by Richard Fox
“I am on the reactor,” the Karigole said.
Elias’ cameras came back online and he zoomed in on the ever-more distant reactor. “You’re where?
“We were in a hurry, and it seemed prudent to remain with the reactor and the control stations. Excellent. I see the recovery Mule on approach with the net already deployed. I’m going to stop the rotation with my jet pack. One moment.”
Elias saw flares from Lafayette’s jet pack push against the spinning reactor, slowing it.
“Out, everyone out,” Elias said. He activated his jet pack and flew toward MacDougall. He scooped the sailor up in his arms and landed on the cube’s surface.
“Gall, this is Armor. Ready for pick up,” Elias said into the IR net. He could see one of the Mules stopped next to the reactor, IR-guided thrusters wrapping a carbon fiber–and-graphite net around the alien technology.
“Armor, this is Mule three. Gall took the rest of the flight planet-side to get the ground pounders soon as the shit storm started,” the Mule pilot said.
“How did you know about the Toth in the cube? We were out of IR contact,” Elias said.
“The what? Look at the Crucible. We’ve got to get the hell out of here,” the pilot said.
Elias found the Crucible beneath the planet’s south pole. Light burned from its center. He zoomed in and saw dozens of black dots emerging through the light. Xaros drones. Hundreds more by the minute.
“Mule three, you have the precious cargo secured?” Elias asked.
“Roger. That cyborg friend of yours just jumped on our cargo bay.”
“Burn back to the Breitenfeld now. We’ll get back on our own,” Elias said.
“You don’t have to tell me twice. Good luck down there.” The pilot cut the transmission and Elias saw its afterburners flare against the void.
“Oye, how the hell am I supposed to get back?” MacDougall asked.
Elias looked down at the sailor, who stood at his feet, arms on his hips. “Oops.”
“‘Oops?’ ‘Oops!’ Are you a tin man in need of a brain instead of a heart?” MacDougall took a wrench off his belt and hurled it at Elias’ head. It bounced off his forehead and tumbled into space.
“Did you forget about him?” Kallen asked on a private channel.
“A little,” Elias sent back.
“Need I remind ye that I’ve got six hours of rad exposure left in this suit until I start pissing neon for the rest of my shortened lifespan?”
“Hold on,” Elias said to the angry mechanic. “Breitenfeld, this is Armor. Mission accomplished. Can you send a pickup for our specialist?” The only answer was a hiss of static.
“Kallen, report in. My IR to the buoys might be down.” Elias ran a diagnostic on his comms system, which came back optimal.
“I’ve got nothing,” she said.
“But we could talk to the Mule,” Bodel said.
“We had line of sight on that.” Elias tapped at the side of his transmitter. “We’re on the buoy net. It’s almost like we’re being jammed.”
“While you’re trying to call tech support, my nuts are shriveling away,” MacDougall said.
“Take your mag liners off your boots and put them on your forearm mounts. I’ll attach you to my chest and you’ll have to hang on like a remora,” Elias said.
MacDougall grumbled and put his right foot across his left thigh.
“‘Join the navy,’ they said. ‘It’ll be fun,’ they said.” He unlatched the lining from his heel and held up an admonishing finger toward Elias. “And one more thing … bloody hell—what is that?”
Elias looked up and saw a massive spaceship wavering in and out of existence. Its pearlescent hull looked like it had been fashioned from the inside of a sea conch. Windows and open hangars dotted the side. Elias made out jagged weapon mounts and a focusing crystal the size of a Mule on a laser cannon slung beneath the ship’s prow.
“So that’s where the Toth came from,” Bodel said.
“Looks like there’s a dogfight in atmo,” Kallen said. She pointed to flashes of red Xaros disintegration beams flitting against blue flashes of energy from Toth fighters.
Elias zoomed in and a glimpse of a Mule and Eagle crossed the bottom of his vision. He scanned around until he found them again and saw the energy of a green tractor beam connecting them to a Toth fighter on course to the ship. A gunner was slumped over in the Mule’s upper turret ball.
“They’ve got prisoners,” Elias said. He watched as the tractor beams from the Toth spaceship grabbed the human planes and brought them into the maw of a hangar.
CHAPTER 12
Hale snapped awake, struggling to breathe. His lungs refused to inhale and he gawped like a fish as he tried to move his hands. A breath finally came to him, the smell of heavy oil permeating every breath. He tried to look around, but everything was a blur.
His arms were held up and away from him, his legs at wide angles, turning his body in to a giant X.
“Anybody?” he said. The last thing he remembered was the Toth fighter coming at his ship, Durand’s Eagle behind it with a blazing white tractor beam. There’d been a flash from the Toth, then an electrical storm. He wondered if that was what it was like to be hit by a Q-shell. He felt like every college hangover he’d ever had compressed into one miserable experience.
“Sir? That you?” Hale heard Orozco’s voice.
“Yes. Who else is here?”
“I can’t see too good, and I feel like hammered shit.”
Hale pulled at his restraints, but whatever was wrapped around his hands was solid. He heard a woman’s groan, Durand.
His vision stayed blurred. He couldn’t make out anything but his own body and an outline of someone trussed up like he was across from him.
“You remember what happened?” Hale asked.
“I was locked in my turret. Saying a Hail Mary when the ship’s electrical tried to fry me.”
“I don’t think it was the Mule. We’re not on the Breitenfeld. Xaros don’t take prisoners. We must be on the Toth ship,” Hale said.
“If we’re prisoners of war, guess I should stop calling you ‘sir,’ eh?” During wars on Earth, captured officers were more often subject to torture and separated from the men and women they were supposed to lead. Hale had a feeling he’d find out how the Toth treated prisoners pretty soon.
“Ken?” Durand asked meekly. He heard her spit. “Ken, what have I got myself into?”
A door slid open and hot, fetid air blew into the room. A tall shape came in, deep orange in color. The door closed and Hale’s vision improved.
He blinked hard and saw a cylindrical tank supported by six mechanical legs. Slowly, what was in the tank came into focus. It was a misshapen brain, and a thick spinal column dotted with bone spurs ran down the tank. Long nerves floated in the tank like columns of seaweed buffeted by tide. This must be a Toth overlord, Hale thought.
“Meat, language zero,” a modulated voice came from the tank. The tank crab walked over to the person bound across from Hale, one of the pilots from his Mule. A mechanical arm extended from beneath the tank, a thick red-stained needle attached to it. The needle split open, revealing dirty filaments. “Language, one.”
The arm lifted over the pilot’s head and the filaments crept through the pilot’s hair.
“What’re you doing? Stop!” Hale struggled against his restraints.
The filaments went rigid and plunged into the pilot’s skull. The pilot jerked his head up as his eyes opened and rolled back in his head. The filaments gloved like hot electric wires. The pilot collapsed and the wires extracted, leaving behind blood spots on his skull.
The nervous system in the tank shuddered, nerves lashing against the edge of the tank like it was in the throes of sexual pleasure.
“Exquisite,” came from the tank, the voice matching the pilot’s. “But … not the taste I was expecting. That was fuller, natural. I thought you all would be false minds. You ….” One of the tank’s mechan
ical arms jabbed at Hale. “That meat remembers you as an officer. Hero of … Crucible. You have a Xaros gate, how fascinating. Tell me why the meat on the planet had false minds but his was true.”
The nervous system in the tank formed into the outline of a six-legged Toth warrior as it spoke to him. A face leaned toward Hale.
Hale didn’t answer—out of spite and because he had no idea what the overlord was talking about.
“Strange, strange yes. Some motivation, perhaps?” the overlord said. The restraints holding the dead pilot lifted the corpse away and a panel on the wall flipped around. The Mule’s co-pilot, a blond woman Hale remembered seeing in the ship’s gym, floated toward the overlord.
The co-pilot screamed when she saw the overlord and tried to pull an arm from the cap over her hand.
“Yes, scream. The fear changes the taste,” the overlord said. “Hale-meat, explain how your species creates false minds. Does your ship have the technology aboard?”
The co-pilot babbled in German, thrashing against her restraints.
“Tell me, or I will drink from this one to learn more.” The overlord’s needle arm touched the co-pilot’s thigh and ran up her body.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. What do you mean by false minds?” Hale asked.
“The minds I drank on Anthalas, they were shallow. A false front over nothingness.” A Toth word came through the speakers. “Perhaps I lack the words. Let’s see if she has them for me.”
The co-pilot’s screams cut off as the tendrils jabbed through her skull. Her body went stiff then as limp as a cloth doll.
“No, she doesn’t know either.” The overlord extracted the needle and returned it beneath his tank. “Such a monumental achievement, yet they both knew nothing. I will ask you again, Hale-meat. How does your species create the false minds and the weed hosts? The Toth will trade for this knowledge, give you everything the Alliance and the Qa’Resh are withholding from you. We would even stand beside you when the Xaros return to your system.”
Hale spat on the tank.
“A curious gesture. Let’s consult another.” The overlord’s outline reached out and touched an unseen control. A panel on the ceiling swung around, and a bound and gagged Steuben floated down to take the co-pilot’s place. The caps around Steuben’s hands and arms were twice the size of Hale’s, but they still gave way as Steuben struggled.
“A Karigole in the wild, what a treat. I could sell this one on my world for a billion slaves. The supply has been dry for so long since we overindulged ourselves. Not all of us had the wisdom to prolong what this meat could give us. Such a shame, but that is the price of excess.” The restraint on Steuben’s mouth parted and Steuben growled at the overlord, hate burning in his eyes.
“Tell me, Karigole, how are the humans creating false minds? Or don’t tell me. Give me an excuse to drink from you. It might be worth the loss in trade for the pleasure—and what I could learn.”
Steuben breathed heavily, his teeth bared.
“Eh?” The overlord’s outline looked up, then the outline broke away as the nerves went loose. “Seems it’s time to negotiate with someone a bit more senior.” The door opened and the overlord left.
“Steuben, what the hell was that? What does it want from us?” Hale asked.
“The Toth are broken. At some point in their past, they meddled too deeply with their genetic code to try to preserve their lives indefinitely. They found a way to keep their nervous systems going, but they had to feed off the other sentient lives to do it. The process was addictive, drove the ones rich enough to afford the conversion mad with cravings. They learned that an older, more developed mind gave them a bigger high when they ‘drank’ from it.
“The overlords consumed their own species to the edge of extinction, then they began cloning the ones that remained. The system was imperfect, and they grew weaker with every generation. Then the Alliance found them.” Steuben shook his head. “They helped the Toth get off their world, stabilized the decline in cloning and helped them grow stronger. The Qa’Resh thought the Toth would become the army for the Alliance.
“The Karigole used to ostracize addicts, for they could never truly be trusted. The Toth came to our world to incorporate us into their war machine. We are longed-lived; many of our elders were over a thousand human years old. We were a temptation too great for the Toth to ever resist. I and the rest of the cohort were off world when they finally turned against the planet. I don’t think they meant to … consume all of us. They must have lost control, binged on my species.”
“How many of you are left?” Hale asked.
“We never settled other worlds, and my all-male cohort was the only group to survive. There are four of us left, Lieutenant. Four, where once we were hundreds of millions. Four. You asked me what Ghul’thul’ghul means. It means, ‘I will not be the last.’”
****
Captain Valdar tapped at the control panels on his armrest, counting down the seconds until the extraction Mules were scheduled to clear the moon and report that they had the Marines and Rangers he’d sent to the planet’s surface.
He wanted to get up and pace, but under combat conditions the captain’s place was strapped into his command chair.
“Spotters? Anything?” he asked.
“Negative, sir. Still have thirty seconds to go,” Ericsson said.
Valdar swiped down a contact list and called Lafayette.
“Is that giant lump of alien tech going to blow us up when we hit the wormhole?” he asked the Karigole, his icon showing him on the flight deck next to the Omnium reactor.
“No, Captain. The engines project a pocket of real space around the ship. The jump will be just as safe as we are right now,” Lafayette said.
“We haven't had the best of luck when it comes to strange new engines on this ship. Now lock that reactor down tighter than Fort Knox and get off the flight deck. We’ve got birds coming in,” Valdar said.
“The birds will not loosen Fort Knix,” Lafayette said.
“Sir! Contact, one Eagle, one Mule inbound,” Utrecht said.
“One of each? Open a channel.” The communications officer sent him a thumbs-up. “This is Breitenfeld actual. Where is the rest of your flight?”
“This is Mule 1. Mule 2 was damaged. Gall stayed back to cover them. We lost contact a few minutes ago,” Choi Ma said.
Valdar’s hands clenched into fists. Who was on the incoming Mule? Who had he lost now?
“Breitenfeld, we’ve got a serious Xaros problem. The Crucible is open and they are pouring through,” Ma said.
“How many?”
“All of them!”
“Get back here at best speed.” Valdar cut the transmission and pointed to the engineering officer.
“I know where your missing planes are,” came over the IR. “Want to see them?”
Valdar looked at the communications officer, who shrugged her shoulders.
“It’s coming in through our buoys, sir,” she said.
“Valdar. Captain. Breitenfeld. Your name was prominent in their minds. You are who I can deal with,” the Toth overlord said.
“Who is this?” Valdar asked. He scrawled out a message on his forearm computer ordering the ship around the moon once the remaining Eagle and Mule had landed and sent it to the astronavigation ensign.
“You will not have my name. Meat does not learn Toth names. Meat cannot bargain with Toth, but the Xaros are here and they are getting closer. Meat can exchange with Toth and leave,” the overlord said. “A good bargain for meat.”
“Do you have my people?” Valdar asked.
“Some live. Some don’t,” the overlord said. Valdar heard a tapping sound come through with his transmission. “Their meat helps us speak. Fair. Fair. You will give us the engine. You will give us the meat with the high mind. You will give us the secret to your meat with false minds and weed bodies.”
Valdar sent a text message to the communications officer, telling her to c
heck the Toth’s transmission for Morse code. The tapping was too fast and controlled to be transmission static.
The Breitenfeld lurched as the engines fired.
“How about you return my people unharmed and I won’t blow you out of space?” Valdar asked.
A savage growl filled the speakers.
“Meat will give us the false minds and weed bodies. Now. Or I will taste your mind, Valdar, know what you will not bargain,” the overlord said.
The communications officer rolled her hand forward several times, wanting Valdar to keep him talking.
“Toth, we may have a different term for the ‘false minds and weed bodies.’ Can you explain it better?”
“Minds of lies. False images over shallow souls. Bodies not born of females. Bartlett was false mind and weed body. Crenshaw was false mind and weed body. False minds! Weed bodies! You will give this to me now. Now!”
“Enemy contact, dead ahead!” the gunner officer announced.
Valdar looked through the portals and saw the Toth ship as it came around the moon. Its bulbous hull was pearlescent and refracted light into waves along its hull. Valdar was mesmerized by its beauty, like it was some ancient sea creature come to life in the void.
A pen bounced off his visor. He looked over in the direction it came from and saw his comms officer gesturing madly at his forearm screen.
Valdar looked down and read “FIRE Q-SHELLS? RESCUE? IH” Valdar chewed at his lip, unsure if the Q-shells would even work on the Toth.
“Toth if you want to bargain. We need to—”
A bolt of blue light lanced out of the Toth ship and flashed over the Breitenfeld’s hull.
“Damage report! Anti-aircraft turret two not responding,” the XO said.
At the prow of the ship, a burning mass of metal marked where one of the many gauss cannon batteries used to be. Five sailors crewed that station.
“Meat. We are done with bargains. Give me the false minds,” the overlord said.
“Toth, if we gave that to you, we’d have to have iron hearts and fire in our bellies,” Valdar said, hoping the Iron Hearts would pick up on his hint before the Toth fired again.
