by Isaac Hooke
Tightly gripping the handrests, I swung my boots down so that my body was positioned just above the seat. I grabbed the old-style buckle with my rightmost glove and, maintaining my deathgrip on the left handrest, attempted to fasten the clasp one-handed. It was difficult, because the right side of my body kept drifting upward whenever I let go of the handrest. Where was an automatic seat clamp when you needed one? After three tries I finally secured the buckle and tightened it so that my body was snug against the seat.
“Good to go!” I sent.
Ghost righted himself.
Facehopper still drifted alongside us. “You first, Ghost. Initiate emergency landing procedures.”
Ghost launched Antares’s three emergency parachutes. The canopies opened above us and I felt the G forces as we shot upward.
Facehopper rapidly plunged into the void below, but then he too pulled his own chutes and ascended as the fabrics opened. He wobbled back and forth, constantly shifting his body to compensate for the damaged air brake. It was probably a good thing he didn’t have to handle the weight of my mech as well.
Facehopper moved past us fairly quickly as we were heavier—the drag from our three chutes couldn’t sufficiently counteract our weight.
“Looks like you’ll have to cut away Wolfhound,” Facehopper said over the comm. “You’re falling too fast.”
“Not yet,” Ghost replied.
“I trust your judgment,” Facehopper sent. “Good luck, mates.” He vanished into the darkness above and passed beyond signal range.
Ghost and I were alone.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” I told Ghost over the comm.
“I’ve done this a hundred times,” Ghost replied.
“Really?”
“No.”
“Reassuring.”
I was staring at the continuous blur of rock beside us, wondering if the pit would ever end, when abruptly the wall fell away entirely.
We had plunged into some vast cavern whose extents were well beyond the ambient light of our headlamps.
“Hang on, Cyclone!” Ghost sent. I heard the undisguised fear in his voice.
“Get ready to drop Wolfhound,” I told him.
He didn’t answer.
There was nothing around us save blackness. I knew the bottom was coming. I could feel it. I leaned over the passenger seat, glancing down to peer into the void below.
Drop Wolfhound, I thought. Drop Wolfhound.
The noise-canceling tech in my jumpsuit was still filtering out the gushing air, so when a distant reverberation arose from below, I heard it distinctly. The slug had finally hit the bottom.
“Let go of Wolfhound,” I sent.
“Not yet,” Ghost replied stubbornly.
“Saving the mech won’t matter if we both die in the process!”
Still he clung to my ATLAS.
Some moments later another, louder reverberation reached my ears, and I realized the earlier sound had come from the first slug.
Even though I couldn’t see the bottom in the darkness, I knew we were close. I had my aReal extrapolate the position, based on the rate of descent of the second slug and the resonance of its impact, accounting for Doppler shift. I overlaid the computed position onto my vision.
The bottom was indeed coming up fast.
Too fast.
CHAPTER NINE
Rade
At first I thought the nuclear warhead had detonated because, around me, the bulkhead of the enemy starship blinked out.
I stood instead with my squad brothers on an abandoned rooftop, overlooking a city whose buildings were caked in a familiar black resin.
This definitely wasn’t the afterlife.
In the milliseconds that it took to get my bearings, I managed to get out one word. “Chief!”
But Chief Bourbonjack had already input the final digit of the disarm code on the command console. I don’t know when he’d started entering that six-digit code, but it had to have been at least two seconds ago, before the alien bulkheads winked out. Maybe he’d been bluffing after all, and had input most of the disarm code beforehand so that he’d only have to add one or two digits if the enemy actually yielded. I don’t know. Either way he’d saved us. Barely: the timer on the nuclear payload was frozen at 00:00:00:103, or one hundred and three milliseconds before detonation.
The Chief lifted his gloved hand from the warhead command console and slumped visibly.
“We’ve died,” Manic said. “And this is hell.”
“We haven’t died yet,” the Chief said, looking up. “Though I won’t dispute that we’re in hell. Snakeoil, position update?”
I returned my attention to the city that stretched before us in the twilight. I thought it might be Shangde because of the geronium-caked buildings that reminded me of tree trunks with anthills clumped around their bases. The solar panels built into the asphalt were probably still absorbing the weak sunlight but the city’s generators weren’t converting any of it to power, judging from the dark street lamps and lightless buildings.
The blue and white gas giant that could only be Tau Ceti II filled much of the sky, while stars populated the remainder of the heavens. The sun appeared as a pinpoint in the distance and cast the landscape in the dim light of what I assumed was perpetual twilight—which would be the case if this were indeed Shangde.
“We’re in Hongleong City,” Snakeoil said over the comm.
Bender turned toward him. “Say what?”
“The capital of the moon Tau Ceti II-b,” Snakeoil returned. “The celestial configurations and building layouts confirm it.”
Tau Ceti II-b. I was disappointed because for a moment I had entertained the hope of joining up with the rest of Alfa Platoon, but we were on the wrong moon for that: Digger squad resided on Tau Ceti II-c, not b.
“What the hell happened to Bogey 2?” Bender pressed.
“Nothing.” Snakeoil pointed. “It’s right over there.”
In the distance, the colossal Skull Ship ate up the horizon, reaching from the ceiling of the gas giant all the way down to the surface of the moon.
“The question really should be,” Snakeoil continued, “what the hell happened to us?”
“Ahhh frick.” Lui sat down heavily. He let his boots hang over the elevated dais we all stood on.
I wasn’t the only one who was disappointed, apparently.
Lui started to twist off his helmet assembly.
“Lui, wait—” Manic took a step toward him.
Snakeoil intercepted Manic with a hand. “It’s safe. The air’s breathable and the geronium-275 radiation from the buildings isn’t too intense, yet.”
Lui removed his helmet, aReal visor and all, and set it down beside him. He inhaled deeply of the air, then bowed his head and rested his chin on a gloved fist. “What a mess. A goddamn mess. Mission’s over, dudes. We failed.”
One by one the rest of us opened our faceplates. We kept our aReal visors lowered over our eyes.
I took a long whiff of the cold air. It stank of char, but at least it wasn’t stale like the recycled environment of my suit.
“The mission wasn’t a complete failure,” Snakeoil said. “We gathered important intel. And before we left, we inflicted heavy damage on that jellyfish mess hall or whatever it was.”
“Ha,” Lui said. “I’m not sure I’d call that damage heavy.”
“We hurt them,” Snakeoil insisted stubbornly.
Lui chuckled. “Like a pinprick hurts a thumb.”
I turned off my headlamp and others did likewise. We didn’t need them here. The twilight, though weak, provided more than enough illumination to see by.
“Fan betrayed us,” Hijak said. “I think it’s telling that he didn’t teleport down with us.”
Hijak was right. Fan wasn’t with us.
I hadn’t even noticed up until that point.
“He ran away during the firefight,” Bender said. “I let him go. Too many other things to worry about.”
“He’s the least of our worries,” the Chief said. “Let’s hear some ideas on how the hell we got here, people.”
“Um, we’re facing an incredibly powerful alien species whose technology is ten times more advanced than our own?” Manic said.
The Chief regarded him crossly. “That’s not an answer.”
I reviewed the vid log of the last few moments leading up to our sudden displacement, from the encircling of the squad by the Phants and their jellyfish, to the nuclear countdown initiated by the Chief. I hadn’t realized it at the time but the entire squad had stepped onto the wide dais in the center of the chamber. The Phants and the jellyfish had herded us there. In the vid archive, I could clearly see Fibonacci spirals engraved into the metallic disc.
At this moment we stood upon a similar disc, situated atop a comparable dais on the rooftop.
I told the Chief.
“Maybe we can use their own tech against them,” Manic interjected when I was done. “And have the disc send us back somehow.”
“You might be on to something!” Bender mocked. “Because of course our aReals can interface with these teleporters. Human tech always seamlessly integrates with alien tech. If it’s true in the movies it’s gotta be true in real life, right baby? Man, you’re so smart Manic! Wish I had your IQ.”
“Hey, I’m thinking out loud, okay?” Manic said. “Trying to brainstorm some ideas here.”
“Yeah well, I’d prefer if you ‘brainstormed’ ideas that might actually work, bitch.”
Normally the Chief would have interceded at this point, but he let them verbally spar. We were all pissed at failing the mission and needed to let off steam one way or another.
“What I don’t get is why the enemy wouldn’t just send down more troops to finish the job, now that they’ve realized the nuke hasn’t detonated,” Lui said.
“While you boys have been arguing,” the Chief said, “I’ve been busy running a search on my offline copy of Lana’s embedded ID transcripts.” Only the Chief had a copy of that, as the contents were highly classified. It wasn’t something available to mere grunts like us.
“Lana?” Manic said.
“The former Phant host rescued by Rage and Hijak.”
“Rescue her?” I said bitterly. “Yeah. Only to let her die in the end.”
Obviously uncomfortable, the Chief cleared his throat. “Anyway, here are the results of my search. Apparently these discs are called ‘Acceptors.’ They’re teleporters, as we guessed already. But here’s the thing: the source objects can teleport only when the target Acceptor is clear of matter. Seems to be a safety mechanism of sorts because if the teleportation actually happened while anything was on the target, the incoming object could combine with it, depending on its position. Hardly a desirable outcome to say the least.”
“That doesn’t entirely make sense,” Hijak said. “What about the atmosphere just above the Acceptor? The safety mechanism ignores that? What if the air is full of toxins? Wouldn’t the teleportee ‘merge’ with the gas, even if he were inside a jumpsuit? Filling his body and suit with toxins?”
“Look, I don’t claim to be an expert on the things, goddammit,” Chief Bourbonjack said. “I’m merely telling you what I found.”
“I just thought of something,” Manic said, growing pale. “You say these are ‘teleporters’? But what if the source disc actually destroyed us, while the destination disc reconstructed our bodies? And we only think we’ve been teleported, when in actuality we’ve been cloned—our bodies and neural imprints duplicated down to the molecular level to make us believe we’re the same people—but our original selves, the bodies containing our actual souls, are dead!”
“Don’t overcomplicate it, Manic,” the Chief said. “I’m sure our souls or psyches or whatever you want to call them teleported, too.”
“But you don’t know that, not for sure,” Manic said. “We could all be the living dead. Seriously. And . . . and what if the source disc didn’t destroy our original selves during the process, and those of us down here are mere copies? That means we’re still soulless clones but our original bodies are aboard Bogey 2, fighting for their lives. No wait, the original nuke would have detonated by now, wouldn’t it? So our source bodies are still dead. But if it did detonate, how come we’re not seeing any damage to the ship? And—”
“Manic . . .” the Chief said warningly.
Lui rubbed his chin. “So. Going back to what the Chief was trying to say: aliens from Bogey 2 won’t teleport down because we’re still standing on the disc.”
“Bingo,” Chief Bourbonjack said.
We all exchanged glances, then got up in four-person teams and started dismantling the surrounding superstructures on the rooftop. We tossed the remains onto the disc, blocking every square meter of it to be on the safe side. Eventually we ported the warhead off the Acceptor and quickly shoved debris into the empty area left behind.
Snakeoil attempted to contact Fleet but the effort proved futile—all he received was static, courtesy of the interference from the Skull Ships. I couldn’t see the individual fleet ships up there in the twilit sky, though I doubted I’d be able to distinguish them from stars anyway—assuming they were actually still in orbit.
“So what now?” Hijak said.
“We certainly can’t stay here,” Chief Bourbonjack said. “Bogey 2 has probably communicated with the local alien presence by now, and likely a party has already been dispatched to clear the debris from this Acceptor.”
“We should find an armory,” Bender said. “You know, restock our ammunition, recharge our suit batteries, refill our jetpacks.”
“Probably a good idea,” the Chief agreed. “But after we restock, we need to find a shipyard or a working communications array and then get the hell off this rock.”
I enlarged the HUD map of the city. We had the full layout of Hongleong and the blueprints to all its buildings, even the classified ones, thanks to the planetary data shared by the SKs before the mission—the city was essentially lost to them and they had nothing to gain by hiding information from us.
I highlighted nearby munitions depots on my map and turned toward the Chief.
“This is the closest armory,” Snakeoil said, beating me to the punch. A blue dot flashed several buildings away. “It belongs to the city defense forces. Or used to. As a plus, the building also has a communications array. Though whether it’s working or not is another story.”
“Good find,” the Chief said.
“We don’t have enough jetpack fuel to leap between buildings like we did in Shangde City,” Lui said. In that op we’d brought along extra fuel, unlike today. “We’re going to have to hike it.”
“How do we know this armory won’t be crawling with enemy?” Hijak said. “Or already looted?”
“We don’t,” Chief Bourbonjack responded. “But we’ve overstayed our welcome if you ask me. Let’s move!”
And so we did.
The payload didn’t fit the stairwell, of course. However, the building we stood on was only three stories high and the black resin that caked it reached right to the rooftop, forming a thirty-five-degree ramp to the ground. Thus, we were able to port the warhead to street level without wasting any jetpack fuel.
After touching the solar-paneled asphalt we immediately hurried onto a side street, wanting to put as much distance between the building and ourselves as possible. The coloration of our jumpsuits changed to match the dark gray around us.
At the far end of the street, Chief Bourbonjack called a halt. “I’m separating the squad into bounding overwatch. Rage, Hijak, Skullcracker, Manic, you’re FT1.” Fire Team 1. “You get first overwatch.”
We lowered the warhead
and dug in while the Chief brought Fire Team 2 forward through those too-quiet streets. Though we’d left the Skull Ship far behind, it still felt like we were trapped in the heart of enemy territory, not knowing when and where our hidden opponents would strike next.
It was only two weeks into the invasion, yet Hongleong City seemed utterly deserted. Only about half the population had evacuated, which meant five hundred thousand people were potentially trapped here. Though given the expediency with which the invaders had captured and eradicated the populace of Shangde City before it, probably only five to ten thousand refugees were actually still alive. If that.
“You really think we’ll use it anymore?” Hijak nodded at the warhead.
Manic shook his head. “Doubtful. There’s got to be at least five thousand survivors hidden in the city,” he said, echoing my own estimates. “If we use the nuke, they die.”
“Eventually they’ll die anyway,” Hijak said. “If not from starvation, then from geronium radiation. Besides, if we don’t nuke the place, Brass will probably eventually do it from orbit for us. Like they did to Shangde City.”
Manic exhaled in disgust. “Hopefully Brass decides to do that after we get off this dead rock.”
I kept one eye glued to the scope of my rifle, scanning the buildings and their resinous bulges for any sign of attackers.
“How’s the leg, Skullcracker?” I said.
“Probably gangrenous,” he said from his watch position behind me, a little too casually.
“Want one of us to take a look at it later?” I resisted the urge to glance from my scope. Hijak and I were the designated snipers, and the lives of Fire Team 2 depended on our overwatch.
“Nope.”
“You sure?” I said.
Skullcracker chuckled. “That’s right, keep asking. And I’ll keep saying no. When we reach some Weavers, maybe I’ll let the robos have a go. Until then, piss off.”
“What’s the matter, we’re not good enough to treat you?” I said jokingly.
