by G. H. Holmes
"I thought you can get it open," the captain said to the engineer.
"Trying to override the system right now," the engineer replied and Gruzka saw in the haze that he was busy with a panel on the side of the closed door.
"What if it doesn't work?"
"This door is ten centimeters of steel," the engineer estimated. "We can cut a hole into it with a laser…"
"But?" Gruzka said.
"We'd damage anything that's behind this wall as well," the engineer clarified.
And who knows what's behind it, Gruzka thought.
In the meantime, the coughing Marines staggered down the dark tunnel.
Great, Gruzka thought. We're massing in one spot.
"Space out, folks!" he shouted, making the dust in front of his mouth to swirl. "Scatter and keep at least three meters between you and the next man! Line up on both sides of the road; I don't want this to stretch back all the way to the girls."
When there was just coughing and wheezing, but no reply, he barked, "Did you hear me?"
A few voices came out of the cloud, growling "Yes, Sir." Then there were footsteps as the troops did as ordered.
Gruzka turned back to the engineer—just when the door to the Armory slid open.
The engineer lifted his hands as if to surrender.
"What'd you do?" Gruzka asked.
"Nothing, Sir," the sergeant said. "The door opened by itself."
Gruzka didn't know whether this was good or bad.
He stepped up, pushed the engineer out of the way and peered into the dimly-lit Armory. Gun in hand, the captain let his eyes roam. His lieutenants arrived next to him and did the same. What they were looking at was an empty round hall. Through its domed ceiling pale sunlight filtered in and painted crisp patterns onto the floor and walls.
The place was dusty, too. And as everywhere else, its dust was undisturbed. It had been a long time since anybody had set foot into this part of the station.
In the middle of the hall stood a giant artillery piece whose barrel pierced the dome and was aiming into space. It sat on a huge base and was rotatable. There was a bucket seat attached to it and a targeting console, complete with targeting monitor and touchpad.
A shiver ran down Gruzka's spine. Now, this was a gun if there ever was one. In battle, this little bucket would turn into quite a roller coaster. Colonel LeBlanc had known what he was doing when he'd ordered Pere Gruzka to secure the Armory.
The round wall of the rotunda seemed to be one giant gun rack. Rifles stood side-by-side all around. Pyramids made of canisters containing energy ordnance were stacked up in different places. EnO-cans were usually a last-ditch measure, only to be used if the station's much bigger and more powerful energy sources failed.
"Nobody home," Gruzka said and stepped into the rotunda. His boots left track marks in the dust. Looking around some more, he discovered deserted workstations and their black screens, and shafts and tubes in the wall right beside them.
The engineer by his side saw what he was looking at and said, "These tubes supposedly connect the guns all over the station with this Armory. From here all battle stations are supplied."
Gruzka grinned. "That's why we're here, eh?"
"Yes, Sir."
Then they discovered the elevators: twenty skinny tubes lined up along the wall, marked with the number of the battle station to which they were connected.
The captain pointed them out. "They weren't in the plan, weren't they?" he asked the engineer.
"No, Sir. But they sure come in handy."
"Let's pray they work," Gruzka said.
He turned to the door and motioned with his hand, and the waiting officers walked towards him.
"Tell everybody to come in!"
The platoon leaders went out and Gruzka heard them shout for the Marines to come into the Armory.
That wasn't so difficult, Gruzka thought and let his eyes roam. On the far end there was a fleet of offices.
Suddenly there was a commotion by the entrance. A wide-eyed Marine looked in and shouted, "Boots on the ground, Sir! We're hearing them! Somebody's marching—and it's not us."
Gruzka arched his eyebrows. Now the same thing was going to happen to his company that had happened to the general's group.
"Well, come in here then!" Gruzka roared.
Far off, he heard marching boots now, too. A stolid fellow like Pere Gruzka wasn't easily excited, but there was something threatening about those boots. For some weird reason they sounded more menacing than anything he'd ever heard. Partly to blame was this otherworldly environment. It bent your mind and there was a bad mojo to it.
He knew there weren't any troops coming.
After all, the Colonel himself had told him what had happened to Aleph Company. Those boots were just sound effects. But he pointed his rifle at the entrance anyway.
The Marines spilled in, sweating and caked with dirt. In the midst of them, the FAVs drove in and soon there was enough powder stirred here, too, that the air became nearly unbreathable. Coughing, the troops covered their mouths and noses with kerchiefs if they had any and with their shirts if they didn't.
As soon as the last Marine had staggered in and the marching boots seemed upon them, the door to the Armory began to move. It slammed shut and all sound from outside was cut off—including the marching Invisibles.
"What's going on here, Captain?" a nervous private asked. "We heard them boots, but we saw nobody. We fightin' ghosts?"
"No ghosts," Gruzka said with a calm voice. "Just acoustical illusions."
He turned to the engineer by the door. "How did you close this?"
The engineer walked towards him and lowered his voice. "I didn't do nothing, Sir." He swallowed. "The thing worked itself."
Gruzka's eyes narrowed to slits. He leaned closer. "You mean to tell me we're locked in?" he whispered.
The engineer locked eyes with the captain and slowly nodded.
"Not a word," Gruzka breathed. His soldiers would find out soon enough.
He turned and faced the troops. "All right, ladies, listen up! Familiarize yourself with this environment. Read the plans on the walls and ascertain what kind of weaponry we're dealing with here. Understood?"
"Yes, Sir!" the Marines answered.
"Move it!"
When Gruzka saw that they got busy, he walked into a quiet corner and tapped his earpiece. "How's it going down by the gate?" he asked the lieutenant of Second Platoon on the company command channel.
Her voice, when it finally came on, sounded frantic. "I tried to reach you a couple times, Sir, but I couldn't raise you."
That was odd. Wrinkles appeared on Gruzka's forehead. "What's up, Lieutenant?"
"We're under attack, Sir," she said. "Somebody marched right into camp and opened fire on us."
"Who?" Gruzka asked.
"We can't see them," she said.
"Anybody down?"
"Well…, no."
Gruzka sighed. "Lieutenant, I thought I told you—"
Static filled his ear. He frowned and turned the volume down. Waiting for the channel to clear up and for the lieutenant to come back on, he noticed that the air around him was turning red. Since he was facing the wall, he turned around—and froze when he saw that a red fog was manifesting five meters up in the air, right under the dome. The cloud began to grow and to intensify.
Captain Gruzka swallowed hard.
This was not just the dust reflecting the light of some minor source, this was something else. It was as if the dust had acquired a life of its own and was gathering. The red mist began to thicken and flowed down to the ground like a red waterfall—like fog from dry ice. It soon covered the ground and spilled around their legs.
In absence of any decent cover, the Marines just stood and stared at the phenomenon. Their gaze wandered between the gathering red sea on the ground and its source up in the air.
"Captain, what is this?" a young private shouted.
Blessed if I know, Gruzka
thought. His mouth was a thin line.
All eyes were on the source of the light under the dome. Everybody waited for something to happen.
When it did.
Two blood-red coals, almost black, appeared in the cloud. When their sheen intensified from bottom to top and turned crimson, everybody had the impression of lids lifting and eyes being opened.
There were gasps all around, but nobody overreacted. The Marines were surprisingly calm, Gruzka felt.
The captain walked out into the rotunda and stood in front of the five-meter-high cloud and its glowing eyes. In his mind there was no question that they were dealing with an alien. Gruzka took his rifle by the barrel and placed its butt on the ground. He looked up at those eyes and asked, "Who are you?"
When there was no answer, he said, "I am Captain Pere Gruzka of the Terra Gemina Space Marines. We are members of the Human Union and we come in peace."
A tense second went by and Gruzka had no idea if the eyes were looking at him or at a spot on the wall behind him—or at anything at all.
Suddenly the red cloud exploded and threw every Marine on the ground, including rock-like Captain Gruzka. Their guns clattered as they fell. When their faces got submerged in the red fog on the ground, they noticed how cool it was and how very pleasant…
The captain sat up after having been thrown and found himself still alive. He blinked and strained his eyes and looked around, but darkness surrounded him in all directions.
Did the light go off?
He rubbed his eyes with both fists.
Misgivings suddenly rose in his heart.
"I can't see!" he shouted. After a tense second he added, "Anybody else can't see?"
"Yeah, me," came a feeble young voice. Others answered in the affirmative, too.
"Can't see, either. What's going on?" a deep voice said.
Gruzka recognized this to be the one of the engineer who'd worked the door.
"Answer me if you can still see," Gruzka barked, his unseeing eyes wide open.
There was no answer.
"Can anybody still see?" he asked again.
Silence.
Gruzka's heart sank.
"Okay, don't move!" he demanded. We're doomed, he didn't say.
"What's happening to us, Captain?" somebody shouted.
"Nobody shoot! Don't let's act hostile, you hear?" Gruzka said. "We're not winning if we shoot while we're blind."
He touched his earpiece and dialed himself into the battalion command channel.
LeBlanc came online and identified himself.
"Colonel, we just met a red alien that struck us blind," the leader of Chaos Company reported.
"What?"
"Request orders on how to proceed," Gruzka said as soberly as he could. He felt a cold wind pass over him. From one moment to the next he passed out, sank back and disappeared in the swirling red lake that covered the floor of the Armory. His sturdy arms were still sticking out. The rest of him was gone.
Chapter 14
Lieutenant Stella Halvorsen and her all-female Golf Platoon followed General Harrow and his men at a distance. It wasn't that she was dragging her heels. Rather, she did not entirely agree with the general's reasoning that the Invisibles, whose stomping boots they heard in the distance, were trying to deny them the place to which they went. Couldn't it be, Stella thought, that they were leading them right into an ambush?
Why did Harrow have to leave the robo-dogs behind? Why couldn't they run after those Invisibles? If they got blasted: big deal. They were just machines.
She wasn't a machine.
And neither were her girls.
Perhaps it didn't matter to Harrow if he got blasted to smithereens. Hadn't he lived through that before?
Stella reminded herself that they were on a space station. No sane adversary would blast them here. That was way too dangerous and would destroy both, friend and foe. Harrow knew that, too. Surely, he knew what he was doing. He was older and had more experience than any of them. Stella decided to trust him.
The noise from the boots had not marched towards the command center. Instead, they'd gone off into a sun-glaring vitrum tube at some point and had entered the maze that was Kasa Station. By now, Stella and her troops were bereft of any sense of orientation. They had no idea where they were headed. But that didn't matter as long as the general new where he was going, and she wasn't going to doubt him. At least not publicly.
Rifles at the ready, Golf Platoon hurried down the walkways, peering into any nooks and crannies they passed.
After a while they entered a dead hydroponic garden. Dried-up reeds rustled in the draft that the swiftly passing troops generated. Stella saw that it was a kind of forecourt to some live-in modules whose metal doors she noticed on one end of the square. There was no time to check out those, because the troops in front of Golf now entered a down-sloping tunnel and she had no intention to get lost searching for who-knows-what in some forsaken fleet of apartments.
Stella entered the tunnel, too. Down there was another, much bigger hydroponic park—a functioning one. She could see the greenery at the end of the tunnel as she and her girls were walking towards it.
Slowing her approach, she realized that the noise from the marching boots had vanished. She stood inside the tube and paused, while her platoon washed around her and entered the park.
Ben put the butt of his rifle down and looked around. This garden module was pretty big—and it was wonderfully alive. The vegetation here had not died up as in the other spot they'd passed. There were no withered plants. On the contrary, everything was dark green and hung with colorful flowers, almost like a triple-canopy jungle. This was an illusion, of course, because the sides sloped upwards; the module was really a good-sized sphere, Ben realized. There was even grass on the ground, some tall and dry, some short and green.
The air was warm and muggy.
Further away, lush vegetation, overgrown and untended, hung from terraces. Immediately around those grew palm trees and unpruned jacarandas; tropical flowers had sprawled beyond the borders of their beds. On one side water ran down a large metal wall, rusty and covered with green and blue algae.
There was a good amount of dust in here, too, but it wasn't as oppressive as in other parts.
The marching Invisibles were nowhere to be heard anymore. The Marines wiped their brows. Their eyes were on their general.
"What are we going to do now, General?" a private asked boldly.
"Fan out and see if you can find anything noteworthy," Ben said. He was a bit disappointed that the Invisibles hadn't led them to any place more exciting or interesting. "On the double!"
The Marines did as told and spread out over the garden. Stepping over flowers and walking among bushes, they pointed their rifles in the directions in which they looked and searched the park, not expecting to find anything unusual.
An engineer was busy analyzing the water with a pistol-like liqui-checker, but found nothing exceptional. This was no-frills H2O with normal mineral content, because it ran over stones.
"All right, let's call it quits, here," Ben said after an uneventful handful of minutes. "We're wasting our time."
"Fall in line!" Captain Anderson shouted. He turned to the general. "Where are we going, Sir?"
"To the command center."
Stella Halvorsen had been leaning on the wall inside the tube that led into the garden sphere. She hadn't participated in the ordered search of the place, because she was still a bit out of it.
Her stomach.
The journey on the pylon road had been tougher on her than she wanted to admit. She also hadn't eaten when everybody else had.
Suddenly a red sheen surrounded Stella and she cast a moving shadow on the tunnel's wall. There was a light shining onto her from behind.
What was that…?
Excited, she turned around and saw how the dust of the tunnel started to bubble up around her as if it were boiling. Stella felt she stood in a bubbling, boiling cau
ldron.
It was the dust that cast the red light.
The bursting bubbles spewed powder into the air. Transfixed, Stella stared at the red cloud that was gathering in the tunnel. A cold wind swept by as the red mist passed her and entered the garden sphere.
Stella watched the red cloud intensify as it rushed towards General Harrow. Shocked, she inhaled briskly.
"Tango at six o'clock!" she shouted as loud as she could with her failing voice.
The Marines had already discovered the new phenomenon. They were nervous, notified one another and pointed with their fingers, but didn't move.
General Harrow swirled around and looked up at the glowing ball of red dust that rose above him, until it hovered five meters up in the air. The light coming in through the overhead vitrum panes illuminated the soaring fog and made it to glow like a crimson ball of fire.
And what are you? Ben thought.
Not having received an order, the Marines remained in loose formation. However, they crouched and pointed their rifles at the specter above their heads.
"Take cover!" Ben boomed.
But while they all were still staring at the apparition, the ball of fire exploded and knocked them to the ground.
Ben, too, went down.
Finding himself unharmed, he immediately got up again. Only his vision was impaired for the moment. Strange. But that would fade. He blinked a couple of times and found that he still couldn't see. He blinked again and realized, he was positively blind.
What is going on? he wondered.
The light hadn't been that bright. But fact was, he couldn't see.
If he couldn't see, a worse fate might have befallen his Marines. Blinking, he sensed a hard layer covering his eyes. Something was coating them. His eyelids tensed and when he blinked again, his lids scraped off whatever it was that had coated them and Ben could see again. He wiped the red debris out of his eyes and saw that he was kneeling in a lake of fire covering the ground of the garden sphere. The fire was cool, however. It was just the fog that the sunlight illuminated and made to look as if it were burning.
