by Isaac Hooke
Hummingbird returned behind me, and Braggs had TJ send the HS3 straight back to check-in with the ship again.
In single file we proceeded down the middle passageway of the fork.
We reached the first Centurion, Larry, and TJ sent the robot hurrying ahead to leapfrog Lucy.
A few minutes later:
"Larry just entered a new cavern," TJ reported. "There's some kind of metal object embedded in the floor."
"UC make?" Chief Bourbonjack said.
"No sir. Not SK either. Larry's scanning it, but he's not sending anything intelligible back. Must be the signal degradation. But that's not all. There are charred objects on the ground. Seem to be organic. Human."
"Pick up the pace, people!" Chief Bourbonjack said. "TJ, have the Centurions gather around Larry."
We all hurried forward, assuming the worst.
The passageway enlarged into a natural cavern, not as big as the previous one we'd come across, though. Soon enough we found the three Centurions, standing beside about five charred objects on the ground. The outline of each one was vaguely human. I couldn't tell if they were UC, or SK.
Snakeoil knelt, and touched one. A thread of black goo followed his gloved finger as he removed his hand. "It's mostly a super-heated mass of carbon. Definitely organic."
"Human?"
"I am reading some ribonucleics, but no full DNA strands. But yes, the RNA does appear to be human."
"Look at this." Alejandro pointed out shrapnel embedded in the rock wall, and bullet marks.
Ghost knelt and picked up a shell casing. "UC design. Bravo." His voice choked up.
I know I felt my own eyes moisten. Members of Bravo had made some kind of stand here. I couldn't pretend they were all right anymore.
"Toughen up, MOTHs," Lieutenant Commander Braggs said. "We don't know that these are their bodies. We—" He had to stop. He was taking this pretty hard, like the rest of us. "Whatever happened to Bravo Platoon, there's going to be hell to pay, I can tell you that. I swear to you. No one touches my boys. No one."
It was a small speech, but it was enough. Those words hardened us.
"Here's the metal object TJ was talking about." Snakeoil crouched beside a small, metallic box set into the bottom of the cave. Lucy, the Centurion, was standing guard beside it.
"And what in the hell is that supposed to be?" Chief Bourbonjack said.
I came closer, and saw swirls reminiscent of Fibonacci spirals engraved all over the metal surface. Also known as golden spirals, because they recurred everywhere in nature, from the shells of mollusks to the spiral arms of galaxies.
"Seems to be some kind of communications device," Snakeoil said. "I'm getting a signal. Beamed straight up."
"I can confirm that," TJ said. "Lucy just picked up the signal. Seems to have activated with Snakeoil's approach."
"We tripped some kind of alarm?" Lieutenant Commander Braggs said.
"I don't know," TJ said. "Have a listen."
A garbled, robotic sound filled our hearing.
"Sounds like gibberish," Chief Bourbonjack said.
TJ nodded, then cut the noise.
"Anything else to add, Snakeoil?" the Lieutenant Commander said.
"There is. And you're not going to like it." Snakeoil ran a gloved finger away from the artifact, up into the air. "The signal comes out of the device but then seems to vanish about a meter up. I'm actually detecting a Slipstream signature. In here."
I stepped back in alarm. I wasn't the only one.
"What the hell are you saying?" Chief Bourbonjack said. "A Slipstream? In here?"
"A quantum-sized one, yes. I think... I think this is some kind of trans-space antenna, for communicating over vast distances. Sort of like one of our InterPlaNet nodes, except with zero lag between it and the destination node."
"I didn't know the SKs had technology like that," Trace said.
"No one has technology like that," Snakeoil stated, rather ominously.
Right then I heard what sounded like a distant rustling, similar to leaves stirring on a breeze in the woods. No one else seemed to have noticed though, so I assumed my ears were playing tricks on me.
Mao stepped forward, panting, making frantic gestures with his fingers, as if he were trying to tell us something but was so afraid his voice no longer worked. His wrists were still bound by fibroin, so he couldn't move his gloves very much. It was a disturbing thing to watch.
"Big Dog, you're canary's firing again," Trace said.
Mao dropped and started pawing at the cave bottom with his bound hands, like he just wanted to get away. His gloves didn't even make a dent.
"He's going to depressurize his suit if he keeps that up," Trace said.
Big Dog shrugged.
Then I heard the rustling again. I glanced at Facehopper. I was about to say something but he forestalled me with a raised fist.
I boosted the volume in my facemask. Above Mao's frantic pawing I definitely heard something, a noise that brought me right back to one of my earliest childhood memories.
About a year before I met Alejandro on the streets, I was still living with my parents at the plantation. That one summer, an infestation of caterpillars had overrun everything. They were everywhere. The grass, the trees, the farmhouse, the machinery—every single square centimeter was covered. No blade of grass, no leaf, no branch was spared. You couldn't take a step without crushing a hundred of the things. You'd walk under the trees and the larvae would just be falling down on you in clumps.
The thing I remembered most about that infestation was the noise. The eerie, spine-tingling chitter of a hundred million caterpillars chewing up a hundred million leaves. Chewing up anything and everything that had any shred of life in it, turning our plantation—our livelihood—to ruin.
I heard that very same sound now.
"TJ," Chief Bourbonjack said. "Send the Centurions in. Dark."
The recon lamps on the Centurions deactivated, and the robots moved lithely down the tunnel.
"Dim the lights, people," Chief said.
We did.
Mao stopped clawing. He just perched there, listening like the rest of us.
I stared straight down the passageway the Centurions had taken. I couldn't see a thing, even though I had the night vision on my facemask cranked up to max. I decided to stare at the three green dots of Lucky, Lucy, and Larry on my HUD map instead, watching them move slowly away.
The chittering grew louder.
I swung the Mark 12 down from my shoulder, slid the safety off, and held the rifle at the ready. Beside me, my platoon brothers were doing the same with their own weapons.
The three green dots halted.
Red dots started popping up on the map, positioned directly in front of the green ones.
More red dots appeared as the Centurions cataloged and transmitted enemy positions to our Implants.
More.
I glanced sharply at Facehopper.
"Hold," he said.
I heard shooting in the distance, and saw flashes of gunfire down the cavern as the robots fired at whatever was attacking them.
"What do they see?" Facehopper said in a soft voice. "TJ?"
"Death," Mao gurgled from the floor. "Death!"
"Shut up!" Big Dog kicked him in the side.
There were so many red dots now I couldn't count them. There was just this big mass of red bearing down on the three green friendlies.
"TJ?" Facehopper said. "Turn on the Centurions' lamps."
"Already on, sir," TJ said.
"Then what the hell do you see? TJ?"
He didn't answer.
"TJ?" Still he said nothing. "TJ! Petty Officer Second Class Wilson!"
"I— I don't know what I see." TJ said.
"Then show us the damn feed!" Lieutenant Commander Braggs said.
Too late.
The green dots abruptly winked out and the gunfire stopped. The red dots froze as the Implants recorded the last known positions of the ho
stiles.
Mao clambered to his feet and took off at a run down the tunnel, back the way we had come.
The metal anklets he wore clattered at Big Dog's feet. Somehow the SK Officer had managed to get them off.
Ghost swung his sniper rifle around, dropped to one knee and aimed.
I rested a hand on his shoulder. "Let him go," I said.
The albino hesitated. He glanced at the Chief, who nodded. Ghost lowered the rifle.
Facehopper gripped TJ by the shoulders. "What did you see, Petty Officer?"
TJ shook his head. "I don't know, sir. Creatures. Thousands of them."
"The hyena things?"
"No," TJ said. "These were different. More like... like... just, this roomful of gnashing teeth and claws."
Facehopper glanced at Chief Bourbonjack. "Orders?"
That clattering, chittering sound had been growing in volume. It sounded way worse than the infestation on my plantation ever had.
Lieutenant Commander Braggs was the one who answered. "Our backs are exposed here, with that five-way fork behind us. Let's fall back to a more defensible position. And might as well turn on your helmet lamps. They know we're here!"
As we retreated, the clattering continued behind us, seeming more frantic than before.
Or maybe just more eager.
I switched off the night vision, then gladly turned my helmet lamp up to full intensity. I didn't think I could fight whatever was trailing us in the dark. Not physically. Not mentally. But in the light, I had a chance.
Alejandro wasn't too far ahead. I could see Tahoe beyond him. The strength-enhancers in our exoskeletons were operating at full bore, and we pushed the suits to the max, spurred on by the unseen threat.
Soon the platoon emptied into the forking section of tunnel. We continued on, arriving at the vast cavern with the beautiful crystalline structures. The clattering had faded somewhat behind me.
Lieutenant Commander Braggs called a halt. "Here," he said, turning toward the circular, five-meter diameter tunnel we'd just evacuated. "We make our stand here. We can guard this entrance all day. It'll be like Thermop—"
Before he could finish, my vision exploded with digital snow. Ear-piercing, garbled static consumed my hearing.
I fell to my knees, reflexively trying to cover my ears with my palms, but there was no way my gloved hands could ever reach them, not through the helmet. I shut my eyes tight, but that randomized pattern of digital snow didn't go away. It looked like flickering black bugs crossing a white background.
The Implant was malfunctioning.
I concentrated on the command words that would shut the device down. Thinking proved difficult with my hearing and vision so sorely affected, but I managed to remember the words and I said them in my head.
Zulu Romeo Lima!
The Implant switched off.
I fell forward, panting, sight and sound restored.
The ominously beautiful cavern was back.
As was the clattering sound.
There was no way to reboot the Implant, not without returning to the Royal Fortune. I wasn't sure I wanted to turn it on again anyway.
Half the platoon was on their knees in front of me, their hands held to their helmets, their bodies rocking in distress. The other half was trying to help those who were down.
The clattering grew louder. At the edge of the glow cast by the helmet lamps, I could barely make out a milling crowd of black shapes piling into the circular tunnel beyond.
Most of my platoon mates had recovered now, including Alejandro and Tahoe. TJ was still struggling nearby, so I went to him and shouted on the comm. "Zulu Romeo Lima! Zulu Romeo Lima!"
TJ finally disabled his Implant, and Alejandro and I helped him to his feet. I definitely felt his weight, because with the Implant offline I couldn't uptick the power of my exoskeleton. That meant I wouldn't be able to boost my strength much further than my body's own natural muscle power—the exoskeleton would offset the weight of the jumpsuit and not much else.
I'd also lost the Heads-Up-Display generated by the Implant.
I tried accessing the secondary HUD that was built into the facemask: "HUD, on."
Nothing.
Well, at least we still had suit-to-suit communications.
"Good thing we retreated," Big Dog said grimly. "If our Implants had burned-out in the middle of combat, I doubt any of us would be here."
Lieutenant Commander Braggs nodded. He was staring at the circular tunnel. "As I was saying, before I was so rudely interrupted, we make our stand here. Standard wedge formation."
We spread out without question, and dropped. None of us wanted to run. It was time to get some payback for Bravo Platoon.
I looked through my scope and took aim.
Ahead, a stream of... things... crawled through the tunnel toward us. Hundreds of them. Sharp spikes covered the black carapace that was their bodies. They had eight pairs of legs, with pincers and crushing mandibles on all sides. No eyes that I could make out. About one meter tall by two meters wide (three by six feet). Black, semi-translucent skin, so that I could see the three red hearts beating inside.
They were like big, multi-headed, black crabs.
"MOTHS!" Lieutenant Commander Braggs said from the head of the platoon. "Fire at will!"
Facehopper had his Carl Gustav over one shoulder and he launched a rocket. It struck, and I saw claws and pieces of shell splatter into the air. Ordinarily the pressure waves from firing such a powerful weapon in an enclosed space like this could get pretty intense, but I hardly felt a thing. The suits did an amiable job of protecting us. The crabs weren't so well-protected, though, judging from the ruined, twitching bodies left behind.
Big Dog launched his own Gustav; almost half the platoon was firing rockets at the incoming targets, while the other half reloaded those rockets. The constant stream of sonic booms resounded across the cavern.
I didn't have a Gustav, and nobody nearby needed help reloading, so I stuck to my rifle. One of those 'crabs' walked squarely into my sites, skittering right for me.
I fired.
The creature added its splat to the others.
"Goddamn aliens!" Alejandro said over the platoon comm. He was helping Tahoe reload his Gustav nearby.
Skullcracker and Big Dog were the first to run out of rockets. They picked up their heavy guns and started mowing down the aliens like they were cutting grass.
A bus-sized, black creature slithered forward, barely fitting the confines of the tunnel's five-meter diameter. Though I couldn't see most of its body, I had the impression it was oval-shaped. It had these long feeler things in front, with two smaller ones where a mouth should be.
A giant "slug," for lack of a better term.
Skullcracker and the rest of the platoon just unloaded on it. The bigger creature seemed to be phasing in and out of existence, so that sometimes our gunfire passed right through it. Eight rockets and countless rounds of ammunition later, we finally brought it down. The nearest living crabs abruptly turned over and died right along with it—though we hadn't touched them. The lifeless slug faded entirely out of existence, leaving behind the dead crabs.
More alien crabs surged forward, crawling over and around the bodies of their brethren.
"There's too many!" someone shouted.
"TJ, Facehopper, see if you can bring the tunnel down on their heads," the Lieutenant Commander said.
Rockets struck the roof of the tunnel ahead, and succeeded in bringing down a lot of fragments, but didn't come close to sealing off the tunnel.
"Angle's no good," TJ said.
I was picking them off shot by shot. I ran out of ammo, swapped magazines. Fired again. Making every shot count. Ran out. Swapped.
Beside me, my team mates were delivering just as much damage, if not more, but there were just too many of the things. For every twenty that fell, another twenty came forward to take their place. Our ammo supply was steadily diminishing. Already the Gustavs were silent.
I hadn't noticed this before, but as the crabs got closer, I picked out dark, slimy cords leading away from the carapaces. I followed the cords with my eyes. They led to another one of those bus-sized slugs, slithering along in the circular tunnel not far behind. As that slug phased in and out of our reality, its cords stayed in place, maintaining the connection to at least two hundred crabs.
Facehopper hurled a grenade at the slug, timing it so that the grenade exploded just as the creature phased-in. The explosion rocked the chamber.
The slug continued forward, ignoring the gaping hole in its side, and emerged from the tunnel into the main cavern. Big Dog, Skullcracker, and Tahoe launched more grenades, while the others unloaded their rifles into it.
We were forced to back away as the onslaught became too intense. The crabs connected to the slug closed on our wedge, the nearest ones falling about ten meters away from the tip of the formation.
I concentrated on keeping the crabs at bay, as did the other snipers, while the rest of the platoon focused on the slug itself. The bullet-riddled creature, chunks of flesh sloughing from its body, finally succumbed, and collapsed in a lifeless mass on the floor. The remaining one-hundred or so smaller crabs that had been connected to it abruptly turned over, legs crimping in death. The dead slug dematerialized.
But the onslaught didn't cease.
More crabs simply piled out of the tunnel.
And more slugs. Two, one after another.
We'd backed to the far side of the cavern now, and concentrated all our fire on those slugs. Grenades were hurled in force. Machine guns unloaded.
We brought down those two slugs, and the crabs connected to them instantly died.
But then the slugs got smart. When the next one emerged into the cavern, it stayed back, letting its crabs advance, stretching the cords that bound them to the limit.
The smaller creatures literally swarmed our position.
"Get the cords!" someone shouted on the comm.
I switched to full auto and fired at those semitransparent, organic umbilicals, severing entire swaths of crabs from the host slugs.
The disconnected creatures instantly turned over and died.
The rest of the platoon concentrated fire on the cords too, but when we'd severed most of the crabs, the slug merely retreated, phasing out of existence so that the next slug and its army of crabs could take over.
