by B. V. Larson
“Sorry about that,” he told the major. “It wasn’t professional—especially in front of the troops. You’ve fought well today, and you deserve better.”
Hendricks looked mollified and a little embarrassed. They were anything but professional out here on the frontier, so I decided to pretend I hadn’t noticed his humiliation.
Tapping a few stims out of my case, I handed them around to both the officers. They looked at them dubiously, then took them. They lit up and puffed a bit, sighing as the stress-relieving smoke oxidized in their lungs.
“What are we going to do now, gentlemen?” I asked.
“Hendricks, you set up camp on the banks, here. Tell the men not to drink the water. I’ll contact our engineers down in New Town. Maybe they’ll know how to pull the plug on this disaster.”
The colonel stumped off, touching his comlink and shouting into it.
Hendricks took a few puffs on the stim I’d given him. Water dripped from his hair and off the tip of his nose.
“You might not get your payoff,” he said. “That’s a damned shame, because you earned it, Gorman.”
“Thanks,” I said, thinking his pity was small comfort.
As soon as I was alone, Jort walked up to me. “Let’s go,” he said.
“Where?”
“Back to town—or call Sosa, tell her to fly the ship up here to pick us up.”
“Why?”
“Are you kidding, boss? You’re funny, sometimes. We got no money—we got nothing. If we stay until it gets dark, maybe we die as a bonus.”
I thought it over. Jort was right, actually. This whole venture had turned to shit. I probably should call it a day and walk out with my life and my ship intact.
We could go back to Sardez in a few months to pick up a fresh load of guns. Maybe Kersen would understand how things went, or maybe he wouldn’t. Either way, it was better than waiting here next to a radioactive river with a pack of sullen colonials.
Heaving a sigh, I stared up at the sky again. The sun was moving… we had three hours, tops, before it was pitch black out here.
“You going to say goodbye?” Jort asked. He was watching me closely.
“Hell no. Let’s just disappear.”
Jort grinned. His big teeth belonged in a horse’s mouth.
“You smart-man. I always knew it. I always say this to anyone who will listen.”
“Thanks…”
We walked away as the troops set up camp and formed a perimeter. By the time anyone thought we’d been gone too long to be off pissing somewhere, we’d topped the rise and vanished on the far side.
Speeding up, we moved downhill rapidly. Moving at a jog, it would take a lot less time to reach New Town than it had to march up under fire. Each jarring step took us a long bounding stride downward. Soon, we began to feel like we were going to make it.
Then we came to the second battlefield. It was quiet here, and the sun had fallen behind the bulk of the mountain. It was becoming dark in a hurry.
Jort grabbed my arm and squeezed with such force that it almost went numb. Then he pointed at something.
There, fifty meters off, I saw hunched figures. They were prowling among the dead. I couldn’t be sure, but they didn’t look quite like the colonists.
As we watched, looking around for more of them, we spotted a dozen others. They were moving from body to body, inspecting and prodding only the fallen ducks. They didn’t seem interested in the human dead, which had been hastily buried or carried off down the hill. They were only investigating ducks.
“What they doing?” Jort whispered in my ear.
“Hush.”
We watched. It was getting darker, but it seemed to me that they were digging at the corpses using their bare hands or knifes from their belts. They prodded and cut at the bodies of the fallen and pulled something out—then I knew.
Unslinging my rifle with infinite care, I took aim at the nearest creature. Jort did the same—but he made the mistake of letting the bolt snap when he activated the gun.
A dozen pairs of eyes swung in our direction. Even in the dimming light, it seemed I could pick them out. They had reflective eyes, gleaming a yellow-green like those of a wolf pack.
I fired first, taking down the nearest of them. He flew onto his back, flipping and twisting in the dirt. Jort shot two more, then I shot a fourth.
None of these creatures seemed to be carrying conventional rifles. Because of this, I expected them to flee—but they didn’t. They charged us instead.
The crack of our rifles tore up the night. The muzzles of our guns kept blazing, gushing blue-white flame that smelled of ozone. When hit, aliens were always knocked down, but sometimes they got up and kept coming.
Two of them reached us. One was dragging a hanging mass of his own guts, stepping on them and slipping—but he was still trying to make it to us.
The other was uninjured and came in fast. Jort roared and charged into hand-to-hand, his blade out in his fist.
Jort was strong, stronger than most men I’d met in my lifetime, but the duck matched him. The two traded a few blows, neither taking out the other. Jort lifted his knife high for a killing stroke, but the alien grabbed his wrist and dug in claws. Blood flowed, and it was hard to tell whose it was.
My rifle cracked. The alien’s head blasted red mist. He went down, but then the second alien arrived, dragging his belly with him. One-handed, he fought with Jort. I danced around them, trying to get a clean shot.
Two hands were better than one, however. Roaring with exertion, Jort managed to drive his knife into the duck’s throat. The fight was over.
We stood over the mess, breathing hard. Both our guns were up, seeking fresh targets.
“There!” Jort pointed.
I tracked his aim, and I saw it too. Looking through my night scope, I saw a humanoid figure fleeing. It seemed to be carrying a mass of squirming things in its arms.
We popped off a dozen shots, but we missed. The creature had escaped us, disappearing among the trees and rocks.
“Look at this,” Jort said. “And over here… another one!”
We found three Tulk writhing on the ground. The fleeing alien had been carrying a load of them. He’d been harvesting them from the dead bodies.
In disgust, we crushed the spiny Tulk under our boot heels.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“These Tulk-things are bad,” Jort kept saying. He prodded the tiny dead alien parasites with his boots, spitting and sneering.
“Come on, let’s go to back to town.”
Jort followed me, but he seemed reluctant. He kept looking back over his shoulder toward the top of the ridge.
“Someone needs to warn the colonel.”
“Yeah? Call him.”
Jort chewed on that idea for another four steps. “He might get mad because we left. He might order his men to arrest us down in town.”
“You think?”
We walked on another four steps. Finally, Jort halted. “I’m going back.”
I turned around and flashed a glimmering light at his face. It was getting dark—really dark. Baden had no moon, and even though the planet was in a star cluster, it was on the edge of that cluster, so the starlight wasn’t nearly enough to penetrate a dense forest canopy.
“Seriously?” I asked him.
“Those things will crawl into the sleeping men tonight, just like they did to the ducks. You know this.”
My face twisted up. I didn’t know any such thing—but it stood to reason.
“You going to warn them, or join them?” I asked.
Jort shrugged. “If you fly off and leave me, then I guess I join them.”
Jort was both impressing me and pissing me off right now. No wonder he’d been an unsuccessful pirate. He was too full of romantic ideas about honor and being a good citizen.
“Come on,” Jort said. “If you walk all the way down in dark to town, they’ll probably get you too. But, if you go back with dead Tulk to show, yo
u a hero. Maybe you get some kind of reward in the end.”
“Yeah… a Tulk up my ass or a shank in my back.” Sighing, I turned around and began walking uphill again. Jort grinned and told me what a smart-man I was. I didn’t feel very smart.
As evidence, we took some pictures of the dead aliens, both the ducks and the Tulk that had crawled out of them. The camera flashes—they must have alerted something.
A crashing began in the woods. Something big was breaking branches and knocking aside small trees and brush.
Using our rifle scopes, we saw it was a gigantic arthropod, a beast the size of a truck. The churning hairy legs were wicked-looking and as thick as sapling tree trunks. The numerous eyes, planted in between each of those long legs, glittered redly as it regarded us in return.
Without hesitation, we aimed our rifles and fired big, explosive rounds. The thing charged, but the shock of two Sardez rifles, each hitting like light cannons took it down fast. It thrashed, flipped over, and curled up its legs to its belly in death.
I began walking uphill again, figuring it was just a local predator who’d missed dinner. Jort, however, moved closer to examine the beast.
“Careful. Those fangs are full of venom.”
Jort waved away my words and examined the disgusting monster. He prodded at it for a few minutes, but finally walked away, shaking his head.
“What?” I asked.
“I don’t think it had one.”
“One what?”
“A Tulk, of course.”
I laughed. “Only humanoids get infested with Tulk. At least, that’s how I understand it.”
Jort nodded and we trudged up the slopes again. In less than an hour, we reached the rise and walked down into the flickering light of a hundred campfires. We were challenged by guards, but the moment they realized we were human, we were allowed to pass.
“Are these figments of my imagination?” Colonel Fletcher demanded sarcastically when we approached his command tent. “We figured you boys went out to take a leak and got lost hours ago.”
The leading officers encircled an old battle-computer with cracks running the length of its flat screen. They laughed, but they shut up when I tossed the bodies of three crushed Tulk onto the cracked glass before them.
“Get that slime off my map, Gorman!”
Instead, I prodded one. It wriggled feebly.
“That, gentlemen, is a Tulk. The ducks have them in their bellies. That’s why they can fight so hard—why they’re organized and determined. This is your real enemy, not the ducks themselves.”
They all stared and frowned at the mess on the battle-computer. Dubiously, Fletcher plucked one of them up on the point of a knife.
“Careful with those spines,” I told him. “They’re tipped with neuro-poisons.”
“This actually makes a lot of sense,” he said. “The ducks aren’t acting normally, that’s for sure. They haven’t been for months.”
“Right. What you have to do is figure out a way to kill these parasites, rather than worrying about killing the ducks themselves.”
Fletcher nodded. “All right. I hereby rescind my order to have you shot for desertion. Major Hendricks, call the spaceport, release Gorman’s woman and his ship.”
Hendricks stood up and contacted New Town. Jort and I listened to this with alarm, but we both played it cool.
Fletcher put his big hands on his hips and eyed us. “What do you suggest?”
“About what?”
“About how to kill these things, of course!”
“The first problem you’ll have is avoiding infestation yourself. They’ll come in tonight, trying to implant. If we still have an army that will take our commands in the morning, we can move on to the next step.”
It was Fletcher’s turn to look alarmed. He began shouting orders as he walked out of the tent into the cool night. He shouted orders at everyone he saw.
“You see?” Jort said. “We did good. We warned them.”
“Yeah… and haven’t even been arrested yet.”
Jort laughed and told me how smart I was for a time. It was nice to hear, but tonight I didn’t really believe him.
During the night, the men slept in shifts. They watched the ground, the skies. The Tulk made six daring attempts to prey upon the senseless, but only succeeded twice. Both victims were drunks on watch.
The affected men sprang up from a sound sleep and rushed off into the brush. One of them, a witnessed claimed, was still snoring loudly as he ran, his eyes shut tight. It was a strange thing to see, and the men were spooked afterward.
The other men detected the approaching Tulk and crushed them in the dust. Hissing and stinking, they died rapidly.
After hearing these accounts in the morning, Jort came to sit beside me. I drank coffee and puffed on a stim, watching the dawn light cut through the sky with bleary eyes.
“I worry, Captain,” he said.
“Why?”
“What if more came? What if they are among us right now, running the minds of these troops?”
I hadn’t considered it. But, once considered, the idea could not be shaken.
That’s what the Tulk would want to do, after all. They’d infiltrate, hiding among the loyal humans. They would only move to rebel once they had enough of their kind installed.
“I’ll talk to Fletcher about it.”
I found the colonel having a glorious meal near an open fire. His battle-computer was switched off and dark. Last night, he’d spent every waking minute poring over it.
“Colonel Fletcher,” I said. “I’m concerned. I think we should head down the slope, back to New Town.”
He looked up at me. His face ran with grease. He was eating some kind of roasted water-fowl with his hands.
For the barest second, his eyes were empty. It was as if he didn’t recognize me at all.
Major Hendricks, standing to one side, leaned close and whispered.
“Oh… of course.” Fletcher stood up, his hands running with juices. “The gun runner. I’m very glad you’re still here. We owe you so much.”
Fletcher grinned at me. There was an odd hunger there. A gaze of predatory intent. It was unmistakable.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Smiling, I approached Colonel Fletcher without a hint of concern. He was obviously infested, but I didn’t let that worry me.
“That breakfast looks good, sirs,” I said. “May I have a bite?”
“Might as well,” Fletcher said. “Take what you want. Fatten yourself.”
His words were odd and out of character, but I gave no hint of noticing.
“Jort?” I called. “Come into the tent and join us. Don’t be rude.”
Jort was standing in the doorway. He didn’t move. He just stared and bristled like a watchdog smelling a stranger.
“Here, take this meat,” Fletcher said, pushing a platter in my direction with wet fingers. “It’s excellent!”
“It must be…”
Stepping closer, I reached down for the plate of steaming hot meats—but came up with a knife instead. It unfolded open with a whisper.
Fletcher laughed in my face. Flecks of meat and grease flew from his gusty bellow.
“What are you going to do with that, Gorman? You’ll get the whole camp down on you, that’s what!”
“What do you want with us?” I asked him. “Or rather, what does your rider want?”
Fletcher’s face contorted. The right side grinned, while the left looked frightened.
“We’ll take this planet. We’ll take all human worlds. Evil things are falling here soon. Evil things that you humans can never stop.”
I narrowed my gaze. “Like the Tulk?”
Fletcher’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “You know our race-name?”
“Yes,” I told him. “We know what you are. You infest humanoids and control them like puppets. You’re as disgusting as worms in a man’s bowels. Despite this you have the gall to talk about evil aliens.”
Fletcher’s face looked reproachful. “Have a care, walking ape. Your kind is nothing in the grand scheme of things. Terrible demons sleep among the stars—worse than you, or me.”
I thought about that. “You mean like the creatures in the Sardez system?”
Fletcher stood tall. He stopped chewing. “What do you know about Sardez?”
“I saw a culus and a shrade there only two weeks ago. I killed them both.”
Fletcher’s eyes shifted from confident and jovial to mildly insane. He was still chewing, but his heart was no longer in it.
“You will be taken. You will be tormented. You will be wrung out, until every fact you know—or think you know—is drawn from you.”
That’s when I stabbed him in the belly—the right side, where the liver was supposed to be. Clinging to that organ, I knew, was a nasty little crab covered with spines.
My thrust was sudden and unprovoked—but the surprise stroke still didn’t land. Fletcher’s big hand flicked up to grab my wrist. I was strong, but Fletcher was a brute. We strove together, with the bigger man’s hands clasped over mine.
Hendricks and Jort both rushed in. I expected them to grab me and try to pull me away from the colonel—but they didn’t. Instead, Major Hendricks added his weight to my thrust, as did Jort.
Together, while Fletcher bleated and roared, we stuck him in the guts.
A half-dozen colonial troops tore open the tent. The three of us, looking like assassins, stood over their commander. Blood dribbled from our fingers.
Major Hendricks saved the situation. I’m quite certain that if it had been only Jort and I who’d performed this apparent murder attempt, we’d have been shot down on the spot.
“The colonel has been compromised. He has one in his belly. Call the medics.”
Prodding with the knife, we dug out the alien that clung to Fletcher’s guts. Fletcher groaned and thrashed, but he didn’t really fight us. My initial thrust, once it had been slammed home by my accomplices, had killed the Tulk. Fletcher now wanted the beast out of his belly as much as we did.
By the time the medics arrived and pushed us away, we’d gotten half the alien out of him. Blood ran everywhere. Fletcher howled and roared.
