by Richard Fox
The Marines moved on. Moments after they left, the remnants of the log Steuben threw into the corral rose from the mud and levitated a few inches in the air. The log floated through the fence, hovered at the edge of the grass line, and then were flung back into the surrounding forest.
****
Lieutenant Bartlett leapt over a fallen tree trunk and splashed through ankle-deep water. He slammed into a tree, fighting for breath. The Ranger raised his rifle and fired wild shots into the jungle behind him. A squeal rose through the fog.
Bartlett cursed and shrugged off the vines that tugged at his armor. They were still on him. The squeal cut off suddenly and Bartlett took off running.
“Hale! Breitenfeld!” Bartlett kept his IR transmitter open as he ran, praying someone could hear him. “We were ambushed by—” His foot hooked a root beneath the water and tripped him up. He twisted as he went down and landed with his back in the water. He fired off wild shots at loping shapes in the mist and got back to his feet.
The ground rumbled as something big ran toward him. Thumps through fog sounded like a herd of Clydesdales stampeding at him.
Bartlett set his rifle to high power. If a shot from this could take out a Xaros, it might put a dent in whatever he’d seen rip his soldiers to pieces.
“Come on,” Bartlett braced himself against the ground and fired into the mist. The high-powered shot twisted the fog with its passing vortex. The recoil hit him like a hammer blow, rocking him back. The rumbling grew closer.
A green light on his rifle flashed—ready for a second shot.
He readied his next shot, determined to see the creature before he killed it.
The rumbling died away. Bartlett glanced around, but the jungle was still.
There was a hiss behind him, deeper than the warning from a rattlesnake. Bartlett spun around and saw an enormous clawed hand an instant before it enveloped his face.
The blow knocked him horizontal. He squeezed the trigger on his weapon out of shock, sending the high-powered shot straight into the sky.
His world went black.
****
The Xaros drone orbiting beyond Anthalas’ atmosphere was one of many caretaker drones monitoring the planet. A net of drones had been in orbit since its fleet passed through this system thousands of years ago, all selected at random to oversee the planet’s realignment and gate construction and to maintain the vigil over the world.
In the thousand years that the drone had held its watch, there had been two incidents of note. The first, a rogue radio transmission detected from deep space that turned out to be nothing more than a primitive exploration probe sent by a species that conveniently included a celestial map leading back to their location. The drones replicated a force sufficient to overwhelm the planet and reported the annihilation through the jump gate—all as per their programming.
The second incident was the routine removal of a comet that would have impacted with Anthalas in 9,007 years. Again, as per their programming.
The drone compiled reports from the rest of the net, noted no discrepancies, and continued monitoring the planet’s surface. A routine check for emergent intelligent species was scheduled in exactly three hundred years. Its programming allowed for no deviation.
The drone’s infrared sensors registered a detection, a small object breaching the atmosphere. All small heat traces going down the planet’s gravity well were ignored. Meteorites fell into the atmosphere regularly and were of no consequence. But when an object burned through the air from the ground up, that was no random act of nature.
The drone traced the trajectory of Bartlett’s final shot back to the surface and awoke the rest of the drones around the planet. The drone sent an alert to the jump gate, where the message would be passed to an intelligence much higher than its own.
The black oblong shape orientated toward the planet’s surface and accelerated in that direction. The detection would be investigated and the full force of the Xaros around the planet would converge to aid in the search and annihilation mission. As per their programming.
CHAPTER 7
Bartlett fell to the ground, unable to see through his cracked visor. He tasted blood and his face ached from fractures along his jaw and around his right eye. His hands were bound beneath his knees and his armor had been stripped away. The sound of hissing snakes and guttural barks surrounded him.
“Bartlett? That you?” a familiar voice asked.
“Crenshaw?” Bartlett struggled to say the word through his swollen face.
“Yeah, I … I’m pretty sure the rest are dead. The little ones ripped them apart before that big one got to me,” the Ranger said.
“Don’t say a word about anything. Anyone. Understand?”
“Got it. We … oh, what the hell is that?” Crenshaw asked.
Bartlett heard the sound of hydraulics, growing louder with each mechanical whirr.
“Qabu,” the word boomed, trailed by a static hiss. “Lu qabu. Alaksu qabu!”
Crenshaw screamed, first from fear—a sound Bartlett knew from many battlefields. His scream then rose into a tortured wail, Bartlett’s protest drowned out by his soldier’s death cry.
Bartlett heard a body hit the ground. A mechanical claw grabbed him by the arm and sat him up. Something squeezed the sides of his helmet and yanked it from his shoulders.
There was a tank. Orange water bubbled within like it was boiling.
“Speak … meat.” The words came from the bottom of the tank. He looked down and saw mechanical legs propping the tank into the air.
“False mind. Shallow mind. Wrong, wrong, wrong,” came from the speakers. An arm unfolded from beneath the tank, and a spike covered in red blood poked Bartlett in the chest. “Wrong. How? How!”
“Go to hell,” Bartlett said.
“Taste. More taste. Yes.”
Mechanical arms snatched Bartlett by the shoulders and lifted him into the air. The bubbles within the tank lessened, and Bartlett saw what was inside.
His screams echoed through the jungle far longer than Crenshaw’s.
****
Three Mule drop ships and four Eagle fighters floated above Elias and Lafayette. A Mule lowered to the surface and dropped its rear ramp. A sailor in an armored space suit tried to walk down the ramp, carefully testing each step like a drunk trying to negotiate stairs.
“Oye! To hell with you, you big metal son of a bitch!” MacDougall shouted through the IR. “I’d break my foot off in your ass if I could kick through solid steel. Bring me out of my nice and snug Breitenfeld to go spelunking through some alien Rubik’s Cube.” His Scottish brogue loaned a certain air of poetry to his rant.
“I don’t understand what he’s saying,” Lafayette said.
“Neither do I, half the time,” Elias said.
“What’re you waiting for? Christmas? Come get these explosives out of the back of this Mule.” MacDougall pointed at a pallet load of plastic explosives and pre-molded shaped charges strapped into the Mule.
“Armor, this is flight leader Gall. I’m taking the ships to the moon side of the cube, the side you aren’t going to blow up, and latch on,” Durand said.
“Roger, Gall,” Elias said. “You’ll know when we’re done. Have the net ready so we can get the hell out of here.”
“That’s the plan,” Durand said.
Elias slid the pallet of explosives out of the Mule and carried them to the cube’s opening he’d torn open.
“You have the schematics I asked for?” Lafayette and MacDougall broke off into a technical discussion that Elias had neither the patience nor vocabulary to appreciate. Lafayette jumped over the opening and sent himself down with a burst from his maneuver thrusters, but MacDougall hesitated at the edge.
“Eh, wee bit dark in there,” the sailor said.
“Jump or be pushed,” Elias said.
“Just because you can crush me skull doesn’t mean I’ll let you bully me,” MacDougall said. Elias reached for the engineer. “OK!
OK! You can bully me, but I won’t like it.” He took a hesitant step over the hole and lost his balance. He floated over the opening, his arms pinwheeling.
“Ah, shit!”
Elias reached out and put the palm of his hand against MacDougall’s helmet and pushed him down.
Once they were all inside, they made their way to the engine room with only a minimal amount of complaining from MacDougall.
“We’ll need to set the shaped charges at these structure points,” Lafayette said, pointing to an Ubi slate. “I’ve got the other two soldiers already exposing—what is that?” The Karigole looked up at the air vent nestled into the corner of the passageway.
“What’s what?” MacDougall asked.
“There’s a vibration. You can’t feel it? In the air vent … and it’s coming this way,” Lafayette said. He pointed down the passageway.
“Get behind me,” Elias said. He felt the vibration that Lafayette spoke of and saw the air vent rattling as something moved through it toward them.
“I knew it,” MacDougall whispered. “Told Standish just as much. Soon as I ever set foot off the Breitenfeld something would try and eat my face. Now I’ll never get that last bottle of Glenfiddich.”
The rattling grew closer and Elias slammed his fist through the air duct. He punched his other arm through the thin metal and yanked a section of air duct holding whatever was in it from the wall. Elias pinned the section against the wall with his hip and peeled the metal open.
Inside was a creature in a flimsy space suit that looked like a gecko with an alligator’s uneven teeth. It clawed at Elias and convulsed, like a rat trying to wriggle out of a trap that failed to kill it.
“Toth!” Lafayette spat. He pulled his knife out and set the point against the creature’s throat. It froze, bulbous eyes locked on the knife blade.
Lafayette leaned forward, his lips pulled apart, revealing his own sharp teeth. The Karigole put his visor glass against the creature’s helmet and spoke. Sibilant words exchanged between the two of them, passing through where their helmets met.
“Kek kek kek,” came from the creature and into Lafayette’s IR. The creature made the same sounds, and Elias thought it was laughing.
Lafayette leaned back, raised the knife over his head and slashed the creature’s space suit. Air and yellow blood burst into the vacuum. The creature thrashed uselessly then went limp.
“Jesus Christ, Lafayette!” MacDougall shouted as he wiped at his visor frantically, trying to remove the drops of blood that hit it.
Elias flipped the metal air duct back over the creature and pinched the ends tight into a makeshift coffin. Blood seeped through the torn metal.
“Care to explain?” Elias asked.
“Toth. The Toth are here. I am such a fool. We never even considered that the gravity tides would open stable wormholes for them too. The math was there but I didn’t see it,” Lafayette said.
“Why did you kill it? Are there more? Did you just piss them all off too?” Elias asked.
“The menials are never alone. It must have come from one of the other cubes.” Lafayette knocked the blade against his thigh and slid it into the scabbard.
“You didn’t answer my questions,” Elias said.
“Lord have mercy, I shouldn’t be able to smell it but I swear that I do,” MacDougall said.
“The Toth are my enemy. The Karigole’s enemy. They will attack the moment they know you’re here, no diplomacy or discussion. Now, we need to hurry before the rest arrive,” Lafayette kicked the Toth’s body and hurried down the passageway.
****
A footpath cut through the mountains, wide enough for three Marines to walk abreast. Hale and his team stopped at an altered hill, half of it cut away. Slag of shattered rock lay strewn alongside the path, the limestone pattern of the detritus matching the striations visible within the bare rock within the exposed hill.
Cortaro stepped off the path and kicked at a rock. “Hey sir, check this out.”
Hale scanned the sky for Xaros before he stepped off the path, then came to where Cortaro stood, his feet straddling two boulders nearly a yard high and around. Cortaro pointed his muzzle at a circular hole in the rock.
“Looks like a Xaros disintegration hole,” Hale said.
“Except that it’s not,” Cortaro said. “You see those striations on the side? Those were made by a drill bit. Whoever made this path blew out the side of that hill with explosives, dynamite or something. My grandfather used to work the mines in Mexico. He used to take me to the old shafts, show me how they did the work. I’ve seen this exact thing on Earth.”
“You saying humans did this?” Hale asked.
“No, sir. The laws of physics are the same everywhere, right? Anyone does mining, eventually they’ll use explosives to blow rock up. Better than knocking away at it with a pick axe, right?”
“Lowenn,” Hale said to her through the IR. The air had cleared as their elevation increased. They still couldn’t raise the Breitenfeld or the IR buoys, but they could talk to each other over a few dozen yards like they were right next to each other. “Lowenn, assuming the Shanishol did this, why would a civilization that can cross the stars still use tech from our twentieth century?”
“Maybe they left it all behind on those cubes. Decided to live at a lower technological level on their path to eternal life like the message promised,” she said. “I know we run a risk of an equivalence fallacy by judging them to our cultural norms, but we don’t know enough about their base behavior patterns to make any informed comparisons.”
“I have no idea what she just said,” Standish said over the open net.
“She means the Shanishol ain’t us. Don’t think that they’re going to act like bluer, uglier human beings,” Yarrow said.
“Steuben, any of this make sense to you?” Hale asked. “You’ve been on Xaros worlds before.”
“I’ve been on one such world, uncivilized, and most of that mission was spent fleeing the drones once our presence was compromised,” the Karigole said. “There were a number of theories discussed on Bastion before our arrival on Earth. None fit the evidence I’ve seen.”
“Keep moving,” Hale said. “We should see the capital once we get to that next rise.”
“Face-first, as always,” Standish said.
“Standish!” Cortaro snapped. “You’re on talking profile. Don’t say another word unless you see something that can kill us.”
The lance corporal nodded vigorously under his new constraints.
****
One of the first places Stacey insisted on seeing after she arrived on Bastion was the cartography lab. As a naval astrogator and star watcher since before she could walk, delving into Bastion’s ancient databanks and star charts was a dream come true.
This trip to the laboratory had a different purpose than just the sheer joy of learning—she was there to test a hypothesis.
A platform, nothing more than a railing around a thin floor that Stacey thought was too flimsy to support any weight, extended into a tube-shaped room larger than any planetarium she’d ever been to on Earth. Stacey cracked her knuckles and shook her hands out.
“Chuck, show me a galactic map with a frontline trace of known and projected Xaros positions,” she said.
The station answered her request instantly. A red shadow spread over the spiral arms of the Milky Way, encroaching on the last part of the galaxy still free from the Xaros’ touch.
“Show me known Crucible gate locations and Xaros invasion fleets.” Hundreds of stars lit up as Bastion plotted where Alliance members had seen the interstellar gates built during the drones’ long march across the galaxy. Invasion routes, blood-red arrows stabbing toward inhabited systems, represented groups of drones numbering in the hundreds of billions strong. There were fifteen known invasion fleets, including the one that had bulldozed over humanity decades ago.
“Zoom in on Earth.” Earth remained an anomaly in the entire galaxy, the only place where
a Crucible gate was within Alliance control, and the only known inhabited planet behind Xaros lines.
“What are you doing?” a young woman’s voice asked.
Stacey glanced over her shoulder where she saw a woman in her early twenties with the dark complexion of someone from the Indian subcontinent standing at the edge of the platform, her hands folded over her waist.
“Thrag’shak’a’zont … no, it’s Thak’hath’a … damn it.”
“Darcy.” The woman waved a hand dismissively. Without the conversion field, she looked like a well-muscled manatee with long fingers instead of flippers and feeder tentacles instead of a mouth. Her species would be nicknamed “the Cthulhu” within a few minutes of meeting humanity anywhere but Bastion.
“Darcy, hello. Testing a theory. Care to help?”
“Always.” She walked up next to Stacey and put her hand to her chin. “What are we looking for?”
“A pattern and a reason,” she said to Darcy. “Bastion, show me where we still have spy probes and their effective collection range.” A few dozen points spread up from free space and around the galactic core toward the other end of the galaxy.
“The farther the probe, the older the data,” Darcy said. Despite all the Alliance’s advancements, it had yet to find a way to transmit data faster than the speed of light. The only way it could coordinate action from the member worlds was by sending ambassadors to and from Bastion back to their home worlds with information and instructions.
“Show me a chart on worlds with known Crucibles on a habitability scale,” Stacey said. A bar graph appeared with almost all the data points massed into a single column; shorter bars were on either side of the tall column. A few gates were in each data point, some containing only one or two. “So, the Crucibles go up on worlds like Earth. Oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide atmospheres, in the Goldilocks’ Zone for liquid water. Bastion, remove data points for star systems where planetary realignment rings are in use.”
