Long Fall

by Chris J. Randolph

  Marcus decided this wasn't a good time to scrutinize the ship's psychology, though. They had an operation to conduct, and fighting to oversee.

  Marcus closed his eyes and looked through the ship's, focusing in on their target. Not the small island, but a point exactly opposite it in the lake. This was where they would fire.

  Strength gathered in Legacy's nose and strength became heat. Nerves in the machinery flared, then a beam of burning red light burst out and down through the atmosphere, and further through the water to heat the lakebed below. Stone turned red, then yellow, then white, finally becoming a hot fluid with little friction.

  Together, Marcus and Legacy altered the energy beam and made of it a hollow tube. They waited a pause, then launched a shell down through that empty core.

  The shell streaked down inside the beam and plunged into ground, where its glossy armor brushed molten stone aside. It rocketed through the lava and bashed through the facility's outer shell, and further into a storage area where it dropped to the floor with a hard clank, tipped over, and split open on the sides.

  Kazuo Nagai and his four teammates climbed out clad in deep red MASPEC Mk-4 armors, powered shells that transformed the wearers into something more than human. They were walking weapons, and no matter how hard Kazuo fought against it, he couldn't escape the feeling he'd become some kind of Greek god.

  This MASPEC model was smaller and more organically shaped than its predecessors, now looking very much like they belonged to Legacy and her strange, living fleet. They were dismembered Art Deco scarabs whose chitin and leathery flesh had been rearranged into the rough shapes of men.

  Newer, stronger versions of the armor existed, but Amira took those designs with her when she left Legacy; off to the Arkangel Compact, and gone from Kazuo's life.

  But not forgotten.

  When Kazuo and the team were clear of the delivery vessel, it melted away into a thick slime, digesting itself to prevent the New Union's researchers from dissecting it. The Eireki had invented that trick for use against the Nefrem, and it was just as valuable a few geological epochs later.

  "Weapons free," he said, and it resonated in the team's helmets. They unshouldered darkly colored carbines styled to match their armors, and disengaged the safeties with a thought.

  Kazuo turned on his jammer and lights went out for ten meters around. A glowing overlay on his screen drew the facility's walls far into the distance, using information from Legacy's deep scans. Kazuo didn't understand the tech involved there, and he doubted anyone other than God and Veejay Rao did.

  He oriented towards his target and followed the planned route, while his team's boots lightly thudded behind him. There was no foot traffic thanks to careful scheduling: the facility had two teams on alternate schedules so it was nearly always busy, but Fleet analysts had discovered a small gap between one shift drifting off to sleep and the next waking, which gave Kazuo five minutes of quiet before the storm.

  They swept corners in flowing formations, spreading apart and contracting again, roles shifting from one trooper to the next as their positions changed. Cloaked in a sticky patch of shadow, they rushed down one hall after another, and finally stopped between two offices.

  Their time window was closing. Kazuo motioned toward Rhys who stepped up and pulled a disk the size of a manhole cover from his back. It was a shaped fission charge, which he placed on the floor, double-checked for warning lights, then armed with a few quick presses.

  The team stepped back a short distance and Kazuo gave the signal. Light flashed, a blast washed over their armors, and the floor beneath the charge was gone.

  One by one, they stepped forward and dropped down into deeper darkness, while thin blue jets lit all over their bodies and silently slowed their descent. These were ion thrusters backed by hundreds of kilowatts, which the suits stored inside living cells like a rechargeable battery.

  When they came through the lab's ruined ceiling, they crunched down in the rubble and suddenly found themselve's in more than sufficiently deep shit.

  Security personnel armed with assault rifles stood in a loose circle, and they opened fire on sight. Rounds ricocheted off Kazuo's chestplate and he could feel each one relayed through the MASPEC's nervous system, coming to him like pulses of warmth. Where they grew uncomfortably hot, the armor was threatening to fail.

  He and his team engaged their built-in flashbangs, producing a shockwave and flash of light that disoriented the enemy. The MASPEC troopers fired into the ensuing chaos, slinging blue-white bolts of light trailed by spiraling embers which quickly brought their targets to the ground.

  Kazuo said, "Secure the area."

  The others took up posts at each of the lab's entrances, guns at ready, while Kazuo began hunting about for his objective. He was in a large compartment broken up by head-height dividers with small glass windows. As he moved from one division to the next, he saw pieces of alien technology—Eireki and Oikeyan alike—prised apart and gruesomely stitched back together.

  "Nagai to Mission Control... I think I figured out what this lab is."

  "What've you got, Nagai?"

  "It appears to be a rather sophisticated reverse engineering operation."

  It made perfect sense to him. The New Union was badly outclassed by every enemy they faced, and theft was the fastest way to catch up. They were taking apart what they didn't understand, then analyzing and replicating it to the best of their ability. He'd do the same if roles were reversed.

  Kazuo turned a corner and it took him a few seconds to realize that he'd found what he was looking for. A humanoid body was tightly suspended within a metallic ring, arms and legs outstretched, skin removed and layers of tissue splayed apart. It hung there unmoving.

  Several large appliances surrounded the specimen, different kinds of monitors and recording devices interspersed with a variety of diamond-edged circular saws.

  "I have Subject Two. Looks like they've dissected it."

  "Son of a bitch," Marcus growled over the channel. "Collect the remains. Bring them back."

  Kazuo heard gunfire. There was no time to waste, but the grotesquely stripped corpse nevertheless gave him pause.

  He swallowed his disgust and went to work. He pulled some kind of metal probe from the base of the spine, disconnected various instruments attached to its internal organs, then released the clamps around its wrists and ankles.

  He gently put the body on the floor and went to retrieve a bag from his pack, but stopped when he saw something move out of the corner of his eye. The motion came again, and when Kazuo realized that the corpse was moving, he nearly blasted it to smithereens.

  He cycled his visor to IR and watched a bright spot pulse in the center of the chest, followed immediately by another twitching convulsion. Was some piece of broken machinery glitching here, or was this thing still alive?

  "Hold, Mission Control. I... I think it's moving."

  Marcus Donovan's voice came back loudly. "What is?"

  "Subject Two, sir. Switching on video feed now. You gotta see this."

  Kazuo made sure his onboard camera had a good view of the action.

  Tremors came faster and faster to the ruined flesh, spreading further, torquing every joint over. The thing's glistening jaw began to twist and bite, and for an instant Kazuo thought the tightened deathmask was about to scream, but then it became totally placid.

  Its eyes rolled and locked on him, and his whole body tensed. He wanted to turn and run, filled by a terror he hadn't felt since he was a child.

  Its jaw worked while the tongue wagged. "Donovan sent you?" it asked in a voice that was altogether too pleasant, too at ease for Kazuo's taste.

  Kazuo's heart leaped back into motion and he remembered how to speak. "Yeah. We're here to take you back to Legacy."

  Subject Two nodded. Flaps of flesh in its torso slowly drifted back into their proper places like time-lapse photography of a flower closing at night, then the cut edges began to knit themselves together. />
  Despite all the insane things Kazuo had seen, he couldn't escape feeling that an undead monster was reassembling itself right before his eyes. He was watching a zombie climb out of its grave.

  "Will you be able to walk?" he asked it.

  Subject Two said, "In approximately three minutes... then we must retrieve my belongings. They're all that's important."

  "Donovan?" Kazuo said. No one replied.

  Donovan's answer finally came, amplified over the suit's external speakers. "What belongings, and why are they important?"

  The skinless corpse peered at Kazuo, finally nodded and answered. "A metal gauntlet and a uniform. The materials comprising the uniform are beyond their level of technology, and I would prefer to keep it that way. The gauntlet is a computer, and..."

  With a queer shake, the corpse's flesh settled into place and looked sturdy if repulsively incomplete. It went on. "The gauntlet contains the sum collected knowledge of my people. Our history. Our technologies. Our gene catalogues."

  Kazuo thought he could hear Donovan gritting his teeth over the microphone.

  "Find them, Nagai. If they can't be recovered, destroy them."

  Subject Two climbed to its feet and the horror movie experience was finally complete. It took a few steps and plucked an assault rifle from the arms of a fallen guard, inspected it and held it at ready.

  Kazuo pointed to the men crumpled all around. "We're not killing these men," he said. "They're only stunned."

  Subject Two dipped its head and looked up at Kazuo from under its skinless brow. "I am killing these men," it said, then turned and marched toward a nearby corridor.

  Kazuo was hard pressed to argue that point, so he followed. "Fall in, team. We have new mission parameters. VIP is taking lead."

  Despite having just faced the eternal slumber a few moments before, Subject Two moved with uncanny grace. It was a tiger stalking through familiar jungle, and when it came across prey, they were turned into clouds of aerosolized blood.

  An alarm howled throughout the base.

  Subject Two led them deeper into the complex guided by some preternatural sense, never pausing or showing even momentary indecision. It simply cut a bloody swath through hallways, checkpoints, and finally a research center, killing everyone it met with the cold precision of an industrial riveter.

  It discarded the rifle and collected items from around the room. It slid into its skin-tight uniform quickly, which relieved some of Kazuo's ongoing stress, and took a bulky pistol from a nearby table. Then it bashed open a case, grabbed a dull metallic tube from inside, and latched the device to its wrist. Once in place, some unfamiliar language scrolled across the gauntlet's surface.

  "Exfiltration plan?" Subject Two asked.

  Kazuo smirked. "Yeah, we head to..."

  Donovan cut him off. "Nagai, the main door is wide open. The facility is being evacuated as we speak."

  Kazuo understood immediately. If he were holding something as dangerous as Subject Two prisoner and it escaped, he'd nuke the place. No questions asked. Either that or wait for the unnatural thing to show up a day later hungry for payback.

  "We need a fast evac here," he shouted. Panic tainted his voice. They had come up with contingencies for pitched battles, but nothing for a self-destruct.

  If no one said anything brilliant in the next few seconds, Kazuo's day was about to get worse.

  No one said anything brilliant.

  The flames came quickly and without warning. Kazuo was standing one second, and the next he was struck and enveloped in pure white heat. He gritted his teeth and huffed and screamed inside his armor and it was over.

  Kazuo's face was covered in a mixture of tears and sweat. His ribcage heaved with a stilted rhythm, and his skin felt like it had the worst sunburn of all time. His entire right leg was nothing but pain.

  His MASPEC armor expired with an exhausted sigh, then it came apart at the seams and fell away, leaving Kazuo in nothing but a skin suit.

  He tried to move, but his body wouldn't respond.

  The alien stood over him no worse for wear, its uniform having turned reflective like an emergency blanket before shifting back to its normal colors.

  "Are you mobile?" it asked.

  Kazuo opened his mouth, and his jaw shook like a broken toy. He closed it again.

  The alien reached down, picked Kazuo up and lay him over its shoulder. He saw flashes of the hallway for an instant; ruined walls, melted beams, and the black and withered husks that had been his teammates only seconds before.

  He watched for a few beats as the ground passed beneath him, mesmerized by the alien's heels flashing in the flickering light. And then he was out.

  Chapter 04

  Monsters

  Wizard Island sat at the western edge of Crater Lake, its landscape dominated by a cone rising some 230 meters above the lake's serene waters. To Daniel Grey's eye, it looked like a cartoon volcano sculpted in child-friendly proportions.

  Researchers in lab coats and engineers in dark blue coveralls were swarming out of a rectangular hole near the cone's base. As the last few exited, a great blast of white flame belched out behind them, followed moments later by thick black smoke that bubbled and rolled as it struck the open air. A handful of charred corpses littered the ground.

  "Sterilization phase complete," Daniel said.

  His eyes zoomed and refocused on the facility's entrance, giving him a tack-sharp view from more than two kilometers away. A glowing diamond bounced gently around his vision, indicating where a bullet would land if he squeezed his rifle's trigger. The diamond's color told him how long it would travel before making contact.

  "Still no sign of Samson. I'm moving in for confirmation."

  "Negative, Ajax-Five. Hold your position."

  Ridiculous. Every corner of that building had been scoured with fire. Daniel didn't care what the alien was; it couldn't walk away from a thermite bath. Even if it was somehow still alive, this would be Daniel's best chance to end the game once and for all.

  He didn't need to voice his disagreement. A team of engineers back at HQ were watching and interpreting his biometrics, and they would see the spike in his heart-rate, the muscles of his neck tightening, the furrowing of his brow. So much of his data was being monitored that Daniel thought of himself as a world-class racecar.

  His focus danced across the target area and searched for anything out of the ordinary, and then he found it. A figure appeared in the doorway, striding purposefully with something large slung over its shoulder. Its shape was similar to a human but with too broad shoulders, an elongated and curved neck, and a serpentine midsection; it was an artist's stylized version of a person, a toy store caricature that had somehow escaped its packaging.

  It wore a double-breasted jacket in grey and dark blue, and a mask with a crescent slicing across one eye.

  "I've got eyes on Samson," Daniel said in disbelief.

  The alien machine stepped out into daylight and Daniel could see that the pile on its shoulder was a man. The automaton began to glance about, then it did something that unnerved Daniel. It looked him in the eyes from two kilometers away.

  "I've been made," he said.

  Before HQ could issue an order, Daniel drew a bead on the target and squeezed the trigger. In the dozen milliseconds between tensing his finger and feeling the trigger give way, the target was already gone.

  The .50 caliber round barked and Daniel heard it reverberate around the nearby hills. "In pursuit," he said as he hopped to his feet, then he took off running.

  After what he'd just seen, Daniel had to downgrade himself. He wasn't a world class racecar anymore, but a station wagon or maybe premium minivan. Perhaps a small hatchback with an aftermarket performance package.

  His feet gripped lightly at the pavement and propelled him to nearly sixty kilometers-per-hour. He stuck to the road, while Samson managed to move twice as fast through thick woods over broken terrain.

  It pissed him off, but a
s a sappy commercial taught him to do in his youth, he channeled his anger into something constructive.

  He turned and cut a detour up a hillside, leaping from one switchback to the next. As he crested the hill, he listened for an instant and locked on to a spot in the distance with his enhanced vision. A road cut that part of the forest in two, providing a ten-meter break in Samson's cover.

  Daniel brought the rifle to his shoulder, aimed and waited. He breathed lightly and heard footfalls approach the road, then squeezed his trigger. A round flashed out into the distance while Samson streaked out of cover, and the large hunk of metal tore a hole through the creature's ankle.

  It tumbled at high speed into an embankment out of view, and Daniel sprinted toward it, now holding his absurdly large rifle at ready. Down the hill, up the road. He came around the embankment and found only Samson's cargo, a burned and unconscious man crumpled on the ground, one leg reduced to nothing but a charred remnant.

  Daniel swapped viewing modes and his eyes twitched. Thermal data overlayed the image, and he found a hot shape along the wall.

  The illusion was suddenly broken and he recognized the entity's shape in front of him; its entire surface had become the same color as its background, but in broad ragged strokes like a flea-market watercolor painting.

  Daniel tried to aim and fire, but it was too late.

  The alien machine leaped towards him on its one good foot, and its camouflage changed at the same time. It switched from solid colors to a flickering jumble of lines and shapes, the separate swatches changing on unsynchronized beats. The effect was confusing to the eye, and sickening to the stomach.

  Samson pushed the rifle aside and its fist approached with ungodly speed, but Daniel did what came naturally to him. Reacting with split-second timing, he released dropped his weapon, redirected Samson's strike with one arm and bashed the automaton in the face with the other. They exchanged the next several blows like strings of firecrackers.