Survival Strategy

by Anders Raynor

  As the recording finished, Adrian stared at the empty screen, mulling over what he’d just learned. Tenev’s video-log confirmed what he’d suspected, but it didn’t give him any useful details about what happened to Tenev or his whereabouts.

  He played the next video-log entry.

  “We lost all contact with Neo,” Tenev’s hologram said. “Cause? Unknown. I suspect there is something wrong with our cybernetwork. I asked our IT to run a full diagnostic.

  “Meanwhile, security personnel tracked Subject Nine to the basement. He was drawn to the generators, I suppose, or maybe some instinct compels him to seek refuge below ground. We hastily designed a weapon that should help the guards neutralize the subject. The Jotnar are sensitive to light, even more than the Taar’kuun. The hybrid can see in almost total darkness, but his eyes can’t quickly adjust to bright light. He can also see in infrared. We assembled a laser shooting coherent beams of eight wavelengths ranging from seven hundred nanometers to twenty-five microns. This laser should blind the hybrid temporarily.”

  Adrian jumped as Mortensen boomed, “That’s what we need.”

  He turned to the sergeant. “You’ve been watching over my shoulder? Shouldn’t you watch the door instead?”

  “Sir, we have twenty marines defending this room and all adjacent corridors. But our weapons aren’t adapted to fight this enemy. We need that laser, sir.”

  Okoro joined the conversation. “I concur. Doctor, do you have the schematics for that device? Can you assemble one?”

  Adrian turned to the lieutenant. “Sorry, but I’m not an engineer or weapons designer. I’m a geneticist. Don’t you have a tex?”

  “We have a tex, yes,” Okoro replied. “But it would take him time to build a new weapon, even if we had the schematics, the components, and the tools for the job. We must find and recover the one Tenev and his team assembled.”

  “Let me finish watching the logs. With a little luck, we’ll learn what happened to that laser.”

  “Doctor, could you send me all anatomic data on the Jotnar?” Mortensen asked.

  “Sure,” Adrian approved. “The more one knows about their opponent, the better their preparation for confrontation.”

  The sergeant wasn’t just a mindless brute, and he understood the need to study his foe. Adrian appreciated that.

  He sent the data to Mortensen and hit play again. Tenev’s face reappeared on the screen. “The situation is even more dire than I thought. After his initial feat of rage, Subject Nine has recovered his cognitive abilities. He attacked the cryogenic chamber where we kept our previous test subjects in suspended animation. He killed the security personnel guarding the chamber and defrosted all the subjects. Three of them were dead when we froze them, and another one didn’t survive reanimation. We don’t know what happened to the other four, but I assume they survived.”

  Tenev made a pause, rubbing his chin pensively. “As the director of this facility, I have to make a difficult decision. We have another chamber where Taar’kuun troopers who descended from the Jotnar remain in cryogenic suspension. If Subject Nine reanimates and infects them with the Jotnar retrovirus, we’ll have not five, but more than a hundred hybrids to contend with. We cannot let that happen. We must destroy this facility. I thought of other, less drastic options, but they all have serious drawbacks. I’ll call for evacuation and set the self-destruct sequence.”

  Adrian decrypted and played the next recording.

  “We’re trapped.” Tenev’s blood-shot eyes darted nervously toward the door. Indistinct noises came from the corridors. “I set the auto-destruct and ordered everyone to the hangar. The hybrids attacked. All five of them. Oh, by the stars, I’ve never seen so much carnage. Our guards showed admirable courage and repelled the assault, but took heavy losses. The laser worked as intended. Alas, the officer who operated it was killed and the remaining guards couldn’t recover the device. The hybrids probably took it to the basement in Section Beta.”

  “We must get there,” Mortensen said.

  Adrian paused the recording and turned a puzzled look to the sergeant. “What are you suggesting? An expedition to the basement? That’s the hybrids’ hunting ground now. They know the place better than we do. We won’t stand a chance.”

  “Got a better idea, doctor?” Mortensen challenged him. “We can’t wait here indefinitely.”

  “The sarge has a point,” Okoro concurred. “We can’t expect reinforcements due to the storm. We must take out the hybrids.”

  “Let me finish watching the recordings,” Adrian said. “There aren’t many left.”

  Okoro nodded, and Adrian hit play again.

  “Half of our civilian personnel managed to reach the hangar and escaped the facility,” Tenev’s hologram said. “The rest…were not so fortunate. I almost made it to the transport ship, but then the countdown to self-destruct stopped. I don’t know why. Was it a malfunction, or did the hybrids manage to disable it? At any rate, I had to return to the main control room to reactivate it. The self-destruct system can be activated only by the director of the facility or the chief of security, and the latter is dead. So I’m the only one who can do this.

  “However, I never managed to reach the control room. All security guards who escorted me were killed. Without the laser, this is a desperate battle. I took refuge in my office and set up auto-turrets in the corridor. For now, I’m a prisoner in my own office. The hybrids won’t let me leave. They must hate me for creating them, and I can’t blame them. I wonder how I would feel if someone turned me into a monstrosity animated by an irrepressible killing instinct.”

  The scientist shook his head wearily. “You reap what you sow. This proverb goes back thousands of years, but it has lost none of its meaning. When I close my eyes, I see the corpses of my colleagues. A part of me refuses to believe this is all real, not some horror sim. My colleagues, my friends found a gruesome death from my decisions. I’m the one who created the Minotaur.”

  Tenev lowered his eyes, as if he couldn’t bear to look at his own image. “Frankly, I can’t blame the creature. I’m the one who made him this way. I designed my retrovirus to stimulate his violent tendencies, and it worked. In the end, I carry the responsibility for everything that happened here. I am the killer.”

  19

  Frozen hell

  Riley palpated her chest. The hole in her body armor was alarmingly large. Her hand came out smeared with blood. She tried to get up, but a sharp pain exploded in her chest. She froze, trying to take regular, deep breaths. Even that hurt.

  In the cockpit, only red lights flickered in the dark. The pilot’s body was a dark mass slumped over the control panel. The two marines who’d accompanied her didn’t survive the crash either.

  Buried under tons of ice on some uninhabited planet. That’s not how I imagined my end.

  Riley’s implants struggled to suppress the pain, which was a bad sign. She ordered her cerebral implant to display a full report on her condition. The report confirmed what she’d feared. A non-enhanced human would have died of such injuries within seconds. Even her bionics would probably fail to save her.

  She remembered what Talia had taught her about first aid. Right. Grab medical kit, take a shot to stabilize vitals. No painkillers—I’m already saturated with them.

  Easier said than done. She could barely move, and couldn’t reach the medical kit.

  She lay on the floor in the dark, hoping the pain would subside and allow her at least some mobility. Memories of her short human life unfolded.

  Any regrets? She asked herself. If there is such a thing as the afterlife, what will I regret the most? Chocolate?

  A wistful smile played on her lips. She realized she smiled so rarely, and almost never laughed. Unlike Jason. He always had a smug smile at the corners of his lips, a mischievous spark in his eyes.

  Jason. When I called you an immature, arrogant screwball and an adrenaline junkie, I meant it.

  Still, she had to admit he was the one she
would miss the most.

  Her mind started to drift. The cabin progressively filled with bright, blurry images.

  “…mander Lance? Can you hear me?” That voice sounded almost like Jason’s. “Riley, respond!”

  “You’re not real,” she whispered. “Oh, I wish you were. I would’ve told you what I didn’t have the courage to tell you years ago.”

  “Riley, is that you? Speak up…very faint.”

  “When I told you I was a coward, I meant it. The truth is, I cared about you more than I had the courage to admit. You didn’t make it easy for me. I saw you as an arrogant, superficial playboy. But then I saw something else in you. Deep beneath the surface…”

  “Hold on, Riley…almost there.”

  The dropship’s bulkhead hissed. Riley thought this was another piece of equipment giving up the ghost.

  She smiled. “Underneath, there’s another you. And that other you, I…” She swallowed hard. “See, I can’t say this, even now that I’m about to die. Die alone in my icy tomb. A fitting end for me. People always found me cold. Maybe they were right. Cold, insensitive. Obsessed with my military career, with following orders, reaching objectives, submitting mission reports… Now all that seems so far away… So meaningless…”

  “Riley!” Jason’s blurry face emerged from the dark.

  She thought that too was part of the hallucination.

  “I wanted to tell you…” She didn’t have the strength to finish and lost consciousness.

  *****

  She was in pain, so still alive. Opening her eyes, she saw nothing but ice. The quiet whirring of the rotor fans that kept her sled hovering in the air tickled her ears.

  The sled turned and stopped. Someone wearing a helmet leaned over her. This time, there could be no doubt. She wasn’t dreaming—it was Jason.

  “We should be safe from the storm here.” he said.

  “How?” she breathed.

  “Long story. We found your dropship at the bottom of a crevice. Biozi troopers shot our birds with anti-materiel blasters. Mitch and I had to land. We almost died trying to reach you.”

  “That was damn close,” a voice belonging to a young male said. Riley assumed it was the pilot nicknamed Mitch. “That block of ice almost crushed us. I’m damn lucky you’re as good with thrust packs as you’re in a cockpit, commander.”

  “Wait,” Riley said weakly. Her chest hurt with every word. “Biozi? Here?”

  Jason was cutting through Riley’s armor with a laser scalpel while Mitch was setting up a forcefield generator. “Don’t talk,” Jason said. “You’ve got a nasty injury. I’ll have to operate. It’s a shame we don’t have Talia with us. But yes, there are Biozi troopers on Nifelheim Bis. They’ve been here for months probably. They released artificial microbes in the air to scramble our comms and sensors. I also believe the cockroaches sabotaged your dropships.”

  Makes sense. Riley had no strength to say those words out loud. I called in the squad that guarded the dropships for reinforcement, leaving them unprotected, and open to Biozi sabotage.

  “Have the data,” she managed to utter. “Send to ships.”

  Jason shook his head, eyes focused on his task. “Don’t talk, I said. We can’t send anything. The storm has cut us off. We must survive until it subsides. The upside is that it also slows down the Biozi. We should be safe in this cave for a while. Our forcefield generator should last a couple of days and keep us warm. We salvaged the battery from the Griffin, so we shouldn’t run out of juice.”

  Jason cleaned Riley’s wound and applied medical gel.

  “How is she?” Mitch asked in low voice.

  “The vitals are weak, but stable,” Jason replied, glancing at the readings on the medical scanner. “The wound is deep, and several internal organs are damaged. Her bionics kept her alive, but she lost lots of blood. I must transfuse her. Fortunately, my blood type is compatible-ish.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Mitch asked.

  “Well, Riley’s implants will alter my blood to make it fully compatible,” Jason said lightly, obviously trying to brighten the mood and alleviate Riley’s concerns.

  Jason removed his flight suit, pulled the transfusion tube out of the medical kit, and rolled up the sleeve of his overall. Then he connected one end of the tube to Riley’s chest and the other end to his arm. From now on, the procedure would be fully automated. The tube knew what to do.

  “I’ll watch the cams, you just…do your thing,” Mitch said, stepping away from them. The sight of blood probably made him queasy.

  Due to his unimpressive height and light build, Mitch looked like he was fifteen in anatomical age. His helmet’s lights revealed a face with pleasant features and hazel eyes.

  “I know, it’s hard to believe this kid’s in the military,” Jason whispered. “But we need all the pilots we can get, and he’s good. I shouldn’t have taken him on this mission, though. He’s not ready.”

  He shook his head and added, “I’m still not used to being the Air Boss. I don’t like giving or receiving orders. It’s just not my thing. I loved it when I was my own man, when the only life I put at risk was my own. The burden of responsibility and all that…”

  He sat in silence for a moment. “When my bird was shot above Chloris, I was ready to die,” he confessed. “I knew the attack run on the Biozi base ship was a suicide mission, and I was willing to do it. But leading my fellow pilots to their deaths? That was different.”

  He looked at Riley and smiled. “I was at peace when I was floating there, above Chloris, waiting for the end. I’d done my duty, and I would die in my element, in the cockpit of a starfighter. I never wanted to die in my bed of some old man’s disease. When I was floating there, I thought I had nothing to live for. But then I thought about you, and I had the crazy idea that maybe—just maybe—you needed me.”

  Riley averted her eyes. She would have blushed, if there were enough blood in her body to give color to her cheeks.

  “A mirage, maybe,” Jason added in low voice, “but what I saw in your eyes today… You said you had something to tell me.”

  “Was delirious,” Riley managed to mutter. Her chest still hurt, but she was already feeling better.

  Jason nodded with a knowing smile. “Of course. We’ll talk about that later. Now get some rest.”

  Riley’s mind immersed into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  *****

  Jason woke her up. “Time to move. The cockroaches found us.”

  Her eyelids weighed a ton. She lifted them with effort. Her vision was a bit blurry, and she felt dizzy, but she had enough energy to sit straight. The pain in her chest was now dull and tolerable.

  Jason and Mitch were already geared up. They’d changed into white protective suits more adequate to survive in the deadly cold of Nifelheim’s night. She realized Jason had patched up her suit, and even reinforced it with a blaster-resistant chest plate.

  She stumbled to her feet and looked for a weapon. Jason handed her a Zahn ZBC-10, her favorite model of blaster carbine, and a thrust pack. Meanwhile, Mitch was dismantling the forcefield generator.

  “What’s the situation?” Riley was relieved to hear that her voice was firm. She felt functional again; the transfusion had done its work.

  “A black squad found the dropship and is headed our way,” Jason explained.

  “We can’t take on a black squad,” Riley warned. “They’re the nastiest, canniest troopers in the TGS army. The equivalent of our SpecOps troopers. Well, not the nastiest part, but you get the gist.”

  “Minos Station isn’t far,” Mitch said, obviously trying to help.

  Riley shook her head. “Not a good idea. Our landing party was attacked by Jotnar/Taar’kuun hybrids there. One of those things stabbed me in the chest. I don’t even know if any of our people survived. I managed to get to a dropship with two of my marines and take off.”

  Jason gave her a dark stare. “You mean they’re all dead? Adrian…”

  She pres
sed her lips tight and lowered her eyes at her blaster, pretending to check it. “I don’t want to get your hopes up. I hate myself for abandoning him and the others, but I was following orders. My primary objective was to recover the research data. Omega mission.”

  Jason stepped toward her and snapped, “What? I thought the mission was to rescue the nerds. You’re telling me we lost Adrian as well?”

  Riley found enough courage to lift her eyes and meet Jason’s glare. “Rescuing the scientists was the secondary objective.”

  He turned around and slammed his fist against the wall of ice. “Frag it!” He gave out a loud sigh and added in a more composed tone, “I guess there’s nothing else you could’ve done in your condition. Hunt shouldn’t have sent Adrian to this damn planet. What are our options now? We can’t go to Minos Station, and we can’t return to the surface. Nothing can survive that fragging storm. We’ll try to lose the bugs in the maze of ice caves and wait for the storm to subside.”

  Jason activated the light on his helmet and moved forward.

  “The torch, not a good idea,” Riley said.

  “Too dark even with light amplification,” Jason objected.

  “The glow from the Biozi cephalic appendages will be sufficient for light amp,” Riley insisted.

  Jason switched off the torch and crept forward. Riley followed him, and Mitch brought up the rear. A gust of wind rushed through the cave, so strong that Riley struggled to remain on her feet. Her suit activated the adhesive coating on her boots to prevent slipping on the ice.

  Faint pins of light appeared in a distance, shimmering in the dark.

  “This way,” Jason called, leading his companions into a fissure large enough for two people to walk side by side. Riley’s echolocation implants showed her the walls.

  The pins of light drew closer—the Biozi troopers were charging. They were fast.

  “Take cover!” Riley shouted.

  Plasma bolts flashed and hit the wall behind them as they threw themselves to the ground. The fissure filled with vapor.