by S. A. Lusher
“Glad to have you here, Gray,” Hollis said. “We were trying to gather all the intel we could. Is there anything else you can offer us?”
Allan frowned, considering the question seriously as he stared at the image on display. It was another picture, one taken from his own helmet cam during that assault on the frozen outpost. It was as he was looking to his side, rushing across an open street, a trio of pale, dead-faced constructions aiming at him, coming for him.
“They don't stop,” he said suddenly. “I have a friend who's dealt with something like this before. We don't think the two incidents are connected, but so far, based on my own experience and what I've heard, they operating basically the same way. These things...they don't stop coming after you because they can't. You can't threaten them, or reason with them, or beg them. You can't hurt their morale. If you blow off their legs, they'll keep coming. They will fight you down to the very last man, because they aren't really alive. They're just...machines. Empty shells running off of basic programming. I think that's pretty important.”
“Well, it certainly puts it into perspective,” Lang said quietly. “So we have no idea what they're trying to do?”
“Beyond gather resources, no. They could be planning an invasion or...fuck, I don't know, their version of a tea party. We have so little intel, we don't know what they're after.”
Hollis nodded. “We've been in similar situations before, but we got the job done.” He stared at the image for a moment longer, then turned away. “I'm going to go get a meal in before the drop,” he said, and headed for the door.
A moment of silence passed after he left.
“You’ve served with Hollis for very long?” Allan asked.
“Two years,” Lang replied. “He's solid, if that's what you're after. He knows what he's doing. Gone on over a hundred missions as a Spec Ops leader.” She turned and looked at him directly then. “What about you?” she asked.
“What about me what?” Allan replied, fighting the urge to take a step back, away from her intense, cutting gaze.
“Are you solid?”
“Yes,” Allan replied. “I'm solid. I know what I'm doing...inasmuch as I know that I don't know what the fuck is going to happen when we get down there and the best answer in situations like these is to be flexible as hell and be ready to change direction at a seconds' notice.”
Lang stared at him for a few seconds more, then her expression changed. It was a slight change, visibly, but it seemed like a world of difference.
“I've learned something similar,” she said. “Only idiots think they know what they're doing all the time.”
“The universe is chaos,” Allan replied quietly, turning to look at the image again, at these meat machine horrors that the universe was capable of producing.
“Yes, it is,” Lang agreed, doing the same.
* * * * *
Callie had been talking with Han for about twenty minutes now. He was performing repairs on a panel in the engine room with Pendleton. She'd already spoken with the medic, Shaw, and the demo expert, Morris.
Those had been short conversations.
They were both kind of off-putting.
Morris was really spacey and kind of obsessive. Okay, more than a little obsessive. But he seemed to know his shit.
Shaw, on the other hand, was frighteningly competent in that she had such a single-minded focus it left room for nothing else. She knew a lot about medicine, a lot about patching people up in warzones. And she had suffered some great tragedy in her life, something she was not willing to expand upon in any capacity.
Pendleton didn't seem to have much to say as they talked, but Han was assisting and he was happy to talk. He'd answered all of her questions, which had been simple. He was from a small Japanese colony on a little garden world named Eden. He'd gone into military service in his early twenties, had spent twenty years as a sniper in the Marines and then had gone on to spend another ten in Special Operations.
There was something about the man that was deeply unsettling, something that Callie couldn't really figure out.
“Any family?” she asked.
“My parents are still alive,” he said, his attention somehow perfectly divided between Pendleton and herself. “They are still on Eden, overseeing a hydroponic farm. I have no siblings and no serious contact with any other relatives.”
“Why'd you join?”
He seemed to consider for a moment. There was something...hidden, about him. Something that swam in the far deep recesses of who he was. On the surface, he was enormously polite, and not the bland kind of politeness that society bred into people. He seemed genuinely invested in the conversation.
“I discovered that I possessed a certain skill-set, one that would be best developed and most used by the military,” he replied.
“And what skill-set, exactly, was that?”
“Stealth, sniping, scouting.”
“How did you discover that?”
He paused, and Pendleton suddenly shut the panel with a metallic snap that filled the air. “Done,” he said. “We're solid.”
“Excellent,” Han replied, accepting the varied tools Pendleton had been using and replacing them smoothly into the toolkit. He looked over at Callie. “Another story,” he said, with a small, easy smile, “for another time.”
“Fair enough,” she replied.
Definitely something intriguing about Han.
She followed them out of the engine bay.
They were about ten hours out from the unknown planet now.
CHAPTER 05
–Falling Skies–
Allan found his way onto the bridge as they neared the system.
He'd killed the time leading up to now in many familiar ways, then, as the countdown neared its end, he'd pulled on his suit of armor and grabbed his guns with Callie and the others. It was becoming a ritual to him. No, scratch that, it already was a ritual at this point. Pulling on the suit of power armor, checking it over, getting the guns and the ammo and the grenades...it had all become deeply ingrained in him by now.
That realization, which hit him exactly as he stepped onto the bridge, made him come up short. He managed to get out of the way of the door, since Hollis was behind him, and fell into a brief but deep contemplation.
It made him wonder again about what he might do if he left. He wasn't sure why the hell he was hung up on the idea, but it was stuck in the gears of his mind, gumming up the works. Allan had the uncomfortable notion that his brain was trying to tell him something, or maybe his intuition, his instincts, and he had always listened to them. Instinct was a weird thing. Some of it, maybe even most of it, he could pass off as well-honed senses. Knowing that there was someone at your three o'clock, maybe five meters out, usually happened because you heard something. Maybe it was so slight that you didn't even realized that you'd heard it.
But then there were other things.
Like...when someone entered a room but he had not heard, seen or smelled them. Their presence alone, even if they were perfectly silent, was enough to give them away. He saw the strangeness of intuition written in the way he could sense when a mission was coming up, in the way he sometimes sensed that someone was going to call him up on the intercom about three seconds before it actually happened.
It freaked him out a little if he thought about it too much.
So what was it trying to tell him now? That he should be thinking about a career change? Why? Why would that happen?
He thought about what Callie had said, about the precedent it would set if Greg left. Because she was right, it had never been done before, not in this way. Was that what his brain was telling him? Did he want to leave Anomalous Ops but just didn't have any real excuse to so he'd just shoved it back into the shadowy depths of his brain?
But he didn't want to leave Anomalous Ops. He was doing good work here. Seriously good work. And although he was no longer borderline suicidal and mentally unstable, he did still feel like he owed the people
of Lindholm a debt for sacrificing them all.
“Um...uh-oh.”
That snapped Allan right back to the here and now without a problem.
“What the fuck do you mean ‘uh-oh’?” he asked, moving forward. It was the pilot.
“Something’s gone wrong with the engines. We’re gonna overshoot-” He’d been working the controls furiously but then he froze and the ship jumped slightly. The pilot let out a relieved sigh. Allan shared an uneasy glance with Hollis. “We’re good,” he said, and the shutters covering the windows began to slide back, revealing a brilliant blue-green light. “We just came out of FTL flight closer to the planet than we were planning...oh shit,” he whispered. “Contacts!”
He managed to get that word out before a tremendous explosion that shook the whole ship and threw Allan to the deckplates.
“We’ve got hostile contacts! Taking evasive action!” the pilot yelled.
The ship jerked to one side, which caused Allan, who was struggling to his feet, to fall over again. His helmet radio crackled to life.
“What the fuck is going on up there?!” Callie demanded.
“We came out of FTL too close to the planet and now we’re under attack,” Allan replied. This time he managed to get back to his feet and stay there.
“What’s the plan?”
“I’m not sure yet. We’re waiting on the pilot and-”
Another huge explosion ripped through the vessel and suddenly every single light on the bridge went out. Beyond the windows, the mist of upper atmosphere was ripping by. They had entered the planet’s atmosphere and were now plummeting towards the surface.
“Engines are gone,” the pilot reported, his voice dead flat. “Hold on.” He reached down, yanked off a panel and pulled or pushed or flipped something.
Nothing happened.
“Well, fuck,” he muttered, sitting there thinking for a second. “We’re a dead stick in the air. We’ve got to get to the pods.”
“There’s two on the bridge,” Hollis said, he pushed Allan towards a door he had failed to notice until that moment. “Gray, get in, punch out, we’ll be right behind you.”
“Got it,” Allan said. He headed for the pod, the pilot following him. Hollis left the bridge. “Callie, get to the nearest pod now and punch out.”
“On my way,” she replied, sounding cool and calm and professional.
Over the general suit comms, Allan heard Hollis giving the official order to abandon ship. Allan climbed into his pod, cinched himself inside tightly and worked the controls. Ten seconds later, the pod exploded out of its metal nest.
He looked at a screen to his right, seeing the planet unfold beneath him, rapidly growing closer and closer.
What a great fucking way to start the mission.
* * * * *
The pod smashed blindly into the earth, cutting through a few trees and smashing a smaller one into splinters.
Allan grunted as the pod came abruptly to a halt. The trip had lasted only a few minutes, but they felt surprisingly peaceful. The idea that he might have been vaporized by a malfunction or by the assholes that had been shooting at them didn’t occur to him until just now, and by then it was too late, he was already down.
Hitting the emergency release, Allan watched the door pop out and his gaze fell upon a green world. An emerald existence, waiting for him. Reaching up, he snagged his rifle from here he’d stowed it overhead. Score one for the good guys: for once he was actually starting out one of these fucking missions with a full field kit. Rifle, pistol and all. Armor, too, and it was intact. Maybe his good luck had finally caught up with him.
He glanced up, could just barely make out the burning hulk of their dead ship as it fell towards the ground from orbit.
Well, some luck, anyway.
Allan stepped out and looked around. His landing had created a small clearing and smoking bits of debris littered the area. The world was vibrantly, distractingly green. He’d never been in a jungle before. Great. What a place to run a mission like this in. He remained motionless, listening to the environment surrounding him.
Sounds came to him: a strange, insectile clicking, a distant, sharp hooting sound, a high chattering. Nothing else...for the moment.
Allan activated his radio. “This is Gray to anyone, do you read me?” He waited, listening to the soft hum an open channel. “Is anyone out there? Anyone at all?”
For a few seconds, he thought he heard someone laughing, but it was strangely distorted, almost like a machine’s idea of laughter.
But it was so faint and disappeared so fast that he was sure he must have imagined it. Allan tried the radio a few more times, then sighed heavily and looked around, frowning, considering the situation at hand. What to do? He turned around and looked at his pod, remembering his time on the frozen planet, when they’d face down the headless cyborgs and had brought Matheson over to their side. Sort of. That had been a similar situation.
He could use the pod to help out.
Stepping back into it, he quickly tapped into the pod’s limited scanners and was just as quickly rebuffed: the thing’s senors had been fried on the ride down. Of course. Allan stepped back out of the pod and looked around once more, trying to figure it out. A pretty tall, sturdy looking tree entered his field of view, at the edge of the clearing. He looked up. The tree rose above most of the others in the immediate area.
Well, good enough, he supposed.
Allan crossed the clearing, slung his rifle and got up to the tree. It had sturdy enough branches. Well, here was hoping that they would support his big, bulky, suit-clad ass. Allan started climbing. Yeah, the tree was definitely made of stern stuff. As he climbed, Allan thought about some other people he’d run into in his life, mostly people on Lindholm, (that hurt to think about), who told him they’d climbed trees as kids.
He never had.
Frontier, or at least the parts he’d seen, didn’t really have any trees around. Or, if they did, you couldn’t climb on them.
Allan reached the top and took a look around, fighting a bit of fear and vertigo. He was a good forty feet in the air now. Well, that was part of the job. He took a moment to see what he could see. For the most part, it was just a whole lot more of the same: trees and plants, green as far as the eye could see. Though, in the very far distance, he could see a dark, uncertain shape rising out of the ground. The place they were looking for?
He had no idea where they went down over.
The thing that really stuck out, however, was a pall of smoke rising slowly into the air. Another escape pod. Just before he began to climb back down, however, he caught sight of dark figures moving towards him, and towards the other pod, just barely visible beneath the canopy. Great. Allan fixed their position and path in his head and then hurried back down. He hit dirt, then grabbed his rifle and retreated to the opposite side of the clearing, facing approximately where they should be coming out in just a moment.
No doubt coming to investigate and eliminate.
Allan got down on one knee, activating the silencer function on his rifle, as well as the single-shot feature, and tucked the rifle into his shoulder. He sat there, poised, waiting. He began to hear footfalls and the soft sounds of machinery whirring and ticking as they drew closer, his enhanced audio sensors boosting his natural senses.
Sure enough, ten seconds later, a meat machine pushed its way into the clearing. It had its hand raised, and on the end of that hand was a wide-bore barrel. Allan waited for all of them to come into the clearing, he wanted to get them all at once. In the end, five showed their faces. He wondered if there were more, but something told him no. There was something kind of...basic, about these automatons. Something strangely simple.
He sighted the first one through his scope, frowning at the blown up image of the ugly, pallid, tech-studded face he was granted.
Then he squeezed the trigger.
The head snapped back in a spray of red-black blood and oil and a shower of sparks. The others reac
ted, facing his direction, raising their gun arms. He took out two more before they started to open fire, his silenced weapon whispering as it spit armor-piercing rounds out one at a time. They only managed to get a couple shots off before he put down the final two. As the last corpse fell, all became still and silent.
Allan released his breath, relaxed.
He walked forward and checked the corpses, making sure that they were all dead, put another pair of shots into two of them that were still a little twitchy, then moved on, towards the black snake of smoke slithering skywards ahead of him. As he moved into the dense jungle foliage, Allan tried to keep fearful thoughts from invading his mind. He was worried about Callie. He could tell himself that she was straight pro, that she had far more experience with crazy shit than he did, that they’d been through worse than this, but…
But he knew, deep down, that none of that really mattered.
Okay, yes, years of experience, fast reflexes and adaptive thinking did wonders to keep someone alive in situations like this. But the reality of the situation was that all it took was one slip up, one mistake at the wrong moment, one second of bad luck...and it was over. You were dead. And there was nothing that could bring you back.
For all of Callie’s skill and speed and strength and luck, if that pod hit something harder than it, or of some jackass up there had gotten off a lucky shot, or the pod had malfunctioned, then there would be nothing she could do. She would be dead. Same for him. Same for anyone. And he’d never really been able to totally handle that. He didn’t know how. What were you supposed to do? How was someone supposed to react to the knowledge that no matter how hard you tried, how important or powerful you were, the universe just...didn’t care?
How?
The best answer he’d come up with was ‘don’t fucking think about it and just keep going’. Another one he was beginning to remember and actually comprehend was: enjoy yourself while you still can, because there’s absolutely no guarantee that you are going to be breathing next year, next month, tomorrow, or even the next fucking second.
