The Remaining: Extinction
Page 36
A second too late, my suit bio-sensors began to trill; detecting massive radiation levels. I couldn’t let it concern me. Radiation on an op like this was always a danger, but being killed by the Krell was a more immediate risk. I rattled off a few shots into the shadows, and heard the impact against hard chitin. The things screamed, their voices creating a discordant racket with the alarm system.
Kaminski cracked the inner door, and he and Martinez moved inside. I laid down suppressing fire with Jenkins, falling back slowly as the things tested our defences. It was difficult to make much out in the intermittent light: flashes of a claw, an alien head, then the explosion of plasma as another went down. My suit counted ten, twenty, thirty targets.
“Into the airlock!” Kaminski shouted, and we were all suddenly inside, drenched in sweat and blood.
The drive chamber housed the most complex piece of technology on the ship—the energy core. Once, this might’ve been called the engine room. Now, the device contained within the chamber was so far advanced that it was no longer mechanical. The drive energy core sat in the centre of the room—an ugly-looking metal box, so big that it filled the place, adorned with even more warning signs. This was our objective.
Olsen stole a glance at the chamber, but stuck close to me as we assembled around the machine. Kaminski paused at the control terminal near the door, and sealed the inner lock. Despite the reinforced metal doors, the squealing and shrieking of the Krell was still audible. I knew that they would be through those doors in less than a minute. Then there was the scuttling and scraping overhead. The chamber was supposed to be secure, but these things had probably been on-ship for long enough to know every access corridor and every room. They had the advantage.
They’ll find a way in here soon enough, I thought. A mental image of the dead merchant captain—still strapped to his seat back on the bridge—suddenly came to mind.
The possibility that I would die out here abruptly dawned on me. The thought triggered a burst of anger—not directed at the Alliance military for sending us out here, nor at the idiot colonists who had flown their ship into the Quarantine Zone, but at the Krell.
My suit didn’t take any medical action to compensate for that emotion. Anger is good. It was pure and made me focused.
“Jenkins—set the charges.”
“Affirmative, Captain.”
Jenkins moved to the drive core and began unpacking her kit. She carried three demolition-packs. Each of the big metal discs had a separate control-panel, and was packed with a low-yield nuclear charge.
“Wh—what are you doing?” Olsen stammered.
Jenkins kept working, but shook her head with a smile. “We’re going to destroy the generator. You should have read the mission briefing. That was your first mistake.”
“Forgetting to bring a gun was his second,” Kaminski added.
“We’re going to set these charges off,” Jenkins muttered, “and the resulting explosion will breach the Q-drive energy core. That’ll take out the main deck. The chain reaction will destroy the ship.”
“In short: gran explosión,” said Martinez.
Kaminski laughed. “There you go again. You know I hate it when you don’t speak Standard. Martinez always does this—he gets all excited and starts speaking funny.”
“El no habla la lengua,” I said. You don’t grow up in the Detroit Metro without picking up some of the lingo.
“It’s Spanish,” Martinez replied, shooting Kaminski a sideways glance.
“I thought that you were from Venus,” Kaminski said.
Olsen whimpered again. “How can you laugh at a time like this?”
“Because Kaminski is an asshole,” Martinez said, without missing a beat.
Kaminski shrugged. “It’s war.”
Thump. Thump.
“Give us enough time to fall back to the APS,” I ordered. “Set the charges with a five minute delay. The rest of you—cállate y trabaja.”
“Affirmative.”
Thump! Thump! Thump!
They were nearly through now. Welts appeared in the metal door panels.
Jenkins programmed each charge in turn, using magnetic locks to hold them in place on the core outer shielding. Two of the charges were already primed, and she was working on the third. She positioned the charges very deliberately, very carefully, to ensure that each would do maximum damage to the core. If one charge didn’t light, then the others would act as a failsafe. There was probably a more technical way of doing this—perhaps hacking the Q-drive directly—but that would take time, and right now that was the one thing that we didn’t have.
“Precise as ever,” I said to Jenkins.
“It’s what I do.”
“Feel free to cut some corners; we’re on a tight timescale,” Kaminski shouted.
“Fuck you, ’Ski.”
“Is five minutes going to be enough?” Olsen asked.
I shrugged. “It will have to be. Be prepared for heavy resistance en route, people.”
My suit indicated that the Krell were all over the main corridor. They would be in the APS by now, probably waiting for us to fall back.
THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!
“Once the charges are in place, I want a defensive perimeter around that door,” I ordered.
“This can’t be rushed.”
The scraping of claws on metal, from above, was becoming intense. I wondered which defence would be the first to give: whether the Krell would come in through the ceiling or the door.
Kaminski looked back at Jenkins expectantly. Olsen just stood there, his breathing so hard that I could hear him over the communicator.
“… and done!”
The third charge snapped into place. Jenkins was up, with Martinez, and Kaminski was ready at the data terminal. There was noise all around us now, signals swarming on our position. I had no time to dictate a proper strategy for our retreat.
“Jenkins—put down a barrier with your torch. Kaminski—on my mark…”
I dropped my hand, and the doors started to open. The mechanism buckled and groaned in protest. Immediately, the Krell grappled with the door, slamming into the metal frame to get through.
Stinger-spines—flechette rounds, the Krell equivalent of armour-piercing ammo—showered the room. Three of them punctured my suit; a neat line of black spines protruding from my chest, weeping streamers of blood. Krell tech is so much more fucked-up than ours. The spines were poison-tipped and my body was immediately pumped with enough toxins to kill a bull. My suit futilely attempted to compensate by issuing a cocktail of adrenaline and anti-venom.
Martinez flipped another grenade into the horde. The nearest creatures folded over it as it landed, shielding their kin from the explosion. Mindless fuckers.
We advanced in formation. Shot after shot poured into the things, but they kept coming. Wave after wave—how many were there on this ship?—thundered into the drive chamber. The doors were suddenly gone. The noise was unbearable—the klaxon, the warnings, a chorus of screams, shrieks and wails. The ringing in my ears didn’t stop, as more grenades exploded.
“We’re not going to make this!” Jenkins yelled.
“Stay on it! The APS is just ahead!”
Maybe Jenkins was right, but I wasn’t going down without a damned good fight. Somewhere in the chaos, Martinez was torn apart. His body disappeared underneath a mass of them. Jenkins poured on her flamethrower—avenging Martinez in some absurd way. Olsen was crying, his helmet now discarded just like the rest of us.
War is such an equaliser.
I grabbed the nearest Krell with one hand, and snapped its neck. I fired my plasma rifle on full-auto with the other, just eager to take down as many of them as I could. My HUD suddenly issued another warning—a counter, interminably in decline.
Ten… Nine… Eight… Seven…
Then Jenkins was gone. Her flamer was a beacon and her own blood a fountain amongst the alien bodies. It was difficult to focus on much except for the pain in my c
hest. My suit reported catastrophic damage in too many places. My heart began a slower, staccato beat.
Six… Five… Four…
My rifle bucked in protest. Even through reinforced gloves, the barrel was burning hot.
Three… Two… One…
The demo-charges activated.
Breached, the anti-matter core destabilised. The reaction was instantaneous: uncontrolled white and blue energy spilled out. A series of explosions rippled along the ship’s spine. She became a white-hot smudge across the blackness of space.
Then she was gone, along with everything inside her.
The Krell did not pause.
They did not even comprehend what had happened.
PFC MICHAEL BLAKE: DECEASED…
PFC ELLIOT MARTINEZ: DECEASED…
PFC VINCENT KAMINSKI (ELECTRONICS TECH, FIRST GRADE): DECEASED…
SCIENCE OFFICER GORDEN OLSEN: DECEASED…
CORPORAL KEIRA JENKINS (EXPLOSIVES TECH, FIRST GRADE): DECEASED…
WAITING FOR RESPONSE… WAITING FOR RESPONSE… WAITING FOR RESPONSE…
CAPTAIN CONRAD HARRIS: DECEASED…
This was the part I disliked most.
Waking up again was always worse than dying.
I floated inside my simulator-tank—a respirator mask attached to my face—and blinked amniotic fluid from my eyes to read the screen more clearly. The soak stung like a bitch. The words scrolled across a monitor positioned above my tank. Everything was cast a clear, brilliant blue by the liquid filling my simulator.
PURGE CYCLE COMMENCED…
The tank made a hydraulic hissing, and the fluid began to slough out. It was already cooling.
I was instantly smaller and yet heavier. Breathing was a labour. These lungs didn’t have the capacity of a simulant’s, and I knew that it would take a few minutes to get used to them again. I caught the reflection on the inside of the plasglass cover, and didn’t immediately recognise it as my reflection. That was the face I had been born with, and this was the body I had lived inside for forty years. I was naked, jacked directly into the simulator. Cables were plugged into the base of the device, allowing me to control my simulant out there in the depths of space. My bio-rhythms, and those of the rest of my squad, appeared on the same monitor.
All alive and accounted for. Everyone made safe transition.
I had been operating a flesh-and-blood simulation of myself, manufactured from my body tissue. These were called simulants: simulated copies, genetically engineered to be stronger, bigger, faster. Based on the human genome, but accelerated and modified, the sims were the ultimate weapon—more human than human in every sense. Vat-grown, designed for purpose. Now, my simulant was dead. It had died on the New Haven. I was alive.
ALSO BY D. J. MOLLES
The Remaining
The Remaining
The Remaining: Aftermath
The Remaining: Refugees
The Remaining: Fractured
The Remaining: Allegiance
The Remaining: Extinction
The Remaining Short Fiction
“The Remaining: Trust”
“The Remaining: Faith”
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Contents
TITLE PAGE
WELCOME
DEDICATION
CHAPTER ONE: TRICKERY
CHAPTER TWO: RUN
CHAPTER THREE: CONSEQUENCES
CHAPTER FOUR: TIES
CHAPTER FIVE: ALLIES
CHAPTER SIX: COORDINATING
CHAPTER SEVEN: KENSEY
CHAPTER EIGHT: DISTANCE
CHAPTER NINE: CAUSE FOR CONCERN
CHAPTER TEN: INFIGHTING
CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE HOSPITAL
CHAPTER TWELVE: CONTINGENCIES
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: HOSTAGES
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: CONTACT
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: WOLVES
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: HARD PLACES
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: INFILTRATION
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: RESCUE
CHAPTER NINETEEN: LOSSES
CHAPTER TWENTY: TIMING
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: MESSY
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: CROSSING THE RUBICON
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: ABSOLUTION
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: CRASH
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: BEFORE THE DAWN
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: MILES
EPILOGUE
EXTRAS
MEET THE AUTHOR
A PREVIEW OF THE LAZARUS WAR
ALSO BY D. J. MOLLES
ORBIT NEWSLETTER
COPYRIGHT
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2015 by D. J. Molles
Excerpt from The Lazarus War: Artefact copyright © 2015 by Jamie Sawyer
Cover design by Lauren Panepinto.
Cover photos by Arcangel-Images.
Cover copyright © 2015 by Orbit Books.
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ISBN 978-0-316-26166-1
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