Resurgence

by Daniel P. Douglas

  “And each take different routes!” the commander said, hoping at least one of the couriers would survive the trek below.

  Another convulsion rocked the ship, propelling Beach to the floor. He fell on the deck near Krieger, who locked his gray eyes on him.

  They stared at each other through the haze, hatred rising behind both sets of eyes.

  Beach choked and coughed from the dense vapors.

  “I hope you suck vacuum,” Krieger said.

  “Fuck you,” Beach said, coughing out the curse.

  “You’ve got REF blood on your hands you son of a bitch!”

  “I did my job!”

  A quick, rising hum vibrated through the ship and through the REF officers. Krieger clenched his teeth as the Slipstream’s FTL drive hurled it away from Oeskone, leaving behind a mixed debris field of metal alloy, composite materials, radioactive waste, and human remains.

  And six Chinese Conglomerate warships.

  <> <>

  Eastaway narrowed his eyes at the man in his line of fire, and zoomed in with his HUD’s distance viewers.

  Flattop tossed a grenade forward. He knelt and leaned right. The grenade exploded. Edging back some now, the enemy fighter pulled dead REF soldiers laid out near the crater toward himself as cover. More plasma attacked him from his front. He leaned away from it.

  Now was Eastaway’s chance.

  The distance viewers clicked in rapid succession and then presented a line-up of multiple images of the man.

  Eastaway maintained his carbine’s raised and readied position while he glimpsed the rotating images unfolding in the upper right corner of his HUD.

  And before he realized it, he was ten years old, witnessing two men rape and murder his mother in their home. One of the criminals was Eagan Rodenmeyer, and the other one currently carried multiple weapons and used dead REF soldiers as a barrier against incoming fire.

  “Cover me,” Eastaway said, handing Sapp his carbine.

  “Cover you?”

  Eastaway stood from his concealed position in the dark and released the carbine into Sapp’s confused possession. “Hey—”

  The young lieutenant lunged forward into the tightness of the serrated-edged funnel. He slowed only to tromp over two dead enemy soldiers. Clearing the gnarly passage, he disregarded the two adversaries off to his left, who fired at an unseen REF ally ahead of them.

  “I’ve got those two!” Sapp said, from behind. Bursts of fire from him opened up on the pair.

  Eastaway’s entire attention through the whole dash remained on the rapist-murderer to his right. But just as he neared him, the man’s peripheral vision glimpsed Eastaway rushing him—and in surprise, he swiveled and rose.

  Charging onward, Eastaway grasped the man in a bear hug around his chest and torso before he could defend himself. Eastaway’s forward momentum toppled them both down into the murky sogginess of the blast crater.

  Eastaway settled onto the enemy’s chest at the bottom of the crater. He ripped the carbine out of his hands, but the man tugged a blaster pistol from the holster on his right hip. Eastaway butted the pistol out of his hand with the carbine. Flattop howled, and then the young lieutenant plunged the carbine’s barrel down into his enemy’s breadbasket between padded armor creases. The murderer winced and groaned, expelling a gush of air.

  While his target struggled beneath him, Eastaway flipped the carbine over and smashed its butt end hard against the side of the man’s face. He raised the weapon and plunged its butt into his enemy’s gut as a crushing follow-up.

  Next, Eastaway pressed the carbine sidelong against the man’s neck and shoved. Freeing up one of his hands, he yanked the other blaster pistol from the man’s hip holster. He tossed the weapon aside, and it landed with a splash into a puddle.

  Eastaway crushed his full weight once more onto the carbine against the murderer’s neck, and then he dragged it sideways across tender flesh, scraping and tearing. He chucked it away and belted the man square in his bloodied face with his armored right hand.

  Stunned and struggling, Flattop failed to prevent Eastaway from yanking the machete from its sheath on his back. The lieutenant forced his left forearm against the man’s injured neck and pressed down hard on top of him. His right hand held the machete, and he wiggled its sharp tip into the crease between armor pads on the man’s torso.

  The murderer’s eyes widened as he felt the pointed pressure on his gut.

  “I know who you are.” Eastaway said, shouting.

  “Fuck you!”

  “You raped and killed my mother!”

  “That don’t mean nothing! I’ve raped and killed a lot.”

  “My name is Jerod Eastaway!”

  The man’s eyes widened even more.

  “Eastaway? That kid, yeah…. You weren’t even supposed to be home. Your father said you’d be—”

  A growl erupted from Eastaway’s belly. “MY FATHER SAID WHAT?”

  The man just laughed, and then said, “Ok, fool, you got me. I’m your prisoner now.”

  Memories….

  Nightmares….

  Demons….

  Dead comrades….

  Revenge surged the machete deep into the man’s belly and then upward into his chest cavity. Eastaway didn’t stop thrusting the weapon until its handle met resistance at the torso’s armor pads.

  Blood heaved out of Flattop’s mouth, splattering Eastaway’s faceplate. The rapist-murderer shuddered. He squealed in death beneath his executioner, and then hell consumed his treacherous soul.

  Chapter 9

  Family Reunion

  After pushing himself off the dead man, Eastaway landed on his back in the mud. He loosened his helmet’s soiled faceplate and slapped it up into a recess over his head, exposing his skin to the parting clouds and dusky sky. A moment later, he scrambled onto his side just in time to expunge a mushy putridness from his gut onto Oeskone’s black soil.

  Amidst his violent rib-jarring convulsions, Eastaway glimpsed Sapp sitting above him near the crater’s top. The platoon sergeant scanned the jungle, grasping two carbines. The storm and battle had subsided. The sky now unbound itself from pallid wetness, and instead embraced radiant purple hues offered by the setting sun.

  “How long you been there?” Eastaway said.

  “Long enough, brother.”

  “I never killed anyone like that before… Never killed anyone ’til today.”

  “You’d never know it.”

  Gesturing at the dead man, Eastaway said, “He was one of the men who attacked and killed my mom.”

  In sudden confusion, Sapp glanced at Eastaway, the dead man, then back at the jungle. He nodded in tentative acceptance and said, “Then he got what he deserved.”

  Eastaway winced. He just caught sight of Dodge and Boyle. They lay dead nearby, victims of obvious explosive blasts.

  “Perez?” Eastaway said.

  “He was off to the left there…” Sapp said, his eyes drifting in that direction as his words trailed off. “He fought hard, but he didn’t make it.”

  “Aw, God damn—”

  “Don’t blame yourself!”

  “It’s hard not to. I was in charge.”

  “Well, don’t,” Sapp said, scanning more.

  “What about our ally?”

  “Gone. Dead. Don’t know for sure. Never exactly saw her. But I know she killed some of the freaks before they scattered and ran.”

  “Freaks?”

  “You haven’t seen them?”

  Eastaway cleared his throat. He pointed his chin at the dead man and said, “I was preoccupied.”

  “Yeah…. Well, they’re reptilian-humanoids. Fucking lizard-men!”

  Eastaway’s anger stirred more. “That’s got to be Abraham Harel’s doing.”

  “Huh?”

  “Remember? He’s a genetic scientist who screwed with human and reptile DNA back on Earth. But I’d bet the soldiers here are probably resurrected Angorgals. A resurgent army of reptilian-hu
manoids.”

  “What would he need with that?”

  “Out here, I’d say to take on the Combine. Hurt them and their resource collection and refining infrastructure, you hurt everyone else. You could end up with a lot of control over a good many people.”

  Sapp shook his head. “This is the strangest mission I’ve ever been on. But aside from the murderer from your childhood, the lizard-men we just fought, and the telekinetic horror weapon, you know what bothers me the most?”

  Eastaway nodded and said, “No support from above.”

  “Explain that one.”

  “I can’t.”

  “And I don’t want to.”

  <> <>

  Li Xia had terminated her oversight of the REF soldiers once she confirmed the attack on them had ended. She opted not to pursue the few surviving crimson armor-clad reptilian soldiers because that had not been a mission priority. Helping the REF soldiers had not been a mission priority either, but other prerogatives had swayed her decision. She hoped it hadn’t been a mistake.

  After resuming her course toward the hidden Chuanli burst transmitter to recover it, the noise of a strange humming, like a low-frequency warbling sound, slowed her pace at times due to hesitant curiosity. Although she tried, she had not been able to get a view of its source through the dense jungle canopy. But her infiltrator exosuit’s passive-collection equipment indicated intermittent MASINT similarities with a telekinetic weapon suspected of being in Harel’s possession.

  Nearing the transmitter’s location, Li Xia slowed her strides, eventually halting when she arrived within about a hundred meters of it. She crouched and monitored the dim, eerie scene for several minutes, waiting and watching for any threats. After nothing of concern presented itself, she crept forward.

  Kneeling next to the source of the discreet pulses, Li Xia dug into the ground near a tree stump with her hands. The soft earth gave way under her meticulous burrowing. About a third of a meter down, she struck the short, stout transmitter. As expected, a half-ring connector on its bottom held a cord attached to something deeper in the ground.

  Should be data batons, Li Xia thought.

  She pulled the transmitter, yanking the still-hidden attachment with it.

  An abrupt flash along with a sudden bang blinded and deafened her. She recoiled from the EMP trap amidst an array of sparks ejected from her exosuit. Tumbling backwards and through hazy vision, Li Xia discerned failures in her suit’s chameleon camouflage and ECM defenses. Flat on her back, stunned, panting, a numbing prickliness permeated her vulnerable body.

  Paralytic shock restrained heavy limbs from pushing her up so she could flee from the colony militiamen who now materialized from the depths of the dark brush surrounding her. The spectral threats floated nearer, and Li Xia squirmed to break free of the fuzzy weightiness overwhelming her. One of her hands reached down for the blaster pistol at her side, but her whole appendage felt like a blunt, frozen, powerless stump.

  Another hand—from that of militia soldier—grabbed the weapon instead. He tucked it away in his belt, grinning. His deep laughter resonated in and out of Li Xia’s head, high and low, loud and soft, like malicious warbling. Unable to maintain consciousness, her vision dropped into nothingness.

  <> <>

  Deafening silence reverberated around Eastaway and Sapp, and neither one spoke as their mutual realization of their abandonment and betrayal from higher authority sunk in. Soon, though, strange, distant humming refilled the void. The increasing noise warbled, permeating the jungle with thickening harmonic pulses, and retrieved the pair—for the moment—from languishing in suspicious thoughts of treachery by their own organization.

  “What the—” Sapp said, his own dismay cutting him off.

  “Let’s get out of this hole.”

  “Yeah, yeah…but grab the dead guy’s grenade bandoliers and launcher first.”

  Eastaway leaned over and removed the bandoliers. In the process, he whispered, “I’ll find out about my father. And I’ll get Rodenmeyer, too.” He also noticed an old-fashioned metal dog tag chain around the guy’s neck. He yanked if off and read the name on the tags.

  Jonas Doshi.

  Eastaway stowed the tags and then joined Sapp outside the crater, where he handed him the bandoliers and Doshi’s pulse carbine with attached grenade launcher. The sergeant grinned when he took possession of the additional armaments.

  “How’s the ECM pack?” Sapp said.

  Eastaway swung it around from his muddy backside and wiped off its front panel. After a moment, he said, “Let’s be quick.”

  He and Sapp twisted around, determining from which direction the warbled, pulsing noise originated.

  They both settled on the same direction after a couple of turns.

  “Of course,” Eastaway said

  “Yep, the colony.”

  Their eyes found the anomalous granite outcropping above the black-green structure.

  “Cowgirls up,” Sapp said.

  In the twilight, they scrambled up the strange feature, tugging and crawling high into the jungle’s canopy until they were able to glimpse portions of the colony complex’s dual landing pads five kilometers north.

  Eastaway lowered his faceplate and wiped away the bloody mud that smeared it. Through splotches, he focused his HUD’s distance viewers on the pad.

  “Well?” Sapp said.

  Squinting, Eastaway saw that one of the pads held a blacker-than-night vessel—a freighter of small to medium size—with three large forward-angled rectangular concave antennae half-sunken into its top hull. The pad dwarfed the ship in size.

  “A ship on a landing pad that—”

  “What is that?” Sapp said, interrupting.

  “What?”

  “In the sky… it looks like surging, mirage heat waves.”

  Eastaway raised his head and found the swelling waves of rising air. Their throbbing, vertical movement matched the warbled, pulsed humming coming from the colony. He decreased the focus some on his distance viewers. Although the skyward-rising waves appeared only at a distance well above the ship on the landing pad, they definitely lined up with it.

  “Fireworks show,” Sapp said.

  “Huh?”

  “Upper atmosphere. Check it.”

  Looking higher, Eastaway saw white, yellow, and red flashes far up in the darkening sky. He maximized the focus on the distance viewers, and the scene stole his breath away.

  “Well?” Sapp said.

  “Remember what we said about manipulating minds and matter.”

  “Yeah, and…?”

  “As near as I can figure, that ship on the colony’s landing pad is destroying a fleet of Chinese Conglomerate warships with telekinetic waves.”

  Sapp look skyward, speechless. He heaved a heavy sigh.

  Eastaway watched as multiple ships imploded, exploded, and collided into each other in a transitory fiery chaos. A sizable portion of one of the big ships’ hulls crumpled inward, and the vessel plummeted toward the planet. It loomed larger, and a brilliant, growing radiance enveloped it. Then it melted, fragmenting into countless glowing embers that fell down onto Oeskone in a dazzling array.

  The howling growl of in-atmosphere ship thrusters and giant turbine engines propagated from behind them in sudden rage. The pair rolled onto their backs. A kilometer away and at about the same altitude, a huge, chunky, gray-hulled freighter rumbled and descended its way toward the colony.

  Heat and vibrations accompanied the big ship as it moved overhead, and Eastaway and Sapp both shielded themselves until it had passed them.

  Through the commotion, Eastaway saw a familiar logo—two large, subdued black, block capital “E”s back to back—on the ship’s underside. The logo mocked him. It told him he was worthless. It told him he was a momma’s boy. It reached down and backhanded him across the face and upside the head. It slugged him in the gut.

  Eastaway Enterprises all the way out here? he thought.

  He had joined t
he REF to escape a corrupt and wicked family on Earth. But they still found him on the most distant planet from Earth that could support human life.

  “That ship better watch it, or telekinetic rays may bring it down,” Sapp said.

  Eastaway couldn’t resist a cynical chuckle. “I don’t think they need to worry.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Doshi tipped me off.”

  “Doshi?”

  “The dead guy. I took his dog tags.”

  “And?”

  “He implied my father helped him and the other murderer attack and kill my mom.”

  Overcoming his dumbfounded gape, Sapp said, “I’m sorry, brother…. But—”

  “But how does that explain the ship?”

  Sapp nodded.

  “The double-E logo on its belly stands for Eastaway Enterprises.”

  “Your dad’s freight company.”

  “He’s connected to these people. And just so you know. The second man who attacked and killed my mom was Eagan Rodenmeyer.”

  “The guy on the freighter vid?”

  “That’s why I lost it on the freighter. Recognition after all these years was a little… overwhelming.”

  Sapp sighed. “So, I suppose you want to kill Rodenmeyer too, just like that Doshi guy.”

  Eastaway leered sideways at Sapp. He exhaled a heavy breath, and then said, “Only since I was ten years old.”

  “Hell of a family reunion,” Sapp said, shaking his head in disbelief.

  Eastaway glared at the big freighter howling its way toward Harel’s colony for landing. Muscles in his angry, aching body tensed. “It will be. It will be….”

  As he contemplated the looming confrontation, Eastaway reflected on the words of courage he had repeated to himself several times while inside the Slipstream’s chapel…

  Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me….