Live Echoes

by Henry V. O'Neil

  “They’re destroying it.” Merkit spoke in awe. “And where did all the others go?”

  “Show me the ground around that crater.” Reena ordered, and the view changed after a few keystrokes. Leaving small clouds of dust, the other workers from the shaft were rushing across the open much like the worm that had killed itself. “Where are they going?”

  “Their azimuth will take them to the nearest ruins, ma’am,” the technician responded. “Incubators, I mean.”

  “What about the other craters?” Fingers flew across the consoles, tightening in on different holes but showing no surface activity near them.

  “Forget the holes,” Merkit ordered. “Show us the incubators.”

  At first the empty plain over the buried stones appeared inactive, and the different monitors flashed and flickered as each image changed. Suddenly, a voice called over the speakers.

  “Look at the ruins near Crater Nine!” The image appeared on the largest screen a moment later, and the entire room went silent.

  Numerous sinkholes seemed to be appearing on the dead gray ground. First they resembled black pinpricks that grew into large dots, and then they collapsed inward. Reena’s face was squinching up in puzzlement when one of the cave-ins burst upward in a shower of dirt, broken rock, and fragments of what looked like a golden honeycomb. The explosion resembled a tornado for a moment, but as the broken materials flew away the tubular body of an enormous worm came into resolution. Towering higher and higher, it slowly came to a stop in the air before turning and heaving its entire length down onto the surface.

  The ground fractured and collapsed all around the strike, a giant fissure running away from the worm as it extended hundreds of arms and started burrowing in a frenzy. Other holes likewise erupted, revealing even larger caterpillars. They smashed the dirt with their elongated bodies, and then dug right back among the buried stones. Rock flew everywhere, and in one instant Reena was sure she saw the gaping maw of one of the beasts chewing up the honeycomb.

  “What is that golden material? Is it food?”

  “No, ma’am.” A different technician stared at lines of data rolling across a console screen. “It almost exactly matches the scans for the moth-things. They must have been asleep inside them.”

  “What do you know?” Reena turned to Merkit, astonished. “Ewing was right. They are incubators.”

  “And the workers are destroying them.” Merkit snapped his fingers. “When the aliens came out to fight us, it must have broken whatever hold they had on their slaves. They’re wrecking everything in sight.”

  As if to confirm that, the screens showed similar carnage at other locations. The unremarkable terrain hiding the stones was exploding with geysers of rock, honeycomb, and caterpillars, and then the heat signatures of the swarm flew into view at one of them. A giant red cloud, it converged on the worms destroying the incubators.

  “It’s not working.” Merkit shouted. “Look at them! They’re ignoring the moths. They just keep on smashing and chomping away.”

  “General.” Reena grasped his sleeve. “Order the evacuation. Get all of our people out.”

  “Will you look at that?” Lightfoot crowed from the far side of the perimeter. “Those worm things are tearing up the town!”

  “They don’t seem to like the ruins any more than we do,” Legacy offered. “Captain Varick, maybe we should get out of here before one of those wrecking crew pays us a visit?”

  “Hang on.” Tin ordered. “The shuttles are coming in. The moths have their hands full with the caterpillars, so it’s a full-on evacuation. Get ready to move.”

  “Can we leave these hunks of junk behind?” Dellmore asked, and Ayliss looked over at the silent monitor they’d been guarding. A moment later its dull dome lit up with a deep blue light, and a blast of electronic beeping and twittering came through her helmet.

  “Hey, anybody else getting that?” Cusabrina called. “My hunk of junk just turned on.”

  On the Aurora, Reena was trying not to clap her hands as the screens showed shuttle after shuttle touching down and flying out with squads of Banshees and Spartacans. The carnage at the various buried sites had escalated, to the point that the shapeshifter swarms were physically assaulting the worms. Coalescing into a mindboggling array of spear-like weapons, the aliens were fighting a doomed battle while their workers chewed up the honeycombs.

  Around the craters, more and more creatures were emerging. All of them were tubular in form, but their sizes ranged from tiny to enormous.

  “Look at that,” Merkit said. “They’re uncountable. Those tunnels must go for thousands of miles.”

  “Sir?” One of the technicians waved him over. “The ground monitors have finally synced up with the aerobots. Here’s the imagery so far.”

  The screens shifted to an overhead view of the plain surrounding the selected crater. One moment it was a scene of tumult, with the worms climbing the shaft and then racing away, and then the surface became almost transparent. At an unspecified depth, a network of tunnels appeared as if right on the surface. Twisting and turning, they connected enormous caverns that hummed with electricity and light.

  “Focus in on that one there,” Reena ordered, pointing at a rectangular vault filled with what appeared to be Transit Tubes. The screen filled with the image, and Reena snarled, “There it is! Look at it, General! Rows and rows of ’em! Sims!”

  Tin’s squad had come together again, forming a wide circle around the monitor that Varick was minding. The imagery in their face shields was a kaleidoscope of shuttles and rampant destruction, the flights picking up the separated Banshee squads while the shapeshifter swarms fought their erstwhile workers.

  “This is crazy.” Varick muttered, examining an illuminated screen on the side of the device. “These things are supposed to image the ground, but this one’s uploading data at an incredible rate.”

  “What are you saying?” Tin asked. “That the ruins are some kind of supercomputer?”

  “No—these places clearly hold millions of the moths in some kind of stasis. Ewing thought they were incubators, but how would that account for all this information?”

  A wisp of smoke rose from the glowing blue dome, and Varick took a step back. Sparks popped from the lead stuck in the dirt, and then the entire device began to rock and hiss. With a sudden bang, the dome burst free and flew several yards in the air while flames briefly flickered inside the machine’s overloaded circuits.

  “Too much data?” Bullhead joked. “I remember studying for a test one time—”

  “Uh-oh,” Cusabrina grunted. “Look what’s coming from the north.”

  Ayliss adjusted the display, and then wished she hadn’t. A wave of red dots was rolling toward the ruins, and no shuttle flights were anywhere nearby.

  “Evac! Evac!” Tin shouted. “We are about to get swarmed! Anyone close by, divert to this location and pick us up!”

  “Why are they coming here?” Zuteck asked as the squad reoriented itself to face the oncoming threat. “No worms, no shuttles . . . what did we do?”

  “The monitors,” Varick answered, unclipping her Fasces and stepping into line. “We’ve got the only ones probing the incubators, or whatever these things are.”

  “Oh, you are definitely back to being a jinx, Captain.”

  “Fire control, we have a concentrated cloud of aliens about to hit us.” Tin spoke calmly while Cusabrina motioned the squad down. “Request incendiaries.”

  “We see ’em. On the way. Hang tough.”

  “Heads down.” Cusabrina just got the words out when the missiles landed. Once again Ayliss felt the shockwave lift her, heated air in a world that had turned to nothing but fire, and then she was dropped on her stomach. More blasts erupted in the flames that engulfed them, slapping her back and forth. The suit protected her as it always had, creating a surreal environment where Ayliss should have been burned to a cinder but instead watched the inferno from its very center until it simply blew out.

/>   “Up! Up! There’s more!” she heard Tin shouting, and then saw the mass of black flecks charging toward them. Without thinking, Ayliss raised the Fasces and squeezed the trigger. Fire roiled from the barrel in a hungry jet, blowing through the swarm, lighting hundreds of them and dropping their ashes to the ground as she swept the flame back and forth. The rest of the squad was nearby, other horizontal tornadoes of fire drilling into the cloud, but it wasn’t any good, there were too many of them, her cameras were suddenly blotted out by a million fluttering wings, and then she was knocked over.

  Firing from a sitting position, running out of fuel in that barrel, tonguing the next one up and shooting the jet into the swarm. Buffeted by what felt like high winds, and then a flesh-colored tree branch struck her so hard in the side of the helmet that she fell over, stunned. The swarm shifted off of her, and lying there Ayliss saw it all happen, unable to move, unable to act. Fibers emerging from the moth cloud, twisting, coiling, growing, and then one of them was holding a Fasces and driving the barrel straight into Cusabrina’s shoulder joint and blasting high explosive rounds straight into her armor.

  “Therm-bombs! Drop ’em right on us!” Varick shouted from somewhere. “I been roasted before—it’s nothing!”

  The tendrils wrapped around Zuteck, lengthening, expanding, pinning her arms and her rifle against her torso while she screamed for someone to shoot them off her. Dell stepping up, ricochets bouncing off of Zuteck’s armor as the constricting cords broke and regrew and then Zuteck’s suit exploded right in the middle of them.

  “Dell!” Ayliss wheezed. “Run, Dell! Run!”

  Dellmore turned to face her, the interior cameras activating, and her partner was regarding Ayliss with a beatific smile. Dellmore tossed the empty rifle away and pulled a grenade from her armor just as the surging muscles caught her.

  “Rockets inbound! Rockets inbound! Take cover! Take cover! Take cover!” The words rebounded inside Ayliss’s ears, and she fought her way up onto an elbow just as the bands tightened around Dell and the grenade went off, the confined space of the tendrils blowing them off of her like rotten vines and tearing her suit in half.

  “Dell,” Ayliss whispered, her armored hand reaching for the two pieces of the suit. The swarm recognized she was still alive and dived, the terrible sinewy bands forming, and she was still too dazed to reach a grenade and her suit was making horrible grinding sounds and then the rockets landed. The constrictors evaporated right in the middle of the explosions and the fire, and then the ground gave way underneath her and she fell into darkness.

  Reena stood in front of the screens, too conflicted to move. The evacuation was proceeding at a rapid pace, and the unit markers of entire Banshee companies were quickly disappearing from Omega’s surface. Under the dirt, the mapping of the aliens’ world continued to serve up breathtaking revelations. The ground monitors, though linked in with more powerful systems flying over their heads and in orbit around the planet, were already indicating that the tunnels and caverns extended inside the planet far beyond their range.

  But it didn’t matter. Before her eyes was a steadily resolving subterranean complex of astounding proportions. Moss-covered tunnels alternated with laboratories where sophisticated machines still hummed and spun and shook with the generation of humanoid life. Enormous subterranean factories forged and shaped and twisted the tools, weapons, and ship parts that would be brought together in the craters that had been launching the Sims into their endless war for decades.

  “Ma’am?” Merkit appeared next to her. “Ma’am?”

  “Yes, General.”

  “We’ve received an urgent communication from the Holy Whisper Elders. There has been a significant development on Celestia.”

  “Whatever it is, it can’t even come close to what we’re doing here.” Reena dragged her eyes from the screens. “What is it, and why did it come from the Whisper?”

  “It involves your stepson.”

  Chapter 21

  “This is General Morris Zillinger.” A stern voice came over the speakers in Asterlit’s bunker. “I am the commanding officer of the Tratian armored division that is about to knock the entire Ministry down around your ears.”

  “Fuckin’ Tratians,” one of the commo men spoke in a weary voice. “Gotta make everything an announcement.”

  “I offer you no clemency, and promise I will do my best to see any survivors executed for mutiny.”

  “Guy knows how to sell it, doesn’t he?” a wounded FITCO driver muttered from the wall behind Jander. The vault was now filled with bandaged troops, and rockets were steadily chewing through the upper floors.

  “If you come out with your hands up, I will accept your surrender and see you are safely transported to whatever authority will oversee your courts-martial.”

  “That’s it, Lieutenant.” The nearest radioman took off his headset and pushed away from the console. “They’ve blocked our transmissions. Now we can only hear.”

  “I will give you three minutes to come outside. After that, no surrenders will be honored.”

  Mortas looked around the room. A heavy explosion slapped the reinforced ceiling, and small chunks of plaster rained down. Grim faces returned his gaze, some immobile while others were checking their weapons. Remembering Sergeant Leoni’s decision not to let himself be cornered.

  “I won’t lie to you. They’re going to kill us all, whether we surrender or not.” He made his words loud enough to be heard over the bombardment. “Never forget we did the right thing here. We rid this world of an evil government, and we told the entire galaxy about the suffering and injustice that goes on here to this day. If Command can’t see that, then I have no interest in letting them call me names as they walk me to the gallows.”

  He took his Scorpion rifle from a nearby table and made sure it was loaded. The motion sent many of the wounded struggling to their feet.

  “I’m going out shooting. It has been an honor to lead you.”

  “Then lead us out, sir.” Easterbrook pushed herself up, fresh blood on her lips. “We’ll make them wish they never fucked with us.”

  Jander took her arm across his shoulders. All over the room, FITCO troops and support personnel from the Mound paired up to assist the wounded. Jander started toward the enormous door, even then sliding open on silent hinges. With the bunker unsealed, the roar of the explosions surged in like the howls of ravening beasts.

  Easterbrook coughed once, then again, and then her entire body was wracked with a fit that sent dark blood streaming from her nostrils. Mortas gently lowered her to the floor, sitting her up against the wall while she raised glazing eyes.

  “Aw shit,” she whispered. “Look at me. Couldn’t make the last twenty yards.”

  Her chin sagged to her armor, and Mortas released her. Standing, he looked back at the others. “Let’s go.”

  He was several steps out into the ruined corridor when the speakers bellowed behind him.

  “Attention! Attention! Attention all Human Defense Force units! This is General Euton Marbrook, commander of all HDF personnel on Celestia! By order of Chairwoman Reena Mortas, I command all Force units to cease fire immediately! I say again, cease fire!”

  Pinned under the rocks, Ayliss Mortas rested in an inexplicable state of contentment. A dark space opened up far above, showing that the sun was setting on Omega. She should have been concerned, knowing that sooner or later the fleet would blow the entire planet to bits, but nothing could override the flow of thought that was spilling through her.

  Her brain practically buzzed with the sensation, and she numbly decided that this was how data banks must feel. Facts and concepts and innovations rolled across her mind, and even recognizing that they were in no way human failed to disturb her in the least. Ayliss tried to focus on a single thread as it went by with the current, something about a civilization that had once traveled across the expanse of space with enormous solar sails as their only locomotion, but the information refused to sit still. It was
like sitting in the middle of a crowded room, surrounded by brilliant conversation, but without the ability to hear more than a few phrases clearly.

  A vibration thrummed through the rock, sending a jolt of muted pain from her left arm. Turning her head inside her helmet, she saw that the limb was caught beneath what must have been a titanic amount of rock. Two of the slabs came together in an unbroken seam, and her arm was between them. Her diagnostic readout said the appendage had been crushed all the way up to an inch past her elbow, but the pressure was so great that the suit hadn’t lost its integrity.

  Another shudder, this one larger than the first one, started her wondering about an earthquake, but then the knowledge stream returned. It was different now, broken and panicked, and Ayliss swore she heard voices.

  Devouring us. Our servants turned against us. Helpless.

  Not the servants. The humans. Found us.

  Too old. Too tired. Too late.

  They’re going to exterminate us right here in our home.

  She tried to make sense of the words, and then didn’t need to. The flow now mated with her own knowledge, prompting Ayliss to remember the caterpillars savaging the other ruins across the plain. The swarms had broken off their attacks on the Banshees to combat their own workers and protect what slept under the stones. Ewing had believed the ruins were incubators for young aliens, and he’d been close with that estimate—just in the wrong direction.

  Not incubators. Hibernators. The final stage of an individual moth-thing’s life cycle, when it could no longer shapeshift or fly or even move. They would simply lie there together, communing with each other, living repositories of everything their race had learned over the eons. The younger shapeshifters flew over the hibernators at set intervals, the telepathic link grown weak with age, in order to share their latest discoveries and call up pertinent data.

  All to be lost, now that humanity had found the planet that the aliens could not abandon because their ancestors could not be moved. The irony of her own predicament, trapped with them as Armageddon loomed, reminding her of a calf on a distant planet that died just because it got separated from the others. What had Breverton said about her squad?