“Almost there, then?” Moby’s voice was in his ear. It seemed he’d finally remembered his headset.
“Affirmative,” Tommy said. “Ninety seconds, give or take.”
Moby chuckled. “This is the best part. Opt on the down screen.”
“I should keep on the specs—” Tommy started.
“Just a peek, then, pilot. Trust me.”
The mysterious alien-bugs. Tommy punched in the command, changing the front view to one of the ground that sped past below—and sucked in a breath, forgetting the landing, forgetting himself at the sight.
Dozens—no, hundreds of dark, skittering bodies were pouring out of the ground, from the shadows of caves he couldn’t see, loping after the drop ship on too-thin limbs, metallic black and shining beneath the dull light. They had long, bullet-like heads and serrated tails that snapped and lashed behind them as they ran, and they were fast, faster than anything he’d ever seen, staying in sight far longer than they should have with as fast as the drop ship was traveling. Viewed from this far above, he couldn’t tell how tall they were—but each was taller than a man, definitely, maybe three meters. Maybe more.
“That’s what happened to our last pilot,” Moby said, and Tommy could hear the grin in his voice, and he didn’t ask, didn’t want to know, was too taken by the vision to form words, anyway. There seemed to be thousands of the impossibly skeletal creatures, and they chased the ship like starving animals might chase the promise of food, however slight.
People live here, he thought, in a kind of hypnotized awe, wondering at what kind of crazy you had to be to want to stay on a world overrun by these things, whatever the safeguards—the thought followed promptly by the awareness that he was voluntarily dropping to the same planet, to save his little brother’s stupid ass from being stomped to death. Shit happened, and sometimes you ended up in places you never thought you’d be.
Maybe it’s the same for all of us, he thought, the notion numb and random, lost as he was in the ocean of turbulent black, the sliding movement beneath them, the multitude running, stumbling, flashing over Fantasia’s dull stone surface in pursuit of the lone ship. Jesus.
Tommy dragged his attention away from the frenetic nightmare and back to the ship’s system screen, determined to do his part . . . and part one was seeing to it that they got down safely. Past that, he’d have to keep his fingers crossed.
* * *
Now.
Ray Turner had been waked from a drugged and dreamless sleep by his personal com, gently intoning in its soft, feminine murmur that he’d gotten his message, the message. A single word, and he was wide awake.
Turner had been up and moving instantly; a taste of pure lRic to fire his synapses, a kill on the cell channel to keep his contact safe, and he was out into the main cabin. Three grizzled faces, bleary eyed and slack looked up at him from the console lining the front wall—two of his shooters, Wilson and Duffy, and Vin, always Vinnie—and then his boys were online, too, revived by his expression of triumph. Six days they’d waited, hidden in the perpetual dark of a jagged cliff’s shadow and the best reflective camo paneling money could buy, trying not to listen to those—those things out there, trumpeting and clattering and hissing, and it was almost over. Twenty-four hours from now, give or take, and there was gonna be one hell of a payoff.
Vin immediately took his place as Turner’s right hand, settling in to run the tracking sensors after sending the other two off to sleep, telling them to get Ian up on their way—Ian was their tech on the EMP. According to Vin they didn’t need him for the incoming, but Turner wanted him present, just in case. This had to go flawlessly; there wouldn’t be another shot.
Turner’s ship had a crew of seven in all, his best boys. It was probably overkill—according to his info there would only be a handful of Msomi’s people on the drop ship, coming and going—but after listening to the XTs scrabbling around them for more than a week, he was glad he’d overpacked. They had marine armor and shucked assault tasers, plus good ol’ carbine firepower. It would still be dangerous, extremely fucking so, but he thought they could handle it. Everyone onboard had been in battle at one time or another—not with aliens, true, but considering that their exposure to Msomi’s pets would be limited, Turner was optimistic. His guys were tough, smart, and prepared. And the aliens would keep Trace’s people from coming to the rescue, something Msomi probably hadn’t considered in his eagerness to start his own petting zoo.
Turner grinned, felt the quality lRic spiking into his pleasure centers. Trace Berdella was about to eat a massive shit sandwich, and Turner’s only regret is that he wouldn’t get to see that arrogant asshole take the first big swallow. His only swallow, once Msomi got word that Fantasia’s quarterly output had been hijacked by Ray’s outfit. Ray had dropped some misleading clues before leaving Earth, a whispered word here and there, words that would make it to people Msomi trusted. The drug lord should already be wondering if Trace had set something up, and the tap would seal the deal. Berdella would never know who had sold him out. In some ways that was the one drawback, considering . . .
Ian Carson stepped out of the bunk room, running a shaky hand over a rumpled face as he sat—sprawled—in one of the open console chairs. His eyes were ringed, his nose red. He looked like shit.
“You look like shit,” Turner said, still grinning. Ian had a little bit of a skritch habit. Not a heavy one, or Turner wouldn’t have brought him along, but enough to make him a definite pain in the ass.
Ian nodded. “They’re coming in?”
Vin answered, watching a scrawl of numbers. “Just broke atmosphere.”
Ian peered at the screen. “Okay. And you want me to what, watch? Sing? Do an interpretive dance?”
“Yeah, with your tits out and your thumb up your ass,” Vin said.
“What the fuck, Vin?” Ian snapped. “The pulse is already calibrated to the ship’s nav. When they leave, we push the button, they go down. Anything in front of the fucking pulse goes down. Now, can I go back to bed, or did you want me to say all that again, in case you missed anything? Because I really don’t—”
“Shut the fuck up, Ian, or I’ll feed you to the fucking bugs!” Turner roared, thinking it would be funny, but the power surge that ran through his zapping brain at the sound of his own shout was like . . . well, like a drug, and as he watched Ian flinch, he decided it was just as well. To the best, actually; he’d been lax, letting his people fuck off while they were waiting, but the job was nigh, and it never hurt to remind them who held the reins.
He grinned again, threw some evil into it. “We’re not going to fuck this up, boys. We pull this off, we’ve got supply and capital, plus a demand that’s gonna turn to us. To me. We blow it, we’re fucked, all of us—but I’ll make goddamn sure that whoever missed their cue is the first to feel the pain. You got that?”
Ian nodded, fast. Vin’s wasn’t as deferential—he was higher up the chain—but Turner took both as his due, pleased by the order of things, by his performance as their leader. It was why he’d come, why he’d risked his own life and his own ship, when he could have sent others to take the risk. He wasn’t a total idiot, he’d let the others play defense when it was time to transfer the product, but his decision to oversee the job himself—this felt fucking right, being the instigator and director of his own destiny, hands on. Making the break from being a minor cog in Msomi’s operation had been difficult, but he’d made it, and prospered; he had his own crew now, his own contacts, and it was time for the next step. Just being here as everything was locking into place, becoming inevitable . . . It was the experience of a lifetime.
Outside, a series of trumpeting shrieks rose up—and then the XTs were moving, fast, enough of them to shake the ground ever so slightly, a heavier vibration each time one of them glanced off the ship or scrabbled over it. The private ship—it didn’t have a name, though Turner’s last girlfriend had dubbed it the Avarice and it had stuck in his head, that pedantic bitch—would look
just like part of the rock to them, as long as the paneling did what it was supposed to do . . . but Turner’s permagrin still faltered, just a little.
“What are they doing?” He asked. He wasn’t particularly worried, his ship was outfitted to withstand all kinds of shit, visual, sensory, even a limited tactile scrutiny, but the aliens continued to be something of an X factor, just in general. Any information about their behavior might come in handy when it came time to tap the drop ship.
Vin brought up one of the outside cams, the screen blinking on like a small window over the console. The picture glowed green, then reconfigured, changing the blurred darkness of the cliff’s shadow to a perfectly clear image. Powerful limbs flashed by, glittering blurs of shining black bone set against the metal of dripping teeth, waves of sleekly curving skull pulsing past, rising and falling like an ocean. It was amazing.
“They’re going after the drop ship,” Vin said.
“Not too bright, are they?” Ian said, but his smile looked a little sick. The ship vibrated again and again, the XTs crawling and leaping over and around them. “I mean, they can’t fly, right?”
Vin only watched the screen, and Turner didn’t answer, either, thinking that Msomi had hit on a fairly brilliant solution to getting ripped off or burnt out or busted. Probably a thousand of those fucking things out there, and maybe they weren’t especially clever—near as he could tell from his brief observations, they acted like insects, ants or something—but they also appeared to be absolutely dedicated to ripping apart anything other than themselves, and that made them a fairly formidable X factor. An X factor with teeth, one might say.
But then, so am I, he thought, and started to grin again, unable to help it. Msomi and Trace were about to find out just how hard he could bite.
* * *
When Msomi’s freighter finally opened its doors, ejecting the drop ship over a small planet that appeared to have been illegally terraformed, John Kaye had been asleep and dreaming of Jack. He’d woken confused and aching for his son, for memories of his family; the simple words, “they dropped” in the reluctant call from Ops changed that. In less than ten minutes an alert Kaye was walking onto the bridge, pumped on self-righteous purpose, asking for a status report. The rest of the resolution team had already assembled, were listening as Susan Borkez broke down the essentials.
They were about fourteen hours behind the automated freighter. Aaronson had just established a connection with the planet’s satellite, and was hacking away to dull its sensors, loop in an adjusted spin to cover their approach and orbit. If all went well, they’d be established within seventeen hours, ready to hit as soon as circumstances were optimum. Simmons was pulling in sensor reads on the planet itself, and running a background check—it seemed that “Fantasia” had been a plain old radioactive rock only eight years prior, charted with a number by a DS probe. How Msomi had gotten the information, why he had chosen this particular rock, where he’d gotten his hands on the equipment to give it real gravity and an atmosphere, such that it was, let alone build a drug-manufacturing operation out here—they might never know. But then, answering questions wasn’t a resolution team’s job.
Kaye felt a grim satisfaction at the thought. Shutting it down, that was their assignment. He had no illusions about the outcome, no vague hope that it would deaden his grief to wipe one of Adrian Msomi’s death factories off the charts—nor did he believe that by taking out the installation he’d be striking some massive blow against the drug trade, crippling an industry that would surely thrive for as long as humans had weaknesses.
But I might save one, he thought, listening to Borkez go over the scant information that the Grant Corporation had collected on Fantasia. Maybe one kid won’t get a chance to try the drug that will eventually kill him.
It was a nearly altruistic thought, and only a small part of the real truth, which was both simpler and yet infinitely more complex—the thrust of it being that burning out a drug manufacturer would feel good, that he dreamed about it when he wasn’t dreaming of his lost son.
“Which leads us to the XTs,” Borkez said, drawing his attention. She nodded in his direction. “Sergeant Kaye will observe the defenses once we establish our orbit, and advise us on strategy for drop and approach.”
Technically he wasn’t a sergeant anymore, though he’d worn the rank twice—marines and police—but he didn’t protest the title, still quite aware that most of the team hadn’t wanted him along, presumably still didn’t. There was nothing to be gained by asking to be called “mister.” The six men and two women he gazed back at now were the best that Grant’s Neo-Pharm could buy, which meant that they were very likely the best, period; and while he hadn’t done much mingling with the four who’d shared his six-week wake time—past the bare minimum necessary for civil discourse, anyway—he’d seen enough to know that they were a dangerous crew. He knew that those four, at least, including Susan Borkez, were clean-cut, bright, as physically and mentally disciplined as any good soldier, and entirely sociopathic. Suffered from antisocial personality disorder, to be exact. It was usually a prerequisite for working resolution at this level.
It seemed that Borkez was finished, or that she and the others were waiting for him to say something; the brief silence stretched, and Kaye cleared his throat, reminding himself that they needed him, whether they knew it or not. He must have trained a thousand men and women in hand to hand and small arms, but his specialty had been SOF close chaotic combat, or C-Cube, in the marines and after, with the police—mob situations, riots, small groups against big numbers. These people were corporate trained, and while they might be aces at shutting down independent drug operations, outwitting weapon-toting thugs, and covering their tracks, they had to get to the operation first.
“The most conservative estimate on the XT population is in the upper hundreds,” he said. “From the descriptions, we’ll be looking at an uncoordinated mass attack by hive animals, so obviously, economy of force is going to be essential. We’ll be in deflect suits and full service face masks, we’ve got Semtex slap packs, frangible ammo, and enough bangs to give anything pause—but as I’m sure you all know, equipment isn’t what wins a fight.”
He paused, considered what else to say; until he saw the situation firsthand, discussing strategy was an exercise in futility. But he wanted to make sure they understood who was going to be C2 on the ground, and looking at the barely disguised disinterest on their strong young faces was motivating.
“I’m sure you’re all fantastic at what you do,” he said. “So am I. That’s why they hired me. I trained the teams that went up against the Rahama in ’22, and the people who handled the Chicago insurrection three years ago; you want to know more, read my profile. Be impressed. Once we get to the compound, I’ll stand down, let you call the shots—” He nodded toward Shaw Puente, the team’s captain. “—but until then, I’m command and control—that’s God, for those of you who don’t speak cop—and I’m leading the insertion. If you don’t listen to me, you’ll fuck over your comrades and wind up dinner. Any questions?”
Their expressions stayed blank, but he saw glimmers of attention, at least, even a couple of slight nods. Good. For now, the short speech was all he had for them.
Another small silence and then Borkez calmly picked up again, reciting atmospheric conditions off of Simmons’s screen. Kaye listened with half an ear—he’d be reading through all of the data again before they achieved orbit, multiple times—and wondered if this would be his last mission, if he’d die on this rock at the ass end of nowhere, eaten by a drug dealer’s pet monsters or taken out by some creeping addict. He’d kept tight, still sim-ran ten ks a day, didn’t go anywhere without a C-Cube train program, a chance to practice daily; he was in top physical form—but there was no getting around that the reflexes slowed a bit when forty was a distant dream, or that shit happened no matter how well you prepared. It wouldn’t be the worst way to go. Not dying for Neo-Pharm—that was bullshit, that was about gr
eed, burning out the competition. But buying it in an attempt to take out some bad people . . . That, he could live with.
So to speak.
He did his best to put his mind back to the task at hand, not so easy when his dead boy’s face still danced in his head, a leftover barb from his waking dream. Not so easy, but he managed. It was all he could do.
3
Trace Berdella waited at the docklock, listening to Trog D. and Jessa tell dirty jokes, watching the door for Didi. She was late. The ship was docking. Trog and Jessa had to raise their voices to be heard over the rumble of the outer hatch, the gray “entry” hall vibrated by the heavy machinery just past the blast-doors. The walls were allegedly soundproof, but they could all hear the powerful thrum of the ship’s retros as it set itself down. Trace imagined he could hear a chorus of frustrated alien shrieks as the hatch sealed after the ship, as they tried to clamber up the dock’s slick-sided surface outside . . . But of course, that was just wishful thinking.
“. . . and the guy goes, ‘Here it is! James, James, you’s a vagina!’” Jessa finished, grinning broadly, and Trog wheezed laughter, a raw, dry cawing of sound. Trog was a heavy smoker of multiple substances.
“Vagina!” Trog croaked, and he and Jessa both cut up, laughing in each other’s faces. Trace ignored them. He’d heard the joke before, and where the fuck was Didi, anyway? She’d patched in first thing, he’d heard it on her during the wakeup call, and since that was pretty much her entire morning regimen these days, she should be here by now. On the other side of the airlock door, heavy metal rattled, air cyclers hissed and pumped.
Soundproof, my sac, Trace thought irritably, and then the door back to the compound slid open, and there she was. As always, even after all this time, he felt his cock stir at the sight of her, felt his heart go tight in his chest. She wore the low-cut, dark red slip-dress thing with the tiny straps, like he’d asked, her thick, dark hair piled in a loose knot atop her head. Tendrils of it ran down the back of her long, porcelain neck like black water. Her wide-set eyes were dilated, like always, like she’d just been fucked, and she turned them to Trace now, her expression calm and collected and 7-heavy.
The Complete Aliens Omnibus Page 3
