Assault Troopers

by Vaughn Heppner

  “Do you have a point?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Dmitri said. “I must show you. You are the general. You will know what we need to do about the star-armor.”

  “Show me what?” I asked.

  Then I saw something out of the corner of my eye. I turned and spied a naked woman. She was thin with perfectly shaped breasts. She blinked in the manner of someone missing her glasses and had short brunette hair. Her eyes were sharp, and intelligence shone there. She noticed my scrutiny. She folded her arms before her breasts, glared at me and spoke harshly in Russian.

  Dmitri protectively stepped in front of her, blocking my sight, and he spoke urgently to her. I suppose that was Ella Timoshenko. For a scientist, heck, for any woman, she had lovely tits and nice legs.

  I noticed Ella shaking her head as she spoke to Dmitri.

  The Cossack turned to me. “Ella says we have no chance against the aliens. She says we should run away.”

  “Do you want run, Dmitri? Do you want to let the aliens win?”

  “I am a Cossack. We have always fought and we will always fight. I am with you, my general. But Ella, she is smart. I’m afraid we will lose in the end.”

  “Everyone dies,” I said. “So everyone loses in the end.”

  “That is not what the priests say,” Dmitri said, “about losing in the end. But you are right in saying we all die.”

  “It’s living free that counts,” I said, “standing your ground when the alien tries to cage you.”

  “You must see the star-armor, my general. I’m sure it will help us.”

  I could get used to Dmitri.

  “Rollo,” I said, “Have one of those Russians work the crane. We have to keep attacking. We can’t wait around for the aliens to make their next move against us. We have to keep surprising them until we win.”

  Rollo didn’t bother talking to the freed Russians. He jumped off the machine and grabbed one of the few alien weapons left. He must have noticed that the Russians were quick to arm themselves.

  Instead of one of the men, Ella Timoshenko climbed into the crane’s control chair. She was nimble for a scientist, and those breasts…

  I looked away. As more Russians crawled out of the cracked tubes, they began working in shifts with the other backhoe-like vehicle. Its engine sounded like a buzz saw and thumped from time to time. I wasn’t sure how long it would run. I’d say we had forty people all together, with seven free of the tubes so far.

  “We’re going to keep attacking,” I told Dmitri.

  “But—”

  “We have to keep them off balance,” I said.

  “No!” Dmitri said. “Listen to me. You are a great fighter. You have killed aliens and I don’t know of anyone else who has done such a thing. I am forever in your debt. But you must see the star-armor.”

  “Yeah, you talked about that, but I’m thinking—”

  “General, listen to me, please. Ella called it symbiotic armor, a living tissue mutated or grown for humans.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Dmitri said, “now you’re listening. You must come with me. I show you this thing. It makes more sense once you see it.”

  ***

  I believe the Saurians made a critical mistake. By their translated words earlier, the lizards figured we humans were beasts, animals or monsters. Wrong. We were thinking people using every faculty to figure out what was going on. That included the trapped Ukrainians, Russians and Cossack. Many of them were scientists—trained observers. Others had been former Russian soldiers. According to Dmitri, the Saurians had been conducting tests on them for two days already. One of those tests had included symbiotic armor, a kind of second skin for combat use.

  Why had the Saurians been testing the people? Dmitri said Ella had a theory, but the savant Ella Timoshenko had remained in the tube chamber to free the rest of the Russians. I’m not sure she liked me.

  Rollo, Dmitri and I hurried down a corridor. Rollo had his .45 and an alien long-rifle, Dmitri carried the grenade-pistol I’d picked up earlier and I had my M-14. Dmitri lacked clothes or shoes of any kind, but it didn’t seem to bother him. The heat caused him to sweat so he left wet footprints on the floor. The muggy air made our clothes soggy and I kept shaking my head to fling sweat out of my eyes. The alien stench in the ship atmosphere had begun making me dizzy. I longed for good old fresh Earth air.

  “We’re going to need water soon,” I said, “to keep us hydrated.”

  “There’s plenty of snow outside,” Rollo told me.

  “Getting cold feet?” I asked.

  “Most definitely,” he said. “This lander freaks me out and these corridors with their fuzzy walls—they’re aliens all right. It makes my gut clench every time I think about it. Why did the Saurians ever come here?”

  “This way,” Dmitri said, pointing into a narrower corridor.

  “Are you sure?” I asked. The corridor looked darker, like an alien cave I didn’t want to go down.

  Dmitri grimaced. “For the past two days I have watched everything they do, cataloging each horror committed on us. I am sure.”

  I didn’t like it, but I motioned for Dmitri to keep going. He soon led us before another membrane.

  “I’m a little tired of going through those,” Rollo said.

  So was I, but I clutched my rifle and charged through. In my opinion, we’d run out of time. We’d been taking too long. I plopped through into an oven of a chamber that hit my face like a hellish brick.

  The room was one third the size of the tube chamber. The back wall glowed orange with heat. I spied four raised pads near the wall with a blob of a shiny black substance on each of them. To my horror, the blobs oozed back and forth, the surface making rippling movements. Two long tables stood on the left side of the room. On each table lay a dissected human, with his or her chest cavity and stomach laid open. The corpse faces showed rigid horror and pain.

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  Rollo swore quietly in outrage.

  I glanced at my friend and then looked to the right where he stared. Three tall tubes filled with a green solution stood from floor to ceiling. Each of the cylinders contained a dead woman, with a hundred tiny wires connected to her. I vowed to save the last bullet and use it on myself. I wouldn’t let myself be taken by these aliens, and have things like that done to me.

  “Yesterday,” Dmitri said in a low voice, “Ella and I were in here. I knew those people.” Dmitri shook his head and spoke in an even lower whisper. “The Saurians are vile beings from the stars. They conducted experiments. Ella and I…” Dmitri stared at me with smoldering eyes. “We wore the symbiotic armor. It was strange. Ella understood, though. In the past, she has often made intuitive leaps of understanding. I think she is psychic, or maybe even telepathic.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Ella knew,” Dmitri said. “She told me the Saurian plan. If you knew the reason why we were in Antarctica…”

  “Go on,” I said. “Because why?”

  “It does not matter now,” Dmitri said. “Those are your answer,” he said, pointing at the rippling black blobs on the pads. “We put those on and attack the aliens. Those will give us our chance.”

  “What in the hell is he talking about?” Rollo asked me.

  That was a good question. Dmitri had to be among the whitest persons I’d ever seen. Canadians and Russians, no one could be as white as them. Now, however, Dmitri went even whiter, swayed and might have toppled. I caught his right arm, steadying him. He swallowed several times.

  “I don’t want to do this,” he whispered. “But Cossacks fight to the end. We always fight.”

  “Are you okay?” I asked. “You know you’re not making much sense, right?”

  Dmitri pulled free of me. Like a stoned zombie, he moved to the hot wall with the four blobs.

  Rollo sidled up to me, whispering, “I think the Saurians scrambled his brains.”

  I was tempted to agree, but the last few day
s had shifted my thinking about a lot of things. Maybe it helped that I’d read so much science fiction as a kid and watched every SF movie I could. I was used to strange concepts and weird ideas. Rhode Island-sized spaceships, death spores, Saurians and the greatest nations on Earth demolished in the space of a half hour…why couldn’t Ella have psychic flashes of understanding? The Saurians had used a pink ray on our minds. Why couldn’t our side have an advantage or two?

  “Creed, do you see that?” Rollo asked, with loathing in his voice.

  Dmitri Rostov reached one of the black blobs. Using both hands, he grabbed the jelly-like substance and heaved the thing off its pad, dumping the mass onto the floor where it quivered. Then he did the craziest thing: he stepped onto it with both feet.

  His feet disappeared into the blob so he sank up to his ankles. He had a blood-oozing scratch on the inner left ankle on the ball joint. Then the slimy blob oozed up onto his legs, coating his flesh with the gooey black substance.

  “Dmitri!” I shouted.

  “Be calm, my friends,” he said, with his palms held outward toward me. “I have done this before. This is the symbiotic armor, the living second skin. Ella believes these creatures were genetically engineered for human use.”

  “That thing is alive?” Rollo asked.

  “Oh yes” Dmitri said. “It is warm, and it feeds off our sweat.”

  More of the blob oozed up Dmitri’s legs. The stuff reached his knees and continued to climb like slime toward his waist.

  “Is that what killed those people on the tables?” Rollo asked, indicting the dissected corpses.

  “I do not know,” Dmitri said, “possibly.”

  I swallowed hard. What I saw sickened me, but our backs were against the proverbial wall. Maybe we were Earth’s last chance. Who else had fought their way onto an alien lander? I was almost out of bullets and the aliens must be radioing for backup. I’d watched these beings murder my father. They’d nuked humanity practically out of existence. Now, Dmitri said this was living armor. One of my player characters had worn living armor before in a roleplaying game. I understood the concept of living armor. It was much different seeing it, though, a lot different.

  How much could I trust Ella Timoshenko? But no, maybe that was the wrong way to look at this. The better question was how much chance of victory did I have? In truth, I—we—had no chance at all against the aliens. If this stuff was living armor and if it gave me some kind of advantage—but I don’t know what it would give a person.

  “What do you mean, this is armor?” I asked. “What does it do for you?”

  “It amplifies your strength,” Dmitri said. “It also gives you energy and it can harden its outer surface to deflect or stop certain kinds of attacks.”

  “Come on, guys, let’s get out of here,” Rollo pleaded.

  The black substance flowed up Dmitri’s waist, past his belly button and reached his shoulders when the first Saurian stepped through the membrane.

  I must have figured in the back of my mind that the Russians would race here and give us warning if the Saurians launched the next assault. What I failed to grasp was that the lizards didn’t need to go past the Russians first. I should have realized there were many different ways to move about the ship.

  As foolish as it sounds on our part, the Saurians caught us by surprise. One after another, lizards rushed into the room. Many gripped a half-moon curved blade similar to that I’d taken off a mech-lizard earlier. A wet green substance glistened along the edges of their blades. The first Saurian cut Rollo across the shoulder. My friend shouted in pain and surprise and threw himself away from the Saurian. As Rollo moved, his feet tangled and he tripped.

  I spun around and shot the nearest lizard in the face, the one going for me. I kept firing from the hip, taking down more. I backpedaled, shot another alien and saw a Saurian crouch beside Rollo. My friend had stiffened strangely. The lizard held one of those curved knives, and it looked as if the Saurian planned to cut Rollo’s throat. I aimed, pulled the trigger and my rifle clicked empty. I was out of bullets.

  Croaking a desperate noise, Rollo finally managed to move, kicking feebly but not nearly hard enough. The half-moon curved blade came down, and it might have cut Rollo’s throat and ended existence for my friend. Before that happened, a black-coated humanoid joined the fray. The thing punched the Saurian in the head. The creature catapulted off its three-toed talons and smashed against another of its kind. The two tumbled into a heap.

  I realized the black humanoid was Dmitri. The blob of symbiotic armor covered him from toes to just under his chin, leaving his head free. A fierce joyfulness twisted Dmitri’s features into something unholy. Clearly, he liked wearing the armor and he liked fighting.

  With amplified strength and heightened speed, Dmitri moved among the remaining Saurians. They cut at him but could not penetrate the armor. They fired their weapons and they died. I saw it. I can testify to the truth of what occurred. Several lizards slammed against bulkheads and crumpled to the floor. Others simply toppled down and flopped like snakes, with Dmitri’s blows hitting them like jackhammers.

  Then it was over. This wave of seven or eight Saurians failed just as their previous efforts had. How many lizards were aboard the lander anyway?

  Watching Dmitri in this horror show, I was beginning to believe we could actually win. Earlier, I’d figured, what better way to end life than to go down swinging? Now…now I began to think we might really hijack the ship.

  “Do you finally believe me?” Dmitri asked.

  I would have answered, but I saw Rollo. The curved blade had sliced into his shoulder. There was a little blood, but not enough to cause what I was seeing. Rollo seemed to have frozen into immobility. The foul Saurians must have envenomed their blades with a paralyzing drug. They didn’t fight fair, that’s for sure.

  I feared for my friend. I had to do something for him fast.

  -5-

  Dmitri had the answer for Rollo, but I didn’t like it. I saw the loathing in Rollo’s eyes and knew he positively hated the suggestion. But I had to do something for him.

  Before I subjected my friend to this alien horror, I figured I should try it first.

  “Tell me one thing,” I told Dmitri. “Are you still sane?”

  The Zaporizhian Cossack paused before answering the question.

  “You are human, right?” I asked.

  Dmitri grinned wryly. “I hesitate to answer because the living armor must lace chemicals into me through my skin. When I fought just now, I felt good. Yes, I am sane, but I believe it makes me want to fight when I wear the armor. Ella said yesterday that the symbiotic creature seemed bio-sculpted for us.”

  “What did she mean by that?” I asked.

  “How do you Americans say it?” Dmitri mused. “Bio-engineered, yes, the creature was bio-engineered for our use.”

  “So you think the Saurians have been studying humanity for some time?” I asked.

  “It seems self-evident, yes, my general.”

  “I’m not a general,” I said. “I’m just an American grunt who used to work for Black Sand.”

  Dmitri looked crestfallen.

  “But I’ll keep fighting,” I said. “I’ll lead us to the end.”

  He nodded, grinning at me.

  I took a deep breath, with the hot alien air burning down my throat. It reminded me of the worst smoggy day in LA when I’d played basketball in high school. I’d felt like I’d been drowning after a while, each breath painful in my throat.

  While wearing the symbiotic armor, Dmitri had just fought like Superman or the Hulk. I’d like to do that, but did I trust a blob of living armor, a creature that would flow onto me like a second skin? What if it covered my face? That would obviously suffocate me. According to Ella the Mystic Russian Scientist with the nice breasts, the Saurians had bio-engineered the armor for humans.

  “The aliens are too strong,” Dmitri said. “You have no choice, my…”

  I glanced at him.
I had lots of choices—as long as I didn’t mind losing. With a roar of frustration, I tore off my parka, shirt and unlaced my boots. In seconds, I stood naked in the chamber. This was crazy. I felt like a lunatic. What drove me in the end was the fact that humanity had nearly been exterminated. To come back from the edge of extinction, someone had to do something. The dissected corpses on the table and the dead floating in the tubes meant I had to grab this chance. In my humble opinion, we were dead otherwise.

  Naked, with my heart pounding, I approached a quaking, quivering blob on a raised pad. The living armor hadn’t come from Earth, but from some lab in the stars. The Saurians sure hadn’t worn this stuff to help them tackle us. That should have warned me, right?

  With serious distrust riding on my shoulders, I grabbed the substance. It was warm like a fresh pancake, and it pulsed as if it had a heart rate. I heaved, lifted it off the pad and plopped it onto the floor. Then I stepped onto the squishy blob.

  Now it was my turn to watch it slither and ooze onto my skin. The stuff was warm, and watching it creep up my legs nearly freaked me out. I wanted to howl and leap away, scraping this gunk off with my knife.

  I felt something then: the armor’s displeasure. The advance halted.

  “You must accept it,” Dmitri said. “I believe it senses negative emotions.”

  That was just great. This stuff was like a dog that knew when you were afraid. I tried to take a calming breath. It didn’t work because of the smogginess and the stench of the alien atmosphere. Sweat pooled on my skin and a bout of claustrophobia threatened to steal my logical processes. I was seconds away from howling.

  I glanced at Rollo sprawled on the deck plates. If this didn’t work, I don’t know what we were going to do. I couldn’t lug him out of the lander. This latest Saurian assault showed the lizards hadn’t given up. If nothing else, they could simply take off and return to the mothership. That would end our chances. We had to do something now or it wouldn’t matter.