Eerie images danced on my faceplate. Coolhand peered cautiously into the nutrition chamber and raised his E to his shoulder. He triggered another burst of flame, liquid fire splattering everywhere. Snow Leopard crawled past me, the flames reflected on his faceplate. Behind it, his face could only be described as ecstatic.
“Command, Beta. We have reached the hive, cords as shown. No resistance.”
“Confirm Beta has located the hive. Stand by, Beta, we’re on the way.”
“Take your time, Command. We’re doing fine.” Sometimes I wondered about Snow Leopard, but being crazy was one of the job requirements. He was clearly over-qualified.
Deadeye pulled at my arm, his face blackened, breather firmly in place. “Slayer, remember my people!”
Remember his people-kill the exos. Yes, one at a time. There was a very good reason why we could not simply burn these vile nests out from above ground, why we risked our lives below ground.
“We have to check every one of these holes, guys-don’t forget!”
“Terrific.”
“Move! Let’s do it. And go easy on the flames.”
“Alert!”
“Soldiers!”
“Exoseg Gigantic Soldier…”
Someone let loose on xmax auto. I turned and found myself shoulder to shoulder with Warhound and Deadeye, just behind Snow Leopard, Coolhand and Psycho guarding the tunnel. The chirping rose in intensity. Closer! Closer!
“Xmax, gang!”
“Ten, sir!”
“Xmax auto!”
“Try and stop me!”
Smoke and flame, slowly clearing, and Exoseg Gigantic Soldier appeared, huge and black and horrible, twitching downtunnel, antennae cracking. Two, three…more! Pausing, for just a frac. Magnificent, perfect creatures, perfect killing machines.
“Die, you slime!” Snow Leopard, Coolhand and Psycho fired and a phosphorescent orange glow outlined them, crouching, molten statues of gold. They sent bursts of flame after the xmax blasts.
Sweety squeaked in my ears. I could not understand a word.
Dragon had me by the arm, and Deadeye danced hysterically around us, pointing into the nutrition chamber.
Priestess stood over one creature just past the treecat, her E pointed down, the light triggered. Deadeye raised his stabbing spear and shakily pointed it out to me. Priestess made a trembling gesture toward the creature with her free hand, and turned her face away, abruptly. I cautiously approached and I saw it. Eyes, open and staring. A Sunrealmer boy, covered in slime and filth, as still as death. The eyes were glazed, motionless, the eyes of the dead, the boy caked in congealed blood and covered with debris. Long dead, he had to be long dead.
Sweety spoke. “A Taka child,” she informed me. “The boy appears to be paralyzed. It is probably intended as food for the exosegs.” The boy could only stare blindly into our light, helpless and hopeless.
Deadeye lifted him off the floor. The boy was covered with filth and sores and rot, a lifeless corpse, surely, the arms flopping loosely, mouth gaping. Priestess cradled his head, pressing a biotic charger into one arm.
His eyes flickered. A spark, still alive, in the dark. A human heart, beating, alone, in the house of the dead.
No longer alone.
Ironman fired down the corridor, holding off more exoseg soldiers.
Snow Leopard reported our find. “…Beta. Repeat, one Taka recovered from the hive, alive. Exos are attacking. We could use some bodies to search the hive. Where’s that probe?”
“Beta, Command. Confirm you…”
Search the hive! We wouldn’t be leaving any time soon. But I didn’t mind, not any more. Perhaps there were more Taka to be found. No, there was no rush.
Numb, we watched as the smoke cleared ahead, Snow Leopard and Coolhand on my left, Psycho on my right with his Manlink, and the rest of Beta close behind us. We stood in a fighting circle, surrounding Deadeye and the Taka boy. The writhing heart of the hive burned brightly. The dismembered bodies of an army of exoseg soldiers surrounded us, burning at the edges. From time to time someone snapped off a burst of laser, or shot a fireball into the quivering dark, or blasted some movement with x. Exhausted, silent, and covered with filth, I could barely see out of my gore-smeared faceplate. There was no more emotion left.
We had fought our way into a large chamber, now veiled with smoke. We peered around cautiously. Past the dead and dying exoseg soldiers, the chamber was filled with Breeder males, motionless, all on their backs, legs upraised like tree branches. They appeared to be dead, lined up in orderly rows.
“What’s this?” Ironman asked shakily.
“This is the nursery,” Merlin replied. “And these are the breeder males-performing their last function.”
“What’s the last function?” I asked.
“Look out!” Psycho warned. Three strange-looking exosegs scuttled along one wall and disappeared into the dark, clacking their mandibles. With narrow waists, long legs and large heads, they appeared quite formidable.
“It’s all right,” Coolhand said. “Those are the females. They won’t hurt you.”
“The breeder males mate with the females here,” Merlin said. “It happens quickly. As soon as the egg is fertilized the breeder tries to separate and escape but he usually fails. The female uses a barb on her thorax to inject him with a powerful paralytic agent. Then she injects the fertilized egg into him. The breeder is dragged into the nursery with the other doomed males and is kept alive until the pupa develops and eats its way out, killing the host.”
“That’s the way these things have sex?” Psycho asked. “I think I prefer our own method!”
“I don’t know,” Priestess said thoughtfully. “Making the male carry the baby has a certain appeal.”
“The pupa develops into breeder, neuter or female-probably depending on what the hive needs. There’s not so many females.”
“What about the Soldiers and Dominants?” I asked.
“They’re a separate exoseg species. They all cooperate for…”
“Cut the chit-chat,” Snow Leopard demanded. “Those females are still in there, I can hear ‘em. Let’s burn it. Just burn it all.”
We all fired, a firestorm, a holocaust, and the last three females died almost instantly. We watched them burn without emotion. Maybe that damned noise would stop now.
In the long still hours of the dead of night, we gathered around the tacsit monitor in the squadmod, drinking dox. A faint green glow and the muted peeping of the monitors served as backdrop to hushed conversation. Priestess and I had the duty. Snow Leopard, Psycho and Dragon had bedded down in the lounge, but Coolhand, Merlin, Warhound and Ironman were still with us. I was hoping they would go to sleep so I could be alone with Priestess.
We had all cleaned up, but sleep was not easy with all those images from the hive darting around inside our heads. I had spent a long time in the shower trying to scour away the exo filth. Of course, I had been in armor while in the hive and nothing had touched my skin except my own sweat, but I still felt filthy. It had been that kind of place.
Coolhand had played a sad, lonely tune on his lektra but now he stopped. The quiet intensified the memory of the horror.
Priestess’s silky dark hair was still wet from the shower. She appeared fresh and innocent and her eyes could change a man’s life. She seemed completely unaware of her own powers.
“How’s the survivor? The boy?” Merlin asked. No one mentioned the fact that the boy had been the only survivor found. There had been enough bones and remains to fill a thousand nightmares.
“Back with his people,” Coolhand replied. “Deadeye says it was quite a scene. He escorted the kid back to the village unannounced, and the whole tribe went into shock. They’d already done the death ceremony.” Coolhand thought it all faintly amusing. As a matter of fact, Coolhand found just about everything faintly amusing. He took life very calmly.
“How is he mentally?” Merlin worried about the boy. Merlin always worried abo
ut something.
Priestess responded. “We identified the paralytic agent used by the exos, and countered it.” She paused to sip her dox. “Deadeye said he was in the hive about a week. It’s incredible how he survived. I can’t imagine what he ate, or drank, or how, as he was paralyzed. I don’t think I really want to know.”
“I think I would have freaked in a few hours,” Merlin said. “I almost lost it when those Scalers grabbed me, and they were humans.”
“It’s funny,” Coolhand said. “His people were so glad to get him back, yet they were planning to send him back to us. They said he belongs to us now.”
“He’s yours, Priestess,” I said. “You got your wish. Didn’t you want a Taka man?”
“I wanted a man, not a boy!”
“Deadeye followed orders and wouldn’t tell them who it was,” Coolhand said, “so we don’t have to worry about it.” He smiled again. His fingers toyed with the lektra, and a plaintive wail ran over my skin, a single, pure note.
“You know, it’s remarkable,” Coolhand added. “His people are hostiles, marginally allied with the Priests. And Deadeye said their council was going to meet on whether or not to surrender to us. The Taka don’t believe in words, they believe in deeds. We kill the exos, and return their boy. He confirms it. That’s all they need. All of them may surrender to us shortly. And all because of this boy.”
A silence settled over us again. The glow from the monitors added an eerie quality to our gathering. Another magic note arose from Coolhand’s lektra, like a bell sounding once in a still, cold night.
“How many more hives are there, do you think?” Warhound asked.
“Plenty,” Merlin replied. “Enough to keep us gainfully employed for quite awhile.”
Warhound sighed. “When I was in there,” he said, jaw muscles tightening, “I wanted to kill everything that moved. I didn’t understand why we couldn’t just stay upstairs, and fill all the tunnels with gas, and explode it. I didn’t really believe anyone could be alive down there. Not until I saw it with my own eyes.”
“The Takas think the same way you do,” Coolhand commented.
“Take a look,” Coolhand said. He set aside his lektra, and spread a fotomap over the tacsit console, a brightly colored tacmap of the Sunmarch, Andrion 2’s primary continent. “The red areas represent exoseg territory-that’s the death zone. The Taka don’t go in there.”
“It’s quite an empire,” Ironman said.
“Right. And growing all the time. This is just an estimate, of course-but we’ve got a pretty good idea from debriefing the Takas.”
“What’s the purple area?”
“That’s the Realm of God. It has also been expanding-until recently. They’re pushed out by the exos, you can see. But check out the chronology-you can see where the exosegs appear to have started from.”
Someone read the legend out loud, “The Forest of Bones?”
“That’s what they call it. That’s our next target. It’s going to be a big op.”
“Terrific. Can’t you get us put back on Taka duty?”
“Sorry, gang, I just work here. Besides, it’ll be fun.”
“Right. I’ll get my party hat.”
The others drifted off to the lounge to sleep, leaving me alone with Priestess. I sat close beside her at the console and put an arm around her shoulders. I felt as if I were floating, alone with an angel, my own angel.
“What are we going to do, Thinker?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“What are we going to do about Valkyrie?”
“How’s your eye?” I massaged the back of her neck.
“It’s better,” she said. “Do you think I was wrong-to love you?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t even want to think about it.
“We’re only human,” Priestess said. “Is it wrong to fall in love?”
“We’re not human,” I responded. “We’re soldiers of the Legion. Nothing we do is sane. I don’t blame us for falling in love. I don’t blame Valkyrie for being upset. She’s perfectly right. And we’re perfectly right as well. We’re all insane-understand?”
“You say such strange things sometimes, Thinker. I’ve always believed in the Legion.” She paused, her eyes unfocused, staring into an unseen world. “Will you always be mine, Thinker?”
“We’re immortals. We’ll live together for a billion years.” We kissed, and I closed my eyes, and the world spun softly around us.
She let go, gently, and sank back into her chair. Her eyes glistened with unshed tears.
“Why are you crying?” A stupid question to ask a girl.
“I’m not crying.”
“All right, you’re not crying.”
I stood and picked up my E from the weapons rack and went outside, leaving the door open behind me. A faint breeze rushed lightly over my skin. The east glowed purple but the west remained cold and black and full of stars. I sat down on the steps, the E in my lap. Priestess joined me, hugging herself in the sudden cold, eyes sparkling.
“I was very lonely in Hell,” Priestess said. “I was just trying to keep up with everyone. I thought I wasn’t good enough-I had these nightmares where people would be crying out for the medic and I would be paralyzed with fear, or too exhausted to move. Terrible nightmares. I was always afraid that I would fail-and I thought everyone knew it. I thought they knew that I was too soft, too weak.”
“What nonsense. You graduated Planet Hell, along with everyone else.”
“Yes, and I was terrified the whole time.”
“You think everyone else wasn’t terrified? Remember the snake cliff? Remember the swamp suckers? I’ve still got the scars.”
“People were always helping me. I never could have done it by myself.”
“That was the whole idea-working as a team. Everyone helping everyone else. Now we don’t even think about it, we just do it.”
“I used to dream about you at night,” Priestess confessed. “Remember the Wilderness? When the whole world was on fire? Sometimes you’d sleep nearby, and I would dream that you would come to me in the night, and make love to me.”
“Yeah, that’s funny. I was too tired to move.” But I had been dreaming of Priestess as well. I looked up and could almost feel the starlight, hitting my skin. A billion stars, glittering cold and hard, an endless, milky stream of stars. I did not want to face the future without Priestess. She gave me something to live for. I wanted to live a million years just like this, with Priestess’s hypnotic eyes burning into mine. A meteor shot across the sky, trailing a sparkling wake through the dark.
“Oh, it’s lovely.” Priestess seemed totally relaxed.
An alert tone pinged once. Behind Priestess, the tacsit console suddenly glowed red. She got to her feet and went back into the tac room. I followed.
“What’s this, Thinker?” Priestess stood poised over the main screen, reading the data. I joined her.
Two targets glowed on the screen. Humans, obviously, moving slowly through the forest along the ridge that faced us across the valley. I read through the data.
“What’s that they’re carrying?” Priestess asked. She settled into the duty chair.
ANOMALY, the screen told us. UNIDENTIFIED DEVICES, AS MARKED. UNSTABLE READINGS, UNKNOWN MATTER. The visuals showed the targets as heat images, humans, each carrying something that registered as an irregular, shifting blob of light.
“The sensors can’t ID it,” I said.
“It just means we haven’t seen it before,” Priestess commented.
“Still, it’s odd.” We watched them, two glowing heat images, moving up the forested slope, heading up to the ridgeline. I picked up a comset.
“Deadeye, Thinker.” I spoke in Taka. “Come in, Deadeye.”
“Deadeye here! Speak, Slayer!” Deadeye loved the comset. He thought it a marvelous device. He slept with it.
“Deadeye, are any of your people on the ridge across the valley? We see two unknowns in the forest, climb
ing up to the top of the ridge.”
“Is it the ridge with the yellow stone?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“No, Slayer, we have no warriors there.”
“Well, there’s two people there. Near the top.”
“The top! We will catch them, Slayer!”
“Let us know what you find.”
“Thinker, Deadeye out, tenners, tenners! Goodbye, Slayer.”
Deadeye’s auxiliaries camped not far from us. They would certainly track down these two intruders-probably Cultist stragglers, out to recon our squadmod. They just wouldn’t give up.
“Should I wake up Snow Leopard?” Priestess asked.
“I don’t think so. It’s just a couple of Taka.” I re-read the data. We watched the two unknowns, slowly approaching the top of the ridge. The trees masked the images much of the time. Deadeye’s auxiliaries were moving briskly down our ridge, heading for the valley. It would be quite a chase. The console continued to glow red. Suddenly it pinged again.
ANOMALY, the screen warned, POSSIBLE CAMFAX IMAGE SUPPRESSOR.
READINGS STILL INCONCLUSIVE. RECOMMEND IMMEDIATE REACTION.
My blood went cold.
“Thinker!” Priestess stood up in alarm.
“The aircar!” My fist went down on the alarm, and the red alert claxon shrieked to life. I charged out the door, snatching up my E. I reached the aircar in an instant, leaping in as the assault door snapped open, Redhawk thrashing to life from an airbunk in the aisle. He slept in the car.
“Scut!” Redhawk cursed, “What is it?!”
“Move!” I said, “We’ve got targets!” Redhawk scrambled into the pilot’s seat and started flipping switches, tangled red hair flying as the car came to life, a sharp whine building to a throaty roar. The squad charged through the door as the aircar left the ground in a rising cloud of red dust. Dragon, Coolhand, Psycho, then Ironman, then Snow Leopard, then Merlin and Warhound scrambling in last. Nobody was dressed for combat but we were all armed.
“Count!” Snow Leopard, looking around wildly, no shirt, slipping into a camfaxed coldcoat.
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