by Weston Ochse
“But then you’d be dead.”
I gave him a stony look. “I’ve spent a good portion of my adult life trying to kill myself. It’s nothing new to me.”
This took him aback.
“How’d you get here?” I asked.
“By plane. We have a crew waiting for us.”
“Then they’ll be waiting for a long time, because I’m not coming.”
Nance nodded and handed over a CD in a plastic holder. “Captain Ohirra said you’d say that. She asked me to give this to you.”
I took the CD, then gave Nance a long look. “I have some things to do. If I need to talk to you, I’ll be in touch.”
Nance came to attention and saluted.
I looked at him. My reflex was to salute back, but that single motion could change my life, so I merely nodded.
Then I turned and walked back to the boat. I grabbed my shirt and pack from where we’d stowed them, then headed towards my hooch. When I’d first arrived, they’d given me an abandoned tent next to the ugly. At the time it had been the start of winter, so the tent had been covered in walrus hide with plank floors, walls, and ceiling. Now that it was summer, most of the wall planks were on the roof, letting the hides be either down, or rolled to let air through. I usually kept them down. That close to the ugly, I often received unwanted attention, whether it be from a curious walrus pup, or from a big bull who didn’t understand why the walrus hides wouldn’t respond to his rubbing. Later on, once they’d accepted me, they’d invited me to stay in a tent further from the raucous noise and action, but I’d declined. I’d never had trouble sleeping, and the constant sounds of the walruses barking and groaning in the ugly had become something I looked forward to. Now was no different. The noise rose as I approached. The cacophony might have daunted some, but it had been far more soothing than the noise I’d had in my brain when I’d arrived.
The interior was Spartan. I had a simple bed made of walrus hide, rope and wood. Really nothing more than a hammock suspended just above the floor. The only other furniture was a small wooden table and wooden chair, except for a shelf which held a dozen books I’d borrowed from the Savoonga lending library. I’d read them all before, but wanted to see how reading them now compared to when I’d been in training at OMBRA. I was currently re-reading Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. On the first read through, I’d concentrated more on the battles with the Taurans and the tactics humans used against them. I remember, even as I was locked in the cell and made to study, being fascinated by how they’d been forced to use medieval weapons to fight the aliens.
Now, rereading it, I was attuned to something different. Early in the book, soldiers returning from the initial run-ins with the Taurans rejoined the military after coming home because nothing was like it had been when they’d left. In the book, it was because hundreds of years had passed, but here on the real Earth it was because of the way people looked at things. It was one of the reasons I kept re-enlisting. Whether it be Kosovo, or my second and third tours in Iraq, I remember promising myself that this would be it, that I’d go back to the Land of the Big PX and never deploy again. Then I’d come home and watch my fellow man entranced by reality television and the daily lives of housewives from New Jersey or bearded men who make duck whistles. I’d see the blank looks in their eyes when I tried to describe how alive I’d felt while deployed, how the fear refined me. I’d try and explain how it felt to accidently kill a kid or watch one of your men evaporate from an IED or get told that the town you took from the bad guys at tremendous loss of life was now back in the hands of those same bad guys. Instead of trying to understand, they labeled me, then returned to watching adult cartoons about yellow people and anything at all having to do with the Kardashians. It was like they were the aliens and we’d already been invaded. I just couldn’t stand it.
But when I’d first read The Forever War, I’d been a far simpler man. I’d yet to strap into an Electromagnetic Faraday Xeno-combat suit. I’d yet to see an alien, much less kill one. I couldn’t help laugh as I thought that the alien Cray—the giant flying mantis-looking beings that could pulse EMP and destroy everything with a circuit board—were the only aliens attacking. They were just the warm up. An image popped into my head—me, standing naked except for a diaper in a cage in the middle of a room, mindless, my brain controlled by the fungus ophiocordyceps invasionalis, which had turned me into an alien-created zombie keen to infect anyone who wasn’t like me. But instead of biting as the locus of infection, there were ascocarps growing on my neck and chest which would explode with fungus spore in the proximity of a human. I’d gone from being the Hero of the Mound to the Lieutenant Who Pooped in His Pants.
I tossed the disk on the table and sat down hard on a chair. I rubbed my face with my right hand, trying to wipe the images away. This unwanted trip down memory lane had probably been the result of Nance arriving in uniform. That he had a message from Ohirra made it worse. She’d been with me at Kilimanjaro. She’d been with me in L.A. She was the only one of my first squad to have survived—and Thompson didn’t count, damn it.
I closed my eyes and listened to the ugly.
Like the battering of the waves, or the whistling of the wind through the trees, it lessened the mental load and allowed me to drift through the past, slip-sliding down memory lane until finally sleep found me.
Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
CHAPTER THREE
TWO HOURS LATER, I searched and found Merlin on a rocky outcropping overlooking the harbor. The weather was about forty-two degrees Fahrenheit without the wind. I wore a thick sweater with a T-shirt beneath. I’d acclimatized fairly well, but would never be the native Merlin was. He wore the same insulated pants and boots he’d worn on the boat, but now wore a Patagonia sleeveless parka over a Guns N’ Roses Appetite for Destruction Tour T-shirt. His normally braided hair was loose and moved gently in the onshore breeze. He chewed bear jerky as he stared out at the small sprawl of Savoonga where it reached right up to the rocky shore, the dun-colored sand, the froth of the surf, then the slate of the Arctic Ocean. The town held about three hundred Yupik, a few Russian fishermen from the Chukotka Peninsula, and several gringos like me. I’d met the others, and they’d traveled with all haste to get away from the Cray. I couldn’t blame them. When they’d asked me why I was here, I said the same; it was easier than trying to explain that I came here trying to get away from myself. Which was what Merlin seemed to be doing.
I shivered as a gust of wind tore through me, wishing I’d dressed a little more warmly.
I sat down beside Merlin. I looked for the library, then the men’s traditional long house where they were probably meeting and talking about Merlin, then found my place, closest to the ugly, the place where interlopers were housed.
Without anything else to say, I stuck with the traditional. “Sorry, Merlin.”
“Nothing to be sorry for.” He bit down and chewed for a moment. “I made the choice.”
“Still…” What was there to say? I reached out a hand and Merlin passed me the piece of jerky. I bit into it and wrenched a piece free, chewing on the gamey meat. I passed the rest back. I watched as a Russian fishing trawler pulled into the harbor with a fresh catch. So far the leviathans hadn’t affected fishing this far north. Then again, there was no more commercial fishing so we really couldn’t know.
Finally Merlin said, “I saw a soldier waiting for you.”
“He had a message for me.”
“What did the message say?”
I shrugged. “Dunno. Didn’t listen.”
He turned his head and regarded me. “He came all this way and you didn’t listen?”
“I already knew what he was going to say. They want me back.”
Merlin grunted. He nodded to the men’s long house. “I know what they’re going to say, too. They’re going to ask me to leave.”
> Coming and going. Either way you leave a place. “Where are you going to go?”
“Tradition is for me to take my stake, load up my quyak, and strike out maybe one hundred, two hundred kilometers. Either Chukotka or Alaska, it doesn’t matter as long as I’m far away from here.”
“And then what? Is it forever?”
“Depends on the fishing and hunting. If they don’t get worse, then I can come back in two or three seasons. If I come back and they’re worse, then I’m banished forever.”
I exhaled explosively. “Jesus, Merlin.”
He shrugged. “Such is our way.”
For a moment I felt sorry for myself, ashamed of what I’d done, just like when I’d been in charge and one of my men had died. Then I fought against it as the face of Mother imposed itself upon my psyche. She’d always looked like that actress Kathy Bates, maternal and serious. She’d told me what I’d told myself for years. She’d reiterated the same thing a squad of PTSD counselors had said to me. I’d heard it all before, but somehow, coming from her, it had made a lot more sense.
“You can’t blame yourself for the decisions of others. Everyone has a choice. If they choose to do something that ends up getting them killed, then it’s their fault.”
I remembered sitting like a school kid, staring into her eyes, and asking, “But what if they died because of something I did, because of an order I gave them?”
Her stare had been that of generations of mothers who’d stared at their children, knowing that the child had the answer but just needed to hear it aloud. “They chose. Humans always have a choice. Even when ordered to do something, they have a choice. You cannot blame yourself for the results of another’s choice.”
I could hear her voice in my head as if she were sitting beside me. And it helped. It really did. But it didn’t ameliorate the feelings I had for Merlin. He was about to lose everything he held dear.
I watched him as he stared at the only home he’d ever known. Old Woman Black Hands’ tattoos inked on his arms showed his history. Walrus and bear hunting scenes merged with scenes of fishing, flat halibut and muscular salmon, cavorting from the water, dancing in air. I’d seen his back as well. The centerpiece was an orca, swimming dead on forward, the tattooist creating a point of view that seemed as if the orca was swimming into Merlin’s back, becoming him, guiding him.
Far different from the tattoos Old Woman Black Hands had given me. Among the unit insignias and waving flag I’d had done before the invasion were the names of every person who’d ever died because of me. I didn’t have fish or bears or walruses. I had war and invasion as my past. At times, Merlin and I could be so similar, but then we were so very different. You only had to examine our tattoos to see the difference. But here and now, on the small bluff overlooking Savoonga, we were just two men, looking out on what represented peace and civilization, knowing that they’d have to leave it behind and not knowing if they’d ever be able to return.
Merlin pointed east. “What is that?”
I turned my head and searched the sky. At first I didn’t see anything. Then I saw three dark dots.
“Too small to be a plane,” he said.
We watched as the dots approached, getting larger and larger. They moved irregularly, gaining and losing altitude. They certainly weren’t planes, nor were they helicopters. In fact, I seriously doubted that they were even mechanical. Instead, they looked like larger birds or…
I shot to my feet.
Cray!
They’d never been this far north. Damn!
I began running down the hill. I had to warn the town.
Merlin fell in beside me and as I ran, asked, “Those things the aliens you fought?”
“We have to warn everyone. We have to find weapons.”
“There’s an armory in the long house. I’ll go there.”
Merlin peeled off to the left and I continued on to the center of town, which as I tracked their flight, was where the Cray seemed to be heading. Thankfully, I didn’t have far to run. The bluff was less than half a mile. I ran between two homes, then across a yard. Howard Makepeace was loading crab traps into the back of his truck. He saw me running, then looked to where I was looking in the sky. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him grab a rifle from the inside of the truck and head after me. I ran across Tumbaloo Road, then across another yard filled with three Big Wheels and a crocket set, then I crossed Post Office Road.
I was about a hundred yards away when the first multi-winged, jagged-clawed alien Cray crash-landed in front of the General Store. Sadie and Peter Savinga stood near the entrance, their mouths agape. A Yupik I knew only as Ernest and a Russian named Pavel smoked cigarettes near the corner of the building.
“Get inside!” I bellowed. “Get inside and lock the doors!”
Ernest and Pavel stared at the alien beast as its chest heaved and its wings fluttered, but other than that, the Cray wasn’t moving. Thankfully, I believed it was probably exhausted from the flight from the mainland, which was more than a hundred and fifty miles away. I’d never seen one fly so far. Usually they stayed around the hive, the drones protecting it and the queen inside from attack. For it to fly this far either meant it was terribly off course, or it was searching for something.
I thought of how I’d set the tactical nuke in front of the master in the machine interface device in the bowels of the Hollywood Hive, then mind-jacked one of the Cray to help me escape. Had they been looking for me all this time? Is that what this was? Revenge?
I glanced up and saw the other two were inbound. One would land in about thirty seconds. The other was flagging and might not even make landfall.
I made it to the General Store and held out my arms. “Easy, big fella,” I said, realizing at that very moment that I’d rushed into combat without any armor or any weapons. The talons on the ends of the hand-like appendages were matched in sharpness by the spikes that sprung from each of the Cray’s joints. It had three sets of wings. Two sets hung limp on its back while the highest set twitched like antennae at every sound. Its triangular, mantis-like head regarded me as it tried to get to its feet.
I balled my fists as I searched around for something to use as a weapon. Without one, I’d most assuredly die. Humans needed EXOs to fight the Cray.
Makepeace skidded to a stop beside me, his eyes wide and his lips white. He held the rifle to his shoulder, the barrel trembling. “What should I do, Mason?”
“Shoot the damn thing,” I said.
Makepeace took aim and let off three shots from his .306 hunting rifle. Two impacted the alien’s chest, while one missed entirely.
I remembered how many rounds they could absorb. We’d need a lot more than a single rifle.
“Go for the eyes,” I said. “Take your—”
The Cray suddenly rose up on its hind legs, rising seven, eight, nine feet tall.
Someone screamed.
Then all hell broke loose as everyone who had a weapon pulled it and began to fire. One thing about an Arctic subsistence hunting society was that everyone had guns. I clenched and unclenched my fists as I realized not quite everyone. Not this schmuck.
The Cray lashed out towards me.
I threw myself to the ground.
Makepeace continued to fire.
The Cray grabbed him by the head, lifted him up, then slammed him into the ground with a sickening sound of bones crunching.
Makepeace’s rifle skidded free.
I dove for it. I managed to grab it, then crab-walked out of the path of a Cray claw.
The Cray went down on one leg as everyone continued to fire. It lashed out with a claw, ripping Pavel’s thorax wide open. I watched as his eyes shot wide and his body emptied into his hands before he fell face first to the ground.
I put the rifle into my shoulder and tried to fire, but the trigger wouldn’t move. I glanced at the trigger housing and saw where the side had been caved in. I grabbed the barrel and heaved it at the alien, catching it on the side of the face.
It suddenly jerked its head my way. I stumbled backwards, onto my ass. It began to follow me, unconcerned about anything else.Above its head I saw as the second Cray landed on the roof of the General Store.
Bob Schmoosh skidded to a stop in his old Ford Bronco, one of the few vehicles on the island, blue and red lights flashing.
The Cray pulsed, sending an EMP surge directly at the vehicle, killing it and the lights.
The other Cray, on the roof of the General Store, pulsed too, killing all the power to the building below, which did more harm than it knew. All of the frozen goods were stored there, without which many of the Yupik would die. But I had more immediate things to worry about than food for the coming winter. I was still back-pedalling as the Cray pulled itself after me, intent on doing to me what a little boy might do with an insect.
I felt the earth shudder, followed by the sound of something mechanical. I looked up and saw a white machine above. I couldn’t make out what it was until it stepped past me, reached out and grabbed the Cray’s face with one hand, while the other hand grabbed the alien’s arm.
An EXO! For a moment I wondered how it had gotten here, then I remembered that an OMBRA plane was waiting for me. Who knew how many EXOs it might contain? I watched with delight as the nine-foot tall white EXO multitasked, opening up on the Cray atop the roof with its shoulder-mounted XM214 rotary-barreled machine gun while it ripped the head from the other Cray.
The alien on the roof took a dozen rounds before it tumbled off the other side of the roof.
Gotta love the XM214. Pulled out of mothballs at Aberdeen Proving Ground before the invasion, it was the EXO’s primary attack armament, comprised of a six-barreled rotating mini-gun fed from a backpack ammo supply through an ammo feed arm. TF OMBRA modified the original 1970s General Electric design, giving the system three backpack-mounted 500-round ammo boxes linked together, for a total of 1500 rounds. The original 1970s electronic controls, which could modify the rate of fire on the fly, were micronized, hardened against EMP and incorporated into the ammo boxes, giving the system triple redundancy and protecting the electronics. The servo that spun the barrels only engaged when the automatic harness system that pulled the weapon back out of the way was released.
