Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  Death will be a release for whatever grief plagued her.

  He moved on, for his sword thirsted for more enemies and he was eager to die.

  They took cover behind the piling corpses, lobbed frags at the oncoming hordes, and cut those down that got too close. They could not advance on an enemy that swarmed all around them. There was no ground to be gained. All they could do was fight until they died, which Lyokh imagined would be soon.

  He grabbed the throat of one husk that made the mistake of getting too close. Lyokh throttled it with his strength-enhanced gauntlet, bashed its skull in with the pommel of his sword, all while hacking at the sniping vines that rippled out of its turgid gut. When he eviscerated it, it spilled entrails that writhed and snapped at him like snakes.

  Heeten’s arm-mounted rotary cannons punished those flying high up the chamber, some of them exploding in a haze of wires and green sludge, their corpses plummeting to the ground and bursting open in a cloud of black oil and even blacker smoke.

  Meiks had gotten good at transitioning quickly between rifle and pulser, in a rhythm that worked well for him. His partner, Takirovanen, stood back to back with him, neither one letting the husks get the drop on the other. One of the husks charged Takirovanen, rammed his chest, and knocked him to the ground. The thing impaled his arm with a bladed tentacle. Takirovanen never screamed, just reached out with his free hand to grab the thing by its bulbous head, and started head-butting it with his helmet. Meiks tore the husk in half with stutterfire, and as its limbs still thrashed at the air, Lyokh delivered the final blow with his field sword.

  “The wall!” Heeten screamed, her warhulk becoming encumbered by the hosts of undead humans. A dozen or more were dragging her down. “The wall!” she screamed, gathering two of their heads in one palm and squeezing them until they popped like blisters. “The wall!” she screamed, as one of the husks began prising her armor open, reaching inside for her. “The wall!” she screamed, as she snatched one of them off her back, shoved a frag down its throat, and lobbed it at a swarm of others coming at her. “The wall!” she screamed as it detonated, killing a dozen of them. “The wall!” she screamed as they ruptured her warhulk’s life-support. She began choking. “The…the wall! The…”

  Her warhulk’s chassis screamed, and the servos in each massive limb grinded as she fought back, flinging husks made of moldering muscle and putrefied flesh. She blasted them point-blank, grabbed them by their torsos and peeled them like oranges. Flesh riven from flesh. But still they kept coming. Each one vomited out tangles of tentacles and lashed at her with them.

  More of them were rising from the floor all the time. Husks with grotesquely distended bellies and necrotic flesh, spewing forth milky-white liquid while clambering onto Heeten’s warhulk, clawing at her faceplate, still trying to pry her shell open to reach her inside.

  Heeten never panicked. Just kept screaming for the wall, pushing for some nebulous concept of victory, shouting, like they all were, against the Fall of Man.

  Until now, Lyokh had been using his field sword as a rallying point for his group’s spirit. Now, he saw the need to switch tactics. He reversed his grip, and stabbed the sword into the chitonous ground, then drew up his rifle and squeezed off a few controlled bursts, disintegrating some of the things crawling all over Heeten. He drew the attention of a few, and they came at him. He dropped two more as they launched themselves through the air.

  Once they came within ten feet, he knew they would close to five. It was inevitable. Too close for a rifle. He let it hang from his side, and drew his sword from the ground once more, going at them. A headless husk flung itself at him and he swung the massive blade two-handed for its ribcage.

  “Hoy up!” he cried. “Rally to me! To me!”

  The others tried their best to obey him, slipping on viscera, sometimes the enemy’s, sometimes each other’s. A headless, one-armed soldier was kept upright by his STACsuit, and he fired nonstop at the enemy. Swords sang their one-note song of death as rifles pumped round after round into the horde. Soon, they could not even make out the ceiling of the room, or see its walls, so utterly surrounded were they.

  “The…wall…” Heeten fell choking again, her life-support failing. Lyokh tried to make it over to her, even as the hordes overtook her.

  He scythed the air back and forth, gobbets of wet, oily flesh slipped from his comrpisteel blade, and sizzled on its plasmetic edge, and spattered against his armor as he hewed two more husks in half. He watched the life flicker out of their eyes as he turned and prepared for the next wave. All around him, his people fell against the onslaught. There was no pattern to it all. One moment a soldier was battling a husk on the ground, then fighting off snarls of tentacles rising from the floor, then fending off a flying husk that swooped down on them.

  Lyokh battled his way over to Heeten. His blade clove the skull of one husk before amputating the tentacles of another. He began climbing the legs of her mech with one hand, slipping on oil, blood, and viscera, all while swinging his sword with his free hand. Heeten saw his effort, and tried to help, keeping the husks off his back as he climbed. They started to make progress together, when suddenly a snarl of python-like tentacles wrapped around them both, and dragged them down.

  “THE WALL!” Lyokh roared, confident it would be his last words.

  Just then, the ceiling exploded. Huge chunks of wall fell away, smashing into the soupy floor. Lyokh felt the grip of the python loosen, and heard the unmistakable roar of a hatchling wyrm.

  He smiled. He started laughing. So did Heeten.

  When they looked up through their blood-soaked visors, they saw the winged serpent, its enormous head breaching the ceiling and the walls, its long neck allowing it to push deeper inside. Its claws tore at the ceiling like a titan predator bird trying to get at the yolk inside an egg. Its squamous wings beat hard against the walls as it came swooping down, two squads of armored Wyrm Tamers dangling from its belly by wires. From its wings hung missile carriers, and conveyer belts for reloading.

  The wyrm was a hundred feet long, coated in scales the color of a stormy sky, with hind and forelegs made of steely, rippling thews. It threw back its head in one long, ululating war cry, and proceeded to devour the husks, as the Tamers spread out to cover their landing zone with shoulder-mounted rotary cannons.

  Lyokh looked around at his piecemeal crew. Only four people remained. Lyokh, Heeten, Meiks, and Takirovanen. And even Takirovanen looked like he might not make it. Impaled through his arm, the blade of his enemy broken off, his suit’s neodymium seams could not fill the hole, and he was bleeding badly from a piece of shrapnel in his chest.

  The Wyrm Tamers laid down suppressive fire as they advanced on Lyokh and his team. One of them helped him to stand. Lyokh experienced a vertiginous lurch, and nearly collapsed. He forced himself upright, and moved forward.

  “We got your signal!” the Tamer cried over the roar of the wyrm’s ungodly punishment. “Damn good work! When we got the signal, we couldn’t believe it! Command was just hours away from pulling out of the system and leaving you here!”

  In his periphery, he saw two Marines in power armor helping Heeten to stand. Her warhulk was caked with the viscera and flesh of her enemy, layers of it, which now sloughed off. Lyokh could hear her still calling out, in a gravelly rasp, “The…wall…”

  Someone else was carrying away the husk of the Queen of Mothers. Probably Primacy Intelligence would want to have a peek, dissect the body of the last of the great human royal lineages, see what they could uncover about the Brood’s methods for indoctrination.

  They’ll find nothing, he lamented privately. Exhausted, he had one arm wrapped around the shoulders of the Tamer who had helped him, while he walked with his sword upside-down, using it as a cane.

  Then, the whole chamber trembled with the force of the wyrm’s footsteps. It opened its mouth, revealing rows of yellow, slavering jaws. It let out a full-throated roar and wyrmsong, splaying its wings in a show of domin
ance. Down its gullet, a small flame was kindled, but a hatchling wyrm was too small to produce the breathfire of an adult. Still, it offered more than enough firepower to make itself a rallying point for all soldiers. The main guns on its spinal dorsal spooled up, ready to fire. Its stomach dorsal carried two Kubar Widowmakers, and servos could be heard grinding as the turrets auto-locked on targets.

  Overhead, there came the hum of repulsors and the banshee-wail of downshifting engines. Two skyrakes hovered nearby to offer the Wyrm Tamers support. Lyokh could make out ’rakes farther up in the sky, clawing for the heavens, belching out columns of black smoke as they headed back to the fleet in orbit.

  Lyokh was astonished. They had been saved. They would not die.

  And yet, the Queen of Mothers was gone. He had killed her. It was another symbolic blow. Another royal family wiped out of existence.

  The Fall of Man continued.

  : Zhirinovsky 373b

  The hours were filled with digging. The drones she had brought with her did much of the work, but she helped by using the rover to ferry loads of rock and dirt out of the cave. Every few hours, she got a chance to stand on the surface and just look out at the wastelands. Out in the distance, always visible just on the horizon, there toiled machines of forgotten purpose. Their tentacles swung lazily around, looking for any last vestiges of viable resources. Probably not finding a damn thing, Moira thought.

  Pritchard barked from inside the shuttle. Moira looked up, and smiled at him. He was standing in the cockpit wagging his tail effusively, his breath fogging up the window. She waved at him, and he settled down. Sometimes he just wanted to know she was okay.

  Moira waved a hand in the air, and her imtech activated her NUI. She summoned a screen with data and live feed from the drones. Their infrared cams showed their progress, and they were getting close to the opening that Kalder had told her about, the doorway built out of alloys never replicated by Man, or by any corpus alienum. She hoped to see what was beyond it. To plumb the depths of a world once occupied by the Strangers was the dream of any stellarpath.

  Her eyes ranged across the data for a while, then she dismissed it. She cast her eyes across the plains of blasted sludge, saw the lonely giant funnels of dust and ash that wavered over the distant hills like drunken snakes trying to balance themselves on the end of their tails.

  She commanded her ship to do another sensor sweep. She had left probes in high orbit to act as lookouts. Neither infrared nor neutron-imaging showed anything of interest.

  We’re all alone out here.

  As soon as she thought it, Moira’s eyes detected movement. She turned towards a hill a quarter-mile away, saw what might have been…something. Or just a shadow, brought on by the bursts of red lightning that sketched itself across the sky.

  The theory was that this place had once been occupied by the Strangers, but that they had moved on a million or more years ago, and then it became occupied by some other alien race, perhaps even several races. A place of mining and trade and commerce. Then, after having depleted it of its most valuable resources, they too fled.

  But who might they have left behind? And have their descendents found a way to survive? Am I, perhaps, not so alone as I thought?

  Moire was thankful to receive the signal from the lead drone. It had found something, a large metal slab that its drill and its lasers could not penetrate. Moira ordered the drones to back out, and they soon came trundling back to the surface. With Pritchard barking at her from the cockpit, she stepped inside.

  Rubble crunched underfoot. There were bits of the wall preserved enough to show ancient markings. Perhaps hieroglyphs? Maybe, maybe not. Certainly Nature had proven herself creative enough to produce things, through erosion and natural chemical processes, that occasionally took on the appearance of pattern. Moira imagined the last explorers that came through here seeing the same things, and asking themselves the same questions.

  If it was an alphabet of some kind, though, and if it had been left by the Strangers, that would be a singular thing. Because the Strangers had apparently scrubbed the galaxy clean before they vanished, leaving no written language in any Watchtower, or any other site. Perhaps they had no need of an alphabet, like the Brood?

  Moira had studied the Strangers at the College of Interstellar Pathfinding, and the thing she had discovered frustrated Strangerologists more than anything else was the promise of every new ancient site, and then the bottomless disappointment when they realized, once again, that the Strangers had sterilized the entire site before leaving.

  Her helmet’s lamp shone wherever she looked, but just to brighten the place up some more, she activated a lamp on her wrist, and with her eyes, she used the NUI menu in her visor to pull up a faint, translucent overlay screen. Her suit’s computer utilized infrared, sonar and radar to determine lines, dips in the floor, and junctures. Dangers were highlighted. She was steered away from walls too porous to be considered stable.

  Moira walked tentatively down a series of rounded steps, following the tracks left by her drones. Dust and rocks fell from the ceiling and clinked off her helmet. She came to the doorway where the drones had stopped. It was just as Kalder said it would be—a massive door of unknown alloy, slightly ajar. It had been mapped by past stellarpaths, apparently, but for some reason the cave had been abandoned and left to collapse.

  Stepping through the gap, she found herself inside the mines. Jagged corridors were held in place by huge struts, made of the same mysterious alloy. Doorways to her left and right revealed hallways that wended this way and that.

  Moira took one look behind her, seeing the faint glow of the Series Seven’s running lights, and suddenly very aware of just how alone she was. The nearest Republic outpost was a dozen light-years away, and few people had ever managed to get beyond the Brood to reach this planet. If anything went wrong with the ship while she was down here, she could be stranded on this rock forever.

  Summoning her courage, she turned away, and walked down a steep decline. Here and there the mines broke off into separate corridors, one of which had completely collapsed. Thankfully, that was not the way she intended to go. If Kalder was right, the path she wanted to take was straight ahead, no turns, no offshoot corridors, just down and down.

  The journey seemed interminable. It was a long walk in utter silence, her lamps piercing a dull and unending darkness. Then, she came upon a few small streams of lava, slim enough that she could hop over them. The heat intensified in these areas, naturally, and the sulfur sometimes blinded her, making the way dangerous.

  For a moment—for just one moment—she considered going back.

  “I’ve come this far,” she told herself. “Pritchard, you all right?”

  From the ship, the Vac Hound pawed the comm key, and barked his reply.

  “Just hang tight, buddy,” she said. She heard his worried whine, and couldn’t help but feel the danger of her solitude. If anything happened to her, Pritchard would be alone. He would die inside the ship…

  “Don’t think about that,” she admonished herself. “Focus.”

  She found a number of the tokonoma, a built-in recessed space found in many tunnels and temples the Strangers had left behind. The tokonoma—so named because of their resemblance to the portions of traditional Japanese homes reserved for the display of sacred or artistic items—were a matter of some interest to xenoarchaeologists. One of the more interesting facts was that the tokonoma were cut into hard angles, the walls not curved, but flat, making the strange nooks the only known piece of Stranger architecture that did not endeavor to appear curved or rounded.

  Some believed the little nooks were of religious import. Others thought they were nothing more than a place to eat certain meals, a more casual tradition embedded in the culture. Whatever the case, few of the Strangers’ starships or temples had ever been found without a tokonoma or two.

  Moira continued for another thirty minutes before she finally reached a wide-open chamber. She paused, look
ing at her holotab, verifying the notes. Kalder had been very specific. If he was right, then this was exactly what she was looking for. She wasn’t so sure she believed all of the man’s claims, though—he seemed to be vacillating between three separate theories. The first theory was that the Scrolls were a series of prophecies, perhaps referenced by the xenos who wrote them in times of great crisis, not unlike the Sibylline Books from Ancient Rome; the second theory was that they were a word of caution, a warning to leave something alone; and Kalder’s third theory was that it was both.

  Moira took a moment to gauge the size of the room. She did this by sticking close to one wall and following it, stepping easily around the chamber, taking vids with her helmet’s cam, recording everything. When it was all said and done, Moira judged the room to be a giant circle (Surprise, surprise, she thought) approximately seventy feet across, with a ceiling twenty feet high. At the center of it was a raised dais, one that looked somewhat ceremonial.

  There was the same alien script etched into the floor around the dais, but the stellarpaths that had come before her had believed that that was the script of some other alien explorers before them, the ones who had come to find what she had come for.

  It was strange, walking inside a place where she knew others had come before her. The alien explorers were believed to be on some sort of pilgrimage to find the Strangers, and had been here a million years ago or more. Human explorers had come through here, along with Isoshi priests, some three hundred years ago.

  How many times has this happened? she wondered. How many times has some explorer done what I’m doing now, followed in the footsteps of the Strangers?

  It felt like she was walking through a tomb. Hopefully not her own.

  “Don’t think about that,” Moira said to herself as she stepped to the dais. “Kalder said record it and leave, so that’s what I’m going to do.”