The radio channel was a caterwaul of yelling and bawled orders. Nothing made sense. Lawrence landed on his back, the impact pushing the last gasp of air out of his lungs. He dropped the carbine. Something moved under his legs, writhing about urgently, pushing his knees apart. Shock mobilized him instantly, allowing him to overcome his pained daze. He twisted quickly, bending down to grab at whatever was lifting itself up between his legs.
Excruciating pain bit into his leg, just above the knee. Icons reported both his armor and muscle skeleton had been sliced open. His hands rumbled into contact with a broad object, his brain telling him it was the same size as an alien's body. Through the swirling vapor he could just make out the ruddy infrared blur. It was an alien, and one of its limbs was holding a power-blade. Lawrence lunged for the knife, jerking it free from the pincers. He saw the alien's limb snap from the force of his grab, took a breath and punched the body with his free hand, delivering the full power of the muscle skeleton behind the blow. His armored fist ripped straight through the creature's hide, squishing into internal organs.
He almost vomited, pulling his hand free again, bringing with it dripping webs of membrane and gore. Another bullet struck him, sending him sprawling.
"Ceiling," Ntoko bellowed. "Shoot the ceiling out. Explosive shells. Do it now."
Explosions pummeled the concrete above Lawrence. The blastwaves made his battered armor creak from intense pressure stress. He fumbled his hand across the floor, searching for his own carbine. A maser beam washed over him again, prompting a flurry of scarlet symbols, and he jerked himself clear. Small-arms fire was raking the air above him. Some kind of gelatinous sludge was creeping across the concrete floor, slopping against his armor shell.
He found both the alien body and his carbine and rolled onto his back. Half a magazine of explosive shells smashed into the ceiling. Heavy lumps of concrete fell out of the fog in what seemed like slow motion, splashing into the sludge.
"What are we doing?" Meaney asked. "Why aren't we killing them?"
Lawrence slapped another magazine into his carbine. He'd been about to ask the same question.
"Breaching the bunker," Ntoko said. "I'm going to blow this gas and those alien mothers clean into space."
Lawrence opened fire again. Above the explosions he could hear a shrill whistling sound gather strength. Abruptly, the chemical fog was thinning, and the whistle increased to a tormented howl. A slice of sunlight prized its way down through the vapor, quickly expanding. Lawrence's i-i hurried to compensate, throwing up filters. He shifted his aim, letting the carbine shells chew the edge of the widening fissure in the ceiling. A huge, jagged section of concrete blew upward, pummeled by the bunker's venting atmosphere. The last of the gas surged upward, tugging Lawrence off the floor. Then he was tumbling down in absolute silence. Blazing sunlight shone into the bunker, revealing confusion and mayhem. The dense conglomeration of machinery had been torn to ruin, pipes ripped open, stolid processor units shredded. Sprays of fluid and gas were still pumping out, their ragged plumes curving upward before dispersing. Several alien corpses were hanging limply from metal fangs. They'd all been hit by weapons fire, pulping the tawny flesh.
"Come in, Ops, we have an emergency situation," Ntoko said. "Request backup immediately. Receiving hostile fire."
Lawrence's AS confirmed that they'd reestablished communications now that the roof had been split open. He clambered painfully to his feet as Ops began to interrogate Ntoko. Blood was leaking out of his knee where the power-blade had cut through, most of it, he was confident, coming from the skeleton muscle. Lines of pain flared along his torso with every move he made. He could see cracked dints in the armor; scorch marks had blistered the outer layer. "Oh hell," he groaned.
"We beat them." Kibbo's voice had a hysterical edge. "We beat the fuckers."
"What were they?" Colin asked. "Where the hell did they come from?"
"Holy shit, lads," Meaney said. "We've just fought our first interstellar war."
"And won the bastard! We kicked some ass, huh?"
"We did, man. They ain't gonna mess with this platoon again, that's for sure."
"I don't get it," Lawrence said. "What did we do? Why did they shoot?"
"Who cares?" Meaney said. "We are the masters now!" He let out a whoop, raising his arms in a victory salute. He froze. "Holy shit!"
Lawrence looked up. Aliens were crawling along the top of the broken roof, front limbs gingerly probing the blackened concrete edges. Several were easing themselves through the gap, gripping the twisted reinforcement struts. Maser beams stabbed down, playing over the squaddies. They returned fire, using carbines to chew away at the concrete.
"Get to cover," Ntoko ordered. He led them over to the wheezing bulk of machinery, firing as he went.
"They're natives," Lawrence said, shocked at the realization. "They don't need suits to survive, look. They have to be native."
"Big fucking deal," Meaney cried. "What did we ever do to piss them off?" He was shooting as he dodged behind a solid hunk of equipment.
"Stole their land and their women, I guess," Lawrence said.
"That's a real big fucking help, Lawrence," Kibbo yelled. "What is wrong with these alien freaks?"
Colin sent a whole magazine from his carbine roaring into the fractured ceiling, mauling concrete and aliens alike. "We didn't blow the bastards into space, we just let them in, for fuck's sake!" Concrete and flesh rained down over the squaddies.
"No more saturation fire," Ntoko ordered. "Let's conserve what we've got. Pick them off."
Lawrence ducked down into an alcove, then raised his carbine. A crossed targeting circle drew sharp violet bars across the ruined ceiling. He switched to single fire and located an alien. One shot blew its body apart. For aggressors, they were terribly vulnerable. That didn't make a lot of sense.
"How long before the cavalry arrives, Corp?" Colin asked.
"Any minute now. Just hang on in there."
For the first time in his life, Lawrence found he was praying. He wormed his way deeper into the too-small alcove, wondering if the God he knew didn't exist could be of any possible use. Asking couldn't possibly make things worse.
* * *
Simon Roderick hadn't expected to visit Floyd during the mission. As far as Z-B was concerned, the moon was simply a minor manufacturing location, easy enough to control and strip of its wealth. That was during the planning stage. Now those assumptions had changed drastically. And as a result, Simon was having to cope with low gravity and the uncomfortable indignity of a spacesuit.
The wretched devices hadn't improved much since the last time he was in one, eight years ago—an inner layer that exerted a fierce grip on his flesh, and a globe helmet that blew dry, dead air into his face, making his eyes water. The backpack weighed too much, which on Floyd translated into awkward inertia.
It was almost tempting to wear a muscle skeleton, as his three-man escort was doing. But he could never quite decide which was the lesser of the two evils.
His escort remained outside as he stepped into the chemical plant's airlock. After it cycled, he emerged into a drab concrete corridor. A reception committee had assembled for him, six squaddies in full muscle skeletons, carrying improbably sleek and dangerous-looking weapons hardware. Waiting with them were Major Mohammed Bibi, the commander of the Floyd operation, and Iain Tobay, from Third Fleet intelligence, along with Dr. McKean and Dr. Hendra from Z-B's biomedical science staff.
Simon's spacesuit AS confirmed the chemical plant's atmosphere was breathable, and he unsealed his helmet. "Are we expecting further trouble?" he asked lightly, his gaze on the stiff-at-attention squaddies.
"Not expecting, no, sir," Bibi said. "But then we weren't expecting this particular incident to start with."
Simon nodded approvingly. The major was probably over-compensating for the unexpected firefight, but it was prudent. He couldn't fault the response.
They clumped along more identical corridors to b
unker three, section four. There was a noticeable difference in the air as soon as the steel door slid open. A mild chemical stew permeated the standard oxygen-nitrogen mix, with ammonia percolating to the top. He wrinkled his nose up.
Dr. McKean noticed the motion. "You get used to it after a while. We've brought in extra atmosphere scrubbers, but the processing machinery is still spilling some volatiles."
"I see." Not that Simon cared. Technical types always overexplained their world.
As he walked down an aisle formed by the machinery, the evidence of the fight grew more pronounced. Pools of dark tacky fluid were oozing out from underneath, while the smells strengthened. Metal became buckled and twisted; torn fangs blackened from explosive heat. When he came out into the open space at the end, the elaborate machinery was simply mangled scrap.
Temporary plastic shielding had been fixed across the broken ceiling, its epoxy adding another acidic fragrance to the melange. Bright sunlight shone through the translucent covering, tinged pink.
The tank that had caused all the trouble was now open, its large cap hinged back against the wall on thick hydraulic pistons, like the entrance to a giant bank vault. A ramp had extended from inside. Several Z-B personnel were moving round in front, helping to clear up the mess and shifting trolleys of equipment up and down the ramp.
Simon saw a couple of them were moving slowly, every movement careful, as if they were in pain. He called up files via his DNI: Meaney and Newton. Both in the firefight, both injured and assigned light (noncombat) duties. He was mildly interested by Newton's background.
"How's it going?" he asked them.
Newton straightened up from a mobile air purifier and saluted. His eyes flicked toward Major Bibi. "Fine, thank you, sir."
"Yes, sir," Meaney said.
"That was a good job you did," Simon said. "Muscle suits aren't exactly configured for head-on military action."
"They're good systems, sir," Newton said. He was relaxing slightly now he knew they weren't being bawled out.
"Now that you've used it in combat, any suggestions?"
"Better sensor integration would have been a help, sir. In fact, better sensors altogether. We were operating blind once the AS opened the gas valves; that muck screwed up our i-i and the motion detector."
"That must have been difficult."
"Corporal Ntoko knew what to do, sir, he held us together. But like you say, if we'd been up against serious opposition we'd have been in trouble."
"I see. Well, thank you for your opinion. I'll see what I can do—not that the designers will listen to an executive, I expect. They don't hold us in terribly high regard."
"But you pay them, sir; they hold that in high regard."
Simon grinned. "They certainly do." He indicated the body of an alien, now covered with a sheet of blue polyethylene. "First encounter with an alien life, Newton?"
"Yes, sir. Shame it was under these circumstances. For a moment I thought they were real aliens."
"Real? I don't think you can get much more real than these."
"I meant sentient, sir. It's a crime what was done to these poor things, rigging them up like waldo robots."
Simon pondered the young man's idealistic dismay. Only the truly young could afford that kind of morals. No wonder Newton had rebelled against his background. "I suppose it is. Have you been in the tank, yet?"
Newton pulled a disapproving face. "Yes, sir."
"Ah, well, my turn now."
"Sir?"
"Yes?"
"Will they be punished, sir?"
"Who?"
"The... people who abused the aliens, sir."
"Ah, I see. Well, you must understand, Newton, while we're here, as well as enforcing the local law, we're also subject to it. That's what gives us the legitimate right to procure the assets that we do, because we work within their own legal framework even if they don't like or admit that. What we don't do is impose and enforce foreign laws on the indigenous population. If their constitution says it's okay to sleep with your sister, then that's what we let them get on with. So unfortunately, while enslaving and conducting experiments on animals or aliens is illegal in most countries on Earth, it isn't here."
"You mean they've done nothing wrong!"
"Not at all. They launched a serious assault on legitimate law-enforcement officers in the pursuit of their duty."
"So what's going to happen to them?"
"That's what I'm about to decide."
Simon paused as he was going up the ramp, looking down on yet another discreetly covered alien corpse. "Have you learned anything about them?" he asked McKean.
"Not much," the doctor admitted. "They're native to Floyd. Mammalian. Socially, they're halfway between a pack and a hive. Their whole physiology slows down considerably during the night-time cold. They eat Wellsweed; in fact, they spend ninety percent of their time grazing. And that's about it."
"So they're not sentient?"
"No, sir. We're trying to mine some references to them from Manhattan's memory, but so far we've drawn a blank. It's obviously been deep encrypted. Certainly nobody on Earth knew about them. Which is surprising. From a xeno-biological viewpoint I cannot overstate how important they are. Kaba should have been shouting about them from the moment of discovery."
"Kaba's Earth Board probably weren't informed," Simon said. "You never reveal a good poker hand, Doctor."
He continued up the ramp, with Major Bibi leading the way. The interior of the tank had been split into two levels, each subdivided into several compartments. The arrangement reminded him of a bomb shelter. Not a bad analogy, Simon thought. They were certainly zealous about their security.
"I take it you have debugged this?" he asked Major Bibi.
"Yes sir. I've had technicians sweep it for physical defenses, and the plant's AS has been dumped into a sealed storage facility. It was complicitous with the attack on the squaddies, we know that from the gas release. Our own forensic AS is taking it apart code line by code line to determine what kind of routines were hardwritten in. We suspect it was puppeting the aliens as well. I've also had wipehounds running through the plant's datapool to make sure there are no subroutine remnants lurking. But there's a lot of circuitry here, especially in the processing machinery; we should have an all-clear in another ten hours."
"And the Manhattan City AS?"
"Definitely part of the business. Wiping that is more difficult; it does supervise a lot of hardware functions in the city, including life support. So far I've settled for installing limiter and monitor programs in the datapool."
"Very well." They stopped in front of a heavy security door. There was an elaborate DNA lock panel on one side, but the slab of reinforced metal itself was retracted.
Inside the room, medical support equipment had been stacked into elaborate columns. Eight of them were spaced along the middle of the floor. Each one was topped with an opaque plastic sphere fifty centimeters in diameter. Wires and slim tubes wormed out of the equator to disappear into the stacks at various levels. Five of them were inert, while the remaining three hummed and whirred quietly, with small indicator lights winking above various components. A couple of Z-B technicians were busy taking apart one of the inert columns. Dr. Hendra silently signaled them out, and they left without a word.
Simon stood in front of the first active pillar, staring at the globe. "Your opinion on the procedure's viability, Doctor?'
"Oh, it's viable, all right. In fact, it's much more proficient than the kind of rejuvenation treatments that are employed on Earth."
"Really? I thought Earth led that particular field."
"Technically we do. But v-writing a whole human body is enormously complicated. You have to vector new genes into the individual cells of every organ and bone and blood vessel, not to mention skin. Those genes all have to be specific to their destination. The best we ever manage to revitalize in each organ is twenty to thirty-five percent of the gross. Enough to make a difference, but ther
e are just too many cells for all of them to be revitalized. That's why there's no point in extending rejuvenation past the third treatment. You run smack bang into the law of diminishing returns."
"Depends how young you are when you have your first treatment," Simon murmured.
Dr. Hendra gave a complicit shrug. "As you say. But it's unusual for anyone to undergo the treatment before they reach sixty. These days it's far more effective to provide germline v-writing to inhibit the aging process. When you're only ten cells tall, all those shiny new improved genes can be vectored in without any room for error."
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