VOR 02 The Payback War

by Smedman, Lisa

  “Where are you taking it?” the Union officer asked.

  “There’s a stream nearby,” Alexi said. “I’m going to chip a hole in the ice and drop the growler into it. That should force it into suspended animation, just like a cryotank.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Alexi paused. How did he know it would work—or how did he know there was a stream nearby? He didn’t have the answer to either question. “Follow me if you like,” he told her. “Or stay here. I don’t care.”

  Picking his way through the forest by moonlight, he set out into the falling snow.

  25

  Let’s move out,” Juliana said. “It’s too cold to stand around talking, fascinating though this conversation might be. I’ll take point.”

  She trudged past the place where Alexi and the blue-skinned alien stood in the snow. Alexi started whispering to himself, then suddenly realized that he was counting her steps.

  Five . . . six . . . seven . . .

  What was the unlucky number? Alexi didn’t know—he just knew there was one.

  Ten . . . eleven . . . twelve . . .

  Raheek started to follow Juliana. The pair of them would be hidden behind the trees soon.

  The trees.

  Alexi glanced to his right and saw a tree that was bare of snow, its trunk gouged by . . .

  Without knowing why, he lifted his AK-51 and pulled the trigger, firing a short burst. The response was instantaneous: shouts from up ahead—and then Juliana and Raheek came running back, pistol drawn and blade-tipped staff held at the ready.

  “What’s wrong?” Juliana asked.

  “There’s a growler nearby,” Alexi said. “A big one. Adult.”

  “How do you know this?” Raheek asked.

  Alexi pointed to the tree. “It left a trail in the snow,” he said. “And it chewed on that tree.”

  Juliana gave him a skeptical look, then trudged across the unbroken snow to the tree for a closer look. When she returned, she shook her head.

  “I thought you said your eyesight wasn’t very good,” she said. “How could you see something so far away in such detail?”

  Alexi couldn’t answer. He hadn’t seen it. He had just known.

  Raheek hadn’t moved. The alien stared thoughtfully at Alexi. “You have traveled this path before,” it said. “And you will travel it again.”

  Juliana glanced nervously around. “Alexi can take point,” she decided. “Since he knows so much about growlers.”

  Alexi nodded. Yes, it made sense that he go first. He knew . . .

  Something that they did not, but that they would find out soon enough. And there was a surprise for him, too. He could sense it just behind him, as real as the weight of the backpack on his shoulders.

  He set off along the trail, Raheek and Juliana following a short distance behind. He was still counting footsteps.

  Thirty-three . . . thirty-four . . . thirty-five . . .

  He glanced around at the snow, at the forest, somehow recognizing this spot. That tree, with the forked branch. This was where Juliana would draw her pistol and take him prisoner . . .

  Nothing happened. They passed the spot and kept walking. He kept his eyes on the ground, once again counting the footprints Raheek had left in the snow. He didn’t need to look up, even when Juliana gasped. He already knew what he’d see: a gigantic tetrahedron, balanced on its point in the forest.

  Forty-six . . . forty-seven . . .

  Alexi was starting to sweat. But not from the tension that was winding ever tighter inside him like a trap about to spring shut. His back was uncomfortably warm, under the flak jacket. The backpack didn’t weigh much, but it certainly was making him sweat.

  Fifty-seven . . . fifty-eight . . .

  Was the backpack actually getting warmer? Or was that just Alexi’s imagination?

  Sixty-one . . . sixty-two . . .

  Alexi jerked to a halt in the snow. Something was wrong. He’d never seen this part of the forest before—he was certain of it. Yet he had the soldier’s sixth sense that danger lay just ahead. Was it a growler, hiding in the woods?

  As if in answer to Alexi’s thought, the silence of the forest was shattered by an unmistakable sound: a cross between a lion’s roar and a buzz saw’s metallic whine. Juliana and Raheek froze in their tracks.

  In the second or two of stillness that followed, Alexi heard a faint whirring noise from behind the trees up ahead. In that same instant, he spotted a branch moving.

  No—not a branch. The barrel of a machine gun, swinging their way.

  “Take cover!” he screamed, and threw himself face forward into the snow.

  Bullets whined through the air over their heads as the others followed suit. Chips of bark and pine needles rained down upon them as the machine gun cut a swath through the forest. Alexi crawled into the shelter of one of the thicker tree trunks, and shrugged out of the backpack. If that was a machine-gun nest, one of the frag grenades he was carrying would be just the ticket.

  He reached in to pull one out, shouting in Russian as he did so. There was a slim chance that they were being targeted by friendly fire. And if it wasn’t friendlies up ahead—if those were Union soldiers behind that machine gun, shouting wouldn’t hurt. They were already shooting at him, anyway.

  “Cease fire, tovarish!” he called. “We’re friendly.”

  Then he froze, as his hand slid deeper into the backpack. He’d been right—there was something warm in there. Something he recognized by its metallic but flexible feel.

  With great trepidation, he pulled an infant growler from the backpack. The thing was still tied hand and foot with the microphone cord, but it was squirming. Tiny puffs of sulfuric steam seeped from the blow holes in its back.

  Alexi stared at it in amazement. What idiot had put it in his pack?

  Suddenly, Alexi knew the answer: he had. He just couldn’t remember when, or why. And now, if his instinct about the growlers being able to communicate telepathically with one another was correct, this infant would be calling to all adult growlers within range to rescue it.

  The roaring noise—closer now—confirmed Alexi’s fears.

  He left the infant growler in the snow and crawled back to where Juliana and Raheek were. They had fallen back and were crouched behind a clump of trees. As Alexi reached them, dragging his backpack in the snow, the machine gun fell silent.

  “Who are they?” Alexi panted. He looked at Juliana. “Ours—or yours?”

  “It has to be one of ours,” she said. “An automated weapon. A long-range rocket drone, judging by that jet burn.”

  Alexi looked up at the spot she was pointing to. Just above the spot where the machine gun must be, the treetops were broken and scorched.

  “I’ve got more bad news,” Alexi said, glancing back at the spot where he’d left the tiny growler. But he didn’t need to tell them what it was. This time, the growler’s roar was only a few hundred meters away.

  Juliana blanched and turned to run. But Raheek caught her hand. “Stay still,” it hissed. It wrapped its other hand around Alexi’s arm, overlong fingers closing around his wrist. “Wait.”

  Alexi wasn’t sure what happened next. Raheek began chanting, and suddenly the world blurred around them. A barrier of swirling, ghostly figures surrounded the three of them, howling with alien voices that turned Alexi’s guts to water. Shuddering, he tore his eyes away. But then a sudden motion outside the barrier made him look up.

  Trees fell to either side as a growler crashed through the forest. Beside him, Alexi felt Juliana quail at the sight—and felt a certain satisfaction, knowing that she was reacting with the same intensity of terror that he had first felt when confronted by her heavy-assault suit. The growler, which had a row of spikes down its back and a gigantic twisting horn emerging from its forehead, opened a gaping mouth that reminded Alexi of the tyrannosaurus models he’d played with as a child. Then the creature began to cough. Alexi clutched his chest, vividly imagining how the w
ad of phlegm would eat through his armored jacket and into his flesh. He had a horrible feeling that he, Raheek, and Juliana were about to die a terrible, lingering death. . . .

  And then the howling of the barrier that surrounded Alexi intensified. Although Raheek was still holding his wrist in a vise-firm grip, Alexi forced his hands up to cover his ears and lent his own scream to the howling wail.

  A tremble ran through the growler. It backed away. Then it spun on one heel and loped for the place where the infant lay.

  The blue-skinned hand that was holding Alexi’s arm began to tremble. “I can’t . . . continue the barrier much . . . longer,” the alien moaned. The red flecks in its eyes were starting to fade. “If the growler . . . returns . . .”

  Alexi had a sudden premonition that they were going to be fine. That everything was going just as he’d planned and that they would survive this.

  Suddenly, Raheek collapsed. The magical barrier fell. Juliana’s eyes opened—and widened in fear when she saw Raheek lying in the snow. They widened still more when the growler roared from just behind the trees, a sound that shook Alexi’s guts like a water-filled bag. It hadn’t run far.

  “Don’t worry,” Alexi shouted over the ringing in his ears. “It’s here to collect the infant. And when it goes after the little one, it will—”

  Gunfire erupted. The growler roared a challenge back.

  Alexi smiled.

  Perfect. He’d left the infant growler lying just within range of the drone. And now the growler was attacking it. Alexi heard the familiar cough—and the splat of a wad of phlegm against a hard surface. In that same moment, he also heard the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of multiple minirockets being launched. There was a terrific explosion . . .

  And then silence. The only sounds were the faint cracklings of tree branches that had been set on fire by the blast. And the soft thud of chunks of growler flesh falling back into the snow.

  Raheek groaned and sat up. Alexi extended a hand. The alien’s double-jointed arm snaked out, and its hand fastened once more around Alexi’s wrist.

  Alexi looked at the inverted pyramid, which lay just a short distance ahead. “Come on,” he told the alien. “I have a feeling the drone’s out of commission now. Let’s get a closer look at this bomb you’ve been telling us about.”

  26

  Alexi stared at his reflection in the surface of the crystal. Its perfectly smooth gray wall was polished to a dull sheen. Snowflakes struck its sloped surface above and slid down the side. As they slid across Alexi’s reflection, it wavered like an image on a faulty monitor screen.

  Staring back at him were haunted blue eyes circled with dark shadows. In the past few days he had seen too much, had been forced to make too many decisions. He’d earned the yellow leitenant stripe on the shoulder of his newly acquired armored combat jacket, even if it wasn’t an official promotion.

  Alexi scratched the stubble on his chin. His whiskers were as fair as his hair, a birch white blond. The other soldiers in the rad squad had always teased him whenever he tried to grow a beard, asking if he was trying to look older than his students. But they wouldn’t be teasing him any more.

  Neither would anybody else, ever again, if this thing went off.

  Alexi pondered the fickleness of fate. Of the six men and women in his platoon, only he had survived. The rest were all dead now.

  He laughed. Now. A funny word, that. It had become slippery in the last few days. A fish that slithered out of your hand whenever you grabbed it. In a very real sense, his comrades were still alive. Still fighting, and suffering, and dying . . .

  And so was Alexi. But hopefully, that nightmare would soon end.

  Alexi craned his head to look at the top of the structure. It balanced—impossibly—on its point like an upside-down pyramid. He blinked as the wind blew snow up into his eyes. The wall in front of him was a perfect equilateral triangle, rising from its pointed base to the height of a twenty-story building. A tetrahedral crystal, hard as a diamond. And like a diamond, it could be split, if only the jeweler knew where to place his chisel.

  And that chisel was . . .

  Alexi blinked as he suddenly realized that another chunk of time had gone missing. He looked down and saw Juliana attaching a vodka bottle to the base of the tetrahedron with white tape from the first-aid kit. A clear liquid sloshed back and forth inside the bottle, opaquing it from the inside. A harsh chemical smell rose from the mouth of the bottle. Alexi had smelled that odor somewhere before. He’d been in a close, dark place, and a growler had . . .

  Suddenly, his breathing was ragged. His chest felt tight—he must have been breathing in fumes from the chemicals in the bottle. He took a step back and waited until his breathing became steady again.

  “What are you doing?” he asked Juliana.

  She winked at him. “Bomb-disposal work. Lucky for us that the growler vomited up the one thing that will do the job.”

  When she’d finished taping the bottle in place, she stood and took his arm. “Come on. It’s nearly eaten through the glass. We don’t want to be standing anywhere near it when it topples.”

  They jogged away from the tetrahedron, leaving the bare ground that it shadowed and wading into the knee-deep snow. Alexi was careful not to turn his back on the thing; he couldn’t shake the feeling that the tetrahedron was watching him.

  He nearly tripped over something that was lying in the snow, something soft and yielding. He looked down and was amazed to see Raheek. The alien was lying unconscious on its back, partially covered by a dusting of fallen snow.

  Alexi looked up at Juliana. Without understanding how, he knew that she was responsible. “How—?”

  Just at that moment, the alien’s eyes fluttered open. At first they were as puzzled and uncomprehending as Alexi’s. But then they widened in alarm. The alien struggled to sit up, then froze in place as the bottle attached to the inverted pyramid splintered with a faint cracking noise.

  Raheek stared at the broken bottle. Then it looked up at Juliana. “You should have listened to me,” it said. “But now—”

  A loud hissing filled the air as hydrofluoric acid flowed from the ruined vodka bottle. The acid ate into the point on which the tetrahedron balanced, obscuring it with a cloud of vapor. Alexi and Juliana both tensed. Any moment now, the base of the inverted pyramid would shear off, causing the tetrahedron to fall . . .

  And then the hissing suddenly stopped. There was no shuddering crack, no loud splinter of stone as the crystal split apart. No crash as it fell to earth. Just acid dribbling to the ground and a faint fog of vapor drifting gently around its smooth, unblemished point.

  The acid hadn’t eaten the crystal at all—just the glass bottle. Alexi stood, fists on hips, staring back at the structure. Why hadn’t it . . .

  A spot of color appeared on the surface of one smooth gray wall, and a loud electronic humming filled the air. Alexi had only time to frown—

  And then a jagged bolt of lightning lanced from the tetrahedron. Blown off his feet as the bolt hit his chest, Alexi’s shattered consciousness somehow registered the fact that the lightning had forked in three, its other deadly tongues licking out at Raheek and Juliana as well.

  Hurled through the air, chest on fire with burning agony, finger-sized bolts of lightning shooting out of his hands as the wash of high-amperage energy sought a ground, Alexi smelled burning flesh and ozone. He observed with dizzy wonder that he had been blasted right out of his boots. His vision purpled as his heart fluttered in his chest, its natural rhythm overwhelmed. He landed against a tree with a thud that would have produced a shock of agony had his mind not been occupied by one overwhelming, terrifying thought.

  I am dying . . .

  Juliana lay a few meters away, her neck twisted at an impossible angle, her eyes glazed.

  I am dying . . .

  The alien lay to the other side of Alexi, its blue skull cracked open and unpleasant-smelling smoke wisping from its charred brains.

  I am
. . .

  Alexi’s heart stopped. The thought in his head completed itself. But somehow it became a question, rather than a statement of fact.

  dead?

  27

  They found the remains of the combat drone by the sizzling noise. The growler’s highly corrosive acid had eaten right through the steel armor that protected the drone’s turret, leaving a steaming, bubbling hole in the metal. The machine gun pointed up at the sky at a crazy angle, and exhaust still swirled inside the rocket tubes that had risen in neat columns on either side of the drone. The heat of the rocket’s minijets had melted the snow, exposing the ring of soft earth that had formed around the drone when it dug itself in and that was now turning to mud.

  Chunks of growler lay here and there, scattered across the forest. A viscous, almost-clear liquid had splattered over a wide area; the trees all around the drone were dripping with the stuff. Wherever it had landed, the bark and needles of the trees were eaten away. A heavy, acidic odor hung in the air.

  The severed head of the growler lay cradled on a tree limb. Even though it was an alien—a monstrous creature—the thought of decapitation made Alexi shudder. And for good reason: had the drone torn one of them to pieces with its rockets, it might have been Alexi’s head resting on that branch. Or Raheek’s. Or Juliana’s . . .

  He prodded the growler head with the barrel of his AK-51, lifting the thing’s lip and staring at the rows of razor-sharp teeth. A dribble of saliva slid from the monster’s mouth.

  Raheek caught Alexi’s arm and gently pulled the barrel of the assault rifle away from the growler’s head. Alexi saw that the metal was already beginning to pit. “Be careful,” Raheek cautioned. “The glands will still be secreting acid. If the head falls, it will splash.”

  Juliana sniffed the air. “What kind of acid?” she asked. Alexi suddenly realized where he’d smelled that particular odor before—why it seemed so familiar to him, even though this was his first encounter with a growler that spat wads of acidic phlegm. In the arts-and-crafts room of the high school where he’d taught, they’d used an acid with exactly the same smell to etch glass.