by Rick Partlow
The spacecraft had lost its subtle glow and the faint crackling in the air that had accompanied its presence was gone. It was half buried in the dirt and looked like it had broken in half near the edge, but as I watched I could see that something was moving in that gap...something big. And I could hear a faint castanet sound, a constant clatter from pincer-like jaws clacking together.
Three of them emerged from the dark hole in the side of the ship, as black as the falling night. The way they moved seemed eerily familiar, like an insect or a crustacean, yet alien in ways that I wouldn't have been able to articulate. Weapons that had to have weighed hundreds of kilograms filled their lower, load-bearing arms and their massive heads swung about like turrets, probably scanning with some sort of sonar; that had to be the reason for the endless chattering of their jaws.
A paralyzing and unfamiliar terror crept upward from somewhere in my gut and I could feel the night go cold inside my chest. I suddenly realized that I couldn't remember the last time I'd been scared, not for my family or my friends but for myself. The Machine always beat the fear back, kept it locked somewhere it couldn't reach me; but watching the Skrela warriors skittering towards us on scorpion-like legs the size of tree trunks, the Machine deserted me. This was outside its programming parameters. I knew I should grab Rachel and Pete and run for the control building, but I felt a sick surety that I wouldn't make it before they were on us and I was deathly afraid to turn my back on them.
The spike of fear only lasted a moment, the space of a breath, but it was long enough for the three Skrela warriors to halve the distance between us. The only thing that broke its hold was Rachel's hand clamping down on my arm. I looked at her and saw a fierce certitude in her eyes, a confidence that we would get through this, and I knew I couldn't let her down.
I felt for my pulse carbine where it was slung secured down the right side of my back. I'd nearly forgotten it after Cutter's revelations, but he hadn't bothered to take it from me. I took it in my left hand, secured my handgun in its holster with my right, then looked to Trint.
The cyborg nodded stiffly, as if he had to remind himself what it meant to humans. He already had his carbine shouldered and began sprinting to the right without being directed.
"Get to the other side of the building!" I yelled to Pete and Rachel, then took off to the left as fast as I could run.
It wasn't quite full night, and there was enough ambient light that my infrared filters had no trouble filling in the details for me, even at forty klicks an hour. The soil of the river valley felt soft and yielding under my boots as I left the pavement, and what before had seemed as unreal as some fantasy backdrop in a virtual reality drama suddenly focused into stark clarity as trees and brush whipped by me and dinosaurs the size of chickens scattered at my approach.
I described a wide arc away from the control building and then back around towards the crashed Skrela disc, seeing Trint follow the same path coming from the other direction. We'd been trying to draw the Skrela warriors away from the building and away from Pete and Rachel, and I could already see one of the massive creatures veering off in my direction. The thing leaned its bulk in the direction of the turn like a horse, its clawed foot pads ripping up chunks of sod and soil in its wake, trying to bring its main weapon to bear on me.
I tried to cut harder, tried to stay to the right and behind the thing's firing arc as it clawed its way around towards me, both of its muscular load-bearing arms yanking at the bulk of its primary weapon. I heard the thundercrack of a high energy weapon firing somewhere off in the direction Trint had run, but it was distant and compartmentalized in my mind. I was focused on the armored, segmented body and flat, slablike head of the Skrela as we stalked each other.
I had the edge on speed, but the thing didn't have to catch me, just get that damned weapon turned around faster than I could circumnavigate it. I tightened the circle, cutting in towards the hindquarters of the Skrela warrior, trying to find a weakness somewhere at the rear of its joints. I must have been getting too close, because it loosed a shot off even though it couldn't crank around far enough to target me.
A wave of heat washed over me, nearly knocking me off my stride with its intensity, and a concussive blast of raw sound vibrated in my chest. Out of the corner of my vision a sun-bright flare whited out the night and I felt bits of soil turned to glass spattering off my back as I struggled to maintain my balance. I felt a cold lump of desperation in my chest; even a close miss by whatever that thing fired would likely be fatal right through my Reflex armor.
The thing's prehensile tail whipped around behind it menacingly, but it didn't worry me nearly as much as that gun: I had to get closer. With a surge of effort that took the last bit of artificial boost I had, I threw myself at the thing's right side just behind its rear set of arms. I felt as if I was hanging in the air forever, felt like that damned tail was going to smash me flat in the fraction of a second it took me to cross the four meters that separated us; but somehow I was able to grab the joint of the thing's right-hand load-bearing arm and swing myself onto its back.
The Skrela's outer carapace felt synthetic to my touch, like some alloy or carbon construct: cold and lifeless and jagged. My Reflex armor protected me from it, mostly, but I felt skin abrading on my uncovered right hand where it briefly met the shoulder joint. Then I was perched precariously on the sloping back of the creature, behind the reverse wedge of its flattened, armored head...and I could see the weak spot. There was gap under that armor-plated head, necessary to allow it to bend its neck upward; just centimeters wide and shifting as it moved its head.
I'd barely had time to register what I'd seen before I sensed the business end of that spiked tail whipping down at my head. I leaped forward millimeters ahead of it and heard a crash like a snare drum as the huge spike slammed into the creature's own back, making it stagger a step. The balls of my feet touched for just an eyeblink on the smooth, flat top of the Skrela's wedge-shaped head before I pushed off and flipped backwards, arresting my fall with my right hand talons as I jammed them into the thing's shoulder joint.
The thing began thrashing violently, bugling a call I can hardly begin to describe---a sound an enraged horse might make if it had evolved from a crustacean---and I knew I only had seconds before that tail struck again. I yanked myself up by the tenuous hold my talons had in the Skrela's joint and shoved my pulse carbine's emitter under that huge, onyx-black head and right into that joint in its armor. Then I squeezed the trigger and emptied the magazine in one long burst.
The world flashed in bright, glaring colors, a roaring filled my ears and I felt a brief explosion of intense pressure and blinding pain in my back just before I slammed into the ground face-first like a meteor falling from orbit. I tasted dirt and blood and agony and I was fairly certain I was dead; even if whatever had hit me hadn't killed me, the next shot surely would.
I'm sorry, Rachel, I had time to think. And then...
Nothing.
There was a hissing gush that might have been something's last breath and a thud like a large tree had been felled onto the loamy ground of a thick forest. The death blow didn't come. I forced myself to move, despite a report blinking in my retinal implants informing me that six of my byomer-reinforced ribs were shattered, I had four cracked vertebrae and a collapsed lung.
Details.
I was careful to use my right arm, since the broken ribs seemed to be on the left, and levered myself up to a kneeling position. I had to peel myself out of the soil to do it: I was buried centimeters deep in a man-shaped impact crater, driven there by what I deduced was a blow from that goddamned tail that had finally landed.
There wasn't much pain. It had taken a moment, but my headcomp was shutting that out, mostly. There was a strange feeling like I was full of broken bits of ceramic tile, like parts of me were shifting as I moved. I ignored it. What didn't kill me didn't necessarily make me stronger, but I could survive it and I would heal from it. Which was more than I could say f
or the Skrela.
Turning gingerly, I saw that I had been batted nearly twenty meters away from where the thing had collapsed. Smoke drifted off its neck where the laser had cut through the lighter armor at the joint and severed its brain stem and spinal cord. One of its legs shuddered spastically and I started, clutching for my handgun, but it was just a random firing of nerves.
My head snapped around at the sound of laserfire and a blast of one of the Skrela weapons from the direction of the control building...where I'd left Rachel and Pete. I cursed hotly, running over to where the Skrela had fallen and retrieving my carbine. I swapped out magazines as I ran, ignoring the broken parts of me grinding against each other and forcing myself to pick up speed.
I coughed up a glob of blood and spat it out; but I could already feel the nanites repairing the hole in my lung where a rib had penetrated it. The rib was back in place, thanks to the byomer webbing that reinforced it, and would heal in a day or so, if I lived. In the meantime, my legs worked fine and I churned the soil with them, feeling an overriding desperation to get back to my wife and brother.
Even though night had fallen, the control building glowed with its own, inner, green-tinted light like some ancient temple to lost gods. By its illumination I could see the Skrela warrior galloping across the pavement in the direction of the smoking wreck of the Ariel, the maw of its weapon glowing on thermal vision from recently being fired. I saw a hint of movement on the other side of the wreckage, but the heat radiating off the Ariel kept me from differentiating it from the rest of the white-hot blob on thermal and the shadows were too deep to see on visual.
I knew that somewhere, Deke and Kara were going after those other two Skrela ships in the Dutchman, and Trint was taking on the remaining warrior drone; but I couldn't think of anything past the nightmare scene in front of me. I knew I had to distract the thing from Pete and Rachel before it got to their shelter behind the ruined cutter, so I raised my carbine one-handed and fired it as I ran.
The burst snapped and sizzled in the ionized air, but the pressure-pulsed laser fire sparked off the thing's carapace harmlessly: it would have taken a crew-served Gatling laser to penetrate the Skrela's armor. It did have the desired effect, however, of getting the thing's attention. It swung its slab-like head towards me and I put another burst right between what I assumed were its eyes, rocking its head to the side and making it take a step back.
I knew what would come next: it tried to turn to bring its torso-mounted cannon towards me and I ran as fast as I could to keep to its right and avoid it. There wasn't any pain, but I could tell I wasn't moving as fast as usual and I had to fight to keep from thinking about it. I was trying to keep my eyes on the thing as I ran, and had to be careful not to trip as the soil gave way to the pavement, but I could see that I wasn't going to be fast enough to keep the Skrela from getting me in its sights.
A burst from a pulse laser hit the warrior drone in the side of the head and it paused, looking back the other direction to where Pete had run out from behind the wreckage of the cutter and was firing his carbine at the Skrela. I wanted to yell at him, to curse at him and tell him that he was being an idiot and that I had been trying to distract the Skrela away from him and now he was fucking that up. But I couldn't waste the time or the breath to do it, so instead I just swapped out magazines in stride and shot again as I circled behind it.
I didn't have a prayer of hitting the weak spot behind its neck from where I was, so I concentrated on hitting the thing's arm joints instead, particularly the shoulder joint of its right-side manipulation arm since that seemed the weakest. The thing reared back with an eerie crackling noise of armor plates clicking against each other and a keening howl that came from somewhere in its chest, seeming to feel pain or at least alarm, and started to turn back in my direction.
Just leave the damn thing alone, Pete, I thought, wishing he had a neurolink I could communicate the thought through, because I sure as hell wasn't going to shout with a partially collapsed lung.
Then I did shout---or tried to and only succeeded in croaking hoarsely---because I saw Rachel running out from the other side of the floating sphere of the control building, firing her own carbine from the shoulder at the back of the Skrela warrior. The burst hit the drone in the side of its spindly, barely visible neck: an incredible shot given Rachel's lack of augmentation, though it didn't penetrate the armor.
Now the Skrela looked confused; it half turned to Rachel, then back to me as I continued to put fire into its shoulder joint, then at Pete as he splashed a couple more bursts into the armor plating on its head. I reloaded again, then emptied that magazine at the joint I'd been targeting and the thing's right-side manipulator arm blew off with a spray of black blood. That settled where the Skrela's attention would be concentrated. It spun in place and I threw myself down as its main cannon fired.
It was a plasma projector: I'd decided that much, with the aid of an analysis from my headcomp. I don't know what it used for power or fuel, but it was shooting electromagnetically launched and contained plasmoids at relativistic speeds. The flare of the ball of sun-hot plasma could have scarred my retinas if they hadn't been protected by implants. I could feel the searing heat even through my Reflex armor as the shot passed over me, could feel the concussion as it plowed into the soil twenty meters behind me, turning it into blackened glass.
There was a twisting in my gut that didn't have anything to do with my injuries, a conviction that even as I scrambled to my feet, I wasn't going to be fast enough to avoid the second shot. The maw of the plasma projector seemed huge even from twenty meters away, electromagnetic coils glowing white inside of its barrel. That view had probably been the last thing millions of Rescharr had ever seen, and now it would be mine.
Chapter Twenty Five
Mitchell:
A blinding flash of plasma passed just over my head, close enough to singe some of my hair off, and a scintillating ball of sunfire struck the Skrela warrior directly at the shoulder of its left-side load-bearing arm. The massive limb exploded away from its torso in a flash of superheated blood, and the plasma cannon it supported crashed to the ground heavily, causing the Skrela to stagger the other direction as its weight suddenly shifted. Its whole left side was charred and jagged, but it still kept upright, taking a step towards me before a second blast of plasma took it in the waist and severed its torso from its lower body. Ichor vaporized and armor fragmented into shrapnel and I covered my face with my arms as it rained down around me. After a long second, the four legs wobbled like a drunken man and then went down to their knees before collapsing to the side with limp finality.
It was hard to look away from the thing, even in its death; but as I rose slowly to a crouch, I forced myself to turn and see the source of my salvation. It was Trint...or what was left of him.
He'd obviously taken a near miss from a plasmoid; the flesh had been burnt away from his left leg and hip, leaving the bare, bloody metal of his endoskeleton exposed, and from the hip up what was left of his covering skin was charred and blackened. In his hands he held---with some difficulty, even for him---a Skrela plasma cannon, the jagged protrusions at the back of it looking as if he'd ripped it right off the corpse of one of the warrior drones.
When he saw that the Skrela he'd shot was dead, he let the weapon fall, then followed it down to one knee, resting a supporting hand on the ground to keep himself from collapsing further.
"Cal!" I heard Rachel's voice as she rushed up to us. "Oh Jesus, Trint!" There was horror in her voice as she looked at the two of us and her face was drawn and pale. I must have looked more fucked up than I felt, even. At least Rachel and Pete looked like they were all right...a bit scraped up but okay.
"I shall be fine, Mrs. Mitchell," Trint said in a hoarse, gravelly voice. It sounded as if his vocal chords had received some damage from the plasma strike. "If you would help, I very much need to get inside that building..."
"Dammit, Trint," I rasped, able to talk a bit better now
that my lung had re-inflated, "I'm not going to let you do it. This is my responsibility..."
Our argument was interrupted by a coughing scream of turbojets as the Dutchman passed overhead, barely clearing the sphere of the control building and limping downward on one barely-functioning starboard engine. The whole port aft section of the ship was mangled and glowing with thermal energy from a direct hit by one of the Skrela weapons and I knew just from looking at it that it wouldn't be leaving atmosphere without the benefit of a fully-equipped repair hangar.
The landing gear was extended and the Dutchman fishtailed towards the soft soil just off the pavement, coming down quickly, as if Deke was worried it wouldn't stay in the air much longer. The ship listed hard as the port belly jets sputtered fitfully, and landed with a crash of crushing metal, carbon and polymer as the port rear landing gear collapsed under the stress of the hard touchdown. A spray of soil erupted from the grounded edge of the delta shaped craft and a few small grassfires flared up around it even as it finally shuddered to a halt.
"Jesus," Pete breathed, saving me the effort of cursing.
Deke, I transmitted, are you okay?
There was no reply for a long moment and I discovered I was holding my breath.
Hold on. The reply was curt and uninformative, but at least he was alive.
Another few seconds passed and finally the cutter's utility airlock door opened just behind the cockpit. The belly ramp was half-buried in the dirt and unusable, and the utility lock was the only other way out. Kara appeared in the doorway first, lowering herself gingerly the two meters to the ground and wincing as she limped a step away from the ship. Deke was next and he jumped down without any visible pain; but then again, he was a Glory Boy and wouldn't show pain anyway.
"Can we all get in that building?" Deke asked me as the two of them made their way to us. "Does it have any defenses?"
