by B. V. Larson
“Get it out of me! Get it out!”
We left the doctors to their grim work.
Outside the tent, Major Hendricks met my eyes with two bloodshot orbs of his own.
“How did you know?” he asked, panting slightly. “I’ve been thinking it—but I couldn’t be sure. He looked and sounded like our colonel. I got him to eat breakfast, and he sounded more normal—but then you guys came back to camp. That’s when he became really weird.”
“What matters now is how many of your men were infested last night. We’ve got to find out—to calculate how quickly it has spread.”
“How do we do it?”
“Poke them in the belly!” Jort said suddenly.
We looked at him in surprise.
“Yeah,” he said. “Bring them in here, one by one. Punch them in the liver—here, I stand to this side, I do it!”
We thought about it, and decided it was as good a method as any. We began sending for the men, the officers first. We walked them into the tent, telling them they were about to receive a special briefing, or orders, or that the colonel demanded their presence at once.
Soon, a muttering line of men stood outside the tent, looking concerned. Each man walked in and bellowed, then fell quiet. Soon, they were kicked out the other end of the tent with instructions to tell no one what had occurred.
Twenty officers came and went. We were all getting bored, except for Jort, who seemed to take great pleasure in ambushing men and slamming them in the guts.
Finally, when the twenty-first man stepped through, things went differently. He was a colonial lieutenant, a young guy with long arms and a rangy build. He was strong but wiry. He had bloodshot eyes, as if he hadn’t slept for a week.
The tent flaps closed behind him, but he didn’t stand and wait for Jort’s grinning attack. Instead, he launched himself at Hendricks, who was standing to greet him.
That had been the plan and the method. Major Hendricks called to each man by name, demanding they step forward and stand at attention. Jort would then sneak in from the side, while they were gazing at their commander.
This lieutenant was different. He didn’t fall for our trap—in fact, he seemed to know it was coming. He attacked Hendricks with long-fingered hands reaching for the man’s throat like claws. Jort and I rushed in, grappling with him.
The madman’s muscles stood out like cables under his skin. We struggled to tear him lose. He had the hysterical strength of a berserker, but at last we overcame him and pulled him off of Hendricks.
Gasping and holding his throat, Hendricks walked forward and drew his pistol. He reversed it and slammed the butt of the gun into the tall man’s guts. He did this repeatedly.
Each time, the lieutenant thrashed and howled. He fought us fiercely but went limp after a dozen such blows. Panting, we let him sag to the floor. Then we called the surgeons to remove the Tulk from his abdomen.
“Safe to say the word is out,” Hendricks told me. “I’m getting reports back—these twenty officers, they’re the only ones that are coming. Another ten have fled.”
“We’ll have to check the enlisted before the Tulk can warn each other.”
Nodding, we began the grim task. It took hours, but we soon determined that only the officers had been infested.
“The enemy is cunning,” Jort said. “They tried to take over the leadership.”
“They probably did the same to the ducks,” Hendricks said thoughtfully. He walked outside and gazed around the camp. “Look. While we’ve been finding Tulk, our engineers have been busy.”
The stream of contaminated water that had been flowing from the mine’s mouth had slowed to a trickle. Inside the dark, cavern-like mouth, the walls dripped and reflected wetly.
“We can walk inside. They’ve punched a tunnel through into the lower regions, draining it.”
Jort looked uncomfortable. He shook his head. “Going in there—it’s madness!”
“Do you want your payoff or not?” Major Hendricks demanded, placing his fists on his hips.
“Let’s go in,” I said.
Jort followed us reluctantly. He held his rifle tightly, his eyes darting here and there with every step.
Inside, the mine was more sophisticated than I’d believed possible. I’d expected to find a vast hole scratched out with hand tools. Instead, I found a robotic dig with conveyor belts and model-D workers frozen in place. They’d been flooded and shorted out. Some were still functional, but they had to be recharged.
The colonials rushed into the mine the moment it was half dry. I was surprised at how hard they worked to get things operating again. The processing plant itself was running by nightfall.
“Quite an effort you’re making to pay me, Major,” I said. “Six kilograms of your refined stuff will do nicely.”
Hendricks snorted at me in disbelief. “I bet they would, but first things first, Gorman. For one thing, the enemy appears to have pilfered our stores before flooding the mine. For another, our reactors are running out of fuel at New Town. We’ve been operating with half-spent rods. The turbines barely spin. No, the first load will go to our own equipment. Then, after we’ve got enough to operate the remote mines and plantations, we’ll see about giving you your six kilograms.”
Wincing, I had to wonder how long ago the ducks had taken this mine out of service. Months? It would seem so.
Noticing my perplexity, Hendricks sighed.
“We traded all the radioactives we had for supplies. We even pulled the rods from some of our smaller operating power plants. Then, no doubt sensing a weakness, the Tulk ordered these natives to take the mine from us at all costs. After all, if we had no power plants…”
“You’d be helpless to stop them. I get it.”
When darkness fell, I walked out of the mine and found myself descended upon by rubber-suited men. They ran Geiger counters over us and then ripped away our clothes. They scrubbed to decontaminate our bodies. We were issued new clothes that I liked much less than my original gear.
“This is an insult!” Jort declared. “I look like some kind of colonial recruit.”
I pointed up toward the crown of the mountain. There, a crimson glow had begun around the base of the tree trunks at the summit of the mountain.
“What’s that?” Jort asked. “A forest fire?”
“I don’t know,” I told him, “but I’d say we’ve got bigger things to worry about than our clothes.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
The top of the mountain was a lurid red. The source wasn’t a fire, and I suspected it wasn’t natural at all.
“They’re setting up something above us,” I said to Hendricks when he came to ask me about it.
“Snipers?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“We have to find out. I’m sending up a patrol. Do you want to go with them?” He looked at me suggestively.
I laughed and plucked at my coveralls. “I’m wearing the colonial green, but I’m not one of your grunts, Major.”
He nodded, looking down. “All right. I’ll lead the patrol myself.”
Hendricks hiked away into the gathering darkness, and I frowned after him. I felt a bit low, claiming this fight was theirs, not mine. Sure, this wasn’t my planet, but these people had grown on me a little. They were hard-scrabble pioneers. People who’d drawn a rough lot in life but didn’t complain about it. To me, they were admirable in comparison to the fat-rabbit types that inhabited the Conclave’s inner worlds.
Jort and I watched as Hendricks gathered his men and walked off into the dark. Soon, they vanished under the trees and began the long hike upslope. They weren’t operating any lights, nothing to show their approach. That wouldn’t matter if the enemy had night gear—but I hadn’t seen any evidence of that.
About twenty minutes passed. During that time, the encampment slowly became deserted. All the able-bodied men moved into the forest, hugging tree trunks and watching everything with wide eyes. They sighted their rifles o
n every leaf that moved. They were tense, ready for battle. Every few seconds, we looked up to the mountaintop, wondering about the growing pulsating glow.
The quiet night was ripped apart all at once. The lurid red light from the top of the mountain flared brighter still when the firing began up there.
I knew the snap and crash of Sardez rifles firing. The sound was very familiar.
“Major Hendricks has run into resistance,” I heard one of the lieutenants say. “They’re pulling back. The enemy has set up some kind of energy-field up there—it appears to be growing.”
Staring, I saw he was right. The pulsing red glow now extended above the treetops, past the crown of the mountain in all directions. It looked like a shivering ball of light, a cherry on top of a vast cake.
Soon, the red ball of light consumed the trees. Figures came rushing down the mountain, running in all directions. The glare behind them became swollen, and the forms of the fleeing men were barely recognizable.
A few shots rang out from the colonials hiding around the mine. Officers shouted for a ceasefire.
“Those are our people! They’re on the run!”
Standing up quietly, I tapped Jort on the shoulder. “Let’s back up a little.”
Jort showed me his teeth. He looked indecisive. I could tell his sense of honor plucked at his heart. At last he nodded, and we retreated.
Seeing us go prompted others to get up and began to withdraw. Soon, the official order went out. We were all to withdraw in good order, heading down the mountain.
These orders were followed for perhaps a full minute. After that, it became a rout. Everyone knew in their hearts that if that ball of plasma reached us, we’d be swept from the Earth.
Heading downhill at a trot, I noticed a fleeing man nearby. The back of his hair was singed, and his uniform was blackened. Even so, I thought I recognized Major Hendricks.
Coming close to him, I tripped him and grabbed him as he fell.
“Hey, Hendricks. What’s the hurry?”
Panting, eyes wide with the whites all around shining in the starlight, he stared up at me, but he didn’t recognize me.
“Gorman?” he asked finally.
“That’s right. That big blossom up there seems to be at its fullest extent. It’s not growing anymore.”
Hendricks looked back upslope. His sides heaved from exertion. “There were ducks up there—they all were infested with parasites. You could tell. They were building something odd. A metallic series of tubes and junctions. It was like a web work, a polyhedron of metal tubes…”
“Yeah? What did you do, shoot at them?”
He looked at me. “Yes. We snuck up, saw they were creating some kind of reaction—you know, like when they build a warp-bubble at a slip-gate. I think that’s what they’re doing—building a slip-gate on the top of the mountain.”
“That’s not safe,” Jort said.
“No shit,” Hendricks told him. “We started shooting at them, and we even killed a few, but they ignored us and kept working. They were clearly controlled tightly by the Tulk. Then, suddenly, the field began to balloon to a huge size. I’m not sure if we disrupted it, or if that was what it was supposed to do.”
Looking up, the sight was strange and fascinating. A vast globe of shimmering light, like the northern lights trapped in a bottle, swirled and pulsated over us. The mine itself had now been consumed by the globe, but it wasn’t getting any bigger.
“What about the wounded?” Jort asked.
We looked toward the tents, and the men who’d been left behind in the camp. We’d run past them in our urgency to escape. They were all gone, swallowed up by the vast globe.
“The colonel was recovering in that camp,” I said, slamming a flat palm against Hendricks’ shoulder. “Looks like you’re in command now, Major,”
If it could be imagined, he looked even more shocked and horrified than he had before. “Yes…”
He straightened up. He stood taller and adjusted his dirty, soot-stained uniform. He activated his com-link. “All units, it’s time to stop running like hens. Officers, get organized. Form up into squads and take cover at least a hundred meters from that blob. I want headcounts from every captain in five minutes.”
Although some of the colonials looked like they wanted to run all night to the bottom of the mountain, Hendricks got them to come back and form ragged ranks. In small groups, we huddled behind every boulder. The world was lit up now by reddish light. The night sky was gone, washed out by the odd effect that glimmered nearby.
Hendricks had mentioned going no closer than a hundred meters, but that was a joke. We were crouching and squinting up at the phenomenon from at least five times that distance.
“What the hell do we do now?” Hendricks asked me. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”
“Like I said, it resembles a slip-gate on the ground. At least the radiation levels aren’t too bad. We could stay a week at this distance with a minor decontamination routine and survive.”
“You call that not too bad, Gorman?”
I shrugged. I’d experienced worse. Often, a gun runner had trouble with his engines and their radioactive bleeding.
“We can’t just sit here and wait for their next move,” Hendricks complained. “I’ve got to send scouts into that sphere. Our wounded might be alive and in need of help. I’ve got to know what’s going on in there.”
Jort snorted rudely. “You went there before. You want to go again?”
Major Hendricks eyed him, but he just shook his head. “I doubt I could get any of my men to follow me, anyway.”
“Dammit,” I sighed.
“What?”
“I’ll do it. I’ll go in and have a look.”
They both looked shocked. Hendricks pointed an accusatory finger. “Before, when I suggested you go, you laughed.”
“Yeah, sure. That was when I could get someone else to risk their skins. That moment has passed, so if I want to recoup any of my losses on this trip, I’m going to have to do this myself.”
Hendricks didn’t approve of my logic, but Jort did.
“You see? I tell everyone: he is smart man. He is smarter than you—or me, even.”
Hendricks ignored him. “Don’t stay in long. The field has some kind of effect on people. I saw it in my men and even myself.”
“What kind of effect?”
“I think—I think it makes you go crazy.”
“That’s great. Wish me luck.”
Standing, I advanced up the rocky slope toward the pulsating glow. Behind me, I heard Jort shout: “Wishing luck!”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
When I got up close to the field, I have to admit, I almost turned tail and ran. The whole thing suddenly seemed crazy. Sure, I knew our readings didn’t indicate the field was deadly—but it didn’t look healthy, either.
I’ve touched plenty of containment fields in my day. Usually, these were security effects put in place to stop guys like me from taking guns from armories and the like. I’d never been overly concerned about them, as they were often easy to disable or bypass.
This bulbous mass of contorting energies was different. It was big, out of control, and had no obvious off-switch. I was going to have to walk in there and take my chances.
Now and then, as I got close, I thought I saw figures moving inside. No sound came through the field, however. It was utterly silent, except for some crackling and sparks when the field touched waving tree branches.
I geared up as best I could. I found a radiation suit one of the miners had left behind and slipped it on over my coveralls. Then I put on a respirator, and I walked into the field.
There was a sense of resistance at first. Like I was trying to pop a balloon with my face and body. I pushed harder, and it pushed back.
Finally, I stumbled through it. Inside, the air was hot and still, but there was more noise and activity than I’d expected.
I heard shouts and gunfire. Moving in a crouch, I r
ushed toward the encampment.
There, I saw a group of ducks methodically going from tent to tent and dragging out wounded men. They fought, those who were able, but they didn’t have Sardez rifles. I heard popping pistol-shots and saw a few gleaming knives that reflected the reddish light of the sphere.
Sneaking toward a rocky outcropping, I placed myself with care. Then, I began sniping.
The Sardez rifle bucked and kicked in my hands. The blue-white flash from the muzzle was noticeable, but not much more so than the glowing plasma walls all around us.
I took down three of the ducks. It was easy in the beginning, since the first two were totally surprised. The third alien, however, craned his misshapen head around and pointed toward my location. I shot him, then immediately wormed away on my belly.
The other ducks stopped abusing the wounded and turned in my direction. Cagily, they ran from cover to cover until they leapt in unison to swarm me.
By that time, I’d taken up a new position however, higher up the slope. With a good view of my first hiding spot, I stood and hosed them down. The faithful Sardez bucked in my hands on full-auto. The murderers were shredded, only two escaped.
Advancing toward the tents, I checked on several of the humans. Some had been infested again with fresh Tulk. I saw it in their bloodshot, glassy eyes. They gasped and squirmed and reached for me.
I left them to their agonies. Finally, I found Colonel Fletcher. He was stretched out on his back. Sheened in sweat, he had a knife in his hand. A crushed Tulk lay nearby.
“They put it on my wound, expecting me to just lie here and let it crawl inside. I played dead until they left, then dug it out.”
He said this without looking at me. He knew I was there, despite my precautions. Perhaps this place, which was partly a Baden colony mountaintop and partly someplace else, could alter a man’s perceptions.
“Can you walk?” I asked him.
“Yeah… maybe.”
I shouldered his bulk and half-carried him out of the tent.
“They’ll be back. More will come,” Fletcher told me. “We have to get all my men out of here.”
