m not sure, sir,” I said. “I don’t think it’s going to be very large, though. Maybe big enough for one of the APCs to drive through, sir.”

  “Nothing like the gates at Spokane or the other major cities, sir,” added Bull.

  “Scout gate, then,” said Howard. “They’ve been using those lately, dropping small forces in friendly territory to cause trouble. Command thinks that the Dark might have a hard limit on their capacity to maintain open gates, and most of that capacity is tied up in the major cities.”

  “Sir,” said Mendez. “This might be a chance to capture another transductor crystal.”

  “I was just thinking that, Sergeant,” said Howard. “If we play our cards right, we might drive home with a crystal to present to the General’s scientists. They love the wretched things.”

  “Sir,” said one of the spotters. “Gate spotted up ahead.”

  “Is it open yet?” said Howard.

  “No, sir,” said the spotter.

  Even over the radio, I heard the satisfaction in Captain Howard’s voice, and I did see Mendez smile. Mendez hardly ever smiled, which made it rather unsettling. I looked at the monitors as the cameras focused on a patch of desert a few hundred meters ahead of us. A sheet of mist and gray light rippled there, and the pressure on my skull was coming from that sheet of mist.

  “What do you think?” said Howard. “Two minutes? Maybe three?”

  “Two and a half at most,” said Mendez.

  “Listeners?” said Howard.

  “It’s going to open at any moment, sir,” I said, and Bull agreed.

  “Excellent.” I heard the satisfaction in Howard’s voice. “Gentlemen, God must love us, because he’s dropped this gate gift-wrapped into our laps. Close to within fifty meters of the gate. Mortar teams and gunners, target the gate, and be ready to fire into it at my command.”