Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  Possibly the Brood knew the human High Command was always watching from high orbit. Possibly they wanted the humans to see it. Possibly they knew how demoralizing this was to IX Legion. To humanity.

  “Keep it tight, keep it tight,” said Davisjo presently. “I said tight, Parnes! But don’t bunch up! SIGINT, anything?”

  “Negative,” came the voice of a female signals intelligence officer. “No QEC chatter,” she said, referring to quantum-entanglement communication. QEC technology allowed for instantaneous communication between two points, no matter how great the distance. Apparently, the Brood had mastered it long ago, made it commonplace, whereas humans had only managed to build such comms transceivers aboard the largest of starships.

  “Scanners, say readings,” Davisjo called.

  A sergeant looked at his widescreen wristpad. “Got a scan of ambient atmosphere, respiratory byproducts, and molecule-chain EM polarization effects, sir,” he said. “There’s something alive all around us, and I’m not talking about the walls.”

  “Copy that,” said Davisjo. “RO, status?”

  The radio operator reported, “We’re still being jammed, sir. No contact with High Command or the Visquain.” The Visquain, or the War Council as they were sometimes called, were in charge of running the Kennit campaign, and were doing so from the War Room of Lord Ishimoto, which was in geosynchronous orbit far above their heads.

  They progressed into a huge chamber, one that looked almost like it was reserved for ceremony, so empty and clean was it. It was made of the chiton-like plating, with only one or two throbbing bits along the wall.

  Durzor was first through the giant archway, and seconds later Lyokh drew even with him, weapon pointing all around, looking for work. “Hey, you good?”

  Durzor’s eyes, barely visible through a fogged visor, looked like a shell-shock victim. “Affirmative,” he said weakly. “I’m good.”

  They progressed deeper into the room. There was light here. Dim, blue light. It began at the top of the immense room, from a domed peak, then cascaded down the walls like a waterfall. It did this in regular intervals. At the center of the room was a massive structure, as large as a drop ship, built vertically and with a finial top. If the room wasn’t meant for ceremony, then it clearly had some higher function.

  Some type of transmitter? Lyokh thought. A signal emitter?

  “SIGINT?” said Davisjo, his voice sounding nervous. “Still nothing?”

  “Negative. There’s nothing…wait a minute. Got something…”

  A long, long silence, while they all just stood there. Some of the soldiers instinctively took up defensive positions, taking a knee and scanning the room with their weapons. Their scopes showed no new heat signatures, only the massive signature of the living thing all around them.

  Lyokh was near the front of the group, with Durzor right behind him. They advanced towards the structure, moving along its base, scanning with the sensors on their rifles. The structure was metallic, an alloy of indeterminate make. Lyokh recorded the data to transmit later to PI, assuming he made it out of this, which, truly, he believed he would not. He had that feeling.

  Then, he spied something interesting on the structure, at about eye level. He reached out to touch it. A ceramic-looking cylinder, about the size of a man’s forearm, black, and with strange hieroglyphs on its side. This was perhaps the most alien thing they had seen yet, because, as far as anyone knew, the Brood had no written language. No writing system had ever been discovered on their worlds. Nothing suggested they even needed an alphabet; they seemed to communicate using only radio signals and light emissions, and potentially unknown quantum means.

  Lyokh reached out and picked up the cylinder. It was heavy. It looked like an old scroll. Capped at both ends, it had the appearance of a container…Wonder what’s inside?

  “The hell is that?” Durzor said, stepping up beside him.

  Lyokh started to say he didn’t know.

  Then, someone shouted, “Heads up!”

  The edges of the room started bubbling. The seams where the floor met the wall began secreting a sludgy black resin, which spread quickly across the room, first ankle-deep, then climbing higher. Something dripped from the ceiling. More black liquid secretions, smacking down against their helmets like rain.

  “SIGINT?” Davisjo called. “Talk to me!”

  “Multiple signals now! Underneath—”

  All at once, the room exploded all around them.

  THE FLOOR SPLIT in half. From it, there spawned a hundred or more long, black limbs. Part mechanical, part organic. Octopus-like bodies came swimming out into the air, their central bodies a giant pulsating sack filled with red soup, their slithering tentacles keeping them upright. Lyokh had never seen such an amalgamation of design before, nor seen any enemy so swift and deadly.

  Some of them took flight on unknown propulsion systems. From each tentacle sprang a blade, or two, or three, and they came at the soldiers, some of them windmilling and slicing men in half, while their sack-like nucleus sprouted twin turrets that fired magnetic rounds that left blue trails as they ripped through IX Legion’s troops.

  The room erupted into chaos, unit cohesion broke, and every soldier fought their own battles. Lyokh sprayed, keeping the trigger pressed while he fanned, counting on the IFF transponders in each of his fellows’ armor to switch off his rifle whenever he accidentally strafed them. He and Durzor formed a makeshift buddy-system defense, without even speaking of it. They just went into it. Durzor took up a standing firing position in front of Lyokh while he reloaded. Once he was ready, he patted Durzor on the shoulder, signaling him to fall back, kneel, and go about reloading his own Fell, while Lyokh took the lead.

  Others around them tried to put together similar defenses, with mixed results. The octopus-things’ bullets smacked hard against their armor, lashing at their helmets and knocking them down. Their tentacles thrashed at the soldiers, wrapping around them like boa constrictors, lifting them off their feet and attempting to dash their heads against the walls, floor, and the large metal structure on which the scroll sat.

  Lyokh switched places with Durzor again, and while his companion reloaded, he targeted their tentacles, for he could not get a clear shot of the nucleus of each, and he wanted to free his friends. It seemed to cause a defensive spasm that only gripped the soldiers tighter. Men screamed as they fought to get free.

  Lyokh ran out of ammo.

  “I’m dry!”

  Just in time, Durzor smacked his shoulder, and Lyokh fell back as Durzor covered him. But before Lyokh could reload, Durzor was lifted off his feet, and flung bodily across the room, disappearing amid an orgy of hateful tentacles.

  “Durzor!” he cried.

  In his ear, he heard his friend’s screams.

  From the ceiling, there spilled more things that no human had ever seen. Giant white globules fell on them, pulverizing one or two soldiers from sheer force. When the globules landed, they burst into a hissing liquid, which his helmet’s sensors immediately identified as a mix of sodium hydroxide, sodium hypochlorite, and chlorine, making some acidic cocktail. Swimming within that white acid were three-tailed eels, each one snapping with blue electricity.

  Bullets slammed into Lyokh’s spine, not penetrating, but still causing him to fall forward, sliding through the acidic sludge, losing his rifle. He growled. A perfectly silken rage flooded his veins. He was going to die. He knew it. So fuck it. It costs a dying man nothing to fight until his last breath. Lucerne had told him that. Lucerne, or maybe Herodinsk. Impossible to recall now.

  With his STACsuit’s help, Lyokh whipped back onto his feet and drew his sword.

  “The wall!” he screamed stupidly. His mind, numb with all the death he had seen, went back to that battle cry. It wasn’t just the death he’d seen today, but in all the days before. The Fall of Man was so near. He had lived to see too much. The death of humanity. He had come in at the end of Man’s story. Everything had led to this, to these last
days, when they fought to the bitter end over nothing, over an empire far flung across the galaxy, leaving mostly dead colonies on dead worlds and using drones to scrape a living off the rocks, subhuman remnants hiding within the shadows of worlds coated in fallout, destined to go extinct, or else mutate into something no longer recognizable as human. Here it was. The Fall of Man. The Fall of Aejon Lyokh, Sergeant First Class, Gold Wing, IX Legion.

  Here it is.

  He activated his sword’s plasmetic edge, and threw himself at the things, slashing horizontally, back and forth, back and forth, clearing a path. His feet crunched on the growing piles of spent shells as he made his way through a sea of tentacles, his blade scything air. He was aware of someone hollering his name over the radio, screaming for him to come back to the main group. But Lyokh was moving through the octopus-things, slashing at them, shoulder-barging them, his STACsuit dialed up to max again.

  More enemies were pouring into the room. Lyokh and his friends were encircled by drones on all sides, and the noose was tightening. One tentacle snapped at him. He caught it, pulled it, stretched it straight, then hewed it in half with his blade. The octopus-thing let out a squeal and recoiled.

  He pushed forward.

  Two of the eel-things leapt out of the acid sludge, he caught one, impaled the other with his blade. Kept going. He stomped another eel underfoot, then shoulder-barged another octopus-thing’s leg. He hacked at the sack-like nucleus, ran through its downpour of red soup, ploughed into the next one, slashing horizontally. He happened upon a technique that tended to work very well when cutting the tentacles. Start with the tentacles at the rear, that seems to put them off-balance.

  He pushed forward.

  And if he swung with a thought to slice in zigzagging motions, not hacking at them like tree trunks, then it looked like it cut some crucial tendons. The enemies staggered to one side. As long as he stayed underneath them, where the red sacks were, it appeared their turrets could not reach him.

  He pushed forward.

  Forward.

  Forward.

  The eels appeared to notice that Lyokh had developed a rhythm that worked—or the hive noticed it, and alerted the eels, sharing information the way they did—for the eels began going for his arms, not his body or legs. They were trying to limit the motion of each of his swings. The STACsuit held out, overcoming them just enough. He peeled them off with his hands, squeezed their heads hatefully in his fist, their innards squirting between his fingers, and he kept swinging.

  He pushed forward.

  Red-hot bolts smacked into him, and he ignored them for the most part. He kept slashing at the tentacles in Z-like patterns, using only the pointed tip, never the length of the blade. Slicing, not chopping. Seemed to be working.

  He pushed forward.

  Lyokh gave vent to a primal roar, and moved with single-minded purpose, only realizing after crippling the next octopus-thing that he was moving towards Durzor. He stomped heavily, swung quickly, kept moving, recalling a C-step pattern from his blademaster’s teachings. Seemed to work. A lot of things were coming together, inspiration and improvisation merging into one happening. A flow was developed. A perfect rhythm. He started to predict which way the octopus-things leaned just before they gathered their limbs and lashed out. He could employ his C-step, and sometimes utilize what he had learned from Herodinks’s diamond footwork drills.

  The moment was a perfect cohesion of theories and systems, a synthesis of all he knew. If he lived to be a hundred, it might never happen again. Probably wouldn’t. But in the moment, there was perfect convergence.

  He pushed forward.

  The deafening sound of combat raged all around him. As each of the octopus-things fell inelegantly to their sides, half their bodies sunk beneath the sludge, pinning many of the eels. This gave his remaining brothers a little bit of give in the enemy’s offense, just enough wiggle room to press forward, target their nucleuses, and annihilate them with rifle, pistol and sword. Lyokh was barely aware of it. Teeth gnashing, lost in the broil of combat, his mind was on the Fall of Man, the plight of Durzor, just one of a hundred brothers he had lost.

  He pushed forward.

  “The wall!” he scremed.

  Lyokh’s sword reaped a bloody toll. By the time he reached the place where Durzor had been flung, there was a tangle of tentacles and eels swirling on Durzor like pythons fighting and fucking. He tore into them, not caring if he hit Durzor underneath. Durzor was dead either way. Some of the eels wrapped around him, discharging thousands of volts of electricity. His armor’s capacitors dealt with it, even had systems in place for such an attack, and rerouted the influx of energy to restore the batteries to his STACsuit.

  He pushed forward, grinning as he slashed. He grabbed the sack of one octopus-thing, yanked it so hard off of Durzor that it ruptured. He thrust his blade into it, spilling its contents. His suit was coated with such sludge that his armor was no longer one color.

  “The wall!” he screamed madly over the din of gunfire, his mind repeating a loop it might never be free of. “The wall!”

  Too late, he saw the wide, clawed hand reach out at him from his right side. It snatched him by the neck, and might have killed him if not for a lucky shot by one of his brothers.

  Lyokh dropped to the floor, recovered, kept slashing forward.

  Bullets tore through the octopus-things all around him, punishing them enough in their weakened states that they beat a hasty retreat, back into the holes from whence they came, down through other corridors that adjoined this room. A warhulk’s particle-beam cannon slashed one of the octopus-things in half, and both halves tried to fight as they fell back. Back, back, back.

  It took Lyokh some time to find Durzor’s body beneath it all. He had to slash, and tear, and yank, and push, and pull enemy corpses out of the way. When he found Durzor, he saw the man lying quite still. His brothers joined him. Remembering that he could check Durzor’s vital signs on his HUD, Lyokh did so, and was astonished to find him still alive. Unconscious, badly beaten, but alive.

  The enemy was in retreat.

  Lyokh collapsed to his knees, and cradled the man’s head. He looked at the others, assembled around him quietly. A couple of them had bent one knee, and drawn their swords, stabbing the tip into the ground. They were all staring at him. Lyokh shook his head. “What…are…you all…doing?” he panted.

  A medic came up from the back of the group. He knelt over Durzor, but did not take off his helmet, for fear it might kill him to expose him to the noxious fumes of these tunnels. He did, however, remove one of Durzor’s vambraces long enough to give him an injection of nanite-infused serum. Durzor’s body twitched, and he woke, murmuring to himself dreamily.

  Lyokh looked back at all of them. Men still kneeling, their swords stabbed into the ground.

  “What are you all doing?” he asked them again.

  A hand was on his shoulder. Ruvio. He was looking down at Lyokh, his eyes wreathed with reverence. “Have you even seen what you did?”

  “What? No. Why? What did…?”

  He looked around. The giant chamber was a mess of corpses and wet viscera of every color. A soupy mix of tentacles and severed drone parts littered the floor, forming a bloody path leading up to him. Blood had been sprayed in great jets against the walls, and there were undulating masses of octopus-things on the floor. The quivering corpses looked like snakes after their heads had been lopped off, still squirming, still trying to propel the body somewhere.

  “Doyen,” one of the men said.

  A female soldier from Davisjo’s unit nodded, and said, “Doyen.”

  “Yeah,” Breshdt agreed, “doyen.”

  Ruvio snorted, and clapped Lyokh on the shoulder. “You better believe he’s doyen.”

  Doyen. It was a title with no official recognition, an honor passed around units, with no election process or clear way to earn it. It was bestowed. In moments like these, when someone had proven themselves at some skill, the most promine
nt, the most adept at a thing, they were called doyen. If Lyokh had used his rifle to kill all these things, the others would have knelt and raised their rifles. If it had been his pistol, they would have knelt and touched each of their pulsers to their chests. But he had done this with his field sword, so they knelt and stabbed theirs into the ground.

  It happened quickly. They couldn’t sit here all day going through the ceremony. All those who knelt stood quickly again, resheathing their blades on their backs.

  “Nine of us left,” Ruvio said, stating the situation simply. Three warhulks had survived, though they had been pulled down by tentacles, their awkward weight making it difficult for them to stand back up. “Davisjo’s dead. I’m in charge. Let’s gather spare ammo from our dead, and keep moving. Let’s go, people! The wall!”

  “The wall!” they intoned, like Lyokh’s bloodrage had made it into a solemn oath. A prayer, even.

  They got underway. Lyokh stood there a moment, post-bloodrage, post-deathlust. Convinced he had been about to die, he had prepared himself mentally and emotionally. It had not happened. It still might, just not now.

  As men and women walked past him, they murmured, as though in deference to a superior officer, “Doyen.” Even Durzor, who was being lifted by the medic in a fireman’s carry, looked at Lyokh through his visor with rheumy, medicated eyes and whispered, “Doyen.”

  Lyokh looked at his gloved hands. They were trembling. In a daze, he hustled over to Davisjo’s body. The lieutenant had been slammed repeatedly into the ground, it seemed, and something in his body had broken. Lyokh took the final spare clip from Davisjo’s belt, smacked it home on his rifle, and followed the rest of the group.

  He pushed forward.