by B. V. Larson
“James,” Natasha said in my ear. “I’m getting all kinds of reports from other techs—the ship is so big it’s disrupting our local tides. The harbor area is being flooded. There are waves in the streets, James!”
She sounded a little panicked. I thought of the shops where Della and Etta had been enjoying themselves just yesterday—but then I moved my brain to here and now.
“Not our problem, Natasha. Get your head in the game, girl. I need you.”
“On it, Centurion. I just thought you might want to know.”
Natasha was well known as the best tech in the cohort. Graves, in his infinite wisdom, had decided to put my unit on point, and he’d embedded Natasha with me for support. It was a nice gesture at least.
All we had to do now was wait for the go-signal, and we didn’t have long to wait. The big ship, looming not so far over our heads, soon opened up a section of its massive hull.
A door bigger than a supertanker slid away, revealing a dark maw within. In very short order, sleek-looking objects began to drop out of it.
“Are those fighters?” Carlos asked.
“They look more like landing craft,” Sargon said. “They’re the size of our lifters.”
“Are you crazy? They’re tiny.”
Sargon laughed at him. “Those tiny little bat-winged craft are big enough to carry a thousand troops. You’ve got to wrap your head around the size of this thing.”
“Oh yeah…” Carlos said. “It is the size of the Moon…”
The signal came in about then, as I’d been expecting. I lifted my hand and chopped it down, waving to Barton. A countdown started, overlaid on the ceiling above us.
“Ten… nine…”
“Button-up!” Barton shouted. “Check your gear. Safeties off, O-2 on!”
“She’s a pro,” Sargon said at my side.
“She’s hot,” Carlos said from the other side.
We watched as Barton marshaled thirty-five terrified light troopers. Some of them were confident veterans, such as Cooper and Della, but most were the greenest people in the unit.
When the countdown hit about four, the teleport effect began. Their outlines began to waver, and soon they transformed into standing regions of blue-white light.
This effect grew rapidly, and they all winked out together.
“That’s it!” Harris roared. “Heavy platoon, we’re up! Come on, come on, come on! You didn’t join Varus to live forever!”
Hustling forward with something that bordered on eagerness, the heavy troopers massed up onto the launch pad. I stepped up with them, and we quickly spaced ourselves out by sidestepping.
Each heavy trooper wore powered suits. We looked like hockey goalies in armor. Every man was encased in whirring metal that weighed more than he did, but we moved easily enough with exoskeletal suits underneath that were trained to respond and amplify our every motion.
Soon, the countdown began again. Ten short seconds after that we left the surface of Earth—possibly for the last time.
-10-
Blinking out of existence and appearing again in a different place is always upsetting, but this time it was worse than usual.
We didn’t land on a solid surface. Apparently, there hadn’t been time to aim that precisely. Instead, they’d just thrown us into the open door of the alien ship during the short period it was open.
We were floating, weightless, unanchored—at least, that’s what I thought at first. Then I realized we were falling. Our acceleration curve was kind of slow, but we were moving toward a distant dim-lit wall.
That wall—it was gently curved. It had to be the outer hull of the great ship.
“Oh shit…” I whispered aloud. “Unit leaders, come in! This is McGill—give me a sit-rep!”
“Harris here—and our situation is that we’re completely fucked, Centurion.”
“Barton here—I have to agree with Harris.”
We’d all realized the problem. Central had been so anxious to get us inside this ship, they hadn’t thought things through.
We were inside the vessel, but this hangar area the smaller ships had come from was huge. It was so big that we were probably going to be smashed to a pulp once we fell all the way to the hull.
“Natasha? Talk to me!”
She didn’t answer, and I realized she wasn’t with the rest. Not yet. She was coming in with the third platoon led by Leeson.
I tried to raise Central, but coms were out. Maybe the ship put out too much RF, or maybe the crew was blocking us. I didn’t know which, and I didn’t much care. We were cut off from Earth.
Earth.
I caught sight of my home world then, as seen through the yawning doorway that provided most of the light inside this massive vessel.
Clouds like streamers ran across a hazy surface of brown, green and blue. Those clouds looked like cresting waves from orbit.
“I need a plan,” I said. “What have we got?”
“Let’s bug out,” Harris said immediately. “We can’t do anything in here, it’s ridiculous. We’re like a swarm of gnats inside a football stadium plotting how we’re going to take it all down.”
“I’ll tell you what. If you’re about to go splat, and can’t escape that fate, you can port home. The harnesses are more valuable than we are, and we can always try again.”
“I’m not so sure about that, Centurion,” Barton said.
Looking around, I saw what she meant. A final trio of invasion shuttles left the mothership, gliding out of that gaping door. Their engines flared white with radiation as they nosed downward toward Earth.
How many troops were on those shuttles? Surely it had to be more than we’d sent back at them.
The bad part wasn’t the escaping shuttles, or a radioactive backwash of their engines. It was the massive door that had let them out. It was rolling slowly closed, moving back into place.
“We’re gonna get shut in!” Harris shouted. “We’ll be trapped!”
“Where are you bastards?” Leeson spoke up, having just arrived.
I craned my neck upward, to where I’d first appeared. I could see Leeson and his men, distant metallic dolls. We’d already fallen a kilometer or more, if I had to guess.
The trouble was that on Earth, there would be a terminal velocity due to atmospheric friction. Here, the air seemed to be pretty thin. That meant that even though the gravitational pull of the hull was lower than it was back home, making our acceleration lower, we didn’t have anything holding us back .We were falling toward the outer hull, faster and faster as we went.
“Natasha!” I roared, ignoring Leeson, “I need you, girl. Can we survive a landing on the inner hull of this ship?”
“I… I’m not sure, sir. I’ll do some measurements and calculations.”
“Hurry it up, we’re running out of time.”
“Once that door rolls shut, McGill, I don’t know if we can get out of here. Can these teleport suits take us through solid star-stuff?”
“It sure can,” I said with utter confidence, despite the fact that I didn’t think it was possible.
Straining to spin around again, I looked toward the door. It was half-way shut already.
“Natasha, give me something to go on!”
“Uh… according to my calculations, we’ll hit at about forty meters per second.”
“Great. What’s that mean? Splat or walk it off?”
“If you’re in a light suit, you’re dead. If you’re in full body armor—you might break a bone, but you’ll probably survive the impact.”
That was good enough for me. “Barton! First platoon, withdraw! I repeat, bug out back to Earth!”
They didn’t hesitate. First platoon was full of nervous nellies to begin with. They initiated the sequence. I watched them, far, far below my heavies, as they began to flutter blue-white.
Splat!
Splat-Splat-Splat!
A shower of bodies hit. Some of them had been too close to the point of no return, app
arently. They’d crashed into the inner hull of the great ship before the teleportation sequence could finish.
As they smashed down with killing force, every terminal fall made me wince. There were gasping breaths from a few, but most had died instantly. It all depended on whether they’d come down on their heads or their feet.
Maybe half of Barton’s platoon escaped. It couldn’t have been more.
“If you’ve got no armor, you have permission to bug out back to Earth right now,’” I broadcast to the entire unit. “Otherwise, aim your air tanks at the approaching surface. Release up to half your air to slow yourself down.”
“You crazy mother…” I heard someone say. It was probably Harris, but I couldn’t be sure.
Dutifully, some of the troops winked out. The bio people like Carlos, the techs like Kivi and Natasha—they all took off.
The rest of us, falling in our metal suits, braced for impact. We turned on repellers and fired vital O-2 downward, trying to slow our fall. It had some effect—but that floor was still coming at me way too fast.
“Bend your knees!” I heard Moller and Sargon shouting. “Bend your damned knees, you pathetic splats!”
We did as the veterans said. We’d all been in combat jumps before. No one gets heavy armor without earning it.
So I bent my knees, bled out my oxygen, gritted my teeth and prayed.
Then the inner hull of the great ship came up at me like a giant’s hand and smashed into the soles of my boots.
-11-
Most of us survived without broken bones or compromised suits. A notable exception was Leeson—and he wasn’t happy about it.
Somehow, he’d gotten into a tumble during those final moments before impact. He’d probably fired too much gas out of his tanks without aiming at the precisely correct angle.
He’d come down cracking one knee, then his faceplate, then he’d gone into a violent rolling spin. As the gravity was Moon-level, his body bounced up a dozen meters before smashing down again.
I staggered from my landing spot toward him. He was on his back. His faceplate was cracked like a mirror smashed by a hammer. He managed to groan and wheeze at me.
“I’m dead,” he said, coughing weakly. “Back’s broken, I’m pretty sure.”
I thumbed his suit’s diagnostics. His prognosis was correct. After you’d spent a few decades in Legion Varus, you got know how injuries worked and what they felt like.
“Laser or faceplate?” I asked him, looming into his field of vision.
“What? Can’t you just let a man die in peace?”
“Nope. I need your air, your power, your harness and your weapon. You’re carrion now.”
“Fucker…” he said, and he flipped up his faceplate.
I shot him in the right eye socket. That was a lot better than freezing solid, as I could attest.
When everyone was down, we counted bodies. I had thirty-nine effectives left. About a third of the troops I’d jumped with.
“What about the other units?” I asked. He was my only surviving officer. “Any sign?”
“No,” Harris said. “There wasn’t time, I guess. The big door is closed.”
“Maybe they saw how badly our jump went, and they scrubbed the rest.”
“I suppose they might be here somewhere inside this giant ship. Long-range coms is out.”
We both spun slowly around, panning and examining our new world. We were inside a chamber that was bigger than a city. Above us were hundreds of claw-like docking systems.
“The assault ships must have been hanging on those things,” Harris speculated. “They probably dock there, then fall out of the ship when the door opens, and they’re released.”
“Yeah…” I agreed. “Come on. Let’s get all able-bodied asses up and moving again. Have everyone pick up an extra O-2 pack and ammo if they find it.”
We stripped the dead like pros and moved on. It only made sense to me that we’d been detected by now. There had to be someone on guard duty, and I wanted to get off the LZ before they arrived.
It had only been ten minutes since the first platoon had blinked out from Central and appeared here. My survivors were jogging smartly toward the nearest interesting thing we could see—a big segmented tower of dark metal.
It took some time to get there. When we were halfway to the goal, some of the troops in the rear sounded the alarm. Breathing hard, we stopped running and looked back.
A swarm of alien flying-machines had found our dead lying sprawled on the deck. They seemed baffled. Floating and swaying, even doing little loops, they circled around the bodies and poked at them.
“I rigged them up a little surprise,” Sargon said, walking up to me and grinning.
He thumbed a detonator. A gush of plasma swallowed the fluttering objects, and when it cleared, they’d vanished along with the dead they’d been poking at.
Harris slammed the back of Sargon’s helmet with his gauntlet.
Sargon whirled around, raging, but he lost his urge to kill when he realized who was standing behind him.
“You damned fool!” Harris said. “They’ll know for sure they’ve got commandos aboard now!”
“Easy Harris,” I said. “That had to be pretty obvious to them once they found that graveyard full of splats.”
“How would these aliens know we weren’t all dead? Now, they know we’re here.”
I shrugged. “Don’t worry so much. We’re here to break things, not make friends.”
“What are we going to break next, Centurion?” Sargon asked. He, for one, was ready to kill something.
I pointed into the distance. “The only thing we can reach without running out of air is that segmented tower over there. Come on, it looks important.”
“I’ll beat you to it,” Sargon said, and he began clanking away by using his exoskeletal suit to move his armor faster than a mortal man could run.
For a moment, I wanted to call for him to slow down. He was using up valuable power and oxygen recklessly—but then it hit me. Harris was right, and Sargon knew it.
The enemy had pinpointed us. No matter what we did now, it was only a matter of time before we were hunted down and destroyed—if we didn’t suffocate first.
“Sir!” called out a voice behind me. I turned to see it was Moller. “Permission to port out, sir!”
“What’s the problem?” I asked, but I saw what the problem was almost before I finished the thought. Her faceplate was cracked. “You low on O-2?”
“Yes, I’m down to my last minute. I’ve sealed the crack, but I’m still leaking.”
“I can give you another bottle.”
“No sir,” she said firmly. “I’ll just waste it. The air will all leak out.”
“Moller, I don’t think we can port out of this ship. Our T-bombs couldn’t penetrate the hull, and the door is closed now.”
“I know all that sir, but I’d rather try than die gasping.”
After thinking it over for a few seconds, I nodded to her. “Give it a shot.”
She began to grow a blue nimbus. A moment later she vanished.
A smile appeared on my face. It looked like she’d done it. But then Harris trotted by looking disgusted.
“She bugged out?” he asked. “Serves her right then.”
He pointed, and I saw something at my feet. It was Moller’s gauntlet, fingers outstretched, sprouting out of the hull of the ship like a flower.
She’d tried to teleport through the dense matter, but she’d ended up getting stuck about meter or so down. She was beyond dead. She was encased in star dust forever.
Grimly, I turned back toward the tower Sargon was running toward and picked up my pace. There was no escaping this place. Our best option was to do some fast dirty damage right now while we could.
Kicking on my own exo-suit, I began charging in Sargon’s wake. “Come on! Everyone, top speed!”
Like a herd of kangaroos we set off, bounding in huge ground-eating leaps. The low gravity, combi
ned with our power armor, sent us flying with each stride. Our steps were ten meters high and thirty long.
We ate up ground very quickly. Overhead, I saw something—but I ignored it. A swarm of flying objects was coming after us—but it didn’t matter. We were running out of air.
Before we could make it to the big tower, which now looked to me kind of like a giant coiled tube or cable, the enemy bird-like things caught up.
I don’t think I’d ever been attacked by stranger creatures. With the body of a metallic manta ray, they had flapping wings that shouldn’t have worked in the nearly airless environment—but they seemed operate to anyway. How could something so ungainly fly? I didn’t know. But they were doing it.
The first time we slashed one down with force-blades, we learned more about them. They weren’t robots—not exactly. They were part metal, part meat. They flapped, and they clicked. We cut them out of the air, and they sprayed dark blood all over. They seemed to be full of blood that had the consistency and color of reddish motor oil.
Oddly, they didn’t try to kill us. They tried to capture us instead. They gripped our armor with metallic claws and lifted us into the air. Usually, this was a bad idea for the flapping manta-ray things. We slashed them apart, and they fell back to the deck—and we kept on running.
After a hundred of them were down, the rest flapped away into a darkening cloud.
Glancing up, I realized the cloud they’d formed consisted of thousands more of the same kind of nightmares.
“Centurion!” shouted Harris. “We’ve got more trouble! There are bigger things charging up on us!”
I looked this way and that, then my HUD went red with contacts, and I turned around.
Harris was right. Running across the giant hangar on foot was a herd of strange-looking things. I couldn’t be sure if they were robots, or walking vehicles or maybe just armored giant beasts. Whatever they were, they walked on four legs in a predatory run. It was hard to get the scale right due to their distance, but I would have to estimate they were each two or three times the height of a man.
“Some kind of walking machine?” I asked aloud.
“I don’t know. They’re shaped with curves and move like they have muscles. Metal and meat mixed together just like those flapping things.”
